by Michael Todd
The Turk guffawed at the sight. “Look at its stupid face!”
Chris glared at them and hoped distantly that the earth might decide to crack open and digest them in its magma-filled bowels. People like this were the bane of scientific study as well as common decency. They reminded him of a guy in one of his college classes who had similar sadistic tendencies to go with his IQ of eighty-five.
Micky came up, and the two men half-froze in place.
“No, no, no,” Micky said chidingly. He took the stick away from the Brazilian-Italian. “Like this.” He swung the stick like a riding crop, and it came down hard on the sensitive spot directly above the creature’s tail. It jumped but tangled in the net again. He handed the stick back to the other man. “Just don’t leave marks, okay? Don’t want towelheads to complain about damaged merchandise.”
It would be dawn before long. Micky raised his voice to speak to the entire party. “Me and main force will leave with Chimera in five minutes.” As he said this, the men from the JLTV used poles to pick the creature up, net and all, and place it on the vehicle.
Micky turned to the Turk, the Brazilian-Italian, and the American, who also stood nearby. “You three stay behind and finish breaking down equipment, then take shortcut to meet us southwest. Bring everything essential,” he went on. “I can think of at least two things we can leave behind, however.” He looked around. “Where is O’Donnell?”
Someone shoved the Irishman toward Micky. His arm was crudely bandaged, and he looked half-zombified and scared. “I’m not leaving behind my arm,” he said, and his eyes twitched. “It can still be saved, I’m telling you—”
“We hired you as rifleman,” Micky said. “And you cannot hold rifle. Tell you what. We’ll let you keep the arm with you, okay?” He drew his silver pistol with near-lightning speed and fired.
O’Donnell staggered back as the gun’s cracking report faded. His eyes rolled up and back into his head as though he tried to examine the bloody crater in the center of his brow before he fell into a patch of slimy weeds.
Chris took a deep breath. He suddenly felt much more certain what the other thing Micky planned to leave behind was.
“What will we do with this guy?” the American bruiser asked and nudged Chris with his elbow.
Micky looked back and rubbed his chin. “He did good job helping us catch Chimera after properly persuaded,” he said, “but to let him go would be bad idea in case his pals find him before we are out of this shitty place. Tell you what.” He gestured with an open hand to the three men who’d be staying behind, “I will give you choice. You can either spend several hours finding very safe place to hide him, or same amount of time escorting him out of Zoo…or you can spend much less time on simpler option. Wait till we are gone before you make up minds.” He waved his hand vaguely, turned, and left.
“Hear that, guys?” the American asked his compatriots. “We’ll have to think it over.” The three of them chuckled. For now, though, they focused on gathering up a tarp and the one remaining lighting fixture.
Frankie walked by as the majority of the column plowed its way back into the jungle with its precious cargo at the center of the formation. She flashed Chris a brief coy smile but didn’t actually stop to speak. “Sorry, not sorry,” that smile seemed to say. Then she was gone, twitching ass and all. Her exciting vacation was near its end. This was the part where Chris stopped being a part of her story. She was already on to bigger and better things. He was too tired and pained to think on it much.
Soon, the clearing became silent. It didn’t take much longer for the remaining bounty hunters to finish their work.
“Mkay,” the American said as he looked at Chris. “Let’s shoot him and get outta here. I’m gettin’ hungry.”
“No,” rasped the Turk and drew his enormous hunting knife. “I did not get,” he breathed out, “to finish O’Donnell.” He glared at Chris.
“I swear, I’m not Irish,” Chris said. “Really.”
The Turk took a step closer as the American and the Brazilian-Italian watched with a mixture of boredom, irritation, and amusement.
