James Patterson - Zoo

And then we were flying. The Rover went airborne, backward off the steep riverbank, and for a moment, we were in the air. While bracing for impact, I had a good long two seconds of quiet time to reflect on the situation my life was in, and in those seconds, I decided that I really couldn’t blame Natalie for dumping my ass. Then we hit the ground.

ABE AND I both went sailing out of the Rover as it smashed backward into the riverbank a good ten feet below the sandy ridge. My body whumped into the muddy shore and the truck beside me tipped onto its side with a groan and a decisive crunch of metal, plastic, and glass.

I staggered to my feet, slapped mud from my face, and checked myself for injuries. I could feel bruises galore blooming all over my body, but nothing worse. The truck was still running, its engine panting, its back end submerged in muddy water. One sideways back wheel spun uselessly in the silt, stirring the muddy water.

Abe was in bad shape—as in probably dead. One of his legs was pinned beneath the sideways Rover, and his head was all wrong, almost perpendicular to his body. It looked like his neck had broken in the crash. He wasn’t breathing.

I checked his pulse and wasn’t surprised to find that he had none. Then I glanced up at the edge of the riverbank shelf we’d just been flung from. The heads of lions peered over it. A moment later they were spilling over its edge.

I backpedaled into the shallows of the river. There was one lion in particular—huge, bigger than the others, with a reddish mane and one eye. This one had it in for me. He came right for me.

I turned and dove deep into the river. Kicking as hard as I could, I swam as far out into the slow-moving muddy current as possible. This was a river in a time of drought—the water wasn’t cold and it wasn’t deep. It was warm, shallow, and dirty. I stood on my tiptoes in the middle of the river, and the water line was just below my head. I shook my hair, blinked water out of my eyes, spat, watched the shore. Abe’s body was surrounded by six or seven lions, their manes rustling against each other. They pawed and picked at him as less majestic animals would do. But the other one, the big lion, strode past the sideways Rover and dove into the water after me, panting like mad as he paddled in my direction.

I’d thought I was safe. But no.

Lions hate water. They’re not good swimmers—their dense, muscular bodies aren’t built for it. They’ll swim if necessary, to ford a river during the rainy season, for instance, but for a lion to chase prey into water is pretty much unheard-of.

I turned again and headed toward a sandy spit of land in the middle of the river.

Ten paces from the shore of the islet I saw a long black box bobbing in the water, drifting like a chunk of wood in the lazy current. Flotsam from the overturned Rover upstream. I splashed toward it, thinking I could maybe use it as a makeshift life preserver.

It was a life preserver, in fact: one of the gun cases Abe had brought. I snatched it from the water and slogged for the shore.

Stumbling, hurt, tired, with the gun case under my arm, I fought my way toward the reedy islet and felt the embankment rise under my heavy feet. I had no plan. I was beyond thinking. Ashore, I fell to my knees in the sucking reedy mud like a sinner in church, popped the clasps, thwack-thwack, and retrieved a flat-black bolt-action Mauser 98, a truly badass piece of machinery that had a barrel gauge like a plumbing pipe.

What had Abraham said? I thought as I slung the bandolier over my shoulder and filled the magazine to its limit. Better to have it and not need it.

Walking slowly backward onto the islet, I took aim at the giant cat that was paddling toward me in the river like a dog. He was mere feet away, emerging from the river, shaking off, flinging a thousand twinkling beads of water from his mane. I squared up the rifle, aimed between his eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The gun butt rocketed against my shoulder and the lion went down before me like a sack of potatoes, tumbling in a sopping heap into the river mud. PETA, forgive me. It was a beautiful creature, but it was also a very big, beautiful creature that was trying to kill me.

I turned my eyes back to the riverbank. I watched in disbelief as the lions loosed Abe’s corpse from underneath the truck and hauled him back up the steep, sandy embankment.

I SAT FOR a long time on the shore of the river island, staring at the spot on the opposite riverbank where the lions had carried off Abe’s body. I didn’t think they would come back for me, but I kept the rifle in my lap with the safety off as I sat on the muddy islet, reflected on what had just happened, caught my breath, and collected my wits.

Beside me, the lion I’d just killed lay on his side, sinking into the loose mud, his back legs in the river, tail floating, blood darkening the grass and eddying in the brown water.

Time to assess the situation. Okay, Oz, here’s the 411: you’re lost and alone in the African bush without any supplies. This is a situation that needs to be addressed, quickly. But every time I tried to start figuring out what to do next, my mind would wander. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened.

The more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

Lions are textbook examples of social mammals. Their pride structure, especially when it comes to group hunting, is one of the best-known and most well-documented social organizations in zoology. Lions live in prides, and female lions do the hunting. Nomad male lions will hunt alone, but male lions never hunt together in groups.

Except now, all that was out the window. I’d never even heard of mass male group hunting in lions before, let alone witnessed it. Also: why were these lions carrying off their kills? And why no females? Female lions are better at hunting, anyway. That’s one reason why they do most of it for the pride—their lighter, more agile bodies are better built for it. Where the hell were the girls? I hadn’t seen a lioness all day.

Such bizarre behavior in these lions wasn’t just curious, it was mind-blowing. These lions were doing things that lions just did not do. What I’d just seen contradicted everything I knew about the behavior of this apex predator. Why?

This is to say nothing of the fact that lions are almost never actually harmful to humans. What’s the point in hunting a human? We don’t have a lot of meat on us. The way those lions had come after us, it was as if it were personal.

I knelt and cupped some river water in my palm, splashed my face. I would have to save my confusion for a time when I was in a more comfortable position. For now, I had to snap out of it. Ponder later. I needed to do something to fix my current predicament, stat.

Shifting the rifle in my lap, I patted a rectangular lump in the pocket of my wet khakis. It was my iPhone, which I’d jailbroken the day before so it would work in Africa. Ha-ha. I shook it off: bubbles wobbled under the screen and water dribbled from the battery compartment. So much for calling for help. In any case I wouldn’t have gotten coverage out in the remote African bush. Sure as hell not with AT&T.

I chucked the now-useless chunk of sleek Apple design over my shoulder and saw two huge, gray lumps the size of oil tanks float past me in the river. I stilled as two river hippos swam past.

Hippos are herbivores, of course—but they’re enormous and aggressively territorial animals. They’ll kill without hesitation when they feel their territory is being invaded. They’re actually some of the most dangerous animals you could encounter around here. I held my breath until the two malevolent tugboats disappeared around the bend in the channel.