Sashi fell to her knees, hand coming up to her shoulder, lungs sucking air. Rowan saw what was about to happen and lunged. He tackled Sashi into Mahdi’s lap, hand clasped over her mouth. The impact lodged the scream in her throat. She stared at Rowan with wide eyes, breathing heavily through her nose.
“Not a word,” Rowan hissed. “Not a damn sound. We don’t want to wake up the entire island. Do you understand?”
Sashi’s eyes darted back and forth, a panic driven search for danger.
Rowan clasped her cheeks in his hands. Forced her to look at him. “We can survive this, but you need to do what I say. Do you understand?”
Her breathing began to slow as their eye contact lingered, she absorbing confidence from him. She nodded.
Rowan looked up at Mahdi’s surprised face, caught his eye, and gave him a look that he hoped transmitted the message, ‘Keep her quiet.’ When Mahdi nodded as well, Rowan slowly took his hand away from Sashi’s mouth. When he was confident she wasn’t going to scream, he gave her leg a pat and then moved back to the far side of their bunker, where Talia and Winston were peering through a gap in the root tangle.
“Just one of them,” Winston whispered, his handgun clutched, finger on the trigger.
Rowan looked through the small opening. The silhouette of a single man snuck toward them, stepping silently through the sand. He held a bow, a three foot long arrow—like the one in Sashi’s shoulder—already nocked and drawn back. The first person he saw would get an arrow in their body.
But he’s not sure about what he saw, or who he might have shot, Rowan thought, or he’d have already raised the alarm. There’s still a chance.
Rowan placed his hand on the man’s pistol and eased it down. “We need to be quiet.” Before Winston could argue, he added, “I’ll take care of it. Just stay still and quiet.”
He moved toward the jungle edge of their bunker and paused by Talia. “I’m sorry.”
“Do what you need to,” she said, though she didn’t looked pleased by it. He wished this could be avoided, and prayed there was another solution. But he couldn’t see it. All he really knew was that taking a Sentinelese life would probably negatively affect his relationship with Talia. And while the feelings between them were a far cry from love, her friendship felt like a beacon for him, guiding him away from the abyss into which he’d nearly leaped.
Without another whispered word, he placed the FN SCAR down beside Talia, trusting she would know to keep it away from Winston. Then he slid into the jungle where he was swallowed by darkness.
21
Talia watched Rowan slip into the jungle without making a sound. She’d seen tribal warriors move with the same silent skill, and could manage it herself, but not while fully dressed in a tactical uniform. It was impressive. When he was gone, she turned her eyes back to the beach, watching the Sentinelese warrior’s cautious approach.
He was fifty feet out, taking a step every few seconds. He moved in absolute silence, patiently stalking his prey. She glanced at Sashi, who had managed to stay silent, despite the obvious pain. No doubt, it was that silence that had confounded the man and led to his stealthy approach. She imagined his confusion. Had he hit his target? Had there even been a target? The night played tricks on the eyes, even to those who were accustomed to it.
Talia remained motionless, watching the man hunt them. When he was fifty feet away, she tensed. Where was Rowan?
At thirty feet, she began debating her resolve to not attack the Sentinelese. She had been in precarious situations before, and had always approached tribes as a pacifist, abiding by her rule to not let murder punctuate first contact.
She had been beaten, drugged, bound, and pursued, but most indigenous tribes stopped short of killing strangers. Once a dialogue was established, and her odd physical features—her olive skin tone, tan lines, long black hair, five-foot-eight height, and on occasion, the shape of her breasts which had been supported by a bra, defying gravity’s relentless tug—were accepted as not supernatural, threats of violence ended.
But here, on Sentinel Island, violence marked the beginning, and often the end of every encounter. If this man spotted them, she doubted any of the techniques that worked so well with other tribal people would result in anything more than an arrow in her heart.
