Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  “Go ahead and dig into it,” Amy said. “We’ll look after you. You’ll be no more helpless than you are now, and at least you’ll be happy.”

  Vendetti receded further, moving along the side of the animal enclosure, fading into the shadows. Then he was gone

  The v-chimps were cooing again, softly at first, irresistible whimpers like puppies out in the cold.

  “Vendetti,” Amy shouted.

  No answer.

  The animals began to shriek again.

  A big electric motor hummed, followed by a clunk and a whoosh like…

  “Elevator doors,” Stephen said. “There’s another elevator over there.”

  They heard rattling and a scraping of metal along the concrete floor, then five or six heavy footfalls.

  “We’ve got to head him off upstairs,” Amy said, and raced back into the freight elevator. Stephen followed.

  She pushed the button for the ground floor, then hit the CLOSE DOOR button to hurry things along.

  “When we get up there, I’m going out first because I’ve got the gun,” she said. “Wait until I say it’s okay before you move out of this elevator. He could be waiting right by the door to splash us with that stuff.”

  More likely, he would be dashing off to his favorite alley to sit and cover himself with his prize, but in case he wasn’t, she had to be ready to shoot as soon as the door opened.

  She hit the button for the ground floor again. It lit up, but went dark as soon as she took her finger away. The elevator door was still open. She hit the button again. “What’s wrong? We’re not moving.”

  Stephen looked over the set of buttons. “A key. You need a key to run this elevator. Vendetti must have had one with the keys to his van. He said he set this place up, after all.”

  “Shit,” Amy said. “He was standing right here in this corner while we rode down. Had his hands behind him, nice and casual.”

  “Let’s go see if the other elevator takes a key, too,” Stephen said. “If it does, I guess we look for some way to get up to that catwalk.”

  They left the elevator and headed around the enclosure, looking around for the other elevator. The animals were screaming again.

  “Over there.” Amy pointed to the opposite wall of the basement, facing the rear of the cage.

  Stephen looked over his shoulder as they moved toward the smaller elevator. On the back wall of the cage, he noticed a lopsided rectangle of darkness in one lower corner.

  He stared at that dark spot for a moment, thinking about the rattling sound they’d heard just before the second elevator started up. He remembered the sound of Vendetti running.

  “Let me check something out,” he said, and walked toward the cage.

  Amy pushed the elevator button and a motor hummed. At least the car was coming back down.

  A moment later, Stephen saw that the dark shape on the cage’s rear wall was formed by a low, small door hanging open at an angle. The opening in the cage was about three feet high – just the right size for stuffing a tranquilized v-chimp inside. Like the rest of the wall, the gate was made of chain link covered over by fiberglass. The fiberglass overlapped the chain link, leaving no gaps for the animals to spray through when the gate was closed.

  Vendetti had opened the gate just before he charged toward the elevator.

  Stephen kicked the gate shut, then crouched to see how it latched. A flat metal bar hung bolted to the cage. He swung the bar across the door and dropped it into a spring-loaded catch.

  Immediately, something thumped against the inside of the gate. The smell of the spray intensified tenfold, and almost made him dizzy. He wondered if, at close range, the fumes were enough to send someone on a boof ride.

  He rolled back on his haunches and was about to stand and turn back toward the elevator, but heard a scratching that seemed to be coming from around the corner of the cage.

  Still squatting, Stephen leaned over and looked around the corner to where they had been just a few seconds ago.

  He could only see the back of the animal that had its face stuck into a bucket. Then you go around and dump the red stuff into the metal sink …. The animal was feeding straight out of one of the blood buckets.

  Stephen would have sworn it was nothing more than a small chimpanzee – except for the tail, which stretched out nearly five feet, semi-rigid, bobbing slightly. He could hear a light lapping, maybe even a slurp or two, from inside the bucket.

  “Steve!” Amy called. “What are you doing?”

  At the sound of her voice, the animal shifted its forequarters back from the bucket. The body did not turn, but its head swiveled one-hundred-eighty degrees to face backward, like an owl’s.

