by Kyla Stone
Raven took another step back. A small part of her registered that she was too near the fence, but the horror crashing through her blotted everything else out.
She swallowed the acid rising in the back of her throat. “Zachariah, you should lie down—”
Zachariah didn’t seem to hear her. He lunged at Raven, seizing her arms with an impossibly iron grip.
Behind her, Vlad gave a tense, uneasy growl.
“Help me!” Zachariah screamed, only inches from her face. Blood-flecked spittle struck her cheeks, landed on her eyelashes.
His hands were burning on her bare arms. His whole body radiated a terrible heat. She tried to jerk away, but he was strong, impossibly strong. “Let go!”
“Save me!” he shrieked.
Terror spiked through her. The mask was a flimsy thing, useless this close. If a single microscopic droplet entered her system through her mouth, nose, eyes, or ears—she knew what would happen. She’d watched the newsfeeds reporting the overrun hospitals, the millions of sick—then billions, all dying and dead.
Zachariah coughed again, splattering phlegm onto her face. His cheeks were hollowed, spidered with swollen, pulsing, purple-black veins.
Behind her, Vlad was working himself into a frenzy. He slammed against the fence, letting out a savage, rumbling growl.
“Back away!”
She looked up, still half-frozen in shock. Her dad was running up the path from the direction of the lodge and the park entrance.
He waved his arms wildly. “Get away from him!”
Finally, Raven wrenched her arm free. She stumbled back, her spine striking the fence for an instant—Vlad snarling, hurling himself at the chain-link—before she regained her senses and staggered away.
Vlad’s massive claws scraped against metal inches from where her head had just been, the fence shuddering from his considerable weight. The tiger wasn’t focused on her—his piercing yellow gaze swung between her father and Zachariah, his ears flattened, tail lashing.
Raven leaned against the wall of the tiger house, gasping for breath. “Dad.”
Her father stood between her and Zachariah, a tranquilizer gun gripped in both hands. He pointed the gun at Zachariah, the man he’d worked with every day for over a decade. His expression was taut, his eyes blazing. “He has it, Raven. He has the Hydra virus.”
2
“Go home, Zachariah,” Raven’s father ordered, steel in his voice. He spoke calmly, but the tranquilizer gun pointed at Zachariah’s chest told a different story. “You don’t belong out here.”
Zachariah blinked at him with eyes red as blood. “You have to help me!”
“Go home right now.”
Raven tensed, unsure what her dad was prepared to do if Zachariah defied him, if he came at them again. He was delirious, too sick to understand what he was doing, to recognize his own aggression.
On her left, Vlad paced and snarled at the fence line, lips pulled all the way back from his gleaming fangs. He reared onto his hind legs, growling, and lunged against the fence again and again. Vlad despised guns—the sight of one always worked him into a furious frenzy—but Zachariah’s sickly odor and bizarre, jerky movements were unhinging him. She felt as unsettled as he did.
She stared at Zachariah in growing horror. He was barely recognizable as Zachariah, let alone a human. But his eyes, even reddened and rimmed in blood, were filled with an all-too-human emotion—terror.
“Please,” she whispered, her gut churning with dread, with that twisted, palpable sense of wrongness. “You’re hurting yourself. Please go home so you can rest.”
“Home,” Zachariah mumbled. He shook his head violently, as if he were shaking off fleas or gnats. He took a step back, then another. Raven’s father tracked him with the tranq gun.
The zookeeper coughed again, a harsh, retching sound. “I have to go…I have to…”
He never finished his thought. His gaze roamed, disjointed, jittery and frenetic, then with sudden focus, fixed upon Raven. He blinked rapidly. For an instant, he was lucid. He saw her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, throat gurgling. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to…I’m so sorry.”
“Zachariah—”
He lurched away, staggering up the path toward the foxes, the zebra, and the bobcat, in the opposite direction of the restaurant and his loft.