Doubt crept into her mind as steadily as the man crept through the sand. Would she let the man kill her? Her principles told her to, that her life’s mission was to protect tribal people, not kill them, but what good was she if she was dead?
And it wouldn’t be the first life she had taken. While she had never fought back against a new tribe, a year ago, during her time with the Mashco-Piro, they had been attacked by a nomadic rival tribe, trying to stake claims on Mashco-Piro territory. She didn’t blame them. Their own territory had been logged, their people displaced. But she’d been accepted by the Mashco-Piro and called them her friends. So she fought to defend them and put an arrow in a man’s leg. The wound was far from mortal, and the man escaped into the jungle, but the arrow had been poisoned. She never saw a body, but she knew the man was dead. No one survived curare.
She glanced down at her waist, at the leather pouch that resembled a modern fanny pack, and considered what was inside. When she’d recovered the pouch from her cabin, Rowan hadn’t questioned it. No one had given it a second glance. But it contained power over life and death.
You brought it for a reason, she told herself. You knew you might need it.
Winston tensed, lifting his gun.
Rowan had yet to attack. The man was within twenty-five feet. A few more steps and he would be able to see over the wall of roots. A step or two later, he would be able to attack.
I can’t do nothing, Talia decided. If violence was the language the Sentinelese spoke, perhaps it would also be the one they understood.
She placed a gentle hand on Winston’s arm and shook her head.
He watched her, incredulous, while she opened the sealed pouch and removed three wooden straws, each one whittled down on one end and notched. She fitted them together, forming an eighteen inch blow gun. Then she removed a wooden case, popped it open, and removed one of twelve darts. The thin wooden spines were wrapped in tight twine on the back, and colored black on the tip, where they had been dipped in curare.
She carefully slipped a single dart into the blowgun, closed the case and returned it to the pouch. When she was finished, Winston was watching her with a mix of humor and doubt. She ignored him and leaned down, slipping the blowgun through the narrow gap and taking aim at the man, now just twenty feet away.
He slowed down, she realized. Knows where we are, or at least suspects where his victim is hiding. He doesn’t know we’re all here. Doesn’t know he’ll die if he takes two more steps.
She had to wait for him to get closer. Skilled warriors could effectively use a blowgun to kill small prey at a hundred feet, but to get that kind of range and power, you needed a four-foot-long blow gun and a more substantial dart, not to mention large lungs. Her eighteen inch gun and four inch dart needed close range to punch through skin and deliver poison to the bloodstream.
The man stepped closer.
Talia took a slow, deep breath through her nose.
The bow came up, the arrow angled down.
He can see someone.
She angled the blowgun up, aiming for the man’s chest. It was an easy target and would quickly spread the poison throughout his bloodstream.
The warrior went rigid, a clear sign he was about to release the bowstring.
Talia closed her eyes, hoped she was making the right decision, and when she decided that self-defense, and the defense of others was justifiable, even against endangered people, she sent the full force of her lungs into the blow gun.
The dart puffed from the gun and was immediately followed by a wet thwack. Human flesh being poked by a dart should have been silent. Talia flinched at the sound, yanked the gun back and looked through the gap. The Sentinelese man was
on the ground, but it wasn’t a dart sticking out of him, it was a hatchet.
A second silhouette stood where the man had been, a hand raised to its neck.
“What…” Rowan managed to say before falling to his knees. Then to his side.
“Shit!” Talia said, standing in plain sight.
“What are you doing?” Mahdi asked. “Stay down!”
“I shot him,” she said. “I shot Rowan.”
“With a toy dart,” Winston said.
“Poison dart,” Talia said, scrambling out of the root bunker. “In the neck. It’s going to hit him hard and fast.”
Curare was a fast-acting poison, and while fatal, it didn’t kill the victim outright. It worked by blocking impulse transmission between nerves and skeletal muscle. The result was involuntary muscle paralysis. Victims couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. But smooth muscles, like the heart, continued to function. If a victim’s breathing—human or animal—was supported for a few hours, until the poison wore off, a full recovery could be made. But in the wilds of the Amazon, most creatures poisoned by curare suffocated to death in minutes, which was exactly what was happening to Rowan.
