Carrion Safari

by Jonah Buck

  Denise risked peeking out from under the bat’s wing. They were in an enormous cage of some kind. The bars were inches thick and looked like they could keep a dinosaur contained. However, the large cage was actually inside a larger but less sturdy enclosure that was simply covered in a thin cloth screen.

  It made sense. While the ahool was still under the effects of the full moon, a massive security apparatus was required to keep it from escaping. The rest of the time, it was merely a normal bat, with a wingspan less than a yard. Once it transformed back to its usual size, it could fit right through the normal bars.

  All around her stood more cages, most of them just composed of the heavy metal bars. About half of them were filled with huge, slumbering forms. She saw something that had once been a Sumatran tiger but was now the size of a cheap New York apartment. The beast barely fit inside the enclosure. A pair of massive fangs poked out of its maw like a prehistoric saber-toothed cat. It was also snoring like a power saw.

  Another part of the cargo hold was just heaped with carved moon rocks. They ranged in size from the diameter of a beach ball to the size of a healthy cow. They were all carved into a variety of intricate designs, all of them shaped like angry animal faces. Obviously, Hobhouse wanted the source of what made Malheur Island special, not just a few stray specimens. Most likely, the animals he was collecting now would be studied and then disposed of in the process of making his own monstrosities.

  Balthazar stuck his head out from under the bat’s other wing. Denise looked around. As far as she could tell, the only other person inside the cargo hold was a man in a lab coat with his back turned to them. He was busy at a workstation, working furiously at something tiny with a scalpel. Based on the squealing noises, whatever he was vivisecting was still very much alive.

  Right now, they needed to get out of this cage. If they were still stuck in there when the ahool woke up, it wouldn’t be pretty.

  Denise stepped up to the bars and examined the lock. A massive padlock kept the door shut. She had been hoping for a lever that she could reach and operate from the inside. No such luck. Without a key, she couldn’t open it.

  She pulled out the silenced machine pistol and held the barrel up to the lock. Nearby, the huge tiger-thing continued to snore. Denise waited until the massive cat reached the apex of another loud snort, and then she pulled the trigger.

  The silencer didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. She thought the piece of equipment muffled the noise down to no more than a whisper. It certainly cut down on the noise, but it was closer to the volume of someone shutting a heavy door too hard.

  Thirty feet away, the man in the lab coat stiffened. He grabbed a pistol of his own off his workbench and spun around as the lock dropped off the ahool cage.

  Denise shot him in the head. The machine pistol coughed out another round, which caught Hobhouse’s field researcher just above the left eye. He collapsed midway through the process of raising his pistol, falling backwards and slamming his head against the work table. The impact left a big smear of blood down the edge of the cabinets built into the table.

  “We’re not going to have a lot of time before somebody else comes down here with another catch from the island. I don’t think we can clean up before then,” she said, eyeing the growing pool of red spreading across the floor.

  “If we’re going to disable the Shield of Mithridates, we need to do it quick. Hobhouse still has a lot of personnel on this ship, and they could chew us apart in a couple of minutes if we get cornered down here.”

  “We need some sort of distraction so they don’t realize we’re down here right away.” They looked around the cargo hold for a couple of seconds.

  “I have an idea,” Balthazar said.

  “So do I.”

  She looked over to see what Balthazar had in mind. He picked something up off the worktable and showed it to her. It was a bottle of liquid animal stimulant. He held a syringe in the other hand.

  “Let’s open up some of these cages and wake the cargo up.”

  “I like the way you think.”

  “What do you have planned?”

  Denise pointed to a canister of gasoline against the far wall, next to a small generator. The generator sat directly beneath a sign pointing toward the engine room. “Let’s blow their engines. The fire will draw their attention and ruin the equipment at the same time. While they’re trying to extinguish the flames, we can make a break for it on a dinghy.”

  “Why not both methods at once?”

  “I like the way you think, too.”

