Wild Meat (34 page)

Stephen ran and checked. The key was there. He jogged back to Gray-Beard and said, “Give me your shirt and I won’t kill you. Both your shirts.” Gray-beard was wearing a blue long-sleeve cotton shirt, unbuttoned, over his tee.

It took a kick in the side and another directly on the bullet wound before Gray-beard complied. Stephen pulled on the t-shirt and went to retrieve the sawed-off jug that contained the boof and water mixture. There were only a couple ounces of liquid, but it would be enough for his purposes. He poured half over Gray-beard’s head and the rest onto his wound, eliciting a flurry of snarls and curses.

He used the cotton shirt to wipe off Blondie’s pistol before putting it in his pocket, then used the shirt again to hold Amy’s shoulder as he led her to the freight elevator.

The last thing he saw before the doors closed was Blondie, on his feet now, smiling. His back was arched, arms extended overhead in a perfect rendition of the yoga posture called
sun salutation
.

Amy waved at Blondie, and he waved back, the two of them grinning like children as the elevator doors closed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Amy’s surroundings were vaguely familiar. The walls of the room were bare, but she knew the place, the way you recognize a hotel room that you scarcely looked at before you went to sleep. Her suitcase was open on the floor, but she had no memory of checking in anywhere recently.

Physically she felt awful, with a killer headache that spiked every time she moved so much as her eyes. The little bit of sunlight leaking in through the blinds was painful and fascinating at the same time. It lent all the surfaces in the room a cartoonish glimmer of many colors, and those colors followed her into the hall as she left the bedroom.

More light came from the end of the hall, strange and searing. There were low voices. At the end of the hall she turned through an archway into the next room and covered her eyes against the glare. She heard Rita say, “Here she is. Let’s put the blinds down.”

There was shuffling movement, and a few seconds later
a hand was on her shoulder.

“Okay darling
,” Rita said. “It’s dark now.”

Amy dropped her hands, and now only a warm and gentle glow filled the room. Rita was guiding her to the sofa, asking her how she had slept. The glow was from a
single candle.

“Steve made coffee,” Rita said. “It’s about nine in the morning, in case you were wondering.”

The safe-house living room, with its walls still mostly bare, and no bookcases or bureaus anywhere, felt empty and big, and the candlelight added a church-like quality. Heavy blankets had been draped over the windows. The blankets had Navajo designs, and they made Amy think of stained glass. The atmosphere was immensely peaceful, but did not take away the headache.

Stephen handed her a glass of water and a couple of oblong white pills that she recognized as Vicodin.

“Two?” she said.

“I was going to recommend four. But you’re a good sixty pounds lighter than me, so two will probably do you fine. You remember waking up a few hours ago and complaining about the pain?”

She shook her head. “I remember dropping off your animals here, and…we went someplace near Little Tokyo, right?”

“That’s right. More of it should come back before long, right up to the point where you got attacked.”

“Attacked? Again?”

“Attacked, and utterly doused with the spray
this time. Rita’s been scouring the online forums about boof, and the users’ consensus seems to be that pre-boof memories come back completely within a few hours. But memories of the boof ride itself will never be more than a spotty bunch of sounds and snapshots that just sort of jump out at you now and then.”

Rita brought coffee and sat on the sofa with one arm around Amy’s shoulders.
“Steve filled me in on everything. He says those are bite marks as well as scratches on you, and that means you need to get checked out for whatever wild animal bugs those things might have passed on to you.”

Amy nodded. “Infection. I never even thought about it, which is kind of funny, considering that everyone at the logging camp thought the animals were spreading some kind of deadly fever.”

“You might want to ask your doctor to write a scrip for some more Vicodin, too.” Rita said. “The headaches might come and go for a couple of days, according to the boofheads online. They also say that good painkillers can turn the aftereffects of boof from miserable to kinda fun.”

“I go to a couple of different doctors,” Amy said, “and there’s one who’ll phone in a prescription for pretty much anything I want, short of a year’s supply of morphine. I’ll make sure he authorizes enough Vicodin for you and me both, Steve.”
She sipped while Stephen told her what had happened after the v-chimp got to her.

After their escape from the big basement,
Stephen had called Rita on Amy’s cell phone, and she’d come and led him back to the safe house.

They had stripped her and hosed her off in the fenced-in back yard, which she hadn’t seemed to mind a bit. In fact, she’d giggled and shrieked her way through it. Rita had gotten her into the hot shower afterwards.

Amy shook her head, smiling a little, trying to picture it. Even in her groggy and depleted state, she felt a little thrill at the thought of being exposed in broad daylight in front of these too. Stephen was certainly smiling at the memory of it. “I hope I didn’t say anything too embarrassing.”

Rita laughed. “The closest you came to a coherent sentence was, ‘Epileptic dogs can see the future.’ The rest made even less sense. According to a lot of people on the online forum, that only happens when someone does way too much. If you do a controlled dose, you can sort of communicate, and you remember a lot more of what went on. You got a mega-dose, darling.
Dozens of times what people usually take on purpose.”

Stephen left the room for a moment and returned with a plate full of toasted bagels and a few plastic tubs of flavored cream cheese. Surprised at the strength of her appetite, Amy gobbled down two and a half bagels while Stephen filled her in on the rest of what she’d missed in the big basement.

“I’d say you guys are doing pretty good,” Rita said. “You put a bullet into one guy’s ribs up in Oakland, and busted up a couple more of them down in the warehouse district. And the next people to go into that basement are going to get sprayed, unless Blondie and the other guy get out to warn someone.”

“They may not want to leave the basement,” Stephen said. “They might just decide to stay down there and get sprayed and sprayed and sprayed.”

Amy laughed. “Hey, we
have
fucked up their operation pretty good. If they wanted us dead before, think how they feel now, assuming Vendetti’s figured out who we are.”

