by Newton, Nero
The only other possible save havens were the vehicles in the parking lot. She looked at the van and the motor home in front of it. The motor home had only the one door, and it was on the far side – facing Eloy and company. That left the driver’s door of the van.
She went slowly, halting every time she thought one of her steps had made too loud a crunch on the gravel.
The muscle-shirted guy came out of the building, with a shrink-wrapped case of bottled water under one arm, holding up a bag of chips and a bottle of clear booze. Amy remembered the well-stocked wet bar in the kitchen. The conquering hero’s display was met with cheers from Dale.
In a moment, she was out of the men’s line of side, the motor home giving her cover, but Eloy’s voice was still clearly audible: “Whatever we take down goes inside the building. The vet’s room in there has a strong door that’ll keep them in. Daylight, we can go see if the shed’s still good to hold them. If not, we keep them in the vet’s room until we figure out how to get them out past the cops.”
Amy arrived at the van and tried the door. It was locked, and the windows shut tight.
More rustling over in the brush. She was now about twenty feet from the nearest vegetation – no distance at all to a bounding v-chimp, which might not even hit the ground more than once before reaching her.
She dropped to the ground and crawled underneath the van to the other side, then rose to a crouch. A single sedan, ten feet away, provided a visual barrier between Eloy’s outpost and her.
The van’s front passenger door was locked. So was the big sliding door behind it, and so were the double doors in the back of the van.
Her last chance in this part of the lot was the RV, and to get to the door, she would have to take several strides in the four men’s line of sight.
The moment she took her first step, two of the men began shouting. She looked their way to see how fast they were coming at her, thinking her only choice now would be to charge back to where she’d left Brandon’s van.
But they were all looking the other way, not at her. Ten yards beyond them, the far side of the parking lot was lined by dense brush, and the men acted as though they’d heard something moving there.
Amy stepped lightly and evenly toward the door of the RV, found it unlocked, and eased inside. No interior light came on. She locked the door behind her, slowly slid open a window over a fold-down table, and sat down. She was in shadow, three feet back from the window, invisible as long as no one aimed a flashlight directly at her.
The windows of the Hangar no longer reflected the setting sun, and she could tell for sure that no lights were on within. She wondered whether Brandon and Stephen had seen the patrol car coming from the upstairs window and had rushed to get the place dark. Assuming they were still inside, they must have heard the newcomers’ voices by now.
She needed to stay silent. It would not take long for someone to smash his way into the motor home. Her only defense was the tranq gun, and it wouldn’t bring an attacker down fast enough to prevent him from doing damage to her.
Looking around the RV’s combined kitchen and dining room, she found an impressively large knife. It had a solid blade that probably wouldn’t bend or snap if she had to plunge it into something.
She sat down at the table again and watched the scene outside. The men were thirty feet away at most. One was shining a light into a cooler, and Eloy was telling everyone to quick screwing around and finish getting suited up. He’d put the entire outfit on, from visor to boots, and was shouting to compensate for the hood’s muffling effect. The others raised their voices accordingly, as workers would when communicating across a construction site or factory floor, so Amy could now hear them all.
“I’m telling you, that was one of them,” Eloy said. He was the only one sitting in one of the lawn chairs, the only one with his flashlight switched off, the only one looking out toward the edges of the parking lot. “Nothing else that big jumps around in the trees.”
“Raccoon,” one of the others said.
“Too heavy for a raccoon,” Eloy snapped. “Just get your suits on and get the flashlights off so we can do this.”
“Fuck the raccoon. I’m hungry, and not for chips; had enough of them in the last two days.” It was the one voice Amy hadn’t heard yet, so it had to be the younger uniformed man with the long hair.
“Maybe there’s something else inside that place, Gil.” This was Dale, the older guy, gesturing behind him to the Hangar. “Frozen burgers or something. There’s a big kitchen.”
Another name: the younger man was Gil.
