by Michael Todd
Kemp put a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Let’s do this.”
18
The silence split apart as Wallace fired the pistol. The canister obviously hadn’t amounted to much as a silencer. Chris raced toward the ladder. As he did, the sergeant fired a second shot, and this time, there was a loud thunking sound. It reminded Chris of someone shooting fireworks from a mortar on the Fourth of July. What the hell?
As he reached the debris pile in front of the ladder, Kemp’s arm motioned him up. He crawled over the chunks of plaster, wood, and metal and clambered up the rungs. Behind him, he heard the pounding of Wallace’s boots. That man could run.
He was almost through the ceiling when the soldier appeared behind him and shouted, “Go!” Materials scraped and shifted as he heaved himself against the debris pile and struggled to fit his large frame over top of it. The scientist hesitated in case the man needed help but he made it. As soon as he was clear, Chris vaulted himself upward as fast as he could.
The daylight on the roof was painfully bright after the deep green shadows of the ruined building, even filtered through the overhanging branches of the two great trees. Chris squinted and tried to look to the side as his eyes adjusted. Kemp crouched at the edge of the roof.
He finished ascending the ladder and stood as Wallace caught up behind him. The roof was flat aside from the intrusions by the Zoo’s flora. He could see more of the jungle stretching for miles in every direction, and closer to it, ringing the pseudo-clearing, the three white domes.
A seething mass of green locusts had all swarmed on the north dome, the one Chris and Kemp had passed through en route to the base.
“The second shot sent the canister itself flying,” Wallace reported, “so that probably means more pheromones. They went for it. By God, it worked.” He produced the pistol and handed it to Chris, who stuffed it back in his hip holster.
“Come on,” the lieutenant said and motioned them to the edge. The big vine Chris had pointed out ran close to her shoulder. It appeared to be attached to one of the trees growing from the base, and it angled down to disappear into the foliage beyond the southwest dome.
Kemp looped her rope strand over the vine and tested it with a strong pull. It held. “This had better work, Lin,” she growled and leapt off the edge.
The vine bowed to an alarming degree, and she moved faster than Chris expected. She almost brushed the side of the dome as she careened past it and vanished into the greenery beyond.
“Well, then,” he said.
“Go first,” Wallace ordered. A few locusts seemed to wander away from the north dome toward them.
Chris looped his rope over the vine. If Jackie could survive breaking his head open during a routine tree-jump, this was nothing. He took a deep breath and plunged over the edge.
The vine bowed down as it had before and Chris felt like his stomach had fallen out to strike the ground beneath him. He veered crazily through the air. The ground sped by beneath him and his arms strained painfully with the effort of supporting his entire weight. He passed the edge of the dome. As he did so, a locust hopped into sight.
“Shit!” he exclaimed. Without even thinking what he did, he grabbed—or really hit—a loose section of the white plasteel on the side of the dome. The locust jumped directly into it, crunched against it, and fell to the ground either dazed or injured. Chris laughed. It was like the part during the bicycle chase in Project A where Jackie knocked on the door in time for someone to open it right in a pursuing bad guy’s face. He was on a roll.
He hit the edge of the jungle. Branches and other vines slashed at him. He was almost at ground level now and had to tuck his legs up to keep from scraping them against the jungle floor. A tree loomed ahead.
“Drop and roll!” Kemp shouted.
Chris obeyed, suddenly terrified. He let go and tried to fling himself to the right, hoping he’d clear the tree. He barely did so and tucked his shoulder in as he landed hard and allowed the momentum to spin him along the ground.
For a moment, he lay amidst grass and moss. He was stinging, sore, and as dizzy as hell. Behind him, he heard Wallace slide down the vine. Kemp pulled him to his feet. “We have to go,” she almost snarled.
She was right. Moving was not easy, however. The world still spun and reeled as Chris staggered after her in what he hoped was her general direction.
