Tigers existed to hunt, and feed, and make more tigers. They existed for the sake of existence, without needing to care about whether tomorrow was going to come. She envied them sometimes. No one ever told a tiger that it didn’t know how to be what it was. No one ever said “you must be mistaken,” or implied that there was something wrong with a tiger because it didn’t want to spend its time with confusing, contradictory humans.
One of the tigers yawned, showing her a vast array of fine, sharp teeth. Cassandra smiled.
“No, I’m not going to feed you early just because you’re locked in the feeding cage,” she said. “We’ll have you out in the enclosure in no time, and you know the guests get cranky when you spend the whole day asleep and digesting. Be good, and this will all be over soon.”
As if to put an immediate lie to her words, someone outside screamed.
Cassandra was running before she realized it. A large metal hook on a pole hung on the wall next to the door, intended to be used to remove snakes from the visitor paths and animal enclosures. She grabbed it without thinking. Something about that scream spoke to the need for weapons, the vital necessity of self-defense. Whatever was happening out there, she didn’t want to race into it unarmed.
The smell of decay hit her as soon as she was outside the tiger run. It was thinner than it had been on the edge of the moat. It was stronger at the same time, like it was coming from more than one source. The person screamed again. Cassandra kept running.
The tiger exhibits had their own “island” in the zoo’s design, dividing the public-facing portion of a large oval structure between themselves. Cassandra came around the curve of the wall and froze, grasp tightening on the snake hook as her eyes went wide, trying to take in every aspect of the scene.
The man from the moat was no longer in the moat. The security crew dispatched to help him had obviously done so, using their own, larger versions of Cassandra’s snake hook. Those big hooks were on the ground, discarded. The security team had bigger things to worry about, like the man who was even now sinking his teeth into the throat of one of their own.
She had been screaming when he first started biting her. She wasn’t screaming anymore. Instead, she was dangling limply in his arms while the other security people struggled to pull him away. For a dead man—and he was a dead man, he must have been a dead man; nothing living could smell so bad, or have skin so sallow and tattered, like he had slid down the side of the moat without so much as lifting his hands to defend himself—he had a remarkably strong grip. It took three security men to finally pull him off her.
He didn’t go without a prize. The front of her throat came away with him, clasped firmly between his teeth. As Cassandra watched in horror, the security woman hit the ground, and the man chewed at his prize, still staring mindlessly ahead of himself.
This was not predation. Her tigers were predators, would eat a raccoon or a foolish zoo peacock as soon as they would look at it, but they were aware of what they were doing. There was a beautiful intelligence in their eyes, even when their muzzles were wet with blood and their shoulders were hunched in preemptive defense of their prey. Tigers knew. They might not understand the morality of their kills, but they knew.
This man … he didn’t know. His eyes were blank, filmed over with a scrimshaw veil of decay. His jaws seemed to work automatically, inhaling the scrap of flesh he had ripped from the security woman.
The screaming hadn’t stopped. It was just more dismay and anger now, as the security guards who weren’t restraining the dead man tried to help their fallen coworker.
Then the man whipped around, faster than should have been possible, moving like he didn’t care whether he dislocated his shoulders or broke his arms, and buried his teeth in the neck of the guard who was restraining him.
Then the woman without a throat opened her eyes and lunged for the person closest to her, biting down on their wrist. The screaming resumed, taking on a whole new edge of agony and horror. Cassandra’s eyes got wider still. This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong, and she couldn’t stay here any longer, she couldn’t, this was wrong and unnatural and she needed to go, she needed to—
When she turned, Michael was standing right behind her.
He couldn’t have been there for long; she had been working with predators for too long to be the kind of person who could be snuck up on. The same smell of putrefaction and decay that she had gotten from the man in the moat was coming off of him. Faint, as yet, but there; undeniably there. His eyes were filmed over, unseeing, unblinking.
“Please don’t,” she whispered.
He struck.
* * *
Everything was a blur after that. Cassandra didn’t know how she’d been able to escape; only that she had, because it was like she had blinked and been standing in front of the tiger habitat first aid station, with the door firmly closed behind her and the tigers snarling down the hall, still confined in their feeding pens, growing slowly angrier and angrier. Blood had been sheeting down her arm from the deep bite in her shoulder, painting everything in red. The marks of human teeth were unmistakable.
Even if they hadn’t been, the fact that Michael had left one of his crowns behind would have made it impossible to pretend that she had been bitten by anything other than a human being. Gritting her own teeth, she used the tweezers to extract the small piece of white porcelain from her flesh. It was jagged where it had snapped off, and had probably done almost as much damage to Michael as he had to her. But he hadn’t seemed to notice. He hadn’t seemed to care.
He had been gone. Impossible as it was to contemplate, sometime between asking her to take care of his charges and their encounter outside the tiger enclosures, he had died, and kept on walking.
“No,” said Cassandra. She grabbed for the hydrogen peroxide bottle and emptied it over the wound. It foamed and bubbled and stung like anything, like it was supposed to, but the feeling of rotten wrongness remained, worming its way down toward the bone. “No, no, no. No.”
