Zoo Read online

  “Okay,” he says automatically. His eyes are fixed in an absent, dreamland gaze on the TV. His tiny smooth hand digs unthinkingly into the popcorn, then delivers a fistful to his mouth.

  She is in the small workout room, about to step onto the treadmill, when she hears a sound. Coming from the window. It is a soft, distant crackling—almost like the microwave popcorn cooking.

  She slowly walks to the front of the apartment. She hears more sounds as she opens the door to the hallway. A kind of strange chugging sound starts up, coming from one of the lower floors, followed quickly by a violent knocking, as if a stone fist is banging on a locked door.

  Chloe bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. Gunfire, she thinks. Someone is shooting.

  She slams the apartment door hard enough to topple a vase from an antique table beside her, her heart chugging in time to the machine guns as her fingers turn the locks.

  Chapter 83

  WE HAD TO wait around awhile before we were picked up and taken away from the place where our SUV had crashed.

  Being out in the open while we waited was a strange feeling—simultaneously boring and terrifying. The whole time, I stood on the highway median, leaning on the smashed truck as I looked up and down the flat, empty highway through the sight of Alvarez’s M16, praying we wouldn’t see another animal.

  A Humvee with a roof rack full of blazing lights finally arrived about fifteen minutes after we’d called. Two marines jumped out. There was a dead Saint Bernard lashed to its hood with bungee cords. They were taking trophies now. This was a war.

  I wondered who was winning.

  “The fuck took you so long?” said Alvarez.

  “Attacks are everywhere now, Sarge,” said the driver, a wiry black man with haunted-looking eyes. “We had to shoot our way out here. The Pentagon got hit. Reagan Airport is completely overrun by a swarm of dogs. The hangars, the terminal, everywhere. No planes in or out until the situation gets dealt with.”

  Terrific. No flights, I thought as we carefully laid Alvarez, bloody as a butcher’s apron and spitting curses, across the backseat of the Hummer. Now how the hell was I going to get home? I was stuck.

  The driver pounded the gas and floored us back to the Marine Corps base next to the White House. We didn’t encounter any more animal hordes directly, but down alleyways, side streets, inside windows, we could see movement, shadows scurrying. The whole city felt infested now.

  Relatively safe back inside the base and the packed medical tent, I was getting stitches in my elbow when an attractive petite woman with reddish-brown hair came in. She carried a walkie-talkie and had a White House security badge clipped to the lapel of a pricey blazer.

  “Is there a Jackson Oz here?” she called out. “I’m looking for a Mr. Jackson Oz.”

  I sat there a moment in silence while she trawled the medical tent. What did they have in store for me now? I thought. An IRS audit, perhaps?

  I’d come down here in order to help, and all I’d gotten to show for it was being stranded and separated from my family as the world dissolved into chaos. Oh, and a car wreck, twenty stitches, and a bear.

  But as the redhead was turning to leave, I called out to her.

  “I’m Jackson Oz,” I said. “What do you need?”

  Her eyebrows danced as she lifted her walkie-talkie.

  “I found him,” she said into the radio. “I’ll bring him straightaway.”

  “Bring me where?” I said.

  “Rianna Morton, deputy cabinet secretary,” she said, offering a hand.

  “Bring me where?” I repeated.

  “A cabinet meeting is adjourning as we speak,” Ms. Morton said. “Mr. Leahy said you have a presentation?”

  Five minutes later I was back inside the White House compound, hurrying with the staffer past the flower beds and boxwoods of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. We went through a basement door and up some stairs and turned to the right down a majestic paneled corridor lined with fireplaces, antique bookcases, bronze busts.

  I guess this isn’t another runaround after all, I thought as I realized we were walking through the White House’s West Wing.

  In the Cabinet Room vestibule, a hulking marine in dress blues checked my ID with a white-gloved hand. Among the crowd of suits behind him, I saw the vice president and the secretary of state. They were joking around with each other, something that involved sticking Post-it notes onto the BlackBerrys they weren’t allowed to bring into the meeting.

