Free That Thing At the Zoo - 01 by James R. Tuck

1
     
    “Tell me what it is I’m looking at.”
    I was squinting up into the branches of a giant oak tree. A breeze kicked up. My nostrils started burning from the rank ammonia smell of a cat box sorely in need of emptying. Lion Habitat at the Atlanta zoo, what a stench-fest.
    Litter boxes are one of the reasons why I hate cats.
    I moved my hand from over my eyes, for shade, to over my nose for survival. The sun was directly overhead, making it hard to see, but a figure in coveralls was high in the branches. The figure was taking pictures of something wedged into forked limbs, flash going off like a strobe light in a nightclub.
    “I don’t know. The zookeeper’s ass?” Homicide detective John Longyard stood beside me. He was dressed like he always dressed, expensive dark suit with matching tie and polished shoes, not caring that he was wading through Savannah grass and dirt. Sweat beaded at the edge of his fifty-dollar haircut, threatening to make a break for it and run down his face. Tiny droplets glistened in his light brown mustache, making a wet spot on the cigarette underneath it. He was the one who called me out to stand in the Lion Habitat in the dead heat of summer. Between the temperature and the humidity the heat index was hovering somewhere right around Satan’s ballsack.
    I was about to return his smartass comment when the zookeeper in question yelled out “Fire in the hole!” and gave the thing stuck in the tree a giant shove. It tumbled off the branches, striking limb after limb, bouncing back and forth between them like a crazy pinball. Thudding in front of us, it kicked up a short mushroom cloud of dust that billowed up and made a run at our feet.
    The thing now lying on the ground was a big chunk of meat and bone. My brain tried to make sense of it, categorize it and figure out what it was, but it was so gnarled that I couldn’t. I was pretty sure that it was not human and never had been. The shapes were all wrong, angles too far off. I knelt to get a closer look. The litter box smell thickened like curdled milk the closer to the ground I got.
    Sweat pooled under my shoulder holster, held against my skin by its leather straps. Flies dropped by the hundreds onto the meat, crawling over it with tiny, segmented bodies. Eyes, rainbow-shiny like miniscule, multifaceted oil slicks, moved around, hopping up and down as the flies swarmed, pushing and shoving at each other to just get to the meat. Getting closer, I knew for a fact this wasn’t a human kill. It was too big. Too much meat for a human. I am six foot four, top the scales around three hundred, and I wouldn’t make that much meat.
    The bones were not the right size or shape. My eyes found a backward-jointed knee and a thighbone about the size of an average man’s spine. It looked weird. Something was trying to worm its way into my mind. Something about the way it looked. Something not right. Something off.
    There was no blood.
    No dried blood, no wet blood, no blood at all.
    A body that torn apart should have been painted in the stuff. Hell, it should look like a nacho chip drowning in that orange yellow shit they call nacho cheese…. but with blood.
    I stood up as the zookeeper swung down from a low branch and dropped to the ground a few feet away. Dusting his hands off on dark gray coveralls, he ambled toward us. Long skinny arms and legs rattled around in the coveralls that looked borrowed from his older brother. Mouse-brown hair was pulled through the back of his Atlanta Zoo cap and hung slightly greasy down his back. His spindly goatee cracked open in a grin that had more warmth than it had tobacco stains.
    It was a lot of warmth.
    He squinted up at me and then looked sideways at Longyard. “Who’s the new guy? He a cop too?”
    “He’s a specialist I called. Deacon Chalk, meet Jimmy the zookeeper.”
    I stuck out my hand, holding it towards him. He looked at it for a moment, still through his squinted eye. He hung the camera he had