Zoo

Chapter 50

WHEN I FELT the train slow, my eyes fluttered, bringing me out of an impromptu nap.

Outside the window of the Acela, I could see we weren’t in D.C. yet. We were going through a seemingly abandoned industrial town in South Jersey, or maybe northern Maryland. These decaying towns all looked depressingly the same: windowless brick factories; deserted, rusting bridges; a main street lined with plywood-boarded windows and overgrown with weeds. Going back to nature, slowly.

Turns out an apocalypse actually comes on pretty slowly. Not fire and brimstone but rust and dandelions. Not a bang but a whimper.

Perhaps it was due to the continuing economic downturn, but rumors abounded on the Internet. People were dying in these in-between places. No one knew why.

I had my theories.

Gazing out at the orphaned town, I thought of those lines from Yeats:

For a moment I stared blankly at my reflection in the black screen of the sleeping laptop that was open on the tray table in front of me. You could have packed for a long weekend in the bags under my eyes.

So much to do and so little goddamn time to do it.

For the last five years, I’d been working nonstop with my friends at Columbia to try to get a handle on HAC. A lot of the work consisted of collecting the corpses of affected animals and performing autopsies on them.

We’d seen a lot of specimens. Too many. Tigers from India. Russian bears. Beavers, wolverines, even ground squirrels. The unusually aggressive behavior had spread to so many mammal species we were starting to lose count.

It wasn’t rabies. As far as we could tell from the specimens we’d studied, it didn’t seem like a virus. We had noticed something interesting, though. The brains of the affected animals were a little heavier than normal. Not only that, but they were heavier by the same amount, about 1.3 percent. The increase in brain matter seemed to be concentrated mostly in the amygdala, the part of the mammalian brain generally thought to be responsible for memory and learning.

The finding was unusual enough to finally get the government on board. For the last year, we’d gotten decent funding and had been working with a liaison from the Department of Health and Human Services.

So the good news now was that we had provided the world with proof that something was causing abnormal mutations in mammalian amygdalae that were triggering this aberrantly aggressive behavior. The bad news was that we didn’t have a clue what it was.

There were other questions. Why were some animals affected and not others? And why were humans entirely unaffected by these mutations? Were there other symptoms associated with the mutations? Yes, and they varied from one species to another. In some species—lions, for instance—the mutations seemed to affect only male animals. Not so in other species. There had been an ugly episode of bizarrely psychotic behavior among a group of female elephants in Thailand. Every hunch we got about every question opened up a fresh jar of questions. Questions that had been answered sprouted more questions, like the heads of the Hydra: cut off one and two grow back in its place.

I stared out at the wasteland that America was becoming, rusting under the hard, pitiless summer sky.

Chapter 51

AND THERE WAS more bad news that morning—special, just for me. I had to interrupt my research in order to head down to D.C. to do my Chicken Little dance at another time-suck of a congressional hearing. For all the scientific evidence we were amassing—and in spite of the exponential increases in animal attacks, which were irrefutable—many people, both in the government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

I wasn’t the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore—but still, not everyone had heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long, uphill battle to get people to recognize what was happening. I had frequently been at loggerheads in the op-ed pages with Harvey Saltonstall—yes, the Harvey Saltonstall: evolutionary biologist, popular science writer, holder of the Henry Wentworth Wallace chair at Harvard. I had a couple of public debates with him, too. Harvey and I had shared a few split screens on news shows. He was my most prominent public critic, and his opposition to HAC must have delayed public acceptance of it by years. It drove me nuts debating him—he had the academic cred, the name, the CV, and who the hell was I? I looked like your office’s IT guy standing next to that stately, handsome man, twiggy in his tweeds, with his pipe-smoky baritone, his Boston Brahmin accent, and that obnoxious tic of swiping back his silver hair. Twit.

I rubbed circles on my throbbing temples with my thumbs, my gathering headache coming at me in fuzzy radio waves of pain, and was more astonished than alarmed when a guy I didn’t know came in and sat down across from me. He looked like an ex-husband of Britney Spears: skinny arms blue with bad tats, houndstooth Sinatra hat, a goatee that looked drawn on.

A small part of me wondered if I was still asleep.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“You Jackson Oz?”

I might have rolled my eyes. Here we go.

So, then. I’d written a book about HAC, which had become a controversial bestseller. On the one hand, it was the best thing I’d done yet to spread the word about HAC: it led to appearances on the major media outlets, where I tried to warn people about the growing danger and the increasingly dire need for immediate, coordinated action. On the other hand, I was sort of famous—or, rather, infamous. Pet owners didn’t like me much. “Dog people,” especially, despised my message, now even more so since we’d gotten Congress and the president to consider a national quarantine.

“Actually, no,” I said. “But I get that all the time.”

The man was unfazed.

“Why you gotta hate on dogs, yo? Why you gotta be getting people all crazy and shit? To sell your stupid-ass books? My rottie ain’t evil. She’s a sweetheart.”

“Everything okay here?” said a behemoth of a black man in a tailored pin-striped suit who had just materialized in the doorway beside K-Fed.

“We havin’ a conversation here,” the guy said with righteous indignation. “A private conversation.”

“Not anymore,” said my sometime bodyguard, FBI special agent Nimo Kade. He flashed a winning smile and a badge. “Would you like to find your seat or do you need some help?”

Nimo shouldered the dipshit out of the train car and I let out a long breath of relief.

Working with the government has its perks.

This sort of thing happened a lot. My e-mail in-box was so full of death threats that these days I just deleted them without being curious enough to open them.

“You bring out the best and brightest, don’t you, Oz?” Nimo said when the guy was gone.

“It’s my sparkling personality,” I said. “Where is everyone?”

Chloe appeared in the doorway of the train car. The best thing about the last five years—five unrewarding years of slaving away in the lab, constant traveling, constant frustration—was having Chloe by my side. She’d been working as hard as I was. Harder, actually. And somehow, instead of sporting my burned-fuse chic, she was her same self, with silky skin and owlish eyes, her body willowy and elegant as a stroke of calligraphy.

Then there was a noisy, porcine squeal, and something giggly and sticky shot through the open doorway, scrambled onto the seat, and landed in my lap.

“Egads! A monster!” I said in my 1930s radio drama voice as our three-year-old son, Eli, climbed me as though he were Sir Edmund Hillary and I were Everest. I put him in a mock headlock and kissed him on the top of his fuzzy blond head.

Eli wasn’t only a rambunctious kid who loved wrestling and snapping together LEGO guns, he was smart. As a whip. At eighteen months, he could write words on the fridge with magnet letters. And he was bilingual in English and French.

Chloe and I had gotten married in a quickie job in the city clerk’s office the day after she found out she was pregnant. Then we’d held a ceremony for friends and family a couple of months later. Eli was born eight weeks prematurely, and had to be put in the NICU. We were afraid he might not make it. But a week later, he bounced back. Started getting bigger and healthier.

As I watched him hop up next to Chloe in the seat across from me and open his favorite book, The Jungle Book, my depression was replaced with a rejuvenated sense of determination.

The hell with Yeats, I thought. The center would hold. It would have to. For my wife and son, I’d make it hold or die trying.

Chapter 52

TRAFFIC WAS STOPPED dead on the way to the Capitol from Union Station. In the backseat of the sleek black government sedan, Eli fidgeted in my lap, gnawing like a gremlin on a fruit leather we had gotten at Trader Joe’s. He was getting cranky. Chloe was already cranky because they didn’t have the car seat for Eli that they had said they would. The afternoon sun sparkled on a sea of chrome and glass and glowered like a fat yellow bully above us, a problem that the car’s anemic AC alleviated exactly not at all.

I was getting pretty cranky myself. Another worthless hearing? What was the use? Nothing ever happened at these kangaroo courts but a jamboree of choreographed histrionics. Worst of all, Senator Charlie Chargaff, my avowed archenemy, was going to be on the inquiry panel today. I couldn’t wait to get grilled by a hair-plugged good ol’ boy with a spray-on tan who was going to try to ride his demonization of me into the White House.

When at long last we rounded a corner, I could see the reason for the clogged traffic. A block from the Capitol complex, a smattering of young people in black hoodies and black masks were squaring off against riot cops. Several of the protesters were waving black flags with the circle-A anarchy symbol sprayed on them in cracked white paint. Billowing plumes of pink smoke sprayed up around them. Car horns honked all around us like the bleating of bored sheep.

“What are these fools protesting now?” Chloe said, watching from the corner of her eye as Eli whacked a Batman action figure against the seat, making blow-up noises with his cheeks. “They already have what they want. Anarchy is here.”

The driver peeled off into a U-turn and brought us around the back of the Capitol building. I felt the tickling buzz of my phone vibrating in the inner lining of my suit jacket.

The caller ID said US GOVERNMENT.

“Who is it?” Chloe said.

“Uncle Sam,” I said.

“Mr. Oz?” said a resonant voice.

“Speaking.”

“Are you at the hearing yet?”

“Bad traffic, on my way. Who is this?”

“This is Stanley Marshall, the president’s chief of staff. Something’s come up, a matter of national security. We need your help on it. Take a detour and come for a meeting.”

“Now? I’m scheduled to speak in half an hour.”

“I understand that, Mr. Oz. The president would like to speak to you instead. This is more pressing. Put one of the agents on the phone; I can give him directions.”

I lurched into the front seat and handed Nimo my phone.

“What was that?” Chloe said as we pulled another U-turn. Eli dropped his Batman figure on the car floor as we turned.

“Mommy! Get Ba’man!”

“I don’t know,” I half whispered. “I guess we’re going to meet the president.”

Ten minutes later the car was pulling into a municipal parking garage in Dupont Circle. Seemed fishy. I leaned up front.

“Are we meeting Deep Throat?” I said. “I thought we were going to the White House.”

Nimo looked back at me and shrugged.

“They told us to come here,” he said as we wheeled onto the garage’s ramp.

We slowly circled up to the roof. I was confused. It was deserted.

“What is this?” Chloe said. “There’s no one here.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Mommy!” said Eli. “Get Ba’man!”

“What?” said Chloe, ignoring him.

“This must have been a ploy. Senator Chargaff. He must have found my number and had someone call, pretending to be the chief of staff, so I wouldn’t show up to the hearing. Make me look like a flake. Bastard.”

I tried calling the number that had just called me. I was listening to the phone ring, unanswered, when we heard a low, chopping mumble—like an industrial fan heard through a pillow.

A plastic bag drifting along the concrete wall beyond the windshield fluttered and took flight, graceful as a bird blown across the cityscape of D.C. Then we heard the deafening suck-and-throb tattoo of a landing helicopter, cottoning the air like a migraine in the head of a god.

The whirlybird that landed five empty spots to the left of the sedan was a massive Black Hawk with military markings. An army colonel in mirrored aviators and a jacket as decorated as a Christmas tree hopped out of it and jog-walked toward the car.

“Daddy!” Eli yelled in my ear.

“What?” I yelled above the throbbing din.

“Get—Ba’man!”

Chapter 53

AND WE’D BEEN worried about no car seat for Eli in the car.

Strapped into the wailing, shuddering army helicopter a few minutes later, we pushed off the parking-garage roof and swung low as a sweet chariot over downtown Washington. We picked up altitude, and before long it was no longer concrete and highways but rolling jewel-green Virginia swampland that rushed by beneath us. I looked over at Eli, who was strapped in on Chloe’s lap, clutching his Batman, eyes big as Frisbees, in awe.

We banked hard and thundered due north for twenty minutes or so and then began descending again. An office park of stark glass buildings emerged from the forest. From the vantage point of a few thousand feet above, they looked like blocks of ice melting on the grass. We dove toward the central building. I thought we were going to land on the red H of the helipad on the ground next to it, but instead the pilot guided us onto the flat roof of the building.

“Thanks, Colonel,” yelled a silver-haired man in a navy Windbreaker who was waiting for us on the roof as we disembarked. “I’ll take it from here.”

The colonel flicked a salute at him, and the chopper picked up behind us and rose skyward.

I noticed the letters NSA on the electronic badge clipped to the pocket of his crisp white dress shirt as he led me, Chloe, Eli, and Nimo across the sun-baked asphalt of the roof toward a door.

The National Security Agency: the department that does worldwide electronic surveillance for all the intelligence services—so cloak-and-dagger that some people call it No Such Agency.

“Section Chief Mike Leahy,” the man said, shaking my hand as we entered the building. “Thanks for agreeing to come.”

He led us out of a stairwell into a long, blinding-white corridor.

“Sorry for all the drama, but when”—he glanced at Eli—“the you-know-what hits the fan, things tend to work pretty fast around here.”

We turned a corner and entered a semicircular room that had rows of seats and a podium in front. It reminded me of a college lecture hall. Behind the podium was a shiny, sleek television screen the size of a billboard.

A side door opened and a middle-aged black man entered the room. Leahy was in business attire, but this guy wore a black polo shirt with black jeans and Chuck Taylors that squeaked like balloon animals on the shiny white floor. The gold Rolex at his wrist added a splash of bling to the ensemble.

“Are you the president?” Eli said, gazing up at him.

“No, I’m not,” the man said.

“Actually,” Leahy said, smiling stiffly, “the president has been detained. This is Conrad Marlowe from the Defense Department.”

“Don’t jerk their chains, Mike,” Marlowe said. His teeth could have been mah-jongg tiles, and his voice was like a velvet cello. “Mr. Oz here is smarter than that. He saw this coming back in 2012. Hell, back in 2011, 2010. The president’s not coming. They say that to get you on the bird. And technically, I’m not from the Defense Department. I work for a think tank. War games. That kind of happy crap. They think I can solve this Rubik’s Cube, but I’m having my doubts.”

“But we really do need your help, Mr. Oz,” said Leahy.

Now standing in the doorway was a severe-looking sparrow of a woman with threaded brows and hair yanked back as tight as a figure skater’s. She clicked her knuckles twice on the open door. Leahy cleared his throat.

“This is Jen, my assistant,” he said. “Would it be all right if she brought Eli across the hall to have some ice cream and play computer games while we talk shop?”

“Heck, if he doesn’t want to go, I’m down,” Marlowe said, glancing at Jen, a speck of fire in his eye.

“Can I go, Mommy?”

“No ice cream without the magic word, okay?”

“Pleeease!” Eli beamed bright as a headlight as Jen herded him out the door.

“Hard to find a sitter on short notice,” I told Leahy.

“Okay,” Chloe said after they were gone. “Let’s cut to the chase, yes? What is this? Why are we here? What’s happened?”

“It’s here, Mrs. Oz,” Leahy said.

“What’s here?” I said.

“HAC has arrived in the United States like gangbusters,” said Marlowe. “The animals are on the warpath. It’s spreading. A pandemic.”

“We’re calling the unfortunate new environment Z-O-O,” Leahy said, spelling out the word. “Those letters stand for something, but fuck if I can remember what.”

Marlowe snickered. “And we’re just one of the animals.”

Chapter 54

DR. CHARLES GROH lets the hiss and crackle rise to a frenzy, and then, sensing their undersides beginning to burn, reaches a fork into the cast-iron pan and turns over the slices of bacon one by one. The bacon strips tremble and buckle, spitting a mist of fat flecks and smoke above the pan.

Behind him, sprawled on the patterned floor of Mexican Talavera tiles, his chocolate Lab, Charlie II, whines pitifully and drums his tail against the side of the kitchen island. His whining erupts into a yelp.

“Patience, Charlie. Patience,” Groh says, waving his fork in the air like a maestro. “With the important things in life, it’s all about the timing. And bacon is a very important thing.”

After draping the bacon on a paper towel, Groh hobbles to the sink with his cane and washes his hand. The male gorilla who had attacked him in his primatology lab at Johns Hopkins three years ago took his left hand as well as his nose, his lips, his right eye, left ear, and his right leg from the knee down. Groh uses a prosthetic hand and leg.

The incident had actually been a perverse godsend, in a cosmic sense. Back then, everything had been put on the back burner but his career. He was tenured, secure in his career, with a CV thick as a phone book. He had written academic books and several popular books on gorillas, and had been awarded a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He was the toast of intellectual circles—but as his career floated higher and higher into the ether he had been spending less and less time with his wife, Adrianna, and his son, Christopher Robin. He was growing distant from his family, and Christopher was growing up without him. He was even neglecting his teaching, sloughing off most of his classes on TAs.

For all its pain and horror, the mauling and his grueling recovery had saved him, in a way—it brought him back down to earth. Yes, he now wears sunglasses in public, and his potential career as a foot model is shot. But he can still teach. Although certain positions are off the table, he can still make love to his wife. He can still fry bacon.

All things considered, Groh thinks, lifting a steaming mug of coffee to his surgically reconstructed lips, he is a relatively lucky man.

Groh folds a strip of bacon into his mouth and switches on the radio beside the sink. The needle’s zeroed in on some nattering morning talk show, and he paws around the dial until he lands on some classical music. Verdi. That’s better. He hears the clink of crockery against the marble counter of the kitchen island and turns. His twelve-year-old son mumbles a good morning as he tilts a box of Lucky Charms into a cereal bowl. He’s a handsome kid, currently brown as a nut from hours of outdoor play at his summer day camp.

“Hey, kiddo,” Groh says. “Cease and desist with the Charms. I made us bacon.”

“Bacon and what?” says Chris, turning on the MLB Network on the kitchen TV. He mutes it, letting his dad’s Verdi score the recap of the Braves losing to the Orioles the night before.

“Bacon and bacon so far,” Groh says, opening the fridge. “How about an egg?”

“Can I have bacon with Lucky Charms?” says his son, staring at the screen.

“I don’t know. Would your mother let you do that?”

Adrianna is in Baltimore for a few days with her elderly mother, who just had her gallbladder removed.

“Are you nuts? Hell no,” Chris says.

Groh smiles as he brings over the steaming pieces of swine.

“Then have at it, boy,” he says. “She’ll be home soon.”

