Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

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  >You can get it anywhere on Avenue 9, but it’s still cheaper at Free Forest.

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  >>And no worries at Free Forest cause nobody’s going to bust you there.

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  >>>I’ve never heard of anyone getting busted for it anywhere.

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  >>>>Me neither, but everyone says they lock you up forever if they catch you with it in Equateur, and I’m not taking any chances.

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  >>>>>I thought it wasn’t actually illegal.

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  >>>>>>Supposedly it’s illegal in Equateur. The word at Free Forest Campground is that ruby was once used in some religious ritual that’s been revived, and now it has some political, anti-government significance. So if you’re carrying ruby, then you’re part of some plot, and they kill you or lock you up forever. Even the security guards at the campground tell that story. They warn you that if you get sick and go to a clinic in the city, and the nurses want to know what the horrible smell is, you can’t tell them about ruby because you’ll end up dead in some dungeon. I don’t know if any of that is true or not, but that’s the story that gets passed around.

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  >>>>>>>The story is bullshit. The only explanation is that the security guards at Free Forest started the rumor because they’re in on the trade and they want you to think that Free Forest is the only place you can do it without getting busted bigtime. There can’t be any ancient ritual, because ruby’s probably some synthetic designer poison invented last Friday.

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  >>>>All this talk is making me jones jones jones!!!

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  >You don’t get busted at Free Forest, but you can sure as hell get stuck there. Lay around in a cloud of stink while your money drains away and that’s the end of your trekking days. Not to mention you do a few drops too much and you get a day of catatonia and piss yourself like a bum on the sidewalk.

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  >>You have to take at least three times the normal amount for that shit to happen. Besides, no one makes anyone else take it.

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  >>>No one makes anyone else take it? What about splashing.

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  >>>>Yeah, okay. Splashers should be shot.

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  >>Why go all the way to Africa to get high on skunk piss? And why do you think some people call it BOOF? Because it turns you into a fucking BOOFHEAD !!

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  >I’m new to this forum. What are you idiots talking about?

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  “Yeah, what are they talking about,” Rita said. She was lifting up clumps of Amy’s hair as she spoke, deciding where to begin once she picked up the scissors.

  The words skunk piss reminded Amy of her first phone conversation with Stephen, when he had read the colonial clergyman’s description of the animals’ smell. On a hunch, she posted her own message:

  >Hi all! How would u describe the smell of boof? say it’s a mix of skunk, a dirty stable, and cat pee. Anyone think they can say it better?

  When the haircutting was done, Rita hurried off to her place to get ready for work. She was working evenings all this week.

  Amy stayed in her chair and checked the forum again. She found a single response to her question:

  >>You got the description right, but in case you haven’t heard, it only smells once, baby! Every time after that it’s all love, lilacs and comfort food!

  So this new drug apparently had an odor a lot like the one she’d encountered during her flight from the logging camp. And fans of “ruby” seemed to agree that the epicenter of its usage was in the same general region where she’d encountered her mystery animal.

  That last comment on the forum – about the stuff only smelling bad the first time – seemed significant as well, but tofay’s eight hours of driving had caught up with her, and she was too brain-tired to concentrate any more. Brain-tired but body-restless, and nowhere near sleep.

  Scrolling through the TV channel guide required too much concentration, and choosing channels at random produced only obnoxious clamor. She decided to take a drive, maybe shop for a new laptop; her old one had been slow lately. Before leaving, she mustered enough mental focus to send Stephen Stokes a link to the “ruby” forum. She added a note:

  So, Steve. How about that stink issue? This might help explain why someone thought the raising of oversized bush babies would be embarrassing to the Church or the Spanish crown if it ever got exposed. Suppose it was all about “ruby?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In a ranch house ten miles outside of Needles, California, near the Arizona state line, representatives of Hugh Sanderson presented a one-liter plastic soda bottle to close associates of Lou Burr. The bottle was half full of a solution containing spray from the animals Hugh called stink monkeys, although the animal origin of the compound had not yet been revealed to Burr’s people, and would not be revealed during this meeting. The spray had been cut to half strength; the rest was water and perfume.

  One of Sanderson’s men, an enormous Equateurian with a badly healed broken nose, demonstrated with water how to administer, from an eye dropper, exactly seven drops along the underside of a user’s forearm. The user then needed to rub the tender sides of both forearms together, smearing the solution from wrists to elbows.

  The half-full liter bottle contained two thousand doses of the mixture. Sanderson’s man explained that sales were usually of seven milliliters at a time, which made for twenty-five to thirty doses. That amount filled one-eighth of an airline-size mini liquor bottle, and sold for one hundred U.S. dollars – roughly three-sixty a hit. That was the price among young travelers on budgets visiting poor countries. Surely, a much greater retail price could be had here in America.

