James Patterson - Zoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ugh. What now?”

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

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

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

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

Natalie stands, looking down at herself in disgust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looks at himself in the mirror and positions the red hat on his own head at a rakish angle. He crouches on the edge of the sink, opposable toes gripping the porcelain rim, staring at himself.

Attila sits blank-faced on the sink, motionless and tense, as he stares into his own glassy brown eyes, his rubbery, masklike face. Attila is confused, becoming more agitated by the moment. Something strange and awful is stirring in his soul. He feels alienated by his own reflection.

From the moment Natalie arrived, Attila had detected an odd, unsettling smell—a mixture of the apricot scent of her shampoo, her minty deodorant, even the slight acrid whiff of nail polish on her toes. There was something queasy, bad, sickening about the combination of smells on her. All those grubby odors mingled with the worst smell of all—the scent of her, her resentment of him, her disgust. He smelled that. He had smelled her contempt.

That’s why he had tricked her.

Attila returns to his cage. From the corner he retrieves what looks like a children’s toy tablet. It is a PECS—a Picture Exchange Communication System—a talking touch-screen laptop designed to help teach language to autistic children, which Oz has used in his experiments with Attila.

On the screen are rows of pictures, things that Attila might want, such as bananas, peanuts, balls, and dolls. Also scattered among the columns are pictures of faces displaying various expressions.

Again and again, Attila presses the picture representing himself, and then the face in the lower right-hand corner of the grid.

“Attila, angry! ” says the chipper, computerized female voice to the empty apartment. “Attila, angry! ”

MAUN TO JOHANNESBURG, Johannesburg to New York, New York to D.C. The chirping of the jet’s landing gear and the accompanying jolt of bumping wheels woke me up as we touched down at Reagan National Airport.

As we thudded along the runway I gaped out the window at the majestic and welcome sight of the Washington Monument’s ivory spire across the Potomac. I remembered coming down to D.C. from New York on Amtrak with my dad to see the sights when I was a kid. We would visit the Lincoln Memorial, throw pennies in the reflecting pool. Everything had seemed so solid then. So rational and safe.

I reached into the seat-back pocket in front of me and took out the DVR tape of the lion attacks that I’d smuggled out of Africa. That was then, I thought, shaking my head at it. This is now. Then I slipped the tape into my shirt pocket.

I turned on the iPhone I’d bought in the airport: my in-box was flooded with e-mails, and there were nineteen voice mails. During the layover in Johannesburg I’d been contacting every scientist I could think of who might have any interest in HAC.

I’d put out the Bat-Signal all over the world, and had managed to scramble together a last-second rendezvous with several of my allies before my meeting with Senator Gardner. This was our first shot at getting HAC taken seriously by the world, and I wanted to go over everything one last time to make sure we had our story straight.

I looked beside me at Chloe, sleeping peacefully with her head against my arm.

No wonder she was exhausted. We’d talked pretty much nonstop on our transcontinental trip back to the States, going over all possibilities about HAC. I was a little amazed at how quickly we also slid into more personal matters. Our childhoods, families, the kinds of things that really mattered.

Chloe’s mother had died when she was five. Her father was a career military man, an officer in the French Foreign Legion, who often left her on her grandparents’ isolated cattle farm in Auvergne. Her grandfather, a retired civil engineer turned farmer, opened her eyes to the wonders of the natural world—farming, gardening, and especially animals.