Groh makes his way across the floor between the kitchen and the front door when he hears a truck pull up outside. He glances out the window and sees that it’s a Lawn Doctor truck in front of the neighbors’ place across the street. A couple of childless yuppie lobbyists who pull down some long green, apparently, judging from their matching Beemers. They certainly aren’t landscapers. Crabgrass and brown spots mottle their sickly lawn like mange. Hence the Lawn Doctor truck.

When he turns from the window, Charlie II is looking out the open front door, panting as he spies with him on the neighbors through the glass of the storm door. Groh galumphs back toward the kitchen on his cane, patting the dog on top of his sleek, brown, dopey head. A flurry of shiny red cartoon hearts is floating out of Charlie II’s expression.

“Okay,” Groh says, scooping up his keys with a jingle from the kitchen counter. “I’m off to work. You’re on your own for another hour, Chris. Mom left Nana’s already and will be here to take you to camp. Love you.”

“Dad, wait. I almost forgot,” Chris says.

Groh watches his son ransack the backpack dangling from a hook on the wall by the front door. He fishes something from the bag and hands it to him—what looks like a red-and-white plastic necklace.

“It’s a lanyard. I made it at camp yesterday,” says Chris. “I thought it could hold your sunglasses, you know, like, around your neck, when you’re working or something. I made it red and white for the Nats.”

Groh looks at it, then at his son, his one eye threatening to fog up.

“Hey, thanks, kiddo,” Groh says. “It’s awesome. Are the Nats playing tonight?”

“At home. Versus the Diamondbacks. Seven tonight. Strasburg’s starting.”

“You want to go?” Groh says.

“What? To the stadium? Heck, yeah!” says Chris, slapping him a high five.

Lucky man, Groh thinks again as he pats his son on the shoulder and then steps into the garage.

Chapter 55

“HEY, CHARLIE. WANT some bacon?” Chris says to Charlie II when his dad is gone. “Hear that, boy? The Nats game. Stephen Strasburg throws like a hundred miles an hour.” He heads back into the kitchen. The dog’s claws click on the floor tiles behind him.

No one in the family loves Charlie II more than Chris. They’ve practically grown up together, having been “pups” at the same time. The family has moved three times, following Charles’s new jobs, and each time, Charlie II was Chris’s best friend until he managed to make human friends. Chris remembers how hard it was to make the dog stay home when he went off to play with his friends. Charlie II would whine in sadness, his eyes forlornly watching Chris from the window as he left the house. And if Chris looked back, he might not be able to leave. To not be with Chris seems to be the hardest thing for the dog to do. They are close as brothers.

Chris kills the Verdi on the radio, turns up the volume on the TV, and zaps through the channels with one hand, searching for ESPN. With the other hand he picks up a slice of bacon from the grease-dampened paper towel and offers it to Charlie II under the counter.

A hot shock of pain in his hand. Chris drops the remote.

“Hey!” He yanks back his hand and looks at it. Charlie bit him. There are puncture marks in his hand.

“Ow! What the fuck? What’d you do that for?”

Chris looks agape at Charlie II, standing beside him in the kitchen. The piece of bacon lies untouched on the floor tiles. Something is—something is not right. There is some weird look in the dog’s eyes—some knowing, almost angry glaze in them that Chris has never seen before. Charlie begins to growl. His jowls flap against his teeth, spit percolating deep in his throat. The eighty-pound Labrador crouches, coiling back, the fur bristling high and stiff as steel wool on the back of his neck. He is growling, sounding like a guard dog, his teeth bared, a gloopy white thread yo-yoing from his lower lip in a pool of saliva.

“What in the hell? What’s wrong, boy? Stop it. It’s me. What’s wrong with you?”

It looks like one of his eyes is messed up. Charlie’s head keeps jerking to one side, as though he were a boxer shaking off a punch. Something is wrong.

Charlie curls in on his hind legs and lets loose with a string of the loudest, most threatening barks Chris has ever heard him make. He sounds like a junkyard dog warning off intruders, not the family pet he’s known more than half his life. Charlie is in a rage—lungs heaving up quick, loud, guttural barks that sound like “WAR-WAR-WAR-WAR—WAR!”

That’s it. Chris gets scared. He panics. He tumbles from his chair and starts running. He feels Charlie’s hot breath on the backs of his knees, hears jaws snapping behind him.

The closest door is the hallway pantry. Chris dashes inside and slams the door, and feels the whump and rattle of Charlie throwing his weight against it. He leans with his back against the pantry door, holding it shut.

On the other side of it, Charlie smashes his body into the door, the thing shuddering on its hinges under the impact. Charlie scrabbles his toenails at the door, clawing and barking, heaves himself into it in manic thumps, seemingly wanting to rip him to ribbons. In all the years they have owned the dog, he’s never sounded like—like a wild animal.

He’s gone crazy, Chris thinks. He saw it in his eyes. The dog is off his rocker. He no longer seems like Charlie II. He is something else. Another dog entirely. A bad dog.

He feels himself beginning to cry. In the hallway, he can hear the dog skulking in circles, still rumble-jawed, occasionally sneezing, occasionally breaking into a fresh wave of furious barking.

“WAR-WAR-WAR-WAR—WAR!”

Chris looks down at his hand. The punctures in his palm aren’t huge, but they’re deep, and bleeding. There’s blood all over his shorts.

Chris shakes his head, swiping at his eyes. He has to calm down and think. He’s still bleeding. He has to deal with that.

He crouches down and reaches for a package of paper towels on the bottom shelf. On the paper towel package, a handsome mountain man in a flannel shirt smiles. He tears open the bag with his teeth, wraps a wad of paper towels around his hand, and tightens the makeshift bandage with a strip of plastic wrap.

He sits in the hot, cramped darkness, listening to the dog pace and growl in the hallway. He is thinking about maybe using the broom to beat back the dog for long enough to run for help. Then the phone in the kitchen rings.

The machine bleeps and someone starts leaving a message. He hears Charlie II skitter back into the kitchen.

Chris bolts from the pantry and races up the back stairs. He’s halfway to his room when Charlie arrives on the stairs in front of him.

Chris dives sidelong into his parents’ bedroom. Charlie comes through the doorway a moment later, forcing Chris into the bathroom. He whams the door shut a split second before the dog crashes against it, and Charlie again goes berserk with barks and snarls.

Damn it. His plan had been to call his mom or dad from the cell phone in his room. Now he’s stuck again.

“Charlie!” he calls through the door. “There’s something wrong with you. It’s me. It’s Chris.”

He can hear a note of pleading in his own voice, and it seems only to spark the dog’s contempt.

Charlie either can’t hear him or it doesn’t matter. He continues barking, clawing, snarling.

“WAR-WAR-WAR-WAR—WAR!”

That’s when he remembers that his mom is on her way home. She doesn’t know Charlie II has gone berserk. If she comes in the front door, Charlie might bite her, too.

He needs to call her. His cell phone is in his bedroom. He starts pacing back and forth across the bright bathroom floor. It’s still steamy from a shower. He suddenly remembers the box in his dad’s closet. His dad’s a gadget guy; has trouble tossing out spare parts and computer cables and stuff like that. Chris remembers the box has some old cell phones in it. You can dial 911 on old cell phones, right? He remembers hearing that somewhere. He hopes it’s true.

His parents’ closet is right next to the bathroom. And the walls are made of Sheetrock, right? He stepped through the ceiling once, dicking around in the attic when they’d first moved in, and knew firsthand how that stuff is surprisingly soft and crumbly.

Plan. He will make a hole in the wall, try to climb through it into the closet. Get the old cell phone from the box. Call 911.

He unscrews the metal shower curtain rod and begins to bash at the wall with it. He works at it for a while. The hole is about the diameter of a basketball when he hears the rumbling electric moan of the garage door opening from the floor below.

Charlie II stops barking and bolts from the room.

Chris panics. He’s too late. His mom will get bitten. He thinks of his dad’s gun. He’s been duck hunting a few times with his dad; sometimes with his uncle, too, when his uncle is visiting. He knows there’s a shotgun in the closet. He’s not sure if there are shells.

Chris drops the shower curtain rod to the bathroom tiles with a clatter, yanks the door open, and then goes into the closet. The shotgun is on the top shelf, lying on a pair of folded orange hunting vests. He can’t quite reach the shelf. He kick-scoots a chair into the closet, scrambles on top of it. He fumbles through the orange vests. He finds a box of ammo in one of them. He knocks out a handful of shells, pockets them, races downstairs with the shotgun.

He fiddles with the gun on the stairs. How the fuck do you load the stupid thing again?

Slow down, he tells himself. Think.

He’s shot the thing like three times in his life, always with his dad, and his dad has always done the loading. Remember. He flips the gun over and notices some sort of closed slot on the side. He fiddles with a little catch underneath it and works the slide forward, opening it up. Then he slips the slug in and pumps the slide back. It goes chik-clack.

He can hear his mother coming through the door as he slides around the hallway corner, slippery in his socks on the glossy hardwood floor, shotgun heavy and awkward in his hands.

“Hello?” he hears his mom call. “Chris?”

“Mom!” he shouts down the hallway. “Look out! There’s something wrong with Charlie!”

The dog appears. He turns the corner at the opposite end of the hallway. His toenails click on the wood floor. Spit hangs in frothy strings from his mouth. He does that crazed head-twitching thing again, sneezes.

The dog moves forward slowly, growling, loose pulled-back lips flapping against bared teeth.

He watches the dog approach. He doesn’t want to shoot. Charlie isn’t just a pet. He’s a brother.

“WAR-WAR-WAR-WAR—WAR!”

The dog breaks forward into a run and leaps.

Chris raises the barrel of the gun and pulls the trigger. The kick of the gun butt knocks him on his back. The dog falls.

Blood peppers the walls.

The blast has taken off the Labrador’s face. His skin is gone; blood pumps from the place where his eyes used to be.

Chris rises to his knees, then crumbles back to the floor, crying. He drops the gun. He hears his mom come running.

“What the hell is going on?” she shouts.

The dog’s legs twitch wretchedly as blood gushes on the floor, dampening Chris’s socks. The animal lies dying just feet away from him.

“I’m sorry,” Chris half whispers. “Oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

Chapter 56

THE NEXT FEW hours didn’t seem real. We sat in squeaking, uncomfortable chairs that were bolted to the floor facing the massive TV. Leahy dimmed the lights to show us footage of attacks that the NSA had picked up throughout the country. The most chilling one was from California.

The footage began with an aerial shot of an accident taken from a traffic helicopter. A jackknifed FedEx truck was half overturned alongside a sun-bleached highway. The traffic was at a near standstill as drivers slid by, rubbernecking at the mounds of boxes and packages spilling into the roadside ditch.

“This is news footage from this morning out of Petaluma,” Leahy said. “That’s US 101 just north of San Francisco.”

“News footage?” I said. “You’re showing me something the public has already seen?”

“Grow up, Jimmy Olsen,” said Marlowe. “It’s taped. The feds snatched it up before it could get out.”

The camera cut out and came on again with a shot from a slightly higher elevation. Alongside the same highway, what looked like dirty brown water rushed along a service road drainage ditch.

As the chopper lowered toward the scene, I could make out that it wasn’t floodwater—there were things moving in it.

“What in the hell?” I whispered, mostly to myself. I squinted and leaned forward, trying to make out the fuzzy footage.

It was a flood of fur.

“Mon Dieu,” Chloe said. “Are those… dogs?”

Leahy nodded.

I kept watching. The camera zoomed in.

“What in the shit is going on here?” said the staticky voice of the cameraman, talking to somebody else in the helicopter, apparently. His voice threw the sound levels out of whack for a moment.

It was hard to tell—some of the dogs looked feral, but most of them looked like pets: fat, awkward, with collars on. They were filthy, crazed, scrambling all over each other like migrating lemmings. The camera panned back. This was something altogether new. The roaring column of animals went on for miles, it seemed.

“There must be…,” Chloe said.

“Our estimates are between five hundred and a thousand dogs in there,” Leahy said.

“Wait. Shh!” Marlowe hissed. “We’re getting to the good part.”

The chopper swung in lower and sped along the ditch until it came to the spearhead of the bulging, running line of animals.

“The dogs at the front of this horde we think are Dogo Argentinos,” said Marlowe. “They’re enormous, aggressive dogs, bred for fighting in South America. They’re banned in some countries.”

The Dogos suddenly swerved a sharp turn, up out of the drainage ditch and then down an embankment to the right. The column followed, shifting direction en masse, like a flock of birds.

The cameraman zoomed way in, trying to get a close-up shot. The frame jittered. There was a squall of barking. Then an outburst of shouting among the people in the helicopter. The chopper abruptly lifted. There was a growling sound, and the camera swung sharply downward: a pit bull was stuck absurdly to the helicopter, jaws clamped down on the skid, shaking as if he were trying to kill it. The animal dangled crazily from the flying machine before letting go, tumbling back down through the air into the river of hair and teeth.

Leahy put the lights back on.

I turned as Chloe looked at me with eyes wide and bright as tealights. This was worse than we could have imagined.

She closed her eyes.

“I want to get Eli, and I want to get out of here,” she whispered.

I rubbed her hand powerlessly, not knowing what to say.

Chapter 57

THAT AFTERNOON, MARLOWE and Leahy shuffled us into several other meetings. More government people kept arriving by the minute. There was someone from the CIA, Alicia Swirsky, a tiny middle-aged woman whose elfin features were offset by her serious-as-a-heart-attack demeanor, and two FBI agents in midnight blue—Rumsy, a young guy still wet behind the ears with enthusiasm, and Roberts, a guy with pockmarked cheeks and the old-school look of a man who knew his barber and tailor by name. The latest arrival was a four-star army general named Albert Garcia, who had just stormed in with the fuck-you bluster of someone accustomed to everybody rising and saluting when he enters a room. He was flanked by two uniformed aides. Garcia had a magpie’s nest of shiny objects weighing down his uniform, a body like a backyard brick oven, and a head that looked like it’d been carved out of a tree stump with a chain saw.

After the video of the giant dog pack—dog horde, maybe?—was shown for what seemed like the fifteenth time, this Garcia guy cleared his throat.

“Now, according to ground reports, all the animals in this attack are male,” the general said. “Why is that again?”

“Mass male grouping is one of the fundamental aspects of this phenomenon. We’re not sure why,” I said. “Male mammals—well, actually, any animal species in which males compete for females—usually display more aggressive behavior.”

“In the report it said thousands of house pets had gone missing,” said Agent Rumsy as he thumbed through the binder splayed open in front of him. “Is it just male animals that are missing?”

“That’s another mystery,” Mike Leahy cut in. “The female dogs are running away same as the males, but they’re not the ones causing trouble. In fact, no one knows where they are.”

“What have you learned on the research end, Mr. Oz?” said Alicia Swirsky, the CIA lady.

I gave them the elevator pitch about the research we’d done at Columbia—the discrepancy in brain weights, the strange mutation in the amygdalae of affected mammals.

“Coming to the point,” said Agent Roberts, wiping his bulbous nose with his thumb, a trace of backcountry in his voice, “do we have any theories as to cause?”

He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“We’re still trying to crack it,” I said.

General Garcia clapped his binder shut and tossed it on the table. He sat back in his chair and folded his hands. His fingers were thick and brown as sausages.

“All well and good,” he said. “But I believe, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get down to brass tacks.”

He jerked his head at the aide sitting next to him, who went fishing in a briefcase and came back with a file folder the size of an encyclopedia. He slammed it on the table, from which a cloud of dust would have risen if the room weren’t clean enough to build microchips in.

“We need to talk contingency plans. The president has already signed directive fifty-one and issued an executive order initiating Garden Plot,” Garcia said.

“Garden what?” I said.

“Domestic security contingency plan,” Roberts explained in his Lone Star drawl. “They used it during the L.A. riots in the early nineties, and after nine-eleven.”

“Affirmative,” said the general. “It’s SOP in a situation like this. The military assists local law enforcement in times of emergency. It gives the secretary of defense and the attorney general authority to deploy all appropriate mission sets required to restore order.”

“What about the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military from enforcing domestic law?” Swirsky said.

“I believe it doesn’t apply in a situation like this, ma’am,” Garcia said with a curt nod. “As point of contact for the DOD, I’m going to go ahead and issue orders to start mobilizing the National Guard’s ready reserve.”

I was ready to pull my hair out. HAC wasn’t a riot or a terrorist attack. It was more like an environmental disaster. What a load of bureaucratic bullshit. Were they going to declare war on the animals? Why were they focused on offense? We needed to be thinking defense. This was insanity.

“We need to focus on finding the root of the problem, not killing animals,” I said, trying to remain calm. “I mean, I’m sorry—I just don’t get what your plan is, exactly. Bomb animals or something? What? Why don’t we issue a nationwide warning to watch out for animals, especially pets, to limit the damage until we figure this thing out?”

“Because that would cause a nationwide panic even more destructive than this epidemic,” Garcia said. “And because you boys’ve had plenty of time to ‘figure this thing out,’ and here you’ve come to us with zilch. Wild dogs were a problem in Iraq until we started exterminating them. You remember that, don’t you, Staff Sergeant Oz?”

I flinched. He’d done his research.

“We put enough boots on the street, we can nip this thing in the bud in a few weeks. A month, tops.”

I sat there, stewing in rage. I was about to try to point out how irrational the notion of simply exterminating dogs was, but I stopped myself. It was time for me to go. I needed to get back to New York and redouble my research, do everything in my power to figure this thing out before the army started trying to napalm the animals.

I caught Leahy’s eye at the front of the room as I stood.

“If that’s all you need me for, folks, then I’ve done all I can do for you. I’m sure my son must be getting restless. If you have any more questions, you have my information.”

Leahy escorted us out. We picked up Eli and went downstairs. A black Lincoln Town Car was waiting for us, engine panting in the parking circle. Nimo was already in the passenger seat.

“Everything you heard today is top secret, Mr. Oz,” Leahy said as we stepped outside into cuttingly bright sunlight. “So, in the interests of national security, we trust you’ll be discreet.”

“Of course,” I said as we climbed into the back of the black car.

