Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  The tall guard was looking out the window at the tall foreign woman. “Maybe Sanderson sent her himself,” he said.

  “Why would he send someone to spy on his own logging camp?” Marcel asked.

  “Because maybe he does know something about the rub’ewa, and sent her to find out more. If anyone else in the company knows about it, you can be sure they’ll want a piece.”

  Yes, just like you two turds, Marcel thought.

  The guards had muscled in on the operation after watching Marcel leave the camp one night, not long after Marcel himself had been recruited by the old man. Another bout of rain had left the forest muddy, and they’d followed the tracks of his pickup truck the next morning, then discovered the footpath and the sheds. Too bad they hadn’t opened one of the cages.

  Marcel and the old man had agreed that they would need more hands, but these thugs weren’t what they’d had in mind.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter who knows about it now,” Marcel said, “because it’s over. The camp is closing, and we can’t operate from anywhere else. A couple more nights and we’re finished with it for good.”

  And then someone answered his call. He’d been holding the phone to his ear for so long that he had forgotten dialing.

  A clerk listened to Marcel for a moment, then transferred the call to Wilson, the regional operations manager, the only person in the office who had any experience working with people at the actual logging sites. As far as Marcel could tell, Wilson’s main job was making sure no one at the camps was pilfering from the company. He came out every month or so with a couple of polyglot assistants and poked around.

  “No, she sure as hell didn’t get permission to go there,” Wilson shouted in English, “and nobody’s even heard from Sanderson in two weeks.”

  Marcel understood very little of that, so he passed the phone to the big barrel-shaped guard, who could carry on a conversation in English. The guard listened and said, “Yes, sir…. Yes. Send a goddamn message.... Tonight. Right away, sir. Yes, of course I can think of ways to do that. Thank you, sir.”

  Marcel watched the foreign woman through the trailer window, thinking she’d timed this pretty well. If no one had been working late at Sanderson’s office today, Marcel would not have been able to check on her story until the following morning, possibly giving her time to do whatever she had come for. This woman was clever.

  He wondered how the guards would interpret the order to “send a message.” A few months earlier, Wilson had ordered these same two guards to beat up three workers suspected of stealing gasoline, and they had complied with bloody relish.

  He got a little glum at the thought of something bad happening to the woman. Her face wasn’t strikingly pretty, but it was nice. He liked the way her light brown curls brushed her cheeks. And she was tall, the same height as him. He liked that, too. Up close, he’d seen that she was probably in her early thirties, but she moved with the energy of someone much younger.

  While Marcel watched her, the woman reached into a pants pocket, unrolled a floppy white sunhat and put it on, then headed toward the men returning from the forest. One of the men was young and wiry, wearing no shirt and carrying an old shotgun. Over his shoulder were slung the carcasses of two red colobus monkeys and a tiny brown duiker, all tied together at the hind feet.

  The woman caught up with the hunter and started talking, striding along next to him with what Marcel took to be feigned clumsiness. With one hand, she held down the sunhat as though the wind were blowing. Putting on an act every second of the way.

  A minute later she was sitting with the hunter on a log between two lean-tos, and half a dozen children were gathering to stare.

  Marcel stood up and told the guards, “I’m going to tell her she can’t stay, and that you two are going to escort her out in my pickup in case her vehicle gets stuck in the mud. Stay with her for about twenty minutes to make sure she’s definitely leaving, and then turn around.”

  The big round guard protested. “But Mr. Wilson said….”

  “Just follow her out and come back fast. That will be enough of….” He paused, trying to remember the English phrase he’d heard. “Enough of a goddamned message. We have other work to do. It will be dark soon.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Five minutes after Amy left the camp, Marcel’s pickup roared past her, kicking up moist red clumps of earth. She glanced at the two guards as they went by, but neither looked her way. The tall man at the wheel seemed more interested in flooring the truck than in following her.

  It was a relief to be out of the camp, moving through the forest. The ribbon of visible sky above the logging road had turned a feathery pink, and the sun sinking behind her turned beads of yesterday’s rain into orange diamonds in the greenery. She wished she could strip down and let the balmy air blow past her whole cramped and sweaty body, but settled for just sliding off her boots and unbuttoning the loose shirt that covered her black tank top.

  It was also a relief to know that the day hadn’t been a complete waste of time. She’d brought along a small camera with great resolution and a sensitive microphone, rather than relying on her cell phone’s recording quality, and it had paid off. The hunter she met had confirmed Robert’s story about someone in the company management buying the meat from the foreman. Her hidden mike had picked it all up, and she’d gotten a few good photos of the hunter lugging his kill. With the crowd of children watching, it had been hard for Amy to be discreet about passing him the two twenty-euro notes, but she’d managed.

  The hunter had also repeated another strange story she’d heard from Robert that afternoon, about armed men coming to look for an American named Tobin some days earlier, all of them dressed in biohazard suits and body armor, sticking guns in everybody’s faces. Apparently the guy had been in the camp a week or so before Robert, driving a big mobile lab with a silly name. Tobin had asked everybody he met whether anyone was vomiting up black slime. People kept on saying no, but Tobin had made sure to ask every last person in the camp.

