Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  “We’ve put together an armed landing party to come pick you up. We’ll be there soon. Until then, just leave him tied up. We’ll deal with that once we have you. Do you know if the ahool is still sedated, though?”

  Denise ground her teeth together. “The tranquilizers should last a bit longer. The things on this island don’t go by the natural order of things, but I suspect it’s still down.”

  “Well thank God for that, at least.”

  “Listen, there are people dead here. Six of us died in just over a day. My friends are dead. There’s things a lot more important than Yersinia’s research and development at stake here. This whole project went straight to hell, and I want to make sure you know that.” Denise was breathing hard. Her grip was tight enough around the radio’s mouthpiece that it was starting to flex slightly, in danger of breaking in half.

  “Right. I don’t want to undermine the seriousness of what’s happened here. However, when the landing party collects you, they’re also going to be picking up the ahool for further study. I just want to ensure the safety of my own people here, too. I’m sorry if I came off as callous. Believe me, nothing could be further from the truth. I just want to make sure we all know what to expect.”

  Denise’s grip on the radio loosened. She took a couple of deep breaths. “Alright, I understand. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go specimen hunting, though. The island is too dangerous.” She pictured the ship’s crew traipsing along the beach with pistols and shotguns. They’d be torn to shreds.

  Suddenly, she remembered something. She pulled the broken watch out of her pocket and looked at the inscription on the back.

  “Let me talk to Balthazar again. I want to ask him something about the ship you’re on,” Hobhouse said.

  “Is this the first expedition Yersinia has sent to Malheur Island?”

  “What?”

  “Is this the first expedition Yersinia has sent here? Has the company ever sent another team here for any reason?”

  “No. Absolutely not. This is the first time we’ve ever tried to study the place.”

  Denise handed the mouthpiece back to Balthazar, a queasy feeling in her stomach. Hobhouse was coming to rescue them. Soon, they’d be safe aboard the Shield of Mithridates.

  But something wasn’t right. Hobhouse wasn’t telling them something. She didn’t know what other cards he could possibly have in his pocket at this point, but she didn’t like that he was keeping things from them. Balthazar and Hobhouse talked for another few minutes, coordinating their locations, and then they signed off.

  “Balthazar, let me ask you something,” Denise said.

  Balthazar simply nodded.

  “Do you trust Hobhouse?”

  “No. I heard what he said, but you showed us that watch earlier. Yersinia isn’t telling us everything.”

  “That was my thought.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Silas said. “There’s something very much not on the table here.”

  “Things might go wrong here. We’re all going to have to work together here, and that means we’re going to need some degree of trust in one another.”

  “What about me?” Jubal asks.

  “We’re not trusting you with anything more dangerous than a set of Lincoln logs,” Silas said. Jubal scowled at him.

  “So here’s the deal, Balthazar. I know you hate me. You always have, but I have to know I can trust you.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Balthazar said. “I just try to keep you away from me.”

  “That does sound rather like you’re splitting hairs, my friend,” Silas said.

  “Alright then, why are you so determined to keep me away from you? You’ve done a pretty good job in the past. I want to know what your problem is. We may have to watch each other’s backs.”

  “You mean your father really never told you?” Balthazar asked.

  “Told me what? Did you two have some sort of sportsman’s disagreement?”

  “I always assumed you knew what you father did during the Second Boer War.”

  “He was with the British military before he became a hunter. During the Second Boer War, he administered a refugee camp.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Let me take you back to 1899. The Boer Republics hadn’t been incorporated into South Africa yet. The Boer territories had recently discovered enormous mineral wealth within their borders, but they didn’t have nearly enough people to mine it all. The British wanted to annex the territories, they always had, and the influx of thousands upon thousands of uitlanders who came in to prospect and work provided them their chance.

  “Most of the new arrivals were from the British parts of South Africa, so the Crown demanded that the Boer Republics allow them to vote there. Given that the populations in the Boer areas had become upwards of fifty percent British in a couple of years, allowing the uitlanders to vote would be tantamount to handing the Transvaal over to Britain. Instead, the Boers demanded that the British remove their troops from the border areas. When they didn’t, the Transvaal declared war on Britain.”

  “I was just a young man at the time, and I fell for the same lie that has probably killed more young men than any other statement in the history of the world. The war will be short but glorious, they said. Transvaal troops had already defeated the British a generation ago, and we could do it again. This time, people seemed to think we could keep the uitlanders away from our lands for good.

  “Like most of the men in my town, I mustered out with the veldt commandos. I said goodbye to my wife and two daughters and promised I would be back in time for their birthdays. The war did, in fact, proceed just like they said it would at first. The British marched into the African interior, overextended their supply lines, and were swiftly kicked in the nose every time. We laid siege to British holdings. We surrounded Ladysmith, Kimberley, and other towns close to our borders. It was all terribly exciting.

  “First, I missed my older daughter’s birthday. I wrote to apologize. The war was taking just a little longer than anticipated, but I’d be home soon. The British kept marching columns up to our positions, and we kept knocking them down. Even after they were reduced to eating horses and rats, the British towns didn’t surrender, though. I missed my wife’s birthday next. Then Christmas.

