The noise might not matter, anyway. The monkeys probably had acute animal senses that detected the most meager stimuli; in fact, they were no doubt able to track me by scent.
Orson would be able to smell them, too. In this nebulous night, his black form was barely visible, and I couldn’t see if his hackles were raised, which would be a sure sign that the monkeys were nearby.
As I walked, I wondered what it was about these creatures that made them different from an ordinary rhesus.
In appearance, at least, the beast in Angela’s kitchen had been a typical example of its species, even if it had been at the upper end of the size range for a rhesus. She’d said only that it had “awful dark-yellow eyes,” but as far as I knew, that was well within the spectrum of eye colors for this group of primates. Bobby hadn’t mentioned anything strange about the troop that was bedeviling him, other than their peculiar behavior and the unusual size of their shadowy leader: no misshapen craniums, no third eyes in their foreheads, no bolts in their necks to indicate that they had been stitched and stapled together in the secret laboratory of Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s megalomaniacal great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Heather Frankenstein.
The project leaders at Fort Wyvern had been worried that the monkey in Angela’s kitchen had either scratched or bitten her. Considering the scientists’ fear, it was logical to infer that the beast had carried an infectious disease transmitted by blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids. This inference was supported by the physical examination to which she’d been subjected. For four years, they had also taken monthly blood samples from her, which meant that the disease had a potentially long incubation period.
Biological warfare. The leaders of every country on Earth denied making preparations for such a hateful conflict. Evoking the name of God, warning of the judgment of history, they solemnly signed fat treaties guaranteeing never to engage in this monstrous research and development. Meanwhile, each nation was busily brewing anthrax cocktails, packaging bubonic-plague aerosols, and engineering such a splendiferous collection of exotic new viruses and bacteria that no line at any unemployment office anywhere on the planet would ever contain a single out-of-work mad scientist.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand why they would have forcibly subjected Angela to sterilization. No doubt certain diseases increase the chances that one’s offspring will suffer birth defects. Judging by what Angela had told me, however, I didn’t think that the people at Wyvern sterilized her out of a concern either for her or for any children that she might conceive. They appeared to have been motivated not by compassion but by fear swollen nearly to panic.
I had asked Angela if the monkey was carrying a disease. She had as much as denied it: I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.
But if not a disease, what?
Suddenly the loonlike cry that we had heard earlier now pierced the night and fog again, jolting me out of my ruminations.
Orson twitched to a full stop. I halted, too, and the click-tick of the bicycle fell silent.
The cry seemed to issue from the west and south, and after only a brief moment, an answering call came, as best I could tell, from the north and east. We were being stalked.
Because sound traveled so deceptively through the mist, I was not able to judge how far from us the cries arose. I would have bet one lung that they were close.
The rhythmic, heartlike pulse of the surf throbbed through the night. I wondered which Chris Isaak song Sasha was spinning across the airwaves at that moment.
Orson began to move again, and so did I, a little faster than before. We had nothing to gain by hesitating. We wouldn’t be safe until we were off the lonely peninsula and back in town—and perhaps not even then.
When we had gone no more than thirty or forty feet, that eerie ululant cry rose again. It was answered, as before.
This time we kept moving.
My heart was racing, and it didn’t slow when I reminded myself that these were only monkeys. Not predators. Eaters of fruits, berries, nuts. Members of a peaceable kingdom.
Suddenly, perversely, Angela’s dead face flashed onto my memory screen. I realized what I had misinterpreted, in my shock and anguish, when I’d first found her body. Her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife, because the wound was ragged. In fact, it hadn’t been slashed: It had been bitten, torn, chewed. I could see the terrible wound more clearly now than I’d been willing to see it when standing on the threshold of the bathroom.
Furthermore, I half recalled other marks on her, wounds that I’d not had the stomach to consider at the time. Livid bite marks on her hands. Perhaps even one on her face.
Monkeys. But not ordinary monkeys.
