Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  “Bats are already fragile animals. They are the only mammal that flies, an incredible achievement of evolution. They hunt by echolocation, sending out high-pitched noises and using the sounds that bounce back to figure out where they are in the environment and in relation to their food, and they do it all in a split second. Their bodies are amazingly engineered for flight, incredibly light weight, and specially adapted in almost every way.

  “Right now, I and my colleagues at Yersinia believe the evidence points to ahools living on Malheur Island. Maybe they were more widespread throughout the island chains of the Dutch East Indies once, but this seems to be the only colony in the world right now.

  “If you succeed and confirm that the island is inhabited by ahools, Yersinia wants to work with the Dutch government and ensure that Malheur Island is protected and preserved. It would take very little disruption, maybe even just the dynamiting of a single cave system, to send ahools to the dustbin of history with the dodo and the passenger pigeon.

  “We would like to make this a place of preservation and study the world’s greatest chiroptiary.”

  Hobhouse apparently noticed he was getting a few blank looks from his audience, so he hastened to explain. “A bestiary is a collection of beasts. An aviary is a collection of avians. Birds. A chiroptiary is a collection of chiropterans. Bats. We’d be essentially turning Malheur Island into a giant bat preserve. Any other questions?”

  Denise sat at the table thinking. What Hobhouse had said was both frightening and sort of beautiful. Now she understood why all the hunters on board seemed to specialize in different game. There were no experts in hunting and wrangling giant bats. Yersinia had simply assembled a wide field of talent instead.

  At the same time, the prospect was actually exhilarating. Since she was a young girl, out on the hunt with her father, the herds of animals across South Africa had thinned. There were fewer elephants, fewer lions, fewer rhinos, fewer of everything that people wanted to hunt. Meanwhile, the ivory trade only seemed to be gathering steam, fueling a seemingly insatiable demand for the stuff and further reducing the numbers of the biggest herbivores. The idea of doing something to actually protect a new animal was enticing.

  She did have one question for the Yersinia executive, though. “You said there were four reasons you brought us out here, but that was only three.”

  Hobhouse smiled. “Oh yes. Of course. I nearly forgot. The fourth reason is actually my favorite. We thought the idea of finding monster bats sounded really, really cool.”

  FIVE

  WE CAN’T HELP YOU

  Malheur Island was a paradise. A hot, sweaty paradise. The beach was sparkling white sand littered with shells. The waves washed up and down the beach as the Shield of Mithridates launched its motorized dinghies and ferried the hunters to shore. They was no dock to land at, so the small boat simply motored into the surf, and then the crew pulled them onto the sand to start unloading supplies. Everything from tents to crates of food and water to ammunition needed to be brought to shore.

  Beyond the sparkling beach lay a jungle so thick that Denise could barely see twenty yards into it. A green riot of creepers, ferns, trees the height of apartment buildings, palms, strangling vines, mushrooms, pitcher plants, ivy, heaps of leaf matter piles feet deep, bushes, fruit trees, tall reeds, bracken, and plants of every variety all fought for sunlight in a huge knot of life that covered the island. Overturned logs provided homes to fungal growths the size of Denise’s fist, and battalions of ants marched back to their nests carrying leaf litter and food. Birds sang from the thick forest canopy to the accompaniment of chattering monkeys. The jungle floor stood bathed in perpetual twilight under the overhanging boughs of the mightiest trees, the light above blocked by a sea of leaves.

  Denise had seen plenty of jungle before, but this was an astoundingly thick and untrammeled one. In places, it was difficult to tell where one plant ended and the next began. They were all intertwined in an orgy of chlorophyll, practically knitted together until they were one unit.

  There were still paths through the arboreal mayhem, though. They wouldn’t have to machete their way absolutely everywhere. Game trails snaked in and out of the greenery, trampling through the grass. In some places, the largest trees had killed off nearly all the vegetation around their bases by blocking out the sunlight with their branches.

