“Well, should we go check it out?”
Annaliese looked back at Ripley Hall. The doors were closed and a majority of the windows were obscured by curtains. With the additional cover of the sycamore trees on the lawn, the infected people in the house should not be able to see outside. If everyone kept their distance, then the infected people in the house should pose no risk. But there were still infected people outside the house, wandering the grounds of the zoo and park. As long as they were around, it still wasn’t safe – they would all be forced to hole up inside the reptile house and would be no better off than they had been in the kitchen.
With adrenaline still coursing through her veins, Annaliese made a decision. “Let’s go find out what it is. We need to know what we’re up against.”
Mike seemed to be in a similar state of mind as she was. He nodded grimly, a look of determined resolution etched across his increasingly handsome features.
She honed in on the direction of the commotion – which was getting louder and more frenzied – and headed towards the far side of the zoo.
“What do you think it is?” Mike asked. “That sound. It’s like a monster or something.”
“It’s not a monster,” she said, recognising the noises.
Mike asked her what she meant, but she ignored him. She picked up speed and headed deeper into the zoo. Once she knew exactly where the noises were coming from, she made a beeline for the source. The various animals in their exhibits were awake, disturbed by the commotion and making sounds of their own. A sty full of pigs squealed as she passed by.
But there were no infected people anywhere.
“Where are we heading?” Mike asked her as he struggled to keep up.
She didn’t need to answer his question because they were already there. She stumbled against a nearby bin as she looked on at the carnage in front of her.
“Yikes,” said Mike.
Half-a-dozen infected, including the one that had attacked her earlier, had scaled the walls of the orang-utan enclosure. They were attacking the primates inside.
Annaliese watched in horror as Lily placed her baby in the elevated safety of the habitat’s mangrove tree. She swiped and hissed at the infected as they closed in on her and her child. The male orang-utan, Brick, was rushing back and forth, clubbing the invaders whenever they got close enough. He let out an ear-splitting screech with every blow, his animalistic rage overcoming him as he fought to protect his family. As Annaliese stared harder, she noticed that the male primate held a fist-sized rock in his palm and was using it to bludgeon his attackers.
“How do we help?” Mike asked her.
Annaliese shrugged. It hurt her heart to say so, but there was nothing they could do. “We can’t do anything,” she said. “The drop over those walls is fifteen foot to the moat on the other side. We’ll break our legs. Just look at the people inside.”
All of the infected in the enclosure sported broken legs, arms or ribs, depending on how they’d landed. Bones jutted from broken skin and bled profusely. Of course, the injuries were ignored by them – their ability to feel pain completely absent – and they attacked regardless.
“Do you think that’s all of them?” Mike asked.
“I think so. This must be all of the ones that followed me through the window, or maybe one or two that wondered out the house before we closed the doors. It’s strange.”
“What is?”
“They must have stumbled past a dozen different animal enclosures on their way here, but they only chose this one to invade. They ignored the pigs, the birds, the horses.”
“Maybe they only attack people. Maybe orang-utans are close enough to confuse them.”