by Hugo Navikov
“All right, all right, sorry,” I said, and I could feel a trickle of sweat go down my face. “So you’re a disgruntled Organization IT manager, and now you’re getting revenge on them by … killing miners? I actually wouldn’t mind a monologue, because I have no goddamned idea what is going on.”
He lowered the gun again. “Look at me. Look at my face. I’ve talked to you like a dozen times in the one year I’ve been at [The Organization]. You don’t recognize me at all.”
“I don’t. But all of you people look alike to me; I don’t bother differentiating between you.”
Ellie and Atari both yelped, “What?”
“Not black people, for Chrissakes. The other employees, the cubicle gophers. I assiduously avoid any contact with them. I’m in the field most of the time, so it doesn’t matter to me who they are. And I don’t want to become a security leak by knowing other people’s business at The Organization.”
“And despite all that, now you’re the spy left out in the cold. Right, isn’t that what [The Boss] said? Now that you know they killed your family, now that you believe in cryptids, now that you know what [The Organization] does with the animals you ‘rescue,’ you know too much. Isn’t that pretty much the gist of it?”
In a day of shocks, this one was one that left me speechless … for a moment. I found my voice and said as I pushed Ellie to her feet and stood in front of the dead man’s desk, “There is no way you could know that, any of it. It was a secure line and the storm forced us to go to text mode. You couldn’t have overheard what I said, because I didn’t say it at all—it was text.”
“This is the part of the monologuing where I blow your mind. Ready?”
“I doubt it.”
“Ha! That was me on the sat-phone. I wasn’t meditating or doing whatever faggoty thing you all thought in that tent room of mine. I hijacked the signal with my equipment—all you need is a factory-made laptop with the right software and a little extra hardware—and texted to you whatever I could think of to break you, make you give up and go away. When that didn’t work, I sent Cephu and his boys to kill you, which they apparently couldn’t do because they’re goddamn apes. I hate Africa. It makes me feel like I’m at a family reunion attended only by violent retards.”
I squinted at him. “That was not you on the sat-phone. That was my Boss’s voice and rhythm, even if it was just text. We’ve sent automatically erasing emails a million times, and this exactly matched his cadences and words he’d use. No, you’re bluffing, trying to make me doubt everything all over again.”
Atari put the monster handgun on the desk—a good sign, but one I hardly registered at the moment, so turned around was I. “It’s a very minor tweak in Linux to make your emails ‘automatically erase’ themselves from your computer and [The Boss]’s as well,” he said, “while keeping everything archived for myself. It was trivial then to construct a bot that would automatically make suggestions on how to write in ‘Boss-speak.’ I just approximate the best I can, but the bot makes it match his … what did you call it? His cadence, his rhythm? His word choices? The point is, I’m a goddamn genius and you are a goddamn trusting idiot.”
“Congratulations. If what you’re saying is true, then the Boss doesn’t know anything about what’s going on here?”
“I prefer to play that one close to the chest,” Atari said, and I couldn’t help but see his man-boobs making his nice shirt strain a little at the front. He stood up and stuck the .357 in the waistband in the back of his slacks. “What ‘The Organization’ doesn’t know won’t hurt me.”
Ellie and I looked at each other. Were we supposed to stand, too? What was the protocol for not pissing off an armed villain? I shook the thought out of my head—there were no villains. There were only people with a different conception of “good”—maybe a completely insane conception à la Adolf and the Boys, but their conception nonetheless. So what was Atari getting out of all this Machiavellian subterfuge? He said he was “overworked and underpaid” as an IT guy at our employer—did he do it for the money that would come as a result of the diamond mine? Was this revenge for some imagined snub by me back at headquarters when he upgraded my computer? Did he hate Congo and its inhabitants for some reason, or the Belgians? I was at a loss.
“Stand up.” Okay, one question answered. We stood. Atari pressed the intercom button on his desk phone and said, “Melanie, get Bonte to base. Tell him to bring the boat.”