Soon, Wallace ran up behind him. “They’re heading this way,” he said, “but we’ll keep a good lead on them as long as we don’t stop.”
Fleeing like this was an entirely different experience. It was not the cautious, determined exploration that the team had undertaken at first or that he and Kemp proceeded with. It was a half-blind, half-mad nightmare of shuffling and crashing through foliage and shadows. They tried not to bump into trees or trip over roots. The whole point of this part was to keep going no matter what, even though they sweated profusely in the steaming heat of late afternoon. Again, Chris felt that ancestral chill and primordial fear.
The buzzing grew louder again.
At that moment, another terrible thought crashed uninvited into Chris’s brain. “What do we do when we get to the river?” he asked.
“Fuck!” Kemp blurted and sounded about as angry as he’d ever heard her.
“This is roughly the direction I came from,” said Wallace, who by now had caught up with the pair and ran more or less alongside them. “I never saw any river. How the hell can there even be a river in this place already?”
“I have no idea,” Chris responded. “That’s good though.” He didn’t have the breath for any more detailed conversation than that. The sergeant could hear all about the river later. If there was a later.
Ahead, Kemp bellowed “Stop!” She came to a halt and Chris almost crashed into her from behind. He detoured himself against a tree to the left to avoid doing so. Before he could ask what the problem was, he saw for himself.
Goop plants. They’d stumbled onto another grove of the things. If Kemp had taken two more steps, she’d have AG from the plants spilling onto her legs as a second locust swarm arose from another part of the Zoo.
The lieutenant moved right, trying to circumvent the grove along the west side. Then the trees all seemed to sigh and whisper, and the buzzing was almost deafening. The brief delay had been all the time their pursuers needed to catch up to them.
“Move!” she almost screamed. “Move, move, move!”
Chris pushed himself to run again. Faster, faster, keeping pace with Kemp through sheer force of will. Wallace slowed behind them to cover their rear. The scientist flashed back to the massacre from the previous day and his conscious brain did its best to suppress it. He must not panic. Not now.
They were about halfway past the grove of flowers when the locusts caught up with them.
“Down!” the sergeant said from the rear. Green shapes buzzed overhead, and Chris turned his run into another roll. Kemp did the same. She came out of it with her rifle at the ready.
“Keep moving!” she shouted. “Lin, get behind me now!”
He half-ran, half-crawled to her and to her other side. She opened fire. Three or four quick bursts tore into the second wave of locusts and two of them fell, sparking and bleeding. One crashed into the Goop plants. “God dammit!” she spat. “We need to keep moving! Wallace, shoot and run!”
The sergeant was already doing so. His shotgun boomed to life, shattering the heads, legs, and torsos of half a dozen of the monsters as he backed away from them, almost hopping backward to keep firing as he moved.
Kemp motioned for them to go and they sprinted again. Another wave of locusts formed behind them, and Chris thought he could hear and see two more approach from the sides. The buzzing, rustling, and hissing was everywhere now.
“They’re fucking flanking us!” Wallace growled.
“Straight ahead!” The lieutenant bolted as fast as she could. They were almost to the end of the grove now. The thicker jungle beyond might slow the approach of their at
tackers.
Then the jungle itself rose up and came to life in a seething mass of glistening green, bulging eyes, and bladed claws. A fourth wave had probably been summoned when Kemp had shot the locust that fell into the plant field. They were surrounded. Again.
“No…” Chris said under his breath. The despair almost paralyzed him.
The soldier opened fire to his right and tried to punch a hole in the thinner wave of locusts that approached from that direction. For every two he eliminated, three or four more appeared to take their place. He couldn’t have had much ammo left.
Chris drew his pistol as Kemp set her rifle back on full auto and fired in blazing streaks around them to spread death in as wide an arc as possible to slow the advance. But it was no use. It was over. He clicked the safety. At least he’d die fighting.
The lieutenant’s clip ran dry. It clicked audibly as Wallace’s shotgun continued its freight-train report. A tornado of locusts spun around them.
