Savages Page 5

  “You guys head back,” Quinn said, “I’ll go with them and see if we can find anything.”

  Before Dallas could answer, a scream tore through the jungle from somewhere up ahead of them, a shriek so loud and horrific it sent several birds they hadn’t even realized were there to erupt into flight.

  Quinn parted the brush. Herm and Dallas followed her through and into a small natural clearing in the jungle. Harper had dropped to the ground and was weeping uncontrollably, her entire body shaking as Gino stood expressionless, staring at a thick and gnarled branch about three feet above the ground that protruded at a horizontal angle from the heavier brush surrounding it.

  “Oh dear God,” Quinn gasped.

  When Dallas realized it wasn’t the branch Gino was staring at, but rather what was on the ground beneath it, he saw it too. He knew it was real and right in front of him, but it simply wouldn’t compute, his mind would not accept and process it. His stomach clenched, and it suddenly felt as if the bottom of the world had given way beneath his feet, sending him plummeting down into a dark chasm.

  Harper’s cries filled the silence.

  “What the fuck?” Herm said breathlessly, pacing about awkwardly while wringing his hands. “What the fuck?”

  Dallas felt his mouth go dry, and it was then he realized it was hanging open as he stared at a large rock a few feet ahead of him, and the severed human arm draped across it.

  The left shoulder, arm and hand lay in a pool of blood and gristle, and chunks of flesh dangled from a knob of bone protruding from the shoulder, scraps of meat dried and discolored in the jungle heat.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dallas felt Quinn grab hold of him. Not to keep him upright, it turned out, but to keep herself from collapsing. Her body trembled, joining his, and they held each other close. In that impossibly surreal and terrifying moment, Harper continued to wail, Herm paced about like a caged animal and Gino stood silently staring at the carnage.

  Finally, Harper got to her feet and ran back the way they came, mumbling something unintelligible and flailing her arms around like a madwoman.

  After a moment, Herm went after her.

  Dallas forced his eyes beyond his wife’s shoulder and searched the surrounding area. “Gino,” he heard himself say, his voice distant and weak before becoming more insistent. “Goddamn it, Gino!”

  He turned to them.

  Dallas had never seen him like this. His arrogance was gone, shattered. He was in shock like they were. “What the hell’s—what—what is this, what—what happened?”

  “I don’t…” Gino blinked, shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Suddenly Dallas found himself looking at the lifeless hand, and a band on the ring finger he recognized as Andre’s. “Jesus, that’s really his fucking arm.”

  As Quinn let him go, Dallas brought a hand to his mouth, but it was too late. He spun away, doubled over and vomited, retching violently and expelling bile, as he had no food in his stomach.

  Quinn kept a hand on her husband’s back, but her attention was on Gino. “What could do that to him?” she asked.

  “I-I don’t know,” Gino stammered. “I—an animal maybe—I don’t know.”

  Hesitantly, she moved closer to the rock and looked at the arm, which was swarming with light-colored ants. Though her eyes had filled with tears, Quinn fell back on her training and wrestled her emotions into submission as best she could. She was still having trouble thinking clearly, and her body wouldn’t stop shaking, but she kept pushing for control, and slowly, gradually, it began to return to her. “What kind of an animal would do that?”

  “It’d have to be pretty big.” Gino’s face glistened with sweat. “And I don’t see how an island this small, with a limited food supply, could support a species that size, especially a carnivore. It doesn’t really add up, it…”

  “What about a shark? He could’ve been attacked before he reached shore.”

  “It’s possible, but it stands to reason it was more likely the reef.”

  “He’s right,” Quinn said. “A shark attack is possible. He could’ve been bitten, had his arm nearly taken off. Or he could’ve torn it up on the reef, made it to shore with his arm barely intact, then disoriented, in shock and lost in the dark, he ran across the sand and into the jungle. And then once he got to this point, with it already badly injured, he lost his arm.”

  Gino nodded. “Yeah, that…that could be, and it makes more sense.”

  “Where the hell…” Dallas wiped his mouth but two more waves of dry heaves throttled him before he could speak again. “Where the hell’s the rest of him?”

  “Andre!” Quinn called into the jungle before them. “Andre!”

  “Stop,” Gino said. “Quinn, stop, just…stop. Whatever happened, he would’ve lost so much blood that even if he’d somehow managed to stay conscious and was working on pure adrenaline, he would’ve been in a deep state of confusion and shock. He could’ve staggered off deeper into the jungle and collapsed somewhere nearby, but with that amount of blood loss there’s no way he could still be alive.”

  Quinn knew he was right. Not only her training backed it up, but so did common sense. She stared at him helplessly. “Yeah, you—you’re right.”

  He ran his hands through his hair and across his head, leaving them there as if fearful whatever else he was thinking might spill free otherwise. “I don’t want to be right,” Gino muttered. “Not this time. But we all know I am.”

  Look at it, Quinn told herself, summoning her training and as much courage as she could find. Calm down, focus, and make an assessment. She tried to see only a thing resting there on the rock, not a limb that had once been attached to a human being, and certainly not someone she’d known and cared about.

