by Michael Todd
It was almost noon, bright and hot outside beneath the equatorial sun. Peppy was climbing into the driver’s seat of one of the base’s standard, all-purpose vehicles, a sort of hybrid between a Jeep and an ATV called a JLTV. It had a mounted machine gun, storage space, and room for a few men to squeeze in if need be. She checked the fuel gauge and nodded as she fired up the engine.
Gunnar loaded the extra weapons in the front passenger seat, then leaped up to take his place at the gun turret. Chris swung into the back seat with the medkit, radio locator, and an herbicide bomb he’d also found.
A few hundred feet behind them was the seminar for the rookies. An NCO, hearing the engine start, darted away from what he was doing toward the trio, waving his arms. “What the hell are you doing?” he snapped.
The vehicle started, heading slowly toward the gate at first but picking up speed very quickly.
Chris called back over his shoulder at the man, “Be right back!”
2
“Hey!” someone on the wall shouted as they approached.
“Distress call!” Chris yelled back.
Peppy was pushing the gas pedal steadily toward the floor of the vehicle. “Open the fucking gate!” she bellowed. Chris had never heard her raise her voice that much, either; between that and actually laughing, today was a milestone in more ways than one.
The gate was already half-open, and someone must have gotten the message since the other half retracted just in time. Chris frantically tried to strap himself into his seat as Peppy gunned it. Behind him on the turret, Gunnar had strapped himself around the waist to his machine gun and was braced against it, teeth gritted. The wall zipped past, and they were right on the edge of the Zoo.
“He said a klick or less!” Chris helpfully reminded the driver. As she veered to the side, making for the semi-accessible gap in the jungle foliage that teams typically used to enter the Zoo, Chris checked the radio locator. “Yup, right ahead,” he added.
“Ain’t this some fun,” Gunnar forced himself to say. His voice was tense and warbling. He sounded scared. Chris had driven with Peppy before, so this wasn’t anything particularly new to him. It simply meant that colliding with a tree would likely result in multiple fatalities. That was all.
The bright, hot sunlight ended as the dark green leaves and vines and branches closed around them. It was as though a screen had been pulled over the sky above their heads. The jungle drew in its breath as they entered it.
“Keep an eye out for logs,” Chris said to Peppy, although the team should have removed any of those on their way in. It was growing more and more common to take vehicles into the Zoo, and obstacles of that sort were regarded as major hazards.
“Yeah, yeah,” Peppy replied. “We wouldn’t want to encounter a dead piece of wood on our way to dealing with whatever demons from hell are attacking those guys.”
She had a point there. As they zipped into the jungle and the sounds of gunfire and commotion grew louder and clearer, Chris grabbed the herbicide bomb he’d brought. He had not invented it, sadly. Rather, his reports and suggestions had led to the guys in R&D coming up with it after talking to some of the troops. Its core was an M-80—a glorified firecracker, really—surrounded by the most powerful herbicide they could get their hands on. Chris had observed that all the organisms in the Zoo seemed interconnected to some degree; the ecosystem operated as a unified whole. Therefore, he hypothesized that something designed to kill the plants might also work against the animals. Based on the test reports, this was indeed the case.
“There they are!” Gunnar shouted from his perch. It was easy to see what he was referring to.
Up ahead, an entire column of bluish shapes about the size of large dogs or deer was swooping onto the path. Chimeras—baby ones. Ever since the mother Chimera had secured her nest two months or so ago, more of the creatures had been sighted. They were perhaps most like giant birds, but they also had mammalian and reptilian features, and from their backs sprouted weaponized tentacles that could grow feathers and double as wings.
“Damn, they’re not alone,” Chris observed. Something brown flashed through the trees, heading in the same direction as the Chimeras. That would be a kangarat—one of the man-sized, rodent-marsupial hybrids that had terrorized human intruders in the Zoo since Kemp’s first expedition. Chris hated them more than any other denizen of the place. The danger of what they were doing suddenly struck home, and yet, the confidence he’d felt moments ago in the tent had not left him. They were all experienced.