  A face from the medieval drawings looked at him. It was a “before” face, and had blood dripping from its petite mouth and nose. More blood clung to shapeless wrinkles on its cheekbones, which must have grazed the inside of the bucket.

  It did not morph into a chimp face, only regarded Stephen briefly and blankly with oversized cat eyes, and returned to its bucket with a haughty chirp.

  “Steve!”

  He stood and turned back toward Amy. She had blocked the elevator door with an ancient wooden crate and was coming toward him. “What’d you see?”

  “Get back in the elevator! Hurry!”

  At first he could not understand why she slammed against him, throwing him to the floor, or why she dropped the gun as she landed on him. He was mainly aware of the pain in his broken left hand as he fell on it.

  He rolled and wriggled until he found himself on his feet, then spun around. He spotted Amy kneeling on the floor.

  A second v-chimp had wrapped itself around her shoulder. It looked smaller than the one by the cage. She was frantically, ineffectually, using her shirttail to wipe the spray off her face. Stephen guessed that the droplets of spray had only missed him because he’d been knocked out of their trajectory.

  Inside the cage, the rest of the animals were screaming frantically.

  “Hurry!” was Amy’s last intelligible word.

  The little mouth had already clamped onto her neck. Stephen reached for the animal to pull it off, but then withdrew. If it sprayed again, he would be useless to her.

  He searched the floor for the gun, found it, then turned and saw that Amy’s movements had gotten woozy, arms melting away from the task of swabbing up the poison.

  The animal’s head was too close to hers for him to risk shooting at it. He moved closer, thinking he should get it at close range, but when he was four feet away, the thing’s head turned toward him and regarded him with big dark orbs. It was going to spray.

  He fired into the air.

  Again, the animals in the cage shut up immediately. The one on Amy’s shoulder sprang away and disappeared so fast that Stephen had no idea which direction it had gone.

  He guided Amy toward the small elevator, pushing her with elbows instead of his bare hands, avoiding direct contact with the spray. She stumbled, glassy-eyed, pleasantly amazed.

  He pressed the button for the ground floor and knew immediately that it was futile. Next to the CLOSE DOOR button was a keyhole. The doors came together, but the car sat still.

  He laid Amy down in the back of the elevator. The light from the glowing buttons was enough for him to see that her eyes were swollen. He pulled off his t-shirt, spat profusely on a corner of it, and swabbed her eyes before wiping as much of the stuff as he could from her skin. Then he sat and tried to figure things out instead of just staring at her face – although that wasn’t easy. She was beautiful in a whole different way when she was whacked out and full of wonderment.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stephen fired another shot before going out to look for a way up to the catwalk, and he heard something scurry in a distant corner of the place. There were three rounds left in the clip.

  Walking by the cage, he saw the v-chimp that had been feeding at the bucket, now sound asleep. It had overfed, which probably meant that no one had dumpe
d blood into the funnel for a while. Or maybe higher-ranking members of the v-chimp troop had prevented this one from getting a share of that morning’s feeding, and now it had gotten its first big meal in a long time.

  One circuit of the basement told him there were no longer any ladders going up. It might be possible to pile up some of the junk and climb for the catwalk, but there was no way Amy could make it in her current state. It wouldn’t be easy for him even alone, with one hand disabled.

  As he passed in front of the animals’ cage, he heard their excited whimpering and the drumming of spray on the vinyl. He turned on the misters, as he’d seen Vendetti do, and soon there were a couple fingers of liquid in the collection jug. It might be useful as a means of subduing the men who would eventually come to feed the animals, but there would be a lag time between the splash and the men’s incapacitation. Long enough for one of them to fire a gun or, if they weren’t armed, to simply launch himself at Stephen and start swinging. No matter who won the fistfight, Stephen would soon be out of commission because the boof would get rubbed onto him.

  The motor of the big freight elevator began to hum. Either Vendetti had told someone about the security breech, or someone had come for the regular feeding.

