by Jonah Buck
Denise felt her temper rising, but she tamped it down. She bit down on her lip and put a Herculean effort into not blowing Balthazar to dog food with her elephant gun. He was screwing with her, and what was worse, it was actually getting to her.
“We’re good. We’ll camp with Denise,” Gail said.
“Hey, maybe next time you can shake me down for my lunch money too, jackass,” Denise said as she walked away.
She stormed away from the German cruiser, not bothering to look back. Gail and Harrison plodded along after her.
“What is with it between the two of you?” Harrison asked.
“I honestly have no idea,” Denise said. “C’mon. We need to find a place to shelter before the sun sets and get our supplies there. I just saw proof that there’s already one freak of nature on this island. If there really are more monsters, I don’t think it will be safe at night.”
EIGHT
A SHOT IN THE DARK
Denise checked her dart rifle for the hundredth time in the light of the battery-operated lantern. The sights were calibrated. The barrel was clean. The darts were within easy reach. The stock felt comfortable against her shoulder. The bolt action was oiled and ready for easy use. Everything was set for her to take the first watch of the night as the sun sank toward the horizon.
They’d found a small cave wedged into the side of one of the coastal cliffs. Another one of those carved white rocks stood guard near the entrance, snarling out into the sea against all comers. The cave was maybe ten yards deep, and once they’d pulled all the driftwood and rocks out, the floor was fairly even. The entrance led straight out onto the beach.
Normally, Denise wouldn’t choose a cave to set up camp. If something went wrong, there was only one way in and one way out. Anything that came at them would also block the only exit as it attacked. However, in this case, it made sense. They were dealing with something that could not only eat them, but could swoop down from any direction at all on silent wings. There was no way for Denise to monitor the entire sky, but she could keep track of a much smaller area just in front of her.
They’d also set up a series of nets outside the cave entrance. The nets had breakaway knots, so anything that tried to fly past or through the entrance would crash straight into one of the nets, which would then collapse around it. Whoever was on watch could then sink a tranquilizer dart into the creature and use one of the radios to contact the Shield of Mithridates.
Gail knelt on the floor and unrolled her sleeping bag while Harrison stirred a pot on the burner. Everything else they needed was stashed at the back of the cave, still within easy reach but protected from the elements.
“I can’t believe they have the nerve to call this gumbo,” Harrison said, staring at the pot. “I could crap better gumbo than this.”
“Please don’t,” Gail said.
“I’m just saying.”
Outside, the night was drawing closer as the horizon prepared to swallow the sun. Tomorrow, they’d try to go find the ahool lair, but there was no guarantee they’d be safe wandering the island in the dark. The nocturnal predators would be out soon.
Denise watched the sky turn orange outside, as if the world beyond the horizon had caught fire. It was almost easy to believe here on Malheur Island.
They were four hundred miles from the next closest landmass, and their only connection to the outside world beyond was through the radios that Hobhouse gave them. If the Shield of Mithridates sank, no one would even know they were stranded out here. Denise wasn’t sure what would be worse, being stranded all by herself or being stranded with the likes of Balthazar van Rensburg.
A bat flitted past the cave entrance as the sky grew darker. Denise jerked and almost snapped the dart rifle up, but the little creature was only a few inches across. It was just a normal-sized bat.
Of course, from a distance, an ahool would like tiny and normal-sized as well. Her hand drifted away from the dart rifle, but she kept the weapon within easy reach nonetheless. In about four hours, she’d wake Harrison up, and it would be his job to watch the cave entrance for a shift.
“Hey, Denise. You never said why you quit hunting,” Gail said.
“No, I didn’t. I haven’t really mentioned it to anyone, I guess.”
“I’d rather listen to you than hear about Harrison’s ability to make gumbo,” Gail said. “If it’s something you’re willing to talk about, that is,” she added.
“I suppose it might not be a bad thing to talk about it to somebody. It feels odd after keeping it to myself for so long, though.”
“Hey, I’m happy to listen, too,” Harrison said. “I won’t even make too many snarky comments.”
“Alright, so it goes like this. All I ever wanted to be when I was younger was a hunter, just like my father. He taught me everything I know on the subject, taking me along on most of his trips. He showed me how to track animals across various landscapes, he showed me how to shoot and make a clean kill, he taught me which animals became more aggressive and dangerous during their mating seasons and how to avoid getting flattened or eaten by angry beasts on a rampage.
“I learned all about the habits of animals. Where they congregated. What migration paths they took. What would spook them away and what would attract them. It was all very mechanical.
“When he disappeared on an expedition out in the Namib Desert a few years ago, I already knew everything I needed in order to take over the business. I could track anything across the veldt. Elephants. Rhinos. Lions. You name it, and I could probably find one for you and set up a shooting blind. After that, whoever I was guiding around simply needed to take the shot.”
“At the same time, I’d been noticing something, though. The savanna was a different place from when I was a little girl. There simply weren’t as many big animals as they used to be. Tracking them was harder because there were fewer trails. At first, I thought maybe it was just in my head, that maybe I was losing my touch, but it was true year after year. Each hunting season, there was simply less and less game. We were all taking too much, and the animal populations couldn’t recover at the rate we were hunting them. Pretty soon, I had to guide people further and further north, well away from the main settlements. It was strange, I was doing what I loved, what I always thought I was meant to do, but that meant I was slowly destroying it at the same time.”
