“Stand still, mudak,” he grumbles at Kiril, behind him. “We stand our ground, we live. We run, we die. They smell your fear.”
“Eto piz’dets, eto piz’dets,” Kiril is half whining, half mumbling. “This is so fucked up, this is so fucked up.”
Kiril squeezes the trigger of his gun and a shot goes off, from the hip, aimed almost at random into the crowd of wolves. Cheslav feels the gun crack against his elbow. A jet of blood leaps into the air, like a squirt of bright dark berry juice, and there’s a whimpering howl.
“Kiril!” Prokopovich shouts. “No!”
He hears Kiril pull the trigger again. Another howl and a spurt of blood.
A wave of fresh agitation moves throughout the circle, a swell of freshly crazed barking.
Whatever, Cheslav thinks. Fuck it. And he, too, fires a shot into the crowd.
They kill about seven of them. More keep coming.
Then Kiril decides to run. He leaves their post in the middle of the circle and tries to bolt. A moment after he does—just a fraction of a moment later, a sliver of time so thin an eye blink does not describe it—the circle of wolves rushes in to close. Their bodies become a whirlpool of fur, roaring throats, thrashing legs, ripping jaws, all piling on top of each other. Prokopovich squeezes another fistful of bullets into the horde, but it is useless. The wolves swarm over the two men until they disappear beneath them.
It goes on for several minutes before the clamor dies down. The pack loosens and the wolves separate, rove the field, sniff the ground, begin to tumble and growl, not in earnest violence but in play.
Cheslav and Kiril are gone. There are no bodies left to speak of. There is blood smeared across the floor of grass and pine needles. Many of the wolves have bloody snouts and mouths, and some of them lick blood from their damp, matted fur. Some of them squabble here and there over bones. But the men themselves have disappeared.
Chapter 66
I’M SURE I looked like a zombie who had freshly clawed his way out of the crypt when I flung open the door of our apartment. I heard the clink and scuttle of Chloe putting away groceries in the kitchen. I left the keys in the lock and sprinted down the front hallway.
As I stood in the kitchen doorway, Chloe looked at me as though I had gone completely crazy. I looked it: I was slathered with black filth and breathing hard after running back from Bryant Park.
But I wasn’t crazy.
For the first time in years, I knew I was right.
“Hi,” I said.
“So,” she said. “How was the meeting with the mayor?”
Her voice was sarcastic.
“Incredibly productive.”
Chloe stood up from where she knelt beside the open refrigerator, closed it.
“The mayor’s office just called. What the hell happened to you?”
I took the jar of salsa she was absentmindedly holding and set it firmly on the counter. I held her by the shoulders as I struggled to catch my breath.
“I’ve figured it out!” My voice was choked with excitement. I tried to calm it. “The reason for the attacks…it’s not a virus…it’s pheromones.”
Chloe looked at me askance.
“You’re not making sense, Oz.”
I started to collapse onto a chair next to the kitchen table.
“Don’t touch the furniture!” said Chloe.
I remained standing.
“On my way to the meeting, I saw a stray dog,” I said. “I followed it into a tunnel beneath Bryant Park. Inside were more dogs. Thousands of them.”
Chloe nodded, mental gears turning.
“You saw another dog pack?” she said. “Like the one on the video?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. I started to wipe sweat from my eyes with filthy fingers, thought better of it, got to work on blinking it out instead. “But here’s the thing. They were all grouped together, rubbing against each other, behaving in a way I’ve never seen before. They were mating, regurgitating food. They had these chambers where females were giving birth.”
“Disgusting,” said Chloe.
Then she began backing away from me, her hands flying to her face.
“Mon Dieu! What is that smell?” she said, finally catching the full brunt of the dog sludge I’d crawled through.
“Exactly!”
I shimmied out of my shirt. My pants followed a moment later. I was leaving black streaks on the kitchen tiles. I rummaged through the kitchen drawers in my socks and underwear, found a plastic bag, and threw the clothes inside, tying it tightly.
