by Matt James
A roar broke him out of his stupor—and just in time too. For what he saw would give the normal man pause and then fear. A male—a big one—was pounding through the open plain, quickly cutting the distance between the two predators.
He smiled again. He was no normal human.
Not anymore.
He is not the predator, Georges thought. He is the prey.
He lunged, raking his razor-sharp nails across the animal’s snout. It roared again in fury and in what sounded like pain, but Georges knew from experience—even though he couldn’t remember how he gained such knowledge—that the big cat was far from defeated. It would fight to the death.
So, will I.
Georges went on the offensive, catching the lion off guard. He thrust out his left hand, using his newly formed claws like a set of daggers, and caught the lion in the throat. As he attacked, the male swiped at him, dragging its own large claws through his flesh.
But it did not hurt. It barely bled at all. The only sign of injury was the slash marks themselves and what little blood did spill. The liquid was bright red and dripped from the various veins that now bulged from his black skin.
The lion wheezed, its breathing compromised, a few of the two-inch-long talons had found their mark, puncturing the lion’s esophagus. With its oxygen supply quickly depleted, the male backed away, confused and dying, but Georges advanced, stalking his prey.
You are prey.
Then, as quick as a lightning flash, Georges lunged, teeth bared.
9
The clanging of boots on metal echoed through the vertical shaft, increasing the tension Logan felt in his temples. The resonating sound felt like a jackhammer was going to town on the inside of his skull.
“How much further?” CJ asked from above. He had gone in first, shortly after dropping three glow sticks down the entryway. They landed with a soft clapping noise fifty feet later—twenty feet below ground level of the plains outside.
Fitz had, indeed, met up with Mo and the two men immediately took to the sky, searching for the lone poacher. The one that got away. They needed answers and he—it—was the only thing that could provide them. So, for now, the pit was off limits, just in case some sort of World War Two era contagion was down there.
That’s what Logan was betting on, anyway. He saw what the men had turned into. He would never forget it either.
The blood-red, glowing eyes.
The dagger-like claws.
The ferocious behavior.
Something was definitely down there and they needed to figure out what it was. If this place is what Jan thought it was, then they would have their answers soon enough. That is…if the Nazis left anything behind when they bugged out.
Let’s hope they did, Logan thought as his foot struck solid ground, startling him. He was so lost in thought that he hadn’t even realized he had finished the fifty-foot climb. He turned and through the green tinted haze, saw a hall stretching away in the opposite direction of the mass grave now above them.
Taking up position just outside the short hallway, Logan aimed his SCAR down the corridor and waited for CJ and Jan to join him.
A few seconds later he heard CJ land and then the heavier Jan after her. Both took up positions next to Logan, waiting for him to make the first move.
“Right…” Logan said. “Jan, take point. CJ you’re next. I’ll take the rear.”
“Logan?” CJ asked, about to complain. Normally, he would have taken point.
“It’s fine,” he said, staring down the hall. “I’m out of my element right now and Jan can read German. Plus, he has the better weapon for clearing tight spaces like this.”
Jan hefted his Mossberg tactical shotgun, a staple for them when out in the grasslands. They used steel slugs instead of your standard shell too. Slugs were good for taking down large predators or disabling engine blocks. The latter of which was standard practice for them. Disabling a poacher’s vehicle was an important step in stopping them. They were much easier to find when forced to flee on foot and replacing a damaged vehicle would take time and money. Money was something they didn’t generally have unless they poached something valuable—which goes back to the trucks and their importance.
No transportation means no hunting.
Logan looked up towards the entrance and thought about the cat and mouse game Mo and Fitz must be dealing with right now. Even with all the advanced equipment they had on board Kipanga, it wasn’t a sure thing they’d find the escapee. But it was possible now. If it was a year or two ago it would have been completely absurd to even try.
“Let’s move,” Logan ordered, his voice just over a whisper. The others understood the need for stealth and answered in their own hushed tones.
From what he could see from the rear of the pack, there was an intersection about forty feet ahead and a door directly in front of them.
Jan led them silently forward and stopped before entering the conjunction. He then leaned against the wall and quickly peeked out in both directions, right then left. After returning to the safety of the coverage the corner provided, he signaled for them to continue. They did, stopping in front of the door at the top of the T, the one Logan had seen just moments before.
Logan saw that the metal door had a nameplate on it and, of course, it was in German. He saw Jan tilt his head to the side, thinking.
“We don’t want to go in there,” he said, turning back to Logan.
“Why?” he asked looking at the label. It read, Waschraum. “What’s it say?”
“It’s a restroom,” Jan said with a grin. “Unless you have to go that bad?”
Logan could hear CJ snickering behind him as he shook his head. Great, with everything going on…the first thing we find is a seventy-year-old shitter.
“Fine,” Logan said, “keep moving.”
Back to business, Jan leveled his Mossberg and headed left.
He stopped twenty feet farther down the hall at another metal door. This one was on the corridor’s left-hand side and read, Schlafraume und kantine. Jan cautiously tried the door’s handle, turning it until the bolt popped and the door swung open.
