by Michael Todd
They weren’t alone in this mission. Which meant the dead men were likely from this party and Frankie was probably their mole.
The various men had grouped into clusters. Some drank. Others played cards. No campfires burned. Whoever they were, at least they had that much sense. Two large vehicles of some sort were parked nearby, though mostly obscured by shadows and foliage. Everyone was heavily armed. Off near one of the trucks, Chris could see a small, lithe form that might have been the traitor.
The side of his head ached like hell. He would have to discuss that with her at some point. He clenched his jaw.
One of the men nearest to him had risen to his feet and now took a couple of steps closer. “Hello, my little Chinese-American friend,” he said. It was definitely the same man who’d spoken a moment ago. He was probably in his forties and despite the jab, stood at approximately the same height. He gave off a vibe of lean, scrappy toughness, however. His eyes were hidden by tinted glasses, and he wore an old pseudo-military uniform along with a slouching beret.
“Who are you people?” Chris asked. His voice was slow and gravelly. He needed a drink.
“We are what your government likes to call ‘private contractors,’” the man said, “though of course, we are not working for your government. Even I would not stoop that low.” He raised a bony, veined hand to his mouth and inhaled white vapor from an e-cigarette.
“I knew it,” Chris muttered.
“It seems you know lots of things,” the man mused. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Miklós Szepassony, but don’t call me that. I don’t like it. Call me Micky. Americans seem to prefer cute nickname anyway. I am Magyar…if you even know what that means.”
“Oh, Hungarian,” Chris said. “Your accent sounds more Ukrainian, though.”
“Very good, Professor,” Micky replied. “My grandparents were relocated to Donbass under orders from Soviet Union. I am guessing your parents were relocated to California under promise of cheaper Big Macs with zero-percent dog meat. Unless you are actually Chinese spy.”
“I was born in Anaheim,” Chris said in a flat voice. This man, well-groomed though he was, reminded him of a mangy alleycat, and was about as charming to interact with. “I assume you want something from me.”
“Very good,” Micky said again, though nothing in his tone suggested he was actually giving Chris a compliment. “We want same thing you and your pals want, okay? Or to be more specific, our client wants. That thing the American base calls the ‘Chimera.’ Frankie tells me you were going to kill it. Why does that not surprise me? That you people would see something and want to shoot it. It is far more valuable alive.”
Frankie. That confirmed it. Everything she’d said to him about Pike had been true about herself, more or less. She had lied to him so easily. And so effectively. As he suspected, she had fired the shot that had alerted the Chimera to their trap because these assholes wanted to capture it alive. Anger, shame, embarrassment, and something akin to despair all wrestled with each other to be expressed first.
“Valuable to who?” Chris asked.
“Who cares?” Micky answered. “I only spoke to intermediary. I shouldn’t tell you anything, but I don’t really give shit.” Chris could certainly believe that. “Some Saudi prince wants it for pet or something, okay? Probably use it to keep his fourth wife in line if she flashes her ankle at other men. Or put it on display in hotel. At least those people spend their big money on stupid shit like that, or gold-plated buildings and beaches shaped like palm trees. Unlike some other countries who spend their money on fucking everyone else in ass.”
“I apologize,” Chris shot back, “for having been born in Anaheim, like I said. I mean, what sort of terrible person would choose to be born in the U.S.?”
“Ha, ha. Very funny,” Micky said. He seemed about to say something else when one of the men shouted behind him. A loud crash sounded along with the rasp of steel being drawn from a sheath.
Instantly, Micky pivoted back toward the camp, where the bounty hunters stood and fanned out, making space around the two men who were about to fight.
“Mother-fucking cheating piece of shit!” one man snarled in a heavy accent, probably Middle Eastern or Central Asian. Turkish, perhaps? He was tall and bald with a ring of black hair behind his ears and a huge, bushy black mustache. He stood hunched half-over and held a large hunting knife in a trembling hand. An overturned box lay between him and his adversary. A small portable electric lantern had gone out next to the scattered cards and poker chips.
