Zoo(29)

Barbara remembers running into the jungle, her lungs burning, as leaves and branches crunched and cracked behind her. Then she had looked back and noticed that Sylvia wasn't with her anymore.

She mustered up her courage and came back to the camp that night-to find everyone gone. All three Rwandan trackers, the four young men from the antipoaching team, and Sylvia. All gone.

In the bed, Barbara moans as she grasps at her throbbing head with her hands, trying to wring the memory from her brain as though it were a sponge. She had been quick to dismiss the fringe-level, paranoid racket about HAC, the absurd buzzing of Internet lunatics. She believed the theory was crackpot because she knows animals-gorillas in particular. But now she is having doubts. The behavior of all mammals, even mountain gorilla behavior, seems to have undergone a meltdown.

She's in dire straits. The radio and generators have been smashed, along with the guns. The nearest village is thirty miles away, through mountain jungle so impassable they had to be airlifted here by helicopter. The next supply run is forty-eight hours away.

Two more days to get through, Barbara thinks. If the gorillas return, she will have no chance.

She is sitting up in bed, rocking back and forth. In despair.

Then she feels something. It is a distinctly felt presence, as if Sylvia were there in the room beside her, watching, invisible. Not only that, but her lover seems pissed off at Barbara for doing the damsel-in-distress act, panicking, giving up.

Have I taught you nothing? Sylvia's presence seems to say. Buck up, girl. Grow some ovaries.

Barbara climbs to her feet, ripping aside the gray film of mosquito netting. Sylvia is right. She needs to do something. In a moment she knows what.

Behind the storage shed are barrels of gasoline for the generators. Barbara can fill up some canisters, douse the tree line, set it on fire. She hates thinking about damaging such a precious ecosystem, but it is a life-and-death situation. Her life and death, specifically. Perhaps the smoke will attract attention from the villages in the valley, and perhaps someone will eventually come to investigate. And get her out of here.

She is coming out from behind the shed with two gas cans sloshing tinnily in her hands when she hears the crunch of branches off to her left. She turns. Her eyes fall on the tree line. She drops the gas cans. They tumble at her feet.</ol>
 
 

 

Coming through the trees is something that defies imagination.

About two hundred yards away, rhinos are entering the clearing. Half a dozen massive horned rhinos.

Which is impossible. How did they get here? Rhinos graze in the plains. They have to be within walking distance of water. Why would rhinos migrate seventy miles laterally and several thousand feet vertically from their natural habitat? What would she see next? Polar bears?

The animals keep coming. There are more than a dozen rhinos now. The scene is so out there, so upside down-so wrong.

As the creatures approach, a memory comes to Barbara. She is eleven years old, sitting in the front pew of a Baptist church with her family in northern Florida. The fire-and-brimstone preacher points a gnarled finger at the small crowd in the pews as he reads from the Book of Revelation.

"And the first beast was like a lion," he says histrionically, turning his eyes to heaven. "And the second like a calf. And the third had a face like a man."

End times, Barbara thinks, watching the giant animals step curiously amid the jungle underbrush. She is in such desperation that she almost begins to pray.





Chapter 60




CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS

MOBILIZED OUT OF Fort Drum, New York, Captain Stephen Bowen's Tenth Mountain Division consists of two four-man fire teams, a small but elite unit.

Arrayed in the standard wedge formation, the men move as one up the wooded hill in their camos. Using hand and arm signals, they are silent, all but invisible. Standard operating procedure for combat patrol.

The fact that their combat patrol runs alongside a bike path in Hapgood Wright Town Forest near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is definitely not SOP, though. It's more FUBAR than snafu. In Captain Bowen's opinion, this is about as screwball as it comes.

Bowen knows for a stone-cold fact that what they are doing is illegal. They're supposed to be helping the cops direct traffic, not going out on a search-and-destroy mission in a public park. And the orders, if you could call them that, are truly out there.

Bowen, though only twenty-seven, was hard-core even before he did his three tours neck-deep in the shit of Afghanistan and Iraq. The word INFIDEL is tattooed across his chest in an arc of Gothic lettering, and inked on his back, under the Mountain Division insignia of crossed swords, is his credo, KILLING: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE.

"Cap, down the hill," says King, on point. "Movement. Six o'clock."

"What are you waiting for, soldier?" Bowen says. "Drop it like it's hot."

King opens up with his M16A4.

Bowen's eyes twinkle like Strawberry Shortcake's as the familiar, ripping, heavy-metal clack of gunfire echoes across the hills.

