James Smith - The Flock

"Hello," Ron said.

The man looked over his shoulder as Ron came in. "Hello," he answered. He squinted his eyes, focusing on the patch on Ron's shirt. "Fish and Wildlife." It wasn't a question. "Sorry I can't offer you my hand, but it's covered in bloody goo, so I assume you wouldn't like that."

"You assume right," Ron told him.

"You want a cold drank?" The guy had lapsed into an exaggerated southern accent. "Git you won out dat dere oss bahx. Might have a RC Cola in thar."

Ron opened the refrigerator and saw an array of beverages. He chose a bottle of distilled water. "Thanks. This one looks good. I think I'll pass on the RC. You guys don't have any Moon Pies, do you?"

"Slap outta them. I et 'em all."

Ron eased over to where the other man was working, looking to see what he was doing. "Well, in lieu of a proper southern greeting, I'm Ron Riggs. You already know who I work for."

"I'm Adam Levin. Formerly with the University of Florida. At Gainesville. Now a much higher paid employee of one Mr. Vance Holcomb, all around jillionaire and crusading environmentalist."

"Who's the environmentalist? You or Holcomb?" Ron had all but emptied the water bottle.

"Both of us, actually."

Ron had moved up close, and finally had a view of the contents of the vinyl tub. It looked to be a pile of guts. "Intestinal tract," Riggs noted. "What was it?"

"Turkey buzzard. We've found several dead within the area, and I've been dissecting them to figure out what's going on. We suspect poison. This is the first chance I've had to go through the stomachs. Got three more in the cooler over there." He indicated a waist-high refrigeration unit against the far wall.

"Who would poison a buzzard?"

"Well, someone likely poisoned something else. Something the buzzard subsequently ate. Used to see this kind of crap all the time when I worked out in Arizona. Stupid, short-sighted ranchers would poison the coyote, other stuff would scavenge the dead coyote, and then they'd die, too." He shook his head. "Damned ranchers. Those spoiled brats got away with everything they did. And those jerks grazing their stock on government property practically for free. Makes me sick to even think about it."

Ron said nothing. At times, he felt helpless and ineffective in the face of the turning of events. So he had trained himself to be impassive when it came to something over which he had no control. Why put yourself in anguish when you had no influence to change such things? "Should the stomach be that color?"

"Yeah. That's nothing unusual. Been in the cooler for some days, now. That's the way it goes, you know." Levin was using a small scalpel to open the top of the stomach cavity. Even cooled the smell that oozed out was noxious. It was only then that Ron noticed the scented jelly on Levin's bare upper lip. Unprepared for the stench, Ron backed away.

"Ever come up on a vulture sitting on its eggs? They'll cough up the contents of their stomach at you, hoping the stench will drive you off." Ron was thinking of a black vulture whose nest he had accidentally found while investigating a rocky overhang on a mountain in Georgia.

Levin nodded. "Yeah. Seen it a time or two, myself. And they just lay their eggs right there on the bare ground. No nesting material at all."

"Yep."

Taking a second to glance back at Riggs, Levin spoke again. "So. What brings Fish and Wildlife here to the mighty compound?"

"Kate Kwitney brought me," he said.

"Ooooooooooooh." The biologist nodded knowingly.

"I just met her, actually. Out in one of the savannas a few miles from here." Ron coughed.

"Just met her, you say?" Levin was cutting and squeezing his gory prize.

"Yep. Couple hours ago, is all." He tossed the empty water bottle at the nearest trash bin, but it hit the rim and clattered to the floor. "Oops."

"So, then. You don't…know her that well."

Ron grunted as he picked up the bottle and tossed it at the bin again. Once more it hit the rim and bounced off and clattered to the floor. "Shoot," he muttered. "Um. Yes. I mean, no. I don't know her well. Just met her, I said." He picked up the bottle and put it in the bin.

"What do you think of Kate?" Levin was sawing and squeezing, looking down at the last meal of a carrion eater.

"Well. She's pretty sharp. Very smart lady. Knows what she's talking about when it comes to the local flora and fauna. Knows more than I do, I'd say. Seems to know more than anyone back at the office, actually. And…"

"And?"

"Well, she's good looking. I think she's really pretty."

Levin chuckled. "Air she purdy?"

The guy was getting on Ron's nerves. Maybe he was a boyfriend of Kate's. Maybe not. Riggs couldn't ignore him, though. Levin had pushed just a bit too far. "Yeah, I think she's good looking. I'd like to be alone with her and bang her for an hour or two."

"Why, Ron! That's not very nice." It was Kate, of course, having arrived, having watched the exchange from the open doorway.

Adam Levin, whose back was still to the whole scene, his hands full of buzzard guts, let out a full, belly laugh that, for Ron, went on for far too many painful minutes.

Dodd did his best to keep up with Colonel Grisham, but it wasn't easy to do. He had to practically run just to stay ten feet behind the old soldier. Coupled with the need to take a look behind every quarter mile or so, it was almost going to be impossible to not lose sight of his new companion.

"What the hell did you think you saw, anyway, son?"

The reporter almost ran into the retired officer, since his attention had been on the forest they had just traversed rather than where he was headed. "Damn," he blurted before he could stop himself.

"Well…I don't know, really." Dodd had decided along the miles they had already walked that he didn't want to tell this frankly scary fellow what he had seen. Especially not if what he had seen was real, and not just part of his panic at being lost and disoriented.

"What do you mean? When you came bustin' out of that thicket it sure looked to me like you knew what you saw. And it didn't seem like it was no cottontail, either." Grisham was set solid, glaring eye to eye at the torn and bloodied Dodd.

Clearing his throat, getting ready to lie (something he did well, on occasion), Dodd's mind danced. "First of all, I got lost. I thought I was following a trail that led around the north side of Salutation. But after a while, I knew that wasn't right, because I wasn't coming back to any of the neighborhoods and the roads. I was just getting deeper and deeper into the woods.

"And then, when I came out into that big field-looking place…"

"A savanna, son. They call that type of habitat a savanna. Got lots of it in Africa, not much of it here." Grisham was rapt, examining his charge.

"Okay. A savanna. Yes. Anyway, I really got lost when I was out there. I couldn't tell which way I had come in. I couldn't figure out which way to go to get back to that trail, which I had lost track of before I got out there in the first place." He picked at a thorn mired in the tender flesh in the pad of his thumb. A bright dot of blood welled up where the thorn had been.

"You've got no sense of direction, do you boy?"

"Eh. No. I guess not." He cleared his throat again, afraid to look the retired colonel in the eye. A man like that might be able to spot a lie in a man's eyes. "And so I stopped by this big tree that had fallen over. And while I was standing there, this big blackbird, sounded like a damned foghorn…well, it came out of the bushes and scared hell out of me."

Grisham was chuckling, now. That was good, so Dodd continued. He wasn't really lying, yet. "And right after that, I put my foot down and this big brownish and orange snake crawled over my foot and almost scared me to death. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, for sure."