Zoo Read online

  “So you’re saying what?” I said. “Birds are dying?”

  “No,” Chloe said, picking at the foil on the bottle with her thumbnail. “It’s just the opposite. Bird populations are increasing at incredible rates. Exponential. It is very, very strange.”

  I thought about that. Like frogs, birds are often indicator species—animals whose population stability is a good measure of the stability of an ecosystem. Changes in the environment affect them quickly. Did this have something to do with HAC? I wondered.

  “Tree nesters?” I said raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes, and shrub and ground nesters as well,” she said. “The phenomena are so unprecedented that many of the faculty in Paris refuse to believe it. That’s why my colleagues and I came here. To gather data. I think something very, very wrong is happening to the environment.”

  “So do I,” I said, talking fast now, getting excited. “It’s not just the birds. There’s been a massive outbreak of animal attacks on human beings over the last three years. The lions that killed your friends and mine, that wasn’t just an isolated incident. Human beings are being increasingly attacked by animals. There’s something that’s gone completely haywire with the lions in this area. And other species, too. I think there’s something badly wrong with the environment that’s changing their behavior.”

  I rooted around in my backpack for the camera and set it on the bar.

  “Look. This happened this afternoon.”

  Her face betrayed shock as she watched the footage.

  “Oh, my God! That can’t be right. I was so busy running for my life, I hadn’t noticed. The lions were all male? How can that be? That has never happened before.”

  She shook her head at the screen and looked up at me with dinner-plate eyes.

  “You need to show this, Jackson,” she said. “People must see this.”

  “They will, Chloe.” We began to hear the low thrum of a plane engine in the distance. “And please. Call me Oz.”

  Chapter 30

  SIX HOURS LATER, wearing my good shoes and scratching one of those maraschino-cherry ant stings below my ear, I went clattering down the back stairs of Riley’s—Maun’s largest, and as far as I knew only, hotel.

  Dropping my packed bags beside the scuffed brass rail of the outdoor hotel bar, I looked around for Chloe, whom I was supposed to meet for a quick drink before my midnight flight out of Botswana.

  I did a double take when I spotted her talking on her cell phone, her luggage bunched beneath her feet at the bar stool. We had both been so bitten, bloody, and dirty we’d looked like mud idols when we came out of the bush a few hours before, but now, in a pale yellow dress with her hair still damp from the shower, Chloe was stunning.

  I was struck by how happy I was to see her. Besides her obvious assets, I couldn’t get over the toughness, the dogged will to live that this tiny slip of a woman had shown in surviving the trials she’d been through over the last few days. Meeting her had been one of the only good things to come out of this whole situation. That and the footage I had caught.

  It was late, and there was almost no one in the bar: a group of tourists keeping quietly to themselves in one corner, a couple of gruff-looking drunk men at one table, and a piano player at a baby grand striking notes that tinkled over the steady sploosh of a fountain in the middle of the enclosure. The marble bowl of the fountain was lit from below, and the water flashed veins of blue-green light.

  I turned away from Chloe when a tall, gaunt, red-haired man walked into the bar. It was Robinson Van der Hulst, Abraham’s business partner and the pilot who’d found Chloe and me and flown us out of the bush.

  “What’s the word, Robinson?” I said as we shook hands. “Are the authorities collecting the lions for autopsies?”

  Robinson shook his head regretfully and looked over his shoulder.

  “The government game rangers are so busy they won’t even help me retrieve the bodies. There’s a lot going on, Mr. Oz, none of it good. For one thing, yours wasn’t the only attack today.”

  Robinson glanced over his shoulder again.

  “The whole delta is in chaos, man,” he said. “Two other camps were attacked by lions and another two have been out of radio contact for twelve hours.”

  I blinked at him. The animal crisis that I’d been trying to convince people was coming for years seemed to have arrived full-blown in a single day.

  “I even heard that the largest camp in the delta, Camp Eden, was attacked by jackals, of all things.”

  “Jackals?”

