James Patterson - Zoo

WE HAD TO wait around awhile before we were picked up and taken away from the place where our SUV had crashed.

Being out in the open while we waited was a strange feeling—simultaneously boring and terrifying. The whole time, I stood on the highway median, leaning on the smashed truck as I looked up and down the flat, empty highway through the sight of Alvarez’s M16, praying we wouldn’t see another animal.

A Humvee with a roof rack full of blazing lights finally arrived about fifteen minutes after we’d called. Two marines jumped out. There was a dead Saint Bernard lashed to its hood with bungee cords. They were taking trophies now. This was a war.

I wondered who was winning.

“The fuck took you so long?” said Alvarez.

“Attacks are everywhere now, Sarge,” said the driver, a wiry black man with haunted-looking eyes. “We had to shoot our way out here. The Pentagon got hit. Reagan Airport is completely overrun by a swarm of dogs. The hangars, the terminal, everywhere. No planes in or out until the situation gets dealt with.”

Terrific. No flights, I thought as we carefully laid Alvarez, bloody as a butcher’s apron and spitting curses, across the backseat of the Hummer. Now how the hell was I going to get home? I was stuck.

The driver pounded the gas and floored us back to the Marine Corps base next to the White House. We didn’t encounter any more animal hordes directly, but down alleyways, side streets, inside windows, we could see movement, shadows scurrying. The whole city felt infested now.

Relatively safe back inside the base and the packed medical tent, I was getting stitches in my elbow when an attractive petite woman with reddish-brown hair came in. She carried a walkie-talkie and had a White House security badge clipped to the lapel of a pricey blazer.

“Is there a Jackson Oz here?” she called out. “I’m looking for a Mr. Jackson Oz.”

I sat there a moment in silence while she trawled the medical tent. What did they have in store for me now? I thought. An IRS audit, perhaps?

I’d come down here in order to help, and all I’d gotten to show for it was being stranded and separated from my family as the world dissolved into chaos. Oh, and a car wreck, twenty stitches, and a bear.

But as the redhead was turning to leave, I called out to her.

“I’m Jackson Oz,” I said. “What do you need?”

Her eyebrows danced as she lifted her walkie-talkie.

“I found him,” she said into the radio. “I’ll bring him straightaway.”

“Bring me where?” I said.

“Rianna Morton, deputy cabinet secretary,” she said, offering a hand.

“Bring me where?” I repeated.

“A cabinet meeting is adjourning as we speak,” Ms. Morton said. “Mr. Leahy said you have a presentation?”

Five minutes later I was back inside the White House compound, hurrying with the staffer past the flower beds and boxwoods of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. We went through a basement door and up some stairs and turned to the right down a majestic paneled corridor lined with fireplaces, antique bookcases, bronze busts.

I guess this isn’t another runaround after all, I thought as I realized we were walking through the White House’s West Wing.

In the Cabinet Room vestibule, a hulking marine in dress blues checked my ID with a white-gloved hand. Among the crowd of suits behind him, I saw the vice president and the secretary of state. They were joking around with each other, something that involved sticking Post-it notes onto the BlackBerrys they weren’t allowed to bring into the meeting.

Outside, the nation’s capital was melting down, probably the world, too, but the well-protected politicians were sharing a pleasant bon mot .

No wonder people liked Washington, D.C., so much, I thought.

I HEARD A familiar voice behind me call my name.

There was a soft sound of electric buzzing, and the crowd of suits parted as Charles Groh hummed up to me in his wheelchair. I grasped his hand.

“Finally, a friendly face,” I said. “What’s the word? You hear anything?”

“Are you okay, Oz?”

I remembered that I was filthy and covered in blood. My sleeves were rolled up and my loosened tie dangled absurdly down the front of my blood-speckled button-down.

“I’m fine. Car crash, bear attack. I’ll tell you later. Any news from the world?”

“It didn’t work, Oz,” Dr. Groh said as I followed his wheelchair from the security line to the other side of the hallway. “The bombing campaign was nothing more than a lot of sound and fury, signifying jack shit. Now that they’re done with their temper tantrum, they want to hear from us.”

“We should take a minute to compare notes,” I said, motioning Dr. Groh toward the corner of the room.

“Sounds good, Oz,” he said, producing a thin gray MacBook Air from a leather satchel dangling off his chair. “These are thick skulls we’re going to have to try to get through.”

Aides were sitting like ducks along both walls of the Cabinet Room when we came in some fifteen minutes later. Rianna Morton directed me to a chair at the end of the oblong table farthest from the door. As she tipped a pitcher of ice water into the glass in front of me, I noticed there were several glossy monitors set up on rolling carts. The chancellor of Germany was on one of them, whispering with an aide. On another screen was the British prime minister.

“This meeting will be videoconferenced with several world leaders,” Ms. Morton explained. “The paramount leader of China should be online in a moment.”

As I tried, unsuccessfully, not to let that information rattle my chain, President Hardinson arrived. Everyone in the room who had been seated shot to their feet. Except for Dr. Groh.

It was the first time I’d seen President Marlena Hardinson in person. She did have a remarkably arresting presence, this slightly heavyset woman with bags under her dark green owlish eyes, eyes that had an almost intimidating intelligence in them. She was stately in pearls and a midnight-blue blazer.

“Okay, everyone,” Hardinson said, waving the people to their seats. Her voice had that familiar husky rasp that I’d heard on TV a thousand times before, but it was an odd feeling to hear it in the flesh. She smiled as she sat down at the center of the table. Her smile had no warmth in it. I reminded myself that her teenage daughter died yesterday, and that I wasn’t supposed to know that.

“Mr. Oz, Dr. Groh,” she said, nodding to us. “Please. Tell us what you know.”

All eyes were on me. I sucked in a deep breath.

“Thank you, Ms. President,” I said. “Everyone, my name is Jackson Oz, and for the last ten years I’ve been researching the aberrant animal behavior now known as HAC. Animal attacks on people have been around as long as people have been around, but over the last fifteen years or so we began noticing a startling, exponential increase of animal-on-human violence.

“Coupled with this increased aggression, animals also began exhibiting behavior uncharacteristic not only of their particular species but also of mammals in general. All over the world—as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now—animals are aggregating in swarms or hordes and attacking human beings en masse. This is not happening at random. Animals are forming into insect-like swarms.”

“Insects?” said the secretary of defense. “Why? And why now?”

Charles Groh cut in. “Inadvertent man-made changes to the environment, sir,” he said, clicking his laptop to control the PowerPoint display.

I waited for the hydrocarbon graph to pop up on the screen before continuing.

“Recently, human beings have caused two things to become prevalent in the environment that weren’t around before: electromagnetic radiation and the by-products of petroleum. Petroleum is an organic compound made up mostly of hydrocarbons. We believe that in the last fifteen years, the explosion of electromagnetic radiation due to cell phone use has begun ‘cooking,’ if you will, the hydrocarbons that are all around us, ultimately changing their chemical makeup.