by Newton, Nero
Stephen’s cell phone sounded, and Amy smiled at the ghostly cooing that was his ring tone.
“Tarsier vocalization?” she asked.
“Yeah. I downloaded it after our first phone conversation.”
“Spooky sound.”
The call was from Stephen’s cousin, Elaine. Before he could get out the syllable Hi, she asked, “You’re not at home right?” It was a tone he’d never heard her use before – sharp, with a sort of military efficiency.
“No, I’m visiting someone in the East Bay.”
“Good. Stay there, or at least don’t go anywhere near your apartment.”
“How did you know–?”
“Steve, about an hour ago, someone tried to abduct Lucy. An enormous man walked right into our house five minutes after I’d gone out to the store.”
Lucy was eight years old, the younger of Elaine’s two daughters.
“My God!”
“Lucy was home alone,” Elaine said. “The man told her that he was a friend of her Uncle Steve, and asked if she knew where you were. When Lucy said she didn’t know, he grabbed her and headed for his car. She got away because the neighbors’ dog went charging over and startled the guy…I’ll tell you about that later. Lucy and I will be leaving for the Bay Area as soon as I’m finished making a statement to the police. Give me directions to where you are.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Amy made calls to warn a few relatives that she thought the thugs might go after in order to find her. Her parents’ place was in a gated retirement community, so they were almost certainly safe, but she still phoned to let them know that someone might try to get past the gates looking for information about her.
She found Stephen sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, head down, massaging his forehead with the fingers of his good hand.
“I just thought of something,” he told her as she sat heavily beside him. “Elaine said the intruder was a big guy, so it wasn’t Elf-beard. Maybe you wounded him more than you realized.”
“Well there’s some potential good news, at least. Have you called and warned everyone who might be targeted if the goons keep looking for you?”
“Yeah. I figure they found a phone bill or something at my place, so I called everyone I can remember talking on the phone with in the last couple months. Not too many. I’ve been sort of a recluse since the school year ended.”
“But they have your computer. What about email?”
“I only use web-based email,” he explained, “which means the messages are stored on a server somewhere, not on my computer. I also make sure to delete my cache and history, and I have a program that overwrites my .dat files. I don’t keep an electronic address book, either. I’m not sure how hard it is for techies to retrieve data that’s been overwritten, but even if Elf-beard has pals who know how to do that, it seems like it would have taken a little longer. They got the PC late last night, and already they’re onto Elaine’s place.”
“Why so many precautions with your email?”
He told her a story about phone calls from investigators who’d apparently been subcontracted by Mexico’s INAH.
“All of that ended almost two years ago,” he said, “but I’m still in the habit of not storing email on my computer.”
“What about all the images from Baja? Wouldn’t they tip off investigators if they ever got a warrant to look into your files?”
“None of the Baja material was on my computer until a few weeks ago. Once I read your post on PrimateWeb and saw your sketches, I was more excited about the animals than worried about getting into trouble. And like I said, that whole business with the Mexican government has been over for a while.”
“Is anyone else likely to stop by your place looking for you?” Amy asked. “Friends who might just stop in to say hi?”
“My neighborhood isn’t the sort of area that people enjoy visiting. I only live there because it’s half a mile from where I work.” He smiled. “My ex-wife’s lawyer hasn’t paid a visit lately, but Elf-beard’s welcome to talk to him if he happens by. We weren’t married long enough for her to be entitled to much of what I make, but she keeps trying to squeeze a little more out of me.”
“Sounds like you’re on great terms.”
Stephen surprised her by opening up on the subject. She could tell he was feeling fine on the pills, in spite of the shock from his cousin. He talked about his marriage to Cynthia, a woman who, in the end, hadn’t been satisfied with his modest ambitions. She’d come from a family of overachievers, had rebelled against her parents by marrying Stephen, but had soon gotten sick of relative poverty and decided that she didn’t want to rebel any longer.
“While we were dating, she seemed to be into all the same things I liked. But not long after we were married, she started getting sullen about how we didn’t go out on the town often enough. I think the day I brought home the iguana was the day I first realized I didn’t really know her. It was actually a birthday present for her. I thought she’d love it because of the way she’d always been with animals. But when I showed it to her, she just made a face like she didn’t understand, and then started nagging me to hurry up or we’d be late for our dinner reservation at one of the waterfront restaurants.”
“Does she know anything about the Baja papers?”
“No, we split up five years ago. My trip to Baja was after that.”
They went back to Amy’s room, where the animals were all hanging out. The young tabby hadn’t yet gotten bored with stalking the iguana’s tail, and the older cats were lounging in the sunlight that streamed in through an east-facing window.
“I think the worst that can happen has already happened,” Amy said. “I mean as far as our friends and families. The important thing is that your niece wasn’t hurt. Elaine’s okay, and her husband’s camping in Big Sur with the other daughter; isn’t that what she told you?”
“Yeah.” He sank into an armchair by the window and one of the older cats jumped into his lap. “It just drives me crazy to think that I brought this whole business down on Elaine and her family.”
