Page 6 of The Last Sanctuary
He blinked rapidly. For an instant, he was lucid. Hesawher.
“I’m sorry.” He spoke in a choked, jagged voice. Something wet and thick gurgled in his throat. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to hurt anyone… I’m so sorry…”
“Zachariah—”
“Forgive me. Please, forgive me…”
Raven stood on the path, her entire body trembling. She could feel every fleck of spittle stuck to her cheeks, her neck. Panic bit at the back of her throat, the same panic she saw reflected in his tortured gaze. Whatever he’d done to her, he hadn’t meant to do it. She understood that. “I forgive you.”
The old man turned and lurched away. He staggered up the path toward the foxes, the zebra, and the bobcat, in the opposite direction of the park entrance, where the lodge, the restaurant, and the loft he called home were located.
Neither Raven nor her father stopped him.
Relief flooded through her. He was gone. For the moment at least, the threat had passed. Except it hadn’t. Heart thudding in her throat, she tentatively touched her face. Her fingers came away wet with speckled phlegm and blood.
“He coughed on you,” her father said in a stricken voice. “Did it get in your eyes or mouth?”
Her pulse roared in her ears. “I… I don’t know.”
Her skin crawled. Every hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Zachariah had coughed in her face. His infected, bloodied spittle had landed on her skin. Had microscopic droplets infiltrated her eye sockets? Her ears? Her nostrils?
She felt contaminated as if the virus was splitting and spreading inside her right now, right this second, like thousands of tainted spiders crawling through her insides, invading her organs, infiltrating her bone marrow, burrowing deep and invisible beneath her skin.
“Don’t touch anything.” From ten feet away, her father dug in his pocket with his free hand, keeping the tranquilizer gun in his right hand as he tugged out a spare pair of plastic gloves and a bottle of disinfectant spray, and tossed them to her.
“You need to wash yourself thoroughly, right now.” He gestured to the coiled hose hooked to the side of the tiger house, used to scrub the walls and floor of the tiger den. “Hurry.”
She pulled on the gloves. Carefully, she unhooked her blood-tinged mask and threw it on the ground. She’d dispose of it properly later, but for now, she just wanted it off.
She sprayed her face and hands with the disinfectant spray and scrubbed her skin until it felt raw, then used the hose to wash her face, hands, arms, and torso thoroughly. The freezing water soaked her clothes, but she barely felt it.
The scrub-down wouldn’t do anything, not if the virus was already inside her, but she scoured her skin as hard as she could anyway. She had to dosomething.
After several minutes that felt like an eternity, she carefully peeled off the gloves and dropped them onto the sidewalk beside the mask.
Raven offered her father the disinfectant spray, but he just shook his head. “Keep it. You need it more than I do. Reapply it every hour.”
It wouldn’t do any good, but she nodded to put him at ease as much as she could, to comfort him. There was nothing to feel comforted about.
She stuffed the bottle in her pocket. Her fingers trembled. Images from social media feeds flooded her mind: the jerky phone videos posted to TikTok and Insta and YouTube of people vomiting in restaurants, their eyeballs bleeding in ER waiting rooms, the body bags piling up in the morgues.
She’d listened to the statistics and watched the talking heads repeat the mind-numbing numbers, so large they hadn’t seemed real. Neither had the footage of the rioting outside government buildings, or the soldiers with guns at checkpoints, enforcing curfews and travel bans in cities she’d never visited.
Like some terrible movie or collective nightmare she couldn’t awaken from, it somehow hadn’t seemed real. Not until Zachariah got sick.
Even then, her father had insisted it was nothing. And she’d only heard wheezy coughs through a door when she dropped off meals. She hadn’t witnessed the virus up close and personal—until now.
“How could you?” Her father stared at her, his jaw working, a vein in his temple throbbing. He was upset. “How could you be so careless?”
She flinched. “I had my mask.”
“But no gloves.” There was blame in his voice, and recrimination. “You let him get too close.”
“He trapped me.”
“You should have tried harder. Pushed him down if you had to.”
“What did you want me to do, jump into the moat with Alex the giant sharp-toothed alligator? Scale Vlad’s cage and have tea and crumpets with a tiger?”