  The center of the island was dominated by a small mountain. From the beaches, the trek to the island’s interior quickly became a steep upward slog. Jagged outcroppings and sharp drop offs made the journey even more hazardous.

  Only a few trees clung to the summit of the mountain. The terrain was simply too steep and barren to support the lush explosion of biology that existed further down the slope. She wondered if the mountain was actually a volcano, either extinct or slumbering.

  So long as it didn’t start raining molten rock and burning ash down on them, the idea was rather promising. A volcano ought to have abandoned lava tubes and maybe even an empty magma chamber where bats could live, maybe even extraordinarily large bats.

  From where she stood, Denise could see a cliff that had partially tumbled into the sea, leaving a chasm filled with rock and seaweed. She hoped she could find a similar, drier hidey hole elsewhere on the island. The sheer walls and tight fit ought to keep her safe from anything flying overhead that might fancy her as a tasty snack. Given the broken, tumultuous landscape, she figured there were decent odds of finding someplace to set up before nightfall.

  For all its splendor, Malheur Island wasn’t very large. It was shaped roughly like a trapezoid. At its longest, the island was only ten miles across, and it was about four miles wide. The Shield of Mithridates had anchored off the island’s eastern edge, which had more beaches and fewer cliffs. Hopefully, the interior was more traversable on this end as well.

  A large, off-white boulder lay half-buried in the sand at the edge of the jungle. The rock was about the size of a comfortable armchair, and it was actually a conglomeration of smaller stones that had all been cemented together into a larger mass by some natural process.

  What had happened after that was no natural process. Someone had carved the boulder into a stylized face that looked like a snarling demon head. Pitted eyes watched the crew and hunters offload their equipment onto the sand. Fangs the length of Denise’s hand grimaced at them. She couldn’t tell if the face was supposed to be a stylized human or some sort of animal. Years of erosion had softened the features down until the details were no longer clear.

  Hobhouse had said there was a small village on the island and that sailors sometimes traded with the residents. At least they were moderately friendly. Obviously, this sculpture was the handiwork of whatever group lived here.

  If Malheur Island really was home to a collection of gigantic murder bats, Denise wondered how the villagers survived. Hobhouse also mentioned they’d built a wall around their village, but that wouldn’t do any good against something that could fly.

  For that matter, why build a wall at all? If they were the only people on this island, what were they keeping out?

  Denise didn’t care for that thought. She hefted her Nitro Express elephant gun as she watched the edge of the jungle and waited for Gail and Harrison to make it ashore. They’d already decided they were going to establish their basecamp together. Someone could always be awake during the night that way, and it would be much harder for anything to pick them off while they slept.

  She didn’t plan to use the elephant gun at all during this trip, but like hell was she going to leave it behind. The Nitro Express fired rounds as thick as a garden hose and as long as her finger. If she held the rifle wrong when she fired it, the recoil could break her shoulder or knock her off her feet. Each one was meant to take down an elephant or an angry rhino. She could probably hunt dinosaurs with it, if there were still any around. She wouldn’t be caught dead without it.

  Of course, if Hobhouse was right about this island, she very well might be dead if she was
caught without it.

  Hopefully, she’d never have to fire it, though. In addition to the Nitro Express, she’d also brought a tranquilizer rifle and plenty of netting. The goal was to capture an ahool alive if she wanted the hundred thousand dollars. That meant she needed to trap it and sedate it, not blow it to kingdom come. She was pooling her resources with Gail and Harrison, so if any of them managed to bring down an ahool, they’d split the money by thirds. Thirty-three thousand dollars wasn’t anything to sniff at either.

  Besides the money, she didn’t want to shoot one of the giant bats. Herschel was right. This was an entirely undiscovered species. It would be unfortunate to whittle down their numbers when there was an unknown number to begin with. If this was the only place where they lived, there couldn’t be that many. Such a small island couldn’t even have enough food to support a particularly large group. No, she’d only kill one of the ahools if she had to.

