Zoo Page 16

  VIRUNGA MOUNTAINS, RWANDA

  BARBARA HATFIELD DOESN’T know what time it is when she emerges into consciousness on top of the covers of her bed beneath the misty canopy of mosquito netting. Inside the dark, rough clapboard room, and outside the windows, it is gray now. All time, space, matter comes in shades of sad, heavy, leaden gray.

  She’s still wearing her shorts and shirt and mud-encrusted jungle boots. She scratches at the hardened pus of a mosquito bite under her greasy hair, scratches the skin on her arms and legs. She hasn’t bathed in four days.

  Her eyes fall to the empty side of the bed beside her. She leans over and takes Sylvia’s pillow in her hands, presses it to her face.

  The scent of her still clings to the fabric. Sylvia’s smile as she’s coming back from her run, flesh glowing, slick with sweat. Her nimble hands always doing something, fixing the forty-year-old compound’s leaking roof, changing the Land Rover’s oil. Tending the garden—she looked so gorgeous with her arms and legs stained black with dirt up to her elbows and knees and her hair held back, Rosie the Riveter–style, in a bandanna. She’d come through the door in that bandanna and her weathered leather gloves, holding her clippers and a twine-bound bundle of weeds, and Barbara would want to grab her and kiss her so long and deep that Sylvia would have to push her away just to come up for air.

  This year-long grant was a once-in-a-lifetime scenario, a golden ticket for a primatologist. It provided enough money to live for a year in Rwanda, working at the mountain gorilla research camp that Dian Fossey had made famous.

  Sylvia had thought it would be too dangerous, but Barbara had begged and cajoled and finally convinced her to put the community garden on hold for a year and follow her to Africa.

  They’d been returning from doing the yearly UN-required endangered species census of the mountain gorillas when the unspeakable occurred. Barbara was walking up the path to their cabin behind Sylvia when three silverback male gorillas emerged from the open front door.

  A moment later, there were gorillas everywhere. Silverbacks and younger males. There was an electric fence around the camp, but the gorillas had somehow penetrated the camp’s perimeter. They grunted, threw debris, leaped off the roofs of the cabins and outbuildings. Cargo crates clattered; the air was a swirl of pounding, panting, huffing.

  Barbara remembers running into the jungle, her lungs burning, as leaves and branches crunched and cracked behind her. Then she had looked back and noticed that Sylvia wasn’t with her anymore.

  She mustered up her courage and came back to the camp that night—to find everyone gone. All three Rwandan trackers, the four young men from the antipoaching team, and Sylvia. All gone.

  In the bed, Barbara moans as she grasps at her throbbing head with her hands, trying to wring the memory from her brain as though it were a sponge. She had been quick to dismiss the fringe-level, paranoid racket about HAC, the absurd buzzing of Internet lunatics. She believed the theory was crackpot because she knows animals—gorillas in particular. But now she is having doubts. The behavior of all mammals, even mountain gorilla behavior, seems to have undergone a meltdown.

  She’s in dire straits. The radio and generators have been smashed, along with the guns. The nearest village is thirty miles away, through mountain jungle so impassable they had to be airlifted here by helicopter. The next supply run is forty-eight hours away.

  Two more days to get through, Barbara thinks. If the gorillas return, she will have no chance.

  She is sitting up in bed, rocking back and forth. In despair.

  Then she feels something. It is a distinctly felt presence, as if Sylvia were there in the room beside her, watching, invisible. Not only that, but her lover seems pissed off at Barbara for doing the damsel-in-distress act, panicking, giving up.

  Have I taught you nothing? Sylvia’s presence seems to say. Buck up, girl. Grow some ovaries.

  Barbara climbs to her feet, ripping aside the gray film of mosquito netting. Sylvia is right. She needs to do something. In a moment she knows what.

  Behind the storage shed are barrels of gasoline for the generators. Barbara can fill up some canisters, douse the tree line, set it on fire. She hates thinking about damaging such a precious ecosystem, but it is a life-and-death situation. Her life and death, specifically. Perhaps the smoke will attract attention from the villages in the valley, and perhaps someone will eventually come to investigate. And get her out of here.

