Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  Denise didn’t know where Silas was, so she sprayed the dead Yersinia man’s machine pistol into the jungle in a wide arc as she moved. If nothing else, it would force Silas to duck down long enough for them to get into the dense cover the foliage provided.

  Silas’s laughter followed them into the brush. She couldn’t tell exactly where he was. The thick layer of greenery seemed to muffle and dampen sound. Hopefully, that would limit his ability to find them as well.

  She pointed a direction ahead to Balthazar. They couldn’t run forever. Silas would track them down eventually, and even if they somehow managed to avoid him until dawn, Hobhouse would still pack up and leave without them. Right now, they needed a way to force Silas’s hand so they could take him out. Denise thought she might know a way to flip the tables.

  Hopefully.

  Maybe.

  “Oh, Denise.” Silas’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere. He was somewhere behind them, probably following a trail of footprints and thrashed vegetation. He stretched out the S in her name until it became a long hiss. “Balthazar. Where are you two going? Come back.”

  Denise picked up a rock and threw it behind them. It crashed through the foliage and landed in a pile of leaves somewhere with a crackle. A rip of machine pistol fire answered the noise. Silas had switched to one of the smaller weapons for close-up work.

  “You know, I’m going to miss my good friend, Creighton. He will be sorely missed indeed. We never had much in common really, except we were both what you might call scholars of Jack the Ripper. The both of us were both just young boys when he haunted the streets of Whitechapel, but it was an enormously exciting time to be a young man in London. Creighton and I met when we decided to do some, I suppose you might say, research into the killings years later. It was lovely. We always had someone to provide an alibi for the other. Yes. Of course. He was with me the whole night for dinner. No, I wouldn’t know anything about such things, officers. It was splendid.”

  Silas was trying to herd them forward, to keep them moving. By talking, he was letting them know he was constantly approaching. He didn’t want them stopping and setting up an ambush. Even though they didn’t know exactly where he was, being outnumbered two-to-one still put him at a disadvantage.

  His tactic was working, too. Denise and Balthazar forged ahead through the jungle. He was following their trail. Surprising him would be very difficult.

  She spotted a creek she recognized and started following it. What Silas didn’t know was that they weren’t just running blind. They still had a few plays of their own to run.

  “Of course, both being upper-class lads, we were expected to have an interest in fox hunting. We certainly enjoyed it, but the real fun was traveling to some distant corner of the country, to yet another sleepy village where the locals were all so kind and didn’t bother to lock their doors at night. Expeditions abroad were even better. Why, when Mr. Hobhouse told us he had a special task just for us, a unique hunting opportunity on a tropical island, we all but jumped at the chance. A chance to hunt our very favorite prey, completely unencumbered by restrictions. Marvelous, don’t you think so?”

  Denise followed the stream and burst into a grassy clearing. She’d been here once before. It had been less than a day before, but it felt like years ago. The long grass came up to her hips.

  “You know what? Even if Creighton didn ’t make it, I think he would have wanted it this way,” Silas called after them. “Hobhouse wasn’t supposed to show up until morning, when all the animals were safely back to their normal size. We radioed him to pick us up early once our base was overrun by those crabs, though. It ’s a little riskier for his men, but they came prepared. Monsters aren ’t so scar y when you have silver bullets. I have them, too. Had Hobhouse come in the morning, you simply would have been executed by Creighton and myself. No, this way I get to hunt you. A perfect toast to Creighton ’s memory, don’t you think?”

  She purposely squelched through the mud near the creek, leaving a very good set of footprints. Then she and Balthazar diverted into the high grass. The reeds of greenery sprang back up after they stepped through them, leaving minimal signs of where they’d gone.

  “Down,” Denise said. She and Balthazar both went prone on their stomachs. The grass tickled her face, but her main concern was the rotting orangutan carcass a few feet in front of them. The smell from the corpse wafted up and slapped her across the face each time she tried to breathe.

