Cage The Dead (15 page)

Solomon stared at her, her back to him. “Gaia is making a safe home for the family,” she signed to him, and he nodded ‘yes’ that he understood, before quickly going back to eating another leaf on the potted plant.

 It was in that moment that Gaia came to realize just how much attention the caretakers of the house had given to ensuring that the plants were placed in such a way as to receive the appropriate amount of sunlight beneath the expansive sunroof.

It was then that the sounds of approaching footsteps from behind stole her appreciative contemplation— though she did need to water them immediately!—and she turned to see Justin, wrapped in a towel. His hair was soaking wet as he stood behind her, also watching Solomon intently, he smiled at the gorilla and clapped his hands, and she in turn smiled at his reaction.

Suddenly Maye was with them again. Gaia, despite her losses and various injuries, was gratified in that moment to have these two amazing animals and Justin with which to share her experiences.

She did admit, in a moment of weakness and self-pity, that she might not have anyone with which to share things on a mature emotional level again for many years, until perhaps Justin were much older. That saddened her deeply, as connecting with a mature person on adult problems had proven important and therapeutic to Gaia in her past.

Her lamentations were cut short once again when a stabbing pain from her injured foot occupied her senses, followed by a much duller one. She fished in her jacket pocket and found the bottle of pills, removed the lid and popped a pair. She shook the bottle and realized that there were only a few left. She’d have to get into that medical facility maybe tomorrow, she decided. She could check the generator and refill her pain meds while she was at it, as well as getting a first aid kit to keep inside the house.

She shambled off into the living room and decided to lie down. Her foot was throbbing and she needed to elevate it, and resting ad recuperating all day today would certainly be a good start. Her first priority had to be to getting healthy.

“Justin, please do me a favor once you get dressed….” She waited for him to respond and stared into the porch area, where he and Solomon were interacting. It seemed as though the silverback was teaching the boy a thing or two about communicating. She couldn’t be sure, but that’s what it seemed. Solomon was always proven to be a higher intellect among any primate she’d ever been around—so were Molly and Maye for that matter—but the gorilla seemed even smarter and more cognizant these past few days. It was merely a feeling she’d had when signing with him the last day or so, as if he knew what she was going to say.

Could be the meds
, she thought.

“Did you call me, Miss Gaia?” Justin asked, still wrapped in his towel.

“I did. You clothes are in the dryer upstairs and I need to rest my foot. Would you please go around to all the doors and windows on the first floor here and make sure they are all closed and locked for me?”

Justin nodded and smiled at her, seeming to burst with pride at having been given some responsibility. “I can do that!”

“Okay, young man,” trying to stifle her laughter at his enthusiastic response. “And please…make sure you hear a click when you pull the doors closed. Wake me up in a few hours and I will make us some dinner. Oh, and please keep the blinds out back closed for now,” she instructed, her mind beginning to give in to the pain meds as her vision began to blur.

She closed her eyes and allowed the blissful dullness to take hold of her, unable to fight the need for sleep any longer.

Chapter 13

A week had passed with Gaia recuperating on the sofa in the living room. Justin was doing a fine job of keeping things in order, too. He was taking good care of her, Solomon and Maye, doing whatever Gaia had asked of him. They had been surviving on simple things, namely, fruits and canned goods, bread and butter, peanut butter and jelly, cereal and the like.

Gaia was very pleased that the boy had proven both resourceful and capable in her time of need.

Her foot felt much better now, though still a bit tender, and she had been cleaning it every day, treating it with peroxide and taking antibiotics to make sure infection did not set in. Her mind, regrettably, gave thought to what had happened to Nick not that long ago under a similar set of circumstances. She would not allow that to happen to her, she vowed. She was still needed.

She took a ‘walk’ around the living room this morning, admitting that her foot felt much better than it had in days, and then went upstairs to get dressed. She put on her uniform, meaning to go out today to retrieve some food from the freezer, feed the animals, and check on that damn generator.

After she dressed, she found herself out on the porch, looking up at the skylight and basking under the sun’s rays as she stretched. In that moment, she was respectful of life. She turned around and peeked through the blinds that surrounded the porch, gazing out at the surrounding area. She placed her hands in the pockets of the jackets and found the bottle of pain meds and twisted the cap, pouring one into her hand. She was about to place the pill into her mouth when she caught her reflection in the windowpane and stopped, frozen in silent concern upon seeing the image. She looked deeply into her eyes and her heart skipped a beat.

What the hell am I doing? Does my foot even hurt anymore?

