by Ahimsa Kerp
There was something else about the print that disturbed him.
Spread out across the print was a smashed body. He couldn't identify if it was male or female, or who it had once been. Torn threads of clothing were mixed in with pulped guts and tattered flesh. The poor son-of-a-bitch had been stepped on by a giant.
He wasn't safe, that much was clear. The jungle terrain seemed to pick up on his fear. The night came alive. The .45 pistol clutched in Lee's hands became insignificant against what lurked out there.
Concussions rocked the ground. Then came the pounding steps of an enormous creature, and the shriek of a hideous bird. Thrown into the mix were the incoming steps of a stampede. Screeches and wild hissing joined in on the jungle cacophony.
The song of Lee's demise.
New sounds joined the nerve-churning choir. Tribal drumming. Bones rattled and chimed. Dozens of crude instruments played their disturbing death chords. Then the screaming from human voices, "Yip-yip-yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeei!"
God knows what they were saying, Lee thought, as flickers of torches appeared in the distant jungle thick. Everything was coming for him at once. Lee spotted the vague outlines of humans in loincloths. Savages. They were coming for him in countless droves.
Something large swooshed overhead, and Lee imagined powerful wings batting at the air. He dove for the ground, lost his .45, and crawled on all fours to stay undetected. Cold mud was sinking through his clothes. He didn't care. This was too much to handle!
Lee howled in terror when a force smashed through a set of trees, literally uprooting them from the soil. Hundreds of stomping sounds punctuated the explosions of wood. Ravenous birds screeched in the sky, the flock now circling overhead.
He couldn't take crawling on the ground anymore. Lee retreated on foot, going anywhere that was away from this madness. He considered purging himself into the ocean, when the strange moving lights surrounded him. Dozens of sources pointed their beams at him. The blue-white lights halted him.
"Don't move!"
"Hands over your head!"
"On your knees!"
"They're sure riled up tonight."
"We're taking you in, Mr. Branch."
Wait, how do they know my name?
Before Lee could see the persons behind the lights, he took off running deeper into the jungle, and didn't look back.
Pierce Range
Pierce Range was the man sitting alone at the back of the dive bar ironically named "The Dive.” The unkempt man with long graying hair and a sharp silver stubble-covered face smoked another cigarette, and finished his screwdriver. Pierce was staring out the window facing the wide-expanse of the Atlantic Ocean from the Florida shore. Pierce had been wandering the United States without a destination for eight months. His checking account dwindled down to sixty-five dollars. This bar was the end of his aimless journey; he had seen the end coming for a long time. The grizzled journeyman was ready for the climax of his existence. Death.
"I could walk right into the ocean, and keep on walking," Pierce said to his friend Skeeter. Skeeter was a skinny prick who looked just like a bug, with his bulbous eyes and a curious slit for a smile. The jerk was also a ghost in Pierce's mind. "I've reached the end of my path. I should've died when Angel and the rest of you roughnecks died in that crash."
Skeeter shook his head. "Die today? And die looking like a bum? No, Pierce. I'm not letting you go down like that. At least cut your scraggly hair, and get a decent shave first. You don't want a funeral mortician to have to give you a make-over, do you? It's bad enough that those funeral mortician guys have to shove cotton up your ass so you don't leak shit all over the place. Let's get you cleaned up before you kill yourself. Your face looks like an ashtray."
"You make some good points," Pierce said, "but I've already made my decision. What can you do to stop me, huh? You're dead."
"You have an argument there, my friend," Skeeter said. "I am dead. And you're talking to me in your head, so there's a reason I'm here, right? If you haven't gone completely psycho on me, you should hear me out, Pierce. You've got enough money for some more drinks. You might as well listen to me while you keep wetting your whistle. What else you going to do? Stare out at the ocean and cry?"
"Damn it, shut up." Pierce was getting irritated. "I'm not going to cry. It does nothing to change a damn thing, so why cry?"
"Well, maybe you should cry a little bit. Then you might realize none of this was your fault. You're taking this self-blame shit too far. I'm not seeing you die. Not like this."
"Nothing you can do to stop me, Skeeter. You're just a voice in my head. You have no power over me."