  Balthazar took the bottle of animal stimulant, an oversized syringe that looked like an industrial turkey baster, and a ring of keys off the dead scientist. A few minutes later, all the cage doors were unlocked, and Balthazar was administering the first dose.

  He only took little squirts of the stimulant. They didn’t want the monsters all waking up instantly. The two of them wouldn’t last long if everything down here came out of its stupor all at once. For another thing, giving them too big a dose while they were already sedated might cause their hearts to all but explode as the stimulant and sedative duked it out inside their bodies.

  When he was done, Denise shot all the locks off the cages. Even if Hobhouse managed to somehow regain control of the ship after the creatures woke up, he couldn’t just lock them back up.

  The cargo elevator above started to whir and grind its way down again just as Balthazar set the syringe down. Already, the first creature was starting to stir. The tiger opened one bleary eye and gazed out at them. Its eye wasn’t focused yet, but it tried to push itself up into a sitting position.

  “Time to go,” Denise said. She looked at the ahool and saw it was already starting to twitch.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ENGINE TROUBLE

  They scrambled down a hallway toward the engine room. The rumble of the engines quickly overtook the squeak and grind on the cargo elevator. A loud, steady thrum filled their ears, almost loud enough to drown out the shout of alarm from behind them. A few seconds later, the shout was replaced by a scream.

  Denise and Balthazar hopped through the last door in the hallway and closed the water tight seal behind them. Now, the men aboard the Shield of Mithridates would have one major issue to deal with, so it was time to give them another.

  The jerry can of gasoline bounced and sloshed at her side as she moved. As they drew closer to the engine room, the noise became overwhelming, like they’d fallen into the lungs of some giant beast.

  Only a couple of men were in the engine room. Almost everyone was on Malheur Island, leaving only essential crew behind to run the Shield of Mithridates. One of them glanced over at them and then did a double take as he realized that they weren’t part of the regular crew. Denise shot him in the head as he fumbled for his own weapon, and Balthazar gunned down the second man. The noise from Balthazar’s unsilenced machine pistol was all but swallowed up by the omnipresent engine noise.

  An intercom started squawking overhead, but Denise could barely hear the words. “All personnel should report immediately. There has been a containment breach in the cargo hold. I repeat, there are subjects loose in the cargo hold. Possible rogue agents aboard the Shield of Mithridates. Use extreme caution.”

  She thought that was Hobhouse’s voice. He must have come back to the ship after greeting them on the beach. He could better oversee all the operations from his command center here.

  Upturning the jerry can, Denise started splashing gasoline over the equipment and controls. She made sure there was a thin layer across most of the floor and leading toward the coal storage. Once this area went up, they would have to get off the ship fast. Lighting the coal supplies on fire would quickly lead to the boilers overheating and exploding, which would take out everything and everyone on this end of the ship.

  The moved toward the closest staircase leading to the upper decks. With everyone distracted by the creatures loose in the cargo hold, the next step was to steal a dinghy a
nd head for land.

  Actually, there was something she had to do before they found their ride out of here. Denise turned around and fired a bullet into the engine room. The silver round struck a piece of the metal shaft and created a spark.

  With a FOOMPH, the engine room came alive with fire. Flames crawled across the floor in every direction. The gasoline was too spread out to create an explosion of any significant size, but Denise could feel the air start to move as the huge fire gobbled up oxygen. The fire crawled right up the walls and licked across the engine shafts. The control consoles, with their levers and buttons, went up like funeral pyres.

  A smell reached her nose. It was the scent of burning paint and overheated metal, and roasting human corpses. Some of the ammo on the two dead bodies started to cook off like giant popcorn kernels, adding pops and bangs to the sound of the crackling flames.

  Even as Denise watched, rubberized hoses and the insulation around wires started to melt and drip. The heat reached out and bit at her face, trying to scorch her, even from a distance.

