Read The Extinction Club for Free Online Page A

Hôpital vétérinaire de l’Avant-Mont. As it rang I watched a startlingly fat woman in the parking lot hit a golden retriever, once, twice, three times, with a snowbrush. What is wrong with this world?
    “Thanks, I’ll be right there,” I said after repeating then memorizing the directions. I ran back to the parking lot, but the woman and dog were pulling away in a silver Saab. I could make out only the last three letters of the licence plate: RND . I fired up the van, which took a couple of minutes, enough time for her to make a clean getaway.
    On the highway I fiddled with the chrome knob on the old radio, watching the red line scan the frequencies, stopping at Jean Leloup’s “Le grand héron” at 96.9, then a French version of “Angels We Have Heard on High” at 99.5, then “Bye Bye Bye” by Plants and Animals at 99.9. What a signal, all the way from Vermont! You can’t beat German radios, you can’t beat a Blaupunkt!
    Candy canes dangled from lampposts, and green bulbs winked at me from nests of pine boughs and tinsel. While admiring them I drove at a geriatric pace, trying my best to keep to the speed limit every inch of the way. And trying my best not to jam on my breaks for the benefit of the car behind, a tailgating yellow Hummer. The concept of keeping your distance, it would seem, is as foreign to drivers here as it is in France. I slowed to a crawl and flicked on my four-ways. The driver flashed his brights, three, four times, before passing me on the shoulder, displaying his longest finger.
    I reached for the .38 in the glovebox but thought better of it. Pushed on the accelerator, primed for a chase, but thought better of that too. Instead, I wrote down the licence plate (666 HLL) and flicked back to 99.5, a Montreal station. Classical music, my father’s lawyer once told me, is good for anger management. Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending was playing, which was perfect, but I couldn’t focus. Questions were crowding my mind. From the police if I got pulled over: Are you aware, sir, that the vehicle’s registration expired two years ago and has not been renewed? Are you aware that this vehicle was involved in a serious crime? Are you aware that you are wanted in the state of New Jersey, and that a full-points bulletin is out for your arrest?
    The streets were all biblical: Matthieu, Marc, Luc, Jean. I turned right on Mathieu, left on Marc. Past a disused arena announcing a Pumas-Lynx hockey game from the previous year, past a schoolyard with a swing set, climbing bars and a slide in the shape of a dinosaur tongue. But where were the children? I hadn’t seen a single one, anywhere. Why weren’t they out tobogganing or skating or making snowmen? Or whipping snowballs at cars and windows? Where were they? Was this a retirement village?
    Right on Luc, past the flash and trash of new condos littering the mountainside, to a veterinary clinic atop a small hill. The cars were parked in front at a steep angle, presumably with their emergency brakes on. Mine didn’t work so I parked at the bottom and made my way up the slick staircase like a chimp on skates. At the top of the hill I looked down on a glaciated valley strewn with black boulders, at a line of birches and poplars that marked the course of a river whose wild waters defied the frost. I must have a suicide complex because I wanted to jump. It all looked so beautiful, pristine. And sad too, as if I were seeing the end of the old world.
    A quaint habit of mine: trying to visualize landscapes from before Columbus landed—towering trees fifteen storeys high, titanic fish leaping out of crystalline waters, ferocious mountain lions, bobcats and wolves skulking through lush boreal jungle … Or trying to see in the other direction: toward post-human landscapes. It took ten thousand years to ravage Mother Earth, but after we’re gone it will take only two hundred years for her to have her revenge. To turn the concrete jungles into the real thing.