Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  Having cleared that obstacle, Eloy slowed down, changed directions, and began trotting again. Vendetti was aware that Eloy had changed is grip, grasping pant cuffs rather than thick ankles. Kicking free would be all but impossible now.

  Then another thump, up and over another something hard. Vendetti turned his head and saw that he’d just been dragged over a couple of the concrete barriers that lined the row of parking spaces closest to the building, just high enough to prevent most vehicles from going over them. The office they’d just left attached to a warehouse that had another entrance at its far end. There were at least ten more little barriers before other entrance, and Vendetti rightly guessed that Eloy intended to keep S-curving, so as to hit every one of them. He was much bigger and more powerful than Eloy, but far too disoriented to fight back, especially starting from this position.

  Eloy did not tire out. Three barriers later, a gash opened up across the bump on Vendetti’s occipital bone, just above the base of his skull. Subsequent blows mashed and tugged at that wound, opening it further. The next to last impact, which came just as Vendetti turned his head sideways, created a hairline fracture in his right cheekbone. By then he had vertigo and his vision was fading in and out.

  Finally arriving at the distant doorway, Eloy dragged him inside. They turned into a hallway, then went through a door onto a disused loading dock. At first he thought his vision was fading even more, but then realized that the area was actually dark, with only a faint, rust-brown glow coming from some source he couldn’t see. The outer doors were closed and one of his vans had been backed up the ramp and onto the dock.

  Then he heard a familiar, puppy-like cooing, distant and muffled, followed by a burst of scuffling, and understood the reason for the near darkness.

  And what? Were they going to feed him to the animals? No one was supposed to bring any of them here; that order had come straight from Lou Burr. The stink monkeys were supposed to be brought straight up the freeway from the port of Long Beach to the big basement, then back down south as soon as everything had been set up. Yet one of them was here, just on the other side of the van’s back doors.

  Vendetti’s whole body tortured him, especially his head. At least the boof, whatever it felt like, would put an end to this pain. He had sworn never to touch the awful-smelling shit, but since things were looking fairly bleak just now….

  Eloy dropped him on the concrete floor, then took a roll of duct tape from a nearby shelf. Sanderson shut the building’s outer doors and came to assist Eloy by leveling a 9mm at their captive.

  Before binding his arms together, they wrapped each wrist and forearm individually with about fifteen layers of the tape. Eloy next held Vendetti’s head off the floor by his thinning dyed hair and Sanderson proceeded to wrap his neck just as thickly in the duct tape. He wrapped it loosely, not cutting off any air. Vendetti was too dazed and in pain to wonder why. Then they retreated behind a chain-link gate, which Eloy closed, latched, and carefully tested.

  “The creature you’re about to meet is the male from the pair you intended to steal,” Sanderson called out.

  “I never stole anything,” Vendetti croaked as loudly as his cracked ribs would permit. “That asshole next to you, along with the other asshole who’s dead now, tried to use one of the stink monkeys to do another job, just like I told them never to do, and it got away. And if he told you any other story, it’s because he knows we’d blow his guts out for fucking up like he did.”

  Sanderson ignored the protest and continued calmly. “You know, when we asked your accomplice outside the company where he’d hidden the animals, he didn’t want to answer at first. After we escorted him through the parking lot with which you’ve just become so intimate, you know what happened? He wanted to tell us, but he passed out. And then he didn’t wake up. All he managed to say was ‘van.’ And it took us until this morning to find that van – the very van whose rear doors are facing you now, by the way. That’s two and a half days. Now, if you hadn’t been out of town, we could have just asked you about it. Then our furry playmate in there would have been spared nearly dying of thirst. He didn’t have any water that whole time and – silly us – we plum forgot to give him any.”

  All at once, Vendetti understood the many layers of duct tape, and he gurgled out a sound of distress.

  “It sounds as though you know what happens when our wild brethren get badly dehydrated,” Sanderson said. “They stop producing ruby.” He sighed theatrically. Ahh…glorious ruby.”

