“I’ll keep plugging away on this end,” Leahy said, shaking my hand and giving it a warm paternal squeeze that was meant to be reassuring and wasn’t. “In the meantime, when you get back to New York, prepare a presentation to explain the science of this to the president and her staff when they’re ready to listen. That would be extremely helpful. I’m going to try to arrange a teleconference for this evening or tomorrow morning at the latest.”
A teleconference? Splendid idea. Now, why didn’t I think of it? Oh, wait: I had. I wondered how many thousands of tax dollars had been wasted on my useless trip down here. Then I made the decision not to care. Getting home to my family was my priority now.
“Will do, Mr. Leahy,” I said, making my escape.
Chapter 79
SERGEANT ALVAREZ WAS sitting in the driver’s seat, locking and loading an M16, as I opened the passenger-side door and climbed into the SUV. The VIP treatment was over. He was wearing Kevlar body armor now, and a grenade vest.
He didn’t have to explain to me that things were even worse now on the streets of D.C. I thought about Chloe and Eli back in New York, and wished I was already airborne.
We were two blocks south of the White House, about to make the left onto Constitution Avenue, when we heard music.
Ani DiFranco yodeled from the cranked speakers of a car parked at the corner of President’s Park. Around it stood thirty or forty young people, many in hoodies bearing their college insignias, drinking beer. Some of them had painted their faces to look like animals. I smelled pot. They had handmade signs that read
MEAT IS MURDER! AIN’T PAYBACK A BITCH!!!?
HI HO! HI HO! IT’S BACK TO NATURE WE GO!
Everything has gone nuts, I thought, shaking my head. Animals, the president, college kids.
When we rolled past the National Mall again, I thought of all the noble historical assemblies the area had been host to. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech there, the presidential inaugurations. Now there were dead dogs floating in the reflecting pool.
We took the Arlington Bridge back over the Potomac for the airport this time. About a half mile inbound, we came toward an overpass; standing on it were what looked like more deluded young protesters. The college kids we’d seen back by the White House had been mostly harmless, but these guys looked more sinister in their ski masks and black bandannas. They were waving black flags.
Then there was a flash of darting movement in front of the SUV, and the windshield caved in.
Glass dust stung my eyes as the joint-compound bucket somebody had dropped from the overpass whipped just past my head into the backseat.
The SUV accelerated and veered to the left. I turned and saw that Alvarez’s face was covered with blood. He was slumped over the steering wheel, motionless.
I reached for the wheel, tried to right the vehicle. The car slid into the Jersey barrier at around eighty. Metal shrieked and showered sparks as we lurched up and rode the barrier for fifty feet before the momentum flipped the truck.
Chapter 80
DARK. AT FIRST I thought the rhythmic thump-thump-thump was my heartbeat. Then I opened my eyes. I realized the noise was the windshield wipers beating uselessly against the shattered windshield.
The truck’s upside-down shattered windshield.
The SUV had come to rest on its roof in the left lane. I was being held in place by my shoulder belt, dangling like a bat. I felt hot blood from my nose dripping into my hair. I sneezed and sprayed a mist of blood onto my one good suit. I blinked, staring out through the hole in the windshield. My thoughts were slow and oozy.
Hmm. So what now?
I turned toward Alvarez. He was upside down, like me, still unconscious and bleeding steadily from a gash in his temple.
I reached out for his seat belt and was stopped when I looked out the window. In between the steady slap of the wipers pushing glass crumbs into the car, I heard a strange huffing sound. Outside the passenger-side window, something was moving.
I squinted at it. Brown. Brown. Brown.
A enormous muzzle and small beady black eyes appeared in the window.
Oh, okay, I thought. That’s a bear.
It gazed through the window at me with an almost quizzical expression. What I was feeling wasn’t even quite fear. What I was feeling was the fear equivalent of when you’re so sad you laugh. The wheel of fear went around a whole turn, came out the other side. I thought, well, this is it.
How a grizzly bear had gotten here on this strip of road beside our wrecked truck was unclear. What it was doing in Washington, D.C., was unclear. Escaped from the zoo? I had a feeling that it didn’t work for AAA.
It made its choppy huffing sound again and pressed its moist black snout against the glass of the car window. It sniffed at the glass and then made a low throaty moan as it scratched at the window with a paw twice the size of a catcher’s mitt.
The screech of the bear’s claws on the glass snapped me out of my little absence seizure. Fumbling with my seat belt release, I stretched an arm into the backseat, feeling for Sergeant Alvarez’s rifle.
I abandoned my search for the rifle as the bear moved from the passenger side to the front. I felt the truck lurch upward as the bear began squeezing himself under the upside-down hood.
So this is how I will die, I thought. Eaten by a grizzly while hanging upside down in a car wreck. Interesting, at least. If, years before, you’d gazed into a crystal ball and told me that was how I’d go, I genuinely would not have believed you.
I turned to Alvarez and tried to shake him awake. For what reason I didn’t know. To wake him up for his death? I wasn’t sure. I guess I didn’t want to die alone. In any case, he was out for the night.