“Chris,” she said. He looked up and saw her face was oddly calm, though her blue eyes were as intense as ever. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”
He grimaced, more apologetically than anything. Before he could speak, she said, “I have one more order for you. Get the hell out of here and save the world. Do you copy?”
“What?” he asked as locusts landed around them and prepared to wade in and carve them apart. “What are you—”
“Like I said before. When everything we hold dear is in danger, people sometimes have to make the ultimate sacrifice.” She turned and was gone.
Chris stood frozen in a split-second of total shock. Kemp had sprinted directly into the grove of red-and-blue flowers. She kicked them, trampled them, broke them with the butt of her gun, and finally, seized a big one by the stem and tore it out. Its long roots snapped with the speed and force of her charge.
“No!”
Blindly, stupidly, Chris started after her. The locusts turned away from him and edged their way back toward the field and Kemp. Chris blundered after them. He couldn’t see her anymore. Tears stung at his eyes.
Wallace was suddenly there beside him. A powerful hand pulled him back. “No.”
“We have to—”
“No.” The sergeant dragged him now the same way she had after the ATV crashed. “There’s nothing we can do, goddammit. Move. Run for it! Don’t make her sacrifice worthless!”
He was right, Chris knew. The tears coursed freely down his cheeks as they ran.
19
For a few moments, they almost had peace. They still ran, but they could afford to move at a jog rather than a gallop. The jungle still tore at their arms, legs, and faces, but no bug-eyed executioners appeared to finish them off. Kemp had taken the whole swarm with her.
The scientist lost track of how much time had passed. Everything had become a daze, a fever-dream of pain, exhaustion, and grief. They must have been halfway through the Zoo by now, maybe more. But they still had so far to go. The dark labyrinth showed no sign of coming to an end.
Wallace leaped onto a fallen log and Chris leaped over it. Suddenly, his body stopped and he crashed into the mud and weeds.
The sergeant was there in an instant. “What’s wrong?”
“I—” Chris hissed in pain. His body convulsed uncontrollably and he barely managed to climb to his hands and knees without falling again. He shook his head and a long string of frothy spittle fell from his mouth.
His companion sighed. “You’re exhausted.”
The comment hit the nail squarely upon the head. Chris had thought he’d been tired at other times in his life. He’d thought he’d been tired during his lengthy and demanding belt tests in Hapkido class or after marathon sessions of research followed by all-nighters spent typing up tedious reports. Those were nothing compared to this. And it certainly didn’t help that he was only alive now because a woman he’d grown to respect was dead. The emotions dragged up by this knowledge paired with the overexertion to effectively demolish his body’s ability to function properly.
“We can’t stop for long,” Wallace went on. “Take a moment and try to get up. If you can’t, I’ll carry you. But something will find us.” He looked around, his eyes dark and his jaw clenched. “And it won’t be long.”
Chris gasped and tried to get himself back under control while the soldier reloaded his shotgun. He had six or seven shells left. That was all. Chris realized that, for what little good it did them, he still had eleven rounds in his pistol and an extra three in the spare magazine. It was better than nothing.
Perhaps a minute passed, and Chris struggled to his feet. His body complained, and he wanted to either die or sleep, but he could move again.
“Good?” Wallace asked.
He nodded, gulped in air, and struggled forward at an unsteady trot. His companion moved ahead of him and slowed as needed to allow him to catch up before he increased the pace again. That made more sense than carrying him, really. The sergeant could scout ahead this way, and he’d have made no faster progress by himself if he’d been burdened with a human draped over his shoulders, even if that human were a short Asian. Chris half-laughed to himself, wishing he had the respiratory capacity to say that out loud. He’d save it for later when they were safe at the base.
“We’ll be out soon,” Wallace said. “I can smell napalm.”
The scientist gasped with delirious half-laughter. He must have loved the smell of napalm in the…wait, what time of day was it?
