Deadly Import

Waking in total darkness is a disorientation that cannot be put into words. In the first moments, the barrier of light and eyelids and perception that stands between sleeping and waking does not exist. Thus, Mike Calafut lay still for a good while, blinking in that void which so neatly mirrored his brain’s pounding and oppressive emptiness.

There was smell, a slow but growing awareness leaking into his foggy, rebooting brain which convinced him of his consciousness. Roadkill. Marty’s cheap grill. The time the chest freezer in the garage broke down and fifty pounds of meat sat for weeks without being noticed.

Deciding he was in fact awake and thus trying to move, he discovered three things in rapid succession: First, his hands were tied and completely numb. Second, just on his right was the source of the foul smell. It brushed his forehead as he rolled over, a hot feeling like the thin all-weather carpet on his grandparents’ porch. Third, he was lying on metal up against a wire mesh wall of considerable strength.

He paused a moment after coming up into a crouch, his senses swimming and a spike of deep and abiding pain throbbing in his temples. He was moving. He felt now the distinctive muffled metal-on-metal banging and squeaking rumble of a train. He cracked a smile and spoke in a hoarse voice: “So it’s not the headache.“

He closed his eyes, but the concentrating effect was somewhat lessened as there was no discernible difference from the act. What was he doing here? Where was here? His brain fed him a vaguely reddish nothing that swam distractingly around leaving scattered fragments that evaporated when he reached to put them together.

“First things first, then.” He brought his bound hands up to his face as he stood through another wave of nausea that left his breath coming in short, sharp pulls. “A zip tie. Just a big zip tie. Problem one, as good as done.” With a small bit of fiddling to position the lock, Mike put his leaden hands out in front of him and brought them back with savage force against his breastbone. The plastic snapped instantly, and pins and needles flooded into his hands. He felt something lightweight fall from his nerveless grip.

Instead of scrounging for what was obviously not a light, he slapped at his pockets. Empty, empty, empty. No wallet, no keys. They had been turned out, which meant that whoever had thrown him into this cage—

“Hoooooooo…” He remembered the smell now. Meat. He was in this cage with a large apex predator of some kind, apparently sleeping. His hearing told him little over the false noise of his pulse and the overwhelming dizziness.

He resolved to be quieter, rubbing his hands until they felt less like rubbery gloves. As he did so, his hands brushed his breast pocket and felt something: Two pens and his trusty pen-light and…

“Oooh, and my pack of cinnamon gum too? Don’t mind if I do.” He took a piece and pocketed the wrapper as he clicked on the light. He almost yelled, “You missed a pocket, boys!” but was checked by the sight of the king of the beasts, lying on its side a few feet in front of him. “Problem 2, asleep for now. Problem 3…” He turned to investigate his surroundings.

He was in a shipping container. The lion’s cage occupied the whole rearmost section, with a small strip of unused space left over. In the front were four smaller cages on one side with each containing an enormous eagle, hooded and silent despite looking in his direction whenever he spoke. The door at the end of the container was a standard shipping container doorway, split down the center and basically impossible to open from the inside.

Opposite the birds were a large stack of crates and boxes on forklift pallets, with a terrarium on top fastened down with bungee cords. Inside was a water dish for whatever inhabited the tank, and Mike had never wanted anything more in his life.

Swallowing thickly, he shone his light on the door. A heavy-duty padlock kept him inside, but he could reach it through the admittedly tight bars of the feeding panel. “Lucky me.” Sweeping the rest of the cage, he noticed the lion had a blue-feathered dart in its tawny flank, which was definitely rising and falling. Inspecting himself, a pair of orange-feathered darts quite low in his abdomen.

“Wonder where we got these little souvenirs, Leo. Any ideas?” The lion remained asleep as the man pulled out the sources of his headache. The tubes inside were empty, and the needles were just shy of an inch long. While he was inspecting them he saw a third bit of orange near his feet on the cage floor, which was otherwise bare.

His attempt to stoop down to retrieve it turned into a swift and sudden crouch and then a full-on collapse back against the cage wall. His vision swam, and he wasn’t sure if it was the drugs or his body’s natural rush of memory and energy and horror. Mike wasn’t sure if he was about to vomit or pass out, feeling punch-drunk and watery down to his very soul.

In his hand was an orange hair bow, the kind a girl would wear but not a woman. A little girl… His little girl. What was her name? His headache was suddenly right behind his eyes, which started streaming uncontrollably. He felt oddly detached, as if waiting for the tears and sobs and nausea and incredible pain to subside. In this strange haze he could see himself rocking himself and patting himself on the back, holding him in his own lap with the orange bow in his hair.

