Zoo Read online

  I knew it. More politics, more people covering their asses rather than actually trying to understand what’s happening in the real world. It was Washington at its finest.

  I took a deep breath.

  “There is an imminent threat, ma’am,” I said. “Perhaps if you’d taken time out of your busy day, you could have come by the meeting yesterday and seen for yourself. Animal behavior is changing radically and alarmingly, and people are dying. I can prove it.”

  “It doesn’t make the slightest shred of sense,” Wernert said. “Why is it happening?”

  “I’m not sure. Not yet. That’s one of the questions we need to figure out. But the why of it is not what’s at stake at the moment, Ms. Wernert. You don’t have to know why your house is on fire to run for the exit. Warnings need to be sent out right now for people to be wary of animal aggression.”

  “Right. I’m afraid that’ll fly like a lead balloon on CNN,” Wernert said. “Senator Gardner tells the public, ‘Lock up your killer Shih Tzu.’”

  “Please. At least let me show Senator Gardner the film I have.” I was irritated to hear a new note of begging in my voice.

  “The senator has more important things to do than become involved with your fringe theory. He’s booked solid for the next month. Good-bye.” Wernert hung up.

  I stared at my phone. To come this far just to be sold down the river was unacceptable. I didn’t even care about all the time and effort it took me to put this presentation together. It was the fact that the public needed to hear what I had to say, and that the facts were being hidden by the very people who were supposed to be protecting the populace.

  Senator’s blessing or not, a warning needed to go out. No one else was going to do it. It was up to me.

  I looked at the media people down by the door, gathered for the environmental hearing that was starting to get underway, and a plan came to me.

  As I walked back toward the metal detectors, I turned and stopped. Then I climbed up on the platform base of the giant indoor sculpture, jumped up, and caught the first branch of the stainless steel tree.

  Lawyers and politicians and even some real people stopped and started pointing as I scurried up to the top.

  “Excuse me!” I called to everyone through cupped hands. “Excuse me. I have something important to say.”

  “Oz?” Chloe said, looking up at me from the lobby floor. “What are you doing?”

  “The only thing left to do,” I called down to her. “The people need to know.”

  Chapter 42

  “EXCUSE ME!” I shouted. “Everyone—I am a scientist. My name is Jackson Oz, and I was invited to speak at an environmental hearing for the US Senate before I was mysteriously uninvited.”

  I glanced down to see the cop who’d just eighty-sixed us standing beneath the tree, his gun in one hand, his radio in the other.

  I paused, swallowed, continued.

  “An environmental disturbance of global proportions is happening. Three days ago, in Botswana, more than a hundred people were killed by wild animals. I believe this epidemic is spreading worldwide. Everyone may be in jeopardy. Be on the lookout for sudden aggression in animals—”

  An alarm sounded. I paused. A piercing white light strobed, and the hallway reverberated with clanging bells. From deeper inside the building, I could hear an approaching herd of stomping footfalls.

  I bit my lip. I thought maybe I’d grab a little attention from a reporter or two before I was arrested, but now I was worried. After 9/11, this was probably one of the best-guarded places on earth. Maybe my plan wasn’t as brilliant as it sounded a moment before.

  That thought was confirmed as a team of men in black fatigues appeared from an interior hallway, swinging M16s and riot shields. As the SWAT team came through the ringing metal detectors, I could see the letters CERT flashing in silver tape across the backs of their flak jackets.

  “Get down from there! Now!” a mustached man in a tactical helmet called from the skinny end of a crackling megaphone as he trained the business end of his M16 at my chest.

  I was doing just that, kneeling down to hang-jump off the metal branch, when I heard a boom, and what felt like an A-Rod line drive hit me in the back of my right hand. My grip faltered and I dropped to the marble floor like a bag of meat.

  I looked at my hand. It felt broken. It looked like I’d been stung by a hornet the size of a kitten. I’d been shot with some type of nonlethal round. A rubber bullet, I guessed.

