Wild Meat (5 page)

“I am sorry,” Marcel said. “I really am. But who could have guessed? I was afraid more people would die, so I begged the company to send help. For all I knew, it could have been as bad as those fevers they have to the east. By the time
you showed me the truth, it was too late.”

“I
understand.” The old man sighed as though his last breath were leaving him.

CHAPTER FOUR

The sight of the machete in Tall Guard’s hand got Amy flailing again. Almost at once she managed to wriggle out of the unbuttoned shirt, and suddenly she was free. The floppy white sunhat still clung to her by the string under her chin, but now it
covered half her face instead of her head, and partly blocked her sight.

The barrel-shaped guard was between her and the drop-off. When she tried to get around him, he moved with surprising speed for his size, recovering her left arm with one sweep of his own. He calmly grabbed at the air in pursuit of
her right, like a sleepy bear shooing away flies. Amy kept moving and twisting enough to prevent him from retaking the fugitive right arm, but could not free her left again.

Tall Guard stopped a few paces away, maybe waiting for Barrel Guard to hold his prey still.

“I’ve got money,” Amy shouted in English, trying anything that might slow down whatever was going on.

No response. She quickly glanced at Tall Guard again and saw that he’d set down the machete and was fumbling in his pants pocket. He pulled out a transparent plastic bag that held what looked like a miniature liquor bottle, the kind served on airplanes.

Amy had no idea what he was doing and no time to puzzle over it. She concentrated on keeping her right arm as far as possible from Barrel Guard. The effort kept her squatting, with the free arm sticking straight into the air as though she were trying to fly.

She shouted her offer again, this time in French, and now the guards exchanged a look. She
was right; Barrel Guard had only been feigning incomprehension earlier.

“I
can get money from a bank in the capital,” she said. “You can be rich by tomorrow morning.”

That seemed to get Tall Guard thinking. He stood still and looked again at Barrel Guard, who only barked angrily in a language that Amy could not even identify.

“You’ll have the money by morning,” she repeated, and continued spitting out her offer in telegraphic bursts as she struggled:
“Cent mille euro! Argent liquide!”

This time Tall Guard spoke at length, but Barrel Guard only snapped at him again, with more words and greater venom. Barrel Guard also looked away from Amy while he scolded the other man, giving her time to try something new.

She leapt a couple of feet off the ground and pulled her knees up against her chest. The huge man kept his grip, but didn’t realize how far Amy’s body would drop this time. The sudden downward force on his arm was enough to pull him a little to one side. It wasn’t much, but she had managed to move him against his will.

Planting her feet, she twisted around and drove herself backwards into his side, pushing him further in the direction he was already tilting. That upset his balance more, and he had to take another couple of steps to keep from falling.

When he turned back to face her, he stood at perfect striking distance and she jabbed her right fist at his windpipe. The impact would probably have made him gasp, might even have done some real damage. But Barrel Guard, still off balance, reeled and dipped his head forward just a few degrees an instant before she struck. The blow landed against the side of his nose, and Amy was sure she felt something give way when her knuckles connected.

He let out a muffled honk, but still did not let go of her wrist. 

Then came bubbling, and he started to cough explosively through his mouth and nose.

Small droplets, almost a mist, peppered Amy’s cheek and arm. The guard’s face was partly toward the headlights now, and she saw blood running down to his chin. He bubbled some more and used his free hand to swat the choking flow away from his nose.

Amy twisted her left arm again and this time the guard’s grip slipped. She lurched away from him.

Even as he struggled to breathe, Barrel Guard managed to swing a big palm down onto her head and clench hard
, but the hand was slick from wiping blood off his face, and his grip on Amy’s hair slipped. She kept moving, and between the guard’s fingers nothing remained but a few dozen long strands of medium brown hair.

She threw herself toward the drop-off and began tumbling, sliding, crashing through thick undergrowth that spattered her with cool water. A knot on a fallen branch dug viciously into her back as she
skimmed over it. It was a steep, uncontrolled descent of thirty feet or so, and Amy kept rolling hard, even after the ground beneath her leveled out. She got to her feet and tried to charge further into the darkness, but her head was spinning so badly that she couldn’t keep from slamming straight into an enormous tree trunk, though she saw it coming a good five feet before impact.

There were rifle shots, but no one followed her down that s
harp drop. She stayed still, not giving the guards any clue where she was. Somewhere above her, Barrel Guard was still roaring away. The strap of the sunhat had somehow stayed hooked around Amy’s neck.

CHAPTER FIVE

Amy awoke in the cab of a parked truck and had no idea how she’d gotten there. The morning light seared her eyes. The first clear thought that made its way through the pain in her head was that she needed to get moving before anyone came up the road.

She got outside, stood painfully, and checked her pockets, which were now just little white sacks dangling against her bare quadriceps. The camera was in one sack, the floppy white sunhat stuffed into the other. At the moment she cared more about the hat, which she put on gratefully.

Seeing the scraps of denim tied to her feet, she began to remember the first part of the evening. Tearing up her jeans to make moccasins had taken half an hour and required teeth as well as hands. The seams, which served as ropes to lash a few layers of fabric to each foot, had made uncomfortable lumps under her soles, but that had still been better than walking in just her socks. She’d meant to have cutoff shorts left over, but in the darkness had accidentally made a diagonal tear all the way up through the seat of the pants. Instead of shorts, she
now had loose shreds of fabric hanging from the waistband.

