In the back of his mind was an equation he could not justify, but which nagged him nonetheless on a level that made his hands sweaty: One herd of elephants vanishing in Santa Monica = One herd of elephants appearing on the Miracle Mile. There was a dizzy logic to it that some primitive level of his mind could not dismiss. Those must be his lost elephants. He had seen films of what a rampaging elephant could do, and the idea of a herd of them running wild through a city was almost too frightening to contemplate.
The picture on his screen wasn't very clear. It looked as if some streetlights were out in the target area. He brought up an infrared image on a second screen. He enhanced it. He was presented with a view down Wilshire, looking east. Already quite familiar with interpreting the night-vision infrared orbital cameras, he quickly picked out a line of vehicles that weren't moving, out in the middle of the street, the brightest part of them being the unseen engines under the hoods. Near the curb by the park that surrounded the tar pits and the museum was a larger heat source that he quickly identified as a city bus, and right in front of it was a massive, moving object. He clicked up the magnification twice. It sure looked like an elephant, and it was doing battle with the bus. Beyond it, he could see police cars, doors open, with officers crouching behind them. There was something odd about the elephant. Howard switched back to the visible light lens, and clicked it up two more notches. The resulting picture was grainy and indistinct, even with the real-time enhancement, but he immediately noticed the fantastically long tusks, the hump behind the animal's head, and the incredible size, four or five feet taller than his Indian elephants. Howard was the first person in Los Angeles to realize that the city was facing an invasion of mammoths.
They held their fire as the herd reached the prostrate form of Big Mama, but the animals paused only long enough to snuffle at the sleeping mammoth with their trunks. The mammoths could tell from her smell that she was not dead, and they could see the rise and fall of her massive chest, and they might have wondered why she had picked this moment, of all moments, to lie down and snooze, but they didn't linger on the question. What was clear was that something was horribly wrong. The beta female, now the de facto herd leader, made her second command decision, raising her trunk and bellowing, a terrible declaration of frustration and rage that reached right down to the monkey part of the human brain to make every hair on the body stand up. Instantly the whole herd wheeled and charged at the line of police cars stretching across the broad street.
The cops held their positions, and most held their fire, but they couldn't hold it forever. A shot rang out, then another, and the first burst from an automatic rifle set off a fusillade that stopped the mammoths in their tracks.
The bullets from the handguns did little more than irritate the beasts, but the rifles did real damage. One cow fell to her knees, then staggered up, her head streaming blood. The firing continued, and the charge was stopped. The herd wheeled and took off rapidly in the opposite direction, west on Wilshire.
As many police and soldiers have learned when in a firefight, once you have started firing your weapon it can be very hard to stop until it is time to reload. The hail of lead continued as the mammoths ran away from the police line. Now they were being hit from behind.
In all times and in all things there was one prime instinctive directive all mammoths lived by: The Herd sticks together. But now herd civilization collapsed, just as human civilization did when a hundred people tried to escape a burning building through a single door. The herd ceased to exist, they no longer pressed together as they ran, but each ran blindly in whatever direction looked best to her overloaded senses. The steel and glass canyon of Wilshire Boulevard channeled them, but some were in the middle of the street, some on the sidewalks, and the one who had gone to her knees was stumbling, bewildered, over rows of parked cars, crushing hoods and trunks.
They went three blocks in a very short time, and found themselves facing another row of police cars, bumper to bumper across the road. This time the order to fire was given quickly, and once more the mammoths came to a halt, not as a group this time, but one by one as the bullets tore into their thick hide. One went down, fell on her side, and though she was breathing, she did not get up. None of the other mammoths came to her, they were far beyond noticing a fallen comrade now. The survivors wheeled once more and headed east. The street was spotted with dark puddles of blood.
"NO!" Susan shouted. "Stop shooting!" Matt had to grab her and pull her back against the partially destroyed fence surrounding the tar pit, then force her to the ground as bullets whizzed through the air all around them. They huddled on the ground and watched as the herd fell apart, broke against the western line of cops, turned, and came back toward the original killing ground. One was down, and a second seemed to have injured herself badly, tearing a foreleg open on a jagged piece of metal from a Toyota Land Cruiser she had stomped almost flat.
"Here they come again," Matt said. "Maybe we should get behind the fence here. It won't stop them, but it might channel them away from us."
Susan could only sob as Matt pulled her to her feet and through the hole in the fence, where they crouched a little down the slight slope and watched the slaughter continue.
HOWARD watched with increasing horror as the scene unfolded before his satellite-aided eyes. The big green blobs in the infrared cameras charged west, then east, then west again. One, then two of them ceased to move.
His frustration was growing. Because of the location of the tar pits, even with his situation high in the Resurrection Tower to the south of the unfolding action, he had doubted he would be able to get a look with the telescope in the tower. He could see things happening in the nearby mountains, see into windows on the sides of buildings that faced him, and the roofs of almost any building within fifteen miles, but a two- or three-story building two miles away always blocked his view of the street beyond it. His recollection of the La Brea Tar Pits area was that such buildings stood between him and the disaster unfolding on Wilshire.
But he called up a map of Los Angeles and was surprised to see he might almost have a clear sightline right down Curson Avenue. He might be able to see the herd as they passed that street, for a few seconds.
Bringing the telescope on line, he quickly aimed it north, then aligned it with Curson Avenue in time to see the remainder of the herd, now caught in a murderous crossfire from both ends of Wilshire, turn one by one and thunder in his direction, big as life though almost three miles away. He thought he could see the blood streaming off their heads as they ran. He even fancied he could see the terror in their eyes.
One thing he was sure of. He could see the thin line of police cars, three of them set across Curson, not quite bumper to bumper, with only six officers standing behind them. And not quite a block beyond them, so that Howard was looking over their heads, was a single yellow strip of police tape tied to lampposts, holding back a crowd of several hundred people who had come out of their houses in the residential neighborhood, probably drawn by the sound of gunfire.