by Newton, Nero
Wild Meat
by Nero Newton
Copyright 2011 Nero Newton
PROLOGUE
Driving the Fat Rabbit through deep mud felt like piloting a boat in calm water. The driver’s-side wiper had been wrecked by a hanging branch, and Tobin could barely make out the jumble of shacks and human figures in the center of the huge clearing they had just entered. Through the wall of froth moving down the glass, it looked like the kind of out-of-scale mosaic in which distant figures appeared to be as large as near ones.
Basilio woke up in the seat beside him, looked around, and began howling for Tobin to be careful. The panic in the young scientist’s voice surprised him. The kid had kept it together through a day of real hazards, slipping and hydroplaning off the road the whole way down from the mountain ridge. Why should he get jumpy now? He acted as though they were nearing a cliff rather than crossing a level expanse of soupy earth.
Then the vehicle started doing a slow spin.
The speckled mosaic of clothing, faces, and lean-tos slid smoothly to Tobin’s right until he could see it clearly through Basilio’s half of the windshield. The surviving wiper revealed that the people and structures were much closer than they had appeared through the roiling distortion on his own side. He was seconds from plowing into the logging workers’ settlement.
The Fat Rabbit paid no attention to Tobin’s frantic steering, braking and gear-shifting. It kept revolving in a big lazy circle and finally, impossibly, came to rest without crashing into anything. Tobin opened his door six inches and it struck something lightly. He stopped pushing, held the door steady, and wiggled his hooded head outside until he could look down.
A boy of about five stood in the mucky red soil below, rubbing his head theatrically where the door had tapped him. The child was grinning, but the grin vanished when the door opened further and he saw that Tobin had a shiny yellow body, purple hands, and no face.
Tobin tried to smile back but his features were obscured by condensation inside the visor. He hopped out and his feet shot into the mud with a gushy, organic splat. He pulled off his protective hood and smiled again, but the kid had turned away to stare at three more apparitions coming around the vehicle.
The Fat Rabbit had stopped just four feet short of hitting a lean-to about as big as a newspaper kiosk. Its frame was made of green branches, the roof of palm fronds, the walls a patchwork of fabric scraps, plastic bags, and old sheet metal. To the left and right of it, and for half an acre beyond, stretched staggered rows of variations on the same theme. An urban slum transported to some of the most isolated acreage on the African continent.
People were emerging from the lean-tos, braving the rain and coming closer, gathering behind the awestruck child as though he were their leader. There were at least a dozen women and twice as many children in view now, which meant a pretty big fraction of the workers had brought families along. None of them looked particularly sick to Tobin. Anyone able to stand up could not possibly be afflicted with the bug his superiors were worried about. Even if it were present in the camp, it wasn’t airborne, and the people facing him now could not be passing it on.
Tobin let the rain cool his itchy scalp. To the three men coming up behind him he said, “We may still need the suits, but not yet.”
His companions were two epidemiologists from the World Health Organization, both under twenty-five, and an overworked doctor employed by the local government.
Tobin himself had a pocketful of documents showing that he’d been sent by an international wing of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The others had been uneasy ever since he showed up unannounced at the last minute that morning. The fact that he came bearing space suits and a custom-designed mobile lab the size of a jumbo RV had downright spooked them. He knew the humpbacked monster of a vehicle made a worrisome sight, which was why he had given the Fat Rabbit its benign nickname. All during today’s drive, Tobin had labored to quell the others’ anxieties by drowning them in casual chatter, every so often apologizing for his bad French, which wasn’t really all that bad.
“The list of symptoms caught some dizzy bureaucrat’s eye,” he had said as he steered past the shanty towns on the outskirts of Prospérité, the little nation’s capital. “So they hijacked my vacation and sent me here to follow you guys around.” Actually to take over, but why point it out if they hadn’t guessed? “I’ll guarantee it’s nothing worse than the usual African bug fest you guys deal with all the time.”
He’d lamented aloud that he would have been in Madrid with his girlfriend by now, had it not been for this pointless assignment. That much of what Tobin said was true. Most of the rest was not. He had not been sent by the C.D.C., although he’d used that cover so many times he nearly believed it. He worked for an unofficial inter-agency task force that specialized in tracking down dangerous engineered microbes, especially ones gone missing from U.S. government labs that did not officially exist.
His favorite line for downplaying his role in this kind of situation was: “I think my boss just needs to spend the rest of this year’s budget to justify next year’s.” The others had laughed and relaxed a little, but Tobin guessed the journey’s wild finish had probably undermined his happy talk.
Doctor Roland Ngwene pulled off his own protective hood and marched through ankle-deep mud to the boy who had been outside Tobin’s door. He hunkered down to the boy’s height, removed his gloves, and gently tilted the small head back to examine the eyes. He said something that drew only a puzzled look from the boy. When the doctor spoke again, apparently trying a different language, the boy smiled and started talking. He pointed to a woman coming their way.
The young epidemiologists, Basilio and Aiden, also took off their hoods after seeing Ngwene touch the child’s face without hesitation.
