“Who is that?”
The cook squinted. “Looks like Behrend and Sundeep.”
They drew closer, and Mary saw that the two men—the crewmen who’d hidden from the pursuers with them and then gone in a different direction—were running along the beach as fast as they could go. Every few steps they looked into the trees to their left, as if looking for something.
“The natives must be after them,” the cook said. “Maybe if we swing close, they can swim to the boat. I wish this thing could go faster.”
The two runners were still more than a hundred and fifty meters ahead of the lifeboat when numerous small forms emerged from the greenery.
“What are those?” Mary said.
“Damned if I know.”
They were brown, birdlike creatures, waist-high. They walked on their hind legs like chickens, but were way too big to be farm birds. They were muscular and leathery, with no feathers visible from where they sat.
They were also much faster than the men they were following.
The runners must have realized that at the same moment Mary did, because they stopped and turned to face their pursuers. As the distance between them closed, Mary saw that the front of the blond man’s uniform—she assumed that must be Behrend—was covered in blood.
The creatures were upon them instantly. Somehow, standing next to people made it even more clear that these weren’t birds. It wasn’t just the size, but the way they moved. Mary remembered seeing chickens running in a farmyard beside an A-road on some trip with her parents, and these moved differently. Instead of holding their wings out for balance, tiny arms hung in front of them and they balanced perfectly on the balls of their long feet.
“Those things are so thin the guys are gonna box ‘em to pieces,” the cook said.
The first one to get too close proved him right, as the big blond sailor kicked it so hard it flew through the air and landed in a heap.
“Right on!” the cook exulted. “Can’t this thing go any faster?” He tried to open the window, but it was a sealed unit. You needed to open the door to get it open, and that had a security clasp. “Get that open and yell at them to come towards us,” he told Mary.
She tried to comply but, after a moment, found herself staring at the scene on the beach.
The creatures—they looked like walking lizards to her now—had surrounded the men and were circling warily. None of them seemed to want to share their companion’s fate.
The door popped open, surprising her. She’d been fumbling at it blindly while she watched the scene unfold. “Guys!” she yelled.
Either her voice failed to carry far enough or the men were too preoccupied to acknowledge her.
The standoff lasted another couple of seconds, and then, as if some invisible signal had been sent, every one of the creatures around the sailors attacked at the same time.
It was no contest. The two men stood only a moment before they were buried under the onslaught through sheer weight of numbers and bodies. Mary heard a long, drawn out scream which cut off suddenly.
“No!” the cook shouted. He pressed the silver bar forward, but the lifeboat chugged along at the same sedate rate it always did. It was built for luxury and safety, not speed.
Mary watched, mesmerized, as the creatures moved back from the two men, eyeing the immobile, bloodied figures warily, as if to make sure they weren’t going to do anything unexpected. Even from where she was sitting, Mary could tell that Behrend and Sundeep were beyond heroics. Sundeep’s wide-open, terrified eyes, told her that he wouldn’t be doing anything ever again except haunting her dreams forever.
“What are you doing?” she asked the cook.
“Trying to get close enough to save them,” the man replied. They were thirty meters from the place the two men lay.
She put a hand on her arm. “They’re dead.”
“No, we can still…”
“They’re dead.” She wanted to say his name, for emphasis, to comfort him, something. But she realized she didn’t know it.
The creatures, convinced that they were safe from their victims, moved. They began to feed.
“Let’s go,” Mary said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Fuck,” the cook replied, and pulled his shoulder from under her hand. “Fuck this all.”
But he steered the lifeboat back onto a course that would take them parallel to the beach.
Chapter 5
Sked opened the door to their cabin and realized that everyone staying at the resort seemed to be on the beach.
Akane, standing beside him, blinked several times and glowered into the bright sunlight. “What the hell happened to the rain?”
“You know how these tropical storms are,” Sked replied. Akane hated being out in the sun even more than he did… and he was a night owl and an indoors person. Still, the two weeks they’d been at the resort had transformed her. The deathly pallor was gone from her cheeks, and she’d even managed to get past the sunburn phase to where her face and body were even starting to take on a light gold tan. Combined with the weight she’d regained and the complete unavailability of anything stronger than rum on the island, it was the first time he’d ever seen her looking healthy. Health made her stunningly beautiful.
“Want to take a dip?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “I want to see what everyone’s looking at.”
Their fellow holiday-makers were standing in a loose circle on the white sand, looking at something lying by the sea. Sked couldn’t see what it was.
As they approached, one of the employees of the resort, dressed in white shorts and a blue t-shirt, was trying to move a rotund man and his wife from the scene.
“Please, sir,” the lackey whined. “We’re dealing with this.”
“Have you notified Mumbai?” The man had a deep voice with a clipped British accent. Even though he seemed to be in his mid-sixties, the young man speaking to him was never going to be able to budge him by main force or gentle persuasion. The Englishman was a full head taller and at least fifty kilos heavier than the employee. And Sked knew—from conversations over dinner—that the British gentleman was a former SAS Colonel. He almost hoped the people at the resort attempted to get physical. The man would toss them all into the sea.