“I can see that,” Gail said. “There’s fewer wolves in my neck of Montana than there were even just a few years ago. There’s a lot fewer bears, too. People don’t like them, so they shoot them on sight, and now they’re starting to disappear from some of the more settled areas.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was seeing, too. I was concerned about it, but I was concerned about it because that’s where my livelihood came from. I didn’t really think about it beyond that. I mean, Harrison, have you ever been in any danger of running out of hogs to exterminate?”
“I can’t say I have been, but they’re definitely more common out in the boonies than right near the city these days. Wild pigs can repopulate an area pretty quick.”
“Right. But some animals can’t do that. A lot of the big game in South Africa doesn’t really come back after you clear it from an area. You’re just left with hyenas and some gazelles instead of lions and elephants, but that doesn’t mean there’s any less demand to hunt lions and elephants.”
“So, about a year ago, I was leading a hunting party far to the north. It was a group of Belgian dentists that had formed a hunting club and wanted to go on a real African safari for their vacation. Very good money. One of the things they wanted to hunt was an elephant, so I’d been tracking a medium-sized herd for a few days. We were following them through the grassland, using the trampled areas and droppings to tell us where they’d been.
“We finally caught up to them, and I set up an ambush not far away from the nearest watering hole. All we had to do was wait for the elephants to come to us. I’d already picked one out from the herd that was older and slower. My cl
ients would bag that one and then we’d move on. It would be a simple, easy hunt. I’d done the same thing fifty times before.
“I led the group up to the blind, and waited for the elephants to come. It didn’t take long, maybe only an hour. The whole herd trundled up to the watering hole to get a drink, and I told the dentists which elephant they should go after. Everything seemed to be going just swimmingly.
“Then they opened fire. I’d rented them each a big bore elephant gun and made sure they knew how to use it. The blasts knocked a couple of them on their asses anyway.
“Apparently, they weren’t content to just hunt one elephant. They all wanted an elephant each. I guess they planned it among themselves when I wasn’t looking. All at once, almost the entire herd of elephants crumpled. Some of them didn’t go down right away due to poor marksmanship. They had holes in their sides you could throw a medium-sized dog through, their intestines spilling out and tripping them up as they tried to scatter and run away, but they were still moving.
“I just remember staring in open-mouthed amazement for a moment. I thought there must have been some miscommunication. But then they started to reload, and I realized that it was just their plan to kill the whole herd of elephants. They wanted the whole enchilada, and they thought I was just in the way of giving it to them.
“I shouted at them, screamed right in their faces to stop, but they just snapped the guns back up and fired again, bringing down the rest of the herd. I wrenched the gun out of the hand of the nearest one. He tried to keep me from getting it, so I just punched him in the face. I think he lost a tooth, and one of his buddies had to fix it back in Belgium.”
“That’s not exactly playing by the rules of sportsmanship,” Gail said.
“No, it wasn’t. Some of the elephants were still alive at that point, but they were pretty much all down. You could actually feel the earth quiver slightly as they all fell. The ones that weren’t dead yet were all screaming and making awful noises. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. Frankly, it’s pretty much what I imagine hell sounds like. Sometimes, I can still hear them screaming when I go to sleep.
“There was only one elephant still on its feet, a baby. The baby elephant’s left ear had been blown off by one of the guns, but I’m not sure that it had even noticed. It was using its trunk to prod at one of the big females, apparently urging her to get up. She was on her side, one of her legs half-collapsed under her, not moving. The baby was standing in a big puddle of her blood.”
“That’s…an unpleasant image,” Gail said.
“I thought so, too. One of the other hunters shot the baby elephant a few seconds after that. Maybe it was best to put it out of its misery then and there. I don’t think it was old enough to survive on its own.
“Either way, I couldn’t hunt after that. I tried going out a few times after that, but I just couldn’t do it. I’d hear those screams and see that injured baby elephant standing in its mother’s blood, and I’d break out into a cold sweat and feel like my guts were trying to work themselves into a sailing knot. I was a mess.
“Before, I mean, I understood that the animals I was hunting were living things, but I didn’t really think of them as things with lives. Do you see what I’m saying? I could tell that if an animal was wounded, it was distressed and in pain, but I never really thought of myself as someone who inflicted death and agony for a living. That moment just sort of blew me right off my foundations, and I didn’t know what to do with myself after that.
“I…I haven’t told that story to anyone else. Just thinking about that day is enough to make me cringe up a little bit inside. I could use a drink.”
“And I’d buy you one if we were on the mainland,” Harrison said.
“Me too,” Gail added.
“Did your clients seem to realize what they’d done afterwards?” Harrison asked.
“Oh gracious, no. They thought it was a hoot. They thought they were having the time of their lives as far as they were concerned. Well, except for the guy I punched. He was scrubbing around in the dirt looking for his tooth. I don’t think he found it.”
“So this is far enough removed from a real hunt that you’re okay with it?” Gail asked.
