by Jonah Buck
“That’s not a good idea,” Balthazar said.
Denise stared at the men Hobhouse had brought ashore with him. She recognized a lot of them from the ship ride out to Malheur Island. Whereas she’d expected grim looks and worry, but they were all looking at her and the others with something resembling eagerness.
“Not to worry,” Hobhouse said. “The crew of the Shield of Mithridates are all trained in basic combat techniques. A lot of former Navy special warfare-types. Ah, I see we have company. Gentlemen, would you offer a demonstration?”
Denise turned around. A pair of glowing eyes lurked in the shadows at the edge of the jungle. As Denise watched, a claw reached out and brushed some fronds aside, revealing one of the things the villagers had become.
“Get on the boats. We need to get out of here,” Denise said.
Several of the crew pulled out their machine pistols. They checked the guns and grinned.
“Wait, you shouldn’t do that. That thing is actually—”
Denise didn’t get to finish her sentence before the crewmen fired off a stream of bullets. The arcs of light from the muzzle flashes sent staccato flashes across the beach, lighting up the sand with flashbulb brightness. She was as much concerned for the crew as she was for the creature. She’d seen these things shrug off small arms fire like it was little more than a nuisance. Their flesh healed over too quickly in the moonlight.
Instead of weathering the hail of bullets, the creature fell to the ground, nearly chopped in half. More bullets slammed into the body as it lay prone on the ground, reducing it to red mulch in the span of a couple of seconds.
“That…that was a person,” Denise said.
“Not anymore it ain’t,” one of the crew muttered in response.
“Hell yeah,” Jubal shouted.
“How did you do that?” Balthazar asked.
“Why did you do that?” Denise demanded.
Hobhouse looked at them. “I’ll answer in order. Raul, hand me your gun.” He took the machine pistol from one of the ship’s crew. Snapping out the magazine, he showed it to them.
Denise stared at the bullets lined up inside. There was something different about them, but it took her a second to figure out if it was the moonlight playing tricks on her eyes or not. But no. The heads of the bullets were all a different color from the usual brass.
“Silver bullets,” Hobhouse said, slapping the magazine in and handing the weapon back to his henchman. “Very effective. As to why we did that, I’ll tell you. I lied to you a little earlier. Yersinia has sent a research team to this island. How did you know, out of curiosity?”
Denise pulled out the watch she’d found and threw it to Hobhouse. He looked at it for a moment before noticing the inscription on the back.
“Ah, very nice. For thirty years of service. Yersinia does like to reward loyalty. You see, the last group we sent here was simply a research team. They weren’t armed like you were. We didn’t realize what we were dealing with at the time, although we gained some idea when we recovered their research notes later. That’s when we knew we had something really special.
“I told you I’m with Yersinia’s research and development division, and that’s completely true. Yersinia makes medicines and does research. We also produce a limited number of biological weapons, which we sell through government contracts. Mostly government contracts, anyway. That’s the department I’m in charge of.
“This island represents a really great opportunity for Yersinia. Absolutely fantastic. Imagine if the military could wait until a week before any full moon and release creatures pumped full of moon minerals behind enemy lines. It can be anything. A fly. A house cat. Anything at all. A week later, that section of the front is absolutely devastated when the full moon comes out. It’s completely untraceable and amazingly effective. First, we needed to test it out against armed subjects, though. Being trained to deal with wild animals, big game hunters from a variety of disciplines were our first choice. You and Mr. van Rensburg here specialize in African big game. Your friends Ms. Darrow and Mr. Quint had experience with American game. We thought it would be good if there was some variety.”
“Wait a minute. You knew this island was infested with…with monsters, and you didn’t tell us at all beforehand? You knew this was going to happen?”
“More or less. I expected a few more of you to survive, actually.”
“Did you know about the maniac who’s been shooting at us this whole time, too?” Denise pointed to Jubal. “Two of us weren’t killed by the creatures here. Razan and Gail were both shot.”
“I did know some members on your team had certain proclivities. The issue was deemed more useful than not when I discussed it with the other people in my research and development section.”
“More useful than not? You realize that we’re not going to just stand idly by about this, don’t you? My friends are dead, and you knew exactly what we were walking into? You sent a serial killer here with us. No amount of money you could offer us would convince me to keep quiet about this,” Denise said.
“Yes, well I figured about as much. But really now. Did you really think we were going to pay you ten thousand dollars for a single hunt? Or a hundred thousand dollars for one single specimen? Don’t you know that some things are too good to be true?”
“You mean we’re not getting paid?” Jubal asked.
“No, I’m afraid not. Your contracts specify that you only get paid if you survive. I put some measures in place to assure myself that the cost of this excursion wouldn’t be too exorbitant. That’s where those proclivities I mentioned come in handy. Silas, would you please?”
“Did I ever tell you three what Creighton and I specialized in hunting?” Silas asked. “People.” He grinned, and then he pulled out his pistol and shot Jubal in the head.
Denise was already running, Balthazar close behind her, before Jubal even collapsed onto the beach. She leaped over the bloodied remains of the villager and fled into the jungle.
“You can run, but I’ll find you. It’s a long time until dawn,” Silas called after them.
