Raccoon City

Raccoon City, Pennsylvania

September 26, 2018 –

Moby Dick

Leon whispered, "...run."

And they already were.

They didn't look. They ran. The barreled into the zoo and Kevin slammed the gate in their wake, wrapping the chain fast and desperate. He was far behind them by the time he took to running in their wake.

It was a bold move to lock the gate. A brave one. And it might get him killed for it.

But it stopped the gazelles that hit it first. They whinnied and squealed, screaming for blood, smashing into the metal in a hoard of hungry frenzy.

At the main concourse for the zoo, a pretty fountain showed a bathing seal spilling water into the sparkling pool beneath his rock. They cut left, around the fountain, racing toward the main gate. Leon couldn't bring himself to look at the exhibit beside him as they ran.

It was broken and warped bars. It was blood splattered all over the dirt and the trees around it. It had once been the beautiful, gentle, wonderful meerkats. It was nothing now but corpses and death.

Thunder rumbled and rain spilled wet and warm down on them as they ran.

The gate didn't last long. They heard it scream, almost like a person, almost like a promise of pain - as Dumbo the mutated elephant tore it down and came for them. A horrible tableau of a freakish circus that Ryan Murphy might have used once in American Horror Story. This nightmare didn't end when the show did. It just got worse.

Leon jerked Claire's arm to throw her left as they tried to find a way out of the charging path of the angry African beast. It smashed through concourse on hooves big enough to crush a man. A shambling set of zombies dared to emerge from the corner of the fountain, moaning pitifully and were trampled beneath the crushing stamp of those massive feet.

They splattered like a water balloon chucked down from a roof onto the hot pavement - making a horrible squelching slurp of sound as their bodies became pools of congealed blood and bone turned to dust.

Claire breathed, "Oh god..."

And Leon kicked open the door that was locked before them. Without looking he tossed her into the aviary with Cindy shortly behind them. Kevin was so far back. So far back there. He was losing ground to the elephant when he shouted, "GO! GOOOOO NOW! LEAVE ME!"

Cindy screamed, "KEVIN! NO!"

And Leon slammed the door on the aviary, shoving the women forward. "You heard him! GO!"

They stumbled, Cindy weeping madly, even as they ran for it. The aviary was filled with tweeting birds. Were birds unaffected by the virus? Were they immune?

The second they hit the bridge to cross the small pond beneath them, the answer became clear: no.

They were dive bombed by maddened birds. They caught in your hair and pecked at your face. Claire threw up her arms to block her skin while Cindy smacked them out of the sky with the fanny-pack like a weapon. The small birds were harmless, but annoying, but the eagle that came at them was deadly.

It called hungrily and went for Leon's face. Its beak caught the tip of his left ear and took a slice from it. Claire screamed and smacked it, open handed, like you'd swat a fly. It squawked and circled back around to come at them again.

It was missing an eye. The socket was empty and bleeding. The beautiful symbol of their great country was rotting. They could see inside its chest cavity where the delicate flesh and pretty white feathers had sloughed away from the bone.

It came for them again, inciting a battle cry to rally the other birds. It was clearly the leader. Leon breathed, hands shaking, and stopped running. Claire and Cindy hit the far side and called for him. But he couldn't do it. He couldn't leave it.

It was the great bald eagle. It deserved peace. He waited for it to come for him, calling for blood, and he blew its face apart with a single shot between the eyes. It twirled almost prettily for a moment before it plummeted into the water beneath.

The rage trembled around him as he ran out of the aviary with the woman. The virus had eroded even that. Even that gentle symbol of freedom was ruined. There was nothing worth saving in this city.

The aviary opened to the Safari walk of the zoo. It promised the viewer a series of incredible things -

Big Cat Country: The King Of Beasts - The lion.

The leopard.

The black panther.

The list went on for all the incredible, rare, and lethal beasts that waited beyond the walkway.

It signaled the second path toward the waterway exhibit -

Come see the killer whales! Come see the rare white alligators! Meet a seal! Swim with a dolphin!

Jesus.

What a joy it must have been here once.

Cindy breathed, "This is what happens when you cage something that was meant to be instinctively free."

She wasn't entirely wrong. Zoos were often depressing enough for those who believed nothing should be put on display that was meant to roam wild. Wherever they were, most of the things in the exhibits they passed were missing. They were free now, Leon thought, and hopefully not close by.

Big Cat Country crossed above exhibits with electric fences and overhangs. It was really a bridge above the deadliest cats in the world. As they moved, Leon glanced down into the dark, even though there was no hope of seeing anything beneath them but shadows.

