We are here to hunt the beasts the natives call Coqeli. We have traveled six thousand miles by plane, car, boat and helicopter. For two days, we have been trekking through the thick trees. Our skin is raw from the constant streams of sweat oozing out of it. Half our blood is probably flying through this tropical nightmare in the mosquitoes.
“Damn!” says Willy. “It’s hotter than your wife out here.”
“Keep your voice down, you idiot,” says Dango. “We don’t want to scare them off.”
Hundreds of Coqeli live in this isolated jungle valley. We can hear them calling to each other. They sound like sad ghosts, searching for a way out of this world. None of us has seen a wild one before, but we know what they look like: ten feet tall when they stand on their hind legs, weighing somewhere between two and four tons, sharp teeth three inches long, claws that are foot-long knives, golden horns that look like lightning, fur as black as oil, and, of course, their dull red eyes. Many people say they resemble demons. Maybe that’s true. The Coqeli we saw at the zoo looked somewhat like a demon, but one that had recently had its heartbroken.
“Do you guys hear that?” says Jackson, who was bitten this morning by something fast and ugly and has been talking to things not there for several hours.
“Hear what?” says Willy. “The Coqeli calls?”
“Grandmas,” says Jackson. “Are there grandmas in this jungle?”
“He’s losing his shit,” says Dango. “Maybe we should use him as bait. What do you think, Slick?”
Dango looks at me. I am thinking about love songs.
“What’s wrong with you?” he says. “You’ve been quiet all morning.”
Before I have to answer, a thousand-colored bird flies by inches from my head. It soars upwards and lands in a tree. Dango and Willy raise their guns at it.
“It’s just a stupid bird,” Dango says and starts to laugh. Willy throws a bullet at it.
We push on. Dango’s machete hacks a snake hanging from a tree. Willy throws another bullet at what looks like a squirrel that’s as big as a medium-sized dog. All around us are exotic animals, many of which possess horns and pelts and feathers worth fortunes. We care only for the Coqeli. They are unique: whatever they eat, they turn into love, which they store in a large balloon-like sack inside their abdomens.
An insect the size of a baseball bounces off Willy’s face hard enough for us to hear it.
“God damn it!” he says. “Do you think those guys on the news had to put up with this shit?” He’s talking about the hunters who came down here three months ago. They killed several Coqeli and pioneered a technique for extracting the love.
Dango shakes his head and spits.
“Who cares? They’re living like kings, now. That’s what matters.”
Willy nods and spits.
“Fuck yeah!”
Jackson convulses.
“Who turned on the air conditioning?” he says. His teeth are chattering.
Dango looks at me again. I look away and reach behind me. For the third time in an hour, I feel the pack on my back, which contains the items necessary to extract love from a freshly killed Coqeli:
a plastic tube, eight feet in length, three inches in diameter
an artificial heart to pump and contain the love
a small motor to power the heart
Before we came here, we spent weeks in Willy’s garage training ourselves to use these things. We practiced the extraction process on deer we hunted. We strung up the carcasses and took turns working with the equipment. I remember the smell, the bright decomposing notes. I remember the taste of all the beers. At the time, my head was filled with thoughts of glory.
“We’re going to drain those suckers dry,” I remember saying over and over.
I’m pretty sure I brought those thoughts of glory with me into the hot stink of this jungle, but I can’t seem to find them anymore.
“What now?” says Dango.
Good question, I think. Good question.
*
The first foreigner to see a Coqeli was the anthropologist who stumbled upon this hidden valley, Rowley Jones. He lived amongst the Coqelquin, the valley’s human natives, for two years. When he returned home, a journalist interviewed him about his experience and published an article that piqued the interest of several scientists. They eventually got their hands on a live specimen, and, after several months of experiments, concluded incorrectly that the love was unextractable.
Then they left the creature at the zoo to die.
Here in their native habitat, the Coqeli are treated quite differently. The Coqelquin worship them as gods. Jones talks about this in the article, making reference to two Coqelquin rituals. The first takes place in what we would call October. All the Coqelquin women over the age of nine head into the jungle for two weeks. They search for the Coqeli born since the previous October and name them.
The second ritual also takes place once a year, but in what we would call April. All the Coqelquin men over the age of thirteen head into the jungle for two weeks to hunt the Coqeli. The Coqelquin consider it their duty to cull the weaker ones so their gods will always be strong.
Jones witnessed both these rituals twice. What he found to be most interesting was that the women all returned from the jungle, whereas the men suffered losses.
“The implication here is obvious,” he says, “The disposition of their gods is affected by the Coqelquin’s intentions.”
This is also obvious: the Coqeli will one day be an endangered species. Even as we hunt them, we know it. But there is currently no law forbidding us. We are taking advantage of a loophole in our consciences–us and the at least three hundred other hunters who are currently spread out through the valley.
