Soon he sits up as another chimp clambers up onto the rock and sits down beside him. She is a large female who escaped from the Central Park Zoo. She has something in her hand. It is an orange. It is like a ball of flame in her hand, a sun. She peels it with her long fingers and offers it to Attila. Attila breaks it in half and hands the other half back.
Together they eat the orange. The cool, sweet, sticky juice feels good in his mouth. The female cuddles next to him and begins grooming his fur. Soon they are lying there together on the warm stone. Feeling her warmth, and the warmth of the earth, Attila is at peace. He closes his eyes and slips back into sleep.
Chapter 93
TWO MORE DAYS of meetings slid by like sludge. It was difficult to see by lantern and candlelight, and hot indoors, so the meetings were held outside, in the Rose Garden. We sat around the tables on springy metal outdoor furniture, using paperweights to keep things from fluttering across the South Lawn in the breeze.
On the third day, going stir-crazy behind the paper-stacked walls of my dark FEMA trailer and the army compound itself, I canceled my afternoon meetings. I'd heard that D.C. had been free of animal hordes for more than two days now, and I wanted to see firsthand if it was true.
I bumped into Sergeant Alvarez coming out of the compound's mess tent and convinced him to come with me. When I met him by the northwest gate a few minutes later, he was in full Kevlar and holding a smooth flat black rifle with a cylinder on it.
"How's the ankle?" I said.
"Getting there. Like my walking stick?" he said, shaking a beast of a weapon. It was an automatic shotgun called an AA-12, he explained, which can fire the thirty-two rounds of double-aught buck in its drum in about an eyeblink at full auto.</ol>
"Which is ludicrously destructive when you think about it, but probably just the thing if we run into another tooth-and-claw mob," Alvarez concluded. "They just handed them out. I named mine Justin."
"Justin?"
"My man, Justin Case."
Outside the White House gates, the city appeared peaceful, quiet. The quiet was the most amazing of all. You could hear the wind.
The downtown area was still cordoned off, but they were beginning to allow some residents in to check on their property. We stopped and talked to several people coming in and out of the town houses-a couple of student nurses from Georgetown, an FBI agent, a lobbyist, and her son. It was as though D.C. had become a village.
For now.
I was encouraged that people seemed to be upbeat and cooperative. But I knew this was only the beginning. This was still the honeymoon. How would people feel after a week of no hot showers or air-conditioning? With the country's dependence on trucking for food delivery, how long would it be before people started getting hungry?
We were on Constitution Avenue when a dog appeared from around the corner. It was a black Lab, and, with knee-jerk immediacy, Alvarez hoisted his new toy to his shoulder, ready to blast the dog to kibbles and bits. But the dog didn't even glance at us. It passed by in the street, pausing just long enough to relieve itself on a fire hydrant.
Alvarez and I looked at each other. Then we burst out laughing.
"Call the Times. I have tomorrow's headline," I said. "Dog pisses on hydrant!"
Chapter 94
THAT NIGHT AND almost all the next day, Charles Groh and I attended romantic candlelit policy meetings with the CDC and various branches of the military. After a quick dinner, I was catching a half nap on a couch in a FEMA trailer parked on the South Lawn when I felt an impish tug on my foot.
I sat up, and NSA chief Leahy sat down beside me. Leahy and the NSA had been put in charge of monitoring the effect of the industrial and power shutdown on the animal populations. I'd been waiting to hear back from him. He smiled enigmatically and handed me a cup of coffee.
"Well, the suspense is killing me," I said, yawning and taking the coffee. "What's the story, morning glory?"
Leahy's smile brightened and broadened.
"Come see, boy genius."
We left my trailer and headed into another one near the Rose Garden that had a satellite dish wired to the side of it. There was a rattling hand-cranked generator hooked up to the trailer. It was a comm room. There were a dozen techs and military people barking into phones, staring at monitors, pointing at bright shiny things on screens.
Leahy peeled some sheets off a fax machine and handed them to me.
"Feast your eyes on these, Wizard of Oz," he said. "On the Thursday before the shutdown, we were getting national reports of thousands of attacks every day. Now look at yesterday's tally in the US."
