by Michael Todd
“It doesn’t make much sense,” the scientist said. “Each man looked like he was attacked by at least two or three—maybe more—different creatures. They appear to have completely different kinds of wounds. Then again, the men back at the base seemed to describe it as some kind of hybrid creature. I briefly saw a bizarre silhouette that seemed to confirm that.”
“You may continue,” Pike graciously offered, as he examined the lines of fire leading to and from the cache.
“The way the bodies are stacked suggests that the creature is both highly agile and intelligent,” Chris went on. “That’s really all I can say without further examination.”
“That will be enough,” Pike said. “We will take up various positions on the opposite side of the bodies, hide, and wait for our quarry to approach. When it does, we will all fire at once. If by some chance we fail to kill it outright, it will flee from us, back into the swamp, where it will have less mobility in addition to being wounded.”
Chris blinked. “Okay. That seems simple. And what if it isn’t hindered?”
“We pursue it and keep shooting it until it dies,” Pike stated. “Like you said, it has a certain elegant simplicity to it.” That confident smirk had found its home again.
The scientist sighed. “It can jump very high and very far, you know,” he pointed out. “That’s one thing about it that I’m certain I saw. It might even be able to fly to some extent.”
Pike nodded but otherwise ignored him. “Everyone, take your positions.”
They did. Once again, Pike climbed a tree. This time, he covered himself with a leafy branch. One had to look closely at the tree to see the barrel of his rifle protruding between the leaves. As the men with the heaviest weapons, Gunnar and Metaxas took the flanks again. Gunnar had the honor of climbing down a root-latticed slope next to the swamp and smearing himself with mud while he kneeled halfway submerged in the water. Metaxas simply stood behind a large tree.
Everyone else spread out in a curved line to form an enclosing semicircle in an area of particularly dense foliage that acted as a screen. Pike seemed confident that the Chimera would not approach from that direction, simply because said foliage would be inconvenient for such a large creature.
They waited. And waited. Chris checked his phone. Over an hour had passed. Everyone was getting antsy, tense, and irritated. Just as Chris was about to stand and protest loudly, Pike unleashed a soft but clearly audible hiss.
Then, suddenly, it was there.
Chris’ eyes bulged, and his bowels tightened. He couldn’t immediately tell what he was looking at. It wasn’t in clear sight yet. But there it was, in the shadows of two huge trees just north of the edge of the swamp. That meant that it would approach them sidelong, which would screw up their firing formation. Gunnar wouldn’t even be involved in the initial barrage. How could Pike not have considered that? Metaxas, meanwhile, circled around his tree to keep himself hidden.
“Oh, my God,” Glassner breathed so softly that Chris barely heard, and he was less than a yard away from the man.
It approached them at a series of angles, as though trying to hide from sight, even though it could not have known they were watching it. Could it? As it moved closer, they felt the faint vibrations of its great weight through the earth. But still, its appearance was vague and contradictory. Chris almost felt as though one creature passed behind a tree, only for a completely different animal to emerge, now moving in a slightly different direction. What in God’s name was this thing?
Suddenly, it picked up speed and darted around with surprising lightness and grace for such an ungainly monstrosity. And then it was almost on them. The time to spring the trap was only a moment away. Chris wondered if—
A sharp crack rent the air. Too soon.
“No!” someone shouted angrily.
The Chimera let out a roar and charged at them, knocking over one tree as it continued to dance between the others.
“Fire!” Pike shouted. “Damn you, fire!”
They did, ravaging the air again with ear-splitting gunshots. But the game was up. The creature had been alerted, and it would not simply allow them to shoot it.
Metaxas was the closest. He fired his shotgun around the tree. The Chimera screeched—its voice somehow deep and high-pitched at the same time. Some sort of appendage, a barbed tail or tentacle, lashed out. It slashed through both the tree and the man behind it. Metaxas shrieked and collapsed in a fountain of his own blood as wood fragments scattered and the tree fell into the swamp.
Then the Chimera was gone.