  Vendetti could see Eloy looking toward the van and tugging on something that was invisible in the darkness. With each of Eloy’s tugs, there came more scuffling from within the van, and finally its back doors came open.

  “This one,” Sanderson said, “might just have a teensy, concentrated drop still left in his shriveled-up rump, although it won’t come out in much of a spray. That’s part of the reason we insisted on going to a dress-up sort of place for lunch today. You need that nice corduroy coat and slacks to protect you from any stray droplet that might rub off as he drags his sweet little ass over you.”

  Vendetti heard no more of Sanderson’s words because all at once the thing was in the room with him, its whimpers of distress much louder, sounding just like his girlfriend Tilda’s ancient Labrador retriever moaning for someone to help him haul his arthritic bones up onto the sofa.

  At first, it only pawed lightly at the taped spots on Vendetti’s body. Once it determined that all points were all equally difficult to reach, it opted to concentrate on his neck. Planting most of its weight on Vendetti’s chest, the stink monkey used its hind feet to dig at the tape on his neck.

  Christ, he’d never seen those feet up close before, and now they were digging at his neck, like when a cat tries to rip the belly out of a mouse. He could make out the toes on the foot closest to his face. Two had thin, curved claws and the others had what looked like long, thick fingernails sharpened to points.

  By the time it clawed through to the flesh beneath the tape, Vendetti had several dozen bleeding scratches on his face and neck. Dozens of swipes of those claws had gone astray and shredded the skin at the top of Vendetti’s chest. On his cheeks he received nearly symmetrical wounds that, within a few days, would look like ritual scarification. So much blood oozed from his cuts that the animal didn’t need to bite at first; it just lapped up the flow.

  “Hey, looky there,” Eloy said. “He’s bleeding war paint.”

  When the creature finally stopped slashing and settled down to quietly feed on him, Vendetti managed to catch his breath.

  “Hungry, too,” Sanderson said. “You know what happens when they’re starving, right? They just keep on feeding until they’re full. Normally they let their prey live to generate more blood for another night, but when they’re starving to death, another instinct overrides moderation. My team in Africa suspected that, and last night Eloy came across confirmation while he perused a hard drive that recently came into his possession. And did you know they never feed on young children? It’s as though they understand the need to preserve their prey, just like deerhunters not shooting fawns. Fascinating, no?”

  Wondering how much of his blood could fit into the animal’s stomach, Vendetti began to feel woozy. A lot could fit, apparently.

  His captors seemed to be reading his thoughts. “That same hard drive,” Sanderson said, “contained some interesting zoological speculations about our treasured beasts. They may be larger versions of little animals called prosimians, some of which have very expandable stomachs that can hold up to eight percent of their body weight. I’ve done a rough calculation and concluded that it’s entirely possible for our little friends to drain over forty percent of a person’s blood supply – forty percent being right about where the situation becomes life threatening.”

  “Now let’s see.” This was Eloy calling out. “What do you go, about two hundred twenty pounds, Mr. Vendetti? Two thirty? You might be okay.”

  “Unfortunately,” Sanders
on said, “your lady friend, Tilda, was a damn sight lighter than you. That became a problem for her when she met this fellow’s lady friend.”

  Vendetti couldn’t have known that Sanderson had simply paid Tilda five thousand dollars to stay away from the business, or that Eloy had promised her the beating of a lifetime if she showed up here again. Or that the female of the breeding pair had never been recovered from the wilds behind the foothills bungalow where it had escaped.

  In fact, Vendetti had little in his mind at all, and what few thoughts remained kept fading into gray blotches of nothingness. The other men’s words faded into indistinct mumbling. He was barely aware of the chain-link gate opening, but did open his eyes enough to see Eloy coming in with a cattle prod in his hand. He wondered, with very little alarm, what the shock would feel like.

  The animal lifted its face away from Vendetti’s neck, and its head bobbed drunkenly.

