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Blood peppers the walls.

  The blast has taken off the Labrador’s face. His skin is gone; blood pumps from the place where his eyes used to be.

  Chris rises to his knees, then crumbles back to the floor, crying. He drops the gun. He hears his mom come running.

  “What the hell is going on?” she shouts.

  The dog’s legs twitch wretchedly as blood gushes on the floor, dampening Chris’s socks. The animal lies dying just feet away from him.

  “I’m sorry,” Chris half whispers. “Oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

  Chapter 56

  THE NEXT FEW hours didn’t seem real. We sat in squeaking, uncomfortable chairs that were bolted to the floor facing the massive TV. Leahy dimmed the lights to show us footage of attacks that the NSA had picked up throughout the country. The most chilling one was from California.

  The footage began with an aerial shot of an accident taken from a traffic helicopter. A jackknifed FedEx truck was half overturned alongside a sun-bleached highway. The traffic was at a near standstill as drivers slid by, rubbernecking at the mounds of boxes and packages spilling into the roadside ditch.

  “This is news footage from this morning out of Petaluma,” Leahy said. “That’s US 101 just north of San Francisco.”

  “News footage?” I said. “You’re showing me something the public has already seen?”

  “Grow up, Jimmy Olsen,” said Marlowe. “It’s taped. The feds snatched it up before it could get out.”

  The camera cut out and came on again with a shot from a slightly higher elevation. Alongside the same highway, what looked like dirty brown water rushed along a service road drainage ditch.

  As the chopper lowered toward the scene, I could make out that it wasn’t floodwater—there were things moving in it.

  “What in the hell?” I whispered, mostly to myself. I squinted and leaned forward, trying to make out the fuzzy footage.

  It was a flood of fur.

  “Mon Dieu,” Chloe said. “Are those… dogs?”

  Leahy nodded.

  I kept watching. The camera zoomed in.

  “What in the shit is going on here?” said the staticky voice of the cameraman, talking to somebody else in the helicopter, apparently. His voice threw the sound levels out of whack for a moment.

  It was hard to tell—some of the dogs looked feral, but most of them looked like pets: fat, awkward, with collars on. They were filthy, crazed, scrambling all over each other like migrating lemmings. The camera panned back. This was something altogether new. The roaring column of animals went on for miles, it seemed.

  “There must be…,” Chloe said.

  “Our estimates are between five hundred and a thousand dogs in there,” Leahy said.

  “Wait. Shh!” Marlowe hissed. “We’re getting to the good part.”

  The chopper swung in lower and sped along the ditch until it came to the spearhead of the bulging, running line of animals.

  “The dogs at the front of this horde we think are Dogo Argentinos,” said Marlowe. “They’re enormous, aggressive dogs, bred for fighting in South America. They’re banned in some countries.”

  The Dogos suddenly swerved a sharp turn, up out of the drainage ditch and then down an embankment to the right. The column followed, shifting direction en masse, like a flock of birds.

  The cameraman zoomed way in, trying to get a close-up shot. The frame jittered. There was a squall of barking. Then an outburst of shouting among the people in the helicopter. The chopper abruptly lifted. There was a growling sound, and the camera swung sharply downward: a pit bull was stuck absurdly to the helicopter, jaws clamped down on the skid, shaking as if he were trying to kill it. The animal dangled crazily from the flying machine before letting go, tumbling back down through the air into the river of hair and teeth.

  Leahy put the lights back on.

  I turned as Chloe looked at me with eyes wide and bright as tealights. This was worse than we could have imagined.

  She closed her eyes.

  “I want to get Eli, and I want to get out of here,” she whispered.

  I rubbed her hand powerlessly, not knowing what to say.

