Apocalyptic pirates 5, p.24
Apocalyptic Pirates 5, page 24
The jungle wasn’t as quiet as I had expected it to be. A bird trilled out a musical call, another answered it, and my heart gave a little jump as I saw something bright fluttering from tree to tree, but settled when I saw it was a toucan. It bobbed its long, colorful beak and watched me with a curious, beady eye.
There were more birds, and I hoped that this was a sign that there weren’t too many dragons close by. They hopped and flapped between the trees, and I spotted a trio of red and white parrots taking flight. Their piercing squawks rang through the air, and I surprised myself by smiling at the sight. It was such a welcome change to hear a cry that wasn’t an omen of danger.
I tracked the parrots’ path across the trees. And then I halted as I spotted something in the sky in the distance.
Shannon touched my arm in a silent question.
I showed her the phone screen and zoomed in to try and get a better look at it. It was a huge cloud of birds that were completely blocking out the gaps between the trees, and when I listened carefully and filtered out the sounds of the forest around me, I could hear a medley of excited squawks and cheeps coming from up ahead.
I hit stop on the camera and turned around as the soldiers caught up.
“What is it?” Sergeant Rodriguez asked in an urgent tone.
“There’s a cloud of birds up ahead.” I pointed. “It might be nothing, but it’s worth checking out.”
“I agree.” He gave a brisk, firm nod. “We’ll go together and see what it is.”
I slipped my phone back into my pocket for the time being and swung my gun around into my arms so I had its reassuring weight pressed into my shoulder.
We advanced slowly down the road.
As we got closer, the sounds of the birds became even louder, and there was another noise mixed in with the bird calls that I couldn’t place at first. Then a fly buzzed past my ear, and then another and another, and I recognized the sound as the humming of insects.
“Can you smell that?” Dia wrinkled her nose.
“Yep.” I swallowed hard as I caught the stench in the air.
“Something’s died here.” The Sergeant’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Those birds are vultures.”
We advanced further up the track, and the buzzing of flies became even louder and more pronounced. The insects were soon so thick that we had to wave them away from our faces as we walked, and Letty suddenly broke out in an enormous coughing fit that seemed to reverberate all around the trees.
“I think I swallowed one,” she wheezed as tears streamed down her face.
“Oh, my god, ew, ew, ew,” Ally squealed.
“That’s so disgusting,” Dia squeaked.
“Alright, don’t rub it in,” Letty complained as she scrubbed at her face with her sleeve.
“Shhh,” I commanded. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us up there. Letty, are you okay?”
The Southern woman’s face was still creased in disgust, and her eyes were streaming tears, but she sniffed and swiped at her nose before nodding.
Within a few more minutes of walking, we turned a bend in the track and saw it.
There was a huge dragon carcass sprawled across the road.
It was just as big as the huge fucker that we’d seen earlier. Its body rose up in front of us like a grotesque flesh-and-muscle mountain, and its neck and tail were so thick I didn’t think the Sergeant and I could have spanned them with our arms linked.
But this corpse had been brutally invaded.
There was a ragged row of bullet holes running down its neck and spine, but there was more than that. There was a jagged, uneven slice across its throat where the jugular vein had been sliced open, and although there were splashes of blood on the ground, it wasn’t as bloody as I would have expected– until I realized that the dragon’s killers had probably cut its throat to collect the blood after they’d taken it down.
There were patches of raw, open flesh on its body too where its scales had been scraped away, and its enormous feet ended in bloody stumps where its toes had been sawn off to collect its claws. The dragon’s head was lying at a crooked angle with one glassy yellow eye staring blindly up at the sky. Its jaws hung slackly open, and its black gums showed rows of empty sockets where its teeth had been pulled out. Its tongue had been cut off, and a black nub of raw meat at the back of its throat was all that was left behind. Its chest and throat were stained with a red-streaked foam that was drying to a yellowing curd that provided a feast for the flies and insects that were feeding on the carcass.
A crowd of red-faced vultures were perched on the beast’s enormous shoulder, and they hunched their black shoulders defensively as we got closer to the body, but they were too excited at their bounty to fly away. One of them dug its beak into a bare patch of skin and tore away a ragged red strip of meat that it swallowed in a series of gulping jerks.
“Oh, my god,” Shannon whispered.
Ally pressed her hand against her mouth, and Letty and Dia’s faces were pale.
Even Sergeant Rodriguez seemed shaken, and all of the soldiers looked a little green around the gills.
“Who the hell would do something like this?” one of them asked.
“I think we know who,” the Sergeant replied in a hard voice. “Scales, teeth, claws. These are all becoming valuable commodities.”
I glanced at him briefly. I hadn’t been too sure exactly how much the Sergeant knew about the mission and exactly what the Coast Guard were up to, but from his words and the way he uttered them so freely in front of the rest of the troops implied that this was no secret.
“Body parts like these are going for thousands of dollars,” I said to the soldier who’d spoken. “People will do anything to get their hands on what they think is a miracle cure.”
