Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
By the time Raven returned to Haven, the Camry’s electric battery was completely drained. She drove through the back entrance, passing the bonobos, otters, and Leo the leopard, who was lounging on his favorite tree branch in the shade, and parked in the garage behind the lodge.
Upon examining the exterior, she discovered a tiny hole punched into the trunk just above the keyhole. The round hadn’t hit anything too critical. She’d gotten lucky—this time.
She almost plugged the vehicle into the charger, then hesitated.
The electrified fences in the park had automatic backup generators that would last a few more weeks.
She didn’t want to turn on the one for the lodge where she and her father lived, not unless she had to.
If the power was out for months, maybe longer, the generators were all she had.
She brought the tranq gun into the house, locked the front door, and set the weapon on the coffee table. She didn’t want it in his room or anywhere near where he might reach it.
The pills would help. The pills would take away his pain.
Raven entered the doorway to her father’s bedroom. Like him, it was spartan—a lumpy mattress, a scarred desk, a nightstand, the orange armchair, and the log walls bare of pictures or sentimentality.
She held the bottle of painkillers in one hand, low near her thigh. “Dad?”
He didn’t answer.
Heavy shadows drifted across the room. Dusk stained the windows. The dense air stank of sour sweat and sickness. Her stomach roiled. She slipped an N95 mask over her mouth and nose and went to his bedside, flipping on the solar lamp.
His chest rose and fell in jerky, uneven movements. Rasping breaths tore from his chest. He moaned and writhed, tangling the rumpled bedding. The sheets beneath him were damp.
A drop of blood rimmed his outer ear. Another dot of crimson stained the hollow beneath his right eye.
Hemorrhaging from multiple orifices…
This was it, then. The last stage before the end. Before death.
How had he hidden it from her for so long? How could he have been so sick and stayed on his feet? The fever stage burned through adults at over 105 degrees. She remembered that little nugget from the CDC health alerts.
Why had he purposefully kept this from her?
“Dad.” She cleared her throat. “Dad. I got it. I got you medicine.”
He groaned and opened his eyes. They were glassy and threaded with scarlet.
She fumbled with the bottle and spilled three pills into her palm. She added two more, to make sure. “This will help you feel better.”
His reddened eyes widened slightly as if he were surprised to see her. Like he hadn’t expected her to make it back. “You’re here.”
“I told you I’d be back. Here, take these. They’ll ease the pain, I promise.”
He managed to lift his head. She pressed a glass of water to his lips and helped him swallow the pills. With a groan, his head fell back against the sweat-drenched pillow.
After a beat, he said, “You start coughing, you know what to do.”
She shook her head. “Don’t talk like that.”
“You don’t want to go like this, trust me.”
“Dad.”
“It’s a better way to go. More humane.”
She pressed her lips together. Tears sparked at the backs of her eyelids. “I know.”
He heaved a ragged breath. “Do the animals first. Before you do it yourself. You know where the guns are.”
Her mind revolted from the thought. “You should rest.”
“Don’t be weak. Be brave.”
“I—I will.”
He stared up at her like she was a stranger, his eyes so bloodshot they looked crimson. The fever-heat emanated from him in waves.
He turned to the wall as he hacked up a bloody, phlegmy cough. She handed him a clean washcloth. He wiped his mouth. For several minutes, he didn’t speak. The sound of his ragged breathing filled the room.
“Dad—”
“I was weak.” His face contorted. “I was weak to let Zachariah stay. He came after you. Now you’ve got it, too.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said, stricken. She’d never seen him like this before, never heard him talk about anything beyond lessons and instructions and orders. “And you don’t know that. I might be okay.”
“Don’t be stupid. I saw what I saw. So did you. I should’ve kicked him out long ago… never should’ve let him stay.”
“That’s not fair.”
“He might have killed you!” her father snarled. “That’s the mistake… never trust anyone… especially the ones who call themselves ‘friend.’”
“He was our friend.”
“He came after you. He attacked you.”
Her heart contracted. “He didn’t mean it.”
“I don’t care!”
This wasn’t how she wanted things to go. He was dying. She should say something important. Something that meant something. But her words failed her.
Her father groaned. She forced herself to look at him, at the mask of agony that contorted his face into someone unrecognizable. But she’d never really known her father. No one had.
Her gaze strayed to the medal of valor framed on the wall above the dresser.
Her mother claimed he wasn’t the same man after he came back from the war.
A decade ago, after the Hand of God terrorist group detonated suitcase nukes across the United States, he’d served as a peacekeeper in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He was flying a chopper full of medical aid to wounded soldiers when he was shot down. The helicopter crashed into the Congo Basin. He survived alone in the jungle for ninety-seven days. Raven had been five years old.