They knew what they were doing in here.
Gunfire sounded again, and this time Chris could see the muzzle flashes and a few tracer rounds cutting through the greenery up ahead, right where the Chimeras were heading. They were almost there.
“I think I’m just going to ram a bunch of them,” Peppy said, back to her usual moroseness.
“Could you maybe let us try to shoot them first?” Gunnar protested. He began powering up his machine gun turret and swiveled it toward the moving column of monsters.
“No one’s stopping you from shooting now, before I ram the ones you miss,” said Peppy.
Gunnar snorted. “‘Miss,’ she says. I don’t miss much…”
It was true, Chris thought.
Even over the roar of the engine, the gun’s report was deafeningly loud. Flames leaped from the barrel and streaks of lead zipped out in a line so tight it looked in places as though an invisible saw were cutting through the jungle. Gunnar had started by aiming near the back of the line of Chimeras. Half a dozen of them exploded in firework-spreads of feathers, scales, and splattering gore. He worked his way forward from there, herding the now-terrified creatures onto the path directly ahead of them.
“See, I’m giving us a bigger cushion!” Gunnar shouted.
“Looks very, very soft,” replied Peppy. She had slowed just a bit when they’d sighted the creatures to allow Gunnar to aim, but now she floored it again. The wind whipped by and the mass of Chimeras ballooned in size. They were almost on top of them.
“Here we go…” Chris breathed. He cradled the herbicide bomb against him so he wouldn’t drop it when—
Crash—their windshield turned at once red with blood and blue with feathers, a crack blooming in the glass. All of them jerked forward, wind knocked out of their lungs, seatbelts painfully straining against their midsections, feeling like their brains and stomachs had flown ahead of them. The JLTV vibrated crazily as Chimeras scattered away from them in three directions.
“Wasn’t too bad,” Gunnar wheezed.
Chris pressed the button that armed his bomb. A quick glance showed the largest concentration of Chimeras plus a couple of kangarats to his right. “Hey, guys, catch!” he called and lobbed it toward them.
The M-80 burst with a gunshot-worthy crack and a cloud of yellowish vapor rose from the jungle floor. Several of the Chimeras screeched horribly and tried to flee, but some slumped and died as the cloud enveloped them. A fat, hideous kangarat made a gasping sound and fell from a tree, crashing heavily into the underbrush. The remaining creatures scattered. And the underbrush, meanwhile, wilted and turned dull brown.
Before Chris could come up with some clever remark celebrating his victory, Gunnar fired the machine gun again. Another kangarat and another five or six more Chimeras were ripped apart, screaming as their bodies were totally devastated by the onslaught. And yet, they had already begun to regroup, and were preparing to attack the JLTV.
Peppy unbuckled herself, stood, and raised an M-92 automatic rifle, then took aim and fired. A Chimera’s head shattered into red fragments as it leaped onto the hood of the vehicle.
Chris had to admit that this was kind of fun. While Gunnar and Peppy focused on unloading the heavy firepower, he got out of the vehicle, pistol at the ready, and headed toward the dark corner of the path where he’d seen the muzzles flashing. His bomb and Gunnar’s first barrage had largely cleared that area of monsters, the Zoo’s guardians having been mostly corralle
d into the jungle to the left.
“Hey, this way!” Chris yelled. Now he could see.
There were three of them, all young men, and all looking ragged and terrified. One looked like a scientist; the other two were clearly soldiers. They stood back to back in a triangle, the two soldiers blasting at stray Chimeras with their rifles. The scientist was armed only with a knife. All three looked at Chris at the same time and did not hesitate for even an instant; they bolted. Or tried to. One of the soldiers, a thirtyish Latino guy, lagged behind, wounded somewhere in his abdomen and leaving a trail of blood as he struggled forward. He stopped and fell to his knees.
“Shit,” Chris exclaimed. His good mood evaporated. He now recalled that there had been seven people on the team originally, and apparently these three were all that was left. He turned and motioned Peppy to pull the vehicle up to them. She did so, firing her rifle one-handed and braced against the doorframe as she did. Gunnar stopped shooting from his turret. The barrel of his machine gun had begun to glow, and he’d burned through a lot of ammo. Fortunately, the horde had mostly retreated by now.