Half an hour later, the woodlands beginning to give way to the D.C. metropolitan area, I felt the tickling buzz of my phone again, vibrating in the inner lining of my suit jacket.

It was a message from Charles Groh. He sounded—well, upset.

“Oz, listen. HAC is here. My own dog went crazy today. My twelve-year-old son had to kill it.”

“What is it?” said Chloe as I shook my head.

I wanted to lie to her, but I couldn’t.

Chapter 58

FROM THE REAR of Leda Lady Queen, his rust-caked twenty-two-foot fishing boat, Ronnie Pederson lights his fourth cigarette of the morning and squints as he stares out at the gently slapping surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

The coast of Texas—Galveston Island and, beyond it, the southern suburbs of Houston—is now just a flat brown line on the horizon to the north. To the south, the moisture in the air blurs the line between the sky and the sea. Somewhere in that blue-gray blur, the water bends out of sight over the surface of the earth. Although the radius of visibility at sea on a perfectly clear day is only twelve miles, for some reason you grasp the bigness of the world when you’re out on the open water, more than you ever can on land.

The sky looks clear enough, and the water is flat as a drum skin to the horizon, but Ronnie keeps his eyes open nonetheless. Out here in the Gulf you have to watch the weather carefully. This late in August, a storm can brew up at the drop of a hat.

The boat is silent. The way Ronnie likes it. Just the chug of the old diesel and the hiss of spray off the bow. Duane and Troll, his old high school football buddies turned commercial fishing partners, are at their positions aft and starboard, lost in their own early-morning thoughts.

An hour later, as the sun finally peeks above the horizon, they’re ratcheting in the first net lines. Looks like a good catch, from the way Troll’s netting the fish out of the drink, his arms working like a ditchdigger’s. Soon the deck pens are filled with shrimp, the little things squirming like slimy pink bugs as Duane sprinkles ice over them.

They had taken on another hand a couple of weeks before, but it didn’t work out. The college kid had come on all tough, but the guy was green as a sapling. The rocking of the boat had gotten to him. He was still puking the second day—feeding the seagulls, as they called it—and they had to let him go. Now it’s just the three of them again.

As the sun gets higher, they decide to try their luck farther out. For a moment, there’s a breath of coolness in the air, promising more, and Ronnie is struck with a good feeling. It’s the same feeling he used to get on the football field. That same pregnant sense of peaceful isolation right before you knock a fullback ass over teakettle into the sidelines.

“Hey,” Duane calls from the other side of the boat. “Look at ’at!”

Ronnie steps across the clanging sheet-metal deck, ducking beneath rigging and machinery.

“What?”

He looks at where Duane’s pointing.

Up ahead of them, moving fast but seemingly not moving at all because of the wideness of the sea, are several dolphins. They look like saddlebacks, but he isn’t sure. They hop in and out of the water in graceful arcs. There are three or four of them. Their sleek, silver bodies weave in and out of the water in perfect sequence, moving together all at once. How the hell do they know how to do that? Where’d they learn that? Why do they all jump out of the water and dive back in again at the same time? There must be a reason for it. An animal’s body does everything it can to maximize results by minimizing energy, Ronnie knows. Everything like that has some kind of reason. Animals don’t do things without a reason. It is a beautiful sight.

Ronnie is awakened from these thoughts when he hears a loud, heavy thud in the boat.

“What in the hell—,” Ronnie hears Troll say behind him.

The three friends stare at what is now in their boat, and then up at each other. It is a dolphin. A full-grown saddleback dolphin has leaped out of the water and into the back of their boat, where there’s an open drop-off to bring up the trawling net, and is slapping and writhing on the deck, wiggling like a maniac.

They would only be slightly more surprised if a mermaid had jumped into their boat.

Thing looks silly, absurd, out of the water. It’s about six feet long, and squealing like a pig.

“Well, look at that,” says Duane.

Ronnie cuts the engine and walks to the back of the boat.

“This is the damnedest thing I ever seen,” says Troll.

“Well,” says Duane. “I reckon we should put him back.”

He moves to start pushing the dolphin back into the water. The dolphin bucks and giggles.

“This is a story to tell our grandchildren, ain’t it?”

They are laughing as they try to roll the lashing dolphin off the deck.

They all startle, and jump back, as another dolphin races headlong out of the water, arcs through the air with a trail of jewel-like water droplets behind it, lands with a wild slapping thud on the deck right beside them, and slides down half the length of the boat.

The friends look at each other, then burst into laughter.

“Is this some kind of dolphin joke?” says Duane.

That’s when the weird shit really starts happening. In come the dolphins. One after another after another, the fat, sleek, shiny animals leap out of the water and land in the boat.

Ronnie stands there on the deck, looking down at the now seven or eight dolphins, squirming like crazy in the boat. Suffice it to say he has never in his life seen this sort of behavior. Bizarre. Completely fucking bizarre.

Soon it goes from funny to scary.

Now there are dozens of dolphins on the boat. This is when Ronnie turns from bewilderment to fear. Something not only very strange but very wrong is happening. The dolphins tunnel deeper across the deck, sliding all over each other. An avalanche of heavy, slippery silver bodies, a chorus all around them of squeals, squeaks, giggles.

It is as if the sea is throwing them up, heaving the animals from the sparkling depths of the Gulf.

After a while, it’s not just the deck pens that are full; the deck itself is a mess of dolphins. The men are desperately heaving and kicking the animals off the back deck, but more keep coming.

There must be more than a hundred now. Ronnie slogs through the wiggling dolphins back toward the wheel and gives her some throttle.

In response, the thirty-year-old trawler, weighed down more than it has ever been, tipples like a drunk on a three-day bender and capsizes.

Ronnie, treading water, feels himself going into a kind of slow-motion shock.

Troll is the first to panic. He’s doggie-paddling beside the overturned trawler, splashing like mad and making huffing sounds.

“Calm down, damn it,” Ronnie shouts to him. “Kick off your boots. Conserve your energy.”

Dolphins are pressing up against them like cattle, splashing, chattering, squeezing, suffocating them.

Troll is still splashing, clawing at the rim of the sinking boat, fighting the herd of dolphins. In another minute he goes down, pops back up, and goes down again. This time for good.

Duane goes the same way a few minutes later.

Before too long, Leda Lady Queen is gone beneath the waves.

Ronnie, doing the dead man’s float, lasts a little while longer. When he is sure he has nothing left, and no one is coming, he faces it like a man. He stops fighting and, drinking as much salt water as he can, slides beneath the dark, cool water, letting it rush over him like a blanket, letting the Gulf swallow him.

Though the three men are dead, the dolphins continue to play. They leap, they splash, they giggle, they frolic and jump.

Seemingly for joy.

Chapter 59

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

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 windows, 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

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, my taxi driver cranked the reggaeton as we swam upstream through sludgy traffic on the Bowery for my early-morning meeting. Usually the noise would have driven me up the wall. But that morning, I actually found the only-in–New York aggravation oddly comforting. By the time we made it to the Flatiron district, I had begun to think affectionately of the swamp of traffic and gratuitous honking.

It meant that, disaster or no, people were going to work today. The Big Apple hadn’t gotten the end-of-the-world memo just yet.

Then I saw a dog on the street. It was moving along the sidewalk just north of Thirty-Fourth Street.

On the east side of Third Avenue, coming off the curb about half a block ahead, was what looked like a medium-size black-and-white Border collie mix with a dirty blue bandanna around its neck. The mutt was by itself, and as I watched, it began to thread its way through the traffic, from east to west, across the avenue.

What set my alarm needles to twitching was the animal’s sense of purpose, of deliberate calmness. Stray dogs usually have a guilty, skulking look about them, especially in a big city in broad daylight. This dog wasn’t going too fast or too slow, nor was it looking at anyone. It was focused, confident—looking like it was headed somewhere.

I had a sudden hunch.

I leaned forward. “Stop the cab, please,” I said.

“Here?”

I threw him a bill. “Keep the change.”

“You want receipt?”

I was out the door, narrowly avoiding becoming enmeshed in the grille of a beer truck as I jogged across Third Avenue and headed north in pursuit of the dog. I got to the corner of Forty-First Street and looked left, down the block where the dog had been headed. At first I couldn’t see anything. Then I stepped into the street alongside the line of parked cars and saw a white tail wagging as it crested the top of the rise by Lexington Avenue.

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” a traffic cop shouted at me as I played Frogger across the intersection.

I kept my eyes on the tail of the collie, its little white feet picking up into a trot, as it crossed Park Avenue, a block west.

Kicking it up to a full-blown sprint, I managed to keep track of the dog as it crossed Madison Avenue. It kept going west on Forty-First, heading toward Fifth Avenue and the front steps of the New York Public Library.

I got to Fifth just in time to see the dog heading north on the sidewalk on the west side of the avenue, toward the corner of Forty-Second.

Dodging my way through an asteroid belt of early-morning commuters, I ran on the east side of the avenue, parallel to the dog—who was really moving now, boogying—toward Forty-Second. When I got to the corner there was too much traffic to cross and I had to wait for the light.

It took ten ticks of eternity for the light to change.

When it finally did I bolted ass-on-fire across Fifth, scanning the avenue up and down and looking east and west on Forty-Second. The dog could have gone anywhere—maybe into Bryant Park, behind the library to the west. It could have slipped into one of the surrounding office towers for all I knew.

The dog was nowhere to be seen. Wherever it had gone, and whatever I might have learned from it, was lost now.

I was crossing to the other side of Forty-Second to catch another cab, glancing at my watch and trying to calculate how late to the meeting I would be, when another dog almost ran between my legs in the crosswalk. I wheeled around and watched as a white Yorkshire terrier made the corner and trotted west along the south side of Forty-Second. Little dude was on a mission.

Oz: follow that Yorkie.

There was a small ornate stone building on the perimeter of Bryant Park—not taking my eyes off it, I watched the little white dog scuttle on stubby legs and disappear into the recessed doorway of the little building.

In a moment I was standing by the squat, easy-to-miss building. The recessed doorway led to a small descending stairwell that ended in two black wrought iron doors hitched together with a padlocked chain.

I stood at the top of the stairs, blinking. I was completely bamboozled. Because there was nothing else to see. The dog had vanished.

Chapter 63

I HEARD THE echoes of my shoes clattering down the fetid concrete stairs. I pushed against the doors—they creaked and groaned inward easily, making a wide gap against the bight of the heavy black chain. I presumed the dog had slipped through the gap.

Why he had done so was a mystery.

I squinted, peering through the dim gap. I thought about going into the library and finding out who might have the key to the lock.

For about four seconds.

I abandoned that plan and popped two buttons off my oxford cloth shirt, squeezing myself feetfirst through the narrow gap.

Inside, I found a light switch and turned it on. A feeble orange lamp flickered on above. It was a storage room, full of lawn mowers, rakes, and other maintenance equipment for the park. Beside the equipment to the right were more stairs, leading to a downward-sloping corridor lined with ducts and pipes.

The arched tunnel was made of old-fashioned faded red brick. I vaguely remembered that Bryant Park stands on the site of what had been the city’s main reservoir in the mid-1800s. The curving tunnel went on for ten feet and then opened up into a small round room filled with huge pipes, valves—everything gunked up with disuse and caked orange with rust. The largest of the pipes was open at the end and set sideways into the wall about a foot off the floor, like a tunnel.

I squatted down next to the pipe and caught a scent—rank, musky, unmistakable.

It was the smell of wet dog.

Wet dog and then some. It was mixed with a lush potpourri of garbage, skunk, dead animal, shit. It was a smell that could peel paint. There was some kind of moisture on the floor of the wide pipe, and the stench seemed to emanate from it like smoke from a tire fire. It was acrid, hideous.

I stared into the reeking blackness. For a long time. I thought of turning back, of dog attacks. Something about the complete focus of the dogs I had followed told me I was safe. I went into the pipe.

It was like crawling into the asshole of Satan. Every five feet I had to stop and repress the urge to vomit. My hands, knees, and feet squelched in the sucking black muck as I slogged my way through the tube.

Darkness. Stench. Claustrophobia.

In the pipe, I could hear sounds coming from someplace I figured was at the opposite end. Yelping, whining. Dog sounds.

Eventually I ran out of pipe. I stood up in the dark of some new room. The smell was even more concentrated here. Had I climbed into the sewer?

There was a dim, barely luminous light on somewhere, a weak orange flicker. My eyes adjusted.

Below me, the sunken floor of the ballroom-size underground chamber was moving.

As far beyond me as I could see, there was a squirming mass of eyes, teeth, hair.

The dogs were moving around and on top of each other in a way I had never seen before. They were slithering against each other like worms in a can. I was within scenting distance for all of them, but not a single one even turned toward me.

Many of them were copulating. The dogs fucked impassively, with slack tongues and unchanging expressions. Others looked sick, their hides mottled in what looked like a whitish mold. Small fights broke out here and there. A few dogs would come together in a sudden tumble of kicking legs, snapping jaws, and barking—blazing into sudden fits, one dog dominating and another surrendering with a pitiful whine, the other dogs skulking away quickly. The room was foggy and hot with moving bodies, wet with breath and tongues. Snorting. Sneezing. Heads twitching. Legs scratching.

Along the wall of the chamber to my right, galleries had been carved in the raw dirt walls and in them, female dogs were nursing puppies. The swollen bitches lay on their sides, their bloated bellies looking tender and thin-skinned, pink, jiggling with the weight of milk as the puppies suckled.

I looked out across the squirming underground orgy of dogs. These dogs were acting as if they were organized somehow, as if they had a hive mind. They were acting more like insects than like mammals.

Then that lightbulb clicked on again above my head. The hive mind. Bugs. That proved to be one of the keys to understanding what was going on.

The animals were all acting like social insects—swarming, teeming, feeding, breeding.

The sight reminded me of something I once saw on a research trip to Costa Rica in grad school. The time I saw an ant death spiral. It’s an amazing thing. We came across hundreds and hundreds of ants, all running together in a giant spiraling circle. It was as though they were running laps, spiraling and spiraling together, a squirming black whirlpool of ants. It shows you the power of pheromones. Ants follow one another by their pheromone trails. When you see a line of marching ants, it means that each ant is following the chemical trail of the one in front it, picking up the scent with its sensitive antennae. But every once in a while something happens that breaks the pheromone trail—a log falls on the middle of the line, for example. And suddenly some ant in the middle of the chain now finds himself at the front of a new one. He panics. (I’m anthropomorphizing here, but bear with me.) He runs around like crazy, searching for another pheromone trail to follow. Eventually he finds one, and starts following this other ant. But unbeknownst to him, he’s just found the pheromone trail of the ant in the back of his own line. And then the column turns into a loop that winds and winds in on itself as the ants, blindly following one another, simply run around and around in circles until they die.

And I thought: pheromones.

Chapter 64

SCRAMBLING, HUFFING, NEARLY ten meters up in the tree, Cheslav Prokopovich stops climbing and tentatively leans out, distributing his weight carefully along the limbs of the Siberian pine, which are getting thinner at this height.

Through the mesh of crisscrossing branches, he can see for several kilometers down the rocky river valley, its horizontal visual panorama interrupted only by the tall and starkly looming transcontinental radio tower that is the reason for the village’s existence this far north.

But sightseeing is the least of his concerns this afternoon.

Prokopovich carefully unstraps his rifle from his back and flicks a downward glance at the forest floor, looking for the other members of his hunting party. From this height, Sasha, Jirg, and Kiril look identical. The three Russians are wearing army boots and cheap camouflage hunting coveralls. All of them are stocky, bald, and chunky-featured, as if they’re built out of rocks.

Lifelong friends and residents of Inta, the four men had worked together in the nickel mine that opened up in the heady times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their annual late-summer hunt is supposed to be a time of respite before the snow and ice come, before the arctic temperatures drive them inside and underground for six months beside the fire—six long, boring, maddeningly sedentary months of bottomless cups of vodka and endless hands of durak.

All year, Prokopovich anticipates this excursion, especially the sunny moment before he bags his elk—that full-body tremble of excitement, the childlike splashing of his heart inside his chest.

His heart is splashing now, Prokopovich thinks as he breathes on his rifle’s scope and dries it with his sleeve.

The weapon Prokopovich presses to his cheek is a handcrafted Mosin-Nagant hunting rifle. Through the scope’s reticle he scans the boreal forest of evergreens, firs, and pines that green the landscape. He is looking for any slight sign of movement.

Specifically, he is looking for the wolves. The wolves that have been chasing them since morning.

There are several dozen, maybe more. The biggest and most aggressive wolves he has ever seen. Why so many wolves have decided to pack together and come after them Prokopovich does not know. He only knows that if Kiril had not woken up early to take a piss and seen them in the distance, loping up the mountainside like lava flowing in reverse, they might already be dead.

Prokopovich rests the sight on the rattletrap rail bridge that spans the ravine they crossed earlier. The abandoned rail line was built by gulag prisoners in the 1950s, when Inta’s network of government labor camps was still running. Their plan had been to head up the mountain across the dilapidated old bridge. They thought the wolves would be unable or too afraid to cross it. Up in the tree, he spies the bridge through the rifle scope, waits, and watches.

Prokopovich is thinking about his wife when the wolves break cover from the tree line en masse and head for the ravine.

“’Tchyo za ga’lima,” Prokopovich mutters to himself as the animals head straight for the bridge.

He watches as they begin to fastidiously work their way across, gingerly picking over the decrepit wooden ties and iron beams, one by one, paw by nimble paw.

“Blya!” Prokopovich says to the sky. “Vse zayebalo!”

Whore!

Fuck it all!

Chapter 65

SPITTING OUT A sticky pine needle, Prokopovich rivets his eyes on the approaching wolves. They are moving fast, but he tries to count them. Soon, the task of counting them becomes overwhelming. He can’t. There are too many. What he sees is impossible. He has heard of packs of ten, maybe fifteen. Surely there must be fifty wolves spilling out of the trees, funneling over the bridge after them.

Prokopovich straps the rifle on his back and hurries down the tree.

