Zoo 2 Read online

  I writhe and splash, pain coursing through my body, praying the boat gets here fast. The tiger sharks must be mere yards away, circling, preparing to finish me off.

  Finally I spot the noisy vessel. It’s a local fishing trawler manned by a group of shirtless Balinese men. Three of them dive into the water and paddle over to me…

  And as if by magic, the jellyfish, sea snakes, and tiger sharks all swim away.

  I’m too stunned and light-headed to make sense of this. But, Jesus, am I thankful.

  The fishermen pull me over to their boat and gently lift me aboard. I’m shocked by all the blood I see. Not mine—the gallons of it staining the deck.

  While I start to triage my throbbing wounds, I can’t help but notice the awful conditions of the sea life on board. Filthy tanks full of bloody fish, crammed together like sardines. Blue crabs stuffed into rusty cages, their shells crushed and mutilated. Even an adorable baby dolphin, tangled in a net, struggling to take its last breaths.

  I’m beyond grateful to be alive, but appalled by the horror I’m seeing.

  And confused by it, too.

  Putu, the hotel attendant I met yesterday—he said most Balinese were Hindu vegetarians who revered all animal life. Clearly that isn’t exactly true. Judging by the scene on this boat, fish have plenty to fear from Bali’s fishermen. That army of sea creatures fled when the fishermen showed up, but they sure as hell had no problem trying to kill me. Why?

  My head spins. Maybe animals can distinguish among the human race by scent—whether Hindu vegetarians or dangerous predators—and react accordingly.

  For now, as I try to catch my breath and tend to my painful snakebites and jellyfish stings, there’s only one thing I know for sure.

  Bali isn’t the HAC-free paradise we thought it was.

  Chapter 11

  “It was not another of the dreams in which he had often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a vague but heavy fear was upon her.”

  Chloe stops reading aloud from A Tale of Two Cities and places the well-worn paperback down on her lap, suddenly overcome by emotion.

  Charles Dickens wrote those words—about one of the novel’s main characters, worried about her husband’s safety—in 1859. Yet tonight, for Chloe, they hit painfully close to home. Her mind drifts to Oz, halfway around the world. A “vague but heavy fear” is definitely what she’s feeling.

  “Mommy, keep reading,” says Eli. He’s nestled in bed beside her under the covers. It’s one of the novels that she and Oz have been reading to Eli, a few pages a night, ever since they were in the Arctic. “Why did you stop?”

  “Just lie there, honey. Something tells me you’ll fall asleep pretty soon.”

  Chloe sets down the book, walks to the door, and is about to turn off the light…

  When she hears a loud scratching noise coming from outside.

  She’s used to the occasional sounds of wild animals trying to find their way in, but tonight it’s alarmingly loud.

  She nervously peels back the bedroom window curtains—and gasps.

  Through a crack in the boards between the glass and wrought iron grate she glimpses at least five or six furry, reddish-brown creatures scurrying up the side of the building, tongues dangling out of their mouths, fangs glistening in the moonlight.

  She tries to stay calm. She reminds herself how safe she and her family are—relatively speaking—inside this modest Paris apartment, the one in which she grew up. Every door and window has been heavily reinforced and is kept locked practically around the clock. Beyond the fact that all possible entry points had been sealed up, just a few nights ago, after stomping to death a dazed rabid mouse that had managed to crawl in through the shower drain, Chloe even plugged up much of the apartment’s plumbing, too.

  Still, the sight of this pack of feral animals—dogs? wolves?—scrabbling up the side of her building fills her with quiet dread.

  For good measure, Chloe checks the screws securing the iron grate over the window, making sure they’re nice and tight. Satisfied, she smooths out the curtain.

  “Bonne nuit, Eli,” she says to her son. “Good night, my love.”

  He responds with a gentle snore. The boy is fast asleep.

  Chloe tiptoes back to the bedroom door, which is suddenly pushed open from the other side. Marielle, her stepmother, is standing at the threshold.

  “Maman? What is it?”

  At first Marielle doesn’t speak. She simply blinks, clearly confused.