“I am, however, American,” Chris went on. “I’m a US citizen, and I work for the US government. There may be multiple countries managing the Zoo, but the good old USA is running the show at the top. They’ve already got tons of guys combing through this whole jungle looking for me. And if they find me dead, they’ll get very curious as to why. And who’s responsible. That’s when the really scary guys hunt you down. Even if you take your money from this job and flee to a mountaintop in fucking Madagascar, there are guys working for my government who will find you there and put a knife—like that one—straight up your ass.” He paused for effect. The scar-jawed Yank actually seemed to be considering his words. “If you don’t need me anymore, then leave me here. Uncle Sam will still be angry, but he won’t be vengeful. Besides, the Zoo will probably kill me anyway. Mama’s coming home sooner or later.”
All three of them thought about it now.
The Turk was the first to snap out of it. He shook his head rapidly and aimed the point of his knife at Chris’ groin. “No,” he said. “I gut you now.”
“Sorry, buddy,” the American explained, “but we’re protected from on high. Big connections, my man. It goes way above just Micky. We can pretty much do whatever we want.”
The Turk smiled, and the knife moved closer. Chris closed his eyes.
Something cracked. A ragged burbling scream followed, and when Chris opened his eyes again, the Turk’s hand was gone, along with the knife. He stared and gibbered at the bloody stump, and then another crack—like the report of a high-powered rifle in the distance—opened a red chasm in the center of the man’s bald head. He spun back and fell.
“Fuck!” the American cried and dropped to his knees, but a burst of automatic rifle fire cut him down. He slumped on top of his own weapon, groaning and bleeding from a dozen holes, including two in the neck.
The Brazilian-Italian gibbered insanely and fired a few suppressing shots as a commotion broke out somewhere to the right. A loud boom echoed, like a shotgun, and the man’s chest was blown open. His ribs stuck out as the blast knocked him off his feet.
Chris cleared his throat. “Okay then…” he breathed.
“I didn’t know you were into that bondage shit,” Gunnar’s voice said. “And a foursome, even. Hoo, boy.”
Chris turned. Gunnar, Peppy, and Pachrapa ran up to him, with Duchesne and Glassner following behind. And far back, within the jungle, he was pretty sure he could see Pike climbing down from a tree.
Private Peppy looked at him. “You look injured, exhausted, sick, malnourished, potentially traumatized, and dehydrated,” she said.
“Yes,” Chris replied. “May I have a drink of water?”
Gunnar cut the ropes around his upper body, and Pachrapa tossed him a canteen. He caught it, raised it to his cracked lips, and drained it in one long appreciative swallow. When he was done, he asked, “How did you find me?”
“Oh, you know,” Gunnar said, “our expert hunter and tracker did things like ‘hunt’ and ‘track.’”
Chris nodded. That meant, unfortunately, that he owed Pike his life.
15
“Oh, hell,” Glassner said as he looked Chris over. “You poor guy.”
“That bad, huh?” Chris remarked. He hadn’t seen a reflective surface in a couple of days, come to think of it. “I’m almost positive I’ve got a broken rib over here, but I’m not sure about any other major injuries. I can stand and walk, at least. I could maybe use something to eat.”
“You should be lying down in an infirmary for at least a couple days.” Glassner sighed. “But I suppose we don’t have that option right now, do we?” He fished around in his kit for some painkillers and fever-reducers while Peppy handed Chris an MRE.
Pike approached, striding along at a nice clip, but not hurrying. He carried his hunting rifle in both hands with the barrel angled down and away from his
team and surveyed the scene before him. He chose not to speak yet. Duchesne and Gunnar removed the mercenaries’ bodies. They tossed them onto a pile next to a tree by the nest.
“Thanks,” Chris said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I mean, really. I thought I was dead at least three times and wasn’t sure if, well, you’d come after me or go after the Chimera.”
Pike nodded. “We may need to pursue your former captors very soon,” he began, “but we should take a moment to explain to one another what has happened.” He loaded two bullets into his rifle and brought it back up to max capacity.
