Guitierrez said, “You’re probably just thrown off because of its size. The fact is, here in Costa Rica, we occasionally encounter these aberrant forms—”
“Marty,” Levine said coldly. “I am never thrown off.”
“Well, of course, I didn’t mean that—”
“And I am telling you, this is not a lizard,” Levine said.
“I’m sorry,” Guitierrez said, shaking his head. “But I can’t agree.”
Back at the white helicopter, the men were huddled together, putting on white surgical masks.
“I’m not asking you to agree,” Levine said. He turned back to the carcass. “The diagnosis is settled easily enough, all we need do is excavate the head, or for that matter any of the limbs, for example this thigh here, which I believe—”
He broke off, and leaned closer. He peered at the back of the thigh.
“What is it?” Guitierrez said.
“Give me your knife.”
“Why?” Guitierrez said.
“Just give it to me.”
Guitierrez fished out his pocketknife, put the handle in Levine’s outstretched hand. Levine peered steadily at the carcass. “I think you will find this interesting.”
“What?”
“Right along the posterior dermal line, there is a—”
Suddenly, they heard shouting on the beach, and looked up to see the men from the white helicopter running down the beach toward them. They carried tanks on their backs, and were shouting in Spanish.
“What are they saying?” Levine asked, frowning.
Guitierrez sighed. “They’re saying to get back.”
“Tell them we’re busy,” Levine said, and bent over the carcass again.
But the men kept shouting, and suddenly there was a roaring sound, and Levine looked up to see flamethrowers igniting, big red jets of flame roaring out in the evening light. He ran around the carcass toward the men, shouting, “No! No!”
But the men paid no attention.
He shouted, “No, this is a priceless—”
The first of the uniformed men grabbed Levine, and threw him roughly to the sand.
“What the hell are you doing?” Levine yelled, scrambling to his feet. But even as he said it, he saw it was too late, the first of the flames had reached the carcass, blackening the skin, igniting the pockets of methane with a blue whump! The smoke from the carcass began to rise thickly into the sky.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Levine turned to Guitierrez. “Make them stop it!”
But Guitierrez was not moving, he was staring at the carcass. Consumed by flames, the torso crackled and the fat sputtered, and then as the skin burned away, the black, flat ribs of the skeleton were revealed, and then the whole torso turned, and suddenly the neck of the animal swung up, surrounded by flames, moving as the skin contracted. And inside the flames Levine saw a long pointed snout, and rows of sharp predatory teeth, and hollow eye sockets, the whole thing burning like some medieval dragon rising in flames up into the sky.
San José
Levine sat in the bar of the San José airport, nursing a beer, waiting for his plane back to the States. Guitierrez sat beside him at a small table, not saying much. An awkward silence had fallen for the last few minutes. Guitierrez stared at Levine’s backpack, on the floor by his feet. It was specially constructed of dark-green Gore-Tex, with extra pockets on the outside for all the electronic gear.
“Pretty nice pack,” Guitierrez said. “Where’d you get that, anyway? Looks like a Thorne pack.”
Levine sipped his beer. “It is.”
“Nice,” Guitierrez said, looking at it. “What’ve you got there in the top flap, a satellite phone? And a GPS? Boy, what won’t they think of next. Pretty slick. Must have cost you a—”
“Marty,” Levine said, in an exasperated tone. “Cut the crap. Are you going to tell me, or not?”
“Tell you what?”
“I want to know what the hell’s going on here.”
“Richard, look, I’m sorry if you—”
“No,” Levine said, cutting him off. “That was a very important specimen on that beach, Marty, and it was destroyed. I don’t understand why you let it happen.”
Guitierrez sighed. He looked around at the tourists at the other tables and said, “This has to be in confidence, okay?”
“All right.”
“It’s a big problem here.”
“What is.”
“There have been, uh . . . aberrant forms . . . turning up on the coast every so often. It’s been going on for several years now.”
“’Aberrant forms?’” Levine repeated, shaking his head in disbelief.
“That’s the official term for these specimens,” Guitierrez said. “No one in the government is willing
to be more precise. It started about five years ago. A number of animals were discovered up in the mountains, near a remote agricultural station that was growing test varieties of soy beans.”
“Soy beans,” Levine repeated.
Guitierrez nodded. “Apparently these animals are attracted to beans, and certain grasses. The assumption is that they have a great need for the amino acid lysine in their diets. But nobody is really sure. Perhaps they just have a taste for certain crops—”
“Marty,” Levine said. “I don’t care if they have a taste for beer and pretzels. The only important question is: where did the animals come from?”
“Nobody knows,” Guitierrez said.
Levine let that pass, for the moment. “What happened to those other animals?”
“They were all destroyed. And to my knowledge, no others were found for years afterward. But now it seems to be starting again. In the last year, we have found the remains of four more animals, including the one you saw today.”
“And what was done?”
“The, ah, aberrant forms are always destroyed. Just as you saw. From the beginning, the government’s taken every possible step to make sure nobody finds out about it. A few years back, some North American journalists began reporting there was something wrong on one island, Isla Nublar. Menéndez invited a bunch of journalists down for a special tour of the island—and proceeded to fly them to the wrong island. They never knew the difference. Stuff like that. I mean, the government’s very serious about this.”
“Why?”
“They’re worried.”
“Worried? Why should they be worried about—”
Guitierrez held up his hand, shifted in his chair, moved closer. “Disease, Richard.”
“Disease?”
“Yeah. Costa Rica has one of the best health-care systems in the world,” Guitierrez said. “The epidemiologists have been tracking some weird type of encephalitis that seems to be on the increase, particularly along the coast.”
“Encephalitis? Of what origin? Viral?”