by Kyla Stone
“What am I supposed to do?” she whispered. “How am I supposed to do this?”
But her father’s face had gone slack. Finally, mercifully, he’d drifted into a drug-induced sleep.
She backed away, her legs like lead, and sank into a faded orange armchair she’d once loved for its deep, downy cushions. Now it was just old, dirty, and smelled like moths.
Her backpack sat in her room. The cabin was waiting for her. The animals still needed to be fed. The bonobos’ night house had never been cleaned. And she was exhausted, so incredibly weary.
To keep herself awake, she forced herself to look around the bedroom. Like him, it was spartan—a lumpy mattress, an old computer-integrated desk, a nightstand, the orange armchair, the log walls bare of pictures or sentimentality. An ancient television sat on the dresser. No holoscreens or wall screen for her dad.
He never watched television anyway. He was always in the woods, hiking or hunting or with the animals, which was usually what this room smelled like—pine and dirt and dank fur.
It had been different when her mom was here. But those memories were fading like old-fashioned print photos; she could no longer remember the particular scent of her mother’s perfume.
Some days, even the image of her mother blurred in her mind, and she couldn’t recall the shape her mom’s smile took when she was genuinely happy, or whether it was her left or right eyebrow that scrunched like a caterpillar when she was upset—which was often.
She did remember the depressions, remembered creeping into one of the guest rooms to discover the lump of her mother’s body beneath the covers, the room shadowed and dark, the air thick with misery.
Raven swallowed hard. She ran her fingers over the soft ridges of her mask. It was harder to breathe with it on in here, in the claustrophobic air that felt like it was losing oxygen by the minute.
She shifted uncomfortably, her father’s oversized SmartFlex digging into her wrist. She unsnapped the two-inch wide faux leather cuff and unfolded it, turning it over and over in her hands. She hadn’t checked the vlogs in almost two weeks. She’d been too busy keeping Haven going.
She thought of Clay Creek, the eerily empty streets and shops; of Carl’s face imploding before her eyes. The arterial spray of blood, so impossibly bright; the black hole opening up beneath her feet when she realized the police weren’t coming, that maybe there weren’t any police anymore. Of the flinty gleam in those bikers’ eyes, their casual cruelty, their absolute belief that they would get away with it, that there was no longer anyone to stop them.
Her stomach cramped. She activated her dad’s SmartFlex. She’d let the battery die on hers. It was mostly useless now anyway.
Her dad’s data appeared as a digital overlay. It hovered above her hands, three-dimensional, tinged bluish and slightly transparent—nothing but statistics about the animals, bills that needed paying, health updates that were overdue.
She swiped the newsfeed bar. No new posts. The latest vlogs were almost three weeks old, which was almost more terrifying. When she tried to search the internet, nothing came up. “Error. Please try again,” the Smartflex chimed. She gave up on the search and scrolled through all the old alerts instead.
Schools districts closing, by county and, later, by state. Big businesses and corporations shutting their doors. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization releasing health alert after health alert, warning after warning. Videos of riots outside hospitals and medical centers. Whole communities burning. Thousands shut inside quarantine areas lined with fences topped with barbed wire. The sick lining up outside FEMA tent cities. And the bodies. Bodies everywhere. By the thousands, the hundreds of thousands. Mass graves. And worse.
The President gave repeated addresses in attempts to calm the people. She declared martial law along with an emergency bill requiring every citizen be chipped to detect even microscopic virus levels.
Her father had insisted neither of them get the implant. “Let them come to us, then,” he’d growled. “Seems to me the government’s got bigger problems.” And he was right. It was the one thing he and her mother had always agreed on: their mutual distrust of the government.
Raven scrolled through more vid feeds she’d already seen. Soldiers manning checkpoints and guarded quarantine zones, refusing to allow people in or out. More rioting, more burning. Looting and violence. The National Guard called in to quell outraged uprisings. International air and naval travel banned. Then national, then state and county. Then it didn’t matter.
Mayors and governors, senators and presidents, prime ministers, princes and tyrants, they died as easily as the homeless, the poverty-stricken, the children. Police and soldiers either died in droves or abandoned their posts to protect their own families. Cities and urban centers fell to gangs, brutality, and violence.
She swiped on the last report: “The death toll has now reached four billion,” a shell-shocked Hispanic woman said, her hands clenched over the broadcasting desk. “An epidemiologist at the CDC just released a projection model indicating that within the next thirty to sixty days, ninety-four to ninety-six percent of the population will be wiped out. Experts at the World Health Organization are working around the clock to find a vaccine and have made significant headway…”
The report was dated seventeen days ago.
Then, nothing.
No more reports. No more newsfeeds or vloggers. No more internet.
Fresh fear stabbed the base of her spine. A tremor went through her, like she was standing too close to the edge of a cliff. The numbers were impossible to comprehend. Not until she’d gone to Clay Creek, seen the town for herself. Not until she’d met the bikers.
It was the end of the world.
Right here, as she sat next to her dying father, the whole world was crumbling, dying right along with him.
Her mind kept wanting to reject it, deny it, keep on pretending as long as she could—until she couldn’t anymore.
