Wild Meat (6 page)

That wasn’t exactly true. The fabric had a distinctly clean scent. She sniffed the left side of the tank top and it smelled just like it ought to: a sweaty old shirt that she’d worn for a whole day and then slept in. So did the front. But the right side that had so captivated the chimp smelled as though it had just been laundered and dried in a garden breeze. She took another whiff and decided that it smelled more like a doctor’s office where every surface was frequently wiped down with alcohol.

The
second chimp arrived and followed the first one’s lead, snuffling at Amy’s clothing.

Amy was nervous, but not acutely afraid. She wondered if this was happening because of some plant she’d brushed against, a spray of flowers rubbing perfume onto her when she
had dashed off the road to avoid the truck.

Zoologists had long ago verified that chimps were attracted to certain plants when they were ill – various plants depending on the ailment. Different chimp populations had discovered different treatments. Maybe the ones in this isolated basin used a completely unique set of medicinal plants. Maybe Amy’s shirt had picked up enough of the right sap or pollen for whatever ailed these two, and they’d caught a whiff of it.

She eased the camera out of her pocket, put it in video mode, and tried to capture some of what was happening. It was hard to focus the lens on movements occurring so close to her.

That effort was cut short when she heard a chimp war cry, and turned to see a third ape, not slouching or shading its eyes from the sun, but bounding toward her at a furious clip. It was an enormous male,
at least a hundred-fifty pounds. Every hair on its body stood out, giving it a round and monstrous look.

Before she could even imagine reacting, it arrived and knocked her seven feet through the air
, and she kept sliding for another few yards after hitting the ground. Her left arm and side erupted in fiery pain as the skin was sanded off.

The intensity of the violence paralyzed her. No animal or person had ever struck her
so hard. She’d been hit by a car once, and this was a lot like that. She lay still, every bit as afraid of this animal as she’d been of the two guards the night before.

The enraged chimp was above her, still screaming. Amy curled up and clutched her head
an instant before its arms came down onto her side like clubs. They rose and hammered down twice more, and for many long seconds her forcibly emptied lungs refused to work.

Then the ape was moving away, its voice just as terrifyingly loud, but receding. Amy shifted her head and saw that it was herding the other two chimps back the way they had come. They hobb
led and stumbled as though not built for the speed they were being forced to achieve.

Amy lay still for several minutes
before standing and continuing up the road. She touched her left side and it stung, and when she pulled her palm away it was evenly coated with blood. She sort of remembered, from the car accident, what cracked ribs felt like, and guessed that none were broken now. Still hurt like a bastard, though.

Several
minutes later she realized that the camera had stayed strapped to her wrist and was still recording. She played back her strange encounter. The lens hadn’t picked up her attacker, although the sound was there. She didn’t remember screaming, but apparently she had done a lot of it.

CHAPTER
SIX

As he drove down the logging road toward the camp, Hugh Sanderson thought about the woman he’d just seen up in the blasted-out trough that served as a mountain pass.
The vision of an obvious foreigner loping along, covered in mud, had been a strange welcome back to one of his least favorite countries in the whole world.

Nine days earlier,
while waiting for a hotel limo to pick him up at Grand Turk airport in the Caribbean, Hugh had gotten a call from William, his boss and older brother. William was calling to talk about relief trucks and public relations. He wanted Hugh to return to Equateur for a photo shoot with the relief trucks at the beleaguered logging camp.  “Get your picture taken with your sleeves rolled up. Act like you’re supervising when they pass out the food and pills.”

William was the chairman of Sanderson Tropical Timber. The company wasn’t really a family business anymore, but William and a few loyal friends still held a controlling share, and the family name remained.

Little brother Hugh had been kept on board as vice president in charge of keeping the logging rights open in the African theater of operations. He had an office in a colonial-era mansion outside of Prospérité, but lately his work had kept him traveling a lot, mostly in the First World. For the past eighteen months, Hugh’s camera-friendly, cheerful face – vaguely resembling Sting, but with the fleshy cheeks of young Luke Skywalker – had been the company’s principal PR resource while it strove to build an eco-friendly image.

“Drive out to a logging camp? Again?” Hugh had said. “C’mon, Will. It’s hardly been two years since my last trip to one of those places. Gimme some time to recover.”

William had laughed. “How about five days from now? That enough time?”

But a crackle of static had caused Hugh to hear “
nine
days,” and he’d accordingly marked the date in his planner.

“How come we need PR for that relief business?” Hugh had asked. “I thought we were keeping the whole outbreak thing pretty quiet.”

“World Health Organization already has a couple of people at the camp. Apparently someone gave them a call.”

“No way! I had my man at
the Interior Ministry call over to Public Health and explain that this information was not for public consumption. Especially not foreign consumption.”

“Maybe someone at Public Health doesn’t like us very much. But it’s a done deal now. The word’s out.”

Hugh had closed his planner and buried his the phone in his luggage, resolving not to answer any more calls while he was in the islands.

After arriving back in Equateur last night, he’d scarcely glanced at the memos in his inbox, and still had no idea that the date for the PR photo shoot had
already passed. The only message he recalled now was about a woman who had apparently forged his signature on a letter, then tried to use it to gain access to one of the camps. If that call had come from the very camp he was headed for now, then it could have been her he’d just spotted. In spite of the layer of mud that covered most of her body, and the filthy, mud-drenched hat that sagged over her head, he’d seen some light skin in places. Clearly not a local.

