INHUMANUM: A THRILLER (Law of Retaliation Book 1)

by Bradley Ernst

  There.

  Henna leapt from the truck to inspect the first snake of the evening. Not a taipan—a desert-phase death adder. Henna used a long hook to manipulate the fat orange snake into a pillowcase. Once inside, she tied the top closed and placed the snake inside a large plastic tub. Fifty meters down the road she came across a red-naped snake. She handled it gently with the hook but didn’t collect it. The snake’s venom was both mild and common. Next came a bandy. She admired the black and white snake but left it undisturbed. Henna learned road hunting in the Anza Borrego desert. She’d used the technique successfully in Mexico and Columbia. She was never disappointed.

  What a variety and density of animals.

  Before long, Henna didn’t get out of the truck to identify the cold-blooded menagerie. To explore the most area, she stayed in the truck unless she saw an animal to collect or one that would likely be hit by a car. Henna slowed to identify a woma, then sprung out to photograph a curl snake. As she put the snake in a pillowcase, she saw movement a few feet away.

  An eastern tiger snake.

  The thick reptile was road-warm and grumpy. It took a while to get it in a pillowcase. The moment she tied that pillowcase shut she saw something else in the road. Something big—ambling toward her. Henna stepped into the HiLux and backed up. She focused the headlights at the newcomer and sucked in her breath—an enormous perentie! A Stimpson’s python dangled, half swallowed, from the monitor’s jaws. The lizard noticed the truck. Head high, it ran off the road. It wanted to swallow the rest of the snake in peace. Without the benefit of a tranquilizer, the two meter long perentie would be a handful, but Henna felt up for it. She strapped her satchel tightly across her left side to protect her from the monitor’s long tail and aimed the headlights at the monster so she could see well in the battle to come. The monitor stopped a few meters off the road. It worked hurriedly to gulp down the snake. Henna approached from behind and jumped on top of the lizard. She forced the beast’s right rear leg straight and pinned its body with her knees. The monster smelled of rot and dust. If it bit her she was in trouble.

  It worked.

  The perentie could only lash its tail to the left. The satchel took the brunt of the impacts and she pinned the animal’s long neck to the sand with her left hand. The lizard struggled to bite her, but the python was in the way. Henna quickly collected the biofilm scrapings and saliva she needed. When the animal stopped struggling, she released it. Henna encountered monitors throughout Indonesia and Asia. The samples from the perentie could be compared to the others. It was a good night. The inland taipan gave her a reason to come back.

  When Henna returned to Edinburgh, she set up permanent enclosures for each new addition. The trio of tiny octopuses was amazing to watch. They were so intelligent. She hired a grad student to log the animal’s behaviors. She hoped the colorful invertebrates would breed in captivity. Two of the three were females. Since their lifespan was only two years, providing a breeding environment was a top priority. She would study TTX levels in each generation, to measure if the species lost their defenses in a captive environment. Henna didn’t organize her collection by species—she organized species by toxin. Each blue-ring was roughly the size of a chicken egg. They studied their enclosure methodically. Henna imagined the intelligent trio formulating an escape plan as they surveyed their neighbors. The TTX-laden moon snails were unlikely accomplices, although the snails did have the sense to migrate as far as they could from the octopuses. The octopuses next focused on the nearby comedians of the TTX collection, Taricha granulosa; the male rough-skinned newts staged slippery Greco-Roman struggles to impress the female newts, but promptly forgot about wrestling when Henna tapped some crickets into their vivarium.

  The octopuses seemed to conspire in a huddle. They quietly reached consensus—they were on their own.

  Henna kept some of her TTX collection in the laboratory deep freezer. Starfish, worms, puffer fish—she was thrilled to bring live animals home, but there was only so much room. Henna smiled at the blue-rings. When she’d bought drinks for the divers at the open-air bar on Fraser Island she told them a story about a dragon. She’d scraped biofilm from the teeth of a tranquilized Komodo dragon. When she got to the exciting part of the story, one of the fishermen paused to throw his half-empty bottle of beer at a dingo that sniffed at Henna’s satchel.

  Life was strange.

  Her audience hadn’t realized it, but the dingo story was better. The divers stayed and drank more. They exchanged contact information. The octopuses hadn’t cost her a dime.