Neither Raven nor her father stopped him. She was just relieved that he was gone for the moment, that the threat was past. Except it wasn’t. Heart still thudding in her throat, she tentatively touched her face. Her fingers came away wet with speckled phlegm and blood.
“He coughed on you,” her father said in a low, rough voice. “Did it get in your eyes or mouth?”
Her pulse roared in her ears. “I—I don’t know.”
“Don’t touch anything.” He dug into his pocket, tugged out a spare pair of plastic gloves, and tossed them to her. “Take off the mask.”
She pulled on the gloves. Carefully, she unhooked her blood-tinged mask and threw it on the ground. She’d take care of it later, but now, she just wanted it off. Her skin was crawling, every hair on the back of her neck standing on end.
Listening to the statistics and watching talking heads repeat the staggering, mind-numbing numbers hadn’t seemed real. Neither had the vids of the rioting outside government buildings and soldiers with guns at checkpoints, enforcing curfews in cities she’d never been to. Not even the disappearing staff had made it real.
First it was the bat-flu, a terrible epidemic in itself. Millions of people complaining of headaches, coughing fits, chills and fevers. Then another illness cropped up, flawlessly imitating a simple cold and then the flu. It spread like wildfire. People continued to go to work, to school, to stores and restaurants and airports. By the time health officials began reporting hemorrhaging from eyes, mouths, and ears, it was too late. The virus had spread too rapidly. There was no way to contain it.
Over four weeks ago, the president had died from the Hydra virus. The newly sworn-in President, Amanda Sloane, had given an explosive presidential address, announcing the pandemic was an engineered virus, a bioweapon released by terrorists, designed to be highly contagious and highly virulent. The president had declared martial law, promising to eradicate the virus and restore order.
She’d failed. Rumors spread that the surviving government had fled to some underground bunker, abandoning the country to the ravages of the virus and the desperation of those that survived.
After the president’s address, Raven’s father immediately closed the refuge and locked the gates, though by then, the visitors had already slowed to a trickle. One by one, the staff had called in sick or simply stopped showing up. Hakeem, the bird and reptile keeper, and Sonya, the big cat keeper, had been out for five weeks. Raj, who cared for the bears and the wolves, hadn’t been heard from in a month.
At first, rolling power outages lasted for hours or days at a time. News coverage was sporadic at best. The vloggers reported the millions dead, then billions. The newsfeeds began to repeat old information, the same reports and health warnings replaying over and over. Then the net went black altogether. The power followed.
Luckily, Haven had back-up generators. Zachariah had scavenged up plenty of gas in those early days, though it was currently running low.
But power was one of the least of their problems now.
Her father stared at her, jaw working, silent and angry. “How could you be so careless?”
She flinched. “I had my mask.”
“But no gloves.” There was blame in his voice, recrimination. “You didn’t run from him. You let him walk right up to you.”
She went rigid. He was right. She’d allowed her thoughts to be consumed by other things—her plans for escape, her mother—and she hadn’t been alert. She’d let her guard down. “It was—he’s Zachariah!”
“It doesn’t matter,” her father said, his voice hard. “You don’t put yourself in danger for anyone. Do you understand me?”
>
“Yes.” She forced herself to think of something other than the microscopic virus particles that could be percolating through her blood in that very moment. “Zachariah is suffering. He needs medicine.”
Her father lowered the tranq gun and shook his head. His long black hair was threaded with gray and tied in a knot at the back of his neck. He was trim and lanky, with hard, wiry muscles from years of heavy labor. His face was lean and weathered. She couldn’t see his mouth beneath his mask, but she knew it was pressed into a grim slash.
“No.” He rubbed sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. His skin was sallow. Bruises circled his eyes from weeks of stress and little sleep.
He turned away from her, likely to head to the rear of the park, to the wolves, were he spent his free time after all the animals had been fed and cared for. Her father was a man of few words. Her mother had hated it. Raven had grown used to it, resigned to reality. But today, his reticence was unacceptable.
