Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  Eloy stumbled forward, but didn’t fall. He spun around, found steady footing, and fired point blank at the neck of the animal attached to Gil. The thing shrieked, flopped to the ground, scrambled for a second, and sprang away. It landed less than ten feet from Amy’s window and crawled; then it slowly grew still. The dart had probably gone into an artery. Or maybe the impact had damaged its small windpipe; such accidents were known to happen during wildlife research.

  Eloy and Manny were steadily sweeping their lights around the rest of the parking lot.

  Manny’s beam found another bloodsucker feeding on the unconscious Olaf, and when he fired, the thing vanished from sight.

  Muffled cries came from one man, then the same voice louder, no longer blunted by a hood. “It clawed right through. I think it dug into my throat.”

  Eloy shouted something about, “…back on!” Then, loud enough to hear clearly, “Don’t…outside of your suit until…gloves…!”

  Someone was coming forward to inspect the fallen v-chimp that had landed close to Amy’s window. The flashlight showed a pink feather attached to its neck. The hooded figure lifted and probed the creature and Manny’s voice shouted, “Female. Still breathing.”

  “Good,” Eloy called out. “We’re in good shape already.” He threw something to Manny. “There’s the bungees. See them?” He shined his flashlight where the bundle had landed. “Front legs tied behind it, like we talked about. Then haul it into the building.”

  It looked as though Eloy was involved in some kind of problem over at the circle of lawn chairs. He had the light on Gil, and Amy could hear him saying something in urgent tones.

  Amy decided that, with two men down, it was time for her to stop waiting. The v-chimps might yet take care of the two remaining thugs, but if they didn’t, she ran the risk of discovery, and that would be lethal. She might well manage to stay hidden in the RV all night, but by morning, Gil and Dale would probably be up and around again.

  She tried to slide the window screen aside, but it was jammed, and forcing it would likely cause too much noise. Instead, as quietly as possible, she pushed the big kitchen knife through the screen and cut a long slit. The light rasping sound was completely masked by Manny’s scuffling in the gravel as he bound the limp v-chimp. She poked the barrel of the tranq rifle through the slit.

  Eloy called out, “Gil fucked himself up. Stuff was all over his gloves and he got it on his face, or in his eye or something.”

  “Let’s put him inside,” Manny said. “Dale, too.”

  “Alright, but finish doing that,” Eloy said. “And remember, Gil won’t stay in the car.”

  “Hit him with a couple of darts,” Manny said. “Then he’ll sleep through it.”

  “Good thinking, bro.”

  Amy watched Eloy point his tranq rifle at the man on the ground in front of him, then she took aim at Manny. She fired as soon as she heard the pop from Eloy’s gun, hoping he’d take the sound as an echo of his own.

  Eloy turned his head toward the parked vehicles and gazed around. A second later, when the dart skittered harmlessly on the gravel a few yards past Manny, Eloy’s head made another quick, birdlike shift. He took another glance toward the RV and the van, then resumed tending to Gil, who had taken his hood off and was starting to ramble boof nonsense.

  “Come on, Manny,” Eloy said, his voice loud again. “Let’s get Gil into the car.”

  Amy loaded another dart into her strange-looking gun and wondered whether it would be better to fire at Manny or Eloy. Maybe wait and see which of them moved closest to her. It would be very bad to miss again and give away her location. Another pop and clatter would be too much for Eloy to dismiss as irrelevant night sounds.

  As she eased the barrel of her tranq rifle out the torn screen, bright light stabbed into her eyes. She pulled away from the window and squatted on the floor, but knew it was too late. Eloy had guessed the source of the sound he’d heard a moment earlier.

  The flashlight beam stopped shining into the RV window, and there were hurried footfalls on the gravel. Then two men were running. Amy leaned forward again and saw Eloy hustling Manny out of her line of sight.

  The men were in front of the RV now. Amy loaded again, but knew she probably wouldn’t get another chance to shoot. There were windows on the other side of the RV, but none in the rear, and a dart certainly wasn’t going to go through the windshield.

