A work of fiction. Standard disclaimers.
Chas and Sylvia strode purposefully through the double doors leading from the tarmac of the small civilian/military airport into the departure lounge. Chas, business casual, graying at the temples but tall, lithe, ebony, showed little sign of the grueling journey from the mainland to the small island in the western Pacific Ocean that they had just completed. Sylvia, thirty-something, pale, short and stocky, any suggestion of female figure obscured by her khaki field garb and the khaki shoulder and backpacks containing the tools of her trade, kept up (it was clearly a matter of pride), but not without visible effort.
Once inside, the pair paused for a moment, to let their eyes adjust from the tropical midday sun outside. Their ears, as much as their eyes, told them of the approach of another couple, both palefaces, a tall, thin, thirty-something blond man and a sixty-ish craggy woman with rebellious shoulder-length gray hair.
“You are Chas?” the man called out.
“Yes sir”, Chas responded. “Chas Brooks, Big Smoke Herald. And this is Sylvia Forrest of the Herald, my photographer.”
“Pleased to meet you both”, the man acknowledged, extending his hand first to Chas and then to Sylvia. “I’m Tod Reaper, EPA and leader of the Viabellator Preservation Project.”
“And I’m Maud Kiser, PETP and Editor-At-Large of PETP’s People First media franchise.” The rebellious-haired woman didn’t wait for Tod to introduce her, and her next sentence made it clear why. “And if ever there was a project that demonstrated the arrogant overreach of the environmental bureaucracy, this is it.” She turned to Sylvia, hand extended, and asked, “City girl?”
Sylvia made a wry face, unsure yet whether she admired or despised Maud’s wit, but she shook the hand. “Six generations of wheat farmers in the Dakotas. I’m the black sheep, taking up photography and moving to Big Smoke. My folks used to joke that I was the only tree in the Forrest. I haven’t decided yet whether I can forgive them.”
“But you’ve kept the name”, Maud prodded.
“It has its virtues”, Sylvia replied, quietly. “Helps me judge character from time to time.”
Maud took a small step back, touché written all over her face.
“The demonstration will happen soon, we should get ourselves to the site”, Tod urged, somewhat hastily. “I’ve got a cab waiting at the curb.”
“We’ve got luggage”, Chas alerted.
Tod picked his phone out of a belt pack, looked at it, returned it to the pack. “Staff’ve got it in the cab already. Let’s go.”
The ‘cab’ turned out to be a six-seater humvee, heavily armored, with slits for windows (including the windshield) and a turret on the top from which the parallel muzzles of two Gatling guns protruded. Sylvia shuddered visibly. “Brrr!” she buzzed.
Chas, somberly, said “Yeah, wasn’t too long ago that these were how you got anywhere. Alive, that is. I imagine you’ve got a stockpile, on surplus.”
“We do”, Tod responded. “And we of, ahem, the ‘environmental bureaucracy’ are doing everything we can out here to ensure we don’t suddenly have to pull them all back out of surplus. Settle in, and I’ll tell you more when we get to the research site. I guess you all remember that these things are too loud for conversation. Earplugs are in the same places that they used to be.”
Tod hauled himself into the driver’s seat; the rest scrambled into the rig where they could find a spot. Tod checked the systems, including the remote sensors and AI operators of the gun turret, then started the engine, and the humvee pulled away from the airport with its characteristic roar.
After a mercifully short drive through the island’s characteristic semiarid low scrub, the humvee pulled into the parking lot of a low, featureless building. The four, having confirmed with the vehicle’s AI that the coast was clear, extracted themselves and walked to and then into the building through a somewhat public-looking set of double glass doors.
On the other side of those doors, there was a short hallway, which emptied into a large, rectangular reception area. Its walls were covered with displays which, progressing from the left side of the hall nearest the entryway, reported to the visitor the short but apocalyptic story of Viabellator rapax, the Rapacious Road Warrior, and, at the end, described the Endangered Species Act-mandated Viabellator Preservation Project and its objectives.
Viabellator rapax. A massive animal with the size, shape, head, and claws of a Kodiak bear, but with an armored hide like some sort of hideous amalgam of a rhinoceros and an armadillo, rendering it nearly indestructible. The strength and tenacity of the bear, the fleet-footedness of the cheetah, the intelligence of the chimpanzee.