  She turned around and dashed up the stairs as the thrum of the engines started to rise in intensity, growing to an angry howl. There wouldn’t be much time at all now.

  A klaxon started to blare even as Denise and Balthazar moved up the stairs. They took the stairs in leaping strides, vaulting two and three at a time. Red lights must be flashing all across the ship’s bridge. Soon, they’d lose the systems down here completely, and that would be absolute hell to repair out here. Hobhouse would have to wait for a passing freighter, radio out, and then get towed to a port somewhere. Denise and Balthazar would definitely be to shore somewhere by then, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing Hobhouse or Yersinia could do about it.

  As they reached the main deck, Denise could hear screams and hoarse shouts. A few errant bursts of gunfire rattled away.

  The ship’s intercom system buzzed to life again. Now, Denise could definitely recognize Hobhouse’s voice. “We’re recalling Teams Six and Seven from the island. Keep the cargo hold contained. Team Two, find the firefighting equipment immediately and get to the engine room.”

  Balthazar was about to open the door in front of them when it flew open from the other side. A man with a fire extinguisher in one hand and a machine pistol in the other charged inside. He made it about three steps before he registered who Denise and Balthazar were, and he tried to scramble back behind the door for cover.

  Denise raised her weapon and pulled the trigger. A line of red dots stitched its way up the man’s chest, the final round tearing his throat out in a great crimson gout. He fell to the ground in a tangle of limbs. The noise from Denise’s gun was barely audible above the wailing siren, the shouting, and the other sporadic bursts of gunfire.

  She poked her head out of the doorway. To her left, she could see a group of Yersinia men firing down into the cargo hold. Furious animal shrieks answered them as they poured silver bullets down the elevator shaft.

  Suddenly, a huge shape swooped out of the opening and grabbed one of the men in its massive talons. The ahool didn’t even slow down as it sped upward into the night. A high-pitched scream dopplered away from them only to cut off suddenly.

  “They’re moving into the forward part of the ship,” one of the men shouted.

  “Oh Jesus, that whole hallway is on fire,” another said.

  “Should we abandon ship?” a third man asked his comrades.

  “No,” a commanding voice said. “Do not abandon ship. Even if we have to kill all our captured specimens, we need those lunar rock samples down in the hold. Team Two will deal with the fire. You need to go below decks and deal with those specimens.” Hobhouse appeared behind the men and gave orders with sweeping hand gestures.

  The men looked around, uncertain among themselves, but they moved out. They disappeared through the big glassed-in dining room that Denise remembered. There was a way down into the lower hold from in there. Hobhouse disappeared, probably retreating back to the bridge where he could monitor the situation.

  A furious orange glow was emanating out of the cargo hold now. Denise could feel the metal around her growing warm, too. Short of flooding the engine room with seawater, Denise didn’t think the Yersinia teams were going to be able to save the Shield of Mithridates. It might not be as luxurious as the Titanic, but it was going down nonetheless.

  So long as the fire disabled the ship, Denise didn’t really care if it stayed afloat or not. She just needed to make sure that the big ship couldn’t follow them as they were gunning away toward the coast of Sumatra.

  There was one other thing she wanted to do before she abandoned the ship, though. She looked at Balthazar. “Do you think you can get one of the dinghies ready to launch without being seen?”

  “Probably. I think I can sabotage the others while I’m at it, too. It looks like everyone is pretty distracted at the moment.”

  “Good thinking. We can’t do anything about the dinghies they’ve already dispatched to the island, but we don’t need them launching their lifeboats and then using those to pursue us.”

  “Where are you going to be while I’m doing all this?”

  “There’s something I should do for Gail and Harrison. For everyone, really. They weren’t all my friends, but none of them deserved what happened on that island. I’m going to go air some disagreements about how he ran this expedition with Mr. Hobhouse.”

  “Air them right between his eyes.” They shook hands.

  “If I’m not back in a few minutes, launch the boat without me.”