His breaths were ragged and shallow, his eyes wide. He was fighting the poison, forcing air into and out of his lungs, but in a few seconds, it would be impossible.
She dropped to her knees by his side. “Hold on. Try to relax.” It sounded stupid. He was drowning in the open air. And had no idea that she also carried the cure for curare poisoning. She dug into her pouch and removed a long metal container. Popped it open, revealing five small syringes, each one containing Pyridostigmine, a cholinesterase inhibitor that blocks the paralytic effect of curare.
In most cases, the victim would still need respiratory support, as the effects could take thirty minutes to kick in, but in those cases it was delivered long after paralysis set in, not seconds later. She yanked the stopper off the needle, found the dart in his neck, and plucked it out. Then she slid the needle into the same puncture wound and delivered the Pyridostigmine dosage.
She put her finger on his neck. His pulse was racing, but strong.
A final haggard breath wheezed out of him, and then nothing. His body went slack. His heart continued to pound, but it would no longer be delivering fresh oxygen from his lungs. “You’ll be okay,” she said. She tilted his head back and began performing mouth-to-mouth, filling his lungs with secondhand air, and enough oxygen to keep him alive until he could breathe on his own again.
She watched Rowan’s chest rise as she blew in, and deflate when she stopped. After five blows she started to feel lightheaded. How long could she keep this up? I need help, she thought, and she glanced back toward the bunker. Winston stood in the bunker, his torso in plain sight, aiming the FN SCAR toward her.
Or was he? The angle was off slightly, aimed to her side where the Sentinelese man had fallen. Why would he be covering the man with a hatchet buried two inches into his spine?
Talia blew into Rowan’s mouth again, and then looked. The Sentinelese man was missing. Her eyes flitted to Winston again; his aim had wandered behind her.
She tensed. Listened. Heard a swish of sand.
Talia dove to the side, clumsy.
She received a mouth full of sand, but avoided a swinging hatchet.
Spitting grit, she rolled over. The Sentinelese man, blood curtaining his legs as it poured down his back and around his thighs, stood above her, ready to swing again.
He should be dead. He should be dead!
The axe rose higher. She expected to hear a gunshot, but Winston held his fire.
Then the man swung, the blade sweeping down toward her hands raised in defense. The hatchet would take her hands, and then her life. But the downward arc never finished. The warrior’s arm was caught.
Rowan stood beside the man, looking equal parts determined and ready to pass out. He yanked the smaller man’s hand up and slipped the knife from the sheath on his belt and slipped it between the man’s ribs, once, twice, three times, driving the man back with each blow.
When the Sentinelese warrior fell, Rowan went down with him. While the man lay still, Rowan rolled onto his back, his face red, straining. He gasped, sucking in a lung full of air like he’d just surfaced from a long free dive. After five deep breaths, he pushed himself into a seated position and said, “You poisoned me.”
She crouched beside him. Felt his pulse. Strong and slower. “Wasn’t aiming for you.”
“Thought you wouldn’t kill to survive,” he said.
“Nobility is great until you’re faced with a violent death.” She shrugged. “I’m not perfect.”
He smiled and pushed himself up. He searched the area, his eyes lingering on Winston, who still held the FN SCAR, but had lowered his aim. Then he pointed at the dead again man. “Arms or legs?”
“What?”
“We need to carry him to the bunker. Hide his body. Do you want his arms or legs?”
Talia moved to the man’s head, bent down and picked up his arms. Working together, she and Rowan carried the man to the bunker and rolled him over the wall. After moving the supplies and the raft, they pushed the corpse into the ditch they had dug, covered him with a layer of sand and covered it all with the raft again. When they were done, Rowan made a quick trip back to the beach, brushed sand over every spot of blood and then returned to the protection of their alcove, which had already begun to smell like death.
