Zoo 2 (12 page)

All five of us
—Chloe, Eli, Sarah, David, and myself—race up the stairs and outside. It's the first time we've stepped foot out of the lab in days. The sun is setting and the mostly empty campus is bathed in eerie, shadowy orange light.
Only
eerie, shadowy orange light. It looks like the entire school has lost power.

Scratch that. Glancing around in every direction, I see that the blackout stretches across
the entire city of Las Vegas.

I also see the source of those feral war cries.

A band of rabid humans is stalking across the campus—a dozen, at least, maybe more, chasing and ferociously attacking everyone they encounter. They're also a distorted reflection of Vegas society. One is wearing the black vest and green visor of a blackjack dealer. Another, the heavy makeup and skimpy dress of a cocktail waitress or maybe a prostitute. Another is a Vegas cop, in uniform, firing his sidearm.

“What do we do?” asks Sarah, panicking.

The truth is, I have no goddamn idea.

We can't just stand here, but we don't have a plan, either. We don't have a new safe destination. And we don't have any weapons.

All we've got is a wrecked government Jeep with a quarter tank of gas. A single nasal injector with an antidote that
might
work. And each other.

The most important thing of all.

“What do we do? We run!”

Scooping up my son and pulling my wife along by the hand, we rush to the Jeep still parked not far from the lab entrance. We pile inside and peel out.

By the time we get off campus, we spot another cluster of feral humans coming from the other direction—the Strip, its famous casinos and hotels all scarily dark. One of them wears the uniform of a hotel housekeeper. Another, a burly bald man wielding a shotgun, has on the shiny black suit of a casino bouncer.

They catch sight of our speeding Jeep and decide to pursue. As they pick up speed, the bouncer fires at us, spiderwebbing our rear windshield with buckshot.

“Go faster, Oz!” Chloe shouts from the backseat.

So I do. And soon we're whizzing down one of the city's wide boulevards, littered with trash and abandoned cars and the occasional non-feral person running for his or her life.

We seem to have lost the second pack of rabid humans, but more keep popping up around every corner. A Chinese tourist hurls a concrete cinder-block at us with incredible strength, leaving a divot in the hood. Even a feral Elvis impersonator leaps in front of the Jeep and bashes one of the headlights with a baseball bat.

“Merde!”
Chloe exclaims. “Goddamn you, Oz! I said faster! Why can't you ever do anything right?”

“Hey, I'm trying my best here!” I call back to her, almost more freaked out by her angry tone of voice than by the rabid humans we're trying to avoid.

When I suddenly realize…holy shit…

I turn around in my seat to look at Chloe. Her forehead is drenched. Her cheeks are deep crimson. She's holding Eli in her lap, but clutching onto him so tightly that his skin his turning white—and she's digging her nails into his flesh a bit, making him cry.

Please. God, no…it can't be…

Chloe lets loose a bloodcurdling primal roar and grabs me from behind.

She—not Sarah—is the one who's been going feral!

Our car fills with screaming and mayhem as Chloe attacks me like a maniac, clawing at my face and neck from behind, quickly drawing blood.

Stunned, Sarah and David scramble to yank her off while I try to keep the car moving and under control. We swerve wildly—sideswiping a telephone pole, scraping the roof of an overturned tour bus, just narrowly avoiding being hit by a flaming Molotov cocktail hurled by a feral human on a rooftop I can't even see.

As the fight continues—me resisting and struggling and gurgling on my own blood—I see David pull the nasal injector from his pocket. He rips off the cap with his teeth, yanks Chloe's head back by her hair, jams the injector up her nostril, and depresses the trigger.

Chloe gasps and screams. She starts to writhe and seize, shaking horribly and frothing at the mouth. It's an awful, agonizing sight…

But it's over in just a few seconds.

Chloe releases her grip on me and slumps back in her seat. Slowly, her breathing and complexion return to normal. Her muscles relax.

