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 chattering 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 toorapid 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 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, iv
breath pungent and repuls’ e. 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.
Orson, ” 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