“I think I found something,” says Willy. He is stooped over, reaching towards the ground. “This is Coqeli shit. And it’s warm. We must be getting close.”
We gather around him. In front of us is a tiny pile of yellow dust. That’s the entirety of what the Coqeli has left behind. The beasts have an astounding ability to digest things. In the laboratory, the scientists fed the captured creature a variety of substances in one hundred pound amounts: fish, chicken, beef, radishes, bicycles, razor blades, radioactive waste, diamonds, moldy books. According to analysis, the Coqeli digested it all with equal proficiency, converting 99.3% of the mass into love.
I crouch down next to Willy. The yellow dust in front of me is the remaining .7% of something.
I wonder what it’s made of.
Dango doesn’t care. He throws an elbow at the air. He kicks his right foot at a tree.
“Where are these things?” he says. “How can we not have seen one by now? There has to be tons of them out there, howling and howling and howling. Where the fuck are you fuckers?”
“Any ideas, Slick?” Willy says. He looks at me.
I’m still thinking about the dust.
“Don’t bother,” says Dango. “He ain’t gonna answer.”
Jackson pushes his way through the rest of us. He bends over and picks up some of the powder. He inhales it through one of his nostrils.
“Tell me again what you’re going to do with your share,” he says, his teeth still chattering.
“I’m going to get laid,” says Willy. “No. Check that. I’m going to get superlaid.”
“I’m going to make people beg,” says Dango. “People are going to come to me and plead for some of the love I have and I am going to tell them to beg.”
They all look at me, wanting to know my answer.
What is this yellow dust the remains of? I think. What did this Coqeli eat?
*
A few months after the original article came out, Rowley Jones authored an article of his own. In it, he speaks of a second tribe that once lived in this valley. They called themselves the U’Coqel. Unlike the Coqelquin, the U’Coqel didn’t worship the Coqeli, and they didn’t kill them, but they did have a ritual of their own. Every three months, the men and women of the tribe would march into the jungle and capture a live specimen, which they would bring back to the village and keep in a cage. Then, over the course of a day, several of the tribespeople would voluntarily enter the cage and be eaten.
Jones talks about how he had to ask the Coqelquin to repeat that part over and over, not because he couldn’t believe it, but because he couldn’t understand what they were telling him.
“They weren’t saying ‘duqwai,’ which is their word for ‘eat’’’ he recounts, “They were saying ‘coqen,’ a verb that doesn’t exist in our language. ‘To be transmuted into love.’ That’s the best I can translate it. That’s what they were saying to me. I had to make the connection myself.”
The story of the U’Coqel ritual doesn’t end there. The U’Coqel had discovered that the Coqeli’s hunger lacks a shut-off switch. If enough food is present, a Coqeli will eat until the love-filled balloon inside it ruptures and the Coqeli explodes. This is what the U’Coqel were after. They would feed themselves to the captured Coqeli until it burst.
“The Coqelquin described the explosion to me,” Jones says. “A bright pink light accompanied by a pure, perfect sound. They said it produced in the people near it a short-lived euphoria that can’t be described. I asked how they knew that. Their eighty-six-year-old chief told me that he’d witnessed such a ritual when he was boy, and that even though he’d never seen such an explosion again, he still dreamt about it with perfect clarity.”
I believe we experienced this phenomenon last night. Around sunset, we heard twenty minutes of horrible screaming. It was followed five hours later by a bright flash of light that came from the dark jungle and rolled over us, accompanied by what sounded like the single beat of a heart submerged in water.
Despite the implications, it made us happy. Stupidly happy. For close to an hour, the jungle heat was a womb. Every mosquito bite felt like a kiss.
“Those sweet dead bastards,” said Jackson.
“I need to call my girlfriend,” said Willy.
“I want love to say my name forever,” said Dango. He repeated that one phrase over and over.
I was quiet, listening to the calls of the Coqeli, which had been transformed by the explosion. I don’t recall what they sounded like at the time, but I remember thinking I was listening to love songs.
I feel a tap on my shoulder. I jump slightly. It’s Jackson.
“Who are you?” he asks me.
I swallow some saliva poorly and start to cough. Suddenly, the Coqeli calls seem louder.
“Did the calls just get louder?” says Willy. “Hey. Wait! Shit. What the hell is he doing?”
Jackson is wandering away from us. He is already twenty feet from where he tapped me on the shoulder. He is saying something that’s difficult to hear over the ambient noise of the wilds, but it sounds like, Where are you, my loves?
“Someone grab him,” says Dango. “He has all our food.”
I hang my gun on my shoulder and dart after our friend.
“Totally useless,” I hear Willy saying behind me. “When the time comes, I don’t think he should get a cut.”