The killers’ actions in Angela’s house—the business with the dolls, the game of hide-and-seek—had seemed like the play of demented children. More than one of these monkeys must have been in those rooms: small enough to hide in places where a man could not have been concealed, so inhumanly quick as to have seemed like ghosts.
Another cry arose in the murk and was answered by a low hooting from two other locations.
Orson and I kept moving briskly, but I resisted the urge to bolt. If I broke into a run, my haste might be interpreted—and rightly—as a sign of fear. To a predator, fear indicates weakness. If they perceived any weakness, they might attack.
I had the Glock, on which my grip was so tight that the weapon seemed to be welded to my hand. But I didn’t know how many of these creatures might be in this troop: perhaps only three or four, perhaps ten, maybe even more. Considering that I had never fired a gun before—except once, earlier this evening, entirely by accident—I was not going to be able to cut down all of these beasts before they overwhelmed me.
Although I didn’t want to give my fevered imagination such dark material with which to work, I couldn’t help wondering what a rhesus monkey’s teeth were like. All blunt bicuspids? No. Even herbivores—assuming that the rhesus was indeed herbivorous—needed to tear at the peel of a fruit, at husks, at shells. They were sure to have incisors, maybe even pointy eyeteeth, as did human beings. Although these particular specimens might have stalked Angela, the rhesus itself hadn’t evolved as a predator; therefore, they wouldn’t be equipped with fangs. Certain apes had fangs, though. Baboons had enormous, wicked teeth. Anyway, the biting power of the rhesus was moot, because regardless of the nature of their dental armaments, these particular specimens had been well enough equipped to kill Angela Ferryman savagely and quickly.
At first I heard or sensed, rather than saw, movement in the fog a few feet to my right. Then I glimpsed a dark, undefined shape close to the ground, coming at me swiftly and silently.
I twisted toward the movement. The creature brushed against my leg and vanished into the fog before I could see it clearly.
Orson growled but with restraint, as though to warn off something without quite challenging it to fight. He was facing the billowy wall of gray mist that scudded through the darkness on the other side of the bicycle, and I suspected that with light I would see not merely that his hackles were raised but that every hair on his back was standing stiffly on end.
I was looking low, toward the ground, half expecting to see the shining, dark-yellow gaze of which Angela had spoken. The shape that suddenly loomed in the fog was, instead, nearly as big as I am. Maybe bigger. Shadowy, amorphous, like a swooping angel of death hovering in a dream, it was more suggestion than substance, fearsome precisely because it remained mysterious. No baleful yellow eyes. No clear features. No distinct form. Man or ape, or neither: the leader of the troop, there and gone.
Orson and I had come to a halt again.
I turned my head slowly to survey the streaming murk around us, intent on picking up any helpful sound. But the troop moved as silently as the fog.
I felt as though I were a diver far beneath the sea, trapped in blinding currents rich wi
th plankton and algae, having glimpsed a circling shark, waiting for it to reappear out of the gloom and bite me in half.
Something brushed against the back of my legs, plucked at my jeans, and it wasn’t Orson because it made a wicked hissing sound. I kicked at it but didn’t connect, and it vanished into the mist before I could get a look at it.
Orson yelped in surprise, as though he’d had an encounter of his own.
“Here, boy,” I said urgently, and he came at once to my side.
I let go of the bicycle, which clattered to the sand. Gripping the pistol in both hands, I began to turn in a full circle, searching for something to shoot at.
Shrill, angry chittering arose. These seemed recognizably to be the voices of monkeys. At least half a dozen of them.
If I killed one, the others might flee in fear. Or they might react as the tangerine-eating monkey had reacted to the broom that Angela had brandished in her kitchen: with furious aggressiveness.
In any event, visibility was virtually zero, and I couldn’t see their eyeshine or their shadows, so I dared not waste ammunition by firing blindly into the fog. When the Glock was empty, I would be easy prey.
As one, the chittering voices fell silent.
