Nothing Left But Fear

by Russell, Adrian

  This allowed him to enjoy the morning sun, which was something he liked to do whilst contemplating his life. It was at times like these when he got many of his new business ideas.

  He left the office and walked down the long corridor which led to the open front door. As he approached the door, he could see the sun beaming in from outside. The wooden floor made a hollow sound as he walked across it in his boots. The knots and blemishes in the old floorboards were highlighted by the sun’s rays as they cast shadows across it.

  As Druker reached the veranda, which was covered by a metal corrugated roof, he took in a long, deep breath of the African air.

  A small table and chairs on the veranda were just catching the sun at this time of day. He grabbed one of the chairs and scraped it across the wooden floor so he could sit in the soothing rays.

  As he sat there, he noticed the resident Vervet Monkeys frolicking in one of the trees in the courtyard immediately in front of the house. They were there most days, seemingly playing without a care in the world.

  His coffee soon finished, he returned to his desk to fire up his diary and plan his next trip to the UK. He was keen to get the trip arranged, even though he had only just returned late last night from a five-day trip.

  There were always plenty of arrangements to make and he always stayed in the same hotel in Chelmsford. Druker logged onto the Atlantic Hotel’s website to make end-of-the-week reservations.

  Rooms were available, so he booked two for five nights. One of the rooms was for himself; the other was for his colleague, Scott, who would be joining him on this trip like on others before.

  After he’d booked the hotel, he went onto book a hire car for the duration of his stay.

  Druker had a lot of property, mostly in the UK. Recently, he’d branched out into the United States, where he was buying properties on the back of the huge drop in real estate values after the 2008 crash. Now that the market was recovering, he was gradually selling them off to cash in on his foresight.

  His most recent purchase was not an investment at all. He’d bought Mwatusanga Reserve, 25,000 hectares of game reserve in the Zambian Luangwa valley.

  The house on the reserve where he lived was in colonial style and included a number of thatched-style outbuildings.

  The reserve was perfect. It came with plenty of game, including elephants, rhinos, lions, buffalo and leopards, together with an abundance of herbivores.

  Mwatusanga was not far from Mfuwe Airport, which had a runway length of 2,000 metres. This runway was long enough to take off and land his Learjet Global 5000, which requires around 1,700 metres to take off fully laden.

  His reserve also had a runway, too, and was now long enough to accommodate his private jet, which had a range of 9,500 kilometres. This meant he could fly to the UK non-stop from his home in Africa.

  His Learjet was too large to be kept in his own small hanger, and his facilities were not sufficient to maintain such an aircraft, so instead it was kept and maintained at Mfuwe Airport. He rented a hangar from a local private jet company working out from Mfuwe, as this meant that the plane would be regularly serviced, plus there were proper refuelling facilities at this airport, too. Whenever he decided he wanted to go anywhere, the pilots would fly in a light aircraft to Mfuwe from Lusaka Airport and then switch to his Learjet and fly to his place to collect him.

  When he’d first purchased his Learjet, his first flight was not to the UK, but instead to Cape Town in South Africa.

  Druker had always been a keen diver and had not yet dived with Great White Sharks, so he decided to make a visit to Gansbaai, which was around a two-hour drive southeast of Cape Town. The small town is known for its great cage diving, and the short trip out on a boat to Dyer Island is something he’d always wanted to do. The flying time to Cape Town was around three hours with the Global 5000’s cruising speed of just over 900Kmh, so this was a good trip to try it out and get used to what it was like, before the longer trip to the UK.

  On his inaugural trip, he had arranged for a driver to take him to Gansbaai. He had booked a stay in the Crayfish Lodge, which was a short drive to where the harbour and the boats for his outing were situated. He had chosen this lodge for its panoramic suites and great uninterrupted views of the sea off Gansbaai. Whilst he stayed there, his pilots had been booked into an expensive hotel in Cape Town, all expenses paid.

  He chartered the boat privately so he could be the only person on it; he hated the idea of spending time with other tourists whilst on this experience. The company he chartered seemed to have a good reputation from the reviews he read, and was on Kus Drive, which looked out over Van Dyks Bay in Gansbaai. The person who arranged the trip for him was helpful and happy to accommodate his private hire.

  On the morning following his arrival, and on the day of his trip, it was drizzling with rain. The weather hadn’t stopped the trip from going ahead, though, and they’d set off at just after 7:30 in the morning, heading out to what is known as Shark Alley, which is in between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock, where 60,000 Cape Fur Seals breed. Druker recalled the smell of rotting fish that had hit him as they first approached the seal-covered rock, which was caused by the huge amount of their fish-scented faeces that blanket the island.

  Soon after they’d arrived in Shark Alley, the crew had begun to throw chum into the water and to drop a decoy, which looked much like a seal pup. It took a few hours before they had lured a couple of Great White Sharks near the boat, but in the end the trip turned out to be very successful. He had seen a number of Great White Sharks whilst he was in the cage, with two of them coming up very close to check him out. After he had come up from the cage, he remembered he had felt cold, as the weather hadn’t improved all day. He’d asked the skipper to return to base, in order to get warm and because he had been satisfied that he’d seen enough.