Is there anything better than guns unloading? he thinks. What else can make your eyes water and your dick get hard at the same time?

"Shit," King mutters after three three-round bursts. "Missed. I think it's still coming."

"That's what she said," says Chavez.

"Lemme show you how it's done, Poindexter," Bowen says, parting leaves as he steps forward.

When he gets to the crest of the hill Bowen mentally does a little Scooby-Doo: Eeuooorr? Directly in front of them, down the incline of a patchy deer path, are three-what are they? Bowen thinks. Dogs? He glasses them with the 10X binoculars. Hmm. Foxes? About a dozen or so. Now, how about that? Rabid, bloodthirsty foxes. Whatever.

"Tallyho, motherfuckers," Bowen says, dropping the glasses and lifting his rifle smoothly to his shoulder.

The new gun pulls left a bit when he pulls the trigger, but he manages to adjust.

The men start laughing as they come down the hill.

"Shit, Cap. Didn't think we'd be going hunting today," says Chavez, poking at one of the dead foxes with the muzzle of his gun. "Hope you understand PETA will be gettin' a e-mail."

They camp for the night by a creek under an old train bridge three clicks to the north. There's a battered old couch there, a couple of sun-faded Coors boxes, torn condom wrappers, amateur graffiti.

"This night air's making me feel romantic," Gardner says, popping open an MRE. "Any you guys wanna take a moonlit stroll?"

"How about a weenie roast, boys?" someone says in a falsetto.

Bowen sits Indian-style beside the fire, zeroing out the rear sight of his rifle with an Allen wrench. He wonders if or when he should tell them the real reason they're here.

Two nights ago there was an incident. A whole cul-de-sac off Cambridge Turnpike was massacred. He's seen the photos. Some of the scariest shit he ever saw, which was saying something. One of the pictures he's having trouble getting out of his mind. A little boy on a racecar-shaped bed, entrails ribboned out onto the carpet.</ol>
 
 

 

"Wire that shit tight, ladies," Bowen says, glancing out at the dark beyond the firelight. "I know this is fun, but this ain't a frat party. This is a military op, so act like it."

The attack comes a few minutes north of 0130. Bowen wakes to screaming and gunfire. Between three-round bursts comes howling. Guttural, snarling, inhuman noises. Fairy-tale monster-type shit.

"We got a fuckin' ogre out there?" he shouts, rising to his feet and grabbing his gun in one movement.

If that isn't bad enough, Bowen hears the whine and tiny crack of bullets singing by his ears.

"Watch your goddamn shooting lanes!" Bowen barks. "Watch your lanes!"

Someone throws a flare. The sudden light throws long shadows high onto the spindly black trunks of the trees.

Some twenty feet away, galloping on all fours up the shore of the creek, are bears. Four of the biggest goddamn brown bears he has ever seen.

Bowen doesn't think. He yanks an M67 frag grenade from his vest, snaps off the safety clip, fingers the pin, and pulls the grenade away from the pin the way you're taught to. He holds the grenade for a moment, thumb off the safety spoon, letting it cook.

"Frag out!" Bowen hollers, and dives to one side as he tosses it.

There is a flashing soft thump. Followed by silence.

When someone chucks another flare, they can see that all four bears are down for the count. Off in the darkness, they hear the sound of other bears retreating, their paws splashing in the creek.

Bowen scans his men, does a quick head count. Everyone in the squad present and accounted for. He puts a hand to his chest, feeling his heartbeat hammering bang bang bang against his ribs like a goddamn elf making shoes in somebody's basement. Bears in the wire? Good holy shit, that was close. This animals-rising-up-against-man bullshit isn't bullshit after all.

He turns. Out there in the darkness, beyond the firelight and across the water, Captain Bowen can feel eyes on them.

A lot of eyes.





Chapter 61



I'D HAD BETTER mornings.

I awoke that day from a dream. Eli and I had been walking through New York's Museum of Natural History. The light was eerie, watery, pale blue. We stopped before the diorama of the gray wolf. Eli's favorite. The wolves were posed in midhunt, racing through timberland snowdrifts in pursuit of an elk. This elk was doing it wrong. You get attacked by wolves, you stay still. Stand your ground, you have a chance of surviving. Run, you're dead. One of the wolves had his jaws clamped on the hind leg of the elk. The wolves' eyes flashed winter-moonlight yellow, their lips curled back to show their teeth. I held Eli's hand. Then the wolves came alive, and suddenly there was no glass in the diorama. The wolves spilled from the diorama and were on the floor of the museum in an instant. Eli's hand slid from mine, and the wolves tore at his throat.