“Two-hundred forty-seven,” Nora says. Her face beams as she tracks their clicks and bleeps on her Echo Meter X-17. She’s smart, not too bubbly. The perfect research assistant, even though it’s her first field work since Cal State Northridge had to move their classes online. “It’s amazing how fast their population grows without humans.”

             Nora frowns. No one on the L.A. Repopulation Task Force likes it when I talk this way. I don’t expect them to.

             I let out a short grunt. “Suppose so.”

             I remember when I was twenty-seven, a new grad student, idealistic and insecure, just like her. Even if I didn’t have the cute braids with perfect orange highlights and canvas hiking pants. And all the crap I got from my professors back in the nineties–bearded men to a tee–it made me promise to never shut down a young person’s ideas. After all, I used to think like her. Have everyone plant some milkweed and soon L.A. would be overrun with monarchs. Get the city to turn abandoned lots into parks filled with sage and buckwheat. But my degree was in Biology, not real estate development and local politics.

             A swarm of bats woosh past my earlobes, snatch mosquitos in mid-flight. I haven’t told Nora I can understand their clicks just as much as the howls of coyotes or the sharp squawks of crows. An albino bat circles my neck and shoulders. Seventeen quick clicks. There’s so many bugs now, Dr. Byila. It all happened when you left. Maybe I’ll tell Nora what I’ve learned from my time talking to the animals. Teach her how to ask them questions too.

             We walk down to the riverfront. One of the meteor impacts smashed through the concrete channel, diverting the flow far east of the warehouses that used to loom over them. Among some submerged rubble, we notice a few splashes. Something spurts out of the water.

            “Can’t be. Look at how small the splash is,” I say.

             But then we see it jump again. “Steelhead” I say. “One of the meteors hit the Brown Mountain Dam. The other Devil’s Gate. Freed up the arroyo.” A pair of the trout leap through the purple twilight, bug hunting just like the bats. The way to the ocean is free again. That’s where we’ll grow. Grow beyond our wildest dreams.

             Nora tells me most of her family resettled in San Diego. Others in Las Vegas. No one wants to come back, not even when the city opens back up for the general public. They’d grown sick of the fires, the rent, the traffic. But there were ten million others flung far afield to abandoned malls in Oregon and emergency shelters in Arizona. And it was up to our Task Force to tell them when it was safe to come back. How long it’d take to cut back the plants, scatter the animals to the far corners of our city.

             We listen to the croak of Western toads and the egrets’ caterwauls as we walk south on the riverbanks. I tell Nora about the animals I knew before, how I worry for the ones that needed us to survive. The rats that used to live in the Costco parking lot, who told me about how they’d snatch strawberries and almonds off the big rigs before they were unloaded. Or the mountain lions who fed on housecats. Tell me what neighborhoods are best, Dr. Byila. You must know where your kind keeps the plump ones. What were they eating now?

             We meet up the next day with the full Task Force. I can tell Nora despises Eamon Barkus, the head of our group. She picks at her nails with her incisors all throughout his slide presentation. It sounds like mice gnawing on bone. He shares Mayor Katresian’s latest directive, purely hush-hush, that our time is winding down. It’s time to resettle, since there’s big money on the line.

            “Land where the meteors hit is all the rage,” Barkus says. “We’ve got folks from as far away as Beijing and London, ready to buy and build.” He flips over to a new slide in his presentation with a design for a twenty-seven-story building. “Life in the Impact Zone. Luxury Lofts in the Cosmic Crater”

             Nora raises her hand. You can see the fingernail dangling off her index finger like a crescent moon. “We don’t know what the radiation’s done to the earth in the impact sites, how it’s going to affect humans.”

             It was true. Somehow the meteors that struck that night seemed to have made everything blossom, ten, twenty times faster than before. In a radius around each of those twenty-two impact points apricot mallow and yarrow have swallowed the crabgrass lawns. Toyon berries overflow the crater of Chinatown and Echo Park. Our paws have never felt better, the possums say. The streets became wild while we blinked.

            “Nature’s changed,” Nora says. “We can’t just move everyone in and think we’ll adapt without problems.” I put my hand on her back and smile. She knows my thoughts well, still has the rage to speak out when others stay silent.

            “I don’t see the danger in a bunch of shrubs,” Barkus said. He snapped back toward his presentation and continued with the next slide.

             That night, I decide it’s time. Time to teach Nora how to speak with the red-tailed hawks and the pill bugs and the bluegill in the park ponds filled with Styrofoam cups. Take the stance of an outsider. A stranger visiting their earth. Ask them for guidance. Like someone who’s never seen a map, never held a compass. That’s the only way they’ll talk.

             Nora, of course, is a natural. She asks the flies their favorite types of dung, the ants what corpses they’ve found in the recent rains. We wait until dusk to walk the streets of downtown that have cracked open from the upward thrust of bunch grass. I spy a pack of stray dogs mixed with a few coyotes. I invite her to try, to ask what’s really on her mind.

             A drooling rottweiler steps out of the throng. “Why don’t you test us? I’ve heard human tastes better than rat.” The dog growls and snaps a few times, the saliva begins to glow maroon. I hold out my hand and we take a few steps back.

            “We ate the dead mountain lions, who ate the deer who ate the grasses in the crater. Their disease is in all of us.”

             One of the coyotes in the pack answers moves forward. “No worse than when we had to lick water mixed with oil or avoid your cars in our night crossings. This disease, at least is ours.” The rottweiler growls and we decide it’s best to leave them to the hunt.

             Another week passes and the time for our final report arrives. I wonder what Nora will want us to write. Now that she’s spoken with the creatures of the city. Now that billions of dollars are ready to pour back in. Maybe she still thinks we can resettle Los Angeles the right way. Construct the mountain lions their overpasses, let the craters be turned into parks. Cure the coyote’s disease and tame their angry teeth. We’ll find the stray dogs new homes and give them bubble baths again.

             But then what? Human footsteps will push deer into the lost fields of Griffith Park and the shrubs will be uprooted to make way for the condos. Yellow mustard and ivy will be the only plants that thrive. The sidewalks paved over with new asphalt. But then, Barkus will say, the cars can come back and the freeways’ thrum will echo and the skyscrapers will cast shadows on the tents among the broken beer bottles and shopping carts. And Los Angeles will be restored. 

             I decide to take one final survey before I type up our findings. I go down to Fletcher Street and watch the bats zip among the sycamore branches. They snap up flies with their little tongues. Clasp on the holes in the underside of the bridge. I think tonight I’ll talk to a few, as many as I can find. I’ll talk to the sphinx moth and the steelhead and the lonely, lost possums as well. Ask them what they think. Ask them if we deserve to return or not.

             Only then can I give the Task Force my findings. Only then will my report be complete.