Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  “We are not killing him,” she said again. “You’re worried he’ll spoil our plans about the moon rocks? Fine. I’ll reset the playing field again so we don’t have to be paranoid about everyone learning our secrets. If Hobhouse wants to pay for the idols, he’ll pay everyone, not just the three of us.”

  She grabbed the Dutch geologist’s journal off the desk and tossed it at Jubal. He winced as it landed next to him.

  “I think you’re making a mistake,” Gail said. “This could be our gold rush.”

  Denise wasn’t even sure what she was doing was a good idea. She didn’t like the idea of selling cultural artifacts to Yersinia when they were part of a living society. It felt too much like robbery. Giving the journal to Jubal and spreading word about the moon rocks would almost certainly lead to the widespread pilfering of the statues one way or the other.

  On the other hand, they all needed to survive this. If everyone thought she, Gail, and Harrison held some enormously valuable secret, more people than Jubal might turn on them. They could be as hunted as the ahools by the end of the day, and she didn’t think any of them would live very long with targets like that on their back. Fear and greed might turn even the relatively even-keeled hunters like Silas into members of a blood-hungry mob. Instead of pitchforks and torches, they’d be out with high-powered rifles and flashlights.

  It would be good cover for whoever killed Razan to take more victims, too. No, survival trumped any moral victories from preserving the statues on the island.

  Off in the distance, Denise could hear voices shouting. “Jubal! Jubal, where have you gone?”

  That was Balthazar and Dr. Marlow, looking for their little lost lamb. They’d realized he was missing and had gone looking for him.

  Good. That meant he hadn’t killed them both and stuffed their bodies somewhere. A day before, Denise wouldn’t have even entertained such thoughts, but now that one of their number had been gunned down like a prey animal, it was on the forefront of her mind.

  “Take that journal and show it to Balthazar. He speaks Afrikaans. Balthazar might be able to translate the Dutch even better than me. Tell him not to read it until he can find Silas, Creighton, and Shinzo. Then everyone will know what we know. We’re leaving, and if I see you try to follow us instead of scampering back to Balthazar with your tail between your legs, I will put a bullet through that mess where your nose is supposed to be. Do you understand?”

  Jubal nodded. “Bitch,” he said under his breath, although the blood clogging his crushed nose made it come out as Bish.

  “What was that?” Denise said.

  Jubal didn’t say anything. He just looked away.

  “Answer the lady, honkey,” Harrison said.

  “I’ll take the journal to Balthazar,” Jubal wheezed.

  “Good,” Denise said. She strolled out of the hut and back into the tropical sunlight.

  “Denise, you’re my friend, but I think you just screwed us,” Gail said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m not sure there’s a maybe about it,” Harrison said. “I’m sorely tempted to go back there and club Jubal’s brains out anyway.”

  “We might be screwed now, but I think we’d be twice as screwed if we did anything else,” Denise said. “Jubal didn’t love us before, but if he’s not the killer, he doesn’t have any extra reasons to come after us. For that matter, whoever killed Razan won’t have any additional reasons to track us down. Harrison, you were the one who thought the killer was probably after more money. Who do you think would be next on his hit list if he thought we had some extra means of pulling out aces here?”

  They were walking in the general direction of Malheur Island’s central mountain. A game trail wandered through a patch of tall grass in a clearing. Above them, the sun beat down like a molten hammer, and sweat started to stain their clothes. The jungle humidity turned every breath of air into a gasp.

  “I don’t trust Jubal. He’s a bastard and a half,” Gail said.

  “I don’t trust him either.”

  “We should have at least tied him up or something. If he’s the one who killed Razan, he’ll probably want to come after us next, even if he knows as much as we do about the lunar meteorites.”

  “J’accuse. Look, I don’t know that Jubal is innocent of killing Razan, but I don’t know that he’s guilty, either. If we let him return to his group unharmed to his group, it shows some good will. If any of us are going to survive on this island, we’re going to have to work together until we find out who’s responsible for Razan’s murder. We’ll still play things safe. Travel together. Hold watch shifts at night. If we had killed Jubal without knowing he was the real killer, would we actually feel any safer?”

