by Michael Todd
Chris, of course, was ordered to the extreme rear and instructed not to do anything unless everyone else failed.
The seconds stretched out in agonizing silence, but it could not have been more than two minutes before Chris heard things moving up ahead. A familiar thumping, scampering sound punctuated by a lighter, softer sound rustle of leaves carried through the undergrowth.
“No one fire until I have fired,” Pike ordered from his sniper’s nest. “Do not hit Miss Stoudt.”
Frankie burst through the foliage. Her face was pink and her eyes wide. Chris’ heart leapt with relief at the sight. But no sooner had she breached the clearing than two brown shapes exploded through the greenery behind her. They were hairy things the size of men with wriggling, clawed fingers and gaping, drooling maws. One of them was almost on top of her. It crawled sideways across the trunks of vertical trees and reached out a paw to snatch her by the head. She dropped into a roll barely in time.
The air cracked. The first kangarat’s outstretched hand shattered in a bloody mass of fragments and it let out a guttural scream of pain as it fell back and its partner now outpaced it. Frankie had reached the base of the bent tree that Pike had climbed.
“Now!” Pike shouted.
Everyone opened fire. The reports of their guns were deafening in the jungle’s stillness. The massive brown-furred creatures staggered back, spilling red blood behind and around them and weaving through the trees to the sides.
The one to the right attempted a straight charge at Metaxas. He and the troops behind him quickly adjusted their aim and fired. The blasts of the automatic shotgun barreled like a freight train and flayed the flesh from the kangarat’s face while simultaneously breaking open its ribcage. The rifle bullets pierced through its abdomen and shattered its arms and skull. It fell dead mid-pounce and crashed to the ground in a wet heap.
The one that had lost its hand was cleverer. It clambered between trees like an acrobat over a jungle-gym and stayed mostly hidden. Suddenly, it leapt right at Pike. The man pivoted and fired with stunning speed, and the monster went limp as its partner had done. The corpse brushed the side of Pike’s tree as it crashed an inch or two away from Gunnar.
“Well, shit,” Gunnar said. His mask broke under the crushing force of the blunt shock. He took two steps to the creature and unloaded a single shotgun shell into its opened mouth, blasting its jaws apart and destroying its neck and throat. “Bang,” he said.
The shot was overkill. Pike’s shot had struck true through the creature’s eye and into its brain. The skirmish was over, but they still had a long way to go.
Silence returned to the forest as the men and women of the team reloaded and Pike climbed down from his perch. He picked up one of the fangs from the remains of the kangarat that had almost killed him. “About three-point-five inches. Quite a weapon,” he said and put it in his pocket.
Chris watched with some satisfaction. Despite his obvious satisfaction at their victory, Pike looked flustered, maybe even a little scared. His ambush had worked, but it had not gone nearly as smoothly as he would have liked.
“All right, everyone,” Pike announced. “Our path forward is clear.” He signaled them to carry on. They fell back into formation and Private Peppy muttered about the types of fleas that rat-marsupials of that size might have carried. Chris worked his way ahead to Pike.
They soon came to an area where the grasses and weeds were matted down. An awful stench filled the air. This must have been where the two kangarats had slept. The ground sloped gently to their left. Straight ahead and to their right—toward the center of the Zoo—it sloped upward.
“We go left,” Pike said.
“Hold it,” Chris objected. “Something tells me that the Chimera is nesting closer to the center of the Zoo. As intelligent as it is, it probably understands that it wants to sleep as far from us as possible, so that it’s surrounded on all sides by the other creatures.”
“Of course,” Pike agreed. “Which is why, if it heard all that gunfire moments ago, it might have retreated to another, less obvious spot. Perhaps one on the other side of swampy, low-lying ground that’s difficult to traverse.” He gestured to the left. “That way.” He did not wait to see if Chris agreed. He simply strode off in the direction he had chosen, and the troops followed.
