Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  “Kind of a shame to take it away on company business then, don’t you think?” Gail asked.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. We do some wonderful things here, but Yersinia has taken a major interest in this project. We need this ship. Hopefully, you’ll be able to help us fill up the cargo hold with live specimens. There’s no guarantee obviously, but we really think that we can derive some new treatments from what you’re going to find. In the end, taking the Shield of Mithridates out here for a short while will do more good in the long run than any single place it might be in the short term. That’s the hope anyway.”

  Denise tried to ask something, but Harrison spoke up first. “Interesting choice to name the ship,” he said.

  “Do you like it? It’s named after an ancient king of Pontus, a region that’s now northern Turkey. Mithridates was one of the great experimenters in early medicine.”

  “I know about Mithridates,” Harrison said. “He would feed various poisons to flocks of ducks. If any of the ducks survived, he knew for sure that they’d eaten a nonlethal dose, so he’d slit their throats and drink their blood. That way, he could build up a tolerance and immunity to most ancient poisons.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Hobhouse said. “That’s the vision we want the Shield of Mithridates to project. Through bold experimentation, Yersinia wants to protect humanity from all ailments and sicknesses, albeit we’re more focused on natural diseases than poisons.”

  “And if the pulp magazines are right, he probably gained all the super powers of a duck, too,” Harrison said.

  Hobhouse gave him an odd look.

  “Then again, I mostly remember Mithridates from my history books because he launched a series of rebellions against the Romans,” Harrison continued. “Pontus didn’t like that the Romans had the bad habit of enslaving everyone they came into contact with. Mithridates coordinated a massive uprising that killed eighty thousand Romans in a single day when it began.”

  “Today, he would probably be labeled a terrorist, yes. But we think his legendary immunity to poison was too good a symbol to pass up.”

  “I was going to congratulate you on naming the ship after a freedom fighter but, hey, whatever.” Harrison shrugged.

  Denise jumped in before the conversation could turn into a history debate. “You said you were hoping we could collect live specimens. However, our contracts never said exactly what we’re supposed to collect. It just referred to ‘unique botanical and zoological organisms.’ I’ve brought dart guns, nets, and everything else I could think of, but I still don’t know exactly what we’re looking for when we get there. I’m not a zoologist or a botanist or a biologist. What exactly are you sending us out to collect?”

  “Dr. Grant Marlow actually is a zoologist as well as an expert hunter. I’m sure he’ll be able to identify species that diverge from their mainland counterparts.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I know. Believe me; I’m dying to tell you. However, I don’t want to go into details until we get closer to the island. Right now, we’re still close enough to land that someone could get a message ashore. Passenger pigeon. Radio. Even a note in a bottle.

  “Yersinia has many competitors. BioSyn. Wormwood Enterprises. Some of them would be happy to pay a huge sum of money just to learn more details about what we’re doing out here. It’s not that I don’t trust you. Any one of you.” Hobhouse smiled at them.

  “I just don’t want to let this little secret out of the bag too early. Trusting you four is easy. Trusting everyone on the ship, from captain to cook, is much harder. Rest assured, though. You’ll get plenty more information from me by the time we get closer to the island.”

  “Your man Roger Pick told me that the island might harbor some downright prehistoric life. I just want to know what I should be looking for. Will it be obvious, or do you want samples of each species of moss that grows under every rock on the island?” she asked.

  Herschel’s smile collapsed in on itself. “Mr. Pick shouldn’t have mentioned that.”

  “Admittedly, I might have been pointing a shotgun in his general direction at the time. Just a small one.”

  “I’ll tell you this. What you’re looking for should be pretty obvious. Plenty of people have sailed to this island and not seen anything out of the usual. However, no one who’s stayed there for over a month has ever come back alive. We think whatever you’re looking for is just as likely to find you first.”

