by Michael Todd
Chris took one more step.
“This jungle,” Kemp went on, “is not a threat to humanity. It’s a gift. Our world needed for this place to be born here. I was right. It holds so much potential.”
“I knew it!” Chris exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to continue your work.”
“The jungle revived me,” Kemp explained, her strangely-altered voice growing louder and more resonant. “I was nearly dead, but it revived me. Healed me. Improved me.” One of her knees rose and then fell as she stepped closer toward him.
“But how could that have happened?” Chris asked. He was still confused and even faintly afraid, but he felt powerfully and irresistibly drawn to her nonetheless. His feet obeyed the impulse; they weren’t more than ten paces apart now. “The locusts turned into monsters when the Zoo got hold of them. How could you have retained your—”
“Humanity,” Kemp interrupted, the exact word Chris had been about to say, “can have a place in the overall scheme of things, even with everything you’ve done wrong. You can have a place here, Chris.”
What did that mean? Was the Zoo learning to tolerate humankind? Trying to develop something like a cease-fire or a peace treaty? Would whatever traces of the Yufos’ intelligence that remained embedded in this jungle allow humans to tame and domesticate them? That was what Dr. Marie had wanted, and Kemp, and Chris—to turn this place’s savagery around and make the whole of Earth a garden.
“I want you here with me, Chris,” Kemp said, taking another step closer. “I want you by my side while we finish our work and save the world. That was what I always wanted, remember? To help living things. You agreed with me. You promised to help me finish my work.”
“Yes,” Chris replied and took first one, then two steps closer to her. “How will we do that, though? I need to know more, Emma. You have so much information now that we could use. If you would just…come with—”
“Come with me,” she interrupted, her voice having regained the tone of command she’d used when ordering her troops around, although it still had a lush sweetness to it, as well as that mysterious undertone of rustling leaves. She took one more step forward and reached out. Now he could see the silver light of the stars glinting in her eyes.
Chris reached out as well. They were so close now; one more step and their fingers would brush together, and he would take her hand. No, that was wrong. She would take his hand. That, somehow, seemed far more likely. Chris took a deep breath.
Behind them, a twig snapped, and leaves and vines sighed as they were crushed beneath a heavy metal object. Or perhaps a foot. Chris spun, shocked, snapping out of the near-trance he’d been in.
Wallace was at the edge of the open patch of weeds, one eye squinting at them through the cybernetic lens that had unfolded from his headpiece. His rifle, tight against cheek and shoulder, was aimed at Kemp.
“Don’t move,” he said.
11
“What are you doing?” Chris gasped.
“I said don’t move!” Wallace responded, his voice almost a growl. He took a step closer to both of them.
Kemp stood where she was but brought her arms slowly inward and up, her dark gaze now turned to the man who had once been her second-in-command.
“Put your hands up!” Wallace barked.
Chris’ hands shot up into the air, mostly in surprise, and he backed out of Wallace’s line of fire. The man was looking at Kemp, not at him. Kemp, for her part, began to obey, but not quickly, her hands moving as though underwater. “Hands on your head!” Wallace went on.
“Erik,” said Chris, “it’s Kemp! We found her! It’s okay, man!”
Wallace ignored him. The former sergeant had fixed his whole attention on the nude woman in the narrow valley, the fog of intoxication created by the purple fern utterly gone from his consciousness now. He was focused, it seemed, on keeping her on the correct end of his rifle. “On your head!” he repeated, now shouting loud enough for his voice to grow raw at the edges.
Kemp’s hands planted themselves atop her head, restraining some of the tresses that had been blowing in the night’s breeze.
Wallace spared a hand for a second to tap his headpiece, and Chris faintly heard radio feedback. “Sergeant Antoine, Sergeant Grimaldi, come in. Over,” he said into it. No response was forthcoming. “Sergeants, I want half the platoon tracking my position within ninety seconds. Over.”
