Keepers of the Lost City

28 What Lurks in the Dust?

Sally loved having so many guests. She loved her husband, but most nights he was understandably exhausted, and on other nights he was just a plain old grump, which did not make the best of company. Now she had some interesting conversation due, if she could keep up with the cooking.

“Mrs. Cockran, we can really stay over at a holiday resort,” Purdue smiled. “There are some cabins down at Lake Brunner, you know.”

A light slap to his arm affirmed the friendly lady’s protest. “Don’t you dare rebuke my offer, Mr. Purdue. I insist! Of course, I cannot offer you the luxury accommodation I am sure you Brits are used to, but it is clean and a lot more personal.”

Nina was smiling at Purdue’s amusing body language, lurching over the small farm wife like an awkward teenager. “Oh, we don’t care for luxury,” he assured Sally. “If you had seen the places we have had to sleep before…”

“Aye,” Sam agreed. “We are the most unspoiled lot you will ever meet.”

“Even though you are all stupidly wealthy,” Miss Palumbo chipped in. Her tone was oddly cordial for such a snide remark. Sally looked a bit confused, having no idea who her guests were in the outside world. Nina lolled her head to one side and Louisa knew she was about to be confronted.

“Wealth is subjective, my darling,” Nina said. “What you see as wealth might be a burden of responsibility to someone else. Besides, if you feel uneasy among us stupidly rich lot, the barn looks rather accommodating.”

“How dare you!” Louisa gasped.

Nina smiled sarcastically. “What? If you want to think like a brainless peasant, I’ll treat you like one.”

“Nina,” Sam said softly, reading Nina’s hostility towards the conservationist as a clear sign of misdirected jealousy. In fact, it flattered him just a little.

“No, Sam, I could not give a shit about money,” she whispered harshly, shooting her address straight at Louisa. “I studied very hard for many years to attain my doctorate, only to get my ass kicked by sexist professors. I had faculty politics fuck me over, keeping me from tenure by some bullshit technicalities, until Purdue employed me as a freelance advising historian.” Nina’s dark eyes were on fire as she slowly approached Louisa. “The last thing I need is for a stranger, an ignorant hussy in a bush uniform, to pass judgement on me for making my own fucking way in the world.”

‘Ouch,’ Sam cringed in his mind.

“Nina,” Purdue fell into the mix, smiling uncomfortably as he gently seized the petite firecracker away from the terrified Louisa, who had now back into the living room corner. Sam was relieved to see Purdue twirl with Nina in an evasive dance, supposedly jesting to get her away from her target.

“Jesus Christ, what is her problem?” Louisa asked Sam, her eyes wide and stiff.

“She is defensive,” he shrugged nonchalantly. “It is true, though. Nina has been through hell, quite literally, since she became involved with us. You’re a woman. I’m sure you have been faced with sexist bullshit in your career.”

“Plenty,” she concurred. “Try being a big wildlife ranger amongst a bunch of macho assholes.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Nina barely got away with her life at times and the success she has amassed over the years, really should not be used to make assumptions.”

Louisa understood now, yet she dared not apologize to Nina before the historian had put out that inferno she held in her tongue. The even-tempered Aussie had heard about the Scottish temperament, but she never dreamed that it was this harsh. Throughout dinner, Sam found Nina unnaturally quiet, but he guessed that it was due to her brief scrap with Louisa, exacerbated by Mrs. Cockran placing Sam next to her.

After dinner, Sally denied all offers to help with the dishes. Instead, she served ice tea and beer where they congregated outside on the veranda for a bit of fresh night air. Under the thick coverage of the cloudy night, it was warm and pleasant, even though the weather was unusual for the time of year.

Purdue, of course, was interested in finding out as much about the area as possible, but all he could muster from the Cockrans was some history of gold mining and the three severe storms that sporadically devastated crops between the Arnold Valley and Greymouth.

“Tell me about the mine on the Harding farm, Gary,” Purdue requested.

“It’s dirty, old, and it ate my father,” Gary mumbled indifferently.

“You sound pretty sure that your father is in the mine,” the old farmer sneered. “Uncanny, isn’t it?”

Gary Harding ignored Nigel Cockran, and chose to address Purdue instead. “I have only been there a few weeks, Dave,” he recounted, “but I was there when my father scuttled into the mine’s entrance when the shit hit the fan.”

“Yes, about the shit hitting the fan, son,” old Cockran started, nursing a small coffee mug filled with beer. “You were about to tell me a bit about that this morning, remember, before your brother got up?”

Cecil leered at his brother. “Funny. He told me he could not remember much in the chaos. I found him practically catatonic inside the house.”

“It is true, mate,” Gary retorted. “I don’t remember much from that brief period of madness when Dad disappeared.” Gradually, the different conversations among the group of people ceased to tune into the intriguing account that Gary Harding was delivering. “I did not remember much, and what I do remember was not worth mentioning.”

“Why?” his brother asked abruptly.

Gary hesitated, but on realizing the attention was on him, felt compelled to tell the party around him. At least, with this many people about, his brother and the old farmer could not just dismiss his words as folly. It was hard for him to reach back into the hazy bedlam of that afternoon, but he had to bring it to light, no matter how crazy it sounded.

“Look, we needed parts from the Agritek tractor, so Dad made me help him clear the weeds and matagouri…”

“What the hell is matagouri?” Purdue frowned.