  She is coming out from behind the shed with two gas cans sloshing tinnily in her hands when she hears the crunch of branches off to her left. She turns. Her eyes fall on the tree line. She drops the gas cans. They tumble at her feet.

  Coming through the trees is something that defies imagination.

  About two hundred yards away, rhinos are entering the clearing. Half a dozen massive horned rhinos.

  Which is impossible. How did they get here? Rhinos graze in the plains. They have to be within walking distance of water. Why would rhinos migrate seventy miles laterally and several thousand feet vertically from their natural habitat? What would she see next? Polar bears?

  The animals keep coming. There are more than a dozen rhinos now. The scene is so out there, so upside down—so wrong.

  As the creatures approach, a memory comes to Barbara. She is eleven years old, sitting in the front pew of a Baptist church with her family in northern Florida. The fire-and-brimstone preacher points a gnarled finger at the small crowd in the pews as he reads from the Book of Revelation.

  “And the first beast was like a lion,” he says histrionically, turning his eyes to heaven. “And the second like a calf. And the third had a face like a man.”

  End times, Barbara thinks, watching the giant animals step curiously amid the jungle underbrush. She is in such desperation that she almost begins to pray.

  Chapter 60

  CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS

  MOBILIZED OUT OF Fort Drum, New York, Captain Stephen Bowen’s Tenth Mountain Division consists of two four-man fire teams, a small but elite unit.

  Arrayed in the standard wedge formation, the men move as one up the wooded hill in their camos. Using hand and arm signals, they are silent, all but invisible. Standard operating procedure for combat patrol.

  The fact that their combat patrol runs alongside a bike path in Hapgood Wright Town Forest near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is definitely not SOP, though. It’s more FUBAR than snafu. In Captain Bowen’s opinion, this is about as screwball as it comes.

  Bowen knows for a stone-cold fact that what they are doing is illegal. They’re supposed to be helping the cops direct traffic, not going out on a search-and-destroy mission in a public park. And the orders, if you could call them that, are truly out there.

  Bowen, though only twenty-seven, was hard-core even before he did his three tours neck-deep in the shit of Afghanistan and Iraq. The word INFIDEL is tattooed across his chest in an arc of Gothic lettering, and inked on his back, under the Mountain Division insignia of crossed swords, is his credo, KILLING: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE.

  “Cap, down the hill,” says King, on point. “Movement. Six o’clock.”

  “What are you waiting for, soldier?” Bowen says. “Drop it like it’s hot.”

  King opens up with his M16A4.

  Bowen’s eyes twinkle like Strawberry Shortcake’s as the familiar, ripping, heavy-metal clack of gunfire echoes across the hills.

  Is there anything better than guns unloading? he thinks. What else can make your eyes water and your dick get hard at the same time?

  “Shit,” King mutters after three three-round bursts. “Missed. I think it’s still coming.”

  “That’s what she said,” says Chavez.

  “Lemme show you how it’s done, Poindexter,” Bowen says, parting leaves as he steps forward.

  When he gets to the crest of the hill Bowen mentally does a little Scooby-Doo: Eeuooorr? Directly in front of them, down the incline of a patchy deer path, are three—what are they? Bowen thinks. Dogs?
He glasses them with the 10X binoculars. Hmm. Foxes? About a dozen or so. Now, how about that? Rabid, bloodthirsty foxes. Whatever.

  “Tallyho, motherfuckers,” Bowen says, dropping the glasses and lifting his rifle smoothly to his shoulder.

  The new gun pulls left a bit when he pulls the trigger, but he manages to adjust.

  The men start laughing as they come down the hill.

  “Shit, Cap. Didn’t think we’d be going hunting today,” says Chavez, poking at one of the dead foxes with the muzzle of his gun. “Hope you understand PETA will be gettin’ a e-mail.”

  They camp for the night by a creek under an old train bridge three clicks to the north. There’s a battered old couch there, a couple of sun-faded Coors boxes, torn condom wrappers, amateur graffiti.