  Outside, the nation’s capital was melting down, probably the world, too, but the well-protected politicians were sharing a pleasant bon mot.

  No wonder people liked Washington, D.C., so much, I thought.

  Chapter 84

  I HEARD A familiar voice behind me call my name.

  There was a soft sound of electric buzzing, and the crowd of suits parted as Charles Groh hummed up to me in his wheelchair. I grasped his hand.

  “Finally, a friendly face,” I said. “What’s the word? You hear anything?”

  “Are you okay, Oz?”

  I remembered that I was filthy and covered in blood. My sleeves were rolled up and my loosened tie dangled absurdly down the front of my blood-speckled button-down.

  “I’m fine. Car crash, bear attack. I’ll tell you later. Any news from the world?”

  “It didn’t work, Oz,” Dr. Groh said as I followed his wheelchair from the security line to the other side of the hallway. “The bombing campaign was nothing more than a lot of sound and fury, signifying jack shit. Now that they’re done with their temper tantrum, they want to hear from us.”

  “We should take a minute to compare notes,” I said, motioning Dr. Groh toward the corner of the room.

  “Sounds good, Oz,” he said, producing a thin gray MacBook Air from a leather satchel dangling off his chair. “These are thick skulls we’re going to have to try to get through.”

  Aides were sitting like ducks along both walls of the Cabinet Room when we came in some fifteen minutes later. Rianna Morton directed me to a chair at the end of the oblong table farthest from the door. As she tipped a pitcher of ice water into the glass in front of me, I noticed there were several glossy monitors set up on rolling carts. The chancellor of Germany was on one of them, whispering with an aide. On another screen was the British prime minister.

  “This meeting will be videoconferenced with several world leaders,” Ms. Morton explained. “The paramount leader of China should be online in a moment.”

  As I tried, unsuccessfully, not to let that information rattle my chain, President Hardinson arrived. Everyone in the room who had been seated shot to their feet. Except for Dr. Groh.

  It was the first time I’d seen President Marlena Hardinson in person. She did have a remarkably arresting presence, this slightly heavyset woman with bags under her dark green owlish eyes, eyes that had an almost intimidating intelligence in them. She was stately in pearls and a midnight-blue blazer.

  “Okay, everyone,” Hardinson said, waving the people to their seats. Her voice had that familiar husky rasp that I’d heard on TV a thousand times before, but it was an odd feeling to hear it in the flesh. She smiled as she sat down at the center of the table. Her smile had no warmth in it. I reminded myself that her teenage daughter died yesterday, and that I wasn’t supposed to know that.

  “Mr. Oz, Dr. Groh,” she said, nodding to us. “Please. Tell us what you know.”

  All eyes were on me. I sucked in a deep breath.

  “Thank you, Ms. President,” I said. “Everyone, my name is Jackson Oz, and for the last ten years I’ve been researching the aberrant animal behavior now known as HAC. Animal attacks on people have been around as long as people have been around, but over the last fifteen years or so we began noticing a startling, exponential increase of animal-on-human violence.

  “Coupled with this increased aggression, animals also began exhibiting behavior uncharacteristic not only of their particular species but also of mammals in general. All over the wo
rld—as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now—animals are aggregating in swarms or hordes and attacking human beings en masse. This is not happening at random. Animals are forming into insect-like swarms.”

  “Insects?” said the secretary of defense. “Why? And why now?”

  Charles Groh cut in. “Inadvertent man-made changes to the environment, sir,” he said, clicking his laptop to control the PowerPoint display.

  I waited for the hydrocarbon graph to pop up on the screen before continuing.

  “Recently, human beings have caused two things to become prevalent in the environment that weren’t around before: electromagnetic radiation and the by-products of petroleum. Petroleum is an organic compound made up mostly of hydrocarbons. We believe that in the last fifteen years, the explosion of electromagnetic radiation due to cell phone use has begun ‘cooking,’ if you will, the hydrocarbons that are all around us, ultimately changing their chemical makeup.