  Chapter 57

  THAT AFTERNOON, MARLOWE and Leahy shuffled us into several other meetings. More government people kept arriving by the minute. There was someone from the CIA, Alicia Swirsky, a tiny middle-aged woman whose elfin features were offset by her serious-as-a-heart-attack demeanor, and two FBI agents in midnight blue—Rumsy, a young guy still wet behind the ears with enthusiasm, and Roberts, a guy with pockmarked cheeks and the old-school look of a man who knew his barber and tailor by name. The latest arrival was a four-star army general named Albert Garcia, who had just stormed in with the fuck-you bluster of someone accustomed to everybody rising and saluting when he enters a room. He was flanked by two uniformed aides. Garcia had a magpie’s nest of shiny objects weighing down his uniform, a body like a backyard brick oven, and a head that looked like it’d been carved out of a tree stump with a chain saw.

  After the video of the giant dog pack—dog horde, maybe?—was shown for what seemed like the fifteenth time, this Garcia guy cleared his throat.

  “Now, according to ground reports, all the animals in this attack are male,” the general said. “Why is that again?”

  “Mass male grouping is one of the fundamental aspects of this phenomenon. We’re not sure why,” I said. “Male mammals—well, actually, any animal species in which males compete for females—usually display more aggressive behavior.”

  “In the report it said thousands of house pets had gone missing,” said Agent Rumsy as he thumbed through the binder splayed open in front of him. “Is it just male animals that are missing?”

  “That’s another mystery,” Mike Leahy cut in. “The female dogs are running away same as the males, but they’re not the ones causing trouble. In fact, no one knows where they are.”

  “What have you learned on the research end, Mr. Oz?” said Alicia Swirsky, the CIA lady.

  I gave them the elevator pitch about the research we’d done at Columbia—the discrepancy in brain weights, the strange mutation in the amygdalae of affected mammals.

  “Coming to the point,” said Agent Roberts, wiping his bulbous nose with his thumb, a trace of backcountry in his voice, “do we have any theories as to cause?”

  He didn’t phrase it as a question.

  “We’re still trying to crack it,” I said.

  General Garcia clapped his binder shut and tossed it on the table. He sat back in his chair and folded his hands. His fingers were thick and brown as sausages.

  “All well and good,” he said. “But I believe, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get down to brass tacks.”

  He jerked his head at the aide sitting next to him, who went fishing in a briefcase and came back with a file folder the size of an encyclopedia. He slammed it on the table, from which a cloud of dust would have risen if the room weren’t clean enough to build microchips in.

  “We need to talk contingency plans. The president has already signed directive fifty-one and issued an executive order initiating Garden Plot,” Garcia said.

  “Garden what?” I said.

  “Domestic security contingency plan,” Roberts explained in his Lone Star drawl. “They used it during the L.A. riots in the early nineties, and after nine-eleven.”

  “Affirmative,” said the general. “It’s SOP in a situation like this. The military assists local law enforcement in times of emergency. It gives the secretary of defense and the attorney general authority to deploy all appropriate mission sets required to restore order.”

  “What about the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military from enforcing domestic law?” Swirsky said.

  “I believe it doesn’t apply in a situation like this, ma’am,” Garcia said with a curt nod. “As point of contact for the DOD, I’m going to go ahead and issue orders to start mobilizing the National Guard’s ready reserve.”

  I was ready to pull
my hair out. HAC wasn’t a riot or a terrorist attack. It was more like an environmental disaster. What a load of bureaucratic bullshit. Were they going to declare war on the animals? Why were they focused on offense? We needed to be thinking defense. This was insanity.

  “We need to focus on finding the root of the problem, not killing animals,” I said, trying to remain calm. “I mean, I’m sorry—I just don’t get what your plan is, exactly. Bomb animals or something? What? Why don’t we issue a nationwide warning to watch out for animals, especially pets, to limit the damage until we figure this thing out?”

  “Because that would cause a nationwide panic even more destructive than this epidemic,” Garcia said. “And because you boys’ve had plenty of time to ‘figure this thing out,’ and here you’ve come to us with zilch. Wild dogs were a problem in Iraq until we started exterminating them. You remember that, don’t you, Staff Sergeant Oz?”

  I flinched. He’d done his research.

