Elektra by Yvonne Navarro & Stuart J. Zicherman & Raven Metzner & Zak Penn

Author:Yvonne Navarro & Stuart J. Zicherman & Raven Metzner & Zak Penn [Navarro, Yvonne & Zicherman, Stuart J. & Metzner, Raven & Penn, Zak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9781416513063
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PULAU KOMODO

There were people who lived on this primitive tropical island, but those who did built their crude wooden homes on stilts and pulled what little livestock they had inside at night. They farmed the rocky soil but not very successfully, and they catered to the tourists who came with the diving and biking companies, welcoming the foreign money to help support themselves in their poor economy. They left the tourists to make their way, safely or not, with the guides, but the native islanders watched their own children constantly and even the adults stayed in pairs and traveled armed with heavy walking sticks and machetes, although speed was always the best defense.

If you couldn’t outrun the dragons, you couldn’t survive.

Tattoo grinned and followed behind the guide he’d hired to lead him into the denser jungle on Pulau Komodo. The brown-skinned man, whose name was Budi, knew the trails well, and Tattoo had to stay on his toes to keep up. Budi was a local guy, older and balding, with black eyes and skin as sun-wrinkled as an old belt; he’d looked at Tattoo critically and decided he was good to go physically. Pressing a crumpled American twenty-dollar bill into Budi’s hand—enough money to support his impoverished family for at least a month— had ensured the guy would take Tattoo to see what he wanted.

It was hot and humid here, and Budi had told him in broken English that November, only a month ago, had actually been the hottest month of the year. There were plenty of dragons around, but they were slow and sluggish because of the humidity, with less of a tendency to be aggressive; this obviously made it a good time to visit and study them. Tattoo was very interested in these prehistoric animals, and while the guide could think he was a tree-hugger environmentalist or a misguided animal lover, Tattoo had his own reasons for wanting to get close to them. It all had to do with that long, blank patch of skin on the outside length of his left leg.

Picking his way up a steep, rocky slope in front of Tattoo, the guide came to the crest of it and stopped, then gestured back at his tourist. “Ora,” Budi said, pointing. “Buaja darat.” Ora was the local word for Komodo dragon, and Tattoo had heard the term often since his arrival. The other phrase meant “land crocodile,” something Budi was using only, he thought, to impress this man who he thought was nothing but an ignorant tourist. The dragons were really lizards that could grow huge, up to ten feet long and three hundred pounds, with bacteria-drenched mouths that gave infectious bites to their prey. They were fast runners and surprise attackers, cannibalistic to their own young, and the island’s visitors and guides did well to stay out of their way. It had taken a bit of doing to find this guide, who was willing to get Tattoo closer to the lizards than anyone else,