Zoo II (4 page)

Most mornings, I like
to start the day with a shower. Today I feel like taking a dip in the sea, right outside my front door.

I’m standing by the entrance of my wooden villa, gazing out at the crystal water all around me. The sun is just starting to rise, casting vibrant streaks of pink and orange along the horizon.

It’s a precious moment of peace before what I know will be another grueling day.

After arriving in Bali yesterday afternoon, our team wasted no time getting down to business. Freitas, Sarah, the other scientists, and I spread out to cover as much ground as we could. We took samples of the water, soil, pollen, and air. We tested the island for unusual patterns of radiation and electromagnetic activity. We dug through mud as thick as tar to collect insects and worms. We waded into a rushing river to net fish and plankton. We even trekked through the punishing jungle in Padangtegal to trap a feisty twenty-two-inch-long macaque. Before we left, Sarah told me to bag a stinking pile of the monkey’s dung. I thought she was kidding—or maybe stung by my rejection earlier—but Freitas insisted I obey.

By the time we all made it back to the hotel, well after midnight, I could barely keep my eyes open. I knew the next day would be even more exhausting: the plan was to head further inland into the mountains to capture additional animals to study, including a Komodo dragon and a six-foot Burmese python. I flopped onto the bed the moment I walked in, still wearing my filthy clothes, and fell fast asleep.

But now, thanks to a mix of jet lag and nerves, I’m wide awake at dawn. It’s almost 11:00 p.m. in Paris, too late to call Chloe. To clear my head, I decide to take a dip.

I strip down to my boxers and cannonball into the calm sea, as if I were a little kid again at the local pool. I’m surprised by how warm the water feels, like a soothing bath.

I flick my wet hair from my eyes and float on my back at first, letting the gentle current carry me. Then I flip over and use a slow breaststroke to swim farther out.

I glance over my shoulder at the coastline. The swaying palm trees, the quaint villas, the stunning beach—it’s like something you’d see on a postcard. I make a mental note to bring Chloe and Eli back here someday, when all this HAC craziness is finally over, for a family vacation. Lord knows they deserve it.

I know I should probably start heading back to my hut, but something beckons me to swim a little farther out.

Big mistake.

Just up ahead, maybe twenty yards in front of me, I spot a rippling, pinkish-purple mass of something underwater heading my way—fast. Thanks to the way the light is being refracted, I can’t quite make out what it is. But I have a very bad feeling.

My first instinct says it’s a school of angry jellyfish. Toxic ones.

As the giant blob keeps coming toward me, I realize yes, it
is
a school of jellyfish…with some venomous sea snakes mixed in and a few tiger sharks behind it.

Oh, shit!

“Help, help!” I shout as I twist around and start swimming frantically back toward the shore. “Sarah! Dr. Freitas!”

I’m flapping my arms and kicking my legs wildly, as fast as I can move them. I think I might be getting away, but when I steal a glance behind me, the jellyfish, sea snakes, and tiger sharks are even closer.

I thought Bali was supposed to be safe! What the hell is going on?

I keep swimming and screaming, but it’s no use. I can feel the water churning behind me as the mad sea creatures close in. And I can see out of the corner of my eye that they’ve even started to spread out in a semicircle, flanking me on both sides.

My heart is pounding. My mind is racing.

Is this really how I’m going to die?

Then, in the distance, I hear a glorious sound: the low rumble of a ship engine speeding in my direction. As it gets closer, I hear voices, too, calling to me in Balinese.

Thank God,
I think—I hope they’re not too late.

I feel a stinger pierce my right ankle and a set of fangs chomp down on my left calf. I howl in pain and try desperately to shake the creatures off…as another jellyfish latches onto my shoulder and a second sea snake latches onto my hip.

I writhe and splash, pain coursing through my body, praying the boat gets here fast. The tiger sharks must be mere yards away, circling, preparing to finish me off.

Finally I spot the noisy vessel. It’s a local fishing trawler manned by a group of shirtless Balinese men. Three of them dive into the water and paddle over to me…

And as if by magic, the jellyfish, sea snakes, and tiger sharks all swim away.

I’m too stunned and light-headed to make sense of this. But, Jesus, am I thankful.

The fishermen pull me over to their boat and gently lift me aboard. I’m shocked by all the blood I see. Not mine—the
gallons
of it staining the deck.

While I start to triage my throbbing wounds, I can’t help but notice the awful conditions of the sea life on board. Filthy tanks full of bloody fish, crammed together like sardines. Blue crabs stuffed into rusty cages, their shells crushed and mutilated. Even an adorable baby dolphin, tangled in a net, struggling to take its last breaths.

I’m beyond grateful to be alive, but appalled by the horror I’m seeing.

And confused by it, too.