“It’s not, though, is it?” The soldier’s voice was almost pleading, and he stared at the fallen dragon with a peculiar look on his face that was a mixture of sadness and anger. “It’s not a miracle cure. All those videos… they were exaggerating. They were doctored.”
“Well… no.” I hesitated as I wasn’t sure how much I should tell him, but Dia had no qualms about filling him in.
“Look,” she said, and she shoved her arm under the soldier’s nose. “I was wounded in a dragon fight. My arm got sliced open by a baby. Then I got some dragon blood on me, and it healed practically overnight.”
The soldier stared at Dia’s smooth forearm and then back at the sprawling desecrated corpse in front of us. The confusion on his face was clear to read, and I felt sorry for him because I recognized those conflicted emotions of suddenly having to come to terms with realizing that destroying the enemy was no longer the black-and-white issue that it had been.
“It’s fucked up,” I said. “Before, we could just kill the dragons without thinking too much about it at all. They were the invaders, they were a threat, we had to protect ourselves. But now…”
“Now, killing the dragons means that we’re potentially robbing someone else of a life-saving cure,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “It’s a hard thing to get one’s head around. The enemy is no longer the enemy but our savior.”
“A savior that still wants to rip our heads off and eat us alive,” the soldier said with a bleak expression on his face.
We were all silent for a moment, and I wondered if the others were also thinking about Ramirez and the soldiers who’d been killed.
Then the Sergeant seemed to shake himself and bring things back to business.
“We can’t waste time,” he said, and he waved to the Jeeps behind us to go off the track and drive around the corpse.
The soldiers jumped off the road and walked around, but I lingered behind for a moment with the women.
“Are you guys okay?” I asked in a low voice.
“Yeah.” Shannon raised her eyebrows. “We’ve seen dead dragons before, Drew.”
“I know, but… this feels different.” I looked around at them with concern. “I just want to check in and make sure you’re all hanging in okay.”
“Thank you.” Ally smiled and patted my arm. “That’s sweet of you, Drew. I’m okay.”
“Me, too,” Letty said.
“Yeah.” Dia nodded, and then added, “This is still fucking intense, though. Like, seeing how enormous these things can get. And now this one with all its parts taken out. I don’t know, it’s…”
“It feels dirty,” Letty said with a little shudder.
“Yeah.” Dia shrugged. “I know they’re dragons, and I know we’ve killed hundreds of these things by now. But this is kinda disgusting.”
“I know what you mean.” I turned around to look up at the carcass looming over us.
There was a black cloud of flies buzzing around the dragon’s head, and they briefly dissipated as a bird that looked a bit like a falcon but with a striking bright orange face landed on the dragon’s snout. It shot a glance at the vultures nearby, and then in one quick, stabbing motion, it dug its hooked beak into the dragon’s glassy eye.
“Nature, red in tooth and claw,” Letty whispered.
“It’s not just that.” Dia shook her head. “It’s the waste of it. It’s so arrogant to kill a creature, take the parts of it that you need, and then just leave the rest of it to rot in the sun.”
“At least the predators here will help clean it up,” Ally said.
“Yeah, and then what happens when there are more dangerous creatures in the area?” I shook my head. “Dia’s right. It’s so arrogant. They’re killing the dragons but without any thought at all about the possible consequences to the people who actually live here. The Coast Guard aren’t going to step in and protect the people who now have to live in a place full of roaming big cats and crocodiles that wouldn’t ordinarily be seen here. They should have cleaned this up way better if the balance of this area meant anything to them…”
We were silent for a moment, and then with a sigh, I pulled my phone out of my pocket again. I walked the width of the road to take in as much of the dragon’s corpse as I could, and then I stepped off the road and walked around to get a full picture of it.
The dragon had been lying on its side with its back toward us, and as I stepped back onto the road, I saw that a jagged line had been cut down its front. I moved in closer with the camera, and when I’d waved away the ever-present flies, I saw that the belly had been slit open, and the internal organs removed.
It was a sickening sight, and I swallowed hard and clicked off the camera.
The vultures bobbed their ugly, red, wrinkled heads and watched as I stepped away from the body. One of them spread its wings and let out a low, guttural hiss.
I took the hint and turned back to the road.
We joined the rest of the team and walked soberly on into the forest. The soldiers might have been aware of the rumors about the dragons, but this seemed to be the first time they’d seen the evidence of it so up close before, and they were talking quietly and urgently among themselves.
Dia was listening to their conversation, and the same soldier from before looked around at her and asked her something in Spanish.
Dia held out her arm again to be examined, and the soldiers all shook their heads in disbelief.
“Were you worried when you applied the blood?” one of the soldiers asked.
I assumed that he had switched back to English so that we could all understand him, and Dia also answered him in English.
“I guess I didn’t really think about it,” she answered. “In the moment, I just thought it would be cool to find out what would happen.”
“Cool?” Sergeant Rodriguez echoed.
“That’s Dia for you, Sergeant,” Shannon said with a grin at the Latina woman. “Act first, think about the consequences later.”
“Well, it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?” Dia stuck out her tongue.
