Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  Olaf passed them up, got to his hind legs and did a couple of awkward-looking cartwheels.

  “He’s a circus rescue,” Brandon said. “Still does his tricks sometimes, even though he doesn’t get rewarded for them anymore.”

  “He doesn’t smell like he got sprayed last night,” Stephen said. “How do you suppose he avoided it while he was missing?”

  “He probably went into the infirmary. He knows a way in through a hatch above one of the windows. He spends a lot of time there.”

  “Is he sick?” Amy asked.

  “Heart and lung problems. He’s old, and things keep going wrong. The vets have removed tumors a few times, and they were going to check him again this week for any new polyps.”

  The sanctuary staff called the Quonset hut, “the Hangar,” because it of its shape. In addition to the animal infirmary, there was a large office, a big communal dining room and TV lounge, a couple of bathrooms, six separate bedrooms, and several other smaller rooms meant for storage, but which could be used as sleeping quarters in a pinch.

  Lounging on an old, sprung sofa, Amy and Stephen ate crackers and scrambled eggs and listened.

  Brandon had arrived two nights earlier with Tony, the newly hired vet. There were supposed to be four people staying at the Hangar that night, but they’d found it deserted. Brandon had decided to show Tony around the place anyhow. Approaching the chimp enclosure, they’d spotted someone Brandon knew, a keeper named Margaret. She’d been stumbling, foul-smelling, and badly scratched up. At first, they’d been too focused on helping her to notice that the gate to the enclosure was open. Brandon had shut it, but later they’d done a count of the remaining chimps and discovered that three were missing.

  While driving Margaret back to the Hangar in a golf cart, they’d come upon the dead body of another keeper named Junichi. He had been badly mauled, and there was blood all over the walkway.

  Brandon himself had been jumped when they were right outside the Hangar. Tony had somehow managed not to get sprayed in the process of getting the animal off of Brandon and ushering him inside. Then he’d locked Brandon into a small windowless room and Margaret into another. For the 911 call, Tony had said that there had been animal attacks, that one person was sick, one dead, two missing. The animals that attacked had smelled sick and had acted crazed. They appeared to be small chimps.

  It turned out that similar calls had come from a couple of the little villages on the mountainside, and no emergency personnel had been able to make it to the Hangar for several hours. During that time, Tony had gone up to the little loft in the tallest part of the Quonset hut, locked himself in with some vodka he found in the kitchen, and fallen asleep.

  When the place was evacuated well into the next morning, Margaret had been the only one already up and around, having bashed her way out of the locked room. Because of her trip on the ruby highway, she hadn’t even remembered that Brandon and Tony were there. Most of the Hangar’s many rooms were searched, but Brandon’s closet-sized quarters and Tony’s remote loft were overlooked. The two men had slept through their chance to get off the mountain. That had been about the time Amy and Stephen were climbing up the mountain road, just before their thwarted assassination of Hugh Sanderson.

  Tony and Brandon had driven down and registered at the police barricade that Amy and Stephen had seen from the hillside. After giving blood samples, they were allowed the same choice the residents of the villages had been given: stay in the tent city being established just inside the perimeter, or drive back up here and stay in contact. They’d chosen to stay and try to locate the missing chimps; the live ones had already been airlifted out for testing and observation.

  During the day, Tony and Brandon had watched the news, talked to public health officials by phone, and listened to police dispatches on a radio in the office. It sounded serious. There was increasing Federal involvement along with sheriffs and state police. A deputy had gone missing, and all afternoon the sheriffs’ dispatcher had pleaded for a Lieutenant Cisneros to report in. News choppers had been banned from flying over the quarantine area.

  Unable to leave, Brandon had decided to explore, and had started with the dirt road that led to where Top Gun Security kept their vans. When TGS first took over the sanctuary, they’d set up a new office in an RV on the next hilltop to the north. It was over two miles away. With no explanation, they’d gated off the only road that led up there, and it was almost impossible to go up the sheer sides of that hill on foot.