“We need to test my clothes. It’s their smell. I think the dogs are emitting it. But they almost weren’t acting like dogs, Chloe. I know this sounds insane. They were acting like insects. Like ants or bees or something. It’s not a virus, like rabies, that’s making the animals go haywire. We need to test for some kind of new pheromone in the environment.”
“That’s crazy,” Chloe said, still covering her face.
“Is it?” I said. “This whole thing has been staring us in the face from the beginning. How do animals communicate? Subconsciously, I mean. How do dogs, bears, hyenas recognize one another, their environment, their territory?”
“Secreting and sniffing pheromones,” Chloe said.
“Life, at its most basic level, is chemistry,” I said. “Right?”
“Hmm.”
“Groups of molecular compounds reacting to other groups of molecular compounds. When an animal sniffs a rival or a predator, it receives information that changes its behavior. That’s what’s occurring here. In some way. Except the animal signals are getting crossed somehow. The signals they’re getting are making them act against their instincts. There’s something new, something wrong—either with the pheromones themselves or the way the animals are processing them.”
“It might make sense,” Chloe said, getting into it now. “The mutations we found in the animals were in the amygdala, which usually governs the sense of smell.”
I paced back and forth across the kitchen in my underwear, still holding the sagging trash bag full of my reeking clothes.
“I think it may even have something to do with that bizarre stuff that went on with Attila,” I said. “A chimp’s sense of smell isn’t that great. But I rescued him from a perfume lab where they were doing chemical experiments on him. I think the pheromone or whatever it is in the environment somehow made him go crazy.”
“Like a steroid or something,” Chloe said. “Are the animals exhibiting a kind of chemically triggered rage?”
“Could be.”
“But why all of a sudden?” Chloe said. “What’s changing the way they perceive pheromones?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that we need to find some pheromone experts and put them in a room, yesterday. More like five years ago. I’ll call the lab, you call that government guy, Leahy. I think we finally caught a break on this thing.”
Chapter 67
THE REST OF my morning consisted of a Silkwood shower and a Jerry Lewis telethon’s worth of phone calls.
By midafternoon Chloe, Eli, and I were sitting around the kitchen table with our bags packed and ready to go. I guessed our ride was out front when my phone went bzvvvvt bzvvvvt on the table and UNKNOWN NUMBER popped up on the screen. I went to the window and looked down.
When the NSA chief, Mike Leahy, said he was sending a car to take us to a secure location, I thought he had meant, well, a car.
On the sidewalk in front of our building was a camo-colored up-armored combat Humvee, with a soldier manning a machine gun in the steel-plated turret. For traveling with a low profile, I guess.
A young kid with orange hair and freckles, straight out of Archie Comics, met us in the lobby downstairs. He saluted.
“Lieutenant Durkin, US Army Third Infantry,” he said in that military cadence, a forward tumble of barks rising in pitch.
“Jesus, is it getting this bad out there, Lieutenant?” I said, gesturing at the war machine we were apparently about to e
nter. Durkin hoisted our bags as though he were a valet and led us toward the Humvee.
“Manhattan below Ninety-Sixth Street is in the process of being evacuated,” he said. “We’re starting with the hospitals and hospice facilities.”
“What? Why?”
“Rats.”
As we rolled north through Manhattan we saw barricades, checkpoints. The city was swarming with men and women in camo. The only vehicles that passed us going in the opposite direction were government evacuation buses and more army Hummers.
Times Square was empty. I glanced at the darkened marquee as we passed the Ed Sullivan Theater, where they tape Late Show with David Letterman. No stupid pet tricks tonight.
When we turned west on Fifty-Seventh Street we heard the whoosh of fire, and looked out the window to see two soldiers in silver suits kneeling in front of an open manhole, aiming flame throwers beneath the street.
We stopped on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-First Street. A chain-link fence braced with sandbags had been strung across the avenue in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Upper East Side was occupied now? When had all this happened? And why hadn’t I heard about it? The world had flipped from normal to bizarre in what? Hours? Things had seemed fine to me that morning.
