Zoo Read online

  In the bedroom doorway I smelled something so concentratedly dense, so horrific, that I was afraid to turn on the light. But I did turn on the light.

  I stood there for a moment, stock-still, breathing heavily.

  “What is it, Oz?” Chloe called from behind me, in the hallway.

  It wasn’t just that the room was a wreck. It wasn’t just that the stripped mattress was torn to tattered fluff and sodden with urine—though there was that.

  I could feel my heartbeat hammering in my ears as my eyes scanned the room. There was blood on the walls. In thin streaks and freckles. In wide, heavy smears. Handprints.

  Huge, long handprints—chimp handprints. There was one right there beside the switch plate, which also had blood on it. Four very long, thick fingers and a small stubby hook of a thumb.

  I looked up. There was dried blood misted on the light fixture in the ceiling. It gave the room a slightly pinkish cast. All this blood had been there for days. It was dry and dark, the color of brown rust.

  With my eyes, I followed the blood smears to the far corner of the room.

  “What?” Chloe said in the hallway.

  There was something on the floor in the corner of the room opposite me, between the bed and the wall. The streaks of blood led there, just as all roads led to Rome.

  I could feel Chloe behind me.

  “Stay there,” I said. “Don’t come in.”

  I covered my face with the collar of my shirt and I stepped farther into the room. I tasted bitterness in the back of my mouth. Bile was rising in my throat.

  It was a human body. Most of one, anyway. It was a decomposing—and what looked like a partially eaten—human body. I couldn’t identify it by the face, because the face was gone. As were the feet and hands. But there was long red hair. Red, red, Irish girl’s hair, and the body was wearing turquoise hospital scrubs.

  A rectangular plastic card was clipped to the breast pocket of the blood-stiffened shirt.

  I unclipped it and looked at it. Under dirt-brown streaks of dried blood, there was Natalie’s deer-in-the-headlights mug shot on her hospital ID badge.

  NATALIE MARIE SHAW, it said beneath the picture.

  I hardly noticed Chloe as I brushed past her in the hallway. I’d made it to the front door when Chloe grabbed my arm.

  “What is it? Tell me, Oz. Please. What’s in there?”

  I babbled. “My—uh, my girlfriend…”

  She balked, scrunched her face up. Her face showed confusion, with the possibility of anger in it.

  “I thought she was your ex-girlfriend.”

  “She is now.”

  We called the police from Mrs. Mullen’s apartment. Mrs. Mullen, my next-door neighbor—a sweet little Irish lady who was so old she’d probably come over in the potato famine. I wasn’t terribly shocked when Mrs. Mullen said she hadn’t heard anything in the last week. The lady was deaf as a stone. She didn’t even know I lived with a chimp.

  The first cops to arrive were already aware of Attila. They told me he had been spotted on the street but that he was still on the loose. Something about hiding on the roof of a bodega.

  What now? What did I do with my life?

  My home was destroyed. If I hadn’t zipped off to Africa and asked Natalie to take care of Attila, she would still be alive. My fault. If I didn’t have a fucking chimp in my apartment she would still be alive. Also my fault. She was a saint—even after breaking up with me, she’d still come over to check on Attila. And he had killed her. I went further and further back down the chain of decisions I’d made, thinking about what I could have done differently. A lot. Regret sucked at my heart like a leech.

  Chloe sat beside me and held my hand as I sat in the stairwell while police radios squawked and crackled in my apartment and all down the hallway neighbors had come out to stare.

  What now? What indeed.

  And the nightmare wasn’t over. Not even close.

  Book Four

  THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS

  Chapter 50

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  WHEN I FELT the train slow, my eyes fluttered, bringing me out of an impromptu nap.

  Outside the window of the Acela, I could see we weren’t in D.C. yet. We were going through a seemingly abandoned industrial town in South Jersey, or maybe northern Maryland. These decaying towns all looked depressingly the same: windowless brick factories; deserted, rusting bridges; a main street lined with plywood-boarded windows and overgrown with weeds. Going back to nature, slowly.