“Hold!” Pike said.
And somehow, it emerged again at that moment, right in front of Chris. He almost fell back on his ass. He sputtered and stared as he tried to aim the pistol that shook in his trembling hands. He had no choice but to see it, at last.
Even up close, in decent lighting, it made no sense. It was grotesque, and yet the impression of its randomly-assembled hideousness was softened by a vagueness of shape and outline, a sense that something about it was camouflaged. Not by coloration or covering, but that the very anatomy of the creature was designed to fool the eye. To fool the human eye.
He glimpsed it for only a moment. And at that moment, it looked right at him with its cold, sharp eyes.
Rifles fired, and the Chimera roared again, spun in place, and ran off. It started by crashing into the waters of the swamp. Gunnar opened fire with his shotgun and the creature changed course, going back the way it had come. Then it was gone.
“Dammit!” Pike raged, leaping down from the tree. His lips drew back from his teeth. “Goddammit all! Idiots!”
Chris was still frozen in shock. The Chimera had looked at him as though it knew who he was. It could have killed him, but it didn’t. He was easy pickings. It hadn’t hesitated with Metaxas. Why did it hold back with him? Then this strange impression vanished and only anger remained. They had failed. Pike had failed. Chris stomped toward Pike as the man stalked toward him.
“You moron,” Chris burst out. “You’re so focused on getting your stupid fucking trophy, you couldn’t even wait long enough to spring your own trap. That was a single rifle shot. Even I could tell that!” He could actually feel his own face turning reddish-purple.
“What?” Pike returned, his teeth still bared. “It was a small caliber report, like a pistol!” He pointed at Chris. “If it wasn’t you personally, it was someone you spooked with your…your propaganda about how we shouldn’t even touch anything!”
The other troops formed a circle around the two of them. All of them looked angry but confused. They had not yet decided who was to blame. Glassner ran over to check on Metaxas, but it was hopeless. The man had been cut almost in half.
“You don’t care about the stakes here,” Chris raged. “There are things we can learn from this place that will help the entire human species. But you don’t care about that, ohhh no. You don’t respect the Zoo, or me. You merely want to be able to say you shot something that no one else—”
“You, sir,” Pike threw back, “are the one who has failed to respect the stakes or grasp what it is we learn from places like this.” He had himself back under some control now but was clearly still furious. “You think this place can be tamed, controlled, or put under a microscope like a cell culture. That is obviously not the case. This is a true wilderness, a pure savage realm, where only savage measures will prevail. We don’t calculate formulas here. We calculate matters of survival.”
Private Peppy watched as the argument proceeded. “Leadership.” She sighed. “Another leading cause of human fatalities. Especially in civil wars. Two sides, one group. Double the lingering painful death. Joy.”
“Can I come up and get dry now?” Gunnar asked from the swamp.
9
Chris was pretty sure that Gunnar and Peppy were on his side, at least. Frankie and Glassner seemed neutral so far. However, Pachrapa and Duchesne had definitely sided with Pike. “How grateful of him,” Chris muttered, in reference to
Duchesne, “after I saved his ass from that vine.” Then again, Metaxas seemed to have been friends with the other mercs, and Metaxas was dead.
Because Pike had screwed it up. Chris ground his teeth and balled his hands into fists. Pike hadn’t even thought about what would happen if the Chimera approached from the side, rather than straight across the swamp, and Metaxas had died horribly because of it.
Who had fired the shot that ruined everything? Chris knew that he hadn’t done it himself. Pike claimed the same. It couldn’t have been Gunnar or Metaxas. The retort sounded nothing like a shotgun blast.
“Look on the bright side,” Private Peppy said, as she cleaned and reloaded her rifle, “it will be dark before long. Then we won’t have to actually look at the nightmare before us. At least until we fall asleep and have regular nightmares.”
Gunnar emptied muddy water out of his boots. “I think I’ll have a wet dream, instead,” he commented. “About killing that rat-thing earlier, I mean.”