She sat in a chair opposite him. “Listen, if anybody’s to blame for dragging others into this, it’s me. I went to that logging camp knowing I might be tangling with vicious people, and I should have been careful who I contacted after I got back.” She paused. “You look a little spacey. Are you awake enough to hear what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. I’m just thinking about several things at once.”
“That’s understandable. But are you able to focus a little, try to sort out what we need to do next, and how?”
“Sure.”
“Good. First of all, I have the resources to keep you and your relatives safe.” She explained her financial situation, the spendthrift trust, and the monthly payment schedule that kept her from spending too much at one time. “That means I don’t have access to a huge ton of money right now, but I do have one hell of a line of credit. I mean I could probably run up half a million dollars. Seriously. Not that I think it would take that much, but you get the idea, right?”
“Sure.”
“So I can at least get you and Elaine and her family out of town for a while – and comfortably. Like Australia, or Bora Bora. Wherever.”
“Is Elaine on vacation this summer?”
Stephen nodded. “Yeah, she doesn’t start up again until the middle of September, and Jerry’s got his own business. He sets his own schedule.”
“Perfect. And if the situation isn’t resolved before one or all of them need to get back here, I can get some private security for them. Will they be willing to accept my help, do you think?”
“Probably,” he said. “If it looks like that’s the safest thing for the girls, then I’d say they’ll go for it.”
“Good. Setting that up will be the first order of business when she gets here.”
She sat for a while, then felt restless and got to her feet. On the dresser, she found the stack of folders that Step
hen had given her in the diner the previous evening.
“Hey, here’s an idea,” she said. “Instead of sitting around feeling guilty, let’s talk about this stuff while we’re waiting for Elaine to get here.” She spread the folders out on the bed. “Last night you said you had some new things to tell me about the animals. Do you think any of what you’ve figured out will help us deal with this situation?”
“Maybe.” He paused, concentrating. “When you saw the dead animal on the truck, you attributed the saggy flesh on the face to the mystery fever, right?”
“That’s right,” she said. “But since it’s there in your medieval drawings, too, I assume it’s a normal feature.”
“If that animal on the truck were alive, and on all fours,” he said, “and if its tail were curled up and hidden under its body, then only the face would tell you it wasn’t a chimp?”
“I think so. Everything else – the back of the torso, the backs of the hands – they were all chimp-like.”
Stephen went to the bedside, searched through the folders, and laid three Xeroxes on the bed. They were medieval drawings that showed front, back and side views of a “blood rat.”
“Each of these pictures is actually the first half of a before-and-after set. Before I show you the ‘after’ pictures – which you haven’t seen so far – tell me, what do you think these faces would look like if those gushy gobs of flesh around the eyes were suddenly pumped full of blood, so full that they expanded?”
She looked at the pictures, frowning, then shrugged. “I…guess it would sort of change the shape of the face, depending how much the clumps expanded.”
He continued. “Imagine if that ugly tissue unraveled and spread out enough to partially obscure those big eyeballs, so that the eyes didn’t look so giant. You think those dark smudges on the wrinkled clumps over the eyes might look like eyebrows?”
She stared at the images, saying nothing.
“Now, you can see that there’s also some loose flesh on the sides of its head, and under its mouth, although it’s not as noticeable as the gelatinous glop around the mid-face. Now picture the skin behind its cheeks expanding in such a way that those little rat ears begin to look like nothing more than the upper points on a set of larger, rounder ears. And the saggy part below the mouth – well, think of that swelling up and spreading out to make the jaw line a little more simian, even anthropoid. Almost a chin.”
He flipped through the folders a little clumsily with his one hand, finally found more printed pages, and placed them under the first row of images on the bed.
“These are the ‘after’ pictures,” he said.
The second row of drawings seemed to be of the same creatures, more or less, and showed them from the same three angles: front, back, and side. They stood two-legged, forelimbs hugging their torsos, as if they were shivering. The black shag that hung from their backs was now wrapped all the way around them, like someone clutching a robe tightly in the cold. Their heads were changed, morphed into something like pale young human beings of indistinct sex.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
If the faces in the drawing were meant to look human, Amy thought, they were fairly deformed. Or just oddly formed. The lips bulged forward as though very large teeth were pushing them out, even more than would happen with the most pronounced overbite. Yet Stephen seemed to be saying that this was just an illusion created by the expanding loose flesh on the animal’s face, mere mimicry of a human mouth.
“This is what several looked like from afar,” he said, laying down another picture. It showed five such creatures that seemed to be ambling at different speeds from the far edge of a field. They looked human enough in stature, although their faces were obscured by the distance and the dim light.
“They could be kids wearing dark cloaks,” Amy said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” he said. “Now think about your animal on the logging truck again. Imagine that it could pump up that saggy skin around the eyes. You might not have eyebrows, but you could have a brow ridge. And the ears moving down, the fake jaw filling out, maybe a few wispy chin whiskers, like juvenile chimps have. If it hunched over with that perfectly chimp-like back dominating its form….”
