Labyrinth of Shadows

by Kyla Stone

  “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 blood, 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.

  No Safe Haven Chapter Three

  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.

  “Stay back,” her father said.

  She didn’t point out that she’d already had contaminated bodily fluids sprayed at her face from less than a foot away. If the mask hadn’t protected her, there was no point in taking precautions now. That horse had already left the barn.

  Her fath
er coughed and cleared his throat.

  She knelt on the paved pathway beside the body. She wished he still looked like the Zachariah she’d known and loved, the one who was always grinning, his dark skin splitting into a hundred groves and wrinkles, who loved to ruffle her hair, who’d nicknamed her ‘Little Bird’ with great affection. “Is he—is he dead?”

  Her father holstered the tranq gun. “If he isn’t yet, he will be soon.”

  Her gaze snagged on the small gray tube with the orange top sticking out of Zachariah’s concave chest. She reared back, her stomach wrenching. “What did you do?”

  “He’s no longer suffering,” her father said, his voice flat, expressionless.

  She jerked out the dart and stared at the syringe, the needle. She stumbled to her feet, reeling. “You gave him a dose intended for a tiger. You stopped his heart. You…you killed him.”

  “He was dying anyway.”

  It was true. She knew it was true. Still, the thought of pointing a gun, even a tranq gun, at a friend and then pulling the trigger set bile roiling in her stomach. She took a steadying breath, then another. “I didn’t say goodbye.”

  “He wasn’t himself anymore,” her father said brusquely. “He could barely speak.”

  Still, revulsion filled her. It seemed so horrible, too horrible. She felt sick, her whole body going hot, then cold, then hot again. She thought of the virus, possibly inside her. The same virus that had done this to Zachariah.

  “I should have kicked him out the moment he coughed.”

  She looked sharply at her father. “And abandon him when he most needed us? Where would he go? Who would feed him or bring him water? Who would take care of him?”

  His face was strained, eyes glittering with anger. “He promised me he’d stay in the loft. He swore to me.”

  “He was sick! Crazed with pain.”

  “It was a mistake to allow him to stay.”

  “He is—was—family.”

  “No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t family, and he shouldn’t have been here. I should’ve kicked him out like I wanted to.” His gaze slanted at Raven, harsh and angry.

  She was the one who’d begged to allow Zachariah to stay, who’d suggested the quarantine in the loft. It was her fault. Her father blamed her for this.

  She shook her head, incredulous. Did her father even have a heart? Did he really even care about anyone else? He hadn’t wept a single tear when her mother left. And he would’ve abandoned Zachariah—whom he’d known for fifteen years—without a backward glance or second thought.

  Anger boiled up, but she shoved it down. It was useless. Her father didn’t care about her outrage. “What now?” she asked. “We have to bury him. We have to…do something.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “We have to bury him,” she repeated.

  Her father glanced down at the body, eyes narrowing. “I said I’ll take care of it.”

  “That’s not the same thing.” Her father was unsentimental to the extreme. Who knew what his idea of ‘taking care of it’ meant. “He needs to be buried. We have to show our respects.”

  “Fine.” Her father expelled a sharp breath. “I will bury him.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “No, you won’t.” His voice was steel.

  “He was my friend, too—”

  “I said no!” He coughed again, a deep, horrible hacking that shook his shoulders. He pulled down his mask to wipe his mouth with the back of his arm.

  Raven stared at the mask, aghast. It wasn’t white like it was supposed to be. Instead, it held a pinkish hue. Her gaze dropped to his right arm. His faded, long-sleeved plaid shirt was speckled with red droplets.

  Understanding struck her, sharp and swift as an axe blade. She saw suddenly what she hadn’t noticed with the world in chaos, Zachariah’s illness, the never-ending tasks of caring for the animals, dread over her impending birthday, and her own plans for escape—which suddenly seemed ridiculous, empty, and selfish.

  The sweat leaking down her father’s face, beading on his forehead, his lower lip, staining the underarms of his khaki shirt. Sweat on a cool day. The bruised circles beneath his eyes, which she’d assumed were from lack of sleep. The coughing—she’d believed it was simply his asthma.

  And the smell. Which she’d barely noticed until now, but Vlad had. Vlad, who was still frantically pacing behind the fence at the bottom of the hill, his lips pulled back from his two-inch fangs as he snarled and shook his head, unable to rid himself of the stench of something sharp and pungent, a sour, noxious scent that turned her stomach and filled her with dread.

  The stink of sickness.

  Her father was infected.

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