Zoo

The world was becoming a zoo, without cages.

Turns out an apocalypse actually comes on pretty slowly. Not fire and brimstone, but rust and dandelions. Not a bang but a whimper.

Then the doctor broke my nose and I cried like a baby

It wasn’t because the lions were particularly hungry. The humans had been nothing compared to the eighteen-hundred-pound Cape buffalo, the pride’s more typical prey. The cars had been like boxes full of snacks.

Toxic pheromone pollution. How can we combat that?” Charles Groh and I looked at each other. This was it. We’d finally arrived at the hard part. What had to be done. “The first step,” I said, “would be removing the factors that are causing the environmental disturbance.” “Remove petroleum products?” said the president. “And cell phones?” said the secretary of state. I nodded at both of them, then looked out at the faces around the table and on the screens.

For all the scientific evidence we were amassing, many people, both in government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening. I wasn't the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore - but still, not everyone heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long uphill battle to get people to recognize what was happening.

Why is this happening? Who knows, really? Life and existence can never be fully understood. Stars are born only to explode. Creatures hunt other creatures, and then they die. The universe is a chaos of irrational forces wrestling with one another in a war without end. The human race is on the receiving end now.

Desperate times, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Here’s what I think we should do.

The greatest known power in the universe is the resilience of man coupled with his intellect. He tinkers and tests and fights through to solutions.

Her English had an elegant European lilt, what I thought was a French accent—​vowels in the front of her mouth, consonants brushed with feathers.

Turns out an apocalypse actually comes on pretty slowly. Not fire and brimstone but rust and dandelions. Not a bang but a whimper. Perhaps

MRE. “Any you guys wanna take a moonlit stroll?

They told us to come here,

Horses had been brought in from a farm in Rockville, Maryland, to pull U-Haul trailers.

The terminal was filled to capacity, crowded with tourists coming in from evacuated safari camps. The air buzzed with fear and nervous excitement. The tourists looked scared and confused, though I was glad to see that many of them were texting

It was like crawling into the asshole of Satan.

Raksasom! Rana! Atanka!” he warbles as he runs past the van. Monsters. Horror. Run. Monsters. Pardeep smiles to himself, amused. This is a prank. Probably kids playing tricks on some superstitious old fools. “Hello? Police,” he says, entering the lobby. It’s deserted. “Police!” The smell is awful. It smells like shit, garbage, death—which is to say, nothing unusual for this neighborhood. There’s no response. He starts up the stairs. At the top of the first-floor landing he sees something moving in the dimness down at the end of the hallway. It’s low to the ground, perhaps about waist level. In the windowless corridor, it looks to Pardeep like a woman with a blanket over her, crawling on all fours. He is confused. He reaches for his flashlight, takes a few steps closer. Then there is something moving at him very fast down the dark hallway. He clicks on his flashlight and sees bright eyes flash jewel-green in the darkness. Then he is falling backward. Pardeep doesn’t have time to scream as the leopard opens him from belly to chin. Two more leopards arrive, skulking slyly in the hallway. The leopard is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. The beautiful turquoise-eyed creature is sometimes called a leaping chain saw due to the fact that it uses both its rear claws and its razor-sharp front claws, as well as its teeth, when it strikes.