Chris hung back a moment to get his temper under control, then fell into formation in the center of the squad. If he couldn’t keep them out of pointless danger, at least he could still look for goop flowers.
Frankie was suddenly beside him. “Well, that was fun,” she remarked. “‘Oh. look, it’s three-point-five inches,” she said in a mocking imitation of Pike’s theatrical voice.
Chris snickered. “He’s obviously used to getting his way all the time. Even if it almost got you killed, not to mention himself.”
“I can handle myself,” she replied. “But thanks for caring.” She smiled.
That mixture of sprightly toughness and girlish vulnerability… Chris found himself sweating, even beyond what would be normal in the humid heat of the jungle. Sometimes, he swore women had some kind of superpower.
7
Pike had been right about one thing. The path to the left had indeed led into a swamp. They found themselves first ankle-deep, then knee-deep in filthy water and mud crawling with vines and sprouting odd moss-hung trees. It looked almost like a scene out of the old deep south. Mist rose in ephemeral patches over the water.
“It’s only a matter of time before Earth’s mosquitoes find this place,” Peppy said. Her voice still dropped in her typical depressing fashion. “Mosquitoes transmit malaria, you know. Thanks to that, they are responsible for more deaths than any other animal on the planet. That’s even including other humans. Sometimes, they can transmit other diseases too. I’ve seen it happen. Many, many times. Just try to imagine the clouds of mosquitoes that will spawn in this place when they finally find it.”
“That’s why God made flamethrowers, Private,” Gunnar retorted from his place closer to the front. “If I see one mosquito here, though, that’ll be the time for them to finally napalm this shithole, even if we’re still in it. Better than seeing skeeters end up the size of our locusts here.”
“Yes,” Private Peppy responded. “That, at least, would be something to look forward to for once. No more muck in our boots.”
There was silence for a moment. Gunnar and Peppy must have run out of cheerful things to discuss.
“Anyone want to sing a song?” Gunnar finally asked. He smirked. And then he began to sing. “Four thousand bottles of beer on the wall, four thousand bottles of—”
“Shut the fuck up, man,” Metaxas growled. “See, this kind of shit is why I don’t work for the government on a permanent basis anymore. You end up like these two, with shit for a paycheck but enough benefits to keep you on board. It’s like you’re a fucking dog waiting to be fed, and soon, you go insane. Maybe you two should go into the private sector.”
“Peppy could work in assisted suicide simply by talking to people,” Gunnar suggested.
“And Gunnar could be an exterminator,” Peppy shot back. “Any gun ought to seem big enough for him when he’s putting an end to the pointless, futile lives of things that are a lot smaller and weaker than he is.”
“Y’know, I always wanted to shoot a cockroach with a .357 Magnum,” Gunnar said and looked wistfully into the distance. A few of the others laughed in low voices. Chris was glad that Gunnar—and, to a lesser extent, Peppy—was with him this time. It kept things interesting and gave the journey a better sense of comradery.
Pike’s head snapped back. He raised a hand, and they fell silent. Everyone looked over their shoulders.
Another kangarat perched behind them on two crisscrossing tree branches overhead, not far past the edge of the swamp. It did not move, and it watched them.
Metaxas and Duchesne were the closest to the creature. They turned slowly.
“Do not fire,” Pike hissed. “Not yet.”
The kangarat studied them with its beady-eyed stare, then seemed to look ahead of them, farther into the swamp. It turned, leapt in the opposite direction, and climbed back the way it had come.
“Ha, it knows what we did to its friends,” Pachrapa said.
“No,” Pike disagreed. “It’s avoiding this area. This is not where its kind hunt. Something here is bigger and meaner than it is. Which means that we’re going in the right direction.” He puffed out his chest and smiled.
An uncomfortable silence set in as they sloshed deeper into the muck. Soon, they approached an area where mud and dirt around the exposed roots of the trees formed a kind of lattice of natural walkways amid shallower pools of water. Pike led them up onto these, perhaps sensing their frustration at being forced to wade through all the filth.
