The Night Eternal

The Master was right. He was afraid of the leopard, and rightly so. But which one was the keeper and which one the kept? Didn’t she have Zack working for her, feeding her regularly over these many months? He was her pet as much as she was his. And suddenly, with the rifle in his hand, that arrangement didn’t feel right.

He hated her arrogance, her will. He walked around the enclosure, the snow leopard following him on the other side of the mesh. Zack entered the ZOO EMPLOYEES ONLY feeding area, looking out through the small window over the door through which he dropped the leopard’s meat or released livestock. Zack’s deep breathing seemed to fill the entire room. He ducked through the top-hinged door, which slammed shut behind him.

He had never been inside the leopard’s pen before. He looked up at the high tent overhead. A number of different-sized bones were scattered over the ground before him, remnants of past meals.

He had a grand fantasy of striding out into the small wood and tracking the cat, looking her in her eyes before deciding whether or not to pull the trigger. But the noise of the closing door was the equivalent of ringing the dinner bell, and at once the snow leopard came slinking around a boulder strategically set to shield the leopard’s feeding from zoo visitors.

The leopard stopped short, surprised to see Zack inside there. For once there was no steel mesh between them. She lowered her head as though trying to understand this strange turn of events, and Zack saw that he had made a terrible mistake. He brought the rifle to his shoulder without aiming it and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled it again. Nothing.

He reached for the bolt handle and yanked it back and slid it forward. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped in his hands. He worked the bolt again, frantically, and squeezed the trigger, and the report was the only thing that reached his ringing ears. He worked the bolt again, and squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped. Another time, and the rifle clicked empty. Again, and still empty.

He realized only then that the snow leopard was lying on its side before him. He went to the animal, seeing the red bloodstains spreading over its coat. The animal’s eyes were closed, its powerful limbs still.

Zack climbed up on the boulder and sat there with the empty rifle on his lap. Overcome with emotions, he shuddered and cried. He felt at once triumphant and lost. He looked out at the zoo from inside the pen. It had begun to rain.

Things began to change for Zack after that. His rifle only held four rounds, and for a while he returned to his zoo each day for target practice: more signs, benches, branches. He began to take more risks. He rode a dirt bike along the old jogging routes in the park, around and around the Great Lawn, riding the bike through the empty streets of Central Park, past the shriveled remains of hanging corpses or the ashes of funerary pyres. When he rode at night, he liked to turn the bike’s headlight off. It was exciting, magical—an adventure. Protected by the Master, he felt no fear.

But what he did feel, still, was the presence of his mother. Their bond, which had felt strong even after her turning, had faded over time. The creature that had once been Kelly Goodweather now barely resembled the human woman who had been his mother. Her scalp was dirty, hairless, her lips thin and lacking even a hint of pink. The soft cartilage of her nose and ears had collapsed into mere vestigial lumps. Loose, ragged flesh hung from her neck, and an incipient, crimson wattle, undulating when she turned her head. Her chest was flat, her breasts shriveled, her arms and legs caked with a grime so thick the driving rain could not wash it away. Her eyes were orbs of black floating on beds of dark red, essentially lifeless… except for sometimes, rarely, perhaps only in Zack’s imagination now, when he saw what he thought might be a glimmer of recognition reflective of the mother she once was. It wasn’t so much an emotion or expression, but rather the way a certain shadow fell across her face, in a manner more obscuring of her vampire nature than revealing of her former human self. Fleeting moments, growing more rare with time—but they were enough. More psychologically than physically, his mother remained on the periphery of his new life.