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Five stops in front of a wrought iron arch bridging two crumbling brick walls together. The arch reads Herbert Humphrey Zoological Park. There's a lot of good sounds in that. He doesn't come across 'z' words that often. He reads it out loud to Delores and then says it a couple more times, just because he can.
Zoological Park. He thinks about that for a moment. What is a Zoological Park? Zoo, meaning animal, logical being the study of. Is it a research campus? Weird to have an animal research campus in the middle of a city. It seems big, too. The space under the arch is large, at least ten people could walk shoulder to shoulder through it.
Delores is asking him a question when he figures it out. She gets to zoo- and he feels like an idiot.
"It's a zoo," he interrupts her. "Like with..." He falters for a second. "Animals," he settles on, rather lamely, unable to think of any specific animals that are in zoos. Were in zoos. He's never been to one. Not that he thinks anyway. He thinks he would remember if he'd been to a zoo, Before.
No time like the present, and this is an exploration mission. He’s been in the apocalypse for fourteen (fifteen?) years, and they’ve never made it to this corner of the city. Maybe zoos have lots of useful supplies inside. There’s only one way to find out. Five pulls Delores behind him and they enter the Herbert Humphrey Zoological Park.
It's quiet, which is a non-event in the apocalypse. It’s always quiet. There are buildings around here, still mostly standing, and a big plaza in the middle, only slightly littered with rubble. Bodies slump among the debris, of course, but Five doesn't pay them much mind. There are bodies everywhere all the time and anything useful they may have had on them rotted long ago. Two main paths branch to the left and right.
Five hums as Delores suggests starting to the right and they head down that way. There's a weird glass... Pit? That's not right, it's above ground. But it has glass walls that reach up to Five's head and there's a rocky mound in the middle. Water pools in the bottom, only a few inches deep and a burnt orange color. Five makes a mental note of it; if he gets really desperate with his regular water holes he can get back here and rig up a system to collect the rainwater before it falls to the bottom and becomes that toxic sludge.
Delores pulls his attention from the water to something on the rocks. He squints at it. It's a skeleton, for sure, but of what Five isn't sure. He's very, very familiar with human skeletons. He's come across dog and cat and rat, too, frequently enough. This is none of those.
He feels pretty confident that it's a bird. It has a beak, and birds had beaks. This one's beak looks heavy and roughly textured. Its body lays more or less complete behind it, a little out of order thanks to the uneven rocks underneath. It's maybe a foot long. The arm (wing, birds had wings) is weird. All the arm bones Five has ever seen have been round, cylindrical. This one's is flat. Like something rolled it out, took all the height from them.*
Delores gives him a pointed look, her question hanging between them. Five doesn't have an answer.
"It's... A bird." It's all he has. Delores takes that as enough, bless her.
They keep moving. Five detours to poke through a building that used to be some sort of shop. Rags that used to be clothing hang sadly in a corner. Five still sorts through them, just in case. There are some large, plastic water bottles that are still whole, so he grabs a few and throws them into the wagon. Can never have enough containers.
While pushing aside some rubble that used to be shelves, Five uncovers a pile of… animals. Little plastic figurines. He picks one up. Buried and covered like they were, they’ve retained their color well. The orange and black stripes of the cat in his hands tickles at the edge of his memory. He knows this one. He knows what this is. Five rubs his thumb along its plastic back as he chases that familiarity.
With a grin, he turns to Delores. “It’s a tiger,” he says, holding it up to show her. Delores asks about another in the pile, a blocky gray creature with two horns sticking up from its face. Now that he’s figured out one, the other names come a bit easier. Five crouches by the pile of figurines, announcing them to Delores as he remembers their names. A rhino. Another cat, this one a lion. A large turtle. The black striped horse he only remembers because ‘z’ is for zebra.
Delores suggests they keep the figurines, to put on the shelf with their Umbrella Academy things they’ve scrounged up over the years. Five scoffs at that. It’s a waste of space. She says the animals are small and it would be fun to have a reminder of what the zoo used to be, what they can see again once they figure out the math. Five rolls his eyes but indulges her, like he always does, and tosses the plastic animals into the wagon.