  But that was the least of my problems. Two blinks later, there was a violent, zinging pain in the backs of my legs and my teeth involuntarily clenched as I started shaking.

  “You are being Tasered. Don’t move, you squirrelly little prick,” said a voice so close to my head I could smell the onions on his breath.

  That was easy: I couldn’t move, as my muscles were being zapped into paralysis. Even after the Taser’s fishhooks were ripped from my back, it still felt like someone was boring into my skull with an electric drill. My brain was numbed.

  Now four cops were on top of me, wrenching my arms behind my back to cuff my wrists.

  “That’s what you get for dicking around,” the cop said in my ear. “You’re in trouble. Like federal homeland security–style trouble.”

  I was hauled to my feet and shove-walked toward an open double door in the marble wall. I tried to get my feet under me, but the muscles in my legs were still wobbly. I stumbled, they dragged me, I got my legs back, and then they fell out from under me again. I looked down at my useless, jellylike legs. It was like they were somebody else’s.

  “Oh, so now you’re resisting arrest,” the cop sneered, and a boot blasted into my spine.

  “Get off of him! Stop hurting him!” A woman, screaming. I heard it as if I were underwater, registered it as if I were in a coma.

  I saw Chloe out of the corner of my eye. She was rushing forward, pushing at the cops as she screamed.

  I also spotted Gail Quinn, Claire Dugard, and Charles Groh beside her, shouting at the Capitol police. The hallway resounded with the cacophonous echoes of shouting, scuffling, stomping boots.

  Two dream moments later, they were all cuffed and trussed on the floor beside me. They even cuffed Charles Groh to his wheelchair. Clearly a very dangerous man, him.

  We were yanked up and dragged toward a side door opening onto a dingy back corridor.

  “Hey, look, Larry,” said the cop to one of his buddies. “It’s the attack of the retards. Where’s the bearded lady? Outside keeping the short bus running for the getaway?”

  Right then was when I truly lost it. I turned and tried to kick the cop in his balls. I missed, though I did manage to land a pretty good blow on his shin.

  Then my view was blocked by a fist, showing me a sweeping vista of some guy’s fingers and knuckles. I took in the scenery for a leisurely fraction of a second before being disturbed by the noisy crunch of my nose breaking, which echoed numbly in my ears as the lights above me dimmed and sputtered out.

  Chapter 43

  AFTER THE PANDEMONIUM, the Capitol cops brought us to an MPDC holding tank. We were processed and conveyed into a cell in the rear of the building. The walls were cluttered with peace signs, anarchy signs, and pot leaves that previous occupants had keyed and Sharpied onto the grimy tiles. This room had seen its share of troublemakers.

  We spent the night in the cell: Gail Quinn, Claire Dugard, Charles Groh, Chloe, and me, as well as a few cockroaches I at first mistook for Yorkshire terriers. I leaned against the wall with two scraps of paper towel twisted in my nostrils and my sinuses clogged with blood.

  We used the time wisely. After I was done apologizing profusely for landing us all in jail, we stayed up half the night in the windowless concrete room, trying to piece together the potential causes of HAC.

  We kept bumping up against the same barriers we had encountered at the meeting. We decided it was unlikely that it was a virus. Whatever it was, for it to similarly affect various different species
in diverse areas argued against that possibility. We all agreed it was more likely that this sudden and aberrant shift in behavior was probably a response to some change in the environment. Obviously the best thing to do now was to perform autopsies on affected animals and look for any anatomical or physiological peculiarities that might point us in the right direction.

  Dr. Quinn pledged the help of the Columbia University biology department, if and when we could get a specimen.

  “Who needs the government anyway, Oz?” she said from where she sat, campfire-style, by the jail cell door. “Even if they’d listened to you today, they would have formed a committee to hire a research team to come up with a study on the personality types of the best people needed to come up with an action plan.”