  “This new hydrocarbon mimics animal pheromones. But it’s stronger. It’s this pheromone-like pollutant that’s making the animals go haywire. In essence, we believe that because we have changed the way the environment smells, animals have changed the way they behave.”

  “Pheromones?” the secretary of state asked. “I thought they only worked with insects or something.”

  Charles Groh shook his head. “Many animals respond to pheromones. Communication, food gathering, mating behavior, aggression—all these things involve scent. That may be one reason why dogs in particular have been so susceptible. Their sense of smell is one hundred thousand times stronger than ours.”

  “But why are they just attacking us?” said the president. “Why not each other?”

  “That’s where another factor comes in,” I said. “It seems that due to all the petroleum-based products we use, the human scent is actually mimicking an attack pheromone. The animals are being drawn to us with the same automatic ferocity of wasps in a disturbed nest.”

  “Hmm,” said the president. It was almost a harrumph. “Toxic pheromone pollution. How can we combat that?”

  Charles Groh and I looked at each other. This was it. We’d finally arrived at the hard part. What had to be done.

  “The first step,” I said, “would be removing the factors that are causing the environmental disturbance.”

  “Remove petroleum products?” said the president.

  “And cell phones?” said the secretary of state.

  I nodded at both of them, then looked out at the faces around the table and on the screens.

  “Desperate times, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Here’s what I think we should do.”

  Chapter 85

  STRAINING HER EARS, her eyes glued to the front door she just double-locked, Chloe sits on a creaking Louis Quatorze chair in the entryway of the apartment.

  For the last half hour, she has sat listening as gunfire has cracked and rollicked throughout the building, thudding through the walls and echoing in the hallways. The noises keep getting louder, rising floor by floor, like a fire. Soon they will reach their floor, and she and her son will be consumed.

  And yet all she can do is sit there. The wild fear is so great that she is almost immobilized now. She can’t act, can’t think, can’t plan her next move. All she can do is sit and stare at the crack of light beneath the door, wondering what will happen next.

  The pressure in her tightly clenched jaw seems to double, triple when she hears a sound that is clearly in the hallway outside the apartment. It’s a brief creak, followed by a click. Then she hears it again. Creak and click. Something is pushing at the stairwell door in the hallway, she realizes.

  Probing.

  It’s something that isn’t human.

  Or even really animal anymore, she thinks.

  It’s true. What they are up against is something that has never been seen before. She has thought of it as devolution. It is as if the nature of every higher animal has been erased and replaced with the alien instinct of the insect world, an instinct older, more terrible, more pitiless than human beings have ever seen.

  She thinks about her career as a biologist, all the tireless work, the cataloging of animal species and genera. It has all been made useless now—all animals are joining into one, a roving amalgam of fur and bone and teeth no different from any other wave of destructive energy. What is happening is like a lava flow, a raging inferno of animated protoplasm that seeks the same thing as fire itself. To initiate change. To consume until the thing consumed is gone. To devour.

  Why is this happening? Who knows, really?

  Life and existence can never be fully understood. Stars are born only to explode. Creatures hunt other creatures, and then they die. The universe is a chaos of irrational forces wrestling with one another in a war without end. The human race is on the receiving end now.

  Chloe finally stands. On legs as stiff and unresponsive as stale bread, she returns slowly to the living room. Eli is still planted, glassy-eyed, before the television. On the TV, there’s a cartoon movie of friendly animals talking to each other. Madagascar, comes a useless thought, like a bird flying through the opaque cloud of her fear. She looks for the remote to turn off the TV, gives up, and clicks it off by pressing the button on the set itself.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Eli says. Stars in his eyes.

  He’s an impressively smart kid—obedient, especially perceptive of her feelings, especially when she isn’t fooling around.