  After the “outbreak,” with no Top Gun people around to block access to the hilltop, Brandon had driven up to investigate. There he’d discovered that, not only were the hillsides impassible to all but expert rappellers, but anyone who got to the top would have faced a complete circuit of razor-wire fence. In the middle of that enclosed area, he’d found the RV, two TGS vans, and three uniformed TGS employees – dead and pallid and looking rather shriveled. There had also been a shed made of fiberglass and chain link, carefully camouflaged so as to be invisible from the air.

  The inside of the shed had smelled wonderful to Brandon – like the beach on a hot day and his girlfriend’s coconut sunscreen mingling with her sweat and the ocean breeze.

  He described a strange setup inside the shed, with cages and hanging sheets of clear vinyl.

  “But none of the little animals?” Amy said.

  “None.”

  The following night – the same time Amy and Stephen were making their unlit way toward the sanctuary – Tony had gone outside for some reason, gotten sprayed, and gotten completely drained by a succession of the animals. Brandon had come out of his bedroom in the middle of all that, noticed what was happening, and managed to shoot one of the animals with a tranq dart. He’d scared the rest of the animals away by banging on a big cooking pot with a hammer, but it was too late for Tony.

  Brandon had gone out again as soon as the sun came up. The animal was still breathing. He had no idea what to make of the animals appearance, and didn’t want to call and tell any of the health department officials about it for fear that they’d think he was delirious with the mystery disease himself, and would order him to head straight for the temporary clinic. He much preferred to spend his imprisonment up here, with solitude and access to the outdoors.

  When the creature came around, it had started screaming, hiding its eyes from the sunlight. A moment later, he’d thought he must be hallucinating after all, because the face had started contorting. The side of it was puffing out, so that it seemed like a side view of a chimpanzee. Then it had shrunk back to its usual weird teddy-bear look.

  He’d fired several more tranq darts into the animal, hoping to put it out of its misery. An hour later, it was definitely dead, lying perfectly still, the big saucer eyes open and staring straight up at the sky. It had vomited some reddish-brown slop onto the ground, and Brandon thought he knew why Tony’s body and those of the TGS employees had seemed so shriveled.

  Right away he had called the county health people to inform them that there was another victim: a man mauled by something in the night. He didn’t say what kind of animal had done the mauling.

  “Your car must have been in the parking lot already,” Brandon said,” but I didn’t notice it until I went out again to throw that tarp over Tony. I thought you might be Top Gun people come to try and round up the little animals. After seeing that setup inside the shed, I figured TGS must be behind them. I remembered a couple of those guys using the phrase ‘stink monkeys,’ but of course at the time, I had no idea what it meant.”

  Amy and Stephen told Brandon their own story, leaving out, by unspoken agreement, the Carpathian connection and their attempt to assassinate Sanderson.

  Brandon said, “So, you guys probably won’t want to call up the people in charge of the quarantine and say, Here we are, right?”

  What Amy and Stephen both wanted was a few hours of real sleep, stretched out on beds.

  “But our main worry,” Amy said, “is that we can’t b
e here when they send up the men in space suits to look over the plague zone. I think we need to hurry up and go hide out somewhere.”

  “There won’t be anyone today,” Brandon said. “They called a couple of times asking whether I needed food or anything, since they won’t be coming here until tomorrow at the earliest. So you’re okay to rest if you need it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Olaf had run away again. Brandon had intended to seal him into the clinic before nightfall, lest he finally be lured outside by faux chimp calls, but now they had to find him first. If they couldn’t coax Olaf to safety once he was found, they’d have to knock him out with one of the sanctuary’s several tranquilizer guns.

  They took turns searching, sometimes on foot and sometimes in Brandon’s delivery van. Because the authorities knew of only one living person at the sanctuary, Amy insisted that only one of them go outside at a time, in case a chopper flew over. Whoever went out had to wear the same wide sunhat and the same big khaki shirt so that, from above, it would always look like the same person.