Cindy was still crying softly as Claire tried to comfort her, "He knows what he's doing, Cindy. He probably cut left and went through the Ape House to get back toward the main gate. Don't give up."

Leon reached the end of the rise to the doors leading into the tram station and cursed, softly. "It's electronically sealed."

Claire froze, watching him turn toward them, "What?"

"It's sealed with a coded electronic lock. The door is steel. We have to restore power to this damn door to get into this building."

Cindy looked horrified. "How do we do that?!"

There was a ruffle of sound besides them. Leon and Claire were both aiming without realizing it. They glanced at each other in admiration before a tiny voice whispered, "...there's a generator in the maintenance shed on the east side of the zoo. It powers the whole grid in case of emergencies."

A bush was talking to them.

A bush.

In a night where elephants were trying to kill them, hellhounds were chasing them into a tunnel with killer spiders and flesh-eating zombies, it shouldn't have been funny. But it kinda was.

Leon called, "Come out, slowly. Please."

A small blonde woman emerged out of the bush, looking pale and frightened. She wore a khaki zoo vest and a walkie-talkie on her hip. She was thin and pretty with a curling tail of blonde hair along her shoulder in a svelte little coil.

She was also the woman in the photograph Leon held.

He made a sound and pulled it out, showing it to her. "Are you Alex?"

Alex blinked blue eyes, putting her hand out for the photo. She glanced at it -her smiling face and the dead man in the office. Her eyes teared up, "...Ewan."

Leon patted her arm sympathetically, "I'm sorry. He's..." He trailed off.

Alex nodded, putting the photo in her pocket of her vest. "Thank you. I understood why he locked the gate. I-we-the last of us...I didn't blame him. But others?" She shook her head.

Leon encouraged, "Are there others with you?"

She shook her head again, sadly, "I lost Amanda in the Ape House trying to get first-aid for Stu at Garden Cafe down front. She...the silverback gorilla...it was-it just-and we couldn't..." She dissolved into silence, shaking.

Cindy moved in to hug her without a word. The woman clung, shivering.

She finally whispered, "...I just ran while it smashed her into the bars and the glass. I just ran. I left her there. I left her..."

She wept openly now and Claire turned away to look back the way they'd come. Leon murmured supportively, "Don't blame yourself. There was nothing you could have done. If you hadn't run, you'd both be dead now. There's no shame in surviving."

A good speech, Claire mused, from a man who didn't really believe it.

Alex sniffled and wiped a hand under her running nose as she let go of Cindy. "Thank you...we can..." she coughed to clear her throat, "We can use the generator to bring power back to the zoo. It should let us get through the doors here into the tram station. I've heard it running until about an hour ago when the power went off. I got here and was too cowardly to turn around and go back by myself to try to start the generator."

Leon nodded, glancing at Claire. He considered things for a moment and finally said, "You three should wait here. I'll go start the generator."

Cindy shook her head, adamantly, "I am NOT waiting here! That elephant is still out there. Kevin is out there. And god knows what else. Splitting up is a really bad idea."

Alex added, "I'll go with you. I should. I have the passcodes for the locks. I have the keys for the exhibits. The last time I was down that way, the power was still on. The swamp exhibit is dangerous without electrified fences. We'll need to go through the whale habitat and cross underground to avoid it."

Leon sighed, shaking his head, "It's a bad idea to go that way together. I don't think I can protect all of us at once."

Claire arched both brows, "...I'm pretty sure we can work together on that, Kennedy. Don't worry."

He sighed, glancing at Alex, "Any chance you can use a gun?"

She shook her head sadly, "Never even held one."

With a sound of surrender, he gestured with his head, "Ok. When in Rome right? Let's get moving. Maybe Kevin is hiding somewhere close by."

Alex whispered, "...there's...the security office is down by the maintenance shed too. If-if we-if we can just get down there and get the elephant gun..."

Leon froze, looking at her, "...you have something that can stop that thing?"

Alex nodded, eagerly, "Of course. It's there with the sniper file they have just in case one of the exhibits gets infiltrated by a guest and they have to employ force."

Claire mused, thoughtfully, "What the hell is an "elephant gun" anyway?"

Leon shook his head as they walked, looking eager. "A big ass gun. The Holland and Holland I saw once set the guy firing it on his ass. It shoots a .700 Nitro Express cartridge. That beast fires a 1,000-grain bullet at a velocity of like two thousand feet per second."

Claire blinked, "You think you can handle that kind of thing?"

He gave her a bland look until she chuckled a bit and shrugged. "Sorry. Just asking."