It first appeared, maybe (the records are garbled), alongside a newly-constructed highway in the coniferous forests of southwestern China, then, almost instantaneously, and inexplicably, spread to the rest of human civilization, with catastrophic effect. It hunted along highways in packs of up to twenty animals, chasing down vehicles, ripping them open, and devouring the humans and anything else alive within them. When traffic came to a standstill, the creatures entered homes. Cities with the compactness and the resources to support a massive military presence, armed with the heavy weaponry needed to stop a Road Warrior, and with the civilian discipline and good fortune needed to prevent epidemic disease outbreaks, were able to survive. Rural areas, however, were devastated, and the communities that staved off immediate destruction faced the prospect of elimination by starvation.
Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, the Road Warriors disappeared, leaving behind no trace, not even carcasses, and no explanations of their biology, not least their explosive, and unfathomable, rate of reproduction. Humans, driven by hunger, slowly and cautiously emerged from their strongholds, and gradually, facing no opposition, reoccupied as much of the land as their savagely reduced numbers could now occupy. When relict Road Warrior populations were discovered on remote islands and other isolated spots around the globe, there was an immediate, universal outcry for their obliteration with extreme prejudice. But, since V. rapax now qualified for protection as an endangered species, some of those populations were designated as protected, and research stations were founded around them to get answers to unanswered questions, lest worse befall. Most of those populations had died out regardless; the one on this island was almost the only one left.
Chas, Sylvia, and Maud took all this in at a glance; they had, of course, lived through these events, reminders were unnecessary. Tod gave them no opportunity to linger. He went to an inconspicuous doorway at the back of the room and called out, “Maria?”.
A sultry, alto, disembodied female voice answered. “Yes, Dave?”
Tod, hands on hips in posture and voice, shot back, “For the last time, Maria. I am not Dave, and you are not Hal. Got it?”
Maria giggled. “OK, Dave. Anything you say, Dave.”
Tod charged ahead. “I’ve got three members of the press here to witness the demonstration. Let us in, willya?”
A small point of light appeared on Chas’s chest. “Chas Brooks, reporter, Big Smoke Herald.” Chas nodded. The light moved to Sylvia. “Sylvia Forrest, photographer, Big Smoke Herald.” Sylvia nodded. “Hopefully able to see the forest through the trees.”
“Maria!“, Tod scolded.
The light moved to Maud. “Maud Kiser, Editor-At-Large, PETP’s People First.”
“Correct”, Maud called out. “And don’t get smart with me.”
“Approved”, Maria stated matter-of-factly. The door clicked, opened. The four humans passed through. As they did, they could have sworn they heard a jaunty tune being played just at the margins of hearing, a tune that could have been from an ancient television situation comedy.
“AI from the same corporation that couldn’t make spreadsheet software work properly?”, Maud asked. Tod just sighed in response, kept walking.
After a short trek through nondescript hallways that connected offices with each other, Tod and the representatives from the media emerged outside at the back of the building. There, they found a small automobile and a team of technicians around it, checking sensors, cameras, and connections. Inside the vehicle were two objects that looked like crash test dummies; one of them oozed a reddish liquid from the neck and shoulder region. A paved road stretched from the vicinity of the vehicle towards the scrubby forest beyond.
“The biggest problem we’ve got in trying to figure out anything about Viabellator biology is how to observe any of it”, Tod explained. “They’re very good at showing us how they hunt and capture prey, and even better at hiding everything else they do. Most especially how they managed to reproduce so damned fast. So we’ve outfitted this passenger vehicle, of the type that was common in the years BV (Before Viabellator) with various sensor arrays, and we’ll operate the vehicle on the road that you see there, in the expectation that the Road Warriors will attack it. Our plan is that some of the sensor arrays will attach themselves to the animals, and these sensors will allow us to peek into their private lives, so to speak.”
“What’s with the dummies?”, Chas asked.
“Beef carcasses dressed up to look like humans”, Tod replied. “If we wish the Road Warriors to keep accepting our offerings, they will need a reward, and we hope that beef will do. I see that one of the dummies has sprung a leak. Oh well.”
There was a rattling from the roof above their heads. Sylvia looked up, pointed. The muzzles of four Gatling guns poked out, covering the roadway. Tod’s gaze followed Sylvia’s hand.
“Beef dressed up as humans are on the Viabellator menu. Humans are not. If the animals try to make us be on the menu, they will be taught to think differently. And if that wipes out the study population, so be it.”
“As should have been done in the first place, spending time and money on people and not on verminous animals”, Maud spat out. “The Endangered Species Act be damned.”
