Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  “I think I can account for that,” Stephen said. “But let me back up a few million years. “I’m guessing that before we clever Homo sapiens came along, blood rats could easily insert themselves into a primate social network. I bet the ones that mimic chimps even smell like chimps – I mean their body scent, not the spray. And the ones that followed earlier hominids also developed different scent-mimicking ability to suit their prey. But we were trickier to tackle, probably the first species to think their way around the blood rats’ deception, and organize well enough to go after them.”

  “So how did the blood rats get to Europe?” Amy asked.

  Elaine was nodding. “I think I see where you’re going, Steve.” Turning to Amy, she said, “Hominids started migrating out of Africa as early as two million years ago, way before our species ever popped up. They evolved into various species around the old world, including Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East. We Homo sapiens sprang up in Africa only a couple hundred thousand years ago.”

  Amy nodded to show she was following.

  Stephen took up the explanation. “I figure that some blood-rat populations stayed in Africa, while others followed early hominids into other parts of the old world. A couple million years later, when Homo sapiens appeared in Africa, we probably wiped out the blood rats on that continent – except for the ones that were still feeding on apes and not bothering us. But sixty or a hundred thousand years ago, when some of us Homo sapiens left Africa end entered Europe and Asia for the first time, we had to tangle with the blood rats all over again. That’s because we ran into the ones that had been feeding on Neanderthals in Europe, and Peking Man in Asia, and all the rest of them. As we replaced those other populations, the blood rats that had been feeding on them began to feed on us, but they still mimicked the appearance of those other hominids.”

  Elaine filled in the rest: “And kept mimicking them instead of us right up until they were wiped out a few hundred years ago. Or maybe they started to look more like us, but the transition was never complete because they only had a few tens of thousands of years.”

  Amy said, “So by the time Homo sapiens got to Europe and found the blood rats there, it would have been hundreds of generations since their ancestors killed off the ones in Africa, and there was probably no memory of how it had been done the first time.”

  “Exactly,” Stephen said. “Groups of modern humans in largely ice-covered Europe had to work it out all over again. Probably at different times in different areas, since knowledge didn’t travel all that fast.”

  “Imagine the cultural significance of battling the things,” Elaine said. “Every time some community of humans finally eradicated the blood rats in their area, they must have celebrated. They probably told the stories over campfires for centuries. It would have been a monumental, heroic event each time.”

  “Maybe once it was accomplished in one place, the news spread,” Stephen said. “Maybe the expertise required to get rid of blood rats was like a commodity that could be traded. I’ll lend you my slayers for a year in return for ten young women, half a ton of dried bison meat, and a sled full of those pretty pink seashells.”

  “Or maybe they traded the knowledge itself for goods,” Amy said. “Taught people from other tribes how to do it for a very high consulting fee.”

  “Hell, the challenge of dealing with them probably made us what we are,” Elaine said, then grinned. “I bet figuring out the whole thing with the garlic and the wooden stakes pushed our brain development right over the finish line.” After a long silence, she added, “Here’s something that bugs me: If they evolved to mimic humans or apes, then why wouldn’t they just have human-looking or simian-looking eyes and faces in the first place? It seems like a pretty clumsy adaptation, all that extra flesh and the mechanism for morphing.”

  “If they had smaller eyes like ours all the time,” Amy said, “their night vision wouldn’t be as good. So in order to be nocturnal and still look like an ape or a human, they would have to change back and forth.”

  “But why mimic in the first place?” Elaine said. “Why not just hunt like a lion or a hyena?”

  “Because these things didn’t prey quite like those big hunters,” Stephen said. “Its method was all about inserting itself into a social group – maybe not spending a lot of time with the troop, but it had to make itself seem like a friendly being, someone worth going out to visit once the sun went down. And looking like a juvenile helped a lot. Maybe the blood rats were even protected from other predators by the very primate groups they preyed on.”

  Elaine was frowning, concentrating hard. “So…the fact that the prey become light-sensitive from the spray has nothing to do with the fact that the predators are naturally light-sensitive, being nocturnal. Is that right? Just coincidence?”

  “That’s right,” Stephen said.

  Amy held up a hand. “Maybe not all coincidence. If the spray keeps the prey animal away from the sun for hours, including well into the next day, then its sleep cycle will be thrown off. It’ll sleep half the day, and then it won’t be sleepy when night falls. And since the world outside its usual sanctuary is less painful in dim light or darkness, the prey will be all the more likely to venture out and about. And swap its blood for a fix of boof.” She shrugged. “I know it’s awfully complex, but a lot of things in nature are. I think that’s exactly what was happening at the logging camp.”

  Elaine arched her torso into a long stretch, then slumped back in her chair and sighed. “I’m hungry. Anyone else hungry? Lucy, are you hungry?”

  Without looking away from the TV, Lucy grinned and nodded vigorously.

  Elaine turned to Amy, a change in her tone of voice indicating that her thoughts were returning to practical matters. “Do the police realize there’s a connection between the break-in at your place and the one at Steve’s?”

  Amy shook her head. “I don’t think we can tell the police everything.”

