Zoo Read online

  The Bad Smell is people. And as he stands here in the epicenter of one of the most densely populated places on earth, this frightening, stifling, choking stench closes in on him like a noose, like a bag over his head.

  He is shaking. His hands are trembling. The wind shifts, and he smells the psychiatric center a block north. He hears screaming and smells horror, unbearable pain.

  All this terrible foulness collects in his mind like smoke in an air filter. Attila plugs his nostrils with his fingers. He stops shaking and opens his glassy brown eyes. He shudders.

  A cracked coffee mug with two toothbrushes in it rests on the soap dish. Attila picks it up, shakes out the toothbrushes, and flops the mug back and forth in his hands, wondering what to do with it. He looks again at his reflection in the mirror, wearing the red hat. He rocks back and flings the cup hard at the mirror, smashing it to smithereens and splintering the mirror into a fractured starburst. It feels good. It scratches an itch inside of him.

  Then the itch comes back.

  Huffing, panting, yowling, he leaps from the sink into the hallway, hurling and smashing everything he can reach. He goes into the room with the computers and smashes them all. He rips them from the wall, yanking out their electrical cords, and tosses them into each other. Sparks crackle and fizz, bits of machinery fly about the room like handfuls of flung sand.

  Soon he hears a noise: a repeated thumping on the wall near the door.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP IN THERE!” comes the muffled voice of a person. Next-door neighbor. “You stop that shit right now or I’m calling the cops!”

  Attila screams back as he rushes over to the wall and begins pounding it as hard as he can. Plaster particulates rise in the air like white smoke as the mirror on the wall jumps once, twice, then breaks free of its moorings and crashes to the floor near his feet. Glass scatters across the hallway.

  When he sniffs again, he catches a new scent emanating from the adjacent apartment.

  Attila pant-hoots and shrieks as he scampers through the ruined room.

  There is one human smell he enjoys, and he can smell it now.

  The scent of human fear.

  Chapter 38

  THE HAC MEETING was still in full swing that afternoon when an e-mail popped up on my iPhone from Elena Wernert, Senator Gardner’s senior staffer.

  The senator couldn’t meet with me today, she informed me, and my heart sank like a stone before I read the bit that followed: if I was interested, she could “squeeze me in” for five minutes at a conservation hearing that the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works was holding tomorrow at ten.

  I thought: a congressional hearing—booyah. That was better than a meeting with the senator. I couldn’t have rubbed on a bottle and asked a genie for a better way to get the word out.

  So: was I interested?

  Absolutely interested, I wrote back, tapping letters on the phone’s glowing screen under the table.

  As the meeting wore on toward evening, something strange happened. More people kept arriving, prominent geneticists, biologists, people whose names I’d known for years but whom I had never met. I did a double take when Jonathan Eley walked in—a popular astronomer who hosted a New Agey PBS series on the origins of the universe.

  They all wanted to see the lion attack footage, which by then had been set up to run continuously in a cordoned-off section of the meeting room.

  The Botswana zoological anomaly, as many were starting to call it, was attracting scientists like moths to a flame.

  This whole thing was on a new level now, I realized. The buzz on this was intense. Also, in a strange way, I’d won a kind of respect that I’d never really had before: as the meeting gradually segued from the ballroom to the hotel bar, well-known scientists from top-shelf institutions—Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins—who normally wouldn’t have given me the time of day shuffled over to shake my hand or offer to buy me a beer.

  As the attaboys accumulated, I took five from worrying about the end of the world to allow myself a golden moment of self-congratulation. Even after people had called me crazy, I’d stuck to my guns with HAC, and now I felt vindicated.

  “Well, aren’t you quite the celebrity?” Chloe said, picking at the shoulder of my sport coat after I’d said good-bye to a frosty-haired Princeton microbiologist. My hand was pink and hot from handshakes.

  “Yep,” I said. “Ladies and gentlemen, Jackson Oz, rock-and-roll biologist. No autographs, and easy on the flash photography.”