The bear had shimmied its mass under the hood, and was now nosing the hole the compound bucket had made. It sniffed and huffed as it began peeling back the shattered glass. The bear ripped at the glass as though it were a kid tearing into a stubborn candy wrapper.
Then I remembered the grenades that dangled like avocados from the sergeant’s vest. I unclipped the first one I could reach. I bit out its pin and tossed it at the bear as hard as I could as it poked its head in below the upside-down dashboard.
The bear roared and reared back as the hissing canister clanged off the side of its head. Interesting experience, having a bear roar in your face. The bear shook his head as if he’d been slapped.
Instead of exploding, the canister came to a spinning stop on the asphalt under the hood and began pouring out canary-yellow smoke. Roiling, acrid fumes burned my eyes. The smoke stung like a wasp stings. I covered my mouth as I coughed.
I reached over to Alvarez and managed to wrench another grenade free from his vest. But by the time I was ready to throw it I could see I didn’t need it. Beyond the window, I saw the bear in retreat, bounding over the grass beyond the shoulder of the road.
When the air cleared, a long minute later, I finally disentangled myself. Alvarez was hacking up a lung by the time I got him out of his seat belt as well. We crawled out of the wreck. The SUV looked like John Belushi had crushed it against his forehead.
“What the hell just happened?” Alvarez said, slouching against the Jersey barrier, touching his face and inspecting the blood on his fingertips.
“It’s just like bees,” I said to myself, looking at the smoke billowing from beneath the truck.
“What bees?” said Alvarez, rooting around in the wreck for his rifle. “You okay, Professor? You bang your head?”
“When the animals smell us, they want to attack us,” I said, crouching with him behind the overturned truck. “Anything that masks our scent makes us invisible. That’s why the smoke drove off the bear. It knocked our scent out of the air.”
“No shit,” Alvarez said absently, shouldering his gun.
“It makes perfect sense,” I said. I was thinking out loud. “Beekeepers use smoke in the same way. When the keeper shakes up a nest, the bees produce a pheromon
e that signals a mass attack. Except nothing happens because the smoke disperses the signal.”
“So that’s what happened to all the animals, Professor—why they swarm together? They’ve all, like, bugged out or something?”
“Exactly. They’ve all bugged out,” I said. “Now call one of your marine buddies to get us the hell out of here. We need to tell them how to fight this thing.”
Chapter 81
US ARMY MANHATTAN SECURE ZONE
UPPER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK CITY
THE FREIGHT ELEVATOR is pretty rank even before Private First Class Donald Rodale starts collecting the garbage from the Fifth Avenue emergency government residence that evening. By the time he’s done, at six thirty, the lush, steamy aroma from the chest-high pile of greasy garbage bags is making his eyes tear and his lunch churn dangerously in his gut.
Stopping the old manual elevator in the basement, a particularly slimy Hefty CinchSak slides off the top of the pile and smacks him in the back of both legs with a wet spatter.
Bull’s-eye, Rodale thinks.
Rodale opens the gate to the building’s rear courtyard and begins carrying out the garbage bags one at a time, tossing them into a plastic rolling bin. When the bin is filled to its brim, he gets behind it and begins rolling it up a steep ramp leading to Eighty-First Street.
Huffing and slick with sweat, Rodale scowls when he makes it to the top of the ramp. The little security booth by the gate is empty. The guard at the booth is supposed to kill the juice on the electric fence and cover him with an M16 while he makes the journey across the street to toss the trash into the shipping container. But he’s MIA.
What to do. The guard who’s usually at the booth is a cop named Quinlan. Cool dude. He doesn’t want to get him in trouble for not being at his post.
Problem is, if he waits around here any longer, he’ll be late to help Suskind, a whiny prick if there ever was one, with the Porta-Pottys across the street at the museum. He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
Rodale looks down the long dark corridor of East Eighty-First through the chain-link fence. It’s empty. Just a narrow lane of brick and granite town houses, trees, empty sidewalks. No rabid packs of crazed animals. Nothing at all.
Fuck it, Rodale thinks. Only take a second. He leans into the guard booth, hits the cutoff for the electrical gate, and swings it open.
He pushes the garbage bin through. It makes a rattling, rumbling sound on the concrete as he pushes it off the curb toward the green corrugated fiberglass shipping container they’re using for a Dumpster.
Rodale notices something funny when he reaches out to pull up the handle on the container door. It has already been pulled up. Had he forgotten to close it yesterday?
The door yawns slightly open with a groan. He pushes it open all the way. The dark container stinks even worse than the freight elevator. Like something rotting, something dead. Rodale holds his breath. He tips the bin over and starts tossing the bags as far back into the container as he can throw them. The heavy ones he grabs two-handed and kind of wheels around with them, like a discus thrower, to get some distance. He’s almost—almost—having fun.
When he’s chucked about half the garbage bags, he hears a sound. Like something moving. He’s not looking in the container. He figures the sound was one of the bags he had just thrown rolling back toward the entrance.