It was too much to take in, too much for one person to bear; she was finally, irrevocably alone. She was getting what she’d wanted. To be alone. To be a loner, solitary, surrounded by silence.
But not like this, her panicked mind whispered. Never like this.
She got up slowly, her muscles aching, and walked to her dad’s bed. His legs thrashed, twisting in the bed sheets. Sweat drenched his ashen face. His whole body was rigid. Tendons stood out on his neck. His eyes were deep, bruised hollows.
Blood dripped like tears down his cheeks.
She pulled the armchair right up to the bed, ten-feet rule be damned, and hunched beside him, keeping vigil long into the night.
She kept waiting for his last words, for him to finally look at her and say something important, maybe some last-minute advice on surviving the apocalypse. Or what she really hoped for—an I was wrong, or I wish things were different, or most of all, an I love you.
But in the end, in death he was the same as he was in life—reticent, private, unknowable.
Twelve hours later, her father was dead.
8
The next day, Raven buried her father where he’d buried Zachariah less than three days ago.
She had no coffin, no funeral home to call. This was the new world: a twisted, funhouse version of the old world, the two hundred intervening years erased in only a few desperate, horrifying weeks.
It was difficult, exhausting work, punching the shovel though the red Georgia clay again and again and again. By the end of it, she was trembling and sweating, her damp and sticky T-shirt clinging to her chest and back, her palms stinging with blisters.
She’d buried one of her wolf carvings with him, along with an old family picture she’d found stuffed in a drawer. It had been taken in front of the wolves’ enclosure when she was six. Her little round face had been shining, joyous, but even then, her dad was looking at something off-camera, distracted. Her mom’s expression was tight, pinched, her eyes distant, already dreaming of somewhere else.
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br /> Happiness had never been a defining trait of her family. She remembered three people bumping around within the same four walls, never touching. She remembered silence. Lots and lots of silence. Not the living, vibrant kind, filled with insects and wind and animal sounds, but the oppressive silence weighted with all the words hungry to be spoken. They never were.
Raven patted down the last shovelful of red dirt and clay, her arms aching. The trees rustled above her, their crimson, orange, and yellow leaves curling at the edges, ready to die. She was deep in the woods, about a mile outside the perimeter of the park.
Last night, the timber wolves had begun to howl. Somehow, they had known her dad was gone. It was different from their usual howling to communicate with each other. This was a chorus of grief. They sang in sorrowful, haunting concert, sending up a keening wail that echoed, eerie and beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the dirt. Her eyes stung. Her chest was too tight. Some giant hand was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing the life out of her. She couldn’t catch her breath. The ground kept tilting dangerously beneath her feet.
She didn’t know what to say or how to say it. She didn’t know any poignant poems or appropriate songs. Nothing meaningful would come. Only a dull sense of despair, a numbness spreading from the center of her being.
She resented her father. She also loved him. “I know that you tried.”
She turned away from the graves—her father’s and Zachariah’s—and made her way through the forest back to Haven.
She had wanted to escape to find solitude, but now that solitude—and safety—was here. Solitude maybe, but not peace and quiet. The bonobos were screeching their displeasure, the bobcat yowling unhappily, the zebra braying and barking, the wolves growling with hunger.
Her father had bought Haven Wildlife Refuge when he’d returned from the war when Raven was five. It housed one tiger, two black bears, six timber wolves, two hybrid wolves, four bonobos, two porcupines, one bobcat, three red foxes, four otters, one zebra, two ostriches, one eagle, four peacocks, two tortoises, two dozen flamingos, flocks of geese and ducks, and a fifteen-foot long boa constrictor named Winston.
Every one of those animals was hungry—with the possible exception of Winston. Most of them ate an enormous amount of food. None of the animals had been fed yesterday or today.
She desperately needed a distraction from the grief encircling her throat like chains. Here it was, the animals demanding her attention whether she wanted them or not.
“Okay,” she muttered. “Hold your horses. I’m coming.”
She circled around the four-foot wrought-iron perimeter fence to the front of the park, skirting the parking lot and coming through the front entrance. She closed and locked the gates.
There was no such thing as visitors anymore, but her father had drilled caution into her. Every night since the president’s first catastrophic address, her father had patrolled Haven’s perimeter with his hunting rifle. The sight of the gun had infuriated Vlad every single evening.
The flagstone walking paths took a serpentine route through the oblong-shaped park. In the center of the park sprawled the enormous walk-in enclosure, featuring the lake with the flamingos, various feathered fowl, the pens for the tortoises, and the peacocks, though they were always escaping into the general park.
Near the entrance were the ancient turnstiles, the Grizzly Grill restaurant, souvenir shop and bathrooms, and the six-suite log lodge that her dad had converted into their living quarters.
Whoever built the place thirty years ago hadn’t put much thought into it. The food storage and prep sheds—including the meat house—were only twenty yards behind the lodge. When the wind blew the wrong way, she kept her bedroom window closed.
Raven went into the concrete block building that contained the frozen meat for the carnivores—the tiger, wolves, bobcat, and bears. The walk-in freezer held the two hundred pounds of meat Zachariah picked up every few weeks from a local renderer—mostly calves, sheep, and pigs; occasionally bulls or horses.
