Page 24 of The Last Sanctuary
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.
Chapter Ten
Raven focused on the task at hand, on getting through this awful, endless day. The shock and grief of her father’s death numbed her.
She had not coughed. She didn’t burn with fever. It was early still. The virus simply hadn’t made itself known yet. Her father’s last moments kept flaring through her mind—his bloody tears, his rigid features, his feverish limbs contorted in pain.
If that future awaited her, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, on the chores she’d completed hundreds of times over the years. She lugged buckets of water from the well outside the perimeter fence, cleaned each pen and enclosure, disposing of the manure, ensuring the hay was fresh without mold, and methodically checking the bottom layers.
It was past noon by the time she loaded up the wagon attached to the electric cart with hay and five-gallon buckets of grain for the herbivores: the deer, the ostriches, and Sal the zebra. She’d managed to fit in a deer carcass for the wolves and cuts of horse meat for Vlad.
At the tiger house, she whistled to call Vlad inside his chamber so she could open the gate and give him his food. One long note, two short.
Vlad rose from sunning himself on his favorite flat rock, sauntered to the fence, tail twitching, and gazed at her with a distinctly displeased expression on his furred face. With an irritated chuff, he turned his rump to her. She jumped back in time to miss the spray of urine.
Vlad’s spray had a distinct stink. Zachariah used to say it smelled like hot buttered popcorn. While Raven wished she could disagree vehemently, Zachariah hadn’t been wrong. He hadn’t been wrong often. Not much good that did him.
“Very funny,” she said to the tiger, stepping backward.
He chuffed at her again, the tigerish version of a mocking laugh. He was obliging and playful again now that he’d adequately punished her.
Even in her grief, she hadn’t forgotten. After she’d lugged over his dinner, she dug in her pocket, tugged out a few pieces of his favorite venison jerky, and tossed them over the fence. He consumed them in seconds.
He was so incredibly majestic, it made her heart hurt to look at him. How unfair it was to imagine the world without this magnificent creature, without any of these beautiful wild animals in it.
She’d spent her life resenting these animals for stealing the coveted attention of her father. But she had to admit that she’d grown fond of them, too. More than fond.
Her feelings for the wild animals of Haven were a tangled, complicated mess, much like her feelings for the refuge, for her father, and her mother.
This was the dichotomy of her life—she simultaneously loved and hated the same things.
“I don’t want to do it,” she said.
Vlad cocked his great head and twitched an ear at her.
“If I have to do it, I hope you’ll understand. That you can forgive me.”
Shaking her head, she stepped back from the fence. What was she doing, seeking absolution from a tiger?
