As one, the troop responded, raising their heads, springing away from the iron disc that had preoccupied them, craning their necks to see what was happening.
Bleating, shrieking, scolding, gibbering, Curious George leaped into the air, leaped and leaped, tumbled and flipped and twirled and capered, beat upon the sidewalk with his fists, hissed and screeched, clawed at the air as if it were cloth that could be rended, contorted himself until he seemed to be looking up his own butt, rolled, sprang to his feet, slapped his chest with his hands, hissed and spat and sputtered, rocked and jigged, raced toward the bungalow, but exploded away from it and scurried back toward the street, keening at a pitch that ought to have cracked the concrete under him.
Regardless of how primitive their language might be, I was pretty sure I got the message.
Even though most of the troop was forty feet from the bungalow, I could see their beady shining eyes like a swarm of fat fireflies.
A few of them began to croon and hoot. Their voices were lower and softer than Curious George’s caterwauling, but they didn’t sound like a hospitality committee welcoming a visitor.
I drew the Glock from my shoulder holster.
Eight rounds remained in the gun.
I had the spare ten-round magazine in the holster.
Eighteen bullets. Thirty monkeys.
I had done the calculations before. I did them again. Poetry, after all, is of more interest to me than math, so there was reason to double-check my figures. They still sucked.
Curious George raced toward the house again. This time he kept coming.
Behind him, the entire troop erupted out of the street, across the lawn, straight at the bungalow. Simultaneously, as they came, they all fell into a silence that implied organization, discipline, and deadly purpose.
7
I still didn’t believe the troop could have seen me, heard me, or smelled me, but they must have detected me somehow, because obviously they were not merely expressing their distaste for the undistinguished architecture of the bungalow. They were in a rage of a kind that I had seen before, a fury they reserved for humanity.
Furthermore, by their schedule, dinnertime had probably arrived. In lieu of a mouse or juicy spider, I was the meat dish, a refreshing change from their usual fare of fruits, nuts, seeds, leaves, flowers, and birds’ eggs.
I turned a hundred eighty degrees from the window and headed across the living room, hands out in front of me. I was moving fast, blindly trusting in my familiarity with these houses. My shoulder clipped the casing on a doorway, and I pushed through a half-open door into the dining room.
Although the monkeys continued to restrain themselves, operating in attack-status silence, I heard the hollow thumping of their paws on the wooden floor of the porch. I hoped they would hesitate at the front entrance, tempering their rancor with caution long enough for me to put a little ground between us.
A tattered blind, though askew, covered most of the single window in the small dining room. Too little light penetrated to bring meaningful relief from the gloom.
I kept moving, because I knew that the door to the kitchen was directly in line with the living-room door through which I had just entered. This time, passing from room to room, I didn’t even knock my shoulder against the jamb.
No blinds or curtains covered the pair of windows over the sink in the kitchen. Painted with a thin wash of moonlight, they had that ghostly phosphorous glow of television screens just after you switch them off.
Under my feet, the aging linoleum popped and cracked. If any members of the troop had entered the house behind me, I couldn’t hear them above the noise that I was making.
The air was thick with a foul miasma that made me want to retch. A rat or some wild animal must have died in a corner of the kitchen or in one of the cabinets, where it was now decomposing.
Holding my breath, I hurried to the back door, which featured a large pane of glass in the upper half. It was locked.
When this was a military base, personal security had been assured, and no one who lived inside the fence had reason to fear crime. Consequently, the locks were simple, keyed only from the outside.
I felt for the doorknob, which would have a lock-release button in the center. Found it. I would have turned it and torn open the door — except that the shadow of a leaping monkey flew up across the glass and fell away just as my hand closed on the cold brass.
I quietly released the knob and retreated two steps, considering my options. I could open the door and, pistol blazing, stride boldly through the murderous monkey multitudes as though I were Indiana Jones minus bullwhip and fedora, relying on sheer panache to survive. The only alternative was to remain in the kitchen and wait to see what happened next.
A monkey leaped onto the sill of one of the windows above the sink. Gripping the casing to keep its balance, it pressed against the glass, peering into the kitchen.
Because this mangy gremlin was silhouetted against moonlight, I could see no details of its face. Just its hot-ember eyes. The faint white crescent of its humorless grin.
Turning its head left and right and left again, it rolled its eyes, squinted, then went wide-eyed once more. By following its questing gaze, which roamed the kitchen, I deduced that it couldn’t see me in the darkness.
Options. Stay here and be trapped. Plunge into the night only to be dragged down and savaged under the mad moon.
These weren’t options, because either choice guaranteed an identical outcome. The worst kook surfer knows that whether you get sucked over the falls on a fully macking shore break or just get pitched off the board and do a faceplant in some seaweed soup, the result is the same: wipeout.
Another monkey leaped onto the sill at the second window.
Like most of us in this movie-besotted, Hollywood-corrupted world, if I succumbed to the narcissist in me and listened to my mind’s ear, I could probably hear a film score underlying my every waking moment: gluey sentimental string-section indulgences when I am stricken by sadness or sorrow; tear-evoking, heart-stirring full- orchestra rhapsodies when I enjoy a triumph; droll piano riffs during my not infrequent spells of foolishness. Sasha insists that I look like the late James Dean, and even though I don’t see the resemblance, I am appalled and ashamed to say that at times I take pleasure in this supposed resemblance to such a celebrated figure; indeed, it would require little effort for me to conduct periods of my life with the edgy score of
Although I am as capable of self-delusion as the next guy, I decided against the most cinematic of my options, electing not to swashbuckle into the night. After all, though charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his handful of movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.
I quickly sidled across the floor, away from the windows, but also away from the entrance to the dining room. Within a few feet, I bumped into cabinetry.
These cabinets would match those in every house in Dead Town: plain but sturdy, with birch frames, their shiplap doors painted so often that the shallow grooves created by the overlapping joints had all but disappeared under the many coats. The work counters would be laminated with one color or another of speckled Formica.
Before any of the troop entered the kitchen from the front of the house, I needed to get off the floor. If I stood with my back to a wall, pressed into a corner, dead motionless, breathing as noiselessly as a fish passing water through its gills, I was still certain to give myself away. The linoleum was so curled and so undermined by tiny pockets of air that it would crackle and pop from any unintentional shift of weight, from no more than a heavy
In spite of darkness so thick that it seemed viscous, and in spite of a stench of decomposition strong enough
