James Patterson - Zoo

The smell in the air is back, calling him, dragging him to his feet. The female beside him is seething as well, her eyes bright with anxious rage.

The animals are back by the time he climbs down from the rock. They cover the softball field like a living rug. The pack is bigger and more bloodthirsty than before.

Attila leads the swarm east, toward the apartment-building lights. His eye is trained on the terraces of the high-rises. He knows how to climb them, how to get in. He will go alone and open the doors for the others. The smell tells him this. This time, he will not fail.

Any mercy he has shown to man is not even a memory anymore. Because he has no memory. He has the smell. The smell is master, friend, mate. The smell is all.

A man and a woman on a motorcycle are riding crosstown on the Sixty-Fifth Street Transverse. Attila gives his pant-hoot call to herd the others, but it is unnecessary. In the pheromone cloud, sounds are unnecessary. The animals can smell what he wants in his breath and sweat. His orders become scents. The mass moves, anticipating him almost as easily as his own hand.

A roaring cascade of bodies falls from a bridge onto the motorcycle. It is a husband and wife, both in their fifties. The woman is enveloped first. She screams as teeth and claws meet flesh. Attila, at the bottom of the scrum, gnaws chunks out of the woman’s leg, blinking against the jet of arterial blood.

The man, a retired cop from Queens, reaches for a sidearm that hasn’t been there since 1999. A rat makes off with his left pinkie up to the first knuckle. Then a squirrel attaches itself to his face with a squeak, clawing at his eyes. A rottweiler bites into his crotch, and he sinks to the ground.

The animals lacerate the people, carve them to ribbons as efficiently as the blades in an abattoir. In less than three minutes, all that’s left of the two is very dirty laundry.

Stained red with slaughter, Attila moves himself and the swarm toward the smell of humans. All the animals are moving together now with the same rhythm, like cells in the bloodstream.

There is no Attila anymore. He is bigger now. Something else has broken through, taken over. He is only energy now, a soulless organization of bones and blood and meat propelled by electricity and surging chemicals. He moves toward the sounds, toward the lights.

AH, HOW QUICKLY the tide turned back. The blood-red tide.

With the sounds of generators came screams and roaring gunfire. Were we really this stupid? Yes, apparently.

It was just coming on midnight when the door of my trailer whacked open and Alvarez darkened the doorway behind it.

“Grab your shit, Oz. We’re overrun. They’re evacuating the White House.”

The East Wing had been overtaken. Inside and out, hundreds of thousands of mammals—dogs, raccoons, rats, squirrels, possums—were streaming uphill into the iconic building, swarming like ants. The gunfire was constant now. As I ran alongside Alvarez I saw a luminous orange glow lighting up the sky to the northeast. I pointed to it.

“What’s—”

“The Capitol’s on fire” was all he said. We kept running.

Alvarez rushed me into a waiting truck. The marine guard at the east gate was down, blood running over his dress blues, his face chewed off. Alvarez glanced at him, raised his AA-12, and squeezed a lackadaisical stream of firepower in the direction of the handful of mold-spotted dogs still working on the body.

“God help us,” Alvarez said, crossing himself.

“Help us?” I said. “God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, didn’t he? I know I’m just a scientist, but it looks like we’ve pissed him off again.”

An hour later, I was wheels-up in the air on an air force 737 back to New York.

With the White House overrun, a new plan had been hatched. The government was moving north. Extremely north. About as north as you could get, actually. The scientists and government were supposed to pack up and regroup at Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The only good thing to say about it was that we were coming to New York first to get the other scientists who had come to the meeting.

Great, I thought. That means I get to spend the apocalypse holed up in an igloo with Harvey Saltonstall. Then they told me Harvey had been mauled to death by dogs.

“Oh,” I said.

They said family had to stay behind, but I was having none of it.

I found Leahy up near the plane’s cockpit.

Reluctant to throw any of my weight around up until this point, I threw it now as hard as I could.

“You either have my wife and kid on the tarmac, Leahy, or you shitheels can go to Greenland and figure it out by yourselves.”

When Chloe and Eli came through the airplane’s door, I tackled them into a seat. We hugged each other and cried for about ten years. For a short, dark time I thought I might never see them again, but, luckily, for once I was wrong.

The plane kicked its heels and was airborne again. It began to rain when we were zipping over Canada, but the plane ascended to a higher altitude. As we broke above the clouds, a bright, luminous glow came into the cabin. High off to our right, a full moon was rising bright and clear in the cold, and the clouds skirted by beneath us like a river of silver silk.

That’s when Eli saw something.

“Daddy! Look!”

He was sitting in my lap, pointing out the window.

Rising from a cloud to the east was some kind of mass. A kind of dark, moving cone, it looked like. A cloud? It was black, dense. Flapping. Alive.

We seemed to be flying toward it—or did it come toward us? At first I thought it was a cloud of birds. More birds in one place than ever imaginable. But then I realized they were bats. They were swarming in an upside-down pyramid, revolving incessantly, mindlessly flying around and around, chasing each other, endlessly moving up and up…

Bong!

“Seat belts!” was all I heard on the PA system. Then we flew into them.

I grabbed my wife and my son and held them to me as what sounded like the fist of God pounded on the plane. The bats flapped against the aircraft, spattered on the windows, were sucked into the engines, and shot out like bloody confetti, a vast black cloud of frantic scurrying and flapping. The starboard engine blew out a moment later, and in another moment we were descending. I closed my eyes and pressed my family to my heart as we plummeted, screaming, toward the earth.

Luckily—in a word—our pilot was an Iraq war vet, used to evasive maneuvers. We dropped several thousand feet in only a few seconds.

But after we came out of the bat tornado, the pilot got the engine working again somehow, and he turned the plane around and headed south and west. We were able to make an emergency landing in Syracuse.

Other planes weren’t so fortunate, we learned. Three airliners were downed. Hundreds more gone. How many would die in this war before it was over? I thought as I huddled in Hancock International Airport’s crowded terminal with my family. I didn’t know. No one did.

PART OF ME still believes that it’s possible to turn the world around. I don’t know how yet, but we will. The greatest known power in the universe is the resilience of man coupled with his intellect. He tinkers and tests and fights through to solutions.

How noble in reason, as Hamlet said. How infinite in faculty. In apprehension how like a god.

I know we will make it. Because from where I write this, I can see my son, Eli. As I look upon his innocent face, so like his mother’s, there is only one thing, one feeling that lingers.