“What now, hunter man?” Kiril says, soothing his nerves with a swig of vodka from his canteen.

Kiril’s face is cauliflowered and enflamed with rosacea. His eyes are like raisins.

Prokopovich pauses for a moment, frowning. It is not Sasha, who still plays hockey, or his cousin Jirg, the weight lifter, whom he is worried about; it is the largest of the men, his best friend, Kiril, who causes him concern. The big, boisterous fool is squatting against the trunk of a tree, wheezing like a concertina from the exertion of the morning’s uphill march. Kiril is fat as a swine and smokes like a broken truck, and is as slow-moving as sap in January.

Dead weight, Prokopovich thinks grimly, looking at his friend.

“Blya! We run, you drunken pig. We run for our lives!”

The wolves are a swarm of gray dots down in the distant valley, slaloming between trees up the mountain. They make no noise. No barking, no howling. Only silent running.

“Hurry! Run, if you want to live!”

The men have one last chance. There is another bridge over the ravine, a little less than a kilometer farther north. It is in even worse shape than the first one, a mere skeleton of a bridge, with no ties at all. They will have to scale the outside of its rusted latticework frame. An almost suicidal enterprise, especially for poor fat Kiril. But there is no other choice. At least there is no way the four-footed wolves will be able to cross that. The problem is getting there in time.

They are within sight of the bridge when Kiril drops. He looks terrible. He huffs at the air like a fish out of water, hacks into a fist. His face is swollen, the color of borscht.

“Bol’she—nyet!” he says between gasps. “No. More. Can’t. Not…one…more…step.”

“Damn you!” Prokopovich gives him a savage kick. For all the good it does, he may as well have kicked a tire. “Mudak! Get up, you son of a whore.”

“Blya, blya,” Jirg adds. “My wife isn’t going to be a widow because you’re a fat fuck.”

“Pojdite! Go! Both of you!” Prokopovich says as his knees crunch in the pine needles beside Kiril. “Kiril just needs to catch his breath. We will catch up with you at the bridge.”

Sasha and Jirg do not need to be told twice. In a breath, they are gone.

Prokopovich holds Kiril’s heaving shoulder and gazes forlornly through the trees at the distant Ural Mountains, looming to the east.

“Go, Cheslav,” Kiril pants. “Don’t do this.” His beady eyes look defeated and miserable. “Jirg is right. I am fat and useless. I am too weak. Always have been.”

Kiril is a clumsy, bumbling fool, laughed at by one and all. What redeems him, what has always made him Cheslav’s best friend, is that Kiril himself is always the one who laughs the hardest.

Prokopovich checks the ammo in his rifle as he sees the wolves beginning to race through the trees.

“I’m sorry,” Kiril says as the panting of the wolves becomes audible now. Kiril is weeping. His voice is cracked and whimpery. “I always loved these hunts. You are my great friend, Cheslav. I never became a millionaire, but I am rich to have had you for a friend.”

“Zatk’nis!” Prokopovich hocks a dismissive dollop of spit in the pine needles. “Shut up, you poof, and take up your gun. We are going to live.”

As the wolves approach, Prokopovich looks down the valley. It is crisply sunny at this elevation, but the plain beyond the bridge, where the village is located, is overcast, bathed in a dark purple-red glow, as if lit by a black light.

So this is where I die, Prokopovich thinks.

Then the first wolf, a male with eyes as yellow as the moon, steps into the clearing.

It is a monster of a thing, fifty kilos at least. When he was a child on a hunt with his father, Cheslav saw a wolf smaller than the one now before him take down a bull elk.

Too bad I am not a bull elk, Cheslav thinks.

“Stand up, you fool,” he says to Kiril.

Kiril heaves himself to his feet.

Together, they stand back-to-back, with their guns facing out.

Prokopovich knows what to do with wolves. Stand your ground. You stay put, they respect you, you live. You run, you die.

The wolves begin to gather around them. More and more come. The groups of wolves begin to mingle, merge, intermesh. Snarling, growling, teeth snapping, staccato bursts of threat-barks. The wolves form a circle around them. They advance, they retreat. The air is filled with a cacophony of barking.

Prokopovich can feel Kiril quaking against his back.

“Stand still, mudak,” he grumbles at Kiril, behind him. “We stand our ground, we live. We run, we die. They smell your fear.”

“Eto piz’dets, eto piz’dets,” Kiril is half whining, half mumbling. “This is so fucked up, this is so fucked up.”

Kiril squeezes the trigger of his gun and a shot goes off, from the hip, aimed almost at random into the crowd of wolves. Cheslav feels the gun crack against his elbow. A jet of blood leaps into the air, like a squirt of bright dark berry juice, and there’s a whimpering howl.

“Kiril!” Prokopovich shouts. “No!”

He hears Kiril pull the trigger again. Another howl and a spurt of blood.

A wave of fresh agitation moves throughout the circle, a swell of freshly crazed barking.

Whatever, Cheslav thinks. Fuck it. And he, too, fires a shot into the crowd.

They kill about seven of them. More keep coming.

Then Kiril decides to run. He leaves their post in the middle of the circle and tries to bolt. A moment after he does—just a fraction of a moment later, a sliver of time so thin an eye blink does not describe it—the circle of wolves rushes in to close. Their bodies become a whirlpool of fur, roaring throats, thrashing legs, ripping jaws, all piling on top of each other. Prokopovich squeezes another fistful of bullets into the horde, but it is useless. The wolves swarm over the two men until they disappear beneath them.

It goes on for several minutes before the clamor dies down. The pack loosens and the wolves separate, rove the field, sniff the ground, begin to tumble and growl, not in earnest violence but in play.

Cheslav and Kiril are gone. There are no bodies left to speak of. There is blood smeared across the floor of grass and pine needles. Many of the wolves have bloody snouts and mouths, and some of them lick blood from their damp, matted fur. Some of them squabble here and there over bones. But the men themselves have disappeared.

Chapter 66

I’M SURE I looked like a zombie who had freshly clawed his way out of the crypt when I flung open the door of our apartment. I heard the clink and scuttle of Chloe putting away groceries in the kitchen. I left the keys in the lock and sprinted down the front hallway.

As I stood in the kitchen doorway, Chloe looked at me as though I had gone completely crazy. I looked it: I was slathered with black filth and breathing hard after running back from Bryant Park.

But I wasn’t crazy.

For the first time in years, I knew I was right.

“Hi,” I said.

“So,” she said. “How was the meeting with the mayor?”

Her voice was sarcastic.

“Incredibly productive.”

Chloe stood up from where she knelt beside the open refrigerator, closed it.

“The mayor’s office just called. What the hell happened to you?”

I took the jar of salsa she was absentmindedly holding and set it firmly on the counter. I held her by the shoulders as I struggled to catch my breath.

“I’ve figured it out!” My voice was choked with excitement. I tried to calm it. “The reason for the attacks…it’s not a virus…it’s pheromones.”

Chloe looked at me askance.

“You’re not making sense, Oz.”

I started to collapse onto a chair next to the kitchen table.

“Don’t touch the furniture!” said Chloe.

I remained standing.

“On my way to the meeting, I saw a stray dog,” I said. “I followed it into a tunnel beneath Bryant Park. Inside were more dogs. Thousands of them.”

Chloe nodded, mental gears turning.

“You saw another dog pack?” she said. “Like the one on the video?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. I started to wipe sweat from my eyes with filthy fingers, thought better of it, got to work on blinking it out instead. “But here’s the thing. They were all grouped together, rubbing against each other, behaving in a way I’ve never seen before. They were mating, regurgitating food. They had these chambers where females were giving birth.”

“Disgusting,” said Chloe.

Then she began backing away from me, her hands flying to her face.

“Mon Dieu! What is that smell?” she said, finally catching the full brunt of the dog sludge I’d crawled through.

“Exactly!”

I shimmied out of my shirt. My pants followed a moment later. I was leaving black streaks on the kitchen tiles. I rummaged through the kitchen drawers in my socks and underwear, found a plastic bag, and threw the clothes inside, tying it tightly.

“We need to test my clothes. It’s their smell. I think the dogs are emitting it. But they almost weren’t acting like dogs, Chloe. I know this sounds insane. They were acting like insects. Like ants or bees or something. It’s not a virus, like rabies, that’s making the animals go haywire. We need to test for some kind of new pheromone in the environment.”

“That’s crazy,” Chloe said, still covering her face.

“Is it?” I said. “This whole thing has been staring us in the face from the beginning. How do animals communicate? Subconsciously, I mean. How do dogs, bears, hyenas recognize one another, their environment, their territory?”

“Secreting and sniffing pheromones,” Chloe said.

“Life, at its most basic level, is chemistry,” I said. “Right?”

“Hmm.”

“Groups of molecular compounds reacting to other groups of molecular compounds. When an animal sniffs a rival or a predator, it receives information that changes its behavior. That’s what’s occurring here. In some way. Except the animal signals are getting crossed somehow. The signals they’re getting are making them act against their instincts. There’s something new, something wrong—either with the pheromones themselves or the way the animals are processing them.”

“It might make sense,” Chloe said, getting into it now. “The mutations we found in the animals were in the amygdala, which usually governs the sense of smell.”

I paced back and forth across the kitchen in my underwear, still holding the sagging trash bag full of my reeking clothes.

“I think it may even have something to do with that bizarre stuff that went on with Attila,” I said. “A chimp’s sense of smell isn’t that great. But I rescued him from a perfume lab where they were doing chemical experiments on him. I think the pheromone or whatever it is in the environment somehow made him go crazy.”

“Like a steroid or something,” Chloe said. “Are the animals exhibiting a kind of chemically triggered rage?”

“Could be.”

“But why all of a sudden?” Chloe said. “What’s changing the way they perceive pheromones?”

“I don’t know. But I do know that we need to find some pheromone experts and put them in a room, yesterday. More like five years ago. I’ll call the lab, you call that government guy, Leahy. I think we finally caught a break on this thing.”

Chapter 67

THE REST OF my morning consisted of a Silkwood shower and a Jerry Lewis telethon’s worth of phone calls.

By midafternoon Chloe, Eli, and I were sitting around the kitchen table with our bags packed and ready to go. I guessed our ride was out front when my phone went bzvvvvt bzvvvvt on the table and UNKNOWN NUMBER popped up on the screen. I went to the window and looked down.

When the NSA chief, Mike Leahy, said he was sending a car to take us to a secure location, I thought he had meant, well, a car.

On the sidewalk in front of our building was a camo-colored up-armored combat Humvee, with a soldier manning a machine gun in the steel-plated turret. For traveling with a low profile, I guess.

A young kid with orange hair and freckles, straight out of Archie Comics, met us in the lobby downstairs. He saluted.

“Lieutenant Durkin, US Army Third Infantry,” he said in that military cadence, a forward tumble of barks rising in pitch.

“Jesus, is it getting this bad out there, Lieutenant?” I said, gesturing at the war machine we were apparently about to enter. Durkin hoisted our bags as though he were a valet and led us toward the Humvee.

“Manhattan below Ninety-Sixth Street is in the process of being evacuated,” he said. “We’re starting with the hospitals and hospice facilities.”

“What? Why?”

“Rats.”

As we rolled north through Manhattan we saw barricades, checkpoints. The city was swarming with men and women in camo. The only vehicles that passed us going in the opposite direction were government evacuation buses and more army Hummers.

Times Square was empty. I glanced at the darkened marquee as we passed the Ed Sullivan Theater, where they tape Late Show with David Letterman. No stupid pet tricks tonight.

When we turned west on Fifty-Seventh Street we heard the whoosh of fire, and looked out the window to see two soldiers in silver suits kneeling in front of an open manhole, aiming flame throwers beneath the street.

We stopped on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-First Street. A chain-link fence braced with sandbags had been strung across the avenue in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Upper East Side was occupied now? When had all this happened? And why hadn’t I heard about it? The world had flipped from normal to bizarre in what? Hours? Things had seemed fine to me that morning.

“These two blocks are HQ for the time being,” Durkin said as a guard waved us through the makeshift fence. “This kinda reminds me of the Green Zone in Baghdad.”

“Or Ground Zero after nine-eleven,” I said.

We rolled past sandbagged trailers and stacked crates of bottled water and came to a stop in front of a stately granite prewar building directly across from the Met. The building’s interior was all gilded ornaments and Corinthian columns, glass, brass, marble, potted ferns. Durkin led us into the grand lobby, where an NYPD sergeant checked our IDs and, for no discernible reason, wanded us with a metal detector—including Eli, just to make sure our three-year-old boy wasn’t packing heat.

“Who’s in charge?” I asked Durkin.

“Colonel Walters, but he’s in the field.”

“The field?”

“Well, the city. I think some of the other scientists are here. Let me show you to your quarters first.”

They were nice quarters. The apartment we were led into was a multimillion-dollar duplex with massive fireplaces and twelve-foot coffered ceilings. The living room was cluttered with marble sculptures and African masks. There was a Chagall on the dining room wall.

“Fancy digs. How’d the army sublet Xanadu?” I said to Durkin.

He shrugged.

“Ours is not to reason why,” he said. “You guys settle in. The meeting’s on the first floor at sixteen hundred hours. Enjoy your vacation at the end of the world.”

Chapter 68

WE LEFT ELI in a makeshift day-care center that had been set up for the scientists’ children on the building’s fifth floor and went downstairs to help prepare for the meeting. I was surprised at how quickly Chloe and I adapted to all this doomsday scenario stuff. One day, you drop your kid off at pre-K, the next you take him to a government evacuation center’s day-care facility. What else could we do?

In a large alcove off the sweeping marble lobby, we worked with camo-clad army techs to convert a dining room into a conference room, complete with an interactive whiteboard. The table was a sleek, oblong, blood-colored mahogany, its surface so glossy it reflected light as sharply as a mirror. The room was huge, the ceilings fifteen feet high, with marble cornice moldings in the corners and dark oil paintings of robber barons set in the walls. A chandelier dangled like a bunch of crystal grapes above the table.

Over the next hour, Chloe and I greeted the other scientists whom the government had shuttled in via Hummer and helicopter. In addition to my colleague Dr. Quinn, they had recruited most of the rest of the lab staff from Columbia as well as more than a dozen top-drawer entomologists, environmentalists, and other scientists.

“Ah, look who it is,” I said to Chloe behind my hand. “Dr. Harvey Blowhard.”

Chloe rolled her eyes.

Dr. Harvey Saltonstall, the Henry Wentworth Wallace chair in biology at Harvard, shook my hand and gave me a cold, curt hello. Being proved right before your enemies is a pretty good feeling, and I couldn’t help but smirk a little. I did not like this man. Last time I’d seen him he was on the other side of a split screen on MSNBC, with Rachel Maddow moderating. That was more than a year ago. As usual, he’d made me look like a wing-nut bozo with his whole aristocratic persona—this handsome devil in tweed, occasionally swiping back his elegant shock of silver hair.

Harvey Saltonstall’s prominent public opposition to HAC had delayed progress for years. Now, why wasn’t I surprised that the officious, elitist asswipe was front and center in the government team assembled to solve the problem?

Soon I was standing at the head of a conference table ringed with the country’s best and brightest. I hoped all the expertise gathered in this room would be enough. And that we weren’t too late.

I started out by quickly going over what I had seen that morning under Bryant Park.

“At first, I thought HAC had a viral origin,” I said, looking around the table from face to face. Everyone nodded back at me. “But after seeing the animals up close today, acting in such a bizarre way, I think it’s time to take a new approach. I think this has to do with pheromones. The dogs I saw today were displaying textbook pheromonal aggregation behavior. It’s my belief that some new kind of morphed pheromone has entered the environment, and it’s probably our doing, because we seem to be one of the only mammals whose behavior isn’t affected by it.”

“We came here for this?” Harvey Saltonstall took a long, fastidious sip from the cup of coffee in front of him while everyone waited for his next words. “The environment? Please. This theory is infantile. A pheromone is a chemical that’s very specific to communication within species. I’ve never heard of the same pheromone affecting multiple species. Are you suggesting there’s some invisible crazy gas affecting all mammals except humans? Why should it not affect us?”

Irritating as he was, I knew Saltonstall had an excellent point. He’d immediately stuck his finger in the biggest hole in my theory. I bit my lip and thought.

Chapter 69

HARVEY SALTONSTALL MADE a prim cage of his fingertips and began to accordion them in and out, readying himself to redouble his attack. And then Chloe jumped in to save me.

“What about pollution?” she blurted.

“Yes, well, what about it?” Saltonstall said.

“Pollution in the environment sometimes causes mutational changes in animals. Take nylonase, for example. In a wastewater pond beside a nylon factory in Japan, they found a species of bacteria that only eats nylon. The presence of the pollution genetically altered the bacteria that were already there.”

“This stuff is all well and good when we’re talking about pollution,” said Saltonstall. “But I thought we were talking about pheromones. What does pollution have to do with pheromones?”

I rapped my knuckles on the table.

“Hydrocarbons,” I said. “That’s where pheromones and pollution connect. Pheromones are made up of hydrocarbons. So is petroleum.”

Around the table, everyone sat up a little straighter. My mind was racing. I couldn’t help it—I sprang to my feet and started pacing behind my chair.

“Hydrocarbons are everywhere,” I continued. “Over the last two hundred years, from car traffic and industrial activity, there’s been a massive increase in volatile hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. Methane, ethylene…”

“Not to mention the prevalence of petroleum,” Chloe said. “Petroleum is in everything—plastic, house paint, balloons, pillows, shampoo. It leaches into the groundwater.”

“Didn’t studies in the nineties explore the health hazards of plastics due to their chemical similarity to estrogens?” Dr. Terry Atkinson added. He was a chemical engineer from Cooper Union.

I felt like diving across the table and giving him a high five. I didn’t.

“Yes!” I said. “If hydrocarbons can mimic estrogen, it’s entirely conceivable that they can mimic pheromones.”