Suddenly, a lot of things made far too much sense to Denise. Creighton and Silas had killed Razan and Gail. Hobhouse had hired a pair of killers to ensure that no one got off the island alive. Not only would he not have to pay anyone, but they would take their secrets about the island with them to the grave.
Maybe they’d just killed Razan for sport. Maybe he’d found some scrap of information that implicated Yersinia’s plans, something like the watch Denise found, and he made the mistake of sharing it with Creighton and Silas first. She’d never know now.
Most likely, the dishwasher who had disappeared on the Shield of Mithridates was their doing as well, murdered and then thrown overboard in the dead of night. They were Hobhouse’s pet hyenas.
Silas and Creighton had pulled a masterful coup. By blaming Jubal for the murders and using each other to deflect suspicion, they’d divided and conquered. They’d collected the remaining survivors, knowing full well that Hobhouse was on his way, so he could get whatever information he wanted, and then they would conveniently have everyone in one location for the final culling.
“We’re going to find you,” Silas called after them. Then he laughed.
She tore into the jungle at full speed, more afraid of the inhuman things behind her than the inhuman things that might be in front of her. Balthazar ran behind her.
They’d been betrayed. Betrayed from the very beginning. Hobhouse already knew about the island’s horrors. He knew, the bastard. She and Balthazar were just guinea pigs to test out the ferocity and deadliness of Malheur Island’s creatures. By bringing in his own team, Hobhouse could dispose of all the witnesses and save a whole pile of money in the process. His crew would probably receive a nice bonus for this, but it wouldn’t cost anything like the ten thousand dollars paid out to ten different hunters.
“Wait,” Balthazar said. He pointed to a crevice beneath a rotting log. “We ne
ed to talk for a minute. We should be safe if we hide here briefly.”
Denise nodded. “Alright. We won’t last long if we just rush blindly along like animals being flushed into a trap.” She took a few deep breaths. She couldn’t hear anything following behind them, but that didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t something or someone back there. They vaulted behind the log and crouched there.
“We’re being hunted,” he said. “We need to be smart about our next moves. What we need is some sort of plan.”
“Okay, the way I figure it, our ultimate goal needs to be to get off this island. Even if we avoid Silas and Hobhouse’s hunters for the night, they’ll just sail off and maroon us, and then we’re in no better a position than before.”
“Got any ideas?”
“There’s only one way off this island. We’ve got to hijack one of the dinghies on the Shield of Mithridates. I don’t think we can operate the ship itself with just two people. We’ll probably have to disable the Shield of Mithridates too, or they’ll just follow us. We can motor a dinghy to safety by ourselves, though.”
“That ship is anchored out off the coast and manned by dozens of Hobhouse’s people. How are we going to manage to disable it and steal a dinghy?”
“We kill everyone who gets in our way.”
“I can deal with that. What happened to the woman who couldn’t go hunting anymore, though? I thought you basically renounced killing anything.”
“It’s one thing to kill an animal that’s just minding its own business, trying to survive out there in the world just like us. I couldn’t do that anymore. There’s no point to it. It’s another thing to shoot a lion that’s about to tear your throat out. I wouldn’t be happy about it. The lion’s either hungry or feels threatened. I like living a lot more than I like being a pacifist, though. I’d shoot it without hesitation.”
“This situation is more like the lion, then.”
“Oh no. This is a whole different category. These people set us up to die. They sent us in knowing we’d be torn to shreds. They sent a pair of killers to take us out one by one in case the island didn’t kill us all on its own. They murdered one of my friends and allowed the other to die. Now they’re trying to kill us so we keep quiet and don’t cost them any extra money. I may have given up on hunting, but I have no problem killing every single one of them to get off this godforsaken island.”
“Good,” Balthazar said. “So where do we start?”
“I have an idea,” Denise said.
TWENTY-FIVE
CRUNCH TIME
They angled through the jungle, staying close to the beach when they could but veering away whenever they heard anything that sounded like human activity. Hobhouse hadn’t just landed dinghies near the Hookstadt. He’d set his crew loose on this entire side of the island.
Occasionally, she could hear the chatter of their machine pistols and the furious animal shriek of whatever they’d wounded. She grimaced at those noises.
What she was really listening for was the sound of Silas approaching, though. Most of the crew seemed to be here to collect specimens. Their priority wasn’t to deal with Denise and Balthazar. Silas, on the other hand, was presumably actively seeking them out. Denise wondered just where Hobhouse had found Silas and Creighton. Had he sprung them from some backwater prison? Did he have enough contacts with the underworld that he could simply keep a serial killer on retainer for whenever he needed people eliminated? Did Silas even work for money, or did he just like the killing?
She brushed those questions off. Directly ahead of them, a pair of Yersinia workers stood over a sedated bird. The creature was over nine feet tall, with a serrated beak that looked like it could crush a human skull without much effort. A blood-red crest flopped to one side on its head. Denise thought it might have originally been a chicken from the village, but now it looked like a prehistoric terror bird.
One of Hobhouse’s men pulled some sort of gun off his belt, and for a second, Denise thought they were going to kill the captured animal for some reason. Then the man raised the gun over his head, and a bright red flare shot up into the sky and burst in a fireball.
