Larry Underwood sat on a bench in Central Park on the morning of June 27, looking into the menagerie. Behind him, Fifth Avenue was crazily jammed with cars, all of them silent now, their owners dead or fled. Farther down Fifth, many of the posh shops were smoking rubble.
From where Larry sat he could see a lion, an antelope, a zebra, and some sort of monkey. All but the monkey were dead. They had not died of the flu, Larry judged; they had gotten no food or water for God knew how long, and that had killed them. All but the monkey, and in the three hours that Larry had been sitting here, the monkey had moved only four or five times. The monkey had been smart enough to outwit starvation or death by thirst - so far - but it surely had a good case of superflu. That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world.
To his right, the clock with all the animals chimed the hour of eleven. The clockwork figures which had once delighted all children now played to an empty house. The bear tooted his horn, a clockwork monkey who would never get sick (but who might eventually run down) played a tambourine, the elephant beat his drum with his trunk. Heavy tunes, baby, heavy f**king tunes. End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures.
After a bit the clock fell silent and he could hear the hoarse shouting again, now mercifully faint with distance. The monster-shouter was somewhere off to Larry's left this fine forenoon, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown.
"Monsters coming!" the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry's nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals.
"Monsters coming now!" The monster-shouter was a tall man who looked to be in his middle sixties. Larry had first heard him the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer - Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They're in the suburbs! - and Larry became convinced that the suite's door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there... not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth.
But earlier this morning Larry had seen him in the park and he was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bikepaths with a loud comic thwap! sound, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry's opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.