It was a long moment before she spoke. “How does the loose flesh contort? Does it fill up with blood?”
“Blood or air or both. It’s made up of a series of spongy chambers, probably long tangles of blood vessels that shrink or enlarge, depending on some neural trigger.”
“And in that colonial drawing you showed me,” Amy said, “with the animal about to get burned at the stake, the face was actually in the middle of this change.”
Stephen nodded. “Just imagine how that detail supported the clergy’s claim that this was some shape-shifting demon they’d managed to capture.”
“So,” Amy said, “since the one I saw in Equateur looked like a chimp from the back, you figure the ones from around the logging camp mimic chimps instead of humans?”
“My idea is that different blood-rat populations diverged millions of years ago. Some continued to mimic the ancestors of chimps and evolved along with them. Others followed early hominids and adapted their mimicry to their new hosts. I think the psychoactive nature of the spray made the animals bond more closely with socially complex primate populations. Since that basin in Equateur was so isolated, with no human population, the ones that lived there continued to mimic the largest primates around.”
“Wait,” Amy said. “Something doesn’t fit here. I’ve been assuming all along that the animals use their spray either to sedate small prey or as a defense when they were confronted by larger animals – like humans in the logging camp. Now you’re telling me that they followed people on purpose?”
“You’re right on both counts – it’s both a defense and a way to sedate its prey. Except that their food source isn’t all that small. They drugged their prey because they feed without killing them. And that spray is so addictive that the prey keeps on coming back, presenting itself for more feedings.”
“Feedings?” She stared Stephen hard in the eye as his meaning became clear. “And they were called ‘blood rats?’”
“I didn’t make this up, Amy. I’ve just tried to make sense out of this pile of stuff that got buried in the Sonora Desert. I’m open to any other conclusions you might draw.”
Amy kept staring at him, part of her wanting to believe he wasn’t crazy and the other part wanting to give him a second broken hand. “This ancient Kingdom of Hungary you mentioned before – did it encompass, perchance, any part of what is now Romania?”
“Quite a bit of it. Including the Carpathian mountain range, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Connective tissue behind Vendetti’s shoulder blade snapped apart like marshmallow crispies as Eloy wrenched his arm behind him and up into a chicken wing. That bullet must not have gouged too deep, Vendetti thought, if Eloy can still push this hard.
His field of vision encompassed nothing more than one of Sanderson’s thousand-dollar Italian shoes and part of the mottled gray carpet that covered the concrete floor. His floor, in his office, from which he ran Top Gun Security. He couldn’t see Sanderson’s other shoe because it was on the back of his head, mashing his face into the floor. Christ, the three of them had been laughing over lunch half an hour ago.
“Eloy!” Vendetti tried to shout. Only half an inch of his lips would open enough for him to push air out between them, so his left cheek inflated frog-like with every attempt at words. He managed a semi-intelligible rendition of, “What the fuck has gotten into you?” before another foot rocketed into his left kidney.
“I think the question is what got into you,” Sanderson said. “You tried to steal the very first breeding pair we shipped. Don’t you know when you can fuck somebody and when you can’t?”
Why couldn’t Eloy have gotten killed instead of Cody? Vendetti thought. Cody had been slow, but no way would he have turne
d on him like this. Of course, he had thought the same of Eloy until a few minutes ago. Unbelievable.
And even more unbelievable that this gentleman smuggler, alias Prince of the Eco-Pixies, had gone bad-ass on him out of the blue. Like all of a sudden he’d learned how.
Vendetti searched frantically for something to say that would prove he had never tried to steal anything from Lou Burr. He had no way of knowing that Sanderson was only pretending to think he’d tried to steal the breeding pair. No way of knowing that Sanderson was doing this partly for fun, partly so he could stay connected to the boof trade a little longer, and partly so that Lou Burr would owe him a very substantial favor. Now Burr would see, courtesy of Sanderson’s and Eloy’s vigilance, that Vendetti didn’t have enough self control to abstain from indulgence in the very product whose North American market he was supposed to be establishing.
Eloy released Vendetti’s arm, and for a moment it seemed to stay twisted, with no elasticity left to make it spring back to a natural position.
“Makes me wonder,” Vendetti heard Sanderson say to Eloy, “if we can still work with him. I mean, can we trust him at all?”
They had to be screwing with him. No way were they going to let him live after all this.
“One way to find out,” Eloy said. He grabbed Vendetti’s feet and twisted him over onto his back. Vendetti noticed that Eloy winced a little with the effort, and he wished to God that bullet had done more than graze the little freak’s ribcage.
Then Eloy was dragging him out of the room by his feet, like a man pulling a rickshaw. Through the doorway and bump bump bump down the five metal steps to the hot pavement of the nearly empty parking lot.
Midday sun knifed into Vendetti’s eyes, forcing them shut. He felt Eloy picking up speed, breaking into a trot. In a moment Vendetti’s lower back, then his shoulder blades, then his head, smacked hard into something that rose up about five inches from the pavement.