  “Careful,” Gino warned. “If those ants are what I think they are you don’t want them on you.”

  She looked at him questioningly. “Do they bite?”

  “I think they might be Yellow Crazies. They’re found on some South Pacific islands. They don’t bite. They spray acid.”

  “Of course they do,” she said, wiping sweat from her brow with a heavy sigh.

  “Just don’t touch it.”

  Quinn had no intention of touching the limb, but that bit of news only served to make their nightmare even more horrific and surreal. Covering her nose against the smell, she leaned in for a closer look. It was impossible to know for sure, but a closer inspection revealed that despite the grisly look of it, and the bevy of ants all over it, the arm did not appear to be badly torn, as one would expect from the bite or ripping motion of a predator. “It’s hard to tell,” she said, “but it looks relatively clean. Almost like it was cut.”

  “In a way the reef could’ve?” Dallas asked.

  “I don’t know. It definitely doesn’t look like a bite.”

  “Jesus,” Dallas said through a sigh. “Are you saying somebody cut his arm off?”

  “Of course not, I…”

  “What then?”

  Quinn moved away and looked out across the jungle, as if for answers. “I don’t know, all right? I’m not a coroner. I’m just saying that to me it doesn’t look like any kind of bite I’ve ever seen. I’m thinking it had to be the reef. It had to be.”

  “I can see how it could happen if he hit just right and got snagged on it,” Dallas said. “But at the same time, would it be that clean?”

  “If it’s not that then—I mean, Dal—come on.”

  Gino finally dropped his hands but he still had no idea what to do with them. “Okay, let’s just get one thing straight here. The odds that there’s anyone else on this island are practically nonexistent.”

  “Why?” Dallas asked. “We’re here, why couldn’t someone else be?”

  “Because we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “It’s a million-to-one that we wound up here, much less anyone else. There aren’t any native peoples who’d be
out this far on some uncharted little useless stretch of land like this.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Common sense, you’ve heard of that, right?”

  “Honey,” Quinn said, “I didn’t say for sure it was cut, I said it looked like it might have been. The reef being responsible is a much more realistic—”

  “Then where’s the rest of him?” Dallas said. “We need to find him.”

  Gino motioned to the blood covering the nearby leaves and ground, and the wide swaths of it around the base of the rock. “We need to keep looking.”

  Quinn nodded and hugged herself. “He can’t be far.”

  “But we’re not sure what did this to him,” Dallas said.

  “It had to be the reef,” Quinn answered. “How could there be anyone else here? Gino’s right, the odds of us ending up here are astronomical. We could very well be the only people to ever set foot here, and even if we aren’t, it’s likely we’re the first in a very long time.”

  Dallas thought a moment, trying desperately to quiet the storm in his head. Quinn was likely right, but something deep within him wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know.”

  Suddenly Gino seemed to recover himself and his strength, as if some epiphany had managed to rescue him from the brink just in time. “I don’t know for sure if there’s someone else on this island or not,” he said, his voice stronger, more even and controlled now. “Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. The odds tell me it’s damn near impossible. So then it has to be that he mangled his arm on the reef and lost it once he came ashore, just like Quinn said. It’s either that or someone did this to him, which means we’re not alone. If it’s neither of those things, then that leaves us.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Quinn said. “None of us did this.”

  “Exactly my point,” he said. “The only one I’d even suspect might be Herm.”

  “Herm?” Dallas laughed, but it was one of panic and disbelief, not humor. “Are you insane? As if he even could do something like this, much less to Andre.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Besides, why would Herm do such a thing? He’s not capable.”

  “We’re all capable. Besides, we’re under an abnormal amount of stress, and we’re struggling with thirst and food issues, it can alter a person’s—”

  “I don’t care how thirsty he is. He’s a history teacher, not Jason Voorhees.”

  “There was a period of time, during that first night, before we found each other. Damn near anything could’ve happened. An altercation, maybe, or some sort of disagreement, I—”

  “Come on, Gino,” Quinn said, “this is hardly the time to play devil’s advocate.”

  “My point is that Andre’s arm was lost somehow, and there’s only a certain number of ways it could’ve happened. We can’t know for sure at this point, but unless you want to entertain one of these other scenarios, then we go with the reef explanation as the most likely, and we move the fuck on and focus on finding him.”

  “Yeah,” Dallas said. “Okay.”

  Gino’s posture seemed to soften a bit, and he turned to Quinn.

  She gave a slow nod.

  Dallas put a hand on Gino’s shoulder. It was hard as granite. He knew if Gino let his emotions go—allowing himself something other than anger—he’d be better able to process what was happening, but that wasn’t going to happen because that might also make him vulnerable, and in his mind, weak. A man like Gino didn’t do vulnerable and weak. He knew one way, and that was strength, right or wrong. Dallas had always known how to reach him, but it wasn’t foolproof, and he could only hope the usual approach would work. “We need you. I know this is fucked up, and we’re all scared and confused here, all right? I’m not making sense either, I’m sorry, I—I don’t understand any of this. I know you loved Andre. We all did. But we need you to hold it together, man. If you lose it, we’re all fucked. Understand?”

