Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  He had never seen the place before, but felt confident that some new understanding had brought him here. He bounded toward the center of the clearing and began to whirl around the outer edge of the grove, striking martial arts poses and wielding the machete like a Japanese long sword. After six or seven circuits, he collapsed onto the ground. Dusk had arrived.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Wiping fog off of the mirror in her bathroom at the Hotel d’Or, Amy beheld a face like a police photo of a beating victim. She wondered when the hell her cheeks and forehead had gotten so banged up, then remembered running into the tree right after tumbling down the hillside, just after escaping Barrel Guard’s grip. She remembered the big man roaring away above her, and almost smiled, thinking his single injury would take a lot longer to heal than her multiple ones.

  At twenty-five euro a night, the Hotel d’Or was the most expensive place on Avenue 9. Amy tried to live cheaply wherever she went, conserving the money Andre had left her, saving it for the work that had become her whole life. She stayed in low-budget guesthouses with backpackers and managed to hide the fact that she could afford far more comfort. Besides, the conditions of Andre’s trust fund – now hers – stipulated that the money was to be paid out to her in quarterly amounts that did not allow for indulgence in unlimited luxury. She really did have to choose between extravagance and funding her work.

  Avenue 9, though very broad, was only one block long. Along with the several guest houses, there was a snack bar, a place to get some nasty instant coffee, an erratically open Internet café, a clinic, and a food market frequented by travelers and locals alike.

  In and out of these establishments, crisscrossing the dusty pavement, went young Westerners: women in silks and cottons they’d picked up elsewhere during their round-the-world trips: lime greens and intense lavenders alongside pale, blue-gray peasant dresses. Men wore blond dreadlocks, braided beards or shaved heads. Colorful woolen Rasta caps had somehow stayed at least marginally in fashion decade after decade, at least on the travelers’ circuit.

  The clinic staff told her she’d gotten back to the city just in time, that her wounds were infected and her condition was mushrooming dangerously into sepsis. She’d known something was wrong. A slithery sensation had been rushing through the muscles in her neck and shoulders for the past three hours. Her face was burning hot, and intense nausea came and went in waves.

  She’d been ignoring the symptoms, fearing she might have contracted the mystery fever from one of the carcasses on the truck, but the clinic staff assured here that there was nothing new or mysterious about her condition. They gave her an injection and sent her away with two weeks’ supply of cephalosporin tablets. It surprised her how quickly the symptoms began to subside.

  At the Internet café, the woman at the counter asked, “What happened to you?” Amy got the same question from eight backpackers in five languages over the next half hour.

  The camera she’d carried all the way from the camp was encrusted with her blood, but the data had survived. In French and English, she typed out rough transcripts of her interview with the hunter. She sent these, along with the original audio file and her images of the carnage on the truck, to three dozen environmental watchdog groups and six dozen news outlets worldwide.

  She wanted to use her real name, but resisted. If the logging company sued for libel or slander or whatever, they could bankrupt her just on court costs. That was how these people operated. Andre had known that because it was one method that his dad’s pals at Ovation Energies had used to crush their adversaries. He had explained all of that on the night he first proposed – not proposed marriage, but the work he wanted them to do together.

  Besides the court issues, there were rumors about the company hiring thugs to intimidate activists, media – even elected officials. One of the Sanderson’s non-tropical subsidiaries operated in California, where the state government had mysteriously failed to stop its illegal logging of old-growth redwoods. A couple of state assembly members had started an official investigation of the issue, but had abruptly called it off after one assemblyman’s adolescent son got slammed off his bike by a hit-and-run driver. The kid had lived, but the assemblyman had two even younger children to think about. That had been years ago, and any connection between the child’s accident and the terminated investigation remained conjecture. But why take a chance when the stakes were so high?

  And then there was that business about the big mobile lab at the logging camp, and the armed men in biohazard suits searching for a missing American scientist. Those events had occurred not too long before Amy’s own visit to the camp, and if that coincidence came to official attention, it might be sticky to explain. All the more so these days, when anyone who regularly contributed large amounts of money to activist groups, even environmental organizations, was automatically the object of intense scrutiny by all Western governments. She might be viewed as some kind of eco-terrorist, accessory to a biological attack on on of the few U.S. logging companies operating in Africa – a ridiculous conclusion, but that didn’t mean Homeland Security wouldn’t run with it.

  She sent everything under the pseudonym “Caroline Yi.”

  * * *

  Around ten at night she settled into a surprisingly comfortable bus seat, closed her eyes, and immediately entered a familiar half-dream state in which she almost always encountered Andre.

  The past couple of days would have been less of an ordeal if they had gone through it together, although she would probably have taken the lead most of the time. Andre had been the more experienced one when it came to handling complex gear –Nitrox equipment for extended dives over expanses of contaminated coral, or high-tech cables and harnesses for ascending into the forest canopy. But Amy had been better at navigating without a GPS, at reading the land to guess what kind of terrain lay ahead and what sorts of things lived there.

