by Cassie Cole
His strong hands slid down my back and along my ass, then lifted me off the ground. I wrapped my legs around him and drove my hips against his cock, trying to angle myself just right. Finally it found the right place and his head slid inside. Still holding me in the air, Jake lowered me onto his cock. I moaned loudly with surprise and pleasure as he filled me. His manhood was so thick that I felt it widening my inner walls, stretching me with a wonderful sexual ache, and somehow I took every inch of him.
“I don’t care if this is just temporary,” he told me. Our heads were so close together that our noses touched, and his sexy face was all I could see. “I’ve wanted to fuck you since the day I first saw you.”
I ran my hands over his arm and chest, touching the ink and imagining it had its own texture. “What are you waiting for?”
He pushed me against the wall of the shower and drove his cock into me like he was trying to smash through the tile. I draped my arms around his neck and held on for dear life while he pounded my pussy. It was intense, and erotic, and fierce, and exactly what I needed after three hours working on a sick animal. The mutual fear and relief shared by Jake and I, expressed through lovemaking. The sight of him, tattooed and chiseled and slick with water, was as erotic as his cock buried deep inside of me, and soon I was clutching his hair and clenching my pussy lips around him as I climaxed, and when his own eyes widened and his jaw opened in ecstasy I kissed him and imagined that I was breathing in his pleasure.
I could barely stand once he lowered me to the ground, and I might have slipped and fallen if not for his hand on my ass, holding me up.
“There’s no shampoo in here,” I said, looking around. “I probably should have checked that first.”
He slid his hands over me methodically. “I’ll get you clean.”
“You ought to, after getting me dirty.”
We smiled together as we showered.
Fortunately, there were towels in the office, but they were across the room in a cabinet. Watching Jake tip-toe across the room while naked and wet was the perfect show after what we had done. I hated putting my dirty clothes back on, but I didn’t have much of a choice.
We went back into the examination room after that. Caesar was breathing steadily on the table. I mentally kicked myself for leaving him alone, even if it was just for ten minutes. Even though he should remain asleep for several more hours, big cats could react unpredictably and it was best not to get complacent.
Jake put his palm on Caesar’s body and closed his eyes. Then he leaned over and hugged the animal, burying his face in the animal’s neck. I gave him a few seconds of privacy before coming forward.
“In a few hours he’ll be awake. We’ll need to keep him sedated in a smaller cage for a day or two, to make sure he doesn’t do anything too strenuous to break open his stitches.”
To my surprise, there were tears in his eyes. “Thank you.”
“It’s my job.”
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if Caesar died.”
Seeing the normally-abrasive man so vulnerable was jarring. I rubbed his back and said, “I didn’t realize you and Caesar were so close.”
He continued resting his head against the tiger’s chest, rising and falling with the beast’s breathing. “He was born on my thirteenth birthday. He was sort of an unofficial birthday present. Dad was always very protective of the newborn cubs, because he used them in photos with visitors a bunch, but he made an exception for Caesar. I got to help raise him, and train him. It… It was one of the few things dad and I did together.”
“So that’s why you spent the first few days working on the fencing so he could have a larger enclosure,” I said.
“Dad didn’t care about him the way I do,” Jake said bitterly. “I hated seeing him in a smaller cage, so I made that my first priority when I came back. In a way, Caesar is my last connection to dad. If he died… I don’t know. I wasn’t ready to deal with that loss yet. Tomorrow, I’m going to make new signs to put up in front of the cages. And I’m going to watch much closer for visitors that throw shit inside. No warnings—just kicking them out as soon as I see it.”
I hesitated. “Jake? I need to tell you something. And you have to stay calm.”
He tensed underneath my hand. “What is it?”
I retrieved the two neodymium magnets from the table. “These magnets are very powerful.” I pulled them apart, and then they violently snapped back together. “If they were connected when Caesar ate them, they would not have hurt him. They would have just passed through his body like any other object.”
Jake stood up and crossed his arms. “Uh huh.”
“But they weren’t together. One of them was deeper in his GI tract than the other. That’s what caused the problem: they were pinching together two sections of his intestines.”
“What does that mean?” he asked in a dangerous tone.
“It means he ate one magnet, waited several hours, and then ate another.”
It took him a moment to realize what I was implying.
“This wasn’t just some random junk that found its way into his enclosure by accident,” I said. “Someone intentionally fed Caesar these two magnets several hours apart in order to hurt him.”
Pain spread across his handsome face, then was replaced by a cold rage. His arms flexed as he clenched his hands into fists.
“I’ll kill her,” he said.
“Jake…”
“I don’t care if she denies it,” he said while storming out of the office. “I’m going to make her admit to it.”
I followed him outside into the cool night. I intended to tell him no, that we couldn’t do anything without proof.
Before the words could leave my mouth, an animal went trotting by.
One of the Bengal tigers. Chasing a squirrel.
And to our right, a chimpanzee screeched while running along the pedestrian path.
The walkie-talkie on Jake’s belt crackled to life. “The animals are loose. The animals are loose!”
