Wild Meat (27 page)

It was a long moment before she spoke. “How does the loose flesh contort? Does it fill up with blood?”

“Blood or air or both. It’s made up of a series of spongy chambers, probably long tangles of blood vessels that shrink or enlarge, depending on some neural trigger.”

“And in that colonial drawing you showed me,” Amy said, “with the animal about to get burned at the stake, the face was actually in the middle of this change.”

Stephen nodded. “Just imagine how that detail supported the clergy’s claim that this was some shape-shifting demon they’d managed to capture.”

“So,” Amy said, “since the one I saw in Equateur looked like a chimp from the back, you figure the ones from around the logging camp mimic chimps instead of humans?”

“My idea is that different blood-rat populations diverged millions of years ago. Some continued to mimic the ancestors of chimps and evolved along with them. Others followed early hominids and adapted their mimicry to their new hosts. I think the psychoactive nature of the spray made the animals bond more closely with socially complex primate populations. Since that basin in Equateur was so isolated, with no human population, the ones that lived there continued to mimic the largest primates around.”

“Wait,” Amy said. “Something doesn’t fit here. I’ve been assuming all along that the animals use their spray
either to sedate small prey or as a defense when they were confronted by larger animals – like humans in the logging camp. Now you’re telling me that they followed people on purpose?”

“You’re right on both counts – it’s both a defense and a way to sedate its prey. Except that their food source isn’t all that small. They drugged their prey because they feed without killing them. And that spray is so addictive that the prey keeps on coming back, presenting itself for more feedings.”

“Feedings?” She stared Stephen hard in the eye as his meaning became clear. “And they were called ‘blood rats?’”

“I didn’t make this up, Amy. I’ve just tried to make sense out of this pile of stuff that got buried in the Sonora Desert. I’m open to any other conclusions you might draw.”

Amy kept staring at him, part of her wanting to believe he wasn’t crazy and the other part wanting to give him a second broken hand. “This ancient Kingdom of Hungary you mentioned before – did it encompass, perchance, any part of what is now Romania?”

“Quite a bit of it. Including the Carpathian mountain range, i
f that’s what you’re thinking.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Connective tissue behind Vendetti’s shoulder blade snapped apart like marshmallow crispies as Eloy wrenched his arm behind him and up into a chicken wing.
That bullet must not have gouged too deep,
Vendetti thought,
if Eloy can still push this hard.

H
is field of vision encompassed nothing more than one of Sanderson’s thousand-dollar Italian shoes and part of the mottled gray carpet that covered the concrete floor.
His
floor, in
his
office, from which he ran Top Gun Security. He couldn’t see Sanderson’s other shoe because it was on the back of his head, mashing his face into the floor. Christ, the three of them had been laughing over lunch half an hour ago.

“Eloy!” Vendetti tried to shout. Only half an inch of his lips would open enough for him to push air out between them, so his left cheek inflated frog-like with every attempt at words. He managed a semi-intelligible rendition of, “What the fuck has gotten into you?” before another foot rocketed into his left kidney.

“I think the question is what got into you,” Sanderson said. “You tried to steal the very first breeding pair we shipped. Don’t you know when you can fuck somebody and when you can’t?”

Why couldn’t Eloy have gotten killed instead of Cody?
Vendetti thought. Cody had been slow, but no way would he have turned on him like this. Of course, he had thought the same of Eloy until a few minutes ago. Unbelievable.

And even more unbelievable that this gentleman smuggler, alias Prince of the Eco-Pixies, had gone bad-ass on him out of the blue. Like all of a sudden he’d learned how.

Vendetti searched frantically for something to say that would prove he had never tried to steal anything from Lou Burr. He had no way of knowing that Sanderson was only pretending to think he’d tried to steal the breeding pair. No way of knowing that Sanderson was doing this partly for fun, partly so he could stay connected to the boof trade a little longer, and partly so that Lou Burr would owe him a very substantial favor. Now Burr would see, courtesy of Sanderson’s and Eloy’s vigilance, that Vendetti didn’t have enough self control to abstain from indulgence in the very product whose North American market he was supposed to be establishing.

Eloy released Vendetti’s arm, and for a moment it seemed to stay twisted, with no elasticity left to make it spring back to a natural position.

“Makes me wonder,” Vendetti heard Sanderson say to Eloy, “if we can still work with him. I mean, can we trust him at all?”

They had to be screwing with him. No way were they going to let him live after all this.

“One way to find out,” Eloy said. He grabbed Vendetti’s feet and twisted him over onto his back. Vendetti noticed that Eloy winced a little with the effort, and he wished to God that bullet had done more than graze the little freak’s ribcage.

Then Eloy was dragging him out of the room by his feet, like a man pulling a rickshaw
. Through the doorway and
bump bump bump
down the five metal steps to the hot pavement of the nearly empty parking lot.

Midday sun knifed into Vendetti’s eyes, forcing them shut. He felt Eloy picking up speed, breaking into a trot. In a moment Vendetti’s lower back, then his shoulder blades, then his head, smacked hard into something that rose up about five inches from the pavement.

Having cleared that obstacle, Eloy slowed down, changed directions, and began trotting again. Vendetti was aware that Eloy had changed is grip, grasping pant cuffs rather than thick ankles. Kicking free would be all but impossible now.

Then another thump, up and over another something hard. Vendetti turned his head and saw that he’d just been dragged over a couple of the concrete barriers that lined the row of parking spaces closest to the building, just high enough to prevent most vehicles from going over them.
The office they’d just left attached to a warehouse that had another entrance at its far end. There were at least ten more little barriers before other entrance, and Vendetti rightly guessed that Eloy intended to keep S-curving, so as to hit every one of them. He was much bigger and more powerful than Eloy, but far too disoriented to fight back, especially starting from this position.