No amount of denial would heal the wound in her arm, or chase the smell of decay from her arm. Time seemed to jump again, taking her along with it: this time, when the haze cleared, she was applying butterfly clips to the gauze encircling her arm, sealing the bite marks out of sight. They continued to throb. Out of sight was not out of mind.
“No,” said Cassandra, somewhat more firmly. She shook her head, trying to prevent another jump. What was this?
Think about it logically. Think about it like a biologist. Yes: that was the ticket. Think about it like she was back in class, like the worst that could come from getting the answer wrong was a bad grade.
Michael’s roommate had been acting strange this morning. Michael had come to work with a bite from that roommate fresh on his arm. Michael had been behaving normally. Now Michael was acting like the man from the moat, and he had bitten her. Michael smelled of decay.
The man in the moat had smelled of decay when she had found him; her first impression had been that he was dead, yet somehow still standing. He was wearing the uniform of the night groundskeepers. She had seen wounds on him, but they had all been consistent with sliding down the side of the rocky wall between the fence line and the ground. What if nothing had bitten him? What if he’d just … fallen? It was always a risk, especially when the staff had to lean over the low retaining wall to retrieve something from the moat’s edge. There had been falls before.
The woman, the security guard … the man from the moat had bitten her. He had torn her throat out with his teeth, and she had died. Cassandra had no doubt at all that the woman had died. She’d seen it. But after dying, she had started moving again, attacking another member of her team. So what if …
What if the man in the moat had died, only to come back again as something that wasn’t quite human anymore? Something dead and terrible, that looked like a human being but smelled like the grave, and only wanted to … what? Feed? Bite?
Pass the … curse, infection,
whatever it was along?
Cassandra turned to look at the bandage on her own arm. Michael hadn’t died. Not like the woman. Michael had been fine. Human mouths were filthy things, but a bite wouldn’t be enough to kill a healthy man, not under ordinary circumstances. She could feel the hot pulsing buried deep in her flesh, telling her that something was very, very wrong. Whatever had been in him, it was in her now, too. Hurting her. Maybe killing her.
“Okay,” she said, as much to hear her own voice as for any other reason. “I need to get out of here.” Michael’s mistake had been coming to work instead of going to the doctor. Doctors could flush the wound, could make things better. Could fix it.
She had long since accepted the fact that one mistake at her job could put her in the ground. But she wasn’t going to die like this.
Feeling better now that she had a plan, Cassandra started for the door. She needed to get to the locker room, to retrieve her purse and her car keys. She would tell Dan that it didn’t matter whether he closed the zoo today, because she wouldn’t be here either way. She would be at the doctor’s office, getting the flesh on her arm debrided and patched up, until the hot pulsing from within stopped. Until she wasn’t scared anymore.
The tigers paced and muttered in their deep feline voices as she passed them, expressing their displeasure with the whole situation. Cassandra smiled wanly.
“I need to be sure the dead man isn’t in front of your enclosure anymore before I let you out,” she said. “If he fell back in, that would only upset you. I’ll make sure someone comes to open the gates, I promise.”
The tigers didn’t speak English, but she had been their handler for years. Most stopped grumbling and just looked at her, staring with their wide amber eyes. They trusted her, as much as one apex predator could trust another.
“I promise,” Cassandra said again, and opened the door to the outside.
The smell of decay was like an assault. Behind her, the tigers roared and snarled, protesting this invasion. She couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t have to mean anything: not when she could smell them.
The zoo grounds had never seemed so claustrophobic before, so crowded with thick bushes and copses of trees. How many dead people could be lurking in there?
This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. She would get to the locker room, get her purse, and drive herself to the hospital. Maybe stop long enough to make a few phone calls, to make sure that whatever was going on at the zoo was only going on at the zoo. Michael’s roommate was confined to their apartment, right? And Michael could have been exposed here, at work, picking up some … some novel parasite or tropical disease from one of the animals. Spillover diseases didn’t always look the same in people as they did in their original hosts. This could be, could be a flu, or a respiratory illness, or something, that behaved in a new, terrifying way when it got into a human being. It could be—
Cassandra crested the hill and froze, getting her first look at the zoo’s entry plaza.
They had opened the gates after all. Sometime between her leaving Dan’s office and coming to in the back hall of the big cat building, someone had turned on the carousel and opened the gates, letting the public—letting the dead—come to the zoo one last time. Bodies thronged around the admin buildings, moving with that same odd, graceless hitch that she had seen in Michael, before he had attacked her. Whatever this was, it was spreading with horrific speed. Based on what she’d seen in front of the tiger enclosure, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that it was spreading to everyone who was bitten.
Including her. She had been bitten. It was spreading—it had spread—to her.
Maybe that would protect her. If this was a disease, they might not attack someone who had already been infected. There was no sense in taking chances: if she got killed, who would take care of the tigers? They were trapped, penned in their little cages, without even the freedom of their enclosures to enjoy. She needed to make it back to them, now more than ever. But she also needed to see. She had to.
Carefully, Cassandra crept closer, sticking to the edges of the underbrush, where she might be ambushed, but she was less likely to be seen. When she came to one of the staff gates in the fence, she opened it and slipped through, relieved to see that the path was clear. These pathways were mostly used to transport things—food, equipment, sick animals—during the day; until the crowds got thick around noon, even the most privacy-loving zookeepers would tend to stick to the public side of the zoo. Maybe she could get to the gates without further incident.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter.