As Chris started to help the three men into the JLTV, he noticed a flicker of blue motion ahead. A single Chimera had gotten around the vehicle. The healthy soldier, a tall white guy, moved toward the creature to cover the escape of his comrades, but the Chimera shot out one of its barbed tentacles. The man’s rifle flared to life just as it fell from his grasp. The man toppled back, groaning, his lower throat and shoulder slashed open.
“Dammit!” Chris raised his pistol and emptied half the mag into the creature responsible. It tried to dodge, but wasn’t quick enough; one of its forelimbs shattered and its head fell to the side in a spray of blood, hanging by a thread as the creature toppled.
The man who’d been struck by the tentacle was effectively dead since half his blood had soaked into the ground, but Chris nevertheless heaved him, bleeding and twitching, into the JLTV next to the others.
“Go,” he said.
Peppy nodded, swung the vehicle around in a tight circle, and gunned it once more. In only a moment they were clear of the Zoo. Once back in the sunshine they saw armed men grouping near the gate, preparing to head in after them.
“Okay, slow down,” Chris said.
“I suppose.” Peppy sighed.
“What the goddamn fucking hell were you doing!?” A man practically screamed, red-faced. It was the same NCO who’d asked the same question when they’d first driven out, Chris saw.
“There wasn’t time,” Chris said. “Urgent distress call. We barely rescued these three.” These two, really. And the other soldier, the Latino guy, was pretty seriously wounded; he was ghostly pale, breathing only faintly; he might well be dead in a few more minutes. The scientist had also taken a slash across the arm. He would live, but for now, he just stared and gibbered.
Chris listened to the man’s ravings as they helped the injured men out of the JLTV. He was clutching a bag or satchel of some sort. “She’s real,” the man said, his eyes like dinner plates. “She’s real, she’s real, she’s real. And she’ll eat us…”
Hearing this, the hairs on the back of Chris’ neck stood up. Had this man seen the mother Chimera? Even that creature, frightening as she was, was well-known on the base. Chris had the disturbing suspicion that this scientist was referring to something else altogether.
“She’s going to eat us all!” the man went on in a hoarse, thin voice as Chris and Gunnar tried to help him out. “She’ll devour the whole world, goddammit!”
“Easy there, my friend,” Gunnar soothed.
The man dropped his bag, and Chris blinked and squinted at what rolled out of it—a single piece of red fruit.
3
Obviously, someone hadn’t been following protocol. Chris sighed.
The fruit lay on a sheet of antiseptic glass under the bright lights in his lab, just asking to be examined. So far, things didn’t look good.
“Contaminated,” Chris muttered, snapping on latex gloves to go with the safety goggles he’d already donned. “They probably grabbed the damn thing off the ground bare-handed. Half-crushed it in the process. Dirt all over it.” He looked it over, top to bottom and side to side. “Overripe; probably fell from a tree on its own at the original time of collection.” It looked somehow too plump, and yet too shriveled. It was red; Chris got the impression that at peak ripeness it would have been a bright blood color, but now it was more the color of drying blood or perhaps red wine. And yet something about it looked appetizing…
Chris fetched a scalpel and a pair of tweezers and returned to his patient to its glass bed. “All right, my little friend,” he announced, “this is going to hurt. A lot.” Smirking, he recalled something he’d seen on the Internet as a kid about some doctors who performed surgery on a grape. Supposedly the grape had later died of complications. He used the tweezers to hold a small bulging section of the fruit and cut gently near the base of the same part with the scalpel. Hardly any force was required; the fruit was soft, and the blade glided right through it. The piece came loose in a shower of golden juice.
“Huh,” Chris said, raising the piece to his face. The smell hit him then—an absolutely mouth-watering aroma. His stomach knotted with hunger and he was almost drooling. He blinked in surprise at his reaction. The urge to pop the little chunk directly into his mouth was incredibly strong, but he was a scientist, dammit. Not only might that be hazardous, but it would ruin his sample. He took a deep breath and told himself no. Instead of eating it, he placed it under a microscope.