  “This night air’s making me feel romantic,” Gardner says, popping open an MRE. “Any you guys wanna take a moonlit stroll?”

  “How about a weenie roast, boys?” someone says in a falsetto.

  Bowen sits Indian-style beside the fire, zeroing out the rear sight of his rifle with an Allen wrench. He wonders if or when he should tell them the real reason they’re here.

  Two nights ago there was an incident. A whole cul-de-sac off Cambridge Turnpike was massacred. He’s seen the photos. Some of the scariest shit he ever saw, which was saying something. One of the pictures he’s having trouble getting out of his mind. A little boy on a racecar-shaped bed, entrails ribboned out onto the carpet.

  “Wire that shit tight, ladies,” Bowen says, glancing out at the dark beyond the firelight. “I know this is fun, but this ain’t a frat party. This is a military op, so act like it.”

  The attack comes a few minutes north of 0130. Bowen wakes to screaming and gunfire. Between three-round bursts comes howling. Guttural, snarling, inhuman noises. Fairy-tale monster-type shit.

  “We got a fuckin’ ogre out there?” he shouts, rising to his feet and grabbing his gun in one movement.

  If that isn’t bad enough, Bowen hears the whine and tiny crack of bullets singing by his ears.

  “Watch your goddamn shooting lanes!” Bowen barks. “Watch your lanes!”

  Someone throws a flare. The sudden light throws long shadows high onto the spindly black trunks of the trees.

  Some twenty feet away, galloping on all fours up the shore of the creek, are bears. Four of the biggest goddamn brown bears he has ever seen.

  Bowen doesn’t think. He yanks an M67 frag grenade from his vest, snaps off the safety clip, fingers the pin, and pulls the grenade away from the pin the way you’re taught to. He holds the grenade for a moment, thumb off the safety spoon, letting it cook.

  “Frag out!” Bowen hollers, and dives to one side as he tosses it.

  There is a flashing soft thump. Followed by silence.

  When someone chucks another flare, they can see that all four bears are down for the count. Off in the darkness, they hear the sound of other bears retreating, their paws splashing in the creek.

  Bowen scans his men, does a quick head count. Everyone in the squad present and accounted for. He puts a hand to his chest, feeling his heartbeat hammering bang bang bang against his ribs like a goddamn elf making shoes in somebody’s basement. Bears in the wire? Good holy shit, that was close. This animals-rising-up-against-man bullshit isn’t bullshit after all.

  He turns. Out there in the darkness, beyond the firelight and across the water, Captain Bowen can feel eyes on them.

  A lot of eyes.

  Chapter 61

  I’D HAD BETTER mornings.

  I awoke that day from a dream. Eli and I had been walking through New York’s Museum of Natural History. The light was eerie, watery, pale blue. We stopped before the diorama of the gray wolf. Eli’s favorite. The wolves were posed in midhunt, racing through timberland snowdrifts in pursuit of an elk. This elk was doing it wrong. You get attacked by wolves, you stay still. Stand your ground, you have a chance of surviving. Run, you’re dead. One of the wolves had his jaws clamped on the hind leg of the elk. The wolves’ eyes flashed winter-moonlight yellow, their lips curled back to show their teeth. I held Eli’s hand. Then the wolves came alive, and suddenly there was no glass in the diorama. The wolves spilled from the diorama and were on the floor of the museum in an instant. Eli’s hand slid from mine, and the wolves tore at his throat.

  Then my eyes opened. It took me a long moment to realize who I was and where I was. When I realized these things, I wanted to go back to sleep. Maybe dream better dreams.

  It was before dawn. I was in the Alphabet City apartment Chloe, Eli, and I had moved into a year ago.

  I sat up. I placed a palm on Chloe’s warm, still back, then looked across the dim room into the corner, where Eli slept soundly in his toddler bed, a curled hand clutching his stuffed bunny to his chest.

  I wiped sweat from my face. My hand was shaking. My child and my wife. They were both safe. For now.

  Since our return from Washington, things had been escalating. Day by day. Exponentially. Strange, extraordinarily violent animal attacks were on the news every evening now, happening everywhere from New Hampshire to New Delhi, from Sweden to Singapore.

