Wild Meat (2 page)

“I know,” Marcel said. “The animals don’t seem to be looking for food. They just bite and scratch and leave. As if they are crazy like sick dogs.”

“Apes and monkeys don’t move around at night, either,” Tobin said.

“And neither do exhausted logging workers,” Marcel continued patiently, “when they are in their right minds. But when they are sick with this fever, they get restless and run off if no one holds them back. Two people who left the camp were never found, and two were found dead. They usually do their wandering a short time after the shaking starts. Like this….” He paused to mimic the symptom: with teeth and eyelids clenched, he pretended to shiver for two or three seconds and then go slack. “The sick people cannot stand the bright light, so they do their wandering at night. Maybe these are daytime animals that also can’t stand the light.”

“Are the human victims violent, like the animals?” Ngwene said.

“Only a few, and not for very long. Most just lie around during the day and then stumble around at night.”

“Maybe we could get the hunters to help us trap one of the animals,” Tobin suggested.

“Maybe,” Marcel said. “Somebody shot one two nights ago, but the man who shot it burned the carcass right away. The thing had scratched up his wife’s face very badly, and now she is sick. The cuts on her face became terribly red and swollen.”

“What kind of animal did he think it was?” Aiden said.

“That man said it was a chimpanzee, but he could only tell by the body because the face was so deformed. He said the flesh on its cheeks and all around its eyes was hanging in wrinkled lumps. Another man who helped him burn the carcass said he saw a long tail coiled up against the animal’s back. And if there was a tail, then it was no chimpanzee. I went to look at the bones after the fire died down, but something had already dragged away the burnt remains.”

Ngwene plopped
a hand on the report in front of him, as though trying to hold the details in place. “Do any of the people’s faces have that same disfigurement?”

“No. There are sores and rashes and blisters, but nothing like that drooping skin.”

“Does anyone try to guard the camp against these animals?” Tobin asked

“We build big fires around the edges of the camp and keep them burning for about two hours after sunset. Someone waits with a rifle near each one. The light is usually enough to keep the camp safe until people are inside. And the gunshots scare off anything we hear moving in the trees. But it’s not a perfect barrier.”

* * *

Tobin and the others spent the remainder of the first day fully suited up, examining victims of the strange fever.
The symptoms were just as Marcel’s report had described, although the full range of them was not always present, and they seemed not to appear in a consistent sequence.

The
team collected samples of blood, urine, saliva, and stools, and took scrapings from inflamed skin. They analyzed some samples on-site in the Fat Rabbit; others they froze.

They encountered fleas, lice, malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, HIV, measles, and a range of intestinal bugs. But they found no unfamiliar microbes. The scrapings contained no mites, which would have been
consistent with the contagious form of mange. No mycobacteria consistently showed up where the clusters of small sores appeared. The microscope revealed no evidence of any new disease.

The consensus was that
contact with the animals might be the cause of the inflamed skin and the foul odor. Any wounds inflicted by the creatures certainly left victims vulnerable to infection, and if an attacking animal itself already had open wounds, then contact would make infection even more likely, and the smell could be transferred simply through contact with necrotic tissue. What Marcel had described as delirium could have been shock in some cases, and in others, actual fever dream from one of the many known illnesses discovered in the camp. In other words, some apparent symptoms of the supposed new illness could have been signs of other maladies, undiagnosed until today. That would explain why the symptoms of this new “fever” did not occur in any predictable sequence.

Late in the afternoon,
Tobin sent an encrypted message to his superior’s office. He relayed all the data he’d collected, along with his conclusion that the weaponized virus code-named “Z9Z30” was definitely not present at the camp. No one was vomiting black jelly, too few people were dying, and none were dying fast enough. Good news all around.

Except that the team still had no
firm explanation for what they were dealing with.

There were two attacks
late that evening, and one just before dawn the following morning, but no one got a good look at the animals. Shots were fired, but no quarry brought down.

On the second day, two men were found dead in the forest. The team took tissue samples and again found nothing new. The bodies had been so extensively fed upon by scavengers that the cause of death could not be determined.

At the start of Tobin’s third evening in the camp, Marcel announced that two vans would be arriving from the capital within a few days, carrying more medical personnel, water-sterilization gear, and drugs for the known diseases present. And there would also be a couple of rigs pulling boxcars full of food. The company had apparently decided to pump food and medicine into the camp in hopes of keeping the remaining workers there.

So
Tobin decided it was finally time for him to leave. The roads had firmed up, and Ngwene’s team would soon have reinforcements; his continued presence here would serve no one.

Just before heading out,
he sent another encrypted transmission to his superior, this one consisting of a little white lie. He said that he had already reached the capital, and had turned the Fat Rabbit over to his contact at the U.S. consulate. He claimed that he was already at the airport, boarding a flight for Lagos, Nigeria, where he would connect with another flight to Madrid, where he would finally begin his vacation.

His reason for lying was a fear that someone back at the office would decide they needed one more level of redundancy on this mission and ask him to stay
here longer.

Driving away, he tried not to puzzle over the mysterious fever, forcing himself to think of Carina, what she would be doing late the next morning when he arrived in Madrid. Working, probably.
He imagined walking with her near the Puerta del Sol, just feeding on her voice, watching her warm, lightly painted lips form sounds, barely hearing the words.

