“Sure, Doc. Sure thing, Doc.” Lucy recognized the voice of the night cleanup man.
“Goodnight, then.”
“Night, Doc.”
Was it the on-call vet that Eisner had mentioned? He wasn’t supposed to come unless there was an emergency. She knew: He wanted no witnesses. Lucy felt a deep lethargy come over her. She simply wanted to sleep. Then all at once the answer rose from the mist of her mind like the first rays of sunlight in the forest morning.
Lucy stood and crossed the cage. She took the tray of dinner from the compartment and flung the food onto the floor. Mashed potatoes spread in white blotches like fungus. She stepped on the food and smeared it around. She tore the sheets and mattress and scattered the shreds around the cell. She reached up and dragged the bandage off of her head. She ripped the wires out of her skull. She winced at the sharp pain as her scalp tore. She took off her hospital gown, soaked up the blood that was flowing from her head, then put it back on. Then she smeared blood over her face and neck and arms. She lay on the floor as far from the cage door as she could, arranging her body in an awkward way as if she’d fallen. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing. She heard the muffled sounds of the building’s ventilation system.
She felt her heart fill with a dread that spread through her stomach and thighs as the quiet grew. She thought back to the forest, to the time that the female leopard had come and snatched poor little Offie, the savagery of the bonobos’ counterattack. Offie was dead, but they had massed and charged the cat anyway, throwing stones and screaming. At last Lucy found what she needed: Rage. Rage at the thought of what those people were going to do. All at once, she was wide awake, filled with strength and energy. But she kept still. She made her mind a blank. She could see herself as if she were looking down on the cage from high above: A dead girl, filthy and smeared with blood, lying on a concrete floor, her neck jerked back in an attitude of anguish.
She was not sure how long she lay like that before she heard the key slide into the lock again. She held her breath. She dared not look. This would either work or it would not. There was no middle ground. She heard footsteps, then a sharp intake of breath and the word “Shit.” She heard footfalls. “What the hell—” She heard a clatter as the man set the rifle down. She heard a metallic jingling and then the sound of the big key turning the tumblers in the cage door.
She heard him say, “Goddamnit.”
She could feel her heart hammering. She allowed herself to view him through barely slit eyelids. She saw the five-o’clock shadow on his jaw, a small mole on his neck, as he approached to look more closely at her. She felt an electrical crackling of energy surge through her belly and legs.
This is what she learned in the jungle. Some things are automatic. When a big cat is onto you, you have to pick the right moment. You have but one chance to act. Even more than her strength, that was what had made her a good wrestler. You don’t really decide. You simply act from a place that is below the level of consciousness. An impulse rises within you that is irresistible because it is right, and if it’s not right, you simply don’t contribute any more to the gene pool. That’s what Lucy felt at that moment. It was the same feeling that she’d had the first time she went to Amanda’s house and the dog Cody had wanted to kill her. She knew that one of them would die on that spot. And that was fine. The one right thing that she had to do rose within her. There was no other choice. Now she felt the same. What she did was absolute and irrefutable. The forest had arranged it this way.
As the man leaned over her, Lucy rolled back, pulling her knees to her chest, and kicked him in the head with both feet. His head snapped back sharply. She heard it crack as he went flying across the cage and hit the bars. His head made the whole cage clang and vibrate as he went down with a heavy sigh, his neck askew. Lucy was on her feet and out of the cage. She grabbed the nearest heavy object she could find, a cinderblock. Everything was going in slow motion, sharp and clear. She turned and stepped back into the cage. She stood over him, the concrete block above her head, ready to smash his skull. She waited for him to move, but his neck was broken. He stopped breathing. The scent of his blood was sharp and metallic. She watched it flow into the drain where the janitor had washed the feces and urine.