  The implausibilities kept compounding, one on top of another. Jackals are basically coyotes. They occupy the same niche in the ecosystem. Once in a blue moon you’ll hear about a jackal making off with a baby or something like that, but it’s so rare that if it happens, it makes the news. Jackals don’t attack adult humans. They just don’t. Jackal attacks on humans are so rare that there isn’t even any data on them. Feral dogs, wolves, dingoes, and so on might attack people now and then, but even those attacks usually occur because the animals are rabid.

  That thought clicked on another lightbulb over my head.

  “Listen—do you think there’s any chance these attacks might have something to do with a virus? Like a massive outbreak of rabies? Robinson, you have to ask the authorities again. Hell, you have to tell them. The bodies of the lions, the jackals, all these animals need to be collected and studied. We need to do autopsies, tests for rabies—yesterday.”

  “You don’t understand, Mr. Oz,” Robinson said, shaking his head at me. “The authorities here aren’t scientists. They’re politicians. Which in Africa means they’re thugs. Believe me, they’re not in a listening mood right now. There must be close to a hundred people missing, and they’re panicking. It’s so bad, I hear they’re going to issue an evacuation order for the entire delta. I’ve heard rumors the military is on its way.”

  At that moment, we saw a pickup truck roar up beside the hotel and come to a squealing, jerky halt. The smoky diesel engine of the parked truck hammered and chugged. A middle-aged African in a crisply ironed white shirt got out of the passenger door and marched into the bar. His head was roughly the size and shape of a basketball. Two young soldiers carrying AK-47s hopped out of the truck bed and filed in behind him. There was an immediate and palpable tension in the bar. The two drunk men at the nearby table quit talking.

  “That’s Assistant Superintendent Mokgwathi,” Robinson whispered to me. “Maun’s top cop. What now?”

  The piano player stopped playing, and the vacuum of silence was louder than the music. The fountain splashed, glass clinked behind the bar.

  “I must speak to a Mr. Oz,” Mokgwathi said to the room in a deep and musically sweet African accent. “A Mr. Jackson Oz.”

  My legs twitched, and I was about to step forward when Robinson squeezed my shoulder and kept a vise grip on it. Chloe’s eyes flashed at me from the bar and quickly looked away. Robinson didn’t let go until the policemen, getting nothing from the room but vacant looks, pivoted on their jackboots and left the bar.

  “What’s up?” I said. “Why would they be looking for me?”

  “Do you have your plane ticket?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” Robinson said, grabbing my bags and jerking his head in the direction of the street. “My truck’s around the corner. It’s time to get you to the airport and onto your plane.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Someone in the hotel must have seen your camera and alerted the police,” he said. “Tourism is big business here, man. One of the only businesses. If word gets out that animals have gone bonkers and are killing tourists, that’s bad news for Botswana’s GDP, isn’t it? This is very dangerous for you.”

  “What is dangerous?” Chloe said. She’d watched the episode with the cops over the rim of her drink and now stood beside us with her bags.

  “I’ll tell you on the way to the airport,” I said, shouldering her carry-o
n as I led her toward the street.

  Chapter 31

  AT THE AIRPORT, all the seats were taken in the Air Botswana waiting area. The terminal was filled to capacity, crowded with tourists coming in from evacuated safari camps.

  The air buzzed with fear and nervous excitement. The tourists looked scared and confused, though I was glad to see that many of them were texting or talking on their cell phones. With the threat of a government cover-up looming, I hoped word of this craziness was already leaking to the press.

  It took no small amount of persistence, as well as a folded hundred-dollar bill, and then another, to snag Chloe a seat on the midnight flight to Johannesburg with me. From there, we’d be going our separate ways. I was headed back to the US, I hoped for a press conference at which I would show the lion footage. Chloe needed to return to Paris.

  I was glad I’d decided to leave the camcorder with Robinson when the airport scanners pulled me out of the security line for a more thorough search. I held my breath as the inspectors tossed my bags and wanded me. They missed the DVR tape I’d hidden in my pants, taped against the inside of my thigh. No TSA-style pat-downs out here, thank God.

