Bunny will be done with her housekeeping shift by now. Footsore, back aching, she’ll be waiting for him to pick her up and drive her to the Pig N’ Pancake. Are police cruisers streaking past the window? Are her coworkers talking about something happening at the library?

He tries to imagine Bishop’s warriors assembling somewhere nearby, using code words on radios, coordinating efforts to rescue him. Or—a new doubt slithers into place—maybe the police are somehow disrupting his ability to call out. Maybe Bishop’s people didn’t receive his calls. He thinks of the red lights moving out in the snow, the drone hovering over the hedges. Would the Lakeport Police Department have capabilities like that?

The wounded man is lying across the stairs with his right hand clamped against his bleeding shoulder. His eyes have closed, and the blood on the carpet beside him is drying, traveling past maroon toward black. Better not to look. Seymour diverts his attention instead into the long shadow of the middle aisle between Fiction and Nonfiction. What a shambles he’s made of the whole thing.

Is he willing to die for this? To give voice to the innumerable creatures that humans have wiped off the earth? To stand up for the voiceless? Isn’t that what a hero does? A hero fights for those who cannot fight for themselves.

Scared and confounded, body itching, armpits sweating, feet cold, bladder brimming, Beretta in one pocket and cell phone in the other, Seymour removes the cups of his ear defenders and wipes his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker and looks down the aisle toward the restroom at the back of the library when he hears, coming from upstairs, a succession of booming thuds.

ELEVEN

IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Λ

… I shadowed my scaly brothers through the endless deeps, fleeing the quick and terrible dolphins. Without warning, a leviathan came upon us, hugest of all living creatures, with a mouth as wide as the gates of Troy and teeth as tall as the pillars of Hercules, their points as sharp as the sword of Perseus.

His jaw gaped wide to swallow us, and I waited for death. I’d never make it to the city in the clouds. I’d never see the tortoise or taste a honeycake from the stack on his shell. I’d die in the cold sea, my fish bones lost in the belly of a beast. The whole school of us were swept into the cavern of its mouth, but the wickets of its enormous fangs proved too large to impale us, and we spilled past unharmed, down into its gullet.