Safari: A Technothriller

by Alexander Plansky

  And accidentally knocking over a toolbox, which opened upon impact and spilled its contents all over the floor. The metal tools clattered loudly as they tumbled to a halt.

  “Shit,” Sydney hissed, rushing over.

  Andy was frantically trying to put the hammer, screwdrivers, and scattered screws back in the box. She crouched down and helped him. “Can you hear anyone coming?” he asked.

  She stood up for a moment and listened towards the door. Nothing. She got back down on her knees and started picking up screws. “Not yet, but just hurry.”

  They managed to get everything into the container, shut it, and put it back on the shelf.

  That was when the door opened.

  Both of their flashlights went off almost immediately and Sydney blindly stumbled over to the rear of the closest SUV. She felt Andy behind her a moment later.

  “Hello? Is anyone in there?” a South African accent called out.

  She focused on keeping slow, quiet deep breaths. There’s nothing here. Just shut the door and go away–

  The lights came on.

  Sydney could hear the man walking around to look behind the cars. He stopped. She gulped, her fingers tightening around her flashlight.

  Then she heard footsteps receding. The room went dark again and the door closed.

  She and Andy spent another minute remaining still, then Sydney stood up and turned on her beam. She turned towards the last Land Rover. “Let’s do this one,” she whispered.

  She opened the driver’s door, which automatically activated some interior lights, and stood on the floor in front of the seat as she inspected the light rigs and took the GoPro out of her pocket. She could hear Andy fumbling with the tape in the dark behind her. Finally, he handed her a strip.

  “Can you hold my flashlight?” she asked.

  He took hers and placed it down on the ground, then handed her the tape and shone his beam where she was working. She pressed the camera into the bar and began applying the strip. Afterwards, she held out her hand for another.

  “Hold on,” he said. The light shone away from her and towards the ground as he tore off another long piece. “Here you go.”

  “Do you think we could get some food after this? I’m feeling hungry again.”

  “Sure, I’ll call up UberEats and ask them if they do air delivery.”

  She rolled her eyes, rubbing the wrinkles out of the tape on top of the camera. “Come on, isn’t there a pantry with snacks in it or something?”

  “I think there might be one in the kitchen. Can we please stay focused?”

  She held out her hand. “Tape,” she said. He sighed and fumbled with the roll again. Two strips later, she patted the last of the adhesive into place and switched the device on. “There.”

  “Done?”

  “Yeah, let’s get out of here.” She jumped down and closed the car door, then scooped her flashlight off the floor.

  Quietly, they made their way around the backs of the Rovers toward the exit, turned off the flashlights, and left them on the table. Sydney felt around in the dark for the handle and cautiously turned it down, pulling the door open as slightly as possible so that she could still see through the crack.

  She looked out into the hallway. No one was visible and all was silent. She waited for a moment, just wanting to be sure. Then she said, “Coast’s clear.”

  With Andy right behind her, she opened it wider and prepared to step into the hall. Just then, a figure came around the corner from the staff quarters. She immediately backed up, bumping into Andy, and closed the door over. A moment later, she took a peek.

  A man wearing white medical technician’s clothes was walking away from her into the foyer. She watched as he turned for the front door, which she saw open and close. Then he was gone. He must’ve been going to the laboratory building. She still didn’t get what they were doing there at this hour.

  “Is he gone?” Andy breathed into her ear.

  She nodded and opened the door again. The pair of them stepped out and Andy softly pulled the door closed until he heard a soft click and sighed with relief. They then walked quickly toward the foyer. Sydney felt her shoulders relax and the tense feeling in her body receded to the usual soreness she’d been feeling for the past few days.

  Ahead of them, Graves walked around the corner. She looked surprised and stopped in her tracks. “What are you two doing here?”

  Sydney was caught off guard. She was about to stutter an answer, when mercifully Andy intervened.

  “We’re just walking around. We’ve been reading for the past few hours, just wanted to stretch our legs.”

  The nurse’s cold eyes regarded each of them with suspicion. “Have a good evening,” she said. It didn’t sound like she meant it. She brushed past them and disappeared into the staff corridor.

  Without further delay, Sydney and Andy walked briskly into the foyer and up the stairs.

  “How will we get it tomorrow?” he asked as they approached their rooms.

  “I’ll grab it off the car after the tagging.”

  “Won’t Ramsay see you?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “What if Sans doesn’t go out tonight?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Then this was all for nothing. Good night.” She opened her door, then looked behind her. “Oh, and Andy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for helping out.”

  “Always, but you do know you’re crazy, right?”

  “Of course.”

  She shut the door and then flopped on the bed, glancing at the clock. It was 9:17 now. She still had forty minutes or more until they left. If they left at all, that was. Andy’s words stung at the back of her mind. What if the last two nights were a fluke? What if they had just risked getting caught for nothing? She couldn’t leave the camera up there all day. The battery would be long dead, so she’d have to take it down, charge it, and then put it up again tomorrow night if she wanted another chance.

  She sighed and rubbed her forehead. The fever was coming back. She got up and went to her bathroom, where the container of extra-strength painkillers that Graves had given her this morning lay. She took her nightly two with water, then paced the room for several minutes. She looked at the clock.

