Chapter 2
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 stared toward him, but not quite at him, with eyes red as blood. “You have to help! It’s inside me! I can’t get it out! I can’t!”
“Go back to your room right now. Lock yourself inside. I’ll take care of you, Zachariah, I swear it. But you need to go—now.”
Zachariah swayed. Blood-speckled foam glistened at the corners of his mouth. A fetid stench emanated from his pores, a smell with which she was well-acquainted from living among carnivores—the rancid odor of rot.
Raven tensed, unsure what her dad was prepared to do if Zachariah defied him, if he came at them again. The old man was delirious, too sick to be coherent, to recognize or control his aggression.
Vlad paced and snarled at the fence line, his black lips pulled back from his gleaming fangs. He reared onto his hind legs and lunged repeatedly against the fence. He growled low and fierce.
Vlad despised guns. The sight of one regularly worked him into a frenzy. This was something else. The tiger wasn’t focused on her father or the tranquilizer gun; his yellow gaze was fixed on Zachariah.
His ears flattened, tail lashing in alarm. His behavior was clearly distressed, as if he sensed danger in Zachariah’s sickly odor and odd behavior. She felt as unsettled by Zachariah as the tiger did.
She stared at her old friend in growing horror. He was barely recognizable as Zachariah, let alone a human. His eyes, reddened and rimmed in blood, filled with an all-too-human emotion—terror.
“Please,” she whispered. Her gut churned with dread, with that palpable sense of wrongness. “You’re hurting yourself. Please go home so you can rest.”
“Home…” Zachariah shook his head violently, as if he were shaking off fleas or gnats. He took an unsteady step backward, then another.
Raven’s father tracked him with the tranquilizer gun. “That’s it. Keep moving. Nice and slow, now.”
The zookeeper coughed again, a harsh, retching sound. “I have to go… I have to… get away… before… before…”
“Before what, Zachariah?” Raven asked.
He never finished his thought. His jittery, disjointed gaze roamed back and forth, his eyeballs rolling in a strange, frenetic pattern. With a sudden intensity of focus, his terrified, bloodshot eyes fixed upon Raven.
He blinked rapidly. For an instant, he was lucid. He saw her.
“I’m sorry.” He spoke in a choked, jagged voice. Something wet and thick gurgled in his throat. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to hurt anyone… I’m so sorry…”
“Zachariah—”
“Forgive me. Please, forgive me…”
Raven stood on the path, her entire body trembling.
She could feel every fleck of spittle stuck to her cheeks, her neck.
Panic bit at the back of her throat, the same panic she saw reflected in his tortured gaze.
Whatever he’d done to her, he hadn’t meant to do it. She understood that. “I forgive you.”
The old man turned and lurched away. He staggered up the path toward the foxes, the zebra, and the bobcat, in the opposite direction of the park entrance, where the lodge, the restaurant, and the loft he called home were located.
Neither Raven nor her father stopped him.
Relief flooded through her. He was gone. For the moment at least, the threat had passed. Except it hadn’t. Heart 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 stricken voice. “Did it get in your eyes or mouth?”
Her pulse roared in her ears. “I… I don’t know.”
Her skin crawled. Every hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Zachariah had coughed in her face. His infected, bloodied spittle had landed on her skin. Had microscopic droplets infiltrated her eye sockets? Her ears? Her nostrils?
She felt contaminated as if the virus was splitting and spreading inside her right now, right this second, like thousands of tainted spiders crawling through her insides, invading her organs, infiltrating her bone marrow, burrowing deep and invisible beneath her skin.
“Don’t touch anything.” From ten feet away, her father dug in his pocket with his free hand, keeping the tranquilizer gun in his right hand as he tugged out a spare pair of plastic gloves and a bottle of disinfectant spray, and tossed them to her.
“You need to wash yourself thoroughly, right now.” He gestured to the coiled hose hooked to the side of the tiger house, used to scrub the walls and floor of the tiger den. “Hurry.”
She pulled on the gloves. Carefully, she unhooked her blood-tinged mask and threw it on the ground. She’d dispose of it properly later, but for now, she just wanted it off.
