James Patterson - Zoo

I reached for the wheel, tried to right the vehicle. The car slid into the Jersey barrier at around eighty. Metal shrieked and showered sparks as we lurched up and rode the barrier for fifty feet before the momentum flipped the truck.

DARK. AT FIRST I thought the rhythmic thump-thump-thump was my heartbeat. Then I opened my eyes. I realized the noise was the windshield wipers beating uselessly against the shattered windshield.

The truck’s upside-down shattered windshield.

The SUV had come to rest on its roof in the left lane. I was being held in place by my shoulder belt, dangling like a bat. I felt hot blood from my nose dripping into my hair. I sneezed and sprayed a mist of blood onto my one good suit. I blinked, staring out through the hole in the windshield. My thoughts were slow and oozy.

Hmm. So what now?

I turned toward Alvarez. He was upside down, like me, still unconscious and bleeding steadily from a gash in his temple.

I reached out for his seat belt and was stopped when I looked out the window. In between the steady slap of the wipers pushing glass crumbs into the car, I heard a strange huffing sound. Outside the passenger-side window, something was moving.

I squinted at it. Brown. Brown. Brown.

A enormous muzzle and small beady black eyes appeared in the window.

Oh, okay, I thought. That’s a bear.

It gazed through the window at me with an almost quizzical expression. What I was feeling wasn’t even quite fear. What I was feeling was the fear equivalent of when you’re so sad you laugh. The wheel of fear went around a whole turn, came out the other side. I thought, well, this is it.

How a grizzly bear had gotten here on this strip of road beside our wrecked truck was unclear. What it was doing in Washington, D.C., was unclear. Escaped from the zoo? I had a feeling that it didn’t work for AAA.

It made its choppy huffing sound again and pressed its moist black snout against the glass of the car window. It sniffed at the glass and then made a low throaty moan as it scratched at the window with a paw twice the size of a catcher’s mitt.

The screech of the bear’s claws on the glass snapped me out of my little absence seizure. Fumbling with my seat belt release, I stretched an arm into the backseat, feeling for Sergeant Alvarez’s rifle.

I abandoned my search for the rifle as the bear moved from the passenger side to the front. I felt the truck lurch upward as the bear began squeezing himself under the upside-down hood.

So this is how I will die, I thought. Eaten by a grizzly while hanging upside down in a car wreck. Interesting, at least. If, years before, you’d gazed into a crystal ball and told me that was how I’d go, I genuinely would not have believed you.

I turned to Alvarez and tried to shake him awake. For what reason I didn’t know. To wake him up for his death? I wasn’t sure. I guess I didn’t want to die alone. In any case, he was out for the night.

The bear had shimmied its mass under the hood, and was now nosing the hole the compound bucket had made. It sniffed and huffed as it began peeling back the shattered glass. The bear ripped at the glass as though it were a kid tearing into a stubborn candy wrapper.

Then I remembered the grenades that dangled like avocados from the sergeant’s vest. I unclipped the first one I could reach. I bit out its pin and tossed it at the bear as hard as I could as it poked its head in below the upside-down dashboard.

The bear roared and reared back as the hissing canister clanged off the side of its head. Interesting experience, having a bear roar in your face. The bear shook his head as if he’d been slapped.

Instead of exploding, the canister came to a spinning stop on the asphalt under the hood and began pouring out canary-yellow smoke. Roiling, acrid fumes burned my eyes. The smoke stung like a wasp stings. I covered my mouth as I coughed.

I reached over to Alvarez and managed to wrench another grenade free from his vest. But by the time I was ready to throw it I could see I didn’t need it. Beyond the window, I saw the bear in retreat, bounding over the grass beyond the shoulder of the road.

When the air cleared, a long minute later, I finally disentangled myself. Alvarez was hacking up a lung by the time I got him out of his seat belt as well. We crawled out of the wreck. The SUV looked like John Belushi had crushed it against his forehead.

“What the hell just happened?” Alvarez said, slouching against the Jersey barrier, touching his face and inspecting the blood on his fingertips.

“It’s just like bees,” I said to myself, looking at the smoke billowing from beneath the truck.

“What bees?” said Alvarez, rooting around in the wreck for his rifle. “You okay, Professor? You bang your head?”

“When the animals smell us, they want to attack us,” I said, crouching with him behind the overturned truck. “Anything that masks our scent makes us invisible. That’s why the smoke drove off the bear. It knocked our scent out of the air.”

“No shit,” Alvarez said absently, shouldering his gun.

“It makes perfect sense,” I said. I was thinking out loud. “Beekeepers use smoke in the same way. When the keeper shakes up a nest, the bees produce a pheromone that signals a mass attack. Except nothing happens because the smoke disperses the signal.”

“So that’s what happened to all the animals, Professor—why they swarm together? They’ve all, like, bugged out or something?”

“Exactly. They’ve all bugged out,” I said. “Now call one of your marine buddies to get us the hell out of here. We need to tell them how to fight this thing.”

THE FREIGHT ELEVATOR is pretty rank even before Private First Class Donald Rodale starts collecting the garbage from the Fifth Avenue emergency government residence that evening. By the time he’s done, at six thirty, the lush, steamy aroma from the chest-high pile of greasy garbage bags is making his eyes tear and his lunch churn dangerously in his gut.

Stopping the old manual elevator in the basement, a particularly slimy Hefty CinchSak slides off the top of the pile and smacks him in the back of both legs with a wet spatter.

Bull’s-eye, Rodale thinks.

Rodale opens the gate to the building’s rear courtyard and begins carrying out the garbage bags one at a time, tossing them into a plastic rolling bin. When the bin is filled to its brim, he gets behind it and begins rolling it up a steep ramp leading to Eighty-First Street.

Huffing and slick with sweat, Rodale scowls when he makes it to the top of the ramp. The little security booth by the gate is empty. The guard at the booth is supposed to kill the juice on the electric fence and cover him with an M16 while he makes the journey across the street to toss the trash into the shipping container. But he’s MIA.

What to do. The guard who’s usually at the booth is a cop named Quinlan. Cool dude. He doesn’t want to get him in trouble for not being at his post.

Problem is, if he waits around here any longer, he’ll be late to help Suskind, a whiny prick if there ever was one, with the Porta-Pottys across the street at the museum. He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

Rodale looks down the long dark corridor of East Eighty-First through the chain-link fence. It’s empty. Just a narrow lane of brick and granite town houses, trees, empty sidewalks. No rabid packs of crazed animals. Nothing at all.

Fuck it, Rodale thinks. Only take a second. He leans into the guard booth, hits the cutoff for the electrical gate, and swings it open.