  She slid open all the side windows in order to hear the men moving on the gravel. Crouching on the floor again, she listened; noisy footsteps were marching away. At first she thought it must be both men, but then decided it was only one, kicking gravel as he went, making extra noise on purpose. He was masking the sound of the other one, who was probably still just outside the RV, stepping softly, creeping to wherever he would strike from.

  Maybe he was headed for the door; that would make the most sense. If she heard someone trying to get inside, her only possibility of escape would be squeezing her body through a window, and that would do no good. Either the men would hear her and get to her with a dart – or bullet – or she’d be set upon by the v-chimps.

  Her other option was to wait at the door with her dart ready. But even if she hit one guy, he’d still have plenty of time before he went down, and how could she fight him off?

  The answer, a desperate one, was already in her hand. She didn’t remember picking up the knife she’d used earlier to slit the screen, but here it was.

  There were piercing electronic shrieks and beeps through the patrol car megaphone, then a roar of static and music. Someone had turned on both the police radio and the regular car radio, more sound cover for whichever of the men had stayed next to the RV.

  Amy crouched at the top of the small stairwell, which consisted of three steps down to the door. She held the tranq rifle in her left hand, arm extended down toward the center of the door, ready to plunge a dart into the chest or belly of whoever appeared. The kitchen knife was in her right hand. As soon as she pulled the trigger, whether she missed the point-blank shot or not, she would drop the rifle and throw herself onto her attacker before he knew what was happening.

  The moment she formulated that plan, the door swung open.

  No one was there. Whoever had opened the door had stayed behind it.

  Thirty feet away, one of them was squatting on the ground. The school-bus yellow of his protective suit was mostly covered up by a dark blanket, probably from the trunk of the sheriff’s car. The ambient light barely revealed his shape.

  Then the light was in her eyes again.

  Squinting, she fired straight toward the light, and at the same instant felt a sharp pain in her right shoulder. She yelped. She couldn’t help it.

  “I hit her,” she heard Eloy shout from a distance. “And she already fired hers. Get her now.”

  Manny’s big frame came around the door just as Amy found the dart in her shoulder and pulled it out.

  She threw herself down the stairwell onto him, free left arm first, going for his face. The visor was transparent soft plastic, which allowed her to grip it like fabric and rotate the whole hood to one side, partially blinding him. He couldn’t see her right arm, which was drawn back.

  She brought the kitchen knife down as she knocked him backward. It struck bone and did not go in very far. It might have been his ribs, or the front of his shoulder, maybe his collarbone. She drew it back to strike again, but he hit the ground just then, and her chest slammed into his. Her knife thrust went spastically into the gravel. She heard Eloy’s footfalls in the gravel coming toward her fast.

  Manny was trying to throw her off when she sat up, straddling him, and struck again. This time she got his arm, probably between those two bones in the forearm. The blade was in so deep that he nearly tore it out of her hand when he jerked his arm away, but she managed to pull it free, and brought it down once more. That last one went in good, probably into his neck because there was only slight resistance this time.

  Eloy arrived a
n instant later and kicked her off of Manny, and she landed on her back. Eloy looked around, then dropped, straddled her, and smashed his left fist into her jaw. After the starburst in her head subsided, she sent the heel of her hand up into the side of his ribs, where she’d shot him a week earlier in Oakland. It was not a very forceful blow, but it brought out a surprised and angry grunt.

  Then she faded out.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Someone was demanding an answer from Amy, shaking her, shouting at her. She opened her eyes but everything was a blur, and very bright. Too bright. She closed them again.

  “What was it called?” a male voice insisted. “We’re running out of time.”

  Something cold spread all over her face and she sat up.

  “That’s better,” the voice said. “We need you up and around.”

  She moved her jaw to say Shut up! but the side of her face screamed with pain at the disturbance.

  “The big mobile lab at the logging camp. What was it called?”