  If Robert had explained that the reason for the camp’s impending closure was some kind of infectious disease, Amy reflected, she might have been more inclined to heed his warning about going there. But then, she really hadn’t given him time to give her a more complete picture, pretending that reception was bad, and finally turning off her phone.

  After another fifteen minutes, the road began the long climb east, toward the only vehicle-friendly mountain pass out of the basin. Half a mile into that ascent, she saw the foreman’s pickup stopped in the middle of the road. The barrel-shaped guard was leaning against the side of the covered truck bed. The road was so wide that Amy could easily pass the pickup on either side, and she began a shallow swerve to the right.

  She slowed down enough to say goodbye and to thank the men for accompanying her on the road. The big guard seemed not to understand, which seemed struck Amy as odd because she was sure she’d heard this same man speaking in French with Marcel. He pointed ahead to where the road curved and shook his head. Unsure what to make of this, she just waved and drove on.

  After rounding the curve, she understood. Thirty yards further along, the road was completely blocked by an empty flatbed at least twenty feet long, hitched to an ancient rig. It was jackknifed but not toppled, and the front wheels appeared to have skidded past the shoulder into the greenery. A man sat on the running board by the driver’s door. Cigarette smoke coiled and spread above his head, rising through bars of evening sunlight that sliced through the foliage.

  Feeling suddenly unsettled, Amy made a U-turn and headed back around the curve.

  Now both guards were standing at the side of the road, right next to a narrow trail that led into the forest. The taller guard pointed at Amy, then to the trail, then traced a long arc with his hand, clearly indicating that the detour would make a wide half circle and rejoin the logging road. At the end of the arc, he made a flinging gesture with that same hand: Once you’ve looped back to this road, it’
s a quick shot out of here.

  Amy looked at the trail doubtfully. It was big enough to accommodate her Land Rover, but just barely.

  “How far?” she asked in French. There was no response, so she switched to English. “How long until I’m back on this road?”

  The guards still said nothing. They just returned to the pickup, got in, and headed back toward the logging camp without even a wave.

  The late afternoon was sliding into twilight, so Amy switched on her headlights before turning onto the trail. The ground was mostly solid, but there were soft spots and plenty of tire ruts. Soon she passed an old red gas can lashed to a tree, and then the trail widened by a few feet. The foliage there had been trimmed back very recently. She managed to pick up a little speed and stay out of first gear most of the time, though the terrain was getting hilly.

  She held onto a hope that one of the curves would continue arcing around and take her back to the big logging road, but the trail kept changing direction and snaking deeper into the forest. It felt like ten minutes, then fifteen, and then she could no longer tell because alarm was boiling up in her. It was getting a lot harder to pretend that maybe nothing was wrong. She slid her feet back into her boots.

  On her right, two rusty, misshapen, sheet-metal sheds came into view. They looked even less sturdy than the workers’ lean-tos back at the camp.

  The next big oh-shit moment came forty yards past the sheds. The little trail simply stopped there. Her hi-beams lit up the vegetation enough for her to see that the land dropped away not far beyond the dead end.

  She sat still, trying to figure out what had happened. Had the guard meant for her to make a left turn, which she’d then missed? It was possible, although she’d been watching pretty closely.

  The larger question, the one she’d avoided thinking about, was whether the logging truck blocking the road had really been disabled, or whether someone had contrived to trap her here.

  She began backing up, planning to turn around in front of the sheds, where the trail was wider. Before she’d gone twenty feet, headlights appeared behind her, bouncing wildly, coming fast. They stopped four feet from her bumper.

  A door slammed. Something briefly blocked one headlight, then the other, and then the barrel-shaped guard was opening her door.

  He motioned for her to get out. Being altogether trapped, Amy complied. She swung her legs to the ground and leaned down to tie her boots. The guard took hold of her arm as if to steady her, but instead hauled her firmly outside and toward the front of the Land Rover. The boots stayed behind.

  She began twisting her arms and body. She clawed at his dinner-plate-sized hands, trying to pry away the pinky and ring finger as she’d been taught in a self-defense class. He simply mashed her against the Land Rover and switched his grip. Now he held her elbows from behind and she could no longer reach his hands with hers.

  Walking backward, he dragged her a little further. She kept struggling, twisting her arms against his fingers, trying to feel which direction of torque might weaken his grip. Amy was strong, triathlon strong, but he held her like a small child, his fingers easily encircling her arms. She kicked her heels backwards, but the blows appeared to have no effect, even when it felt like she was connecting squarely with his kneecaps. He seemed too big to hurt.

  So she saved her breath and went limp in the hope that making him hold her weight would tire out his arms. He jerked her upright a few times, trying to get her to stand on her own, but finally gave up and let her sag.

  With her head turned away from the blinding headlights, she could still see where the ground dropped into darkness just a few yards off. If she could get loose, the next move would be to get herself down that slope right away. No telling how far down it might take her, but a tumble would most likely be better than whatever was about to happen here.

