Wild Meat (28 page)

His captors seemed to be reading his thoughts. “That same hard drive,” Sanderson said, “contained some interesting zoological speculations about our treasured beasts. They may be larger versions of little animals called prosimians, some of which have very expandable stomachs that can hold up to eight percent of their body weight. I’ve done a rough calculation and concluded that it’s entirely possible for our little friends to drain over forty percent of a person’s blood supply – forty percent being right about where the situation becomes life threatening.”

“Now let’s see.” This was Eloy calling out. “What do you go, about two hundred twenty pounds, Mr. Vendetti? Two thirty? You might be okay.”

“Unfortunately,” Sanderson said, “your lady friend, Tilda, was a damn sight lighter than you. That became a problem for her when she met this fellow’s lady friend.”

Vendetti couldn’t have known that Sanderson had simply paid Tilda five thousand dollars to stay away from the business, or that Eloy had promised her the beating of a lifetime if she showed up here again.
Or that the female of the breeding pair had never been recovered from the wilds behind the foothills bungalow where it had escaped.

In fact, Vendetti had little in his mind at all, and what few thoughts remained kept fading into gray blotches of nothingness.
The other men’s words faded into indistinct mumbling. He was barely aware of the chain-link gate opening, but did open his eyes enough to see Eloy coming in with a cattle prod in his hand. He wondered, with very little alarm, what the shock would feel like.

The animal lifted its
face away from Vendetti’s neck, and its head bobbed drunkenly.

Eloy stopped a few yards away. “Will you look at that,” he called back to Sanderson. “You were right. It’s getting ready to pass out. Didn’t even need the zapper.”

Vendetti rolled his head and saw the animal lolling onto the floor next to him.

“It’ll sleep for at least half a day,” Sanderson said

Eloy stood staring at the animal. “Shame not to use the shocker after we went to such trouble to get a hold of one.”

Sanderson
gave a surprised and tired laugh, as though he couldn’t believe the situation had yielded yet more humor. Eloy stepped closer and wiggled the end of the instrument in between the buttons of Vendetti’s dress shirt, used it to push the undershirt aside, and placed the cool metal against his bare belly. A second later, the titular boss of Top Gun Security was fully awake in spite of his blood loss, and all his wounds were singing loudly.

Sanderson came in and leaned close to Vendetti, as he had at the start of the afternoon’s fun. “We were just fooling around with you. You’re going to get relief after all.” He produced a small apple-juice bottle that now contained a quarter inch or so of brown liquid. He leaned over Vendetti’s face and unscrewed the cap, and the toxic smell added nausea to Vendetti’s woes. Sanderson tipped the little bottle. When the liquid hit Vendetti’s face, he felt it sear into his eyes and his many fresh cuts.

A few heartbeats later, all was light and rushing movement. Vendetti felt himself entangled with Tilda on an old-fashioned shag rug. Suddenly he was falling through water, then air, then clouds, then whooshing merrily through a tunnel that pulsed with lights of many colors. Kind of how he’d hoped Disneyland’s Space Mountain would be when he’d first heard about it.

And he knew that his life had become something wonderful.

CHAPTER THIRTY
-ONE

“Why’d the blood rats stick with primates?” Amy asked Stephen. “Why not other animals, too.”

“Apes and humans are large enough not to drain in a single feeding, but not too large to sedate with a blast of boof. Blood rats sometimes attacked livestock or large wild animals like deer, but those animals weren’t as affected by the spray, probably because of their dense fur and their greater mass. Chimps and humans, on the other hand, have a lot of hairless surfaces on their bodies.”

“So, eventually,” Amy said, trying to follow Stephen’s line of speculation, “early humans must have come to recognize the animals as something that should be avoided.”

“Yes, like pests or parasites,” Stephen said. “And eventually we managed to wipe them out everywhere except for small pockets. They may still have been in Europe during the last glacial period, and then retreated to the higher altitudes as the climate warmed and the glaciers receded.”

“Maybe they were in other mountain ranges besides the Carpathians.”

“Maybe they still are,” Stephen said. “Anyway, thousands of years later, somebody up in those mountains saw the value of their spray and turned it into a lucrative business. By the time of the earliest records in the Baja bundle, the origin of the stuff was a carefully guarded secret. Only the highest-ranking families were supposed to have knowledge of the creatures – although the people who worked in their kennels were probably commoners. They even made sure that the wild blood-rat population stayed way down, so that no one else was likely to discover the wild ones and start up their own kennels. There were specialists who knew how to seek out blood-rat nests during the daytime and kill them while they were helpless. By the way, do you remember what I said about the arguments the local elite used when they were resisting the Church’s cease-and-desist order? How they said that keeping the animals was an important part of their cultural heritage?”

“I think so.”

“And you know about the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 1200s?”

“Not really, but I’ll take your word for it.”

He laughed. “The Carpathian mountain range happens to be precisely where the Mongols got bogged down, and it happened at a time when all the powers of Europe put together didn’t have the manpower to hold off the tidal wave of invaders. They had tried already and gotten slaughtered. All of Europe was looking at destruction. The Mongols would have done to Europe what Europeans eventually did to the Native Americans. All throughout the eastern kingdoms, aristocrats deserted their castles ran like hell westward. Up in the Carpathians, the members of the noble houses took their prized animals with them when they fled to the countryside. But in the winter, they started a guerilla campaign that partly consisted of letting loose dozens of their blood rats right next to the Mongol army camps.”

“
Smart move.”

