A Thief Among Ghosts

Victor Donahue known as Robin Hood as returned to the Zoo after many years absence.

The gates had not changed.

Rust chewed at the iron bars like a sickness, flaking in jagged scales where the rain had eaten through. The zoo’s arch still bore its faded lettering The Lincoln Park Zoological Gardens, but whole chunks had fallen away, leaving only The Zoo in cracked stone above Victor Donahue’s head. Beyond the gates, the shadows of dead trees clawed upward, their branches black against the late afternoon sky. A smell lingered; rot, rain-soaked leaves, and the faint trace of smoke, as though something had been smoldering deep inside for years and never quite gone out.

Victor drew a breath, slow and deliberate. He told himself it was air, but it felt like stepping back into a cell: cold, stale, waiting to close around him.

Five years gone. Five years stolen. And still, the Zoo stood waiting.

He touched the scar along his jaw, a reminder from Stateville. Nights in that place had taught him to keep his back to the wall, his voice quiet, his hands steady. Silence was safer than violence. Most nights he chose silence, and yet the name had followed him down the tiers: Robin Hood. Half insult, half myth. They said he stole from the wolves and gave to the rats. He never corrected them. What would’ve been the point?

A memory pressed hard against him, uninvited: the clang of bars at lights out, the scraping sound of a shiv against concrete, somebody whispering his name in the dark. He could almost smell the bleach, hear the muffled sobbing two cells over. A man learned in prison that survival came in two currencies: fear or respect. Victor had tried to trade in neither, but somehow earned both. That was the trouble with legends...they grew without your permission.

And now here he stood, legend or ghost, staring at the Zoo’s rusted maw.

Inside, he knew, nothing would be the same. The place had teeth now. Desmond had seen to that. Word had reached even the prison yard: the Zoo had grown darker, tighter, more like an empire than a refuge.

Victor pressed his palm against the cold iron gate. The metal left a red smear of rust across his hand.

Would they remember him?
Would they want him?

He pushed. The gate creaked open, loud enough to wake the dead.

The path was still there, cracked concrete split by weeds, puddled with rain that hadn’t drained in years. Once it had carried families to cages filled with lions and apes. Now, the cages were for people.

Victor walked slow, his boots crunching glass and gravel. Every step echoed louder than he liked, as if the whole ruin were listening. The smell deepened the further he went, mold, piss, burned rubber. Something sweet underneath, too, like cheap whiskey spilled and left to rot.

Eyes found him before voices did. Shadows shifted in the husks of old exhibits: faces behind bars, in doorways, under collapsed roofs. The Zoo had always been a refuge for the lost, the broken, the unwanted. But where he remembered ragged laughter and campfire warmth, now there was a tighter silence, suspicious and sharp.

A figure leaned out from a shattered ticket booth. A girl...no, not a girl anymore. The last time Victor saw her, she’d been fifteen, wiry and quick, lifting wallets on the Red Line. Now her hair was shaved close, a jagged scar running across her brow. She stared at him for a long moment, then ducked back inside without a word.

Victor’s chest tightened. Once, kids had run to him, calling his name like he was a hero back from the dead. Now they hid.

A voice finally cut through the air, gravelly and uncertain.
“Donahue?”

Victor turned. From behind the rusted bars of the old reptile house, a man emerged, broad shoulders, a limp dragging one leg. Marcus Tate. They’d run side jobs together, back before it all fell apart. Tate’s beard was shot with gray now, his eyes narrower, harder.

“Thought you were a ghost,” Tate said. His tone carried something between respect and accusation.

“Not yet,” Victor answered. His voice came out lower than he intended, roughened by years of silence.

Others gathered, drawn by the sound. Men and women; some Victor knew, some strangers who only knew the stories. Their expressions were unreadable: a few smiles, more frowns, all edged with the same question...was he still the man they remembered, or just another broken ex-con?

Victor could feel the weight of it pressing down on him, heavier than the prison gates ever had.

“Desmond’ll want to see you,” Tate said finally. No warmth in it. Just fact.

Victor nodded, though his gut twisted. Of course Desmond would. The king always demanded tribute when ghosts came crawling back.

As they started walking deeper into the Zoo, past cages that smelled of rain and ruin, Victor felt the old instincts clawing their way back. Keep your eyes sharp. Keep your back covered. Keep your hands steady.

The cage had changed. But so had he.

Word Count: 840
Written for:"Chapter One"