By the evening of the next day, they had.
First was a herd of rabid reindeer. They rammed their hoofs and antlers against the metal siding for hours until finally giving up from exhaustion. Next came a pack of wolverines. Not the scary Hugh Jackman mutant kind but weasel-like critters the size of small dogs. Still, their teeth and claws are as sharp as razors. If they’d found a way in, they’d have had no trouble turning three helpless humans into mincemeat.
I peer through the door’s porthole. The coast looks clear—but anything could be out there. Lurking. Waiting. The quarter-mile hike to the airstrip might as well be a marathon.
Which is why I’m holding that trusty Glock—the one that saved my life once before—just in case. I check the clip: seventeen shiny gold bullets. Locked and loaded.
I push open the door and the three of us step outside. With my very first breath, the frigid air stabs the back of my throat like a knife.
“Come on,” I manage to croak. “Let’s hurry.”
We traipse as fast as we can across the fresh snow; it’s up to our knees. Over the crunching of our footsteps and the whistling of the wind, I hear Chloe speaking some comforting words to our son to help keep him calm.
Meanwhile, I’m scanning the icy vista all around us like a hawk. Which is harder than you might think. The endless snow and ice reflect the midday sun brighter than a million mirrors. If a feral animal or two—or ten—came charging toward us, sure, I’d probably spot them in time. But would I be able to see well enough in the glare to aim and fire?
I pray I don’t have to find out.
Before long I do spot something looming. It’s bluish-gray. And enormous.
It’s the C-12 Huron transport plane—its dual propellers still spinning—sent by the Air Force to take us home.
We finally reach it as its rear stairs are hydraulically lowered. I gesture for Chloe and Eli to board first. I take one final glance around, say a silent good-bye to this icy hell, then climb in after them.
“IDs and boarding passes, please?”
One of the two pilots, a surprisingly youngish woman with a megawatt grin, is turned around in her seat to face us. Chloe and I smile back, filled with relief and glad to discover our saviors have a sense of humor.
“Shoot,” I say, patting my pockets. “I think I left my wallet in my other subzero bodysuit.”
“I’m Major Schiff,” the captain says, grinning. “This is First Lieutenant Kimmel. Sit down, strap in, and let’s get you guys out of here.”
There are only about a dozen plush leather seats in the plane, which we have all to ourselves. Eli picks one by the window. Chloe sits next to him, and I beside her.
Within seconds, the plane’s engines come alive and we’re speeding down the bumpy, potholed runway. As we lift off into the sky, I close my eyes for just a moment…
When I hear Eli shriek at the top of his lungs.
“Look, look!” He’s pointing out the window. A flock of birds—looks like a mix of gulls and ducks and even owls—has suddenly appeared on the horizon, flying right at us. They can’t touch a speeding jet, and we leave the squawking mass of feathers in our atmospheric dust.
I reach over and take Chloe’s hand. It’s clammy. And trembling.
I realize mine is, too.
Chapter 5
The plane’s cabin is pitch-black. We’ve been flying for hours. Eli and Chloe are snoring softly, both sleeping like babies.
Me? Not even close.
I’m exhausted but haven’t caught a wink. My first stop, before returning to the United States, is London. There I’ll attend an international summit to discuss new global responses to the animal attacks with representatives from around the world.
My mind’s been on overdrive pretty much since wheels-up. That world we’re returning to after all this time—what does it look like? The government’s promise to treat HAC as a scientific crisis, not a military one—how will that actually play out? And what is my role in it all?
The lights inside the cabin come on. Major Schiff turns to face me.
“Time to stow those tray tables. We’re about to land.”
Now my heart rate really starts to rise. Not because of the summit in London.
No, I’m getting nervous because we’re not landing in London right now.
And my wife has no idea yet.
Chloe rubs her eyes and sits up in her seat. She gives me a groggy smile and glances out the window—when her expression instantly turns to shock. Then anger.