“Or take the plastic compound used in water bottles,” said Dr. Quinn, jabbing a pen in the air. “They found that it caused the estrogen levels of fish to skyrocket for some reason. In a lake outside a manufacturing plant in Germany, researchers found that there were no male fish present at all.”

“We are flying down the wrong path here, folks,” Saltonstall insisted. He cleared his throat and swiped back his silver shock of hair with his hand. “How do chemical hydrocarbons change without some sort of catalyst? Plastic has been around for over fifty years. If it affected the way animals process pheromones, wouldn’t we have noticed long before now?”

I let out a breath and tried to come up with an answer. Saltonstall again had raised a good counterargument.

“Excuse me, Mr. Oz,” said Betty Orlean, an environmental scientist from the University of Chicago. “Quick question. When did you start noticing this increase in animal aggression?”

“As far as my data show, around 1996,” I said. “But it didn’t start getting bad until the aughts.”

“Nineteen ninety-six is right around when cell phones started becoming more popular,” Betty said a bit cryptically. “And cell phone use has exponentially increased since then.” The thought was half formed in her head.

“So?” Saltonstall said.

“Well, Dr. Saltonstall,” she said, “we know that cell phones use radiofrequency energy, which forms fields of electromagnetic radiation. Some animal functions at the cellular level can be affected by such fields. The fear for years has been that one field could disrupt the other. That’s why there have been so many studies about the link between cell phone use and brain cancer. For years, our world has been swimming in an unprecedented sea of radiation.”

“Yes,” I said, really going now. “Perhaps cell phone radiation is somehow cooking the ambient environmental hydrocarbons in a way we’ve never seen before—morphing them into a chemical that animals are picking up as a pheromone. And it’s changing their cerebral physiology, as we’ve seen at Columbia. We know that the affected animals have bigger amygdalae.”

“Oz, I believe I remember something.” Dr. Quinn jumped in. “It was a study about bees in the Netherlands.” She spoke slowly and distractedly as she poked at the laptop open in front of her. “Yes, here it is. I’ll put it on the SMART board.”

A moment later, a graph-peppered scientific paper appeared on the screen.

“This was a study done in the Netherlands in the nineties,” she said. “It shows the effects of radiation on bees whose nest was relocated beside a cell phone tower. As you can see in table one, when the bees were in the forest, they had no trouble foraging and returning to the nest.”

She got up, walked forward, and pointed at the curving lines of a graph on the screen.

“But here in the second graph, it shows that when the nest was placed next to the cell phone tower, the bees took longer and longer to get back, until the hive eventually died off.”

“I, for one, am intrigued by Mr. Oz’s theory,” Dr. Orlean said. “I think we may have our culprits—pollution from hydrocarbons and electromagnetic radiation from cell phones have coupled together, resulting in critical biosphere meltdown.”

There were nods all around. Harvey Saltonstall was visibly irritated. You could see the steam escaping from his ears.

“But that still doesn’t explain why these alleged hydrocarbon-morphed pheromones don’t affect human beings. Can you explain that, Mr. Oz?”

He gave the “Mr.” a very slight emphasis to remind everyone that I didn’t have a PhD.

I bit my lip again. But only to create my own dramatic pause. I did have an answer.

“Human beings lack the vomeronasal organ,” I said to Saltonstall. “The tissue at the base of the nasal cavity that causes response to airborne pheromones. Almost all mammals have it, but not humans. In fact, there are theories that the human VNO may have diminished as our relationship with dogs evolved. As it got bigger in dogs, it went away in humans. Many of the genes essential for the VNO are completely nonfunctional in humans.”

I looked around the room and realized I had won it.

Saltonstall sat there looking as though I’d yanked his pants down, so I assumed he knew what I was talking about. Dr. Orlean smiled at me.

“Bravo, Mr. Oz,” she said. “I don’t think anyone can deny that this is a breakthrough. I think we’ve finally hit the jackpot. For the first time I feel like we have a good chance of understanding what’s causing HAC.”

“Yes, but unfortunately that only leads us to the next question,” I said. “How do we stop it?”

Chapter 70

A BATTERED POLICE van emits a feeble, oscillating shriek as it weaves through the clogged, dust-choked streets of East Delhi, India.

Behind the van’s wheel, newly appointed sub-inspector Pardeep Sekhar nearly clips a fruit vendor as he wipes sweat off his face with the sleeve of his khaki shirt. The fruit vendor erupts into a torrent of curses, and Pardeep answers him with a dismissive wave.

“Clean the dirt out of your ears, bumpkin,” he halfheartedly grumbles out the window. “That sound from my van—that’s not a demon but a siren. It means, out of the way. Police coming through!”

Pardeep blames the television and Internet for the last decade’s influx of rural migrants into the city. All those channels luring illiterate fools into the bright lights and Bollywood lifestyle they will never achieve. When they can’t find work, they turn to petty crime—pickpocketing, purse snatching. That’s where he comes in.

At the next traffic-glutted intersection, he laughs to himself as he watches a guy trying to maneuver his cherry-red Lamborghini around a donkey cart. An Italian luxury car revving around a jackass is twenty-first-century India in a nutshell. Digital age, meet stone age.

If only I had a camera, he thinks. The men back at the station would love it.

Pardeep’s beat is Yamuna Pushta—the largest slum in Delhi, which puts it in the running for the largest slum in the world. In every direction lie blocks of jhuggis, makeshift huts made out of wood and cardboard tied together with string. The shantytown has no electricity or sewers. Today, people are flying kites and playing volleyball; naked children sit grinning as they play in the dirt.

Pardeep brings the van to a stop in front of a three-story concrete housing block beside a particularly fetid section of the Yamuna River. The Yamuna is a tributary of the Ganges. Bathing in its sacred water, according to the holy men, is supposed to free one from the torments of death.

Pardeep rolls up the window and through the dusty glass takes a look out across the smooth brown surface of the polluted cesspool. He sighs and shuts off the engine.

It would free one, all right. But not from death. From life.

He looks up at the grim three-story complex: River Meadow Apartments. They make it sound pleasant, don’t they? The calls that have been coming in from the building are confusing. People screaming about a break-in, a crazed killer stalking the hallways.

Pardeep shrugs his narrow shoulders. Looks quiet enough from the outside. Probably a prank.

Still, he lifts his newly issued weapon off the floor of the passenger-side footwell just in case. It’s one of the Indian-made INSAS submachine guns that have been handed out in the years since the Mumbai terrorist attacks. He casually shoulders the strap and heads for the building.

In the back of his mind, Pardeep idly hopes it isn’t a prank but a real-life terrorist. He would love nothing more than to blow some foreign-born radical scum to smithereens, maybe get promoted out of the city’s armpit in the bargain.

He’s trying to decide which plum district he would like to be assigned to when an old man runs screaming from the building.

“Raksasom! Rana! Atanka!” he warbles as he runs past the van.

Monsters. Horror. Run.

Monsters. Pardeep smiles to himself, amused. This is a prank. Probably kids playing tricks on some superstitious old fools.

“Hello? Police,” he says, entering the lobby. It’s deserted. “Police!”

The smell is awful. It smells like shit, garbage, death—which is to say, nothing unusual for this neighborhood.

There’s no response. He starts up the stairs.

At the top of the first-floor landing he sees something moving in the dimness down at the end of the hallway. It’s low to the ground, perhaps about waist level. In the windowless corridor, it looks to Pardeep like a woman with a blanket over her, crawling on all fours. He is confused. He reaches for his flashlight, takes a few steps closer.

Then there is something moving at him very fast down the dark hallway. He clicks on his flashlight and sees bright eyes flash jewel-green in the darkness. Then he is falling backward.

Pardeep doesn’t have time to scream as the leopard opens him from belly to chin.

Two more leopards arrive, skulking slyly in the hallway.

The leopard is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. The beautiful turquoise-eyed creature is sometimes called a leaping chain saw due to the fact that it uses both its rear claws and its razor-sharp front claws, as well as its teeth, when it strikes.

Before a dark mist falls over his eyes, one last word floats up from Pardeep’s mind.

Raksasom.

Monsters.

Chapter 71

I HAD A dream that night. I dreamed of a circle of ants. They chased each other in a spiral—a squirming black whirlpool. Turning around and around, each one blindly chasing the pheromone trail of the ant just in front of him. A closed circle. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Locked in their loop, the ants ran around and around in circles—desperate, stupid, doomed.

I didn’t know what time it was when I woke in the dark to the sound of what sounded like the world ending.

There was an alarm going EEHN EEHN EEHN. It sounded as though I were on a submarine that had just been torpedoed.

I clawed at the sheets and scrambled to sit up. Smoke detector? I thought. Some kind of military alarm?

Then I saw a light pulsing on the bedside table and realized the sound was coming from my iPhone. I vaguely remembered Eli playing with it the day before. Three-year-old kid knew more about the stupid thing than I did. I snatched it off the table and shut it off. Kid had set it to some crazy DEFCON 3 ringtone. Which was actually funny, in a morbid way, under the present quasi-apocalyptic circumstances. My heart started beating again, and I almost laughed. Then I answered it.

“Mr. Oz, sorry to bother you at this hour,” Lieutenant Durkin said. “I have a message for you from Mr. Leahy of the NSA. A high-level meeting is scheduled at the White House this morning. The president will be there, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Leahy has requested that you be there in person to present the new theory you and the other scientists have developed.”

I wiped sleep gunk out of my eyes. What? Another meeting?

“Oh, okay. I guess,” I said, clicking on the bedside lamp. My brain was still woozy.

“Your wife and son are free to come with you, but since travel is becoming dangerous, it might be safer to leave them here in the Secure Zone. We can have you back up here by dinner.”

“That’s fine, Lieutenant. When am I leaving?” I said.

“Your flight out of Teterboro will be ready to go in about an hour. Can you be ready in, say, twenty minutes?”

Twenty minutes, I thought, inwardly groaning. The meeting last night had gone on until well past midnight. It felt like I’d gotten about twenty minutes of sleep.

“Of course. I’ll meet you in the lobby,” I said.

After I hung up, I immediately called Leahy.

“Why the face-to-face, Leahy? Why don’t we just teleconference?”

“It’s complicated, Mr. Oz,” Leahy said. “I know it’s a pain in the ass, but I really need you here. You’re a persuasive speaker.”

I blinked. What was Leahy talking about?

“Persuasive?” I said. “What does the president need to be persuaded about?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here,” Leahy said.

I smelled fish. For some reason the needle on my bullshit detector was jittering. The last thing I wanted to do with the world falling apart was leave my family, but it looked like I didn’t have much choice.

“Fine. See you later,” I said.

One of Chloe’s eyes peeled open as I was coming out of the shower.

“The president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House are having a meeting,” I said. “They want my input. Face-to-face in D.C.”

“Back to D.C. again?” Chloe said, opening her other eye and sitting up. “But you can’t. It’s too dangerous. Can’t they, I don’t know, use Skype or something?”

“That would make sense. This is the federal government we’re talking about. Sounds like they need some convincing on the pheromone angle. Until they’re on board, we won’t be able to make progress on tackling this insanity. Besides, I’ll have a military escort the whole way. They said I’ll be back before dinner.”

I was heading for the front door of our lavish government-assigned apartment when Eli poked his head out of the room we’d put him in.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said, kneeling down next to him. “Did you change my ringtone?”

“Um, maybe?” he said.

I messed his hair and gave him a hug.

“Listen, Monsieur Maybe. I’m going to Washington. I need you to stay here and take care of Mommy for me until I get back tonight.”

“No, Daddy,” Eli said, his face crumpling. I stood up. He hugged my leg. “I can’t take care of Mommy. Don’t go. You have to stay here. I don’t want you to go.”

By the time Chloe helped pry him off me, I felt like crying, too. Shutting that door was the hardest thing I’d done anytime lately.

I met Lieutenant Durkin in the lobby and we proceeded outside. Alongside the sandbagged gate strung up across Fifth Avenue, soldiers and cops were drinking coffee in Anthora cups beside a convoy of up-armored Hummers and police cars. The row of engines idled, quietly panting exhaust into the brisk white beams of the headlights.

“Are any of the other scientists coming with us?” I asked as Lieutenant Durkin and I climbed into one of the Hummers.

“My orders were just you, but if you want to bring some of the others, I can check.”

I waved off the idea. I was slightly surprised, but I actually liked it better that I was the only one they’d asked for. We rolled through half a dozen checkpoints on the way out to Teterboro. As we were coming up the ramp for the George Washington Bridge, I noticed a black column of smoke rising in the distance above the South Bronx.

Lieutenant Durkin looked at the smoke and then back at me.

“There have been problems with the evacs,” he said, looking away. “Some looting and such. We’re trying to keep a lid on it.”

Chapter 72

WHEN WE ARRIVED at Teterboro, Lieutenant Durkin drove us through a gate in a chain-link fence right onto the tarmac. Off to the right, beyond the doors of a nearby hangar, a sleek, cream-colored business jet began slowly taxiing toward us, its wing lights blinking.

I couldn’t help but notice that it was the top-of-the-line Gulfstream G650, a luxury aircraft that can hop the Atlantic and reach speeds near Mach 1.

If they thought they could impress me by rolling out a G650 to take me down to D.C., they’d succeeded.

Then I had another thought.

All this—for me?

What was up with the sudden VIP treatment? This definitely didn’t seem like your standard government travel itinerary. Was I being buttered up for some reason?

What the hell was this meeting about?

Lieutenant Durkin stayed behind on the tarmac. Another military guy waved me toward the airstair, and I boarded the plane with nothing but the suit on my back.

The Gulfstream had flat-screen displays over mirror-polished teak desks and leather executive chairs you could sink into as though they were pudding.

The interior was furnished in the manner of somebody’s corner office, I thought as I chose one of its eight empty seats and sat in it. A corner office that flew at fifty-one thousand feet and more than seven hundred miles an hour.

Not that I had much time to enjoy it. The flight attendant handed me a cup of coffee before we took off, and I was still sipping it when the Gulfstream’s wheels skidded with two soft shrieks against the tarmac at Reagan National an amazing twenty-five minutes later.

The jet’s engines whirred down as we taxied. I looked out the window. There was something strange about the airport. There were jumbo jets parked along the terminals, but they weren’t moving. No other planes were on the tarmac. Nothing was taking off or landing. It looked as if the airport were closed. It was eight in the morning on a Tuesday.

When we approached the terminal I saw that there was some activity here after all. Lined in two vast rows were dozens of military aircraft—Harriers, Warthogs. Marines were scampering around, loading and unloading tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters.

I slowly realized the airport had been commandeered by the military.

Chapter 73

I GOT A call from a number I didn’t recognize as I felt the plane jerk to a halt. I answered as the flight attendant unclipped a bracket and the door yawned open with a happy hum.

“Mr. Oz, it’s Dr. Valery. I have the test results.”

Dr. Mark Valery was a biochemist at NYU whom I had asked to do a chemical analysis on the muck on my clothes.

“What did you find?” I said.

“Your pheromone theory seems spot-on,” Valery said. “Your clothes were saturated with a chemically unique hydrocarbon similar to dodecyl acetate—a common ant pheromone. I say ‘similar’ because it’s like it, but isn’t quite the same. This stuff has properties we’ve never seen before.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The carbon chains are strange. Very strange. The substance has an extremely high molecular weight. Unlike dodecyl acetate, this stuff seems to dissolve quite slowly, which might help explain its unusually strong effect on larger animals. But that ain’t all, it turns out. The animals aren’t the only ones who seem to be secreting a pheromone. So are we.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Long story short, a human being’s scent is very complex,” Dr. Valery said. “We secrete materials from several different types of glands. There’s regular sweat, secreted by the eccrine glands, and then there’s sweat from the apocrine glands, in the hairier parts of our bodies. Then there’s sebum.”

“The substance that contains our smell,” I said.

“Right. Sebum is the stuff that bloodhounds home in on when tracking an individual person. Our olfactory fingerprint. The fragrance industry has been doing sebum experiments for years. I used to help run some of them. The thing about sebum is, like pheromones, it’s chock-full of hydrocarbons. That’s why, after hearing about your breakthrough, I decided to test some skin swabs from humans. I used myself and some of the other lab workers as subjects.”

“What did you find?” I said.

“It turns out that our sebum is chemically different from some samples I found in a similar study that was done back in 1994. I don’t know if it’s the air, our diet, seepage from plastics, or what, but initial tests seem to indicate that our sebum has a new compound in it. With pentanol and methyl butanoate. Not only that, but this new compound’s chemical structure seems to resemble several insect attack pheromones.”

I stared at the floor of the plane, trying to piece together what I was being told.

“So you’re saying the animals are attacking because of our smell?” I said. “It’s not just them. It’s us.”

“Think about it, Mr. Oz,” said Valery. “The olfactory system of most mammals is incredibly strong. A dog’s sense of smell is about a hundred thousand times more powerful than a human’s. The power of olfaction is primal. And it seems the critters don’t like what they’re smelling.”

Chapter 74

WITH THESE NEW and even more troubling implications playing a polka in my head, I exited the plane and was guided by a couple of soldiers toward a shiny black-and-chrome government motorcade thrumming by the hangar.

If our innate human odor was helping to cause this chaos, how were we supposed to fix that? How could we humans have changed what we smell like on a molecular level? How could it have happened so quickly? And why?

I approached the vehicles: a marked D.C. police car, a black Suburban, and another military Humvee.

A stocky marine in full camo shook my hand. He was Hispanic and his spiky high-and-tight made him look like he was wearing a hedgehog as a yarmulke.

“Mr. Oz?” he said with a slightly cockeyed grin. “You’re that animal scientist guy, right? I saw you on Oprah, man. Welcome to the war zone formerly known as Washington, D.C. I’m Sergeant Alvarez. But call me Mark. Do you have any bags or some beakers or something I can grab for you?”

“No beakers this time,” I said distractedly as he opened the door of the SUV for me.

“So what are you down here for?” he said, getting behind the wheel. “Lemme guess. Tour the cherry trees, a Nats game?”

We were rolling now. I was trying to think. I wished he’d shut up.