  For over an hour, Amy had been patrolling the area to either side of a small service road that led from the Hangar to the chimp enclosure, driving as far off-road as possible, often shutting off the engine and getting out to call out and to listen.

  At seven in the evening, with a scant hour of light remaining, the situation did not look promising, so she headed back toward the Hangar. She had almost arrived when she saw the missing ape.

  Olaf galloped across the road just a few yards in front of her, and she stomped on the brake. He made a big circle around the vehicle, charged back into the woods, then came out and crossed the road behind her. She hopped out and called to him in a high voice, as though summoning a dog, and he responded by arcing back around and trotting toward her.

  Amy slid open the van’s side door and he charged straight for it, but then veered away at the last minute, crossed the road just a yard from the front bumper, and disappeared into the brush and cedars.

  She’d been hoping that the tranq gun wouldn’t be necessary, but now she readied it, aiming at the place where the chimp had reappeared the last time. It only occurred to her now that if she did hit Olaf with a dart, and managed to follow him until he dropped, she’d then be faced with the task of getting the big chimp’s drooping body into the van – at least 160 pounds of animal. She’d have to leave him and go get one or both of the guys to help her, and they’d have to race in order to get the job done before nightfall.

  But Olaf did not show himself again. Amy waited several minutes before stuffing the packet of tranq darts into her pocket and heading after him on foot. She spotted him once, high in a big Coulter pine, shaking loose a few of the enormous cones as he leapt to a narrow branch. He was down and gone by the time she got to that tree, and her last sign of him was a heavy rustling far ahead.

  The next sound was of a powerful car engine somewhere to her right. Olaf had led her almost to the main road, which was separated from the service road by a couple hundred yards of brush. Someone was approaching the parking lot.

  Health Department? Cops? Maybe Brandon was out in another of the cars, desperately seeking Olaf.

  Or it might be none of the above, and that could only be bad. Stephen was still inside the Hangar with Brandon, probably unaware that someone was coming.

  The car would have to follow a long arc before it got to the parking lot, but Amy could go straight there on foot, maybe in time to get inside and let Brandon and Stephen know that they had visitors. They would all need to stay out of sight until they knew who had come.

  When she broke through the brush at the edge of the parking lot, the Hangar was about forty feet to her left. She checked the windows of the loft above the lounge, but could see no one moving around. The glancing sunlight turned the downstairs windows a rusty orange, making it impossible to see whether any lights were on.

  From the opposite direction came the sound of tires on gravel.

  Amy stepped back and crouched among the bushes, wishing she had the latte burner instead of the tranq gun. The combination of Ketamine and Xylazine was meant to immobilize an animal and relax its muscles, but not to knock it out completely. The onset might be as quick as a few minutes or as long as fifteen, depending on whether the dart struck muscle or, much less likely, a large vein.

  All of which meant it wasn’t much of a weapon. It didn’t even look like a gun, really; more like an oversized hacksaw with a scope. All it really did was make her feel a little less naked.

  A San Diego County Sheriff’s patrol car came into view about thirty yards to her right, crossing the parking lot, heading for the Hangar. It disappeared on the other side of a van and an RV, then appeared again, continued another thirty feet. It stopped next to the walkway that went to the front door of the Hangar, just about midway between Amy and where she wanted to go.

  Four men emerged from the car. Two had Top Gun Security uniforms, one wore a white muscle shirt, and one had on a brown t-shirt. This last one she recognized immediately as Elf-beard. The muscle-shirted man was young and dark, with a buzz-cut, and looked Latino. One of the uniformed men was also young. He was skinny and pale, and had hair about as long as Brandon’s. The other one in uniform was light-skinned, stocky, and moved like a man of at least fifty.