“For the fresh meat?” an office worker’s voice sounded from the speaker and laughed.
Atari laughed, too. “Don’t you guys worry about it—just get the office pool together and we’ll see who dies first, and how.”
“Where are we going?” Ellie blurted immediately.
“We ain’t going nowhere, not unless you got a mouse in your pocket. You and Indiana Jackass here are gonna get the chance to do what you came here for—you’ll get your story and he’ll get a chance to save an endangered species. That is,” he said to me, “if you can save your own dumb asses first.”
I had no power to stop him, but I blocked his way around the desk anyway and said, “It’s not monologuing until you tell us why. Why in the hell are you doing this?”
Atari laughed heartily, a much deeper and angrier laugh than he had ever given when he was in his cameraman persona. “You mean, other than getting rid of these lazy Negro miners and getting some modern equipment up in here to get those diamonds up out the ground?”
“Lazy?” Ellie protested, unable to control herself. “They work 16 hours a d—”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Now they won’t have to do—Ima turn those diamonds around myself and make a shitload—a shitload—of money.”
“So you’re doing all this for money.”
“No, little lady,” Atari said as if I weren’t there, “there are so many other reasons. [The Organization] didn’t want an asthmatic butterball like me in the field, saving animals. I love animals, but no—ain’t gonna have no colored boy going out and catching poachers.”
“So revenge on [The Organization]?”
“Ellie, listen. There’s no bottom to the well of why I’m doing this. Taking care of this next batch of miners is just what this company needs to go onto the chopping block at a pennies-on-the-dollar discount. The hostile takeover—if you can even call it that—doesn’t even need to be hostile anymore, since the unfortunate death of Mister Vermeulen there. It’s business mixed with pleasure. I would think you’d get that, a creamy white Harvard-educated—”
“Vassar, actually.”
Ha! I knew it! You can’t mistake a Vassar—
“—educated bitch, running around chasing Bigfoot and Sasquatch—”
“Those are the same cryp—”
“I know that! Now shut up before I kill you right here and don’t let you see the Kasai Rex yourself!”
I could feel myself turn three shades of green. “Seeing” the Kasai Rex meant going into the jungle again, that uncharted jungle full of monsters. Atari’s little army obviously knew where to find the nest and could find their way back out. But Ellie and me …
A polite knock came at the door.
“Melanie?” Atari called.
The door opened and a little white face bearing a wicked smirk poked in. “Bonte is here, sir,” she said in a slimy European accent, then paused to give Ellie and myself a disgusted look. “For the cargo.”
Atari laughed and motioned for us to lead the way, with him at the rear once he had picked up his hand-cannon again and stuck it in my back. We shuffled out of the office, following Melanie, who drew the attention of the office workers behind the glass, most of whom—no, wait, all of whom—were sniggering at the coming fate of the stupid Americans.
I shot them the bird. I don’t know if that’s something they have in Belgium, but they were welcome to it. I had a lot more to give.
Melanie got to the front door (the only door, as far as I could still tell) and held it open as Atari marched us to our doom. Outside, wi
th General Cephu’s knotted rope exchanged for handcuffs that shackled him to the oar holder of a small motorboat dragged behind his station wagon, was an abjectly miserable-looking Bonte.
Looking past him, I could see the miners all hard at it, slipping in and out of holes, digging at the sides of shallower pits, easily a hundred people including the women and children, maybe more.
Atari was going to kill every one of them to get control of this mine.
This mine.
I stopped, even as Atari jabbed me with the revolver. “There’s one more question I have to ask you, even though you’ve danced around every other.”
“Okay, Scout’s honor, I’ll give you a straight answer, I totes promise,” Atari mocked.
“There are hundreds of diamond mines in Congo. Why this one?”
Atari pulled on my shoulder to turn me around to face him. “Because this place has a pre-installed monster, and something was dragging off an occasional animal or child … and adult, actually. The call to Cryptids Alive! and also to [The Organization] originated from Tshikapa, and that meant our employer would be sending their number-one operative: You.
“You, Brett Russell, wonderboy poacher hunter, would get every ounce of blame for things going FUBAR here. And I would clean up to get every penny. It was the perfect situation, one I had been waiting for this entire past year.”
“Did you tell me the truth about The Organization using operatives to provide them with endangered animals for private hunting?”
“You said you had one question, you got one answer. Now get in the goddamn car—you both got an appointment with fate.”
I didn’t move. “What about my family? Were they who really killed my family?”
Atari pointed his gun right at Ellie’s chest and said, “Any more questions? How about one bullet in the bitch for ‘no,’ two for ‘yes’?”
I shut my eyes, shut my mouth. We climbed into the station wagon’s back seat, General Cephu cuffed in the shotgun seat, looking sick as shit. I didn’t have to wonder why—his balls had been ripped off and he had lost a lot of blood. If he didn’t get some antibiotics and some of the red stuff fairly soon, his end was going to be long and extremely unpleasant. Much better was how Ellie and I were about to die, swallowed whole by a mythical creature.
“General Cephu,” Atari called to the semi-conscious figure in English, “catch,” and tossed him one of the militia’s .45s. “Show these fine people where your boys get the eggs, and we’ll get you all fixed up, ’kay? Do NOT shoot them unless they refuse to follow orders.”
Cephu picked up the weapon, and I could only imagine how much he wanted to put a bullet into each of our brains right then.
“Cephu!” Atari barked. “You understand me? I want them bringing the eggs back. They’re gonna have the fun of killing the miners this time.”
The general kept his wavering gaze at the .45 in his lap, but mustered a nod.
“Excellent.”
Bonte got into the driver’s seat and shut his door. Atari leaned in close to him and spoke low into his ear. Whatever he said, it made Bonte nod solemnly and start the car.
“Goodbye!” Atari yelled with a cheery tone as Bonte dragged us and the boat down to the river. “You assholes keep it warm in Hell for me, ya hear?”
Chapter 15
“Bonte, man, stop the car. We’ll get out and run,” I said.
But the smiling, jovial Bonte we had met earlier had vanished. In his place was a gray-looking simulacrum who barely had a voice to answer me with: “Monsieur Bushnell says they have my family under guard up in the village.”
“Monsieur Bushnell?”
“The bad man. The one who came with you.” Atari, he meant.
Ellie said, “‘Under guard’—isn’t that a good thing?”
Bonte shook his head mournfully. “They are not keeping anyone out. They are keeping my family in. If I don’t do what he say, he won’t kill just me, you know? My daughters, my wife. My mother.” We were at the river now, and he started backing the boat into the water as he added, “I am very sorry, my new friends.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Ellie said, and put a pale hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Feel good that you’re saving your family.” She realized what she had just said in front of me and looked at me with a stricken expression.
“It’s okay, Ellie. I’m glad he had a choice. I’d do the same thing.” I patted her other hand and just concentrated on how they say you’re reunited with the ones you love the most after you die. That would have made our imminent being-eaten-by-a-monster thing a little less horrible. But I doubted it was true.
“Il existe une différence,” Bonte said, remaining in the driver’s seat. “Monsieur Bushnell wants me to take you across in the boat, then leave you and take the boat. I am not going to do that. I am going to go with you, and we will walk out of this jungle together.”
“You will not be walking,” Cephu said in French, very slowly. “You will all be running.” Then he let out a weak laugh and returned to stillness.
Bonte got out of the station wagon and unhooked the boat, settling it into the water before calling to us, “Come, please. Let us give Monsieur Bushnell a show of obeying his orders.”
Not seeing any alternative that would keep us alive, Ellie and I opened and got out via our respective doors. Cephu roused himself to open his door and walk stiffly to the motorboat. When he got to Bonte, he said, “He told you to take the boat back, leave us all on the other side? All of us?”
Bonte nodded and said, “He did.” An idea appeared to our driver. “Cephu—General Cephu—why do we not work together now against Monsieur Bushnell? He wants to kill all these people! He’s made you and your soldiers kill so many people! Why do we not—”
The gray visage of the general spoke with a firm voice: “Nobody forced me to do anything! These miners are vermin, and stupid too. They sell a diamond for five francs so they can buy a skinny chicken for their pots. They embarrass me for my country. I want them all dead and I laugh every time the Kasai Rex eats up a bunch of them and their shit-eating families.”
We all stood at the boat, no one moving or even knowing what to say.
“Now ta gueule and get in the goddamn boat.”
We did, and Bonte manned the outboard motor to get us across the Kasai quickly, shutting it down to allow us to drift right up to the far shore. Ellie and I got out, as did Bonte—but Cephu remained in the boat with a smile on his nauseated visage. “To hell with you and to hell with Bushnell,” he said, and pulled on the cord to restart the motor. It rumbled and died. Cephu was just about to pull it again when Bonte spoke up:
“General, they await you on the other side.”
Cephu looked up at Bonte quizzically and then glanced over to the part of the shore we had just departed from. Standing there, very still, was an ebony-faced soldier in camo and holding an Uzi that made me wish that Bonte had been able to grab his own. The general seemed to recognize the machine-gun–toting man and shouted to him in the local dialect.
I had no idea what he was yelling, but the soldier definitely heard him. Upon Cephu’s completion of his statement (or command, maybe), the soldier turned the Uzi toward us and let fly a hail of bullets that splashed into the water very near the boat and very near the shore.
The general got the message, and jumped out of the boat like a man who hadn’t suffered the bloody loss of two pieces of his three-piece set of genitalia. I would have laughed if the bullets hadn’t come awfully close to my two friends and me as well. We all lifted our boots toward the hole in the jungle before the soldier with the Uzi decided we needed a fresh dose of motivation.
***
If there had been any tracks from the monster or Cephu’s henchmen with the stolen eggs, they were washed away in the recent downpour. The clay was still slick and the mud sticky as hell, but we made good progress and by the time I thought to look behind us, the opening in the foliage was no longer visible. Just a couple of minutes ago,
Cephu had looked ready to die of sepsis, but now he led our group like a man on a mission. (Which I guess he was, now that he knew how enthusiastic Atari was about pushing him into the jungle with us.)
I got the chills when we passed the two trees I had hidden behind that night that seemed so long ago, and I nudged Ellie to look at the giant skull against them. Scavengers and insects had taken every bit of flesh and the jaw had fallen under the rest of the skull once its tendons had been severed and eaten. But it was a skull, and Ellie’s eye bugged out as she realized what she was looking at. It was catnip for the host and producer of Cryptids Alive!, but cruelly, she had to keep walking and leave it behind. We didn’t even have smart phones with cameras on us, nothing to document anything we might see.
Of course, we were very likely to be too dead to share any such documentation with the world anyway. I actually shrugged to myself at these thoughts, and pulled out my penultimate cheroot for a smoke to calm my nerves and let me think, goddamn it, but I felt in my back pocket for my matches and remembered I had burned the whole book getting out of my bonds back at Cephu’s little party.
Now I was really getting depressed. I chucked the unlit cigar into the bushes and trudged at the end of the pack, just looking at my boots as they splat splat splat in the mud. I was out of ideas, confused by whether Atari’s lies were not lies after all, tired as shit, with burned wrists and a raging hatred of just about everyone and everything at the moment.
It was already dark within the muddy corridor when Cephu veered off the path and through the chaotic growth on the left side. I could just make out a very slight diminishing of the plant life on that side, making a vague path that surely would go unnoticed if one didn’t already know it was there. This must have been the route the soldiers took after snatching one of the monster’s eggs, one that got them onto the path to the opening and across the river in the quickest way possible. That was probably pretty important when Mama was hot on your heels.