  “Listen to him,” Quinn said. “We can’t make it without you.”

  Gino looked down at the ground a moment and closed his eyes, his sculpted chest slowly rising and falling. When he opened his eyes he gave both Dallas and Quinn reassuring nods. “You guys go back to camp,” he said. “Secure the water, the fire and what little else we have. Then get to work on opening some more coconuts, but not too many. They’re a natural laxative. Last thing any of us needs is dysentery.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m gonna look for him.”

  “Not alone you’re not,” Dallas said.

  “You don’t have shoes,” he reminded him. “You can’t handle this terrain without ripping your feet to shreds. Then you’ll be useless to yourself and us. Go back to camp and get things together there. I’ll handle this.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Quinn said.

  “Don’t go too far,” Dallas warned. “And be back before dark. I don’t want to have to come looking for you guys.”

  “Worry about what I told you to do,” Gino said, face set like stone. “I got this.”

  “What about…” Dallas motioned to the arm without looking at it. “Do we just leave it there?”

  “At this point, we don’t have much choice,” Quinn said softly.

  “We need to find his body,” Gino said. “Get back to camp, look after the others.”

  Dallas and Quinn exchanged troubled glances and then kissed quickly. Without another word, she and Gino pushed on, vanishing into the brush and leaving Dallas alone in the clearing.

  In a haze of confusion and both physical and emotional exhaustion, Dallas left the jungle and walked back across the beach, past a bevy of rotted coconuts scattered about. Less than a mile beyond the water’s edge, on the far side of the coral reef that ran nearly the entire length of the island, the open sea surged with each incoming wave, slapping the reef and flying up into the air in great misting sprays. The sun, still brilliant in the blue, clear, endless sky, hung lower than it had earlier, slowly sinking into the horizon like the dispassionate deity it was.

  And as Dallas headed back toward the others, the jungle watched, silent, still and predatory.

  Along with whatever else was hidden within it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They followed the blood.

  Swaths of it on the ground, smears all around them, and after perhaps fifty feet or so, they came across Andre’s other sneaker. It too was stained with blood, and while touching it was the last thing Quinn wanted to do, when Gino told her to grab it as now they had a pair Dallas could wear, she snatched it up, ignoring the still sticky blood along the sides and soaked into the laces.

  She’d seen her share of blood and gore in the past, but it was never something with which she’d become nonchalant or comfortable. Choking back bile, she pressed on, clutching the shoe and pressing it tight against the side of her chest. With each new discovery of blood, Quinn forced visions of Andre—disoriented and bleeding to death as he stumbled through the jungle—from her mind, knowing that eventually this would end with his body collapsed and long dead. There would be no miracles, not even any goodbyes. Theirs was not a mission of rescue, but recovery.

  Gino stopped, crouched down and looked more closely at a splotch of dark crimson near the base of a large stalk. He looked around but remained crouched. “It’s no different than tracking any other wounded animal,” he said flatly. “Body’s close.”

  “We’ve gone pretty far.”

  “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. We’re not lost.”

  Quinn nodded, but despite Gino’s expertise and assurances, she’d never felt more lost. Surrounded by a thick maze of stalks, plant life and brilliantly colorful flowers, giant spider webs that seemed too beautifully intricate and enormous to be real, and a strangely fragrant though oppressive heat, they may as well have been on another planet. Nothing seemed quite right here. She’d seen trees and plant life her entire life, but none like this. Even the flowers were large, bizarre, Technicolor and exaggerated, as if born from
the dreams of a child. What she’d have called exotic in the past had since taken on an almost Wonderland feel. Through the looking glass, she thought. And in that moment, Quinn felt farther from reality, home and everything she’d known than ever before. Why not a vast expanse of space rather than an ocean? Why not some alien world instead of a deadly paradise of Earthly origin? It seemed just as real as anything else in this place where nothing and everything mattered, where life and death held each other so close that one could scarcely be determined from the other.

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” Gino said with a shake of his head. He held a hand up, alerting Quinn to remain where she was, as he ventured a bit further, eyes trained on the ground. When he returned, still studying the jungle floor, his expression was even more perplexed. “Just doesn’t…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been following the blood trail because it’s really hard to see footprints in this kind of terrain, too much underfoot, and the ground’s firmer here than on the beach,” he explained. “But if you know what to look for you can make out when there’s been impact with a significant amount of weight. It disrupts the ground enough to make an impression.”

  Quinn hugged herself. “Okay, so what are you seeing then?”

  “He fell,” he said, pointing. “See the indentation in the ground? These two here, those are his knees. He dropped to his knees and then fell forward. Here. See?”

  “I think so.” She pictured Andre lying there. Dying, hopeless and alone in the dark and wondering where she and the others were, and why no one had come to help him. Or had he thought himself the only survivor? What had gone through his mind in those last moments while he lay dying?

  “The depth of those knee marks tells me he landed hard,” Gino said. “Much harder than he would’ve by just sinking to his knees. He didn’t throw himself down that hard for no reason. Nobody does that from a stationary position anyway. That means he had a good deal of momentum behind him when his knees hit.”