But it wasn’t him. He hadn’t been picked on and abandoned by the girls at the middle school party back home. He knew her but her face escaped his recall and he suddenly bit his lip as he realized he was howling in agony, sobbing and weeping and nursing this half-formed memory of something precious in this orange hair bow.

Someone. His daughter. He was here because of her. No, her grandmother. His mother-in-law? Again there were fragmentary images, but no clear face. It became his own before morphing through misshapen and mismatched lumpy-featured visages to settle again on his own ugly face.

After a timeless cry, the sobs calmed to the stillness of a puddle in a supermarket parking lot. He wiped his face on his sleeve and looked at the lion. His fear too had vanished. “Well, Leo, I’d love to stay but I think I’d better get back to… anywhere else. Colorado comes to mind, maybe I lived there. Do you know where that is?”

The lion suddenly huffed heavily and for a brief moment Mike grabbed back at the cage wall with all the terror of a caveman seeing fire for the first time. The headache subsided while he clamped his fingers into the wire’s comforting strength, and his hearing once more cleared.

The train was slowing, and the lion’s huff had actually been a gentle braking sound. A moment of clarity was enough. Mike looked at the padlock, then at the darts he had dropped.

Filled with renewed inspiration, he squirmed his meaty paws through the opening and got to work with the thin needles of the darts. First he lifted and twisted to keep the padlock from moving or sliding, then he plunged one needle deep while the other wedged in the outer barrel of the lock to act as a tension wrench as he held the penlight in his mouth.

Every movement made him grimace as the slightest bit of over-eager pressure could bend the needles and make his job infinitely harder. It’s not like he did this every day. Shockingly, after only three gentle rakes the padlock leapt open. Once released, the lock was easy to slip around and drop to the ground, and then the longer process of lifting the bar and torquing it open remained. Once free, the very next breath saw him reattaching the lock.

Spent, he once again melted to the floor and ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair. “You know, Leo? This safari gets zero stars.” When his legs stopped shaking, he clambered heavily up onto a sturdy crate and inspected the water dish.

It was nearly full of clear, sparkling, tantalizing liquid, and in the far corner of the cage sat a small but wicked-looking viper as the sole guardian of the treasure. Black eyes stared intensely at him. The lid would be easy enough to get off, once the bungie cords were loosened, but how to protect his hand?

Without really thinking, Mike had the lid off and coiled one of the bungee cords around his four fingers as armor. He said a quick prayer and began softly crooning and babbling at the snake, who he named Jeremiah. It seemed right.

“Ok, Jerry. I want you to just stay still in your corner and don’t mind me one bit. I’ll just be in and out, not trying to bother you just, uh, inspecting your setup here for the quality assurance department. This visit is being recorded for training purposes. You don’t mind if I call you Jerry, do you Mister viper? That’s ok, right? Everything’s going to be fine…”

Just as he worked his courage up to send his curled hand down into the cage, the train car came to a stop with a sudden jolt. Mike gasped and shivered and hugged himself briefly. “Ok buddy. That wasn’t me. That was them. Not me. Don’t bite me. We can still be friends, right?”

He chawed feverishly on the almost-depleted cinnamon gum for courage. Swiftly, before he could come up with a better argument to convince the stone-cold killer beside him not to end him, he dipped into the cage and brought out the bowl. In a few gulps, it was gone.

“Delicious. Five stars. Best restaurant in the country, and so exclusive. My God, Jeremiah, you have simply got to open a chain or sell franchises or something.” The lid went back on with a pop of plastic and Mike drummed his thick fingers on the top.

The shipping container lurched suddenly beneath him, swaying ever so slightly but definitely rising up in the air. “A crane? Wonder where in wonderland we’re going, J-bird. Figure these folks want to do the same thing with you as me, or am I special?”

Leaning his head back a moment, he felt the water seeping into his very soul like a soothing balm. Dehydration. He had been outside for hours before they’d darted him. Who? Not sure. It had been hours more in here with the lion. The drugs in his system certainly needed water to be processed out too.

He clicked off the light and sat for a moment in silence. Names and faces floated before him in the dark, none attached to any meaning that was clear to his addled mind. He hooked his fingers on the far side of the lid and pulled it up against him like a companion.