Eloy managed to veto a food run with about ninety seconds of shouting. He eventually got everyone seated and partially suited up, although nobody else had a hood on yet.
“How fast did you say the dart’ll take them down?” another voice asked.
“Depends,” Eloy said. “One of the dogs I was practicing on went down in just a couple minutes, but I probably hit a vein.”
“Won’t they get out of range?”
“Not likely. The transmitters reach almost a mile, and the Africans said the stink monkeys don’t range all that far. They stay around the same couple of square miles pretty much their whole lives. Any ones we dart will probably just go a little way out of sight. They might even come back and try to spray us again before they pass out.”
Now Dale had the bottle from the Hangar, and nothing Eloy said could get him to put it down. As the older man drank, his voice got louder. Amy could hear them talking about their visitors from Equateur, men who had come to help set things up.
“And that big one with the jacked-up nose, what the hell was his name again? He was the only one who could speak English for dick.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
After half an hour of waiting, Eloy pulled his visor off.
“Welcome back,” the young Caucasian said.
“Still keep your mouth shut,” Eloy hissed at him, “so we don’t keep scaring them off and end up sitting here all night for nothing. And there is no after tonight, because pretty soon the National Guard’s going to get orders to move in and shoot anything with a heat signature.”
So the men sat still.
Nothing happened for so long that Amy started getting accustomed to the situation. Half her tension had fled, and fatigue was quickly filling the void. She felt heavy, yawning frequently from the adrenaline come-down, but knew that falling asleep might be fatal. She tried to refresh herself by dumping half a bottle of water on her head and doing a few minutes of yoga in the motor home’s narrow aisle.
And where the hell were Stephen and Brandon?
A blast of excited voices startled her. The young Latino had started yelling, “We got one! Right there!”
Amy returned to the window. She could see only the faintest movement in the darkness. Two flashlights came on just in time to illuminate Olaf leaping onto Gil, and locking him in a bear hug. Maybe the long blond hair had made the chimp confuse Gil with Brandon, or maybe he was just like that with everybody.
Gil toppled off his lawn chair, arms pinned to his sides in the ape’s embrace, and started screaming. “Jesus, Eloy. Shoot it!”
Olaf suddenly let go and did an awkward cartwheel.
Two flashlights, and hence two rifles, were still aimed at the big chimp, and Eloy shouted, “Don’t shoot. Save your darts.”
Olaf came to rest in a triumphant bipedal stance, arms forming a wide V above his head.
There was a sharp pop and the ape yelped, then dropped to four legs, still yelping. Two flashlights followed his movements, and Amy could see the ape rolling around like he was trying to get the dart out of him. It was too dark, and the flashlight beams too jumpy, for her to see where he’d been struck.
“Damn!” Gil shouted. “I thought you said they were small.”
“What I said was not to waste your darts,” Eloy snapped. “It’s not what we came to get. It’s just a regular monkey. They keep them here, remember? It’s a wild fuckin animal sanc
tuary.”
“How you supposed to know the difference?”
“Cause it’s about a hundred pounds too big, and it didn’t spray you or bite you or do shit else to you.”
Olaf galloped around a little, grunting softly and sounding offended. Finally he sat down on the gravel about ten yards from the men. It was getting too dark to see much of anything clearly, but Amy thought Olaf already looked a little dopey. If the dose had been calibrated for a v-chimp, which would weigh about seventy pounds at the very most – more likely half that – then the big ape might only get groggy instead of passing out.
“I’m getting hungry,” the muscle shirt said. “Where’d I put those chips?”
“The bag’ll make too much noise,” Eloy said, but the other guy was headed for the car already.
Dale, the older man, laughed. “The animals are scared off by the sound of a plastic bag?”
“No, but we can’t hear them moving in the bushes if you’re making noise here.”
Dale took another swig from the bottle, and Eloy scolded him. “Why the fuck can’t you wait a few hours until we’re done? You gotta be able to hit these things.”