“Oz…? Where are we?”
She asks rhetorically, of course. We’ve just flown past the Eiffel Tower.
“Chloe, look, I’m sorry. If I’d told you the truth—”
“I never would have agreed to it, you’re absolutely right!”
“Listen, I can explain—”
“No, let me,” she fires back. “While you jet off to London for the conference, then to God-knows-where-else around the world, Eli and I will be staying here. In Paris. With my parents. Because in your head you’ve convinced yourself that’s safer!”
Chloe knows me too well. That was my plan to a T. I’d arranged it secretly with Dr. Freitas of the Department of Energy. And it did sound good in my head. But hearing my wife repeat it back to me, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve done the right thing.
“If there was any way we could stay together,” I say, “any way at all, you know I’d choose that in a heartbeat. But be real, Chloe. Let’s say they send me to the Amazon. Or Mount Kilimanjaro. Or the Antarctic. Are those any places to take a four-year-old?”
Chloe just rolls her beautiful eyes.
I want to tell her we’ll talk every day, no matter where in the world I am. I want her to know that every second I’m not working on solving the animal crisis, I’ll be thinking about her and Eli. I want her to believe me when I promise I’ll be coming back to get them as soon as I possibly can.
But I don’t get a chance to say any of that. Our plane touches down on a private runway at Le Bourget, and before I know it, Chloe and I are walking down the retractable steps, Eli in my arms. A shiny black Citroën sedan and a handful of people are already waiting for us on the tarmac.
“Chloe, ma petite chérie!”
Marielle Tousignant, my wife’s bubbly seventy-year-old stepmother, wraps her in an emotional hug. Marielle married her widowed father when Chloe was still fairly young. She never adopted Chloe officially, but it didn’t matter. Marielle couldn’t have children of her own, and before long, the two became extremely close, as if biological relatives.
I stand in silence as they speak to each other in rapid-fire French. I can’t understand a word, but the gist of their conversation is pretty obvious.
“Salut, Oz,” Marielle says to me, kissing both my cheeks and blotting her eyes. “Thank you for returning to me my daughter.”
“Of course, Marielle,” I say. “Thanks for taking care of her while I’m gone.”
“And who is this handsome garçon?” she asks, gently stroking sleeping Eli’s hair.
Chloe furrows her brow. Is her stepmother making a joke? Or is it something else?
“Very funny, Maman,” she says. “That’s your grandson.”
After the slightest pause, an embarrassed smile blooms across Marielle’s face. “Oui, bien sûr! My, how big Eli is getting!”
A suited man standing by the car interrupts us: “Ma’am?”
He has an American accent, and I presume he’s one of the U.S. Embassy security escorts Dr. Freitas promised would pick Chloe and Eli up from the airport. “We should get going.”
Everyone agrees. Eli is still sleeping, and as Chloe takes him gently from me, I can tell from her expression she’s still upset. Is it because I didn’t tell her the plan? Because we’re going to be apart again? Or because the world has come to this?
Probably all three.
“Where’s Papa?” I hear her ask Marielle as we approach the sedan.
“Right here, my dear,” come
s a scratchy old voice from inside the vehicle.
Jean-Luc Tousignant, my wife’s seventy-six-year-old father, is sitting in the backseat. A wooden cane is draped across his knees. As he reaches up to embrace his daughter, his hands tremble terribly.
“Forgive me for not getting out. I do not have the strength.”
Chloe can barely hide her shock. Neither can I. The last time we saw him, just a year ago, when he and Marielle visited us in New York, Jean-Luc, a former French Foreign Legion officer, was hale and hearty for his age. Tonight he looks frail and sick.
Wonderful, I think. I figured my wife and son would be safe in Paris with my in-laws. I had no idea that one of them had developed early-stage dementia and the other, Parkinson’s.
But at least this is safer than bringing Chloe and Eli with me to dangerous, far-flung lands…right?
I suddenly feel my wife pressing up against me, her arms around my neck, her lips on mine.
