Zoo II Read Online Free Page A

British soldiers open our doors and escort us inside, I hear a pack of wolves in the distance, howling.
    I hope they’re not signaling that another innocent person has been mauled.

Chapter 7
    My God, these scientific conferences are dull.
    I’d forgotten how absolutely painful they can be. Even when the topic is literally the fate of the planet, the only thing these bland professors and rumpled “experts” seem to know how to do is drone on and on. And on.
    It makes me want to pull my hair out. Worst of all, we’ve been at this for almost five hours now, and I haven’t heard one single presenter offer any useful new information or viable solutions.
    If this really is a confab of the finest minds in their fields…we’re screwed.
    A team from Senegal, for example, discussed the inconclusive results of some recent biopsies of the brain tissue of rabid elephants. A Brazilian electrical engineer spoke of her lab’s failed attempt to use gamma radiation waves to block the effects of cellphone signals on animal pheromone reception.
    A group of officers from Moscow’s Valerian Kuybyshev Military Engineering Academy outlined a Kremlin-backed plan to carpet-bomb any and all major underground animal breeding areas. When I angrily interrupted to explain that the American government had tried an almost identical bombing campaign just a few months ago and that it had failed spectacularly, the committee chairman cut the feed to my microphone.
    Thank goodness it was time for a fifteen-minute break.
    Right now I’m standing in the hallway outside the main meeting room, mainlining some desperately needed caffeine and sugar: a muddy cup of coffee and a rich, gooey Cadbury chocolate-caramel bar.
    Sarah is reviewing her notes for a presentation she’s giving later about what she’s dubbed HMC—Human Microbial Conflict—which she believes, based on her research, will be the next, even more terrifying stage in all this madness.
    Freitas, meanwhile, is sitting on the floor, talking animatedly on his smartphone and tapping wildly on his iPad. I don’t have the foggiest idea to whom or what about—but by the look of it, it’s important.
    “Feeling nervous?” I ask Sarah when I see she’s reached the end of her pages.
    “Of course,” she replies. “ Exceedingly nervous.”
    “Don’t worry about it, you’ll do great. Just try to imagine that every chubby, balding, pasty scientist in the audience is wearing nothing but his underwear. Actually…no, don’t do that. That’s a pretty disturbing picture.”
    Sarah smiles and shakes her head.
    “Thanks, Oz. But I’m not nervous about giving the presentation. I’m terrified…about what my data show. If you think wild animals attacking humans is bad, just wait another few months or so, when I predict wild bacteria will join in. There’s no way to bomb something microscopic.”
    “Good God,” I mumble, rubbing my temples. The prospect of that sounds beyond horrific. “One crisis at a time, please.”
    Suddenly Freitas leaps up from the ground and hurries over to us, waving his iPad in the air. Given the glint in his eye, I can tell he’s overjoyed about something.
    “They’re in! The latest worldwide AAPC numbers!”
    “Isn’t that just a bunch of old fogeys?” I ask.
    Freitas doesn’t like my joke. The acronym, he says, stands for animal attacks per capita. It’s a metric he invented to measure the rate of animal-related incidents and deaths in different countries around the world.
    “Over the past few weeks,” he explains, “rumors have been flying that all nations are not created equal. At least not when it comes to HAC. Allegedly, some have begun seeing a marked decline in attacks, while others have experienced a skyrocketing.
    “So,” he continues, “I ordered a team of DOE statisticians to crunch all the millions of data points we had and turn them into an easy-to-digest format.”
    He hands me his iPad. On it is a map of the world shaded every color of