Page 8 of The Last Sanctuary
“Yes, sir,” she said through gritted teeth, though it was the last thing she wanted to do today.
A part of her loved the refuge and the animals within it—this place had been her home for as long as she could remember. But a darker, bitter part of her resented it.
The needs of the animal refuge had taken over her life. After her mother left, her father enrolled her in online high school classes. He said she was safest at home, because even three years ago, the world was a dangerous place, with the crop blights and food shortages, the riots and domestic terrorist attacks, and school shootings growing more common every day.
Everything was falling apart slowly and then all at once.
After graduating from high school last spring, there was nothing to keep her from working all day. She couldn’t afford the incredible expense of college.
Instead, she’d stayed at the refuge and helped the keepers rake droppings and shovel fresh straw, fed and watered the animals, and ensured the foxes weren’t digging escape tunnels in their pens.
During operating hours, she’d waitressed at the restaurant or managed the guests, kept idiots from leaning on the wolves’ fences or throwing French Fries at the bears.
For the last month, it had been Raven, her father, and Zachariah. Now, she and her father had to do it all, just the two of them.
Dread settled in her stomach like a block of ice. “What about Zachariah? Do we just leave him out here, then? What about when night falls? How are we going to get him back in his room?”
Her father’s grip tightened on the tranquilizer gun. “I’ll take care of it.”
“But how?—”
Her father didn’t answer. Without another word, he strode up the path, deeper into the refuge, headed the way that Zachariah had departed a few minutes earlier. He’d already dismissed her from his mind as he turned to his myriad other tasks.
He’d always cared about this place and the animals more than people.
More than her mom, more than Zachariah, more than her.
It figured he wouldn’t remember her birthday. She might have forgiven him with everything going on, except that he never remembered. Not once. She told herself it didn’t hurt anymore, that she was too strong to care.
Raven turned back to the tiger house. Her limbs felt heavy as lead. No matter what horrific atrocities were happening in the outside world, her dad kept order in his domain.
While Zachariah was wandering around out there somewhere, suffering and dying, Raven would spend the afternoon mopping up tiger scat the size of her head.
It didn’t feel right. None of this felt right. She glanced up at the large tree in Vlad’s enclosure. No cow heads were hanging from the branches today, not since Zachariah had fallen ill.
When she had been a little girl, she used to watch in terrible fascination as Zachariah hung the bull heads he’d procured fromthe renderer on several branches eight to twelve feet above the ground. It was for the tiger’s enrichment.
Raven never squealed or allowed herself to appear squeamish as Zachariah nonchalantly wedged horns attached to a bull’s head in the fork between two branches, or hung a disembodied head upside down, the ghastly purple tongue poking from the thing’s maw.
Afterward, Zachariah had squeezed her shoulder in silent reward for her bravery, then pointed at Vlad, who repeatedly sprang high in the air, batting at the heads eagerly, intent on bringing them down for his next meal.
“He’s working for his dinner like the rest of us, right?” Zachariah grinned at her. “They look gruesome, but they’re nothing to fear. Simply the way he likes to eat, little bird.”
Zachariah faced everything with a jovial fearlessness. He’d made Raven want to be brave, too. Because of his kindness, she hadn’t suffered a single nightmare.
As for her father, the concept that his young daughter might be frightened of bloodied, severed animal heads hadn’t entered his mind.
She sucked in her breath, fighting the wave of sorrow flooding her system. For a moment, she couldn’t move from the grief rolling through her body.
And that persistent fear niggling at the back of her mind—that she, too, was now infected.
If a single pathogenic particle slipped through the fibers of the N95 mask and invaded her body, she was done for. In ten days, she’d be the one choking on her blood, her organs melting into a toxic, insidious stew.
She shoved the thought down deep. There was nothing she could do about that now. What was done was done. She was so deeply sorry for Zachariah. She grieved for him. But she had too much work to do to feel sorry for herself.
Raven straightened, took a breath, then pressed her hand to the bioscanner beside the locked, steel-reinforced door and pushed the button to lower the drop gate on the other side of the tiger house, which opened to Vlad’s enclosure.
The scanner beeped. The service door swung open with a hiss. Before she went inside, she peeked around the corner at her backpack, still ready and waiting next to the wall.
