Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

It was funny. People came to the zoo to goggle at animals they’d never seen outside of books, but it was like they thought that alone was enough to conserve the planet: just paying their admission meant that they could litter, and feed chocolate to the monkeys, and throw rocks at the tigers when they weren’t active enough to suit their sugar-fueled fantasies.

Nothing ruined working with animals like the need to work with people at the same time. But in the mornings, ah! In the mornings, before the gates opened, everything was perfect.

Cassandra walked along the elegant footpath carved into the vast swath of green between the gift shop and the timber wolf enclosure—people picnicked here in the summer, enjoying the great outdoors, sometimes taking in an open-air concert from the bandstand on the other side of the carefully maintained field—and smiled to herself, content with her life choices.

One of the other zookeepers strolled across the green up ahead, dressed in khakis like the rest of the staff. The only thing out of place was the thick white bandage wrapped around his left bicep. It was an excellent patch job, and yet…

“Michael!”

He stopped at the sound of his name, and turned to watch as she trotted to catch up with him. His face split in a smile when she was halfway there.

“Cassie,” he said. “Just the girl I was hoping to see.”

“What did you do to yourself this time?” she asked, trying to make the question sound as light as she could. Michael worked with their small predators, the raccoons and otters and opossums. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that one of them could have bitten him. If he reported it, it would reflect poorly on him, and on the zoo. If he didn’t, and it got infected…

There were things that could kill or cripple a zoo. An employee failing to report an injury was on the list.

“No,” he said, and grimaced sheepishly. “It was my roommate.”

“What?”

“My roommate, Carl. He was weird this morning. Not talking, just sort of wandering aimlessly around the front room. I thought he was hungover again. I figured I’d help him back to bed—but as soon as he realized I was there, he lunged for me and he bit me.” Michael shook his head. “Asshole. I’m going to tell him I’m through with this shit when I get home tonight. He’s never been late with his share of the rent, but enough’s enough, you know?”

“I do,” said Cassandra, with another anxious glance at the bandage. “You want me to take over your feedings for the morning?”

“Please. I cleaned it out and wrapped it up as best I could. I did a pretty decent job, if I do say so myself. There’s still a chance the smell of blood could get through the gauze, and well…”

“We don’t need to exacerbate a human bite with a bunch of animal ones, even though the animal bites would be cleaner.” Cassandra frowned. “You’re sure it’s cleaned out? I can take a look, if you want.”

“No, really, I’m good. I just wanted to ask about the feedings, and it turned out I didn’t need to.” Michael’s grin seemed out of place on the face of a man who’d just been assaulted. “That’s our oracle.”

“Ha ha,” said Cassandra. “Get to work. I’ll do your feedings after I finish mine.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Michael, and resumed his progress across the green, seemingly no worse for wear. Cassandra frowned. It was entirely like him to brush off something as unusual and traumatic as being bitten by his own roommate, and it wasn’t her place to get involved. At the same time, the situation wasn’t right. People didn’t just start biting.

“Classic Cassandra,” she muttered. “If you can’t find a catastrophe, you’ll invent one. Get over yourself.”

She started walking again, trying to shake the feeling that some of the brightness had gone out of the day. The sky was clear; the sun was shining; one little bit of human weirdness shouldn’t have been enough to dampen her enthusiasm. But it was. It always was. Humans were strange. Animals made sense.

A tiger would always act like a tiger. It might do things she didn’t expect, might bite when she thought it was happy to see her, or scratch when it had no reason to be threatened, but those times were on her, the human: she was the one who’d been trained on how to interact with wild animals, how to read the signs and signals that they offered. There was no class for tigers, to tell them how to deal with the strange, bipedal creatures who locked them in cages and refused to let them out to run. Tigers had to figure everything out on their own, and if they got it wrong sometimes, who could blame them? They didn’t know the rules.

People, though… people were supposed to know the rules. People weren’t supposed to bite each other, or treat each other like obstacles to be defeated. Michael was a good guy. He cared about the animals he was responsible for, and he didn’t slack off when he had duties to attend to. He wasn’t like Lauren from the aviary, who smoked behind the lorikeet feeding cage sometimes, and didn’t care if the birds were breathing it in. He wasn’t like Donald from the African safari exhibit, either, who liked to flirt with female guests, talking to their breasts when he should have been watching to be sure that little kids didn’t jab sticks at the giraffes. Michael was a good guy.

So why was she so unsettled?

Cassandra walked a little faster. Work would make things better. Work always did.

The big cats were uneasy when Cassandra let herself into the narrow hall that ran back behind their feeding cages. They should have been in the big enclosures by this hour of the morning, sunning themselves on the rocks. Instead, they were pacing back and forth, not even snarling at each other, although her big male lion normally snarled at anything else feline that got close enough for him to smell. Cassandra stopped, the feeling of wrongness that had arrived with Michael blossoming into something bigger and brighter.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

The big cats, unable to answer her, continued to pace. She walked over to the first cage, where her female tiger, Andi, was prowling. She pressed the palm of her hand against the bars. That should have made Andi stop, made her come over to sniff at Cassandra’s fingers, checking them for interesting new smells. Instead, Andi kept pacing, grumbling to herself in the low tones of a truly distressed tiger.

“You’re not going to delight many families today if you keep hanging out back here,” said Cassandra, trying to cover her concern with a quip. It was a small coping mechanism, but one that had served her well over the years: her therapist said that it was a means of distancing herself from situations she didn’t want to be a part of.

It was funny how her therapist never suggested anything better. Surely there were situations that no one wanted to be a part of. What were people supposed to do then?

“All right,” said Cassandra. “I’ll go see what’s going on. You stay where you are.” She pressed the button that would close the tigers in their feeding cages, keeping them from venturing into the larger enclosure. Then she counted noses.

It was unlikely that she would ever mistake three tigers for four tigers, but it only took once. No matter how much they liked her, no matter how often she fed them, they would still be tigers, and she would still be a human being. They would eat her as soon as look at her if she caught them in the wrong mood, and then they would be put down for the crime of being exactly what nature intended them to be. So she counted noses, not to save herself, but to save them.