  THREE

  OVERBOARD

  Denise had learned to adapt to life aboard the ship as it chuffed northward toward whatever lay off the coast of Sumatra. Every day, she ate with Gail and Harrison, sometimes playing cards with them late into the night as the stars crawled across the sky.

  Silas Horne, the English Oscar Wilde lookalike, sometimes ate with them as well. He was always perfectly friendly, though he usually ate with the other hunters inside the ship’s dining room. Usually, he stayed with the expedition’s other Englishman, Creighton Montgomery. Whenever the two groups needed to communicate for some reason, Silas was usually sent as a sort of emissary. He always seemed slightly embarrassed by the behavior of his colleagues, but he wasn’t willing to split from them completely. Meanwhile, Shinzo Takagari and his golden eagle kept to themselves.

  Herschel Hobhouse refused to say another word about what they could expect to find at their destination. Denise had asked several more times, and he’d said he would address everyone when they finally drew close enough. Now, they were only about a day out from the island, but he still hadn’t said anything new.

  Denise had thought about what he’d said, though. Mostly, she’d decided it was probably a bunch of bologna. She’d heard plenty of hokum before. All sorts of stories developed about far off and isolated places.

  Ghost tribes. Forty-foot-long river crocodiles. Impossible monsters. She’d heard it all at some point. Usually, there was a kernel of truth wrapped in an exaggeration inside a hazy memory based on a mistranslation. If everyone who tried to stay on this island really died, it was more likely to be from disease and malnutrition than some horrible predator. She was almost surprised the stories didn’t also say that the island had a hollowed-out mountain shaped like a human skull.

  At the moment, though, she had something much more important to think about than whatever goofy myths surrounded the island. She and Harrison were both losing their shirts to Gail in a poker game.

  “Fold,” Denise said, putting her cards down in disgust. The highest card in her hand was the ten of hearts. Gail and Harrison raised each other a couple of times, throwing pennies and nickels into the pot.

  “So, Denise,” Harrison said, picking over his cards.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know what ‘kaffir’ means?” he asked.

  “Did Balthazar call you that?”

  “No. It was Creighton Montgomery, the other Brit that hangs out with Silas sometimes. He said he learned it on a hunting trip to South Africa. He called it a term of great respect. I asked van Rensburg about it, but he just shook his head. Given that Creighton thinks being able to trace your ancestry back to a bunch of inbred medieval royals makes him the hottest snot around, I don’t really trust him calling me words I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t get the word from van Rensburg?” Denise felt another stab of annoyance that Balthazar seemed to have a grudge against her alone. It would have been less obnoxious somehow if he didn’t like her friends as well. “I hate to break it to you, but ‘kaffir’ is basically the Afrikaans equivalent to ‘nigger.’”

  “Oh. Well, that’s a relief,” Harrison said, still studying his cards as if he could will them to match up into a full house.

  “A relief?” Gail asked.

  “Yeah, well, I managed to convince him that ‘peckerwood’ was a term of great endearment back in the South. Creighton’s family tree probably looks like a wreath when you look at all the great family intermarriages, so maybe that explains why he’s such a dipshit. It would
have been embarrassing if kaffir actually did mean something nice.”

  “Not bad at all,” Gail said. “Now, are you done stalling before I win this pot, too?”

  Finally, Harrison laid his cards down. Two of a kind with sevens.

  Gail flipped her cards over. Two of a kind with queens.

  “Dammit,” Harrison said. “Where do you keep getting these cards?”

  “Wanna play again? If I win, I get all your bacon at breakfast tomorrow, though.”

  “You got all my bacon at breakfast this morning,” Harrison said.

  “And mine,” Denise added.

  “I don’t even like bacon anymore after so many hog hunts, but can’t you at least leave a man with some shred of dignity here?”

  “Whiners,” Gail said, smiling as she shuffled the battered deck of cards.

  Denise was only half paying attention, though. She kept looking up, waiting to finally see the tiny speck on the horizon that indicated they had reached their destination. They were still supposed to be a good day’s travel away from the island, but she couldn’t help herself. She felt like a little kid, constantly checking if they were there yet.

