This Rotten World | Book 2 | Let It Burn

by Morris, Jacy

  "What the hell are you doing?" she said to no one. Then, as the man threw his other leg over the railing, she stopped watching and she ran. She bolted through the security room's door, down the stairs of the back offices, and through a set of double doors into the gift shop, past rows of stuffed animals and piles of forgettable keychains thrown haphazardly in wicker bins. The doors of the gift shop slid open, and her feet pounded the paved path that led through the zoo. At the first intersection, she took a right and headed toward the pacific shores exhibit. Her breathing was ragged as she rounded the corner to the seal enclosure. Kaya and the other seals were sitting on top of the manmade rocks and there was no sight of the man that had entered the enclosure. However, the harsh barking of the seals let Lila know that the man was still around. She climbed up on the railing, though she would have yelled at anyone else for doing the same, and she scanned around the enclosure, looking in the shadowy parts for signs of the man. There was nothing, but the seals were more insistent now.

  Lila backed off the railing and circled around into a small, dark cavern. The gravel crunched under her shoes, and the artificial cave was lit by the light that poured in from a small porthole that was set into the wall of the cavern so that people could see the seals underwater. It was the only way to see them as far as Lila was concerned. As Lila stepped up to the porthole, her hand went to her mouth. The man was there, underneath the water, his hair floating above his head as if it were trying to get away from him.

  His eyes were trained upwards at the rock formation where the seals were perched, their barks echoing through the park. His face was expressionless and his arms were outstretched before him. He struggled to move through the water, walking along the bottom of the pool. As Lila watched, she waited for the man to bend his knees and propel himself to the surface. She banged the side of her fist on the disorienting, thick glass of the porthole trying to get the man's attention.

  "Hey! Hey!" she yelled, the side of her fist smacking dully of the porthole glass. "Get out of there!"

  There was no response from the man. She wasn't even sure if the man was seeing her due to his hair floating around his head. He simply trudged forward, up the natural incline that led toward the seals.

  He has to come up for air, she thought. How long has it been? But he didn't come up for air, he struggled up the incline, bending at the waist and crawling like an animal up the smooth interior of the enclosure.

  Lila turned and ran through the darkness, her heels slipping in the loose pea gravel. She skidded to a stop in front of the barely concealed door to the enclosure. She fumbled at her waist for a key ring. The base of the keys were color-coded with rubber to help her easily find the correct key, aquamarine for the Pacific Shores exhibits which featured seals, otters, polar bears, and even a few penguins and other less impressive aquatic birds. She jammed the key into the door, spun it around, and then pulled the door open.

  Inside, the enclosure, the floor was sparse gray concrete. It led up to the rock-like formations, and Lila saw the seals leap into the water, swimming to the opposite side of the enclosure. They sat in the sunlight, the sun sparkling off of their glistening hides, but the man appeared again, pulling himself out of the water, his hair hanging over his face.

  "Hey!" Lila yelled. "Get out of here!"

  The man turned towards her, as a blind man would. She could only see bits of his eyes through his long, wet hair. He shuffled towards her. In the back, she heard the seals barking as if they were warning her to escape. Something felt decidedly off, and she backpedaled a bit. The man continued forward.

  "Listen. I'm going to call the cops if you don't get out of here." It was a bluff at best. She had no phone. She had a radio that she would have used to contact whoever was in the security room, and they would either call the police or handle it on their own. But there was no one in the security room. There was no one at the zoo, just her and this man, this silent, plodding man.

  Water dripped from his clothing and his hair, spattering on the concrete. She backed through the doorway, and he came at her. She began to feel like a carrot. Was he mentally ill? Was he on drugs? None of that really mattered to her at the moment. She just wanted him out of the enclosure. She would figure out the rest of it once he was out and the seals were safe.

  They were on the gravel, backing through the fake cavern, and she asked the man, "Are you ok?" There was still no response. He just gurgled, and water spilled from the man's mouth. He came closer to her, and she was about to dodge out of the man's way when she bumped into one of the zoo's many garbage cans.

  She fell to the ground, and then the man was upon her. She pushed with all her strength, but she couldn't escape from underneath of the man. His weight was too great. She pushed with her legs, and they slid across the gravel. His wet hair hung down, brushing her cheeks with cold wet tendrils, and then she saw his eyes, lifeless dead things, not a spark of life in them.

  Around her, she could hear the bleating of the seals, the roar of the polar bears, and the excited chattering of the penguins. They could sense that something was wrong, and Lila cursed herself for not noticing it before. Something had been wrong for days, but she had been too stupid to notice. Content with her own simple world, she had failed to pay attention to the warning signs, and now she was going to pay the price for it. Something was wrong, and she didn't even know what it was. Something was wrong, and it was lying right on top of her.

  As she shoved the man backwards, she thought about the zoo. She thought about what would happen if she were to fall here, to this man. The animals, the glorious animals, would be trapped in their enclosures. Most of them would starve to death. Some of them would eat each other, but most would just starve without the human caretakers there to feed them, The thought of her lovely cheetah's lying dead in their enclosure did something to her. Strength filled her muscles, and she pushed the man off of her.