The other man was much smaller, wiry, and pale. He looked like he was on the verge of cracking up with laughter. Most likely, he was drunk. “Feckin’ crazy talk. I don't know what he—”
The Turk pounced. Multiple voices yelled, and the small Irishman stumbled back, groaned raggedly, and clutched his arm, where blood ran like an open faucet from his bicep. Someone moved to help him tie a tourniquet as three other men grappled with the enraged Turk and restrained him.
Micky took a few quick, purposeful steps onto the scene. Bystanders moved out of his way without needing to be told. He examined the four struggling figures. Then one of his hands shot out and seized the Turk’s knife.
The bald, mustachioed man gaped. Then he growled. “Give me back knife!”
“Tomorrow,” Micky said. He tossed the knife straight up in the air. One of his fists lashed out, and the Turk staggered back into the arms of three other mercenaries. His body was limp. The blow had knocked him out. Micky caught the knife as it fell.
“Put him in tent,” he instructed the others. “He will wake up with headache and probably erection. Too bad no little boys here for him, okay?”
Then Micky turned to the Irishman. “Think you will lose the arm?”
“Don’t feckin’ know man,” he gasped.
Micky patted the man on the head. “Try not to lose it. Amputation is pain in the ass. And then you would be almost useless.”
The merc leader turned again and walked back toward Chris, who silently gave thanks that these guys weren’t, in fact, working for Uncle Sam. The U.S. government would only have hired their type for the blackest of black ops. Or so he hoped.
“As I was saying,” Micky resumed. His lean face carried a trace of a smile. The fight had entertained him, and he looked satisfied at having gotten to punch a man in the face. “We have job to do, which is capturing the Chimera alive and getting paid large sum of money. We will succeed before that hunter and your friends do,” he went on, vaping again from his e-cig. He gestured to Chris with an open hand. “And you will help us do it.”
11
The camp was moving out. Chris woke up again, still bound. He’d passed out for a few hours after midnight. Now, he felt like he’d challenged a black belt yesterday, gotten his ass kicked, and then drank an entire fifth of vodka to cope while forgetting to drink water or take aspirin.
“Uh,” he said through a dry, tight throat, “water?”
The light of dawn crept down into the jungle and the bounty hunters bustled around, grumbling and securing their gear before they resumed their mission. One of them passed in time to hear Chris’ request. “You want water?” he said in what sounded like a Caribbean accent.
“Please and thanks,” Chris gasped.
The man made a barking laugh and turned away. A moment later, Micky reappeared with a canteen.
“I hate to waste precious natural resource,” he said, “but we can’t have you dying before mission is complete.” He more or less shoved the canteen in Chris’ face and upended it in front of his mouth. There was only enough for maybe two quick swallows, and some of it spilled down his chin and chest anyway. It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing.
“We will let you down from that tree in a moment,” Micky went on. “Then we will go on field trip. Of course, you are required to come with us or else we will shoot you in leg and then put knife through your face and grind it around against back of your skull, okay? So do as we say.”
Chris nodded. “Those terms are clear enough.” He didn’t want to help them but getting himself killed immediately wouldn’t do much good. He would go along with them for now. Sooner or later, he’d have a chance to escape. And after he made good his escape from the Zoo, he would be able to alert someone who could stop these people from smuggling an alien bio-weapon into the hands of God-knew-who.
Micky motioned to the Caribbean guy and had him untie Chris from the tree while the leader rested a hand on his pistol, a big silver semi-auto. A Desert Eagle? Did they still make those? Chris half-fell as the ropes came loose. He staggered and put a hand to his head, which still hurt from Frankie’s love-tap the previous day. The dizziness might have been partially from hunger.
“Can I have something to eat?” he asked. As he did, the Caribbean came up behind him and tied his hands behind his back.