  “Why not? I understand why Steve can’t let on that he has all that stolen material from Mexico, but for you…?”

  “We still have absolutely nothing to substantiate our story. If I try to link this timber company to a couple of very minor break-ins, or worse yet, to an animal unknown to science, I’ll just sound like a flake.”

  “You wouldn’t have to mention the animals,” Elaine said. “Just say that you think some people connected with the logging company are exporting something illegal or dangerous. They think you know more about it than you really do because you went to that logging camp, but you were really spying on the hunters. That’s what happened, right?”

  “Yeah, but there’s a problem with that, too.” Amy explained what she’d heard from her Cameroonian friend Robert and from the hunter at the logging camp: the story about an American scientist probing into the mystery fever, and about heavily armed foreign soldiers swarming the camp, looking for him after he’d gone missing.

  “I was in that very camp, not that much later, traveling under a fake name. And I had also hired someone to snoop around the place. If I become associated with whatever that scientist was looking for, or with his disappearance, I might find armed men carting me off somewhere in the middle of the night. Guantanamo might be closed, but the feds can still lock you up without charges for years on end. I’m worried that maybe this guy Tobin was investigating biological terrorism. It was probably just a false alarm brought on by the blood-rat attacks – I mean v-chimp attacks – but I don’t want the remotest possibility of a connection with that.”

  Elaine sucked on an ice cube and nodded.

  “On the other hand,” Amy continued, “somebody wants me dead, and now they want Steve dead, and I can’t see what else to do besides run like hell, go into hiding. And get you and your family out of harm’s way, too.”

  Elaine kneaded her forehead for a long while. “I’m afraid I can’t come up with any other suggestions right now. And I thank you for the offer of help; I don’t really have a choice but to accept.” Sh
e turned and called out to her daughter, “Why don’t you call Daddy’s number and ask how he and Linda are doing?” Lucy rushed over to take the cell phone from her. “Then we’ll go find a restaurant and have an early dinner before it gets crowded.”

  Stephen had been tapping on Amy’s laptop, looking for the forum about boof and the Free Forest Campground.

  “Did you come across the Sanderson cartoons?” Amy asked him.

  “What cartoons?”

  “You’d know what I’m talking about if you’d seen them. I’ll show you another time. Not for young audiences.”

  Lucy appeared at Elaine’s side and tapped her knee. “Linda says she answered Daddy’s phone a little while ago, and some man asked where they were, and she told him, and then Daddy got mad when he found out that she told him, and he packed everything back into the car. They’re coming here.” She held out the phone. “Now she says Daddy wants to talk to you. She says he’s driving really fast.”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stephen awoke in Amy’s passenger seat to the sound of the engine starting. They were outside a freeway-stop diner near Coalinga. Even in the shade of a stand of eucalyptus at the edge of the lot, the heat of the San Joaquin Valley had seeped into the car and baked him to sleep.

  It had been two days since their conversation in the hotel. Elaine and her family were about to head to Vancouver for a couple of weeks. Because Stephen knew that his wounded and distracted condition would make him lousy company, he had chosen not to tag along with Elaine’s gang. He and Amy were on their way south, back to L.A. For now, the plan was for Stephen, the cats, and the iguana to hole up in Amy and Rita’s “safe house” for a while. Beyond that, they hadn’t decided anything. Amy had suggested getting out of the country, going somewhere warm and cheap, preferably tropical. She’d talked up the glories of diving and snorkeling until he reminded her that nothing aquatic would be an option for him as long as his hand was in a cast.

  Stephen gazed around droopily as Amy backed out of the parking spot and headed for the freeway onramp.

  “Nice and cool in that restaurant,” she said, turning the air conditioning on full blast and aiming one of the vents at his face. “And you’ll want to be nice and wide awake to hear what I have to say.”

  The air blast took a minute or so to turn cold, but it did the trick, reviving him as it surrounded his head and flowed into his lungs.

  “You must have made your phone call,” he said.

  She’d been planning to try the phone number that had been on the email with Marcel’s warning. They had both agreed that it would be best to wait until they were away from both the Bay Area and L.A. It seemed unlikely that someone could trace their location from use of a disposable cell, but not being sure, they’d decided she should call from someplace they would only be passing through.

  She nodded. “I just spent twenty minutes on the phone with the guy who sent the email. I told him what we think we know about the animals, minus the medieval part, and he told me plenty, too. Says he was one of the doctors who originally went to investigate the mystery fever at the logging camp. Didn’t give his name, but he hinted pretty clearly that he’s with the Ministry of Public Health.”

  Stephen found a paper cup half full of old coffee and slurped up a sugary mouthful.

  “And listen to this,” Amy said. “According to Marcel, Hugh Sanderson himself is the man making all the deals. This doctor claims to have actually saved Marcel from the other people who’re working for Sanderson. He thinks they were going to kill him so they could each get a bigger cut of what Sanderson pays them to capture the animals and deliver them to wherever they get shipped from. Once Marcel realized he was safer being on the doctor’s side than back with his partners in crime, he was more than happy to reveal everything he knew. And he did say the money came straight to them from Sanderson, and he thought Sanderson was also getting paid per animal with each delivery overseas.”