  The ship’s crew had been bustling all over the ship since dawn. They kept checking all the rooms and crawlspaces. One of the ship’s officers would come inspect a supply closet, and five minutes later, a different officer would go check it.

  She assumed that this was related to the imminent end of their journey in some way, but she couldn’t make sense of what anyone was doing. It almost looked like they had lost something and the entire crew, from captain to cabin boy, had gone in search of it. If this was an inspection of the equipment, it was a very thorough one.

  Denise spotted Herschel Hobhouse coming toward them as Gail started to deal cards out. He had the captain of the Shield of Mithridates with him. Gail had just picked up her cards, perfectly stone-faced as always, when he stopped in front of their table.

  “I have some bad news,” Hobhouse said. Everyone put down their cards to look up at him. “One of the crew has gone missing.”

  “Missing?” Harrison asked.

  “Who?” Denise said.

  “Our dishwasher. The chef last saw him while they were cleaning up after dinner last night. He says the dishwasher went up onto the decks to have a cigarette before going to bed, and that’s the last anyone saw of him. He didn’t show up to help with breakfast this morning, and we’ve checked his bunk. We’ve checked everywhere, as a matter of fact,” Captain Englehorn said.

  “What happened?” Gail asked.

  “He must have gone overboard,” Hobhouse said. “Probably shortly after he went up to have a cigarette.”

  “That seems odd. We didn’t have any rough seas last night,” Denise said. “No big waves to knock a man over the railing.”

  “It could have been something else. Maybe he tripped on a wet patch and went over. Maybe it was intentional.”

  “Intentional? Surely you’re not saying he was murdered?” Gail asked.

  “No, no. Of course not. Nothing of the sort. He might have chosen to…take matters into his own hands,” Hobhouse said, trying to discretely find a way to bring up suicide. “Right now, we just don’t know. All we can say is that he’s not on the Shield of Mithridates anymore, so he must have gone into the water.”

  “Are we circling back to look for him?” Denise asked. She looked up to see if she could tell that the ship had changed direction at all, but there was nothing but blue ocean and sky all around them.

  “No,” Captain Englehorn said. “If he’s been in the water that long, he’s most likely dead already. By the time we get back to where he probably fell over, that will certainly be the case. For that matter, we don’t even know exactly where he went over, and the currents will have moved him around a bit since then.”

  “You’re just going to leave it at that then?” Gail asked.

  “No. We radioed it out to every ship we could contact. We also managed to get on the horn with the British Navy, and they’ll divert a couple of ships to investigate. If anyone finds him, it’ll be one of the ships that’s already a lot closer,” the Yersinia executive said.

  “That still seems rather callous,” Gail said.

  “The man is almost certainly dead already,” Captain Englehorn replied.

  Denise was still searching the horizon toward the prow of the Shield of Mithridates. She squinted against the light on the water. “Is that another ship out there?” she asked.

  “It shouldn’t be. We’re way out of the shipping lanes,” Hobhouse said.

  “Where?” Englehorn asked. She pointed, and he raised a set of binoculars dangling around his neck. He adjusted the focus and gazed out over the water. “It’s a pleasure yacht. Looks like it might be in trouble. The main mast is collapsed.”

  “Are we going to help them?” Harrison asked.

  “We’ll see if there’s anyone to help,” Englehorn said. “The boat could have broken free of a pier in a storm months ago with no one on board.” He marched away toward the ship’s bridge, ordering the first crewmen he saw to find the first-aid kits and bring and ready a dinghy.

  A few minutes later, the Shield of Mithridates changed course and lowered its speed. The engines chuffed toward the stricken boat like tired but wary horses.

  Denise watched the boat grow closer and closer. Soon, she could see with her own eyes what Englehorn spied through the binoculars.

  The boat was some sort of sailing yacht, the kind wealthy adventurers sometimes used to sail around the globe. However, it had seen far better days.

