by Brian Hodge
Their guide on the microphone announced that the Congo Station was coming upon their left. The last thing she wanted to hear all of a sudden…
cloudburst
…because she knew, with a sinking feeling, that this flat-out changed everything.
Before the rain began, Kerebawa had been crouching half in and half behind a creeping tangle of bush atop the rocks. Hugging low to the massive formation, that was the key to not being seen. Justin had made it very clear that being up here was taboo.
There was little to do during the anticipation but think, and his mind went in directions unbefitting a warrior. He was dirty within, his soul filthy. He had still not been able to perform the ritual of unokaimou, that week-long purification for having taken lives in warfare. They had started all the way back in Medellín, those dead men behind him who had stacked up like plantains for a feast. Their blood was an anchor on his soul.
Distracted by these thoughts, he didn’t foresee it as he should have. He smelled it only a couple of minutes before it came, read it in the thickening of the sky…
Rain. Tentative drops at first, soon a torrent that drenched to the skin, and suddenly he bore a fresh set of worries. From around him and below came the sounds of people fretting and scurrying for the cover of these strange buildings that were supposed to look as though they belonged in a jungle and truthfully looked anything but. Rain pelted him, darkened the rocks and drummed off them in a fine spray, ran across them in rivulets.
Rain. The very worst thing they could have hoped for.
Kerebawa raised his head to look for Justin, see what he would do. Call this off? He squinted against the rain, couldn’t see Justin through the screen formed by the tops of the buttonwood trees.
Kerebawa’s heart began to pound as it never had before a raid. This was punishment for his impurities, for straying so far, so long, without cleansing his soul. He had brought this down upon their heads. So he must not fail them, must not fail.
He stretched his body across the nylon bag, anything to keep it dry. Then he remembered the little blue firestick Justin had given him. Surely it too must be kept dry. He wiggled it from his pocket and held it clenched inside his fist, trapped the fist between his body and the bag.
Waiting for hell, enduring high water.
If anything stood out as a symbol of Busch Gardens with all its diversity, it was surely the tigers. Not just any tigers, but the white Bengal tigers, of which a scant fifty or so awee known to exist in the world, all descending from a single white (though not albino) male captured in India in 1951.
Busch Gardens owned a male and female pair, both born a decade earlier. Also living with the pair was a second female of normal orange coloring, but carrying white genes in addition to the orange.
The tigers were kept in an area called Claw Island, a misnomer, since it wasn’t an island, but a peninsula. Sunk into a vast hole of geometric oddities, it was separated from park visitors by a moat of water. A series of fenced observation posts ringed the outside, some open to the sky, others roofed and rustic. Anything remotely close to the tigers’ land was screened by a tightly woven net of stout ropes, easy to see through, but nearly impossible to climb over.
The land itself was a skewed hourglass shape, bulbous at both ends and tapered in the middle. It was dotted with palms and small shade trees, a few stumps and logs, and most of the land’s outer edge was lined with rock to prevent erosion into the water. The southern end bordered the moat. The northern bordered a curving formation of elephantine rocks built into a bluff twenty-odd feet high, sloped down and inward to prevent even the most dexterous tiger from climbing up. Wholly inaccessible.
That is, unless one were to try from the other side of the rocks. Where the only thing preventing access to Claw Island was a three-and-a-half-foot fence, a small plaque warning against climbing, and common sense. If you could overcome the latter, the first two were no obstacles.
Just don’t get caught by park personnel — that was Justin’s main worry, and so far, so good. Kerebawa had remained undetected. Justin was beginning to think they had a chance of pulling this off, damn the consequences to be faced later.
That is, until the rain.
It seemed to come out of nowhere, one of those sudden Florida gulf storms, clouds cruising in and darkening the day in a matter of minutes. Pressed against the stockade wall, he felt it wash him from top to bottom, and fumed with panic bordering on paralysis. What an absolute idiot he had been, hadn’t even considered this possibility.