  She waved at Gail and Harrison as they got off a dinghy of their own and started unloading their supplies. Gail came up and hugged her. “We finally made it,” she said. Then she noticed the face carved into the boulder nearby and grimaced.

  Denise noticed her gaze. “Yeah. The welcoming committee leaves something to be desired.”

  “We have more company than that,” Harrison said, pointing to the edge of the jungle. Denise turned around and scoured the tangle of overgrowth, trying to see what Harrison had spotted.

  A man stood at the jungle’s edge. He hadn’t been there a minute ago. Denise had a lot of experience looking for animals in the bush. She would have seen him if he was there before, and he was making no efforts to hide.

  He must be one of the villagers native to this island Denise realized. The man wore a pair of old, faded dungarees and a pair of sandals that looked handmade. The dungarees must have come from traders at some point in the past. His expression looked unmistakably worried as he walked up to Denise.

  “You should not be here,” he said in lightly accented Dutch. Denise was surprised for a moment, forgetting that the Netherlands had tried to colonize this island before. It made sense that at least some of the locals would understand some Dutch.

  Afrikaans was sometimes called Kitchen Dutch, a sort of descendant of the European tongue that had been hybridized and cross-pollinated with some of the African Bantu languages and a few other sources. The Boers that settled South Africa’s interior brought Dutch with them, and it slowly evolved away from the mother language. Because there had been some scholarly efforts to clean up irregular grammar in Afrikaans, Dutch speakers could actually understand Afrikaans better than the other way around.

  “Hello. We are friends. We will not be here long,” Denise said. “Verstaan jy my?” she added. Do you understand me? She could see the man mentally picking through the Afrikaans.

  He said something she didn’t fully understand. The gist of it seemed to be about the same, though. You should not be here.

  The rest might have been about…mouths? Months? Mounds, maybe? Perhaps something about the mountain? The words were all similar in Dutch, and Denise had no idea which one had just been used. They were too close for her to understand.

  “Friends,” she reiterated instead, making sure that her rifle was pointed well away from the islander. It was hard to look too friendly while holding enough firepower to blow a man’s soul clean off.

  “You have until tomorrow night to leave,” the man said before retreating back into the forest. He slid over a fallen log, and then he disappeared back into the jungle like he had never been there in the first place.

  “What was that all about?” Harrison asked.

  “I didn’t understand all of what he said, but I told him we were friends, and we wouldn’t be here long.”

  “That sounds good,” Gail said. “And what did he say?”

  “That we had until tomorrow night to leave.”

  “And that sounds bad,” Harrison said.

  Herschel Hobhouse came to shore on the last dinghy. There was only a single, large crate on his craft. The crew hopped into the surf and dragged the boat onto the shore before grabbing the crate and prying it open with crowbars. Hobhouse lifted a black, metal box out of the crate and began walking toward Denise and her group.

  “Alright, everyone,” he said. “In a few minutes, the Shield of Mithridates is going to set off and head a safe distance away from the island before night sets in. I want everyone to take one of these radios. If you need to contact us for any reason, you’ll be able to do so with these. If you get sick or injured, we can steam in and pick you up. If you manage to capture an ahool alive, we’ll pick it up and lock it in the cargo hold to bring back.”

  He started handing out radios to all the hunters gathered on the beach. They came with a mouthpiece and antenna, and they were encased in hardy-looking black metal.

  “Thanks,” Denise said.

  “Don’t thank me too much yet,” Hobhouse said. “The Shield of Mithridates is going to be eight hours out to maintain a safe distance. If you have an emergency, a real emergency, we can’t help you.”

  SIX

  MISS GRITS & THE HOG KING

  Denise, Gail, and Harrison picked their way through the jungle and up a gentle incline. Harrison was in the lead at the moment, slicing away at vines and creepers with a machete. Once they reached the apex of the hill, hopefully they could find a good place to camp for the night. None of them liked the idea of camping out in the open when there might be massive airborne predators after nightfall.

