Bestiary

by Robert Masello

  The footsteps had stopped, and Sadowski wondered what Tate was thinking. Was he wondering why Sadowski hadn’t outfitted him with an asbestos sheath, too? Had he been burned—badly—by the fire? Was he going to be really hard to look at?

  And what should he, Sadowski, do? Should he play dead? Or should he say something, or stir inside the bag, to show that he was still alive in there? His fingers instinctively reached for the gun that he now regretted having left in the car.

  The footsteps came closer, but they sounded heavy and hard. Maybe Tate was on his last legs. That wouldn’t actually be so bad; if he died, Sadowski could take his wallet and ID off of him, and his body would probably never be identified; there’d be a lot of unidentified remains by tomorrow, Sadowski figured.

  Either way, Sadowski hoped he had a full canteen on him; his throat was parched and he’d left his own water supply in the Explorer.

  Sadowski didn’t hear anything more, but he sensed someone very close by, and even through the small aperture he could smell something now—but it wasn’t like human sweat or flesh, even of the slightly cooked kind. He knew those smells pretty damn well, from the white phosphorus attacks they’d laid down on the insurgents in Iraq. No, this was a different smell, but it, too, took him back to the desert . . . to the day that Captain Greer had talked them all into that little extracurricular mission outside Mosul. It was the smell he’d encountered in that empty zoo in al-Kalli’s palace . . . where the bars of the cages were bent like they’d been hit with battering rams . . . and Lopez, the poor dead son of a bitch, had helped to press on the wings of that iron peacock . . . to reveal the box that Greer claimed he had never opened.

  He decided not to call out. Or move. Or give any sign of life at all.

  But the footsteps came closer anyway. And something was strange about that, too. It didn’t sound like two footsteps at a time . . . but four.

  Sadowski tried to pull the zipper closed again, but it was stuck firmly in place.

  And the smell—of scorched fur and rugged hide—got much stronger.

  Sadowski froze, not so much as breathing anymore.

  But something was breathing—and it was directly above him now. As he peered through the hole in the bag, he saw a green eye, as big as a baseball, looking back down at him. He felt a trickle of urine stream down his leg.

  The creature snorted—its breath was as fetid as a garbage dump—and Sadowski felt a broad paw grazing the top of the bag . . . looking for a way in.

  Jesus, Mary, Mother of God, God Almighty . . . Sadowski couldn’t think the words fast enough. And he couldn’t think of anything else he could do; he could barely move his arms and legs anyway.

  The gentle pawing became more firm, and Sadowski could swear that he heard the click of the creature’s claws suddenly extending; one of them, an evil, crooked talon, hooked itself inside the tiny opening at the top of the bag and drew the zipper down as smoothly as a tailor. Sadowski lay there like a sardine in an opened can, while above him he saw what looked like a giant hyena, a mottled beast with hanging fangs and a thick matting of black fur all across its shoulders and neck.

  Sadowski wanted to jump up and run, but his feet were still tangled in the bottom of the sheath, and when he tried to kick them free, the creature reared up on its hind legs, the black fur flying out like a cape, like the wings you’d see on a vampire bat. And then—just as Sadowski had mustered enough spit to scream—the beast threw back its head and let out a howl of its own, more bone-chilling than anything Sadowski had ever heard, and loud enough to drown out his own cry altogether.

  Then it fell forward—jaws open and claws out—its black fur wrapping itself like a reeking veil around his thrashing head.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  SUNSET BOULEVARD WAS predictably snarled, the traffic inching along as policemen, stationed at the major intersections, tried to redirect the cars and keep the lanes moving at all. Carter ached to hit the klaxon again, and then use the limo like a snowplow, just shoving everything ahead of him out of the way; he had no doubt that this car could do it. Everytime he stopped dead, he studied the screens and dials on the dashboard, and eventually he found the phone connection.

  “Number, please,” an automated female voice said.

  Carter, relieved, recited his home phone number.

  But instead of connecting him, the voice said, “Unrecognized caller. Please say your name.”