The throbbing from her arm was getting worse and worse, reminding her with every step that this was how it had started for Michael. Whatever this was, it spread through the bites. If she didn’t get medical help soon, she was going to become like them: dead, but still moving, still standing. Still biting. She was going to become a dangerous predator, something both more than animal and less than human.
The path ended at a slatted gate looking out over the zoo’s front plaza. The merry-go-round was running, the painted horses dancing up and down in their eternal slow ballet. Cassandra stopped a few feet back, looking silently at the crowd that pressed around the classic amusement. They swayed and shambled, eyes glazed over and focusing on nothing. The smell that rose from their bodies was thick and undeniable, the smell of death, the smell of things decaying where they stood.
There had been people riding the merry-go-round when … whatever had happened here had happened. Some of them were still tangled in their safety belts, dangling from their painted horses, unable to free themselves as they pawed mindlessly at the air. Cassandra’s stomach churned, bile rising in the back of her throat.
Soon that will be me, she thought. Soon I will be one of them.
What would happen to her tigers then? What would happen to Michael’s otters, or Betsy’s zebras, or any of the other animals in the zoo? Some of them were already doomed, unable to survive in this ecosystem, but others …
She could see the parking lot from her current position. There were dead, shambling people moving there, too. As she watched, a group of them caught up with a screaming man and drove him to the ground, where he vanished beneath a hail of bodies. This wasn’t contained to the zoo. This could never have been contained.
Cassandra turned her back on the scene in the front plaza. She had work to do.
* * *
Any disease that hit this hard and spread this exponentially was going to overwhelm the city in a matter of hours: that was just simple math. One was bad; two was worse; four was a disaster. The numbers kept climbing from there, until she reached the point where the dead outnumbered the living, and there was nothing left to do but die.
If she hadn’t been bitten, she might have tried to find another way. The big cat house, especially, had hundreds of pounds of raw meat stored in the freezers, just in case, and doors that were designed to stand up to a raging male lion. She could have locked herself inside with her beloved cats. She could have tried to wait it out.
But her arm burned, throbbing with every heartbeat, and she was starting to feel … bad. Feverish. Like she wanted nothing more than to lie down for a nap, to close her eyes and let her body finish the transition it was clearly aching to undergo. She needed to act quickly, before she was no longer equipped to act at all.
She began with the herbivores. She opened doors and propped gates, leaving the avenues of escape open for anything that wanted to take them. By the time she made her way to the aviary, there were zebras cropping at the lawn, ears flicking wildly back and forth as they scanned for danger. A kangaroo went bounding away down a side path, all but flying in its haste to get away. If there were dead people lurking in the bushes, they weren’t fast enough to catch it.
The birds knew something was wrong. As she opened their cages, they flew away, wings clawing at the air, and were gone. Some of them would make it. Some of them had to make it.
&n
bsp; Slowly, almost shambling now, she made her way back to the big cat house. The smell of decay was less noticeable now, maybe because she was adding to it. Maybe because her nose was dying with the rest of her.
There were so many doors she hadn’t opened. There were so many cages she hadn’t unlocked. But there wasn’t time, and she didn’t want to endanger her animals. Not in the end. Not when the burning in her arm had become nothing more than a dull and distant throb, like the nerves were giving up.
The tigers stopped their pacing when she came into view, staring at her silently. Cassandra pulled out her keys.
“Try … not to eat me, okay?” she rasped, and started down the line of cages. One by one, she unlocked them, leaving them standing open. When she finished with the tigers, she began releasing the lions, the cheetahs, until she was at the end of the hallway with a dozen massive predators between her and freedom. They looked at her. She looked at them.
One by one, they turned and walked away, heading for the open door; heading for freedom. Cassandra followed them until she reached the main door to the tiger enclosure. Her fingers didn’t want to cooperate, didn’t want to work the key or let her turn the lock. She fought through the numbness, until the bolt clicked open and she stepped through, into the open air on the other side.
The door, unbraced, swung shut and locked itself behind her. Cassandra didn’t care.
Stumbling, she walked across the uneven ground to the rock where her big male liked to sun himself during the hottest hours of the day. She sat down. She closed her eyes. In the distance, the merry-go-round played on, a soft counterpart to the slowing tempo of her heart.
Cassandra stayed where she was, and waited for the music to stop.
PAGES FROM A NOTEBOOK FOUND INSIDE A HOUSE IN THE WOODS
by Brian Keene
In hindsight, it was probably a dumb idea, but it didn’t seem like it when John was explaining it to us. Robbing a bank was a fool’s errand, he said, what with all the security technology they have now. Sticking up a supermarket or store was also stupid—too hard to keep the crowd controlled, too many people shopping with plastic rather than cash, and too many chances of some well-meaning civilian wanting to play hero. John said instead, we should pull a heist at the comic book convention—not that big event in San Diego, but the small, regional con right here in rural central Pennsylvania.
Nights of the Living Dead Page 24