“Maybe later,” said Micky, “if you are good boy. We have been in this fucking place for over two weeks now. Rations go to quality fighting men first and civilian passengers second.”
Chris glowered. Kemp had told him that he was not merely a passenger after he’d helped save her from drowning in a river.
Micky turned and walked away toward the center of the group. He passed a man who squatted in place doing something on his cell phone and, without breaking stride, kicked the man in the ass. “Long-distance and roaming fees come out of your cut of total,” Micky said, and was gone. The man, meanwhile, had dropped his phone and now squirmed and bucked in place on the ground. The kick had been perfectly aimed at his tailbone.
As the Caribbean man shoved him forward, Chris realized now that Micky possessed a particular trait of character, one he’d noticed before in both nerds and jocks. In jocks, it took the form of going out of their way to run over squirrels and possums on drunken joyrides in their trucks, along with locker-checking the nerds. In nerds, it took the form of using D&D or video games as opportunities to torment enemies and humiliate NPCs, gloating about it all the while. In short, a fondness for hurting things.
“Go,” the man behind Chris said and poked him in the back with his rifle.
“Obviously,” Chris replied and rolled his eyes.
As the team prepared to move, Chris realized that they took only one of their two vehicles, a JLTV. The other was a tracked Hammerhead. Two mercenaries with what looked like heavy machine guns and a grenade launcher stayed with it. They must have realized the Hammerhead would be too big to take through parts of the jungle and planned to bring the Chimera back to it, perhaps by dragging it behind the JLTV.
He thought back to his brief glimpse of the creature and shuddered. Even a JLTV might have trouble pulling that thing. It was huge. The bounty hunters did, however, have a good two dozen men and some serious weaponry. That meant that, in their company, Chris would probably at least survive any attack by locusts or kangarats.
They did not possess the relative cohesion of an actual military unit or even the half-privatized force under Pike. Chris doubted that any two men were from the same country. They tolerated each other’s company gratingly and everyone communicated in various degrees of broken English. The whole column advanced slowly but brutishly, not so much weaving through the forest as bludgeoning it out of their way.
“I think I might be infected,” the Irishman said as they trudged along and clutched his wounded arm, which had turned a disturbing blackish-purple. “No way to predict what sort of diseases they’d have in this awful place. It’s not of this Earth.” The man looked sickly with fear as well as pain and actual sickness.
“Don’t cheat at fuckin’ cards then,” replied another man, who must have been either American or Canadian. The Turk had wisely been put on the other side of the column and near the front. Chris was closer to the rear along with the Caribbean—who mentioned that he was from Haiti, specifically—the Irishman, this Yank-Canuck fellow, and a couple of others.
Another figure fell back from the center as they moved along and sidled up to Chris.
“Hey there,” Frankie said.
“Wait, who are you again?” Chris asked in a blasé monotone.
The young woman laughed. It wasn’t a nasty laugh. She legitimately thought that what he’d said was funny. “Sorry,” she went on. “We kinda needed your help, though. These guys have been dicking around here for a couple of weeks now and they don’t have any expert science guys with them, so…”
“Oh,” said Chris.
“Plus, none of them have even really gotten a good look at the Chimera,” she said. “It and some of these other things have picked them off one by one, but they haven’t made progress. So I was sent in to infiltrate the American base and gather intel. I love stuff like this, it’s so exciting. I always wanted to travel to exotic places and do stuff like that. Good thing I have the skill set.” She smirked and wagged her hips a little more as she walked. She clearly enjoyed the image she got to project—the sexy female badass, the anti-heroine of the story.
Chris tried not to grind his teeth. “This is, what, a vacation to you?”
“It’s work, but hey, at least it’s fun.”
Chris wondered if this was another act. She’d lied to him and everyone else so much that there was no reason for him to believe anything she said now. And yet, somehow, he didn’t think she was acting. This was the real Frankie. And the scary part was this was all simply a game to her.
