Labyrinth of Shadows

by Kyla Stone

  There were the usual miss-yous and love-yous, each one like a stab to Raven’s gut. A few lines toward the end caught her eye. I’m coming to get you, her mom had written. With everything that’s happened, it is too dangerous for you there.

  Her heart lurched in her chest. She fumbled for the envelope and rechecked the date stamped on the front. Almost three weeks ago. Her mom said she was coming. For the first time in three years.

  So where was she?

  I’ve messaged your father so many times, but he connection here has been spotty this last week. I don’t know how long it will last. Hopefully, you have been sheltered from most of it, but things are bad. Everything is falling apart out there. I’m worried this is it. The end.

  The Settlement is a safe place for us. There are good people here, and it is well-fortified. Until I come, wear your mask. Be careful. If for some reason, I’m prevented from reaching you, then come here. Find good people you can trust. Whatever you do, don’t be alone. I love you.

  Raven balled the letter in her fist and crumpled it between her fingers. Her hands trembled, her knuckles whitening. Had her mother really found a safe place? Was she really going to leave it to come for Raven?

  Raven clenched her jaw. Old pain sprouted in her gut, tangling her stomach in knots. What did her mom know? She thought she could ride in on a white horse and save everyone when she hadn’t even bothered to visit in all this time. She was the one who ran off—who was she to decide to care now?

  No thanks. Raven could handle things just fine on her own. She’d been taking care of herself for years, since long before her mother had left. Aiko Nakamura had abandoned her daughter long ago, seeking

  Still, despite her anger and resentment, Raven’s breath quickened as she stared at the letter. If her mom had really tried to come, she hadn’t made it. Had something happened to her? Raven knew the commune where her mother had found refuge was near Elijay in the north Georgia mountains. It was dangerous for a woman to travel alone in the best of times, especially through gang-controlled Atlanta.

  But now?

  There were a hundred things that could have gone wrong, a hundred threats, from the roving gangs of thugs and killers, the hungry, desperate people driven to steal or worse, the millions of coughing, feverish infected spreading the virus.

  Raven tried to tell herself she didn’t care, that it didn’t matter. But of course it did. Her mother was still her mother, no matter how thick and bitter the distance between them.

  A frantic shout splintered the air.

  Raven jerked her head up, stiffening. She wasn’t supposed to be on the tiger house roof—ever—and if her father saw her hiking backpack…but no, it was the head zookeeper, Zachariah Harris. He was stumbling along the path at the top of the hill near the bobcat enclosure.

  Raven hadn’t seen him in days, since he first started coughing. Her father had insisted he quarantine himself, holing up in his loft above the Grizzly Grill, the park’s restaurant.

  She’d tried to bring him food and water, wearing her N95 respiratory mask and plastic gloves, but Zachariah had locked the door and shooed her away. “Your father would kill me,” he’d said with a grunt and a pained laugh that swiftly dissolved into a phlegmy, wracking coughing fit.

  What was Zachariah doing? Why had he left his room? Was it possible he was getting better? If he had the virus, it was unlikely, from the vlogger reports inundating the newsfeeds the last several weeks. The same hope she’d clung to all week flared through her—maybe it wasn’t the infection. Maybe he’d only contracted the flu.

  She took a steeling breath, slipped to the edge of the roof, crouched, and leapt to the ground. It was a long drop, but she softened her legs and curled into a roll before scrambling to her feet, brushing off twigs, pine needles, and mulch.

  She whistled one long note, two short ones—Vlad’s signal for food.

  Behind the tiger house, in an area off-limits to visitors, she could get right up to the eighteen-foot fence. The rest of the enclosure was circled by a deep ditch surrounding a perimeter wall that was six feet high on the tiger’s side, but only four feet high on the visitors’ side, giving the illusion of close, unobscured proximity.

  Vlad usually lounged on a rock shelf beside his shallow bathing pool, a waterfall streaming above him. The rocks were a polymer replica airbrushed to look authentically aged and weathered; the waterfall poured from a hidden PVC pipe.

  Vlad sauntered over and eyed her, ears pricked, waiting impatiently. She pulled a piece of dried venison from her cargo pocket. Normally, tigers only ate raw meat, but Vlad had developed a taste for jerky. She took several steps back and hurled it over the fence. Vlad’s head snapped toward it. He pounced and inhaled the venison in a blink.

  Vlad prowled back to the fence and pressed his enormous body against it, chuffing eagerly for a good petting like some hugely overgrown house cat. Tigers didn’t purr when they were happy or content; they chuffed, which sounded like a cough.

  Carefully, on full alert, she pushed her fingers between the chain-link and scratched his thick fur along his flank, far from his dangerous jaws. He chuffed encouragingly as she felt the solid bulk of him, his muscles taut as cables beneath the lush softness of his fur.

  No matter how tame he acted, she could never let her guard down, not for a fraction of a second. Vlad was a magnificent creature; he was also a voracious, powerful, and efficient predator. Once, she’d seen him take down a hawk in mid-flight a full twelve feet off the ground.

  And this particular tiger had an appetite for his human keepers. At his last home, Vlad’s uber-rich owner would parade him before his aristocratic, elite friends on a gold chain during decadent parties until the tiger attacked two people, killing one and horribly maiming the other in the time it took for a security guard to raise his tranquilizer gun and dart him.

  Maybe that’s what they deserved for forcing an obstinate tiger to socialize. More likely, they’d taunted and abused him to the point of desperation until he finally struck back.

  She withdrew her hand, and the tiger turned his great head, ears flicking, and gave her a lazy stare, as if affronted.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she muttered.

  Another yell drew her attention. Zachariah was closer now, staggering toward her. There was something…off about him, something wrong in the jerky way he moved, in the ashen pallor of his face.

  Instinctively, she took a step back. She pulled the mask hanging around her neck up over her nose and mouth. She cursed herself for leaving her gloves in her room.

  “Zachariah,” she said. “I thought you were sick. I thought—” Her voice broke off, her throat closing like a fist.

  The Zachariah she knew was a spry and cheerful black man in his sixties, his skin the color of rich, damp earth, his face scored with deep wrinkles, his eyes always sparkling with humor. Zachariah had worked at Haven as head zookeeper for fifteen years, as much a fixture as Vlad or Electra, the park’s elderly, arthritic bobcat.

  This Zachariah was something different.

  His bloodshot eyes bulged, the veins bursting until his entire eyeball glistened crimson. Blood smeared below both of his eyes and around his gaping mouth. His skin was gray, his face both simultaneously gaunt and bloated and gaunt.

  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. Red-specked foam glistened at the corners of his mouth. 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 in her eyelashes.

  His hands on her bare arms were burning. His whole body radiated a terrible heat. She tried to jerk away, b
ut 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 happened. She’d watched the newsfeeds reporting the overrun hospitals, the millions of sick, then billions, all dying and dead.

  Zachariah coughed again, splattering phlegm into 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.”

  No Safe Haven Chapter Two

  “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 a bottle of disinfectant spray, 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.

  She sprayed her face and hands with the disinfectant spray and scrubbed her skin until it felt raw. It wouldn’t do anything, not if the virus was already inside her, but she did it anyway. She had to do something. She carefully peeled off the gloves and dropped them beside the mask.

  She offered her father the disinfectant spray, but he just shook his head. “Keep it.”

  She stuffed it into her pocket, her fingers trembling, her skin 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 medicin
e.”

  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.