  “Then the Prime Minister and his lords seemed to decide we were more than just pests, and we discovered why the British had managed to colonize so much of the world. They had many more men waiting in reserve, waiting to be shipped out and deployed to the southern tip of the world. Your father was one of them.

  “They poured thousands more troops at us. The Transvaal didn’t have very many men to begin with. There weren’t really any reinforcements we could call on. Eventually, they shoved us back from the towns we’d surrounded, forcing the end to one siege and then the others. By June of 1900, they’d marched their way into Pretoria, our capital. It was the end of the Boer Republics. They’re simply part of the Crown’s South African colony today.

  “I was young and hotheaded, though. A lot of us were. I didn’t take well to losing. A lot of us could see the writing on the wall early and knew we couldn’t stand up to the full might of the British military. Even before Pretoria was captured, the Boer armies more or less dissolved into guerilla units.

  “We burned down warehouses full of supplies, chopped down telegraph lines, ambushed troops as they moved from town to town. Basically, we made life hell for any of the troops sent out to try to pin us down. They couldn’t control every inch of the countryside at once, so we would simply go wherever they weren’t and then give them a good jab when they weren’t expecting it.

  “I don’t know what we thought we were doing at that point. I guess we were all just too incensed to see uitlander boots trampling the sacred Transvaal soil or some such rot that we forgot we lost the war already. I suppose we just thought that if we were obnoxious enough, maybe the British wo
uld just leave us alone. Maybe if the bees just stung the bear enough times, it would abandon the honey.

  “It didn’t work, though. The British caught on pretty quick that a lot of the countryside was perfectly happy to feed us, clothes us, and hide us on their land. The British army was large, but there was no way for them to cover every square inch of the countryside or station troops at every Boer farm. So they came up with a plan we never expected.

  “They brought the countryside to them. Troops would block off a section of the Transvaal and round up everyone inside who wasn’t British. Women. Children. African tribesmen. Basically, anyone who didn’t have the right accent was suspect, so they were thrown on the back of a freight car and taken elsewhere. The abandoned farms left behind were usually burned, so that there was nothing for the guerillas to scavenge, and no new crops to gather.

  “Honestly, it was a good strategy. It was like something out of General Sherman’s march through Georgia during the American Civil War. The British troops would come in, and another section of the countryside would go up in flames. Men in the guerilla units would find out that their families had been moved to the camps and their livelihoods turned to ash. It took the fighting spirit out of a lot of men, though it just made some even angrier.

  “My wife and daughters were taken early, and I was wounded and captured shortly after that. I was put in one camp for prisoners of war. They were put in another for civilians, a camp run by your father. They weren’t refugees. They were taken there by the British government.”

  Denise interrupted Balthazar. “And you’re still mad about that today, and now you’re taking it out on me because of my father.”

  “No. I’m afraid not. It’s more complicated than that. I was never mad at your father. It’s my understanding that he did the best he could under the circumstances. However, the British never properly allocated resources for the internment camps they set up. There were many problems. Disease spread rapidly, and malnourishment was a constant problem. My wife and oldest daughter were among the twenty thousand or so Afrikaner civilians that died in those camps.”

  “Oh,” Denise said, not sure what else to say. “I’m sorry.” The apology sounded incredibly lame, even to her ears.

  “I didn’t find out until the conflict had been completely snuffed out. That’s when I was released from my own imprisonment. For a long time, I was genuinely mad at your father. I viewed him as responsible for what had happened. With time, the anger faded, though. There was nothing he could do from his position. There was only so much food, so much medicine to go around. I was lucky that my younger daughter survived. Some of the men had their entire families wiped out.”

  “Where’s your daughter today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “When I was captured, some of the paperwork was filled out incorrectly. My family was told I was dead, not merely wounded. It took years after the war to prove that I was actually alive because somebody checked the wrong box on a form. However, my family thought I was gone that whole time. When my wife and oldest daughter died, another family took my daughter in. The camp didn’t keep track of that sort of thing. There was no paperwork to find out who had my daughter, no formal adoption system to look her up.

  “Once the war was over, I tracked your father down. Part of me wanted to murder him, but I was ultimately more interested in getting my daughter back. He’d stayed in South Africa and opened up a hunting shop in Cape Town after the war. I went there and demanded he help me.

  “In the end, there wasn’t much I could do. Your father didn’t have any of the paperwork from the camp, and the British government had probably destroyed everything right after the end of the war and the public relations fiasco over the camps. There was nothing he could do to help me.

  “I might have stood there and badgered him all week just out of spite, except he had a young daughter of his own. She was a bit older than mine, but she still reminded me of the daughter I had lost. She had the same inquisitive eyes. I left that day because it was too heartbreaking seeing you standing there like my own daughter’s ghost. It was heartbreaking then, and it’s heartbreaking today. I can’t look at you without seeing her, so I do everything in my power to keep you away.

