James Patterson - Zoo

There were nods all around. Harvey Saltonstall was visibly irritated. You could see the steam escaping from his ears.

“But that still doesn’t explain why these alleged hydrocarbon-morphed pheromones don’t affect human beings. Can you explain that, Mr. Oz?”

He gave the “Mr.” a very slight emphasis to remind everyone that I didn’t have a PhD.

I bit my lip again. But only to create my own dramatic pause. I did have an answer.

“Human beings lack the vomeronasal organ,” I said to Saltonstall. “The tissue at the base of the nasal cavity that causes response to airborne pheromones. Almost all mammals have it, but not humans. In fact, there are theories that the human VNO may have diminished as our relationship with dogs evolved. As it got bigger in dogs, it went away in humans. Many of the genes essential for the VNO are completely nonfunctional in humans.”

I looked around the room and realized I had won it.

Saltonstall sat there looking as though I’d yanked his pants down, so I assumed he knew what I was talking about. Dr. Orlean smiled at me.

“Bravo, Mr. Oz,” she said. “I don’t think anyone can deny that this is a breakthrough. I think we’ve finally hit the jackpot. For the first time I feel like we have a good chance of understanding what’s causing HAC.”

“Yes, but unfortunately that only leads us to the next question,” I said. “How do we stop it?”

A BATTERED POLICE van emits a feeble, oscillating shriek as it weaves through the clogged, dust-choked streets of East Delhi, India.

Behind the van’s wheel, newly appointed sub-inspector Pardeep Sekhar nearly clips a fruit vendor as he wipes sweat off his face with the sleeve of his khaki shirt. The fruit vendor erupts into a torrent of curses, and Pardeep answers him with a dismissive wave.

“Clean the dirt out of your ears, bumpkin,” he halfheartedly grumbles out the window. “That sound from my van—that’s not a demon but a siren. It means, out of the way. Police coming through!”

Pardeep blames the television and Internet for the last decade’s influx of rural migrants into the city. All those channels luring illiterate fools into the bright lights and Bollywood lifestyle they will never achieve. When they can’t find work, they turn to petty crime—pickpocketing, purse snatching. That’s where he comes in.

At the next traffic-glutted intersection, he laughs to himself as he watches a guy trying to maneuver his cherry-red Lamborghini around a donkey cart. An Italian luxury car revving around a jackass is twenty-first-century India in a nutshell. Digital age, meet stone age.

If only I had a camera, he thinks. The men back at the station would love it.

Pardeep’s beat is Yamuna Pushta—the largest slum in Delhi, which puts it in the running for the largest slum in the world. In every direction lie blocks of jhuggis, makeshift huts made out of wood and cardboard tied together with string. The shantytown has no electricity or sewers. Today, people are flying kites and playing volleyball; naked children sit grinning as they play in the dirt.

Pardeep brings the van to a stop in front of a three-story concrete housing block beside a particularly fetid section of the Yamuna River. The Yamuna is a tributary of the Ganges. Bathing in its sacred water, according to the holy men, is supposed to free one from the torments of death.

Pardeep rolls up the window and through the dusty glass takes a look out across the smooth brown surface of the polluted cesspool. He sighs and shuts off the engine.

It would free one, all right. But not from death. From life.

He looks up at the grim three-story complex: River Meadow Apartments. They make it sound pleasant, don’t they? The calls that have been coming in from the building are confusing. People screaming about a break-in, a crazed killer stalking the hallways.

Pardeep shrugs his narrow shoulders. Looks quiet enough from the outside. Probably a prank.

Still, he lifts his newly issued weapon off the floor of the passenger-side footwell just in case. It’s one of the Indian-made INSAS submachine guns that have been handed out in the years since the Mumbai terrorist attacks. He casually shoulders the strap and heads for the building.

In the back of his mind, Pardeep idly hopes it isn’t a prank but a real-life terrorist. He would love nothing more than to blow some foreign-born radical scum to smithereens, maybe get promoted out of the city’s armpit in the bargain.

He’s trying to decide which plum district he would like to be assigned to when an old man runs screaming from the building.

“Raksasom! Rana! Atanka!” he warbles as he runs past the van.

Monsters. Horror. Run.

Monsters. Pardeep smiles to himself, amused. This is a prank. Probably kids playing tricks on some superstitious old fools.

“Hello? Police,” he says, entering the lobby. It’s deserted. “Police!”

The smell is awful. It smells like shit, garbage, death—which is to say, nothing unusual for this neighborhood.

There’s no response. He starts up the stairs.

At the top of the first-floor landing he sees something moving in the dimness down at the end of the hallway. It’s low to the ground, perhaps about waist level. In the windowless corridor, it looks to Pardeep like a woman with a blanket over her, crawling on all fours. He is confused. He reaches for his flashlight, takes a few steps closer.

Then there is something moving at him very fast down the dark hallway. He clicks on his flashlight and sees bright eyes flash jewel-green in the darkness. Then he is falling backward.

Pardeep doesn’t have time to scream as the leopard opens him from belly to chin.

Two more leopards arrive, skulking slyly in the hallway.

The leopard is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. The beautiful turquoise-eyed creature is sometimes called a leaping chain saw due to the fact that it uses both its rear claws and its razor-sharp front claws, as well as its teeth, when it strikes.

Before a dark mist falls over his eyes, one last word floats up from Pardeep’s mind.

Raksasom .

Monsters.

I HAD A dream that night. I dreamed of a circle of ants. They chased each other in a spiral—a squirming black whirlpool. Turning around and around, each one blindly chasing the pheromone trail of the ant just in front of him. A closed circle. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Locked in their loop, the ants ran around and around in circles—desperate, stupid, doomed.

I didn’t know what time it was when I woke in the dark to the sound of what sounded like the world ending.

There was an alarm going EEHN EEHN EEHN . It sounded as though I were on a submarine that had just been torpedoed.

I clawed at the sheets and scrambled to sit up. Smoke detector? I thought. Some kind of military alarm?

Then I saw a light pulsing on the bedside table and realized the sound was coming from my iPhone. I vaguely remembered Eli playing with it the day before. Three-year-old kid knew more about the stupid thing than I did. I snatched it off the table and shut it off. Kid had set it to some crazy DEFCON 3 ringtone. Which was actually funny, in a morbid way, under the present quasi-apocalyptic circumstances. My heart started beating again, and I almost laughed. Then I answered it.

“Mr. Oz, sorry to bother you at this hour,” Lieutenant Durkin said. “I have a message for you from Mr. Leahy of the NSA. A high-level meeting is scheduled at the White House this morning. The president will be there, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Leahy has requested that you be there in person to present the new theory you and the other scientists have developed.”