Aquarium Quarantine

Chapter 7

I contemplated for a moment before coming up with an idea. "We could filet a lot of the frozen fish and salt cure it. That way it won't need refrigeration and can be a long term backup solution."

Sasha clapped her hands gleefully, "That is a great idea!! We have tons of boxes of salt! We could probably salt everything in the freezer with all of that!"

Madeline was the one who was the main chemist of the aquarium, and she knew more than we did about it. She frowned and my hopes instantly started to fall. "We can use the Aquarium salt, because it is just purified sodium chloride. But we can't use the Marine salt, it could be toxic. The marine salt has buffers in it that could potentially kill us. I don't know for sure what would happen, but the chemical makeup of it doesn't seem safe for human digestion. It could make us extremely sick and we have no way to get to a doctor if that happens." She said, pursing her thin lips slightly.

I let what she said sink in, we had a massive amount of marine salt, but only about half of a pallet full of aquarium salt. The marine salt was used constantly for salting the tanks for ocean animals, but the pure aquarium salt wasn't used often. Aquarium salt was actually a product used in fresh water tanks only, because adding a small amount of salt to a freshwater tank was a safe method for treating infections and injuries in fresh water fish. We had enough to salt cure a decent amount of food, but it wasn't nearly as much as I initially thought. We decided that today’s task was going to be focused on salting the food so it would be ready when we eventually needed it.

 We got started, everyone loading pallets full of whole frozen fish out of the freezer and into the kitchen.

In our aquarium, food is prepped constantly for the animals. They get a huge variety of foods that are all cut and prepared specially for them. The food was bought from local fisheries whole, and some of the fish were half the size of us. This meant that butchering and fileting the fish took a large portion of the day and took a lot of muscle work. It took us hours to filet tons of fish and prepare it for being salted. Three of us worked on butchering the fish while the other two de-boned the filets and packed them in salt in big plastic storage bins. While we worked, we also set aside the daily food prepared for our animals. It was tedious and tiring work, and I tried to keep some upbeat music playing on my phone the whole time to keep everyone's spirits up. We were all fully aware that there might be a time when we would no longer have any way to feed the animals if this nightmare continued for too long, but we would continue to care for them as long as we were able too. That might sound silly to some people, but you have to understand that these animals meant the world to us. They were our whole life up until this disaster happened.

Six hours later, we had fileted and packed two full pallets full of fish into salt. We had continued prepping the food until we completely ran out of the Aquarium salt, and then we retired to the office together to rest our achy muscles. We had a mini fridge and a cabinet full of snack items in the office that we had fully stocked for eating at work, and we opted to munch on that rather than trying to cook any fish after spending so much time already messing with it. I honestly felt sick at the idea of eating any fish after spending so much time staring at fish guts for the majority of the day, and I was grateful for the option of something that didn’t have any blood involved… As I crunched on a bag of Cheetos and a can of orange soda, the thought sunk in that we were going to burn through this food quickly and soon be only left with seafood to eat. I shuddered at the thought of being forced to only eat meat after trying and failing miserably to adopt a keto diet a few years back when it was all the rage. I needed my carbs or I felt like total s**t.

"Hey guys, these snacks are not going to last very long. We have probably only have a few bags of chips and a few sodas, and then all we are going to have left is the seafood. Do we have any more of the animal vitamin supplements in the cabinet Scarlet? Because I am afraid, we might end up pretty vitamin deficient without any vegetables." I said with a frown.

"Well it's not like eating chips and soda is going to be any healthier," Madeline scoffed.

Scarlet got up and unlocked the cabinet, pulling out a bottle of vitamin capsules. "Well, this is the only bottle left. I put in an order for another case last week but it hadn't arrived yet when all of this started happening." She frowned for a second before climbing up on top of the cabinet and rummaging around in the back.

She pulled out two large containers of something and tossed them over to us. "I just realized something. We are going to need this too. We have to use the distilled water filter to make sure the water is uncontaminated and safe to drink, but if we drink that for too long it is going to make us sick. We would get dehydrated because eventually drinking distilled water starts sucking the electrolytes from your body if that is all that you drink.”

I had never heard of that before, but it was a frightening thought. I remembered that I had bought gallons of it at the store from time-to-time before to drink because I thought it was cleaner than the typical drinking water. I had never noticed a difference, but I thought that maybe that was just if you only drank that and nothing else.

Scarlet tossed me the container and I clumsily missed catching it, letting it hit the table with a loud thwack that made everyone visibly flinch. Silence took over and the realization of our situation started to creep back into everyone’s minds.

Scarlet quickly recovered from her flinch and tried to lighten the mood again. “This stuff is something we use to use when we would go help animal control with any strange animal cases. Remember that time that guy had all those illegal exotic cats in his house and someone finally called the cops on him because a lynx escaped, ended up going through a dog door, and eating the neighbors Chihuahua?"

Charles nodded with a small chuckle at the absurdity of that situation, "Yeah they were all dehydrated and malnourished and we got that mega electrolyte powder to help them get back into shape. It isn't often that stuff like that happened though luckily. I forgot that we even had that. It might be expired by now."

Scarlet nodded, "Yeah I think it is but I think it should still be safe to drink. We need to put a scoop of it in the water storage bin every time we fill it up. That could keep us from getting sick, but that isn't going to help us when we run out of the other vitamins. Humans can't live on meat alone."

Sasha chipped in, speaking up for the first time in a while, "We have that twenty pound bag of rice in the storage cabinet that we have to put our electronics in when they get wet." She wasn’t looking at any of us, staring down at her lap and fidgeting anxiously with a pen cap from the desk.

