James Patterson - Zoo

The love my mother and father gave me grows inside of him, day by day, and one day he will pass it on to his wife and child, and it will continue.

We will survive because, although we make a mess of things, we have the hope and faith and will to make things better for ourselves and for those we love.

Making things better is what we do.

Is it?

I don’t know.

Maybe.

I am recording this from a bunker. It’s November, the cold season, and temperatures here hover around minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.

It is dark outside now. It’s almost always dark here in our new, frigid home. The wind makes the walls shudder. I hear its constant, whistling howl even in my dreams now. As if the earth itself is in mourning.

In the nearly twenty-four-hour darkness, sixty-mile-an-hour winds howl off the mountains onto the white desert of the ice cap. Almost no mammals live here, so we are blissfully safe in using our generators and radios. Lucky us.

No matter how bad it is, I put on my arctic suit and go outside once a day, to stare forlornly at the brutal horizon. I consider it a pilgrimage of sorts, a penance for my sins, for all our sins. It doesn’t make me feel better, but I do it anyway. I guess I have finally found religion, in a way. I suppose the end of the world will do that.

There have been several suicides, mostly among Washington people—senators and representatives accustomed to soft living. There is no soft living now.

Communication with the continental US is sporadic. Supplies still seem to be coming in, but there are rumors of chaos back in the States. Lawless bands of people roam the streets, fighting animals and one another. For years, some in our country have advocated modern man’s return to nature. It seems as though they have finally gotten their wish.

In the hours of isolation and boredom, I think about what has happened. Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t blame technology. Petroleum improved human life. So did cell phones. No one knew that the combination of the two would eventually lead to biological disaster. We screwed up. It happens.

But I dreamed that dream again last night. I dream it often.

The dream of the death spiral. The ants I saw once in Costa Rica. There was a circle in the sand. The squirming black whirlpool. Thousands and thousands of ants, all running together in an endless circle. Blindly, they follow each other, each one locked onto the pheromone trail of the ant in front of him. Running themselves in circles, circles. Running themselves to death. A closed loop. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Locked in their loop, the ants run around and around in circles—desperate, stupid, doomed.

HENRY MUHLENBERG CLAMPED his hand down hard over Edie Coburn’s mouth. She sank her teeth into the soft flesh of his palm and threw her head back, but he didn’t let go. The last thing he needed was for some idiot to walk past her trailer and hear her screaming.

Her body convulsed. Once. Twice. Again. Again. She shuddered and went limp in his arms.

He eased his hand off her mouth.

“Get me a cigarette,” she said. “They’re on the counter.”

Muhlenberg slid off the sofa and padded naked to the other side of the trailer. He was twenty-eight, a German wunderkind who made edgy films that critics loved and nobody went to see. Fed up with driving a ten-year-old Opel and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Frankfurt, he sold his soul for a Porsche 911, a house in the Hills, and a three-picture film deal.

The first picture had tanked, the second made six mil—a home run for an indie, but in big-studio speak a colossal failure. If this one didn’t blow the roof off the multiplexes, he’d be back in Deutschland, shooting music videos for garage bands.

It was his final at-bat, and now that bitch Edie Coburn was screwing it up. He had come to her trailer to negotiate a truce between her and her asshole husband, Ian Stewart, who unfortunately was also her costar. Negotiate? More like grovel.

“Edie, please,” he had said. “We’ve got a full crew and a hundred extras standing around with the meter running. It’s costing the studio a thousand dollars for every minute you refuse to come out and shoot this scene.”

“Ian should have thought of that before he started banging that brainless bundle of silicone and peroxide.”

“You don’t know that for a fact,” he said. “The rumor about Ian and Devon is just that—a rumor. Probably started by some flack at the studio to get advance buzz about the movie.”

“I don’t know about Germany, Herr Muhlenberg, but here in New York, all rumors are true.”

“Look, I’m not a marriage counselor,” he said. “I know you and Ian have problems, but I also know you’re a professional. What’ll it take to get you into wardrobe and onto the set?”

She was wearing a short royal blue kimono that was busy with floral designs and peacocks. She tugged on the sash, and the kimono fell to the floor.

Revenge fuck. Muhlenberg complied.

At a thousand bucks a minute, the sex cost the studio fifty-four thousand dollars. Edie wasn’t nearly as good as the underage star of his last film, but if you had to bang a forty-six-year-old diva to save your career, you could do a lot worse than Edie Coburn.

He lit the cigarette for her. She sucked in hard and blew it in his face. “I hope you’re not waiting for a standing ovation,” she said. “This was strictly business.”

“Right,” he said. “Then I can tell Ian you’ll be on the set in thirty minutes.”

“Yeah. You might want to put some pants on first.”

“SETTLE DOWN, PEOPLE,” the assistant director bellowed. “Picture is up. Roll sound.”

Henry Muhlenberg took a deep breath. He was finally back in control. Thirty feet away, looking elegant in a vintage Casablanca black shawl-collar tuxedo, the Chameleon had the same thought.

“Speed.”

The clapper board snapped shut, and the assistant director called out, “Background action.”

The Chameleon and ninety-nine other wedding guests slid into character, chatting, laughing, drinking, all without making a sound.

“And action,” Muhlenberg called.

The bride and groom, Devon Whitaker and Ian Stewart, stepped onto the dance floor, and the assembled guests stopped pretending to talk and pretended to be enthralled as the happy couple began to dance.

The band pretended to play. The music would be added to the sound track in postproduction. Ian and Devon twirled around the room.

“Dancing, dancing, dancing,” Muhlenberg called out, waiting for the couple to hit their marks. “And now!”

Edie Coburn stepped into the scene, wearing a pair of wide-legged, high-waisted Katharine Hepburn trousers and a loose-fitting chocolate-gray silk blouse.

“Well, well, well,” she screamed, pointing a 9-millimeter SIG Pro at the couple. “The former Mrs. Minetti finally gets to meet the current Mrs. Minetti.”

The crowd reacted with appropriate horror. Muhlenberg looked at the video monitor of the close-up camera. Edie Coburn was calm and cold on the outside, but seething with rage on the inside. Hardly a stretch for her to play the jealous ex-wife, Muhlenberg thought, but still, she was brilliant.

Ian turned to her, his eyes filled more with anger than fear. “Put the gun down, Carla. If this is another one of your stupid melodramatic —”