Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  What evidence had they seen so far that ahools existed? So far, it basically amounted to Hobhouse’s say so and a wrecked pleasure yacht. There was no guarantee that the Venture and its crew hadn’t met some other ill-fated demise, either. If not for the scrapes in its deck that looked like claw marks, Denise would have said that whoever was piloting the yacht simply met one of the dozen or so ways to die at sea. Nothing about the scene really confirmed the existence of a giant bat native to Malheur Island.

  The same was true of the SMS Rear Admiral Hermann Hookstadt. Obviously, it had run aground, and Balthazar said there were some skeletons wearing German uniforms inside, but that didn’t really mean anything. They could have gotten lost in a fog or chased here by a British warship. Some of the crew died in the crash and were never recovered, but it was less of a leap of logic to guess that the remaining hundreds of German sailors aboard that ship were rescued or captured by passing ships, not carried away and devoured by monsters.

  Even staying up nearly all last night, Denise didn’t see any pterodactyl-sized sky creatures swooping through the darkness. She saw a few normal bats, but there was nothing that looked anything like what Hobhouse described.

  As to the Dutch expeditions that came to Malheur Island before? Denise didn’t have a good answer for why they all failed. Plenty of colonization attempts didn’t work out, though. Disease. Angry natives. Internal disputes. All of them could lead to a Roanoke Island situation in which a colony was wiped off the map before the next supply ship arrived. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

  That was one of their goals for the day. If they inspected some caves and crevices, and they could find no signs of any giant bats, that was another mark against the existence of the ahool. Maybe she’d sleep a little easier tonight if there was more assurance that she wouldn’t be foully eaten alive by some massive, half-blind freak of nature.

  And she’d feel less jittery about going out on the island with a rifle. Denise felt a little better distracting her mind from what she was doing by focusing on the task at hand and speculating on the odds of whether monsters really existed or not. It was like unclenching her mind.

  “There’s something up ahead,” Gail said.

  Denise looked forward and saw what Denise was pointing at through the trees. It was a cabin, badly overrun with creepers. Looking closer, Denise realized they’d entered an area with smaller, second-growth trees. More sunlight dappled the ground around them, and that was because someone had cleared this patch of jungle at some point.

  If she looked closely, she could even see the remains of some massive stumps hidden in some bushes nearby. About two acres had been hacked back and tamed, but that was a while ago, Denise guessed maybe two decades or more. The jungle had regained a lot of its crushing green presence since then, so much so that she hadn’t even noticed they were walking through a cleared zone at first.

  “This must be where the last group of Dutch administrators tried to set up shop,” Harrison said. He was probably right.

  Now that Denise was looking for signs of human activity, they were subtle but unmistakable. Some decaying wood stuck out in the surf was probably the last remains of a dock that had long since rotted and fallen apart.

  She looked over and saw an ax head buried in a tree. The ax’s handle had long since decayed and fallen away, but the ax head remained. Since someone started to chop away at the tree all those years ago, the tree had since grown and nearly eaten the blade meant to fell it.

  A few upright posts over there were probably part of an old fence rather than the dead saplings she’d originally taken then for. The flattened area over there was probably meant as the foundation for another building, and the pile of stones nearby had probably been dredged up in an attempt to create a field.

  The cabin was the only part of the endeavor that had survived, and it was in danger of falling apart. Gaping holes marked its windows, and it sat crookedly on its foundation. Some of the logs used to build it looked like they might crumble into a puff of spores if she stared at them cross-eyed. Vines grew around the building like skinny snakes working together in an attempt to crush the structure.

  Further back behind the cabin stood another white boulder, but this one was the largest Denise had seen yet. It was almost ten feet tall and almost as wide. From here, it almost looked like a giant egg from some truly massive bird. Like the other white stones on the island, it had been carved into a nightmarish face, like some macabre version of the Easter Island idols.

  Unlike its brethren, this one clearly didn’t belong here. Huge straps and chains crisscrossed the stone, wrapping around it like it was in a giant sling. The chains led to the remains of some harnesses and a set of picked-over oxen skeletons. Someone had moved the huge idol here before the nascent settlement fell apart completely, which didn’t look like it had taken very long. With only one fully constructed building, it wasn’t much of a settlement to begin with.

  “Let’s check it out,” Gail said.

  Harrison looked at the crumbling buildings. “I’m mighty curious what this is all about myself.”

  They all trudged through the once-cleared field toward the cabin. The giant stone head watched them as they walked toward it, but Denise ignored the howling beast face. It was difficult, though. The carved eyes seemed to bore into them as they approached, like some ancient sphinx watching travelers approach and preparing to devour them.

  The door to the cabin had fallen off its hinges, allowing them to see inside. Moss and insects had run rampant inside the structure. Most of the space inside was taken up by bunks. This building was probably intended to just be temporary until more structures could be built, but now it was the only remnant of whatever expedition landed here years ago.

  A desk and set of drawers lay along the far wall. Denise, Gail, and Harrison stepped inside the mildewed shadows to poke around.