Twenty minutes later, beginning the slow climb up to the only negotiable pass leading out of the basin, Tobin
lowered his window and savored the forest air, moist and sweet, so different from the sour-smelling deathtrap he’d just left behind. Sometimes, when he took his foot off the gas pedal and let the enormous engine wind down to idle, he could hear a faint sampling of the region’s many night birds. A few sounded close by, and it surprised him that the noisy vehicle hadn’t scared them all off. Sometimes they seemed to coalesce into a single sweet voice, similar to the cries of a small chimpanzee, plaintive as a puppy’s whining.

When something dug into Tobin’s collarbone, surprise held off the pain for a second or two, until after he noticed the smell. When the pain did hit him, it immediately began to spread. Something scraped across his flesh, tearing skin the whole way from shoulder to neck.
His eyes burned and he shut them protectively. When he opened them, his vision was hopelessly blurred. He barely managed to stop the vehicle without crashing, and somehow got outside.

H
is whole upper body rang with a harsh stinging. A weight clinging to one side of his upper back kept him stumbling. He tried to shake free but only managed to throw himself further off balance until, after perhaps a full minute, he finally went off his feet altogether.

He hit the ground with his back but never knew it, was never aware of the impact, only an endless sensation of falling, or maybe flying. Then the music started. The darkened forest canopy above him became a glowing cascade of medieval Italian mosaics, depicting not a grim worker’s camp seen through a rainy windshield, but host upon host of golden angels, and Carina’s face among them. He could smell her skin, and her
warm breath told him beautiful things.

* * *

“Did you know that my people once lived on the farmlands just on the other side of the ridge?” the old man asked Marcel.

They were in Marcel’s pickup, a couple of miles outside the camp, just past that big humpbacked thing the American scientist had driven away the night before. It had been looted, and the driver was nowhere in sight.
It also smelled like the fever victims at their worst, and Marcel had backed away before getting within five feet of the vehicle.

“No, I never knew that your people used to live around here,” Marcel said, trying to convey with his tone that he didn’t even care about his own people’s ancient history, let alone someone else’s. He only kept listening because he half believed the old man when he claimed to know something that the scientists didn’t. He claimed to know for certain that the reason the scientists couldn’t identify the mystery fever was that it did not exist
, and that fit with the little bit that Marcel had overheard a day earlier. The old man said he was going to show Marcel proof that there was no fever. He wanted Marcel to try and convince the company not to shut down the logging site.

The old man had been working for Sanderson Tropical Timber longer than Marcel. He was nimble and wiry, and
on a work day, he could usually be seen wielding his chainsaw like a Japanese calligrapher’s ink brush as he trimmed branches from trees already felled by younger men.

“Before the wars for independence, ours used to be the only language you heard out there.” The old man gestured eastward. “But when the fighting got close to us, the French took almost all the land. They set up army camps and moved us a hundred miles away.”

Marcel yawned. He’d heard the same story back home in Niger, and from his relatives in Nigeria. Heard it a hundred times. The version from Nigeria substituted
the English
for
the French
, and in more recent tellings it was
the oil company
. But the story didn’t change much.

A minute later they made a right turn onto a trail barely wide enough for the truck’s wheels. Soft green branches slapped the sides of the pickup and poked inside.

The old man went back to his rambling. “I remember what some of the old people used to say about the valley on the other side of the jagged mountains. They were talking about this place. Right here. No one came here to hunt because they could not carry much meat back over those high ridges. And men who came here looking for farmland never returned. No one ever knew what they had found.”

“You’re sure this is the same place?”

“It is. I came in here with Sanderson’s first crew, right after they dynamited a new pass through the mountains. We were clearing away trees to make a road. Even after all those years, I recognized that line of peaks at the top of the ridge. Have you ever noticed they look like giant teeth? Giant crocodile teeth, maybe.”

Marcel had noticed it.

“Some of the road builders disappeared into the forest forever,” the old man continued, “and I remembered that this was no ordinary place. It was weeks before some of us began to understand, and a few men had already died by then. At first there were five of us who saw what an opportunity we had here, and we worked together. By the time the camp was up and running, there were only three of us, and the day before yesterday, those two other men died. I am the only one left, and now you are going to join me. But first you have to see.” He paused a moment and said, “Now.”

Marcel stopped the truck. An old red gas can had been tied to a small tree as a marker. Beyond that, the narrow road diminished to a footpath.

“We’ll need to widen that path for your truck pretty soon,” the old man said, pointing ahead. “But for now, come over this way.” They left the trail. After a few paces, Marcel looked back in the direction of the truck and saw only undifferentiated forest.

They stopped at a plastic tarpaulin that had been draped over something waist high and roughly square, about three yards on a side. The edges of the tarp hung to the ground. The old man reached down and lifted one side of it. He told Marcel to back up, then did so himself, pulling the tarp. Very faintly, an animal whimper came from underneath it.

At the far end of the tarpaulin, an uneven row of low, crude wooden posts came into view. It made Marcel think of a pen for small farm animals, except that the posts were too far apart to keep anything in. They seemed to do nothing but hold up the tarp.

The whimpering changed to terrified shrieks. A thick rope came partly into view, and Marcel saw that it extended past the penned area and was tied around the trunk of a sturdy tree. The receding tarp revealed more and more of the rope, which went taut and limp and taut again as something tugged at it hard.

At last the plastic was pulled clear of the pen.

Marcel could think of nothing to say as he stood looking at the anguished creature writhing on the ground. The old man kept staring at him, waiting for a reaction, as though the sight before him should explain what had become of the driver of the Fat Rabbit. As though it should explain why the old man said he knew that no one was sick from any fever, and why he had insisted on telling his stories about the old days.