Sector C (36 page)

She bent near for a better look. The short fur, thinned by disease, was clearly not suited for the hot summer. Not with the incredibly thick skin beneath, too. “It may not have been the VTSE that killed it,” she told Mike.
“Not directly, at least.
If it wasn’t used to running around in the afternoon sun, it could easily have died from heat stroke.”

She stretched out a hand and, almost reverently, ran it across fur and skin, marveling at being able to touch a species only a handful of modern people had ever seen. “What an incredible testament to science and what we can do.
Unimaginable, really, when you consider all the pieces that have to fall precisely into place in order to create such a magnificent beast from a bit of DNA.”

“Look at the size of this thing,” Mike marveled, moving around to examine its head and trace the curve of its horn. “How did herds of these beasts ever survive? I mean, you always see humongous dinosaurs surrounded by jungles of lush vegetation. But it wasn’t like these guys lived in the tropics. Can you imagine how much even one of these rhinos eats in a day? And then herds of mammoths on top of that? We’re talking Ice Age here, right? A few pockets of animals here and there I could understand. But don’t they say there were herds of millions of animals thundering over the frozen steppes the same way bison used to dominate the Great Plains? I just can’t wrap my head around that. Not after seeing this guy up close.”

“I’m not a paleontologist,” Donna said, “so I can’t
do
anything more than speculate. But animals are pretty amazing. One little thing in the environment can cause one group to die off like that,” she snapped her fingers, “while others seem to be able to adapt easily to most of the big changes nature throws at them. Maybe these guys were more efficient at processing what food they got. Or maybe they were able to store up enough food when it was plentiful to get them through the long winters they must have had.
Kind of like bears.
They just didn’t hibernate.”

 “That’s still a lot of energy needed to keep an engine like this going,” Mike pointed out. He squatted down in front of the rhino’s head, looking deep into the animal’s unblinking eyes, trying to glean its mysteries as no doubt many Clovis hunters had done before. His blood stirred, drumming to a beat of days not so long past. In his imagination, Mike could conjure scenes of Ice Age hunters as jubilant as the still-circling vultures at finding fresh meat so readily available. Could easily see how a creature this massive could feed a small tribe for weeks the way Inuits could survive for months off the scavenged flesh of beached whales. The flies beginning to swarm the head, though, brought him back to reality. “They still weren’t successful in the end, were they?”

“Change is inevitable.
Part of the process.
Old species give way to new.”

“Except for sharks.
They’ve been around forever. Like crocodiles.”

“And cockroaches.” Donna smiled. “I guess nature does get it right every once in a while — then it can’t improve on perfection.”

“But it can sure find some piss-ant ways to force change.
Meteors, ice ages, global warming, disease.
And then here comes people to help the process out. Maybe we were destined to reach some kind of evolutionary plateau before the next big extinction came along. But no, we’re too impatient. Let’s not look at what consequences our actions will have. Let’s burn fossil fuel, strip the rainforests and clone extinct animals that have already had their heyday. Let’s tamper with whatever cosmic plan is in place because we can and because we demand instant gratification. Let’s do what will benefit us today and leave tomorrow for thinking up even more things we can do to hasten our demise.”

Donna frowned. “Maybe we
have
reached our evolutionary plateau. Have you considered that? Maybe nature is counting on our hubris to take us down. Maybe this,” she pointed at the rhino, “is how we are supposed to die. I’m sure the dinosaurs and the mammoths didn’t think their time should be up either when they started dying out. We can’t second-guess everything we do. We’ll just drive ourselves crazy.”

“You’re probably right.” Mike yanked out a handful of fur a few strands at a time and tucked it in his pocket.
A souvenir.
Something he hadn’t been able to pick up at Triple E. “We should go,” he said as he stood up. “The buzzards are hungry and we’re keeping them from their breakfast.”

He glanced back once as they tramped their way toward civilization. The still-life of a dozen great black birds sitting on a woolly rhino carcass trying to figure out how to consume it all sent an Ice Age shiver through him.

“I wonder if birds get VTSE,” Donna said, looking back with him. “Are they a vector? If they eat infected meat will VTSE prions come out the other end?”

Mike cupped her elbow and turned her away. “Let’s let someone else figure that one out, okay? Right now, we just need to find a phone.”

/////

Even living in such a remote part of the state, Donna was used to more activity in the fields.
The odd steer or two at least.
Even the occasional glimpse of a pronghorn.
Not this eerie desolation. Her father had once told her how the skies had cleared of traffic for two days after the Twin Towers had been destroyed on 9/11. During the days he’d missed the hum of planes and the sight of contrails high in the sky. It was at night, though, when he’d most felt their non-presence. The same stars were there, the same city lights. But the familiar twinkles of aircraft were simply gone. Even the flashing beacons on radio towers warding planes away became a poignant reminder that something was missing there in the night skies.

Looking out over the fenced fields where only the occasional bird flew by gave her that same sense of emptiness.
Of desolation.
Of a world gone wrong.

Grimly, she kept moving, knowing there was simply no other choice.

Less than an hour later they finally stumbled across a road. It was ill-maintained but it was paved. That meant a high probability of finding a concentration of people somewhere along it. They turned
north,
picking their pace up a bit at the thought their long trek was nearly done.