If yesterday’s gate crasher was American, as she had claimed, her
appearance at the camp was probably eco-driven. Sanderson Tropical Timber was the only U.S.-owned logging company for a thousand-mile radius. A couple of years back, the greenies in the States had ganged up and tried to give Sanderson the same kind of lumps that the French and Italian companies in Africa were getting. They’d nearly succeeded.

To thwart that attempt, the company had thrown major resources into the green-image campaign, and
Hugh had been cornered into being its front man. His tall, athletic stature and oddly handsome features had put an attractive face on the company. He had played the role wonderfully, but had also hated every minute. Hated it so much that he’d begun spending hours a day trying to imagine some way to leave his brother’s company without going broke.

The embarrassing fact was that he didn’t have much in the way of assets. He had never been good at holding onto his salary and dividends, and
his debts were mounting perilously. He was beginning to worry about that situation for the first time in his life. If he could just round up a few million more – not even ten million – he could leave Sanderson Tropical Timber and never look back. He was forty years old, and it was time to free himself.

In the meantime
, if Mud Woman up there on the pass had come up with anything that could stink up the company’s image all over again, William and the rest of the crowd in New York would look to Hugh for damage control. They might even call for a mini repeat of the first phase of the green campaign.

That was a
hellish thought. It would mean continuing to pose as the kind of person he’d despised since college, people with a religious devotion to crickets and buzzards and endangered swamp grass. People who dressed up in green makeup and leafy costumes for demonstrations, who held phony pagan ceremonies on campus or in front of downtown office buildings, pretending they were Iroquois healers, or Druid priests, or whatever daffy shit caught their fancy at the moment. It reminded him of a nightmare he’d had the previous year. In the dream, his father had been alive again, forcing him to marry the queen of the tree-worshipers in some kind of New Age ceremony on the steps of a Mayan pyramid.

* * *

It was late afternoon when he arrived in the logging camp. Like the previous day’s visitor, he correctly guessed that the trailer at the edge of the clearing was where he could find someone in charge. Next to the trailer he saw a black Land Rover, identical to his own, and figured it must belong to the photographer.

But there were no tents, nothing that looked like a
makeshift clinic or a place where food might be distributed.

The foreman emerged from the trailer and introduced himself, and Hugh asked, “Where is everybody?”

“Sir?”

“The relief trucks. The photographer. Why isn’t anyone prepared for the pictures?”

So the foreman explained, and Hugh started to blow up at him, but only got as far as, “Jesus Christ–” before checking himself. He might need this man’s cooperation.

In an effort to calm himself down
, he slogged off through the mud, following a row of trucks parked in a line along the edge of the clearing. His face was hot. He felt lousy from the couple of beers he’d knocked off during the drive, and a headache was coming on. He needed another vacation already.

T
omorrow it was back to the load of whatever monotonous crap was in his inbox, including a lot of whining from William about how Hugh had screwed up and missed the photo shoot, as though it mattered. The timber-journal people had probably gone ahead and pasted his face onto a logging scene from a file photo, which should have been their plan in the first place.

There was nothing to do now except turn around and head back. The return trip was a miserable prospect, but he wasn’t staying here, late as it was. No way. This place stank even worse than the one other camp he’d visited.

He wanted to go home, have a couple of drinks and some food, and sleep. More than that, he wanted to close his eyes right now and be home when he opened them. He walked back to the trailer.

“There’s one thing I need from you,” he
told the foreman. “A driver. A good one who won’t wreck my jeep. I’ll pay him fifty U.S. dollars, and another fifty goes to you for getting him. I want to sleep on my way back to Prospérité.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then he remembered Mud Woman. “Are you the one who called last night?” he asked. “About an American woman who came to the camp?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hugh felt himself smile. “I think I just saw her on the road about an hour ago.”

“She’s alive?”
The foreman actually sounded pleased.

“She was dragging pretty badly.”

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Marcel looked at the stock of bushmeat that remained in the freezer next to his trailer.
Wilson, the regional production manager, usually sent someone every few weeks to pick up a supply of it, paying more than triple the usual price. There was a rumor about Wilson serving the stuff – sometimes entertaining government officials, and sometimes entertaining himself by serving it to shocked fellow foreigners new to the country. But the impending closure of the camp had disrupted all regular comings and goings. The freezer was filling up, and Marcel needed to make room for more important things. He decided to sell off the meat at a discount to a truck driver, someone who could unload it easily at some street-side market in the city.

The freezer ran off a small gas generator that also powered a mini refrigerator, from which Marcel
now took four bottles of cold beer. He went looking for the old man and, when he found him, said, “I think we might not be lost, after all.” His voice was full of excitement at the idea that had just come to him.

The old man didn’t reach for the offered beer.

Marcel tried again. “You know the white man who just came in the Land Rover? It was Hugh Sanderson.”

After a minute the old man said, “From the family that owns the company?”

“That’s right. He was supposed to be here almost a week ago, but he got the date wrong. Don’t ask me how it’s possible, but he didn’t even realize that this camp was closing.”

“A member of that family here in the camp.” The old man spoke quietly, still as full of resignation as he
’d been the night before. “Should I be excited?”