  9:24.

  Sydney groaned and resolved to brush her teeth and get ready, since walking around wasn’t doing anything for her. After she’d gotten into her pajamas, she checked the time again. 9:36. Closer.

  She paced her room and kept coming back to the window, just in case Sans decided to leave early. But there was nothing out there. She looked off at the laboratory building, obscured by the trees. Its lights were on as usual. She glanced down at the ground. Still no sign of Jones.

  Sydney repeated this in a cycle until the clock finally displayed 10:00. Chewing on a fingernail, she peered out the northern window again. Still nothing, granted the convoy hadn’t left until a few minutes past the hour for the last couple nights.

  But for the next half an hour, nothing came.

  Her empty stomach kept grumbling irritably, but she knew she wouldn’t have anything to eat until morning. Angrily, she went back to the window. “Where are you, you bastards?” she muttered.

  There was nothing out there but an empty plain, barely visible beneath the starry night sky.

  Fuck it. She turned off her lights and climbed into bed. Maybe Sans was going out later. Or maybe he really wasn’t going out at all. Tomorrow, she’d have her answer.

  CAMERA

  Sydney carefully slid the injector’s syringe into the zebra’s neck and squeezed the trigger. There was the metallic hiss of pressurized air escaping as the implant went in. Relieved, she pulled the device away and wiped sweat from her brow.

  “That’s the last one,” she said.

  Ramsay was standing not far behind her with his arms crossed, a blank expression on his face. “Good,” he said. “Congratulations, you’ve completed all your tagging assignments.”r />
  She stood up, still feeling sore. Her fever had also been getting worse throughout the morning, but not quite to the level it had been on Wednesday. At least, not yet.

  “Shame Brandon couldn’t be here,” she said, glancing at the three zebras she’d just upgraded to Mark VIIs.

  “He’s still not feeling well, but Nurse Graves says he should be fine in a few days.” Ramsay started leading her back to the car.

  As she was about to climb into the passenger seat, she took one last look around at the savanna. She wasn’t sure if Sans would let them do one final safari next Saturday, but regardless that was still a way’s away. Next week, she’d be huddled up in the lab analyzing the data from the new implants and Andy would be out here. She wasn’t sure if he would have to do the entire week without a partner, though. Courtney’s departure had really thrown things off.

  The vehicle began driving back to the lodge. Sydney let her arm hang out the window, feeling the cool air run between her fingers. She glanced over at Ramsay, who appeared detached and silent as usual, sitting upright as if someone was pulling a string from the top of his head. She wondered how he and Sans had met, what his history was before he came to a place like this. Had he been in the military or a militia? Was he a big-game hunter? He clearly knew the sport. She figured she didn’t know how to broach the subject properly and dropped it from her mind.

  Eventually, they made it back to the lodge and Ramsay turned the Rover around to reverse it into its spot in the garage, a retractable door opening behind them. The SUV rolled into place and Ramsay turned it off. They got out and went through the door into the interior of the lodge.

  Sydney waited until they’d passed the hallway that led to the staff rooms, then said, just as she’d rehearsed in her mind since breakfast, “Oh crap, I think I left my water bottle in the car.” In truth, she had.

  Ramsay rolled his eyes. “Go get it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, hurrying back into the garage and shutting the door behind her. The retractable door just finished closing as she flicked on the main lights and proceeded to the Land Rover at the very end of the row.

  Moving quickly, she threw open the door, stepped up onto the floormat, and gripped the upper racks with one hand as she looked closely beneath the lighting rig. The GoPro was still there, untouched from where she left it. She pried both it and the tape loose from the metal bar as fast as she could, not wanting Ramsay to wonder why she was taking so long to grab a bottle.

  Sydney shoved the camera and tape into one of her shorts’ pockets and retrieved her water bottle from where she’d left it under the seat of the car they’d just been in. She had purposely put it down there instead of the cup-holder so Ramsay wouldn’t notice it getting left behind and blow her reason for coming back.

  She was expecting him to make some remark about her lack of speed when she returned inside, but instead found he hadn’t waited for her and was long gone. Even better. She walked up the stairs and, checking over her shoulder to make sure no one was around, knocked on Andy’s door. He should’ve been back from the lab building by now.

  Sure enough, he opened it. “Come on in,” he said.

  She stepped through the door and he closed it. His suitcase was set up on the floor, leaving the desk for his laptop. She’d given him her mini-USB adapter that morning and it sat hooked up to the computer, waiting.

  “It might need to charge for a little bit,” Sydney said, glancing outside at the afternoon sky as she plugged it in.

  “That’s fine. But what were you starting to say earlier? You’re not sure if they went last night?”

  She shook her head. “Not by the time I went to sleep.”

  “So this might be just two hours of a darkened garage?”

  “Maybe.”

  Andy scratched the back of his head. “Well, we might be in for some riveting entertainment then.”