More boys had gathered and were daring one another to get closer to the vehicle. One pulled himself up the slick wet frame and stood on the high front bumper, hands in the air in triumph. Another slipped off trying to join him. Two more women came forward to get the boys in hand, and Ngwene began speaking to them in French.
Tobin couldn’t help staring at the women. The leanness of their faces made their cheekbones more prominent and their eyes more striking. The one nearest to Tobin had a mesmerizing profile that compelled his eyes to make repeated slow sweeps from her rich yellow head scarf, down along the elegantly strong curves of her brow and mouth and jaw. A bright yellow wrap, magically spotless amid the mire, covered her torso. Her shoulders remained bare and shining in the rain, which had dwindled to a mist. Tobin’s sensations as he sweated away in his protective clothing were far from sexual, but the women’s beauty made him aware of a deep and hollow longing.
Carina was waiting for him in Madrid, and he would have been there with her already if his superior hadn’t suddenly rerouted him to this place in the name of quintuple redundancy.
Impatience took hold of him. The possibility that the Z9Z30 bug had been unleashed on this population was infinitesimal, and he intended to put the matter to rest.
As Ngwene began asking the women about the mystery fever that was causing workers to flee the camp, Tobin interrupted with the question that would settle his role here for certain: “Et vomissement?” What about vomiting?
The women stared at him. So did Ngwene and Basilio and Aiden.
“Vomiting,” Tobin repeated. “People throwing up gobs of black and bloody slime?”
The women couldn’t recall people throwing up black or any other particular color.
Tobin looked at Ngwene and shrugged. “So now we can eliminate most of the hemorrhagic stuff. That’s all.”
And Tobin could confirm that the scenario troubling his superior had not come to pass. False alarm. File it in the archives and move on.
No one really had any idea what had happened to the culture of Z9Z30 stolen from a military lab once upon a time, but now Tobin could say for sure that it was not to be found in this forested basin, surrounded by mountain ridges like rows of giant shark teeth. The place had been uninhabited and inaccessible before the logging company blasted through the rocky barrier just a few months earlier. Not the sort of place that would give a terrorist much incentive to launch a biological attack.
Not the sort of place Tobin would have chosen to spend his vacation, either, but the continuing rain meant he was stuck for a while. The logging road would soon be too fluid for even the Fat Rabbit to make it back to the highway, so he would hang around and take part in all the sampling and testing. For a few days, he would be like these two kids from the W.H.O., helping to fight the endless storm of disease in rural Africa.
Few Westerners could say they’d visited this little nation that glided quietly along the borders of Cameroon, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo. On any map detailed enough to accurately show its borders, it resembled a long, thin balloon, wrinkled and deflating. It still carried the name, ‘Equateur,’ given by its former French masters, and that name added to its obscurity, for it was often confused with the Congolese province of the same name, or with Equatorial Guinea, or with the southern Sudanese region called Equatoria. It was also not quite on the Equator, but a little north of it. What struck Tobin about the place was how vast the land could feel in such a tiny country.
Twenty minutes later, the four visitors were seated around a fold-down table inside the Fat Rabbit. They were joined by the logging foreman, a lean man in his thirties with a small, round face. His name was Marcel, and he spoke French heavily accented with some local tongue. Tobin knew from his experience in the region that migrants came to camps like this from all over Equateur, and even more came from neighboring countries. At least a dozen languages were spoken here, within an area the size of a few football fields.
Doctor Ngwene was reading aloud from the report he’d received two days earlier. “…rashes, delirium, clusters of small sores that are sometimes bleeding.”
Marcel nodded at the mention of each symptom.
“Sharp odor; inflammation of the eyes and lips ….”
“Yes, the odor is so sour and rotten it stings your whole body to breathe it in,” Marcel said. “Smells like something died and half rotted, and then something else came along and pissed on it. And some parts, like the nose, get very red.” With a fingertip he indicated the edges of his nostrils. “It shows up on most people’s faces, but not everyone’s. The worst places are where they are scratched. Those get fiery red, and they’re slow to heal.”
“There’s itching, as well? The victims scratch themselves?” Aiden, the young New Zealander, scanned his own copy of the report. No one remembered any mention of chronic itching.
Marcel hesitated. “I mean scratches from the animals.” He looked around at the uncomprehending faces. “Maybe you don’t know. When I first reported the situation to the company managers, I did not know yet either. Most of the workers think the fever is brought by animals that come into the camp at night.”
“Animals?” Ngwene asked, frowning.
“Maybe apes, maybe big monkeys,” Marcel said. “It always happens at night, so no one gets a good look at them. They just jump on people, scratch and bite, and then disappear into the trees.”
Tobin felt his scrotum shrink to the size of a raspberry. If the disease came from primates, then it might be a hemorrhagic fever after all. It definitely wasn’t Z9Z30, not with one of the major symptoms missing, but it could be something just as bad.
Ngwene frowned. “Don’t the victims see the animals clearly?”
“I suppose they do, but they don’t remember anything after the delirium sets in.”
“Apes and monkeys don’t prey on people.” Basilio observed.
“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.