I reach Jackson and step in front of him. Jackson changes direction and continues walking. I get in front of him a second time, and once again he does the same. I get in front of him for a third time. This time, he stops and looks at me. He leans in to whisper something in my ear. I think he’s going to ask who I am again, but he doesn’t. His teeth stop chattering and he hums a musical fragment. For a moment, I am paralyzed, but when Jackson tries to walk away again, I grab him by the jacket and pull him towards the others. He doesn’t put up a fight, but continues to look off into the jungle behind him.
“Can we at least tie him to a tree?” says Dango, when we are reunited. I let go of Jackson’s jacket. Willy looks to me for direction. I look at Jackson. He is staring at me, his once again chattering teeth exposed in a smile. I turn away. The heart in my pack shifts and digs ruthlessly into my spine.
*
We are here to hunt the beasts the natives call Coqeli, I tell myself.
Two hours deeper into the jungle. A thousand more birds and snakes deeper into the jungle. A million beads of sweat deeper into the jungle.
“I think the calls are still getting louder,” says Willy. He’s holding tightly to Jackson, who has run away twice more. I did not go after him either time. I left that to the others.
“They are,” says Dango. “We must be getting closer. I hope you fuckers are as ready for this as I am. I bet I can bag and tag in five or less.”
This is something the first hunters learned: it is essential to act fast. Without a living beast to host it, the love inside a Coqeli has a half-life of a quarter-hour. After two hours, you’re left with nothing but a foul-smelling, nearly inedible corpse.
“Dead Coqeli,” says Jones, “give off a smell like rotting vomit and the meat has a razor-like quality that cuts up the tongue and gums. The Coqelquin are the only people who eat them, and they do that only during the culling ritual, believing as they do that they’re consuming the flesh of their fallen gods.”
Back in Willy’s garage, we put an emphasis on speed. Jackson excelled at it, the same Jackson who now stumbles next to Willy, mumbling phrases to himself at low volumes. He could hook the equipment to the deer carcasses in half the time it took the rest of us. He used to rub it in our faces and brag about how he was going to bring back twice as much love as anyone else.
He is suddenly chuckling.
“We’re going to drain those suckers dry,” he says. It’s still a mumble, but I’m sure I heard that part correctly, just as I am sure that were I to look at him now, he would look up and smile at me.
I move to a position on our flank, a few yards further away from him and Willy.
“Let’s stop for a bit and eat something,” says Dango, after we’ve trekked another ten minutes or so.
Willy orders Jackson to sit on the jungle floor as if our friend is a dog. Jackson obeys and we all sit in a circle around him, me at his back. Dango reaches into Jackson’s pack and gets out jerky and granola bars, which he passes out.
I eat with my eyes down. My teeth violently gnash and grind the jerky in my mouth.
“Hey,” I hear someone say.
Dango throws a piece of granola bar at me.
“I’m talking to you,” he says. “You need to get your shit together, Slick. It’s like you don’t remember what we’re here for.” “Yeah,” says Willy. “You’re the one who talked us into this. ‘Let’s go kill those fuckers and get what’s ours.’ Remember that?”
I did say that. At a bar around the corner from Willy’s house. Before we knew how hot the jungle is. Or what a Coqeli sounds like. Or how it feels to be bathed in projectile love.
We continue to eat. While Jackson mumbles and Dango and Willy talk about all the love they plan to harness, gunshots ring out in the distance. This has been happening more and more frequently. They tear through the Coqeli calls and punctuate the presence of men in the valley. Then the Coqeli calls stop entirely. It only lasts a few seconds, but in that stillness, my senses merge with the tissue of the jungle and I swear I can feel a growing hostility. At the same time, I also feel a longing. I don’t understand it, but I miss the calls. I miss the unintelligible ramblings of the creatures we are hunting.
I do not tell Dango and Willy about either of these things.
*
“This pack is sooooooooooo heavy,” says Jackson. He’s been complaining about it for half an hour.
“I’m going to gag him,” says Dango. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”
“No,” says Willy. “I’m going to gag him.”
“Do you remember those tiny brown men?” says Jackson. He must be talking about the Coqelquin we saw yesterday. They stood amongst the trees like statues, silent, serious, unafraid. “They hated us. I bet they’re praying to their gods for our destruction.”
“Forget what I said,” says Dango. “I’m going to shoot him.”
“Wait!” says Willy. “Do you guys feel that? My heart is beating so hard I think it might break my ribs.”
“Mine too,” says Dango.
We all know what this means.
“The Coqeli,” says Jones, “secrete a pheromone that makes the heart tremendous. The Coqelquin actually harvest it from the animals’ skins and distil it into a spirit they drink at marriage and burial ceremonies. I had the opportunity to try it. It was very uncomfortable. I’d compare the experience to what I imagine a heart attack would be like. When I told this to the Coqelquin, they laughed at me. I asked them why they were laughing. One of them tapped me on the chest a few times. ‘Not enough room,’ he said.”