  He remembered the knife on Amy’s keychain, and took it out to see how much of a blade it had. Definitely useless in a fight.

  But it would go easily through vinyl.

  Standing at one end of the cage’s front face, he punched the little blade through the clear vinyl at about waist height, then cut upward to just above his head. Slicing as he walked, he headed toward the other end of the cage front. Spray drummed against the sheet at his side, and he looked back to see dark spots form on the floor outside the cage where the vinyl was falling away. The animals were aiming at him.

  At the far end he made a downward cut, creating a flap that hung straight down and left a three-foot-high window the length of the cage.

  He raced around to the back of the cage, out of sight of anyone coming from the elevator. The doors slid open noisily, then two men were speaking. Next came a shout of alarm, one guy warning the other to stop, to avoid the front of the cage.

  Apparently the warning came too late, because suddenly both men were shouting furiously and frantically.

  “Come back to the elevator! Hurry before you lose your shit.”

  “Fuck, man. I can’t even see.”

  “Follow my voice.”

  Next came a sound like someone stumbling and hitting the floor.

  “I can’t see! Help me up!”

  “Aw, shit, I can’t touch you. Hold on. I’ll be right back.”

  “Fuckin wait!”

  The man who hadn’t been sprayed was about to take the elevator back up, and Stephen couldn’t let that happen.

  He stepped out from in back of the cage, saw a gray haired, gray bearded man backing toward the elevator, and shouted at him to stop.

  The cast on Stephen’s left hand made it impossible for him to hold the gun properly. Instead of cupping the butt of it, he had to rest his right forearm on his left, just like the silhouette James Bond during the opening credits of the early 007 flicks.

  Gray-beard looked around, saw Stephen, and lunged for the elevator.

  Stephen fired and heard a shout of agony. He shouted, “Stop and get on the floor.”

  Two rounds left.

  Another shot followed his. The second man had crawled out from in front of the cage and was lying on his stomach fifteen feet in front of Stephen, eyes clenched closed, waving a pistol blindly in his general direction. He fired again, and a bullet clanged off of some metal junk in the shadows.

  “Almost got him,” Gray-beard shouted. “Little to your left.” He was also on the floor now, inch-worming toward the elevator. Stephen had hit him in the leg.

  The man who’d been sprayed was much younger than Gray-beard, with blond hair and braided goatee. He was grinning. He fired a few more times, but clearly wasn’t going to hit Stephen unless by dumb luck. In addition to being blinded, he was already starting what would likely be a very long ride on the boof express.

  Stephen raced straight toward Blondie and stomped on his shoulder. Blondie let go of the gun and giggled. Stephen started to reach for the weapon, then realized that the grip was probably covered with boof. Instead he kicked the pistol aside and ran the last few strides to the elevator. Gray-beard was almost to his knees, trying to get his hand around the door and inside to the buttons, but was having trouble balancing.

  Stephen saw that he had shot him in the right thigh, and any pressure at all on that leg was giving the man intense grief. He grabbed Gray-beard’s right ankle and heaved. Gray-beard howled with pain and tried to kick Stephen with his uninjured left leg.

  When he had hauled the injured man several yards from the elevator, he said, “Gimme the elevator key.”

  “Still in the elevator.”

  Stephen ran and checked. The key was there. He jogged back to Gray-Beard and said, “Give me your shirt and I won’t kill you. Both your shirts.” Gray-beard was wearing a blue long-sleeve cotton shirt, unbuttoned, over his tee.

  It took a kick in the side and another directly on the bullet wound before Gray-beard complied. Stephen pulled on the t-shirt and went to retrieve the sawed-off jug that contained the boof and water mixture. There were only a couple ounces of liquid, but it would be enough for his purposes. He poured half over Gray-beard’s head and the rest onto his wound, eliciting a flurry of snarls and curses.

  He used the cotton shirt to wipe off Blondie’s pistol before putting it in his pocket, then used the shirt again to hold Amy’s shoulder as he led her to the freight elevator.