“Jeremiah my friend, I have a feeling we’re in Africa but I don’t think I’m from around here. Any chance you have a phone?” The lidless eyes of the serpent, peaked with the intimidating high crests, regarded him coldly and curiously. “Yeah, I mean, all we can do now is wait to be let out, right?” The tongue flicked out and in, out and in, and the eyes never wavered even as the shipping container scratchingly came to rest in its new location.

Minutes passed by, stretching into a dark infinity. Muffled scraping and clunking and what might’ve been distant voices rose and then fell silent again. “Looks like it isn’t our stop. Thanks for being such a bro about the water, at any rate.”

Mike may have fallen asleep, and he may have dreamed about a girl named Kate. A girl with a temper that made her beautiful just like her mom, who loved cheerleading and soccer. A girl who loved orange and bred loathsome, smelly hamsters in the garage next to his workbench. He may have remembered something, but when the churning thrum beneath him startled him awake it was all gone again and in its place was a terrible emptiness and loss.

Unlike the familiar and even comforting repetition of the train’s clickety-clack, this new noise was a constant basso purr that tickled somewhere deep in your ear. It made Mike think of dim corridors and red lights and alarms, heavy machinery in ill-swept rooms of smooth concrete.

The lion stirred, making a terrifyingly loud yawn as it stretched stiffly. On went the penlight to double-check the padlock, and its large yellow eyes found his. It licked its lips and sniffed at him.

“Don’t be like that, Leo. I’ve got enough exes to deal with. We both know it never could’ve lasted. Just let it go.” It looked confused, dipping its head and enormous mane and yawning repeatedly between looks at the man in front of it. Mike watched it try to walk, finding the stilted initial steps more fascinating than any TV show he’d ever flipped on. The pen light was his remote, which he treated for a moment like a child first taking charge of the family’s entertainment for an evening. “On Leo. Off Leo. On Leo. Off-“

The lion growled and Mike stopped dead, slowly turning the pen light back to Jeremiah. “Uh, sorry.”

After what could’ve been ten minutes or an hour, Mike started searching through the crates for more water. Medical tubing. Well-worn leather and canvas tie-downs. Veterinary tools. Small bags full of leaves and rocks and bundles of herbs. One crate in the corner was full of foam-packed rhino horns, which fascinated Mike. He’d never get another chance to see something like that up close.

He found an empty jug to relieve himself in, but no drinking water. The most interesting things were several white sacks labeled in French, and inside them appeared to be dog food.

“Tempting, but without water I’m afraid I’d just increase my misery. Hey Jerry, how long have we been in here, exactly?” The snake didn’t move, just staring straight at him. “Strong and silent type, go figure. Well, at least you’re polite. He yelled at me, the dirty mammal.” Mike gestured Leo’s way.

That turned out to be the wrong move. The lion bared its teeth and snarled good and proper, slamming the cage wall with its skillet-sized paw. The eagles startled, shrieking and keening and flapping their huge wings in a deafening uproar.

The thunder of the big cat’s wrath sent Mike clambering up with Jeremiah like a monkey up a tree, but after a moment he jumped back down and yelled at the lion aggressively: “Ooh, oh yeah, big scary lion. Stop being a baby and screaming at me. We’re all in this together, big guy, so can it!”

This did not work to calm the lion down.

After a few minutes, Mike grabbed a handful of the kibble and threw it through the wider gaps near the lock. Leo paused his rampage to sniff at the offering, and then began licking up the little pieces scattered about his cage.

When the hubbub died down, Mike heard voices outside and the telltale jingle of keys followed, then the harsh scrape of the always-reluctant locking bars getting twisted and jerked to open the storage container.

Thinking quickly, he picked up Jeremiah’s cage just as the door opened to the blinding halogens of the enclosed cargo bay. He threw the snake-laden glass straight right into the face of a very surprised man in a white uniform, where it shattered into a million diamonds. The man yelped and half leaped, half fell backwards out of the shipping container as Mike bounded free with a war-whoop.

Two other African sailors were there, momentarily stunned by the sudden violence. From the expressions of abject terror on their faces, Mike was the last thing they expected to come bounding out of the metal box. One peeled away to a nearby bulkhead for the fire axe, while the other was torn between squaring up with the wild American and leaning down to help his friend on the floor who was clearly screaming, “Snake! Snake!” in his own tongue. Jeremiah’s head was buried in the unfortunate man’s bicep, pumping out his deadly venom.

Taking advantage of the indecision, Mike came on strong. With a shuffle-step straight at the man, he sent a jab in like a lightning bolt. Back rocked the man’s head, his earrings flashing in the bright bay lamps.