The dense, ceaselessly seething clouds now damped even the sound of the surf. I could hear Orson’s panting and my own too-rapid breathing, nothing else.
The great black form of the troop leader swelled again through the vaporous gray shrouds. It swooped as if it were winged, although this appearance of flight was surely illusory.
Orson snarled, and I juked back, triggering the laser-sighting mechanism. A red dot rippled across the morphing face of the fog. The troop leader, no more defined than a fleeting shadow on a frost-crusted window, was swallowed entirely by the mist before I could pin the laser to its mercurial shape.
I recalled the collection of skulls on the concrete stairs of the spillway in the storm culvert. Maybe the collector wasn’t some teenage sociopath in practice for his adult career. Maybe the skulls were trophies that had been gathered and arranged by the monkeys—which was a peculiar and disturbing notion.
An even more disturbing thought occurred to me: Maybe my skull and Orson’s—stripped of all flesh, hollow-eyed and gleaming—would be added to the display.
Orson howled as a screeching monkey burst through the veils of mist and leaped onto his back. The dog twisted his head, snapping his teeth, trying to bite his unwanted rider, simultaneously trying to thrash it off.
We were so close that even in the meager light and churning mist, I could see the yellow eyes. Radiant, cold, and fierce. Glaring up at me. I couldn’t squeeze off a shot at the attacker without hitting Orson.
The monkey had hardly landed on Orson’s back when it sprang off the dog. It slammed hard into me, twenty-five pounds of wiry muscle and bone, staggering me backward, clambering up my chest, using my leather jacket for purchase, and in the chaos I was unable to shoot it without a high risk of wounding myself.
For an instant, we were face-to-face, eye to murderous eye. The creature’s teeth were bared, and it was hissing ferociously, breath pungent and repulsive. It was a monkey yet not a monkey, and the profoundly alien quality of its bold stare was terrifying.
It snatched my cap off my head, and I swatted at it with the barrel of the Glock. Clutching the hat, the monkey dropped to the ground. I kicked, and the kick connected, knocking the cap out of its hand. Squealing, the rhesus tumbled-scampered into the fog, out of sight.
Orson started after the beast, barking, all his fear forgotten. When I called him back, he did not obey.
Then the larger form of the troop leader appeared again, more fleetingly than before, a sinuous shape billowing like a flung cape, gone almost as soon as it appeared but lingering long enough to make Orson reconsider the wisdom of pursuing the rhesus that had tried to steal my cap.
“Jesus,” I said explosively as the dog whined and backed away from the chase.
I snatched the cap off the ground but didn’t return it to my head. Instead, I folded it and jammed it into an inside pocket of my jacket.
Shakily, I assured myself that I was okay, that I hadn’t been bitten. If I’d been scratched, I didn’t feel the sting of it, not on my hands or face. No, I hadn’t been scratched. Thank God. If the monkey was carrying an infectious disease communicable only by contact with bodily fluids, I couldn’t have caught it.
On the other hand, I’d smelled its fetid breath when we were face-to-face, breathed the very air that it exhaled. If this was an airborne contagion, I was already in possession of a one-way ticket to the cold-holding room.
In response to a tinny clatter behind me, I swung around and discovered that my fallen bicycle was being dragged into the fog by something I couldn’t see. Flat on its side, combing sand with its spokes, the rear wheel was the only part of the bike still in sight, and it almost disappeared into the murk before I reached down with one hand and grabbed it.
The hidden bicycle thief and I engaged in a brief tug of war, which I handily won, suggesting that I was pitted against one or two rhesus monkeys and not against the much larger troop leader. I stood the bike on its wheels, leaned it against my body to keep it upright, and once more raised the Glock.
Orson returned to my side.
Nervously, he relieved himself again, shedding the last of his beer. I was half surprised that I hadn’t wet my pants.
For a while I gasped noisily for breath, shaking so badly that even a two-hand grip on the pistol couldn’t keep it from jigging up and down. Gradually I grew calmer. My heart worked less diligently to crack my ribs.
