Free Wild Meat by Nero Newton Page B

hers.
    He took the scrap of paper from the big guard. There was nothing on it but a partial city street map, faintly printed, the kind of map generated online.
    Marcel stared for a moment and said, “What is it?”
    “It’s a map.”
    “I can see it’s a map. Why are we interested in it?”
    “It’s a neighborhood in Prospérité. There are street names on it, and there is a red pen mark. Maybe someone there knows about her. Maybe she’ll go back there.”
    “If she’s still alive,” Marcel said.
    “But you told me Mr. Sanderson says he saw her on the road.”
    “He said he might have. But so what?”
    “So what?” The guard sounded truly taken aback. “So WHAT? Look at my nose!”
    Marcel groaned. “I know, but we have a lot of things to do. If you want to go after her, I don’t care. But do it later, after everything’s taken care of.”
    “Later? She may be out of the country later. She could be leaving tomorrow, for all we know.”
    “It’s too bad, but breaking her neck isn’t going to fix your nose. Besides, she can’t do us any harm.”
    “She can destroy everything. Wipe us out if she spreads the word.”
    Marcel said, “I told you, she came to find out about the hunting. She was talking to a hunter while we talked on the phone. As soon as you drove off behind her, I asked the hunter about it, and he said they talked about animals.”
    “Exactly.”
    “No, not our animals,” Marcel said. “The monkeys and birds that the hunters shoot for meat.”
    “How do you know she wasn’t trying to find out about our animals, just going at it roundabout?”
    “Forget about her,” Marcel said. “And remember what we have to do when Mr. Sanderson wakes up.”
    Marcel headed off to find the old man. He did not turn around when the guard shouted after him, “Forget about her? Look at my nose. Look at my fucking nose!”
     
    * * *
     
    Drowsiness crept up on Hugh. He set the plate of food aside and lay back on Marcel’s bed, feeling himself sink slowly out of consciousness. His eagerness to go back into the forest had almost completely faded. Now his surroundings began to fade, too, and the sinking turned to floating.
    The CD changer rotated and some Nigerian dance pop rocked him to sleep.
    Half an hour later, the CD changed again. The vocals and guitar became shrill and confrontational. The first chord sent lightning crackling through Hugh’s abdomen and hauled him straight from deepest dreaming to his feet, fully alert. It was music that had been on the radio a lot during his college years.
    Something significant was taking shape here . He’d heard someone recite a line from this song. When had it been? Not long ago. He was sure that something cataclysmically important had happened at that moment. Welcome to the jungle…. Why did it give him this sense that some great event was imminent?
    The song continued in a hammering rhythm that conjured a vision of an endless thrumming lattice of blue-green crystal, shot through with networks of hot red capillaries. At one of several crescendos, the singer in the recording seemed to step across the trailer’s dim interior, lift Hugh overhead and hurl him out of the trailer, He crashed through the latched door, which broke and was left hanging at an angle from its upper hinge. The woman sitting outside leapt and shouted when he landed at her feet.
    It was very late in the afternoon, and because the trailer was near the edge of the forest, the sunlight came in slanting shafts that cut through the camp at a low angle. At first the shafts paralyzed him. He thought of them as the laser beams that a master jewel thief must not break as he approaches the velvet pedestal upon which the emerald-studded bauble rests.
    But excitement welled up too fiercely to allow for a patient negotiation of the imagined obstacle course, and he began simply sprinting along the edge of the clearing. The cheap, rigid material of the boots cut into his feet, but he did not