Fear Nothing

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, breath pungent and repulsive. 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.
        “ Jesus ,” 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 wheel was the only part of the bike still in sight, and it almost disappeared into the murk before I reached down with one hand and grabbed it.
        The hidden bicycle thief and I engaged in a brief tug of war, which I handily won, suggesting that I was pitted against one or two rhesus monkeys and not against the much larger troop leader. I stood the bike on its wheels, leaned it against my body to keep it upright, and once more raised the Glock.
        Orson returned to my side.
        Nervously, he relieved himself again, shedding the last of his beer. I was half surprised that I hadn't wet my pants.
        For a while I gasped noisily for breath, shaking so badly that even a two-hand grip on the pistol couldn't keep it from jigging up and down. Gradually I grew calmer. My heart worked less diligently to crack my ribs.
        Like the hulls of ghost ships, gray walls of mist sailed past, an infinite flotilla, towing behind them an unnatural stillness. No chittering. No squeals or shrieks. No loon-like cries. No sigh of wind or sough of surf. I felt almost as though, without realizing it, I had been killed in the recent confrontation, as though I now stood in a chilly antechamber outside the corridor of life, waiting for a door to open into Judgment.
        As time eased by with the pace unbroken, the encounter with the monkeys should have seemed less real second by second. Instead, it grew more vivid in my mind, and I felt as if those terrible yellow eyes had not merely seared their radiant image into my memory but had left their mark on my soul.
        Finally it became apparent that the games were over for awhile. Holding the Glock with only one hand, I began to walk the bicycle east along the horn. Orson padded at my side.
        I was sure that the troop was still monitoring us, although from a greater distance than before. I saw no stalking shapes in the fog, but they were out there, all right.
        Monkeys. But not monkeys. Apparently escaped from a laboratory at Wyvern.
        The end of the world, Angela had said.
        Not by fire.
        Not by ice.
        Something worse.
        Monkeys. The end of the world by monkeys.
        Apocalypse with primates.
        Armageddon. The end, finding, omega, doomsday, close the door and turn out the lights forever.
        This was totally, fully, way crazy. Every time I tried to get my mind around the facts and pull them into some intelligible order, I wiped out big time, got radically