On the walkway, parkgoers scurried with frantic urgency, tenting brochures and maps over their heads. Probably packing under the roofed observation posts, joining those already there, watching the tigers or grazing from the food stands nearby. Waiting out this humid steambath of a rainstorm.
When Kerebawa didn’t come down from the rocks, Justin knew the call was up to him. Every fiber in his being that was remotely vindictive said to grab Kerebawa and stage one final retreat, leave the traitorous April to whatever fate Tony had a whim for. Sure, and spend the rest of his life — far, far away — knowing he’d lapsed to her level of betrayal.
No option, he couldn’t do it. And by now, he couldn’t pull her away because she would already be with Tony. The convergent meltdown of fate and destiny was minutes away.
He curled his lower lip in over his teeth, bit to the point of pain. Slammed both fists back against the wall. Hell with it. They were committed.
Justin moved over to the end of the wall, beside the pathway leading north to the train station. He looked down along his body. The rain had soaked through the yellow and green surfing shirt he wore loose and untucked, and which now clung revealingly over the Beretta tucked into his jeans. Although he didn’t know what good it would be, since not even an assault rifle would stop the guy.
He was pushing sodden hair back from his forehead when April and Tony rounded the corner. They saw him, stopped. Drowned rats, the both of them. His heart lurched when he saw just how wet Tony’s clothing was. This situation was steadily approaching lost cause.
“You’re empty-handed,” Tony said. Behind rain-beaded shades, he smirked. Looked back and forth. “Let me guess: It’s with the other guy. Wooo, clever. I can tell, you’ve done this before.”
Justin wanted to haul off and smack him. Probably lose a hand in the process. Then he noticed threads of blood stringing from April’s ear, rinsing in rain down the curve of her neck. It was a shock to realize that, despite everything, he could still feel pity for her.
Get on with it.
Tony glanced about, craning his neck in exaggeration. “Where is he? Mmmm? Down there in the bathrooms? Hmmm. Maybe in that trash can over there. No? Don’t tell me we have to ride the little choo-choo again. Oh my, anything but that.” He shuddered theatrically.
Justin did some looking about as well. They were completely alone back here, thanks to the rain. It was good for that much, at least. He pulled out the Beretta, held it in close to his body while training it on Tony. Who didn’t even flinch. Instead, he looked bored.
“You’re incredible,” he said. “You just don’t learn, do you? You got some kind of disability? That’s no good to you anymore.”
Justin shrugged. “May not kill you, but it’ll still trash you over for a while.” He nodded toward the canvas bag, looked at April. “Is it all there?”
She nodded. “I think. I didn’t have time to count it.”
“What’s the use, anyway?” Tony said to her. “Why count his money for him, huh? You won’t be seeing dime one.”
Trying to divide and conquer, Justin thought. Be a smart move, if the situation were as it appeared on the surface. He reached for the canvas bag and Tony swatted his hand away, held the bag out of reach. Justin was glad he couldn’t see the eyes behind those shades.
“Not yet, don’t even think it,” Tony said. “Try that again, I’ll bite. Just ask her.”
He looked at April, her bleeding ear. And believed.
Justin wiggled the gun barrel. “Come on. This way.”
Tony eyed him, statue-still for a long moment. Sizing the situation, one hand wrapped around the bag’s handle, the other resting against its bottom edge. A very defensive pose. At last he began to move, matching Justin step for step, while April hung behind.
Across the walkway…
Toward the buttonwoods, beyond them, the rocks…
Eye contact with Kerebawa, peering over a bush…
And Justin began to count seconds. One … two … three…
They came to the fence, Justin trusting that Tony was paying too much attention to him to bother looking at the little plaque at the west end of the rocks. They eyed one another like a pair of duelists awaiting a vulnerable opening, thrust and parry.
six … seven…
“Up the rocks,” Justin said.
Tony narrowed his eyes, watchful, ever suspicious. He flipped his hand in an after you gesture. “Age before beauty.”
Bastard. “Same time.”
