Page 3 of The Last Sanctuary
I’ve tried to call and message, but the connection has been spotty this last week. Things are bad. Everything is falling apart out there. I’m worried this is it. The end.
The Settlement is a safe place for us. There are good people here. It is well-fortified. Until I come, wear your mask. Be careful. If, for some reason, I’m prevented from reaching you, then come here. Find good people you can trust. Whatever you do, don’t be alone.
I love you.
The Settlement, where her mother had found refuge, was a self-sustaining New Age commune located near Elijay in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Georgia, a hundred miles or so northwest as the crow flew.
It was dangerous for a woman to travel alone, especially through gang-controlled Atlanta, but now? With all this?Millions of people spreading sickness, disease, death to anyone who got too close.
The world had gone mad again. And things were so much worse than the last time, and the time before that.
Raven balled the letter in her fist and crumpled it between her fingers. Her hands trembled, her knuckles whitening.
Had her mom already tried to come for her? If so, she hadn’t made it. Had something happened to her?
Her jaw clenched. Old pain sprouted in her gut, tangling her stomach into knots. What did her mom know? She thought she could ride in on a white horse and save everyone, yet she hadn’t bothered to visit in all this time.
Raven could handle things just fine on her own. She’d been taking care of herself for years, since long before her mother had left, always seeking something else, something better, always searching for the perfect life she’d never been able to find here at home.
Steeling herself, Raven stuffed the letter in her pocket next to the whittling knife. She was far too busy to worry about her mother right now.
She took a deep breath, then slipped to the edge of the roof, crouched, and leaped to the ground. It was a long drop, but she softened her legs and curled into a roll before scrambling to her feet.
She brushed twigs, pine needles, and mulch from her pant legs, then whistled one long note, then two short ones—Vlad’s signal for food.
Behind the tiger house, in a fenced area off-limits to visitors, she could draw close to the eighteen-foot-tall fence. The rest of the enclosure was circled by a deep ditch, surrounding a six-foot-high perimeter wall on the tiger’s side, with a four-foot-tall wall on the visitors’ side, which provided the illusion of unobscured proximity.
Vlad typically lounged on a rock shelf beside his shallow bathing pool. A thin trickling waterfall streamed above him. The rocks were a polymer replica airbrushed to look authentically aged and weathered, while the waterfall poured from a hidden PVC pipe.
At her approach, Vlad rose lightly to his feet and sauntered up to the fence. He eyed her, his ears pricked, waiting impatiently. She pulled a piece of dried venison from her cargo pocket and held it in front of him.
Vlad chuffed in approval. Normally, tigers ate raw meat. In particular, Vlad enjoyed beef, cow femurs, and horse meat, along with turkey and chicken necks, which aided his dental hygiene.
Lately, Vlad had developed a taste for jerky, specifically deer jerky. She took several steps back and hurled a few pieces over the fence.
Vlad’s head snapped toward them. He pounced, snapped his jaws shut, and inhaled the venison in the blink of an eye.
Vlad prowled back to the fence and pressed his enormous body against it, chuffing eagerly for a good petting like some hugely overgrown house cat.
Tigers didn’t purr when they were happy or content. Instead, they chuffed, which sounded a lot like a cough.
Carefully, Raven pushed her fingers between the metal bars and scratched his thick fur along his flank, far from his sharp teeth.
He chuffed encouragingly. She felt the solid bulk of him, his muscles taut as cables beneath the lushness of his fur.
No matter how tame he acted, she could never let her guard down, not for a second. Vlad was a magnificent creature; he was also a voracious and efficient predator.
Once, she’d seen him leap into the air and take down a hawk in mid-flight, a full twelve feet off the ground. The poor hawk had made the unfortunate decision to fly over Vlad’s enclosure.
This particular tiger had an appetite for his human keepers. At his last home in Dubai, Vlad’s uber-rich owner would parade him before his aristocratic friends on a gold chain during decadent parties—until the aggrieved tiger had had enough and attacked two people, killing one and maiming the other in the seconds it took a security guard to raise his tranquilizer gun and dart him.
Maybe that’s what they deserved for forcing an obstinate tiger to socialize. More likely, they’d taunted and abused him to the point of desperation, until he finally struck back.
She withdrew her hand. The tiger turned his great head, ears flicking, and gave her a lazy stare, as if affronted. His tail twitched rhythmically behind him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
His ears flicked.
