by Newton, Nero
Only about a third of the supply had been fully butchered, with a couple dozen limbs and several sets of ribs already smoked. The rest of the carcasses had been gutted, but remained otherwise intact. These were heaped in odd postures, the fur matted, the hollow torsos caved in. Amy managed to distinguish an assortment of small game: guenons and other monkeys, chevrotain deer, brush-tailed porcupine, assorted lizards, a few birds. Some of the monkeys were so squished that Amy could not tell if they were adults of one species or juveniles of another.
She rearranged a few carcasses so that they would be more recognizable, then freed her camera from the tangled pouch that had once been a pants pocket. Backing up a few yards, she got some wide shots that included Sanderson’s logo on the cab door. Then she switched to video mode and panned slowly, listing aloud the species she was sure of.
An odd change took place while she was creating the video clip. The smell of the raw meat had been overwhelmingly nauseating ever since she had climbed under the tarp, but suddenly the aroma of the smoked pieces drowned out all other odors. It was as though someone had a barbecue going right next to her, and – God help me, she thought, but it smells fantastic. She picked up a long rack of rather small smoked ribs and was ready to begin chewing the flesh off the bones, but fear of disease stayed her jaws at the last second. In her already weakened state, she might not be able to fight off any bacteria she ingested here. She let the rack fall back onto the pile.
There also seemed to be a faint echo of the awful smell that had briefly filled the truck cab right after something grabbed her the night before last, but it faded in and out and she couldn’t really tell whether or not it was the same.
After a moment she noticed what looked like the back of a small chimpanzee, its dark skin showing beneath sparse and wiry hairs up. She returned the camera to her pocket and began clearing away body parts that were piled on top of the chimp. She removed a colorful cluster of birds tied together on a wire, a slurry of stray guts at the center of a fly swarm, and finally a long tail, apparently severed from some creature much bigger than anything she could see here.
Except that the tail resisted her pull. After a moment of staring dumbly, Amy realized that it was actually connected to the torso she was trying to uncover, which meant the animal could not be a chimpanzee.
She grasped the thing by a front and back leg, hauled it over, face up, and her confusion quadrupled.
Somehow it was much skinnier now, with a body like…hard to say. Maybe a long, slender monkey. The face was somewhere between a teddy bear and a rodent, and its eyes were the giant orbs of a nocturnal creature. Gobs of bunched-up, pink-brown flesh hung on its upper face, surrounding the enormous eyes and a petite kitten nose. The sagging bits reminded her of the folds of skin on a young Shar-pei, the baggy-skinned dogs from China. There were smaller clumps of similar loose skin below its mouth and on the sides of its head.
Amy was still holding one front and one back limb, and now she took a good look at the paws. At first glance, the front paw seemed like a chimp’s hand – but it was really more like a smaller creature’s appendage embedded into a chimp’s palm. Almost as though what looked like a chimp’s hand were really just a hardened fatty growth that clung to the back of a smaller, real paw. The digits of that paw had joints and tips that were round and bulbous.
The fingernails were thick, pointed, and overly long, but definitely nails rather than claws – a trait that ought to put this animal in the primate order.
Yet those big eyes belonged to something nocturnal, and there simply were no nocturnal primates more than a tenth the size of this thing.
The back foot was similar, but stranger. The ankle was especially long, designed for jumping. The paw-within-a-paw effect was there again, but this time there were nails on three digits and claws on the other two – another characteristic of nocturnal primates. Yet even the largest of such creatures weighed under seven pounds, and this thing felt closer to fifty.
Amy put her hand to her injured shoulder and ran a fingertip across the five rough scabs that were forming where her skin had been punctured two nights earlier.
When she curled the dead paw as though it were gripping something, the points of the claws and nails formed an array proportionally identical to the marks on her shoulder. Another member of this species may well have been what had grabbed her, although it had been far too dark to see her attacker’s features. She wasn’t even sure whether she’d really seen the limb that had taken hold of her, or simply formed a mental image based on how it had felt.
But why grab with its back leg? A possible answer came quickly. This animal’s hind legs were at least fifty percent longer than its front ones. Maybe, with the window only open a couple of inches, her attacker hadn’t been able to reach all the way to her shoulder with its front paw.
Not that she had any idea why it would grab a five-foot-ten human being.
She turned the animal face down again for another look at the features that had seemed so chimp-like, and the illusion reappeared. It looked exactly like the back of a small chimpanzee, except for the long, pinkish, mostly hairless tail. The body looked much wider than it had seemed from the front. The apparent chimp posterior seemed to cup a smaller animal, the way a shell cups a tortoise.
She needed another photo, less for her exposé than for the ability to identify this thing later. She flipped the creature face-up again and reached for her camera, then decided that the picture should be with the mouth open. The configuration of the teeth, the number of incisors, molars, and premolars in each quadrant would help her name the animal, or at least classify it.
But she withdrew her hand just inches before touching the mouth.
The epidemic at the logging camp.
Was the baggy facial skin a natural feature of this animal, or had it become disfigured by disease?
She’d heard of hemorrhagic fevers that made a victim’s flesh fall away from the bone, as though there were no connective tissue holding it there.