Alex stayed very close to him as they walked. Leon noticed she was worrying a string of beads between her fingers like a comfort blanket. They fell silent as they turned down the small stairway to the underground tunnel through the whale exhibit.

Admittedly, it was once awesome.

If the power was on, the tunnel - entirely surrounded by water- was self-propelled, escorting the viewer through like an escalator as you took in the beautiful sight of natural aquatic life at play. Now the tunnel was dark and the water surrounding them murky and empty. Occasionally, you could glimpse the bloated corpse of a dead fish or an expired dolphin that floated by. The filmy whites of their eyes were the only thing seen in the foggy waves beyond the glass tunnel.

Claire looked so stricken that Leon finally asked, "What?"

"I remember coming through this for the first time a few years ago. I almost cried because it was so wonderful. I made faces at a hippo. I listened to the music of the humpback whale as it went by. It was..." She trailed off, her voice breaking.

Cindy put her arm around her, looking pale. "It was so beautiful."

Alex nodded, sniffling.

Leon said nothing, moving through the dark with them. It was worse somehow that this city had once been an architectural marvel. Worse to corrupt something that was so beautiful and pure. Nature turned black with man-made disease was too terrible for words.

They were halfway across when the first whomp of sound found them. Claire paused, narrowing her eyes into the dark above them. "You hear that?"

It was distant, nearly indiscernible - until it came again to the left. Leon turned his gaze and the light in his hand. It flickered and danced against the glass and the dark water beyond...and settled on the glistening fin of the killer whale.

It was just there, watching them.

The rot had turned it into something out of a Steven King novel. Its upper jaw was almost entirely bone and swirling blood that looked black in the dark waters. The parasite it held had turned it macabre.

Its fan was sheered back into bloody chunks and split down the middle giving it two to the naked eye. Its eyes were red like the devil, pooled in the pinkened muscle surrounding the bare sockets - bleeding like something out of a nightmare. Its rib cage was entirely displayed on one side, the bare white bone somehow obscene amongst the eroding flesh and muscle. It nudged the glass with it's disintegrating snout, almost gently.

Claire whispered, "...Shamu from hell..."

Apparently, Shamu hated that insult the most. It reared back and spun, smashing its massive bulk into the glass with a force so great it shook the tunnel. They stumbled, Cindy grabbed Alex to stay upright. Alex shouted, "Oh god! It will crack the glass if it keeps doing that!"

Jesus Christ - she was right.

As if she'd invited the universe to shit on them, evil Shamu smashed the glass against with its weight and it was joined now by two great whites that made Jaws look like a guppie.

Leon shouted, "GO! Get to the door!"

If they cracked the glass, being eaten alive was the least of their worries. They'd die quickly that way. If that water touched them, they'd die infected and drowning. Infected in the dark while mutated sharks devoured them. It was almost worse than dying crushed by an enormous elephant.

They were running. They were running like they'd win the marathon and take home the gold. The tunnel was so long - made that way to offer such beautiful views of the aquatic habitat constructed with love. Infected fish blubbered by, smacking into the tank sides as if to aid to its demise.

There was no beauty here.

They might have gotten out without anything but a scare, but Shamu had company now. With a great SLAP of sound, a colossal squid attached itself to the tunnel. It was oozing blood and ink into the water, the putrid rotting suction cups on its many legs gripping the glass with a gleeful hunger. It was missing both eyes, the empty sockets filled instead with bloody nerve endings, trailing like snot in the fetid water.

They passed under it, running for their lives.

The door was still a hundred yards away when the CRACK split the air. Alex screamed, "4-1-2-1!"

And Leon felt the first droplet of water on his face. They were out of time.

He hit the panel on the door and crammed his fingers at the lock on it, turning the dials in a desperate rush.

The tank made another audible crack and the water rushed through, racing around their feet in a pooling circle. The air seemed to get sucked out of the tunnel with the water that raced in. It was suddenly hard to breathe in the once beautiful glass circle.

He clicked the last number on the lock and the door slid upward on rusty hinges. It was so slow, impossibly slow, Cindy crab walked through with Alex beside her when it was waist level...and the tunnel finished cracking.

It split with a sound like nothing Leon had ever heard. It screamed, like a banshee, the glass giving way as it was ripped apart under the assault of aquatic life meant to live in the wilds of the wide open ocean. The water gushed in so fast there was no time to do anything but duck under and pray.

Later, he'd think maybe he was cursed.

Claire was halfway under the door when the tentacle wrapped around his throat. It looped so fast that it was almost comic. The force of it stole his breath and jerked him toward the cracking glass directly above him.