  We were freed the next morning after our arraignment. The others got off with a misdemeanor charge of public disturbance and a five-hundred-dollar fine, and I was charged with criminal trespass and had to enter a plea and pay three thousand dollars in bail.

  Though I now had a federal record and a court date, I wasn’t terribly worried about it as we pushed Dr. Groh’s wheelchair down the ramp beside the courthouse steps in the early morning sunlight. I had bigger fish to fry—we all did, whether anyone realized it or not. The government was about to be overwhelmed with a lot more important things than me.

  “What now? We go hunting?” Chloe said after we had helped load Dr. Groh into the back of a wheelchair-accessible cab with Claire and Gail and said our good-byes.

  “First, the next portion of your vacation package,” I said, pointing to a restaurant down the street. “Allow me to introduce you to an American gem: the twenty-four-hour diner.”

  “I have another suggestion,” Chloe said, pointing at my nose. “Your nose looks crooked. Very crooked. You might want to think about seeing a doctor.”

  So our breakfast wound up being eaten in the waiting room of the George Washington University Hospital’s ER. After wolfing down an Egg McMuffin while John Hancocking half a dozen documents, I stood on a chair and blitzed through the channels of the wall-mounted TV, trying to see if there was any word of our protest on the news. Two trips around the horn and I left it on ESPN, where they were recapping a game last night in which the Celtics had lost to the Knicks: a small glimmer of good news.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said to Chloe. “There’s nothing. Not a single word about Botswana or the protest. We were arrested for nothing.”

  Another hour of waiting and I was taken for some X-rays. When Chloe and I came back into the treatment room, we noticed a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit surrounded by armed guards in the bay across from us.

  “Look. Another troublemaker,” Chloe whispered to me. Her smile was sweet and impish.

  I smiled back. That she could keep up a sense of humor through all this bullshit was incredible.

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “This must be the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know section.”

  After a while a handsome doctor came in with my X-ray, the glossy sheet of black film flopping in his small, smooth hand. He looked young enough to be a George Washington University undergrad. He glanced at Chloe a beat too long for my liking and smiled cheerily as he told me that my nose was indeed broken.

  “I didn’t like your nose before anyway,” Chloe said as Dr. Feelgood snapped a pair of latex gloves onto his tiny porcelain hands to set my nose back into its proper form.

  “I am kidding,” said Chloe, smiling behind her hand. In a moment I was lying with my shirt off on a crinkling sheet of gurney paper.

  “I’m going to have to rebreak your nose before I set it,” the doctor said as he pinched down hard on my face. “It’s been a number of hours since you were injured.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. My face betrayed me.

  “It’ll only take a second,” said the doctor. He was talking to me as though I were a child afraid of needles.

  “Ready?” He snapped his glove. Bastard was whistling.

  I was struggling to sit up, and then I felt a soft hand in mine.

  “You can do this, Oz,” Chloe said, squeezing my hand. “I’m right here.”

  A funny thing happened then. I actually did calm down. This was becoming a theme for us, helping each other out, anticipating each other’s needs. As I looked at Chloe and felt her cool hand in mine, I realized I was falling very hard and fast in love with this woman. I had a suspicion it was happening to her, too.

  Then the doctor broke my nose and I screamed like a baby.

  Chapter 44

  WITH A BANDAGE X-taped across my face and bloody cotton balls peeking rakishly from my nostrils, I left the hospital with Chloe and caught a cab back to the hotel. We showered, packed, checked out, and went to Union Station to catch the next New York–bound Acela train.

  New criminal record or not, I needed to return to the Big Apple to regroup and try like hell to broadcast my lion footage to the world. Get it on the Internet, see if I could get it on the network news.

  As we were settling into our seats, I tried calling Natalie again. The phone went straight to voice mail, and I hung up. I’d left her a message almost forty-eight hours before. What the hell? Was she icing me out?

  Half an hour later I was coming back from the snack car with a beer and a half bottle of wine. Chloe was shuffling a deck of cards on the tray table in front of her.

