Mammoth (19 page)

Twist.
Twenty-seven left. It had to be getting tight in there.

Twist.
Only eight now.

Twist.

He looked up to see a Los Angeles city bus bearing down on him.

THE
herd of mammoths appeared on the Miracle Mile at 10:18
P.M.
on a Thursday night, almost two days after a building belonging to Howard Christian vanished in Santa Monica.

THE
matriarch of the herd didn’t have a name, but the press would soon dub her Big Mama.

Big Mama was pissed.

First it was the pipsqueak bipeds with their annoying little spears, too small to do much damage to a mammoth but hurtful if one dared get in close enough to jab, carrying the hateful bright hot light, setting the world on fire. Then a long rush through the night, blinded and stumbling and terrified. Then Big Daddy sinking up to his belly in the sticky pit. It was at that point Big Mama began to get angry.

Big Mama wanted to try to help Big Daddy out of the black goo, and would have, even at the risk of getting caught herself…but the world was on fire. So for a few minutes she had dithered, swayed back and forth by conflicting duties and impulses and instincts, until something inside her finally broke and she left Big Daddy to his fate. It was a moment that seldom came to domesticated elephants, but trainers dreaded it like nothing else, because when an elephant’s normally placid temper broke, she was capable of doing almost anything.

What Big Mama wanted to do was kill a few of these pesky bipeds. As she rounded the tar pit she could actually feel biped bones crushing under her mighty feet. It was a good feeling.

The explosion of sound startled her and stopped her in her tracks. Another member of the herd, the one with the notch in her left ear, mother of the third child to be born last birthing
season, actually collided with her, something that would have been unthinkably rude normally, and would have earned her a big cuff on the head. Big Mama hardly noticed it. She had no idea a slug of lead big and fast enough to have torn through her massive skull had passed a few feet over her head. She only knew she
hated
that sound. She didn’t want to go toward it.

But what was she to do? Behind her the land still burned, and she could smell the approaching hunters even over the stench of smoke. After another few moments she lowered her tusks, aimed at the two bipeds, and charged.

Before she had taken three steps, everything changed.

SUSAN
was between Matt and the bus, with her back to it, her whole concentration on the herd of mammoths bearing down on them. As the brakes of the bus began to shriek, Matt got up and dived at her, his arms extended, and lifted her right off her feet, thrusting her out of the path of the bus. Then there was no time to do more than put out his hands as his feet got tangled under him. He was falling backward when the bus struck him, the bike rack on the front missing him by an inch. The back of his head hit the pavement and his vision was filled with bright points of light for a moment…then he looked up to see the bottom of the front bumper of the bus just above his face and, inches from his head, a massive gray foot smelling of urine and tar and elephant shit. Just above that, he had an astonishing worm’s-eye view of a full-grown Columbian mammoth as she thrust forward with all the strength in her body. Glittering cubes of safety glass showered down all over him as he closed his eyes,
hard
, and hoped for the best.

SIGHT
is the fastest sense, and the first thing that assaulted Big Mama was a scene in which she recognized
nothing.
A human could not have been more baffled if she had been instantly transported to the bottom of the sea.

Sound arrived next, and the only thing familiar in that cacophony was the terrified bleating of the rest of the herd behind her.

Scent information was the last to arrive in her brain with
her first massive inhalation, but it was the most important to her, and the most awful of all, because there were literally thousands of smells in the night air that were perfectly alien to her. In her normal surroundings just one strange scent made for an exciting day, and she might linger over it for many minutes, fixing it in her comprehensive library of smells, far more vast than a human mind could comprehend.

There was a crumpled McDonald’s cup lying in the gutter, which had held a strawberry shake; she smelled that, had a pretty good idea where it was, no idea
what
it was, though she knew it was edible as it was related to her mental folders labeled
MILK
and
BERRIES.
On the other side of the street a woman was walking a German shepherd on a leash and Big Mama smelled that, too. It was
something
like the dire wolves she had always ignored in her world, puny little animals, but also wildly different, and mixed with a hundred other smells she could separate but not identify: shampoo, his mistress’s perfume, dog food containing the cooked flesh of several different animals plus carrots, grains, charcoal, and the metallic smell of the tin the food had come in.

There were dozens of restaurants a short whiff away, each emanating a thousand smells, very few of them pleasant. There were a thousand people on the street each with an odor as distinctive as a face, each wearing clothing made of alien substances, laundered in harsh detergents, and shoes made from canvas and rubber and leather.

There were smells of creosote from phone poles, paint and plaster and brick from the buildings, a monstrous panoply of chemicals used in processing paper and plastic and cloth and electronic devices and metals and ceramics, a phantasmagoric stench that could be summed up in a word no puny Pleistocene biped had yet used in Big Mama’s world: civilization.

Over it all, a vast enveloping presence, was the apocalyptic smell she classified as burning tar, the petrochemical miasma humans constantly swam through, as oblivious to it as a fish to water. The burned tar products belched from the tailpipes of the bright, low, shiny animals that darted past her on all sides, sweated off the oil-coated sides of their roaring guts, oozed off the hard asphalt surface she stood on. It was a smell antithetical
to everything her heart knew as wholesome, and she hated it.
Hated it.

Now here came another animal, an animal actually larger than Big Mama, a unique and affronting experience in itself and one she normally would have run from, being at her center a peaceful and cautious beast. But her capacity for caution was gone and there was nothing left but a red and blinding rage. She turned, faced the creature, and lunged at it. Her tusks went right through its eyes, which were hard and brittle and no match for ten feet of ivory. Inside the beast she could see other creatures, more of the damned bipeds, screaming and fleeing toward the back of the thing’s bright alien belly. This made no sense, but she was far beyond any concept of sense. She roared again, and tried to flip the creature onto its back. It was too heavy, so she put one huge foot into the broken eye socket and stomped down on it.

