Šī¸ J Rydher 2000, 2023
This is another story of mine that I wrote in 2000 and revised/updated to republish. I have just started working on a sequel. Hope you enjoy!
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"Here he is! Here he is!" Miguel's voice cried out. The search party quickly found its way to the area that Miguel was calling from. Roland Hatcher had been missing for a week. As a favor to his employer, he had gone off with two of the other men to find his employer's daughter. The two men returned to camp, but Roland Hatcher never returned. Now nearly a week after his disappearance, the search party found him lying beneath tropical plants that were commonplace in the area.
Until now, the group had looked for days with no luck at all. They had been through the very area that Roland was found at least half-a-dozen times. Oppressive heat, bugs, reptiles, and other unwelcome guests had made the search even tougher. Now on the seventh day of the search, Miguel the guide, who also had heard the legend, found the body. Miguel continued calling out to the members of the search party. His voice was frantic and his eyes roamed the countryside, fearful that he would be the Zenobee's next victim. Finally, Thomas Jennison, the British expedition leader and financial backer, reached the Miguel and the body.
"Good Lord! Rollie, Rollie, can you hear me?" Hatcher slowly opened his left eye, but could only manage to open it halfway before it shut again. He attempted to talk, but he could only utter the name Jessica, before losing consciousness. His clothes were in tatters. Bruises, scratches, and welts that appeared to have risen from his body as the result of a whip or blunt instrument, covered his body. The remainder of the search party soon reached the area.
"How is he?" asked Jennison's long time employee, Clay Wright.
"Barely alive it would seem. We need to get him out of here as quickly as possible and get him to hospital. My God Rollie, what happened to you?" Quietly, under his breath, Jennison added, "And where is my Jessica?"
Jessica Jennison was Thomas Jennison's only child, a 26 year-old free spirit that insisted on going on the trip despite her father's protestations. Jessica was both intelligent and beautiful. She had graduated from Oxford at the age of nineteen and was working as an executive in her father's company. This was no case of nepotism though. Jessica had earned everything she had achieved at her young age.
She had been considered a child prodigy from the age of four when she began reading books that college students were having trouble handling. Over the years her face and body had developed into that of a beauty queen. She stood six feet tall, with long fiery red hair. Her green eyes had a look of depth as well as mischief. She was her father's pride and joy, and she was his entire world.
Jessica's mother, Regina, had died nearly twenty years earlier, when Jessica was just a child. Thomas and his mother, Francesca, along with a number of servants had helped raise Jessica and had done an excellent job. At the moment though, Thomas Jennison was questioning his decision to let his daughter go on this trip with him. He always did have trouble saying no to her. This time his unwillingness to disappoint his daughter may have cost her the most precious thing of all, her life.
Miguel and a couple of the men loaded Hatcher onto the stretcher and placed it carefully in the boat, so as not to tip their already worn passenger into the water. Being sure not to wander too far from where Hatcher's body lay, Wright and the four remaining members of Jennison's team quickly canvassed the area. The trip had already cost Jennison three men, including his two best trackers. Hatcher was barely clinging to life, and his daughter was missing in action. Wright whistled the signal to the rest of the team to return to the boat. Nightfall would soon be setting in and this was not the place to be once that happened. As Wright stepped onto the boat, he took one last look around. It didn't take all his years of experience to tell him he was being watched.
~~~
The legend had grown over the years. At first, most people who heard the story refused to believe the legend, but as time passed and men like Thomas Jennison tried to prove their existence, people began to believe.
A race of nomadic women, descended from Amazons, was living in various areas south of the equator. The latest information was that it was somewhere off the coast of southern Africa. An island, that for the most part, was uncharted. Like many who had come before him, Thomas Jennison had learned of the legend at an early age and was dazzled at the tales he heard. Some of the stories were clearly fabricated, by men who claimed to have interacted with the tribe and lived to tell the tale. They even had scars to prove it, or so they told their willing audiences.
Thomas Jennison was now a grown man, his boyish exuberance replaced by a businessman's demeanor and untold fortunes, gained by reputable and sometimes disreputable means. Though his dark black hair was now completely white, and a beard covered his boyish dimples, Jennison had never forgotten the legends he had heard as a boy. In the spring of his sixty-third year, he had decided that he would finance, and therefore lead, an expedition to the relatively unknown island of Tandika. His goal was to find the Zenobee, the lost tribe of Amazons.
Jennison knew he needed the best trackers, the best guides, and anything ese needed to complete his conquest. To him, this was simply another merger or acquisition.
Thomas passed the legend on to his daughter Jessica, just as Thomas' father had told him and his father before him. Jessica Jennison grew up an intelligent, curious little girl that gathered up knowledge like a sponge. Unbeknownst to her father, Jessica had collected research on the subject over the years and was now as knowledgeable as anyone on the Zenobee. So it came as no surprise that she would approach her father when she learned of his quest. Jessica told Thomas of her secret research and requested that she be part of the journey.
"Are you crazy? It's no place for a woman!" shouted Thomas in an expected response.
"Excuse me? This is the new millennium, not the centennial. With all the information I have gathered over the years, how can you possibly deny me?"
"Because I'm your father and there is absolutely no way I will allow it."
"And what are you going to do to stop me?"