Putu, the hotel attendant I met yesterday—he said most Balinese were Hindu vegetarians who revered all animal life. Clearly that isn’t exactly true. Judging by the scene on this boat, fish have plenty to fear from Bali’s fishermen. That army of sea creatures fled when the fishermen showed up, but they sure as hell had no problem trying to kill
me
. Why?

My head spins. Maybe animals can distinguish among the human race by scent—whether Hindu vegetarians or dangerous predators—and react accordingly.

For now, as I try to catch my breath and tend to my painful snakebites and jellyfish stings, there’s only one thing I know for sure.

Bali isn’t the HAC-free paradise we thought it was.

“It was not another
of the dreams in which he had often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a vague but heavy fear was upon her.”

Chloe stops reading aloud from
A Tale of Two Cities
and places the well-worn paperback down on her lap, suddenly overcome by emotion.

Charles Dickens wrote those words—about one of the novel’s main characters, worried about her husband’s safety—in 1859. Yet tonight, for Chloe, they hit painfully close to home. Her mind drifts to Oz, halfway around the world. A “vague but heavy fear” is definitely what she’s feeling.

“Mommy, keep reading,” says Eli. He’s nestled in bed beside her under the covers. It’s one of the novels that she and Oz have been reading to Eli, a few pages a night, ever since they were in the Arctic. “Why did you stop?”

“Just lie there, honey. Something tells me you’ll fall asleep pretty soon.”

Chloe sets down the book, walks to the door, and is about to turn off the light…

When she hears a loud scratching noise coming from outside.

She’s used to the occasional sounds of wild animals trying to find their way in, but tonight it’s alarmingly loud.

She nervously peels back the bedroom window curtains—and gasps.

Through a crack in the boards between the glass and wrought iron grate she glimpses at least five or six furry, reddish-brown creatures scurrying up the side of the building, tongues dangling out of their mouths, fangs glistening in the moonlight.

She tries to stay calm. She reminds herself how safe she and her family are—relatively speaking—inside this modest Paris apartment, the one in which she grew up. Every door and window has been heavily reinforced and is kept locked practically around the clock. Beyond the fact that all possible entry points had been sealed up,  just a few nights ago, after stomping to death a dazed rabid mouse that had managed to crawl in through the shower drain, Chloe even plugged up much of the apartment’s plumbing, too.

Still, the sight of this pack of feral animals—dogs? wolves?—scrabbling up the side of her building fills her with quiet dread.

For good measure, Chloe checks the screws securing the iron grate over the window, making sure they’re nice and tight. Satisfied, she smooths out the curtain.

“
Bonne nuit,
Eli,” she says to her son. “Good night, my love.”

He responds with a gentle snore. The boy is fast asleep.

Chloe tiptoes back to the bedroom door, which is suddenly pushed open from the other side. Marielle, her stepmother, is standing at the threshold.

“
Maman?
What is it?”

At first Marielle doesn’t speak. She simply blinks, clearly confused.

“I…I’m sorry. I was looking for the bathroom.”

Chloe sighs. Looking for the bathroom? She’s lived in this apartment for forty years. Clearly her forgetfulness is getting worse. Chloe has suggested they see a doctor, but Marielle has refused. Not that they could get an appointment even if they wanted to. Practically every hospital in the city is strained to capacity treating victims of animal attacks. An old lady with early-stage dementia isn’t exactly a top priority.

“It’s all right,” Chloe says soothingly. “This is Eli’s room. My old room, when I was a little girl. Remember? The bathroom is that way. Second door on the left.”

“Of course it is,” Marielle says, waving her stepdaughter off with a mixture of frustration and embarrassment. But then she adds, with a bashful smile, “And I only had to open every
other
door to find it.”

Marielle pads back down the hall. Chloe gives Eli, dozing soundly, a final look.
He deserves a better world than this,
she thinks, turning off the light.

Headed to the kitchen, Chloe suddenly hears vicious growls and violent scratching coming from the other end of the apartment—along with her mother’s bloodcurdling screams.

“No, no!” Marielle is shouting. “Chloe, Jean-Luc, help!”

“Maman!”
Chloe yells back, rushing to find her.

On her way down the hall, she notices that the guest room door is wide open…the pantry door is wide open…and to her horror,
the front door is wide open, too.

Chloe understands immediately what’s happened. In her stepmother’s absentminded search for the bathroom, she has done the unthinkable.

She’s just let in the animals.

“Maman!”
Chloe shouts again,
rummaging frantically around the kitchen for anything she can use to fight back. “I’m coming!”

She uses one hand to grab the first blade she spots, a small paring knife, and the other hand to heave an old frying pan off the stove.

Not the ideal set of weapons, by any means, but they’ll have to do.