  She’d also tamed his risk-taking behavior to a functional level. High-adrenaline sports had been his whole life until the day his snowmobile had plunged into icy water, the same afternoon she’d first met him. Amy had been monitoring gray wolf populations in the snowy vastness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, part of a project for her undergrad program in environmental science. Andre and a friend had been riding snowmobiles illegally on the same stretch of protected land. Through binoculars, she had seen them zoom down a hillside, and had cursed them as they disrupted the movements of a sizeable pack she’d been watching for days. A storm would arrive within hours, and it would be hard to find the wolves again if she lost them.

  Then she’d realized where they were headed, and started running.

  The wind had kicked up the powdery snow in the valley and had sculpted ridges that disguised the surface of a small lake. The ice hadn’t yet thickened enough to hold the snowmobiles, which were heading straight for it. Moments later, Amy had heard the sound of their engines die abruptly, had kept running through thigh-deep show, and found Andre shivering and weeping on his knees at the edge of the lake, a dark pool of floating ice chunks marking the place where he’d tried again and again to find his friend below the surface.

  Back inside her tent, he’d slept for fifteen hours. A storm had kept them stranded for five days, during which he’d stayed mostly silent. When he spoke, it had usually been to ask about Amy’s studies. His comprehension of the answers had surprised her. Sometimes he would be quiet for long spells after she explained things like the effect of shrinking forest cover on wolf populations, or microorganisms trapped in glacial ice far to the north.

  His Nordic flat-plane cheeks, offset by a rounded chin and nose, with hair that curled in a very Mediterranean way, had struck Amy as a strangely pretty mix of features. That prettiness always made it seem as though he were drifting in some mindless ecstasy, thinking of nothing at all. But he’d always followed his silences with questions that showed he’d been paying attention.

  Her mini lecture on the balance of wolf, beaver and moose populations had gotten
him concentrating particularly hard, as though the two of them were working out a strategy of immediate importance.

  Sometimes, when the tent was warm inside, and she was lightly dressed, she’d caught him glancing furtively at her figure, but he had never followed it up with any real flirting. More than that, he’d taken meticulous care never to touch her. Once, when she handed him some instant ramen, he’d been so fussy about avoiding contact with her fingers that he’d gotten a weak grip on the bowl and spilled scalding broth on both their laps.

  By then she had figured out that he was in awe of her. His own near death, the trauma of losing a friend, the accompanying guilt, and his helplessness in the hands of this woman with a worldview so far from his own had combined to put him through a dizzying gestalt shift. He’d treated her like some inviolable earth goddess, and his abject adoration had erased her attraction to him, leaving her anxious for a clear day when she could bring him into town and come back to search for the wolf pack again. That day had come within a week.

  The next time Andre Kellet showed up in Amy’s life, it had been at her small-town Michigan college at the end of the following spring, not quite half a year since their first meeting. She’d just finished her last exam and agreed to dinner with him.

  Over beer and curry, Andre had told her about his late father, an exec with oil giant Ovation Energies. No wonder his conscience had taken him for such a ride when he realized that an environmental scientist had saved his life.

  “If I stay with the company,” he’d explained, “I can collect a salary. My dad died three years ago, and I inherited a fair-sized chunk of the company from him. Not a controlling share or anything like that, but worth a lot of money. Plus, out of regard for him, they’ve offered me a good-paying position.”

  “How nice for you.” So fuckin what?

  “We can leave my inheritance invested just as it is now, hopefully never touching the principal, and use the interest to fund our work. Plus, I’ll have a big salary from my position with the company, and we’ll only need a little of that to live on.”

  “Andre, you keep saying ‘we,’ and that sounds like you’re— Did you just say ‘live on?’” What was this guy thinking? “This is…I don’t even know you.”

  “Whoa! Whoa, there, cowgirl! I’m not suggesting that you marry me.” A swig of a newly arrived beer. “But what do you think? About doing the work together, I mean.” Grinning at her again suddenly, like they were old pals and he’d just added a new installment of a private running joke.

  “You keep saying ‘the work.’ What work?”

  He’d replied with a halting sound like, “Ahp,” then said, “well...I was planning on leaving that up to you.”

  And she had thought, Holy shit. Rightly so, for her life was about to change dramatically.

  Because she suddenly had funds at her disposal, she’d decided to become more involved in political activism, rather than go mainly into research, which had been her plan. Now she could work in the field and use the power of money to effect remedies to environmental problems.

  And they had married after all.

  Because Andre was genetically wired to seek out the riskiest element of any endeavor, they had decided to use at least some of his resources to engage in espionage. Exposés are much easier to carry out when you can pay someone to help you obtain secret information. The two of them had made a lifestyle of defying not only the elements, but also laws, security personnel from various corporations, and Andre’s family, always in secret.

  Andre had approached championing the environment as though it were one more of the dangerous sports that had been the focus of his life since adolescence, and some of it had actually played out that way. They’d dealt with unsavory sorts of people outside the law from time to time. More than once they’d recruited a prostitute to assist in a little blackmail. They’d bribed office clerks to leak damning emails from the files of a major polluter, and sometimes paid for outright theft of company documents, which they would then leak to activist groups and media worldwide.