35
Rachel
I stared after the tiger in a daze. Panic gripped my chest like a vice, paralyzing me in place.
“No, no, no,” I whispered. “What is happening…”
“How the hell…” Jake said. “I know we opened Caesar’s enclosure, but that was the only one!”
“Someone’s opening the cages,” David said on the radio.
Jake put his walkie-talkie to his mouth. “You mean she is opening them!”
“Anthony and I are searching for her before she can do more damage,” David replied. “We need you two to track down the animals that are already loose.”
I grabbed the walkie-talkie from Jake. “Tough to do when we don’t know what’s loose. We saw a tiger and a chimp so far…”
“We’ll call out which cages we find open. Just go!”
Now that we had a task, it was easier to lurch into motion. The two of us jumped in the Mule and flew down the path.
“Where are we going?” Jake asked as I drove.
“The equipment shed. I have plenty of Thalazol here in the Mule, but we need more syringes and the dart gun.”
“I thought you hated using the dart gun. Said it scared the animals.”
I glanced over at him. “Scaring them is the least of our problems right now.”
He gripped the top of the Mule tightly. “True that.”
We passed the chimpanzee again on the way to the shed. He hopped along and made a happy hooting sound at us. The sight of him out and moving along made me panic again. Putting aside the fact that these animals were dangerous—which was a very important fact—the animals could injure themselves or each other.
I slowed down as Chloe, one of the female tigers, appeared up ahead. She was loping along without paying us any attention. Then she turned down a side path.
“Damnit, damnit, damnit,” I muttered.
“Chloe’s heading east from the equipment shed,” Jake said into the walkie-tal
kie. “Be aware.”
“Copy that.”
We reached the supply shed and quickly gathered what we needed. Two more jab sticks, a box of syringes, then the dart gun and a pack of darts.
“You drive,” I said as we loaded up the Mule.
“Good thinking. That way you can prep all the darts.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I explained. “We can’t just shoot each animal with the same amount of sedative. The amount required to knock out a tiger would stop a chimp’s heart. We have to prepare a specific dosage for each animal and their weight. So when we come across an animal, I need to prepare the syringe on the spot depending on which it is.”
“Dad never did that,” Jake argued. “He had a big box of darts all with the same dosage.”
“What your dad probably did was prep a bunch of darts for the same small amount, then use multiple darts as needed. Three for the tigers, two for wolves, one or smaller animals.”
“Exactly. Let’s do that.”
I shook my head. “It’s a shitty, lazy way to do it. It’s dangerous for the animals if they don’t receive the proper dosage.” I showed him the box of darts. “Plus we only have twelve darts. We can’t afford to use three or four on one animal.”
“Shit.”
We flew down the road, the wind blowing my hair all around. It felt like a safari, and not in a way I enjoyed. I had left my hair ties back at the medical office, and my hair was still damp from the shower. Thank goodness there was no soap or shampoo in the office; the smell might have attracted the animals to us.
“These animals may exhibit more aggression now that they’re loose,” I warned Jake. “Don’t approach them. Stay back and use the jab sticks as protection if you need to.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious,” I insisted. “This isn’t the time for bullshit. I’m in charge, and you need to listen to what I tell you. So don’t do anything stupid. Got it?”
“I said okay,” he replied. “I trust you.”
I was surprised by how sincere he sounded. Like he was a completely different Jake Haines. Maybe having sex with him was all it took to get him to fall in line.
If I had known that, I would have done it on the first day, I thought with a smile.
We caught up to the chimpanzee first. There were two of them together now, Bonzo and Bubbles, pulling the lid off of a zoo trash can and reaching inside with their long arms. They glanced at us as we pulled to a stop thirty feet away, but then returned to their scavenging.
“Bubbles is eighty-two pounds,” I muttered while doing the mental math on how many cubic centimeters of Telazol to use. The darts were long, thin needles with pink feathering on the end. My hand trembled as I loaded it with the sedative. “Bonzo is one-fifteen…”
“Bubbles is looking this way,” Jake hissed.
“Almost done…”
I finished the second dart, then loaded it into the dart gun. Bonzo was the male, and therefore the most dangerous, so I wanted to take him down first. I rested the gun on the front of the Mule and took aim. Bonzo was sitting on the ground with his back to me, eating a leftover sandwich from the trash. It had been years since I fired one of these in my zoo residency, and if I missed…
I squeezed the trigger. There was a puff as the compressed gas fired the dart. A pink spot appeared in Bonzo’s shoulder blade. He screeched and began running off, but slowed down after twenty feet and drew sluggish. Bubbles, the female chimp, watched him run away and then picked up his half-eaten sandwich happily. The next dart caught her on the butt. She bounced away with the sandwich, slowing down and then swaying drunkenly like Bonzo had before finally laying down on the path.
“Nice shots.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We drove up to the chimps and I removed the darts and did a quick check to make sure everything seemed fine. Then I hopped back in the Mule and told Jake to move on.
“What if a tiger comes along and decides it wants a monkey meal?”