  Mr. Burr’s associates had recruited five young men and women to sample the product. Not being the backpacking sort, they had never had access to it before. The perfume only partially masked the hideous, rancid-meat smell, and the volunteers wrinkled their noses and made tortured faces when the bottle was first uncapped. They groaned as they took turns putting the drops on their skin. One woman said that she’d been starving a moment earlier, having eaten nothing since the previous evening, but now had completely lost her appetite.

  It was nearly fifteen minutes before the solution took effect, compared to the almost immediate onset when an animal sprayed the pure stuff into its prey’s eyes, nose, or open cuts – or when someone threw it into another person’s face. Once the effect hit them, the volunteers stayed blissfully off the planet for over two hours, and even after they became aware of their surroundings, they remained pleasantly unsprung and giddy for an hour more.

  Thirty minutes after comedown, when Sanderson’s man first mentioned the possibility of another go-round, they were tentative about accepting, so the second application was delayed. Another fifteen minutes on, they were all pretty sure they wanted to do it again, but Sanderson’s man held back. After a further twenty-minute delay, during which Mr. Burr’s men chatted maddeningly about the previous day’s pre-season football games, the test subjects were stridently agitating for another dose.

  At that point, Sanderson’s man uncapped the same container as before, but insisted that it was a different one. The volunteers all agreed that it must be different, because this batch didn’t give off that horrible smell. There was a sort of…ghost of the original odor, they said, but this new stuff actually had an o
verall pleasant aroma. The woman who had had nothing to eat all day thought it smelled like pancakes. One man said it reminded him of the perfume his ex-girlfriend used to wear. Another said it smelled just like his favorite Mexican beer.

  Within forty-eight hours, Burr’s people had sold the contents of three such liter bottles, at double the price that backpackers had paid for it in Equateur. When Hugh Sanderson finally spoke directly with Lou Burr, he did not offer to sell the product wholesale, but to sell the sole source of it.

  “It’ll be a big investment, but the payoff’ll be incredible. You’ll have an iron-clad, worldwide monopoly. And there’ll be no risk with the feds, because the stuff’s not even illegal. Worst they can do is fine you for importing animals without the proper paperwork.”

  “Come again, Huey? Did you say animals?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Hugh Sanderson was pleased. Marcel and the guards had once thought he was hopelessly dependent on them, but had come to realize that they needed Hugh Sanderson much more than he needed them.

  The reason he had the upper hand was simple: he’d gradually cut back on his use of the smelly stuff, taking far fewer rides on the ruby highway that he’d done after he was first introduced to it. At first, his time away from ruby was unbearable, but he’d kicked cocaine once, when he was practically a kid, so this was not entirely new territory, and wasn’t as frightening as it might have been for someone else. The effects were quite manageable now. He seldom had the sensation that invisible millipedes were crawling all over him at high speeds, and even when it did happen, it wasn’t nearly so intense as it had been a couple of weeks earlier.

  He could function just fine. Sure, there were a few times when the ruby and its aftereffects took away clarity, but far more often it delivered clarity in spades.

  Hyper-clarity.

  Oddly, as he used ruby less and less, the state of hyper-clarity came on more often, even though it was the ruby that made the hyper-clarity possible. He was experiencing that state at least a couple of times daily, some days half a dozen times.

  When it came to him, always unexpectedly, he could often see his own heightened awareness as a thing separate from him. It was like a visible substance that emanated from everything and flowed into him, and that emanation was a rich, vibrant green. Not eco-green, but blazing, pulsing, high-energy emerald.

  He beheld intertwining currents of that color even now, as he sat in his office looking over the furniture, the curtained windows, the latest stack of cash on the coffee table in front of him. As always, he had the impression that the flow, though fluid and formless in its whole, actually consisted of zillions of rectangular panes, coming at him in a choppy dance of shifting right angles. Some of the panes were as small as dust motes, others bigger than a castle, all engulfing one another in an endless flow that was intensely busy, yet sublimely harmonious. This vision was strong today, because his most recent ride had been only the day before.

  Once upon a time, these day-after experiences had been painful as well as awe-inspiring, and sometimes frightening, nightmarish. But then Hugh had discovered a wonderful thing: a handful of the right prescription painkillers could erase most of the unpleasant effects of comedown, but the residual visuals and thought-trains from the previous day’s ride would remain. A ruby ride had become a two-for-one deal: the first day was a full-on plunge into high-octane wonder and euphoria, the second day a calm-water ride during which he could engage in mundane activities while leaving half his consciousness on the ruby highway.

  These day-after experiences were excellent times for discussing the future of the new business with Marcel and the guards.

  They were in the office with him now,, and he was informing them of the decision he’d made several days earlier, before making his first call to Lou Burr’s people. He knew they were feeling rich just on what they made selling the stink juice, but now he needed to explain the limitations of the operation in its present form.