  “After this, I was planning to use my ten thousand dollars from Yersinia to take out newspaper ads in every rag in South Africa to help me try to find her. She’d be in her early twenties by now, a bit younger than you. Most likely, she doesn’t even remember me that well, but I’d do anything to be a part of her life again.”

  Denise sat in surprised silence. Her father had always told her he administered a refugee camp during the war. She realized he’d been ashamed of the truth.

  He’d given her the sanitized version of everything. When she was younger and asked why Balthazar seemed to dislike them, he’d merely told her that some people had their own issues they needed to work through. For that matter, he’d probably though that Balthazar hated him, too.

  The large man was looking down at his feet. Denise put a hand on his elbow. “Balthazar, I’m so sorry about what happened. I didn’t know there was more to the story than that. I was planning to retire from hunting after this expedition. If you want, I could help you draft ads to send into newspapers when we get back to South Africa.”

  “That’s very kind of you. I will have to consider that. Why are you planning to stop hunting? You’re the best hunter in Cape Town.”

  “Was. I was the best hunter in Cape Town. I don’t do that anymore, though. The only reason I agreed to come along on this trip is because they said it wouldn’t be a true hunt.”

  “But why?”

  Denise gave him a shortened version of the tale of the elephants and the Belgian dentists. Balthazar nodded grimly as she told him about the baby elephant nuzzling its dead mother.

  “I have seen this sort of thing before. There are people who simply enjoy the killing for the sake of the killing. They don’t do it for the sport.”

  “Yeah. Watching that sort of ruined the sporting part of it for me. In a weird sort of way, I think this trip helped me figure out what I wanted to do with myself afterward, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t think I could sit around in an office all day or spend all my time cooking dinners. The veldt is where I belong. For the past few months, it was like life pulled the rug out from under me. The thing I loved most, something I always assumed I was put on this earth to do, had become abhorrent to me. It all but made me physically sick to try to go out there and hunt more because I knew I was destroying something beautiful.

  “However, I managed to shoot one of the ahools with a tranquilizer dart earlier tonight. It attacked our camp, and I managed to stop it thanks to a heavy dose of sedatives. I realized something, though. There’s plenty of zoos that need live specimens. Research teams sometimes need to capture live creatures. Game preserves have been slowly springing up, and they often need animals to be sedated and tagged. I could do that for a living.

  “I could still spend most of my time outside and tracking animals, but it would serve a better purpose. At this point, I don’t think I would do anything else for Yersinia, though, regardless of the pay.”

  “I wouldn’t either after this,” Balthazar said.

  The radio crackled to life. “Anybody copy?” Hobhouse asked.

  Denise looked out the windows and was surprised to see the sky was less dark than before. Dawn was still several long hours away, but they’d passed through the darkest part of the night.

  Balthazar picked up the radio. “We’re still here.”

  “The Shield of Mithridates is in position. We’re sending a group out to pick you up. Get down to the beach. I’ll meet you there myself. You’re coming home.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PET HYENAS

  Denise stood in a gap in the ship’s armor, watching the dinghies approach. Their motors whined over the sound of the wind. She could see people sitting
in the dinghies with rifles. At least it looked like Hobhouse had come prepared.

  A few minutes later, the dinghies skidded ashore on the beach. Denise, Balthazar, Silas, and Jubal emerged from the shadows under the ship and dashed toward the boats.

  The men piling off the dinghies were oddly dressed. They all wore matching, puffed out clothes. No, not clothes. Armor.

  The material looked a little like medieval padded armor meant to protect troops from archers and light projectiles. Unlike the chainmail and plate metal knights wore, the padded armor wasn’t so much meant to deflect blows as to absorb them with a minimum impact for the wearer. They were stuffed with wool, sawdust, or anything else that could be packed in tightly while still maintaining a modicum of maneuverability and still being light enough to wear in battle.

  Today, soldiers obviously didn’t wear padded armor. A bullet could punch right through it where an arrow couldn’t. However, animal trainers sometimes wore a variant, especially people training attack dogs. Claws and fangs couldn’t penetrate the ultra-thick padding.

  For a moment as she rushed forward, Denise thought it was odd that Hobhouse had so much of the armor on hand. He’d expected to pick up some large animal specimens from Malheur Island, though. Maybe he’d prepared well ahead.

  The crew also all had tranquilizer rifles. Denise wanted to shout at them to just hop back on the boats and take her to the ship, not try to mount any further thrusts into the island interior for specimens. They also wore big, black, greasy-looking machine pistols on their sides.

  Hobhouse stepped forward and offered a hand as Denise and the other survivors came to a halt in front of the boats. He offered them a big smile like he was meeting them in his office after an important meeting to hammer out some last minute business strategy and needed to crank up the charm.

  Denise batted his hand away. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Now hold on just a minute here,” Hobhouse said. “I realize you’ve been through a lot, but I’ve brought in my team now. We can still learn a lot from this island if we can capture some specimens. We’ll collect that sedated ahool, too.”