piling on top of each other. Prokopovich squeezes another fistful of bullets into the horde, but it is useless. The wolves swarm over the two men until they disappear beneath them.
It goes on for several minutes before the clamor dies down. The pack loosens and the wolves separate, rove the field, sniff the ground, begin to tumble and growl, not in earnest violence but in play.
Cheslav and Kiril are gone. There are no bodies left to speak of. There is blood smeared across the floor of grass and pine needles. Many of the wolves have bloody snouts and mouths, and some of them lick blood from their damp, matted fur. Some of them squabble here and there over bones. But the men themselves have disappeared.
Chapter 66
I’M SURE I looked like a zombie who had freshly clawed his way out of the crypt when I flung open the door of our apartment. I heard the clink and scuttle of Chloe putting away groceries in the kitchen. I left the keys in the lock and sprinted down the front hallway.
As I stood in the kitchen doorway, Chloe looked at me as though I had gone completely crazy. I looked it: I was slathered with black filth and breathing hard after running back from Bryant Park.
But I wasn’t crazy.
For the first time in years, I knew I was right.
“Hi,” I said.
“So,” she said. “How was the meeting with the mayor?”
Her voice was sarcastic.
“Incredibly productive.”
Chloe stood up from where she knelt beside the open refrigerator, closed it.
“The mayor’s office just called. What the hell happened to you?”
I took the jar of salsa she was absentmindedly holding and set it firmly on the counter. I held her by the shoulders as I struggled to catch my breath.
“I’ve figured it out!” My voice was choked with excitement. I tried to calm it. “The reason for the attacks… it’s not a virus…it’s pheromones.”
Chloe looked at me askance.
“You’re not making sense, Oz.”
I started to collapse onto a chair next to the kitchen table.
“Don’t touch the furniture!” said Chloe.
I remained standing.
“On my way to the meeting, I saw a stray dog,” I said. “I followed it into a tunnel beneath Bryant Park. Inside were more dogs. Thousands of them.”
Chloe nodded, mental gears turning.
“You saw another dog pack?” she said. “Like the one on the video?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. I started to wipe sweat from my eyes with filthy fingers, thought better of it, got to work on blinking it out instead. “But here’s the thing. They were all grouped together, rubbing against each other, behaving in a way I’ve never seen before. They were mating, regurgitating food. They had these chambers where females were giving birth.”
“Disgusting,” said Chloe.
Then she began backing away from me, her hands flying to her face.
“
“Exactly!”
I shimmied out of my shirt. My pants followed a moment later. I was leaving black streaks on the kitchen tiles. I rummaged through the kitchen drawers in my socks and underwear, found a plastic bag, and threw the clothes inside, tying it tightly.
“We need to test my clothes. It’s their smell. I think the dogs are emitting it. But they almost weren’t acting like dogs, Chloe. I know this sounds insane. They were acting like insects. Like ants or bees or something. It’s not a virus, like rabies, that’s making the animals go haywire. We need to test for some kind of new pheromone in the environment.”
“That’s crazy,” Chloe said, still covering her face.
“Is it?” I said. “This whole thing has been staring us in the face from the beginning. How do animals communicate? Subconsciously, I mean. How do dogs, bears, hyenas recognize one another, their environment, their territory?”
“Secreting and sniffing pheromones,” Chloe said.
“Life, at its most basic level, is chemistry,” I said. “Right?”
“Hmm.”
“Groups of molecular compounds reacting to other groups of molecular compounds. When an animal sniffs a rival or a predator, it receives information that changes its behavior. That’s what’s occurring here. In some way. Except the animal signals are getting crossed somehow. The signals they’re getting are making them act against their instincts. There’s something new, something wrong—either with the pheromones themselves or the way the animals are processing them.”
“It might make sense,” Chloe said, getting into it now. “The mutations we found in the animals were in the amygdala, which usually governs the sense of smell.”
I paced back and forth across the kitchen in my underwear, still holding the sagging trash bag full of my reeking clothes.
“I think it may even have something to do with that bizarre stuff that went on with Attila,” I said. “A chimp’s sense of smell isn’t that great. But I rescued him from a perfume lab where they were doing chemical experiments on him. I think the pheromone or whatever it is in the environment somehow made him go crazy.”
“Like a steroid or something,” Chloe said. “Are the animals exhibiting a kind of chemically triggered rage?”
“Could be.”
“But why all of a sudden?” Chloe said. “What’s changing the way they perceive pheromones?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that we need to find some pheromone experts and put them in a room, yesterday. More like five years ago. I’ll call the lab, you call that government guy, Leahy. I think we finally caught a break on this thing.”
Chapter 67
THE REST OF my morning consisted of a
By midafternoon Chloe, Eli, and I were sitting around the kitchen table with our bags packed and ready to go. I guessed our ride was out front when my phone went
When the NSA chief, Mike Leahy, said he was sending a car to take us to a secure location, I thought he had meant, well, a car.
On the sidewalk in front of our building was a camo-colored up-armored combat Humvee, with a soldier manning a machine gun in the steel-plated turret. For traveling with a low profile, I guess.
A young kid with orange hair and freckles, straight out of
“Lieutenant Durkin, US Army Third Infantry,” he said in that military cadence, a forward tumble of barks rising in pitch.