“Sometimes”, Tod ground out, “the law tells us what we need to know and do, not what we wish to hear. When that stops being the case, maybe you should be worried about it. Unfettered people can be no less verminous than those animals you’re dissing. And you should know this as well as I do.”
Maud’s retort was drowned out by a bellow from the crew working on the test vehicle. “Ready!”
“OK”, Tod acknowledged, “let’s get this rolling before those bleeding carcasses start to reek and stink us out. You guys set?”, he asked the press crew. They nodded, Sylvia with cameras in hand. “Roll it, Maria!”
The little vehicle with its crash-test beef carcasses and its network of sensors started off down the road, operated remotely by the AI. Near the margins of unaided human sight, the vehicle made a right turn and sped near the margin of the scrubby forest for a kilometer or two, then turned and sped back, clearly along a straight track built for the purpose. By the third cycle, the humans began to slump, to make preparations for a long and possibly fruitless wait.
Abruptly, there was a bellow from one end of the track, a quasi-metallic half-yelp, half-roar. It was answered by two others from the other end of the track. The humans sat up, pulses quickened. Rattling from the roof indicated that the gun station operators had heard the noises, were now on full alert. Sylvia raced through checks of her cameras and computer monitoring equipment.
“There!”, a crew member shouted. At the left end of the track, from which the first bellow had come, the silvery-grey mass of a Road Warrior had emerged. “God, that’s a huge one”, Tod muttered. A few moments later, two slightly smaller animals appeared alongside, presumably the ones who had bellowed from the opposite end of the track, and had now joined the first in a team of three. The vehicle sped towards them, then slowed as it reached the end of the track and turned to speed off in the other direction.
It never got up to speed. The three animals raced after it, easily matching the vehicle’s pace. With a bound, the largest Road Warrior jumped onto the roof of the vehicle, flipping it off its wheels and ripping the roof half off in the process. The other two beasts joined in, rapidly reducing the automobile to scattered shards of metal, glass, plastic, and fabric, deftly avoiding and then disabling the spinning wheels and cranking engine until all was still. The two smaller animals then each grabbed a dummy, and the Road Warrior team dashed off, with its prizes, into the woods.
“Any sensor captures?” Tod called out, in anxious hope.
“Some”, came the response. “We’ll see how long they stay there.”
“Anything is better than the nothing we’ve had to go on before”, Tod gloated. “You on this, Maria?”
“Yes, Tod”, Maria responded. Tod breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll holler if there’s a high point, otherwise hourly summaries.”
“Bonus”, Tod acknowledged.
“Was that your only test vehicle?”, Chas asked.
“We’ve got others”, Tod responded. “Not a lot, there weren’t all that many survivors from BV, new manufactures haven’t yet made it to dealerships, and the prices for both old and new are astronomical. But we’ve got a few, stashed among the surplus humvees. We’re good to go for awhile.”
Maud stood off to one side, visibly fuming. “Damned carnivores!” she blurted out at last.
*************
A week later, research station personnel were poring over the data, with more coming in by the hour. The sensor performance exceeded all expectations, and answers were coming in thick and fast.
Tod walked into the room. He didn’t seem to be sharing the excitement. “Hey Tod”, the chief engineer called out. “You gotta see this! We’re halfway to figuring out how these critters reproduce so fa …”
“Pack it in”, Tod gloomed.
“What?!?” Everyone in the room, including Maria, joined in the shout.
“Pack it in”, Tod repeated. “We’re done. Project’s defunded, effective immediately. I’ve got your termination slips here, I hope at least some of you have been reassigned instead of just flat fired. I did manage to extract a promise that all of you will get your airfares back to the mainland covered.”
“What the hell happened??”, the chief engineer bellowed.
“‘Damned carnivores‘”, Tod ground out. “That remark, by that PETP person (the word came out a snarl) went viral, and the outcry was overwhelming, got the President Ruler’s attention, got a rant from him about (another snarl) experts. The decree is straight from the top. We’re done.”
“What you need to know …” another staff member mused.
“Doesn’t stand a chance against what people wish to hear”, Tod barked. “Get used to it. And get cracking. We’re supposed be clear of this place by noon tomorrow.”
Right at noon the following day, the Viabellator Preservation Project facility stood empty, with the last to leave being the helicopters that lifted the Gatling gun stations off the building’s roof. More than two hundred V. rapax watched them go … and then stormed the building, ransacking it.