  After the meeting broke up in the early evening, Chloe and I went upstairs to her hotel suite to prepare for the Senate hearing. Sharing a pot of coffee, we cranked out a five-minute statement to the committee that emphasized the dire nature of the problem. I gave several specific policy suggestions, such as broadcasting warnings to every local department of animal care and control to be on alert for increased aggression. But the most important request was for funding to research the problem. We needed to get the best people we could, as fast as possible.

  After rereading it, Chloe collapsed in a chair and nodded her head.

  “This is good, Oz. With the tape, it should cause quite a stir. We’ve already grabbed the attention of scientists. Now we’re going to tell the world.”

  We called room service and had the coffee exchanged for a late dinner. Skate wing with capers and cauliflower farro and a bottle of Vouvray (Chloe’s suggestion). It was delicious.

  She was oddly quiet as we ate. She swirled her wine and gazed distractedly through the window. Outside in the bluish, luminous dark, the Frederick Douglass Bridge, lit up like a birthday cake, spanned the Anacostia River.

  When Chloe finally looked at me, her brown eyes were glistening with moisture.

  “Back in Africa,” she began, her voice quiet, “when night fell, I had resigned myself to my death. I started praying to my grandfather, saying that if I had to die, that maybe he could help somehow. That it would be quick. The next day, I was about to give up hope. Then I looked up, and you were there.”

  “And now we’re here,” I said, raising my glass.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I never believed in fate before, but now I don’t know. One moment, I’m about to die in Africa, and the next, I’m in America. And in the middle of a storm. Something that might be one of the biggest events in history. This doesn’t often happen to a girl from Auvergne. It doesn’t seem real.”

  “It is real,” I said. “You want me to pinch you to prove it?”

  That’s when she leaned across the tiny table and touched my face.

  “No,” she said. “I want you to kiss me.”

  I leaned toward her from across the table and we kissed for the first time. It was soft and right. Then the image of Natalie floated across my eyelids, and though it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, I broke it off.

  “No?” Chloe said surprised. “I thought—”

  “I should have told you. I’m sort of, uh—”

  “You’re married.”

  “God, no.”

  “Petite amie? Une amante?”

  “No, no. I mean, it’s, uh…it’s hard to say. I think I just broke up with someone,” I said, avoiding her eyes.

  Chloe harrumphed. “You think?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chloe lifted her glass, took a sip of wine. “Well, I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Truth and Justice,” she said.

  “I guess I should go back to my room,” I said. I wadded my napkin on my plate and stood. “We have a big day tomorrow.”

  “Are you completely crazy? You are here now,” she said. Then she sipped more wine and added: “Besides, I’ve already seen your underwear.”

  I gave her a look.

  “No, I’m serious, Oz. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Please stay?”

  “I’ll sleep on the chair.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Sleep in the bed, with me,” she said over the rim of her glass. “Don’t worry. Just sleep.”

  It turn
ed out she wasn’t kidding about the just sleeping part. She was sawing logs by the time I came out from my shower.

  I watched her in the dim light from the window—her dark eyelashes, her pale face, her thin, delicate arms. Lying there, she looked lovely, so girlish and birdlike. I was already kicking myself. What were you thinking? Natalie broke up with you. It’s done. You’re a free agent now. Go for it.

  Chloe had come all this way for me, I realized. She trusted me and believed in me, which Natalie never really did.

  After I tucked her under the covers, I lay beside her and looked at the ceiling.

  “Good night, you dumbass,” I said to myself, and shut my eyes.

  Chapter 39

  MY EYES OPENED I don’t know how many hours later. The room was so dark I almost couldn’t tell whether or not I’d opened my eyes. Not even an orange glow from the city outside. It was as if someone had put blackout curtains on the windows, which I hadn’t remembered doing.

  Then: shaking. Some sort of clicking, metallic rattle. My eyes flitted around the dark room. It took me a moment to realize it was the doorknob.

  The rattling became louder—and more violent—as if someone were trying to wrench the doorknob out of the door. A grinding, scratching sound soon accompanied it. Then came a tentative whump against the door.