“Our local law enforcement station isn’t in Mumbai. It’s in South Andaman.”
“Well, when are they coming?”
“They aren’t. We sent the boat and a couple of our boys to talk to them and show them pictures. But I know what they’ll probably say: it was either a shark or an accident, and that they’ll log the incident and tell us to keep the body on ice until we can send it over. They don’t get too worked up over people who die at sea. Not even tourists.” He shrugged as if to say it happened all the time, and he wasn’t going to get too worked up that it had happened on his watch as long as people moved away.
“That’s no shark bite,” the man said.
By now, Sked and Akane had reached the edge of the crowd and looked down to where everyone’s gaze was focused.
The first thing Sked saw was a large jet ski.
Correction. Half of a large jet ski.
It looked like it had been torn in two, with the back half discarded.
Again, he corrected himself. The vacation they’d taken was dulling his first impressions. The jet ski didn’t look like it had been torn in half; it looked like it had been bitten in half.
Then he realized no one was looking at the jet ski so he craned his neck to see what they were looking at.
That’s when he saw the body. Even in his current condition face down on the sand, Carlo was unmistakable: deeply tanned skin covered the bulging shoulders and back muscles of a man who spent good chunks of his day in the gym. His legs, Sked knew, were equally impressive.
But those legs were gone. Everything under the man’s kidneys was gone. This time there was no room for confusion: he’d definitely been bitten in half. Sked could see the teeth marks…
although he didn’t know what kind of creature would have teeth that size.
“Damn,” Akane said. “He was the best looking thing on the island. I wanted to ask his girl if they wanted to swap for a night.”
“What?”
“Kidding,” she replied with a smirk. “You’re cute when you get jealous.”
Under different circumstances, he might have responded, but now, all he could do was marvel that Akane could banter while half a guest was lying in the sand, entrails stretching all the way into the sea. He’d seen his share of corpses—working around the fringes of the law made for some interesting professional interactions—but Akane was cold, really cold.
Of course, he’d seen plenty of evidence of that before.
“Besides,” she went on, “it doesn’t look like his little pocket Barbie is among the gawkers. She was probably the appetizer for whatever munched him. So the swap would have been dead on arrival.”
That was a good point which nobody seemed to be talking about. Sked stepped into the circle. “Has anyone seen his girlfriend?” he asked.
An elderly German woman, who always seemed to be the first on the beach just after dawn and the last to leave in the evening, spoke up: “They went out together, early in the morning. I saw them take the vehicle. He pulled it all the way to shore himself. Strong fellow.”
“And she didn’t come back?”
“Son,” the big Colonel said. “You’re looking at everything that came back. I’m afraid the girl is dead.”
The resort employee tried again. “Please. We’d love to get this cleared up with the respect the man deserves, but as you can imagine we can’t move him until we get instructions from Andaman. Please.”
Sked moved away, but not because he cared what the resort told him to do. As far as he was concerned, a resort that didn’t warn its guests that there might be dangerous animals in the water didn’t deserve his obedience. Besides, he didn’t like the resort itself. There was something strange about it: the place was a fortress, with the borders not only fenced off but fenced off with the kind of fencing that would slow down an infantry division. The fence was twenty feet tall, topped with razor wire and three levels thick. He’d seen more inviting borders around North Korean military installations.
More tellingly still, it stretched into the sea nearly a hundred meters out. The resort was either really concerned about something getting in or about its denizens getting out. Sked wasn’t sure which, yet.
The reason he moved away from the dad man was that he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. In the distance, a tiny dot approached the beach: a boat of some sort.
He strode over to the spot where the boat would likely land, wondering if the guy they’d sent to Andaman could have gotten his answer already. But as the vessel approached, it soon became apparent that this wasn’t the ship the resort used to ferry visitors and supplies from the larger island. It was a smaller vessel, shaped like a British canal boat but made of fiberglass instead of wood.
Interesting. Shipping, other than the employees and guests headed for the resort, was forbidden to approach within five nautical miles of North Sentinel Island, so whoever was aboard the boat was defying the Indian Navy… something that boat didn’t look big enough to do. Not for long, anyway.
The boat hit the beach without stopping, and a guy inside wrestled with the door as Sked ran over.
“Is there a doctor here?” the guy shouted.
“I suppose so,” Sked replied. “Luckily, I haven’t had to ask.” He turned to see the rest of the group approaching now that they’d noticed the boat. The resort employee who’d been trying to get the Colonel to move led the charge. “Is there a doctor on the island?” Sked asked him.
The man ignored him and rushed up to the boat. He grabbed the driver’s shoulder and shook.
“You can’t be here,” the man said. “This island and the water around it is off limits. I need to ask you to leave.”