A few minutes later, a larger transport boat sped off from the Shield of Mithridates and bounced across the waves toward the shore. The transport boat had a small crane attached, and after a few minutes of huffing and puffing, the Yersinia men managed to roll the bird onto a tarp and cinch it up with the crane. The crane lifted the bird onto the boat, and then the vessel sped back to the Shield of Mithridates. Elsewhere on the island, another flare shot up into the air, indicating another live capture.
Hobhouse had obviously put a lot of thought and preparation into this endeavor. There was a distinct and orderly system to transport things to the ship where they could be loaded up.
Perfect.
“Where are we going?” Balthazar asked.
“Toward my old base camp. Hobhouse will have sent a team there to pick up the ahool I tranquilized earlier. I think I can hitch us a ride to the Shield of Mithridates from there.”
A few minutes later, Denise carefully peeled back the fronds of a large fern to reveal exactly what she was looking for. The coastal cliff with her base camp wedged in the base lay just ahead. A dinghy sat near the surf line. There were no signs of the crabs that had invaded the beach earlier. They had moved on to some other part of the island.
However, there were two of Hobhouse’s men in their place. The pair of crew members stood near the downed ahool, pointing their tranquilizer rifles at the net-draped form. At some point, the ahool had awoken from its stupor, but it was still too groggy to disentangle itself from the net. It lurched toward the Yersinia men before flopping back down in the sand.
One of the crew members approached, taking short, careful steps as he inched forward. The ahool swiveled its head around and tried to bite the man through the net, but he jumped back with time to spare. As it raised its head to snap at him again, he shot a dart into the soft flesh of its throat.
The ahool coughed and gagged. It tried to swivel its head around to chew the dart out of its skin, but it couldn’t angle its head that far down. After another minute, it wobbled and collapsed back onto the sand, still but for its breathing.
Putting his rifle aside, the man who shot the ahool gave his partner a big thumbs up. Denise chose that moment to shoot him with the Savage 99. The man’s upper half separated from his legs as the blast tore him in half. His torso flew a few feet and landed on the sand nearby. The man’s legs collapsed where they stood, dropping down to their knees as if in prayer. For a moment, the man looked around as if he couldn’t figure out quite how he had gotten down on the ground.
Even though the Yersinia men were wearing padded armor, it was never meant to stand up to gunfire, and it was certainly not meant to keep the wearer safe from big game rifles. The huge rounds from the Savage 99 ripped through the padding like it wasn’t even there.
The other man stood in stunned surprise for a second, as if his brain wasn’t sure it had really just seen his buddy torn in half. He adjusted quickly though, grabbing his machine pistol and looking around to figure out where the shot had come from.
He didn’t adjust quickly enough. The Savage 99’s rotary magazine clicked another round into place before the man could even duck for cover. Denise’s next round caught him in the ribs, a little under his armpit. The impact was like having a truck full of sledgehammers fall off a cliff and land directly on top of him. Every bone in his chest shattered, and the bullet ripped his ribcage and arms off his body. For a second, he continued to stand there, trying to shoot at her. His body took a second to realize that his arms were now a good ten feet away and that he was dead. The man collapsed, jerking a couple of times on the sand before going completely still.
Denise and Balthazar stepped forward. She picked the machine pistol out of the second man’s severed arms. She pulled the clip out and examined the contents. Silver bullets, just like in Harrison’s pulp magazines. Very u
seful on Malheur Island, but they would kill anyone who got in her way just as well. Hobhouse in particular deserved a nice, expensive bullet straight through the teeth. He’d paid for them after all. It would only be fair if he got to keep one as a special memento.
She unzipped the man’s pack. Most of the contents weren’t immediately useful. Some basic first aid supplies. Water. Canned rations.
A couple things caught her eye, though. She scooped up the extra magazines for the machine pistol. There was also a dark, metallic-looking tube that puzzled her for a moment. Then she realized it was a silencer for the machine pistol. She’d never had cause to use one before; she didn’t do wetwork for a living. It might come in handy, though.
“Don’t mind if I do,” she said to herself, picking the silencer up.
“These gentlemen came prepared,” Balthazar said, eyeing the other man’s hardware. With some reluctance, he picked up the other machine pistol.
“That they did. Does your friend over there have a flare gun?”
“Yes. I assume we’re going to call in their collection boat and hijack it?” He picked up the flare gun and handed it to Denise.
“I had something a little different in mind. The crew on the Shield of Mithridates will notice pretty quick if it’s us steering the collection boat back rather than their guys. However, if we—”
Denise was cut off as a game rifle bullet shot past her face. The wind in its wake blew her hair around as if she’d been standing too close to a train. If the bullet had hit her, it would be a lot messier than getting hit by a train.
“It’s Silas,” she said. “Into the jungle. Quick!” For all the chaos he’d caused, Silas was only a mediocre shot. It took two bullets to kill Razan rather than a single, quick kill shot. They’d probably only been able to hit Gail earlier because she was standing still. So far, they hadn’t been able to hit a target moving low through the jungle.