Collectively, the Hardings and Cockrans babbled that it was an indigenous thorny weed, usually rare, on the South Island.

Sam nudged Nina and whispered, “Agritek tractors. I once did a scoop on a wheat farmer who ran a drug cartel from his farm, so I learned a bit about farm machinery.”

“Fascinating, Sam,” Nina said, rolling her eyes while Gary was recounting how he had to struggle maintaining his footing on the loose black soil.

“It is just interesting,” Sam explained. “Those tractors were made in and imported from Argentina.”

Purdue and Nina took a moment to process the seemingly insignificant shard of information, but soon they snapped what Sam was drawing about. Of course, it was for Argentina being the Nazi sanctuary from where the twin ships would deploy the Inca operation and Operation Eden, respectively.

“I’m just saying. If they could import Argentinian farm equipment, they could have had other business ties between Argentina and New Zealand,” Sam remarked.

“That is a valid theory,” Purdue conceded, and with that recovered his attention on Gary Harding.

“We were up at the mouth, chopping through the brush, when I saw something move in the branches, making the stems of the weeds shake like this,” he described, gesturing wildly with his hands. “I thought it was someone squatting in the hill, you know, not wanting us to find him and I could not see him through the leaves. I figured he was leopard crawling towards Dad, so I froze, pissing Dad right off,” he snickered bitterly. “But the bushes started shaking like crazy, right, so I told Dad not to move. Being Dad, he did the opposite, charging at the bloke in the bushes without even knowing how big he was.”

“And they fought?” Cockran asked.

“Too right, they fought,” Gary affirmed. “Like two bloody wrestlers, I just saw them roll into the mouth of the mine. Just dust, man, everywhere. I heard Dad screaming, and I heard the other blokes screech like they got really hurt, right, and the dust choked me and burned my eyes, so I saw nothing else. But I swear to God, this part is true.” He waited, his chest heaving as the apprehension gripped him. Gary stared into space and whispered, “I swear to God I am not lying.”

“Yes, we gather that,” Cecil sighed. “Now, what is it you are not lying about?”

Gary’s countenance was laden with distress. “Under my hand I felt something slide, something massive, cool to the touch and scaly. My eyes were burning too much to open them properly, but I swear that it was a snake.”

“I thought that there were no snakes in New Zealand,” Nina said, perplexed.

Cecil nodded. “That is what makes my brother so adamant that we know he is dead serious, I suppose.”

“I am dead serious, mate,” his brother contested. “I know what I felt. I know what I saw.”

Playing the devil’s advocate, Sam asked, “Alright, what kind of snake do you think it was? It might explain the snake venom in the dead animals.”

Purdue’s face lit up at Sam’s suggestion. He could not agree more.

Gary shrugged. “An Anaconda or a Python.”

“Preposterous,” Cecil scoffed.

“Who the fuck are you to doubt me?” Gary growled at his brother.

“Um, I am a veterinarian,” Cecil bragged. To insult Gary even more, he blatantly laughed at him. “And I bet you a year’s worth of Lion Red that there is no such thing as an Anaconda on South Island, mate!”

From the pitch dark of the shadow cast by the trees around the back of the house, a voice of mature age spoke. “Then you had better start buying beer, mate.”

Nigel Cockran jumped up out of his chair, shotgun in hand and his eyes like saucers. “Who’s that? Who’s there? You come out or I’ll blow your bloody brains out!”

Everyone sat frozen, dead quiet and staring into the dark beyond the reach of the porch lights. They could hear the faint scuffle of feet, alarming them to seize whatever weapons they carried. After all, with the talk of poachers running amuck in the local area, they had every right to distrust the voices of strangers in the dark.

“Easy, mate, easy,” the voice urged calmly. “No trouble here. No trouble.”

From the shade stepped two Maori elders, hands up in the air in surrender. “We are here to help look for the Harding man. That is all. Put away the gun, Mr. Cockran.”

“Hope you don’t mind that we show up early,” the other elder man said, as Cockran lowered his barrel. “Quite a walk from our place, but we got here too early. Sgt. Anaru asked us to come back to join the search party.”

“You were here last time, when the thunderstorm came?” Sally asked. “The constable told me about only five men left after the rain started.”

“That’s us,” the one man said. “I’m Sully. This is Herman.”

“Well, come up and get some beer,” Farmer Cockran invited them. He went to look for more chairs, but found that all the chairs were already occupied.

“No worries,” Sully smiled. “I’ll perch. I’ll perch.” With a limber leap, he hopped up on the bannister and made himself comfortable. His friend, Herman, did the same.

“Are you blokes from the tribe at Brunner?” old Cockran asked.

“I am,” Herman said. “Sully is from Christchurch’s Samoan community, but he moved here few months back.”

“Ah, so you are Samoan?” Purdue asked.

“Nah,” Eddie Olden objected. “He is Maori, clearly. Right, Herman?”

“Correct,” Herman affirmed happily, to which Eddie introduced himself and Louisa Palumbo to identify with the wildlife claim the two native men made inadvertently. “By your response to Dr. Harding’s bet with his brother, I deduce that you insinuate that there are Anacondas in New Zealand?” Eddie inquired.

Both Herman and Sully nodded, evoking a buzz of negation from the group present, but among all of them, David Purdue was the only one who believed them out of hand.