  The painful marks around her neck throbbed as she spoke. Maybe she would feel safer if they had chained Jubal to a tree in some ways. He was undoubtedly a danger, but he might not be the danger.

  Cripes. She could do with a stiff drink or a dozen right about now. They kept walking, the jungle around them giving way to a clearing of reeds and grass.

  The tall grass ahead of them shuddered suddenly. Denise stopped in her tracks. She held the Nitro Express in her hands.

  She sniffed the air.

  Gail and Harrison seemed to notice at the same time she did. There was a strong odor in the air, something they’d missed during their arguments. It was something strong and pungent. Now that they were paying attention again, their instincts as hunters started waving great big orange neon DANGER signs.

  That odor was the scent of decay. More than just the usual odor of the jungle, this was a smell that said a large amount of spoiling meat sat somewhere nearby. Or it was the smell of something that spent a lot of time wallowing in spoiled meat, and there was only one class of animal on earth that strongly smelled of rotting, putrescent corpses.

  And that was the type of animal that made a lot of corpses. Large predators.

  The grass ahead twitched again.

  Suddenly, a gigantic scaly monster burst out of the grass straight toward them, moving freakishly fast on four clawed legs. A tail covered in bumpy osteoderms whiplashed back and forth behind it as it moved. A gaping mouth opened wide, displaying dozens of shiny recurve teeth faceted into the compact, brutish head. Twelve feet of angry reptile surged toward them.

  “Run!” Denise turned and sprinted down the path as four more of the massive creatures burst out of the grass. Gail and Harrison followed suit, fleeing as fast as they could.

  At first glimpse, Denise had assumed that the reptilian beasts were crocodiles. Big ones at that. She was used to crocodiles at the watering holes around South Africa.

  Then she realized that what was chasing them was actually much worse.

  They weren’t in South Africa anymore. She didn’t even know if the Dutch East Indies had crocodiles, but what the Dutch East Indies did have was Komodo dragons.

  While they weren’t quite as large as a full-sized crocodile, they had some features that made them even worse. Their bite itself wasn’t venomous, but their mouths were naturally home to so many aggressive bacteria that broke down animal carcasses that the effect was almost the same as a potent venom. Whenever a Komodo dragon bit anything, it released toxic bacteria into the victim’s bloodstream. Even if the prey managed to escape the dragon’s clutches, it would likely die from sepsis anyway. The huge monitor lizard could simply trail behind the unfortunate animal and wait for it to die all on its own. Essentially, Komodo dragons had weaponized bad hygiene.

  There were too many of the lizards, and they were moving too fast for Denise to hit them all with her Nitro Express. She’d be overwhelmed and torn apart before she could reload.

  Gail and Harrison ran beside her. They needed to get up in a tree or somewhere else where the Komodo dragons couldn’t reach them. She didn’t know how far they could run, but she’d already seen that they could run faster than her. They only had a few moments before the huge reptiles caught up and brought them down in a frenzy of s
lashing claws, whipping tails, and frothing saliva.

  Since they’d entered the clearing, there weren’t any trees close by. However, there was an abutment of fractured land. At some point, some geological fault had pushed one section of the island up in a jagged wall of nearly vertical earth and rock. A narrow stream ran between the level clearing and the upthrust wall.

  “Over there. Climb! Climb!” Denise pointed and veered away from their current path, vaulting through the tall grass. She dashed around the skeletonized remains of some sort of deer, only a few runny strands of sinew and fly-blackened meat still clinging to its bones. This must be the heart of the Komodo dragons’ territory, the killing fields where they outpaced and slaughtered prey. She could hear them scrambling through the grass behind her, gaining ever closer.

  Reaching the edge of the creek, she leaped and grabbed onto the craggy surface of the wall. Her body slammed into the hard surface, nearly punching the breath out of her lungs. Her face met dirt, and pebbles scraped open her cheek. One hand still clutching her Nitro Express by the barrel, she launched herself up the uneven surface as best she could. Gail and Harrison were right behind her, launching themselves at the wall and grabbing on.

