"Go, monkey, go!" the kids start chanting. The ape makes it to the top of the six-story building and disappears over the ledge of the roof.
After waiting a respectful moment, Officer Murphy shrugs at his boss and joins in the chanting.
Chapter 49
CHLOE WANTED ME to go to the hospital right away. I waved her off. I'd been in enough waiting rooms lately. Still keyed up with adrenaline, I dumped half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my knee and taped wads of paper towels to it. Clutching my leg, I hobbled around the apartment surveying the rest of the wreckage.
It was as if everything I owned had been fed through a wood chipper. There was hardly an object in the apartment that Attila hadn't found a way of smashing. To say nothing of the suffocating, nauseating stench of rotten food combined with the piss and shit spattered everywhere. I figured I shouldn't count on getting my deposit back.
I had known that before long Attila would become unmanageable, and I'd have to find a more suitable home for him, but he was only five. Chimps generally don't get too unruly until they're a bit older. I couldn't help but wonder if what I was looking at here showed rage, a personal anger toward me. What had made Attila do this? Separation anxiety? And how had he escaped from his cage?
With our bags still piled in the hallway outside the door, Chloe stepped gingerly amid the wreckage, afraid to touch anything.
"Oz, I'm so sorry," she said.
Maybe it was Chloe's presence that had set him off. Chimps are fiercely territorial, and have often been observed to kill over boundary disputes. Had Attila perceived Chloe as some sort of territorial threat?
On the other hand, he'd clearly taken a lot of time to do this much damage to the apartment.
I was walking past the doorway of the back bedroom when I smelled something especially foul. Even worse than the potpourri of rotten food and fecal matter that the rest of the apartment reeked of.
In the bedroom doorway I smelled something so concentratedly dense, so horrific, that I was afraid to turn on the light. But I did turn on the light.
I stood there for a moment, stock-still, breathing heavily.
"What is it, Oz?" Chloe called from behind me, in the hallway.
It wasn't just that the room was a wreck. It wasn't just that the stripped mattress was torn to tattered fluff and sodden with urine-though there was that.
I could feel my heartbeat hammering in my ears as my eyes scanned the room. There was blood on the walls. In thin streaks and freckles. In wide, heavy smears. Handprints.
Huge, long handprints-chimp handprints. There was one right there beside the switch plate, which also had blood on it. Four very long, thick fingers and a small stubby hook of a thumb.
I looked up. There was dried blood misted on the light fixture in the ceiling. It gave the room a slightly pinkish cast. All this blood had been there for days. It was dry and dark, the color of brown rust.
With my eyes, I followed the blood smears to the far corner of the room.
"What?" Chloe said in the hallway.
There was something on the floor in the corner of the room opposite me, between the bed and the wall. The streaks of blood led there, just as all roads led to Rome.
I could feel Chloe behind me.
"Stay there," I said. "Don't come in."</ol>
I covered my face with the collar of my shirt and I stepped farther into the room. I tasted bitterness in the back of my mouth. Bile was rising in my throat.
It was a human body. Most of one, anyway. It was a decomposing-and what looked like a partially eaten-human body. I couldn't identify it by the face, because the face was gone. As were the feet and hands. But there was long red hair. Red, red, Irish girl's hair, and the body was wearing turquoise hospital scrubs.
A rectangular plastic card was clipped to the breast pocket of the blood-stiffened shirt.
I unclipped it and looked at it. Under dirt-brown streaks of dried blood, there was Natalie's deer-in-the-headlights mug shot on her hospital ID badge.
NATALIE MARIE SHAW, it said beneath the picture.
I hardly noticed Chloe as I brushed past her in the hallway. I'd made it to the front door when Chloe grabbed my arm.
"What is it? Tell me, Oz. Please. What's in there?"
I babbled. "My-uh, my girlfriend … "
She balked, scrunched her face up. Her face showed confusion, with the possibility of anger in it.
"I thought she was your ex-girlfriend."
"She is now."
