James Patterson - Zoo

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.

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.