Chris wondered if the two of them were having some kind of competition. He shook his head and focused. Peppy was correct that they didn’t have much daylight left. He stood and wandered over toward the fallen tree, where Pike, Duchesne, and Pachrapa sat tending to their weapons and conversing in low voices. As he passed Frankie, she gave him an odd, meaningful glance. He would talk to her in a few minutes. After he finished with Pike.
“Look,” Chris began as he stood before the three independent contractors, “I’m sorry things haven’t gone so well, and we’re all under a lot of strain, so maybe we’re all having trouble being…diplomatic. But it’ll be dark pretty soon, and we need to decide what we’re going to do.”
Pike, Duchesne, and Pachrapa all looked at him, unspeaking, with dull dislike and lidded anger. The squad leader had put his wraparound sunglasses back on. “Is this your attempt at an apology, Dr. Lin?” he asked, before turning his head back toward his rifle and his pack.
Chris was already seeing red again. Before he could respond, Pike went on. “I have already decided what we will do, Doctor. We will rest another fifteen minutes, tend to our gear and refreshing ourselves, and then we will follow our prey and try once more to kill it. The Zoo isn’t that big, and it won’t try to flee to Egypt or the Congo now, will it?”
Chris took a deep breath. “All right, but we will have to sleep at some—”
“Oh, one more thing,” Pike interrupted, louder than necessary. “I want you to surrender your pistol. That will guarantee that the untrained and inexperienced do not squeeze off accidental shots at inopportune times.”
A strangled, choking sound worked its way up Chris’ throat. He turned and balled his hands into fists as he walked away. He was certain that if he put his hand on that pistol again, he might try to shoot Pike in the kneecap.
“Chris!” Frankie called as he stormed past. He kept walking, past Gunnar and Peppy, and did not stop until he was a good two hundred feet out into the woods, mostly hidden from the rest of his team.
A quick scan confirmed that there were no locusts, kangarats, death-vines, or even goop plants in the immediate vicinity. Satisfied with this knowledge, he punched the nearest tree. His fist went half-numb and left a splintery dent in the wood. Then he roundhouse-kicked it in the same place. Then side-kicked it. And then, for good measure, he snapped off a low-lying branch and threw it randomly into the murk.
When he finally ran out of steam, Frankie stood there. He blushed. How much of his stupid tantrum had she seen?
“Chris,” she said softly, “we need to talk.”
He made a vague grunting sound. Women always wanted to talk…aside from maybe Kemp. She would have known how to handle this situation.
“Listen,” Frankie said, taking a step closer to him and lowering her voice almost to a whisper, “I believe you. I know you weren’t the one who fired that shot. Pike did.”
His head snapped up and he looked sharply at her. “You’re sure?”
She nodded, and her lovely face had darkened slightly with fear. “He’s not who he says he is, Chris. Part of the reason I’m on this mission is to keep an eye on everyone else. And I think our worst fears might be confirmed.” She glanced around quickly to make sure no one else had come within earshot. They were alone. The others must have assumed that Chris needed a moment to himself.
He squinted as he thought about her words and waited to hear more.
“There are holes in his employment history,” Frankie went on, “especially recently. We don’t actually know if he’s still working for someone else while he pretends to work for us. Do you see what I mean?”
“Go on,” Chris prompted.
“Think of some of the stupid, risky stuff he’s made us do. And that’s not all. When I scouted ahead there—before we found all those bodies, when I said I was taking a leak—I found something that proves that he’s not on our side and is endangering the whole mission. We’ve got a few minutes yet. I can show you quickly. At least that way, if something happens to one of us, the other will still know the truth.” Her eyes were big and intense. She was trusting him with important information.
The anger rose again. It all made a certain amount of twisted sense, really. Maybe the dead men in the Chimera’s mass grave had been Pike’s former accomplices, and the real reason he was there was to cover his tracks. He mentioned a swamp, and a swamp had appeared. He spoke with confidence about the terrain like he’d seen it before. Maybe he was trying to get the rest of them killed with his brash maneuvers? If Chris could come back with proof of something like that, the others would turn against Pike and sanity would be restored on this mission. Unless…
“Do you think Pachrapa and Duchesne are in on it as well?” he asked. Metaxas might have been too, but that was a moot point now.
