by Hugo Navikov
I looked up and almost literally slapped my hand to my forehead: the bunker. Vermeulen Mining had that huge area, more than half of its concrete building, in which to hide its workers during an attack. It seemed that those who could make it to the building by the time the thing pounded on the door and were saved. The ones closest to the mine and the river couldn’t get away in time.
Was that what the two men I saw by the light of their own flashlights doing there last night, running to warn the miners that something was coming? Even with a motorboat, they would have had a hard time beating the swimming beast across the river. There was no sign of a motorboat this morning. Had they not made it, or had they made it in time to wake almost everyone and herd them into the bunker? Had the creature destroyed their boat as it climbed out of the river, or did they survive to drive it away?
And if they did drive away … why? Maybe they did it so they could send up flares or something to awaken the miners so didn’t even land the boat on that shore? And if that was what happened, where the hell did they go?
Filthy, with bugs in my hair, sweating on top of the sour sweat already seeped deep into my clothes, I made it to the front door of the Vermeulen Mining building and banged on it as hard as I could in my confused, fried condition.
After a minute or so, a buzzer sounded and the door opened. Ellie White’s face popped out and she yanked me in by my sleeve as the door closed, right into an embrace so tight I couldn’t help but think of the Megapython. “You’re alive!” she shouted with amazement in her voice. “You went into the jungle and never came out—we thought you were dead, especially after—”
She took in a huge gasp and held me at arm’s length, taking me in with wild eyes.
“—the Kasai Rex! It attacked last night! They were able to get almost all of the miners inside in time, but holy crap, Brett! It does exist!”
Atari and Gregory had come over now to join her and slap me on the back like I had just become a father. My eyes were adjusting to the lower light level inside the compound now, and I saw many black faces poking out of sleeping bags with “Property of Vermeulen” printed on the side. I looked back at her and the rest of the crew and stammered, “D-Did you get any footage? What did it look like? What the hell was it?”
Ellie let loose her grasp on my arms and all three of them looked sheepishly at the floor as Atari said, “We didn’t exactly get any video.”
“Or audio,” Gregory muttered.
“I was uploading the B-roll and interviews to the sat-link. We didn’t have the cameras out of the cases. We didn’t think something would happen so soon,” Atari added. “And it was really dark.”
“The only lights were those pathetic floodlights on this building. You couldn’t see a damned thing farther than five feet from the building,” Gregory said.
“It was really, really dark.” Atari looked at me and shrugged. “You bet your butt I’ll have the infrared set up as soon as the sun even thinks about going down from now on.”
“We didn’t see anything, Brett,” Ellie said quietly, “but we heard everything. It was terrible.”
“Mister Russell,” a Dutch accent resounded, and Daan Vermeulen, already in a different sharp gray suit, joined our group and shook my hand. “You look like you had a rough night out there. I’m glad you’re all right, to say the least. I trust you found something out there that might be able to help us with our problem?”
“I don’t know exactly what I found out there,” I said. “But I need a shower and some breakfast before I tell you all what happened. You’re not going to believe it.”
***
Almost an hour later, as I wiped up yolk remains with a piece of wheat toast and watched as the last of the miners emptied out of the building and back to work—including discarding their fellows’ body parts into the Kasai, I had to assume—Daan Vermeulen sat back and said, “You are right, Mister Russell. I don’t believe it.”
“I had video and some parallax photos.”
“But you forgot your backpack in the jungle.”
“By the time I realized it, I was halfway across the river coming back.”
“So you could go and retrieve it.”
There was no amount of money or glory that would have compelled me to go back into that mutant-giant hole of horrors. “No, the monkeys have probably already run off with it and dumped everything along the way,” I said after a moment, knowing it sounded lame but also knowing that it was the truth.
“I see.” Vermeulen smoothed his already-smooth tie and turned to Ellie. “And you and the rest of your crew didn’t have your equipment ready to capture this beast on video.” It wasn’t a question. More of a pouring-salt-on-an-open-wound kind of sentence.
“We had an opportunity last night that may not come again, Mister Vermeulen, we understand that,” she said. “But all we can do now is set up our night-vision equipment and hope it happens again. Um, I mean, of course I don’t hope for anyone else to die or—”
Vermeulen laughed the single least amused-sounding laugh I had heard since my own at the funeral for my wife and boy, when some third-cousin or somebody said, “At least they’re in Heaven now.”
Heh. Good one.
After Vermeulen’s chuckle, he stood and said, “I believe you will find out what’s killing our people, Miss White. I have to. None of my employees or miners will go to explore that black hole Mister Russell went into yesterday, not for any amount of money I offered them. ‘Money is hard to spend when you’re dead,’ the miners say, and my office workers here are comfortable in their hidey holes. Good day to you all. I must tally up last night’s losses.”
Ellie nodded at him and then, seeing the janitorial crew rolling up the sleeping bags for laundering or storage, called to his retreating figure, “The monster attacks only at night, isn’t that what you said?”
Vermeulen turned with a perturbed look on his face and came back to our table to say in a low growl, “I’ll thank you not to call it a monster, Miss White. And yes, whatever it is, it has come at night, only at night.”