After finding nothing else useful amongst the rubble, they return to the path; six large water bottles and five plastic animals richer. Five and Delores make their way slowly through the zoo. The paths are all open, minimally blocked by corpses and rubble. Plants started making a comeback a couple years ago, and they’ve returned with a vengeance in the zoo. Ivy climbs over fences while grasses and bushes crowd inside the enclosures, obscuring most of the animal remains inside. If the animals were large enough, they poke up, white islands in a sea of green.
When the fences are broken enough that Five can clamber over them, he squeezes into the cages to get a better look at whatever lived in them. Delores chides him every time, warning him about the risk he’s taking if he can’t climb back out. He brushes her off. Five can teleport, he can’t get stuck anywhere (not that he’s actually teleported in… years now. Or that he’s most definitely and very stuck in the apocalypse).
They’re a little disappointing, to be honest. He thought zoos were full of hundreds of exciting and colorful different animals. A lot of the skeletons he scrambles to get a better look at look the same. All long skulls, two rows of flat teeth*. Some have long or branching horns, which is neat, but they aren’t very different. It’s just cages and cages of these same skulls. They are pretty big, some of them the length of Five’s whole torso, but they’re still underwhelming for how much effort they are to get to.
Things get more exciting as they get farther in. The series of same-long-skulls finally breaks when they get to a huge, fully enclosed cage, the thick chain-link roofing it in. Five pulls out his chunky pliers from his jacket to further rip open a rusty corner so he can get in. He can feel Delores’ judgement on his back as he squeezes through the gap he made. This cage is different, though; it must have something good inside.
Five almost trips over a log hidden in the long grass and only just catches himself from falling face first into a human skeleton. Time hangs suspended for a long moment while he tries to figure out why there’s a person in the animal cage. Maybe it’s one of the people that took care of the animals in here, and they didn’t get out before The Event hit?
No, he’s wrong. Five has seen so many human skeletons, this one is different. It’s smaller. The proportions off. He brushes aside an errant branch to reveal the skull. It’s very human but also completely not. The brow is heavier, the teeth sit farther out. The canines are long and pointed*. Five picks it up to show to Delores and to study it closer.
Human but not, similar stature but smaller and with longer arms, shorter legs…
Five drops it like it’s burned him, backing up before he realizes that’s what he’s doing. He falls over the same log and scoots on his butt until his back slams into the chain-link of the cage walls. His heart hammers in his ears.
“Chimp,” he gasps to Delores behind him. “It’s a chimp.”
He keeps his eyes closed and focuses on bringing his breathing back down, shoving memories of Pogo back into the corners of his mind where they belong. He hasn’t thought about Pogo in years. Can’t think about kindly brown eyes behind spectacles. Not about large, gentle, hairy hands tucking him in after he accidentally teleported out of bed too late at night. The tap of a cane and uneven gate padding through the halls.
“I’m okay,” Five responds on the third time Delores asks him, her tone growing more and more concerned. He takes a final, grounding breath in and then forces himself to push off from the fence and stand. Not looking back at the chimpanzee skeleton he knows is hiding in the grass a few feet from him, he squeezes back out to the path. He runs a hand over Delores’ back, reassuring her. “I’m okay,” he repeats for her.
“Yeah,” he agrees to her suggestion. “Maybe we keep out of the primate area.”
He sees enough primate skeletons, anyway.
They turn and backtrack a little to take a different fork in the path.
The return to a few more long-same-skulls is a relief, not that he’ll tell Delores that. Around another corner, the enclosure style changes. There isn’t tall, high fencing anymore to keep the animals in. Now it’s a short fence to keep guests in their place before a deep pit cuts into the ground, effectively separating the rocky land for the animals from the path. The first pen has a huge skeleton in it, and Five paces back and forth along the path, looking for how he can climb over and get a better look at it. His hand rasps against his beard as he rubs it to think. Once he gets to it, he’ll have easier access to the adjacent pens, too. He just has to figure out a way over a ten-foot pit.
The thought to just teleport flits across his mind and he throws it away immediately. He hasn’t had the calories to spare to teleport in years, and his food stash isn’t robust enough to support any non-emergency jumps. Getting into an enclosure at the zoo to feed his own curiosity is not an emergency. Needing to get out of a pit that he fell into because he was a fucking idiot trying to satiate said curiosity does count as an emergency.