The black 4-wheeler that appeared about ten minutes later confirmed they were closing in on their target. With a shout, they stood in the middle of the road, waving their arms to flag the driver down.

The vehicle slowed as the man behind the wheel palmed his phone, either to call a friend to tell them how he’d run across two strangers stupid enough to be walking down a remote road in the middle of a summer day, Mike thought, or to take a picture to prove it.

As the vehicle came closer, Donna saw the logo plastered on its hood and doors: three interlocked E’s.

“Run!”

She grabbed Mike’s arm and pulled him off the road toward the barbed wire fence beside it. Thank God for economical ranchers, she thought. Four strands of wire instead of the usual five meant there was more room between the strands. Yanking the middle two wires apart, she told Mike, “Go!”

He heaved himself through, ripping his shirt and his arm on the sharp points. Once on the other side, he held the wires apart so Donna could slide her smaller frame between. Together, they ran for a grove of trees in the field 50 yards away.

Behind them, the runabout revved up then slammed to a stop where they’d gone through the fence. Lim Chiou slid out of the vehicle, lifting a tranq gun off the seat beside him.

Grabbing the trunk of the nearest bur oak, Mike and Donna slung themselves around it just as the rifle cracked. The first dart flew within inches of the oak and
thocked
into a tree only a few feet beyond where Mike crouched. He opened wide eyes in Donna’s direction and gestured with a jerk of his head toward the dart that had embedded itself in the bark.

While Lim reloaded, he and Donna fled farther into the grove.

When they looked back, they saw Lim was on the move, climbing through the barbed wire fence.

Mike felt Donna’s hand tighten on his upper arm. His eyes followed where she pointed, away from the keeper.

A shape loped along the side of the nearby hill, paralleling the road. But instead of heading away from the area with the noise of the rifle and the engine as Mike assumed most wild animals would, this one was heading toward them. More precisely, toward the keeper, now in open pasture peering down the length of the rifle as he advanced.

Donna covered her mouth, fighting back the warning everything in her that was human begged her to scream.

Mike was slower on the uptake. But it was only a moment more before he saw what Donna had already seen.
Stripes and fangs and a burled body that resembled nothing native on this prairie.

The cold reality of the cat sank in quickly. Of course the saber-tooth wouldn’t be afraid. In fact, it likely associated people — and all the noises related to them — with handouts. And for a cat that size, a brace of prairie chicks certainly wouldn’t have been enough to fill its belly.

His gut clenched. They’d had no clue the cat had been trailing them.
If they had known …

The cat bounded toward the man it linked most closely with food. It was closing in fast, peripheral to the man’s field of vision, certainly out of his focus, gaining speed as it came.

Like Donna, Mike struggled to keep from crying out.

It wasn’t a true attack. A true attack, Mike thought, would have been swifter, more merciful.

Lim saw the charging cat far too late.

He swung and fired his rifle, the dart burying itself deep in the cat’s chest just before it reared over him. A smaller animal would certainly have reeled at the force of the impact, but the saber-tooth’s sheer mass kept its forward momentum true.

Had the keeper not fired out of instinct, Mike thought, the cat might have only mauled him a bit looking for its regular meal of raw steak or a haunch of pig. Whether it was the report of the gun from only feet away or the sudden pain from the dart that changed the cat’s outlook, what started out as a cat expressing impatience over a late breakfast quickly turned into something far more gruesome.

The cat wrapped its forelegs around Lim, bringing the keeper down using its weight much as a bear would. It nuzzled the downed keeper, trying in its muddled animal brain to decide what to do with him. Capitalizing on the cat’s hesitation, Lim, the breath nearly knocked out of him, hauled back and struck the cat across the muzzle with the stock of the rifle.

The cat raised its head and roared. Mike hadn’t known any animal’s jaws could open so wide.

Its paws still clenched around the keeper, the cat flexed its retractable claws, burying them in Lim’s ribs. The man screamed. Mike felt a sympathetic pang cut through his own chest just before he saw the spreading stain of blood.

Then the muscles in the big cat’s neck tensed and its head fell forward, its saber teeth flashing, spearing,
jaws
closing not just over Lim’s exposed throat but half his head as well.

The keeper’s screams died abruptly.

The big cat raised its head. Mike expected it to roar, to flout its victory across the plains. Instead, it stretched its jaws and yawned. Arterial blood dripped off its fangs as its eyes squeezed shut. It shook its head, then reached down and ripped a chunk of flesh from the man’s stomach, looking for the nutrient-rich organs.

 Mid-chew, its head began to nod. With a deep sigh, it settled itself beside its meal, its chin stretched out along its forelegs. It struggled once to open its eyes, failed and collapsed at last into drug-induced somnolence.

“It’s got its meal,” Donna whispered. “Even if it does wake up, it’ll probably just ignore us. We should be able to get by it now.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “How much are you willing to bet on that?”

Donna just stared back at him.

They waited a couple of minutes more to be sure the big cat was fully asleep before making a rush for the runabout. Not knowing how long the sedative from the dart might last, they ran full tilt for the road, their hearts pounding with every step and fear gnawing within as they tore their way through the barbed wire.

Scrambling over the doors of the 4-wheeler, they sped off east, heading for the nearest town.