Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,53
and Lolo was acting like a bear. Or rather, wasn’t acting like a bear at all.
“Come on, Lo,” Jude said. “You have to eat something.” She stood inside Lolo’s enclosure in the Bezos Family Arctic Tundra exhibit, holding a chunk of hot-pink flesh in one gloved hand, a bucket of the same stuff at her booted feet. Lolo, draped like a wet rug over a boulder in the middle of a greenish, oily pool, emitted a long-suffering sigh. They’d been promised tankers of fresh water to bathe the animals, but so far, the tankers hadn’t arrived.
Jude’s sigh was as long-suffering as Lolo’s, her skin almost as ashen and dirt-streaked as Lolo’s fur. She stomped to the edge of the pool and waved the hunk of flesh over the algae blooms. “It’s salmon. You love salmon.”
It wasn’t salmon. Oh, the man who’d sold it to Jude at the docks claimed it was salmon—Wild! Fresh!—but the flesh was far too pink and rubbery. Possibly it was dyed shark meat. Or the remains of some twisted catfish the man had hauled out of the farthest reaches of Lake Michigan, away from the prying eyes of patrols. Whatever it was, it should have been enough to coax Lolo out of her sulk. If anything was going to coax her out of it.
“Listen, Lo, no one wants to see a skinny polar bear,” Jude said. “You’re going to make the children cry.”
Lolo yawned.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, what children?” All the zoo’s regulars—parents pushing double-wide strollers, teenagers taunting the animals and one another, couples too in love or in lust to notice they were sharing their first kiss in a miasma of hippo dung—were too busy boiling gutter water or waiting in line at the supermarket for the next shipment of bottled water.
The animals were thirsty. The people were thirsty. And that meant—
“Jude, what the hell are you doing?”
She didn’t have to turn around to know that scratchy, cranky voice. Diwata was the closest thing Jude had to a boss. At least, she was the only one left who dared to question Jude. The rest of the employees and the volunteers were too weirded out. They had reason to be, though not the reason they thought.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said.
“Like you’re trying to get yourself eaten by a polar bear.”
“Lolo doesn’t even want to eat her salmon.”
“Probably because that’s not salmon,” Diwata said.
Jude gave up on the “salmon,” dropped the hunk of overly pink flesh into the bucket with a plop. “Lolo’s depressed because her pool is dirty. We need fresh water.”
“Don’t we all?” said Diwata. She stood in the doorway at the back of the exhibit, her tanned, weather-beaten face cross-hatched with so many lines she looked like a map to everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Maybe it will rain,” Jude said. Diwata grunted. Overhead, the weak November sun had just cracked the horizon, scraping the sky a grumpy purple.
“Maybe it will rain for so long that we won’t need some jerk to turn on the water; we’ll have plenty of our own. For free.”
With an elbow, Diwata shoved the heavy door open wider. “And maybe rainbows will shoot out of my ass while we’re building an ark. Come here before Lolo decides to bite off your arms.”
Lolo snorted, tiny ears twitching in amusement. Lolo thought Diwata was hilarious.
“I brought you some coffee,” Diwata said.
Jude nudged the bucket with her foot. “This isn’t salmon and that isn’t coffee.”
“Well, it’s all I got,” said Diwata. “You want it or not?”
She didn’t, but this was Diwata. Jude left the bucket for Lolo just in case and trudged across the habitat. Diwata took a step back to let her through the door, then kicked it closed behind her.
“What did I tell you about climbing into exhibits with the predators?” Diwata said, handing her a soggy paper cup.
“I don’t know. Something about claws, something about teeth, blah blah blah.” For show, Jude took a sip of the coffee, winced. She used to love coffee, even the fake stuff. She used to love a lot of things.
The coffee cup had the name MOJO JOE printed on it. Next to that, someone had scrawled Jood.
Jesus.
“How much did this cost, Diwata? And what’s it made out of? Whipped jellyfish? Toxic slime?”
Diwata punched in the code to lock the door to Lolo’s exhibit, jabbing at the keypad harder than she needed to. “Don’t try to change the subject. One of these days you’re going to get hurt.”