  Eloy stopped a few yards away. “Will you look at that,” he called back to Sanderson. “You were right. It’s getting ready to pass out. Didn’t even need the zapper.”

  Vendetti rolled his head and saw the animal lolling onto the floor next to him.

  “It’ll sleep for at least half a day,” Sanderson said

  Eloy stood staring at the animal. “Shame not to use the shocker after we went to such trouble to get a hold of one.”

  Sanderson gave a surprised and tired laugh, as though he couldn’t believe the situation had yielded yet more humor. Eloy stepped closer and wiggled the end of the instrument in between the buttons of Vendetti’s dress shirt, used it to push the undershirt aside, and placed the cool metal against his bare belly. A second later, the titular boss of Top Gun Security was fully awake in spite of his blood loss, and all his wounds were singing loudly.

  Sanderson came in and leaned close to Vendetti, as he had at the start of the afternoon’s fun. “We were just fooling around with you. You’re going to get relief after all.” He produced a small apple-juice bottle that now contained a quarter inch or so of brown liquid. He leaned over Vendetti’s face and unscrewed the cap, and the toxic smell added nausea to Vendetti’s woes. Sanderson tipped the little bottle. When the liquid hit Vendetti’s face, he felt it sear into his eyes and his many fresh cuts.

  A few heartbeats later, all was light and rushing movement. Vendetti felt himself entangled with Tilda on an old-fashioned shag rug. Suddenly he was falling through water, then air, then clouds, then whooshing merrily through a tunnel that pulsed with lights of many colors. Kind of how he’d hoped Disneyland’s Space Mountain would be when he’d first heard about it.

  And he knew that his life had become something wonderful.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Why’d the blood rats stick with primates?” Amy asked Stephen. “Why not other animals, too.”

  “Apes and humans are large enough not to drain in a single feeding, but not too large to sedate with a blast of boof. Blood rats sometimes attacked livestock or large wild animals like deer, but those animals weren’t as affected by the spray, probably because of their dense fur and their greater mass. Chimps and humans, on the other hand, have a lot of hairless surfaces on their bodies.”

  “So, eventually,” Amy said, trying to follow Stephen’s line of speculation, “early humans must have come to recognize the animals as something that should be avoided.”

  “Yes, like pests or parasites,” Stephen said. “And eventually we managed to wipe them out everywhere except for small pockets. They may still have been in Europe during the last glacial period, and then retreated to the higher altitudes as the climate warmed and the glaciers receded.”

  “Maybe they were in other mountain ranges besides the Carpathians.”

  “Maybe they still are,” Stephen said. “Anyway, thousands of years later, somebody up in those mountains saw the value of their spray and turned it into a lucrative business. By the time of the earliest records in the Baja bundle, the origin of the stuff was a carefully guarded secret. Only the highest-ranking families were supposed to have knowledge of the creatures – although the people who worked in their kennels were probably commoners. They even made sure that the wild blood-rat population stayed way down, so that no one else was likely to discover the wild ones and start up their own kennels. There were specialists who knew how to seek out blood-rat nests during the daytime and kill them while they were helpless. By the way, do you remember what I said about the arguments the local elite used when they were resisting the Church’s cease-and-desist order? How they said that keeping the animals was an important part of their cultural heritage?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you know about the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 1200s?”

  “Not really, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  He laughed. “The Carpathian mountain range happens to be precisely where the Mongols got bogged down, and it happened at a time when all the powers of Europe put together didn’t have the manpower to hold off the tidal wave of invaders. They had tried already and gotten slaughtered. All of Europe was looking at destruction. The Mongols would have done to Europe what Europeans eventually did to the Native Americans. All throughout the eastern kingdoms, aristocrats deserted their castles ran like hell westward. Up in the Carpathians, the members of the noble houses took their prized animals with them when they fled to the countryside. But in the winter, they started a guerilla campaign that partly consisted of letting loose dozens of their blood rats right next to the Mongol army camps.”

  “Smart move.”