  Silas barely made a sound as he moved. She only caught a brief glimpse of him as he slid off the path they’d taken and noticed the field of long grass. He immediately went into a low crouch and started moving forward just below the height of the grass. He’d stopped talking too, sensing something amiss. Before, he knew roughly where they were as he flushed them forward. Now, they were all in the thick of it together. Aside from the occasional rustle of grass, Denise quickly lost track of Silas’s exact position.

  She could spray down the grass with her own machine pistol, but there was no guarantee she’d hit Silas. If she didn’t, the burst of fire would only give away her position and make her an easy target. Instead, she had something a little different in mind.

  Reaching down to her belt, she pulled the flare gun out. She didn’t need to be accurate with the gun. She just needed to know vaguely which part of the field Silas was moving through. The rustle of grass and periodic snapped twig told her that. He was maybe one hundred feet ahead, moving through the clearing toward the opposite side. Most likely, with no one firing at him, he thought they’d cut through and he could pick up their fleeing tracks again on the other side of the clearing.

  Wrong. Denise stood up and leveled the flare gun about where Silas was creeping along. She squeezed the trigger, and a bright red flare shot out, streamers of dazzling light exploding off the central flare.

  Silas looked up above the grass just a split second before the flare struck the ground near his feet and burst like a giant firework. Red light exploded all around him, and Silas jumped and twisted in midair, trying to shield his face from the small explosion.

  He whipped around and fired off an entire clip off his machine pistol in Denise’s general direction, but the blast had temporarily blinded him. Denise had been standing much further away, but there was a big, angry red blotch of afterimage dancing across her eyes. Silas wouldn’t have his night vision back for a long time.

  The grass in front of Silas started burning as the smoldering flare sputtered burning pieces off into the reeds. Silas backed up, reloading as he moved. He swatted his hand in front of his face, trying to brush aside the smoke already billowing in front of him. Slapping a fresh magazine of silver bullets into the machine pistol, Silas fired that one off into the darkness, too.

  Even though he had experience hunting, experience killing, Denise had managed to surprise him with the flare, breaking his discipline. Half blind and probably a bit burned, Silas retreated from the growing fire. He wasn’t thinking tactically anymore, he was just trying to get away and keep her and Balthazar at bay. They’d put him back on his heels.

  That was probably why he didn’t hear the rumbling footsteps behind him. He apparently didn’t notice the overwhelming smell of decay that began to overpower even the scent of smoke.

  While Denise had been to this field before, Silas hadn’t. This was where she first discovered that Malheur Island had its own subspecies of Komodo dragons.

  The flames, explosions, and gunfire had drawn the nest’s attention. Silas was busy digging out a fresh magazine from his belt when a tree crashed down directly beside him. He stiffened and went stock still as he suddenly realized there was something behind him at the other end of the clearing.

  Slowly, very slowly, he turned around to see what was behind him. Then he looked up…and up…and up. Three Komodo dragons stood behind him, eyeing the tiny human at their feet. Ropes of drool hung from their jaws.

  Silas bolted. He took off running, speeding blindly through the tall grass. Th
e growing inferno prevented him from bolting straight across the field, so he had to run at an angle toward the jungle. He tried to reload his machine pistol with silver bullets as he ran.

  The largest dragon took a single step forward and scooped Silas up in its claws. His machine pistol tumbled forty feet to the ground and landed in the reeds. Silas screamed and tried to break free from the creature’s grip, but there was nowhere for him to go except tumbling to the ground in a bone crunching heap.

  For a moment, the dragon stared at Silas, as if its reptile brain was processing whether anything so small was even worth eating. A second later, it completed its ponderings, and its van-sized jaws cracked open to reveal fangs as long as a big man’s boot.

  Silas had just enough time to scream before the dragon thrust its head forward and gobbled him down. Denise heard a loud crunching noise, and then the scream cut off. A single severed leg thumped to the ground, and then the Komodo dragons turned around and retreated back into the jungle, away from the fire consuming more and more of the clearing.

