“Hey,” he calls into the shipping container. His voice bounces off the narrow walls. He doesn’t know what else to say. “Are you okay?”
As if in response, the chimpanzee grabs him by the shirt with its huge black hands, lurches forward, and bites off his nose.
Rodale falls to his knees, the air pulling a scream, like a long scarf, from his throat. Blood dribbles over his lips and chin, between the fingers of the palms cupped to his face. The chimp makes a high, piercing call sound. From the town house beside the container, animals begin to emerge.
They come from the windows, they come from the alleyways, from the brass mail slot in the red town-house door. In five breaths the street is crowded with mange-mottled feral dogs, raccoons, hundreds of cats. But by far the largest contingent is rats. Thousands upon thousands of plump, red-eyed rats. They make a living carpet out of the street. A squeaking black tide.
Rodale runs, holding his face. He tries to run back to the fence. When he’s in midstride, the animals take him under. He sinks into the ocean of dogs and rats as if he’s drowning. Like a drowning man, he flails and thrashes. The rats envelop him. They scurry over the backs of his legs, his arms, up the back of his shirt. He writhes on the ground, slapping and punching at himself. From his groin to his chin, scissoring, needlelike teeth are puncturing his skin, rending his flesh.
In a moment the rats are eating at muscle, at his organs. The thousands of tiny teeth snip through his tendons and then go to work stripping the meat from his bones.
Attila spits out the soldier’s nose and is knuckle-running at a loping cant across the street toward the open gate of the building. Behind him, the animal horde follows, snapping and howling.
Chapter 82
THE BAG OF popcorn in the droning microwave has begun to go from a few desultory
She takes note of a stash of instant soup boxes above the shelf where she just found the bowl. There is no way to tell how long they will be here in this place, so it’s good to know where they stand with food. Things will get better eventually, she thinks as she climbs back down the folding step stool. It’s just a matter of holding out.
Arriving back into the bright marble kitchen, for a moment she takes small solace in the aroma of butter and salt. A smell that conjures up family, happiness, safety.
It doesn’t work. Her resolve, wavering all day, evaporates. She flings away the bowl and covers her face with her hands.
The comforting scent is a mockery now. There will be no more comfort, she knows.
Her family is separated. No one is happy. No one is safe.
Though she has never told Oz about it, she had panic attacks in grad school that had been serious enough for her family to convince her to see a therapist. It took almost a year of hard work, and a brief hospitalization, to finally conquer them. Since Oz left, she has felt them creeping back. The same itching fear, the same paralysis, the same pathological self-condemnation.
Worthless, says an inner voice as she bends over the countertop, shivering. Worthless. As a wife, a mother, a woman, a human being. Only two things will happen now. She will get her son killed, then she will get herself killed.
The bone-drilling shriek of the microwave timer brings her back out of the hole she’s fallen into. She squeezes the cold edge of the marble countertop until her knuckles whiten. She wipes her tears with the back of a hand and checks her face in the glass-fronted cabinet above the sink. She dumps the steaming popcorn into the bowl and heads back into the living room.
In the cavernous room, Eli sits cross-legged on the Oriental carpet, gazing up, wide-eyed, at the monolithic flat-screen TV on the wall. A rerun of
Under ordinary circumstances, she wouldn’t let Eli watch TV that wasn’t at least vaguely educational. Under these circumstances, though, Chloe kneels down and hugs her son, inhales his smell, listens to him giggle.
“I like this fat yellow man, Mommy,” Eli says.
Chloe kisses her son on the top of his head and remembers something. One of the therapies that she used to keep her panic attacks away was exercise. She had started going to the gym every night after school to swim laps before dinner. It cleared her head. It worked.
She doesn’t want to leave Eli at all these days. In fact she feels like attaching him to herself in a papoose, as she did when he was an infant. But her anxiety is buzzing in her skull like a power drill. Her little meltdown in the kitchen proved that. If they are going to survive, she needs to calm down. She needs to be strong.
“Hey, Eli, baby. Listen,” Chloe says, setting the popcorn in front of him as though it were an offering for an idol. “Mommy’s going to exercise now in the room on the other side of the kitchen, okay?”
“Okay,” he says automatically. His eyes are fixed in an absent, dreamland gaze on the TV. His tiny smooth hand digs unthinkingly into the popcorn, then delivers a fistful to his mouth.
She is in the small workout room, about to step onto the treadmill, when she hears a sound. Coming from the window. It is a soft, distant crackling—almost like the microwave popcorn cooking.
She slowly walks to the front of the apartment. She hears more sounds as she opens the door to the hallway. A kind of strange chugging sound starts up, coming from one of the lower floors, followed quickly by a violent knocking, as if a stone fist is banging on a locked door.
Chloe bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. Gunfire, she thinks. Someone is shooting.
She slams the apartment door hard enough to topple a vase from an antique table beside her, her heart chugging in time to the machine guns as her fingers turn the locks.
Chapter 83
WE HAD TO wait around awhile before we were picked up and taken away from the place where our SUV had crashed.
Being out in the open while we waited was a strange feeling—simultaneously boring and terrifying. The whole time, I stood on the highway median, leaning on the smashed truck as I looked up and down the flat, empty highway through the sight of Alvarez’s M16, praying we wouldn’t see another animal.
A Humvee with a roof rack full of blazing lights finally arrived about fifteen minutes after we’d called. Two marines jumped out. There was a dead Saint Bernard lashed to its hood with bungee cords. They were taking trophies now. This was a war.
I wondered who was winning.
“The fuck took you so long?” said Alvarez.
“Attacks are everywhere now, Sarge,” said the driver, a wiry black man with haunted-looking eyes. “We had to shoot our way out here. The Pentagon got hit. Reagan Airport is completely overrun by a swarm of dogs. The hangars, the terminal, everywhere. No planes in or out until the situation gets dealt with.”
Terrific. No flights, I thought as we carefully laid Alvarez, bloody as a butcher’s apron and spitting curses, across the backseat of the Hummer. Now how the hell was I going to get home? I was stuck.
The driver pounded the gas and floored us back to the Marine Corps base next to the White House. We didn’t encounter any more animal hordes directly, but down alleyways, side streets, inside windows, we could see movement, shadows scurrying. The whole city felt infested now.
Relatively safe back inside the base and the packed medical tent, I was getting stitches in my elbow when an attractive petite woman with reddish-brown hair came in. She carried a walkie-talkie and had a White House security badge clipped to the lapel of a pricey blazer.