  The last thing he saw before the doors closed was Blondie, on his feet now, smiling. His back was arched, arms extended overhead in a perfect rendition of the yoga posture called sun salutation.

  Amy waved at Blondie, and he waved back, the two of them grinning like children as the elevator doors closed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Amy’s surroundings were vaguely familiar. The walls of the room were bare, but she knew the place, the way you recognize a hotel room that you scarcely looked at before you went to sleep. Her suitcase was open on the floor, but she had no memory of checking in anywhere recently.

  Physically she felt awful, with a killer headache that spiked every time she moved so much as her eyes. The little bit of sunlight leaking in through the blinds was painful and fascinating at the same time. It lent all the surfaces in the room a cartoonish glimmer of many colors, and those colors followed her into the hall as she left the bedroom.

  More light came from the end of the hall, strange and searing. There were low voices. At the end of the hall she turned through an archway into the next room and covered her eyes against the glare. She heard Rita say, “Here she is. Let’s put the blinds down.”

  There was shuffling movement, and a few seconds later a hand was on her shoulder.

  “Okay darling,” Rita said. “It’s dark now.”

  Amy dropped her hands, and now only a warm and gentle glow filled the room. Rita was guiding her to the sofa, asking her how she had slept. The glow was from a single candle.

  “Steve made coffee,” Rita said. “It’s about nine in the morning, in case you were wondering.”

  The safe-house living room, with its walls still mostly bare, and no bookcases or bureaus anywhere, felt empty and big, and the candlelight added a church-like quality. Heavy blankets had been draped over the windows. The blankets had Navajo designs, and they made Amy think of stained glass. The atmosphere was immensely peaceful, but did not take away the headache.

  Stephen handed her a glass of water and a couple of oblong white pills that she recognized as Vicodin.

  “Two?” she said.

  “I was going to recommend four. But you’re a good sixty pounds lighter than me, so two will probably do you fine. You remember waking up a few hours ago and complaining about the pain?”

  She
shook her head. “I remember dropping off your animals here, and…we went someplace near Little Tokyo, right?”

  “That’s right. More of it should come back before long, right up to the point where you got attacked.”

  “Attacked? Again?”

  “Attacked, and utterly doused with the spray this time. Rita’s been scouring the online forums about boof, and the users’ consensus seems to be that pre-boof memories come back completely within a few hours. But memories of the boof ride itself will never be more than a spotty bunch of sounds and snapshots that just sort of jump out at you now and then.”

  Rita brought coffee and sat on the sofa with one arm around Amy’s shoulders. “Steve filled me in on everything. He says those are bite marks as well as scratches on you, and that means you need to get checked out for whatever wild animal bugs those things might have passed on to you.”

  Amy nodded. “Infection. I never even thought about it, which is kind of funny, considering that everyone at the logging camp thought the animals were spreading some kind of deadly fever.”

  “You might want to ask your doctor to write a scrip for some more Vicodin, too.” Rita said. “The headaches might come and go for a couple of days, according to the boofheads online. They also say that good painkillers can turn the aftereffects of boof from miserable to kinda fun.”

  “I go to a couple of different doctors,” Amy said, “and there’s one who’ll phone in a prescription for pretty much anything I want, short of a year’s supply of morphine. I’ll make sure he authorizes enough Vicodin for you and me both, Steve.” She sipped while Stephen told her what had happened after the v-chimp got to her.

  After their escape from the big basement, Stephen had called Rita on Amy’s cell phone, and she’d come and led him back to the safe house.

  They had stripped her and hosed her off in the fenced-in back yard, which she hadn’t seemed to mind a bit. In fact, she’d giggled and shrieked her way through it. Rita had gotten her into the hot shower afterwards.

  Amy shook her head, smiling a little, trying to picture it. Even in her groggy and depleted state, she felt a little thrill at the thought of being exposed in broad daylight in front of these too. Stephen was certainly smiling at the memory of it. “I hope I didn’t say anything too embarrassing.”