  As I was standing by the window at the gate, looking out onto the runway, my stomach dropped like an anchor when what looked like a military cargo plane blasted in. It was thick and snub-nosed, painted brown. Was the Botswanan military really crazy enough to try to quarantine this thing? I didn’t want to find out.

  Things were changing right in front of my eyes, I realized. Whatever this phenomenon was, it was spreading, getting stronger, catching hold. The jittery feeling of a rising crisis was in the air, like the feeling before a hurricane.

  But I was convinced HAC wasn’t a local problem. It was a global one. Governments and military forces have enough trouble dealing with large-scale problems one at a time. How were they going to be able to assist everyone everywhere, all at once? This problem would call for an unheard-of amount of global cooperation. And I didn’t see it happening yet.

  “So you really think this thing is real, Oz?” Chloe said. Her eyes were focused out the window. Outside on the rough tarmac, soldiers spilled from the plane, Trojan Horse–style. “All around the world, animals suddenly attacking humans for no reason? And not other animals? I mean—how can that be? Why? Why now? It sounds—er—completely crazy.”

  “I don’t know how or why, Chloe,” I said. “All I know is that bird populations don’t just double in the course of several years, and lions don’t just suddenly, radically, inexplicably change their hunting behaviors. Something very weird is going on.”

  The temporary cell phone I’d bought in Maun that day rang as we were standing in line to board the plane. It was a voice mail from Gail Quinn, a former professor of mine at Columbia. It was good news. She’d shaken some trees and managed to arrange a meeting about HAC with Nate Gardner, the senior senator from New York.

  “What is it?” Chloe said when I hung up, smiling. We were on the small passenger plane, hunching under the low ceiling.

  “Good news. I have a meeting with one of the most prominent leaders in Congress about all this. With the videotape, I might have a real shot at getting the US government to help.”

  A depressing thought hit me as I was stowing my bag in the overhead. What if Senator Gardner reacted to me the same way Chloe initially had? Since I dropped out of Columbia before I received my doctorate, what if he thought I was just some wacko blogger, spinning Internet conspiracy theories between naps on my mother’s couch? Sometimes I forgot to step back and look at how nut-jobby I could seem.

  “Hey, I have a crazy idea,” I said as I sat down next to her. “Because I’m crazy. Chloe, I know you have a lot to do after all this, but would it be possible for you to come with me?”

  “What?” she said. “Go with you to the US?”

  “You’re right,” I said, facing forward. “Like I said, it’s crazy. Forget about it.”

  “No, wait,” Chloe said. “I mean why? Why do you want me to come?”

  “Well, your credentials, for one thing,” I said. “Your degree. The École Polytechnique. You’re a credible expert. Even better, a credible European expert who’s seen and experienced the same things I have. I’m concerned that the senator might initially react to me the way you did. He’ll think I’m a crackpot. He’ll probably look at me like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat. But if you’re there with me…”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “But please,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.”

  I took out my phone and pretended to play with it. Out of my peripheral vision, I picked up her aquiline nose doing a little crinkling thing as she squinted at me.

  She leaned back in her seat as she let out a deep breath.

  “It isn’t a choice,” she said as the plane began to taxi. “There really is some sort of environmental disaster happening. What kind of biologist would I be if I didn’t do everything I could to solve this? Besides, you saved my life. I owe you a favor. So I’ll go. On one condition.”

  “Anything.”

  “I hate flying. Can I just—er—hold your hand as we take off?”

  I smiled as I slipped her fine-boned hand in mine.

  “Twist my arm,” I said.

  Chapter 32

  THE BROADWAY LOCAL clatters past on the elevated subway track when Natalie Shaw arrives at the door of Oz’s building.

  It’s just past five a.m., still dark, though the sky is beginning to turn blue, and the steel-shuttered Harlem streets are empty. New York City actually does sleep after all, she thinks. The backs of her knees and armpits are misty with sweat in the already warm predawn summer air. She yawns as she keys herself into the dingy lobby. She’s stopping by on her way home from the hospital, having just put in a thirty-hour shift, and she’s half dead on her feet.