  She opened her eyes a slit. Brandon was holding a washcloth.

  “Sorry about the cold water,” he said, “but we need you with us. And we need that name.”

  “Eloy,” she said, meaning it as a question but not sounding that way.

  “No, that’s the guy who tried to kill you last night. I’m talking about a big mobile lab in the logging camp. You had a spy there, and he told you that the scientists used a funny name for the mobile lab.”

  “Robert,” she said. “Robert’s in Cameroon.”

  Somewhere behind her, Stephen said, “I’ll get that old coffee out of the fridge. It’ll be easier for her to get down than hot stuff.”

  A cold glass was pushed into her hand and she immediately gulped down its contents. The coffee was heavily sugared and mixed one-to-one with half-and-half. It swept about a third of the fog from her brain.

  “What happened to Eloy?” she said.

  “Steve shot him,” Brandon said.

  “Dead?”

  “Knocked out. Two darts, each calibrated for a very big chimpanzee.”

  Amy glanced toward the window. It was still dark out.

  “Where were you guys that whole time?” she asked.

  “I was sitting up in the loft with your gun in my hand,” Brandon said. “We saw that sheriff’s car coming up the road about two minutes before it got to the parking lot. Steve ran outside and got into the van. He didn’t want to be inside the Hangar in case it was real cops, because he would’ve had to explain why he was here. But he brought a tranq gun and his nine millimeter, just in case. He went to let you into the van right after you tried the door. I saw him lean out of the van, but you were already stepping inside the motor home”

  “You were out there all the time?” she said to Stephen.

  “Yep. I was waiting for the right moment to start shooting. When they turned on the siren and radio, I knew something was up, but I didn’t realize they’d spotted you. Not until I saw the one guy open the door of the motor home.”

  “I would have called the cops,” Brandon said, “but my cell phone was still in the delivery van, and the land line is right next to the front door, so I couldn’t risk coming down here and making noise.”

  “You had me covered from the loft the whole time?”

  “Yeah,” Brandon said. “I didn’t want to start shooting, because odds were against us getting all of them, and if the survivors took cover, then we’d have had a lot more variables to deal with. I wanted to shoot Eloy when he crouched down to aim that dart at you, but he was out of my line of sight then.”

  “I didn’t have a shot at him, either,” Stephen said. He handed her a glass of orange juice. “Not until he was right on top of you. The dart took a few minutes to knock him out.”

  “Didn’t he come after you before he lost consciousness?”

  “He was definitely going to, but then he saw me holding the 9mm instead of the tranq rifle. He just took one glance at me and then dropped down and slugged you. Like he knew he’d lost and he just wanted to do a little damage while he could. I would’ve put a bullet in him, but he was too close to you. I didn’t trust my aim.”

  “What about the other guy?” she said. “The one that opened the door for Eloy?”

  “You pretty much took care of him,” Brandon said. “You remember that part?”

  “I…I jumped on him. I remember struggling.”

  “You sank that knife right into his throat,” Brandon said. “I doubt he lived more than a couple of minutes.”

  “Good.” She said. “What were you asking me a minute ago?”

  “Your spy Robert told you there was a name for the big mobile lab that came to the logging camp.”

  “The Fat Rabbit. Why?”

  “The news reports are full of speculation that there’s some kind of bio-terror threat” Brandon said. “Heavy federal involvement. Well, I think we’ve figured out a way to keep the cops focused on Eloy’s boys. And I know a place where you and Steve can hide out for a while.”

  “What are you going to report?”

  “That I went outside last night to greet the sheriff’s car I’d seen from the upper window. But once I was outside, I remembered the report of the missing deputy, so I hid in a van until I was sure who they were. Sure enough, they looked like thugs, and they were armed, so I stayed in the van and just watched. That’s why I couldn’t call in a report until this morning. After a while, one guy came out of the brush dragging one of the chimps that was dead of the mystery disease. They threw it in their trunk, and then had a drunken argument and started fighting with knives and tranq guns.”