  Denise examined the bunks. Animals had torn the mattresses apart, and the jungle had eaten away whatever was left behind. The only thing left were rusty springs inside a frame.

  She wondered what happened to these people. Hobhouse said there had been a number of failed expeditions to Malheur Island over the years. Had everyone here died? Or had they packed up, waved down the first ship that sailed past, and made their way back to Amsterdam? Judging from the oxen skeletons outside, they must have left in one hell of a hurry. Or they’d been absolutely and swiftly wiped out.

  “Hey, look what I found,” Harrison said, pulling something out of one of the desk drawers. It was a small journal, slightly water damaged but in remarkably good shape overall. He opened it up, peeling a couple of pages apart that had become stuck together. “Oh, hmm.”

  “What is it?” Gail asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Harrison said. “Denise, is this Dutch, or did somebody turn some monkeys with typewriters loose?”

  Denise took the notebook from Harrison and looked at the crinkled pages. “This is Dutch.” She flipped the book open to its cover and squinted at the words. Royal Dutch Geological Society – 1902 was printed on the front.

  “Can you read it? I was under the impression that Dutch was more of a throat disease than a real language.” Harrison looked over her shoulder at the densely written words on the page.

  “I can read some of it. Afrikaans is close enough to Dutch that I can puzzle out a good bit of it. Some of this is piled high with scientific terms that I would need a degree in geology to understand, though. Here’s what it looks like to me, though. This is apparently the notebook of a Dutch geologist sent by his government to survey the island. It makes reference to a few other people. Looks like there was an anthropologist on the expedition, a couple of builders, a couple of soldiers, and a bureaucrat who was supposed to establish control over the island. I guess they were planning on setting up a waystation and warehouse for the Dutch East India Company, and they wanted to know if there were any interesting minerals here that would be worth mining.”

  “Anything good?”
Gail asked. “If we can’t find an ahool, I’d settle for bringing back a small pile of gold.”

  “A lot of this is just field notes, and I’m having a hard time reading those. Too much jargon. It looks like he found some iron and some…other stuff. I don’t know.”

  “Too bad there’s not a treasure map in there, too,” Harrison said.

  “Wait, I can read most of this part. Looks like our geologist friend took an interest in the weird carved heads all around the island.”

  “They do have a way of grabbing your attention,” Gail said.

  “He was less interested in their artistic merits than their composition. Looks like they aren’t like any other type of rock in this area. There’s some exotic sounding stuff in there. Looks like he got all excited here because there was even a new mineral in them that he was going to name after his wife.”

  “Doesn’t look like he got the chance,” Harrison said.

  “Whoa. Okay, get this. He was pretty sure that the white rocks are lunar meteorites.”

  “As in moon rocks?” Gail asked.

  “Yeah. He figured that a comet smacked into the moon, blew a chunk of it off the surface, and it ended up falling to earth with a bunch of smaller fragments. He thought it probably exploded in the atmosphere and sent a whole bunch of these white rocks across this part of the world. I guess most of them would have landed in the water, but a good chunk of them landed on Malheur Island.”

  “Well, huh. I’m not sure Hobhouse will get his giant bats, but he might get something just as interesting from this expedition. Lunar meteorites. Hot damn,” Harrison said.

  “I’m not sure we should just be walking off with those things,” Denise said. “They seem sort of important to the locals. They’ve carved every single one of them up like something out of Shutter Magazine.”

  “Maybe we can trade them something for one,” Harrison said.

  Denise frowned. She didn’t know if the meteorite statues were idols or warnings or just art, but she didn’t like the idea of trying to bargain canned food and guns for one. That felt like a swindle.

  “Does the journal say what happened to everyone on this expedition?” Gail asked.

  “No. It just ends. There’s nothing more after a certain date.”

  “You think Hobhouse would buy these lunar meteorites? I mean, they must have some pretty hefty scientific value. I don’t know of anybody else who just has moon rocks sitting around. Somebody will want to buy them, even if it’s not Yersinia.”

  “You’re right. We could get richer off these rocks than the giant bats were supposed to be looking for,” Gail said.

  “Split the proceeds in thirds, just like our original deal?” Harrison asked.

  “I don’t think—” Denise started.

  “Deal,” Gail said.

  “I’m not sure we should—” Denise tried to break through her friends’ growing excitement.

  “But it’s important that we keep this absolutely secret between ourselves,” Harrison said. “If the others find out that these statues are worth something, things might get complicated.”

  “Oh, we are going to make a lot of money off this,” Gail said. “Boston art school, here I come.”

  “Did I hear someone say there was money to be made?” a voice asked from behind them. Everyone spun around to see Jubal Hayes standing behind them, blocking their exit.

  ELEVEN

  HERE BE DRAGONS

  “How long have you been lurking there?” Denise demanded.

  “Oh, a little while.” Jubal grinned. “Long enough to hear that there was some kind of secret plan to make lots and lots of money.”

  “Back off, Jubal. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Oh, I think it might. Here we are on an island, with me thinking that maybe one of my friends being murdered and all was a cause for concern, and now I hear you three scheming in this hut here.”