  “Which means Sanderson’s a vital link in this for sure.”

  “Yeah, and apparently they’re not finished shipping yet. They still have more animals in cages.” She accelerated up the entrance ramp and tried to meld into traffic. Not until they were doing eighty did the majority of other cars stop blowing past them.

  Stephen hunted around for his bottle of pain pills and saw that it had rolled onto the driver’s-side floor. His left hand was useless, and reaching with his right would require considerable contortion. When Amy saw him going for the pills, she slipped off her sandal and picked up the little bottle with her toes. Extending her leg sideways in a way that made him think of ballet, she dropped the pills into his lap. Her long, toned leg was tanned to a medium gold, and there was curly, translucent peach fuzz on her kneecap.

  “You do yoga?” he asked, downing a couple of pills.

  “I go to classes once in a while, but I stretch a lot. I do a lot of running and swimming. You run?”

  “Four or five times a week for about an hour.”

  Amy changed the subject back to what she’d just learned on the phone. “Our friend confirms that the animals change appearance to mimic juvenile chimps. And you were right: the loose flesh on their faces is spongy. He actually dissected one. The glands that spray the boof are located just near its rectum, same as a skunk’s scent glands.”

  “How’d he get hold of the v-chimp?” Stephen asked.

  “I’m not quite sure – something about finding a dead one in a crate in a warehouse.”

  “So now the Equateurian government knows about the animals, and knows what they can do and what they’re worth. That’s not really good news.”

  Amy shook her head and grinned. “No. The rest of his government doesn’t know. The guy is working almost completely on his own. Remember how I said he contacted me totally outside of official channels? Anonymous email and all that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So he’s not interested in telling anyone in Equateur about the animals. Part of the reason he contacted me on the sly was to dodge Sanderson’s influence. In fact – get this – he’s even been told directly by someone in the president’s office to lay off investigating what seemed to be another outbreak of the logging camp fever – close to the capital! Where a couple of million people live! He investigated anyhow, on his own, and it led him to Sanderson’s free campground, which was where he spotted Marcel, who he knew from the logging camp. He also saw a couple of big goons that he recognized as camp security guards – one of them with a very crooked nose, as it happens.” She let go of the steering wheel long enough to punch her palm in triumph.

  “You busted up the right guy.”

  “Damn right I did. It looks like that crooked-nosed asshole is also the one who convinced Sanderson that he needed to go after me because of what I posted online, my description of the dead thing I saw on the bushmeat wagon made me a threat. I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out that Caroline Yi and Francine were the same person.”

  “Did our doctor friend get all that intel just from Marcel?”

  “Started with Marcel, but then got some other names. Somehow he’s strong-arming one of those guards into giving him regular reports on what’s going on in the boof operation.”

  “Does he know which part of the U.S. Sanderson is sending the v-chimps to?”

  Amy shook her head. “Not yet. Apparently some Sanderson employees – not sure which ones – came here with him to set up the boof lab for his buyer. The guard that our friend is leaning on says he doesn’t know. He says he didn’t make the trip and, that Sanderson didn’t tell him the destination beforehand, and the setup team hasn’t arrived back in Equateur yet, so there’s been no one around to tell him anything. Marcel says that’s probably a lie, because he knows the setup team was supposed to be back by now, so the guard’s probably trying to hold back a certain amount of information for leverage or whatever.

  “Since a v-chimp tried to climb in your bathroom window,” Stephen said, “it’s a prett
y good bet they’re sending them to California. They could have sent goons from anywhere in the country to knock off you and me, but I doubt they’d send one of the animals a long way from wherever their new kennel is. Not precious cargo like that.”

  “Probably right.” Then she slapped the dashboard as if she’d just remembered something. “I haven’t told you the best part yet. Our friend says he thinks he can use the old story about a mystery disease to get his boss – the actual Minister of Public Health himself – to clamp a tight quarantine on the basin where the animals live. Whip up a big enough scare that even Sanderson’s allies in the government will think twice about letting anyone go messing around in that place.”

  Stephen stayed silent a moment, absorbing what this might mean. “If they can’t get any more animals out of that basin where the logging camp used to be,” he said, “then Sanderson has nothing more to offer. His buyers will be stuck with the animals they’ve already received - ,aybe breeding, maybe not.” He was silent for a moment, then asked, “What’s our Equateurian doctor’s interest in all of this?”

  “First of all, he hates the fact that someone threatened him on Sanderson’s behalf. Second, I think he hates Sanderson just on general principle; he apparently takes his job seriously enough to be annoyed by companies who house their workers in cesspools with hardly any medical service available.”

  “What about the guys in body armor who were looking for the disappeared scientist? Did you talk about that?”

  “Yeah. I told him I’ve been worried that someone in the U.S. government might think I was connected with that whole thing. He didn’t know all that much. His team concluded that there was no unusual outbreak at the camp except possibly some contact dermatitis that came from being in physical contact with whatever animals had been jumping people. Apparently Tobin – the American scientist – agreed with him on that, but whoever came looking for Tobin after he disappeared wasn’t convinced.”