He lays his hands on the next bag. A heavy fucker, this one. Needs both hands. He’s about to do his Olympic toss thing with it, and is reeling back, when from out of the shadows of the container’s interior there appears a chimpanzee. Rodale stands at the door, still holding the garbage bag.
Yes, it is a chimpanzee. Face like a strange rubber mask, sweet lucid eyes like marbled brown glass. This chimpanzee is wearing a hat. The hat looks battered, threadbare, and filthy, but it looks like it once was red.
It continues to stare right at him. It looks as if it’s about to say something.
In the last two weeks since all the crazy shit started, he’s seen dogs attacking, and rats—but a chimp? This is unexpected.
“Hey,” he calls into the shipping container. His voice bounces off the narrow walls. He doesn’t know what else to say. “Are you okay?”
As if in response, the chimpanzee grabs him by the shirt with its huge black hands, lurches forward, and bites off his nose.
Rodale falls to his knees, the air pulling a scream, like a long scarf, from his throat. Blood dribbles over his lips and chin, between the fingers of the palms cupped to his face. The chimp makes a high, piercing call sound. From the town house beside the container, animals begin to emerge.
They come from the windows, they come from the alleyways, from the brass mail slot in the red town-house door. In five breaths the street is crowded with mange-mottled feral dogs, raccoons, hundreds of cats. But by far the largest contingent is rats. Thousands upon thousands of plump, red-eyed rats. They make a living carpet out of the street. A squeaking black tide.
Rodale runs, holding his face. He tries to run back to the fence. When he’s in midstride, the animals take him under. He sinks into the ocean of dogs and rats as if he’s drowning. Like a drowning man, he flails and thrashes. The rats envelop him. They scurry over the backs of his legs, his arms, up the back of his shirt. He writhes on the ground, slapping and punching at himself. From his groin to his chin, scissoring, needlelike teeth are puncturing his skin, rending his flesh.
In a moment the rats are eating at muscle, at his organs. The thousands of tiny teeth snip through his tendons and then go to work stripping the meat from his bones.
Attila spits out the soldier’s nose and is knuckle-running at a loping cant across the street toward the open gate of the building. Behind him, the animal horde follows, snapping and howling.
Chapter 82
THE BAG OF popcorn in the droning microwave has begun to go from a few desultory pip-pops to a full-on clamor as Chloe chances upon a large plastic mixing bowl in the sprawling apartment’s pantry.
She takes note of a stash of instant soup boxes above the shelf where she just found the bowl. There is no way to tell how long they will be here in this place, so it’s good to know where they stand with food. Things will get better eventually, she thinks as she climbs back down the folding step stool. It’s just a matter of holding out.
Arriving back into the bright marble kitchen, for a moment she takes small solace in the aroma of butter and salt. A smell that conjures up family, happiness, safety.
It doesn’t work. Her resolve, wavering all day, evaporates. She flings away the bowl and covers her face with her hands.
The comforting scent is a mockery now. There will be no more comfort, she knows.
Her family is separated. No one is happy. No one is safe.
Though she has never told Oz about it, she had panic attacks in grad school that had been serious enough for her family to convince her to see a therapist. It took almost a year of hard work, and a brief hospitalization, to finally conquer them. Since Oz left, she has felt them creeping back. The same itching fear, the same paralysis, the same pathological self-condemnation.
Worthless, says an inner voice as she bends over the countertop, shivering. Worthless. As a wife, a mother, a woman, a human being. Only two things will happen now. She will get her son killed, then she will get herself killed.
The bone-drilling shriek of the microwave timer brings her back out of the hole she’s fallen into. She squeezes the cold edge of the marble countertop until her knuckles whiten. She wipes her tears with the back of a hand and checks her face in the glass-fronted cabinet above the sink. She dumps the steaming popcorn into the bowl and heads back into the living room.
In the cavernous room, Eli sits cross-legged on the Oriental carpet, gazing up, wide-eyed, at the monolithic flat-screen TV on the wall. A rerun of The Simpsons is on. Homer runs away from an out-of-control car. To escape, the cartoon character dives into a manhole, only to do a face-plant on a hot steam pipe.
r /> Under ordinary circumstances, she wouldn’t let Eli watch TV that wasn’t at least vaguely educational. Under these circumstances, though, Chloe kneels down and hugs her son, inhales his smell, listens to him giggle.
“I like this fat yellow man, Mommy,” Eli says.
Chloe kisses her son on the top of his head and remembers something. One of the therapies that she used to keep her panic attacks away was exercise. She had started going to the gym every night after school to swim laps before dinner. It cleared her head. It worked.
She doesn’t want to leave Eli at all these days. In fact she feels like attaching him to herself in a papoose, as she did when he was an infant. But her anxiety is buzzing in her skull like a power drill. Her little meltdown in the kitchen proved that. If they are going to survive, she needs to calm down. She needs to be strong.
“Hey, Eli, baby. Listen,” Chloe says, setting the popcorn in front of him as though it were an offering for an idol. “Mommy’s going to exercise now in the room on the other side of the kitchen, okay?”
“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.