“I hate you so much, Oz,” she whispers between kisses. “But I love you more.”
I tell her I love her, too. I tell her to be safe. To watch over Eli. That I’ll be back for them.
“Just as soon as I save the world. I promise.”
With that, Chloe gets into the sedan and it speeds away into the night.
As I climb back up the steps of the plane, I swallow the growing lump in my throat. I knew saying good-bye to my family wasn’t going to be easy.
Now comes the even harder part.
Chapter 6
Dawn is breaking over London. It’s 2016, but squint, and you’d swear it was back during the Blitz.
Our three-SUV convoy is speeding east along Marylebone Road, one of the city’s central thoroughfares. My eyes are glued to the streetscape outside the window, and my jaw is stuck to the floor. I’m getting my first glimpse of just how much the world has changed since I’ve been gone.
By “changed,” I mean “gone to absolute shit.”
The sidewalks are splattered with dried blood and strewn with debris and broken glass. Gutters are filled with soggy garbage. Shops are boarded up. Most traffic lights are out. A few other cars and trucks are on the road—police and military vehicles, generally—but I don’t see a single pedestrian.
Instead, central London is overrun by animals—in particular, roving packs of rangy, rabid wolves.
Their fur is patchy, but their fangs glisten like icicles. They seem to be stalking down virtually every sidewalk and alley we pass, sniffing the ground, searching for human prey.
Clearly they’re the primary animal threat in this part of the city. But I also spot plenty of feral dogs and house cats in the mix. I see squirrels skittering across rooftops, too. A flock of falcons circling and cawing overhead.
When we pass a burnt-out black London cab, abandoned on the corner of Baker Street—near the address of the fictional Sherlock Holmes—I notice that inside, about fifty greasy rats have built a giant, filthy nest. They’re gnawing the flesh off a severed human leg, and it doesn’t take a crack detective to figure out how they got it.
“Welcome back to the jungle, Oz.”
Seated beside me, Dr. Evan Freitas pats me on the shoulder and lets out a grim chuckle. He can’t be more than fifty, but the stress of spearheading Washington’s scientific HAC response has clearly aged him prematurely. His bushy black beard is streaked with gray. Every time he speaks, his entire face fills with wrinkles like a prune.
“It’s…it’s just…,” I stutter, “unbelievable.”
“Worse than you imagined?”
“Worse than—my worst nightmare! We had satellite internet back in the Arctic. I’d read that the animals were gaining ground. That huge swaths of major cities had basically been overrun. And abandoned. But this…this is just beyond—”
“London Town ain’t been abandoned, mate,” says Jack Riley, our driver, a cranky, baldheaded Brit with the Metropolitan Police. “See?”
He gestures to an apartment above what was once a high-end shoe store, now looted and dark. A woman has opened her second-story window a crack. She quickly reels in a line of laundry and slams the window shut.
“The whole bloody lot of us just stay indoors now. Least the smart ones do.”
Yep, I’d read about that as well.
In many places, just setting foot onto the street is a death wish. So most people, especially in big cities, remain inside their homes pretty much 24/7, with their doors and windows locked tight. Some have gone even further, converting their buildings into anti-animal mini-fortresses, as Chloe’s parents and a few neighbors had done to their Paris apartment complex. It was one of the many reasons I thought my wife and son would be safer there.
Folks communicate with friends and family almost exclusively by phone and internet—even more so than they did before. School and work are done online as much as possible. In terms of food and other necessities, people have come to rely on sporadic deliveries of rations by armed government soldiers. Doctors have gone back to making house calls, at great personal risk…and are almost always packing heat.
“It’s like this in Atlanta, too. And the suburbs and surrounding counties? Even worse. People are getting desperate. Civilization is breaking down.”
Those ominous words come from the woman sitting in the row of seats behind us, nervously biting her cuticles: Dr. Sarah Lipchitz.
