Wild Meat (38 page)

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 it 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.

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.