She tested the foot, felt a twinge of pain, and popped the pill in her mouth. She resignedly hung her hands on the collar of her jacket and her forearm brushed against something solid in the top pocket. She pulled out the source and stared at a hard pack of cigarettes, downing a morphine pill.

She looked around and did not see Justin or Solomon, though Maye slept on the remains of the sofa in the living room that Solomon had made his own. She knew that the two of them had been exploring the house these past few days and so she did not give it much thought.

Gaia removed a cigarette and lit it, feeling the rush of the nicotine as it flooded her system. It was quite a high for her these days, she realized, as she sat in one of the patio table chairs and finished the cigarette in quiet contemplation. She put the pack of cigarettes away, decided she wanted to find Solomon and Justin to examine the med lab today, and went from room to room looking for the pair.

She could not find them anywhere. She went to both the front and back door and began frantically calling their names as she raced around the entire house as bast she could, thinking that the pair was playing a game. Perhaps they were trying to even give her a scare or maybe even trying to hide from her. But, they were nowhere to be found; not the basement, not the bedrooms, not the upstairs or anywhere.

She was in a panic as she spun around, her heart racing in her chest as Maye was suddenly climbing up her and onto her perch. “Have you seen Justin and Solomon, Maye?” oddly enough, the capuchin pointed out the window.

“Outside?!”

Maye clapped and chattered, her typical response to a question. Gaia removed her gun, chambered a round and stepped out the back door of the porch and into the backyard. She paused and stared back, realizing that it was unlocked.

“They are definitely out here somewhere,” she whispered. She placed the binoculars over her eyes and saw nothing but open fields and empty pens all about. “Maye, stay here,” she commanded, staring back at the monkey as Gaia ran out into the spacious area of the back yard.

Her heart raced as her mind quickly pondered over a few thoughts of where they might be. “Could be the pens where the living animals are, or maybe…?” she paused and ran back around the opposite side of the house toward the veterinary facility and past that, heading north toward the primate exhibits and Solomon’s enclosure. As she approached, she was relieved to see the two of them playing in the distance. Solomon chased Justin and vice versa.

All of her angst and anxiety was suddenly replaced with a respect for the innocence and simplistic purity of what she considered to be two ‘children’ playing with one another. It was when she finally came to a stop and the adrenalin rush slowed that she realized the pain in her foot was still very real and that the meds had either worn off or not done much in the way of numbing the ache.

Gaia gingerly and silently hobbled over to the pen and watched for a few more minutes as the two continued their game. She continued to slink closer, trying to let the pair enjoy the adolescent freedoms that she would never again experience in this hellish world. That harsh reality, in their blissful ignorance of simply wanting to play and have fun, was lost on them. She wished for one moment that she could reach that level of naivety again, even if it was only for a day.

Gaia turned around to see Maye hopping toward her and bent low to allow her to climb up and onto her shoulder, which she did.

“I thought I told you to stay?”

Justin turned around on hearing Gaia’s question and he began to tear up. “I’m sorry miss Gaia, Solomon just wanted to go home,” he said, believing that last question was directed at him.

“It’s okay, Justin. I mean…it’s not really okay,” she began, stumbling over her words and not really knowing where to begin with this sort of thing. “I mean…I wish you would have told me you were going outside, or—“

She stopped midsentence, not really knowing what the hell protocol would or should be used in this setting. “Anyway, you two enjoy yourselves. I’m going to check on the animals.”

“I already did, Miss Gaia.”

“You already did?!”

“Uh-huh. Me and Solomon. We been coming out here every morning to check on the animals. I been feeding them with the food from the freezer, just like you said.” He stared at her, and she back at him. Her facial expression must have looked to the boy like she got punched in the face or something like that.

“Wow,” was all she could manage. She was impressed at the boy’s competence once again, as well as his maturity in this situation. It completely was contradictory in every way to her last thought about the boy. It would seem, Gaia admitted, that the boy was more than capable of fending for himself, and, was still young enough to be able to play with total spontaneity.

“You are quite the extraordinary young man, aren’t you?” she asked aloud. He looked back to her and smirked and then chased after Solomon, who seemed to enjoy being back in his enclosure. The gate was open and Gaia realized that the boy had the keys as she heard them dangling on his belt.

“Justin, can I have those keys?”

“These are the extra set,” he said. “The ones you found last week on one of the zombies!” he called back to her. She looked down and felt the other set of keys on her own belt and felt foolish again.

I guess he
does
have everything under control.

Then she paused again as she was about to go check on the hippos and the otters on the opposite side of the camp. “You have your gun?”