"Yeah, I'm a figment of your imagination. So think about why I'm here. Your brain is working to save you, man. It's, um, psychology, or psychosomatic projection, or whatever mind fuck nonsense those eggheads go on about. I'm your body trying to hit the self-preservation button. Why don't you just cry and mourn your losses the right way instead of hopping from bar to bar?"
The truth, Pierce wanted to cry. Really cry and purge his emotions. The love of his life had died. And the way it all happened was the ruining of him.
Pierce was a private investigator by trade. He tagged cheating husbands, searched for missing persons for families, and helped the local police whenever they needed to beef up an investigation. Angel, his late girlfriend, and her team were mercenaries for hire. Pierce was kept out of the loop on their missions. Angel would vanish for weeks at a time and come back with another mission completed, and her bank accounts fattened up with cash.
The mercenary team was hired by private companies to deal with terrorist situations, kidnappings, and other sticky endeavors that required tactical or lethal force, with an emphasis on secrecy. It was vague to Pierce what they did, really. Pierce didn't care. That was all Angel's business. As long as she loved him, and she came back alive, what she did for a living didn't matter.
Pierce met the rest of the mercenary team, the three others being Skeeter, Shark, and Hard Case. They were all codenames they used on the battlefield. They taught Pierce how to fire various automatic weapons, and stay alive in tough survival situations. Pierce camped out with Angel and the team during various training outings and learned the ropes of being a mercenary.
A year ago, Pierce was accompanying Angel and her fellow mercenaries on a joyride in a single engine plane. During this joyride, the plane malfunctioned. They crashed. Pierce was the only one to survive. He suffered serious burns along his back and a broken arm. He was otherwise unscathed. The problem, he did his best to save Angel from the wreckage, which was the reason he suffered the extensive burns. Pierce dragged everybody's body from the flames, but they were all already dead.
Pierce quit working as a private investigator after that incident. He drove from place to place, drinking and trying to hash out his emotions. That's when he started seeing members of the mercenary team in his head. Pierce knew they were dead people, but he talked to them anyway.
He noticed Skeeter was still sitting next to him. Skeeter's bug eyes could drive him to talk even when he didn't want to say anything.
"What do you want from me?"
"I want you to live, Pierce. You treated Angel, for lack of better words, like an angel. I've never seen that girl happier. Our team, we were tight. We knew everything about each other, including our relationships. You made her very happy. Trust me."
"I loved her."
"I know you did."
"She said she could never marry me," Pierce said. This time he let the tears flow. "She kept me close, but not as close as she could've. Angel said she could die at any time. A person who served in her line of work wasn't meant to be somebody's wife. Still, I tried. I thought one day when she reached a certain age, she'd hang it up, and be my wife. I guess I'll never see that day."
"At least you met someone worth falling in love with, man," Skeeter laughed, running his hand through his faux hawk. "I dated some characters in my time, and man, the bitches got ugly real f
ast. You'd fuck them good, then they'd unload all of their life problems on you. That's when you realized you've just stuck your wiener into trouble. Then you learn they have kids, and those rug rats are already calling you daddy, and..."
Pierce spoke over Skeeter. "What I don't get about all of this, I see you in my head, a dead man, and I see the others from the team, all dead, but not once, not once, have I seen Angel. Why can't I see her? I need to see her, I have to say goodbye."
"You think if you try to kill yourself, she'll suddenly appear? Is that it? Well, hedge your bets, my friend. Nobody made you any promises. You realize this is all in your head. I can't tell you why she's not showing herself to you. Your brain's doing the heavy lifting here. I'm just a dead guy. I left my psychology degree in hell."
"Damn you, why can't you help me? Thanks for nothing, you useless, ugly--"
"Mr. Range? Is that really you?"
Skeeter vanished.
That's when Pierce finally noticed the woman standing in front of his table. She was almost six feet tall, with long athletic legs, and the fiercest natural red hair that ran in curly tresses down to her chest. The woman was dressed like she was about to go on a safari. Also striking, the woman appeared to have been crying earlier. She was a scared child. If someone needed help in this world other than himself, it was this woman.
Pierce recognized her.
Susan Branch.
