Page 5 of The Last Sanctuary
Terror spiked through her. The face mask was a flimsy safeguard, practically useless with Zachariah this close. If a single microscopic droplet entered her system through any orifice—her mouth, nose, eyes, or ears—she knew what would happen.
She’d watched the news reporting the overrun hospitals, the suffering people left to perish in their homes, the millions of sick and infected—then hundreds of millions, then billions. All of them, dying in the throes of agony.
“Help me—please!” he cried.
“Let me go—!” Raven struggled to break free, to no avail. Zachariah coughed again, splattering bloodied phlegm onto her ear and the side of her neck. His cheeks were spidered with swollen, pulsing, purple-black veins, as if there were worms inside him, rotten worms squirming beneath his skin, his diseased flesh.
In the enclosure behind her, Vlad was working himself into a frenzy. Snarling, he slammed against the fence, the metal rattling against her spine.
“Raven!” Her father ran up the path from the direction of the park entrance. He was dressed in grungy white overalls, a gray T-shirt, and tall black boots, with a work belt around his waist. He held a tranquilizer gun in his right hand. He waved his arms wildly. “Get away from him!”
“I’m trying!”
“Zachariah!” her father ordered. “Stop! Now!”
For an instant, the force of his command startled Zachariah from his sickened fugue. His grip slackened. Raven pulled away and dashed to the right along the fence perimeter.
Vlad snarled and hurled himself against his cage. The fence shuddered from his considerable weight. The tiger’s claws scraped the metal fencing mere inches from where her head had been a moment before.
Zachariah stood in confusion, swaying unsteadily on his feet. She pushed past him and fled past the waist-high fence ringing the alligator moat to the stone path before pausing at the tiger house, which she could climb to safety if Zachariah came after her again.
Frantic breaths tore from her chest. “Dad, be careful!”
Her father circled the old man until he stood between her and Zachariah, the tranquilizer gun gripped in both hands.
“He has it,” he said, his voice bleak. “The virus. It’s here.”
Chapter Two
“Go home, Zachariah,” Raven’s father ordered, steel in his voice. He spoke calmly, but the tranquilizer gun pointed at Zachariah’s chest told a different story. “You don’t belong out here.”
Zachariah stared toward him, but not quite at him, with eyes red as blood. “You have to help! It’s inside me! I can’t get it out! I can’t!”
“Go back to your room right now. Lock yourself inside. I’ll take care of you, Zachariah, I swear it. But you need to go—now.”
Zachariah swayed. Blood-speckled foam glistened at the corners of his mouth. A fetid stench emanated from his pores, a smell with which she was well-acquainted from living among carnivores—the rancid odor of rot.
Raven tensed, unsure what her dad was prepared to do if Zachariah defied him, if he came at them again. The old man was delirious, too sick to be coherent, to recognize or control his aggression.
Vlad paced and snarled at the fence line, his black lips pulled back from his gleaming fangs. He reared onto his hind legs and lunged repeatedly against the fence. He growled low and fierce.
Vlad despised guns. The sight of one regularly worked him into a frenzy. This was something else. The tiger wasn’t focused on her father or the tranquilizer gun; his yellow gaze was fixed on Zachariah.
His ears flattened, tail lashing in alarm. His behavior was clearly distressed, as if he sensed danger in Zachariah’s sickly odor and odd behavior. She felt as unsettled by Zachariah as the tiger did.
She stared at her old friend in growing horror. He was barely recognizable as Zachariah, let alone a human. His eyes, reddened and rimmed in blood, filled with an all-too-human emotion—terror.
“Please,” she whispered. Her gut churned with dread, with that palpable sense ofwrongness. “You’re hurting yourself. Please go home so you can rest.”
“Home…” Zachariah shook his head violently, as if he were shaking off fleas or gnats. He took an unsteady step backward, then another.
Raven’s father tracked him with the tranquilizer gun. “That’s it. Keep moving. Nice and slow, now.”
The zookeeper coughed again, a harsh, retching sound. “I have to go… I have to… get away… before… before…”
“Before what, Zachariah?” Raven asked.
He never finished his thought. His jittery, disjointed gaze roamed back and forth, his eyeballs rolling in a strange, frenetic pattern. With a sudden intensity of focus, his terrified, bloodshot eyes fixed upon Raven.
