Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
The next day, Raven buried her father in the garden by the lake across from the flamingo enclosure, next to the spot where he’d buried Zachariah three days earlier.
She had no coffin, no funeral home to call. This was the new world: a bizarre, twisted funhouse mirror version of the old world. Two hundred years of progress and invention, and technology was utterly eradicated in a few desperate, horrifying weeks.
Digging a grave was hard, tough, and exhausting. It took hours to repeatedly punch the shovel through the red Georgia clay, creating a hole large enough and deep enough to protect her father’s corpse from nosy predators.
Her muscles were shaky. Sweat drenched her damp Nine Inch Nails T-shirt to her chest and back. Her palms stung with weeping blisters.
Once she’d wrapped his body in a tarp and dragged it out to the garden in a wheelbarrow, she put him in the ground, grunting from the effort. She took one of the carvings from her pocket and lowered it gently into the grave. It was a carving of the white wolf, his favorite.
She added a family photo she’d found stuffed in a drawer.
Taken in front of the wolves’ enclosure when she was six, her round face shone with joy.
She was the only one who appeared happy.
Her dad was looking at something off-camera, distracted and distant.
Her mom’s expression was tight and pinched, something closed inside her, as if she were already dreaming of somewhere else.
Happiness had never been a defining trait of her family. Her childhood consisted of three people moving around each other within the same four walls, never touching, never getting too close, always orbiting the others.
She remembered the silences. Not the vibrant quiet of nature, buzzing with insects, the soft sough of the wind, the twittering of birds, and the shuffling of small animals in the underbrush, it was an oppressive silence, weighted with words hungry to be spoken.
Raven hauled the last shovelful of red clay and patted it down, smoothing the topsoil over the grave. Her arms ached. The trees rustled above her, their crimson leaves curling at the edges, ready to die.
Raven stood over the grave. Her eyes stung. Her chest was too tight. A giant hand squeezed the breath from her lungs. She couldn’t get enough oxygen. The ground kept tilting dangerously beneath her feet.
She didn’t know what to say or how to say it. She didn’t know any poignant poems or appropriate songs. Nothing meaningful would come. Only a dull sense of despair, a numbness spreading from the center of her being.
She resented her father. She loved him. He was dead. What was there to say? Grief encircled her chest like chains, threatening to drown her.
“I wish you were still here,” she said. “I wish we’d had more time to fix things. I’m sorry.”
The wolves started howling again. Last night, the wolves had howled for hours. Somehow, they sensed that her dad was gone. It was a different sound from their usual collective howling to communicate with each other.
This was a chorus of grief. They sang in haunting concert, sending up a sorrowful keening wail that echoed across the park, eerie and beautiful.
The bonobos added their screeches to the symphony. The bobcat yowled his displeasure. The zebra brayed obnoxiously. The coyotes yipped and yowled with hunger.
Haven Wildlife Refuge housed one tiger, one leopard, two black bears, six timber wolves, two hybrid wolves, four bonobos, two porcupines, one old bobcat, three red foxes, two otters, one zebra, two ostriches, one eagle, four peacocks, two tortoises, two dozen flamingos, flocks of geese and ducks, one grumpy alligator, and a fifteen-foot boa constrictor named Winston.
Every one of those animals was hungry—with the possible exception of Winston. Most of them ate copious amounts of food. None of them had been fed yesterday or today.
No wonder they were loudly complaining. The animals demanded her attention, whether she liked it or not.
“Okay, okay,” she muttered. “Hold your horses. I’m coming.”
First, she made her way to the front gates and checked to ensure the wrought-iron gates were closed and locked with the padlock. Her father had drilled caution into her. Every night for the last month, her father had patrolled Haven’s perimeter with his hunting rifle.
A new person hadn’t shown up in weeks, but that didn’t mean a stranger wouldn’t appear, begging for entry. An image of Carl’s face moments before the round struck him invaded her brain.
There were bad people out there.
It was now her job to keep them out.
The flagstone pathway took a serpentine route through the oblong-shaped park.
An enormous walk-in enclosure, featuring the gardens surrounding the small lake with its flamingos, various feathered fowl, pens for the tortoises, and the peacocks, was sprawled in the center of the park.
The peacocks regularly escaped into the general park, wandering about and pooping wherever they wished.
Near the entrance were the ancient turnstiles, the Grizzly Grill restaurant, the souvenir shop, and bathrooms, along with the six-suite lodge that her dad had converted into their living quarters.
Whoever built this place fifty years ago hadn’t put much thought into it. The food storage and prep sheds, which included the meat house, were located only twenty yards behind the lodge. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, she kept her bedroom window closed.
Raven entered the concrete-block building containing the frozen meat for the carnivores—the tiger, leopard, alligator, wolves, bobcat, and bears.
