Page 23 of The Last Sanctuary
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 Ravenweresick, 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.