  That solved the mystery of the missing sheriff’s patrol car. The TV reporters had speculated that Deputy Elena Cisneros could have fallen victim to the mysterious disease. Amy, Stephen, and Brandon figured the v-chimps had gotten to her, and that she might even be alive somewhere in the hills, half out of her head.

  Now Amy thought she could guess what had happened. There had to be a dozen or more roads leading into these mountains, and before state and federal personnel arrived, the sheriffs department’s coverage of those roads had probably been thin, especially in the more remote areas. The deputy had gone missing early on during the enforcement of the quarantine. Elf-Beard and his boys must have gotten to her while she was covering some country road by herself, then used her car to move around freely for the first few hours. But once Cisneros’s lack of response was noticed, the goons had needed to travel after dark so that her car would not be spotted from the air. It had taken them two nights to get here from one of the farther perimeters of the quarantine zone.

  Amy no longer imagined that the deputy was alive somewhere.

  One of the men gave a loud groan and the others looked at the ground where he was pointing. They were too far off for Amy to make out much of the conversation, but one of them said something that sounded like, “Damn, we lost one already.” They’d apparently seen the dead v-chimp.

  There followed a loud rippling of plastic, then a cry of disgust, mixed with amusement. Somebody had looked under the tarp and seen the dead veterinarian’s body. Amy could hear, “…got to them.” “Yeah…and…fucking careful.”

  The older guy started laughing, pacing around and swinging his limbs. His voice carried more than anyone else’s had, and Amy clearly heard him say, “…your idea to hide under the trees all day…this…only half an hour away!”

  Elf-beard muscled up to the older guy, who now snapped, “I’m done listening to you, Eloy,” then unlocked the trunk and hefted a cooler to the ground.

  So Elf-beard was the “Eloy” that Vendetti had mentioned.

  She focused on Eloy, watching him fish in the trunk and begin tossing gym-bag-sized packages to the other men, who caught them with a great crackling of cellophane.

  He spoke louder, addressing everyone like a football coach. “You’re going to listen to me when I say to put these things on.” He tore the wrapping off his own package, and in a moment a length of fabric unfolded, school-bus-yellow. A smaller piece fell away, and when Eloy picked it up, Amy saw that it was the hood of a protective suit. Eloy unraveled the hood and pulled it over his head.

  “We’re all wearing these things,” Eloy shouted. “I don’t care how sweaty you get. And if you didn’t load a dart already, do i
t now. Make sure your power valve’s as low as it goes. You don’t want your dart to bust the monkey’s skull.” He waved toward a clear spot at the center of the parking lot. “We need the chairs over there. Backs together, facing out from the middle, like we talked about. And check to see if your flashlights work. What about yours, Dale?”

  Amy heard the older man grunt. Two names so far: Eloy and Dale.

  The muscle-shirted man headed toward the front door of the Hangar and Eloy shouted after him not to take too long.

  The young guy with the buzz cut was already holding a slender rifle with a flashlight strapped to the barrel. Amy heard more fragments of conversation: “We…vans from the shed?”

  “Not until dawn,” Eloy said. “It’s almost dark. We start our work now.”

  “What about the cop car? They see that from the air they gonna come here fast.”

  “We’ll get it out of sight before daylight.”

  Eloy was right about night coming on. Amy needed to be inside, and the most sensible enclosed space to retreat to was the van she had just left, about five minutes’ walk back through the brush.

  She turned and took only a single step before she heard a heavy rustle less than ten yards off. There were enough tall pines clustered here that some of the ground was almost in full nighttime darkness. According to the Baja papers, the animals would begin going about their business as soon as the light fell to a level their eyes could tolerate, sometimes when part of the sky still glowed.

  The rustling came again. It might have been Olaf, but she didn’t dare call out to him now. And because it might not be Olaf, heading back to the van through the brush was out of the question.

  She thought about going to the back of the Hangar, but there was no visual cover along the sides of it. An alternative was to go through the woods to get there, but then she’d be in darkness even longer than if she retreated to the van.