Panting, glowing with sweat, Lucy dropped the cinderblock to the floor. She took off her hospital gown and rinsed it quickly with the hose. Then she tied it tight around her and picked up the cinderblock again. She flew across the bars of the cage, over the top, and up the steel beams that gripped the walls. She reached the skylight at the top and threw the cinderblock through the glass. She watched the glittering pieces fall and crash in slow motion onto the cage below. They broke into smaller fragments and settled around the body. She drew herself up onto the roof and ran to the edge. She took a quick look at the distance and then jumped rather than climbing down. She landed and rolled, then popped to her feet and was gone in the night.
43
AMANDA WAS GOING to interview for a job and then to have lunch with her mother. She wanted to try to mend some fences. School had started. She had decided not to go to college yet. She wanted to keep her options open until they learned what had happened to Lucy. She and Jenny had agreed that it wasn’t good for her to sit around the house worrying. Amanda had to get out and live her life. She had to be with people her own age and reenter society. Jenny needed something to distract her as well, so she had returned to volunteer at the shelter. Nina, the administrator, had welcomed her back with the comment, “Now I know you’re ready. I think I have just the thing to take your mind off of your own troubles.” And she had introduced Jenny to a sixteen-year-old girl whose father had kept her locked in a basement for two years.
Jenny had just made coffee. She could hear Amanda upstairs in the girls’ room, dressing for her job interview. Jenny went outside to bring in the newspaper. It was the sort of autumn day that made her glad that she lived in an area that had actual seasons. High thin clouds hurried across the sky toward the lake. The sun made colors jump out of the background, and the wind bumped her with sudden gusts that made her widen her gait.
In the kitchen she glanced through the headlines. How much more did she want to know about the Mideast? How much violence could she stomach this morning? She wondered why she even subscribed to a newspaper. She knew: Because her mother had done so all her life.
Amanda came down looking smart in a gray pantsuit and a black cashmere sweater.
“Breakfast?” Jenny asked. “I’ll cook.”
“I’ll just grab some cereal.”
“Fruity Cheerios?”
“Yum.”
They exchanged a look, then Jenny turned to the national news page, where she found short summaries of incidents from various states. Double murder at a Taco Bell in Texas. A chemical plant explosion in New Jersey. A man fell from a construction site in midtown Manhattan and landed on a car, killing himself and the driver. A veterinarian had been killed by a chimpanzee at a primate facility in New Mexico. The story struck Jenny as odd the moment she saw it. But newspaper stories were often odd, raising more questions than they answered, so she paid no attention to it at first.
She and Amanda ate cereal with bananas. “What time is your interview?”
“Eleven.”
“What is it?”
“Internal marketing. I thought I’d do a little shopping since I’ll be downtown. Want to get some retail therapy?”
“Thanks. I have to go to the shelter. They took in a new girl. Terrible story. You don’t want to know.”
“No, I don’t.”
As they were cleaning up the breakfast dishes, something that had been nagging at the back of Jenny’s mind rose to the level of consciousness. She dried her hands and crossed to the table. She turned the pages of the newspaper and found the story. Amanda was loading the dishwasher as Jenny reread it. A veterinarian. A chimpanzee. The story said that a thirty-nine-year-old chimpanzee named Buddy had escaped from its cage when a
member of the staff happened to enter the area. Robert Walton, 41, was found dead of a broken neck when the morning shift arrived, according to the county coroner. To herself, Jenny said, “What?”
“More nonsense about Lucy?”
There had been more huffing and puffing from Congress after Lucy went missing. But then Senate Bill 5251 had passed, and it seemed to cast a pall over those who might have wanted to protect Lucy. Ruth Randall had offered a reward for Lucy’s safe return. The lawsuit that Sy Joseph had filed was grinding its way through an endless maze.
“Come here and look at this,” Jenny said.
Amanda dried her hands and read the short item. “Yeah, that’s too bad. Gives apes a bad name. You think the guy screwed up?”
“Well, it doesn’t say much. You have to be awfully cautious with a middle-aged male chimpanzee. But what’s even stranger is this cause of death: His neck was snapped.”