We called the police from Mrs. Mullen's apartment. Mrs. Mullen, my next-door neighbor-a sweet little Irish lady who was so old she'd probably come over in the potato famine. I wasn't terribly shocked when Mrs. Mullen said she hadn't heard anything in the last week. The lady was deaf as a stone. She didn't even know I lived with a chimp.
The first cops to arrive were already aware of Attila. They told me he had been spotted on the street but that he was still on the loose. Something about hiding on the roof of a bodega.
What now? What did I do with my life?
My home was destroyed. If I hadn't zipped off to Africa and asked Natalie to take care of Attila, she would still be alive. My fault. If I didn't have a fucking chimp in my apartment she would still be alive. Also my fault. She was a saint-even after breaking up with me, she'd still come over to check on Attila. And he had killed her. I went further and further back down the chain of decisions I'd made, thinking about what I could have done differently. A lot. Regret sucked at my heart like a leech.
Chloe sat beside me and held my hand as I sat in the stairwell while police radios squawked and crackled in my apartment and all down the hallway neighbors had come out to stare.
What now? What indeed.
And the nightmare wasn't over. Not even close.
BOOK FOUR
THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS
Chapter 50
FIVE YEARS LATER
WHEN I FELT the train slow, my eyes fluttered, bringing me out of an impromptu nap.
Outside the window of the Acela, I could see we weren't in D.C. yet. We were going through a seemingly abandoned industrial town in South Jersey, or maybe northern Maryland. These decaying towns all looked depressingly the same: windowless brick factories; deserted, rusting bridges; a main street lined with plywood-boarded windows and overgrown with weeds. Going back to nature, slowly.
Turns out an apocalypse actually comes on pretty slowly. Not fire and brimstone but rust and dandelions. Not a bang but a whimper.
Perhaps it was due to the continuing economic downturn, but rumors abounded on the Internet. People were dying in these in-between places. No one knew why.
I had my theories.
Gazing out at the orphaned town, I thought of those lines from Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …
For a moment I stared blankly at my reflection in the black screen of the sleeping laptop that was open on the tray table in front of me. You could have packed for a long weekend in the bags under my eyes.
So much to do and so little goddamn time to do it.
For the last five years, I'd been working nonstop with my friends at Columbia to try to get a handle on HAC. A lot of the work consisted of collecting the corpses of affected animals and performing autopsies on them.
We'd seen a lot of specimens. Too many. Tigers from India. Russian bears. Beavers, wolverines, even ground squirrels. The unusually aggressive behavior had spread to so many mammal species we were starting to lose count.
It wasn't rabies. As far as we could tell from the specimens we'd studied, it didn't seem like a virus. We had noticed something interesting, though. The brains of the affected animals were a little heavier than normal. Not only that, but they were heavier by the same amount, about 1.3 percent. The increase in brain matter seemed to be concentrated mostly in the amygdala, the part of the mammalian brain generally thought to be responsible for memory and learning.
The finding was unusual enough to finally get the government on board. For the last year, we'd gotten decent funding and had been working with a liaison from the Department of Health and Human Services.</ol>
So the good news now was that we had provided the world with proof that something was causing abnormal mutations in mammalian amygdalae that were triggering this aberrantly aggressive behavior. The bad news was that we didn't have a clue what it was.
There were other questions. Why were some animals affected and not others? And why were humans entirely unaffected by these mutations? Were there other symptoms associated with the mutations? Yes, and they varied from one species to another. In some species-lions, for instance-the mutations seemed to affect only male animals. Not so in other species. There had been an ugly episode of bizarrely psychotic behavior among a group of female elephants in Thailand. Every hunch we got about every question opened up a fresh jar of questions. Questions that had been answered sprouted more questions, like the heads of the Hydra: cut off one and two grow back in its place.
I stared out at the wasteland that America was becoming, rusting under the hard, pitiless summer sky.
Chapter 51
AND THERE WAS more bad news that morning-special, just for me. I had to interrupt my research in order to head down to D.C. to do my Chicken Little dance at another time-suck of a congressional hearing. For all the scientific evidence we were amassing-and in spite of the exponential increases in animal attacks, which were irrefutable-many people, both in the government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening.