The Bone Hunter, page 5
She paced forward through the brush one meticulous step at a time. Allison watched the ground for covered mines or trip wires. She did not think they had the time or the motivation to set those types of traps around their camp. Of course, she had not expected IEDs or grenades before today. Seeing a Masai camp slaughtered and stripped clean was new for the area, as was a spiny monster tearing through everything in its path.
She looked off to her right, but no longer saw the creature’s trail. Its path might have veered after another target while she was following the smoke. She turned her attention back toward the potentially deadly ground.
Allison had to use one hand to help her climb the last stretch of the muddy slope. If one of them checked over the side, she would be toast and unable to reach the trigger to fire in time.
She paused below the lip of the rise next to the vehicle and the wire fence. Once she decided to bring her weapon over the side, she expected there would be gunfire one way or the other.
The smoke had shifted from sickly brown to tendrils of gray, thick with snowy ash.
She rolled her arms over the top, with muscles flexed out in sharp lines under the colorful tattoos swirled down her arms with meanings she would never explain, no matter how much she was asked. Allison instantly came to a prone aim with her finger hooked in the trigger guard.
Allison stared through her sights under the belly of a jeep. Two of the tires were flat, and dark oil drained out of the engine in lurches into a puddle in the sand. She lifted her eye away from the weapon. “You are past due for an oil change.”
The wire fence was sliced through in several sections curling back around the metal rail posts.
Allison climbed up onto the edge on her knees behind the jeep. She stared a while longer, but took to her feet walking to the front of the jeep where the hood, grill, and at least half the engine block were missing.
She shrugged. “I don’t think an oil change is going to do it.”
Out across the camp, tents lay shredded in the muddy sand. Chunks of wood and long splinters stuck up from the ground in a way that made her think of arrows falling from the sky. There were no pieces large enough to let her know if the wood had come from surrounding trees or something destroyed in the camp. It could have been pallets or flooring for the tents.
The cloth still pasted to the body parts partially buried in the muddy sand could have been the clothes of the poachers before they were cut to pieces. That would be logical, but there was not enough left for Allison to tell.
Unlike the Masai camp slaughter, this site had not been cleared out. She brought her weapon up as she stepped over a severed leg missing the pants, but still in the boot. It wore a size twelve and most of the ball joint was still attached where it stuck out from the torn flesh of the leg. The slash which reminded her of the cuts on the belly of the poacher she had shot was across the thigh on this lonely leg. The spike had hooked the leg there and tore it from the body, she decided.
Her boots crunched wet in the sand like she was walking through a snowy slush back home in the dead of winter. She took a glance back in the direction of the leg. Her boot prints sunk deep behind her making their own shadows within the craters. Fresh, red blood leaked back in from the sides, and filled the boot prints with tiny lakes of slaughter, one track at a time along her single set of prints in the sand.
Allison’s mother had a picture of a set of footprints along a beach with a poem about Jesus carrying her along during the tough times. It had always creeped Allison out thinking about Jesus carrying her mother along a beach honeymoon style. She now imagined those beachy sandal prints filled with blood. Would Jesus leave bloody footprints behind or is that just me? she wondered.
She turned back forward. “Just you and me, Jesus, but nobody is carrying me. I’m just the last one here with both my feet still on.”
She crossed the camp, never running out of blood or body parts. She found the ripped pieces of metal and parts from at least one vehicle. It looked like too much to be the missing pieces from the jeeps. The one tire left in the sand looked large enough to be from a personnel transport vehicle. That was not something that the poachers normally had.
“One tire left in the sand,” Allison said. “That was when Jesus was driving you.”
She started to wonder if this was a different group. She found the torso and most of the face of one of the bodies under the tire. She realized this was the only head she had seen in the camp. Maybe the monster had a taste for them.
“Or it is jealous that we have faces, so it takes them away from us along with our legs,” she said. Allison shivered after she said it.
She reached down and rolled what remained of the face so she could look at the cheek. Underneath an old scar, she saw a faded, blue tattoo of a growling lion. She let go of the dead man’s head and let it roll back into the bloody sand. His name was Leon. He looked older than the day a bunch of high school aged boys sat handcuffed, but still deadly. Allison remembered him because a poacher having a lion tattoo on his face had particularly pissed her off for some reason, maybe more than the fact that he had escaped when she was shot at. She had not seen him in a long time and had wondered if he had moved on from Tanzania.
“Guess you stayed a day too long, Leon.”
She stood back up and looked around the camp from the opposite side. This had to be the poacher’s camp after all, if Leon died here. It appeared another monster had beaten her to it. She felt a little jealous that something else was handed the honor.
She spotted two circles in the ground that were clear of blood. One was wafting up the gray, ashy smoke. She brought her weapon down from her shoulder and approached.
Something rattled and hummed out in the trees beyond the camp. She stopped and listened for several beats, but then didn’t hear the noise again. Allison continued forward.
The first bloodless circle was a burn pit. Whatever had been set on fire in there had burned down to the bone. She’d have to dig to investigate to know for sure, but from the bone she could see, she thought it was a wild pig. It struck her as odd that in the midst of a warlord conflict and being hunted by Allison’s team that they would fire up a barbeque.
As she stared, a dark realization came over her. They thought they were celebrating her team being killed. Maybe she was the last one left. “Not much of a leader once your whole team has died.”
Her chin quivered, but she bit down until her jaws hurt and fought the reaction off.
She thought about the creature surfacing while the poachers had been throwing grenades, and then traveling here to ruin the poachers’ pit roast. Allison couldn’t imagine that the creature particularly loved her or wanted to protect animals. She thought back to the rhino on the trail. This monster seemed to be cutting down everything in its path.
She turned and approached the other circle. The sand mounded with the bloody mess outside the circle. Allison pushed down on the mound with the toe of her boot and felt it give under her, until it hit more hard packed dirt underneath. She thought about mole hills under her mother’s flowers. This dirt had been turned and packed down behind the creature as it dug back into the ground. The bloody sand was churned under, and the monster’s bony spines and drill action packed the dirt behind it as it traveled underneath.
She continued to probe the strange configuration of loose sand over packed. Allison expected the monster to come tearing out of the ground to catch the one human still poking around with her face and her legs still on.
“Was it the vibration from the exploding grenades that brought you up?” She looked back over her shoulder at the smoldering, ashy pit. “Or something else?”
Allison crossed back over to the downed canvas of one of the larger tents. She pulled to move it aside, but the strip she was pulling tore loose from the rest of the ripped material. She grabbed another and tore it free as well. Allison gritted her teeth and balled up as much of the canvas strips as she could twist around her fists, and she backed away pulling the remains of the tent aside.
Underneath, she revealed a large radio setup sitting sideways on a broken table, at least two butchered bodies splattered around the ground, and another headless body slumped back on a folding chair in front of the radio table. The head was nowhere to be found.
Allison shouldered her rifle and worked the strap around in front over her chest in a manner that was comfortable. If that thing did come back, she was fairly certain her entire magazine would not be enough to save her.
She pushed the remains of the table aside with her boot and set the radio on its base on the ground. She cut a couple of dials on and saw lights indicating power.
She shoved the body propped on the chair over by its shoulder, and then tilted the folding chair to dump the remains of the man out. With a piece of the torn tent canvas, she wiped off the seat as best she could. Most of the wet blood and other fluids scraped off leaving swirling streaks of what had already dried tacky over the metal.
She sat down and leaned over almost double to adjust the radio’s dials on the ground in front of her. The radio reported in high whistles and the hiss of static as she moved between channels. She gritted her teeth at the sound, and tried to remind herself that it wasn’t in her head this time and wouldn’t last forever. Allison looked over her shoulder at the sandy mound and wondered if the bony monster could hear.
She cut the radio off and stood. Allison pulled at a thick cable running off the back of the radio away from the camp. It pulled up from the sand leading away from the bloody ground. It appeared no one had been sliced and diced out that way. “How did you avoid getting cut, power cable?”
She kept pulling it up as she followed. The thicker cable had a thinner, black wire that coiled around it. As she reached the ferns and trees, she found that the cable led up onto the bed of a truck. A generator on the back hummed and raddled slowly as it burned through the last of its fuel stores. The hum rose again, but then faded back into a dying hush.
The thick cable led into the generator, but the thinner wire led off into the brush to the right. Allison pulled the wire until a metal antennae yanked free of the undergrowth. She lifted it and climbed up on top of one of the wheels of the truck so that she could wedge it on top.
Allison ran back to the remains of the camp hoping to get a signal out before the generator ran dry.
She sat back on the stained chair and adjusted the dials getting more solid results. She passed a few voices speaking Ebu and Bantu Swahili on the lower bands. She clicked through to the higher channel she was seeking and lifted the mouthpiece, pushing down the transmission button.
She thought about their code names and code words to try to figure out how to tell them all the poachers were dead and a strange drill monster had done it. She wasn’t sure she had a code for that, and most of those her team cared about possibly overhearing them talk, were in multiple pieces now.
She clicked her tongue, and said, “This Allison to Team Tread. All the poachers are dead. I didn’t do it. If you are still alive, say something … Over.”
She released the button and waited. It was procedure to count off to five from a cold call before repeating. Five seconds passed, but she still sat and waited. If they were still out by the road, their radios might pick her up from this broadcast set up, but their hand radios could be lacking the signal strength to respond.
“Allison? This is Tread Three … ugh, Mark. Good to hear your voice. Where are you? Over.”
She stood from the chair pulling the black coil of the radio handset wire to its limit. She looked out beyond the edges of the camp past the cut wires of the fencing. She depressed the button. “Can you see the smoke at all? Over.”
“Standby … We do not see smoke. No. We found a body near the road and have been tracking what we thought was your trail. Over.”
She pushed the button. “Shot in the head? Over.”
“No,” Mark said, “in the side, we believe. You didn’t kill him, you said? Over.”
“No, him I killed. Over.”
“We also found a body gutted by a machete, we think, maybe blew an arm and part of his chest off with a grenade, hard to tell, and shot through the forehead near a fresh logging trail. Did you kill him? Over.”