“What the hell are you doing, Wallace!?” Chris burst out. His voice shook, and butterflies flitted in his stomach. He felt close to panic. Wallace was acting like he was on the verge of arresting her…or executing her. He quickly held up a hand toward Chris palm out, once again telling him to be quiet.
“You’re making a mistake,” Kemp said softly.
“If you move other than as directed by me,” Wallace replied, using the harshest command tone he was capable of, “I will kill you. Is that clear? Now, slowly get down on your knees. Do it.” His finger upon the trigger squeezed a bit tighter.
“No,” Chris breathed. They were so close. He was still confused, and he couldn’t make sense of the chaos of emotions within him at this moment. “No, no, no…” There was, however, nothing he could do. Why was Wallace acting like this? Was there something he knew that Chris didn’t?
“Keep your hands on your head!” Wallace repeated. Kemp had sunk to her knees but had begun to move her hands back out toward her sides. She obeyed Wallace’s order, though.
“Foolish, foolish man,” Kemp said. She was staring back at Wallace with a kind of mesmeric intensity that Chris unexpectedly found rather creepy. Something about her was just a bit off, he had to admit. “You think you’re just here to clean up a mess, wring out your towel, and go home, but oh, there’s so much more to it than that. You have no idea. You don’t even realize that time is almost up.”
Chris looked at her. Dropping to her knees had put her more directly in the path of the faint shafts of moonlight and starlight falling into the little ravine, and for the first time Chris noticed—or thought he noticed—a faint greenish tint to her skin.
“Shut up,” Wallace said. He advanced a couple steps toward her. “Do not move one inch from your current position.” He spoke into his headpiece again. “Sergeants, are you hearing me? Over.”
“Your time is almost at an end,” Kemp went on, ignoring him. “People like you have no place in this world. Brutes and destroyers, men with souls of metal—and now, even bodies of metal.”
Chris stared at her as Wallace continued to move closer. She still looked like Kemp, but there were a few things that were just a bit odd. Her skin looked almost too smooth and perfect in places, whereas in others it looked somehow too rough, almost as if it were burned or diseased or gangrenous.
But whatever had happened to her during these long months, he couldn’t let Wallace kill her. Her mind had clearly been affected. She might not realize what she was doing, or how one wrong movement or even one wrong word could lead to her getting her head blown off. It could not be allowed to happen. Chris wanted to be sick.
“My time was supposed to be at an end on several occasions before now, Emma,” Wallace said, now almost as close to her as Chris was, “and yet here I stand. Don’t fuck with me.”
Kemp laughed. There was a cold and unhinged haughtiness to that laugh that made Chris’ balls shrivel.
“My Garden doesn’t like it when I’m threatened,” she stated.
No sooner had the echoing double-tracked sound of her voice faded than something rustled through the trees and weeds behind where Chris stood. It was large, whatever it was, although its movements were deliberate and very much land-based—maybe a huge kangarat that couldn’t find trees nearby sturdy enough to support it, or…what? Chris felt a sinking sensation as it approached. It was moving fast.
“Wallace?” he said.
Before his conscious mind could react, Chris dropped and rolled. His years of martial arts training had not deserted him; most of his reflexes were still sharp. He sen
sed rather than saw something big sail over him, casting him in shadow.
“Shit!” Wallace burst out. The mechanisms of his exoskeleton whirred, and he leaped backward to the tree line.
Chris came up from his roll in a kneeling position. Now he could see.
The thing that had burst out of the jungle—coming to Kemp’s rescue?—was not a creature he’d encountered before. It was somehow worse. It was enormous, bigger even than the largest kangarats. Three times the size of a man—comparable to a great warhorse—yet it looked like nothing so much as a gigantic cat that had been injected in utero with the DNA of a tiger shark. It was lean but incredibly powerful-looking. Its flat, glassy fish-eyes flitted back and forth between Wallace and Chris, bespeaking a primitive and bestial intelligence that existed for the sole purpose of finding the best way to kill things. Its top lip curled, revealing multiple rows of jagged teeth. It hissed.