  He rolled over on his side, pawing at her and sending himself off-balance as he tried to rise at the same time. Lila took her steel-toed boot, as demanded by OSHA, and kicked the man in the mouth. She felt nothing, but the results were astounding. The man's mouth went inward, and for a second, it looked like he was trying to suck on her boot. When she pulled her boot free, blood fell to the ground and in that blood she could see bits of teeth. They fell like bits of eggshells onto the ground, and Lila danced backwards, wondering how she had let it come to this. She had never hurt another human being in her life, and guilt overrode her own self-preservation.

  "Are you ok?" she asked the man. But he made no answer, he just stood up, his arms pawing at the air between them. He gurgled through his own blood, and advanced upon her. She was going to have to take him down. Whatever was going on was big. Why else had the zoo been largely empty for the last few days? Why else had her co-workers failed to show up to work? Because something was seriously wrong.

  She wouldn't let the animals be hurt. She looked around for anything that she could use as a weapon, but there was nothing. The zoo was supposed to be a safe place, so most implements that were deemed dangerous to animals or humans had been worked out of the design. All she had were her hands. She looked at the man again, his sickening face and dead eyes followed her as she danced from side to side. She circled behind the man and shoved him to the ground, hoping that whatever was wrong with the man was not contagious.

  He fell to the ground easily, and she went to work, stomping on the poor man. When she was done, the man lay on the ground, his ankle still twitching. His skull had split at some point, and blood and gore stained the gravel where he now lay. She didn't know how long she had been kicking the man, but when she was done, she sank to her knees, as her legs felt like they were built from stuffing jammed inside sun-bronzed skin.

  She fell to the ground and howled at the sky. All around her, she could hear the sounds of the animals in the zoo. Lila looked at the remains of the man on the ground, at the twitching foot, and tears came to her eyes. Sobs rang out through the zoo,
but there was no one there to hear her. She sat that way for some time, her mind running at a thousand-miles-per-hour, filling with questions that she had no answer to. Where was everyone? What was going on? Who was this man? How much shit was she in?

  The only answers were the cries of the animals. Eventually, she wiped the tears out of her eyes and looked at her blood-spattered clothing. She had just killed someone. Someone had died because of her. The clouds of her emotions began to dissipate, leaving one solitary feeling... fear. The fear wasn't for her; it was for the animals. Something was going on. She was the only one here capable of taking care of the animals and making sure they were fed. If the police were to arrest her for her murder, the animals would surely die.

  Lila rose to her feet, fighting her wobbly legs. She grabbed the cold, wet leg of the dead man and dragged him along the walkway that ran between exhibits. Blood spilled out of the man as they went, pouring forth from the grievous head wound she had inflicted. When she reached the edge of the polar bear enclosure, she stopped, and looked up at the sun as it rose high over the zoo, the heat coming with it. In the distance, from the direction of the city, she could see plumes of smoke climbing into the sky.

  She bent down and grasped the man under his arms, straining to pull him to his feet. She managed to get his top half leaning over the railing. Gasping for breath, she squatted down and grasped the man's jeaned legs, She lifted them up, and the weight of the man's torso tipped his body past the point of no return, and he fell into the polar bear enclosure landing with a great splash in the water.

  The polar bears watched from the cooled confines of their enclosure. Unsure about what had just happened. Lila stood, leaning against the railing, her chest heaving. The polar bears, seeing a new play thing, loped out of the darkness of the enclosure and stepped out onto the man-made rocks, the sun beating down on their white fur. They slipped into the water gracefully, swimming through the normally blue waters, now marred by a growing bloom of crimson. They batted at the man with their powerful paws, and Lila waited until they took a bite of the man before she headed back to the front of the zoo.

  Should anyone ask, she would say that the man had fallen into the enclosure on his own. She would need a rake and some replacement gravel to clean up all of the blood the man had spilled in the walkway. She would also need to change her clothes, and take a shower. By the time she returned back to clean up her mess, she hoped the bears would have made the corpse unrecognizable.

  The first thing she needed to do was remove the tape of her transgression. She looked up at the camera hidden in plain sight on a skinny, unobtrusive pole tucked back in some trees. It would have seen everything.

  Before she knew it, she was jogging through the zoo, finding her way back to the paved walkways that led her to the entrance of the zoo and the gift shop that housed the zoo's security room and offices. She stopped off in the locker room and peeled her clothes off in the shower, not wanting them to smear blood anywhere else. She turned the shower on as hot as it would go, and the stream of water sloughed all of the spots of blood off of her naked body. The clothes at her feet squished with every step and she scrubbed herself until her skin was red and raw. She washed her hair five times. When she was done, she turned the water off and stood in the shower shivering despite the accumulated steam and the remnants of the shower's heat.