“
They also sold boof through intermediaries to the invading soldiers. It was like heroin in Vietnam, with the added factor of strange creatures that came in the dark and could take human form. The whole scene terrorized the Mongol troops, turned half of them into junkies, and destroyed morale. Soon their commanders had to pull out, just like Sanderson had to give up on all that prime timber when the logging camp was turned into a mess. The Mongols used the excuse that they had to go home for the great Khan’s funeral, but the local nobility hiding in those mountains knew the truth. They’d driven out the hordes with their furry secret weapons. At least that’s the story they gave to the Church’s emissaries who wanted them to flush their whole inventory down the tubes.”

“How’d they get their livestock back
after the Mongols were gone?”

“They had to go out and capture them, like their ancestors had done. A dangerous business, but a very profitable for anyone who learned the skill of
finding their nests and trapping them without getting sprayed. A few months after the Mongols left, there was a boom in the wild blood-rat population because of all the ones they’d set loose. Also, since it had been a time of superabundant food supply in the form of Mongol blood, there were larger litters, and very few single births among the blood rats.”

“Wait, back up,” Amy said. “Food supply increases
litter size? I’ve never heard of anything like that. With some other mammals, yeah, but not primates.

“I haven’t heard of
it, either. But the locals claimed that if they deliberately overfed their captive blood rats – don’t ask me
how
they overfed them – the result was usually a litter of two to four young, rather than the usual single pup. It’s an interesting question, whether there could be some gene for multiple births that’s triggered by a sudden huge supply of nutrients. The chroniclers say it was a unique property of these animals. Anyway, after the Mongols left, people started new kennels by capturing the wild offspring of prize blood rats that had been––”

Someone pounded on the door. Stephen got to his feet and looked out the peephole to see his cousin Elaine
struggling to hold her sleeping eight-year-old daughter. He opened the door and she came in looking tired and shell shocked. From her free hand dangled two black plastic shopping bags. One contained remnants of assorted chips and candy that she and little Lucy had snacked on during the drive. The other bag held a pint of Grey Goose vodka and a quart of tonic.

Amy
hurried to get ice from down the hall, then quickly returned and mixed the drinks. When all were seated around the little table and sipping way, she voiced her offer to fund a trip out of town for Elaine and her family, plus private security protection afterward. Speaking on behalf of everyone involved, Elaine immediately accepted.

Lucy awoke after a short while, but obligingly stayed in the big vinyl-covered armchair
across the room, exploring the TV channels, making it much easier for the grownups to speak freely about blood-sucking animals, burglars, drug dealers, and illegal weapons.

It took
over an hour to convince Elaine that Stephen hadn’t simply had a breakdown and become delusional. Once that had been accomplished, the paleo-anthropologist in Elaine took over, and Stephen eagerly fell into step with her. They launched into a rambling discussion of primates, hominids, migrations of archaic Homo sapiens, the origins of speech and symbolic communication, and prehistoric social organization.

When Elaine had finished off one
vodka tonic and mixed a second, she raised her glass and said, “I propose we call this discovery ‘Tarsius draculus.’”

Stephen and Amy clinked classes with her in approval.

“What about a common name?” Stephen asked. “Do we call the African ones ‘blood rats,’ the same as the European variety?”

“How about v-chimp?” Amy offered, and this name was also unanimously adopted.

Elaine watched Stephen drain his glass. “Are you sure you should be drinking while you’re on Vicodin, or whatever they gave you?” she said.

Stephen shrugged. “I’m sure I’m enjoying it.”

Amy said, “You know, the populations of these things must have been small, and fairly rare, given the fact that no one’s ever found any skeleton intact enough to put it all together.”

“There
are probably plenty of extinct animals we haven’t found evidence of yet,” Elaine said. “The fossil record really is incredibly scant, but it’s all we have to work with.” She chewed a thumbnail, regarding the pictures. “One thing about these imitations of human faces – they’re sort of cute, but they’re also sort of creepy.”

“I think I can account for that,” Stephen said.
“But let me back up a few million years. “I’m guessing that before we clever Homo sapiens came along, blood rats could easily insert themselves into a primate social network. I bet the ones that mimic chimps even smell like chimps – I mean their body scent, not the spray. And the ones that followed earlier hominids also developed different scent-mimicking ability to suit their prey. But we were trickier to tackle, probably the first species to think their way around the blood rats’ deception, and organize well enough to go after them.”

“So how did the blood rats get to Europe?” Amy asked.

Elaine was nodding. “I think I see where you’re going, Steve.” Turning to Amy, she said, “Hominids started migrating out of Africa as early as two million years ago, way before our species ever popped up. They evolved into various species around the old world, including Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East. We Homo sapiens sprang up in Africa only a couple hundred thousand years ago.”

Amy
nodded to show she was following.

Stephen
took up the explanation. “I figure that some blood-rat populations stayed in Africa, while others followed early hominids into other parts of the old world. A couple million years later, when Homo sapiens appeared in Africa, we probably wiped out the blood rats on that continent – except for the ones that were still feeding on apes and not bothering us. But sixty or a hundred thousand years ago, when some of us Homo sapiens left Africa end entered Europe and Asia for the first time, we had to tangle with the blood rats all over again. That’s because we ran into the ones that had been feeding on Neanderthals in Europe, and Peking Man in Asia, and all the rest of them. As we replaced those other populations, the blood rats that had been feeding on
them
began to feed on
us
, but they still mimicked the appearance of those other hominids.”

Elaine filled in the rest: “And
kept mimicking them instead of us right up until they were wiped out a few hundred years ago. Or maybe they started to look more like us, but the transition was never complete because they only had a few tens of thousands of years.”