Frankie pursed her lips. “I don’t think so, no. The only record of them working with Pike was when he and Metaxas were at the same fort for maybe three days. Duchesne and Pachrapa never even met him before this morning. I think they’re taking his side because he’s…more like them. You’re different,” she said and put a hand on his arm.
Chris felt a tingling sensation deep within the lower part of his torso. Ultimately, he had to voice it. “That makes sense.” He sighed. “All right, show me. But we have to be discreet about it. We don’t want to show our hand to Pike just yet.”
Frankie smiled, and the spunky girlish enthusiasm was back. “I’m all about discretion,” she said. “And stealth. Follow me and no one will even know what happened.” She turned and moved deeper into the jungle.
Chris tried to stay behind her, but it was difficult. And compared to hers, his movements seemed too loud and clumsy. Nevertheless, they made good progress.
Frankie vanished ahead for a moment. Then she reappeared and beckoned him onward. “This way,” she whispered and changed their course.
Chris lost all sense of direction. He was no longer sure exactly where the team’s break spot was in relation to where the two now traveled. Then again, it had been at least a way back when Frankie had taken her momentous leak.
“Are you sure you know where it is?” he asked. The trek and distance from the party had given his anger time to cool properly, and a growing sense of unease gripped him. They might not have time to make it back before Pike ordered them to move out. If they weren’t back by then, he’d probably order a search, and then he’d get suspicious. He’d want to know why the two of them had seemingly deserted the party.
Or he might consider them dead meat and move on without them. That would almost be better in some ways. But then what would happen to Gunnar, Peppy, and Glassner? What would the brass back at the base say when—if?—he returned and Pike had already reported him as a deserter?
“We need to get back before Pike moves out,” Chris said. “They’ll suspect us…we don’t want—”
“We’re here!” Frankie said. “Don’t worry. It will only take a second, and then we’ll hurry back.”
She was twenty or t
hirty feet ahead of him and stood in a space that resembled a doorway between two broad, slime-covered trees. The area beyond was darker than the rest of the forest. Both dread and burning curiosity rose up in him as he wondered what he’d find in there. He had to look, though. He had to expose Pike.
Frankie moved aside as he approached. “Have a look at this,” she said with a note of triumph.
He stepped through the natural doorway and moved past her and into a broad dark clearing. This area seemed the perfect place to hide a dark secret. His eyes adjusted to the gloom.He saw nothing. It was empty, merely a patch of mostly-bare earth surrounded by trees, weeds, and vines. He took another step in and looked more closely.
“Uh, I’m not seeing anything. Frankie, are you sure—” He turned to ask her.
She was almost on top of him. Her face was a blank slate. In the brief instant before everything went black, he saw her holding up her carbine with its butt-end out and noted that it was a small-caliber weapon, probably with single-shot capacity. Its butt crashed into the side of his head.
10
Chris awoke in stages. First, there was a painful, groggy daze. Then came the half-consciousness where one realizes one is awake. Finally, he opened his eyes and returned to full consciousness and all the sensations that came with it. He felt like total shit.
He was, oddly enough, in a vertical position—leaning more than standing, though. He felt the rough slimy bark of a tree behind him. Ropes or cords of some kind wrapped around his body, secured him to the tree, and ensured he couldn’t fall.
Or run.
“Well, well. Sleepytime is over,” a heavily-accented male voice said somewhere close ahead. Chris’ eyes adjusted and he looked around.
It was dark now. He was in a camp of some sort. For a brief instant, he held out hope that he was back with the team, but that hope was dashed quickly enough. There were probably twenty people around. And who the hell had just spoken? The accent sounded Russian or Ukrainian. A gaping chasm of fear opened in his stomach.