  After he had tipped the team in his usual generous way, his driver had returned him to Cape Town’s airport. He’d met his two pilots in the terminal, where he boarded his plane in no time at all. He loved the new-found freedom that his new toy had given him, and he loved the flexibility it afforded him. On the flight home, he sat in one of the plane’s luxury seats, drinking one of his fine red wines and looking out of one of the windows, whilst smiling to himself.

  After this visit to Cape Town, Druker had soon arranged his first trip to the UK, which had also involved organising the pilots, and arranging a hire car and hotel accommodations. The pilots would deal with all the flight arrangements necessary for this. But there were certain elements of paperwork that he had to get involved with, especially when it came to his departing and arriving directly from Mwatusanga without the need for him to go via an international airport and via immigration and customs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  David’s main feeling of horror, which right now was even scarier than finding himself where he was, was that … ‘perhaps someone saw me naked.’

  He thought about how, when he’d screamed, he’d imagined the possibility of something prowling in the shadows, but right now the thought of someone having seen him naked sent a shudder through his entire body. It was a deep-seated fear that was far beyond monster scary for him.

  He re-opened his eyes and looked up. When he gradually got back to standing fully upright, he was careful not to hit his head on the ceiling of his newly found ‘bedroom.’ As he stood and turned his head, he became aware of a small, stabbing pain in his neck, a pain that ran up and into the base of his skull, almost as if someone had pierced his skin with a needle.

  He reached around with his hand to feel the skin just on the nape of his neck, to locate the point at which he’d felt the pain originate, and as he ran his fingers over the site, he could feel a small lump. It was the size of a small nut. As he explored the area with the tips of his fingers, as he pushed and squeezed the skin, it seemed as if there was something just under the surface that moved when he pushed it.

  He also could feel a small cut, which had yet to properly
heal. The area around this strange object felt inflamed and sore, and if he didn’t know better, it was as if he’d undergone some kind of small, surgical procedure.

  ‘But then, why would they leave the lump under my skin rather than remove it — unless someone has placed something there,’ he thought.

  With this discovery, his whole body shivered with a raw sense of the unknown. David felt totally out of control right now. He tried to clear his fuzzy mind and think back to a time before he’d awakened in this cave. He tried to bring forward the vague recollection of the two men, a memory he was sure would help him to work out why he found himself in this strange place. There was a stocky man with a tanned and almost leather-like skin. The second man, who didn’t have the same distinctive features as the first, did have lot of very dark hair, he recalled.

  ‘My memory is good enough to remember these two men, but why can’t I remember any more than that?’ he thought frustratingly to himself. ‘Or was this a dream I had whilst asleep?’

  Turning back to the object under his skin and the small cut above it, he had no recollection of what had caused this injury, but he was becoming even more concerned over what the object might be.

  Slightly unsteady on his feet and still feeling woozy, he walked slowly towards the cave entrance. As he moved off the straw ‘bed,’ he could feel the cool ground beneath his bare feet. On his way to the entrance of the cave, he studied the walls of his enclosure, which were made of a hard-looking grey rock, which seemed to him like rough granite. It looked like the cave had been cut out and formed over a long time; that many millennia had passed since it was first shaped by nature.

  David observed the jagged edges of the stone face of the cave, which carved out areas of light and shadow. This shadowing effect made the walls look to him like a torrid sea, with each of the tips that jutted out appearing to form waves, as if there were an invisible storm wind blowing in from the cave’s entrance. He tried to imagine ships sailing across this dark, rough ocean surface, as this wind appeared to move the rock’s surface back towards the dark space behind him and beyond.

  He continued to move slowly to the cave entrance and, as he turned his gaze to the light source beyond the jagged opening, he felt very uneasy. He sensed he was not alone. As he cautiously approached the misshapen oval, his tired eyes took some adjusting to the bright sunlight ahead, which gleamed inside, its beams glinting off the stones on the floor of the cave.

  David hesitated for a few seconds, contemplating his situation, and as he did, his attention was drawn to a sound. It was something which he’d not been aware of when he first arose. The soft noise suddenly became very apparent to him; it was coming from deep within the cave. David looked back and into the darkness beyond, listening intently.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Graham Smith awoke with a start and found himself on the floor.

  ‘No, it isn’t the floor. It’s hard ground I’m on and I’m outside in the open’, he instantly realised.

  As this knowledge came to him, he jumped up. In doing so, he also found that he was completely naked. Suddenly, he felt extremely vulnerable. He looked around to see who might see him without his clothes on and tried to make sense of the situation.

  As he surveyed the area around where he had been lying, Graham found that he was not in his familiar home in Chelmsford, but instead in a forested area. And it was very warm.

  ‘I’m not in the UK,’ was what went through his disbelieving mind.

  Graham’s body was not designed for being in the wild, with its huge stomach and stubby legs; his was not a physique that would be best to get him out of trouble.

  ‘Where am I?’ he questioned. ‘Why am I here?’

