Page 22 of The Last Sanctuary
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,orI 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.
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 dampNine Inch NailsT-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.