“No? What do you mean, no?” She repeated the same thing she’d said eight days ago, when Zachariah first started coughing and he’d quarantined himself inside his loft. “There must be something we can do. Call Dr. El-Hashem in town—”
“No doctors left to call,” her father said, his accent thickening. He’d moved to the states from Tokyo when he was a kid. He barely had an accent unless he was angry or upset.
Her mind filled with the newsfeed images of the overrun hospitals and medical centers, guarded by soldiers refusing the sick at gunpoint. The screaming children, the desperate, weeping parents.
“What about Dr. Carter?” she said, even as she knew it was hopeless.
Dr. Carter, the exotic animal vet who doctored all the parks’ animals, hadn’t come to take care of one of the timber wolves’ abscess three weeks ago. On vet visit days, he’d always let her assist with the fecal screening programs, routine vaccinations, and other issues that cropped up. Kodiak, a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound black bear, needed a claw cutting for an ingrown toenail; Gizmo, a bonobo, suffered a toothache that required an extraction under anesthesia.
Her dad had her message Dr. Carter again and again. Finally, the vet’s wife had answered, coughing and raw with grief; he was dead, another casualty of the Hydra virus.
“Then the pharmacy in town—”
Her dad whirled on her. His eyes, black as onyx and mirrors of her own, burned with some inner heat. “Too dangerous.”
Fear stuck in her throat like a hook. “Zachariah is our friend. He’s worked here for forever. He stayed to help even after everything went to hell. We can’t just—”
“He’s dying anyway,” her father said flatly, his fingers tightening on the tranq gun.
“I know.” She gestured helplessly. “He’s also suffering. He’s in pain. There are meds—”
“I said no.”
Her dad coughed into his mask. He had asthma—he was always coughing. The stress—and the mask—made it worse. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face. Vlad continued to snarl his discontent, hurling himself at the fence. He wouldn’t stop until her father put away his gun. But he didn’t put it away, even though Vlad was clearly agitated. Deeper in the park, several of the wolves started to howl.
The breeze rustled through the trees, all rich shades of fiery red and burnt orange and plum purple, the pathways underfoot littered with fallen leaves. Dread settled into her stomach like a block of ice. “You want to just leave him? Let him suffer?”
“How do you think he got infected? He went into town for more gas and to get meat from the renderer. I warned him to be careful. He wasn’t careful enough.” He winced, like speaking the words pained him. “You will not risk yourself for him, for anyone.”
She gave a sharp, frustrated jerk of her head, capitulating the same way she had before—the same way she always did. It made her hate herself. It made her want to grab her pack and run as far away from this place as she could.
Her dad coughed again into the crook of his arm. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His face had hardened into his usual expression—flat, closed, impassive. “The hybrids need to be fed. The bonobos need fresh hay in their night house. And when you’re finished with that, Vlad’s house needs scrubbing out.”
“Yes, sir,” she said through gritted teeth.
A part of her loved the refuge and the animals within it—this place had been her home for as long as she could remember. But a bigger, angrier part of her resented it.
The needs of the refuge had taken over her life. After her mother left, her father enrolled her in online high school classes. He said she was safest at home, because even three years ago, the world was a dangerous place, with the crop blights and food shortages, the riots and domestic terrorist attacks, everything falling apart slowly and then all at once.
She had always helped out around her classwork. After graduating the previous spring, she had nothing keeping her from working all day. She couldn’t afford the incredible expense of college. So she would help the keepers rake droppings and shovel in fresh straw, trying not to choke on the fetid stench; feed and water the animals; and make sure the wolves and bears weren’t digging escape tunnels in their pens. During operating hours, she kept idiots from leaning on the wolves’ fence or throwing French fries at the bears.
The fancy zoos had sanitation bots that did the grunt work. But a small, family-run refuge couldn’t front that kind of cash. For the last month, it had been Raven, her father, and Zachariah. Now, she and her father were forced to do it all, just the two of them.