  What would it recognize? Al-Kalli? Or, more likely, Jakob? And did he need Jakob’s last name?—because he had no idea what that was.

  Carter tried “Jakob.”

  The automated voice did not respond.

  He tried “Mohammed al-Kalli.”

  But again, there was no reply.

  “Please say your name,” the voice finally repeated.

  And this time, in total frustration, Carter simply said his own.

  “Unrecognized caller. Please say your name.”

  Carter gave up. Maybe they had some code name; maybe it could actually recognize Jakob’s voice itself. The blue light, next to the siren, was still silently flashing. What the hell was that, anyway—LoJack?

  “Good-bye,” the automated voice chirped.

  “Yeah, right,” Carter replied, “have a nice day.”

  A cop waved him through a blocked intersection—he managed to go about three car lengths—before he had to stop again entirely. He lowered his head to peer up through the tinted windshield at the sky; the wispy cirrus clouds that he had seen earlier were eclipsed now by plumes of smoke, rising like funnels from every direction. It reminded him of the pictures he’d seen from Kuwait, when the fleeing Iraqis had set the oil wells on fire.

  What the hell was going on? Was the whole city of Los Angeles going up in flames? He was reminded of the guys in army fatigues—Sadowski and his pals—who had shown up at the bestiary, and of something their leader had said: “Oh, I’ve got a plan,” or something like that, and then he’d glanced at his watch, as if making sure he was still on schedule. It seemed both impossible and incomprehensible—why would anyone do it?—but Carter had to wonder if what he was seeing was more than random wildfires, started by careless picnickers or kids with fireworks. Was it some insane and orchestrated plan?

  He crawled forward, another thirty or forty feet, just as a helicopter swooped overhead; more images of Middle Eastern warfare teemed in his head. And his fear for the safety of Beth and Joey suddenly grew, exponentially. Were they home? Were they waiting there for him? Or had they fled to safety somewhere else?

  A fire truck, sirens blaring, maneuvered itself across the intersection, right in front of Carter, and then, with a police escort clearing the way in front of it, started driving along the shoulder toward Sepulveda. The right side of the fire truck was riding up on the sidewalks and curbs, but Carter saw his chance and he took it; he gunned the Mercedes and caught the fire truck’s wake, following along close behind. A firefighter, manning the ladder at the rear, waved him off, shouting, but Carter couldn’t make out what he was saying—though he could certainly guess the gist of it—and he didn’t care, anyway. He was determined to get to Summit View, and this was the only way to do it. Several times cops, too, hollered at him through bullhorns, and once, Carter got so pissed off he purposely hit the klaxon again, a blast louder and more powerful than anything you’d hear from even a sixteen-wheeler. He also noticed that one of the LED screens read INTERCOM ENGAGED. He touched the screen and then said, “Testing.”

  His voice boomed out over the jammed traffic lanes.

  Oh man. What did this car not do?

  “Official business,” he said. “Please clear the way.”

  That must have given the cops a surprise, he thought—and at the next corner, they slowed down and fell back to attend to an accident. Carter didn’t doubt that they’d made note of his license plate, though, and that al-Kalli—if he’d lived—would have been hearing from them soon.

  Al-Kalli. When Carter thought about what he’d s
een not an hour ago—the man’s head rolling, and still sentient, if Carter’s guess was correct, across the dirt floor of the bestiary—he couldn’t believe it; it was as if Carter’s own mind could not process the information, could not accept everything that had happened, and everything he had witnessed, that day.

  And though it wasn’t late even now, dusk had come early—the sun was shrouded behind an increasingly dense pall of smoke and cinders. Passengers sitting in the stalled cars that Carter passed looked stunned, terrified. Some had abandoned their cars altogether, and were running down the center lanes, carrying dogs in their arms, or car seats with squalling babies still in them. In the brown grass along one side of the road, he saw several people kneeling around a Hispanic man with a Bible who was leading them, heads down, in prayer; black ash swirled around their heads. Terrible shades, he couldn’t help but think, of 9/11.