  “They also sold boof through intermediaries to the invading soldiers. It was like heroin in Vietnam, with the added factor of strange creatures that came in the dark and could take human form. The whole scene terrorized the Mongol troops, turned half of them into junkies, and destroyed morale. Soon their commanders had to pull out, just like Sanderson had to give up on all that prime timber when the logging camp was turned into a mess. The Mongols used the excuse that they had to go home for the great Khan’s funeral, but the local nobility hiding in those mountains knew the truth. They’d driven out the hordes with their furry secret weapons. At least that’s the story they gave to the Church’s emissaries who wanted them to flush their whole inventory down the tubes.”

  “How’d they get their livestock back after the Mongols were gone?”

  “They had to go out and capture them, like their ancestors had done. A dangerous business, but a very profitable for anyone who learned the skill of finding their nests and trapping them without getting sprayed. A few months after the Mongols left, there was a boom in the wild blood-rat population because of all the ones they’d set loose. Also, since it had been a time of superabundant food supply in the form of Mongol blood, there were larger litters, and very few single births among the blood rats.”

  “Wait, back up,” Amy said. “Food supply increases litter size? I’ve never heard of anything like that. With some other mammals, yeah, but not primates.

  “I haven’t heard of it, either. But the locals claimed that if they deliberately overfed their captive blood rats – don’t ask me how they overfed them – the result was usually a litter of two to four young, rather than the usual single pup. It’s an interesting question, whether there could be some gene for multiple births that’s triggered by a sudden huge supply of nutrients. The chroniclers say it was a unique property of these animals. Anyway, after the Mongols left, people started new kennels by capturing the wild offspring of prize blood rats that had been––”

  Someone pounded on the door. Stephen got to his feet and looked out the peephole to see his cousin Elaine struggling to hold her sleeping eight-year-old daughter. He opened the door and she came in looking tired and shell shocked. From her free hand dangled two black plastic shopping bags. One contained remnants of assorted chips and candy that she and little Lucy had snacked on during the drive. The other bag held a pint of Grey Goose vodka and a quart of tonic.

  Amy hurried to get ice from down the hall,
then quickly returned and mixed the drinks. When all were seated around the little table and sipping way, she voiced her offer to fund a trip out of town for Elaine and her family, plus private security protection afterward. Speaking on behalf of everyone involved, Elaine immediately accepted.

  Lucy awoke after a short while, but obligingly stayed in the big vinyl-covered armchair across the room, exploring the TV channels, making it much easier for the grownups to speak freely about blood-sucking animals, burglars, drug dealers, and illegal weapons.

  It took over an hour to convince Elaine that Stephen hadn’t simply had a breakdown and become delusional. Once that had been accomplished, the paleo-anthropologist in Elaine took over, and Stephen eagerly fell into step with her. They launched into a rambling discussion of primates, hominids, migrations of archaic Homo sapiens, the origins of speech and symbolic communication, and prehistoric social organization.

  When Elaine had finished off one vodka tonic and mixed a second, she raised her glass and said, “I propose we call this discovery ‘Tarsius draculus.’”

  Stephen and Amy clinked classes with her in approval.

  “What about a common name?” Stephen asked. “Do we call the African ones ‘blood rats,’ the same as the European variety?”

  “How about v-chimp?” Amy offered, and this name was also unanimously adopted.

  Elaine watched Stephen drain his glass. “Are you sure you should be drinking while you’re on Vicodin, or whatever they gave you?” she said.

  Stephen shrugged. “I’m sure I’m enjoying it.”

  Amy said, “You know, the populations of these things must have been small, and fairly rare, given the fact that no one’s ever found any skeleton intact enough to put it all together.”

  “There are probably plenty of extinct animals we haven’t found evidence of yet,” Elaine said. “The fossil record really is incredibly scant, but it’s all we have to work with.” She chewed a thumbnail, regarding the pictures. “One thing about these imitations of human faces – they’re sort of cute, but they’re also sort of creepy.”