  Turns out an apocalypse actually comes on pretty slowly. Not fire and brimstone but rust and dandelions. Not a bang but a whimper.

  Perhaps it was due to the continuing economic downturn, but rumors abounded on the Internet. People were dying in these in-between places. No one knew why.

  I had my theories.

  Gazing out at the orphaned town, I thought of those lines from Yeats:

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

  For a moment I stared blankly at my reflection in the black screen of the sleeping laptop that was open on the tray table in front of me. You could have packed for a long weekend in the bags under my eyes.

  So much to do and so little goddamn time to do it.

  For the last five years, I’d been working nonstop with my friends at Columbia to try to get a handle on HAC. A lot of the work consisted of collecting the corpses of affected animals and performing autopsies on them.

  We’d seen a lot of specimens. Too many. Tigers from India. Russian bears. Beavers, wolverines, even ground squirrels. The unusually aggressive behavior had spread to so many mammal species we were starting to lose count.

  It wasn’t rabies. As far as we could tell from the specimens we’d studied, it didn’t seem like a virus. We had noticed something interesting, though. The brains of the affected animals were a little heavier than normal. Not only that, but they were heavier by the same amount, about 1.3 percent. The increase in brain matter seemed to be concentrated mostly in the amygdala, the part of the mammalian brain generally thought to be responsible for memory and learning.

  The finding was unusual enough to finally get the government on board. For the last year, we’d gotten decent funding and had been working with a liaison from the Department of Health and Human Services.

  So the good news now was that we had provided the world with proof that something was causing abnormal mutations in mammalian amygdalae that were triggering this aberrantly aggressive behavior. The bad news was that we didn’t have a clue what it was.

  There were other questions. Why were some animals affected and not others? And why were humans entirely unaffected by these mutations? Were there other symptoms associated with the mutations? Yes, and they varied from one species to another. In some species—lions, for instance—the mutations seemed to affect only male animals. Not so in other species. There had been an ugly episode of bizarrely psychotic behavior among a group of female elephants in Thailand. Every hunch we got about every question opened up a fresh jar of questions. Questions that had been answered sprouted more questions, like the heads of the Hydra: cut off one and two grow back in its place.

  I stared out at the wasteland that America was becoming, rusting under the hard, pitiless summer sky.

  Chapter 51

  AND THERE WAS more bad news that morning—special, just for me. I had to interrupt my research in order to head down to D.C. to do my Chicken Little dance at another time-suck of a congressional hearing. For all the scientific evidence we were amassing—and in spite of the exponential increases in animal attacks, which were irrefutable—many people, both in the government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

  I wasn’t the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore—but still, not everyone had heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long, uphill battle to get pe
ople to recognize what was happening. I had frequently been at loggerheads in the op-ed pages with Harvey Saltonstall—yes, the Harvey Saltonstall: evolutionary biologist, popular science writer, holder of the Henry Wentworth Wallace chair at Harvard. I had a couple of public debates with him, too. Harvey and I had shared a few split screens on news shows. He was my most prominent public critic, and his opposition to HAC must have delayed public acceptance of it by years. It drove me nuts debating him—he had the academic cred, the name, the CV, and who the hell was I? I looked like your office’s IT guy standing next to that stately, handsome man, twiggy in his tweeds, with his pipe-smoky baritone, his Boston Brahmin accent, and that obnoxious tic of swiping back his silver hair. Twit.

  I rubbed circles on my throbbing temples with my thumbs, my gathering headache coming at me in fuzzy radio waves of pain, and was more astonished than alarmed when a guy I didn’t know came in and sat down across from me. He looked like an ex-husband of Britney Spears: skinny arms blue with bad tats, houndstooth Sinatra hat, a goatee that looked drawn on.

  A small part of me wondered if I was still asleep.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “You Jackson Oz?”

  I might have rolled my eyes. Here we go.