Despite being groggy and overwhelmed with nausea from the curare and its antidote, Rowan spent the next half hour treating Sashi’s wound. The med kits had everything he needed, including local anesthesia, which allowed him to remove the arrow, disinfect, stitch, and bandage the wound without any fear of Sashi shouting in pain. She thanked him when he finished, but his response was to shush her.
The next two hours passed in silence, everyone eagerly awaiting the sun. Talia knew they would be easier to spot in the day, but they would also be able to see. Fear of the unknown, especially in the world’s still dark and mysterious places, was often far more poignant than a death you saw coming.
Still an hour from dawn, someone nudged her foot. She looked back and saw no limbs near hers, and no one looking. Rowan was watching one end of the beach. Mahdi and Winston watched the other. Emmei was sound asleep, and thankfully not a snorer. And Sashi was on her back, eyes on the star-filled sky, which had grown even more vivid as the moon slipped over the horizon.
Talia looked out at the beach again, but then felt another thump. She turned back and again saw nothing but the raft she rested on.
Then the sensation of being touched began to resolve.
The bump had come from below.
And then she saw it, the raft shaking, pushed up by something from beneath.
Pushed by the man they had buried.
The dead man they had buried.
22
Every member of the expedition pushed away from the rumbling raft, forming a human crater with Allah-knew-what at the core. Mahdi had seen the man die violently—twice. That he could be moving defied not just logic, but the laws of physics and nature.
“What is happening?” he asked, the question coming out as something like a squeak.
“A burrowing animal?” Rowan guessed. “Attracted to the smell?”
Emmei, who had been startled awake, slid up and over the root bunker wall, more afraid of the dead Sentinelese man inside the bunker than the living outside of it. “There are no burrowing animals in the Andaman Islands large enough to move a body, or carnivorous enough to be interested in it. He is dead rising.”
Dead rising.
While living in London, Mahdi became familiar with the West’s zombie obsession. He had ascribed it to the Christian worldview, which proclaimed that the dead had risen and would again, though in a far less gruesome manner. The Muslim world held no such views. The deceased stayed in the ground. Even the great prophet Muhammad did not return the dead to life, and had remained in his grave after his death.
He wouldn’t have guessed Emmei had an interest in such things, but then, many cultures on Earth believed in the dead rising in one form or another. It’s possible the Andaman Island tribes had their own views on the undead.
“If I’d poisoned him,” Talia said, but let the comment hang. She hadn’t poisoned the man. Rowan had stabbed him three times after burying a hatchet in his spine.
“He’s dead,” Mahdi said. “Something else is moving him.”
“Put that away,” Rowan said, pointing at the gun in Winston’s hand, aimed at the raft.
Winston looked like he smelled something foul. “Fuck no.”
“We might need the raft,” Rowan argued. “And a single shot will wake up the entire island.”
All eyes turned to Winston. The gun in his hand was more of a threat than whatever was moving the raft. “Fine,” he muttered and lowered the weapon.
“We still need to stop it,” Sashi said, clinging to the root wall, ready to throw herself over.
Rowan yanked the food bags out of the raft, inspecting them for holes. Then he removed the medkits. He slipped his assault rifle from his shoulder, straddled the raft, and raised the weapon’s stock above his head. When the raft shook again, Rowan brought the weapon down, smashing the flat bottom where it had wobbled. There was no shriek of pain, though there was a wet crunch. Something organic had been crushed.
Rowan raised the weapon again. Waited. Just as he started lowering the rifle, something shifted on the opposite side of the shallow grave. He clubbed down again. Another crunch. “Must be more than one of them.”
“Rats,” Talia said. “Probably escaped from one of the shipwrecks. The Nineveh, or the Primrose. An invasive species like rats would flourish on an island like this.”
“How’s the saying go?” Rowan asked. “If you see one rat…”
Forbidden Island Page 15