  “Olaf’s dead?” she said.

  “Afraid so,” Brandon answered, sounding somber. “But at least we know he didn’t suffer, as he might have if the tumors had kept popping up. This way, he went out all boofed up.”

  Amy nibbled on a bread roll and had more coffee while the guys explained their plan. First priority would be replacing Amy’s fingerprints on the kitchen knife with Eloy’s. Then they would heave Olaf’s body into the trunk of the sheriff’s car. They’d stuff the three unconscious goons into the car, then drive it half a mile or so down the road and run it into a tree. It would look like the goons had crashed it themselves after murdering their companion and fleeing the scene with an infected animal in their trunk.

  “Olaf’s all ripped up,” Stephen said. “He stinks like boof, and the bite marks on his neck are in perfect little clusters, so they look more like sores than anything else.”

  Sores that appeared as clusters of little weeping dots, Amy thought. Just as Robert had described the symptoms of the fever at the logging camp.

  Stephen continued. “They won’t find any plague bugs in his blood, but they’ll be expecting to. For a while they’ll think they’ve caught their bio-terrorists, or at least someone trying to sneak an infected animal out of the plague zone for some diabolical reason.”

  Amy smiled in spite of her bruised jaw. “And when they ask you what you heard any of them say, especially whether they mentioned names, you’re going to say you heard them talking about something called the Fat Rabbit.”

  Brandon looked at Stephen. “She’s awake enough to think deviously.”

  “And of course he’ll say he heard them talking about Vendetti and Sanderson,” Stephen said.

  “And a guy named Tobin,” Amy added. She reminded them of what the hunter and Robert had told her. They came right into the camp, sticking guns in everyone’s faces, asking where this fellow Tobin was. “You have to say that Eloy talked about…about the big Equateurian with the broken nose, who bragged about taking out Tobin when they got hold of the Fat Rabbit.”

  Brandon was making notes on his forearm with a pen. “…goons bragged about killing Tobin…” he said aloud as he wrote. “…stole Fat Rabbit…big African guy….”

  Amy held up her hand. “Don’t say ‘killed,’ because all I know is that Tobin was missing; just say ‘took him out.’ Oh! One more
thing. Say that the chimp was still alive when they put it in the trunk, and it had just been throwing up – it was lit up by the floodlights in front of the Hangar when it threw up, so you could see it pretty well. What came up looked gooey and very dark, maybe even black. Say a couple of the guys were shouting and swearing because they got the gross stuff on them.”

  “…slimy black puke…,” Brandon recited, still writing on his arm. “How’s your breakfast going down?”

  ***

  Periodically firing shots into the air to frighten away any lurking v-chimps, Amy, Stephen, and Brandon spent twenty minutes getting Olaf’s body into the trunk and the three sleeping goons into the sheriff’s car. It was three-thirty in the morning, and sunrise would come a little before six.

  There were the sores on Olaf’s neck and wrists, just like one of the fever symptoms reported at the logging camp. And a dart was still in the ape’s neck – a dart fired from a gun that the authorities would find in the trunk of this same stolen patrol car.

  Gil started to stir as they dragged him toward the car, so Amy used Eloy’s gun to sink one more dart into each of the thugs.

  Dale was the heaviest. They threw him into the back seat and piled Gil and Eloy on top of each other in the front passenger seat. Brandon, wearing gloves, drove the patrol car a couple of miles down the road and rammed it into a big cedar.

  Amy and Stephen followed in the delivery van, Amy at the wheel. After the crash, Brandon signaled by hitting the horn and Stephen fired a shot into the air, giving Brandon time to open the door and haul Eloy into the driver’s seat. There was no need to peel off Eloy’s bio-hazard gloves; his prints and those of his partners were all over the late Deputy Elena Cisneros’s patrol car. Brandon closed the door of the patrol car and returned to the van.

  Amy began backing up to turn around, then stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” Stephen asked.

  “This isn’t going to be that simple,” she said. “Just give me a second.”