  The main mast had splintered close to the deck. It lay across the side of the boat. Shredded sails trailed from the mast in the water like the top of some gigantic jellyfish cruising the surface. Not only were the sails ripped to pieces, but they were discolored and crusted with clusters of small barnacles, as if they’d been dragging in the water for a long time.

  She could just make out the name of the boat painted on the side, the Venture. The Venture had clearly ventured too far. Denise didn’t see anyone on the decks. No one came out from the yacht’s quarters to wave them down.

  Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe Captain Englehorn was right, and the Venture had been swept out to sea in a monsoon with nobody aboard. Maybe whoever was piloting it had engine troubles and was rescued by a passing freighter a long time ago but had to abandon the boat.

  Those were the best case scenarios. Any other scenario was almost guaranteed to be bad. Very bad indeed.

  As they approached, the other hunters and the crew came out to the decks to watch. Captain Englehorn and his first mate helped prepare one of the ship’s dinghies.

  Englehorn and three of his crew hopped aboard as the lifeboat dangled from its ropes. He cupped his hands and yelled to the assemblage of gawkers. “Alright, I don’t know what we’re going to find out here. Who knows first aid?”

  Denise and a scattering of others raised their hands. Her father had served with the British military and taught her all the basic field medic techniques. Once or twice, she’d seen people injured during her safaris, mostly twisted ankles and the occasional broken bone. Once a client disobeyed her and bumbled too close a wounded water buffalo, and the animal managed to break most of his ribs and fracture his jaw before someone else put it down for good. Another time, someone lost a hand to a river crocodile. Her father’s medical skills were plenty useful on those days.

  “You, you, and you. Get aboard.” Englehorn pointed to Denise, Dr. Grant Marlow, and Herschel Hobhouse. They all clambered onto the dinghy.

  Marlow was older than Denise, maybe about Balthazar’s age. A bushy white mustache perched on his lip. Even though he was part of Balthazar’s clique, he didn’t seem actively interested in making her life unpleasant. Jubal Hayes and Creighton Montgomery were the main instigators, though van Rensburg took particular interest in making sure Denise didn’t feel welcome. Marlow was perfectly pleasant on his own, but he seemed to enjoy the
grade school antics of the others too much to associate with Denise, Gail, and Harrison.

  “I thought you were a doctor of zoology, not medicine,” Denise said as they stepped onto the small, motorized craft.

  “I am,” Marlow said. “But I can suture a wound or stuff guts back inside a body with the best of them.” He paused for a moment. “I’m sorry for the way some of the others have treated you on this trip. I know it must be hard.”

  She glanced away from the crippled yacht to look at Marlow. The sympathy wasn’t nearly enough to counter some of the open hostility she’d received from Balthazar, Creighton, and Jubal, but it was appreciated nonetheless. Denise smiled at him.

  “Thank you. I genuinely appreciate that.”

  “I mean, a ship is no place for a woman, let alone a hunting expedition. This is a place for men. You’re already outside of your natural sphere of homemaking and child rearing. Adding this additional stress on you could do irreparable harm to your fragile feminine psyche.”

  The smile withered on Denise’s face. “I think my fragile feminine psyche will be just fine, thank you very much. And I think I can handle some duties in addition to homemaking and brat taming.”

  “The greatest thinkers in the social sciences could easily tell you that having you here is against the natural order of things. It’s simply scientific fact.”

  “Yeah, well, the greatest thinkers in the social sciences haven’t met me, which is why they aren’t eating all their meals through a straw right now.”

  Marlow made a little sound deep in his throat. “Very well. I just hope you know what you’re doing if we find anyone in need of help on that vessel. You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?”

  Denise decided to count slowly to ten while the crew lowered the dinghy down into the sea rather than knock Marlow over and drown him. After a moment, they touched down into the sparkling water. The dinghy swayed under them as Englehorn started the engine and steered it toward the stricken yacht.