The walk-in freezer held several hundred pounds of meat, which Zachariah picked up from a local renderer—mostly calves, sheep, and pigs, occasionally bulls or horses.
Zachariah hadn’t stocked up since he’d gotten sick. The freezers were half empty.
Her gaze swept the rest of the room, flicking over the steel table meant for chopping meat, a huge steel sink, and a wooden block stuck with gigantic butcher knives.
In the corner stood the chest freezer full of rats for the birds of prey and Winston. Her father used to call them ratsicles.
A memory struck her—her father on the floor, straddling a calf carcass, brandishing a huge bloodied knife, entrails puddling around his boots as he grinned broadly, at home in the gore.
She blinked the sudden wetness from her eyes and checked the generator. It was working but running low on fuel. It would last another week, maybe two. She added propane to her internal checklist of items to scavenge, if there was anything left to find.
In the vegetable storeroom, the wooden shelves were crammed with bins full of past their sell-by-date vegetables that Zachariah collected from several local markets to feed the herbivores. The sickly-sweet odor of overripe peaches filled her nostrils. The vegetables were beginning to rot.
The dry foods section of the storeroom held the mother lode. Bales of hay and alfalfa were stacked in the far corner. Next to them stood several one-hundred-gallon vats that stored grains.
Shelves lined the walls. Every shelf was heaped with boxes and crates of edible food: canned goods, mostly expired; plastic containers of peanut butter (Kodiak’s favorite food, spread on about three dozen pancakes); commercial-sized boxes of Cheerios and Fruit Loops which the bonobos loved; special high-fiber biscuit mix for the otters and the black bears; cases of nuts and seeds, bags of popcorn, and large bottles of honey, which were used to fill the enrichment balls for the bonobos, Electra and Leo, and the black bears.
Raven stared in awe at the storage vault until her eyes blurred. Her legs turned to jelly. She sagged against the wall and sank to the concrete floor.
Her dad kept a four-week store of food supplies for the animals. Vlad ate sixty pounds of meat a day. The wolves ate a full deer or calf carcass every three days. The bonobos consumed their weight in fruits, vegetables, and biscuits. Every. Single. Day.
In less than a month, the animals would starve, Raven along with them.
A terrible thought spun through her mind. If she didn’t feed everything to the animals… if she kept all this food for herself…
Supplemented with what she could hunt and harvest from the forest, this food cache could last her for up to two years, maybe longer.
If she lived.
If she wasn’t infected.
A wave of vertigo washed through her. The world seemed to tilt, the floor cracking open beneath her, splintering into a gaping hole about to swallow her up.
Logically, she knew what she should do. She needed to choose herself. Choose her own survival. They were animals. Thousands had probably starved to death in zoos around the country already.
If Raven were sick, they’d starve without her, anyway.
Even if she fed them all this food, it wouldn’t last.
They would starve.
Raven would starve.
Only three days ago, she’d been about to turn her back on them permanently. What was different now? Two freshly turned graves flashed through her mind. Only everything.
Before, they would have lived without her.
Now, they depended upon her utterly.
No. She wouldn’t let them waste away, afraid, bewildered, in pain.
That was cruel, inhumane. Her father had asked her to take care of them, to offer them the mercy of a quick, relatively painless death.
She had access to the rest of the tranquilizer guns kept in the maintenance shed for emergencies. She could put them down gently.
She thought of Vlad. She thought of Suki and Loki, her favorite timber wolves. What were the deaths of a few animals in cages compared to the collapse of the civilized world? Compared to the catastrophic loss of billions of dead and dying humans?
Outside the storehouse, the bonobos were growing agitated. They hooted and screeched, their frustrated calls escalating into a cacophony of chaos.
The guns were in the maintenance shed, not fifty feet away. She could go get them now, she could—
Something inside her shriveled. Her mind recoiled from the thought. She’d just buried her father. She wasn’t ready. Maybe she’d never be ready. Maybe she shouldn’t care, maybe she should be cold-hearted, but she wasn’t. She did care about the animals, more than she wanted to admit.
It would be better to let them go happily, peacefully, on full stomachs. Wouldn’t it? Wasn’t that the right thing to do in this terrible, horrific situation she found herself in?
There was another option. She could release them from their cages and give them a chance in the wild to survive. The wolves would hunt. The tiger would stalk the night, searching for prey. The bobcat and leopard would do the same. Maybe.
Or maybe they would be a danger to whatever human survivors remained out there in the world. Or perhaps they would hunt Raven herself.
She stood woodenly, frozen by indecision. She would feed them today. Tomorrow, she would figure out what to do.
Tomorrow, she would face every single animal her dad had loved, that she’d grown up with, that she knew as well as she knew herself—and offer them mercy.