Something about the earrings drove Mike into a fury. A confused tangle of memory and betrayal and pure spite sent his fists flying, his hindbrain erasing any doubts about whether these might be friends. His right hook landed on the man’s jaw and his feet danced after the staggering prey. A left straight to the nose with a brief crunching sensation and in came the right again like a cannonball. The man crashed senseless to the deck.

Sucking in a breath, Mike looked for the third kidnapper. The sailor came on with the axe raised high and a yell of his own as he vaulted his companion who was convulsing and screaming incoherently, overcome by the poison of the deadly viper.

Down whistled the shining edge! Mike spun away laterally in a smooth evasion, but stepped wrong with his right foot and killed his momentum, leaving him an easy target for the next one. Panicking and breathing hard, he had a flash of memory of someone coming at him with a baseball bat years ago. He launched himself bodily at the axe-wielding kidnapper, desperate to get inside the arc of the heavy axe head.

The handle of the weapon smashed his breath away as it cracked into his ribs. His left hand fought for control of the weapon while he rocketed one, two, three, four powerful punches into the man’s face. The man was made of sturdy stuff, though, lowering his head and spinning Mike to the ground.

The takedown blasted what little air he had left out of him as the axeman crashed down on top of him. It was every amateur boxer’s worst nightmare: To be grappling a powerful opponent on the ground with life on the line. No matter the training and fitness, boxing is a striking art made of motion and footwork and balance. Flopping and twisting on your back never comes into a boxing match.

The sailor not only stayed atop him, his left hand caught his throat as well. Mike had to cease his escape attempts just to keep breathing, his thumb working against the iron grip of the sailor.

Twisting and wrenching, every moment made the axe handle slip another centimeter, another inch out of his tenuous grip. He was almost out of time, his sweaty palms betraying his valiant efforts. His only reward was the stream of foreign curses coming from under his opponent’s breath.

With a final torque, his captor freed the weapon and raised it high in the same smooth motion. Mike bucked, but his legs were too weak to escape.

The blow did not fall. Instead, with a shriek and a panicked scramble back, the man fell backwards, clutching at his calf. Their struggling had brought them near the container entrance, and Jeremiah had fastened his fangs into the man’s calf.

Mike could feel the man’s terrible pain through the tangle of their limbs, and with a shove he slipped back and away. The axe came with him as the sailor doubled over with both hands on the snakebite, howling in agony. Within moments he too began convulsing, wheezing and growing steadily quieter even as Mike sucked in breath after breath of much-needed oxygen.

A ring of keys on the belt of the man with the diamond earrings caught his eye, and Mike sat heavily to relieve him of them. He looked over to where Jeremiah slithered, free of his latest victim, looking around at the strange new world he was freed into.

“Jeremiah! You fight better than I do, and without even a drink of water!” He fished around in his pocket to toss the half-empty pack of gum at his helper. “Here, have the whole rest of the pack. You earned it, you dirty merc.” The snake’s tail disappeared back into the storage container in short order.

Looking around, Mike noticed that despite the size of the ship’s interior bay there were only two other shipping containers in it. From one of these came an irregular banging, suspiciously like a number of hands slamming into the metal side.

With a heavy sigh, he rose with axe and keyring in hand to investigate with a sharp sense of righteous anger in his eyes. “I wonder who else these people were exporting, don’t you Leo?”

The lion snarled hungrily from its cage, and the eagles squawked angrily as Mike began testing each unlabeled key on the substantial ring against the extremely generic lock on the shipping container. Eventually, it popped open and with a groan of metal he eased it open.

Directly inside the door was a jail cell wall and door, also locked, and a crowd of frightened women blinking and crowding forward. Their voices were overwhelming, cries of help understandable across all barriers of culture. Mike sank to one knee again, surrendering to the pain as he clutched his head. He set down the axe and vaguely waved his hand at the women for silence.

One voice remained, in English: “Dad? Dad? Is it you?” His swimming eyes saw a blurry, familiar frame pushing through the mass of women. Her face refused to come into clear focus.

“I… I remember you I think.”

“You got shot! I thought you were dead! These are some bad, bad guys. You’ve got to get us out of here. We’ve got to go. Let me try to tell them who you are. Three of them are deaf but they don’t use ASL over here so I’m not sure what they’re getting…” He heard her thick emotion drain into a clear, firm thinking prattle as she began rapid flurries of crooked fingers and waving hands. It was familiar and felt good to see, steadying.

He rose and fumbled with the keyring again, mumbling awkwardly.

“Yeah. We’ve got somewhere else to be, don’t we?”