Page 58 of One Adult, Please

The butterfly pavilion is a large mesh dome that used to house hundreds of tropical butterflies in a climate-controlled environment designed to simulate a rainforest. The mesh is intact. The climate control isn't. The butterflies didn't survive the loss of their carefully maintained ecosystem, and the inside of the dome is a conservatory of dead plants and empty flight paths and the silence of a place where hundreds of small wings used to fill the air with movement and now don't.

It's supposed to be empty. For three seconds, it is. Then something moves behind the dead passionflower vines.

I stop.

Grace stops because I stop. She goes silent.

The movement comes again. A drag. A wet shift. The kind of sound that doesn't belong in a room designed for small wings and school field trips.

Grace raises the friendship paddle.

"No sudden noise," I whisper.

Her eyes move to me. "That sentence makes me want to make sudden noise."

"Please don't."

"I'm internalizing."

The vines part. The infected steps out of the dead greenery with a strip of mesh tangled around one arm and a laminated STAFF badge still clipped to its shirt. Horticulture, maybe. Someone who belonged here before here became this.

Its mouth opens.

My whole body calculates the consequence before the sound happens.

One call. One response. One head turning outside. Then another. Then the cluster Captain pulled east begins drifting back before we finish clearing the pavilion.

The infected inhales.

I raise the tranquilizer gun and fire.

The dart hits its shoulder. It jerks.

Grace whispers, "How much time?"

"Too much."

The infected makes a low, wet sound.

"No," she tells it.

The infected comes toward us.

I step sideways, putting myself between Grace and the infected, and reach for the catch pole clipped to the wall beside the supply cabinet. Every animal facility has them. Useful for injured raccoons, aggressive geese, and apparently the dead.

The infected lunges.

I catch its upper body with the loop, not cleanly. The cable catches across its chest and one shoulder. I pull tight.

It keeps coming.

My feet slide on fallen leaves.

"Grant," Grace says.

"Door," I say.

"What?"