  Without toweling off, she stepped into the locker room, found her own locker, opened it up, and fished out a set of clean clothes. When she was dressed, she sat on the wooden bench that ran between the two rows of lockers. What the fuck am I doing? Just call the police.

  With the shower having cleared her mind, she took a moment to assess her situation. Something was clearly wrong out in the real world. No one had contacted her about anything, which meant it was either no big deal or things had progressed so fast that they hadn't had time to concern themselves with Lila, the anti-social freak who lived at the zoo.

  If things were bad, no one would likely miss the crazy man that had attacked her. If things weren't that bad... she could be on the hook for murder. Now was the point of no return. It wasn't too late to call the cops. She could say that her and the man had fought, that the man had lost his balance and tumbled into the polar bear enclosure. Before she could do anything, the polar bears had savaged the man. But then they'd want to see the security tape. Then she would go to jail. Then there would be no one to watch the animals. In the end, it was the animals that made up her mind for her.

  She slapped her hands on her knees and stood up, her shirt clinging to her wet body. She grabbed a plastic bag from the janitor's closet and threw her soggy clothing into it. She carried the bag with her, still trying to think of ways to dispose of them. She climbed a flight of stairs and stepped into the security room, the plastic bag bundled underneath her arm.

  The swivel chair creaked as she plopped down into it. She eyed the wall of monitors as they cycled through different views of the park. Where the hell were they recorded. She got down on her hands and knees and looked at the black boxes underneath. They hummed with electricity, and lights blinked on the faces. She had no idea what she was doing, so she began pressing the buttons, in the hopes that something would pop out somewhere, a VHS tape, a DVD, anything. But the faces of the equipment were smooth but for a button here and there. She didn't see a spot where anything would pop out.

  Lila sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling as if an answer were somehow scrawled there. There was nothing but old acoustical tiles. She would have to destroy the whole thing. She didn't want to lose the cameras, but if that's what she had to do to cover her tracks, well then that's what she had to do. She sighed and looked around the room for anything that she could use to break the recording equipment. There was nothing, but she did spot something interesting in the garbage can to the right of the desk that all of the monitors were piled on. There was a wire-mesh wastebasket sitting on the carpeted floor, and in the wastebasket there was a newspaper. She picked it up. It was only a few days old, but the headlines on the paper gave her some idea of just what was going on.

  The headline read, "Mysterious Disease Strikes Portland and Cities Across the World." She read the article, unable to believe what she was actually reading. Reports of cannibalism and people surviving grievous injuries to attack others... it all seemed like science fiction to her. But hadn't she almost been the victim of one such attack earlier in the zoo? If this were true, if the world was falling victim to whatever this disease was, then she might be the only thing keeping the animals in this zoo alive.

  Somewhere on the surface of her brain, she registered the fact that the world and society could be fading away while she sat in the zoo. But that was a secondary concern. Humans were such ugly creatures, and there were already so many of them. In here, she had creatures who were quite literally going extinct because of humanity. She thought of the Amur tigers in their enclosure, of which there were now less than 400 in the wild. If man were to die, that was sad on some level. But if those tigers should die, that would be a loss that she couldn't live with. There were billions of humans... far too many for the planet to support. Maybe now the animals would have a chance.

  At that moment, Lila broke free of society. She broke free of the rules that bound her. This was her zoo now. She would protect it and shelter the animals there for as long as she could. Any human that came onto her property would be considered an enemy. That would include any sort of law enforcement. If they planned on arresting her, they would be jeopardizing the lives of every animal in the park... and that couldn't happen.

  Chapter 15: Don't Feed the Bears

  It was indeed a lion. The survivors stood still, their heavy breathing filling the confines of the tunnel along with the battering of the dead inside another train in front of them. The lion watched them warily, its ears twitching from the noise that filled the passage. In the light from their flashlights, it yawned and then turned around. Its massive paws padded slowly along the floor, and they s
tood still, not daring to move, not daring to make a sound.

  With a quick bunching of its back legs, the lion leaped from the floor of the tunnel and onto the train's platform. A faint hint of daylight filtered in from somewhere, and they watched as the lion disappeared.

  "Holy fuck," Katie said, her breath exploding from her. "What the fuck was that?"

  "That was a lion," Joan said. "It must have escaped from the zoo."

  Clara put her hand to her head and closed her eyes. "Great. That's just what we need. Wild animals to fend off as well."

  Mort's voice cut through the darkness, "Least it didn't eat nobody. That's something."

  "Everybody be ready," Lou said. "We got more in that train. We get past that, and then we can walk right into Beaverton."

  "Sounds good to me," Katie said.

  They inched forward, shining their light in the tunnel. Body parts lay strewn all about on the platform to their right. To their left, the train rocked with the motion of the dead inside... another train, another group of dead trapped forever. Why didn't they just open the emergency door? Katie wondered.

  Before she could figure it out, she heard something she didn't like underneath the pounding of the dead. It was a faint sound, as of cracking glass. She shined her flashlight in the windows of the train, and then she saw it... cracks spiderwebbing across the surface of one of the windows.