  Trudging up the building’s coffin-width stairwell, she still doesn’t know why she’s doing this. She pretty much broke up with Oz in her e-mail, and told him to find someone else to look in on Attila. It’s the fact that he hasn’t gotten back to her. Annoyed as that makes her, she can’t help but wonder if maybe he never got the message, and now Attila is starving or something.

  Getting closer to Oz’s apartment, she doesn’t have to wait long to find out that that’s not the case. She can hear Attila by the time she gets to the third floor. Christ, she can actually smell the damn thing as she climbs onto the fifth-floor landing. She’s baffled by the fact that Oz’s neighbors haven’t petitioned to kick him out of the building.

  But then again, she put up with him for a long time, didn’t she? I’d do anything for love, she thinks, but I won’t do that. What? Take a detour home after a thirty-hour shift to go clean up chimp shit? Well, apparently I will do that. Except it’s not for love; you already broke up with the bastard. To hell with the chimp—you’re a chump.

  In and out, she thinks, fishing Oz’s keys from the pocket of her turquoise hospital scrubs. Five minutes. Feed the monkey, clean the monkey—maybe—then get the hell out.

  Attila goes apeshit as she comes in. Natalie winces as she approaches, and the chimp goes berserk with shrieking. It’s a piercing, nails-on-chalkboard EEE-EEEE-EEEE sound, the edge of it like a pocketknife slicing her eardrum.

  “Nice to see you too, asshole,” Natalie says, lifting the pooper-scooper as she unlatches the door of his cage. “Your face could make a freight train take a dirt road, did you know that? Anyway. Lucky me is here to gather your droppings.”

  She bags her rubber gloves along with the crap before coming back with the food. Tangerines, a stack of Fig Newtons, and a pound of deli roast beef. Not to mention the goddamn applesauce with the crushed-up vitamins and Zoloft. All of it on a tray. Surprised it wasn’t silver. Oz takes better care of this chimp than he took care of her.

  “Bon appétit, monsieur.” Natalie sets down the tray and latches the cage again. “Breakfast is served. Don’t choke on it.”

  Her hand is on
the doorknob when she hears a noisy thump come from Attila’s direction.

  “Ugh. What now?”

  She hurries back into Attila’s room. She stops short in the doorway.

  Attila is on the floor of the cage, the food scattered pell-mell all around him. He’s lying facedown, his hands under his chest. He isn’t moving.

  What in the hell? Did he have a heart attack or something? That’s all we need, she thinks, undoing the latch. To have the thing die on her before Oz comes home.

  She bends down, nudges him, tries to turn him over. Attila spins around and wipes a reeking handful of shit across the shirt of her scrubs. He shrieks and smears it down her chest and onto her pants. Then he jumps back into the corner of the room, pant-hooting, howling, “EEE-EEE-EEEEEEAHHHH!”

  Natalie stands, looking down at herself in disgust.

  “You evil little bastard!” she shouts at the chimp.

  Then Attila quits screaming. He shuts his mouth, and with his sweet, expressive brown eyes he gives her a cold, quizzical look that makes her begin to slowly back away.

  Chapter 33

  HOT, GLARING LIGHT bores through the diamond-shaped spaces between the links of Attila’s cage as he lies, unmoving, on the cluttered floor of his room, all alone again.

  Slowly, he rises to his feet and crosses the hallway into Oz’s bedroom. He yanks out the drawers of the dresser. After upending the drawers, he ransacks the closet, hooting and screeching as he tosses jeans and shirts across the floor.

  Then he pisses over everything. He drenches the clothes and continues on to the bed, training the hot yellow stream on the pillow.

  That done, he snatches the fire-engine-red hat from a bedpost and knuckle-walks into the hallway bathroom. The wall bolts of the sink creak as he pulls his weight onto it.