  Denise stood up as the fire grew closer and the dragons retreated further into the jungle. Balthazar gazed out at the billowing flames.

  “Those flames will be visible from the shore soon. Hobhouse will know something is happening.”

  “I guess it’s time to deal with him, then.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  STOWAWAYS

  Denise and Balthazar picked their way back through the jungle until they had reached Denise’s abandoned camp again. The ahool remained still under the netting, and the two dead Yersinia men remained spread across the sand.

  “Help me clean these two up,” Denise said, gesturing to the shattered dead men. A few minutes later, she threw the last piece of offal into the jungle where they’d hidden the bodies. She kicked clean sand over the blood on the beach, and then she moved down to the surf and scrubbed the blood off her hands.

  “Now on to the Shield of Mithridates,” Balthazar said. “How exactly were you planning to do that?”

  Pulling the flare gun out again, Denise loaded in another flare. She pointed the gun skyward and shot the flare off with a pflunck. The flare rocketed skyward and exploded into a crimson flower. The remnants drifted down in a brief glow before disappearing in the night sky.

  “I’ll show you. They’re going to send a boat out from the Shield of Mithridates to collect this ahool now, right?” She walked over to the giant bat and started to unwrap the net from around it.

  “Correct. But you already said we weren’t going to hijack the boat.”

  “Yeah, we aren’t. They’d spot us in a minute when we started to get close to the ship. We can’t just steal the boat and ride off into the night. They would figure out what happened and track us down pretty quick.” She threw the top of the net away from the ahool. If it was awake, it could escape now.

  Balthazar realized what she was planning. “I do not want to be that close to this creature.”

  Denise lifted one of the ahool’s wings up and laid down, wriggling under it like she was tucking herself in. The wing was surprisingly light, and the skin was warm and leathery, like a recently occupied saddle. As she snuggled in next to the huge, hairy bat, its musky scent almost made her gag.

  “It’s completely sedated. There’s no risk of it waking up.” She started to rearrange the net around the bat so it still looked like it was captured with no interference. Looking up, she spotted the collection boat moving toward them in the distance. “C’mon, there’s not much time left.”

  Glancing out at the sea, Balthazar swore in Afrikaans and then moved over to the bat himself. A minute later, he was tucked under the other wing. The membranous wings were thick enough, that their bodies barely created any noticeable lumps.

  Denise lay in the net, trying to fit her body between knots and wrinkles in the thick rope mesh. The heavy-duty fiber was rough and scratchy, but she held still as best as she could. Nestled beside the huge bat, she could feel its chest rise and fall as it took long, slow breaths. Each exhalation produced an odor that was reminiscent of dog breath, but it came at her in a hot, wet monsoon.

  Next to her, the bat’s body radiated a massive amount of heat. She was sweating, but she couldn’t tell if that was primarily due to her own anxiousness about the approaching Yersinia boat or the fact that she was basically wedged into a monster’s armpit.

  For a moment, the same nauseous, creeping guilt she became so familiar with after her failed hunt with the Belgian dentists seized her chest and squeezed. She’d killed people in the last half hour. She’d committed premeditated murder by intentionally ending their lives. That was something she could never take back. If everything went according to plan over the next few minutes, she’d kill a lot more people before the end of the night, too.

  The steady whine of an approaching boat engine steeled her. If the men aboard that boat discovered her here, they would have no compunctions against shooting her down. The deaths already on her hands were unfortunate, but she would have put down a rabid dog if it approached her. She didn’t have to like it, but it was for the good of everyone involved. Only the dog would probably disagree.

  Well, as her father liked to say, if you’re going to drain the swamp, don’t bother asking the frogs for their opinion. This was a swamp that needed to be drained. She reached down into one of her vest pockets and found the silencer for the machine pistol. If she had to use the weapon in the next few minutes, her plan would be shot, but she’d rather come up with a new plan than end up dead.