“Well, as long as you have your parents’ permission to be here,” Chris sneered. “I could see how they might object. Someone might get hurt.”
Frankie smiled a bit wider. “You don’t think much of me anymore, do you?”
“I can think of a couple of words,” Chris responded. “They start with b and c, but I won’t say them.” He paused for an instant to reflect. “And maybe a w, but that one’s silent.”
“Well that’s not fair,” she said. “Have fun getting poked in the back with guns.”
As if the possibility of his actually getting shot with those same guns wasn’t anything of great concern.
She hurried farther up ahead. Chris watched her ass twitch as she went and debated if Micky was fucking her or any of the others. Not that it mattered. Not that he really cared, but he couldn’t help wondering.
After an hour of tramping through the jungle—Chris was pretty sure he hadn’t been in this part of the Zoo before—a disturbingly familiar rushing sound caught his attention.
“Locusts,” Chris gasped. “There’s a swarm nearby—”
“Yeah, we know,” a tall, beefy bruiser with a scar on his chin said. Chris was now fairly certain he was from somewhere in the States, rather than Canada. “It happens almost every day. We’ll fuckin’ deal with it, all right?”
“Positions,” Micky snapped from the front.
The caravan came to a halt and most of the bounty hunters formed a line, aiming their guns toward the part of the forest from which the sounds came. This included the guy aiming the JLTV’s weapon, which, Chris now realized, was a flamethrower. Four men took up positions at other points around the vehicle in case the locusts tried a flank attack.
There was silence for a few tense moments before green flashes appeared in the jungle before them. Chris could only shrink back against the rear of the JLTV and hope these mercs knew what they were doing. The approaching wave of locusts wasn’t a large one, but it was big enough. Ravening, bladed limbs and glistening bug eyes became distinguishable amidst the foliage.
“Hold…and fire,” Micky commanded.
Chris almost fell. The ground seemed to shake. The bounty hunters had unloaded all their guns at once on full auto with no particular effort to conserve ammo, and only showed the vaguest effort to aim. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary with their superior numbers. Hot orange light glowed above him as the mounted flamethrower unleashed its infernal payload.
The barrage lasted only a few seconds. When it was over, not only had every single approaching locust been killed, but half an acre of the jungle was destroye
d. Trees had fallen under the onslaught, and vines and weeds were burned. Almost every living thing within the affected area had been reduced to a smoking pile of blasted green fragments.
“Jesus,” Chris said. “Good thing you guys don’t have limited ammo or anything.”
“We got what we need.” The bruiser chuckled as a few of the other men similarly laughed, gloated, or slapped each other on the shoulders. After two long, miserable weeks, all of them were probably itching to kill, burn, ruin, and obliterate anything they could get their hands on. Especially if it might bring them closer to payday.
Chris shook his head. It was a waste of the Zoo’s potential as well as a waste of ammo. Someone had to be smuggling extra supplies in to them. The amount of corruption that must have gone into this venture of theirs made him sick.
Micky gave the men a few minutes’ break and strode back to where Chris still stood near the JLTV. He paused to take a drag from his e-cig. He stared at Chris through his tinted glasses. “Now I will tell you how it is that you will help us, okay?”
Chris said nothing.
“You are the only one who has gotten good look at this Chimera,” he went on. “Your experience will combine well with our knowledge. Your hunter friend laid his trap at what was only temporary resting ground.”
“Oh? Well, that’s interesting,” Chris replied. He hated to admit it, but there had been more truth behind that statement than the blunt sarcasm he’d thrown into it.
“We,” Micky stated, “know location of its nest.”
12
The Chimera’s nest was not, as Chris had guessed, in the exact center of the Zoo. That would have taken them into the ruins of the old base and the three bio-domes, AKA Wall Zero. But it had to be fairly close. It was certainly far into the Zoo, probably somewhere in the southern depths where Chris had never been.