Finally, at the next enclosure, he finds some concrete faux rocks that crumbled to form a shitty bridge over. Delores calls after him to be careful and he rolls his eyes at her like he always does when she calls after him to be careful. He’s been clambering through rubble for half his life now and has had a few very close calls; he knows what he’s doing, now. Knows which shifts are safe and which mean an impending collapse by feel alone.
This pile is relatively stable. He wouldn’t make a habit of using it but it will hold just fine for the there-and-back he needs it for. Ignoring whatever is in the area he’s currently in, Five finds a foothold and hauls himself over the concrete rocks to the skeleton that first caught his interest.
The skull is huge and blocky. It’s roughly half his height in length and he can’t lift it, it’s so heavy. Luther probably could lift it. Luther was strong enough to lift anything. Five shakes that thought away and pushes away some debris from the top of the skull; it’s tipped over so they obscure the top of it. Five almost drops a rock back onto the skull as a horn is revealed*. “Delores!” he shouts, spinning towards her and arm flailing to point at the horn she can’t see. “It’s a rhino! They were huge! Holy fuck, Delores, rhinos were huge!”
He can’t believe something this big existed. That there was enough food to support something so large. How many calories must it have needed to eat? And it got it all from just grass? What did rhinos eat? Maybe they ate meat, too. Five doesn’t know. He knows there were things that only ate leaves and grass. He’s honestly a little jealous of them, now that there are leaves and grass everywhere. The only good they do for Five is as kindling for his fires.
Something so big couldn’t survive on just plants though, right? They would have had to eat so much if so. Five runs a finger over the large, square teeth. They look like his molars, he thinks. At least close enough to that one he pulled last year. Same squareness. His tongue darts into the hole that missing tooth left in his mouth.
Eventually, Five pulls himself away from the giant skull to take in the rest of the giant body. The ribs are longer than his arm and curve gently. He brushes a hand over them, worn smooth by the elements, trying to think if there’s anything he could use them for. They seem like they should be useful for something.
Drawing a blank, he reasons he can always come back here if he thinks of a use. They aren’t going anywhere. He takes a minute to wander the rest of the enclosure, looking for another rhino, but it seems this one lived alone. He has a pang of sadness for the rhino – at least he has Delores.
Five gives the rhino skull one more pass, runs his hand over the huge horn, before he climbs back over to the enclosure next door, excited for what he’ll find. It takes him a while. He sifts through the long grasses for a few minutes and he’s about to decide that maybe it was empty when his foot slips on a loose rock and he slides down a shallow concrete slope and straight into a giant pile of bones.
How the fuck did he miss this? He looks back over his shoulder, up the slope. It’s not that steep and this pit is not that deep. Was he just that focused on the grass? That was so stupid of him. Five disentangles himself from the ribs and vertebrae around him, feeling a little guilty for pushing the bones from the resting place. He is a little excited, though; this thing is huge, almost as big as the rhino. He starts wracking is brain for other big animals, frustrated a bit by the blank he’s drawing. Elephants were supposed to be big, but were elephants real? He doesn’t think they were. The hazy memories he has of them are that they looked ridiculous. Long floppy noses. Too big ears.
Five has no fucking clue what he’s looking at. He stands at the skull and just stares at it, squints at it like that will make it turn into something he vaguely recognizes. He would be the first to admit he doesn’t actually know that many animals – before the apocalypse, he hadn’t particularly cared about them, outside of the few relevant to learning the alphabet or featured in some of their books as kids. Since he got Here there hasn’t been much of a reason to think about them. They’re all dead with everyone else.
This has him completely stumped.
It’s big, almost as big as the rhino skull, but that’s about where the similarities end. It’s all angular, has bits of bone that jut off the back of the jaw and its teeth stick out long from the front*. Is it for catching prey? Stabbing? They aren’t all that sharp, and its back teeth are sort of squarish, too, similar to the rhino’s.
He wishes Delores were in here with him, to help him figure this out. Not that she’s any better at animals than he is. And why the fuck is it sitting in this shallow pit? Did it fall in here when it died? He can’t tell what position it died in, not after he bowled through its entire middle and scattered its bones.
Five brushes along the long top of the skull, willing his brain to figure out what this is. It’s alien, is what it is; he’d think it was fake if it weren’t sitting here in a zoo and proving its own existence as something that was real and alive, once.
