Triple Threat - James Patterson Page 0,35

be stalking down virtually every sidewalk and alley we pass, sniffing the ground, searching for human prey.

Clearly they’re the primary animal threat in this part of the city. But I also spot plenty of feral dogs and house cats in the mix. I see squirrels skittering across rooftops, too. A flock of falcons circling and cawing overhead.

When we pass a burnt-out black London cab, abandoned on the corner of Baker Street—near the address of the fictional Sherlock Holmes—I notice that inside, about fifty greasy rats have built a giant, filthy nest. They’re gnawing the flesh off a severed human leg, and it doesn’t take a crack detective to figure out how they got it.

“Welcome back to the jungle, Oz.”

Seated beside me, Dr. Evan Freitas pats me on the shoulder and lets out a grim chuckle. He can’t be more than fifty, but the stress of spearheading Washington’s scientific HAC response has clearly aged him prematurely. His bushy black beard is streaked with gray. Every time he speaks, his entire face fills with wrinkles like a prune.

“It’s…it’s just…,” I stutter, “unbelievable.”

“Worse than you imagined?”

“Worse than—my worst nightmare! We had satellite internet back in the Arctic. I’d read that the animals were gaining ground. That huge swaths of major cities had basically been overrun. And abandoned. But this…this is just beyond—”

“London Town ain’t been abandoned, mate,” says Jack Riley, our driver, a cranky, baldheaded Brit with the Metropolitan Police. “See?”

He gestures to an apartment above what was once a high-end shoe store, now looted and dark. A woman has opened her second-story window a crack. She quickly reels in a line of laundry and slams the window shut.

“The whole bloody lot of us just stay indoors now. Least the smart ones do.”

Yep, I’d read about that as well.

In many places, just setting foot onto the street is a death wish. So most people, especially in big cities, remain inside their homes pretty much 24/7, with their doors and windows locked tight. Some have gone even further, converting their buildings into anti-animal mini-fortresses, as Chloe’s parents and a few neighbors had done to their Paris apartment complex. It was one of the many reasons I thought my wife and son would be safer there.

Folks communicate with friends and family almost exclusively by phone and internet—even more so than they did before. School and work are done online as much as possible. In terms of food and other necessities, people have come to rely on sporadic deliveries of rations by armed government soldiers. Doctors have gone back to making house calls, at great personal risk…and are almost always packing heat.

“It’s like this in Atlanta, too. And the suburbs and surrounding counties? Even worse. People are getting desperate. Civilization is breaking down.”

Those ominous words come from the woman sitting in the row of seats behind us, nervously biting her cuticles: Dr. Sarah Lipchitz.

While I’d waited with Freitas at Heathrow for about half an hour for Sarah’s plane to arrive from the United States, he explained that she was a brilliant young biologist and pathogen expert currently employed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who had been handpicked to join our team. (What he didn’t mention was that the bespectacled Sarah was very pretty, in a geeky, girl-next-door kind of way.)

“Precisely, Doctor,” Freitas responds. “And preventing global chaos from becoming total anarchy is why we’re all here.”

He means me, Sarah, himself, and the rest of the scientists and experts in our three-vehicle convoy. Barely a dozen people, responsible for the lives of millions.

I have about a thousand follow-up questions for Freitas, but they’ll have to wait. We pass Hampstead Road and turn down a one-way side street. Our convoy comes to a stop in front of the main gates of University College London. The international symposium we’ve come to England to attend is a gathering of some of the finest scientific minds in the world, all trying to save humanity.

As armed 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