Fear Nothing

have been motivated not by compassion but by fear swollen nearly to panic.
        I had asked Angela if the monkey was carrying a disease. She had as much as denied it: I wish it were a disease. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe I'd be cured by now. Or dead. Some days I think dead would be better.
        But if not a disease, what?
        Suddenly the loon-like cry that we had heard earlier now pierced the night and fog again, jolting me out of my ruminations.
        Orson twitched to a full stop. I halted, too, and the click-tick of the bicycle fell silent.
        The cry seemed to issue from the west and south, and after only a brief moment, an answering call came, as best I could tell, from the north and east. We were being stalked.
        Because sound traveled so deceptively through the mist, I was not able to judge how far from us the cries arose. I would have bet one lung that they were close.
        The rhythmic, heart-like pulse of the surf throbbed through the night. I wondered which Chris Isaak song Sasha was spinning across the airwaves at that moment.
        Orson began to move again, and so did I, a little faster than before. We had nothing to gain by hesitating. We wouldn't be safe until we were off the lonely peninsula and back in town - and perhaps not even then.
        When we had gone no more than thirty or forty feet, that eerie ululant cry rose again. It was answered, as before.
        This time we kept moving.
        My heart was racing, and it didn't slow when I reminded myself that these were only monkeys. Not predators. Eaters of fruits, berries, nuts. Members of a peaceable kingdom, not meat eaters.
        Suddenly, perversely, Angela's dead face flashed onto my memory screen. I realized what I had misinterpreted, in my shock and anguish, when I'd first found her body. Her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife, because the wound was ragged. In fact, it hadn't been slashed: It had been bitten, torn, chewed. I could see the terrible wound more clearly now than I'd been willing to see it when standing on the threshold of the bathroom.
        Furthermore, I half recalled other marks on her, wounds that I'd not had the stomach to consider at the time. Livid bite marks on her hands. Perhaps even one on her face.
        Monkeys. But not ordinary monkeys.
        The killers' actions in Angela's house-the business with the dolls, the game of hide-and-seek-had seemed like the play of demented children. More than one of these monkeys must have been in those rooms: small enough to hide in places where a man could not have been concealed, so inhumanly quick as to have seemed like ghosts.
        Another cry arose in the murk and was answered by a low hooting from two other locations.
        Orson and I kept moving briskly, but I resisted the urge to bolt. If I broke into a run, my haste might be interpreted - and rightly - as a sign of fear. To a predator, fear indicates weakness. If they perceived any weakness, they might attack.
        I had the Glock, on which my grip was so tight that the weapon seemed to be welded to my hand. But I didn't know how many of these creatures might be in this troop: perhaps only three or four, perhaps ten, maybe even more. Considering that I had never fired a gun before - except once, earlier this evening, entirely by accident - I was not going to be able to cut down all of these beasts before they overwhelmed me.
        Although I didn't want to give my fevered imagination such dark material with which to work, I couldn't help wondering what a rhesus monkey's teeth were like. All blunt bicuspids? No. Even herbivores - assuming that the rhesus was indeed herbivorous - needed to tear at the peel of a fruit, at husks, at shells. They were sure to have incisors, maybe even pointy eyeteeth, as did human beings. Although these particular specimens might have stalked Angela, the rhesus itself hadn't evolved as a predator; therefore, they wouldn't be equipped with fangs. Certain apes had fangs, though. Baboons had enormous, wicked teeth. Anyway, the biting power of the rhesus was moot, because regardless of the nature of their dental armaments, these particular specimens had been well enough equipped to kill Angela Ferryman savagely and quickly.
        At first I heard or sensed, rather than saw, movement in the fog a few feet to my right. Then I glimpsed a dark, undefined shape close to the ground, coming at