Then she remembered the worst part. The rainforest canopy was so dense in many places that at night there was effectively no light at all. In one of those spots, she’d been using
her phone to light up the ground and keep her footing. Somehow she’d stumbled anyhow, and the phone had gone flying. It might have landed face down in some crevice or it might have broken; either way, she had once again been thrown into total darkness. She had spent half an hour searching for it before giving up.

About an hour after that, s
he’d found the road, and right away had come upon this logging truck stuck on the shoulder. Not the same truck that had blocked her way last night, but one she’d seen en route to the camp the previous afternoon. It had probably been there for days. The cab had seemed like the safest place to spend the night, since the mystery fever was supposedly spread by animals that roamed after dark.

Now, walking up the endlessly rising road, she wondered if there were a second camp nearby, because she could smell the most delectable cooking aromas. She couldn’t identify anything as eggs or bread or any particular dish, but the totality of the smells definitely comprised…breakfast.  It lingered even after she’d gone at least a mile.

She recalled a dream in which a juvenile chimpanzee had been trying to get into the truck cab, slapping at the window next to her. In the dream
, she’d tried to let the animal in, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock the door, and had just sat there tugging uselessly at the inside latch, making kiss-kiss noises at the little ape face.

She ran a fingertip across her
right shoulder and felt five raised bumps, still sore as hell to the touch. The skin around them was rough with smears of dried blood.

Then she remembered what had happened sometime before the dream.

She’d awakened to find a long, furry appendage reaching into the truck through the slightly open passenger-side window. Something with claws rather than nails – therefore no chimpanzee – had been clutching her left shoulder, really digging into it. She’d cranked the window hard, making the edge of the glass bite into that grasping limb, and the thing had wailed and whimpered and squealed. When Amy eased back on the window crank, her assailant had slipped away, thumped onto the ground with a final, sad, “Oooh,” and scuffled off.

Then there had been a suffocating stink, heavy and rotten. She’d gagged, feeling panicked in the closed space and still air, wanting to be outside but afraid to open the door….

And then it had all vanished: the desperation, the pain in her shoulder, even the stench. The cab had suddenly smelled like a steamy shower, the very thing she’d been dreaming about ever since leaving the logging camp. It had smelled, in fact, just like the scented bath soap a friend back in California had given her, an elegant little cake in the shape of a scallop shell. She’d finally unwrapped that soap just a couple of days ago back in Dakar.

She was sure the rest of the night had been full of vivid dreams, but could only recall the one with the little chimp trying to get into the truck. 

Now it was hot and she felt horrible, not just the wounds in her shoulder and the long gouge along her back from skidding down the slope, but a headache as tight and sharp as any she could remember. And she simply could not adjust to the day’s brightness.

She was hopelessly unfocused, too. Her mind kept wandering even as she told herself how badly she needed to stay alert, to be ready to charge back into the forest at the first sound of an engine.

Almost as soon as that thought struck her, a truck growled somewhere down the hill, and she barely got into the cover of vegetation before the vehicle came within sight. The vehicle came so slowly that, for a moment, she was afraid the driver had spotted her, but the truck kept rolling by.

The shade was exquisite
. There were shrinking drops of two-day-old rain on many of the broad leaves, and Amy harvested them greedily. She wanted to stay out of the sun, but the going was too slow here in the undergrowth, and she needed to get out of this basin as fast as possible.

A few minutes after returning to the road,
she realized something was moving in the greenery, just out of sight, staying roughly abreast of her. Something big.

It was making plenty of noise, apparently not aiming for stealth. It stopped and started, fell back ten or fifteen yards, then caught up with her again. A couple of times she heard wheez
y, tired-sounding grunts.

She kept walking. There was no place to run if something charged her here, so she just
plodded on steadily because there was nothing else to do. The movement in the foliage passed her up, and she hoped that the source of it had lost interest in her.

The chimpanzee that emerged from the vegetation fifteen feet ahead of her looked awful. This was no juvenile like the one in her dream, but a big female, its rear end bright pink and swollen in estrus. A
large hand came listlessly up to shade its squinting eyes as it regarded her. The animal’s posture was droopy, the face, arms and neck badly lacerated, as though it had been in a fight. One scratch along its chest was puffed up, clearly infected, as Amy’s own wounds would be if they weren’t treated soon.

Her
appetite had been raging only seconds before, but the sight of the sick animal made her queasy. Suddenly she wanted only to be safe, clean, smeared with antiseptic, and pumped full of antibiotics.

The animal was definitely focused on Amy, but didn’t seem aggressive. If it had been defending its territory, it would have
screamed and shaken its arms at her. This one just stared.

Amy still didn’t feel safe
so close to the creature. An adult chimp could kill a person with a few blows if it wanted to, and there was no guessing what this one wanted. She crossed the road like a kid avoiding a bully.

The animal also came lumbering across, knuckle-walking after her in no particular hurry.

Amy picked up the pace, making her sore legs and feet complain, and her head throb harder. When she looked back, she saw that the chimp was being followed by a second one, even bigger and just as bedraggled.

The first ape broke into a trot, caught up with Amy, and put its hand on her back.
She stopped walking and just waited, hoping it would eventually get tired of whatever it was up to and go away. She felt its breath on her arm and hip.

It grasped the
right side of her tank top and rubbed the fabric against its face, then moved lower, turning its attention to her shredded jeans.

Amy pulled the tank top to her own nose and sniffed, wondering what had attracted the ape. She couldn’t smell anything.