Dango swings around to the other side of me.
“Look alert,” he says.
To my left, I hear something. It is a small sound, like a bird pecking at a twig.
Nonetheless, we all raise our guns simultaneously, everyone except Jackson. He takes off his pack, puts it on the ground and sits on it.
“What are you doing, man?” says Dango.
Jackson starts to make wailing sounds. They last for two to four seconds and each is slightly different from the one before, like he’s making adjustments.
“Is he trying to make Coqeli calls?” says Willy. “He’s out of his friggin’ mind!”
More small noises come from somewhere near us. I scan left and right. I see nothing but jungle. I feel like I am nothing but heartbeat.
I look at Jackson. He continues to make the wailing sounds.
“Someone shut him up,” says Dango.
“Did you hear that?” says Willy.
Willy fires his gun in a random direction. Dango, spooked by this, begins to fire his own. This causes a chain reaction that spreads throughout the valley. Random bursts of distant gunfire are audible in all directions.
My own gun remains cool for now. I can’t take my eyes off Jackson. Willy and Dango stop firing. Both of them start laughing. The gunshots in the distance continue.
“You are one dumb son of bitch,” Dango says to Willy. “Look what you started.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Willy punch Dango in the arm. He starts to say something, but stops suddenly. Both of them turn and look at our friend.
Jackson has perfected the sound.
There is a brief moment for us to admire our buddy’s uncanny accuracy, a brief moment for us to see the strange look on his face.
The Coqeli emerge from the jungle thickness, a Charter of them, six strong: six large, ferocious looking monsters. One of them is less than three feet from Jackson. Its fur is standing upright. Its teeth are sharp enough to split atoms. Its eyes are not just red, they are glowing.
“Jackson,” I say as softly as I can, “get up.”
He looks at me and smiles.
“It’s cool,” he says. “It’s perfect.”
He reaches out to pet the Coqeli. The beast doesn’t move. It waits for his hand and lets him place it on its forehead. For a moment, it does seem perfect. Then the Coqeli swipes Jackson with its claw and knocks his smiling head into the jungle mess.
Fear takes over and we scatter. Out of the corner of my eye, I see three Coqeli disappear after Willy. I don’t see what happens to Dango, but I hear him firing his gun wildly.
I charge madly through the trees, praying, more than navigating, my way around the branches and trunks and vines. On my back, I can feel the artificial heart I am carrying banging into my body. Inside my chest, my own heart bangs against my body from the other side. I hear the Coqeli as it barrels into trees and knocks them over. I can imagine its red glowing eyes latched to my moving form and I am certain they are full of rage.
I push myself harder. Every time I hear a tree fall, I find a little more speed. The air around me seems to be growing thicker and warmer. I slip a few times on the moist jungle floor, but refuse to go down. My lungs start to burn. My legs grow heavy. I know that I’m reaching the ends of my natural stamina. Any moment, I will be fueled by desperation alone.
Suddenly, the noise of the pursuit vanishes behind me. It takes me a few seconds to understand this. When I do, I try to keep running, but curiosity gets the best of me. I look quickly over my shoulder and see the beast has stopped for some reason. Despite my better judgment, I stop too.
I turn around. The creature is twenty yards away, staring at me, strafing from side to side along some invisible boundary. I have seen this in other animals. The Coqeli must be fiercely territorial. I have crossed into another Charter’s territory, so it can’t follow me.
And it doesn’t know to run away.
I touch my pack again. All the supplies are there. I raise my gun and place my index finger around the trigger. I can feel the trigger mechanism resist against it. That resistance is the only thing that stands between me and enough love to last me a lifetime.
But once again, I do not fire.
Jackson’s words in my head. It’s cool. It’s perfect.
With my gun still raised, I walk toward the Coqeli. It feels like someone is striking a large gong inside my chest. I reach a place fifteen feet away from it. From there, I can smell and feel its breath, an inferno of rotting corpses. I look at the beast’s teeth. The Coqeli begins to wail again. I step forward a few more feet. Our eyes meet. The glowing red orbs flare. They don’t just fill my eyes with light, they pull something out of them. It’s like looking into the eyes of someone I love more than myself. The Coqeli calls transform. I hear them again as I heard them last night, as Jackson hummed them to me.
I hear the love songs.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I know that I should pull the trigger or walk away, but that somewhere no longer matters much. I drop the gun and put my pack on the ground. I close my eyes and listen as the Coqeli sings to me. I can hear my friends somewhere in the valley, singing with it. I can hear the song in the belly of every mosquito we have met along the way.
Coqen, I think.
Without even needing to will it, I take my first step toward the snapping jaw sounds. The jungle around me feels like home.
Phillip Jason's stories have been published in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, The Blue Earth Review, and Sou’wester.
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