  She probably had the dingo to thank.

  Henna checked the time. It was late. It was a nice night, so she decided to walk to her loft.

  Henna passed a bar on the way. A student she recognized from the university stood smoking outside. He was inebriated, but polite. She spoke with him for a moment before moving on. Then, no longer polite—

  “Come back. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “No. Thanks.” Henna walked faster.

  “Oh. She’s too good to drink with me. Are you? Are you too good?”

  Henna moved faster. Most of the businesses were closed. She jogged. He jogged.

  She ran.

  He ran.

  Henna held on to her satchel and sprinted. Her lungs burned. She heard him falling behind, but he didn’t stop. He wasn’t just trying to catch up—he wanted to harm her. She dodged some people on the sidewalk in front of another bar. Two guys and a girl. She spun. “That guy’s after me. Please help me!” One of them laughed, but one—maybe a bouncer—didn’t.

  “You don’t know him?” The guy was almost on them. Henna ran. The bouncer yelled after them but didn’t—or perhaps couldn’t run. His footsteps closed in. A Middle Eastern man opened the door of a car nearby. Henna ran for him—

  “Help me! Please! Can you help me?” The man got into his car quickly and locked the doors. Henna raced by the car. He avoided eye contact.

  Just feet behind me. He’s going to catch me.

  She dropped her satchel and flew down Fleshmarket Close. She had her keys in her hand and fumbled with them to contrive a weapon. She bounded, terrified, down the stairs.

  “Help me—please someone—help me!”

  A woman in a garish dress heard her. She was already headed up the stairs, but now she bounded up—the roar of a Berserker barely preceding her mass—four stairs at a time. The woman grew as she came closer. She left no doubt regarding her intent nor destination. Suddenly she pulled off her hair and tossed it behind her. Henna blinked.

  A wig?

  It wasn’t a woman at all. It was a very large man in high heels. He passed Henna like an elephant in musth—momentarily crazed—enraged enough to stomp a usually beloved mahout into the earth like an unlucky man-seed at planting time, only this was not the mahout.

  This was the enemy.

  She was pulled toward him for a moment as he displaced the dank mineral air in the alleyway, the vacuum a taxicab creates when it has sped by too close. A body hit the stone steps just behind her. Henna collapsed against the wall. The drag queen was easily over seven feet tall in the heels, but with the wig off, he was nothing but man.

  “Get off me, you nancy!” The drag queen knelt on the guy’s head. Somehow he’d incapacitated her aggressor with the fingers of just one hand.

  “See? That isn’t nice.” The enormous cross-dresser adjusted his chest. He’d lost a breast sprinting up the stairs. “How far did he chase you? His heart rate is about 160.”

  Henna shook her head, too out of breath to answer.

  “Bugger off, queenie!”

  The tall man’s beautiful face changed. “Well, let’s slow you down a bit.”

  Finger bones cracked. The guy struggled to fight back, but it was like fighting a living monument. The man in drag picked Henna’s would-be assailant up like a rag doll. He pinned him against the stone wall with a forearm and drove his knee up, delivering devastating blows to the drunk’s ribs. He tilte
d his head—a lion assessing damage he’d done to an unfortunate jackal. He palmed the broken man’s face as easy as a softball and eased him to the steps. “Are you done now?” The man couldn’t talk. He curled and moaned. “Silly bloke,” the man offered with a London accent. “The dress always fools them—they don’t think us girls will fight, but we always do.”

  “My bag. I dropped. My bag.” Henna managed.

  The tall man swept his fingers across the downed hairpiece to fix the part but didn’t put it on. Instead, he offered Henna his arm. “Let’s go get it.”

  After they retrieved Henna’s satchel, the man walked her the rest of the way home. He was a Krav Maga instructor. He’d just moved to Edinburgh as well.

  “From a little town near Lake Geneva.”

  “Wait a minute…” Henna looked more closely at his face “…the frog guy? Did you study in Lausanne?”

  “Yes—”

  “I know you. Dendrobates tinctorius? Stephan?”

  It was him.

  Stephan accepted a teaching job in Edinburgh when he wasn’t invited to participate in the toxicology program at EPFL.