She sprayed her face and hands with the disinfectant spray and scrubbed her skin until it felt raw, then used the hose to wash her face, hands, arms, and torso thoroughly. The freezing water soaked her clothes, but she barely felt it.
The scrub-down wouldn’t do anything, not if the virus was already inside her, but she scoured her skin as hard as she could anyway. She had to do something.
After several minutes that felt like an eternity, she carefully peeled off the gloves and dropped them onto the sidewalk beside the mask.
Raven offered her father the disinfectant spray, but he just shook his head. “Keep it. You need it more than I do. Reapply it every hour.”
It wouldn’t do any good, but she nodded to put him at ease as much as she could, to comfort him. There was nothing to feel comforted about.
She stuffed the bottle in her pocket. Her fingers trembled. Images from social media feeds flooded her mind: the jerky phone videos posted to TikTok and Insta and YouTube of people vomiting in restaurants, their eyeballs bleeding in ER waiting rooms, the body bags piling up in the morgues.
She’d listened to the statistics and watched the talking heads repeat the mind-numbing numbers, so large they hadn’t seemed real.
Neither had the footage of the rioting outside government buildings, or the soldiers with guns at checkpoints, enforcing curfews and travel bans in cities she’d never visited.
Like some terrible movie or collective nightmare she couldn’t awaken from, it somehow hadn’t seemed real. Not until Zachariah got sick.
Even then, her father had insisted it was nothing. And she’d only heard wheezy coughs through a door when she dropped off meals. She hadn’t witnessed the virus up close and personal—until now.
“How could you?” Her father stared at her, his jaw working, a vein in his temple throbbing. He was upset. “How could you be so careless?”
She flinched. “I had my mask.”
“But no gloves.” There was blame in his voice, and recrimination. “You let him get too close.”
“He trapped me.”
“You should have tried harder. Pushed him down if you had to.”
“What did you want me to do, jump into the moat with Alex the giant sharp-toothed alligator? Scale Vlad’s cage and have tea and crumpets with a tiger?”
“Either option would have been preferable.”
She went rigid. He wasn’t entirely wrong. She’d allowed herself to be distracted by other things—her birthday, the letter, her mother. She’d let her guard down. And it had cost her. “You’re the one who said it was just the flu.”
“I was wrong.” His expression was shell-shocked. “You don’t put yourself in danger for anyone. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah, I get it. Message received.” She forced herself to think of something other than the microscopic virus particles that might be percolating through her blood at that very moment. “Zachariah is suffering. He needs medicine.”
Her father lowered the tranq gun. Wearily, he rubbed sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. His skin was sallow. Bruises circled his eyes from weeks of stress, lack of sleep, and overwork. “No.”
He turned away from her, likely to head to the rear of the park, to the wolves, where he spent his free time after the animals had been fed and cared for.
Her father was a man of few words—quiet, intense, and contemplative. Her mother had hated it. Raven had grown used to his taciturn nature, to his long silences. 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, when he’d quarantined himself inside his loft. “There must be something we can do. We should call Dr. El-Hashem in town—”
“No doctors left to call. I told you.” His accent thickened. He’d moved to the States from Tokyo when he was a kid, and he barely had an accent anymore unless he was angry or upset.
Her mind filled with the images of the overrun hospitals and medical centers, guarded by soldiers refusing the sick at gunpoint. The screaming children, the weeping parents.
“What about Dr. Carter?” she asked, grasping at straws.
Dr. Carter was the exotic animal vet who cared for the wild animals that called the refuge home. He hadn’t come to treat Electra the bobcat’s abscess three weeks ago.
On vet days, Dr. Carter used to let Raven assist with 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.
When he’d failed to show, her dad had called him. After multiple messages, the vet’s wife had finally answered, coughing violently and raw with grief. Dr. Carter had died two days before, another casualty of the Hydra Virus.
Three days after that, the phones had stopped working.
“Then the pharmacy in town—”
Her father’s gaze hardened. His eyes were black as onyx and mirrors of her own. He glowered at her. “Too dangerous. Absolutely not.”
“Zachariah is our friend. He’s worked here forever. He stayed to help even after everything went to hell. We can’t just—”