Eloy did not tire out. Three barriers later, a gash opened up across the bump on Vendetti’s occipital bone, just above the base of his skull. Subsequent blows mashed and tugged at that wound, opening it further. The next to last impact, which came just as Vendetti turned his head sideways, created a hairline fracture in his right cheekbone. By then he had vertigo and his vision was fading in and out.

Finally arriving at the distant doorway, Eloy dragged him inside. They turned into a hallway, then went through a door onto a disused loading dock. At first he thought his vision was fading even more, but then realized that the area was actually dark, with only a faint, rust-brown glow coming from some source he couldn’t see. The outer doors were closed and one of his vans had been backed up the ramp and onto the dock.

Then he heard a familiar, puppy-like cooing, distant and muffled, followed by a burst of scuffling, and understood the reason for the near darkness.

And what? Were they going to feed him to the animals? No one was supposed to bring any of them here; that order had come straight from Lou Burr. The stink monkeys were supposed to be brought straight up the freeway from the port of Long Beach to the big basement, then back down south as soon as everything had been set up. Yet one of them was here, just on the other side of the van’s back doors.

Vendetti’s whole body tortured him, especially his head. At least the boof, whatever it felt like, would put an end to this pain. He had sworn never to touch the
awful-smelling shit, but since things were looking fairly bleak just now….

Eloy dropped him on the concrete floor, then took a roll of duct tape from a nearby shelf. Sanderson shut the building’s outer doors and came to assist Eloy by leveling a 9mm at their captive.

Before binding his arms together, they wrapped each wrist and forearm individually with about fifteen layers of the tape. Eloy next held Vendetti’s head off the floor by his thinning dyed hair and Sanderson proceeded to wrap his neck just as thickly in the duct tape. He wrapped it loosely, not cutting off any air. Vendetti was too dazed and in pain to wonder why. Then they retreated behind a chain-link gate, which Eloy closed, latched, and carefully tested.

“The creature you’re about to meet is the male from the pair you intended to steal,” Sanderson called out. 

“I never stole anything,” Vendetti croaked as loudly as his cracked ribs would permit. “That asshole next to you, along with the other asshole who’s dead now, tried to use one of the stink monkeys to do another job, just like I told them never to do, and it got away. And if he told you any other story, it’s because he knows we’d blow his guts out for fucking up like he did.”

Sanderson ignored the protest and continued calmly. “You know, when we asked your accomplice outside
the company where he’d hidden the animals, he didn’t want to answer at first. After we escorted him through the parking lot with which you’ve just become so intimate, you know what happened? He wanted to tell us, but he passed out. And then he didn’t wake up. All he managed to say was ‘van.’ And it took us until this morning to find that van – the very van whose rear doors are facing you now, by the way. That’s two and a half days. Now, if you hadn’t been out of town, we could have just asked you about it. Then our furry playmate in there would have been spared nearly dying of thirst. He didn’t have any water that whole time and – silly us – we plum forgot to give him any.”

All at once, Vendetti understood the many layers of duct tape, and he gurgled out a sound of distress.

“It sounds as though you know what happens when our wild brethren get badly dehydrated,” Sanderson said. “They stop producing ruby.” He sighed theatrically. Ahh…glorious ruby.”

Vendetti could see Eloy looking toward the van and tugging on something that was invisible in the darkness. With each of Eloy’s tugs, there came more scuffling from within the van, and finally its back doors came open.

“This one,” Sanderson said, “might just have a teensy, concentrated drop still left in his shriveled-up rump, although it won’t come out in much of a spray. That’s part of the reason we insisted on going to a dress-up sort of place for lunch today. You need that nice corduroy coat and slacks to protect you from any stray droplet that might rub off as he drags his sweet little ass over you.”

Vendetti heard no more of Sanderson’s words because all at once the thing was in the room with him, its whimpers of distress much louder, sounding just like his girlfriend Tilda’s ancient Labrador retriever moaning for someone to help him haul his arthritic bones up onto the sofa.

At first, it only pawed lightly at the taped spots on Vendetti’s body. Once it determined that all points were all equally difficult to reach, it opted to concentrate on his neck. Planting most of its weight on Vendetti’s chest, the stink monkey used its hind feet to dig at the tape on his neck.

Christ, he’d never seen those feet up close before, and now they were digging at his neck
, like when a cat tries to rip the belly out of a mouse. He could make out the toes on the foot closest to his face. Two had thin, curved claws and the others had what looked like long, thick fingernails sharpened to points.

By the time it clawed through to the flesh beneath the tape, Vendetti had several dozen bleeding scratches on his face and neck. Dozens of swipes of
those claws had gone astray and shredded the skin at the top of Vendetti’s chest. On his cheeks he received nearly symmetrical wounds that, within a few days, would look like ritual scarification. So much blood oozed from his cuts that the animal didn’t need to bite at first; it just lapped up the flow.

“Hey, look
y there,” Eloy said. “He’s bleeding war paint.”

When
the creature finally stopped slashing and settled down to quietly feed on him, Vendetti managed to catch his breath.

“Hungry, too,” Sanderson said. “You know what happens when they’re starving, right? They just keep on feeding until they’re full. Normally they let their prey live to generate more blood for another night, but when they’re starving to death, another instinct overrides moderation. My team in Africa suspected that, and last night Eloy came across confirmation while he perused a hard drive that recently came into his possession.
And did you know they never feed on young children? It’s as though they understand the need to preserve their prey, just like deerhunters not shooting fawns. Fascinating, no?”

Wondering how much of his blood could fit into the animal’s stomach, Vendetti began to feel woozy. A lot could fit, apparently.