  Heavy springs creaked somewhere behind her, and she squinted back toward Marcel’s truck. The dome light was on, and even behind the glare of the headlights, the tall guard was visible as he got out of the cab, unfolding to his full size like a winged creature emerging from a chrysalis. He became a silhouette when he moved in front of the headlights. From one hand hung a machete long enough that it could have doubled as a scimitar.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Most of the families with children had left the logging camp already, but nearly two dozen kids remained, and these had spent the day gathering wood for the ring of fires that would hold the fever animals at bay for the first hours of darkness. Now the fun part had come, and the children ran in a ragged group, laughing as they started blazes at intervals around the edges of the clearing. They had made the process into a ritual, building the stacks of wood throughout the day, all the tinder in place, and now each mound would require only a single flick of a lighter. The oldest boy would sometimes reserve that privilege for himself, sometimes bestow it upon a deserving comrade.

  Marcel left his trailer with a rifle in hand and headed down a footpath that led into the forest. After a few minutes he found the old man squatting next to the remains of a fire much smaller than those built by the children. Small, but glowing brightly enough to ward off any creature in the area that was highly sensitive to light. The old man had been cooking plantains over a few burning sticks, and the sweet aroma lingered. Above the embers his face looked like an orange mask suspended in the darkness. Marcel sat down next to him.

  “The camp is really moving?” the mask said. The old man had been attending to business near the capital for nearly a week, and hadn’t known until this afternoon that the company was finally giving up on logging the basin.

  “Yes, it’s true,” Marcel said, “Within a week there will be no trucks going in and out, no generator, and no freezer. We would have to work out of this place on our own, and it would take a lot of time to get started again. I’m not sure we could do it. We haven’t made enough money yet for more equipment.”

  “What about the next camp? Can’t we take everything with us and set up there?”

  Marcel stared at the ground. “No. The hunters would find the cages, and that would be the end of it. Here, most of them were afraid of the forest because of the fever, but anywhere else, they would follow our tracks just out of habit.”

  Back toward the clearing, something rustled. Marcel was calm but picked up his rifle, ready to fire into the air. The unseen creature shot through the trees maybe forty yards away. It sounded too small to worry about. A bush baby coming out to hunt crickets, or a monkey desperate to make it home before other things awoke.

  “I am sorry,” Marcel said. “I really am. But who could have guessed? I was afraid more people would die, so I begged the company to send help. For all I knew, it could have been as bad as those fevers they have to the east. By the time you showed me the truth, it was too late.”

  “I understand.” The old man sighed as though his last breath were leaving him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The sight of the machete in Tall Guard’s hand got Amy flailing again. Almost at once she managed to wriggle out of the unbuttoned shirt, and suddenly she was free. The floppy white sunhat still clung to her by the string under her chin, but now it covered half her face instead of her head, and partly blocked her sight.

  The barrel-shaped guard was between her and the drop-off. When she tried to get around him, he moved with surprising speed for his size, recovering her left arm with one sweep of his own. He calmly grabbed at the air in pursuit of her right, like a sleepy bear shooing away flies. Amy kept moving and twisting enough to prevent him from retaking the fugitive right arm, but could not free her left again.

  Tall Guard stopped a few paces away, maybe waiting for Barrel Guard to hold his prey still.

  “I’ve got money,” Amy shouted in English, trying anything that might slow down whatever was going on.

  No response. She quickly glanced at Tall Guard again and saw that he’d set down the machete and was fumbling in his pants pocket. He pulled out a transparent plastic bag tha
t held what looked like a miniature liquor bottle, the kind served on airplanes.

  Amy had no idea what he was doing and no time to puzzle over it. She concentrated on keeping her right arm as far as possible from Barrel Guard. The effort kept her squatting, with the free arm sticking straight into the air as though she were trying to fly.

  She shouted her offer again, this time in French, and now the guards exchanged a look. She was right; Barrel Guard had only been feigning incomprehension earlier.

  “I can get money from a bank in the capital,” she said. “You can be rich by tomorrow morning.”

  That seemed to get Tall Guard thinking. He stood still and looked again at Barrel Guard, who only barked angrily in a language that Amy could not even identify.

  “You’ll have the money by morning,” she repeated, and continued spitting out her offer in telegraphic bursts as she struggled: “Cent mille euro! Argent liquide!”

  This time Tall Guard spoke at length, but Barrel Guard only snapped at him again, with more words and greater venom. Barrel Guard also looked away from Amy while he scolded the other man, giving her time to try something new.

  She leapt a couple of feet off the ground and pulled her knees up against her chest. The huge man kept his grip, but didn’t realize how far Amy’s body would drop this time. The sudden downward force on his arm was enough to pull him a little to one side. It wasn’t much, but she had managed to move him against his will.

  Planting her feet, she twisted around and drove herself backwards into his side, pushing him further in the direction he was already tilting. That upset his balance more, and he had to take another couple of steps to keep from falling.

  When he turned back to face her, he stood at perfect striking distance and she jabbed her right fist at his windpipe. The impact would probably have made him gasp, might even have done some real damage. But Barrel Guard, still off balance, reeled and dipped his head forward just a few degrees an instant before she struck. The blow landed against the side of his nose, and Amy was sure she felt something give way when her knuckles connected.