  “I…I’m sorry. I was looking for the bathroom.”

  Chloe sighs. Looking for the bathroom? She’s lived in this apartment for forty years. Clearly her forgetfulness is getting worse. Chloe has suggested they see a doctor, but Marielle has refused. Not that they could get an appointment even if they wanted to. Practically every hospital in the city is strained to capacity treating victims of animal attacks. An old lady with early-stage dementia isn’t exactly a top priority.

  “It’s all right,” Chloe says soothingly. “This is Eli’s room. My old room, when I was a little girl. Remember? The bathroom is that way. Second door on the left.”

  “Of course it is,” Marielle says, waving her stepdaughter off with a mixture of frustration and embarrassment. But then she adds, with a bashful smile, “And I only had to open every other door to find it.”

  Marielle pads back down the hall. Chloe gives Eli, dozing soundly, a final look. He deserves a better world than this, she thinks, turning off the light.

  Headed to the kitchen, Chloe suddenly hears vicious growls and violent scratching coming from the other end of the apartment—along with her mother’s bloodcurdling screams.

  “No, no!” Marielle is shouting. “Chloe, Jean-Luc, help!”

  “Maman!” Chloe yells back, rushing to find her.

  On her way down the hall, she notices that the guest room door is wide open…the pantry door is wide open…and to her horror, the front door is wide open, too.

  Chloe understands immediately what’s happened. In her stepmother’s absentminded search for the bathroom, she has done the unthinkable.

  She’s just let in the animals.

  Chapter 12

  “Maman!” Chloe shouts again, rummaging frantically around the kitchen for anything she can use to fight back. “I’m coming!”

  She uses one hand to grab the first blade she spots, a small paring knife, and the other hand to heave an old frying pan off the stove.

  Not the ideal set of weapons, by any means, but they’ll have to do.

  Chloe rushes toward the gruesome sounds of the struggle emanating from inside the apartment’s tiny bathroom. She charges in, desperate to save Marielle’s life.

  But she isn’t at all prepared for the horrifying sight that awaits her.

  A pack of feral foxes—the animals Chloe saw earlier climbing up the outside of the building—is literally tearing her elderly stepmother limb from limb.

  They’re attacking Marielle ravenously, ripping her bloody nightgown to shreds, wrenching whole chunks of flesh from her body as she cries and struggles and screams.

  Chloe roars with anger and snaps into action.

  She clobbers the nearest fox square on the head with the heavy pan, feeling his skull crunch inward from the impact like a hardboiled egg. She hits another fox, then sinks the paring knife into the furry back of a third.

  A fourth fox, realizing Chloe is both a threat and a meal, turns on her, leaping up and clamping his jagged teeth into her thigh.

  Chloe yelps in pain but manages to pierce her knife straight into the animal’s eyeball, lodging it deep in the socket, before forcefully prying the creature off.

  She pummels the animal with the pan, again and again, until finally it dies.

  “Maman!” she yells, kneeling beside her horrendously disfigured stepmother, nearly slipping on the blood-soaked tile floor.

  Marielle is mercifully slipping into unconsciousness. She reaches a trembling hand toward her stepdaughter�
��s face and whispers, in a haze, “Chloe…ma petite fille…my sweet girl…”

  Then her hand falls to her side. Her last breath escapes her lungs.

  Chloe is too shocked to cry. Too staggered to make any sound at all.

  But with so much adrenaline still pulsing through her veins, she is not too stunned to take action.

  “Eli! Papa!” she screams, rushing out of the bathroom into the hallway.

  She finds her father standing there in his underwear, shaking like a leaf.

  “Your stepmother…I heard such terrible noises. Is she…?”

  “Yes, Papa. She’s—she is dead.” Jean-Luc takes a step toward the bathroom to look for himself, but Chloe stops him. “Don’t.”

  Jean-Luc looks past Chloe, into the front hallway, and his eyes grow wide.

  Chloe turns around—and sees three pit bulls trotting into the apartment through the still-open front door.

  “Come on, we have to hurry!” Chloe implores, trying to pull her father along.