While I’d waited with Freitas at Heathrow for about half an hour for Sarah’s plane to arrive from the United States, he explained that she was a brilliant young biologist and pathogen expert currently employed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who had been handpicked to join our team. (What he didn’t mention was that the bespectacled Sarah was very pretty, in a geeky, girl-next-door kind of way.)
“Precisely, Doctor,” Freitas responds. “And preventing global chaos from becoming total anarchy is why we’re all here.”
He means me, Sarah, himself, and the rest of the scientists and experts in our three-vehicle convoy. Barely a dozen people, responsible for the lives of millions.
I have about a thousand follow-up questions for Freitas, but they’ll have to wait. We pass Hampstead Road and turn down a one-way side street. Our convoy comes to a stop in front of the main gates of University College London. The international symposium we’ve come to England to attend is a gathering of some of the finest scientific minds in the world, all trying to save humanity.
As armed British soldiers open our doors and escort us inside, I hear a pack of wolves in the distance, howling.
I hope they’re not signaling that another innocent person has been mauled.
Chapter 7
My God, these scientific conferences are dull.
I’d forgotten how absolutely painful they can be. Even when the topic is literally the fate of the planet, the only thing these bland professors and rumpled “experts” seem to know how to do is drone on and on. And on.
It makes me want to pull my hair out. Worst of all, we’ve been at this for almost five hours now, and I haven’t heard one single presenter offer any useful new information or viable solutions.
If this really is a confab of the finest minds in their fields…we’re screwed.
A team from Senegal, for example, discussed the inconclusive results of some recent biopsies of the brain tissue of rabid elephants. A Brazilian electrical engineer spoke of her lab’s failed attempt to use gamma radiation waves to block the effects of cellphone signals on animal pheromone reception.
A group of officers from Moscow’s Valerian Kuybyshev Military Engineering Academy outlined a Kremlin-backed plan to carpet-bomb any and all major underground animal breeding areas. When I angrily interrupted to explain that the American government had tried an almost identical bombing campaign just a few months ago and that it had failed spectacularly, the committee chairman cut the feed to my microphone.
Thank goodness it was time for a fifteen-minute break.
Right now I’m standing in the hallway outside the main meeting room, mai
nlining some desperately needed caffeine and sugar: a muddy cup of coffee and a rich, gooey Cadbury chocolate-caramel bar.
Sarah is reviewing her notes for a presentation she’s giving later about what she’s dubbed HMC—Human Microbial Conflict—which she believes, based on her research, will be the next, even more terrifying stage in all this madness.
Freitas, meanwhile, is sitting on the floor, talking animatedly on his smartphone and tapping wildly on his iPad. I don’t have the foggiest idea to whom or what about—but by the look of it, it’s important.
“Feeling nervous?” I ask Sarah when I see she’s reached the end of her pages.
“Of course,” she replies. “Exceedingly nervous.”
“Don’t worry about it, you’ll do great. Just try to imagine that every chubby, balding, pasty scientist in the audience is wearing nothing but his underwear. Actually…no, don’t do that. That’s a pretty disturbing picture.”
Sarah smiles and shakes her head.
“Thanks, Oz. But I’m not nervous about giving the presentation. I’m terrified…about what my data show. If you think wild animals attacking humans is bad, just wait another few months or so, when I predict wild bacteria will join in. There’s no way to bomb something microscopic.”
“Good God,” I mumble, rubbing my temples. The prospect of that sounds beyond horrific. “One crisis at a time, please.”
Suddenly Freitas leaps up from the ground and hurries over to us, waving his iPad in the air. Given the glint in his eye, I can tell he’s overjoyed about something.
“They’re in! The latest worldwide AAPC numbers!”
“Isn’t that just a bunch of old fogeys?” I ask.
Freitas doesn’t like my joke. The acronym, he says, stands for animal attacks per capita. It’s a metric he invented to measure the rate of animal-related incidents and deaths in different countries around the world.
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