  My first thought was that it was one of the other scientists playing a joke. After the meeting, the beer had been flowing like water.

  There was a second whump. Harder now. Something big and heavy behind it.

  I sat up. I didn’t think it was a joke. It wasn’t funny enough.

  The blow that followed made the top of the door crack. I heard wood splintering.

  What the hell?

  I threw back the sheet and was on my feet as the groaning hinges ripped free from the door frame. The door exploded inward, smashing against the floor.

  An enormous shape filled the doorway. Then it didn’t. There was movement in the room. Then another huge shape darkened the door for an instant and was gone, inside the black room.

  “Oz? Are you there?”

  Behind me, Chloe sat up in the bed, reached over to the bedside lamp, switched it on, and screamed.

  They were bears. Two bears—two massive fucking grizzly bears—filled the room, maybe five feet from the bed. The two bears moved forward on stout, powerful legs, their fur rippling over their bodies in waves. Drool swung from their open mouths, and their beady little black eyes stared outward, as blank and indifferent as death.

  I could not move. It was as if my feet had been nailed down. There was no thinking. No fight-or-flight. Even my lizard brain had checked out.

  Bear One reared back on his hind legs and swiped at me with his paw. I tumbled backward and felt bright hot wetness I knew was blood on my cheek and neck. My hand flew to my face: blood poured between my fingers, covered my face, stung my eyes.

  Then I woke up on my back in the bed, screaming. My hands were flailing at the empty air above me. I reached for my neck. No blood. No pain.

  It took me a moment to realize Chloe was screaming, too, beside me in the bed.

  “Recevez les de moi!” she yelled in the dark.

  I grabbed her shoulders.

  “Get them off me! No!” Chloe said, pushing me away. Her eyes were open, but still seeing her nightmare.

  “It’s okay, Chloe! It’s a dream! Just a dream!”

  Her lungs sucked at the air. I held her and felt her body slowly loosen.

  “But it was so real. We were sleeping, and then the door broke down and bears rushed in. I watched one of them kill you.”

  “What?” I clicked on the light. “You dreamed about bears?”

  “Yes. They were huge. Two huge grizzly bears broke down the door and came in the room.”

  “Bullshit!” I hopped out of bed and began pacing.

  “What is it?”

  “I had the same dream. Two grizzly bears knocked down the door and came in, and one of them ripped my face off!”

  “How is that possible? How is it possible we both had the same nightmare?”

  I had heard of mutual dreaming before, but I’d always been skeptical, never having experienced it. Only in the most extreme cases were there reports of people dreaming the exact same thing. Was it because we were exposed to the same stimuli, or was it something else? Did it have to do with HAC? Surely not…

  “Mon Dieu,” Chloe said. “What is this? I’m so scared, Oz. What is going on? What is happening to the world?”

  A feeling like a vein of ice sliced from my toes to the top of my head.

  “I don’t know,” I said, holding my head in my hands.

  Chapter 40

  WHEN MY EYES opened again the next morning, Chloe was curled up against me, her head nestled in my armpit and my hand in her hair. Looking down at her, I thought about the night before. The shared nightmare, dreaming the same dream.

  I didn’t know what to think. A definite first for me. Chloe didn’t seem to want to talk about it, either. She didn’t mention it as we got ready and went down to get our cab.

  Outside, it was a crisp, sunny summer day. Sharp light, cloudless blue sky. Taxis and bike messengers, businesspeople going to work, sipping coffee, looking at their watches, Kindles out and earbuds in to isolate themselves for the commute. Seeing them made me think of the animals in Sri Lanka heading for the hills days before the tsunami while the people stayed behind, gathering seashells on the newly extended beach and wondering where the elephants went. Chloe and I exchanged a dark look as we rode. We didn’t have to say it. You could practically taste it in the air. Something bad was coming. Something the world had never seen.