The tree branches were thick with fat green vines. That made Chris nervous. He glanced back and noticed Duchesne was missing. Without thinking he pushed past Metaxas and began looking for the man. “Duchesne?” he said. “Where the hell is he?”
Duchesne stepped out from behind a tree and two vines as thick as watermelons writhed lazily in the misty air behind him. “I needed to take a quick leak,” he said. “Let’s get—”
One of the vines reached for him.
“Shit!” Chris exclaimed, seized the man by the shoulders, and hurled both of them forward. They half-stumbled, half-fell onto the muddy roots, and air rushed right over Chris’ head.
“Holy fuck!” Metaxas burst out and aimed his shotgun.
Chris rolled forward and spun around. One of the vines’ mouths gaped open. He’d forgotten they had lips. It retreated back behind the tree, having barely missed its lunch. A faint expulsion between a gasp and a sigh followed as it drew back.
Duchesne gaped at where the vine had once been. Chris helped him to his feet.
“Uh,” he mumbled bashfully. “Thanks, man. You weren’t kidding.”
“Vine,” Chris explained as the others came back to check on them. “Do not go anywhere near those big fat squirmy ones. And if we have to go under one, I’d suggest shooting it preemptively.”
Pike frowned. “Perhaps,” he said. “But we will try to avoid them instead.”
Chris nodded. The man had some sense.
They continued deeper into the Zoo and finally arrived at what looked like the edge of the miserable swamp. Chris realized that Frankie was nowhere to be seen. In fact, he hadn’t seen her for at least ten minutes and had assumed she had fallen behind him in marching order. His gut clenched with worry.
“Has anyone seen Frankie?” he asked.
“You been ‘seeing’ a lot of her, it seems,” said Gunnar, “but no.”
Everyone stopped for a moment. No sooner had they begun to fan out when Frankie herself appeared from around a slender tree. Stealth was indeed her specialty.
“Here I am,” she announced. “Sorry, I had to take a leak. I’m a girl so, you know, it takes longer. I went ahead a bit to scout while I was at it. It seems clear.”
Pike looked at her evenly. “Do not do that without my permission,” he ordered.
“Well, excuse me,” she groused and returned to her usual spot beside Chris as they resumed. “A lady can’t even take a piss around here.”
Chris scanned the area. No red and blue flowers yet. There were entire groves of them in there, he knew, but he had no idea how the Zoo chose their locations.
“What are you looking for?” Frankie asked. She seemed legitimately curious.
Chris smiled a bit. “Goop plants,” he explained. “The red-and-blue flowers I mentioned. They grow directly out of the AG—Alien Goop, if you can believe the files—and we need to get a sample of one to understand the Zoo better.”
“Oh, wow, I see,” she replied. “I was always curious about scientific stuff since I was a little girl.”
“Me too,” Chris replied.
“You used to be a little girl?”
“Ha-ha. You know what I meant. But if you’re a science person also, you can probably understand that sometimes, a single species is the key to a whole ecosystem. That means it’s as dangerous as all hell, but also that they might have a lot of potential for—” He stopped himself from blurting everything out and cleared his throat. “For research.”
Frankie nodded. “You were going to say something else,” she deduced. “You don’t trust me?”
Chris swallowed and fidgeted in discomfort. He didn’t want to make her dislike him, but he also knew he shouldn’t blab too much. “They told me not to talk too much to anyone outside the government. I don’t feel like I have any reason not to trust you, but orders are orders, you know?”
Frankie pouted.
“I mean,” Chris went on, now afraid he might lose her interest, “think of all the antibodies and medicines we’ve developed by studying diseases. I won’t go into all the specific details, but…I’ll just say that it’s something like that.” The specific details, he knew, were that the goop could be distilled into the elixir of life itself—a serum that could cure almost any ailment up to and perhaps including death itself. Dr. Marie had discovered this before her once-orderly experiment had become the nightmare now known as the Zoo and killed her.
