James Patterson - Zoo

ABE COCKED HIS head and whistled, and the dogs leaped from the truck and into the tall grass.

“Listen, man,” Abe said as he sighted through his rifle’s telescope. “If it comes up, the best way to kill a lion is a head shot, right between the eyes.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said, continuing to film.

I lowered the camera a moment later when two sharp, loud dog whines rose in the air at the clearing’s edge. One right after the other.

Abe whistled for the dogs. Nothing happened.

He put his fingers to his lips, whistled louder. Silence.

“That’s not good,” he said.

Abe raised the Remington to his shoulder and pressed an eye to its sight. I swung my camera in the same direction and held my breath.

A lion appeared in the grass twenty yards to our east.

I had never seen a lion in the wild before. It is a beautiful and terrifying sight. The sheer bigness of the animal. It truly makes something spin in your soul, deep below the ribs.

I was still in a state of unprofessional awe when Abe pulled the trigger. The blast of the rifle so close to me was like a kick in the head. It left a mosquito whine in my left ear. In the place where the lion had been standing a moment before, there was nothing. It was as if he had disappeared.

Abe climbed back up into the Land Rover.

“Get your ass up here if you feel like staying alive, man.”

That sounded like a good idea to me. I slammed the door, and then there was motion from the other end of the clearing. A second male lion broke cover and stood up in the tall grass, stock-still, tail swishing. Watching us. There was something otherworldly and bleak about his implacable, amber-eyed gaze.

The lion roared and began moving toward us. Slowly at first. Then something triggered in him, and he tumbled into a charge, coming at us at breakneck speed. Abe pulled the trigger just as he began his leap. Another jolting crack of firepower in the air. I saw a fistful of brain fly out of the back of his head. He died in the air and slammed onto the ground in a tumble, rolling into the driver’s side of the truck, rocking it as though it were a cradle in the grass.

I kept filming as Abe kicked out the bullet casing. It pinged off the edge of the windshield with a sound like a wind chime. On the ground below, I noticed that the lion was still breathing.

Not for long. There was another whamming thud as Abe shot it right above the buttocks through the spine.

Abe replaced the three spent cartridges in the rifle’s magazine. When he was done, he lifted off his hat and swiped his brow as he looked around the clearing. Silence. No insects, no birds. The shadow of a high white cloud raced over us. I took my eye from the viewfinder for a moment and glanced at Abe beside me. He looked sick.

I panned the camera, following his gaze.

In the grass about thirty feet away, surrounding the truck, was a circle of tawny heads.

All the lions had manes. They were males. Two dozen male lions.

Abe was blinking, a finger to his open lips. He was so puzzled that confusion got the better of terror.

“Impossible,” he whispered. “All males?”

It didn’t make sense. Male lions just don’t do that. A pride of lions consists of a dozen or so related female lions and one, sometimes two, at most three or four males, if it’s an unusually large group. Adult male lions who aren’t part of a pride will hunt alone. Never—absolutely never—in the wild do male lions congregate in large numbers. It just doesn’t happen.

Except it was happening.

I kept rolling with the camera as the male lions began moving. They moved forward for a few steps, then stopped to allow the lion behind them to go forward. They seemed like trained soldiers, coordinated, choreographed, synchronized.

I expected Abe to stomp on the gas and get us the hell out of there. Instead, his mouth pinched into a hard set. Almost in a single fluid motion he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and fired. Off to the left, the head of the lion closest to the truck blew open and the animal slumped into the grass.

Abe was swinging his rifle around for the next one when the grass in front of the truck opened up and a golden blur streaked in front of the camera.

A paw caught Abraham in the face, and there was a cracking sound as he flipped out over the driver’s-side door.

FOR A LONG—much too long—moment, all I could do was sit there in the passenger seat of the truck as if my ass had been nailed to it.

I was visited with the same sudden, gut-squeezing spike of fear I’d experienced when I first jumped out of a Black Hawk as an Army Ranger medic in the Battle of Fallujah. I’d stood there at the door like a dunce with his dick in his hand, unable to move. Okay, here we go. Here we go. Okay, now . Paralysis. Here we go . I even did the same thing I’d done that day as bullets sang past my confused, cotton-filled head.

Act, jackass! I mentally screamed at myself. Do something!

Abe’s gun was lying cockeyed across the driver’s seat next to me. I snatched it up and anchored the barrel on the driver’s-side door. The lion had Abe in his mouth, and was dragging him backward through the grass by the collar of his shirt.

The rifle kicked hard against my shoulder as I shot the lion in the head. I jumped out of the truck and ran the fifteen feet or so across the grass to where the dead lion lay and where Abe, his head pouring blood, was shakily climbing to his feet. My only goal at this point was to get us the hell out of there, get Abe to a doctor.

I draped his arm around me and we hobbled back to the truck. Abe was bigger than me and much heavier. It was slow going.

There was so much blood bursting from Abe’s head I couldn’t tell where the wounds were. I got him into the backseat of the truck, and I was trying to MacGyver a bandage out of his shirt when the truck rocked like a boat and almost tipped over. A lion had leaped onto the hood like a cat scrambling onto an armchair. He peered curiously through the windshield. His eyes were warm amber stones. They glowed like heat, blood, and honey.

I decided—if you want to call it that—the best place to be was under the steering wheel. I crawled into the front of the truck, toward the lion instead of away from it, a bit like a boxer leaning into a punch. I dropped under the steering wheel and squeezed myself in until I was crouching against the floorboard and clutching the gun. As I was waiting for my life to end, I reflected on the fact that the Rover was still running. I slammed my palm down on the gas pedal.

The engine roared in place, and nothing happened.

It wasn’t in gear.

I pounded the clutch with my elbow and reached up and toggled the stick shift back and forth until I heard something catch. I let out the clutch and gave it some more gas with my other hand.

The truck lurched backward. I’d managed to put it in reverse, which was fine with me. We were moving. I pressed the accelerator onto the muddy floorboard with my palm and held it there, and I felt the driverless truck rocking and fishtailing at random across the grass. My head whacked against the steering wheel and the metal door frame as the Rover went bumping backward over the field. On the hood above me, I could hear the lion snarling; his claws clicked and shrieked against the glass.

With the car still in motion, I unwound a little from the fetal position to see his front paws and his massive shaggy head peeking over the top of the windshield—he looked like one of those old “Kilroy was here” drawings—and I reached up and cut the wheel hard to the left. The lion roared as he slid, scrabbling for purchase, off the windshield and fell beside the car, yelping as the Rover thumped against him.