  The Dirksen Senate Office Building was in the northwest part of the Capitol complex on First Street. I was heartened when I spotted some national media trucks at the curb outside the majestic white marble building. At least we had a shot now at giving people a warning.

  I also noticed some familiar faces waiting on the sidewalk beside the building’s steps. I shook hands with my old professors Gail Quinn and Claire Dugard. Dr. Charles Groh was there in his wheelchair. I patted his shoulder and squeezed it.

  “Go get ’em, Oz,” Groh said, turning the pat into a hug. “You can do this.”

  Chloe and I continued into the building, where white-shirted Capitol cops manned metal detectors. In the sweeping marble atrium behind them, spiffy Senate staffers, lobbyists, and press people swarmed about like bees in a hive, making honey and royal jelly. More shabbily dressed groups of people waited in line behind velvet ropes and looked bored.

  As we headed for the security desk, we had to walk around a massive public art installation, a thirty-foot-tall sculpture that looked like a stainless steel oak tree. “Hi, I’m here for the ten o’clock hearing for the Committee on Environment and Public Works,” I said to the cop behind the desk. He was a big handsome black man with a shaved head and a face as hard to crack as a bank safe.

  He sighed as he lifted his clipboard. “Name?” he said.

  “Jackson Oz,” I said. “O z, Oscar Zulu.”

  He tsk-tsked as he shook his head at his clipboard. “Hmm. No Oz,” he said, and stared back up at me.

  “There must be a mix-up,” I said. “I was invited by Senator Gardner yesterday at the last minute. Could you double-check with his office for me?”

  The crime dog looked at me as if I’d asked to borrow his gun.

  “Please?” tossed in Chloe, sweetening the sauce.

  “Fine,” he said, leaning back in his squeaky leather chair and chinning the receiver of the desk phone. “Now I’m a receptionist, I guess.”

  He punched some numbers. Then he turned in his chair and mumbled into the phone. He had a slight smirk on his face when he hung up.

  “Just what I thought. They told me to watch out for you activist crazies at dispatch. Sorry, buddy. You’re not on the list, and you need to go now.”

  My stomach fell inside me like an elevator that had snapped a cab
le. I exchanged a baffled look with Chloe.

  “Did they say why?” I said.

  “Don’t push it,” the cop said. “There’s the exit. Use it.”

  I thought quickly. “The website said that some seats are open to the public. Can’t we just attend as spectators, then?”

  He gave a dismissive noise through his nose, half chuckle and half snort. “How long you been in D.C.?” he said, pointing down the corridor behind him at the line of people behind the velvet rope.

  “You see those folks?” he said. “Lobbyists have been paying those sorry individuals twenty bucks an hour for the last two days to wait on line in order to snag a seat for that hearing. First come, first served here, buddy, and it’s been served for some time.”

  He turned to Chloe with a genuinely sorry expression on his face. “Sorry, sweet cheeks. A pretty face can only get you so far in this town. ’Bye, now.”

  Chapter 41

  THE SPECTATORS WEREN’T the only ones who’d been served, I thought, fuming as we walked away from the desk.

  I couldn’t believe what we were being told. Was this some sort of sick joke?

  On the steps outside the building I took out my phone and dialed Senator Gardner’s office.

  “Yes?” said a quick, impatient female voice.

  Elena Wernert, the staffer who had called me the day before.

  “This is Jackson Oz,” I said. “There’s been a mistake. Security’s not letting me into the hearing.”

  “Yes, well. I’ve been trying to contact you, Mr. Oz,” Wernert said. “We’re not going to be able to accommodate you after all. The hearing is full.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Bull. Shit!”

  “Funny you should use that term, Mr. Oz,” Wernert spat. “Because bullshit is exactly what we’ve been hearing about you. We were led to believe that you were a Columbia scholar, but we’ve looked into your background. You neglected to inform us of some of the more radical claims on your blog. We need some insight into the animal conservation problems we’ve been having, not some lunatic with a conspiracy theory about animals taking over the planet. We’re sorry, but Senator Gardner doesn’t need to associate with wing-nut bloggers.”