I nodded at both of them, then looked out at the faces around the table and on the screens.
“Desperate times, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Here’s what I think we should do.”
Chapter 85
STRAINING HER EARS, her eyes glued to the front door she just double-locked, Chloe sits on a creaking Louis Quatorze chair in the entryway of the apartment.
For the last half hour, she has sat listening as gunfire has cracked and rollicked throughout the building, thudding through the walls and echoing in the hallways. The noises keep getting louder, rising floor by floor, like a fire. Soon they will reach their floor, and she and her son will be consumed.
And yet all she can do is sit there. The wild fear is so great that she is almost immobilized now. She can’t act, can’t think, can’t plan her next move. All she can do is sit and stare at the crack of light beneath the door, wondering what will happen next.
The pressure in her tightly clenched jaw seems to double, triple when she hears a sound that is clearly in the hallway outside the apartment. It’s a brief creak, followed by a click. Then she hears it again. Creak and click. Something is pushing at the stairwell door in the hallway, she realizes.
Probing.
It’s something that isn’t human.
Or even really animal anymore, she thinks.
It’s true. What they are up against is something that has never been seen before. She has thought of it as devolution. It is as if the nature of every higher animal has been erased and replaced with the alien instinct of the insect world, an instinct older, more terrible, more pitiless than human beings have ever seen.
She thinks about her career as a biologist, all the tireless work, the cataloging of animal species and genera. It has all been made useless now—all animals are joining into one, a roving amalgam of fur and bone and teeth no different from any other wave of destructive energy. What is happening is like a lava flow, a raging inferno of animated protoplasm that seeks the same thing as fire itself. To initiate change. To consume until the thing consumed is gone. To devour.
Why is this happening? Who knows, really?
Life and existence can never be fully understood. Stars are born only to explode. Creatures hunt other creatures, and then they die. The universe is a chaos of irrational forces wrestling with one another in a war without end. The human race is on the receiving end now.
Chloe finally stands. On legs as stiff and unresponsive as stale bread, she returns slowly to the living room. Eli is still planted, glassy-eyed, before the television. On the TV, there’s a cartoon movie of friendly animals talking to each other.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Eli says. Stars in his eyes.
He’s an impressively smart kid—obedient, especially perceptive of her feelings, especially when she isn’t fooling around.
She lifts him up. She goes to the corner of the living room and switches off the light. She sits on one of the plush white couches, beneath a canvas that screams with garish splashes of color. Here it is. Her grand plan, she thinks.
Soon she hears a skittering by the front door. Or has she imagined it?
I will not let you in! Chloe thinks. Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin!
Her hands are shaking violently. She clenches her fists to make them stop.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Eli whispers.
“You have to listen to me, Eli,” Chloe whispers back. “We have to be quiet now. Can you do that? Can you be a good boy for Mommy?”
“Yes,” Eli says, squeezing her hand. “Don’t be sad, Mommy. I can be quiet.”
She tries to regulate her breathing. To breathe with steady deliberation. She tries to will down the throbbing in her stomach and her chest and her brain. Tears well up in her eyes. She tries to dam them back. Her vision blurs. Think. Control. The world is receding into focus. Keep it there. Control it. Control it.
She thinks, trying to come up with a rational next step. She thinks about the building. There is a set of front stairs, an elevator, a freight elevator. Wait, she thinks. There’s also a set of back stairs, which might be accessible from the kitchen door, in the rear, where she tosses the trash. Maybe that escape route is still open, she thinks. She could carry Eli and get out that way. But then what? Be out in the open? Go to another building? The best thing to do is just sit here and hope they are ignored and—
Another sound makes her heart skip a beat. It is coming from off to her right. There is a set of French doors there. She has forgotten about them.
They lead out to a balcony.
She watches a shadow fall onto the balcony from above, just outside the glass. Then another. Then a third.
Slowly, Chloe pulls Eli to the floor with her. Lying on her belly beside the coffee table with him, clutching him to herself, trying to protect him with her body as best she can, she raises her head very slowly until she can see the French doors and the balcony again.
There are three adult chimpanzees with their faces squished against the glass, blowing hot fog on it, like children pressing their faces to the window of a candy store.
They are huge. Their fur is bristling, erect. Two of them hold something in their hands. Sticks? No, they are pipes. Tool use, the ethologist still left in Chloe thinks.
The sound of tapping comes a moment later. The chimps are smashing the pipes against the glass doors.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
Then there is a cymbal-crash burst of glass breaking.
Chapter 86
GLASS SHATTERS. JAGGED triangles tumble piecemeal to the wooden floor—clang, clatter, and chime. The chimps clear the glass from the frames with the pipes. The alpha male steps forward, gently shoving the others out of the way. He is wearing a ragged red hat, rakish and totemic on his head, like a barbarian’s scavenged crown.
It is Attila—or what used to be Attila. He is a changed ape. There is a tightly wound, guitar-string tautness to his musculature, a ravenous, lean, and hungry look. His hair is rangy in places. His nose is running. It seems his whole physiology has changed. His brain functions are dulled, perverted, his metabolism stuck in fast-forward.
Attila sticks his face into the apartment, sniffs.
All is smell now. Sound, touch—even sight—play second fiddles in the orchestra of sensation. They all know there are humans here. They know there is an adult female. That scent is unmistakable—the sweat, the sweet tiny reek of ovulation. And what smells like a young juvenile. Their mouths tingle with salivation at the proximity of the prey. They want to feed on them the way fire wants oxygen.
The animals communicate almost exclusively by smell now. Emotions and intentions are detectable in body odor, in sweat.
Attila wants it even more than the two others with him. He hasn’t had a fresh kill in hours, and the hunger gnawing at his belly is a scissors in his stomach, cutting him in half.
Attila is about to enter the room from the balcony when he catches another scent. There is something, something subtle in the human smell of the other one, the young one, something almost undetectable that pokes thinly through the wall of his rage.