With effort, he leaves it behind and crawls his way back up the shallow slope. He shouts over to Delores a quick description of the skull, hoping she’ll have an idea, but she’s just as baffled as he is. It’s frustrating, is what it is. The other skulls he didn’t know, all the long-same ones with different horns or no-horns, at least were generic enough that he gave himself a pass for not knowing. This is so distinct; he should be able to figure it out.
He’s just going to have to cut his losses and move on. He doesn’t know it and that’s that. If the stars align, he might find a book later that could tell him but he won’t hold his breath for that. If he doesn’t already have the book, it is very unlikely it still exists - not in the harsh seasons of the apocalypse. He sighs his frustration and disappointment and then forces his brain to leave it behind and focus on what could be on the other side of the wall, the last in this trio of enclosures.
It’s his first real carnivore, is what it is. There is no doubting all those sharp teeth, and he feels a little proud of himself for guessing the rhino ate grass with its flat teeth. Compared to the sharp ridges of these teeth, it’s retroactively obvious.
He pretty sure it’s a lion. Or a tiger? He thinks the zoo is organized by where the animals lived, but he has no idea if lions or tigers lived with rhinos and the mystery animal. Maybe they both did. Either way, he knows this is a big cat because it looks just like the few cat skulls he’s found while sifting through the rubble of the end of the world – only about ten times larger*. There’s a few of them in here. Maybe there was a whole family of tigers (or lions).
He has a weird urge to take one back with him. It’s neat. The teeth are really cool. But that’s also stupid and will make it hard to carry back over the unstable concrete bridge. Still, he picks one up, not the largest one but still a good sized one, only to abandon it when he can’t hold it and climb over the wall back to the Mystery Animal’s enclosure and the bridge. Serves him right, it was a stupid thing to want. What would he even do with it?
Back with Delores, she has lots of questions about everything he saw. She’s impressed by the lions (tigers?), too, and tells him it would have been neat if he could have brought one to show her. She understands, though.
Together, they wander more. Five pops in and out of enclosures on whims. None are as cool as the rhino, but there are more carnivores (some look like the tiger (lion?) skulls, some are longer, flatter, and he doesn’t know what those belonged to). There’s more birds, more long-same skulls. He spots some more primates and steers clear. They wander for what feels like hours, taking their time and enjoying the green around them and the fun of trying to guess what all these animals used to be. It becomes apparent very quickly just how few animals Five actually knows. Delores is even worse than he is. Still, it doesn’t ruin the fun of guessing.
When Five thinks they have to have seen everything, at least that isn’t blocked by rubble, they turn a corner and they’re met with two massive pens, back-to-back and separated by a mountain of faux rock. One has a wall of plants blocking their view of it, the other has a skeleton laying out in the open. And it’s huge.
Five lets the handle to the wagon drop and almost runs to climb the fence and get a closer look. He walks along the insanely long body, marveling at the size of its bones. It makes the rhino look reasonably sized. He follows the last line of bones to the skull, counting them as he goes because he can. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. They’re each as long as his forearm.
The skull is almost a long-same, if it weren’t for the extreme size and its lumpy top. It has two longer nubs that might have been horns and then a third that’s just a bump in the middle of the forehead*.
Five revels in knowing exactly what this is. He glances back at Delores to tell her and then realizes how far away he left her.
He jogs back and pulls her wagon closer, lifting her up so she can see over the overgrown fence into the enclosure. “It’s a giraffe,” he tells her. Pointing at the line of seven long bones, he continues, “That was its neck. They had crazy long necks so they could eat from the tops of trees.” He thinks Vanya had a book with a giraffe in it. When they were really little. He remembers the cartoon picture at least. Yellow with brown spots.
It’s hard to wrap his head around how fucking tall this thing would have been standing. The legs, alone, would be taller than Five is. There’s a rotting platform on the other end of the pen, stairs spiraling up to the top, a good ten feet up in the air. Five mentally places an upright giraffe skeleton next to it; the giraffe would be taller.
Taller than ten feet. Nothing can be bigger than that.
Delores pulls him back to remind him they still have one more enclosure to look into. He double checks she’s done looking at the giraffe before setting her back into her spot in the wagon. They circle around to see past the wall of shrubs and find what this last pen has for them. Five sets his expectations to be disappointed; there’s no way it can beat the giraffe.
They make it around the greenery and Five throws away his previous statement. This is absolutely better than the giraffe.