“Actually, I’m starting up a brand-new drug testing program for Marine Corps personnel,” I said. “In fact, when we get to the White House, I’m going to need a urine sample.”

A long silent minute dragged past.

“That was a joke.” I said. “Sorry, I have a lot on my mind.”

“No problemo, Doc. I talk too much. Ask anyone,” Alvarez said. “You sit there and solve the disaster. I’ll just button my lip and drive. This is me, shutting up. Zip.”

A few minutes later we were near the Pentagon, approaching the I-395 ramp before the bridge, when I heard what at first I thought were honking geese.

Then a mass of animals burst from the roadside trees. Body after furry body spilled out from between the tree trunks. Dogs. Dutch shepherds, caramel-colored mastiffs, foxhounds, bloodhounds, greyhounds, mutts of every conceivable coat and color and size. The dogs snarled and barked—a din of barking. Fur flew, spit sprayed up from the horde in frothy flecks.

Most of the animals were filthy, crazed-looking. They looked sick, starved, haunted. Many of them had hides that were mottled with that same white fungus stuff I’d seen under Bryant Park. It was horrific. I felt sorry for them.

The mass of dogs didn’t so much as hesitate as it approached our motorcade. The charging herd spilled right out into the road like lemmings off a cliff, right under the lead patrol car’s front wheels. Sergeant Alvarez came close to rear-ending the police car as it hit its brakes.

“The fuck are you assclowns doing?” Sergeant Alvarez yelled into his hands-free headset at the driver of the cop car. “Now’s not the time to be braking for animals, cockwaffle! Go! Go!”

There was a series of yelps and whines, and then sickening thumps under the wheels, as we ran over the dogs. Our car bucked and rocked over them like a rubber dinghy in a storm at sea. We thought it was almost over when an Irish wolfhound that looked like Lon Chaney Jr. in heavy makeup hurled itself onto the hood.

Sergeant Alvarez stomped on the gas, and the monster sailed over the windshield and tumbled over the roof. I turned in time to see it get run over by the Humvee behind us.

“Damn! Thing wanted to eat us for breakfast, huh?” Alvarez said, wiping sweat off his hedgehog. “You can take that urine sample from my pants now, Professor X.”

We glanced at each other for a beat, then exchanged a trickle of nervous laughter.

“Now I understand why the politicians are so concerned,” I said.

The marine nodded as he took his .45 out of his holster and put it in the beverage holder.

“Typical Washington, right?” he said. “A problem ain’t a problem until it happens in D.C.”

Chapter 75

D.C. LOOKED DESERTED. We passed an army checkpoint on the other side of the Potomac. There were dead dogs scattered pell-mell across the usually pristine National Mall, floating in the reflecting pool. The water was cloudy and dark.

I saw that there was a newly erected high electric fence surrounding the White House as we approached it. At each corner of the complex I noticed four Humvees kitted out with what looked like satellite dishes attached to their roofs.

“What are those?” I asked.

“ADS,” Sergeant Alvarez said. “Active Denial System. It’s a kind of microwave transmitter that heats up your skin. Hurts like a motherfucker. Supposed to be effective for crowd control. Fortunately, it works on man’s best frenemy, too.”

We got in line behind two other convoys waiting beside the White House complex on East Executive Avenue. Even when it was our turn, we had to wait for twenty minutes while the operation of ID checking and rechecking was conducted by the Orwellian assembly of security agents at the gate.

I spotted Mr. Leahy as a baby-faced army officer was at long last escorting me into the West Wing. At the end of a hallway, Leahy seemed locked in a heated argument with a staffer in front of a set of closed double doors.

A lot of military types kept coming in and out of the boardroom behind them. A lot of metal flashed on jackets. The staffer shook his head at Leahy emphatically and departed as I stepped up.

“Something heavy-duty is going on, Oz,” Leahy said, buttonholing me by the secretary’s desk.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“They won’t listen,” the silver-haired NSA officer said, more to himself than to me. “I can’t believe this. They won’t even listen to me.”

“Who won’t listen?” I said.

Leahy tilted his head toward a nearby door. “Step outside?”

On the White House colonnade, Leahy shook out a pack of Marlboros.

“I haven’t smoked in ten years,” he said. He popped a match to life and held it to the tip of his cigarette.

I wanted to shake him by the lapels. “You wanted me here. Now I’m here. What’s the problem?”

He didn’t answer. He took another drag, held the smoke in for a beat, and leisurely exhaled it from his nose in twin gray streamers of smoke.

Back in New York, my family was in jeopardy while this jackass pulled my chain. As Leahy put the cigarette to his lips again I smacked it out of his hand.

“Stop fucking around with me!” I said. “What. Is. The. Problem.”

“The military managed to convince the president that this thing can be taken care of with conventional weapons. They have satellite imagery of some animal nesting sites, and they want to use napalm on them. Imagine. They think they can bomb all the critters to kingdom come. They don’t want to listen to reason anymore, Oz. They just want to trot out their toys.”

He shook out another cigarette. “To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said, and lit the cigarette.

“But that’s nuts, Leahy. Isn’t President Hardinson known for being a moderate? A pragmatist? Mrs. Reasonable?”

Leahy looked around the colonnade.

“We’re probably bugged. I should know, shouldn’t I? But screw it. Who’s around to listen? This is top secret, Oz. Mum’s the word, understand? The president’s daughter is dead.”

Huh? I did a double take.

“What?” I said. “Allie?”

Leahy nodded.

“It’s being kept out of the press for now. The way I heard it, she told the president that Dodger had run away. But he hadn’t. She’d hidden him in a crawl space above the family’s quarters. That’s where they found her. The dog had…well. You can guess the rest.”

“Who found her?”

“Secret Service. The president borrowed a gun from an agent and put the dog down herself. She’s just not herself right now. She’s signing everything the military puts in front of her.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Shit is right,” Leahy said. “A shit is what they don’t give about the fact that this is an environmental issue. They don’t want to hear from any more scientists. They want blood, and they’re going to get it.”

Chapter 76

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL officer Lieutenant Frank White stirs milk into the first coffee of his shift with studied nonchalance as he steps onto the main floor of the control tower. As he crosses the room to his station, the lanky thirty-year-old is thinking ruefully about the fishing trip he was planning on taking this weekend before the airwaves became a network of doomsday theories. He’s focusing on trying to keep his eyeballs from rolling out of their sockets.

MacDill is a backwater air refueling base, and his job is usually a cakewalk. The hardest part is trying to keep twenty-three-year-old recruits with thirty hours’ flight time behind their wet ears from coming in too hot and turning the tarmac into a pizza oven.

White blinks down at runway 1, where, for some reason, two dozen F16 Falcons are powering up along the taxiway.

He gawks as a black B2 stealth bomber touches down on runway 2.

This is no fucking joke, he mumbles as he stands, still absentmindedly stirring his coffee.

All the fighters are bristling with underwing ordnance. One of the aircraft maintenance engineers in the locker room swore that they are all incendiary in nature—powdered-aluminum thermite bombs, magnesium, white phosphorus. Said he couldn’t be certain, but the B2s looked like they were carrying thermobaric daisy cutters.

Shit, White thinks. They could be goddamn nukes for all he goddamn knows.

The encrypted chain-of-command phone by his radar station rings twenty minutes later. He’s been drinking the coffee and is almost feeling half conscious now. The orders he receives from the phone are choppy and quick with terse military precision. They seem to have not the slightest whiff of bullshit in them.

“This is NORAD command at Cheyenne. Who am I speaking with?”

“Lieutenant Frank White.”

“Listen up, White. I don’t have all the coordinates in front of me, but you are to clear all civilian aircraft south of Tampa and north of the Keys. Clear the deck up to a ceiling of eighty-five thousand feet.”

White looks at his shadowy reflection in the control-tower glass and squints for a moment, picturing the area in his mind.

“Isn’t that Everglades National Park?”

“Didn’t hear that last transmission, son. What did you just say?”

Oh, shit, Lieutenant White thought. What is this? What’s going on?

“I said of course, sir. South of Tampa and north of the Keys.”

In a moment he is at one of the radar stations, working on carrying out the orders. The two-way crackles in his earpiece.

“Tower, this is two-five-three. Our preflight is complete. Are we clear for takeoff?”

White sits up. Two-five-three is the call sign for one of the B2s.

“Yes, two-five-three. You are clear on runway one.”

Clear for what, I don’t know, Lieutenant White thinks, slurping the dregs of his coffee as the massive aircraft begins to roll onto the airstrip.

Chapter 77

WHEN THE ALL-HANDS-ON-DECK horn sounds throughout the compound that morning at nine in the a.m., it can be heard clearly all the way down the mountain, in the leafy suburbs of Colorado Springs.

The newer residents of the town who notice the braying alarm may idly wonder if the siren is for the volunteer fire department before going back to their newspapers and breakfasts. Those who have family members working at the station immediately leave their jobs and yoga classes and head to the schools to gather their children.

After exactly five minutes, the alarm ceases. Then the two twenty-five-ton steel blast doors that protect the supposedly nuclear weapons–proof military bunker begin to close for the first time since 9/11.

The corridors and rooms of the facility branch off a wide main tunnel, about as big as a train tunnel, that was bored almost through to the center of the granite mountain. The two-story glass-encased main operations center is at the end of the network of rooms nearest the mountain’s westernmost slope. In it, air force techs sit at cubicles, calling orders into headsets as they listen to the squawk and crackle of military radio traffic.

As one enters the room, the forward and right-hand walls are taken up with screens as big as the ones at the local multiplex. The forward screen shows computer maps and blinking radar scopes. The one on the right displays a flickering patchwork of multiple real-time feeds, a montage of ground-level images taken by the cameras mounted on unmanned aircraft and warplanes currently aloft.

Leaning against the stair rail outside the door of his fishbowl office, lofted above the operations center floor, NORAD commander Michael McMarshall stands listening to the staff trading codes and coordinates back and forth. He whispers a furtive Hail Mary for his men and dry-swallows the last three Advil out of the plastic bottle in his hand.

McMarshall had been the CO during the first chaotic hours of 9/11, and this ball of wax is looking like it’s going to be a mite bit worse.

He returns to his office and stands behind his desk, an architect’s drafting table ratcheted up to midriff level. At work, he always stands, due to a training-flight crash that injured his back thirty years ago.

He flips through a stack of photographs. The images are from the military’s most advanced Lacrosse satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Ground-penetrating radar and thermal infrared sensor systems have picked up some very disturbing data. Shockingly large pockets of animal swarms, as they are now being called, have aggregated in virtually every corner of the country.

The initial wave of bombings has been ordered on the largest nests near densely populated areas. Miami, Chicago, and St. Louis are first on deck. If there’s any good news at all, it’s that the animal aggregations seem to be situated mostly in parklands: the Everglades, near Miami; Lincoln Park, in Chicago; Forest Park, in St. Louis. They have been working with ground forces for the last two days, pulling evacs out of their target zones to limit collateral damage.

So, then. McMarshall pauses a moment to reflect. The United States has just begun a bombing campaign on itself. This is some Catch-22–type shit.

It’s not just the United States, he knows. Russia, several European countries, and China are now working in sync, conducting their own campaigns against the animal swarms devastating their countries.

They have to do something. Though people are being kept in the dark, the attacks have become rampant. In affected areas, which is pretty much everywhere now, the hospitals are full. People are holing up in their homes as though there were a plague afoot. Shipping, the airlines, the stock markets have all closed. The entire industrialized world is grinding to a halt. And it isn’t going to be starting up anytime soon, if everyone on earth is in fear of being torn apart by dogs 24-7.

McMarshall hears a polite knock on the glass.

“The B2 out of MacDill is about to deliver its payload, sir,” the spry young officer says with a gung ho grin that’s actually quite irritating under the circumstances. McMarshall’s shoes clang on the metal balcony overseeing the operations room.

The entire forward screen is filled with the image by the time the general arrives at the stair rail. Though it’s a black-and-white thermal image, the clarity is startling. Why, look—there’s Florida. McMarshall can make out palm fronds, a dock, an old car.

“We are changing our heading for our final approach,” the B2 weapons officer says over the staticky military channel.

“And we are away,” the weapons officer announces.

And the screen goes white. The boom of the daisy cutter through the pilot’s open mike a moment later is a jagged roar that starts and then just keeps going on and on. The screen stays white as the Florida swampland burns.

“Get some!” McMarshall’s aide shouts. He whistles through his pinkies and starts to clap. Some of the other personnel join in tentatively.

McMarshall pivots on his heel and heads back to his desk. There’s an emergency bottle of Advil in the bottom drawer.

Chapter 78

WHILE LEAHY WAS arranging transportation for me back to New York, I spent the rest of the morning in a cramped, crowded, and distinctly unpresidential staff room in the back of the White House’s East Wing.

The whole place was in a full-tilt frenzy with the military actions underway. All around me, and even bivouacked out in the hallway, clustered by the electrical outlets, air force officers and politicos were working their smart phones and laptops. Above their frantic murmur was a constant low thrumming—the rotor chop of helicopters landing and taking off in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. It was like my head was stuck in a beehive.

A professionally nondescript Secret Service agent on break began snoring softly on a couch beside me as I watched CNN natter and flash on a TV bolted to an upper corner of the room. There were a lot of stories about the animal attacks, but nothing about the military response that had just been ordered. I wondered if that was because it hadn’t happened yet or because there was some kind of government news blackout.

That might be possible now, I thought, glancing at the throng of soldiers and government officials around me.

I tried to call Chloe several times to tell her what was going on, but the phone would only ring twice and go to voice mail, a sign I decidedly did not like. Text messages didn’t seem to be working, either. My guess was that it was probably circuit overload due to high call volume. That was my hope, anyway.

Leahy came back for me in the early afternoon and ushered me through the crowd out into the hallway.

“Unfortunately, no Gulfstream jet this time, Oz, but I did manage to get you on a military C-130 cargo plane heading out of Reagan National to New York in about two hours.”

“How’s the military response going? Any word?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Leahy said. He led me down some stairs into a utility corridor. “They’re still keeping me in the dark.”

We passed stacks of K rations and a chef in crisp whites cussing a blue streak into a cell phone on the way to the door. At the bottom of some steps was a small parking lot crowded with Town Cars and military vehicles. At the edge of the lot, standing beside the black Suburban that had brought me in, Sergeant Alvarez waved at me cheerily, as if the world weren’t ending.

“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 pheromone 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

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.

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.

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 world—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.

Rocking his dazed head from side to side at the strange vision, Attila stops in the shattered balcony doorway. He is in there somehow, somehow a part of the boy. And yet Attila is angry, so angry. He stands there, his impulses warring with his memory.

The other two apes, squirming with the blood rage, struggle to squeeze past him.

Attila grabs the first one by the shoulder, and then the other. He draws them away from the doorway, back into the outside. There is other meat.

“Heeaagh!” Attila shrieks. It is a violent noise, high-pitched, grinding. “Heeaagh! Heeaagh! Heeaagh!”

Chapter 87

“MOMMY! MOMMY! WAKE up! Listen!”

Chloe’s eyes flutter open. There is a high, ear-piercing primate-call sound coming from the balcony. The chimps on the balcony seem to be tussling with one another.

She sits up.

Chloe reaches out and wraps her arms firmly around her son. As they watch the animals jostle and shriek, she recognizes the familiar sound the chimp is making. It is a warning call—a kind of siren that chimps emit when a threat is close.

One is warning the others not to enter?

After a moment, the apes break it up. The largest of them—who, bizarrely, seems to be wearing a ragged old red hat—knuckle-walks to the balcony railing and hops onto its edge, beckoning the others to follow. A moment later, all three of them slip over the railing and are gone.

Chloe expels a long, shivery breath. First, the chimps wanted to attack, but then, suddenly, they stopped.

Attila. How could it have been him? How could it not have been him—how many chimps are there at large in this town?

Chloe sits on the floor with Eli in the dark. Outside the shattered window, she can hear people yelling, people singing and chanting in Central Park. It is as if human beings are regressing, becoming primitive again. Maybe human beings will start reacting to the pheromones now. Create human zombies to join the four-footed ones. Anything is possible.

Eli struggles in her arms like a giant fish. Struggles to escape her grip.

“No. Stay here,” Chloe says in a curt whisper.

“I’ll be right back.”

She thinks he needs to use the bathroom. But he returns a moment later and hands her something. It is the bowl of popcorn.

“Daddy said I should take care of you while he’s gone,” he says. “Here.”

She kisses him.

There comes a heavy, pounding knock on the door.

“United States Army,” a voice shouts. “Is there anyone in there?”

Chloe scoops up Eli and rushes to the door. A young blond soldier with glasses smiles in the glow of his flashlight as she lets him in.

“Thank God you’re alive, ma’am,” he says, lowering his rifle. “Somebody turned off the electric fence, and they got in through the basement somehow. We think we have it under control now. Are you hurt? Is your son all right?”

“We’re fine,” Chloe says. “Chimpanzees tried to get in through the balcony, but then they left.”

“So that’s what they were,” the soldier says, shaking his head. “I knew I saw something jump over the perimeter fence from the second-floor balcony.”

“Are many people hurt? The other families?”

“I’d be lying if I said no,” the soldier said. “Three families on the fourth floor seem to have taken the worst of it. There have been about half a dozen casualties so far. We’re still sweeping. In the meantime…,” the soldier says, offering her something.

Chloe just stares at it.

It is a flat black pistol.

“We can’t be everywhere at once, ma’am. You might need to use it to drive off the next wave.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Then you might really need it,” the soldier says, slapping it into her hand and turning to go.

The gun lies dark, cold, and heavy in her hand. She hates to touch it. She knows all too well what he meant about needing it. He meant that she should use it on Eli and herself rather than be eaten alive.

“Mommy, is that a real gun?” says Eli.

“No.”

Chapter 88

THE MESSAGE, AS it has come to be called at the White House, is delivered the next day at 0900, and put on a loop to repeat for the rest of the day.

On all TVs and radios, programming is interrupted. The message is broadcast through megaphones on helicopters and through the speakers on army vehicles roving the streets.