Her mother insisted on displaying the medal. Her father hated it. And yet, after her mother left, he hadn’t bothered to remove it, either.
Once, when Raven was ten, she’d made the mistake of admiring it out loud. She’d called her father a hero.
He’d turned away, his eyes glittering with revulsion. “It is not a heroic thing to survive.”
She’d never figured out whether it was the award itself he found so repugnant, or the secret foul things he’d had to do to earn it. She knew only the barest of facts: four men survived the initial crash deep in the Congo jungle, hundreds of miles from civilization. Only one man made it out alive.
Her father returned to them thirty pounds lighter, a festering knife wound in his right bicep, and no explanation for how he’d suffered it. He came back changed. Withdrawn, reticent, and beset with nightmares and PTSD.
Within six months of his return from the war, her father bought Haven Wildlife Refuge with the family’s life savings. He retreated from the world, choosing the solitude of nature and the companionship of wild animals over the noise and chaos of society.
He’d taken his family with him, whether they wanted to go or not.
“Your father thinks he’s an island,” her mom said once, before she left. “He wants to be an island. He cut everyone out of his life. He keeps everything at arm’s length. He thinks it makes him stronger, but he’s wrong. He’s the loneliest man I’ve ever met.”
Her insides twisted. Her mouth tasted of copper. Zachariah was dead. Her father was dying. She was about to be alone, too. Totally, completely alone.
“What am I supposed to do?” she whispered. “How am I supposed to do this?”
Her father didn’t answer. His features went slack. Finally, mercifully, he drifted into a drug-induced sleep.
Raven backed away on wobbly legs and sank into the faded orange armchair about eight feet from her father’s bedside. It smelled old, of dust and mothballs.
Her backpack sat in her room by her bed.
The remote hunting cabin in the woods waited for her.
But could she leave this place, now that her father was ill?
The animals still needed to be fed. The coyotes howled hungrily in the distance.
The leopard, Leo, roared his displeasure.
The bonobos’ night house had never been cleaned.
She would take care of them as soon as she could, but she couldn’t bear to leave her father’s side. Not like this. Not now.
Raven swallowed hard. Exhaustion tugged at her. Her limbs felt so incredibly heavy. She ran her fingers over the soft ridges of her face mask. It was hard to breathe the claustrophobic air. It felt like she was slowly choking to death. She could never get enough oxygen.
She thought of Juliette and Forsyth. The eerily empty streets, the abandoned shops. Of Carl’s face exploding right before her eyes. The arterial spray of blood, so impossibly bright. The flinty gleam in the bikers’ eyes, their casual cruelty, their absolute belief that they would get away with it.
There was no longer anyone to stop them.
Her stomach cramped. Almost out of instinct, she tugged her phone out of her pocket. She’d been charging it with her Biolite stove, though there was little reason to do so anymore.
When she tried to search the internet, nothing came up. Google wouldn’t load. Neither would Firefox nor any other browser. She gave up on the search and scrolled through the archived alerts instead.
School districts closing, state by state. Corporations shutting their doors. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization releasing health alert after health alert, warning after warning.
Thousands shut inside quarantine areas lined with fences topped with barbed wire. The sick lining up outside FEMA tent cities. Soldiers marching through the streets.
And the bodies. Bodies everywhere. By the thousands, the hundreds of thousands. Then millions.
A tremor went through her, like she was standing too close to the edge of a cliff. The sheer immensity was impossible to comprehend. Not until she’d gone to Forsyth and had seen the state of things for herself. Not until she’d met the murdering psycho bikers.
It really was the end of the world.
As she sat next to her dying father, it felt like the whole vast universe was crumbling, perishing right along with him.
It was too much to take in. Too much for one person to bear. She was finally, irrevocably alone. She was getting what she’d wanted. To be alone. To be a loner, solitary, surrounded by silence.
But not like this, her panicked mind whispered. Never like this.
She shifted in her chair, her muscles aching, but remained seated, keeping vigil long into the night.
Her father’s legs thrashed. Sweat drenched his ashen face. His whole body was rigid. Tendons stood out on his neck. His eyes were deep, bruised hollows.
Blood dripped like tears down his cheeks.
Raven waited. She waited for his last words, for him to finally look at her and say something meaningful, maybe some poignant last-minute advice on surviving the apocalypse. Or what she really longed for—I was wrong, or I wish things had been different, or most of all, I love you.
In the end, in death, he was the same as he was in life—reticent, secretive, and unknowable.
Twelve hours later, her father was dead.