“These two blocks are HQ for the time being,” Durkin said as a guard waved us through the makeshift fence. “This kinda reminds me of the Green Zone in Baghdad.”
“Or Ground Zero after nine-eleven,” I said.
We rolled past sandbagged trailers and stacked crates of bottled water and came to a stop in front of a stately granite prewar building directly across from the Met. The building’s interior was all gilded ornaments and Corinthian columns, glass, brass, marble, potted ferns. Durkin led us into the grand lobby, where an NYPD sergeant checked our IDs and, for no discernible reason, wanded us with a metal detector—including Eli, just to make sure our three-year-old boy wasn’t packing heat.
“Who’s in charge?” I asked Durkin.
“Colonel Walters, but he’s in the field.”
“The field?”
“Well, the city. I think some of the other scientists are here. Let me show you to your quarters first.”
They were nice quarters. The apartment we were led into was a multimillion-dollar duplex with massive fireplaces and twelve-foot coffered ceilings. The living room was cluttered with marble sculptures and African masks. There was a Chagall on the dining room wall.
“Fancy digs. How’d the army sublet Xanadu?” I said to Durkin.
He shrugged.
“Ours is not to reason why,” he said. “You guys settle in. The meeting’s on the first floor at sixteen hundred hours. Enjoy your vacation at the end of the world.”
Chapter 68
WE LEFT ELI in a makeshift day-care center that had been set up for the scientists’ children on the building’s fifth floor and went downstairs to help prepare for the meeting. I was surprised at how quickly Chloe and I adapted to all this doomsday scenario stuff. One day, you drop your kid off at pre-K, the next you take him to a government evacuation center’s day-care facility. What else could we do?
In a large alcove off the sweeping marble lobby, we worked with camo-clad army techs to convert a dining room into a conference room, complete with an interactive whiteboard. The table was a sleek, oblong, blood-colored mahogany, its surface so glossy it reflected light as sharply as a mirror. The room was huge, the ceilings fifteen feet high, with marble cornice moldings in the corners and dark oil paintings of robber barons set in the walls. A chandelier dangled like a bunch of crystal grapes above the table.
Over the next hour, Chloe and I greeted the other scientists whom the government had shuttled in via Hummer and helicopter. In addition to my colleague Dr. Quinn, they had recruited most of the rest of the lab staff from Columbia as well as more than a dozen top-drawer entomologists, environmentalists, and other scientists.
“Ah, look who it is,” I said to Chloe behind my hand. “Dr. Harvey Blowhard.”
Chloe rolled her eyes.
Dr. Harvey Saltonstall, the Henry Wentworth Wallace chair in biology at Harvard, shook my hand and gave me a cold, curt hello. Being proved right before your enemies is a pretty good feeling, and I couldn’t help but smirk a little. I did not like this man. Last time I’d seen him he was on the other side of a split screen on MSNBC, with Rachel Maddow moderating. That was more than a year ago. As usual, he’d made me look like a wing-nut bozo with his whole aristocratic persona—this handsome devil in tweed, occasionally swiping back his elegant shock of silver hair.
Harvey Saltonstall’s prominent public opposition to HAC had delayed progress for years. Now, why wasn’t I surprised that the officious, elitist asswipe was front and center in the government team assembled to solve the problem?
Soon I was standing at the head of a conference table ringed with the country’s best and brightest. I hoped all the expertise gathered in this room would be enough. And that we weren’t too late.
I started out by quickly going over what I had seen that morning under Bryant Park.
“At first, I thought HAC had a viral origin,” I said, looking around the table from face to face. Everyone nodded back at me. “But after seeing the animals up close today, acting in such a bizarre way, I think it’s time to take a new approach. I think this has to do with pheromones. The dogs I saw today were displaying textbook pheromonal aggregation behavior. It’s my belief that some new kind of morphed pheromone has entered the environment, and it’s probably our doing, because we seem to be one of the only mammals whose behavior isn’t affected by it.”