  So, then. I’d written a book about HAC, which had become a controversial bestseller. On the one hand, it was the best thing I’d done yet to spread the word about HAC: it led to appearances on the major media outlets, where I tried to warn people about the growing danger and the increasingly dire need for immediate, coordinated action. On the other hand, I was sort of famous—or, rather, infamous. Pet owners didn’t like me much. “Dog people,” especially, despised my message, now even more so since we’d gotten Congress and the president to consider a national quarantine.

  “Actually, no,” I said. “But I get that all the time.”

  The man was unfazed.

  “Why you gotta hate on dogs, yo? Why you gotta be getting people all crazy and shit? To sell your stupid-ass books? My rottie ain’t evil. She’s a sweetheart.”

  “Everything okay here?” said a behemoth of a black man in a tailored pin-striped suit who had just materialized in the doorway beside K-Fed.

  “We havin’ a conversation here,” the guy said with righteous indignation. “A private conversation.”

  “Not anymore,” said my sometime bodyguard, FBI special agent Nimo Kade. He flashed a winning smile and a badge. “Would you like to find your seat or do you need some help?”

  Nimo shouldered the dipshit out of the train car and I let out a long breath of relief.

  Working with the government has its perks.

  This sort of thing happened a lot. My e-mail in-box was so full of death threats that these days I just deleted them without being curious enough to open them.

  “You bring out the best and brightest, don’t you, Oz?” Nimo said when the guy was gone.

  “It’s my sparkling personality,” I said. “Where is everyone?”

  Chloe appeared in the doorway of the train car. The best thing about the last five years—five unrewarding years of slaving away in the lab, constant traveling, constant frustration—was having Chloe by my side. She’d been working as hard as I was. Harder, actually. And somehow, instead of sporting my burned-fuse chic, she was her same self, with silky skin and owlish eyes, her body willowy and elegant as a stroke of calligraphy.

  Then there was a noisy, porcine squeal, and something giggly and sticky shot through the open doorway, scrambled onto the seat, and landed in my lap.

  “Egads! A monster!” I said in my 1930s radio drama voice as our three-year-old son, Eli, climbed me as though he were Sir Edmund Hillary and I were Everest. I put him in a mock headlock and kissed him on the top of his fuzzy blond head.

  Eli wasn’t only a rambunctious kid who loved wrestling and snapping together LEGO guns, he was smart. As a whip. At eighteen months, he could write words on the fridge with magnet letters. And he was bilingual in English and French.

  Chloe and I had gotten married in a quickie job in the city clerk’s office the day after she found out she was pregnant. Then we’d held a ceremony for friends and family a couple of months later. Eli was born eight weeks prematurely, and had to be put in the NICU. We were afraid he might not make it. But a week later, he bounced back. Started getting bigger and healthier.

  As I watched him hop up next to Chloe in the seat across from me and open his favorite book, The Jungle Book, my depression was replaced with a rejuvenated sense of determination.

  The hell with Yeats, I thought. The center would hold. It would have to. For my wife and son, I’d make it hold or die trying.

  Chapter 52

  TRAFFIC WAS STOPPED dead on the way to the Capitol from Union Station. In the backseat of the sleek black government sedan, Eli fidgeted in my lap, gnawing like a gremlin on a fruit leather we had gotten at Trader Joe’s. He was getting cranky. Chloe was already cranky because they didn’t have the car seat for Eli that they had said they would. The afternoon sun sparkled on a sea of chrome and glass and glowered like a fat yellow bully above us, a problem that the car’s anemic AC alleviated exactly not at all.

  I was getting pretty cranky myself. Another worthless hearing? What was the use? Nothing ever happened at these kangaroo courts but a jamboree of choreographed histrionics. Worst of all, Senator Charlie Chargaff, my avowed archenemy, was going to be on the inquiry panel today. I couldn’t wait to get grilled by a hair-plugged good ol’ boy with a spray-on tan who was going to try to ride his demonization of me into the White House.