An image of the Oval Office appears on the forty-foot LED screen at One Times Square. The forty-fifth president of the United States of America, Marlena Grace Hardinson, sits behind the desk. Her smoky, dark green eyes look resolutely into the camera, and in a slow, careful voice, she begins.

“My fellow Americans, I would like to say good morning to you,” the president says. “But as we all know, this isn’t a very good morning for many of us. We are currently experiencing a dark moment in the annals of human history.

“I say this from hard-won personal knowledge. My own daughter, Allison, died yesterday. She was killed by our family pet. This is a tragedy that I and my husband, Richard, may never recover from. But we need to go on. We all do, and we will. That is what the United States of America does.

“Despite the efforts of our military, all across our nation, and indeed all across our planet, animals continue to attack human beings savagely, and without cessation. Fortunately, after much careful research, our scientists believe they have discovered some of the responsible factors underlying these attacks.

“For many years, there has been much heated debate over industrial pollution and its contribution to global warming. As we researched the dangers of industrial activity on climate change, it seems we were simultaneously overlooking another problem that has been developing unnoticed right under our noses for years. This problem amounts to the destabilization of the biosphere.

“It has come to light that the aberrant animal behavior may be directly related to human activity. The recent buildup of hydrocarbon-rich petroleum products, coupled with radiation from cellular phones, has caused changes in the environment, which these animals are reacting to. It has been explained to me that the hydrocarbons normally found in the human environment have subtly morphed into a substance that many animals’ sensory faculties are interpreting as a pheromone, altering these animals’ behaviors. These new airborne chemical particulates are causing animals to swarm together and attack human beings.

“In the interest of public safety, we must do everything in our power to reverse this process. That is why I am asking for the people of the United States of America to come together with the rest of the world this morning. Though I know it will be a great hardship, for the next two weeks, we must cease the use of all cellular phones and electricity, and cease the burning of fossil fuels. In essence, we need to clear the air, literally, of both radiation and petroleum by-products if a first step in ending this disaster is to be made.

“I have just signed an emergency executive order stipulating that all cellular communication towers and power plants in the United States of America will be shut down as of midnight tonight. Except for hospitals and designated emergency personnel, the use of portable generators is banned. The driving of vehicles will also be prohibited, and any violators are subject to arrest. The heads of other major industrial nations, among them the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Japan, have agreed to do the same. You will be informed of any and all further instructions. This two-week cessation is essential to allow our scientists to confirm the causes of human-animal conflict, and for us to formulate a coordinated plan for the future. Thank you for your cooperation. God bless America, and God bless us all.”

Chapter 89

WHEN THE PRESIDENT’S speech came on, Charles Groh and I were downstairs in the Navy Mess, drinking coffee and trying to brainstorm. It was more of a light brainshower—we were too spent and frazzled to stir up a storm.

Really, we were just waiting and watching until the minute hand oozed into place to form the perfect backward L of nine o’clock, and we followed the scuttling commotion into the adjoining stainless steel kitchen and gathered with the crowd of kitchen staff where they stood, vigilant and hushed, beneath a TV mounted to the wall.

When the broadcast was over, the crowd dissolved into anxious murmurs.

“The power’s going out, and the army is going to lock people up for driving their cars?” said a portly black chef. Somebody switched off the TV. “That’s the brilliant new plan?”

He seemed skeptical. Everyone did. I was skeptical, too, and I was the primary architect of the brilliant new plan.

“How does it feel?” said Dr. Groh as we arrived back at our table in the nearly empty dining room.

“How does what feel?”

“To finally get what you want,” he said. “You’ve been trying to warn people for how long? A decade, almost? Now they’re listening. It’s got to be pretty weird to finally get what you want.”

“I just hope it’s what we need.”

I drank the last of my coffee and looked at the sludge in the bottom of the paper cup as though I were a gypsy reading tea leaves. I thought about it. My feelings were definitely of the mixed variety. I was glad the idiotic carpet-bombing campaign had been stopped, but the problem was that my petroleum-radiation-pheromone theory was still just that: a theory.

There was a strong possibility I could be completely wrong, or only half right. It was impossible to rule out other factors contributing to the problem. It was even possible that radiation, electricity, and petroleum had nothing to do with it—that we’d just been barking up the wrong tree. (Ha-ha.) Science is like that. It doesn’t have the answers. It guesses, tests, and guesses again. I had my guesses, and now they were going to be tested. Turning off the world’s lights was an unprecedented, historic event. What if it didn’t work?

“It feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, Charles,” I said. “I’m pretty much scared shitless.”

Dr. Groh shrugged.

When we returned to the Cabinet Room for another round of meetings, everyone seemed dazed, exhausted. But it was the kind of upbeat dazed and exhausted you see in people racing to meet a deadline, the pizza-box-and-black-coffee all-nighter, the burned-out look of dedicated people in the final push of getting something difficult done.

When the president walked in, a spontaneous burst of applause filled the crowded room.

But as the energy secretary whistled through pinched fingers, I kept my hands at my sides. This wasn’t the end of something. This was just the very beginning of what I anticipated was going to be a long, hard journey. I couldn’t quite join in the self-congratulation just yet.

Because letting the public know was one thing.

Getting them to comply was quite another.

In order for this to work, people had to actually stop using electricity and driving cars.

Would they?

It all depended upon people observing the new emergency ordinances. Realistically, there were nowhere near enough boots on the ground to enforce these contingency laws—so all we could do was to count on people to cooperate. In officer training, one of the first things they tell you is to never give an order unless you’re sure it will be obeyed. If a law cannot be enforced, it’s easy for it to crumble. As Frederick the Great said, diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.

As the president found her seat in the middle of the room, I tried to think of other instances in which Americans had been called upon to sacrifice for the good of the country. Or of the world, as the case may be. World War II is a good example. I also remembered all the charity and camaraderie that had abounded in New York after 9/11. It could happen again, right?

I crossed my fingers under the table as President Hardinson cleared her throat. I hoped so. I prayed so.

It was all up to us now.

Chapter 90

BECAUSE OF ELECTRICAL load and supply concerns, large-scale power grids take time to shut down without damaging the equipment. It isn’t until twelve hours after the president’s stated deadline that the US grid has fully powered down.

The rolling blackout catches some people unawares. Water pumps fail in some areas and people are stuck in elevators as everything grinds to a standstill.

And then there is silence, and darkness.

But most people are ready for it.

By 2100 EDT, every power plant, airline, and factory in the United States and Europe is powered down, as well as every commercial cellular communications site. In the United States, army units are deployed to stop all vehicular traffic. For the first time ever, the US Air Force Space and Missile Systems satellite that monitors nighttime data shows only blackness where those twinkling crystalline spiderwebs of light used to be: New York, London, Paris. Dark.

At the break of rosy-fingered dawn in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, Barbara Hatfield wakes inside a shipping container that her zoological research center used for storage. The primatologist locked herself in it almost three weeks ago in order to avoid being ripped asunder by gorillas or the rhinos that appeared out of nowhere.

She is in big trouble. The container is a broiler by day and an icebox at night. Her food has run out. There is only one gallon of water left. She is weak, hungry, dehydrated. Isolated from the goings-on in the rest of the world, she does not understand why no one has come to her rescue. Why has the supply plane not been here in three weeks? Isolation. Hunger. Deprivation. Fear. She is feverish, hallucinatory, the borders between reality, nightmare, and dream blurring and dissolving. She is being punished in some way by God, abandoned in the jungle to suffer and die.

With great effort, she rolls over onto her hands and knees, crawls to the hole in the container by one of the hinges, and peeks through the slit of vision it offers her.

What she sees amazes her. In the clearing near the edge of the tree line, she can see the gorillas. But the females are present again. When the craziness started, all the females seemed to have disappeared. Now they are back. The gorillas are no longer menacing. They are doing what they usually do: eating, mating, playing with their children, lazing in the grass.

Barbara stands on spindly, weak legs and unlatches the container’s door. She steps outside. The gorillas look up at her. Barbara rears back, stumbling. The hollow metal clangs and drums under her staggering feet, and she grasps the edge of the doorway, catching herself from falling.

Should she head back to the safety of the container? Are they going to attack again?

Then she stops and watches as the gorillas slowly lumber back into the jungle, vanishing into the trees and ground fog.

In Delhi, the sun trickles over a sea of flat rooftops, over a dark and quiet city. Strict government enforcement helps ensure compliance with the global energy ban. The two new power plants east of the city have been shut down, along with all the communications towers, the filling stations.

In Yamuna Pushta, the sprawling slum east of the city, the usually traffic-clogged streets are empty of everything but pushcarts and rickshaws. The migrant people who inhabit the slum tentatively peek out from the cracks in their hovels. They have been easy pickings for the roving packs of pariah dogs and jungle cats that have overtaken the city.

As they peer out from their hiding places, they see movement in the streets. Animals—leopards, tigers—are moving northward. A soot-faced child ducks fearfully beneath a window, then his head rises again to look at a passing leopard: patient, lazy, its shoulder blades undulating, its tail a pendulum—it is walking away. The big cats are moving out of the city, returning to the jungles, where they belong.

All around the world, it is happening. In London, in Paris, in Rome, in Beirut, in Iowa City. Animals are leaving the cities. Massive packs of animals are dissipating, going home like a crowd after a ball game.

Chapter 91

CHLOE HAS BEEN up for two hours when the sun rises in New York on the second day of the global power freeze. With the electricity off, she lights a candle, and spends the flat, empty stretch of time going through family photographs. She is glad she included them when she packed her bags for the government evacuation headquarters.

She smiles to herself as she slowly turns the pages of her photo album. She can’t decide which is her favorite: the wedding photos or the shot of Oz at the hospital, holding Eli for the first time. Or the one of a two-year-old Eli chasing a seagull at a picnic on Jones Beach.

She settles on the wedding picture of Oz waiting for her at the altar, a neon-blue Hawaiian shirt under his tuxedo jacket. It is the expression on his face, she thinks. His smile, the glimmer in his brown eyes—they are a freeze-frame of joy and life. God, she misses him. God, does it hurt to be apart.

But she cannot go back to the panic and depression. She has to be hopeful. They will be together soon, she knows.

Because it’s working.

The plan is working.

The night before, she and some of the other scientists had gone onto the roof of the building. She had held Eli’s warm tiny hand in hers, and they looked up into the sky. They could see the stars.

To Chloe, the starscape above was like the night sky in her girlhood home on her grandfather’s farm in the French countryside. Eli was a city kid—he had never seen so many stars. She pointed out the constellations to him, and the planets. Mercury, Venus. Jupiter, Saturn—those winking faraway giants. The galaxy unfurled in a fluttering ribbon of star smoke.

They could see the stars, of course, because every light in the city was off. Even the streetlights. There was not a drop of electricity running in the city’s veins. Chloe had listened for any remnant of the great vibration that had once been New York City. It was gone. There was only darkness and silence. The city was a coral shell of darkness and silence.

And holding Eli’s hand on the roof, Chloe had felt warm tears sliding out of the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. Her tears had come partly from sadness, and partly from the cold joy of seeing all this terrifying, useless, lonely beauty.

Progress is being made, she thinks now, tracing a picture of her husband’s face with a finger. She can feel it in her bones. They are going to make it through this.

After breakfast, Chloe decides to take Eli onto their terrace for some fresh air. Just entering the room where the animals had almost gotten in makes her palms tingle with sweat, but she wills herself through it. Using a broom, she sweeps away the broken glass from the French doors, and then she opens them, and they are outside.

It is a gorgeous September day. Clear blue sky, sunny, slightly breezy.

“Listen, Mommy,” Eli says.

She listens. The only sound is the swish of the wind pushing the leaves of the swaying Central Park trees.

“I don’t hear anything, Eli.”

“Yeah!” he says. “Someone turned New York off!”

Chloe smiles. It’s true. The streets are still, silent. Down Fifth Avenue, morning light trickles through the side streets to lie warm on the wide avenue in golden stripes.

There is something sad about it, and yet wonderful. Beyond the trees in the distance, the roof of the Plaza Hotel could almost be a Mayan temple. It is as if they have traveled back in time.

Chloe puts her arms around her son. Her small, bright, warm son. For a moment, for the first time in a long while, she feels halfway safe, halfway happy.

She thinks about Oz again. The feel of his back under her fingers, his goofy American laugh.

He is okay. She will see him again soon. She kisses her son, wiping the trembling jewel of a tear from the side of her nose.

The world will not end.

Chapter 92

SPLAYED ON HIS back on a rock outcropping overlooking a softball field near the Central Park carousel, Attila watches a high white cloud sail across the ocean of blue sky above him.

He makes a soft mewling whimper, an almost sigh. His shoulders droop, his muscles slacken. He is serene now.

The massive pack of animals he led into Central Park several nights before has dwindled considerably. First the rats left, and then the cats. There are a few dogs left, but even they are starting to circle in ever-widening loops, wandering aimlessly, like electrons in an unstable atom.

The scent in the air that so strongly compelled Attila to act is weak now, just a tiny trace of what it had been. Wracked, spent, limp with physical exhaustion, he dozes on the sunny rock. The aftertaste of blood in his mouth is strong, metallic, slightly nauseating. All he wants to do now is sleep, sleep, sleep.

He dozes throughout the day, waking occasionally, watching the still and silent city, dozing some more. The soft light on the white buildings. His sweet glassy brown eyes blink languidly. He listens to the quiet. The silence is beautiful. The cool, clean air.

Though he is getting hungry, it is normal hunger. It is not a crazed death hunger. He doesn’t want to kill now. The bloodlust has burned away like a fever. He is healing now.

Soon he sits up as another chimp clambers up onto the rock and sits down beside him. She is a large female who escaped from the Central Park Zoo. She has something in her hand. It is an orange. It is like a ball of flame in her hand, a sun. She peels it with her long fingers and offers it to Attila. Attila breaks it in half and hands the other half back.

Together they eat the orange. The cool, sweet, sticky juice feels good in his mouth. The female cuddles next to him and begins grooming his fur. Soon they are lying there together on the warm stone. Feeling her warmth, and the warmth of the earth, Attila is at peace. He closes his eyes and slips back into sleep.

Chapter 93

TWO MORE DAYS of meetings slid by like sludge. It was difficult to see by lantern and candlelight, and hot indoors, so the meetings were held outside, in the Rose Garden. We sat around the tables on springy metal outdoor furniture, using paperweights to keep things from fluttering across the South Lawn in the breeze.

On the third day, going stir-crazy behind the paper-stacked walls of my dark FEMA trailer and the army compound itself, I canceled my afternoon meetings. I’d heard that D.C. had been free of animal hordes for more than two days now, and I wanted to see firsthand if it was true.

I bumped into Sergeant Alvarez coming out of the compound’s mess tent and convinced him to come with me. When I met him by the northwest gate a few minutes later, he was in full Kevlar and holding a smooth flat black rifle with a cylinder on it.

“How’s the ankle?” I said.

“Getting there. Like my walking stick?” he said, shaking a beast of a weapon. It was an automatic shotgun called an AA-12, he explained, which can fire the thirty-two rounds of double-aught buck in its drum in about an eyeblink at full auto.

“Which is ludicrously destructive when you think about it, but probably just the thing if we run into another tooth-and-claw mob,” Alvarez concluded. “They just handed them out. I named mine Justin.”

“Justin?”

“My man, Justin Case.”

Outside the White House gates, the city appeared peaceful, quiet. The quiet was the most amazing of all. You could hear the wind.

The downtown area was still cordoned off, but they were beginning to allow some residents in to check on their property. We stopped and talked to several people coming in and out of the town houses—a couple of student nurses from Georgetown, an FBI agent, a lobbyist, and her son. It was as though D.C. had become a village.

For now.

I was encouraged that people seemed to be upbeat and cooperative. But I knew this was only the beginning. This was still the honeymoon. How would people feel after a week of no hot showers or air-conditioning? With the country’s dependence on trucking for food delivery, how long would it be before people started getting hungry?

We were on Constitution Avenue when a dog appeared from around the corner. It was a black Lab, and, with knee-jerk immediacy, Alvarez hoisted his new toy to his shoulder, ready to blast the dog to kibbles and bits. But the dog didn’t even glance at us. It passed by in the street, pausing just long enough to relieve itself on a fire hydrant.

Alvarez and I looked at each other. Then we burst out laughing.

“Call the Times. I have tomorrow’s headline,” I said. “Dog pisses on hydrant!”

Chapter 94

THAT NIGHT AND almost all the next day, Charles Groh and I attended romantic candlelit policy meetings with the CDC and various branches of the military. After a quick dinner, I was catching a half nap on a couch in a FEMA trailer parked on the South Lawn when I felt an impish tug on my foot.

I sat up, and NSA chief Leahy sat down beside me. Leahy and the NSA had been put in charge of monitoring the effect of the industrial and power shutdown on the animal populations. I’d been waiting to hear back from him. He smiled enigmatically and handed me a cup of coffee.

“Well, the suspense is killing me,” I said, yawning and taking the coffee. “What’s the story, morning glory?”

Leahy’s smile brightened and broadened.

“Come see, boy genius.”

We left my trailer and headed into another one near the Rose Garden that had a satellite dish wired to the side of it. There was a rattling hand-cranked generator hooked up to the trailer. It was a comm room. There were a dozen techs and military people barking into phones, staring at monitors, pointing at bright shiny things on screens.

Leahy peeled some sheets off a fax machine and handed them to me.

“Feast your eyes on these, Wizard of Oz,” he said. “On the Thursday before the shutdown, we were getting national reports of thousands of attacks every day. Now look at yesterday’s tally in the US.”

I glanced at the sheet.

“Am I reading this right? Three?” I said.

“Exactly,” Leahy said. “Not only that, we’re getting in more and more stories about dogs returning to their owners. The industrial and communications freeze really has knocked out the airborne pheromone. Your plan wasn’t just a home run, Oz. It was a grand slam. You’re going to be very famous. I think you may have just saved the world.”

