banged shut.
The cramp in my calf abruptly became more severe. Hot. Sharp. I clenched my teeth to keep from groaning. I had a headache, too: The cap button felt as if it had been pressed all the way through my skull, into my brain, and had begun working its way out through my right eye. My neck ached. My scrunched shoulders didn’t feel too good, either. I had a nagging pain in the small of my back, a spot of tenderness in the gum at an upper right molar, a queasy feeling that I was developing serious hemorrhoids at the tender age of twenty-eight, and was in general feeling pretty much, you know, blah.
The wall slapper stopped slapping the wall when it reached the corner and discovered the cabinetry. It was directly in front of me now.
I was almost four feet taller than this monkey, and a hundred twenty pounds heavier. Though it was unnervingly intelligent, I was a lot smarter than it. Nevertheless, I gazed down at it with dread and loathing, cringing inwardly, with no less repulsion and fear for my life than I would have felt if this had been a demon risen straight from Hell.
It is easy to make jokes about the troop when you are at a comfortable distance from them. Yet a close encounter reduces you to primal fear, fills you with a heart-chilling sense of the
The sympathy I’d had for them earlier was still with me, markedly diminished, but I couldn’t feel the pity at all. Good.
Judging by where its bright eyes were focused and by the fumbling sounds its hands made, the monkey was exploring the face frame to which the broom-closet door should have been attached.
The Glock weighed less than three pounds, but it felt as heavy as a granite gravestone. I tightened my finger on the trigger.
Eighteen rounds.
Seventeen, really.
I would have to count the shots as I squeezed them off — and save the last round for myself.
Above the other sounds in the kitchen, I heard the monkey pluck at one of the loose and broken hinges from which the broom-closet door had once hung.
The total depth of my pathetic hiding place was only two feet, which meant I was standing mere inches from the inquisitive primate. If it reached inside, there was no chance whatsoever that it would fail to discover me. Only the terrible stench in the kitchen prevented it from smelling me.
The cramp in my left calf twisted like barbed wire through the muscle. I was afraid that my foot was going to start twitching involuntarily.
Elsewhere in the room, a cabinet door banged shut.
Then another opened with a squeak of hinges.
Linoleum crackled under small, quick feet.
A monkey spat, as though trying to rid itself of the air’s foul taste.
I had the curious feeling that I was about to wake up and find myself safe in bed, beside Sasha.
My heart was racing, and now it hammered even faster when Sasha’s face bloomed in my mind. The possibility that I would never hear her voice again, never hold her again, never look again into her kind eyes: This was as frightening as the likelihood that I would be torn apart by the troop. And more terrifying, still, was the thought of not being at her side to help her cope with this strange and violent new world, of leaving her alone when, at the next day’s end, night returned home to Moonlight Bay once more.
Before me, the monkey remained invisible except for its luminous eyes, which seemed to grow brighter as it peered suspiciously into the broom closet. Its attention traveled upward from my feet, across my body, to my face.
Its night vision might be better than mine, but in this pure liquid blackness, which was as unrelieved as that four miles down at the bottom of the sea, I was sure that we were equally blind.
Yet our eyes locked.
We seemed to be in a staring contest, and I didn’t believe that my imagination was boiling over. The creature wasn’t looking at my brow or at the bridge of my nose; it was looking directly into
And it didn’t look away.
Although I wasn’t betrayed by eyeshine, as the monkey was, my eyes might be serving as mirrors in which its radiant glare was dimly reflected. Perhaps it detected the merest pinpoint glimmers of its own fiery scrutiny returned to it, wasn’t sure that it saw anything at all, but remained transfixed by the mystery.
I considered closing my eyes, letting the monkey’s bright stare fall upon my unreflective lids. But I was afraid that I would miss its sudden blink of comprehension and would fail to shoot it before it launched itself in at me and, perhaps, bit my gun hand or climbed my body to claw and chew my face.
Meeting its gaze at this close range, with such intensity, I was surprised that my fear and thick revulsion could coexist with a mess of other powerful emotions: anger at those who had brought this new species into existence, sorrow over the hideous oncoming corruption of this beautiful world that God has given us, wonder at the inhuman but undeniable intelligence in these strange eyes. Bleak despair, too. And loneliness. And yet…an irrational wild hope.
Standing in my line of fire, unaware that it was vulnerably exposed to an emotional basket case with a handgun, the creature burbled softly, more like a pigeon than a rhesus. The sound had an inquisitive quality.
One of the other monkeys shrieked.
I almost fired the Glock reflexively.
Two additional voices scolded the first.
In front of me, the monkey spun away from the broom closet. It scampered deeper into the kitchen, drawn by the commotion.
In fact, the uproar indicated that all six were now gathered at the farther end of the room. I saw no shining eyes turned in my direction.
They had found something of interest. I could imagine only that it was the source of the putrid odor.
As I eased up on the trigger, I realized that a glutinous mass had risen into my throat — maybe my heart, maybe my lunch — and I had to swallow hard to get it down and to be able to breathe again.
While my eyes and the monkey’s had been locked, I’d fallen into a curious physical detachment so complete that I had ceased to feel the spasms of pain in my cramping calf. Now the agony returned, worse than before.
Because all the members of the search party were distracted and making noise, I exercised the cramped muscle as best I could by shifting my weight firmly back and forth from heel to toe of my left foot. This maneuver relieved the pain somewhat, although not enough to ensure that I would be able to move gracefully if one of the monkeys invited me to waltz.
The conferring members of the search party began to jabber in louder voices. They were excited. Although I don’t believe they have a language in remotely the sense that we do, their bleats and hisses and growls and warbles were obviously argumentative. They appeared to have forgotten what they had come looking for in the first place. Easily distracted, quick to fall into disorganization, prone to put aside mutual interests in favor of quarreling among themselves — for the first time, these guys seemed an awful lot like human beings.
The longer I listened to them, the more I dared to believe that I would get out of this bungalow alive.
I was still rocking my foot, flexing and contracting my calf, when one of the quarrelers broke away from the rest of the search party and crossed the kitchen to the dining-room doorway. The instant I saw its eyeshine, I stopped moving and pretended to be a broom.
The monkey halted at the dining-room threshold and shrieked. It seemed to be calling to other members of the troop, who were, presumably, waiting outside on the front porch or searching the bedrooms.
Answering voices rose at once. They grew nearer.
The prospect of sharing this small kitchen with even more monkeys — possibly with the entire troop — punctured my half-inflated hope of survival. As my shaky confidence rapidly gave way to confident desperation, I examined my options and found no new ones.
The depth of my desperation was so abyssal that I actually asked myself what the immortal Jackie Chan would do in a situation like this. The answer was simple: Jackie would erupt out of the broom closet with an athletic