Swiftly, Logan and Jan took either side of the door, weapons ready. Holding up his fingers, Logan silently counted from three-to-one. When they hit one, both men spun and aimed through the doorway. What they saw gave them pause.
It, indeed, was a barrack, the housing for the people who called this place home. They saw bunks and central tables, all of which were still covered with the belongings of whoever had lived here.
“It’s like we’ve stepped into a Nazi-era time capsule.”
Logan just nodded, agreeing with his sister’s evaluation of the German barracks. On the left, you had bunks stacked two high. There was at least a dozen of them.
But who’s to say this is the only room like this down here? Logan thought, continuing to scan the room. How large was the force stationed here?
On the right side of barracks, you had more beds, but these were singles with no second tier above them. It screamed of an upper echelon. The bed sheets were more elegant looking than the ones the bunks had. The mattresses appeared to be softer too.
“The more privileged would have slept here,” Jan explained, giving air quotes to the word, privileged. “The higher-ranking officers and science types.”
“Science?”
It’s then Logan noticed a coat laying on the first bed to the right. A lab coat. Jan must have seen it upon entering and deduced what Logan now did. They stepped further in, CJ moving towards the communal tables at the center of the large room. He and Jan turned to the bed with the coat.
CJ found playing cards and half a pack of cigarettes on one table and a plate with long rotted food on another. Military jackets were strung occasionally on hooks next to what was probably their owner’s bunks.
“Weapons,” she said, seeing a variety of them leaning against the walls and lying atop several of the mattresses.
“Leave them,” Loga
n said. “We have better and don’t have the right ammo for relics like those.”
“I didn’t mean we should take them,” CJ said. “I was going to comment that they were still here at all.”
Logan agreed with her logic and instantly regretted jumping down her throat, but this place made him…nervous. He glanced over and saw multiple rifles, coated in seven decades worth of dust. What soldier would leave and not take anything with him—especially when you are stationed out in the middle of nowhere in Africa? He then remembered the dead Nazis buried with the animals topside. Maybe they didn’t leave after all…
Turning back, he picked up the coat, inspecting it, finding a name and an unfamiliar logo on the chest pocket. Tapping Jan on the shoulder, he got the man’s attention off CJ and back to the task at hand, startling him.
Jan spun, noticing Logan staring at him through his goggles. “Sorry,” the bigger man said. Logan couldn’t tell if he was blushing, but he was pretty sure the man was.
“It’s fine and so is she,” Logan said in a hushed tone, a matter of fact. “She’s strong.”
Jan just nodded.
“Take a look at this,” Logan said, holding up the embroidered coat. “You ever see this before?”
Jan took the coat and shook his head, brushing away the coat of dust from the logo. “No idea. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn of a secret scientific sect within the larger Nazi party.”
“What do you mean?” Logan asked.
“Look.”
Logan saw it instantly. The swastika was obvious, but the symbol it was accompanying was what threw him off. Surrounding the “hooked cross” was a helix. The universal symbol representing a DNA strand.
“What about the text underneath the symbols? What does it say?”
Jan stared down at it and for a moment looked like he was going to refuse to speak it aloud, mouthing the words to himself first. But he found his resolve and said, “It says, Wohn Tod.” He then looked back up to Logan. “It means, Living Death.”
10
“You see anything, Mo?” Fitz asked in the chopper’s headphones. He’d been scanning the surrounding landscape for the last few minutes, finding nothing. In any normal circumstance, they would have found the guy already. He thought back to what he witnessed, instantly recalling how not normal this night had been so far. Pandu and Saami were dead, torn apart by these… He didn’t even know what to call them. What the things had done didn’t describe anything human to him.
“No,” Mo replied, “but we should be coming up to the lion’s den shortly. We are just a minute or two out. I will light it up when we get there and circle around.”
Fitz knew what he meant. Over the years, they charted where a lot of the major predator’s territories were, trying to avoid them whenever they could. CJ would mark them on a map and have Adnan upload it into a database, sort of like a GPS system. It worked wonders in the air.
“You think the bloke went towards the lions?” Fitz asked, in his heavy outback accent. Unlike Logan, who grew up in the city, Gray Fitzpatrick grew up in the ‘backwoods’ of Australia. They compared each other to Americans who grew up in the south versus say…Florida.
“If he did,” Mo said, “the lions would take care of him and whatever is left of his body would be easy to spot. Either way, it’s worth a shot to look.”
Fitz nodded his agreement. “You mean if there’s anything left.”
Mo only shrugged, continuing to scan the plains below.
“We should be coming up on them now. I’m flipping on exterior lights.”
They both turned off their night vision devices as Fitz looked out his window. The world below their feet bloomed to life in the soft glow of the Blackhawk’s lights. They outfitted Kipanga with a specially made “soft glow” system. It was basically a dimmer switch but on a grander scale. The animals of the region got frightened easily by the intense light that a standard spotlight would give off. So, depending on the time of day, they could turn down the light’s intensity.
“Damn,” Fitz said, seeing the terrain. There was blood…a lot of it—bodies too. Well, pieces of them.