“Then … why don’t you just let your miners sleep inside here in the sleeping bags every night? No one mines during the night, right? It’s hard enough when there’s light.”
Vermeulen stiffened and I knew something completely awful was about to come out of his mouth, something the Cryptids Alive! crew and I would laugh and shake our heads about back in our big tent but ultimately wish we had never heard. That sounds ridiculously specific, but you didn’t see the look on his face, like his foie gras had been replaced with goose shit.
He said, “My employees have quarters in this building, you must realize. They eat here, work here, sleep here, enjoy whatever amusements keep them sane until their ‘tour of duty’ is over. They—especially the women who make up the bulk of my office workforce—wouldn’t feel comfortable with that many, em …”
“Negroes?” Atari offered with a straight face it must have been hard to maintain.
“… with that many indigenous people having access to the building all night. It’s a matter of safety, you see.”
“Oh, we see,” Gregory said. “I’m surprised you let our cameraman eat in the commissary here.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Vermeulen said, and set off to leave again. But before he literally turned on his heel and fled our piercing stares, he added, “This isn’t about race. It’s about safety for everyone. We let them in if there’s a crisis. That is quite enough.”
And he was gone.
“Whew, for a second there I thought racism might have been about race,” Atari said, and we all enjoyed a bitter laugh. Then he leaned toward me and said, “Is it true, what you said? About the giant crocodile, the gianter python, and the even-gianter super-monster?”
“It’s all true, I swear. There’s no reason for me to lie about this, to you or to anyone else.”
“That means you’ve seen with your own eyes three cryptids, while we have never gotten a good look at even one dur
ing our show’s entire run?” Ellie said, defying me to stick to my story.
“I only saw two of them. The last one, the leviathan, it was too dark, but I could hear it eating the Megapython. And I could see the two men running out of there because of their flashlights.”
Ellie sat up straighter. “You didn’t say anything about any other people in there. You told him and us this entire freaking story without once mentioning anyone else. What were they doing, these men who have suddenly appeared in your little narrative?”
“Just running. They looked like they knew exactly where they were going, too, so they must have been through that area many times to navigate it while running, even with a flashlight.” I thought for a moment, then added, “They took off in a motorboat before the giant whatever-it-was came through. It might have caught them if it hadn’t stopped to eat the snake, especially since one of the men was slowing them down. He was carrying something heavy, I could tell from his gait as his flashlight swung back and forth.”
“Impressive detail,” Ellie said. “What an imagination on our poacher hunter.”
“If this is all fantasy and lies on my part, then what attacked the miners last night? Or do you think that’s all ‘suddenly appeared’ in my narrative as well.”
Ellie sucked in one of her red lips and looked at Atari and Gregory, then returned to look at me. “All right,” she said, “now we’ve got us a mystery to go with our monster. While the sun’s still up, I’m going into that hole across the river—and I’m not going to forget the camera.”
“I knew she was gonna say that,” Atari said with a sardonic smile.
“As did I,” said Gregory.
“You guys do whatever you want. But before I go anywhere near that hole again, I’m getting back to that Jeep that Bonte blew up. We’re going to need that thing they had mounted on the windshield.”
“What, the machine gun?” Atari asked as I stood.
“That’s a 105mm M40 recoilless rifle, kids.” They all looked at me, perplexed. So I added, “It kills tanks.”
Chapter 11
The mines were the midst of the Congolese rainforest, a riot of living, crawling, growing life. Not only was it supplied with water from its deep—itself filled with plants and animals not yet named by scientists—but it also blossomed thunderstorms almost 230 days per year. And a Congo thunderstorm isn’t like a New England gully washer. No, it’s a nearly solid thing, the rain not in sheets but as a brick wall descending on you, full of close-striking lightning and with thunder that shears the air.
Ellie, Atari, Gregory, and I had made it halfway to our tent when the sky opened up like it has been slashed with a razor. “Join hands!” I shouted just before the world went gray with rain so thick and loud none of us could have found the others if they weren’t connected to them. Lightning made us crouch low in what was probably a vain attempt to not become human lightning rods and kept going in the direction we had started in, toward the tent.
The rain wasn’t just heavy as a downpour—it was heavy, a billion huge and warm drops making an actual weight upon our shoulders and heads. I was exhausted from the night before, but the shower and food had perked me up. Maneuvering through this rain and explosive lightning and thunder was enervating me once again, and I needed every bit of strength and clear thinking I could muster. By the time our tent appeared out of the rain—Ellie led the way and hit the bullseye, and we all piled in gratefully.
“You’re good at this,” I managed to wheeze inside the tent. That was something I had forgotten about rainforest storms: there was no air. It was like being submerged—you had to hold your breath if you didn’t want lungs full of water. So we all sucked in as much oxygen as we could inside the fancy-ass tent, hyperventilating before we could slow ourselves down and breathe more or less normally.