“You just worry about your own sorry-ass shooting, dude.” Dale leaned over and picked up an object from Eloy’s side. It looked like a miniature version of a TV roof antenna, and was connected to a box about the size of a cell phone.
“Give it here,” Eloy said when he noticed the older man fiddling with the device. He stood up and pulled the thing out of Dale’s hands, not giving him time to refuse or argue. “There’s not even anything transmitting.”
“What about the one you just shot into that big monkey?”
“Well, we can see where that one is.” He pointed to where Olaf sat rocking. “And even if we couldn’t see him, we don’t need to retrieve a goddamn gorilla, or whatever the hell it is, now do we?”
“But at least we can see how your little box there works. And if it works.”
“Except you’re already drunk, and this thing cost a thousand dollars, and it’s the only one we got.” In a louder voice, addressing all present, he said, “We break this thing, and we might as well go home.”
Eloy was constantly trying to keep the men in their prescribed positions, each facing outward from their circle. His occasional successes never lasted for more than a few minutes, because the men kept shifting around to face each other as they spoke. Eloy had given up trying to get the others to keep their visors on, and had even taken his own off.
Amy found a six-pack of warm supermarket-brand cola in a cupboard and downed a can. The sugar picked her up a little.
She heard someone say, “Well, here’s the thing about our guys who got taken down by these things up here: it was their fault for wandering off. Am I right?” It was the muscle-shirted young Latino, who had been mostly quiet until now. “I start to feel anything, like I got hit with some of that dope, I’m going straight for the car and sleeping it off before it makes me crazy and stupid.”
“Yeah, you think you will,” Eloy said. “You might even make it into the car, but five minutes later you’ll be back outside again, laughing your ass off while they jump on you. So what you’re going to do is keep your gloves on and keep the visor in your hands and be ready to put it on as soon as something moves in those bushes. Exactly one of our guys made it out of here to tell us what happened three nights ago, and he made it out because he stayed put inside his car. If he’d tried to get out and help anybody else when they went goofy, he’d be rotting on the ground out here. We all need to be thinking the same way.”
“Hey, Eloy,” Dale said. “What you just said that goes for you, too? You go silly-ass on us, and should we just let you dance off to hell? Let you lie there and get bled to death with a big smile on your face?”
“If you got any sense at all, that’s exactly what you’ll do. Now, can we please shut up so we hear these things coming?”
Amy could see Dale’s silhouette swigging hard.
“And put that down before you get noisy and lose us a whole night of trying.”
Dale put on a goofy fake drawl. “Boys, I do believe Grandma Eloy has had a trau-ma-tic experience with these here fearsome animals, and we should be more respectful!” He chuckled. “More sensitive to his sensibilities.”
The chairs had somehow migrated so that the four men were almost in a line.
Dale held the bottle out. “Anybody else?”
Long-haired Gil reached for it, but Eloy turned around and slapped his hand down fiercely. “One drunk’s enough. In fact, it’s too many.” He grabbed the bottle from Dale and flung it toward the brush, into the shadows.
“Goddamit, Eloy, you arrogant son of a bitch.” Dale yelled as he walked forward, sweeping his flashlight-equipped rifle around to find the bottle. A second later the light stopped moving and croaked, “Holy shit.”
In the center of his beam were two little animals hunched over Olaf. Their long tails stretched behind them, bobbing in the air like charmed snakes.
Gil stood up and looked where Dale was shining his light. “Hey, look at that! Little baby monkeys come to see if mommy’s okay!”
“That’s them!” Eloy shouted. He had his hood back on and his words were muffled. “Get out of there so I can get a shot!”
Dale turned around. “Why can’t you listen, asshole? It’s like Gil said, just little monkeys.”
“I said get the hell out of there! Can’t you smell it?”
Dale answered, “Ooof!” His body jerked forward and his head snapped back. He turned slightly, and Amy could see a third v-chimp with its mouth planted on the side of Dale’s neck, as though giving him a savagely passionate kiss. Its semi-rigid tail made small, almost expressive movements.