“That reminds me,” Stephen said. “Rita’s been researching a few other things besides the effects of boof. She followed up on a pretty smart hunch.”

“You know about that chimp sanctuary Sanderson’s bought out down in San Diego County?” Rita said.

“Yeah.”

“It used to be called the Imperial Rainforest, and most of the same people are still there, taking care of the animals. Sanderson just took over the land lease and bought out the non-profit corporation. I called down and said I was from one of those save-the-primates groups that you work with, and wanted to ask some off-the-record questions. The guy didn’t have anything bad to say about the takeover, but he did mention that Sanderson insisted on hiring a whole new private security company, and that all the new guards are creepy as hell.”

“No way!”

“Now I think we know what Vendetti meant by ‘down south,’” Stephen said.

This news increased Amy’s heart rate a little, and soon the dimly lit room was pulsing with color – but her headache was gone. The boofheads online had been right about painkillers.

Rita gave Amy a hard look. “But you guys aren’t going to go after them yourselves again, right?”

“Of course not,” Amy said dreamily, and altogether untruthfully. “Enough stupid risks for me.”

“That’s good to hear, darling,” Rita said. “And since you both seem to be getting into a good mood with your magic pills, here’s something to stir up a few more giggles.” She grabbed her open notebook from the end table, tapped the touch pad until the monitor came to life, then sat down by Stephen and put the computer on his lap. “Steve says he hasn’t seen the Sensuous Hugh collection yet.”

“Wow,” Amy said. “There are way more pictures than there were. Somebody’s been seriously busy.”

A lot of the new images played off recent ads promoting Sanderson Wild Adventure Land in Southern California. Many of the comics now featured Hugh’s Indiana-Jones hat and lots of cuddly wild animals.

“I don’t see how they think they’ll be able to compete with the San Diego Wild Animal Park,” Stephen said. He began clicking on the images.

“I heard Sanderson tried to get some kind of joint thing going with the San Diego Zoo,” Rita said, “but so far, they want nothing to do with him. Good for them.”

The first two rows of comics got Stephen chuckling. In the first frame, Sanderson was unzipping his fly, the bulge underneath threatening to burst the pants apart before he could complete the task. On the brim of his hat, along with the lemurs and parrots, were three naked female figures.

“Hey, Power Puff Girls!” Rita cried. “They used to be my heroes. You guys remember them?”

Amy nodded and felt herself grinning. Just the small action of smiling sent a wave of sensations through her body – a strong residual effect of the boof. A second later she burst into laughter. On the screen, she saw Sanderson in the midst of sexual acts with numerous familiar cartoon and real-life characters: the Men-in-Black creatures, Yeoman Rand from the old Star Trek, and a bevy of the latest teenage Russian pop idols – all animated with striking realism.

The last frame showed all of the little creatures suddenly fleeing, leaving Sanderson alone, pants down, with a confused expression and his penis beginning to droop. The Michelin Tire man and the Exxon tiger appeared, many times bigger than Sanderson, who looked with horror at their monstrous members. The corporate mascots had Transformer-like machine genitals, while Sanderson’s was a redwood tree, greenery and all, heroically straining heavenward. The corporate giants scornfully declared that Sanderson had betrayed them, and now he would pay the price.

“I can’t tell whether the joke is pro- or anti-environmentalist,” Amy said, “but it’s funny as hell.”

Stephen kept clicking and scrolling. “There’s Hugh again – he and Captain Picard are taking turns diddling Betty Rubble.”

***

The first time Rita left the room, Stephen leaned close to Amy and said in a low voice, “The official grand opening is tomorrow. They’re already allowing visitors into the sanctuary to see the new enclosure. They want to show off all the new authentic jungle plants they’ve imported. Sanderson’s going to be there to cut a ribbon or two.”

“Time for me to call the doctor,” Amy said. “And we need to get more rounds for that 9mm you picked up in the big basement. I know someone right out in the Valley who’ll have all sorts of ammo for us. Friend of Andre’s. We won’t have to show him any permits.”

“You need to get another car. Vendetti knows your Buick inside and out.”

“What’s your plan for when we get there?”

“Watch where the Top Gun Security cars go,” Stephen said. “That’s probably where the v-chimps are. We’ll have to do a lot of slaughter.”

Amy coughed up her swig of bottled water. “You want a firefight with these guys? We might not get lucky this time.”

“No, I don’t mean shoot the goons, although I wouldn’t be above that. I mean shoot the animals. It’s better than letting them suffer in captivity, right? And if we let them go, they’ll just die when the winter comes. I thought your idea was to turn the whole thing into such a big loss that Sanderson’s new pals will just give up on it”

“You’re right. Christ, I feel like all my thoughts are slipping away through cracks in my brain. Just oozing out like raw eggs through a strainer.”

Around mid-afternoon, Stephen went with her to the car dealer. She got a Camry again, a few years older than the last, and black instead of red.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Around noon of the following day
, Amy and Stephen were weaving through the hills of eastern San Diego County. Traffic was mostly recreational, SUVs with jet skis on roof racks, or hauling ATVs on trailers.

They zigzagged up a broad mountain face and watched desert scrub fade to creosote and manzanita. By the time they reached a plateau, all the other traffic had turned away, following signs for campgrounds, state and county parks, and tiny towns with unpronounceable names.

“We’re all alone up here,” Amy said. “Either we’re late for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, or nobody’s taken much interest.”

A mile later they saw a cartoon billboard showing Sanderson
with a red colobus monkey on his shoulder and a sifaka sharing the brim of his hat with twin Peruvian condors. His left thumb pointed to a turnoff, and a caption along the top read,
THIS WAY TO WILD ADVENTURE!