“No, Miss Gaia. I left it in the house!” he called back again.

There it is
, she thought, walking back toward the pen. “You need to bring it with you if you are planning on going out alone,” she said, hanging on the fencing that made up the enclosure. “And while I appreciate your good manners, you can just call me
Gaia
, Justin.”

“We’re good, M—, I mean
Gaia
. Solomon can kill anything that comes near us,” he said very indifferently.

“What the f—! What do you mean?!” she asked with growing distress.

“I brought my gun along the first few days, and I did shoot one of the zombie things. I shot it right in the head just like you told me. But then, we were attacked last week by two zombies, and I forgot my gun in the house…Solomon killed them both! I'm not scared when I'm with him,” he said with astounding conviction. “And he scared off a tiger, too,” he added, coming to rest in front of her and sucking in his breath, finally tuckered out from their play. He stared at her through the bars with wide eyes, as her face again must have appeared to him as a twisted mask of doubt and worry and he responded as such.

“Really. It’s okay. He is smart and strong and he protects me. And he’ll protect you. He even told me so,” Justin continued to explain. “He told me that we are his family now, and that he’ll protect us.”

Holy shit! That makes total sense
, she thought, staring off into space as she considered that. She’d only given fleeting thoughts to those notions, but to have the gorilla admit it to the boy was something beyond anything that Gaia would have expected.

Solomon truly has a special mind. More so than I’d even considered.

 She believed that the mighty silverback would protect them both to the death. The papa gorilla, in his mind, had replaced his natural family with the two of them.

Gaia walked away completely flabbergasted by the turn of events, leaving a confused  nine year old boy in her wake, as the knowledge of what he’d said raced through her mind.

She made her way to the otter coop and the hippo pen, saw that they were both intact, and watched as Maye leaped off her shoulder to further inspect the trees and the fencing.

“See you whenever, Maye,” she called to the capuchin, as was often the case during her time there, where Maye would do that to her routinely. Gaia watched her go then proceeded toward the wolf and hyena enclosures.

A rustling sound came from the thickets to her left and Gaia spun in time to catch sight of a child-sized zombie, complete with backpack and baseball cap slightly askew on its head, charging toward her.

She removed her pistol, slid the safety off and fired, catching it directly in the chest. She pressed the trigger and then paused, running toward the hyena pen once more.

If I get it close enough, I won’t need to drag the damn thing all the way over
, she thought, running along the path as the encumbered zombie chased after her. It seemed to be gaining ground on her quickly however. Whether that was because of her injured foot, the creature’s inhuman nature, or a combination of both, she was not sure. What she was sure of though, was that if they continued at this pace, it would overtake her in the next thirty seconds.

And so, she spun, focused and fired, catching it in the head as it fell to the side, its head exploding under the impact of the slug. She sat in the grass, watching the zombie and waiting for the throbbing in her foot to go away as she removed the pill bottle, popping another of the morphine tablets.

Getting to her feet again, she removed the backpack from the dead zombie and tossed it over her shoulder.

As she finally made it to the enclosures and peeked inside, she saw both packs fighting over scraps of meat. They appeared partially frozen still and there were several pieces down in either pen. Of course, Justin could not figure or reason the proper amount of meat to put down there and so probably overfed them. She would need to check that on the way back, she decided, as it appeared both sets of animals were doing just fine—probably better than she was, she considered. The wolves and hyenas had food and water, and plenty of space in which to roam.

“Fuck it,” she said, deciding to drag the child-sized zombie over to the hyena pen and tossing it over.

She made her way to the veterinary lab and placed the key in the door, unlocking the far western side door, closest to the primates. She knew that the opposite side yet contained the body of Doctor Friedman, and that they should be making plans to bury her, too. But, Gaia had matters that were more pressing on the docket this day, and could not give it the attention it deserved. She made her way down the hall, which was flooded with light from outside, and stood in front of one of the operating room doors. She knocked, was relieved to hear no response, unlocked the door, turned the knob, and entered, turning on the fluorescent light.

She unlocked and then hunted through the cabinets until she found another bottle full of the morphine tablets. Gaia shamefacedly pocketed another bottle, looking around as if someone were watching her, locked it back up, and headed toward the center of the complex that housed the stairs leading down into the spacious cellar.

The door leading into the basement had a glass pane at the top center. She threw the light switch on the wall beside her as the fluorescent lights stole away the darkness. She stared inside expectedly, but once again, only deafening silence ensued. She opened the door and proceeded down the short set of stairs to the first landing where it doubled back in the opposite direction.