Chloe rushes toward the gruesome sounds of the struggle emanating from inside the apartment’s tiny bathroom. She charges in, desperate to save Marielle’s life.

But she isn’t at all prepared for the horrifying sight that awaits her.

A pack of feral foxes—the animals Chloe saw earlier climbing up the outside of the building—is literally tearing her elderly stepmother limb from limb.

They’re attacking Marielle ravenously, ripping her bloody nightgown to shreds, wrenching whole chunks of flesh from her body as she cries and struggles and screams.

Chloe roars with anger and snaps into action.

She clobbers the nearest fox square on the head with the heavy pan, feeling his skull crunch inward from the impact like a hardboiled egg. She hits another fox, then sinks the paring knife into the furry back of a third.

A fourth fox, realizing Chloe is both a threat and a meal, turns on her, leaping up and clamping his jagged teeth into her thigh.

Chloe yelps in pain but manages to pierce her knife straight into the animal’s eyeball, lodging it deep in the socket, before forcefully prying the creature off.

She pummels the animal with the pan, again and again, until finally it dies.

“Maman!”
she yells, kneeling beside her horrendously disfigured stepmother, nearly slipping on the blood-soaked tile floor.

Marielle is mercifully slipping into unconsciousness. She reaches a trembling hand toward her stepdaughter’s face and whispers, in a haze, “Chloe…
ma petite fille
…my sweet girl…”

Then her hand falls to her side. Her last breath escapes her lungs.

Chloe is too shocked to cry. Too staggered to make any sound at all.

But with so much adrenaline still pulsing through her veins, she is
not
too stunned to take action.

“Eli!
Papa!
” she screams, rushing out of the bathroom into the hallway.

She finds her father standing there in his underwear, shaking like a leaf.

“Your stepmother…I heard such terrible noises. Is she…?”

“Yes, Papa. She’s—she is dead.” Jean-Luc takes a step toward the bathroom to look for himself, but Chloe stops him. “Don’t.”

Jean-Luc looks past Chloe, into the front hallway, and his eyes grow wide.

Chloe turns around—and sees three pit bulls trotting into the apartment through the still-open front door.

“Come on, we have to hurry!” Chloe implores, trying to pull her father along.

But with surprising strength, Jean-Luc resists. He grips his daughter’s shoulder tightly and looks her straight in the eye.

“
Non,
Chloe. I am a slow, old man. It is my time. You and Eli—
you
must go.”

Chloe is left aghast by her father’s command, and by the ultimate sacrifice he is insisting he make for his daughter and grandson. She wants to argue with him,
plead
with him, to reconsider, but she knows his mind is made up.

“I love you,” is all she says, then turns and dashes back to Eli’s room.

She makes it inside and slams the door shut behind her—just moments before she hears this second wave of animals begin brutally mauling her frail father.

She finds Eli awake in bed, cowering under the blankets, crying. Chloe rushes over and sweeps him into her arms.

“Eli, it’s okay, sweetie, Mommy’s here. We have to go!”

But how?
Not through the front door: the apartment is now crawling with wild animals. But not through the window, either: even if she could break the boards, that metal grate is bolted on tight.

Are they trapped?

No. Chloe gets an idea.

She flings open the closet and pushes aside some of her old childhood clothes that are still hanging there, revealing a small trapdoor: a dumbwaiter, dating back to the turn of the century, when the apartment building was one single luxury home and Chloe’s bedroom was part of the servant’s quarters. She discovered this odd historical remnant as a girl and treated it as a secret cubby, a hiding spot for dolls and diaries.

Now, as she pries off the wooden plank she nailed over it only a few days earlier, she hopes it just might save their lives.

She opens the squeaky door and orders Eli to wiggle inside first. “I know you’re scared,” she says. “I am, too. But I’ll be right behind you. You can do it!”

The boy bravely obeys. Chloe squeezes in after him and the two carefully climb down this dark, dusty chamber, using ledges and splintery boards.

They finally make it to the ground floor—a former kitchen converted long ago into a garage. Chloe kicks open the trapdoor and she and Eli crawl out.

The space is cluttered and dark, and Chloe can’t find the light switch. Taking Eli’s hand, she gropes her way to the manual sliding garage door. She strains to pull it open a few feet, and together mother and son slip out onto the sidewalk—the first time either has stepped foot outside the apartment building in almost two weeks.

Chloe’s heart is thumping wildly as she scans the eerily abandoned, trash-strewn Paris streets. The occasional animal growl or human scream echoes in the distance.

Now what?

Her parents are both dead. Their apartment, her only refuge, is overrun with feral animals. Her husband is God knows where, returning God knows when. Her son is cold, tired, terrified. And so is she.

Choking back tears, Chloe scoops Eli into her arms and does the only thing she can think of.

She runs.