  There had been several bizarre animal attacks here in New York. Night before last, two kitchen workers in a chic French bistro in the West Village had been found dead. Mysterious circumstances. A Ninth Precinct cop who happened to live in our building had told us what the papers left out—at the government’s request. The men had been killed by rats that had flooded in through the basement. They had been stripped to the bone. No word yet if this would affect their Zagat rating.

  It was being called the Worldwide Animal Epidemic, and even my fiercest detractors were admitting that it was the worst global environmental disaster of all time. The phone rang off the hook with reporters asking me to comment, but I was too tired. I didn’t take any pride in being right, in saying I told you so.

  I blamed myself, really. I’d had years to prepare, to tell the world, to figure out why it was happening, to try to come up with a solution. I’d failed at all these things. Sitting there, staring at my son, I realized I had completely failed him—my son, my wife, everyone.

  “Where’s Eli?” said Chloe.

  She sprang upright beside me in bed.

  As I rubbed her back, I could feel her heart beating as hard and quickly as mine. Like me, Chloe was torn up inside, worrying about the increasingly bad news and about how we were going to protect ourselves and our son. Paranoia and sleeplessness were our new normal these days.

  “He’s okay. Everything’s fine,” I said. I pulled her close.

  You know things are getting bad when you find yourself uttering empty platitudes that you don’t even believe yourself.

  “What time is it?” Chloe said, her slender olive-skinned arm fumbling for her watch on the bedside table. She was still gorgeous. That didn’t change. “You can’t be late for your meeting.”

  I’d gotten a call from the mayor the day before. He wanted a face-to-face. Though the National Guard had been mobilized for the first time since 9/11, the mayor’s assistant said he needed all the advice I could give him on dealing with this wave of animal violence.

  “Meeting’s at eight,” I said. “I’m going to get up in a second. How are we on food? I heard the Union Square farmers market is opening back up today.”

  Not just attacks but food was becoming a worry now. Some people said farming and trucking were being disrupted out west. There were rumors on the Internet of massive food shortages on Long Island. But no one really knew, or, in any case, no one knew what to do about it. Every day, people fled the city while others seemed to be flocking to it. We were approaching an end-times state of mind.

  “We’re still good,” Chloe said. “We’re out of milk, but that grocery store on Avenue A is still open.”

  “Fine, but don’t stay outside more than you have to. And take the bear banger.”

  In addition to having an alarm installed and gates put on the apartment win
dows, I’d picked up some bear bangers from a sporting goods store on Broadway. The device looked like a pen but was actually an extremely loud explosive flare used by hikers to fend off wildlife.

  I wrenched myself out of bed, gave Chloe a kiss, and headed for the shower.

  Checking the locks on the gated window in the bathroom, I remembered the government code name for the environmental disaster, ZOO.

  Why? I stood in the shower, letting the hot water roll over my head, staring at the tiles. Why is this happening? What has changed in recent history—what have we got now that wasn’t here before?

  Never in human history has there been a time when most people are so distanced from animals. So removed from them, both psychologically and physically. If you are a human being in a place like, say, where I live, New York City, you won’t really have to interact with a nonhuman animal all day long. It makes me think about how the world must have been before the Industrial Revolution. You needed oxen to plow the fields. The fastest way between two points was a horse. Knowing animals, being close to them, used to be a way of life. Less and less so for more and more people now. Homo sapiens is so close to dogs that we even coevolved with them. The genetic difference between a human and a chimp is about the same as the difference between two subspecies of groundhog that evolved on opposite banks of a river—and yet even Attila had been affected. Surely the root of HAC was some very, very small, and very, very recent, change. And that change had to be something that humanity was up to, because we seemed to be the only mammal on the planet incapable of being affected. For whatever reason, whatever it was that was going on got along just fine with our brains, but simply did not gel with the brains of seemingly all other mammals.

  It was a zoo, all right, I thought, shutting off the water, staring out through the bars down at Seventh Street. Only it was starting to look like the Homo sapiens were the ones who would be relegated to the cages from now on.

  Chapter 62