  But with surprising strength, Jean-Luc resists. He grips his daughter’s shoulder tightly and looks her straight in the eye.

  “Non, Chloe. I am a slow, old man. It is my time. You and Eli—you must go.”

  Chloe is left aghast by her father’s command, and by the ultimate sacrifice he is insisting he make for his daughter and grandson. She wants to argue with him, plead with him, to reconsider, but she knows his mind is made up.

  “I love you,” is all she says, then turns and dashes back to Eli’s room.

  She makes it inside and slams the door shut behind her—just moments before she hears this second wave of animals begin brutally mauling her frail father.

  She finds Eli awake in bed, cowering under the blankets, crying. Chloe rushes over and sweeps him into her arms.

  “Eli, it’s okay, sweetie, Mommy’s here. We have to go!”

  But how? Not through the front door: the apartment is now crawling with wild animals. But not through the window, either: even if she could break the boards, that metal grate is bolted on tight.

  Are they trapped?

  No. Chloe gets an idea.

  She flings open the closet and pushes aside some of her old childhood clothes that are still hanging there, revealing a small trapdoor: a dumbwaiter, dating back to the turn of the century, when the apartment building was one single luxury home and Chloe’s bedroom was part of the servant’s quarters. She discovered this odd historical remnant as a girl and treated it as a secret cubby, a hiding spot for dolls and diaries.

  Now, as she pries off the wooden plank she nailed over it only a few days earlier, she hopes it just might save their lives.

  She opens the squeaky door and orders Eli to wiggle inside first. “I know you’re scared,” she says. “I am, too. But I’ll be right behind you. You can do it!”

  The boy bravely obeys. Chloe squeezes in after him and the two carefully climb down this dark, dusty chamber, using ledges and splintery boards.

  They finally make it to the ground floor—a former kitchen converted long ago into a garage. Chloe kicks open the trapdoor and she and Eli crawl out.

  The space is cluttered and dark, and Chloe can’t find the light switch. Taking Eli’s hand, she gropes her way to the manual sliding garage door. She strains to pull it open a few feet, and together mother and son slip out onto the sidewalk—the first time either has stepped foot outside the apartment building in almost two weeks.

  Chloe’s heart is thumping wildly as she scans the eerily abandoned, trash-strewn Paris streets. The occasional animal growl or human scream echoes in the distance.

  Now what?

  Her parents are both dead. Their apartment, her only refuge, is overrun with feral animals. Her husband is God knows where, returning God knows when. Her son is cold, tired, terrified. And so is she.

  Choking back tears, Chloe scoops Eli into her arms and does the only thing she can think of.

  She runs.

  Chapter 13

  “It doesn’t make any damn sense!” Freitas exclaims, hurling a giant binder full of molecular charts and data graphs clean across our plane’s cabin.

  He’s steaming mad, but Sarah and the other scientists and I are so exhausted we barely react. It feels like we’ve been discussing our recent findings and debating our hypotheses—make that our lack of recent findings and our flawed hypotheses—since the moment we left Bali. Hours ago.

  We’re not far from our next destination. But we’re still light-years away from any kind of solution to the animal crisis.

  “We should have stayed in Bali longer,” Sarah says, “like I wanted to. Those jungles, that sea—they’re home to thousands of different species. We ran experiments on less than one percent of them.”

  “That’s still dozens of different animals,” I say. “Not all of which, let me remind you”—I hold up my arms, showing some painful jellyfish stings and bandaged sea snake bites—“were as ‘friendly’ as we were led to believe.”

  Indeed, my own unfortunate episode in the water turned out to be just the beginning. Over the next few days, two other groups from our team fended off sudden animal attacks. First a swarm of so-called gliding lizards. Then a stampede of banteng, a breed of wild cattle. Can’t say I’m sorry I missed it.

  “We sequenced their DNA,” I continue. “We ran brain scans. Conducted autopsies. If I remember correctly,” I add sarcastically, “somebody even collected and ran tests on monkey droppings. And we found nothing out of the ordinary. No unusual radiation or electromagnetic patterns, either. No strange chemicals in the water or magic fairy dust in the air. Nil. Nada. We spent ninety-six hours in Bali and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And, oh, yeah—I almost lost my life.”

