CONTENT WARNING: Gore
“They didn’t eat him,” Nthanda said quietly. Örjan’s mutilated carcass was tangled in a patch of dry reeds, shrouded in the morning mist that rose from the Okavango River at dawn. The Swedish ecologist’s skull had been crushed. His golden hair was matted and bloodied. A clouded blue eye had popped out of its socket, and a gray pulp that was once his brain lay exposed amidst shards of bone. Sethunya, Nthanda’s research assistant, took one look at this scene and vomited. She pushed past the team’s mammologist, Iyawa, and fell to her knees at the riverbank. Iyawa turned away, tears already streaming down her cheeks.
The women had all heard Örjan scream as the lions dragged him out of the camp last night. They heard his cries for help as his bones broke, heard his death gurgles as the big cats crushed his ribs, and heard his skull crack in the lioness’ jaws. Typically, when lions hunt, there’s little left behind. They hadn’t expected to find all of him, pale and crooked, on the edge of camp.
As Nthanda processed the gruesome scene in front of her, a grim realization set in. They were stranded in the maze of braided streams and channels of the Okavango. Unseen dangers lurked beneath the surface of the delta’s seasonal waters, and the mokoro would not return to their research site for another seven days. The epidemiologist sprinted back to camp, turning over bags of clothing and cases of equipment frantically searching for something that could save them: the rifle. Iyawa followed, taking a deep breath, swallowing her tears. Her voice trembled as she spoke.
“So, it is rabies.”
“It can’t be. The symptoms are all there, but rabies is fatal within one to two weeks of exposure. These lions have been behaving this way for twelve months. There’s something else going on here.” Nthanda replied without looking up as she rummaged through supplies.
“Nthanda, what are we supposed to do?” The mammologist was choking back tears again. “This is a pride of thirty lions, how-” A shriek from the river’s edge punctuated Iyawa’s panicked words.
“Sethunya.” Nthanda ran back to the water with the rifle, but her heart dropped when she saw her assistant.
“Please, Doctor,” her assistant’s final words were a whisper. Sethunya’s body had been ripped in two. Her lower extremities lay in the shallows, her torso in the mud. Her hands clutched reflexively at the twisted knot of intestines that tethered her halves together. Her umber flesh was shredded, and blood drained from her doomed form, staining the Okavango a deep shade of ruby.
There was no time to grieve. A low growl from the reeds ripped their gaze from Sethunya’s corpse. A lion, a male, the color of fallow hayfields, emerged from the foliage, fangs bared, snarling. He charged at Iyawa, trampling her under his immense weight, flattening her chest, shattering her ribcage, and squeezing the air from her lungs, cutting short a pained cry. The lion turned to face Nthanda, who now stood alone. She shook as she raised the rifle, aiming it at the beast that was padding towards her, his paws deathly silent on the soft ground, her focus wavering as he closed the distance, each breath rattling her entire body, until she saw his eyes. Blue. Familiar. Sparkling irises that could have been carved from precious celestite.
Human.
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