As if there hadn’t been almost a full minute since I used the last of my breath to compliment here, Ellie whipped her wet hair back and out of her face. “I know you think Cryptids Alive! is bullshit—lots of people do, including some of our biggest fans—but if we weren’t really trying to see what’s out there, we could do the show in front of a green screen and in the woods right next to our studio parking lot.”
“I get you, okay?”
“What I’m saying is that I learned some things out there looking for amazing animals.”
I nodded and continued breathing rhythmically, trying to get the last of the black spots out of my field of vision, then said, “After last night, I am officially no longer a skeptic.”
The trio laughed, but it was true—unless I had gone insane and hallucinated from rubbing against the wrong plant while in that tiny edge of the Congo jungle, I saw things the night before that would forever change me. Did these “cryptids”— I use the quotes because once an unusual animal is discovered and verified, it ceases to be labeled as cryptic—count as endangered or rare species for the purposes of my job here?
It was time to contact The Organization. I looked at my (thankfully totally waterproof) watch and figured it was the middle of the day back in Denver. It wouldn’t have mattered—they picked up the phone day or night, and nothing is entrusted to an answering service. I borrowed the sat-phone and moved to a corner of one of the big tent’s “rooms,” which wouldn’t provide much in the way of privacy but could at least allow my end of the conversation to be drowned out a little by the storm. I chucked off my soaked shirt and pants and sat.
The phone connected, but its signal was too garbled by the rain and lightning to convey voices. I switched it over to text, which would read out on the sat-phone’s small screen. It wasn’t ideal—the Boss didn’t care for a paper trail, even one as temporary and unarchiveable as the phosphorous letters on a 5-inch screen in Africa. I’m just gonna tell relate our text conversation like a regular conversation to help protect the sanity of whomever might read this. Nobody “said” anything out loud, but boy, were some things said over the satellite phone’s text connection.
“Hello, H———-,” the Boss said as the secure connection was made. “I imagine this is something important?”
“Of course, sir … unless you just want to chat.”
“Funny. What’s your report? Did you find a saltwater croc? Before you answer, let me remind you that The Organization is not relocating an animal of ‘least concern.’”
“I found a croc, of sorts. It had all the features of a Nile crocodile but was much bigger than anything ever reported.”
“I see.” And I knew what he was “seeing.” It was a very large crocodile, maybe of unprecedented size—he knew what Congo was like and that it could easily hold such a reptile. “You aren’t contacting me over a sizeable, and non-endangered, animal of unusual size, are you? If the answer is that you are, you should immediately pretend that the satellite lost your signal.”
“I’m not. And it hasn’t.”
“What, then?”
I paused. “In the jungle, I came across a python. A huge rock python that, um … well, it swallowed the giant croc in two gulps.”
Silence on the Boss’s end.
“It was 15 feet across if it was an inch,” I said. “It was bigger than the Megaconda is supposed to be, sir.”
“The Megaconda is a cryptid, H. As in, nobody’s ever really seen one. Are you telling me that you actually saw and photographed a Megapython?”
Shit. “I did, but my camera was lost in my scramble to get away.”
“I see,” he said again. And I knew again what he was “seeing.”
“I could return to that part of the jungle and try to find the camera, but I’m sure that monkeys and other scavengers have run off with it by now.”
“Convenient.”
I did an actual double-take at the screen I was reading from. Was that sarcasm? In my twelve years in The Organization, the Boss had never spoken to me like that. However, it was difficult to get tone from just typed words, and of course, I had never said I actually saw a cryptid creature that natives report
ed stole their valuable animals and less financially valuable but probably still beloved children. I tried to shake the Boss’s apparent tone out of my head, then said, “Also, sir, the giant snake was also attacked and almost entirely eaten by another predator.”
“Another predator, you say. As in ‘something large enough to eat a 15-foot-wide Megapython that had just eaten the world’s largest crocodile.’”
“I know it sounds absurd, but—”
“You’re goddamn right it sounds absurd, because it is absurd. Have you been out in the field so long you’ve forgotten our mission? It isn’t to find amusing variations of animals to report to the Royal Academy of Science. You’re not Richard Francis Burton, H————; you’re not seeking the source of the Kasai. The Organization needs you to focus like you have always done. Find the endangered animal terrorizing the poor bastards in the village and get it relocated.”
“I understand our mission, sir—”
“I don’t think you do. I think you have forgotten our mission.” He paused for any response from me—which was not forthcoming, as I had no idea what to say to his accusation—then continued, “In fact, tell me our mission. Tell me what you think it is. Forget about what’s on the front of our portfolios—tell me what our mission really is.”
This conversation was going from bad to worse, and it wasn’t done. I took a moment, possibly infuriating the boss with my lassitude regarding his question, but I needed a smoke, the Cryptids Alive! crew with their sensitive lungs be damned. I slipped a cheroot out of its (thankfully) waterproof liner from my front pocket and struck a match from another liner in my back pocket, lighting my little stick of happiness before shaking the match out and putting it in the tin cup which was now promoted to ashtray status.
“That wasn’t a request, H.”
“If I’m not mistaken, sir, and everything is upside-down right now, it is ‘to protect endangered wildlife by removing—’”