  He fumbled at the levers of the wheel until he found the windshield wipers and fluid; as the blades went back and forth, the window at first got sootier and more smeared, but then, with another jet of fluid, it began to clear.

  The radio—he finally thought of trying the radio, but when he found it, and got it on, it was tuned to some Middle Eastern music station. Although he needed to keep both hands on the wheel, every chance he got he reached over and played with the controls until he found a news station. But even then the reception was terrible, and staticky. “Fires . . . Temescal Canyon ablaze, fanned by Santa Ana winds . . .” There was another burst of static, and then a fire official’s voice saying, “Please stay in your homes unless and until an evacuation order is given.” Carter continued to listen as the announcer read off an endless list of freeways that were impassable, roads that were closed, neighborhoods that were endangered. But nothing, thank God, was said about Summit View—at least so far.

  The fire engine had turned off in another direction several blocks before, and Carter now was simply barreling along the shoulder, often with one or two tires off the macadam, and eliciting blasting horns and angry shouts and bullhorned police warnings. Over the car’s loudspeaker, he occasionally repeated his claim of official business, and once—at a particularly tricky juncture—announced that he was the mayor; the powerful black limousine with the fortunately tinted windows made a convincing case.

  But when he got to Sepulveda and approached the entrance to Summit View, he found the long driveway blocked by a couple of fire trucks and several police cars. A stream of cars, some of them hastily loaded with stuff, was coming down off the hill and being shepherded toward the Valley. He had to stop short, and a young cop wearing a white paper face mask banged on his closed window with the butt of a flashlight. Carter rolled it down.

  “You can’t go up there,” the cop barked, the mask billowing out, “we’re evacuating.”

  “I have to,” Carter said, “I live there! My family’s up there!”

  “Not anymore they’re not. Everybody’s coming down.” He waved to the left. “Now move it.”

  He walked away, but instead of turning in to the file of cars slowly moving toward the Valley, Carter moved forward. The cop saw it and, pulling down the face mask, hollered, “What did I just tell you?”

  Carter rolled the window up. The cop was running after him, and in his rearview mirror Carter could see that he was actually unsnapping his holster. Carter was fairly confident that this was a bulletproof car, but that still didn’t mean he wanted to test it.

  “Stop!” the cop shouted, and two or three other policemen, dead ahead, got out of their cars to see what was happening. They had parked bumper to bumper, to blockade the right lanes of the drive. Carter would have to go around them. He steered the limousine over the curb, up onto the lawn, and then through the towering palm trees that lined both sides of the drive.

  Carter heard a shot, glanced in the mirror, and saw the young cop, feet squarely planted, firing his pistol into the air.

  And one of the patrol cars that had been blocking the drive started up after him, bumping over the curb with its lights flashing and siren blaring.

  Was all of this for nothing? Carter thought. Was Beth in one of the cars that was already snaking its way down the hillside? He kept shooting glances over to his left, looking for her old white Volvo, but he didn’t see it.

  Nor did he see, until it was almost too late, the big green SUV that was barreling down the hillside, trying to circumvent the traffic on the drive. The SUV blasted its horn, and Carter blasted the klaxon in reply, its piercing wail reverberating around the hillside with a frightening echo; the SUV, perhaps startled, veered to the side, so close that it grazed Carter’s side mirror. Carter saw a panicked woman on a cell phone in the driver’s seat, a couple of kids in the back, and then he saw her swerve to miss a tree behind him, and he heard the crash.

  She’d run right into the front of the police car; the hoods of both cars were crumpled, and there was a cloud of steam escaping from them both. Two cops jumped out to assess the damage, and Carter drove his own car back onto the main drive. While the lane on the other side of the cement median strip had a dozen or so cars still backed up, the lane going up the hill was clear, and Carter took its turns as if he were on the autobahn. The Mercedes purred, like a pent-up animal delighted at last to run free.

