Without having to put her on the ground, Fi crawls onto my back. She has an iron grip with her fingers locked around my neck. It is a stupid thing to say, but the ‘dad’ in me has to say it: “Hold on tight, sweetie.”
I look over at Julie. “Which way?”
She nods to our left, and I know she is looking at the picnic area. There are at least thirty tables set up to accommodate big groups that come to the zoo. It isn’t a bad idea. The tables will give us some room to run through the animals, and if we need too, we can jump from table to table until we reach the gift shop.
“You ready for this?” I ask.
“No, not even remotely,” Julie says back, not joking.
“Me neither.” Time is running out. “Jason, can you run?” I yell over to him.
“Do I have a fucking choice?” he asks, panic building in his every word. I can’t even imagine how much pain he must be in. The collarbone is one of the thickest bones in the body, and to have it snapped in half like a twig by an animal’s jaws… I shudder thinking about it.
“Just try to keep up behind us,” I tell him. “We’ll help you, Jason. We aren’t leaving any of us behind.”
The first picnic table is about five feet in front of us. I figure that if we can reach that table before one of the animals gets to us, we can get to higher ground. Then that negative, pessimistic voice in the back of my mind rears its ugly head.
There’s no way in Hell you can reach that table. These animals are faster than you could ever hope to be. They’ve killed everyone and we’re next
.
I grit my teeth and unsheathed my combat knife. “Let’s go!” I scream to Julie and Jason. I run ahead, not looking back to see if they are moving. I have no peripheral vision and my ‘regular’ vision is fucked. I have no idea if there are any animals coming at us, and if they are, I sure as hell won’t know from what direction.
I run forward, seeing the picnic table getting closer and closer. I hear a scream and turn my head to see Jason falling to the ground. I know he didn’t trip, and that only happens in shitty, clichéd horror movies. My adrenaline is pumping at one-hundred percent. Jason was taken down. He is screaming for help, but Julie keeps running. I can’t blame her. There is a five-hundred-and-fifty-pound African lion taking Jason down. His screams are quickly muffled as the lion tears out his throat.
“Run, Julie!” I scream to her as I jump up on the picnic table.
Julie lowers her head and focuses on the table. She jumps about two feet away and land right on top of it. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing.
“Don’t stop!” I shout. “Keep moving towards the gift shop.”
We immediately start hopping from table to table as we make our way toward the exit. My mind wanders to when I was a kid playing ‘don’t-touch-the-ground-it’s-made-of-lava.’ Now it’s not lava, and it’s certainly not a game.
Some of the tables are so close enough together that we can just run across them, and others are separated enough that we need to jump. I am looking for the close tables, as the extra weight of Fi on my back really reduces my jumping. I hear Julie scream as she falls jumping from one table to the next.
“
Julie!
” I scream. I stop and contemplate leaving her. I can’t do it. I run back to find her.
I can see that the animals have been following us the entire time. They have a look in their eyes that tell me they know they could take us whenever they wanted too. I continue looking for Julie.
“Julie … Julie!” I scream “Goddamnit!” I yell. Then, from the corner of my eye, I see the foggy outline of something crawling onto the table to my left. I don’t hesitate. I stab into the air with the combat knife not even knowing how far away the animal is. I am either going to hit air or flesh.
I feel the knife sink into the target and I smile. Luck is on my side, but then my entire body freezes as I hear a gasp of air escape from the target I have just stabbed.
It was Julie.
I feel her blood begin to pool and leak out around the groove of the K-Bar knife. It is warm as it flows over my hand. I turn to her. Our eyes meet, and she has a look of surprise and pain. I look down to see that I had thrust the knife right below the ribcage.
“I’m… I’m,” words escape me.
Julie’s face scrunches up as the pain finally spreads out to every inch of her body. She starts to cry. She puts her hands on my shoulders and in a whisper, says, “Run. You can still make it.” She then pushes herself off the knife and falls to the ground. She is immediately attacked by a deer and a pig.
I stand there in shock as the world around me runs in slow motion. I just killed a human being. Every heroic illusion I had of today’s events has just melted away. I killed a human being who did nothing but help me protect my daughter and serve as my eyes.
I killed her.
I feel the same paralysis I had when I was ten years old watching my best friend being mauled to death by a dog. The only difference is that I didn’t have my daughter clinging to my back all those years ago.
“Come on, Daddy! Move!
”
I hear the panicked voice in my ear. I shake my head and see how close we are. I jump two more tables, then to the ground and run like hell.
We make it to the gift shop.
My emotions are getting away from me. On the one hand, Fi and I made it to the gift shop, and we are that much closer to getting the hell out of this zoo. But looking around, it doesn’t feel like we are any safer than when we were in the woods.
The doors are unlocked. We quickly ran into the building and slammed the doors behind us. Fi is smiling and I force myself to smile back at her. Our goal was to reach the gift shop and we did it. She feels as though we made it to safety, and I’m not about to tell her that we were still far from safe. If those animals wanted in, they were coming in.
I don’t even bother to look for weapons. We’re in the fucking gift shop of a zoo, and just what the hell am I going to find? I take a bench and some chairs inside the shop and prop them against the door. The animals are out there just watching us. A wolf and a house cat have replaced the deer and pig and are tearing apart and eating Julie. My eyes well up.
“What happened to Julie?” Fi asks.
She hadn’t seen it happen. Fi doesn’t know that I accidentally stabbed and killed Julie. Tears run down my cheeks.
“She fell off the table, sweetie. She… just fell,” I say, trying not to cry.
Fi is staring out among the animals. “I’m gonna miss her, Daddy. She was nice.”