Nothing he could see under the grosser levels of focus was particularly noteworthy. It looked like fruit; nothing more or less. Fairly similar to an apple, a plum, or a pear, he estimated, although clearly a unique species, like everything else from the Zoo. When he zoomed in and examined its textures and structures in finer detail, however, something about it seemed odd. It was difficult to say exactly what. He would have to look up some references; compare it to other things and so forth. In the meantime, there were a few other tests he could perform.
A younger scientist, a guy named Brandon, wandered over and sidled up. “What in God’s name is that thing?” he asked.
“Not sure God would know,” Chris replied, holding up the sample with his tweezers and staring at it, “but I’m going to attempt to find out anyway. A piece of fruit someone brought back from the Zoo. I never saw anything like it when I was in there.”
“Still can’t believe you were actually in there. For days on end, even.” Brandon shook his head, but Chris could sense the young man’s admiration. He tried not to let it go to his head. The last thing they needed was for their few trained researchers to start volunteering to get themselves killed on expeditions.
“I can’t really believe it either, to be honest,” Chris replied. “I should probably have died. Speaking of which, do not touch this fruit. In fact, take a couple of steps back. It smells awful damn tasty, and I don’t want anyone eating my sample.”
“Right, right,” Brandon agreed, obeying instantly.
Chris walked past him and took the little piece to another table, where he performed a few basic chemical tests. These procedures quickly confirmed a suspicion he’d had: the fruit had toxic properties. Rather potent ones, too, from the look of it. Comparable to very powerful snake venom, he guessed. What he didn’t know, though, was if this was an intentional defense mechanism of the Zoo’s or simply a side-effect of its alien biology.
Next, he tried distilling the piece into a liquid to better determine how it performed in action. As the distillation apparatus hummed, Chris glanced around the lab, seeking a fitting subject.
There—in the case in the corner. A harmless weed he’d collected from the Zoo about two weeks ago, and was growing in a patch of soil within a quarantined case. That plant had already taught them all it could, so it was now expendable. By cutting it off from external water supplies as well as the external atmosphere they’d almost killed it, yet it came back
to life, healthy and green, as soon as it was allowed access to air. The dead sand in which they’d planted it turned darker and moist. This suggested that the Zoo’s plants synthesized their own water out of the hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, confirming a long-standing hypothesis.
The machine finished its coffee-maker-like process, resulting in about a tablespoon of bright golden fluid pooled in the cup on the little shelf. Chris took it in a gloved hand, being very careful not to spill any (especially not on himself) and brought it over to the case where the weed grew.
“Okay then, my friend,” he murmured to the plant, then opened the top of the case and dumped the liquid onto it.
To his shock, the plant shriveled and turned brownish-black almost instantly. It even steamed a bit. “Whoa!” he exclaimed.
Brandon had come over to watch. “I definitely won’t be eating that fruit, then, yeah,” he quipped.
“Might be better as a kitchen disinfectant than as part of a balanced meal,” Chris returned. He placed a knuckle on his chin. Among Earth species, it wasn’t uncommon for one organism to be toxic to another, of course. The Zoo’s creatures, though…they were something else. It seemed they had an almost familial relationship with one another; symbiosis and mutual benefit beyond what was typical even in the most stable and well-developed ecosystems native to this planet. Some of them ate each other on occasion, but that happened only as needed, and without the usual friction associated with predators and prey.
What was the point of this fruit, then? Did it contain some further secret the Zoo was desperate to protect, so desperate that it threatened its own children with instant death if they violated it? Or was the Zoo changing again? What they’d already seen strongly suggested that the Zoo’s creatures were capable of some sort of rapidly-accelerated “hyper-evolution.” Perhaps the alien jungle was preparing to expand, which might require a more diversified and competitive ecosystem—one closer to the adversarial clusterfuck that prevailed on Earth.