Wild Meat (39 page)

“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 sanctuary.”

“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.

“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, g
entlemen. 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. 

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.”