  But the air, as he ascended, was darker and dirtier all the time. Smoke from the east was drifting over, and it was as if night was falling by the minute. Carter passed only one or two other cars racing down, one of them an open Miata with a bronze statue of a naked nymph on the passenger seat. Far ahead, he saw a red fire captain’s car, and he could hear the speaker on the top telling people to evacuate now. He cut sharply into a side street, then shot back up through a service drive that led toward the top of the development. Via Vista, his own street, connected with it just a block or two up.

  Ash was falling like snowflakes on the immaculate houses and parched lawns and empty streets.

  Tires screeching, Carter wheeled the limo onto Via Vista, where only one row of houses stood along the crest-line, the dense canyon falling steeply away just behind them. All that could be seen of the massive power towers that rose up above the trees and thick brush were the red signal beacons flashing at their top; the Santa Monica Mountains, perfectly visible on most days, were now just an immense black shadow, far away. Carter raced up the hill, past the tennis courts, past the swimming pool, toward the lighted windows of his own house. Beth was home, he thought, Joey was home! He would gather them all up into the Mercedes, along with Champ—he couldn’t forget Champ!—and get the hell out of there, while there was still time!

  The car lurched to a halt in the drive, right next to his Jeep, and he leapt out while the engine was still turning off. He ran across the front lawn—he could hear Champ barking inside—and threw open the door.

  “Beth! Where are you?”

  But there wasn’t any answer. Champ jumped up onto his pants.

  “Down, boy!” He pushed the dog aside and raced up the stairs, shouting, “Beth! Beth!” The dog bounded up after him.

  He ducked his head into the nursery—the crib was empty—then into the master bedroom—empty, too.

  He stopped to catch his breath, then heard a voice—Beth’s, from downstairs—calling, “Champ! Champ!”

  “We’re here!” Carter shouted, then ran back to the top of the stairs.

  Beth, at the bottom, was holding a leash; her hair was slapped up under a baseball cap, and she was wearing a Getty sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. She looked shocked to see him.

  “Where did you come from?” she blurted out. “I’ve been waiting—”

  “No time—let’s go,” he said, leaping down the stairs again, three at a time.

  “Joey’s in the car, but your Jeep is blocking the drive! I couldn’t—”

  He grabbed her tight, kissed her on the top of her baseball cap, and said, “Follow me.”

  The door to the garage was standing open. He ran in and lifted Joey out of his car seat.
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br />   “What are you doing?” Beth said. “Just move the Jeep out of the way!”

  “Trust me,” he said, running outside now, past his Jeep and toward the limo. If any car could get them out of this maelstrom . . .

  He yanked open the rear door and waved Beth and Champ toward it. The dog made a running jump, Beth quickly clambered in, and as soon as she was seated, he handed her the baby. Even Joey, the imperturbable baby, looked concerned; black ashes clung to his blond curls.

  Beth didn’t even have time to ask where this car had come from.

  Carter threw himself behind the wheel, backed up wildly halfway across the cul-de-sac, then started back down the hill. In the time the car had been out, the soot and ash had piled up on the windshield again, and he hit the fluid and wipers. But the debris was so thick, the wipers could barely move. Carter leaned forward to see ahead, then opened his window instead, and put his head out. It was like a scene from hell.

  The sky was filled with clouds of black smoke, lighted from below by the advancing flames. The streetlamps, on light sensors, had all gone on, casting pale golden pools of illumination on the debris collecting around the base of their poles.

  Carter fumbled at a few switches again, then found the high beams and turned them on. He had slowed down, looking for the turn back down the hill, when he saw something move, just a few yards in front of the car, and hit the brakes.

  At first he couldn’t tell what he was looking at—then he was able to see that it was a kind of animal exodus. In the crosswalk yet! A small herd of deer was skittering across the street, flanked by several coyotes, who were, miraculously, so intent on escape that they weren’t even molesting the deer. A pair of raccoons tumbled over the curb. A skunk followed.

  “Why are we stopping?” Beth said, cradling Joey in her arms. Champ barked at the closed window.

  “Some deer,” Carter said, before slapping the klaxon control again and sending up a mighty bellow. The deer fled, the coyotes scattered, and Carter started down again.