“Yeah, well, chimps are really strong, so …”
“Yes, they’re plenty strong enough. But they don’t fight that way. They have very characteristic ways of killing. They draw their victim near and bite ferociously. They always go for the scrotum and the butt. They’ll bite off the fingers and then attack the face with those huge incisors. When a chimp kills another chimp—or a man—there are really dramatic wounds. Lots of blood and gore. Horrible. But no broken neck.”
“Have chimps killed people before?”
“Definitely. There was one in 2006 at a chimp sanctuary in Sierra Leone. A chimp named Bruno, who was twenty years old, led a mass escape. These guys are really smart. A driver had brought some people in to see the chimps, and Bruno smashed the windshield and dragged the driver out. He bit off the guy’s fingers and killed him with a horrific bite to the face. Then there was that lady in Connecticut. Same kind of wounds. Her face was gone, but she lived. Anyway, after millions of years of killing in this one particular way, a chimp isn’t just going to stop and dream up a new strategy. Bonobos, though. They’re different. They’ve been known to bite fingers off, but they fight with their feet when they mean to kill. They kick. A kick in the head from a powerful bonobo can snap your neck.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means this guy wasn’t killed by a chimp.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Jenny stared at the story as if she might somehow drag more information out if it. “I know this place. Alamogordo. It’s a primate research lab at Holloman Air Force Base. Jane Goodall tried to get the chimpanzees released from there. It’s been going for decades, and no one’s ever been killed. There’s just a lot more to this story. And this guy wasn’t killed by a chimp.”
“So if it’s on this air base and all, why did they even release a story?”
“Well, someone was killed on the job. He was a doctor, a vet. Presumably he had a family at home wondering what happened. They had to say something. They couldn’t say what really happened, so they blamed it on some obstreperous old chimp they wanted to get rid of.”
“Oh, my God, Lucy said she might have to kill somebody. What should we do?”
“I don’t know. But if Lucy was there and if this is how she escaped, then we’d better find her before they do.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
44
THE TERRAIN AROUND the primate facility was rocky and exposed. To the west Lucy could see an airfield blasted in the glare of floodlights, so she fled in the opposite direction, stumbling over rocks and dodging low piñon trees. She reached a small pond and lay panting under a moonless sky. Now at least she had water. That was always primary: Get to water and you’ll be all right. That’s what her father had said. Papa, Papa, Lucy thought. Do I love you or hate you? Lucy could see now that he had prepared her for this. He had known what might come. But why, why? And then she asked herself, Would I rather not exist? No, she knew it more completely than ever before: She wanted to live. Cruel as it was, this world was just too sweet to give up.
She felt the blood trickling down her neck. She touched the wound on top of her skull. The piece of bone had seated itself. But she would need her head covered. All she had to wear was the hospital gown. She had to find clothes. She had to blend in. She had to get to Donna, and she no longer had the luxury of time.
She washed the blood off of her head with the brackish pond water. Then she sat and smelled the air. The wind was light and variable. The air was warm. Here on the thirty-something parallel, autumn wouldn’t come for a while. The breeze shifted, and then Lucy caught the aroma of pine sap. She leapt to her feet and headed into the faint draft that carried the scent. Going as fast as she could over the rocky ground, she found an arroyo about thirty minutes later. She descended into the trees and down to a small stream. She drank again and moved on, following the watercourse. She knew that they’d be out with the helicopters and infrared as soon as they found the body.
She stopped to listen. Coyotes were yipping in the distance. She followed them, and they led her to a place where they had dug a small tunnel beneath the perimeter fence. Lucy squeezed through and continued on.
When the cover of trees petered out in a dry wash, she climbed a butte to see where she was. Another stretch of woods continued toward the east. She made her way to it and then navigated through scrub forest. Stars were hived in branches overhead.