Wallace fired his rifle at the same instant the creature pounced. The gun’s report clove the peaceful silence of the night air, but its flash was already pointing skywards. The bristling, purplish form of the giant cat-thing had bowled into Wallace so fast it might as well have teleported.
“No!” Chris cried out. He could no longer see Kemp, but she had ceased to be his main focus. He sprang toward where his friend and the creature now struggled on the ground. Wallace was making a sound halfway between a groan and a furious battle-cry, while the cat-thing snarled and yowled.
Chris drew his pistol. The cat’s clawed, almost human forepaw had gotten stuck on the metal gauntlet that covered Wallace’s left hand and forearm, but the creature was so big it was about to simply crush him. Chris aimed at its eye and fired.
A purplish flash and a yellow fire-bloom appeared and the pistol was suddenly airborne, while Chris was knocked sideways, stumbling forward to avoid falling. He half-saw, half-felt the thing about to pounce on him. Gritting his teeth in nearly-crazed exhilaration, he somersaulted around the nearest tree. The cat crashed into it instead of him, shattering the trunk. The impact was enough to stun the creature, however.
“Get down!” Wallace shouted. Chris dropped and heard rifle fire. The cat snarled again in bestial rage and then once more it flash-stepped away, gone before their eyes could follow it.
Chris popped to his hands and knees, and then to his feet. Wallace was also standing and once more aiming his rifle, now at the monstrosity that had come to Kemp’s aid. It had retreated partway into the jungle, and seeing it half-hidden by the leaves and branches and tall grass made its appearance even more terrifying. Here was the apex predator man and most other species had evolved to fear; a nearly perfect killer. Lurking.
“Where’s Kemp!?” Wallace raged but kept his eyes and his rifle on the cat.
It was the creature rather than Chris who answered. It opened its jaws, and to their horror its mouth seemed almost too big for the creature who owned it, lined with shark-like teeth seemingly halfway back into its throat. It roared, both louder and higher-pitched than its distant leonine cousins, and the sound was tinged with anger and hate.
Wallace responded with his gun. Two three-shot bursts rang out, shredding the foliage where the cat-thing crouched and filling the cool air with a mist of atomized blood, but the beast was gone.
And so, for that matter, was Kemp.
12
Chris and Wallace were already walking. Already, without having spoken or really thought about what they did, heading back to camp. It was the only thing to do.
“Okay,” Chris started, tramping through the shadowy jungle as he tried to keep up with his friend, “what the hell just happened?” Rational, coherent thought was returning. He felt chilled and hollow and shaky. “What in God’s name were you doing, Wallace?”
“The hell do you think I was doing?” Wallace growled back. “Fulfilling the second parameter of our mission.”
“You were about to kill her! For fuck’s sake, man!” Chris ran a hand through his hair as he stomped through weeds and clambered over mossy fallen logs.
Wallace’s longer and cybernetically-augmented legs allowed him to outpace his companion. He paused for a moment to permit Chris to catch up, although the muscles around his square jaw were taut with tension or perhaps even anger.
Chris didn’t understand. Either Wallace was having some kind of repressed overreaction to Kemp’s presence or there was something else going on that Chris didn’t know about.
“Orders are orders,” Wallace said. He swung a dented metal fist backhand through the air, swatting aside a vine-hung branch and breaking it. Following him, Chris saw clearly the wire from the waist-down apparatus plugged into the back of Wallace’s headpiece almost like an old USB cord. The exoskeleton must have been reading the neuroelectric signals from his brain. This meant that, on some level, Wallace was controlling his movements with his thoughts and will. He was still striding smoothly. Did that mean his self-control was so great that even after what they’d just been through, he had no problem focusing on maintaining his gait?
“What orders?” Chris asked. The parameter he had received from Director Hall was simply to find Kemp and presumably bring her back.
Wallace slowed to heave a log out of his way. It looked like it weighed a good three hundred pounds. His exoskeleton whirred a bit louder, but the man did not expend much effort in tossing it aside. It slowed him a bit, though. Chris caught up to him, put a hand on his arm, and stepped into the man’s path. Wallace stopped.
