James Patterson: Zoo

I looked out the window again. As I stared out at the clouds thousands of feet below me, and the ocean below that, I had a strange sensation. It was a sinking, chilling feeling. For a moment, hurtling six hundred miles an hour toward Africa, I felt suddenly very tiny and very alone. I wasn’t religious, but as I sat there, I started wondering about the inexplicable nature of these things.

It was as though I could actually feel the apocalyptic shift that was occurring. I thought of horses, birds, snakes. I thought of the curse God puts on the snake in Genesis: he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel…

The wrath of God?

Or maybe it was just my jet lag, I thought, rubbing the gunk out of my eyes. There was no doubt that I’d become obsessed with HAC. I thought about all the sleepless nights; the quitting school. And now I was actually on a plane to Africa. Maybe I would finally find the answers I was looking for. Or maybe I was delusional. I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.

I glanced down at my laptop and saw that I had another e-mail from Natalie. This one was a real picker-upper.

Oz, I know this is probably a bad time to say this…

Oh, boy. I knew what was coming. I almost quit reading then and there. The same way I looked at my bank statements in those days. Just flick my eyes over it, knowing I don’t want to see it. Anyway. I read the rest quickly:

…but I’ve been thinking about everything, and I guess, bottom line, I just can’t do all this anymore. At least not now. I just got back my immunology midterm. I flunked it. I’ll be lucky if I get a C now. It’s not just that. I’m distracted, and I have to concentrate on school and my career. I know I shouldn’t e-mail all this. We’ll talk when you get back. And you need to get someone else to check on Attila. I’m too swamped.

Okay, then, I thought. Whoopee. I’m back on the market.

I considered replying to her e-mail, but then decided to just ignore it, leave things alone. I couldn’t turn back now. Natalie knew that, and I knew Natalie’s priority was to become a doctor. She’d always been clear about that. Maybe we did need a break.

I’d just have to call the other woman in my life. I left a message for Mrs. Abreu on her machine, begging her to feed Attila for me until I came back. She wouldn’t let me down.

I closed my laptop and stretched. I had twelve hours to go before I reached Johannesburg for my stopover. I reached into my laptop bag for my iPod, put in my earbuds, cranked some Black Sabbath, and headed down the aisle of the speeding plane in search of the stewardess and some Red Bull.

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Africa, twelve hours later, was actually sort of a letdown. Johannesburg, beyond the massive windows of the airport, was just a bunch of nondescript buildings; it could have been Cleveland.

An hour later, when we took off northbound for Botswana, my mood lifted considerably. The green-and-tan expanse of seemingly endless landscape looked the way the little kid in me wanted Africa to look. Hot, wild, secluded.

As we were beginning our final descent into Maun, I saw there were some modern buildings, but most of the structures were cinder-block and tin. Coming down the steps onto the tarmac, I saw that, beyond the flimsy chain-link fence along the airport’s perimeter, there were donkeys everywhere. There were also rondavels, the traditional African thatch-roofed round huts built of stone and cow dung. The feel of the place—the heat, the sweetish smell of manure and diesel, even the sharp, blinding yellow light—was pleasantly strange.

After I made it through customs, Abraham Bindix took off his tattered straw hat and greeted me with a bear hug inside the run-down terminal. Abraham was a boiler tank of a man. Broad-shouldered and blocky, the fiftyish, weather-beaten man reminded me a Sun Belt college football coach. His face was as hard and creased as an old work glove, with a mustache fading into the scruff on his cheeks. A shag carpet of chest hair burst from the unbuttoned neck of his sweat-dampened linen shirt. Some faded blue tattoos on the furry wine barrels he called his arms were reminders of his navy days. It was good to see his loopy, gap-toothed smile. The last time I’d seen him was in Paris. We’d sat at the hotel bar and gotten drunk as swine after I’d been booed off the convention stage.

He seemed heavier than I remembered him in Paris. He also seemed noticeably older, and a little slower on his feet. I wondered if he was ill.

“Thank you for coming, my friend, but I have bad news,” he said as I scooped up my bags from the pile of luggage beside the plane. I liked Abraham, but took him with a grain of salt. Like a lot of Afrikaners, he was crude as oil and casually racist in a way that can make a white American dude a touch uncomfortable. Still, there was something almost grandfatherly about him, something Papa Bear.

“Unfortunately, a problem has arisen,” he said. “A family thing. Is it possible for you to wait a day before I can take you up to the village near Zimbabwe?”

“Of course. What’s up, Abe? Can I help?” I said.

“No, no. It is a family thing,” he said. Abe had a warm, brassy honk of a voice, like a muted trumpet. “My little brother, Phillip, the pacifist, is the manager at a game-spotting lodge over in the bush near the Namibian border. I take rich American tourists out to kill animals, but he takes them out just to look at them, take pictures. Lions, actually—two huge prides of them that eat the Cape buffalo up there in the Okavango Delta.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Don’t know, man. His lodge has been out of radio contact for over twenty-four hours, and me mum is worried. It is probably nothing, but with all the craziness going on I need to make sure the wanker is okay.”

“So let’s head out,” I said. “You said the lodge has lions, right? Lions are what I just came eight thousand miles to see.”

My enthusiasm seemed to brighten Abe’s spirit.

“Right, man,” he said, slapping my shoulder. It hurt a little. “I knew you were a friend, Oz. I tried to get my trackers to come with me, but the superstitious boogies are still completely spooked by the slaughtered village we came across. The pagan bastards said they wanted nothing to do with lions until, quote, the spirits are calmer, unquote.”

Uncalm spirits; lions. I thought about my sinking feeling on the plane, the feeling of God’s wrath in the air. Then I dismissed it. I wadded up my uneasiness and tossed it over my shoulder.

“Which way to Okavango?” I said, hefting my camera case.

INSTEAD OF HEADING out of the airport, Abe and I walked south, inside the terminal, and made a right into a narrow, dingy corridor.

“What are we doing? I thought we were going to your brother’s lodge,” I said.

“Right, man, we are. In the northern delta, there are no roads, only airstrips,” Abe explained. Walking, he dug a tin of chewing tobacco out of one of the pockets of his khaki utility vest, scooped some of it into his fingers, and put a wad under his lip. “We need to rent a plane.”

“Rent a plane?” I said. “I hope you know how to fly one, because I only know how to jump out of them.”

“That skill might come in handy,” Abe said. His jaw was working, moistening the chaw. He winked. “I have a license, but I have not flown in some time.”

We went through a door and walked right back out onto the tarmac beside the plane I’d just exited. I noticed they were a little more lax with security here on the Dark Continent. No one even asked me to take off my shoes.

We turned a corner into a hangar. A half-black, half-Asian man in a greasy fedora sat behind a desk eating some kind of barbecued meat with his fingers. Another African, who looked like a soldier or policeman, judging by his soiled gray uniform and gray beret, sat next to him and wore a flat black AK-47 over his shoulder. They both had their feet up and were watching a movie on a portable DVD player. I peeked over the policeman’s shoulder: it was Happy Gilmore, the Adam Sandler movie. They weren’t laughing. Granted, it wasn’t very funny, but they didn’t seem to get that it was a comedy.