“Sleep deprivation,” Peppy chimed in. “Existential crises of meaning as we contemplate the extremely low odds of emerging from this jungle with life, limb, sanity, and so forth still intact. I mean, think of how horrible it would be if—”
“We were unable to track the Chimera,” Pike said, cutting her off. “Due to it having plunged into a stream and followed it. Which way, I don’t know. It is a classic maneuver by properly-trained humans and other intelligent creatures. I could have still determined where it went after that, but it would have taken some time.” He rubbed his eyes and looked at Chris as Glassner continued to examine him. “However, we were able to track you. Or, more specifically, Frankie, since her stealth abilities counted for naught once she was forced to drag you behind her.”
Chris nodded and munched on a bit of food from the MRE. Hungry as he was, it was impossible to get terribly excited about eating the stuff. At least it shut up the rumbling contortions of his stomach. “So you surmised that she’s not to be trusted anymore. That’s good,” Chris added between mouthfuls. “You have my permission to shoot her on sight if she pops up. She’s the one who ruined your trap, by the way. Since her actual employers want the Chimera alive.”
“None of us really knew who she was,” Pike admitted, “though the agents cleared her to serve on this assignment and her skills certainly seemed useful. A very clever double agent, it would seem.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Chris tried not to flush with embarrassment. He wondered how obvious it had been to everyone else that he’d been attracted to her and that she had played him like a violin. Probably pretty fucking obvious. And yet, he almost regretted what he’d said about shooting her. Some stupid part of him still wanted to like her.
Pike continued as Gunnar and Duchesne returned. “In any event, let us get out of obvious sight. The sun will rise soon, and your friends will wonder where those three men have gone. We’ll trail them for now, but not too obviously. As we walk, Dr. Lin, please tell us who the hell those people are and what has happened.”
“At least we know what the chimera was doing with all that scrap it took,” Gunnar said. “Building a house. Looks like it’s a shitty-ass carpenter, though. Nothing to keep out the rain. ‘Water always wins.’ Some guy on TV back in the day used to say that, didn’t he?”
“It doesn’t really rain here, man,” Duchesne said. “We’re still in the goddamn Sahara, even if the UFOs figured out a way to pull water out of the ground or whatever.”
“Leave it to this guy to ruin a perfectly good joke with facts.” Gunnar sighed.
“We’ll want to know everything you discovered about the creature as well,” said Pike, “to determine if we should wait for it or trail the people who were preparing to kill you.”
They all left the clearing and moved in approximately the same southwesterly direction the bounty hunters had set off in and, under Pike’s direction, soon lost themselves in a fairly dense patch of forest. They would not be too far from either the bounty hunters or the chimera’s nest but would be well-hidden from both.
“They’re private contractors,” Chris said, “though, uh, of a less reputable sort than you guys, I guess,” he added, for the benefit of Pike, Duchesne, and Pachrapa. “Someone, supposedly a Saudi prince, is paying them to capture the Chimera and bring it back. Whoever it is, they sure don’t give a shit about collateral damage.”
“And have they captured it?” Pike asked.
“I’m getting to that,” Chris retorted. “Yes and no.”
“They captured half of it?” Gunnar suggested.
Chris ignored him. “Apparently, they’ve been out here for two weeks, and I think someone is smuggling extra supplies in to them. They reacted to a fairly small locust swarm by unloading so much firepower that they destroyed a whole section of the forest. And there’s a good two dozen of them, even after how many of them have already gotten killed. Their operation clearly has a fat budget. Lots of greased palms. Bribes in the right places. Their commander, Micky—total fucking bastard, by the way—is a Russian national, I’m pretty sure. He might have connections with whoever’s running the Russian part of the wall. I really don’t know.”
“That’s exactly the sort of thing the agents were brought in to put a stop to,” Glassner mused. “Or so I heard. They can’t be doing the best job.”
“They might have gotten in before the new ‘reforms’ could be put in place,” Pachrapa suggested.