Zachariah hadn’t gone since he had gotten sick. The freezer was nearly empty.
Her gaze swept the rest of the room: a steel table for chopping meat, a huge steel sink, a wooden block stuck with gigantic butcher knives. A chest freezer full of rats for the birds-of-prey and Winston. Her father always called them ratsicles.
A memory struck her—her father as she’d so often seen him, straddling a calf carcass, brandishing a gigantic, bloodied knife, entrails and blood puddling around his boots as he grinned broadly, right at home in the gross muck.
She blinked the sudden sting from her eyes and checked the generator; still working. It would last another week, maybe two. She added finding more propane to her internal checklist.
The vegetable storeroom was constructed of faded, peeling wooden siding. On the left-hand side stood two tables of bins full of past-sell-by-date vegetables Zachariah collected from several local markets to feed the herbivores. The sickly-sweet stench of overripe peaches filled her nostrils; the vegetables were beginning to rot.
The dry foods section of the storeroom held the mother lode. Bales of hay and alfalfa were stacked in the far corner. Next to them stood the large, one-hundred-gallon vats that contained the grain.
And along all four walls were shelves and shelves heaped full of edible food: canned goods, mostly expired; huge plastic containers of peanut butter, Kodiak’s favorite food, especially spread on about three dozen pancakes; commercial-sized boxes of cereal the bonobos loved; special high-fiber biscuit mix for the otters and the black bears; cases of nuts and seeds, bags of popcorn, large bottles of honey to fill the bonobos’ and bears’ enrichment balls.
She stared at the food, her eyes blurring. Reality struck her with the force of a brick wall. She sagged against the drywall and sank to the floor, her legs no longer able to bear her weight.
Her dad kept a two-week advance store of food. Vlad ate sixty pounds of meat a day. The wolves ate a full deer or calf carcass every three days. The bonobos consumed their weight in fruits, vegetables, and biscuits.
Even if she fed every scrap to the animals, in less than a month, they would starve anyway—Raven along with them.
But all this food for herself alone…she could continue to hunt deer and snare rabbits; could harvest berries, herbs, and other edible plants. Supplemented with what she could scavenge from the forest, this food would last her for well over a year—if she lived, she reminded herself. If she wasn’t infected.
A swelling wave of vertigo washed through her. She had that feeling again, like the ground was cracking beneath her, splintering into a gaping, bottomless hole about to swallow her up.
Logically, she knew what she had to do. She needed to choose herself, choose her own survival. Like her mother always insisted when she’d fought with Raven’s dad—they were just animals. Thousands of them had probably starved to death in zoos around the country already.
And if Raven was sick, they’d starve without her anyway.
She wouldn’t let them starve. That was cruel, inhumane. Her father had asked her to take care of them, to give them mercy. She had access to the tranquilizer guns and the rifles kept in the maintenance shed for emergencies. She could put them down gently, painlessly.
She thought of Vlad. She thought of Suki and Loki, her favorites of the timber wolves. What were the deaths of a few animals in cages compared to the collapse of the civilized world, compared to the catastrophic billions of dead and dying humans?
Only three days ago, she’d been about to turn her back on them permanently. What was different now?
The memory of freshly turned dirt in the woods flashed through her mind. Only everything.
Confused and agitated, the bonobos hooted and screeched, calling to each other, escalating into a cacophony of chaos. She closed her eyes.
The guns were in the maintenance shed not fifty feet away. She could go get them now, she could—
Something inside her shr
iveled. Her mind recoiled from the thought. She’d just buried her father. She wasn’t ready. Not yet.
It was better to let them go happily, peacefully, on full stomachs.
She would feed them today. Tomorrow, she would do it. What she’d hadn’t summoned the courage to do with her own father. To give mercy.
Tomorrow, she would face every single animal her dad had loved, that she’d grown up with—and end their lives.
9
If Raven had known how the day would end, she would have done several things very differently. But she was still numb with the shock and grief of her father’s death. Her only focus was on the tasks at hand, on getting through this endless day, hour by hour, minute by minute.
She had not coughed. She had no fever. But it was early still. The virus simply hadn’t made itself known yet. An image of her father flashed through her mind—his bloody tears, face rigid, feverish body contorted in pain.
If that future waited for her, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, on the chores she’d completed hundreds of times over the years. She lugged buckets of water from the well just outside the perimeter fence, cleaned each pen, disposed of the manure, and made sure the hay was fresh and not moldy, methodically checking the bottom layers.
It was past noon by the time she loaded up the wagon behind the electric cart for the third time with hay and five-gallon buckets of grain for the herbivores: the deer, the ostriches, Sal the zebra. She’d also managed to fit in a deer carcass for the wolves and cuts of horse meat for the tiger.
She whistled to call Vlad inside his chamber in the tiger house so she could open the gate and give him his food. One long note, two short.
Vlad sauntered to the fence, tail twitching, gazing at her with distinct displeasure at the insult of hunger she’d subjected him to. He turned his rump to her. She jumped back in time to miss the spray of urine.