“We have an injured woman aboard,” the man responded. Sked now saw that there was a woman with him, a blonde in a British flag bikini. She looked so healthy that he made a point of not staring at her; he didn’t want Akane to get mad.
“That makes no difference to me,” the employee said.
“It makes a difference to me.” The speaker was another man in the blue polo shirt of the resort employees. This guy was in his forties and Sked hadn’t seen him before. Dark and with a black mustache, he seemed the stereotypical Indian man, right down to the British accent. This island was getting more and more English by the minute.
“Go back inside. I make the decisions here.”
“You’re just the manager of this resort. I took an oath to protect human life, but none to the resort.” He turned to the man in the ship. “Who is injured?”
“She’s in here. I’m too scared to move her.”
The doctor climbed aboard and came out, dusky features pale. “Get me some towels and a bucket of warm water. And a saw.”
“You’re fired,” the manager said. “Now get off that boat. I’m sending you back on the next supply ship.”
The Colonel shouldered past the manager and looked inside the boat. Then he turned back, redder than a ripe apple, took two steps towards the manager and hit him with the most beautiful uppercut Sked had ever seen. It snapped the man’s jaw shut and then launched him through the air to land on his back with an audible thump.
That done, he rubbed his hand and turned to the other blue-shirted people present. “There’s a woman in there who really needs medical help. If any of you try to stop the doctor from helping her, or are just too slow to jump when he says frog, I’ll make you regret it, male or female or any of those newfangled genders they have now. I don’t discriminate. Now, you heard him. Run.”
They ran, and Sked moved in to see what had caused Colonel Volcano to erupt. For the second time since finishing his nap, he got a gory show: a woman inside wearing what had once been a white uniform which was now covered in blood. She had something stuck in her neck, and the doctor was listening to her chest.
“Is she actually alive?” Sked asked.
The man looked up. “Yes. But only by luck. This missed the major arteries and the spine. The problem will be getting the arrow out without causing further damage.”
Left unsaid was the fact that further damage looked likely to kill her. Leaving it in looked like it would kill her, too.
Sometimes Sked was glad he wasn’t a doctor. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yes. Stand there and if anyone tries to make this boat move, beat the living daylights out of them.” With that, the doctor pushed past and ran to a hut outside the reception area, sprinting back a moment later with a handful of tools, just as three other blue shirts arrived with buckets of water and towels.
“Rita, I’ll need help with this one,” the doctor said.
A young woman carrying an armful of towels nodded and brushed past Sked.
With no further orders, Sked just stood there until the guy who’d been driving the boat climbed out to join him. “Do you think they’d object to getting us something to drink and maybe some food?” the guy asked.
“If they do, I suspect they’ll have to deal with the Colonel,” Sked responded with a smile. “What happened to her?”
“Natives.”
“Where? There aren’t any other islands nearby.”
“On this island.”
Sked nodded. That explained the fences, anyway. “Didn’t know there were any people living here.”
“Did you know about the killer dinosaurs?”
Sked swore under his breath. In almost any other circumstances, he’d have told the man from the boat that he should get his prescriptions checked after a comment like that. In a more charitable mood, he would have told him to lie down because the stress was getting to him.
But not now. Just before the operation to liberate Akane from the Chinese cell, the Electric Buddha had hired him to infi
ltrate the email system of an employee of a corporation that had been developing the gene editing knowhow to create exactly what the guy described. Worse, he suspected that the hack was purchased by one of that company’s competitors… so at least two organizations were building dinosaurs, probably for defense purposes.
Suddenly, the Buddha’s insistence that Sked lie low on North Sentinel Island looked less like an inspired choice and more like one that had been thought out long in advance. In the best of cases, Sked was there as the Buddha’s eyes on the ground in a place without internet.
Worst-case scenario was that having Sked murdered by a bunch of militarized dinosaurs was a good way for the Buddha to tie up loose ends.
The worst part about it was that, when this was over, he couldn’t just walk up to the Buddha and beat the crap out of him… If there was one player in the hackerverse that absolutely nobody could pin down—although several had tried—that player was the Electric Buddha.
***
Two hours later, Sked opened the door to the cabin he shared with Akane. It contained a double bed, which served to support their cover story: that they were a married American couple. Of course, Akane knew he was always willing to live that reality and, after making him sleep on the couch a couple of days, she finally invited him into bed.
She looked up from an old paperback she’d pulled out of the resort’s scanty bookcase.
“We should have waited a few years before coming here,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because these places never buy books. They just put the ones their guests leave behind on a shelf somewhere and hope for the best. This resort is too new to have accumulated anything decent.”
“I guess you’re right,” Sked replied.
Akane sighed. “So how is she?”
“Doctor says he has her stabilized. Not sure what that means in this case, as we moved her into his office, which looked like something from an old movie. Not exactly a high-complexity operating theater for a critically injured woman.”
She looked at him, long and hard. “You actually care, don’t you?”
Lost Island Rampage Page 5