I glanced at the sheet.
"Am I reading this right? Three?" I said.
"Exactly," Leahy said. "Not only that, we're getting in more and more stories about dogs returning to their owners. The industrial and communications freeze really has knocked out the airborne pheromone. Your plan wasn't just a home run, Oz. It was a grand slam. You're going to be very famous. I think you may have just saved the world."
Leahy put his arm around my shoulder.
"That's why we're going to get you out of here, kiddo. I pulled some strings. I'm going to get you back to your family in Nueva York."
I looked at him. Was that even possible? It felt like weeks since I'd seen Chloe and Eli.
"Surely you're joking."
"No, siree. And don't call me Shirley. They're gassing up your chariot as we speak. You're on the G6 again."
I thought about Chloe, about the actual possibility of touching my wife, holding her, burying my face in her neck. And Eli. I wanted to put that kid up on my shoulders and just walk with him and show him everything that-
I stopped. What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking?
What were they offering? To let me break the rules? And if they "pulled some strings" for me, how many others were they pulling them for?
"Hold it," I said. "Wait a second. I'd love more than anything to see my family, but it's too soon. There can't be any travel now. No combustion engines, no electricity for at least two weeks. That was the plan. You know this."
"One twenty-minute plane trip won't break the camel's back, Oz. You deserve this."
"Deserve?" I said, feeling a bubble of fury flare up inside me. I grabbed him by the lapels. "That's Washington, isn't it? The rules are for the little people, right? We deserve it. Which part of the continuation of civilization do you morons not understand? You think this shutdown is the end? This is the beginning of the beginning of the beginning!"</ol>
"Let go of my jacket," Leahy said.
I shoved him away.
"Do you think this will work without real sacrifice? Without everyone's sacrifice? The bans on gas, cell phones, electricity-they have to be for everybody. The NSA, the military, VIPs. Hell, even the president and the holy Congress. This is just stage one. Don't you understand? We have to do this until we come up with a permanent solution.
"If everything goes back to normal, then it's going to be feeding time again at the zoo, Leahy. You tell all the fat cats to cork the Champagne and cancel the tee times. It's time to suck it up like the rest of us."
"Relax," Leahy said. "I get the picture. I understand. You're right."
"Do you? I wonder," I said as I was leaving. "But I hope so. For the sake of the world."
Chapter 95
ON SATURDAY MORNING, I blew off every meeting on my schedule. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works wanted a meet and greet, as did a group of clinical pathologists from the CDC.
But after the row with Leahy, I was almost sick to death of policy makers who were looking at this thing as if it were already over. For them, this was just something they could pad their resumes with, tell their grandchildren about. They needed to understand that if they didn't take it seriously, there weren't going to be any grandchildren to tell it to.
Instead, I did something useful, something that needed doing. I signed up to help a contingent of marines clean the streets and collect the bodies of the dead.
There was something turn-of-the-century about it. That is, the turn of the last century. Horses had been brought in from a farm in Rockville, Maryland, to pull U-Haul trailers. By noon, the trailers were laden with body bags.
Having served in Iraq, I thought I could handle the detail. I was wrong. The first child I encountered was a little Asian girl in an alley behind a dry cleaner's shop in Dupont Circle. She looked about eight, nine years old. Guts strewn across the alley like spaghetti. Sergeant Alvarez and I stuffed her in a bag and laid her down in one of the trailers. It broke me up. I snapped off my reeking rubber gloves and sat on the curb between a couple of parked cars for a while, weeping.
So many lives had been lost.
It was early evening when we arrived at Arlington National Cemetery. Near the Tomb of the Unknowns, the contents of the horse-drawn trailers were unloaded into a row of portable morgue units. An army bugler played taps as we were leaving.
It was getting dark by the time Sergeant Alvarez and I made it on foot back across the bridge, heading for the Marine Corps base next to the White House.
Near George Washington University, we were walking down a block lined with trees and bracketed with quaint homes.
And I saw a chrome-and-yellow Hummer parked on the street, idling in front of a town house. When I reached in and shut off the engine, a tall, handsome guy wearing a Yankees cap and a rumpled blue suit ran out. He looked pissed.