  “You’re that girl? Sorry—that sounded incredulous. And you’re obviously not a well—a girl—it’s just that, well, you’ve grown up.”

  They stood outside Henna’s loft. They talked for a long time. Stephan held his wig in his hand. He gesticulated with it like a man holding a football after a winning game. “They’re growing the department here. The toxicology department I mean—I’ve got an interview with the new chair of the department next week. Professor Maxwell, I think. I haven’t met her yet, but I’m praying my interview goes well—I don’t mind teaching, but I love research.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get it. I’d bet my own money on it.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot. Listen, I’ve been dominating this conversation. You’re also at the university? What department?”

  “Yours. I’m Henna Maxwell.” They laughed until they had tears in their eyes. Stephan invited her to his martial arts gym and wished her good night.

  “We meet Mondays and Wednesdays—late Sunday nights. It is a good workout. Everyone’s welcome.”

  Henna went on Wednesday. The two became fast friends. Stephan taught Henna how to fight dirty, and she taught him to write grants. When Stephan wasn’t impersonating Marilyn Monroe, he was a regular badass. He was stoic when others were around, but when they were alone, he was a comedian. He loved to impersonate lab animals. He assigned each one a hilarious voice and did accents well. The blue-rings spoke with an Irish brogue and had frequent arguments with the cockney-voiced newts. The moon snails replied to all inquiries with “scissors please” in an East Indian accent. When he channeled one-liners for the animals, Henna laughed like she never had before. He joked that they didn’t want to share her with him.

  The male blue-ring was particularly jealous.

  ~Fork-Tongued Children

  Rupert closed the office for business while the snake-eyed Germans sold assets. The men wrote figures on a dry erase board for Rupert. His only job was to add numbers—the Germans did everything else better than he did.

  He never saw them eat. He doubted if they slept. When the business day ended in the United States, it opened in Asia. The men worked tirelessly. They did big business in the middle of the night, perhaps even better than they did in the daytime. Each asset was sold without ceremony, but Rupert noticed that the stoic duo did have small personal rituals. When Ryker sold a large asset, he stood and stretched his lower back. Rickard rewarded his financial heroics with a new piece of chewing gum. Rupert just tried to maintain by drinking pot after pot of coffee. He kept a running total on an adding machine, so if he made a mistake he could fix it. The Germans drank filtered tap water out of coffee cups. They’d even brought the filter with them. Rupert felt very out of his league. Troy said he’d recruited the duo straight out of MIT—come to find out, the men weren’t even lawyers.

  They were wizards. The gray matter equivalents of planetary gears.

  While Rupert watched, Rickard pulled up a high dollar auction on his monitor. His fingers flew across the keyboard. An illusion was born. It appeared as though a crowd of international investors bid on the fleet of Asian cargo ships, though only one investor in Singapore was logged on to the auction. Rickard pointed Rupert to a digital clock on the screen. Minutes passed. When the clock ran out, a banner above the auction read: bid complete. Rickard dialed a phone number on his headset and placed a confirmation call to the buyer. Rickard congratulated the investor and read a confirmation then gave instructions on how to transfer funds electronically. He opened a piece of gum. He waited to pop it into his mouth until the funds posted. He placed the old gum in the new wrapper. He folded the foil-coated paper elegantly around the refuse as if it were museum-grade origami and opened the next auction.

  Ryker stood. He sipped water from his cup and wrote a figure on the dry erase board. The golf course in Colorado sold for $11,000,000.00—forty percent above the projected goal. In minutes, Rickard liquidated the ranch in South Dakota. Hundreds of millions of dollars an hour were posted to an account, and they’d been going for days. Rupert secretly nicknamed the duo “R&R” however when the job was done, he doubted they’d kick their feet up on a beach and lie low. They were the variety of men who created movement in underworld finance.