They had a history.
Susan asked, "Can I buy you a drink?"
Shark appeared, sitting at the table beside Pierce's. The Samoan mercenary hooted. "Look at the set of legs on this one! She's a walking hard-on machine. I bet she's got a TNT twat. I know I'll explode inside of her."
Shark was as bad as Skeeter, if not worse.
Pierce ignored Shark.
"Sure, I'll have a screwdriver." Pierce's voice was shaky. He hadn't spoken to another living person beyond ordering drinks, food, and hotels for a while now. "Thanks, Mrs. Branch."
"It's Ms. Branch. And call me Susan. We have a lot to talk about."
Shark, a whopping three hundred and twenty pounds of Samoan fury, enjoyed goading Pierce. "You guys certainly have a lot to discuss. Which hole do you jam your rod into first? You better put the blocks to this fine piece before you take that walk into the ocean."
"Fuck you." Pierce felt his heart hammering in his chest. "Leave me alone a second. I need to think. God knows what Susan wants from me."
Susan Branch was the daughter of Lee Branch. Lee was the president of The Green Project, an environmentalist group who took evasive action against those who polluted the world. They lobbied for better laws protecting the environment. Pierce was hired some three years ago to investigate the kidnapping of Susan Branch. The ransom: dismantle The Green Project, and you get your daughter back. Lee Branch wanted to both save his daughter and preserve the environmental cause.
That's when Pierce stepped in.
Pierce tracked where the kidnappers were hiding Susan, and using the training he gained from his group of mercenary friends, disarmed six kidnappers, and brought Susan home safely. The kidnappers were from a drug company dumping chemicals illegally in the backyards of a lower class sector of Missouri. The group thought threatening Susan's life would make The Green Project back off of their cause, but they were dead wrong. After meeting Lee Branch before and after the job, Pierce learned Mr. Branch wasn't the type to back off in the face of any threat, no matter what was on the line.
Susan returned with a screwdriver, and a bottle of sparkling mineral water.
"This bitch is healthy," Shark said with a growing smile. "Too healthy for my tastes. I like them dirty. I want them to teach me new tricks. This one would teach you how to knit and bake. Fuck that shit."
Susan hadn't touched her drink. She didn't want it. What was on her mind consumed her thoughts.
Pierce threw back half his drink, and decided to get to the facts.
"How did you find me? Were you looking for me?"
"No, I wasn't looking for you. Everything's by chance. It's all very hard to explain."
Susan stumbled on her words. The woman wanted to break down into tears. Pierce couldn't allow that if he was going to succeed in getting this conversation over with quickly. Whatever she wanted from him, it would be a swift no for an answer.
"Tell me what the trouble is. Go ahead. Get it out there."
Susan's face soured. Then she did burst into tears. Pierce knew he wasn't going to get anything out of this woman. He could thank the lady for the drink, walk away, take a final swim in the ocean, and end it all without turning back. Then he would finally see Angel again. Maybe.
One thing stopped him from putting the period at the end of his life.
Angel was sitting at the bar.
Pierce's eyes froze on her.
Angel had finally shown herself to him. Figment of his imagination or not, Pierce was so grateful to see her. Her hair was no longer buzzed as it had been when she was alive. It was long and very blonde. Angel made herself up with deep crimson lipstick and blue mascara. Angel wore a blonde wig and the same make-up when they had sex to turn Pierce on. The ruse worked with flying colors. A woman who looked like Angel could ask a man anything, and they couldn't help but agree to any terms.
Angel said this, "Help the poor girl."
Angel smiled lovingly at him, and disappeared as fast as she had appeared.
Pierce dumped the rest of the screwdriver down his throat.
"Listen, I'm staying at the hotel across the street. Room 17. You're upset. Why don't you calm down, get your thoughts in order, and come talk to me then? Think about what you really want to ask me."
Susan nodded her head.
She still couldn't calm herself.
"Room 17," Pierce repeated.
Susan wiped the tears from her eyes. "Okay. Room 17. Thank you."
Pierce got up, left The Dive, walked across the street, and waited in his hotel room for the troubled woman to knock on his door.
Savage Island is available from Amazon here