“What orders, Wallace?” Chris glared up into his friend’s eyes. “You owe me an explanation of that, at least. I distracted that thing before it could squash you like a cockroach.”
Wallace sighed, his steely demeanor softening as it sometimes did when Chris said something true. “Yes,” he admitted, “and thank you.” Then his jaw tightened again. “Don’t keep arguing with me, though, especially not after we get back to camp.”
“Whatever,” Chris replied. “Just tell me.”
The jungle around them was once again mostly quiet. Wallace was framed between two black trees, a sliver of midnight-blue sky visible through the canopy over his head. “Even before that scientist you saved was brought back and started ranting and raving,” he said, “there was…intel that strongly suggested Kemp was still alive.”
“What? How?” Chris felt hurt by this, in the gut; betrayed, almost. Why hadn’t someone told him?
“Hall,” Wallace continued. “Seems he knew a lot of things and was pulling some of the strings even before he arrived to take over the base. As I understand it, he was the man behind the Agents or at least one of several men.”
Chris calmed down some. He was still in the grip of multiple emotions that pulled him in several directions at once, but this new information demanded his powers of analytical thought. In order to think clearly, he had no choice but to push his emotions to the sidelines. “When I met him,” Chris said, “he did mention that he was on the committee that oversaw the creation of this new agency within the Department of Defense—whatever the hell it is.”
“Yes.” Wallace nodded. “He knows more about the Zoo than he should, or at least more than what we’ve been told, even though we’re the ones who keep having to deal with the place. But that’s how the chain of command works.”
“Yeah, I know,” Chris grumbled, not wanting to hear another lecture about orders and the hierarchy and other military ethics stuff. “How the hell did he get this intel, though?”
“I don’t know, Chris. I really don’t.” Wallace started walking again in what Chris hoped was the direction of their camp, but slower now.
Chris followed a couple of feet behind Wallace’s left elbow. “Okay, so what does Hall’s mysterious intel say about Kemp? What does this have to do with her?”
Wallace’s face was turned away and veiled by shadows, but in the ensuing pause, Chris could picture the man frowning or grimacing—dutiful and tough, but solemn. “I received a short briefing on that subject,” he said after a long pause. �
�The intel suggests that Kemp isn’t right.”
“’Isn’t right?’ Well, did they expect her to be totally ‘right’ after she’s had to survive in this hellhole for months?” Chris threw up his hands in exasperation as he walked. Typical bureaucrat mentality. The type of crap that both soldiers and scientists had to hear from the desk-jockeying higher-ups who concocted ideal scenarios and then reacted with confusion when they got less-than-ideal results, even after the people on the ground had warned them.
“It goes beyond that, Chris,” Wallace went on. “I don’t just mean that she’s tired, hungry, scared, or even a little crazy by now. I mean what they told me is that she might not still be…human, at least not entirely. The Zoo might have gotten to her—gotten into her. Changed her.”
Chris’ jaw went slack at that. Not only was the claim outrageous, but how could they possibly have intel to suggest something like that? No one had seen or heard from Kemp until Stroganov’s team…had they?
“Hall and his people seem to think,” Wallace continued, “that Kemp may be the one acting as the Zoo’s guiding hand now. That she’s been contributing knowledge that the place has made use of. Thwarting our progress, helping it adapt, giving it new ideas for how to fight us.”
“Jesus,” Chris said. That was a serious allegation.
“He’s even suggested that the Chimera may have been her idea.” Wallace pushed aside a wall of foliage, and beyond it Chris could see the outline of their JLTV and hear the faint sounds of humans snoring. They’d made it back.
Chris breathed a sigh of relief, but now something else was making him uneasy: the prospect, far-fetched though it was, that what Wallace was saying might be true. Maybe. The mother Chimera had shown extraordinary intelligence; even an understanding of battle tactics and strategy. And its appearance seemed designed to fool and confuse the human eye.