  The other government scientists on board all mumble in agreement. Sarah folds her arms. She won’t concede anything to me—I think out of spite. But she doesn’t disagree with me, either. Which I guess I’ll take as a sign of progress?

  Freitas checks his watch and pensively rubs his beard. I’ve known the guy less than two weeks, but I’d swear there’s more gray hair in it now than when I met him.

  Sensing a lull in our endless discussion, I take out my international satellite phone and dial Chloe again in Paris. One of the perks of traveling on a government plane is that you get to use your government cellphone during the flight.

  Not that it does me any good at the moment.

  I’ve been calling the Tousignant apartment hourly since we took off, but no one’s answering. Which happens again this time. The landline rings and rings, and then the answering machine kicks in. I’ve already left a few increasingly nervous messages, so I hang up. Just for the heck of it, I dial Chloe’s old American cellphone number, which we shut off after moving to the Arctic. I’m not surprised when I get an automated message telling me the number’s no longer in service, but it still feels a little ominous.

  I close my eyes for a moment, desperate to calm my nerves and push the creeping fear I’m feeling out of my mind. There must be a simple explanation, right? Maybe the neighborhood’s phone lines are down. Maybe the power’s out. Maybe Chloe and her family left for an even safer location. Or maybe…maybe…

  I guess I dozed off there for a little while, because when I open my eyes again I see Freitas, Sarah, and the others all buckling their seat belts for landing.

  I look out my window. We’re coming up fast on our destination: Johannesburg. A sprawling metropolis flanked by an enormous nature preserve to the south and teeming slums to the west.

  We’ve come here, Freitas explained before takeoff, because unlike Bali, it’s a major urban area facing a markedly high rate of animal attacks, and he wants us to conduct a series of parallel tests and experiments for comparison.

  But I’m not sure I buy that. In fact, I think there’s something he’s not telling us.

  Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, Sydney—these are all big cities that also have high rates of animal attacks, and each is a much shorter trip from Bali than Johan
nesburg is. Flying all the way across the Indian Ocean to South Africa took us nearly fifteen hours. Freitas knows one of the most precious resources we have in our hunt for a solution to HAC is time. He wouldn’t waste it without a very good reason.

  Still peering out my window, I think I’ve just spotted it.

  A massive, swirling flock of birds—they look like white-backed vultures, or maybe falcons—seems to be heading right for us like an airborne tornado.

  Some of the other scientists notice it, too, and like me are gripping their armrests, bracing for an attack…

  That never comes. Instead, as the birds pass close by our plane, I realize a few of them don’t look like any I’ve ever seen before—except maybe in Jurassic Park.

  Did I just glimpse some scales? Beaks lined with sharp teeth? Reptilian heads?

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say some of them looked positively…prehistoric.

  Chapter 14

  I’m hanging on with all my might as our convoy of SUVs weaves along this rough, badly potholed road. Our vehicle is topping forty, maybe fifty miles per hour, tossing us around inside like ice cubes in a cocktail shaker.

  But I don’t want to slow down one bit. In fact, I wish we’d speed up.

  We’re cruising along Bertha Street, a major downtown Johannesburg thoroughfare, and the chaos outside is some of the most appalling I’ve seen.

  Gray-furred vervet monkeys are swinging from power lines, hooting and screeching. Leopards are leaping from abandoned car to abandoned car. A flock of goshawks is circling and cawing overhead. Giant baboons are scaling darkened skyscrapers. Military Humvees are overturned, hastily built barricades sit abandoned. Bloody, rotting human carcasses litter the streets. The few living souls I spot are crouched on terraces and rooftops, firing off high-powered rifles at any and all creatures they can—the final holdouts, desperately defending their homes, refusing to surrender.

  The entire city center of Johannesburg has been overrun by wildlife. The phrase “concrete jungle” suddenly has a whole new meaning. I’m speechless.