  None but a few close friends had ever known that a fortune in inherited oil money was being spent on a two-person guerilla campaign for the planet. Often the very activists who used the information uncovered by Amy and Andre had no idea who was supplying it.

  Things had continued that way until the day that Amy wasn’t there to save Andre’s life a second time. A fishing boat had hit one reef and Andre had been thrown head-first onto another. Six years after Amy pulled him out of freezing water, he had died in balmy tropical shallows.

  He’d been on that boat with several of his fellow Ovation managers, some of whom were beginning to suspect that Andre’s loyalty was not one hundred percent with the energy giant. Company documents had been leaked to the press after an oil spill off the Carolinas, secret internal memos suggesting that haphazard safety measures had been responsible for the disaster. Andre had been one of the few people with access to those reports. Amy still wondered whether his death had been arranged.

  * * *

  The bus sat at the station in central Prospérité for nearly an hour after Amy boarded, and she remained a little restless, not quite able to fully shake the feeling that she was still being pursued. When the bus finally began to move, it took another half hour of lurching, crawling progress to make it out of town and onto the open highway. Shortly after that, the engine hit and sustained just the right pitch to send her to sleep, like a room full of Tibetan monks o-o-o-ommmm-ing away in their superhuman basso profundo.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The next time he came out of the clouds, Hugh Sanderson was lying in the foreman’s trailer again. Two security guards flanked the door, one quite tall, the other round, huge and powerful-looking. Hugh realized that someone had told him the guards’ names, but he could not remember them.

  The door opened and Marcel stepped in, looking very much in charge. He spoke in French to one of the guards, who then translated into passable English. A bandage and splint on the guard’s nose squeezed his voice as though he had a cold.

  “We know you want to see more of the forest, but you need to rest now, and go home soon. Someone will drive you.”

  “Of course I’m going home.” Hugh’s breathing was short. “What on earth would I do out here? Cut the trees down myself?” But as he said this, a faint and foggy longing flickered somewhere within him, a feeling connected with this place. Strange.

  Nausea swam like snakes in his belly. His head hurt so badly that he felt the need to probe his skull with his fingertips, expecting to find cracks that would give slightly if he pressed on them. He tried to stand up and his brain spun like a small motor given too much juice. A piercing pain in his feet sent him back down onto the bed. “Christ!”

  Marcel handed him a Fanta orange soda from the little fridge.

  The big round guard spoke up again. “We are glad you are listening to common sense again; we almost lost you. You were attacked a second time.” He nodded toward the other guard. “And this man here is also lucky he didn’t lose too much blood after you got him in the arm with that machete.”

  The tall guard held out his arm, showing the bandage that went from wrist to elbow.

  “What? Attacked?” Hugh only now realized that he had bandages of his own, on his neck and wrists and feet. Who in God’s name had attacked him? And twice?

  The barrel-shaped guard said, “You would be dead now if the three of us had not found you in the forest yesterday evening. You ran so fast that you lost us on the trail. When we caught up, two of the animals were on top of you. We carried you all the way back here.”

  “Followed me—?”

  “That’s right,” Marcel said. “We see you run and we go after you. But then is getting so dark, and almost we can’t see you.”

  The barrel-shaped guard said, “If it had been any darker…,” He spread his hands and shrugged. Then he said, “You need to get back to the city, have a doctor look at all your injuries. They could
be infected already. And stay off your feet. You cut them up running in those boots.”

  “Boots….” Sanderson said. “Where are my shoes? Where are my clothes?” He looked around as frantically as his pain and lethargy would allow.

  “Sir,” the big guard said, “I know the reason you want to return to the forest, even though you don’t understand it yet yourself.”

  “Why the hell would I want to go into the forest?” He barely remembered coming out to the camp for a photo session. Just a few faint images of the road and the trees…and a strange woman whose skin was coated with mud. He fixed on that memory. It seemed that she’d been covered with wounds, and now so was he. Had she attacked him? Had he wounded her?

  “Marcel,” he said, “that woman who forged my name…did she do this?”

  The guard with the bandaged nose looked sharply at Marcel and said loudly, in English, “You see? She is dangerous.”

  Marcel shook his head and waved away the comment. “Forget about the woman, and forget about the forest. You go there again and it will kill you.”

  Hugh Sanderson still could not imagine why these men thought he wanted to go into the forest, but again the mention of it stirred something in him. A formless memory of beautiful sounds and smells and colors – and now a rush of urgency. He involuntarily rose to his feet, but the pain and dizziness knocked him down once more.

  The guard with the broken nose came and stood next to him. Calm and smiling, the enormous man produced two cigarettes from his pocket, gently tucked one between Hugh’s lips, and lit them both.

  The first drag felt good, stabilized him, slowed his breathing. He hadn’t smoked regularly since college, and even then it hadn’t been much of a habit. Yet somehow this was just what he needed.