He’s not sure what they are yet, but the size alone is blowing his mind.
Three enormous piles of bones lay through the giant yard. Those are impressive on their own, but the skulls make three, rounded boulders. Five only just remembers to leave Delores a position she can see a bit in before he’s pacing the fence for a spot to jump the dividing pit and get closer. There’s a huge building at the end of the pen, presumably a house for the giraffes and whatever these giants are, and there’s a thick walkway Five can pull himself over the fence and get to and cross to the skeletons.
The rounded top of the nearest skull reaches almost to his chest*. There’s a large hole in its center, shaped like a bit like an infinity symbol. His first thought is for a cyclops but he knows those weren’t real, just part of the mythology they learned in its original Greek. “Polyphemus,” he mutters to the skull, poking a hand into the hole. Pulling the hand out, he runs it down the flat front, along the soft curve to the bottom where it gently splits into two, hollow… tubes, for a lack of a better word. He pokes a hand into those, too, marveling at the size and flipping through ideas for what the tubes could be for. Drinking water? Breathing?
There’s two long bones laying in the dirt near the skull that Five had originally ignored, thinking they were ribs that had been misplaced. He was wrong, though, now that he’s standing over them. They’re rounder, taper more to a point, and are a few feet long.
What the fuck are those?
It is so hard to try and put the clues together around the continued amazement at the sheer size of whatever this creature was. It’s like back with the other mystery animal – it’s so distinct, so large, it makes Five think he should have recognized it on sight.
He hasn’t, though.
He walks to the other two, studies them in the same way, like they’ll spark his memory for something he hasn’t thought about in more than a decade and barely bothered learning in the first place.
Five trudges over to the fence near Delores, willing her to have an idea of what these giant animals are.
She doesn’t, of course.
She’s just as disappointed at being unable to pull the name from the depths of their memories as he is.
This is going to bother him for a long while, he just knows it.
They sit and stare at the bones for another few minutes, Five focusing on different bits of the skeletons – the globe of a skull, the long not-ribs on the ground, the insane size of the limb bones – waiting for something to jog his memory.
Gently, Delores reminds him they need to get going soon if they’re going to make it home by dark. She’s right, like always. Five reluctantly walks back across the yard to jump back to the other side of the fence. He takes one more pass at one of the skulls, circling it and touching it and trying to lift it to gauge its weight (heavy as fuck), before truly calling defeat.
How was there an animal that existed that was this big? It doesn’t seem possible. How did it get enough to eat? Five is tiny compared to them and he can barely find enough to eat. There was that much food in the world, before? He does vaguely remember not being hungry, Before, with delicious meals made by Mo—
He shoves the thought from his mind and hops the fence. He can’t waste his time on silly memories or on mystery animals that all died over a decade ago. Time to get back to work. He’s already lost the whole day on this pointless little adventure. He’s been so distracted by the sights that he hasn’t been properly looking to see if there are any supplies here. Truly, a waste of a day.
He can’t afford to waste days. He doesn’t have enough food to waste days.
Five pulls Delores back through the winding paths of the zoo. It’s not as fun, going back. The silence of the apocalypse is more present than it has been a long while. He’s too aware that the only noises are his footsteps and the rattling of Delores’ wagon, how they echo off the crumbling buildings and twisted metal. The death in every enclosure presses against his thoughts. He can’t ignore that these aren’t just interesting puzzles for him to guess at and figure out, that they had all been living, breathing animals with thoughts and instincts that real, live people came to marvel at.
It’s something Five will never get to do.
No, he forcefully corrects himself. He will get to. When he figures out the math, in another couple years, he’ll get to see them, too. He’s close. He can feel it. And then he’ll jump back, save his family, stop whatever destroys everything, and, maybe, then he can go to the zoo and see all these animals. See them for real. Find out what those two mystery animals are.
See them with his family.
He’ll get his answers.
He just has to be patient.
Always so fucking patient.
Still, Five’s mood is effectively soured by leaving the zoo. Delores is quiet as he pulls her past the flat birds and back out of the large entrance. She knows he’s upset and lets him wallow like he wants to for a few minutes.
As the zoo disappears behind them and Five falls into the familiar rhythm of walking and navigating the wagon around the uneven road, Delores speaks up. Five slows and turns to her, smiling despite himself.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It was a fun day.”