Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

She could see the parking lot from her current position. There were dead, shambling people moving there, too. As she watched, a group of them caught up with a screaming man and drove him to the ground, where he vanished beneath a hail of bodies. This wasn’t contained to the zoo. This could never have been contained.

Cassandra turned her back on the scene in the front plaza. She had work to do.

Any disease that hit this hard and spread this exponentially was going to overwhelm the city in a matter of hours: that was just simple math. One was bad; two was worse; four was a disaster. The numbers kept climbing from there, until she reached the point where the dead outnumbered the living, and there was nothing left to do but die.

If she hadn’t been bitten, she might have tried to find another way. The big cat house, especially, had hundreds of pounds of raw meat stored in the freezers, just in case, and doors that were designed to stand up to a raging male lion. She could have locked herself inside with her beloved cats. She could have tried to wait it out.

But her arm burned, throbbing with every heartbeat, and she was starting to feel… bad. Feverish. Like she wanted nothing more than to lay down for a nap, to close her eyes and let her body finish the transition it was clearly aching to undergo. She needed to act quickly, before she was no longer equipped to act at all.

She began with the herbivores. She opened doors and propped gates, leaving the avenues of escape open for anything that wanted to take them. By the time she made her way to the aviary, there were zebras cropping at the lawn, ears flicking wildly back and forth as they scanned for danger. A kangaroo went bounding away down a side path, all but flying in its haste to get away. If there were dead people lurking in the bushes, they weren’t fast enough to catch it.

The birds knew something was wrong. As she opened their cages, they flew away, wings clawing at the air, and were gone. Some of them would make it. Some of them had to make it.

Slowly, almost shambling now, she made her way back to the big cat house. The smell of decay was less noticeable now, maybe because she was adding to it. Maybe because her nose was dying with the rest of her.

There were so many doors she hadn’t opened. There were so many cages she hadn’t unlocked. But there wasn’t time, and she didn’t want to endanger her animals. Not in the end. Not when the burning in her arm had become nothing more than a dull and distant throb, like the nerves were giving up.

The tigers stopped their pacing when she came into view, staring at her silently. Cassandra pulled out her keys.

“Try… not to eat me, okay?” she rasped, and started down the line of cages. One by one, she unlocked them, leaving them standing open. When she finished with the tigers, she began releasing the lions, the cheetahs, until she was at the end of the hallway with a dozen massive predators between her and freedom. They looked at her. She looked at them.

One by one, they turned and walked away, heading for the open door; heading for freedom. Cassandra followed them until she reached the main door to the tiger enclosure. Her fingers didn’t want to cooperate, didn’t want to work the key or let her turn the lock. She fought through the numbness, until the bolt clicked open and she stepped through, into the open air on the other side.

The door, unbraced, swung shut and locked itself behind her. Cassandra didn’t care.

Stumbling, she walked across the uneven ground to the rock where her big male liked to sun himself during the hottest hours of the day. She sat down. She closed her eyes. In the distance, the merry-go-round played on, a soft counterpart to the slowing tempo of her heart.

Cassandra stayed where she was, and waited for the music to stop.

Our first night out on the ice, we traded war stories. Reyes, Viader, Kellet, Martinez, Ramone, McMann, and me. We were all career military, all career grunts, none of us with aspirations for command. Captain Adams hand-picked us, brought us to the top of the world—a blue place all ice and snow and screaming wind—with only the vaguest idea of our mission. And none of us had cared. We’d signed on the dotted line, and had ourselves ready at 0500 on the tarmac, as expected.

The plane had dropped us at a base camp that used to be an Artic research station. We were all too restless for sleep yet, so we sat around the table and the remains of our meal, and talked.

“Why do you think Adams chose us for the mission? Why us in particular?” Reyes asked.

“To hell with that,” Viader said. “What is the mission? Does anyone know?” She looked around the table.

“Extraction?” Martinez shrugged, underlining it as a guess. “We’re here to get something top secret the military wants very badly.”

“Okay,” Reyes said. “So my questions again. Why us? None of us are anything special.”

He looked around for confirmation; our silence agreed.

“My guess?” Kellet leaned back as she spoke, balancing her chair on two legs. “Because we’re all fucked up.”

When she leaned forward, her chair thumped down hard. The table would have jumped if Martinez and McMann hadn’t been leaning on it. Kellet pointed at me first.

“You. What’s your story? Syria? Iraq?”

“I was in Al-Raqqah.” My stomach dropped, but I kept my voice calm.

“And?” Kellet’s eyes were a challenge, bristling like a guard dog in front of her own pain.

“I was working an aid station on the edge of a refugee camp, distributing food, medicine, the basics.” Under the table, my palms sweated.

Kellet leaned forward; Ramone fidgeted. Six pairs of eyes gave me their attention, some hungry, and some looking away in mirrored shame.

“I was handing a package of diapers to a young mother with a little boy on her hip, and another by the hand. Then the world turned black and red and everything went upside down.”

I paused; instead of the room, the world flickered briefly, black and red.

“I was blown off my feet and ended up across the street, but I saw the second supply truck go up in a ball of flame. The first thing that came back was the smell.”

“Burning hair,” Viader said.

“Burning skin.” This from Ramone.

I looked down. Snow ticked against the windows. Wind—cold and sharp as a knife—sighed around the corners of the research station. It sounded like teeth and nails, trying to get in. But I felt heat, the blooming fireball pushing me back, death breathing out and flattening me to the ground.

“The woman’s legs were gone,” I said. Silence, but for the snow. “But she kept crawling toward her baby, even though there was no way it was still alive. The other kid, her little boy, was vaporized on impact.”

“You thought about killing her.” Martinez’s voice was soft, the intonation not quite a question. I raised my head, the muscles at the back of my neck aching and putting dull pain into my skull. “Putting her out of her misery?”

“Yes.” The word left my throat raw. I’d never admitted it out loud; I’d barely admitted it to myself. Until now.

McMann produced a bottle. I didn’t even look to see what it was before shooting back the measure he poured me and letting him refill my glass. My hands shook; they didn’t stop as I swallowed again and again. The bottle went around, and so did the stories, variations on a theme. An IED tearing apart a market square, a hospital blown to smithereens instead of a military base; a landmine taking out three humanitarian aid workers.