Ignoring that chimps weren’t monkeys, I said, “Nothing we can do about it now except hurry up and subdue the rest of the animals.”
“The enclosure with the two female Bengals is open,” David announced on the radio. “Shit. Same for the wolf pen.”
Jake and I looked at each other. “What else have you seen?” I asked.
“The chimpanzees are gone. And the entire bird aviary.”
“Already took care of the chimps. Looking for the rest now. Let us know what other open cages you find.”
The wolves scared me the most because I had no idea how they would react. They could be hunting us at that very moment from the surrounding trees, slipping through the shadows out of sight. Fortunately, we found them back toward the visitor’s center sniffing around inside Caesar’s enclosure. As soon as I saw that, I hopped out of the Mule and sprinted to the gate. I reached it just in time to slam it shut and engage the bolt, locking them inside.
“That’s an easy win,” Jake said.
We drove around the zoo with our eyes peeled. One of the female Bengals was sitting by the entrance to the zoo as if waiting to be let out. She flicked her tail and stared at us with predatory eyes, but remained stationary while I prepped the syringe and hit her in the flank.
All the lights in the zoo suddenly came on at once, bathing the paths with harsh light. Jake and I winced and covered our eyes for a moment until they adjusted.
“Could’ve used a warning,” Jake said into the walkie-talkie.
“There’s no pleasing you.”
Driving through the zoo was a lot easier now that we weren’t relying solely on the Mule’s headlights. But it also made it easier for some animals to hide in the trees where the lights did not shine.
“Have you found Mary Beth yet?” Jake asked the walkie-talkie. There was no response. Jake and I shared a worried look. If something had happened to them…
We rounded a corner and saw the other female Bengal, Chloe. She was moving away from us slowly, stalking forward as low to the ground as she could go. We saw her target a second later: a large male peacock about fifty feet away, pecking at something on the path.
I hurried to prepare the next syringe. Chloe was about three-fifty the last time I weighed her. I loaded the dart syringe with the correct amount of Telazol and tried to load it into the tranquilizer gun, but my hands were shaking so badly that the tip broke off in the barrel.
“Shit!”
“Hurry up,” Jake hissed. “She’s about to pounce.”
“I’m trying!”
The peacock was totally unaware of the enormous cat that was about to turn it into a late-night snack. The bird had been in captivity too long to know what was good for it. I filled another dart syringe with liquid…
Jake cursed and jumped out of the Mule.
“What are you doing!”
“Hey Chloe!” Jake shouted, waving one of the jab sticks over his head. “You sassy bitch!”
That scared the peacock away. Chloe rounded on Jake, snarling angrily at having lost her kill.
If the pressure of watching a peacock get killed was high, the pressure of Jake’s life being on the line was an order of magnitude worse. My pulse was like a drum in my ears as I loaded the dart into the gun, going extra slow to make sure the tip didn’t break. Chloe was stalking toward Jake, her tail low to the ground.
I aimed the gun but I had no good shot. She was facing us, and I needed to hit her in the side or flank. She was thirty feet from Jake and drawing closer. Her lower jaw flexed and eyes narrowed.
“Take the shot!” Jake shouted.
With no other choice, I jumped out of the Mule and ran sideways until I had a clearer shot of her side.
Jake’s jaw dropped when he glanced back at me. “You’re running away?!?!”
I went to one knee and aimed the gun. My hands were still trembling, but the tiger was about to pounce so it was now or never. I exhaled and squeezed the trigger. There was a puff of compressed gas, and a pink
dart hissed through the air.
Chloe snarled and jumped back with alarm. She twisted like a dog chasing its tail, trying to get at the thing sticking out of her torso, but she couldn’t reach it with her teeth. After three rotations she staggered to the side like a drunk on the sidewalk, then finally gave up and lay down like she was bored with the whole thing. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Cutting it a little close there, huh?” Jake wiped sweat from his forehead.
“I told you not to do anything stupid!”
He lowered the jab stick. “She was gonna kill the peacock. What was I supposed to do?”
Adrenaline was turning my vision white. The back of my mouth tasted like pennies. I dropped the tranquilizer gun in the Mule and grabbed the walkie-talkie.
“We’ve got the wolves, chimps, and both tigers safe. Aside from the peacock we just saved from a gruesome death, what else is loose?”
I was terrified that we would get no response again. But then David’s voice came to life: “Not sure. But we caught the saboteur. We’re over by the lion pen.”
Jake and I relaxed in the Mule. “On our way. Fair warning: you might have to stop me from punching Mary Beth in the nose.”
“Yeah, about that… It wasn’t Mary Beth.”
36
Anthony
The last time an animal escaped was when I was a little kid.
I still remembered it like it was yesterday, because it was one of the first times dad asked me to help him in the zoo. Dad was letting visitors take personal photos with one of the Bengals we had. I was in charge of collecting the money before the visitors went into the cage with him. People paid a lot of money to get their photo taken hugging a real life tiger, and handling all that cash made me feel important.