A medley of voices arose across the street, coming closer. It was too late to run off into the trees. Someone would spot her as she hobbled across the furrowed field.
Her remaining options were to hide or to try and explain herself to the driver, who obviously had some connection to the hunters, since he was carrying bushmeat. And it was a Sanderson truck, after all. Tall Guard’s machete loomed large in her memory.
There was only one place to hide.
Taking deep breaths, she unfurled a doubled-up section of the tarp in order to stretch some of it between her and the heap of slaughter.
She climbed back on the pile and covered up, then slowed her breathing and meditated until the stifling air under the plastic became a warm bath. The approaching voices and the forest sounds began to wash together in a gentle hum, and when the engine started, it harmonized with them.
She slept undisturbed until mid-afternoon, when the roar of many other motors and an infusion of blended exhausts announced the outskirts of the capital.
At a traffic light she disembarked, taking the blue tarp with her, dragging a few loose animal limbs off the truck bed. She wrapped the plastic around herself and, after promising an extra fifty euro to the driver of a nearby taxi, headed off to Avenue 9, the haven for backpackers visiting Prospérité.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
While Amy slept in her bloody berth on the logging truck, Hugh Sanderson’s third eye told him he was rising through cumulus clouds. The sky above and below him vibrated in scotch-tweed patterns of turquoise and blood-orange. Scattered points within the matrix erupted into fractal blooms that snaked together and roared his ribcage into being. He felt his limbs telescope out, extend into the corners of infinity, then coil back and wrap around him to form a cocoon. He beheld a thousand physical forms into which he might metamorphose.
His other senses informed him with equal authority that he was lying in a ditch full of sluggishly flowing suds. The ditch lay between the forest’s edge and a
line of parked logging trucks. Women were washing clothes at a raised plastic cistern twenty yards away, and the runoff had carved a channel straight to where he lay.
He pulled himself out of the slop, shed his filthy clothes, and marched straight toward the crowd of women. They wordlessly made way and he rinsed himself off with the hose that lead down from the cistern. The enormity of what had just happened to him made embarrassment meaningless.
Naked and dripping, he crossed the line of trucks and headed for the foreman’s trailer. The sun and the distant sound of the concession’s few remaining chainsaws teamed up to inflict great physical pain upon him, but even this did not lower his spirits.
When he found the foreman, Sanderson demanded clothes and announced that he would presently be heading back into the forest. He had no idea why he should want to do this, but felt absolutely certain that he must.
* * *
Marcel was relieved to see the boss alive after desperate hours of searching. Soon Sanderson’s energy would give out and he could be put to bed. All Marcel needed to do now was keep him under control until then. He followed Sanderson up and down the trailer’s narrow interior, reaching for his elbow to lead him back to a seat, but Sanderson kept pulling away.
“Sir, please...the sick people who go into the forest. Those are the ones we are finding dead. There is another body yesterday.”
“Do I have to go out and get those clothes myself?”
“Look at these scratches!” Marcel protested. “When you run away from the men, they can’t get to you fast enough, and the animal do this. That’s how you get infected. You go back out there again, you get a lot more sick.”
A few times Sanderson started to leave the trailer, still naked, and with each attempt giggles erupted from a dozen girls who had positioned themselves a few yards away. To keep him from walking back across the camp and exposing himself to anyone who might have missed his first performance, Marcel had to promise him the clothes he wanted.
“And sunglasses,” Sanderson shouted as Marcel went out the door.
* * *
Half an hour later, Hugh Sanderson was dressed in oversized coveralls with the sleeves and legs rolled up. The boots were at least a size too small, and the cheap, rigid material didn’t bend at the toes when he walked.
“Still looking for sunglasses,” Marcel told him, and left again.
Sitting on the foreman’s bed, Hugh began to feel sleepy. He focused on the sound of the small gas generator just outside the trailer. He marveled at the complex mixture of sounds, all harmonizing in a way he’d never noticed. Now he not only noticed, but understood. He could not have explained it in words, but he was sure that now he understood.
He opened the door of the trailer and the light stabbed him even more viciously than before. He retreated, slammed the door and held it for a moment, as though the rays of sunshine might try to pursue him. He sat straight-backed on the edge of the bed, not sure what he was waiting for, but certain he would know it when it appeared.
Marcel returned, still without sunglasses. He turned on a fan and a big portable stereo. “Sorry about no air conditioning.”
There was no radio reception, either, but a CD started up and Sanderson vaguely recognized an old rock tune, something from the seventies or eighties.
Marcel said, “When Mr. Wilson come here two months ago, he forget his CDs that he bring in the car.” The foreman left again.
Wilson. Hugh vaguely remembered the production manager. But now the world such people occupied was no more real to Hugh than a cartoon playing on TV, seen through a neighbor’s window.
He must have dozed because when he suddenly sat up, fully awake, he saw that the sunlight slanting through the windows reached far into the room, its angle approaching horizontal.
Marcel reappeared, followed by a husky middle-aged woman carrying a plate of meat and rice. The foreman opened the little fridge and handed Hugh a cold bottle of Beaufort beer from Cameroon. Hugh’s first icy swig thrilled him from throat to crotch, and he finished the bottle at once. Marcel handed him another, pointed out that the fridge was full, and told him that the woman who had brought the food would be right outside if he needed anything. Then he departed again.
