Three
MOSA GRUNTS AND releases the dead keeper. She uses the thumb-like dewclaw of her right front paw as a toothpick to dislodge a sliver of meat from her teeth. What's left of Larson's wristwatch falls to the dirt as she licks blood from her mouth.</ol>
Dominick, having already fed, is starting to jog for the open gate. At the end of the fenced corridor, the two pass the tiny crush cage the keepers shove them into when they need medical attention. They aren't going to miss that.
They quickly cover the length of the big-cat service yard. At the far end, by the hoses, is a low gate and the zoo's bright white concrete path on the other side. Both Mosa and Dominick clear the gate in a leap easy as a breath, and soon are racing down the zoo's empty promenade. The two lions spring over the turnstiles and skirt the parking lot for the nearest cluster of Griffith Park's oak and walnut trees.
They trot up a scrubby brush-dotted hill and down its other side. They catch a human's scent again on a hot breeze. They spot its source a moment later on one of the golf course fairways. He's a handsome young black man in a red shirt and black pants. Getting nine holes in before work. He looks surprised to see lions on the golf course.
Dominick charges, knocking the man sideways, out of his shoes. His death bite takes away most of the golfer's neck in a flowering burst of blood.
Dominick releases the dead man and rears back slowly as a police car glides down alongside the fairway from the north. He can smell that there are more humans inside this shrieking, shining box. He wants to stay and attack, but he knows that this box full of humans is of the same cold, difficult material as his cage.
The two lions run for the cover of the trees. At the top of the ridge, Dominick stops for a moment, gazing down at the city. Los Angeles spreads out beneath him, a brown field of humanity, woozily shaking in the smoke and the gathering morning heat, dissolving into fuzz at the edges.
That smell is stronger now, coming from everywhere. From the buildings and houses, from roadways, from the tiny cars snaking along the highways. The air is saturated with it. But instead of running away from it, Dominick and Mosa run toward it, their paws digging for purchase, mouths wanting blood.
BOOK ONE
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Chapter 1
I WOKE UP shaking.
I panicked at first, thinking I was having a stroke or something. Then I opened my eyes, relieved, as I remembered it wasn't me that was shaking. It was my apartment.
Outside the wall of dusty industrial-style windows beside my bed came what sounded like a regiment of giants rhythmically striking concrete with their rifle butts in a parade drill. But it wasn't the jolly green marines. I knew it was the elevated number 1 Broadway local, rattling to shake the dead back to life next to my new fifth-floor Harlem loft apartment. Hadn't gotten used to that train yet.
I winced, covered my head with a pillow. Useless. Only in New York did one have to actually pay for the privilege of sleeping beside an overpass.
But I was so broke I couldn't even afford to complain. I sat up. I couldn't even really afford to sleep. I couldn't even afford to think about money. I'd spent it all and then some; my credit was in the sewer. By that point I was in tunnel-vision mode, focusing my entire life on one desperate need: to figure things out before it was too late.
Things hadn't always been so dire. Only two years before, not only had I lived in a nonvibrating apartment, I was actually on the PhD fast track at Columbia University. I was the golden boy in the ecology, evolution, and environmental biology department, so close to the brass ring I could practically smell the book contracts, the cocktail parties, the cushy university appointments.
But then I came into contact with the event-what others called the mistake-that changed my life.
I noticed something. Something that wasn't quite right. Something I couldn't let go.
That's the way it happens sometimes. Life is flowing along like a fairy tale, and then you see something that you just can't categorize. Something that starts filling your every thought, your every dream, your every waking moment.
At least, that's the way it happened with me. One minute I was about to realize my goal of academic greatness, and the next I was wrestling with something I couldn't stop thinking about, something I couldn't shake, even as my world crashed around my ears.
I know how nuts it sounds. Intellectual promise plus obsession plus throwing away conventional success usually ends pretty badly. It certainly did for Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Chris McCandless, the Into the Wild guy, who died on that bus.