  Sydney sighed and opened up the camera files. Knowing the two hours of footage would take up a lot of space, she’d moved everything off the SD card and onto her own computer. Therefore, this thing had had 32GB of space free to record whatever it needed, which should’ve been more than enough. There was only one video as she clicked open the DCIM folder. The details read:

  0116.MP4 07/17/2020 11:27 PM MP4 File 12 GB 02:12:14

  So it had recorded nearly an hour after she’d gone to sleep. She hit the Enter key and pulled up the video in the default media player. At first it was just pitch blackness, which was to be expected. She clicked ahead at multiple points throughout the first hour just to make sure nothing changed, then clicked ahead past the one and a half hour mark. Still nothing.

  Sydney began to grow worried as Andy came up behind her and leaned over her shoulder. “Anything?” he asked.

  “Not yet.” She kept clicking until she got to a point where there was just under half an hour left. She leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “This is hopeless.”

  Then the lights came on.

  They both leaned forward. Only the garage door was displayed before them, brightly illuminated by the lighting rig above the camera. It stayed that way for several minutes.

  “Good thing the Rovers are electric,” Andy said. “Otherwise they’d all be dead of carbon monoxide by now.”

  Suddenly, the retractable door opened before them and the upper lights and headlamps pierced through the darkness outside. There was nothing to see yet, just the trail winding off into the blackness. Then, after another moment, the vehicle began to move forward.

  “What if it’s just driving for thirty minutes?” she wondered aloud.

  “Then we’re screwed.”

  She clicked ahead a couple of times more. Still more driving, although by now they were well out in the savanna. Finally, with ten minutes left of footage, the SUV rolled to a halt.

  Sydney watched intently for any sign of movement, but there was none. The grass swayed gently in the night breeze. Faintly, she could hear the sound of a door slamming and upped the computer’s volume. Someone was speaking, then another voice farther away. Ramsay walked in front of the car.

  He squatted in full view of the headlights and appeared to be looking at something on the ground. It was exactly how he’d examined the dirt after discovering the wildebeest carcasses and the dead elephant.

  “They’re looking for prints,” she said.

  “They’re certainly tracking something,” Andy added.

  On the screen, Ramsay stood up and shouted, “Over here!”

  Then Sans walked into view, holding some kind of tranquilizer gun. He seemed to be suited in full safari gear. There was something resting on his forehead she couldn’t make out. She watched him talk to Ramsay for a moment, then they disappeared on opposite sides of the car: Ramsay towards the driver’s side door and Sans towards the passenger seat. Shortly after that, the car began driving again. It continued like that for the next six minutes and twenty-two seconds.

  Then the battery died on the camera and the footage abruptly ended.

  The two of them sat silently for a moment.

  “Well,” Andy eventually said, “you are right. They were tracking some type of animal out there.”

  “But what?” Sydney said. She kept turning over the video in her mind. Some detail hadn’t seemed right, but she was trying to place it. “Wait, go back to when they’re standing in front of the car.”

  Andy rewound the video to Ramsay crouching.

  “No, no,” she said. “Keep going, until Sans walks in.”

  He dragged the bar a few short spaces forward and got to where Sans began to approach his assistant.

  “There,” she said. “Pause it right there.”

  Andy did so. “What is it?”

  She didn’t answer, her eyes focusing intently on the thing sitting atop Sans’s head. She realized what it reminded her of: night vision goggles. Of course, that made sense with searching for animals in the dark. But something else seemed off. It was suggested first by
the way Sans was dressing; he looked more prepared than for an average safari.

  And that’s when she realized: The weapon he was holding wasn’t a tranquilizer at all.

  It was a hunting rifle.

  TROPHIES

  Brandon was still nowhere to be seen at dinner, so she and Andy sat beside Chang and Ramsay that evening. It was grilled salmon, prepared with Fatou’s “secret recipe” marinade, and Sydney tried not to wolf it down too quickly. The fever was getting much worse again but her appetite seemed to only be getting stronger. She hoped there was dessert.

  “I’d just like to congratulate you again on completing your first week here,” Sans said, looking between her and Andy. She saw that he was wearing the same Pathfinder watch, but now sported a blue sweatband around his other wrist. “You’ve both done excellent work.”

  “Thank you,” Andy said.

  She swallowed a bite and chimed in, “It’s been wonderful.”

  “You’ll switch positions on Monday. Hopefully Brandon will have recovered by then. As for your partner Andy, I’m still thinking of something. Perhaps Brandon can join you for a few days for tagging since he’s missed some field work.”

  “That sounds good.”

  Sans looked at her. “Sydney, how are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she lied.

  “Glad to hear it,” Sans said. “I see you’ve been eating well.”

  She looked down and realized her plate was clean. “Oh…I…”

  He smiled and put up a hand. “I’ll tell Fatou his cooking is appreciated. Can I get you anything else? It’s no inconvenience.”

  Normally, she would’ve politely declined. But she felt as if she’d barely eaten anything. “Could I have some more?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. Fatou!” Sans called into the kitchen. “Could you have someone bring Sydney another plate?”

  It was then she noticed Chang hadn’t been following their conversation. She looked deep in thought, staring at the table as she fiddled with her fork.

  A servant brought Sydney’s second plate. As she thanked him and started eating, Sans looked around the table.