“I probably shouldn’t discuss it at all,” Chris went on, “but it’s only a matter of time before word of this place gets out and other parties become interested, anyway. There are already a bunch of construction crews and observers from different countries helping with the walls and such. I know you guys are all ex-US military, so that helps.” Come to think of it, no one had specifically briefed him on Frankie’s background.
“Fair enough,” Frankie replied, and her demeanor warmed again.
Private Peppy returned after a brief period of wandering. “Good news,” she said glumly. “I found a dead body.”
Chris’ mind raced. Could it be Kemp? The last he’d seen of her as she diverted a whole armada of locusts away from him and Wallace, she’d been heading into a completely different part of the Zoo. Still, part of him ached for closure. He’d never found out exactly what had happened to her.
“Where?” Pike asked.
Peppy led them up a gentle ridge which finally brought them out of the swamp. They came to a bowl-shaped hollow surrounded by large leafy trees and dense undergrowth. A bloated hand stuck out near the rim of the bowl.
Pike and Glassner went first.
“Definitely dead,” Glassner confirmed and shook his head. “And even the freshest ones have been that way for at least a day or two.”
“There’s more than one?” Pachrapa asked.
Peppy shrugged. “Okay, I lied,” she admitted. “I found several dead bodies. The more, the merrier, I guess.”
8
“Who the hell are these people?” Chris asked. The team had gathered around the rim of the hollow and examined the mass grave. They did their best not to disturb anything while trying to resist the awful stench. Metaxas and Peppy stood guard on either side of the pit, facing out toward the jungle.
“Not ours,” said Glassner. It was true. Even though the bodies had been ravaged, and in some cases, half-stripped, none wore US military uniforms. They all looked like fighters of some sort or another. From what Glassner had said, the most recently-slain of them were maybe thirty-six hours old, whereas others had probably been there for a good two weeks.
“Most of them are armed, even quite heavily,” Pike observed, “yet there’s no evidence of a fight around this spot. They were killed elsewhere, then dragged here.” He rubbed his chin. “Very likely by our target. Those man-eating vines can’t travel, so they couldn’t have done the deed. The kangarats avoid this swamp. Yes, I believe we’ve found one of the Chimera’s caches. Perhaps even its home.”
“No one has been allowed into the Zoo,” Chris mused. “Even Kemp’s expedition was illegal. As far as I know, we are the first ones in here who were supposed to be here. Something is going on—”
“As opposed to when a b
unch of dead bodies means something ain’t going on,” Gunnar added.
Chris thought back to what he’d just said to Frankie. Some of the guards around the walls, particularly in the sections operated by other countries, might have been susceptible to bribery. People could have slipped through damaged parts of the wall at night.
“If the Chimera is doing this,” Chris proposed, “I want to be able to study the bodies for a while. It could tell us a lot more about the creature we’re dealing with.”
“We are not here to study it,” said Pike. “We are here so that I can kill it.”
“Well, we might be able to better understand how to kill it if we know more about its behavior and physiognomy,” Chris threw back. He held an arm against his nose to protect it from the smell and leaned closer to examine the bodies.
“The presence of these corpses mean that the Chimera is active in this area,” Pike said, “And some of the subtle disturbances I see around here suggest a large creature has been through. We already know the most important thing. You have five minutes, Dr. Lin, while I set up the ambush that will bring this mission to its end.”
Chris grumbled to himself as he attempted to glean as much information as he could from the corpses in that short time. What sort of fool wouldn’t take the opportunity to learn about the creature he hunted? Wasn’t that also a violation of the old adage, know thine enemy?
He tried to push the resentment aside and focus on the task at hand. The troops around him conferred with Pike and chose their positions. A couple of them took to hacking down branches and non-carnivorous vines to use as cover. Chris backed away from the pit as Pike motioned him over.