  He began to move forward to see if he could find his way out of the trees, to see if he could find help, but as he walked he quickly realised how hard the ground was on his bare feet, making him hobble a bit and wince, as the stones bore into his soles.

  Looking around and wondering how he’d got here, he realised his mind was unusually fuzzy, a feeling that could have been from whatever had knocked him out.

  ‘I must have been drugged with something,’ he concluded. ‘But who did this and why?’

  As he framed the question, dancing on the edge of his memory were images of three men, one of whom was familiar to him for some reason. They seemed to be intent on subduing and capturing him, but his persistent mental fuzziness made this memory vague.

  ‘How did I get here, though?’ he puzzled, but then his thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sound of a bird sitting on a branch above his head, which brought him back to reality and where he was.

  It sounded like a pigeon, and as he stopped and looked up to where the call had come from, his thinking cleared. He began to survey the trees in the wooded area where he stood. These were all unfamiliar to him; they made him feel very uneasy. He started to wonder what other animals might be lurking in them or somewhere else around him.

  Soon his senses seemed to be on a higher alert than he’d ever experienced before. It was as if his hearing had been tuned in; every sound was magnified. His body tingled and quivered with anxiety, a feeling which he’d never had until now. It felt like a deep, primal fear was going right to his core and into his bones, even though he couldn’t actually see any danger. Somehow, he sensed there was something out there or that he was being watched by dangerous creatures.

  What didn’t help was that he was unclothed. His nakedness made his heightened vulnerability seem even more surreal. But, in a strange way, without the thin protection of clothing, he somehow felt more a part of the wild environment that he found himself in.

  After having a cursory glance around, there was nothing obvious that he could use to cover himself up with, so he began to walk again. Step by step, he moved slowly through the trees.

  Graham kept his hands over his crotch, just in case he came across someone else in the bush. As he thought about this, even though it might be embarrassing, he actually hoped he would meet another person, as they could tell him that this was part of some huge joke, or, better still, help him.

  The trees were not as tall as the ones back in the UK and their bark was a lot dryer than any tree he knew back home. They looked as if they had not seen rain in a very long time, as did the ground, which was hard and dry, with any remnants of grass now withered and brown.

  Graham paused to look down at some large ants crawling across the semi-trodden path he was on, and there seemed to be an invisible trail they were all following, albeit in a haphazard way. There was a frenetic purpose about their movement. Some of the ants were carrying leaf parts or parts of dead insects, and in some cases the package each carried was nearly as large as the ant itself.

  As he watched them, the ants made him feel extremely uncomfortable, because his feet were bare and, at the moment, he knew there was nothing he could do about that or his nakedness. This uneasiness, though, was nothing compared to his absolute feeling of being lost and alone, not just physically, but emotionally, with an overwhelming awareness of extreme vulnerability. He thought again about how he’d never experienced this high-alert feeling before, and that something deeper was going on inside.

  He wondered then what sort of person would place him in a position like this.

  ‘Who would strip me naked and kidnap me, then put me somewhere unknown?’ he thought.

  ‘A man with bright blue eyes is who!’ he said out loud, which even surprised him, as he recalled vaguely that one of his captors had this very distinctive eye colour. But finding himself extremely thirsty and hungry on top of being lost and alone, Graham realised he needed to move on and look for help, food and water. He’d worry later about how he’d ended up being here.

  As he walked, he continued to find the ground extremely hard on his bare feet. The smells he smelt were unfamiliar to him; the trees looked so different from what he knew at home; the shrubbery was of a sort he’d only seen on TV when watching African documentaries.

&
nbsp; ‘But if that were the case, and I’m in Africa, how did I get here? And, if so, are there wild animals like lions, leopards, and hyenas around?’ he thought. ‘There could be one of those animals ready to leap out from behind one of the bushes!’

  Finally, he came to a small clearing where there were taller bushes and the grass was higher than it was amongst the trees. As he looked about, and as he moved cautiously out from the trees, he suddenly noticed on the other side of the clearing a group of animals partially hidden by the rain-starved shrubbery.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The dizziness that had bothered David since he’d awakened had almost disappeared.

  He was now convinced that this reaction was due to him being drugged somehow.

  He thought back to when he’d had his appendix operation around five years previous. He recalled the same woozy feeling he had had then.

  He remembered feeling sick when he had first woken up from that operation, but also how it had significantly affected his memory, how at first he couldn’t even remember why he was in hospital and how disorientated he felt.

  He recalled his conversation with the doctor, who explained that short-term memory loss after an anaesthetic is common.

  The wooziness he had now, and especially how it had been when he’d first awakened, was very similar to the feeling he’d experienced then. The difference this time was that he didn’t have anyone around to help him remember or to prompt him with what had happened. This time he had to rely on his memory recovering on its own.

  As he peered into the blackness of the cave, having become acutely aware of a sound coming from deep within, he could make out what seemed like the rhythmic dripping of water. It vaguely mimicked a submarine’s sonar, which was so obvious now that he was mystified as to why he hadn’t noticed it before.