Whew.
Turning back around from the edge of the berm, Larson stops. He stands by the edge of the moat, blinking. Directly between him and the open gate in the keeper fence is Dominick, the male lion: still, tail swishing methodically, golden amber eyes riveted to Larson’s face. His breakfast lies untouched beside him. He sits there, huge, silent, staring at Larson with those flat, flame-colored eyes.
Larson feels his saliva dry up as the immense cat leans forward, then back, like a boxer feinting.
He’s posturing, Larson reasons to himself as calmly as he can, trying to keep his body perfectly still. Of course, the old tomcat’s simply surprised by his presence out here in the middle of his territory. Larson knows that in the wild, this grumpy twenty-year-old would have long ago been killed by a younger challenger who wanted the females in his pride.
Larson figures he’s in a spot of bother here. He thinks about the radio, decides against it. At least not yet. He’s been in the cage with Dominick before. The old man’s just throwing his weight around. He’ll get bored with this little game of chicken and start eating any moment. Dominick has known Larson for years. He knows his scent, knows he isn’t a threat.
Besides, if worse comes to worst, Larson has the moat behind him. Three steps and he’ll be over the side and safe. Wet and humiliated and maybe with a broken ankle, but by the time the other keepers arrive, his skin will still be covering his bones and his guts will still be on the inside of him, where he likes to keep them.
“There, there, buddy,” Larson says—in a whisper, a
Larson senses more than sees the movement at his left. He turns in time to see something burst from the grass, massive, tawny, throwing a column of dust into the air as it rockets at him, growing bigger, picking up speed.
The keeper isn’t able to take one step before Mosa springs. Her head slams into his chest like a wrecking ball. All the wind is knocked out of him as he goes airborne and then down on his back ten feet away.
Larson lies on his back, dazed. His heart is beating so fast and hard, he wonders if he’s having a heart attack. The thought goes away as Mosa’s low, compressed growl reverberates beside his ear.
He reaches for the radio as Mosa puts her paws on his shoulder and bites into his face. Her great upper canines puncture his eyes at the same moment the cat’s lower incisors slide with ease into the underside of his jaw.
Larson is as helpless as a rag doll as Mosa shakes him back and forth by his head. When his neck breaks, with a crack remarkably similar to a pencil snapping, the sound is the very last thing his brain registers before he dies.
Three
MOSA GRUNTS AND releases the dead keeper. She uses the thumb-like dewclaw of her right front paw as a toothpick to dislodge a sliver of meat from her teeth. What’s left of Larson’s wristwatch falls to the dirt as she licks blood from her mouth.
Dominick, having already fed, is starting to jog for the open gate. At the end of the fenced corridor, the two pass the tiny crush cage the keepers shove them into when they need medical attention. They aren’t going to miss that.
They quickly cover the length of the big-cat service yard. At the far end, by the hoses, is a low gate and the zoo’s bright white concrete path on the other side. Both Mosa and Dominick clear the gate in a leap easy as a breath, and soon are racing down the zoo’s empty promenade. The two lions spring over the turnstiles and skirt the parking lot for the nearest cluster of Griffith Park’s oak and walnut trees.
They trot up a scrubby brush-dotted hill and down its other side. They catch a human’s scent again on a hot breeze. They spot its source a moment later on one of the golf course fairways. He’s a handsome young black man in a red shirt and black pants. Getting nine holes in before work. He looks surprised to see lions on the golf course.
Dominick charges, knocking the man sideways, out of his shoes. His death bite takes away most of the golfer’s neck in a flowering burst of blood.
Dominick releases the dead man and rears back slowly as a police car glides down alongside the fairway from the north. He can smell that there are more humans inside this shrieking, shining box. He wants to stay and attack, but he knows that this box full of humans is of the same cold, difficult material as his cage.
The two lions run for the cover of the trees. At the top of the ridge, Dominick stops for a moment, gazing down at the city. Los Angeles spreads out beneath him, a brown field of humanity, woozily shaking in the smoke and the gathering morning heat, dissolving into fuzz at the edges.
That smell is stronger now, coming from everywhere. From the buildings and houses, from roadways, from the tiny cars snaking along the highways. The air is saturated with it. But instead of running away from it, Dominick and Mosa run toward it, their paws digging for purchase, mouths wanting blood.
Book One
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Chapter 1
I WOKE UP shaking.
I panicked at first, thinking I was having a stroke or something. Then I opened my eyes, relieved, as I remembered it wasn’t me that was shaking. It was my apartment.
Outside the wall of dusty industrial-style windows beside my bed came what sounded like a regiment of giants rhythmically striking concrete with their rifle butts in a parade drill. But it wasn’t the jolly green marines. I knew it was the elevated number 1 Broadway local, rattling to shake the dead back to life next to my new fifth-floor Harlem loft apartment. Hadn’t gotten used to that train yet.
I winced, covered my head with a pillow. Useless. Only in New York did one have to actually pay for the privilege of sleeping beside an overpass.
But I was so broke I couldn’t even afford to complain. I sat up. I couldn’t even really afford to sleep. I couldn’t even afford to think about money. I’d spent it all and then some; my credit was in the sewer. By that point I was in tunnel-vision mode, focusing my entire life on one desperate need: to figure things out before it was too late.
Things hadn’t always been so dire. Only two years before, not only had I lived in a nonvibrating apartment, I was actually on the PhD fast track at Columbia University. I was the golden boy in the ecology, evolution, and environmental biology department, so close to the brass ring I could practically smell the book contracts, the cocktail parties, the cushy university appointments.
But then I came into contact with the event—what others called the mistake—that changed my life.
I noticed something. Something that wasn’t quite right. Something I couldn’t let go.
That’s the way it happens sometimes. Life is flowing along like a fairy tale, and then you see something that you just can’t categorize. Something that starts filling your every thought, your every dream, your every waking moment.
At least, that’s the way it happened with me. One minute I was about to realize my goal of academic greatness, and the next I was wrestling with something I couldn’t stop thinking about, something I couldn’t shake, even as my world crashed around my ears.
I know how nuts it sounds. Intellectual promise plus obsession plus throwing away conventional success
