Wild Meat (37 page)

“I knew they weren’t coming yet,” Brandon said. “I’ve been on the phone with them on and off for the past day and a half. Tony, the vet who caught the ride with me, he was the one who reported the outbreak, or what he thought was an outbreak. I was in La-La Land myself when he made the call. The reason I’m still here now is because when they came to clear everyone out of the park, Tony and I were out of sight, holed up in a couple of closets.”

“Holed up?” Amy said, although she thought she understood.

“We slept right through the evacuation yesterday,” Brandon said, “and when we woke up, it was too late to leave the quarantine area. I’ve been talking to the authorities by phone. They’ll be coming up here by and by. They’ve already got both live and dead staff members to examine in their labs.”

He offered to explain more over breakfast, and motioned for them to come inside with him. Olaf trailed along behind as they followed a paved walkway leading to the door of the Quonset hut.

“Little detour,” Brandon said. He turned off the walkway and headed across an expanse of hard, dry dirt where clumps of wild grass grew.

“This is one thing I haven’t mentioned during my phone conversations with the health department,” he said.

Ten yards further along, under a towering evergreen, they saw a dark mass on the ground up ahead. Amy knew what it was even from a distance.

“I shot this one,” Brandon said. “But it was too late to help Tony. That’s him over there.” He pointed to another, larger mound, covered with several layers of plastic sheet that were pinned to the ground with what looked like the broken handles of garden tools. “When I reported him dead, they told me to stay away from the body. But I couldn’t just leave him there all exposed. I only knew him for about twenty-four hours, but it still would’ve driven me crazy to have to see him lying there.”

Olaf passed them up, got to his hind legs and did a couple of awkward-looking cartwheels.

“He’s a circus rescue,” Brandon said. “Still does his tricks sometimes, even though he doesn’t get rewarded for them anymore.”

“He doesn’t smell like he got sprayed last night,” Stephen said. “How do you suppose he avoided it while he was missing?”

“He probably went into the infirmary. He knows a way in through a hatch above one of the windows. He spends a lot of time there.”

“Is he sick?” Amy asked.

“Heart and lung problems. He’s old, and things keep going wrong. The vets have removed tumors a few times, and they were going to check him again this week for any new polyps.”

The sanctuary staff called the Quonset hut, “the Hangar,” because it of its shape. In addition to the animal infirmary, there was a large office, a big communal dining room and TV lounge, a couple of bathrooms, six separate bedrooms, and several other smaller rooms meant for storage, but which could be used as sleeping quarters in a pinch.

Lounging on an old, sprung sofa, Amy and Stephen ate crackers and scrambled eggs and listened.

Brandon had arrived two nights earlier with Tony, the newly hired vet. There were supposed to be four people staying at the Hangar that night, but they’d found it deserted. Brandon had decided to show Tony around the place anyhow. Approaching the chimp enclosure, they’d spotted someone Brandon knew, a keeper named Margaret. She’d been stumbling, foul-smelling, and badly scratched up. At first, they’d been too focused on helping her to notice that the gate to the enclosure was open. Brandon had shut it, but later they’d done a count of the remaining chimps and discovered that three were missing.

While driving Margaret back to the
Hangar in a golf cart, they’d come upon the dead body of another keeper named Junichi. He had been badly mauled, and there was blood all over the walkway.

Brandon himself had been jumped when they were right outside the
Hangar. Tony had somehow managed not to get sprayed in the process of getting the animal off of Brandon and ushering him inside. Then he’d locked Brandon into a small windowless room and Margaret into another. For the 911 call, Tony had said that there had been animal attacks, that one person was sick, one dead, two missing. The animals that attacked had smelled sick and had acted crazed. They appeared to be small chimps.

It turned out that similar calls had come from a couple of the little villages on the mountainside, and no emergency personnel had been able to make it to the
Hangar for several hours. During that time, Tony had gone up to the little loft in the tallest part of the Quonset hut, locked himself in with some vodka he found in the kitchen, and fallen asleep.

When the place was evacuated well into the next morning, Margaret had been the only one already up and around, having bashed her way out of the locked room. Because of her trip on the ruby highway, she hadn’t even remembered that Brandon and Tony were there. Most of the
Hangar’s many rooms were searched, but Brandon’s closet-sized quarters and Tony’s remote loft were overlooked. The two men had slept through their chance to get off the mountain. That had been about the time Amy and Stephen were climbing up the mountain road, just before their thwarted assassination of Hugh Sanderson.

Tony and Brandon had driven down and registered at the police barricade that Amy and Stephen had seen from the hillside. After giving blood samples, they were allowed the same choice the residents of the villages had been given: stay in the tent city being established just inside the perimeter, or drive back up here and stay in contact. They’d chosen to stay and try to  locate the missing chimps
; the live ones had already been airlifted out for testing and observation.

During the day, Tony and Brandon had watched the news, talked to public health officials by phone, and listened to police dispatches on a radio in the office. It sounded serious. There was increasing Federal involvement along with sheriffs and state police. A deputy had gone missing, and all afternoon the sheriffs’ dispatcher had pleaded for a Lieutenant Cisneros to report in.
News choppers had been banned from flying over the quarantine area.

Unable to leave, Brandon had decided to explore, and had started with the dirt road that led to where Top Gun Security kept their vans. When TGS first took over the sanctuary, they’d set up a new office in an RV on the next hilltop to the north. It was over two miles away. With no explanation
, they’d gated off the only road that led up there, and it was almost impossible to go up the sheer sides of that hill on foot.