Agreed. Justin slid the Beretta back into his waistband. They skirted the end of the fence, then moved along to a spot that looked easiest for climbing. A better slope, a few more hand- and footholds. The rain drummed down, stinging, washing off the rocks and turning them slippery.
twenty … twenty-one…
A mere eight feet of quick freestyle, and they were on top. Justin crouched beside Kerebawa and the bush on a narrow plateau. He’d beaten Tony by several seconds, since the guy was slowed by his canvas bag. Justin looked at Kerebawa, saw him wink. A curious gesture; he’d never seen him do that before.
thirty-three … thirty-four…
Justin’s heart began to quicken as he looked down from this new vantage point. He could see all but the northernmost reaches of Claw Island stretching away down below, surrounded by the dimpled surface of the moat. One of the sleekest, most muscular animals he’d ever seen padded along its domain toward the rocks, perhaps seeking shelter from the rain. The alien nature of its coloring made it seem almost spirit. He then looked up and out, saw crowds packed beneath the roofed posts along the west side. Felt as if he were onstage. And sure enough, one or two people under the roofs began to point.
forty … forty-one…
Tony was up, his footing solid, six feet away. Had to distract him, keep him from idly looking down. Justin unzipped the nylon bag, reached in to hold up one of the kilos of skullflush. Another. Another. Just to show he was an honorable guy.
And to check something else, as well. Kerebawa had not let him down. Because there it burned, along the inside of the bag where it was taped on a path rimming the bottom edge…
A construction-grade fuse. No worries about the rain dampening this part of the plan. The stuff would burn even underwater. Six inches every fifteen seconds. A magnesiumwhite ball of sparks crawled along the stout red cord, and the first foot-and-a-half was a track of crusted ash. He zipped back up.
fifty-three…
“So. What next, chief?” Tony stood with one hip cocked, holding the bag in the same way he had below, one hand on its bottom edge.
All at once, Justin didn’t like that pose. At all.
fifty-five…
It came as suddenly as a jet screaming overhead. A tiger, giving a shattering roar at them. Tony yanked his head around at the sound, with such force that his shades went spinning away in the rain. His hand arced away from the bottom of the bag, holding some sort of knife. The blade no thicker than a credit card, the hilt no thicker than the blade. Very sleek, perfectly balanced, and Justin figured he must have cut a concealing gap in the middle of the bag’s base, like an envelope. He was dropping the bag, whipping his arm back to throw.
fifty-seven…
“Eat it!” Justin screamed, and hurled the nylon bag with as much force as he could. He went dropping down to the scrawny bush with Kerebawa, drawing the silenced Beretta when he saw a startled Tony catch the bag one-handed. He aimed while on the roll along wet brush and unyielding rock, squeezed the trigger. The bullet popped Tony in the forehead as he staggered back with the bag clenched to his chest. Justin reared up to fire again, and then Tony’s cobra arm flicked the knife, and it was a whickering silver blur that punched into his right shoulder. Justin went down again, the blade buried halfway in, and the gun clattered down the rocks. He cried out, heard April do likewise, and the sentiment was echoed by more than a few people in the roofed pavilions.
All drowned out, though, when the bag erupted.
One simple plastic bottle of isopropyl alcohol, highly combustible and available in every drugstore in the country.
The colors were beautiful. The bag detonated into blooms of blue and orange fire, launching streamers of powder every which way, and they became a nebulous green cloud that hovered in the air for a moment before dissipating into the rain, washed along the rocks, gone, gone.
Tony.
He was staggered. But not fallen.
He roared, and from where Justin had toppled down the rocks, he wondered if Mendoza might have been temporarily blinded. Tony was blackened, eyebrows crisped away, his tank top shirt in ragged tatters that looked streaked with charbroiled blood. If it hadn’t been raining, he would by now have been flambé, a barbecued treat for tigers. But the fire died almost as soon as it had been born.
All this had truly accomplished was pissing him off.
Struggling on the rocks, rain beating down, Justin wrenched the knife free of his shoulder with a hoarse shriek, and Kerebawa helped him to his feet just as Tony charged.