  Finally, the big skiff motored down and cruised up to the sand. Denise heard it glide to a halt on the beach, and then two pairs of boots splashed into the water. She couldn’t see anything at all aside from some fur.

  “Oy! Saul! Garret? Where the hell are you pricks? You’re supposed to help us haul this thing on board,” a voice called.

  “Forget it. They ditched us so they wouldn’t have to do more work. Let them hang. They’ll just have to hitch a ride with another boat later. I’d rather help with the lifting than get stranded on this damn island.”

  “You think something could have happened to them?”

  “Nah. They got silver bullets, just the same as us. That’ll kill anything here deader than McKinley. They’re just being dicks. What are you? Their mother?”

  “Alright, alright. Let’s just get this done quick. Hobhouse wants everything loaded, and I don’t want to be the one who gets blamed for gumming things up. Man, this is one ugly son of a bitch. You want to hook that end up to the crane while I get this end?”

  “The toothy end? No thanks.”

  “Too bad. Just hook it up. Hobhouse said the poor saps on this island sedated this one themselves, and he wanted a bat especially. The weapons division wants something that can fly.”

  “Fine. Just keep me covered while I hook this big bastard up. I don’t want it waking up, and I don’t want any of its friends to swoop down and get me while I’m working here.”

  “That’s what Saul and Garret are supposed to be here for.”

  A pair of boots worked their way across the sand and stopped a couple of feet away from Denise’s head. The net jerked and bobbed for a couple of seconds as the man worked a rope through the mesh.

  “Well, if they don’t show up soon, I’m going to tell Hobhouse that they wandered off and left his prize bat all by itself over here. He’ll probably leave them on the island to fend for themselves.”

  “Eh, they’ll show up. There’s a fire going somewhere back in the jungle there. Silas probably drafted them into helping him hunt the last couple of losers the monsters didn’t eat.”

  A winch started to drag the ahool across the beach, taking Denise and Balthazar with it. She suddenly realized that she’d been holding her breath while feet crunched in the sand all around them. She exhaled as quietly as she could and then tried not to make any unpleasant noises as she inhaled a big lungful of bat fumes.

  After the winch pulled them up next to the colle
ction boat, it lifted them up and onto the low deck, putting them down on a large pallet waiting there for them. The Yersinia men hopped on and snapped some heavy straps over the ahool and attached them to the pallet so their prize wouldn’t slide off into the sea.

  Tension flowed out of Denise as the boat’s motor started up again and they reversed away from the shore. The first step of her plan had gone off without any major problems. They were headed toward the Shield of Mithridates. She wanted to reach over and give Balthazar a thumbs up, but that would give her away. Instead, she stayed as still as she could, remaining nothing more than a slight bulge in the ahool’s wing.

  Within minutes, they sped away from the choppy surf near the coast and were out into the open water. The two Yersinia men continued to chat amongst themselves, unaware of the stowaways hidden on their boat. After a short skim across the water, the little collection boat pulled up to its big sister.

  A hook lowered down from the deck of the Shield of Mithridates, and the two Yersinia men attached it to the straps on the pallet. Then, the hook pulled the entire pallet up and brought them up onto the deck, lowering them onto a large dolly. Almost immediately, someone wheeled the dolly around and took it to the cargo elevator at the center of the deck. Hobhouse had a precision operation moving along, trying to capture as many specimens as possible before daylight.

  Even though she couldn’t see anything, she could hear the elevator’s whine as it descended. Powerful arc lights burned in the ship’s hold, illuminating everything in glaring detail. As soon as the elevator reached the bottom, the dolly started moving again.

  “Got another one for you, Stanley,” the man pushing the dolly said.

  “Ooh. So they were able to capture an ahool. I’d heard the hunters managed to snag one, but I’m impressed nonetheless. I have just the place for this one. Just the place. Over there in the corner. The enclosure with the extra netting. Yes, perfect.”

  The pallet was unstrapped from the dolly and shoved off. A moment later, she heard footsteps moving away and the cargo elevator grinding its way back upward.