“We came here for this?” Harvey Saltonstall took a long, fastidious sip from the cup of coffee in front of him while everyone waited for his next words. “The environment? Please. This theory is infantile. A pheromone is a chemical that’s very specific to communication within species. I’ve never heard of the same pheromone affecting multiple species. Are you suggesting there’s some invisible crazy gas affecting all mammals except humans? Why should it not affect us?”
Irritating as he was, I knew Saltonstall had an excellent point. He’d immediately stuck his finger in the biggest hole in my theory. I bit my lip and thought.
Chapter 69
HARVEY SALTONSTALL MADE a prim cage of his fingertips and began to accordion them in and out, readying himself to redouble his attack. And then Chloe jumped in to save me.
“What about pollution?” she blurted.
“Yes, well, what about it?” Saltonstall said.
“Pollution in the environment sometimes causes mutational changes in animals. Take nylonase, for example. In a wastewater pond beside a nylon factory in Japan, they found a species of bacteria that only eats nylon. The presence of the pollution genetically altered the bacteria that were already there.”
“This stuff is all well and good when we’re talking about pollution,” said Saltonstall. “But I thought we were talking about pheromones. What does pollution have to do with pheromones?”
I rapped my knuckles on the table.
“Hydrocarbons,” I said. “That’s where pheromones and pollution connect. Pheromones are made up of hydrocarbons. So is petroleum.”
Around the table, everyone sat up a little straighter. My mind was racing. I couldn’t help it—I sprang to my feet and started pacing behind my chair.
“Hydrocarbons are everywhere,” I continued. “Over the last two hundred years, from car traffic and industrial activity, there’s been a massive increase in volatile hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. Methane, ethylene…”
“Not to mention the prevalence of petroleum,” Chloe said. “Petroleum is in everything—plastic, house paint, balloons, pillows, shampoo. It leaches into the groundwater.”
“Didn’t studies in the nineties explore the health hazards of plastics due to their chemical similarity to estrogens?” Dr. Terry Atkinson added. He was a chemical engineer from Cooper Union.
I felt like diving acr
oss the table and giving him a high five. I didn’t.
“Yes!” I said. “If hydrocarbons can mimic estrogen, it’s entirely conceivable that they can mimic pheromones.”
“Or take the plastic compound used in water bottles,” said Dr. Quinn, jabbing a pen in the air. “They found that it caused the estrogen levels of fish to skyrocket for some reason. In a lake outside a manufacturing plant in Germany, researchers found that there were no male fish present at all.”
“We are flying down the wrong path here, folks,” Saltonstall insisted. He cleared his throat and swiped back his silver shock of hair with his hand. “How do chemical hydrocarbons change without some sort of catalyst? Plastic has been around for over fifty years. If it affected the way animals process pheromones, wouldn’t we have noticed long before now?”
I let out a breath and tried to come up with an answer. Saltonstall again had raised a good counterargument.
“Excuse me, Mr. Oz,” said Betty Orlean, an environmental scientist from the University of Chicago. “Quick question. When did you start noticing this increase in animal aggression?”
“As far as my data show, around 1996,” I said. “But it didn’t start getting bad until the aughts.”
“Nineteen ninety-six is right around when cell phones started becoming more popular,” Betty said a bit cryptically. “And cell phone use has exponentially increased since then.” The thought was half formed in her head.
“So?” Saltonstall said.
“Well, Dr. Saltonstall,” she said, “we know that cell phones use radiofrequency energy, which forms fields of electromagnetic radiation. Some animal functions at the cellular level can be affected by such fields. The fear for years has been that one field could disrupt the other. That’s why there have been so many studies about the link between cell phone use and brain cancer. For years, our world has been swimming in an unprecedented sea of radiation.”
“Yes,” I said, really going now. “Perhaps cell phone radiation is somehow cooking the ambient environmental hydrocarbons in a way we’ve never seen before—morphing them into a chemical that animals are picking up as a pheromone. And it’s changing their cerebral physiology, as we’ve seen at Columbia. We know that the affected animals have bigger amygdalae.”
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