Mendoza was beginning to unleash the hekura, homing in on the blood pulsing down Justin’s arm. He was halfway into the change when he swatted Justin with a backhand across the face. Same spot Barrington had kicked, and it knocked off last night’s scab. It was like taking a fastball to the head, and as the knife went flying, Justin flopped back to the rocks, rainwater mingling with hazy spots swimming before his eyes.
Kerebawa went on a weapon-free attack, crouching forward and ramming a shoulder into Tony’s broiled midsection. From where he had rolled into a shallow crevice between two adjoining boulders, Justin watched as they spun across the rocks, saw blood fly with rain.
And then saw them both go dropping over the edge of the bluff.
Kerebawa watched the ground spin better than twenty feet below, and even though he pinwheeled his arms, he knew he could never regain his balance. The only consolation was that Mendoza was faring no better.
They dropped, and Kerebawa lashed out blindly with frantic arms.
The bluff was built so that a stone lip overhung it at the top. One hand caught, and he clawed peeling fingernails into the rock. Swaying, dangling, he sensed the tigers pacing below, two whites and an orange, heard the rumbling in their primal throats. Heard the cries of the watchers somewhere behind him. His free arm flailed to stabilize himself, sought to grip the overhang.
He then dared to look beyond his own predicament, saw Tony hanging two-handed, not four feet away. Grinning like the demon he was. The raw, blackened face, further erupting into the image of his noreshi, the blunted snout pushing out, out. The wound Justin had fired into his head had already quit bleeding. Razor teeth snapped at the air, and he lunged for Kerebawa’s shoulder. Missed by a foot.
Webbing began to sprout between the man’s fingers, the change near completion, and he raked out an arm to seize a fistful of Kerebawa’s shirt. Next time, those teeth would not miss.
Kerebawa recalled so many vastly different things in the next second. His wife Kashimi, the son she bore him who still nursed at her breast. The son he had someday hoped to teach to fire an arrow straight and true, into food and enemies alike. He remembered Angus, the man who had opened his eyes to a world never before dreamed of. And Justin, even April — with whom he would likely never make peace — who had become his only friends in this world of far greater peril than any rain forest.
But the perils of home could sometimes not be escaped, even in the heart of a cit
y.
Piranha teeth, parting wide as Tony readied to strike .
Kerebawa knew the legends. Hekura who ate the souls of men and held them in turmoil, kept them from ascending to that next layer of the sky. God-teri.
It would have no piece of his.
His soul felt the wintery cold of sorrow as never before.
Tony lunged.
And Kerebawa shut his eyes as he released his hold on the rock. He dropped with a tearing of shirtsleeve. Free, eternally free, as he fell toward white fur, white claws, white teeth.
Justin crawled painfully across the rock, on hands and knees, out of the crevice and toward the edge. There was a chance, always a chance. His shoulder throbbed, his cheek throbbed. Behind him he heard a scrape, and turned. April was coming up, draped over the lip of the slippery rocks. She’d found the Beretta, held it clenched by the barrel in one hand.
His arm buckled. He coughed, then breathed rain. Ran prayers through his head in one endless sentence. And then heard the horrified outcry from spectators who were getting more theme park show than they’d ever expected, followed immediately by a renewed roar of beasts that rocked the evening air.
He knew what had happened. The only question was who.
Kneeling, bloody and spent. Close to the edge. Drenched in the downpour that had sent everything to the brink of ruin and beyond.
He watched the arms of the sole survivor as they clawed up and over the edge, saw the rising head. And cried out, half mourning, half mortal dread.
Justin toppled backward, in no shape to fight, not now, not with that. Not when the scent of his blood would send the thing into a frenzy that would end only when its hunger was sated.
They’d lost. Life. Hope. Everything.
Justin tumbled back, past April as she pedaled her feet against the incline. He fell down the curving slope, thudding into the gravel at the rocks’ base, just inside the fence. He heard the crunch of April’s shoes as she dropped back down, and then she was kneeling, helping to pull him up and over the fence, just as Tony reached full height on the plateau overhead.