King of Swords

The police automatically hit the deck, everyone else panicked; a few screamed. The sounds of the jungle suddenly died.

At first Max thought the officer had shot the monkey, but then he heard agonized sobbing and moaning and saw that the cop was on the ground, clutching his left leg below the knee. A few metres away, the monkey was sitting on its haunches, nearly motionless and completely subdued, staring at them all. The animal was evenly spattered, head to foot, in red. Standing in a row behind it, were the other monkeys. The blood-soaked monkey turned and joined the others.

Max got up and raced over to the officer. As he drew closer, he noticed the monkeys were doing a kind of Mexican wave.

Blood was pouring out of the officer's leg, running over his hands.

'What happened?' Max asked.

T just got fuckin' shotY the cop gasped.

'You got shot?'

The officer's holster was empty. Max looked for the gun, but couldn't see it anywhere.

Then he realized what the monkeys were really doing.

They had the gun — a black .44 Smith & Wesson Special service revolver — and they were tossing it to each other, underarm, down the line, like a football; passing and catching.

Behind him, everyone was up on their feet. Joe and a paramedic were running over.

Max heard the unmistakable sound of a hammer being cocked. He turned and saw the gun bouncing down the line of fur and grinning teeth, primed to fire. Without looking away, he held up his hand and motioned for Joe and the medic to get down. Joe shouted the command over to the others, who all hit the deck.

Max grabbed the officer by the collar and dragged him back towards the building. Looking over his shoulder he couldn't help but notice what was going on in the background, by the fence. The gate was wide open and dozens of monkeys were spilling out onto the grass and heading towards them, led, it seemed, by the two large ginger primates he'd last seen on the other side. They stopped a few feet behind the beige ones. Max picked up speed - the wounded officer screaming as he bumped along the ground.

The beige primates had up until now been happily playing pass-the-lethal-weapon. Then, one of them turned around and noticed the ginger badasses coming up behind them, droopy chins swinging like irate pendulums.

Suddenly, the badasses roared so ferociously and so deafc-ningly loud they drowned out the sound of the gun going off. Max saw the flash and the smoke and threw himself to I he ground. One of the beige monkeys was down on its back, but it scrambled to its feet and ran straight for Max in its desire to get away from the ginger primates and the horde of other beasts the jungle was disgorging —gorillas, baboons,

chimpanzees, macaques, great apes, orangutans — now advancing on the crime scene at a fast clip.

As Max got up, the monkey jumped in his arms. The thing was shaking with terror and very very smelly. Max turned and ran, carrying the animal in one arm and dragging the cop with the other. He ran towards the open door of the building where cops, medics, forensics, Park staff and his own partner were pushing each other to get inside before they were overrun by screeching, excited primates. Max, the monkey and the cop were the last in.

The corpse stayed where it was, soon once again disappearing under the bodies of other species.

3

I Gemma Harlan, medical examiner at the Dade County Morgue, liked to play music when she performed autopsies; something soothing, but at a loud enough volume to drown out the procedure's unique noises — the sawing and hammering of bone, the sticky squelch of a face being peeled back from a skull, the occasional farts and belches of released gasses — sounds of life's straggler particles leaving the building seconds before demolition. And then there were other things the music helped her get away from, the little things she hated most about her job, such as the way the spinning sawblades sometimes smoked as the bone dust landed on the hot metal and gave off a sour, ammoniac smell; the toxic aerosol jets the same saws sometimes threw back when they hit soft tissue; the way the exposed brain sometimes reminded her of a big ugly shellfish when she'd pulled the calvarium away from the lower skull. The music also drowned out the feeling that was always with her since she'd turned forty two years ago, a lengthening shadow with an icy cold centre. It was the notion that one day she would end up someplace like this too — an empty shell, her vital organs cut out, weighed, dissected then thrown away, her brain pickled and then examined, cause of death confirmed, noted down, filed away, another stat.

She hit the play button on her portable cassette deck. Burt liacharach and His Orchestra Play the Hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David— instrumental versions of those beautiful sunny songs she so loved and cherished, no vocals to distract her.

'This Guy's in Love with You' came out of the speakers us she looked down at her first cadaver of the morning —