“Yes,” she said, “him too, but I didn’t cut him or blow him up. He was the last one I killed today … so far. And that’s not a logging trail. Follow it up to the poachers’ camp. That’s where it leads, and that’s where I am. There is a rock face you’ll have to go around, but you’ll find me. Hurry. Over and out.”
“We’re on our way. Over and out.”
He said “we,” Allison thought. She wanted to pick back up and ask who was still alive, but she decided against it. She thought about shutting off the generator to save power in case she needed the radio again later. She wasn’t sure it had enough fuel to restart, and she didn’t feel like walking back over.
Allison dropped the handset with a crack as it snapped back to the radio, and she sat down in the folding chair staring out at nothing. When the generator died, the lights on the radio went dark. She did not realize she had grown used to the noises until they were gone. The buzz of the radio and uneven hum of the generator gave way to distant birds and the cacophony of insects.
Allison stared at the wash of blood and bodies around the camp and could not help but to think about washing off the bloody hammer as her father sobbed outside the shed.
By then they had fifteen rabbits in the hutches behind their house, including Huck, that she had saved from blades of the bush hog. Her father told her not to name them, because rabbits were good for food, fur, and key chains. Allison had said no one was killing her rabbits unless they went through her first.
After his heart attack a couple months later, she would end up selling them all to a meat market to try to help pay bills. It wouldn’t end up making much difference to saving her father’s life or for paying off the bills.
Years later when she had put her fists through the wall after watching the documentary on poaching, she had not been thinking about the people killed in Afghanistan or even African wildlife. She had thought about giving up her rabbits to the meat market and how it hadn’t made any difference.
Huck had grown big. He had developed a spot on his leg he kept chewing and that wouldn’t heal. Allison had tried to bandage it, but he kept chewing through. Soon a nasty looking cyst had formed in the spot. Her father had read that clover mixed with saliva sometimes healed cysts. He had chewed clover from the yard himself, prepared a compress, and bandaged it on. Allison had to hold Huck so that her father could change the bandage with fresh chewed clover each day. Huck kicked and bit, but they kept doing it until his fur grew thin and the cysts spread.
Her father told her that she had to put him down to keep from making the other rabbits sick. Allison had begged. They had Huck in his own hutch, and she would chew the clover herself.
Her father insisted. He took Huck by his scruff and a ball-peen hammer. Allison had followed him out to the edge of the woods carrying the shovel like he had asked.
“Wait here,” he had said.
“I want to be with him when he goes,” she had said.
“Do as I say, girl. An animal suffering and dying isn’t a show.”
She stood with a shovel, and her father carried Huck into the woods where she couldn’t see. At first there had been silence, but then the hammer came down with a whack, and her father had let out a moan. He said, “Oh, God.”
Allison had dropped the shovel and covered her mouth with both hands. The hammer landed with three more crisp, wet blows. Her father stepped out of the woods without Huck. His shirt and his cheeks were flecked with dark blood. He picked up the shovel and held out the hammer to her handle first. “Go wash … wash this off, please.”
“I want to bury him,” she had said.
“Just do as I say.”
His voice had gone shrill and it startled her. Allison took the hammer before she saw the gore painted on one side. She flipped the hammer over and saw the other side was clean. He had used the flat side to do the job.
“Can we sell his fur or meat so it doesn’t go to waste at least, Daddy?”
Her father had swallowed with an audible click and turned the shovel back toward the woods. “Nothing good comes of this kind of suffering and dying—when an animal has to be put down to protect the others. It’s all waste. Go do the job I gave you. Use the workroom sink so your mother don’t see the blood. Hurry up.”
Allison had gone and ran the water over the hammer. She had scrubbed with her thumbs under the water feeling the sticky bits ride up under her nails. More and more washed down the open drain, but the hammer wasn’t coming clean. She was about to go tell her father she couldn’t do it when she heard the shovel clink back onto the hooks inside the shed.
She had heard the door to the shed close and her father’s footfalls approaching outside the workroom. She kept washing as she waited for him to come in so she could tell him all the blood wasn’t going to come off.
The first sob came so loud and sharp that Allison thought it was a hiccup or a sneeze. She had almost called out, Bless You, but then the sobs came loud and uncontrollable, like the sound of a man going insane. Allison had felt the fear spread up from her fingers where the water washed over. It spread from her arms through her chest and down into her legs until they felt weak. Her whole body was numb as she listened to her father’s hysterics. Allison decided she would wash that hammer the rest of her life if she had to so her father would never see the blood again.
As Allison sat in the tacky folding chair in the poachers’ camp, she thought about the bloody hammer, Huck that they couldn’t save again that last time, and the rhino on the trail that faced one too many monsters to keep going.
When the slushy steps crossed the camp toward her, it pulled her back to the present and out of her unpleasant memories, but Allison did not turn to look. It could have been her friends or more enemies following the same trails she had. She did not look because she did not want to know either way. If it was her friends, she was afraid to finally see how many of her team had not made it. She was going to blame herself, Mark would tell her not to, and she would anyway. Allison wanted to put that off as long as possible.