She walked on, picking her way by starlight. The image of that man lying dead on the floor kept leaping into her head. After a time, she saw a break in the woods and moved cautiously toward it. At the edge of the forest a tennis court lay in darkness. She moved closer. It was part of an estate. A large adobe house in the distance lay in a wash of security lights. Lucy stepped onto the cold concrete surface and made her way across. A tall judge’s chair stood beside the court. She saw a small building in the trees. She moved toward it.
It was made of adobe and had high louvered windows. She found the door unlocked and went inside. She could smell chlorine. It was a shower room. She felt her way along the wall in the darkness. She touched lockers, cupboards, hooks on the tile walls. She began opening the lockers one by one, and halfway down the row she found a pair of jeans. She dropped her gown and put them on. They were large but would have to do. She cinched the leather belt tight. Searching through the rest of the lockers, she found a T-shirt and then tennis shoes. They were too big but she wore them anyway. Her feet had grown soft during her time away from the jungle, and she could feel her blood sticking to the shoes.
Moving back toward the door, she ran her hand along the hooks until she found a baseball cap. She adjusted the strap and put it on. She picked up the gown and slipped across the tennis court and back into the trees.
She went as deep into the woods as she could go. Adrenaline had kept her going, but now she had to sleep. She checked the canopy overhead. The trees were not sturdy enough to support a nest. As she lay down on the forest floor, she felt the adrenaline begin to subside at last. Things had been moving so fast that she hadn’t had time to think clearly. And now, as she tried to let her muscles relax, this thought came into her mind: I killed a man. I killed a human being.
All her life she had been taught not to kill, and now she’d done it. The worst thing in the world. She felt revulsion spread through her as the image of the dead man came to her once again. His blood. His pleading eyes. She thought of her father and felt grief and anger. All his preaching and effort had come to this. She wanted to scream, Why did you do this to me? But she also thought, Who, if I cried out, would hear me? She hated what she had become. She couldn’t even remember who she’d been before they sank their hooks into her. The hawk. The hawk had gotten her. But she’d managed to escape. She desperately wanted to find a way back now. But back to where? She wondered if she would ever reach a place of safety where she might begin to heal.
Lucy buried the hospital gown and fell asleep. When she woke, she sat quietly and waited for sunrise. She knew it was coming wh
en the birds began. She went into The Stream and waited. She could tell by what the birds and animals said that no one was near. She found a piñon tree and ate some of the nuts. Then the whole forest lit up with a beauty that was almost painful after her time in captivity. The trunks of the trees stood, twisted and dark, and the glittering green leaves seemed to hold the light and vibrate with an electric aura. Aromas rose around her.
But she had no time to enjoy it: They would be finding the body now, sending out the alarm. She wished that she could see what she looked like before going out, to know what sort of impression she would make. She had to pass for an American teenager. At least the ghastly wound in her head was covered.
She could hear a road in the distance. She forged her way through the woods toward it. A scattering of cars and trucks passed on a divided four-lane highway. She began to walk along the shoulder, where a crow picked at some roadkill. As Lucy approached, he cocked a dark and gleaming eye at her and shouted, “I know you! I know you! I know you!”
“Go away!” The crow lifted off and cackled back at her, his heavy black wings cutting the air.
Lucy stuck her thumb out. She had read about it in The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road, and now she wondered if hitchhiking still worked. She walked on with the sun at her back, casting a long shadow across the land like a great spider.
45
AMANDA WAS DIPPING FRITOS into a small container of bean dip and drinking a Diet Coke as the old Toyota crossed through the great irrigated fields of wheat and cotton on a deserted road in Oklahoma. Staying clear of the interstate, they had driven all day and all night, taking turns sleeping.
Jenny had called Ruth Randall, the only person she knew in New Mexico. She had gone to Harry’s to make the call. She told Ruth only that they were accepting her invitation to the ranch.
“Do you want Luke to send the plane?” Ruth had asked. “It’s no bother.”
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