  She lifts him up. She goes to the corner of the living room and switches off the light. She sits on one of the plush white couches, beneath a canvas that screams with garish splashes of color. Here it is. Her grand plan, she thinks.

  Soon she hears a skittering by the front door. Or has she imagined it?

  I will not let you in! Chloe thinks. Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin!

  Her hands are shaking violently. She clenches her fists to make them stop.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Eli whispers.

  “You have to listen to me, Eli,” Chloe whispers back. “We have to be quiet now. Can you do that? Can you be a good boy for Mommy?”

  “Yes,” Eli says, squeezing her hand. “Don’t be sad, Mommy. I can be quiet.”

  She tries to regulate her breathing. To breathe with steady deliberation. She tries to will down the throbbing in her stomach and her chest and her brain. Tears well up in her eyes. She tries to dam them back. Her vision blurs. Think. Control. The world is receding into focus. Keep it there. Control it. Control it.

  She thinks, trying to come up with a rational next step. She thinks about the building. There is a set of front stairs, an elevator, a freight elevator. Wait, she thinks. There’s also a set of back stairs, which might be accessible from the kitchen door, in the rear, where she tosses the trash. Maybe that escape route is still open, she thinks. She could carry Eli and get out that way. But then what? Be out in the open? Go to another building? The best thing to do is just sit here and hope they are ignored and—

  Another sound makes her heart skip a beat. It is coming from off to her right. There is a set of French doors there. She has forgotten about them.

  They lead out to a balcony.

  She watches a shadow fall onto the balcony from above, just outside the glass. Then another. Then a third.

  Slowly, Chloe pulls Eli to the floor with her. Lying on her belly beside the coffee table with him, clutching him to herself, trying to protect him with her body as best she can, she raises her head very slowly until she can see the French doors and the balcony again.

  There are three adult chimpanzees with their faces squished against the glass, blowing hot fog on it, like children pressing their faces to the window of a candy store.

  They are huge. Their fur is bristling, erect. Two of them hold something in their hands. Sticks? No, they are pipes. Tool use, the ethologist still left in Chloe thinks.

  The sound of tapping comes a moment later. The chimps are smashing the pipes against the glass doors. />
  Clink. Clink. Clink.

  Then there is a cymbal-crash burst of glass breaking.

  Chapter 86

  GLASS SHATTERS. JAGGED triangles tumble piecemeal to the wooden floor—clang, clatter, and chime. The chimps clear the glass from the frames with the pipes. The alpha male steps forward, gently shoving the others out of the way. He is wearing a ragged red hat, rakish and totemic on his head, like a barbarian’s scavenged crown.

  It is Attila—or what used to be Attila. He is a changed ape. There is a tightly wound, guitar-string tautness to his musculature, a ravenous, lean, and hungry look. His hair is rangy in places. His nose is running. It seems his whole physiology has changed. His brain functions are dulled, perverted, his metabolism stuck in fast-forward.

  Attila sticks his face into the apartment, sniffs.

  All is smell now. Sound, touch—even sight—play second fiddles in the orchestra of sensation. They all know there are humans here. They know there is an adult female. That scent is unmistakable—the sweat, the sweet tiny reek of ovulation. And what smells like a young juvenile. Their mouths tingle with salivation at the proximity of the prey. They want to feed on them the way fire wants oxygen.

  The animals communicate almost exclusively by smell now. Emotions and intentions are detectable in body odor, in sweat.

  Attila wants it even more than the two others with him. He hasn’t had a fresh kill in hours, and the hunger gnawing at his belly is a scissors in his stomach, cutting him in half.

  Attila is about to enter the room from the balcony when he catches another scent. There is something, something subtle in the human smell of the other one, the young one, something almost undetectable that pokes thinly through the wall of his rage.

  Across the red screen of Attila’s mind, a memory plays. A man’s face appears—vague, watery, but there. It comes down close to the bars of the tiny cramped cage he is trapped in. The man opens the door of the cage, cradles him, talks to him, soothes him. The first kindness he ever experienced.