“We didn’t know at that point that the dragon blood could heal,” Ally mused. “We only knew that something was up because Dia’s blood got on the deck of the yacht and mixed with the dragon blood that was there as well.”
“It started fizzing and bubbling,” Letty explained. “So Dia decided to stick her hand in it.”
“You’re making it sound dumb.” Dia rolled her eyes.
“Oh, I’m sorry if we’re misrepresenting your ability to make sound and well-thought-out decisions.” Shannon made air quotes with her fingers.
“That was very brave of you,” Sergeant Rodriguez said to Dia with a remarkable show of diplomacy.
“Exactly.” Dia shot Shannon a triumphant look. “I was very brave, thank you, Sergeant.”
I stifled a snort at the look on Shannon’s face.
“I don’t know if I would have thought to try it for myself,” the Sergeant added. “But then, I’m not sure if I would try it now.”
“You wouldn’t use dragon medicine to heal yourself?” Ally asked in surprise.
“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” she persisted. “Have you seen the videos of it in action?”
“Yes.” The Sergeant lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I didn’t want to believe them at first. Now I can admit that the dragons clearly have some useful properties. But I just don’t know if I would use them to save my life.”
“What about the life of someone you loved?” Dia asked with a gleam in her eye that showed how much she loved playing devil’s advocate.
“It would be their decision,” the Sergeant replied.
“What if someone you loved was gravely injured and couldn’t consent to the treatment?” Shannon prodded.
“I, uh,” the Sergeant stuttered.
“I might be a hothead, but Shannon’s a lawyer,” Dia told him in a stage whisper. “And we all know that that’s far worse.”
“It’s an interesting ethical question,” Shannon protested. “And one that I imagine is going to get asked a lot in the days to come.”
“I don’t know what I would do in that case,” the Sergeant said with a trapped look on his face. “I can only hope that I’ll never be in that position.”
“Give the man a break, guys,” I said with a chuckle. “It’s not enough that we’re walking into danger, but you’ve got to torture us with philosophy questions, too?”
“Hey, we’re just curious,” Dia said in defense.
“Yeah, Drew,” Shannon added. “Don’t tell me that you haven’t thought about these questions.”
“Yeah, of course I have,” I acknowledged. “But I don’t have any good answers for them yet.”
“I agree with Sergeant Rodriguez,” one of the soldiers announced. “I would never accept dragon medicine.”
“I would,” another one said. “Not for me, though. My mother has cancer. I’d do anything to see her get well.”
“My kid sister was in a biking accident a few years back and injured her spine,” another one chimed in. “She can walk, but she has to use a cane, and she’s in constant pain every single day. I’d try dragon medicine for her.”
“My brother has chronic fatigue syndrome,” another soldier said. “I know he’d accept any kind of cure if he could get well.”
“It’s a complicated situation,” Sergeant Rodriguez admitted. “I think you’re right, Drew. There aren’t any good answers here.”
“Maybe it’ll be one of those things without any universal solution.” I shrugged. “We’ll have to work on a case-by-case basis.”
“I hate those,” Letty grumbled. “I like knowing where I am with things.”
“You want universal truths when there are dragons rampaging across the planet?” Shannon raised her eyebrows. “Sorry, babe, I think those days are over.”
“I guess so.” Letty sighed. “Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, though.”
“Have you seen this video?” One of the soldiers stopped and pulled out his phone. He pressed a few buttons and then held it out at arm’s length so all of us could see the screen, and we gathered around to watch as he hit play on the video.
I was expecting another gory video of someone eating a dragon steak, but instead the video showed a young woman sitting in front of a desk. There was a sheet pinned up behind her as a makeshift backdrop, and I wondered if she was filming out of her bedroom.
She began speaking in Spanish, and the soldier looked around apologetically as he realized that not all of us would be able to understand.
“Dia?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ll translate,” she answered.
The woman on screen was gesturing excitedly. A graph flashed up on screen, but without any context, it was difficult to guess at what statistics it was displaying.
Dia’s eyebrows shot up, and the soldier looked around at her and nodded in agreement at whatever was being said in the video.
Then it ended, and Dia blew out her breath.
“Wow,” she said.
“Si.” The soldier nodded. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“Come on, Dia,” Letty urged. “Don’t leave us hanging.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Dia blinked as she collected her thoughts. “This woman says her cousin works for the Ecuadorian government. They know about the dragons’ magic healing blood, and they’ve been making plans to distribute the blood to everybody through their healthcare system. For free. They’re not going to charge anybody for it.”
“Whoa.” I whistled.
“Ecuador already has free medical care for its residents,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. “They’ve struggled a lot with outbreaks of tuberculosis and malaria in the past, so as a country they’ve worked hard to try and improve their healthcare system.”
“The woman in the video said they’ve been experimenting with using dragon parts in the treatment of diseases like dengue fever and malaria,” Dia explained. “She said it could be a gamechanger for healthcare in poor and remote rural areas where those diseases are really widespread.”
“Damn.” Letty shook her head. “It’s crazy when a country that gets in trouble for its human rights violations is taking better care of its citizens than the United States.”