  Denise climbed as fast as she could, nearly ripping the skin off her palms on the rocks. She was afraid that the Komodo dragons might have the claws and the gumption to try moving up the rock wall after her.

  After what was only a few seconds but felt like an eternity, she heaved herself over the upper edge of the small cliff. Her friends joined her a second later, pulling themselves up as if the rocks were on fire. She chanced a look down, ready to head for the closest tree in case the huge monitors were following her up the wall.

  The dragons circled below in a knot of writhing, scaly bodies. Some of them looked up and hissed at her, but they didn’t seem to want to pursue them vertically up the wall. Their beady black eyes stared up at her with reptilian hunger, but she was safe.

  Rolling onto her back, she issued a big sigh of relief. The lizards couldn’t have been more than a few feet behind her when she leaped for the wall.

  “Well,” Gail said, panting, “that was a first. Komodo dragons, right?”

  “Right,” Denise said, bringing her breathing under control as she lay on the ground and enjoyed the feeling of being alive. There was no sweeter nectar in all the world.

  She looked down at the reptiles below and frowned. Now that she could get a better look at them, she wasn’t sure they were Komodo dragons at all. Komodo dragons didn’t have osteoderms, bumpy ridges like crocodiles, down their backs. They were smooth brown scales all over. In addition, these creatures had a small sail running down their backs, like a prehistoric Dimetrodon. The sail was supported by large spines that jutted out of the monitors’ backs, and made of a thin flap of skin that ran between them. She’d never heard of anything quite like these guys, though they were probably a cousin to the Komodo dragon.

  “You know,” Denise said, “those might not be Komodo dragons after all. I think we just discovered a new species.”

  “I think they discovered us,” Harrison said.

  Denise pulled herself to her feet, still quivering from adrenaline. Her hands shook a little as she looked down at the mob of angry creatures below.

  “Alright, let’s find a safe area where we can get back down,” she said, moving away from the ledge of the cliff. She walked a few feet, trying to get her bearings, when her foot suddenly slipped right through a thin layer of leaf litter covering a narrow hole.

  She screamed as she fell straight down into the darkness below.

  TWELVE

  CAVERNS MEASURELESS TO MAN

  Denise’s scream came to an abrupt end as she slammed into the ground about fifteen feet down. She smacked into a thick layer of decaying plant matter that had gathered at the bottom of the hidden hole. Hitting the ground at an awkward angle, she collapsed and went face down on the floor. She groaned. Even with the softer landing from the collection of leaves and old vines, it was a savage fall.

  “Denise? Are you okay down there? C’mon. Talk to us,” Gail’s voice said from above.

  “I’m alive,” Denise said, checking to make sure her legs weren’t broken. “Barely,” she added under her breath. The fall had discombobulated her senses. One second she was walking through the sunlight, the next she was plunged into darkness and a sudden full body impact. It felt like she’d been thrown in a paint shaker and then smacked against the wall a few times for good measure.

  Her bones didn’t feel right under her skin, but none of them seemed to be broken. She knew she’d probably have a bruise over half her body by the next day, though. When that happened, she’d be able to feel individual air molecules colliding with her tender skin.

  Pushing herself up, she flopped onto her back and looked up. Gail and Harrison were a couple of shapes silhouetted by the sun further up. The cave she’d fallen into was shaped roughly like a flask, with a wide, flat bottom leading up to tapered sides. A couple of leaves she’d disturbed as she fell into the cave drifted down and landed gently beside her.

  A bat, apparently surprised by her sudden entrance into its domain, fluttered away and out through the top of the cave. At least it wasn’t an ahool.

  Rolling over onto her side, Denise forced herself to move her head around and take in more of her surroundings. Fungal growths hung from the walls. Water dripped from the ceiling and formed a number of small puddles nearby. There was a pile of…

  Denise snapped alert as if she’d been given an electric shock. About ten feet away from her sat a pile of massive bones.