Seeing the carnage for himself, he didn’t have to ask. Mo was already landing the helicopter as he stared in horror at the brutal sight in front of them. It was unlike anything they had ever witnessed before.
As the landing skids touched down, Fitz realized something… There was too much blood to belong to one human being, and the bodies…they were covered in a golden-brown fur, not skin.
These are the lions, Fitz thought as a shiver rolled up and down his spine. What on Earth could do this to a pride of lions?
“Leave the chopper running and follow me,” Fitz said, grabbing his Mossberg. Mo did as told and reached for his identical weapon—when movement just outside the range of the Blackhawk’s lights caught his attention.
“Fitz,” Mo said, snatching the Aussie’s arm before he exited. “You see that?”
The look in Fitz’s eyes said he did.
They looked at each other and nodded in unison. Both men were officially terrified, remembering what happened to Saami and Pandu just minutes ago.
They exited Kipanga together, twin shotguns pointed forward and started towards the moving shadow ahead. It slid in and out of focus like a specter against a pitch-black backdrop.
Halfway to where they saw…whatever it was…moving, they paused, hearing a soft mewing from behind a large Acacia tree. They could be found all over the Serengeti. Normally, you would see a family of a dozen, or so, lions lounging about beneath it, trying to avoid the ruthless heat emanating from the summer sun. They were known to sleep twenty hours at a time.
“What the—” Fitz whispered as a shape stepped out from behind the tree trunk.
It was a lion—sort of—a large male, but it was torn to pieces… But alive? There was no way this thing could be alive with the wounds it obviously suffered at the hands of...
Could it be? Fitz remembered who they were really after. Could a man really do this?
Half of the skin on the lion’s face was gone, including its right ear. The skull was in plain view as it stepped closer, looking like the Terminator with battle damage. Then, it roared loudly, noticing the two men for the first time. Its attention had been past them, to the Blackhawk.
Fitz and Mo had heard a lion’s roar up close and personal a few times but nothing like this. The low, baritone bellow was accompanied by a high-pitched shrieking noise, as if an eagle or some other bird of prey was stuck in its throat. But that wasn’t the worst of it… The most horrible part was when the lion started to change.
The SDF men stared in awe as the lion shivered. It was more like intense muscle spasms really but they weren’t what kept the men’s attention. It was the golden fur… The golden fur that began to turn black.
The lion roared again, screaming into the night as its blood-stained coat faded to black, almost camouflaging it against the nighttime setting. The only reason they could see it was because of its eyes.
“They’re red,” Fitz said, hands shaking, “just like the bloody poachers back at the pit.” In all the years he served his country killing terrorists, he’d never been this afraid.
As the ghost-lion approached, its fangs also enlarged, like those of a saber-tooth. They continued to grow until they were a foot long, sharpening to points at the tips. With each inch grown, they made a cracking sound as if the bone was being broken over and over again. Each snap made the two men flinch.
“It’s a hai wafu,” Mo said, his voice trembling, slipping into his native Swahili.
Fitz had been in Africa long enough to pick up on some of the region’s most common language. Mo had taught him most of it—Logan too, who was fluent.
Hai wafu, Fitz thought. Living dead.
“Great… Bloody zombies.”
11
“Let’s keep moving,” Logan said, moving towards the door. They had swept the room for anything they could use to identify th
is place. While they didn’t have any concrete evidence to the exact use it held, Jan had come up with the obvious.
“I think this a secret Nazi bunker,” he said as he moved about the sleeping quarters. “The bodies in the pit above, suggest a murder of some sort as well.”
“What of the poachers?” CJ asked.
“No idea, but I have my suspicions,” Jan replied.
“Which are?” Logan asked.
“First off, the logo stitched into the lab coat shows us the symbol for DNA. I think it’s safe to assume that this place was used for some sort of experimentation.”
Logan and CJ nodded, silently agreeing.
“Secondly,” Jan continued, “I think some sort of virus may have been uncovered when our friends dug up the dead. It’s possible that the contagion was still active after all these years, lying dormant until disturbed.”
The two Aussies nodded again.
Logan then stepped back out into the main hall. The eerie glow from within his device cast shadows everywhere, giving the illusion of something moving further down the hall, back the way they came. He turned left, taking the lead, continuing their search. He stopped after another twenty feet in front of another metal door. It too had a name tag.
“Personlich?” Logan read, turning to Jan. The towering German stepped up and confirmed the word, translating it.
“It means, Private,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “Basically, it’s a ‘Keep Out,’ or ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.”
He turned the handle and pushed, but nothing happened. The door was definitely unlocked, but it didn’t budge.
“It’s stuck,” Jan said. He then shouldered the door, shoving hard. The door gave a couple of inches, resisting against some unseen object, blocking it from opening the rest of the way.
He leaned, peering into the small crack between the door and its frame. “It looks like another bedroom, only it’s much more nicely decorated.” He stood. “Maybe it’s that of an officer or some other higher ranking official?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Logan said, stepping up. “Together on three.”