Something barreled through the foliage ahead of them. The soldier stopped. It was brown and it was huge and as suddenly, it was gone. For a moment, there was silence save for the faint breathing of the Zoo itself.
Wallace turned back to Chris with a finger raised to his lips. He motioned him forward. They moved at a slow careful walk and tried to make no sound. It was pointless to speak anyway. Both hoped that whatever that had been, it was merely passing by.
It passed by again behind them.
“Run!” the sergeant shouted.
Instantly, Chris’s whole body flooded with pain signals as his nervous system tried to tell him to stop. The alarms practically shrieked. What the hell he was doing? But he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. A new rush of adrenaline flowed through him. The two men ran side-by-side and beside them sounded the thumping, scurrying sound of their visitor.
The undergrowth exploded as the thing leapt straight out in front of them. Wallace fired one blast from his shotgun immediately, but either he missed entirely or failed to hit anything important. The creature was so fast their eyes almost couldn’t follow it.
It stood before them, drooling and leering and unclenching its clawed simian hands. Another of the marsupial vermin, Chris realized, but this one put the other to shame. Where the one from the north dome had been the size of a man, this one was half again as large, almost the size of a horse. A horrible, rasping, guttural cry came from its gaping mouth in a cruel imitation of laughter.
They raised their guns in unison and fired, but the beast leapt over them and vanished. Chris spun, not sure if he’d even come close to hitting the thing as he’d had no idea that such a small gun would make such a big bang. It felt like a miniature bomb had gone off in his hand. He was sudden grateful he hadn’t tried to fire his companion’s shotgun.
“Get down!” Wallace barked and shoved him to the jungle floor as the creature made a pass over their heads and swooped around in an arc to claw at their necks. They avoided the attack by mere inches.
Silence descended again. They could see nothing. The hours of daylight were almost spent by now, and in the Zoo, darkness would engulf them very soon.
“Motherfuck,” the soldier said in a low voice. For the first time, Chris sensed a real and smoldering anger in the man. It must have been the fact that the creature practically toyed with them. “Come on,” he said, “I don’t think we can fight this—”
Something almost like a gunshot sounded to their right, and a tree fell toward them.
�
�Shit!” Chris exclaimed and stumbled backwards. Wallace rolled in the opposite direction. The fallen tree crashed into the weeds and vines between them and rebounded drunkenly as its branches shook. This was no coincidence. Chris remembered all too well the kicking power of the rat-thing back at the dome. Now, this one had driven a wedge between the two of them.
He nearly panicked at the thought. It would come for the weaker prey first, of course. They were so close. In the space of a heart’s beat he wondered if he should run and trust Wallace to take care of himself or—
The jungle exploded again. The monstrosity bowled directly into the sergeant, gasp-cackling in triumph as the man was flung back into the fallen tree with enough force to send a car through a concrete wall.
“No!” the scientist gasped.
Wallace screamed. Something crunched horribly, and the man flopped over the broken trunk, limp and bleeding. His body continued to make snapping sounds as he rolled to the ground.
Chris dashed over to him. He appeared half-conscious at best. Both his legs were splayed and bent in the wrong places and covered in blood. A shard of bone jutted out his left shin. His hands shook like rubber as more blood pooled under his back. The creature had not only broken Wallace’s legs, but quite possibly shattered the man’s spine.
The shotgun was nowhere to be seen. He must have dropped it on the other side of the fallen tree when the thing hit him.
“You son of a bitch!” Chris snarled. He aimed his pistol and waited for the monster to come and finish the job. It seemed to have vanished back into the foliage and vines—thick, fat, squirming vines that draped through the branches overhead.
A brown shape scuttled by to Chris’s right and he backed up a few steps and deliberately stomped on one of the tendrils. It trembled beneath his foot. No matter how closely together the organisms in the Zoo might work, they were still individual living things with their own separate prerogatives. That’s how it was with every ecosystem.