  When at long last we rounded a corner, I could see the reason for the clogged traffic. A block from the Capitol complex, a smattering of young people in black hoodies and black masks were squaring off against riot cops. Several of the protesters were waving black flags with the circle-A anarchy symbol sprayed on them in cracked white paint. Billowing plumes of pink smoke sprayed up around them. Car horns honked all around us like the bleating of bored sheep.

  “What are these fools protesting now?” Chloe said, watching from the corner of her eye as Eli whacked a Batman action figure against the seat, making blow-up noises with his cheeks. “They already have what they want. Anarchy is here.”

  The driver peeled off into a U-turn and brought us around the back of the Capitol building. I felt the tickling buzz of my phone vibrating in the inner lining of my suit jacket.

  The caller ID said US GOVERNMENT.

  “Who is it?” Chloe said.

  “Uncle Sam,” I said.

  “Mr. Oz?” said a resonant voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “Are you at the hearing yet?”

  “Bad traffic, on my way. Who is this?”

  “This is Stanley Marshall, the president’s chief of staff. Something’s come up, a matter of national security. We need your help on it. Take a detour and come for a meeting.”

  “Now? I’m scheduled to speak in half an hour.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Oz. The president would like to speak to you instead. This is more pressing. Put one of the agents on the phone; I can give him directions.”

  I lurched into the front seat and handed Nimo my phone.

  “What was that?” Chloe said as we pulled another U-turn. Eli dropped his Batman figure on the car floor as we turned.

  “Mommy! Get Ba’man!”

  “I don’t know,” I half whispered. “I guess we’re going to meet the president.”

  Ten minutes later the car was pulling into a municipal parking garage in Dupont Circle. Seemed fishy. I leaned up front.

  “Are we meeting Deep Throat?” I said. “I thought we were going to the White House.”

  Nimo looked back at me and shrugged.

  “They told us to come here,” he said as we wheeled onto the garage’s ramp.

  We slowly circled up to the roof. I was confused. It was deserted.

  “What is this?” Chloe said. “There’s no one here.”

  “Damn,”
I said.

  “Mommy!” said Eli. “Get Ba’man!”

  “What?” said Chloe, ignoring him.

  “This must have been a ploy. Senator Chargaff. He must have found my number and had someone call, pretending to be the chief of staff, so I wouldn’t show up to the hearing. Make me look like a flake. Bastard.”

  I tried calling the number that had just called me. I was listening to the phone ring, unanswered, when we heard a low, chopping mumble—like an industrial fan heard through a pillow.

  A plastic bag drifting along the concrete wall beyond the windshield fluttered and took flight, graceful as a bird blown across the cityscape of D.C. Then we heard the deafening suck-and-throb tattoo of a landing helicopter, cottoning the air like a migraine in the head of a god.

  The whirlybird that landed five empty spots to the left of the sedan was a massive Black Hawk with military markings. An army colonel in mirrored aviators and a jacket as decorated as a Christmas tree hopped out of it and jog-walked toward the car.

  “Daddy!” Eli yelled in my ear.

  “What?” I yelled above the throbbing din.

  “Get—Ba’man!”

  Chapter 53

  AND WE’D BEEN worried about no car seat for Eli in the car.

  Strapped into the wailing, shuddering army helicopter a few minutes later, we pushed off the parking-garage roof and swung low as a sweet chariot over downtown Washington. We picked up altitude, and before long it was no longer concrete and highways but rolling jewel-green Virginia swampland that rushed by beneath us. I looked over at Eli, who was strapped in on Chloe’s lap, clutching his Batman, eyes big as Frisbees, in awe.

  We banked hard and thundered due north for twenty minutes or so and then began descending again. An office park of stark glass buildings emerged from the forest. From the vantage point of a few thousand feet above, they looked like blocks of ice melting on the grass. We dove toward the central building. I thought we were going to land on the red H of the helipad on the ground next to it, but instead the pilot guided us onto the flat roof of the building.