Down in the street, she watches as a truck screams onto Fifth Avenue from a side street. Then a motorcycle. Then a Mercedes SUV.
It isn’t just happening in New York, either.
In the absence of animal attacks, people have become emboldened. The air force satellite picks up the imagery as lights start to flicker on in Dallas, in Cincinnati, in Dublin, Milan, Madrid. By the next morning, Beijing smokestacks are throwing up clouds of smoke, fluttering in the air like black satin scarves. The Canadian legislature overturns the cell phone ban. Mexico and the EU follow suit.
All over the world, people go back to work. Coal plants are turned on, nuclear facilities, cell towers. Clouds of petrochemicals and hydrocarbons rise back into the air currents, electromagnetic radiation emanates from cell phones and towers, buzzing, shimmering, sweeping across the land like an invisible poison gas. Chemical bonds click back together, re-forming. Energy mixes with matter to create something new.
Change is here to stay. It is the way of life, the way of the world.
The Big Stop is over.
So is human civilization.
Chapter 97
ON HIS SUNNY rock in Central Park, Attila awakens. Tense—so tense now. He can feel the adrenaline bulging his veins, pumping in his heart, sending blood to his brain and muscles. The flash of energy. Dendrites, synapses firing. The feeling surges in his body, warping the molecular structures in his brain, that hypersensitive lump of squishy electric meat. His blood pressure increases. His saliva dries as he begins to sweat. The hair on his back bristles.
He is readying himself for attack. Something has triggered the attack impulse in his brain and left the switch on. His breath comes hard and heavy as his aggravation builds. His respiration comes in ragged huffing sounds, almost a snarl.
The smell in the air is back, calling him, dragging him to his feet. The female beside him is seething as well, her eyes bright with anxious rage.
The animals are back by the time he climbs down from the rock. They cover the softball field like a living rug. The pack is bigger and more bloodthirsty than before.
Attila leads the swarm east, toward the apartment-building lights. His eye is trained on the terraces of the high-rises. He knows how to climb them, how to get in. He will go alone and open the doors for the others. The smell tells him this. This time, he will not fail.
Any mercy he has shown to man is not even a memory anymore. Because he has no memory. He has the smell. The smell is master, friend, mate. The smell is all.
A man and a woman on a motorcycle are riding crosstown on the Sixty-Fifth Street Transverse. Attila gives his pant-hoot call to herd the others, but it is unnecessary. In the pheromone cloud, sounds are unnecessary. The animals can smell what he wants in his breath and sweat. His orders become scents. The mass moves, anticipating him almost as easily as his own hand.
A roaring cascade of bodies falls from a bridge onto the motorcycle. It is a husband and wife, both in their fifties. The woman is enveloped first. She screams as teeth and claws meet flesh. Attila, at the bottom of the scrum, gnaws chunks out of the woman’s leg, blinking against the jet of arterial blood.
The man, a retired cop from Queens, reaches for a sidearm that hasn’t been there since 1999. A rat makes off with his left pinkie up to the first knuckle. Then a squirrel attaches itself to his face with a squeak, clawing at his eyes. A rottweiler bites into his crotch, and he sinks to the ground.
The animals lacerate the people, carve them to ribbons as efficiently as the blades in an abattoir. In less than three minutes, all that’s left of the two is very dirty laundry.
Stained red with slaughter, Attila moves himself and the swarm toward the smell of humans. All the animals are moving together now with the same rhythm, like cells in the bloodstream.
There is no Attila anymore. He is bigger now. Something else has broken through, taken over. He is only energy now, a soulless organization of bones and blood and meat propelled by electricity and surging chemicals. He moves toward the sounds, toward the lights.
Chapter 98
AH, HOW QUICKLY the tide turned back. The blood-red tide.
With the sounds of generators came screams and roaring gunfire. Were we really this stupid? Yes, apparently.
It was just coming on midnight when the door of my trailer whacked open and Alvarez darkened the doorway behind it.
“Grab your shit, Oz. We’re overrun. They’re evacuating the White House.”
The East Wing had been overtaken. Inside and out, hundreds of thousands of mammals—dogs, raccoons, rats, squirrels, possums—were streaming uphill into the iconic building, swarming like ants. The gunfire was constant now. As I ran alongside Alvarez I saw a luminous orange glow lighting up the sky to the northeast. I pointed to it.
“What’s—”
“The Capitol’s on fire” was all he said. We kept running.
Alvarez rushed me into a waiting truck. The marine guard at the east gate was down, blood running over his dress blues, his face chewed off. Alvarez glanced at him, raised his AA-12, and squeezed a lackadaisical stream of firepower in the direction of the handful of mold-spotted dogs still working on the body.
“God help us,” Alvarez said, crossing himself.
“Help us?” I said. “God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, didn’t he? I know I’m just a scientist, but it looks like we’ve pissed him off again.”
An hour later, I was wheels-up in the air on an air force 737 back to New York.
With the White House overrun, a new plan had been hatched. The government was moving north. Extremely north. About as north as you could get, actually. The scientists and government were supposed to pack up and regroup at Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
The only good thing to say about it was that we were coming to New York first to get the other scientists who had come to the meeting.
Great, I thought. That means I get to spend the apocalypse holed up in an igloo with Harvey Saltonstall. Then they told me Harvey had been mauled to death by dogs.
“Oh,” I said.
They said family had to stay behind, but I was having none of it.
I found Leahy up near the plane’s cockpit.
Reluctant to throw any of my weight around up until this point, I threw it now as hard as I could.
“You either have my wife and kid on the tarmac, Leahy, or you shitheels can go to Greenland and figure it out by yourselves.”
When Chloe and Eli came through the airplane’s door, I tackled them into a seat. We hugged each other and cried for about ten years. For a short, dark time I thought I might never see them again, but, luckily, for once I was wrong.
The plane kicked its heels and was airborne again. It began to rain when we were zipping over Canada, but the plane ascended to a higher altitude. As we broke above the clouds, a bright, luminous glow came into the cabin. High off to our right, a full moon was rising bright and clear in the cold, and the clouds skirted by beneath us like a river of silver silk.
That’s when Eli saw something.
“Daddy! Look!”