After the “outbreak,” with no Top Gun people around to block access to the hilltop, Brandon had driven up to investigate. There he’d discovered that, not only were the hillsides impassible to all but expert rappellers, but anyone who got to the top would have faced a complete circuit of razor-wire fence. In the middle of that enclosed area, he’d found the RV, two TGS vans, and three uniformed TGS employees – dead and pallid and looking rather shriveled. There had also been a shed made of
fiberglass and chain link, carefully camouflaged so as to be invisible from the air.

The inside of the shed had smelled wonderful to Brandon – like the beach on a hot day and his girlfriend’s coconut sunscreen mingling with her sweat and the ocean breeze.

He described a strange setup inside the shed, with cages and hanging sheets of clear vinyl.

“But none of the little animals?” Amy said.

“None.”

The following night – the same time Amy and Stephen were making their unlit way toward the sanctuary – Tony had gone outside for some reason, gotten sprayed, and gotten completely drained by a succession of the animals. Brandon had come out of his bedroom in the middle of all that, noticed what was happening
, and managed to shoot one of the animals with a tranq dart. He’d scared the rest of the animals away by banging on a big cooking pot with a hammer, but it was too late for Tony.

Brandon had gone out again as soon as the sun came up. The animal was still breathing. He had no idea what to make of the animals appearance, and didn’t want to call and tell any of the health department officials about it for fear that they’d think he was delirious with the mystery disease himself, and would
order him to head straight for the temporary clinic. He much preferred to spend his imprisonment up here, with solitude and access to the outdoors.

When the creature came around, it had started screaming, hiding its eyes from the sunlight. A moment later, he’d thought he must be hallucinating after all, because the face had started contorting. The side of it was puffing out, so that it seemed like a side view of a chimpanzee. Then it had shrunk back to its usual weird teddy-bear look.

He’d fired several more tranq darts into the animal, hoping to put it out of its misery. An hour later, it was definitely dead, lying perfectly still, the big saucer eyes open and staring straight up at the sky. It had vomited some reddish-brown slop onto the ground, and Brandon thought he knew why Tony’s body and those of the TGS employees had seemed so shriveled.

Right away he had called the county health people to inform them that there was another victim: a man mauled by something in the night. He didn’t say what kind of animal had done the mauling.

“Your car must have been in the parking lot already,” Brandon said,” but I didn’t notice it until I went out again to throw that tarp over Tony. I thought you might be Top Gun people come to try and round up the little animals. After seeing that setup inside the shed, I figured TGS must be behind them. I remembered a couple of those guys using the phrase ‘stink monkeys,’ but of course at the time, I had no idea what it meant.”

Amy and Stephen told Brandon their own story, leaving out, by unspoken agreement, the Carpathian connection and their attempt to assassinate Sanderson.

Brandon said, “So, you guys probably won’t want to call up the people in charge of the quarantine and say,
Here we are
, right?”

What Amy and Stephen both wanted was a few hours of real sleep, stretched out on beds.

“But our main worry,” Amy said, “is that we can’t be here when they send up the men in space suits to look over the plague zone. I think we need to hurry up and go hide out somewhere.”

“There won’t be anyone today,” Brandon said. “They called a couple of times asking whether I needed food or anything, since they won’t be coming here until tomorrow at the earliest. So you’re okay to rest if you need it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Olaf had run away again. Brandon had intended to seal him into the clinic before nightfall, lest he finally be lured outside by faux chimp calls, but now they had to find him first. If they couldn’t coax Olaf to safety once he was found, they’d have to knock him out with one of the sanctuary’s several tranquilizer guns.

They took turns searching
, sometimes on foot and sometimes in Brandon’s delivery van. Because the authorities knew of only one living person at the sanctuary, Amy insisted that only one of them go outside at a time, in case a chopper flew over. Whoever went out had to wear the same wide sunhat and the same big khaki shirt so that, from above, it would always look like the same person.

For over an hour, Amy had been patrolling
the area to either side of a small service road that led from the Hangar to the chimp enclosure, driving as far off-road as possible, often shutting off the engine and getting out to call out and to listen.

At seven in the evening, with a scant hour of light remaining, the situation did
not look promising, so she headed back toward the Hangar. She had almost arrived when she saw the missing ape.

Olaf galloped across the road just a few yards in front of her, and she stomped on the brake. He made a big circle around
the vehicle, charged back into the woods, then came out and crossed the road behind her. She hopped out and called to him in a high voice, as though summoning a dog, and he responded by arcing back around and trotting toward her.

Amy slid open the van’s side door and he charged straight for it, but then veered away at the last minute, crossed the road
just a yard from the front bumper, and disappeared into the brush and cedars.

She’d been hoping that the tranq gun wouldn’t be necessary, but now she readied it, aiming at the place where the chimp had reappeared the last time.
It only occurred to her now that if she did hit Olaf with a dart, and managed to follow him until he dropped, she’d then be faced with the task of getting the big chimp’s drooping body into the van – at least 160 pounds of animal. She’d have to leave him and go get one or both of the guys to help her, and they’d have to race in order to get the job done before nightfall.

But Olaf did not show himself again. Amy waited
several minutes before stuffing the packet of tranq darts into her pocket and heading after him on foot. She spotted him once, high in a big Coulter pine, shaking loose a few of the enormous cones as he leapt to a narrow branch. He was down and gone by the time she got to that tree, and her last sign of him was a heavy rustling far ahead.

The next sound was
of a powerful car engine somewhere to her right. Olaf had led her almost to the main road, which was separated from the service road by a couple hundred yards of brush. Someone was approaching the parking lot.