  “We put enough boots on the street, we can nip this thing in the bud in a few weeks. A month, tops.”

  I sat there, stewing in rage. I was about to try to point out how irrational the notion of simply exterminating dogs was, but I stopped myself. It was time for me to go. I needed to get back to New York and redouble my research, do everything in my power to figure this thing out before the army started trying to napalm the animals.

  I caught Leahy’s eye at the front of the room as I stood.

  “If that’s all you need me for, folks, then I’ve done all I can do for you. I’m sure my son must be getting restless. If you have any more questions, you have my information.”

  Leahy escorted us out. We picked up Eli and went downstairs. A black Lincoln Town Car was waiting for us, engine panting in the parking circle. Nimo was already in the passenger seat.

  “Everything you heard today is top secret, Mr. Oz,” Leahy said as we stepped outside into cuttingly bright sunlight. “So, in the interests of national security, we trust you’ll be discreet.”

  “Of course,” I said as we climbed into the back of the black car.

  Half an hour later, the woodlands beginning to give way to the D.C. metropolitan area, I felt the tickling buzz of my phone again, vibrating in the inner lining of my suit jacket.

  It was a message from Charles Groh. He sounded—well, upset.

  “Oz, listen. HAC is here. My own dog went crazy today. My twelve-year-old son had to kill it.”

  “What is it?” said Chloe as I shook my head.

  I wanted to lie to her, but I couldn’t.

  Chapter 58

  6:00 A.M.

  TWO NAUTICAL MILES SOUTH OF GALVESTON, TEXAS

  FROM THE REAR of Leda Lady Queen, his rust-caked twenty-two-foot fishing boat, Ronnie Pederson lights his fourth cigarette of the morning and squints as he stares out at the gently slapping surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

  The coast of Texas—Galveston Island and, beyond it, the southern suburbs of Houston—is now just a flat brown line on the horizon to the north. To the south, the moisture in the air blurs the line between the sky and the sea. Somewhere in that blue-gray blur, the water bends out of sight over the surface of the earth. Although the radius of visibility at sea on a perfectly clear day is only twelve miles, for some reason you grasp the bigness of the world when you’re out on the open water, more than you ever can on land.

  The sky looks clear enough, and the water is flat as a drum skin to the horizon, but Ronnie keeps his eyes open nonetheless. Out here in the Gulf you have to watch the weather carefully. This late in August, a storm can brew up at the drop of a hat.

  The boat is silent. The way Ronnie likes it. Just the chug of the old diesel and the hiss of spray off the bow. Duane and Troll, his old high school football buddies turned commercial fishing partners, are at their positions aft and starboard, lost in their own early-morning thoughts.

  An hour later, as the sun finally peeks above the horizon, they’re ratcheting in the first net lines. Looks like a good catch, from the way Troll’s netting the fish out of the drink, his arms working like a ditchdigger’s. Soon the deck pens are filled with shrimp, the little things squirming like slimy pink bugs as Duane sprinkles ice over them.

  They had taken on another hand a couple of weeks before, but it didn’t work out. The college kid had come on all tough, but the guy was green as a sapling. The rocking of the boat had gotten to him. He was still puking the second day—feeding the seagulls, as they called it—and they had to let him go. Now it’s just the three of them again.

  As the sun gets higher, they decide to try their luck farther out. For a moment, there’s a breath of coolness in the air, promising more, and Ronnie is struck with a good feeling. It’s the same feeling he used to get on the football field. That same pregnant sense of peaceful isolation right before you knock a fullback ass over teakettle into the sidelines.

  “Hey,” Duane calls from the other side of the boat. “Look at ’at!”

  Ronnie steps across the clanging sheet-metal deck, ducking beneath rigging and machinery.

  “What?”

  He looks at where Duane’s pointing.