Leahy put his arm around my shoulder.

“That’s why we’re going to get you out of here, kiddo. I pulled some strings. I’m going to get you back to your family in Nueva York.”

I looked at him. Was that even possible? It felt like weeks since I’d seen Chloe and Eli.

“Surely you’re joking.”

“No, siree. And don’t call me Shirley. They’re gassing up your chariot as we speak. You’re on the G6 again.”

I thought about Chloe, about the actual possibility of touching my wife, holding her, burying my face in her neck. And Eli. I wanted to put that kid up on my shoulders and just walk with him and show him everything that—

I stopped. What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking?

What were they offering? To let me break the rules? And if they “pulled some strings” for me, how many others were they pulling them for?

“Hold it,” I said. “Wait a second. I’d love more than anything to see my family, but it’s too soon. There can’t be any travel now. No combustion engines, no electricity for at least two weeks. That was the plan. You know this.”

“One twenty-minute plane trip won’t break the camel’s back, Oz. You deserve this.”

“Deserve?” I said, feeling a bubble of fury flare up inside me. I grabbed him by the lapels. “That’s Washington, isn’t it? The rules are for the little people, right? We deserve it. Which part of the continuation of civilization do you morons not understand? You think this shutdown is the end? This is the beginning of the beginning of the beginning!”

“Let go of my jacket,” Leahy said.

I shoved him away.

“Do you think this will work without real sacrifice? Without everyone’s sacrifice? The bans on gas, cell phones, electricity—they have to be for everybody. The NSA, the military, VIPs. Hell, even the president and the holy Congress. This is just stage one. Don’t you understand? We have to do this until we come up with a permanent solution.

“If everything goes back to normal, then it’s going to be feeding time again at the zoo, Leahy. You tell all the fat cats to cork the Champagne and cancel the tee times. It’s time to suck it up like the rest of us.”

“Relax,” Leahy said. “I get the picture. I understand. You’re right.”

“Do you? I wonder,” I said as I was leaving. “But I hope so. For the sake of the world.”

Chapter 95

ON SATURDAY MORNING, I blew off every meeting on my schedule. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works wanted a meet and greet, as did a group of clinical pathologists from the CDC.

But after the row with Leahy, I was almost sick to death of policy makers who were looking at this thing as if it were already over. For them, this was just something they could pad their resumes with, tell their grandchildren about. They needed to understand that if they didn’t take it seriously, there weren’t going to be any grandchildren to tell it to.

Instead, I did something useful, something that needed doing. I signed up to help a contingent of marines clean the streets and collect the bodies of the dead.

There was something turn-of-the-century about it. That is, the turn of the last century. Horses had been brought in from a farm in Rockville, Maryland, to pull U-Haul trailers. By noon, the trailers were laden with body bags.

Having served in Iraq, I thought I could handle the detail. I was wrong. The first child I encountered was a little Asian girl in an alley behind a dry cleaner’s shop in Dupont Circle. She looked about eight, nine years old. Guts strewn across the alley like spaghetti. Sergeant Alvarez and I stuffed her in a bag and laid her down in one of the trailers. It broke me up. I snapped off my reeking rubber gloves and sat on the curb between a couple of parked cars for a while, weeping.

So many lives had been lost.

It was early evening when we arrived at Arlington National Cemetery. Near the Tomb of the Unknowns, the contents of the horse-drawn trailers were unloaded into a row of portable morgue units. An army bugler played taps as we were leaving.

It was getting dark by the time Sergeant Alvarez and I made it on foot back across the bridge, heading for the Marine Corps base next to the White House.

Near George Washington University, we were walking down a block lined with trees and bracketed with quaint homes.

And I saw a chrome-and-yellow Hummer parked on the street, idling in front of a town house. When I reached in and shut off the engine, a tall, handsome guy wearing a Yankees cap and a rumpled blue suit ran out. He looked pissed.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy said.

“I should ask you the same thing. Maybe you’ve been under a rock, but there’s a ban on driving.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” the guy said, glancing at Sergeant Alvarez and showing me his ID. “I’m Gary Sterling, congressman from New York. This is my apartment. I’m heading back to Long Island to get a few things.”

“Says who?” I said.

He fished a document out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket.

“Says the president,” he said, making little effort to suppress his smirk.

I looked at the piece of paper. I couldn’t believe it. It was a presidential order that authorized the bearer to operate a motor vehicle despite the ban. I looked at the president’s seal and signature, dumbfounded.

I guess I shouldn’t have been that shocked, but I was. Everyone needs to follow the rules, except for the people who don’t. I knew it. This was D.C. I was afraid this would happen.

Representative Sterling snatched the permit out of my hand and promptly restarted his car. But I couldn’t take it. Permit or no permit, I reached in and shut it down again. I took the keys out of the ignition.

“Are you blind? I showed you the permit,” the congressman said.

I curled my right fist around the keys and raised my left. My fists were shaking. I knew what I was doing was crazy. But I guess I had seen too much that day. I’d seen too many dead bodies. Did this guy care? The answer was no, apparently.

“I don’t give a shit!” I said. “You think the rules don’t apply to you? You’re above it all, right? I don’t think so. Fuck your permit. Come and get your keys.”

And I put them in my pocket.

Then what did he do? He simply turned on his heels and walked back up the town house steps. When he got to the top, he took out a cell phone, hit a button, and began speaking calmly into it.

“What the hell? This fool’s two for two. He’s got a Hummer and a working cell phone?” Alvarez said.

A military Hummer roared up a couple of minutes later. Sergeant Alvarez stiffened and came to attention as a marine colonel climbed out from behind the wheel. He spoke to Alvarez, and then Alvarez very reluctantly spoke to me.

“I’m sorry, Oz, but it’s true. They are issuing these permits, or whatever they are. It’s legit. The asshole wins. You either have to give him back his keys, or I arrest you.”

I bit my lip. I shook my head for a little while. Finally, I stopped.

“Fine, okay. You’re right, everybody. I’m sorry. Got carried away,” I said. The congressman came back down the town-house steps. I walked over to him. I held the keys out to him at the curb. As he reached for them, I flung them aside, into a storm drain.

“Whoops!” I said. “Clumsy me. My arms are kind of tired from carrying the dead all day. Truly, truly: my bad.”

Alvarez, even with the glaring colonel present, was having trouble burying his smile. I walked away, and nobody tried to stop me.

Guy Smiley was beside himself, cussing like a sailor with a toothache, frothing with self-righteous indignation. He gave me the finger.

“Hey, that’s nothing new, is it, Congressman?” I gave him a little feminine wave. “I’m an American citizen. Telling us to go fuck ourselves is what you guys are best at.”

But it was a brief, small victory. As I walked, still seething, in the gloaming, I heard it from all over the city: gasoline generators being started up—air conditioners humming back to life. All the people of the world were back to their old tricks. And I’d thought the bugle was sad.

I realized it then. In the dying purple light as the sun set over Washington, I realized it. I listened to the gathering chatter in the dark, and I knew it.

There would be no recovery. We had lost. It was over.

Chapter 96

BY SUNDOWN OF the third day of the Big Stop, as people have begun to call it, a loud chugging sound breaks the still, death-like silence in midtown Manhattan. Playing Candy Land with Eli in a pale band of streaming sunlight in the apartment’s back bedroom, Chloe hears it and goes to the window.

She scans the sky over Central Park. The sound picks up volume, and then she sees it. Half a dozen tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters are throbbing over the city, coming in from the West Side. They pass through the gap between the skyscrapers of the Time Warner Center, which stands like a goalpost at the end of Central Park, near Columbus Circle, and continue northeast across the rolling green of the park toward the government Secure Zone.

“No,” Chloe whispers from the terrace. “No, no, no.”

In the sky above them, now there is another roar. A 747 is shrieking westbound, its lights blinking red and green. It’s the first plane she’s seen in a week.

“What is it?” Eli says.

“Helicopters and planes,” Chloe says. “Why are they breaking the ban? It’s been only three days.”

She goes to the terrace. It’s true. Across Central Park West, lights are beginning to twinkle on in the luxury apartment houses, like tiny pieces of luminous candy. She can hear generators whirring on, an ugly, hammering chatter.

Down in the street, she watches as a truck screams onto Fifth Avenue from a side street. Then a motorcycle. Then a Mercedes SUV.

It isn’t just happening in New York, either.

In the absence of animal attacks, people have become emboldened. The air force satellite picks up the imagery as lights start to flicker on in Dallas, in Cincinnati, in Dublin, Milan, Madrid. By the next morning, Beijing smokestacks are throwing up clouds of smoke, fluttering in the air like black satin scarves. The Canadian legislature overturns the cell phone ban. Mexico and the EU follow suit.

All over the world, people go back to work. Coal plants are turned on, nuclear facilities, cell towers. Clouds of petrochemicals and hydrocarbons rise back into the air currents, electromagnetic radiation emanates from cell phones and towers, buzzing, shimmering, sweeping across the land like an invisible poison gas. Chemical bonds click back together, re-forming. Energy mixes with matter to create something new.

Change is here to stay. It is the way of life, the way of the world.

The Big Stop is over.

So is human civilization.

Chapter 97

ON HIS SUNNY rock in Central Park, Attila awakens. Tense—so tense now. He can feel the adrenaline bulging his veins, pumping in his heart, sending blood to his brain and muscles. The flash of energy. Dendrites, synapses firing. The feeling surges in his body, warping the molecular structures in his brain, that hypersensitive lump of squishy electric meat. His blood pressure increases. His saliva dries as he begins to sweat. The hair on his back bristles.

He is readying himself for attack. Something has triggered the attack impulse in his brain and left the switch on. His breath comes hard and heavy as his aggravation builds. His respiration comes in ragged huffing sounds, almost a snarl.

The smell in the air is back, calling him, dragging him to his feet. The female beside him is seething as well, her eyes bright with anxious rage.

The animals are back by the time he climbs down from the rock. They cover the softball field like a living rug. The pack is bigger and more bloodthirsty than before.

Attila leads the swarm east, toward the apartment-building lights. His eye is trained on the terraces of the high-rises. He knows how to climb them, how to get in. He will go alone and open the doors for the others. The smell tells him this. This time, he will not fail.

Any mercy he has shown to man is not even a memory anymore. Because he has no memory. He has the smell. The smell is master, friend, mate. The smell is all.

A man and a woman on a motorcycle are riding crosstown on the Sixty-Fifth Street Transverse. Attila gives his pant-hoot call to herd the others, but it is unnecessary. In the pheromone cloud, sounds are unnecessary. The animals can smell what he wants in his breath and sweat. His orders become scents. The mass moves, anticipating him almost as easily as his own hand.

A roaring cascade of bodies falls from a bridge onto the motorcycle. It is a husband and wife, both in their fifties. The woman is enveloped first. She screams as teeth and claws meet flesh. Attila, at the bottom of the scrum, gnaws chunks out of the woman’s leg, blinking against the jet of arterial blood.

The man, a retired cop from Queens, reaches for a sidearm that hasn’t been there since 1999. A rat makes off with his left pinkie up to the first knuckle. Then a squirrel attaches itself to his face with a squeak, clawing at his eyes. A rottweiler bites into his crotch, and he sinks to the ground.

The animals lacerate the people, carve them to ribbons as efficiently as the blades in an abattoir. In less than three minutes, all that’s left of the two is very dirty laundry.

Stained red with slaughter, Attila moves himself and the swarm toward the smell of humans. All the animals are moving together now with the same rhythm, like cells in the bloodstream.

There is no Attila anymore. He is bigger now. Something else has broken through, taken over. He is only energy now, a soulless organization of bones and blood and meat propelled by electricity and surging chemicals. He moves toward the sounds, toward the lights.

Chapter 98

AH, HOW QUICKLY the tide turned back. The blood-red tide.

With the sounds of generators came screams and roaring gunfire. Were we really this stupid? Yes, apparently.

It was just coming on midnight when the door of my trailer whacked open and Alvarez darkened the doorway behind it.

“Grab your shit, Oz. We’re overrun. They’re evacuating the White House.”

The East Wing had been overtaken. Inside and out, hundreds of thousands of mammals—dogs, raccoons, rats, squirrels, possums—were streaming uphill into the iconic building, swarming like ants. The gunfire was constant now. As I ran alongside Alvarez I saw a luminous orange glow lighting up the sky to the northeast. I pointed to it.

“What’s—”

“The Capitol’s on fire” was all he said. We kept running.

Alvarez rushed me into a waiting truck. The marine guard at the east gate was down, blood running over his dress blues, his face chewed off. Alvarez glanced at him, raised his AA-12, and squeezed a lackadaisical stream of firepower in the direction of the handful of mold-spotted dogs still working on the body.

“God help us,” Alvarez said, crossing himself.

“Help us?” I said. “God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, didn’t he? I know I’m just a scientist, but it looks like we’ve pissed him off again.”

An hour later, I was wheels-up in the air on an air force 737 back to New York.

With the White House overrun, a new plan had been hatched. The government was moving north. Extremely north. About as north as you could get, actually. The scientists and government were supposed to pack up and regroup at Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The only good thing to say about it was that we were coming to New York first to get the other scientists who had come to the meeting.

Great, I thought. That means I get to spend the apocalypse holed up in an igloo with Harvey Saltonstall. Then they told me Harvey had been mauled to death by dogs.

“Oh,” I said.

They said family had to stay behind, but I was having none of it.

I found Leahy up near the plane’s cockpit.

Reluctant to throw any of my weight around up until this point, I threw it now as hard as I could.

“You either have my wife and kid on the tarmac, Leahy, or you shitheels can go to Greenland and figure it out by yourselves.”

When Chloe and Eli came through the airplane’s door, I tackled them into a seat. We hugged each other and cried for about ten years. For a short, dark time I thought I might never see them again, but, luckily, for once I was wrong.

The plane kicked its heels and was airborne again. It began to rain when we were zipping over Canada, but the plane ascended to a higher altitude. As we broke above the clouds, a bright, luminous glow came into the cabin. High off to our right, a full moon was rising bright and clear in the cold, and the clouds skirted by beneath us like a river of silver silk.

That’s when Eli saw something.

“Daddy! Look!”

He was sitting in my lap, pointing out the window.

Rising from a cloud to the east was some kind of mass. A kind of dark, moving cone, it looked like. A cloud? It was black, dense. Flapping. Alive.

We seemed to be flying toward it—or did it come toward us? At first I thought it was a cloud of birds. More birds in one place than ever imaginable. But then I realized they were bats. They were swarming in an upside-down pyramid, revolving incessantly, mindlessly flying around and around, chasing each other, endlessly moving up and up…

Bong!

“Seat belts!” was all I heard on the PA system. Then we flew into them.

I grabbed my wife and my son and held them to me as what sounded like the fist of God pounded on the plane. The bats flapped against the aircraft, spattered on the windows, were sucked into the engines, and shot out like bloody confetti, a vast black cloud of frantic scurrying and flapping. The starboard engine blew out a moment later, and in another moment we were descending. I closed my eyes and pressed my family to my heart as we plummeted, screaming, toward the earth.

Luckily—in a word—our pilot was an Iraq war vet, used to evasive maneuvers. We dropped several thousand feet in only a few seconds.

But after we came out of the bat tornado, the pilot got the engine working again somehow, and he turned the plane around and headed south and west. We were able to make an emergency landing in Syracuse.

Other planes weren’t so fortunate, we learned. Three airliners were downed. Hundreds more gone. How many would die in this war before it was over? I thought as I huddled in Hancock International Airport’s crowded terminal with my family. I didn’t know. No one did.

Epilogue

PART OF ME still believes that it’s possible to turn the world around. I don’t know how yet, but we will. The greatest known power in the universe is the resilience of man coupled with his intellect. He tinkers and tests and fights through to solutions.

How noble in reason, as Hamlet said. How infinite in faculty. In apprehension how like a god.

I know we will make it. Because from where I write this, I can see my son, Eli. As I look upon his innocent face, so like his mother’s, there is only one thing, one feeling that lingers.

The love my mother and father gave me grows inside of him, day by day, and one day he will pass it on to his wife and child, and it will continue.

We will survive because, although we make a mess of things, we have the hope and faith and will to make things better for ourselves and for those we love.

Making things better is what we do.

Is it?

I don’t know.

Maybe.

I am recording this from a bunker. It’s November, the cold season, and temperatures here hover around minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.

It is dark outside now. It’s almost always dark here in our new, frigid home. The wind makes the walls shudder. I hear its constant, whistling howl even in my dreams now. As if the earth itself is in mourning.

In the nearly twenty-four-hour darkness, sixty-mile-an-hour winds howl off the mountains onto the white desert of the ice cap. Almost no mammals live here, so we are blissfully safe in using our generators and radios. Lucky us.

No matter how bad it is, I put on my arctic suit and go outside once a day, to stare forlornly at the brutal horizon. I consider it a pilgrimage of sorts, a penance for my sins, for all our sins. It doesn’t make me feel better, but I do it anyway. I guess I have finally found religion, in a way. I suppose the end of the world will do that.

There have been several suicides, mostly among Washington people—senators and representatives accustomed to soft living. There is no soft living now.

Communication with the continental US is sporadic. Supplies still seem to be coming in, but there are rumors of chaos back in the States. Lawless bands of people roam the streets, fighting animals and one another. For years, some in our country have advocated modern man’s return to nature. It seems as though they have finally gotten their wish.

In the hours of isolation and boredom, I think about what has happened. Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t blame technology. Petroleum improved human life. So did cell phones. No one knew that the combination of the two would eventually lead to biological disaster. We screwed up. It happens.

But I dreamed that dream again last night. I dream it often.

The dream of the death spiral. The ants I saw once in Costa Rica. There was a circle in the sand. The squirming black whirlpool. Thousands and thousands of ants, all running together in an endless circle. Blindly, they follow each other, each one locked onto the pheromone trail of the ant in front of him. Running themselves in circles, circles. Running themselves to death. A closed loop. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Locked in their loop, the ants run around and around in circles—desperate, stupid, doomed.