A bloody morning

An eerie silence hung over the Parkville dawn as the zookeeper began his rounds. He was a man who’d seen the world, been caught with his patrol 25 clicks from anywhere in ‘Nam in ’68, seen what a mortar shell does to a man when it scores a direct hit.

After that, he’d travelled loose and light. Tuna fishing off Port Lincoln, a spell up in the Kimberleys. There’d been a bit of jail along the way, fights in bars that he always won, sometimes won a little too well. No, he’d seen blood before, he’d seen suffering, he’d seen things no man should ever have to see.

But he’d never seen anything like this before.

The paths of the zoo were covered in feathers, fur and scales. The hind leg of a kangaroo lay broken on a grassy verge, bloodied where some monstrous force had gnawed the flesh from the bone.

He followed the trail carefully, automatically into survival mode. He knew whoever – whatever – had done this could still be lurking, watching him , poised to strike,

He came to the open space just by the front gates. A charnel house greeted him. The heads of dozens, no hundreds of animals, from seals, to a zebra, even the poor bloody little lemurs sat in a macabre pyramid. And at the foot of the pyramid, a huge thing, a great pink mass, blood dripping from its gaping maw as it attempted to fit one last morsel into its grotesquely stuffed belly.

“What in the name Peter bloody Landy has happened here,” the ranger demanded.

The man, if you could call the abomination such a thing, shifted its tiny eyes in its enormous head and dimly registered his presence.

“I’m, I’m sorry Mr Clarkson, I couldn’t help myself. I just got hungry.”

With that, he passed out.

Later, as the firemen loaded the man he now knew was Hawthorn player Stewart Dew onto the kind sling normally only used to assist in the rescue of beached whales, the ranger assessed the damage.

Dew had eaten well over half of the animals in the entire zoo. He’d eaten all the crocodiles. All of them. And if the vet staff couldn’t revive the little quoll he’d taken a bite out of before discarding in favour of larger fare, then he may well have sentenced an entire sub-species to extinction with his ravenous hunger.

Just as the ranger was wiping away tears at the sight of the horror, the Zoo’s lawyer came over.

“Bad news Johnno, it looks like Hawthorn have got an injunction slapped on this already. Seems they registered Dew as disabled due to his eating disorders when they recruited him. Legally, we can’t say a word about this to anyone.”

Well, thought Johnno, the law might apply to straight suits and short back and sides men like you, but I answer to a higher power. No, someone would pay for this. Blood would be spilt. An eye for an eye, a tail for a tail.