“I think so, yeah. We’re not out here to kill things for sport. If that’s what Hobhouse and Yersinia wanted, I’d still be in Cape Town. Hopefully, we’ll be able to capture an ahool alive without killing it. I’d shoot one if it came down to them or me; that’s a different situation. I’ll defend myself and you guys too, if it came down to a life and death situation, I just wouldn’t like it very much. Maybe the ahools don’t even actually exist, and they’re just legends. That would take the possibility out of my hands entirely.”
The sun was no more than a faint glow below the water now. A small orange light marked the last embers of the day, and all the rest was darkness. Maybe soon enough they’d find out whether or not ahools were real.
“I suppose so,” Harrison said. “Maybe we can just have a slow, uneventful night without having too many worries.”
A gunshot rang out, followed by a human scream. “Oh Jesus God! I’ve been shot! Somebody help me! Somebody he—”
The shouts cut off with the sound of another gunshot.
NINE
FIRST DEGREE
Denise, Gail, and Harrison rushed outside. “I think the scream came from over there,” Gail said. She pointed into the jungle.
Denise held her elephant gun and watched the skies. Gail and Harrison held weapons, too. It was a bad time to be outside. If there really were ahools on the island, they’d probably be emerging from their dens right now to go on the hunt. With the sky dark overhead, the only way they’d be able to see anything was as it passed across the stars or the nearly full moon. Anything in the air would just be a shadow amongst the shadows.
“Who has a camp that way?” Denise asked.
“I think Creighton and Silas are somewhere over there. Andris, the Russian guy, was setting up a camp that way. Hell, I don’t know. I haven’t even seen Shinzo since we landed on this island, and I don’t know where Jubal or Dr. Marlow ended up,” Harrison said.
“Alright, let’s see if we can find whoever that was. Maybe we can still help them,” Denise said as they moved into the jungle. “Try to stay under the big trees as much as possible. It’ll make it harder for something to swoop through the canopy and get us.”
Denise held her gun in both hands, swiveling around to make sure there was nothing about to attack from overhead. They followed a game trail through the grass, weaving around bushes and fallen logs. Mushy, decaying leaf matter squished under their feet as they moved quickly and silently toward the source of the scream.
“Can you hear anything else?” Harrison asked, speaking low.
“No,” Denise said. Gail shook her head.
“Neither can I,” Harrison said. “That’s not a good sign.”
The jungle around them was dark and claustrophobic. Branches reached out of the shadow to snatch at them like skeletal claws. The earth under their feet was cramped with roots like giant petrified worms, and the soil stank of loamy decay. Logs and rocks loomed out at them from the darkness like the ill-kept tombstones of an abandoned graveyard.
Another big white rock carved like a monstrous head leered out at the three hunters from the darkness. Denise was half-tempted to obliterate the thing with a blast from her Nitro Express, but that probably wouldn’t improve relations with the local culture any. She didn’t like the weird, angry visages glaring at her from random corners of the island like angry gargoyles.
The silvery light of the moon drifted down from a few of the breaks in the canopy overhead, but Denise stuck to the shadows beneath the massive trees. It was easier to walk through the relatively barren zones under their great boughs, and it kept them safe. At least, that’s what she hoped. She still didn’t really understand what they were dealing with here. If nothing else, the brightness of the moon helped guide them.
> They found what they were looking for on top of a short mound beneath a massive tree whose branches spread like the twisting arms of some stretching colossus. Balthazar van Rensburg was already there, leaning over a body.
The corpse on the ground was Andris Razan. For his camp, he’d dug a sort of foxhole along the top of the hill, giving him a good line of sight all around him and a way to duck down in case something came at him from above.
However, the fortified position was dug with animals in mind, not defending against other human beings. Razan’s stomach was a mess of tacky blood where the first bullet must have hit him. Presumably, there was a small entrance wound somewhere in his back, because his belly had been blown apart where the round exited.
Razan’s guts and tatters of his shirt were splashed against the side of his tent. He hadn’t been hit with a round from an elephant gun, or there would barely be enough of him left to identify, but it must have been a large weapon regardless to do as much damage as it did.
There was a trail of blood, scuffed dirt, and more of Razan’s innards where he must have crawled toward the edge of his trench after he was hit. He never made it more than a few feet, though. Another round had taken the top of Razan’s head off. The shock of impact from the large bullet had exploded both his eyeballs as the bullet plunged through his skull, scrambled his brain to a pink slurry, and burst out the other side of his head.
Balthazar looked up at them as they moved into the clearing and approached the still-warm corpse of their fellow hunter. Denise’s rifle twitched in Balthazar’s direction as he got up. He had a rifle of his own, and no one knew what had happened yet.
“Did you do this?” Denise pointed a finger at Balthazar.
His expression was a mixture of disgust and disbelief. “No. I only got here a few minutes ago.”
Denise looked at Razan’s body. There were no powder burns on the corpse, but that didn’t prove anything. It merely meant that the shots were fired from more than a few yards away. The distance could be twenty feet or five hundred, although the longer the distance, the harder it was to put a shot straight through a target as small as a man’s head.