Madeline nodded, but didn't look very enthusiastic about it. "It isn't going to last us long though with all five of us eating it. We are going to have to stretch it out as long as possible, like making a rice and fish soup or something. Hopefully we get rescued soon and it won't be an issue, but it is going to suck once we run out of the rice and the vitamins. I think we can survive on just the seafood for a long time, but we are going to be very weak."

We all finished taking a break and I suggested that me and Sasha get dressed in our wetsuits and catch the snapper. He seriously needed his antibiotic shots to bring down the swelling in his poor face, it wasn’t fair to make him suffer if we could help him. Plus, I wanted to keep her occupied because anytime she wasn't doing anything, I could tell that the sadness over Harrold started to make her disassociate. When we had finally caught the fish, he quickly got his shot and was released back into the tank. I forced a smile at Sasha and gave her some praise for a job well done, but she didn’t seem to register that I was even talking to her. Scarlet was sitting on the edge of the tank as we climbed out, looking worried. "Hey guys, I think after we finish with the snappers medicine in a few days, we shouldn't get into any more tanks."

"Huh?" I asked, confused. "Why not?"

She looked at me sadly, "I know that the chances of actually getting bit by anything is super low, but its better not to take the risk. If anything happened, we wouldn't be able to get to a doctor. The tanks are going to get super dirty, but we can try to attach a scrub brush to a pole or something and just clean as much as possible from the side. I don't want anyone to take any extra risks."

I honestly hadn't even thought of that. After working with such "dangerous" animals for so many years, I had grown very comfortable with being around them. The only time I had ever been bitten by a shark was when we had it restrained for a veterinary exam when we were trying to cut the poor terrified thing out of a tangled-up fishing net. I got in tanks with wild sharks every other day for the past five years, and not once had I ever been bitten or injured by one while swimming with it. Most of them don't like being close to people, it really scares them and they try to avoid bumping into you at all costs. Scarlet was completely right though, there was always a risk and you never know what could happen. There was no reason to take that risk in a situation like what we were in, it would be extremely stupid. I cursed myself for not thinking of that. Any animal in the building posed a risk, even if it was just a fish like the snapper.

"You are definitely right." I told Scarlet. "I hadn't thought about it like that. That means we should be really careful about feeding Leo too. A bite from him would be terrible if we couldn't get medical attention." Leo was our resident grumpy moray eel. He had been tangled up in a fishing net and badly injured, and we had gotten calls from a local dive shop to go and rescue him. He had been here over a year, but his injuries were so severe that he had problems swimming regularly now. We hoped he would make a full recovery eventually and would be able to be released, but it wasn't looking very optimistic. He had a bad habit of trying to bite legs if anyone was in his tank cleaning, so it was a dangerous task that was avoided as much as possible. He had been nicknamed the “Danger Boy” after he managed to leap up out of the water just far enough to land a nasty bite on Charles' hand once when he was offering him food on a pair of tongs. Most eels were usually shy and gentle despite looking so scary, but none of us blamed him for being such a jerk after the horrible things the poor guy went through. Charles had been on antibiotics for weeks though, and that isn’t something we would be able to risk right now.

Scarlet’s brown eyes got wide, "Definitely no contact whatsoever with the danger boy. Don't even lean over the side of the tank when your cleaning or feeding him. I don't want to deal with trying to play emergency doctor if he gets anyone."

 Charles walked up just as she was talking about it and began laughing. "Yeah he really got me that one time... that sure was a lot of blood."

This made Scarlet and I laugh with a sprinkle of hysteria, and reminded me of how crazy you had to be to work a job like we do. No sane person would chuckle at the idea of a highly dangerous creature chomping down on their hand. Our lives were already so high risk and we had grown comfortable enough with it to accept those risks without question, and now a group of us crazies were all trapped together as the world fell apart from f*****g zombies outside. Maybe that made us lucky in a dark way, because we were trained to be calm in high stress scenarios. I felt like we were all doing the best we could to be calm and rational, and we were actually doing a pretty good job of holding it together for the most part. Nothing in life could prepare you for a situation like this though. We were definitely all just sort of, “disassociating and compartmentalizing” the trauma right now. At least, that’s what my therapist would tell me if she wasn’t already dead from the zombies….. That last thought caused a cold lump in my chest to form…

The rest of the day was spent feeding all of the animals and cleaning up the mess in the kitchen from butchering all the meat. It was late into the night when we all showered and finally got ready for bed. I was grateful to be busy, it kept my mind in the moment and kept me from panicking about what was going outside. It was like being in a bubble, and I could keep the evil outside at bay just by focusing on being productive. We hadn't heard any noise outside at all today, and our radio had remained silent. We established a system for checking each other every few hours for any symptoms of illness, completing a series of checks for fever, heart rate, blood pressure, and many cognitive tests. Luckily for us, no one showed signs of anything other than physical and mental exhaustion.

The next week passed the same way. We continued to give the snapper his daily shots, and we fed the animals every few days. Luckily the only animals we had in our possession currently were two adult hammerheads, three lemon sharks, a young sandbar shark, a baby zebra shark, the eel, and a few red tailed boa snakes, a few stingrays and some tropical fish. We had luckily released all of the rescue sea turtles a month prior, so our facility was relatively empty compared to normal. The bulk of what we usually had was sharks that had been rescued from fish net entanglement and stranded sea turtles. Aside from the health checks every few hours, everything felt surprisingly similar to our normal daily routine. We started becoming lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that nothing bad had happened yet. Don't get me wrong, we were still fully aware that everything had gone to s**t outside, but it was still like experiencing it from inside a safe bubble.

We were not prepared for what happened next.....