  “I’m sorry for the way I’ve behaved over the years. There were some feelings that were simply too raw to deal with, and I only made the matter worse by behaving the way I did.”

  “And I’m sorry for the way some things worked out. If we make it out of this alive, I want to help you find your daughter.” Their handshake turned into a brief hug, and then Balthazar split off. He went through the door and disappeared around a corner.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  NOT BAD FOR AN EVENING’S WORK

  Denise took a deep breath. What are you doing? Go back and get in the damn boat with Balthazar. Get as far away from here as possible, the voice of reason demanded. This wasn’t a matter for reason, though. This wasn’t even a matter of survival.

  Her friends were dead because Herschel Hobhouse lied to them. He lied to them all, and she’d fallen for every word of it. Not only had he lied to them about the nature of what they were facing, but he’d sent a pair of killers to make sure everything went according to his plans, and there were no loose ends to tie up. They’d come to this island expecting one thing, and they’d walked into a buzz saw when they got another thing entirely.

  It was like those German sailors from the Far East Fleet who expected to patrol a few colonies but ended up trapped on the opposite side of safety as the world burned around them. Sometimes, the world handed you a big bucket of crap, and you just had to do what you could to clean it up.

  Now, it was time to clean this mess up for good. Denise Demarco, the world-class hunter who could no longer bear to even set her sights on a bunny rabbit, was going on one last hunt.

  She slid around the edge of the doorway and moved across the deck. Crates and equipment, abandoned when the crew learned their specimens were loose, littered the surface of the deck, making it easy to stay hidden. She moved from cover to cover.

  Somewhere down below, she heard gunfire promptly followed by terrified screams. A bone-rattling roar followed.

  A moment later, a huge shape leaped out of the cargo hold. The Sumatran tiger had blood and shreds of padded armor stuck to its claws. Most of a man’s body was clamped firmly between its massive jaws. Faint wisps of smoke wafted off its fur.

  Denise ducked low as the cat looked in her direction, but there was no problem. The cat wasn’t interested in her. Trotting across the deck, it launched itself over the railing and splashed into the water below, leaving nothing behind but the faint smell of singed fur an
d bloody paw prints the size of hubcaps. A second later, Denise saw it paddling back toward the island.

  Good. Denise didn’t want it dying on this ship. Once dawn arrived, it would just be another magnificent creature doing what came naturally. If it ate some more Yersinia crew members in the meantime, that was fine, too.

  The ship’s bridge was directly on the other side of the cargo elevator, above the dining room. She looked up at the windows enclosing the bridge. There were figures moving around up there, bouncing from one set of controls to the next, trying to maintain some sort of grip on the situation.

  For a brief moment, she saw Hobhouse. He stood near one of the windows and grabbed a radio. He shouted something into it, listened for a second, and then shouted something else. Then he slammed the mouthpiece back onto its cradle and disappeared from the window.

  “All teams aboard the Shield of Mithridates,” his voice came over the intercoms. “Your priority is now to extinguish the fires in the cargo hold and engine room. Every team is being recalled from the island to help. We cannot lose those meteorite samples. Deal with the fires.”

  More gunfire erupted from below. Hobhouse must have heard it, too. “The fires, you idiots. Deal with the fires. Ignore the specimens.”

  Denise suspected that order would be difficult to follow, especially if the specimens didn’t want to ignore the Yersinia men scrambling about below decks.

  She scuttled up to the dining room and ducked inside. The oak tables were still here, as was the piano. With the heat and smoke, the room no longer looked elegant and luxurious. Now, it looked like the personal hell of a washed-up lounge act playing in one of Satan’s crummy casinos.

  The staircase to the bridge lay just ahead. Denise ran up it as quietly as she could. Directly ahead lay a closed door. Closed but not locked.

  Flexing her fingers around the grip of the machine pistol, Denise took the final step up and laid her hand on the door’s handle. With a final pause, Denise tried to swallow, but her mouth was completely dry.