  “For that matter, where are Balthazar and Dr. Marlow? You’re supposed to be with them.” Denise didn’t like Jubal in the first place, and she didn’t like the situation here at all. He was purposely standing in the doorway, their only exit from the decrepit hut.

  “They’re nearby. I slipped away while they went to look at the village. I don’t work well in teams. You three, on the other hand, you seem to work well together, a little too well together. I decided to listen to you to see if you were up to anything. Looks like I was right. Oh how right I was.”

  “I’m going to tell you again, this doesn’t involve you, Jubal.”

  “Not with that attitude it doesn’t. But here’s the thing, sweet cheeks. I’ve got a proposition for you. You can deal me in the easy way, or I can find out on my own. That way would be a lot more fun for me, I think.”

  Moving with shocking speed, Jubal whipped his hands out and latched them around Denise’s neck. He lifted up, applying pressure and lifting her up onto her toes.

  Urk. Denise tried to swing her legs out and kick him or spin out of Jubal’s grasp, but he had too much reach, and she was already up on her toes. She spat at him, but he merely smiled.

  “See, here’s the thing that doesn’t seem to be going through your pretty little head, here. I only have two goals on this island. The first is to make lots of goddamn money, the same as everyone else. Hobhouse wants to talk this up as some kind of nature preserve or whatever, but his game is the same. There’s money to be made here, and I want as much of it as I can get, and, well, if I have to take it out of your hide, so much the better.

  “Next, I want to get off this godforsaken rock alive. I didn’t think that would be a problem before somebody put Razan in the ground, but now I have to worry about that, too. And you know what? You’re my number one suspect for killing him. You and your friends here never liked the rest of us. I think you’re playing the same game as we are, trying to suck more cash out of that money teat Hobhouse offered us by nicking people off one at a time.”

  Denise could feel Jubal’s hard hands clamping down on her throat harder and harder as he spoke. She clawed at his fingers, trying to open up some room between them and her flesh so some air could reach her lungs again, but his hands were like iron manacles.

  “Jubal, you may want to put my friend down,” Harrison said.

  “Eh, why’s that? I don’t take orders from niggers.”

  Jubal found out why when Gail leveled her revolver against the back of his head.

  The edges of Denise’s vision were starting to go black, as if a black fog was seeping out of the corners of the cabin and slowly filling it. She took her hands off Jubal’s.

  “Here’s one reason,” Gail said, pulling the hammer back with a cold, hard click.

  “I knew it was you three that killed Razan. I knew it. What, are you going to murder me, too? Balthazar and Dr. Marlow aren’t a quarter of a mile away. I can snap your little co-conspirator’s neck right now. What will they think when they find her dead and me killed by a shot to the back of the head. Eh? Eh? Your game would be up then.”

  Denise took her hands and pulled them back so they were closer to her shoulders, turning her elbows into spikes. Wriggling around to get a better shot, she suddenly thrust her elbows straight down into Jubal’s own elbows.

  No matter how strong someone was, the design of the human arm meant that elbows did exactly what they were intended to do quite easily: bend. Jubal’s arms had been stretched straight out in holding Denise up, but her explosion of downward forced caused his elbows to creak downward.

  That brought her down flat on her feet again, but it didn’t release Jubal’s grip around her neck. To solve that, she used the forward momentum she’d just gained and magnified it. She sprang forward as soon as her feet touched the ground and bashed her forehead straight into Jubal’s nose. The impact hurt a little, but not nearly as much as it hurt Jubal.

  The force of her skull mashing straight into his face at full speed broke his nose like a stale breadstick. He howled and released her to bring his hands up to hi
s mashed-in nose. At the same time, Denise lashed out with her foot and kicked him hard in the gut.

  Jubal Hayes collapsed like someone had turned off his spine. He fell to the ground with a great whoofing noise and promptly threw up on himself. Blood ran down his upper lip from the remains of his nose and puke ran down his chin as he looked up at her.

  “Here’s the thing, Jubal,” Denise said. “We didn’t kill Razan. If we did, you can bet your ass that we would shoot you right now. But see, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to let you run back to Balthazar and Dr. Marlow, where you’re supposed to be in the first place.”

  “You sure we should do that, Denise?” Harrison asked.

  “I mean, he did just put a good effort into strangling the life out of you. What if he’s the one that killed Razan last night? We don’t know where he was. Nobody does.”

  Denise looked at her friends. They were both staring down at Jubal, who was still in too much pain to move a whole lot. He looked up at them with wide eyes. Gail and Harrison looked down at him with narrowed ones.

  “He did hear us talking about the journal, too,” Harrison said.

  “No. We aren’t killing him. We don’t know that he was responsible for what happened last night. If we all start to turn on each other, there won’t be anyone left for the Shield of Mithridates to pick up.”

  Her friends looked at her with skepticism. She didn’t like Jubal. Maybe she even kind of wanted to stake him out on the beach and use him as ahool bait herself, but she wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. She wasn’t about to stop her hunting career of shooting animals only to start shooting people instead. If she knew Jubal was the killer, she’d have no problem wrapping him up in chains until Hobhouse returned, but she wouldn’t execute him.