  The market in Equateur was simply saturated, he pointed out. There would only be a limited number of young foreigners in the country at one time, and very few locals could afford the stuff. They were producing more and more, but there was no way to sell more without exporting, and exporting the spray itself would mean keeping a transport route open continuously. That would be problematic.

  There would be those in the world who considered it their divine right to have a monopoly on the import, export, and retail sales of all recreational substances. Some would be governments, some would be mobsters, and all would be heavily armed. Sanderson had guards on his staff, but not professional fighters. And even if he were to hire fighting men, the fight would be endless.

  Those aspiring competitors were probably already on the trail.

  “For all we know,” he said, “scouts from a dozen drug cartels are already snooping on the operation, sampling the goods. “There are probably several at Free Forest Campground now, young people who aren’t really there just for fun.”

  The only answer to the impossibility of expanding was to sell the whole wad. Sell the operation itself, and do it quick, before anyone had the chance to take it from them by force.

  The international market for the stuff was already in place and growing. Plenty of backpackers who’d been to Equateur had developed a liking for the stuff, and the word was spreading. He’d checked out the online buzz about ruby, or “boof,” as the Australians had dubbed it. The message boards even mentioned Sanderson Free Forest Campground as the best place to score some. The association of ruby with travelers’ elite knowledge of exotic places had gotten people curious.

  But selling the animals would lead to a new problem.

  Until now, Marcel and the others had handled the money, and had been able to do whatever skimming they felt they could get away with. In the next phase, Sanderson would be receiving the money, and he needed to convince these men that they would really receive their shares of the big sale. Otherwise, the any or all of these men might just walk away, maybe stealing the reserve tanks of ruby on their way out. Maybe taking an animal or two, which would destroy Sanderson’s monopoly and reduce the wholesale value of his operation. The wiry old man had already left the country, satisfied with what he’d saved. Sanderson needed the others to stick around for a little longer.

  “There will only be one customer,” he told them, “but in order to keep a low profile, we’ll have to send the stink monkeys in multiple shipments. I’ll pay you as we go along. You deliver them to the rail yard, one by one, or two by two, or whatever. But you don’t deliver until I give you the money. Sound good?”

  Marcel and the guards agreed that the deal sounded wonderful.

  Sanderson briefly wondered whether the three of them would be happy with each receiving one third of what he paid them, or if there would be conflict. It didn’t really matter much, although if he had to choose, he would rather the guards came out on top, since he was less sure of Marcel’s loyalty, and considered the former foreman the sneakiest of the bunch.

  Let them fight it out, he thought, as long as one of them survives to get the stink monkeys into the crates and onto the trucks that go to the port.

  “The only other thing I insist on,” he added, “is that you can’t sell a single animal to anyone else. Not one. That will screw up the whole thing. My buyer has the manpower to find out very quickly if another source of the stuff has popped up, even if it’s in some little village in the middle of Gabon. And if that happens, the price he’s willing to pay will go down by ninety percent – as big a loss for you as for me. Not to mention that whoever owns that other animal, along with whoever sold it to him, will not have long to live.”

  Everyone understood.

  Tall Guard placed a small brown bag next to the week’s cash, and there was a muffled tick as the little glass vessel inside tapped the coffee table’s polished oak through the paper.

  He smiled. “Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll be enjoying that later. I have work to do this after
noon.”

  * * *

  Sanderson was only slightly tempted to take a ruby ride and blow off the little bit of logging-related business that required his attention this afternoon. A few weeks earlier he might had given in, but not now. These days he was imbued with a new sense of purpose.

  When his visitors had gone, he sat back and thought about his coming trip to Los Angeles. It would be the second he’d made since beginning negotiations with Lou Burr.

  He would first stop at Sanderson Tropical Timber headquarters on the east coast, for a photo op as the Green Angel on his mountain top. Next he would fly to California and take the exhilarating ride down into the valley of smoke and blood, where he lived out his role in Lou Burr’s world.

  Burr was not going to pay him for any of the shipments until the first kennel of twenty-five animals was housed and producing, and Burr’s men were adequately trained to take over. He could probably have sold the whole stink-monkey operation without ever meeting any of Burr’s people personally, but he didn’t want that. Instead, he’d had his staff arrange visas for at least one of the guards, and for a couple of other locals that they’d brought on board recently. He needed people to show Burr’s men how to set up production. Marcel wouldn’t be going; Sanderson needed someone to stay and make sure the kennels here in Equateur were well maintained. He’d also made himself the head of this consulting team, creating a way to put himself right in the center of things.

  In the warehouse district east of downtown Los Angeles, a private security company had long served as a money laundry for Lou Burr’s southwestern operations. The office, probably a mechanic’s shop at one time, was now paneled with cheap wood veneer, the concrete floor covered with a thin gray carpet. Aside from laundering, Top Gun Security functioned as a front for a network of methamphetamine couriers. That same network would very soon be facilitating shipments of boof, and Hugh Sanderson planned to make regular visits to the office.