  If she curled her knees up to her legs, she could probably fit inside the ribcage. The skull was almost as long as her entire forearm, and the jaws were rimmed with pointed needle teeth like a giant eel. Most amazing of all were the elongated bones forming the wings.

  The long, thin bones looked like a horribly mutated hand, which was really what they were. Bats were mammals, just like humans, dogs, and dolphins. Hands, paws, and flippers were all skeletally similar in a lot of ways. A lot of the bones were basically the same in all of them, just compacted or stretched and rearranged slightly.

  Bats simply took the evolutionary system one step further. The bones that formed the paws of their ancestors stretched themselves into a complex lattice to form wings. Each of the supports that ran through the wings was really a bizarre sort of finger.

  This was a unique specimen, though. The creature would have had a thirty-foot wingspan when it was alive. It was easy to tell why it wasn’t, though.

  A large rock had given way from the ceiling and crushed most of the giant bat’s pelvis and left wing. Even for all its size, the creature was probably quite delicate in a lot of ways, and the minor cave-in had killed it.

  “Can you see this?” Denise called upward, pointing to the massive skeleton. Jesus, the ahools did exist, and they were absolutely horrifying. A creature like that could easily carry off a full grown man.

  She thought again about the Venture, adrift and empty near Malheur Island. She’d been skeptical before, but now it was all too easy to picture a couple of ahools swooping down on the yacht as it sailed too near to the island at night.

  “We see it alright,” Gail said.

  “Stay where you are,” Harrison said. “We have some rope back at camp. Gail and I will go back and get some and get you out of there.”

  She looked around. A variety of tunnels and open spaces led away from the chamber she found herself in. This whole area must be a karst system, full of caves and sinkholes where soluble rock had washed away and left behind empty underground chambers.

  There were a dozen chambers leading off from where she currently found herself. Some of them were so narrow she would only be able to crawl through them on her belly. Others were big enough to drive a truck through. Or for anything that lived in these tunnels to scurry through.

  Denise didn’t like that idea. She didn’t like it one bit. Obviously, at
least one ahool used to live down here, and everything she knew about bats said they lived in colonies. There might still be some living specimens down here, and they probably wouldn’t be happy to see her.

  “Alright, get that rope fast, though. I have a bad feeling about this,” she said.

  Gail and Harrison disappeared from the little halo of sunlight above her, and she was suddenly very glad for her Nitro Express rifle. She looked down at the teeth on the skeleton beside her again. They were as long and thin as her fingers, and they absolutely filled the creature’s maw in a jagged row.

  She sat in the little pool of light and listened to the sounds of the cave. There was the steady drip, drip, drip of water coming from all around. From overhead, she could hear the calls and cackles of birds and monkeys. The crevasse smelled of wet earth and damp decay, like a Seattle graveyard. The air inside the cave was just as damp as above, but it was much cooler.

  A clicking noise sounded from somewhere deeper inside the cave. Denise recognized that sound. It was the sound of bats sending out echoes. She pulled a miniature flashlight out of her vest and clicked it on.

  From here, it was impossible to tell where the noise was coming from. It could be close or it could be distant. For that matter, the creature making that noise could be small or it could be very large. Very large indeed. She looked down at the nearby skeleton again.

  Biting her lip, Denise pulled herself to her feet. Her body protested after already receiving some rough treatment today, but it obeyed with only minimum creaks and pops. She patted the breast pocket of her vest to make sure that the massive bullets for her Nitro Express were still in there, readily accessible.

  The clicking noise came again. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it sounded closer this time. Her finger crept inside the rifle’s trigger guard.

  Gail and Harrison told her to stay put. Normally, that would be the smart thing to do. They’d come back to this same spot with rope and get her out.

  However, it would take them a while to get back to their camp from here, and it would take just as long to get back. Meanwhile, Denise might be trapped in here with something else, something that might be seeking her out with echolocation right now. If she stayed here and waited for Gail and Denise, there was no guarantee they’d get back in time to find any more of her than whatever parts the ahool didn’t feel like eating. Or maybe it was just a little bat curious about the commotion of her falling in.