Like the hulls of ghost ships, gray walls of mist sailed past, an infinite flotilla, towing behind them an unnatural stillness. No chittering. No squeals or shrieks. No loonlike cries. No sigh of wind or sough of surf. I felt almost as though, without realizing it, I had been killed in the recent confrontation, as though I now stood in a chilly antechamber outside the corridor of life, waiting for a door to open into Judgment.
Finally it became apparent that the games were over for a while. Holding the Glock with only one hand, I began to walk the bicycle east along the horn. Orson padded at my side.
I was sure that the troop was still monitoring us, although from a greater distance than before. I saw no stalking shapes in the fog, but they were out there, all right.
Monkeys. But not monkeys. Apparently escaped from a laboratory at Wyvern.
The end of the world, Angela had said.
Not by fire.
Not by ice.
Something worse.
Monkeys. The end of the world by monkeys.
Apocalypse with primates.
Armageddon. The end, fini, omega, doomsday, close the door and turn out the lights forever.
This was totally, fully, way crazy. Every time I tried to get my mind around the facts and pull them into some intelligible order, I wiped out big time, got radically clamshelled by a huge wave of imponderables.
Bobby’s attitude, his relentless determination to distance himself from the insoluble troubles of the modern world and be a champion slacker, had always struck me as a legitimate lifestyle choice. Now it seemed to be not merely legitimate but reasoned, logical, and wise.
Because I was not expected to survive to adulthood, my parents raised me to play, to have fun, to indulge my sense of wonder, to live as much as possible without worry and without fear, to live in the moment with little concern for the future: in short, to trust in God and to believe that I, like everyone, am here for a purpose; to be as grateful for my limitations as for my talents and blessings, because both are part of a design beyond my comprehension. They recognized the need for me to learn self-discipline, of course, and respect for others. But, in fact, those things come naturally when you truly believe that your life has a spiritual dimension and that you are a carefully designed element in the mysterious mosaic of life. Although there had appeared to be little chance that I would outlive both parents, Mom and
Dad prepared for this eventuality when I was first diagnosed: They purchased a large second-to-die life-insurance policy, which would now provide handsomely for me even if I never earned another cent from my books and articles. Born for play and fun and wonder, destined never to have to hold a job, destined never to be burdened by the responsibilities that weigh down most people, I could give up my writing and become such a total surf bum that Bobby Halloway, by comparison, would appear to be a compulsive workaholic with no more capacity for fun than a cabbage. Furthermore, I could embrace absolute slackerhood with no guilt whatsoever, with no qualms or doubts, because I was raised to be what all humanity might have been if we hadn’t violated the terms of the lease and been evicted from Eden. Like all who are born of man and woman, I live by the whims of fate: Because of my XP, I’m just more acutely aware of the machinations of fate than most people are, and this awareness is liberating.
Yet, as I walked my bicycle eastward along the peninsula, I persevered in my search for meaning in all that I’d seen and heard since sunset.
Before the troop had arrived to torment Orson and me, I’d been trying to pin down exactly what was different about these monkeys; now I returned to that riddle. Unlike ordinary rhesuses, these were bold rather than shy, brooding rather than lighthearted. The most obvious difference was that these monkeys were hot-tempered, vicious. Their potential for violence was not, however, the primary quality that separated them from other rhesuses; it was only a consequence of another, more profound difference that I recognized but that I was inexplicably reluctant to consider.
The curdled fog was as thick as ever, but gradually it began to brighten. Smears of blurry light appeared in the murk: buildings and streetlamps along the shore.
Orson whined with delight—or just relief—at these signs of civilization, but we weren’t any safer in town than out of it.
When we left the southern horn entirely and entered Embarcadero Way, I paused to take my cap from the jacket pocket in which I had tucked it. I put it on and gave the visor a tug. The Elephant Man adjusts his costume.