Chris went on. “Well, in any event, they found the creature’s nest here. I refused to give them information—not like I had much to give, anyway—so they beat the crap out of me and used me as bait. They caught…well, the chimera is a mother. I have no idea who the father is or if the thing even needs to actually mate to reproduce, but…it definitely reproduced. They caught the baby. There’s no sign of the adult yet.”
“There’s a younger one? That complicates matters,” Pike said. “Which one do we go after?”
“If you’re honestly asking my opinion, then I’ll say that we know the Chimera doesn’t really leave the Zoo aside from its raids on the wall. These bounty hunters are definitely taking the baby outside the Zoo, outside the walls, and probably even outside Africa. That’s bad.”
Pike considered for a moment as they crept through the foliage. Dawn had broken, and the black jungle turned a deep gray-green in the rising light. Chris found himself wondering why the hell he had volunteered for this mission. He’d gotten himself badly messed up already and had unpleasant flashbacks to all that had happened during Kemp’s expedition.
Then he remembered his promise to her and the potential the Zoo held for their future.
“The mother will seek out her child,” Pike said, breaking Chris’s thoughts. “We should follow the bounty hunters. We may be able to stop them from smuggling the cub out from under us, and they may be able to lead the mother—which by the way is our true objective—right to us.”
“That’s…not quite what I had in mind,” Chris replied, “but technically true.”
“Do not, sir, confuse this notion of yours that I only care about my ‘trophy,’” said Pike, “with the fact that our orders are to kill the Chimera. In fact, they even told me that the expedition was your idea if I recall correctly.”
Chris took a deep breath and flexed and unflexed his hands. Even if the man had saved his life, having to actually work with him again, to see this misadventure through to the end, might still be slightly difficult.
16
They hadn’t been on the trail long when it seemed that a bomb had gone off somewhere up ahead.
“Christ Almighty! What is that?” Duchesne snapped as they all fell to their knees to make themselves less conspicuous as they looked around. The deafening cacophony went on, longer than a single explosion would have, and they could hear different components of it. It gradually took on the familiar rhythm of gunfire—a veritable barrage of gunfire. Faintly, they thought they could see pulses and flashes of glowing light somewhere ahead.
“A firefight,” said Pike.
“A very one-sided one,” Chris added. “They probably encountered a baby kangarat and three locusts. Maybe even a single suspicious-looking vine fifty feet away. They have a flamethrower on their JLTV, for God’s sake. Does it sound to you guys like they even threw a grenade or something?”
“Yes,” said Gunnar. “I always liked that sound. Ther
e’s something wholesome about a grenade, comforting…knowing it’s out there, getting the job done eight or nine times more effectively than it probably needs to.”
“I once looked up the statistics for how many people accidentally blow themselves up with grenades,” Peppy said. “They were terrible. Just terrible.”
“What about flamethrowers?” Gunnar asked. “I bet there are some fun statistics to go with those. Yessir.”
“Even worse.” Peppy sighed. “Nature has so many ways to subject us all to and abjectly painful demise already, and here we had to go and invent new ones.”
“Why are you even in the Army again?” Gunnar asked.
“Morbid curiosity,” Peppy replied.
“Quiet,” Pike snapped. The gunfire died down, and relative silence returned to the Zoo.
Chris contemplated how it was that no one had heard the bounty hunters deploying that much firepower before. It must have been audible for miles around. Maybe they’d only begun their shoot-first-shoot-second-and-then-shoot-some-more policy since Chris’ capture. They were much closer to their goal than they had originally been. And the fact that Pike’s team was now in the Zoo as well would have provided a mostly-plausible explanation for anyone outside who noticed all the racket.
“They’re moving slower,” Chris said in a flash of inspiration. “Having to actually transport the creature means they can’t hurry along the path of least resistance. They have to blast their way through anything that gets in their way. They must be heading straight for the Russian part of the wall.”
“They were heading southwest, now more due south,” Pike observed. “The Russians control the eastern part of Wall One. The Chinese the south. British west. We control the north as the most direct point of access from civilization.”