  “So, Gail,” Denise said. “You’ve never told us exactly what you would do with your money if we actually manage to capture an ahool. With our base ten thousand dollars, you’d have over forty thousand by the time we split everything three ways.”

  “That’s forty thousand before taxes; don’t forget. Maybe we can buy some gum with what’s left after the taxman is done with us,” Harrison said.

  “Actually, I’d like to retire from hunting altogether,” Gail said. “I’m pretty good at it. My expedition company and fur trading shop makes decent money, but it’s never what I wanted to do.”

  “Really? It was all I ever wanted to do when I grew up,” Denise said. “I never knew what else I would do with myself after spending all those years out in the bush with my father.”

  “Well, my family weren’t hunters. They were circus workers, believe it or not. My mother did an equestrian act, basically dancing across the backs of horses as they rode around the center ring. My father was an acrobat with the same circus. When I was born, I just traveled the country with them.”

  “That must have been an interesting childhood,” Harrison said, slashing another swath of tall grass out of the way.

  “No. Not really. A lot of it was spent on the train, moving from Podunk town to Podunk town. The circus master thought it would be good for me to learn some sort of unique skill from an early age, something he could market. Otherwise, I was just dead weight to the circus. He was something of a tyrant, but it was because he could never see anything outside of drawing crowds and making money, not real malice.

  “My parents didn’t want me out trying to ride a unicycle across a high wire when I was six. Go figure. They taught me to shoot instead. By the time I was ten, I could shoot a cigarette out of a person’s mouth from thirty paces. Toss a quarter in the air, and I could hit it with a rifle before it touched the ground. I could shoot the center out of a playing card from across the center ring. They advertised me as a sort of miniature Annie Oakley.

  “When I was a little older, they improved my shtick further. They gave me a little jalopy, and I did most of the same tricks but from a moving vehicle. The best one probably involved me facing the opposite direction from a floating balloon and using a mirror to sight the rifle backwards over my shoulder while somebody else drove around.

  “Technically, I was born in Oklahoma, though I don’t think we ever stayed in any one spot more than two weeks. The circus master labeled me Miss Grits: Belle
on Wheels. When I reached adulthood, he even had me do the routine in big hoop dresses like some proper Southern lady. The crowds seemed to like it, and I was a big enough hit that the carnival barker would shout about my act to lure more people in.”

  “I have a hard time picturing you in hoop skirts,” Harrison said.

  “I don’t know how those Southern ladies lived. I was as wide as a hippopotamus, and it seemed like it took all afternoon to put them on.”

  “So how did you end up here?” Denise asked.

  “Well, I was probably the only kid who ever wanted to run away from the circus and join a small town. I didn’t like being Miss Grits. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I loved the adulation of the crowd. It was always something special to hear five hundred people go quiet when they realized you were about to try an impossible shot and then erupt into cheers when you pulled it off. However, every day was practicing, setting up equipment, doing the exact same thing you’ve done every day for years, and then picking it all up and carrying it to the next town to do all over again. Every time we packed things in, and I hadn’t even gotten the chance to look around, I felt like I could just die. Younger me was probably a bit more willful and a bit more eager to meet some cute city boy somewhere.

  “We didn’t hit the big cities. No New York or Detroit for us. We were a second string circus, so we mostly did our business in little burgs no one’s ever heard of like Blackacre, Vermont. However, we came pretty close to Chicago on our usual summer route.

  “When we started that run, I told our circus master that I wanted to quit and head out on my own. He almost choked on the sandwich he was eating. I still remember him hacking a big ball of chewed bread and tuna out onto his card table in surprise. He said he wanted me to stay; he all but begged me to stay. I told him I couldn’t, so he asked if I’d be willing to do one last big act, something he’d been thinking about setting up for a while.