Page 21 of The Last Sanctuary
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 toearn 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 Withdrawn, reticent, and beset with nightmares and PTSD.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. “Hewantsto 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. Theleopard, 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 tocomprehend. 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 reallywasthe 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.
