Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“Oh Jesus,” groans Elliot. “What happened? What the fuck happened?”

Johnny’s voice booms out: “Get back. Everyone get back .”

I turn to see Johnny pushing into our circle. We are all here now—Vivian and Sylvia, Elliot and Richard, the Matsunagas. Only one person is missing, but not really, because here is his rib and a clump of Clarence’s hair. The smell of death is in the air, the smell of fear and fresh meat and Africa.

Johnny crouches down over the bones and for a moment does not speak. No one does. Even the birds are quiet, rattled by this human disturbance, and all I hear is the grass rustling in the wind and the faint rush of the river.

“Did any of you see anything last night? Hear anything?” Johnny asks. He looks up, and I notice that his shirt is unbuttoned, his face unshaven. His eyes lock on mine. All I can do is shake my head.

“Anyone?” Johnny scans our faces.

“I slept like a rock,” says Elliot. “I didn’t hear—”

“We didn’t, either,” says Richard. Answering, in his usual annoying way, for both of us.

“Who found him?”

Vivian’s answer comes out barely a whisper. “We did. Sylvia and I. We both had to use the toilet. It was already getting light, and we thought it would be safe to come out. Clarence usually has the fire started by now, and …” She stops, looking sick that she has said his name. Clarence .

Johnny rises to his feet. I am standing closest to him, and I take in every detail, from his sleep-fluffed hair to the thickly knotted scar on his abdomen, a scar I’m seeing for the first time. He has no interest in us now, because we can’t tell him anything. Instead his attention is focused on the ground, on the scattered remnants of the kill. He glances first toward the camp perimeter, where the wire is strung. “The bells didn’t ring,” he says. “I would have heard it. Clarence would have heard it.”

“So it—whatever it was—didn’t come into camp?” Richard says.

Johnny ignores him. He begins to pace an ever-expanding circle, impatiently pushing aside anyone who stands in his path. There is no bare earth, only grass, and no footprints or animal tracks to offer any clues. “He took over watch at two A.M., and I went straight to sleep. The fire’s almost dead, so no wood’s been added for hours. Why would he leave it? Why would he step out of the perimeter?” He glances around. “And where’s the rifle?”

“The rifle is there,” says Mr. Matsunaga, and he points toward the ring of stones where the campfire has now gone out. “I saw it, lying on the ground.”

“He just left it there?” says Richard. “He walks away from the fire and wanders into the dark without his gun? Why would Clarence do that?”

“He wouldn’t” is Johnny’s quietly chilling answer. He is circling again, scanning the grass. Finding scraps of cloth, a shoe, but little else. He moves farther away, toward the river. Suddenly he drops to his knees, and over the grass I can just see the top of his blond head. His stillness makes us all uneasy. No one is eager to find out what he’s now staring at; we have already seen more than enough. But his silence calls to me with a gravitational force that pulls me toward him.

He looks up at me. “Hyenas.”

“How do you know they did it?”

He points to grayish clumps on the ground. “That’s spotted hyena scat. You see the animal hair, the bits of bone mixed in?”

“Oh God. It’s not his, is it?”

“No, this scat is a few days old. But we know hyenas are here.” He points to a tattered piece of bloody fabric. “And they found him.”

“But I thought hyenas were only scavengers.”

“I can’t prove they took him down. But I think it’s clear they fed on him.”

“There’s so little of him left,” I murmur, looking at the fragments of cloth. “It’s as if he just … disappeared.”

“Scavengers waste nothing, leave nothing behind. They probably dragged the rest of him to their den. I don’t understand why Clarence died without making a sound. Why I didn’t hear the kill.” Johnny stays crouched over those gray lumps of scat, but his eyes are scanning the area, seeing things that I’m not even aware of. His stillness unnerves me; he is like no other man I’ve met, so in tune with his environment that he seems a part of it, as rooted to this land as the trees and the gently waving grasses. He is not at all like Richard, whose eternal dissatisfaction with life keeps him searching the Internet for a better flat, a better holiday spot, maybe even a better girlfriend. Richard doesn’t know what he wants or where he belongs, the way Johnny does. Johnny, whose prolonged silence makes me want to rush into the gap with some inane comment, as if it is my duty to keep up the conversation. But the discomfort is solely my own, not Johnny’s.

He says, quietly: “We need to gather up everything we can find.”

“You mean … Clarence?”

“For his family. They’ll want it for the funeral. Something tangible, something for them to mourn over.”

I look down in horror at the bloody scrap of clothing. I don’t want to touch it; I certainly don’t want to pick up those scattered bits of bone and hair. But I nod and say, “I’ll help you. We can use one of the burlap sacks in the truck.”

He rises and looks at me. “You’re not like the others.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t even want to be here, do you? In the bush.”

I hug myself. “No. This was Richard’s idea of a holiday.”

“And your idea of a holiday?”

“Hot showers. Flush toilets, maybe a massage. But here I am, always the good sport.”

“You are a good sport, Millie. You know that, don’t you?” He looks into the distance and says, so softly that I almost miss it: “Better than he deserves.”

I wonder if he intended for me to hear that. Or maybe he’s been in the bush so long that he regularly talks aloud to himself out here, because no one is usually around to hear him.

I try to read his face, but he bends down to pick up something. When he rises again, he has it in his hand.

A bone.

“YOU ALL UNDERSTAND, THIS expedition is at an end,” says Johnny. “I need everyone to pitch in so we can break camp by noon and be on our way.”

“On our way where?” says Richard. “The plane isn’t due back at the airstrip for another week.”

Johnny has gathered us around the cold campfire, to tell us what happens next. I look at the other members of our safari, tourists who signed up for a wildlife adventure and got more than they bargained for. A real kill, a dead man. Not exactly the jolly thrills you see on television nature programs. Instead there is a sad burlap sack containing pitifully few bones and shreds of clothing and torn pieces of scalp, all the mortal remains we could find of our tracker Clarence. The rest of him, Johnny says, is lost forever. This is how it is in the bush, where every creature that’s born will ultimately be eaten, digested, and recycled into scat, into soil, into grass. Grazed upon and reborn as yet another animal. It seems beautiful in principle, but when you come face-to-face with the hard reality, that bag of Clarence’s bones, you understand that the circle of life is also a circle of death. We are here to eat and be eaten, and we are nothing but meat. Eight of us left now, meat on the bone, surrounded by carnivores.

“If we drive back to the landing strip now,” says Richard, “we’ll just have to sit there and wait days for the plane. How is that better than continuing the trip as planned?”

“I’m not taking you any deeper into the bush,” says Johnny.

“What about using the radio?” Vivian asks. “You could call the pilot to pick us up early.”