  Up ahead of them, moving fast but seemingly not moving at all because of the wideness of the sea, are several dolphins. They look like saddlebacks, but he isn’t sure. They hop in and out of the water in graceful arcs. There are three or four of them. Their sleek, silver bodies weave in and out of the water in perfect sequence, moving together all at once. How the hell do they know how to do that? Where’d they learn that? Why do they all jump out of the water and dive back in again at the same time? There must be a reason for it. An animal’s body does everything it can to maximize results by minimizing energy, Ronnie knows. Everything like that has some kind of reason. Animals don’t do things without a reason. It is a beautiful sight.

  Ronnie is awakened from these thoughts when he hears a loud, heavy thud in the boat.

  “What in the hell—,” Ronnie hears Troll say behind him.

  The three friends stare at what is now in their boat, and then up at each other. It is a dolphin. A full-grown saddleback dolphin has leaped out of the water and into the back of their boat, where there’s an open drop-off to bring up the trawling net, and is slapping and writhing on the deck, wiggling like a maniac.

  They would only be slightly more surprised if a mermaid had jumped into their boat.

  Thing looks silly, absurd, out of the water. It’s about six feet long, and squealing like a pig.

  “Well, look at that,” says Duane.

  Ronnie cuts the engine and walks to the back of the boat.

  “This is the damnedest thing I ever seen,” says Troll.

  “Well,” says Duane. “I reckon we should put him back.”

  He moves to start pushing the dolphin back into the water. The dolphin bucks and giggles.

  “This is a story to tell our grandchildren, ain’t it?”

  They are laughing as they try to roll the lashing dolphin off the deck.

  They all startle, and jump back, as another dolphin races headlong out of the water, arcs through the air with a trail of jewel-like water droplets behind it, lands with a wild slapping thud on the deck right beside them, and slides down half the length of the boat.

  The friends look at each other, then burst into laughter.

  “Is this some kind of dolphin joke?” says Duane.

  That’s when the weird shit really starts happening. In come the dolphins. One after another after another, the fat, sleek, shiny animals leap out of the water and land in the boat.

  Ronnie stands there on the deck, looking down at the now seven or eight dolphins, squirming like crazy in the boat. Suffice it to say he has never in his life seen this sort of behavior. Bizarre. Completely fucking bizarre.

  Soon it goes from funny to scary.

  Now there are dozens of dolphins on the boat. This is when Ronnie turns from bewilderment to fear. Something not only very strange but very wrong is happening. The dolphins tunnel d
eeper across the deck, sliding all over each other. An avalanche of heavy, slippery silver bodies, a chorus all around them of squeals, squeaks, giggles.

  It is as if the sea is throwing them up, heaving the animals from the sparkling depths of the Gulf.

  After a while, it’s not just the deck pens that are full; the deck itself is a mess of dolphins. The men are desperately heaving and kicking the animals off the back deck, but more keep coming.

  There must be more than a hundred now. Ronnie slogs through the wiggling dolphins back toward the wheel and gives her some throttle.

  In response, the thirty-year-old trawler, weighed down more than it has ever been, tipples like a drunk on a three-day bender and capsizes.

  Ronnie, treading water, feels himself going into a kind of slow-motion shock.

  Troll is the first to panic. He’s doggie-paddling beside the overturned trawler, splashing like mad and making huffing sounds.

  “Calm down, damn it,” Ronnie shouts to him. “Kick off your boots. Conserve your energy.”

  Dolphins are pressing up against them like cattle, splashing, chattering, squeezing, suffocating them.

  Troll is still splashing, clawing at the rim of the sinking boat, fighting the herd of dolphins. In another minute he goes down, pops back up, and goes down again. This time for good.

  Duane goes the same way a few minutes later.

  Before too long, Leda Lady Queen is gone beneath the waves.

  Ronnie, doing the dead man’s float, lasts a little while longer. When he is sure he has nothing left, and no one is coming, he faces it like a man. He stops fighting and, drinking as much salt water as he can, slides beneath the dark, cool water, letting it rush over him like a blanket, letting the Gulf swallow him.

  Though the three men are dead, the dolphins continue to play. They leap, they splash, they giggle, they frolic and jump.

  Seemingly for joy.

  Chapter 59

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