  “Go fish,” I said.

  “These aren’t playing cards,” Chloe said. “These are tarot cards.”

  “Tarot cards?” I said, giving her a quizzical look. “What scientist carries tarot cards?”

  Chloe shrugged.

  “I think they are very beautiful,” she said. “They belonged to my mother. I found them in a box of her things after she died. It’s my—how do you say it?—good luck charm. It’s superstitious, I know.”

  She slipped them back in their box and reached beneath her seat for her purse.

  “Lemme see those,” I said, putting a hand on hers. “Do you know how to…do whatever it is you do with tarot cards?”

  “We can do a reading,” she said, sliding the cards back out of the box. “You shuffle the cards and then lay out ten of them in what is called the Celtic cross. The best kind of reading is the question reading. First you write down a question, then deal out the cards to find the answer. The tenth card in the sequence will give you the answer.”

  I uncapped a pen and scribbled out on an Amtrak cocktail napkin:

  Will HAC destroy the world?

  I handed her the napkin, but she waved it off.

  “Don’t show it to me yet. Just turn it over and shuffle.”

  So I folded it and put it down. I shuffled the cards and carefully slipped them off the top of the deck one by one, laying them down on the tray table in the places where she pointed.

  The formation complete, Chloe began turning the cards over. The first one showed an old man in a cloak, holding a staff and a lantern.

  “That’s the Hermit,” she said. “It represents, er—how do you say?—introspection, searching.”

  Chloe’s voice had a slight note of seriousness in it. How did a scientist become a closet mystic? I was intrigued. It made me think of Isaac Newton doing alchemy experiments in his spare time, trying to turn lead into gold when he wasn’t busy laying down the foundation of classical physics.

  She turned over the other cards. One card was called the Tower, another the Lovers, which I liked the sound of.

  “Now, this is the one that will answer the question,” Chloe said as I arrived at the tenth card. She flipped it over.

  Outside, the eastern seaboard clattered by in swaths of gray and brown; snatches of the ocean sparkled weakly in the failing afternoon light.

  I looked at the card. It looked like a picture of an angel with birdlike wings. Feathers and red and yellow triangles splayed out from the cloud he was sitting in, and the angel seemed to be blowing through some sort of straw.

  “What is it? The angel?” I said.

&n
bsp; Chloe bit her lip as she kept staring at the card. “This card is Le Jugement.” She pointed at the angel. “This is the angel Gabriel, blowing his horn.” She pointed at the red and yellow triangles. “This is fire.”

  I didn’t need a crystal ball to know what that meant.

  I showed her my question.

  “Duh-duh-duh…” Chloe playfully hummed ominous movie music. She smiled, laughed, and scooped up the cards. But as she did, I saw that her hands were shaking slightly.

  We sat in silence as the Acela train blasted like a switch across the miserable ass of Delaware. Gazing out at the blur of tract housing and strip malls, for some reason I started thinking about the book The Little Red Caboose, which my mom used to read to me when I was a kid.

  How wonderful the illustrations had made the world seem. Shiny cars and friendly policemen as the train went through the city; apple-cheeked farmers driving corn-filled pickups in the country; painted Indians on horseback as the train chugged up the mountain. I remembered looking at the pictures for hours, at the world that was waiting for me, happy, colorful, safe.

  As we went into a tunnel, I closed my eyes and saw the card again: the Judgment.

  What kind of storybooks would I be reading to my children? I wondered.

  Chapter 45

  IT WAS ABOUT nine at night when we emerged from Penn Station onto the bustling expanse of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The dark mood that had gripped me after the tarot reading hadn’t let go. The city was wet. The clouds had broken into rain during our journey, and now the weather alternated between drizzle and bursts of harder rain. We stood on the curb, burdened with our luggage, without umbrellas, getting wet. Steam rose from the streets, and the headlights of the cars were mirrored in the shimmering asphalt.