She watched her father stride away up the path, already dismissing her from his mind as he turned to his myriad other tasks. He’d always cared about this place and the animals more than people.
More than her mom, more than Zachariah, more than her.
She’d known he wouldn’t remember. She might have forgiven him in the chaos of everything going on, except he’d never remembered. Not once. She told herself it didn’t even hurt any more.
She turned back to the tiger house, her limbs heavy as lead. No matter what horrible things were happening in the outside world, her dad kept order in his domain. While Zachariah was dying, an afternoon mopping up tiger scat the size of her head lay ahead of her.
It didn’t feel right. None of this felt right. She glanced up at the large tree in Vlad’s enclosure. There were no heads hanging from the branches today. There’d been no heads since Zachariah had fallen ill.
She remembered being eight, and watching in horrified fascination as Zachariah hung bull heads he’d procured from the renderer on several branches eight to twelve feet high for the tiger’s enrichment. Raven had never squealed or allowed herself to appear squeamish as Zachariah nonchalantly hooked a bloody ear, wedged horns in the fork between two branches, or hung the disembodied head upside down, a ghastly purple tongue poking from the thing’s maw.
He had rubbed his hands together afterward and pointed at Vlad, who was springing high in the air and batting at the heads, intent on bringing them down for his next meal. “He’s just working for his dinner like the rest of us, right?” Zachariah grinned at her. “It’s nothing to be scared of. Simply a trick of the trade, little bird.”
Zachariah had faced everything with a jovial fearlessness—he’d made Raven want to be the same way. Because of him, she hadn’t had a single nightmare. As for her father, the thought that his eight-year-old daughter might be frightened of bloodied, severed heads hadn’t even entered his mind.
She sucked in her breath, fighting the wave of sorrow flooding her veins. For a moment, she couldn’t move from the surge of pain. And the other thought, dark and lethal, niggling at the corners of her mind.
Zachariah had coughed in her face. His infected, bloodied spittle had landed on her skin. Had microscopic droplets infiltrated her eye sockets? Her ears? If a single pathogenic particle slipped through the fibers of the mask and invaded her body, she was done for. In ten days’ time, she’d be the one choking on her own bloo
d, her organs melting into a toxic, insidious stew.
She shoved the thought down deep. There was nothing she could do about that now. What was done was done. She was sorry for Zachariah—deeply sorry. She grieved for him. But her plan hadn’t changed. If anything, she was even more determined to get out.
Tonight, she was gone.
She straightened, steeling herself.
She pressed her hand to the bioscanner beside the locked, steel-reinforced door and pushed the button to lower the drop gate on the other side of the tiger house, which opened to Vlad’s enclosure. The scanner beeped, and the service door swung open with a hiss. Before she went inside, she peeked around the corner at her pack, still ready and waiting.
The tiger house dens were six feet by twelve feet, with steel sheeting lining the walls, a welded mesh floor, and a steel-barred sliding drop gate. There were two chambers, though they had only one tiger.
The concrete floor of Vlad’s den was covered with gristle, shredded fur, and the curved bones of horse ribs. This would take a while. She picked up the mop in the corner and took a shallow breath through her mouth. No matter how often it was scrubbed clean, the tiger house always stank with the fetid stench of raw meat, of death.
Another shout filtered down the hill, this time high and spiked with alarm.
Zachariah.
3
Raven dropped the mop and dashed outside. She shielded her eyes against the sun. At the top of the hill beside the timber wolf enclosure, the figure of her father bent over something lying in the pathway.
She sprinted up the hill, knowing what she would find but dreading it all the same. Her father glanced up as she halted beside him. His face looked like he’d aged ten years in the last ten days.
Zachariah lay sprawled at his feet, his limbs bent awkwardly beneath him, his features contorted in agony. Tears of blood stained his gaunt cheeks. His eyes were open, staring in frozen horror.