  He imagined them tucked into a glass building. They would choose a place with a nice view so they could ignore it—perhaps somewhere in a city overlooking a historic bridge. They would amuse themselves by hacking government files. Once that became tiresome, they would perfect teleportation. Rupert imagined Rickard whistling minty breath into the oval office as he rolled up the big blue rug, tossed it on his shoulder, and beamed himself home. They might use the pedigreed rug for a shower mat and stand barefoot on the icon while they dabbed at their scaly bodies freshly soaked in stolen French spring water. Rupert shook his head. He’d lost any misconceptions of normalcy quickly. Nothing was anymore. Even the numbers on the adding machine didn’t seem real. What was he to tell his wife? It was like monopoly money, with dozens more zeros. Shouldn’t he be happy?

  Three percent of the total was his. He didn’t feel happy. He felt terrified.

  Twice in the past week Ryker used a satellite phone when money wasn’t transferred by an agreed time. Who in the hell did these guys call for help? Rupert didn’t want to know.

  The sooner they were done, the better.

  Two days later, a third call was placed on the satellite phone. Ryker made cold, direct eye contact with Rupert while he dialed; a protective, primordial film seemed to ooze toward the man’s pupils, stopping just short of each feral void as the apertures adjusted, finely tuning information: the attorney’s distance, potential burst speed, and willingness to engage. He spoke in a language Rupert didn’t recognize. When he finished the call, he blinked at Rupert slowly. He then spoke to the older man as if he were a child. “The most effective parenting allows one warning for misbehavior.”

  Rickard nodded. He put his call on hold to add his two cents worth. “Followed by severe consequences if the misbehavior isn’t corrected.”

  Ryker’s eyes never left Rupert. “One warning.” Rupert felt a cold shiver. This was no anecdotal lesson—

  This was his one warning.

  He hadn’t done anything he knew of that seemed satellite phone call worthy. Perhaps the Germans decided to give him a warning first. Rupert doubted Ryker would call anyone if he messed up. They’d surely handle local problems themselves. He imagined the Germans emerging from a leathery clutch of cobra eggs. The man-snakes entered the world seconds apart. Each slit his way to fresh air with a stiletto egg tooth. Back-to-back, hoods open, they swallowed their emerging siblings one by one. Each victim became a limb. Soon, they sat alone—armored golems.

  Fork-tongued children.

  In nine days, it was done. Each man watched a monitor as his respective three percent was transferred to an offshor
e account. Ryker went to retrieve the water filter from the kitchenette while Rickard explained Rupert’s account. As a favor, they’d started a company for Rupert. An insurance company. “Malay Industrial Qualifiers” would be based in a skyscraper in Johor Bahru. The building would have sixty-eight stories. The foundation work alone would take two years to complete. After year eight, when the project was complete, the insurance company would stop taking construction losses. Rupert would declare bankruptcy. He’d sell the building for a premium, however, as it was a booming region. As sole owner, Rupert would pay himself a monthly salary of $510,000.00. To legitimize this income, he would attend quarterly meetings by telephone and fly to Malaysia once a year. On March 29 of the ninth year, a new construction project would be explained and his monthly salary would increase to $2,102,000.00.

  Ryker returned from the kitchenette. He wiped down the water filter and put it in his briefcase. He handed Rupert two Irish passports. One had Rupert’s picture inside, but the name on the document was Aaron Musselli. Rupert flipped through the passport. His Irish doppelgänger was well travelled: he’d been to Paris, Amsterdam, and Chicago in the past year. The second passport was for his wife. She had more expensive taste. In addition to the trips she took with “Aaron” she’d visited Fiji, Barbados, and Las Vegas. Rupert didn’t ask why his fictitious last name sounded like a Swiss cereal. He didn’t ask why the passports were Irish. He knew the identities were necessary to insulate him from paper trails—to protect them all from big brother’s helpful oversight.

  This was the new normal. This was how it worked.

  Rupert watched for the correct moment to thank the Germans, but coffee cups in hand, the men left without a word. Rupert looked out the window. The Germans slid into a rented Tercel. Each man buckled his seat belt before the car cautiously entered traffic. Alone at last, Rupert felt amazed. The number at the bottom line of the adding machine was absurd. He subtracted nine percent, then shook his head with smoothly accelerating incredulity. The Germans were magicians. Bonn Maddox was worth several hundred billion dollars, yet as far as the State of New York was concerned, Bonn would only receive $3,825,633.00 a year for the next twenty years—the sum of Troy’s documented estate.