James Patterson - Zoo

“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.”

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.