Wonderful food smells were filling Amy’s senses now. Three animals had sprayed all over an area only thirty feet from her. A cascade of freshly baked bread aroma, barbecued Italian sausage with grilled bell peppers and onions….
Dale was rubbing his eyes, saying, “Oh shit,” and trying not to stumble. The spray had blinded him for the moment, and Amy knew that by the time he got his eyesight back, he would be in a very special kind of dreamland.
Eloy fired at one of the animals feeding on Olaf. It yelped and sprang away. The other, which had its back to Eloy, spun its head completely around, regarded him blankly for half a second, then also disappeared into the brush.
Dale was still struggling, but with growing listlessness. The third v-chimp was still clamped onto his back, not scared off by the mild report from the tranq rifle, but then a flashlight was trained on it, eliciting out a coo of complaint.
Two tranq rifles made their BB-gun pop almost simultaneously, and the creature clinging to Dale vanished like a flea.
Dale was still stumbling, but smiling now, and when he flopped to the ground, he tossed his tranq rifle away with a giggle.
Eloy played his light over the fallen man until it came to rest on the pink feather of a dart sticking in Gil’s neck. Amy wondered about the combined effects of bourbon, boof, and whatever tranquilizer the men were using. Olaf, she realized, had gotten a similar cocktail: boof and tranq, but no booze.
Eloy’s flashlight beam went back to Olaf. Both v-chimps were gone. He turned his rifle around to shine the light on something in his hand. Amy could hear the receiver beeping.
“Two darts on the move.” Eloy was shouting to be heard through the hood. “Both signals getting weaker; they’re moving away from us.”
Long-haired Gil was up and looking over fallen Dale. Eloy called out to him, “Don’t touch him until you got your hood on. He’s got it all over him. You touch him and you’re going to lose it soon.”
“Fucking stinks, man.”
The other young man was on his feet, holding the rifle ready, and shining the light all around the edges of the parking lot.
Eloy looked at him and said, “You too, Manny.”
There was the fourth name. The young Latino was Manny.
&
nbsp; “Just get your hood on and do what you need to do,” Eloy told him. “We’re still made of gold, bro. We already got darts in two of them, and that’s a good start. We pick up three more, that’s five out of nine. Actually five out of eight, because one’s dead over by the sidewalk. Five out of eight is already mission accomplished. We bump that up to seven out of eight, and I guarantee that’ll be a nice big bonus.” Raising his voice to a more speechifying volume, he said. “Just remember, these are worth over two hundred grand each, and the females over four hundred. I know that at least three of the ones they had here are females. This crop is worth close to two million. So think about that, gentlemen. We’re about to recover two million dollars’ worth of goods from inside the biggest police perimeter any of our bosses has ever seen.”
Amy wondered how on earth the men imagined they could get out of the place at all, let alone toting the captured animals. Perhaps they weren’t planning to leave. Brandon had said that the v-chimp enclosure was camouflaged from the air, so once locked up again, the animals would be hidden. The men must have been planning to hide out somewhere in the hills, maybe take over one of the remote homes, force the occupants to lie to whatever authorities called or visited. The might be able to manage that way until the quarantine was over. It seemed like a shaky plan, but these guys were probably desperate, knowing that the outcome depended partly on blind luck.
With one of the men down, the others fell into line more willingly. Within minutes, Eloy, Gil and Manny were back in the lawn chairs, hoods and gloves on, each facing a different direction. They didn’t talk much, and when they did speak, it was too muffled for Amy to make out. Eloy finally had obedient soldiers to work with. Just in time.
The next v-chimp landed just several yards directly in front of Eloy. Only one more leap would put it on top of someone.
With careful movements, Eloy brought his tranq rifle up to aim at the animal, which shrank from the flashlight beam.
Gil apparently did not see the one that had crept in close to him, because he suddenly crashed sideways into Eloy.