* * *
Marcel guessed that Sanderson was fairly well settled and would soon sleep off the urge to charge into the forest. He breathed a long sigh as he stepped out into the sunlight and closed the door behind him.
The big barrel-shaped guard was coming his way, and Marcel greeted him with a slight head movement. The big man was tiresome to talk with, but at least Marcel could switch back to French and quit struggling with English.
The bloody splint on the guard’s nose usually made him seem to be squinting angrily, but at the moment his mouth was curled into a sloppy smile of triumph. He held out a well worn, double-folded piece of letter-sized paper.
“I found it in her Land Rover.”
My Land Rover now, Marcel thought. He’d found the record of sale in the glove compartment, with no buyer’s name filled in. The woman had picked up the vehicle just a day before she arrived in the camp, and hadn’t even filled out the forms that made it legally hers.
He took the scrap of paper from the big guard. There was nothing on it but a partial city street map, faintly printed, the kind of map generated online.
Marcel stared for a moment and said, “What is it?”
“It’s a map.”
“I can see it’s a map. Why are we interested in it?”
“It’s a neighborhood in Prospérité. There are street names on it, and there is a red pen mark. Maybe someone there knows about her. Maybe she’ll go back there.”
“If she’s still alive,” Marcel said.
“But you told me Mr. Sanderson says he saw her on the road.”
“He said he might have. But so what?”
“So what?” The guard sounded truly taken aback. “So WHAT? Look at my nose!”
Marcel groaned. “I know, but we have a lot of things to do. If you want to go after her, I don’t care. But do it later, after everything’s taken care of.”
“Later? She may be out of the country later. She could be leaving tomorrow, for all we know.”
“It’s too bad, but breaking her neck isn’t going to fix your nose. Besides, she can’t do us any harm.”
“She can destroy everything. Wipe us out if she spreads the word.”
Marcel said, “I told you, she came to find out about the hunting. She was talking to a hunter while we talked on the phone. As soon as you drove off behind her, I asked the hunter about it, and he said they talked about animals.”
“Exactly.”
“No, not our animals,” Marcel said. “The monkeys and birds that the hunters shoot for meat.”
“How do you know she wasn’t trying to find out about our animals, just going at it roundabout?”
“Forget about her,” Marcel said. “And remember what we have to do when Mr. Sanderson wakes up.”
Marcel headed off to find the old man. He did not turn around when the guard shouted after him, “Forget about her? Look at my nose. Look at my fucking nose!”
* * *
Drowsiness crept up on Hugh. He set the plate of food aside and lay back on Marcel’s bed, feeling himself sink slowly out of consciousness. His eagerness to go back into the forest had almost completely faded. Now his surroundings began to fade, too, and the sinking turned to floating.
The CD changer rotated and some Nigerian dance pop rocked him to sleep.
Half an hour later, the CD changed again. The vocals and guitar became shrill and confrontational. The first chord sent lightning crackling through Hugh’s abdomen and hauled him straight from deepest dreaming to his feet, fully alert. It was music that had been on the radio a lot during his college years.
Something significant was taking shape here. He’d heard someone recite a line from this song. When had it been? Not long ago. He was sure that something cataclysmically impor
tant had happened at that moment. Welcome to the jungle…. Why did it give him this sense that some great event was imminent?
The song continued in a hammering rhythm that conjured a vision of an endless thrumming lattice of blue-green crystal, shot through with networks of hot red capillaries. At one of several crescendos, the singer in the recording seemed to step across the trailer’s dim interior, lift Hugh overhead and hurl him out of the trailer, He crashed through the latched door, which broke and was left hanging at an angle from its upper hinge. The woman sitting outside leapt and shouted when he landed at her feet.
It was very late in the afternoon, and because the trailer was near the edge of the forest, the sunlight came in slanting shafts that cut through the camp at a low angle. At first the shafts paralyzed him. He thought of them as the laser beams that a master jewel thief must not break as he approaches the velvet pedestal upon which the emerald-studded bauble rests.
But excitement welled up too fiercely to allow for a patient negotiation of the imagined obstacle course, and he began simply sprinting along the edge of the clearing. The cheap, rigid material of the boots cut into his feet, but he did not care.
He turned up a wide path that had been made by skidders hauling trees to the clearing. He nearly collided with two men coming round that blind bend, but dodged them at the last minute like a running back, moving with agility that surprised and excited him.
Seeing a machete leaning against a tree stump, he snatched it up for no reason except that he knew it would be a thrill to grab it without breaking stride. He hurdled the next, even higher stump, feeling like a gazelle, running wildly, fluidly, guided by the pristine clarity of uncontaminated instinct. There were startled murmurs as he rocketed past a few more men.
Still running, he turned onto a much narrower path, wanting only to get deeper into the bush. After a few more turns, there was no longer a trail. He plowed onward through uninterrupted undergrowth, descended a small slope, and presently came to a natural clearing full of saplings and waist-high grass, with only a small grove of tall trees in the center.