Before our eyes,
she becomes a healthy human being again!

“What…what just…did I…?” is all she can manage to croak.

“It's okay, Chloe,” I whisper, tears of relief streaming down my bloodied face.

Sarah, David, little Eli—they're overwhelmed as well.

I refocus on the road ahead. I press down on the gas even harder and squeal onto a highway on-ramp.

Behind me, through my rearview mirror as we drive farther and farther away, I can see columns of smoke rising. Sin City's been turned into a war zone.

But at least we saved my wife.

And thanks to our antidote,
we might save humanity, too
.

“It's okay, baby,” I say again. “Everything's going to be okay.”

“As of today, Madam President,
the vaccination rate stands at seventy-three percent. That includes all major urban populations of one million or more—”

“What about the
remaining
twenty-seven percent of Americans, Dr. Freitas?”

President Hardinson glares at Freitas, who's one of the many advisors, military leaders, and scientists—Chloe and I among them—seated around this giant polished conference table. He gulps.

“We're working on it, ma'am.”

He can say
that
again.

Over the past three months since we developed the antihistamine antidote to human pheromonal rabidity, or HPR, as I've dubbed it, in that musty Las Vegas lab, I've been helping the government mass-produce and disseminate it as quickly and widely as possible. Given the strained state of the country—and the world—the progress we've made has been remarkable, even for a cynic like yours truly.

But I hear the president's concern loud and clear. A quarter of the country has yet to be inoculated.

That's eighty million new potential feral humans. A staggering thought.

Clearly we have our work cut out for us.

The meeting of the newly re-formed and renamed Animal & Human Crisis Task Force ends, and Chloe and I start to leave. We find ourselves exiting alongside Freitas, who's pushing himself along in his wheelchair. The plane crash left his face badly scarred, and he's still too weak to walk—but he's alive, miraculously.

“Chloe, Oz, I meant to ask you both,” he says. “How are you finding the accommodations?”

“This isn't the first time we've lived in seclusion with the leader of the free world,” I say. Just a few weeks ago, the White House was evacuated for the second time in eight months. The threat of feral human attacks was just too great. “It ain't the Ritz,” I continue. “But living underground sure beats living in the Arctic.”

Chloe and I walk down one of the mountain compound's long, dim central hallways toward the daycare center. Eli now spends most of his waking hours there, learning and playing with kids his own age—instead of being alone with his frazzled parents or running away from animal attacks or witnessing his mother turn feral. We've only been at Raven Rock a few weeks, but already the kid is thriving. Which warms my heart. And gives me hope.

But as we near the daycare center, I can tell that there's something on Chloe's mind. I stop walking and take her hand. I stare deep into her gorgeous eyes.

“What is it, Chloe?” I ask tenderly.

She avoids my gaze and gently runs a finger along one of the deep scars on the side of my neck—a mark from when, just a few months ago inside that Jeep in Vegas, she tried to kill me. She's still upset about the whole episode, even though I've tried to convince her it wasn't her fault. And that I still love her more than anything.

“I don't know,” she answers softly. “I am just…afraid. HPR is under control. All three of us are together again. We're living in the safest place on Earth. And yet…I don't know how to describe it. It's just a feeling. An uneasy one.”

I pull my sweet, beautiful wife into a warm embrace. “I know,” I say. “I'm afraid, too. But there's nothing to be…”

I stop talking—because I hear something.

A faint, distant
scratching
sound. Almost a burrowing. But it's not coming from one particular spot. It's emanating, almost echoing, all around us.

Chloe and I share a look. We both hear it. We're both concerned.

And then, we're both shocked—as
a swarm of cockroaches emerges from the cinder-block walls all around us,
pushing through every nook and cranny, thousands of them, black and shiny, squirming and wiggling…

And coming right at us.

James Patterson
has written more bestsellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He lives in Florida with his family.

Max D
i
Lallo
is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He lives in Los Angeles.

 

 

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