But I wasn't some malcontent or mystic trying to form a deep intrinsic connection to an ultimate reality. I was more like Chicken Little, an evolutionary biologist Chicken Little who had detected that the sky actually was falling. Except it wasn't the sky that was falling, it was worse. Biological life was falling. Animal life itself. Something very, very weird and very, very bad was happening, and I was the only voice shouting in the wilderness about it.</ol>
Before I get ahead of myself, my name's Oz. My first name is Jackson, but with a last name like mine, no one uses it. Unfortunately, my father is also known as Oz, as are my mother, my three sisters, my uncles, and all my paternal cousins. Which gets confusing at family reunion s, but that's neither here nor there.
What is here and there-everywhere-is the problem I was monitoring, the global problem I'd by that point pretty much devoted my life to trying to figure out.
It sounds grandiose, I know, but I feared that if I were right-and for the first time in my life I truly hoped I was wrong-a planetary paradigm shift was underway that was going to make global warming feel like a Sunday stroll through an organic community garden.
Chapter 2
I HOPPED OUT of bed wearing a pair of wrinkled gray pajama bottoms that Air France had gifted me with on a recent flight to Paris. Shaved, showered, teeth brushed, I got back into the fancy French pajamas. Working from home has its perks. Okay, "working" implies I was making money. This was another kind of work. Anyway. They were really comfortable pajamas.
Coming out of my bedroom, I retrieved another prized possession from the doorknob-my fire-engine-red woolen hat, which I'd acquired on a recent trip to Alaska. With my thinking cap firmly on the bottle, I got down and pumped out my daily hundred push-ups, a habit I'd picked up on yet another jaunt, a four-year stint in the US Army before college.
PE complete, I headed into my shop. I flipped the surge-protector switches, turning on the TV sets that I'd lined across a metal workbench in the center of the industrial-style room. There were eight of them in all. Some were nice new flat-screens, but most were junkers I'd picked up diving Dumpsters after the digital signal changeover. Behind them, a Gordian knot of wires connected them to cable boxes and satellite receivers and a set of laptops and computer servers that I'd modified with the help of some electronic buddies of mine into the world's biggest, baddest DVR.
As I waited for everything to boot up, I popped my first Red Bull of the day. Another number 1 train kicked up my heart rate along with a cloud of dust off the windowsills. Call me crazy-go ahead, you wouldn't be the first-but after the initial shock, I kind of liked my apartment's MTA-provided sound track. I don't know why, but from the time I was a little kid up until I received my Rhodes Scholarship, my ADD-addled brain tended to fire on all cylinders when it was surrounded by headbanging noise. Old-school AC/DC, that was my bag. Metallica, Motörhead, with all the knobs cranked to eleven.
I frowned at the lightening screens, remembering my father, a lieutenant in the FDNY, watching the evening news. After a Bronx four-alarmer, he would come home, drop in front of the tube, and at the first commercial, after a Miller High Life or two, he would say, "Oz, boy, sometimes I think this world of ours is nothing but a goddamn zoo."
In front of me, animals began to fill the screens. Lots of them. All of them behaving very badly.
Fathers really do know best, I guess, because that's exactly what was happening. The world was becoming a zoo, without cages.
Chapter 3
SETTLING BACK INTO my tag-sale leather rolling chair, I lifted a new legal tablet from the fresh stack on the table to my right, clicked a pen, wrote the date.
I turned up the volume on set number four.
"A missing seventy-two-year-old hunter and his fifty-one-year-old son were found dead yesterday," said a correspondent from WPTZ in Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, a good-looking brunette in a red coat. She held the microphone as though it were a glass of wine. "The men were apparently killed by black bears while illegally hunting outside of Lake Placid."
The camera cut to a shot of a young state trooper at a press conference. Buzz cut, lanky. Country boy, uncomfortable in front of cameras.
"No, there was no way they could have been saved," the trooper said. He blew his p's and b's straight into the mike. "Both men were long dead and partially eaten. What's still puzzling to us is how it happened. Both of the men's weapons were still loaded."
He ended the report with the claim that the father and son were known poachers, fond of using an illegal hunting method known as deer dogging-using dogs to chase out and ambush deer.
"Back to you, Brett," the brunette said.
"Not good, Brett," I said as I muted set four and cranked up set eight. Blip, blip, blip went the green bars on the screen.