MATT
rolled through bits of broken windshield glass, rolled and rolled and was facing the bus just in time to see the front end slam down on the pavement hard enough to score deeply into the asphalt beneath it, the asphalt he had been lying on three seconds before. Dazed, overwhelmed by too many things happening too quickly, he lay there and watched the mammoth attack the city bus until he felt a hard tug on his arm, rolled over onto his back again, and looked up at Susan.

“Matt, you’ve got to get up!”

He scrambled to his feet. He was vaguely aware of people spilling out the back door of the bus, tumbling over each other. Susan pulled him away and they staggered together to the sidewalk and Matt watched as Big Mama did battle. Still backing up, he hit something metal, turned, and realized he was backed up on the iron fence surrounding the tar pit. In addition to the animatronic mammoth that had been mired in the tar for many years, there was now a live one, still struggling and trying to free himself.

How could that be?
He had to accept that it had happened, just as the building and its contents had been swept into the past by whatever forces the machine had unleashed…but
did the tar the mammoth was mired in come along with him—was he stuck in Pleistocene tar, or twenty-first-century tar?
How can I think about a thing like that with half a dozen mammoths raging through modern-day Los Angeles?

If Susan was being bothered by such questions she gave no sign of it. She raised the elephant gun to her shoulder and fired it at Big Mama. It made a pathetic little
chunk
, with no recoil at all, and Matt realized it was the tranquilizer gun. She must have picked it up when he dropped it. She racked another dart into it and fired again, and then a third time, before lowering the barrel toward the ground.

“I’m afraid any more might kill her,” she told Matt.

“Susan…you may have to kill her.”

“No,” Susan said. “If that has to be done,
you
do it.”

As he took the gun from her, he noticed for the first time that tears were running from her eyes. He realized with a shock that this must be the realization of an elephant trainer’s worst nightmare: one of her charges running berserk, too angry to reason with and too big to be stopped by anything short of deadly force. He imagined she had envisioned this situation in nightmares, on sleepless nights.

He raised the gun and aimed it at the mammoth, then wondered where the brain was in that massive head. Should he try for the heart? And where was
that?

“A little to the left, Matt,” she sighed. “But don’t shoot unless you have to.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” But if the mammoth turned this way and took…what, two steps?…he knew he would have to.

Make it three steps. And one more for Susan.

IF
the extraordinary events of that night had happened twenty years earlier, the LAPD would have been ill-prepared to deal with them. Back then, a police special .38, a nightstick, and a shotgun were deemed adequate for any situation an officer might be likely to encounter. But several events of the intervening years had stretched the bounds of likelihood, including an encounter with two bank robbers in the Valley armed as
well as a third-world nation, the Rodney King riots, several incidents involving gangs and drug dealers packing tankkillers and surface-to-air missiles, and one actual incident of an escaped elephant run amok.

Now all officers carried 9mm Glocks with twenty-cartridge magazines. Most patrol cars had military assault rifles and concussion grenades in the trunk. Stationed around the city were special weapons vehicles that could be anywhere with ten minutes’ notice. And if all else failed, if howitzers and helicopter gunships were called for, there were arrangements with National Guard units that could be brought to bear anywhere in no more than half an hour.

A herd of half-crazed mammoths was a problem, but not an insoluble one.

As in any such situation, the first minutes were chaos. The word “mammoth” was never uttered over a police radio until long after the crisis was past; these were not paleontologists who were called upon to be the first line of defense against the creatures, they were police officers, and to a man and woman they referred to the animals as elephants, according to the well-known principle that if you hear hoofbeats your first thought should be
horses
, not
zebras.
If it’s gray, twelve feet tall, weighs ten tons, has tusks and a trunk, anyone could be forgiven for calling it an elephant. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Mammoths were just as vulnerable as elephants to the firepower the LAPD could bring to bear in an escape situation, and that firepower was being assembled.

To their credit, the responding officers did not immediately set about wiping out the animals. Their first priority was the protection of human life, but a strong second to most of them was to capture the elephants alive, if possible. Protection of property was clearly in third place, so the first officers at the scene stood by as Big Mama demolished the city bus, once it was clear there was no one inside and all nearby pedestrians and motorists had fled the scene.

Roadblocks were quickly established a block away in all directions from the site of the temporal breakthrough, and lines of cops stood behind them pointing shotguns and handguns at what might have been six, might have been eight
milling and confused pachyderms. It was hard to tell in the dark, which had been made worse when several streetlight poles were knocked over by confused mammoths.

When two of the animals started to make a charge for freedom the officers in their path first tried firing into the air, and unleashed such a fusillade that the mammoths turned quickly and rejoined the milling herd.

Things remained in a standoff for almost five minutes.

HOWARD
Christian was not physically suited to being the only thing he had ever really wanted to be: a superhero. He knew it was childish and so he had never told anyone of his ambition, not even when he actually was a child. What he really wanted to do was swing through the concrete canyons of New York on fibers of mutated spider silk, or grow steel claws like his favorite X-Man mutant, Wolverine.

The only thing that had ever been super about him, however, had been his brain. During one of the periods he had been in school he had been given an IQ test and the teachers had been so impressed with the result they had sent him to another testing agency for a more accurate one. He scored 185. The man giving the test told Howard it was the highest score he had ever seen on that test. For years he had treasured that number, 185, and had almost convinced himself it was the highest score ever…but eventually he learned of higher scores, of students who aced the SAT tests on which he had managed only a 1540. So even in that he was not the
best
, not a true mutant, not superhero material.