She bent down and grasped the man under his arms,straining to pull him to his feet. She managed to get his top half leaning overthe railing. Gasping for breath, she squatted down and grasped the man's jeanedlegs, She lifted them up, and the weight of the man's torso tipped his bodypast the point of no return, and he fell into the polar bear enclosure landingwith a great splash in the water.
The polar bears watched from the cooled confines of theirenclosure. Unsure about what had just happened. Lila stood, leaning against therailing, her chest heaving. The polar bears, seeing a new play thing, loped outof the darkness of the enclosure and stepped out onto the man-made rocks, thesun beating down on their white fur. They slipped into the water gracefully,swimming through the normally blue waters, now marred by a growing bloom ofcrimson. They batted at the man with their powerful paws, and Lila waited untilthey took a bite of the man before she headed back to the front of the zoo.
Should anyone ask, she would say that the man had falleninto the enclosure on his own. She would need a rake and some replacementgravel to clean up all of the blood the man had spilled in the walkway. Shewould also need to change her clothes, and take a shower. By the time shereturned back to clean up her mess, she hoped the bears would have made thecorpse unrecognizable.
The first thing she needed to do was remove the tape ofher transgression. She looked up at the camera hidden in plain sight on askinny, unobtrusive pole tucked back in some trees. It would have seeneverything.
Before she knew it, she was jogging through the zoo,finding her way back to the paved walkways that led her to the entrance of thezoo and the gift shop that housed the zoo's security room and offices. Shestopped off in the locker room and peeled her clothes off in the shower, notwanting them to smear blood anywhere else. She turned the shower on as hot asit would go, and the stream of water sloughed all of the spots of blood off ofher naked body. The clothes at her feet squished with every step and shescrubbed herself until her skin was red and raw. She washed her hair fivetimes. When she was done, she turned the water off and stood in the showershivering despite the accumulated steam and the remnants of the shower's heat.
Without toweling off, she stepped into the locker room,found her own locker, opened it up, and fished out a set of clean clothes. Whenshe was dressed, she sat on the wooden bench that ran between the two rows oflockers. What the fuck am I doing? Just call the police.
With the shower having cleared her mind, she took amoment to assess her situation. Something was clearly wrong out in the realworld. No one had contacted her about anything, which meant it was either nobig deal or things had progressed so fast that they hadn't had time to concern themselveswith Lila, the anti-social freak who lived at the zoo.
If things were bad, no one would likely miss the crazyman that had attacked her. If things weren't that bad... she could be on thehook for murder. Now was the point of no return. It wasn't too late to call thecops. She could say that her and the man had fought, that the man had lost hisbalance and tumbled into the polar bear enclosure. Before she could doanything, the polar bears had savaged the man. But then they'd want to see thesecurity tape. Then she would go to jail. Then there would be no one to watchthe animals. In the end, it was the animals that made up her mind for her.
She slapped her hands on her knees and stood up, hershirt clinging to her wet body. She grabbed a plastic bag from the janitor'scloset and threw her soggy clothing into it. She carried the bag with her,still trying to think of ways to dispose of them. She climbed a flight ofstairs and stepped into the security room, the plastic bag bundled underneathher arm.
The swivel chair creaked as she plopped down into it. Sheeyed the wall of monitors as they cycled through different views of the park.Where the hell were they recorded. She got down on her hands and knees andlooked at the black boxes underneath. They hummed with electricity, and lightsblinked on the faces. She had no idea what she was doing, so she began pressingthe buttons, in the hopes that something would pop out somewhere, a VHS tape, aDVD, anything. But the faces of the equipment were smooth but for a button hereand there. She didn't see a spot where anything would pop out.
Lila sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling asif an answer were somehow scrawled there. There was nothing but old acousticaltiles. She would have to destroy the whole thing. She didn't want to lose thecameras, but if that's what she had to do to cover her tracks, well then that'swhat she had to do. She sighed and looked around the room for anything that shecould use to break the recording equipment. There was nothing, but she did spotsomething interesting in the garbage can to the right of the desk that all ofthe monitors were piled on. There was a wire-mesh wastebasket sitting on thecarpeted floor, and in the wastebasket there was a newspaper. She picked it up.It was only a few days old, but the headlines on the paper gave her some ideaof just what was going on.
The headline read, "Mysterious Disease StrikesPortland and Cities Across the World." She read the article, unable tobelieve what she was actually reading. Reports of cannibalism and peoplesurviving grievous injuries to attack others... it all seemed like sciencefiction to her. But hadn't she almost been the victim of one such attackearlier in