“Me too, sweetie. I’m gonna miss her too.” I watch Fi looking out the door at the animals. In the course of one day, she has become desensitized to violence. My little girl was forced to grow up very quickly.
I go over to the cooler and get us a couple of waters. We drink them in silence, Fi still looking out the door, and me getting lost in my head.
I have a million questions, but the one nagging me the most is, why the animals didn’t attack us. They could have taken us down any time they wanted. We were running on top of picnic tables, and it wasn’t as if we were thirty feet above them. I just can’t put these questions to rest. I feel sick to my stomach thinking about Julie, but I am trying to remain strong for Fi.
Then it hit me. “Julie… sick…” My mind is racing as I try to figure out what the hell is going on. My eyes grow wide. “That can’t be it,” I say. Fi is staring at me.
“What, Daddy?” she asks, confused.
There is no point in trying to hide what I am thinking. With everything Fi has seen and been through today, she deserves to get an explanation. It might help her process everything.
“Well, sweetie, I can’t help but keep wondering why those animals didn’t get us as we were running to the gift shop.”
“Is it because you’re really fast, Daddy?”
I smile. I really love this kid. “No, sweetie. The animals got Brice and Jason almost as soon as we started heading for the doors here.” The pieces are coming together. “They didn’t go after Julie until I…” I stop myself before I say “stabbed her.” Fi is looking at me, but that’s it. They didn’t attack Julie until after she was injured.
The animals were thinning out our ranks by eliminating the injured. Brice had possibly broken ribs, Jason’s collarbone was shattered, and Julie… Julie was injured. Fi and I only have a couple of scratches on us. Nothing more. We are healthy and uninjured.
Instead of these thoughts making me feel better, they are starting to make me feel more uneasy.
Why the fuck aren’t they attacking the healthy? Do they have other plans for us?
I think.
Then another thought slams into my mind. We never found the bodies of the kids taken from us back in the woods. Where are they?
5
Sils Research Lab
Butsko is going over the history of Jim, “patient zero.” Since Wilder and his men brought him to the facility, he’s been placed in complete isolation and sedated, although it hasn’t seemed as though he’s needed the drugs.
As doctors and lab technicians are doing their hourly checks, one seems to notice activity from the subject. “Sir,” the lab tech says to Butsko. “Could you come over here?” Everyone in the room walked over to see what the tech was looking at.
Jim is just lying there.
“Sir,” one of the doctors says. “It looks as if he’s dreaming.” The man is looking at the read out from the electroencephalograph (EEG), which is, of course, not registering anything. For all accounts and purposes, Jim is dead.
“I agree, Sir,” another doctor says excitedly. “We have rapid eye movement. I think the subject is dreaming.”
Butsko frowns. “Dreaming,” he whispers. Then he says, “What the hell… no, scratch that.” Butsko tries to organize his thoughts. “How the hell can a dead man dream, and what could he possibly be dreaming about?” No one has any answers.
“It’s not so much what he’s dreaming about, Sir,” the first doctor replies. “It’s more of what the dreaming is doing for him.” Everyone stops and looks at the doctor.
“Go on, Williams,” Butsko says.
“We still don’t know the exact function of REM sleep, but there are a couple of theories. One suggests that certain memories are consolidated during REM sleep, thereby strengthening the relevant or important memories and weeding out less important ones.” Williams stops to let that sink in.
“Okay,” Butsko says. “That doesn’t seem to be relevant here at all.”
“I agree,” Williams says. “Another theory postulates that REM sleep is required in order for our neurotransmitters to recover and regain full sensitivity. Almost like recharging the batteries in our heads.” He pauses long enough to see if there were any readouts coming from the EEG. There aren’t. He continues, “The theory I’m partial to, called the Ontogenetic Hypothesis, says REM sleep is so important because it helps develop the brain through neural stimulation. We know that REM sleep in newborns helps them develop their nervous system by forging more mature neural connections.”
Butsko looks at Williams. “In English please.”
“Okay,” Williams replies. “Think of it like this: every night you shut down your computer into hibernation mode. Now, instead of all functions ceasing, say another program kicks in that might clean up the hard drive and reorganize all the information to make it more efficient and, in a sense, ‘smarter.’”
All eyes are still on him. Finally, another doctor, Levine, interrupts, “If I may,” he says. “So even though your computer seems to be doing nothing after you shut it down, it’s still performing various functions in order to make sense out of all the information it received during the day.”
“So the brain, while in REM sleep, is making itself better and rejuvenating itself?” Butsko asks.
“Essentially, yes,” Levine responds.
“Which brings us back to my original question about our subject over here,” Butsko says, nodding toward Jim, still laying on the table. “What could a dead man’s brain possibly be trying to process and reorganize?”
Before anyone can answer, the lab tech closest to Jim yells, “Holy shit!” Everyone runs over to the containment chamber that Jim is in. “His… his eyes, Sir,” the tech says. “He opened his eyes.”
***
Jim can feel himself swimming in darkness: a warm, embracing darkness. He isn’t scared to be out here all alone. He knows something special is happening inside him. He can feel a new purpose emerging.
Right now, all he has is a hunger.
The drugs being pumped into his system in steady intervals are helping to keep the hunger at bay for now. He can feel it just under the surface, always present.
He hears all the doctors and experts theorizing about what is going on. He is interested because he wants to know what is happening to him. He is curious, but not scared. The hunger lets him know that he is still alive and has some bigger purpose to fulfill. He is aware of what is going on.
On various occasions, he hears different doctors saying he is dead. He hears them say he has no pulse and that he isn’t breathing.