by Michael Todd
“Wallace, we’re threatening her,” he said. “Couldn’t we fall back slightly and maybe offer to send someone in to talk to her? I’ll volunteer to do it. She spoke to me last night, after all, and said she wanted to talk to me and work with me.”
“Offense instead of defense, Dr. Lin,” Wallace replied. Whenever he referred to Chris as “Dr. Lin,” there was no reasoning with him. “The Zoo has gotten too smart, and it’s given us enough trouble. Whether we have to do it the easy way or the hard way, today we cut the head off the proverbial goddamn serpent.”
“Please,” Chris almost begged, “just let me talk to her before we do anything stupid!”
Wallace ignored him. The mouthpiece attached to his cranial unit unfolded before his face, lit up, and hummed. Briefly, they could all hear the hugely magnified sound of their commander’s breath. The mic doubled as a megaphone, then. Into it, Wallace spoke a single word:
“Kemp.”
It was loud enough that the sentries on Wall 01, which was over three miles back through the jungle, might have heard its echo.
Wallace placed a finger on the mouthpiece and it dimmed. In a normal voice, he said to the plasma unit, “Now that we have her attention, I want the six of you in a semicircle, inside the perimeter formed by the rest of the platoon, one hundred yards from the edge of that thing.”
“Yes, sir,” they said and rushed to obey. All of them pulled the goggles atop their heads down over their eyes and flipped switches on their weapons, which buzzed almost disturbingly in a way that seemed to warn of incredible destructive power.
“Santos,” Wallace said. Of the soldiers in the strange scuba-like suits and backpacks, she was the one closest to the acting lieutenant. “Count to twenty and then give a quick demonstration. Fire into the air; don’t hit anything.”
“Finally!” Santos replied, grinning broadly. Her lithe body almost trembled with excitement.
“Everyone, avoid looking directly at the flame,” Wallace directed.
A moment later, Santos hit the count of twenty. She pointed her plasma-thrower skyward and fired.
A high-pitched sound, half-rushing and half-shrieking, filled the air, and it seemed the surrounding sky went dark in contrast to the brilliance of the stream of shining plasma-flame that blasted from Santos’ weapon. The flame had a pure white core surrounded by blazing blue-violet fire. The sight was both thrilling and terrifying, and Chris almost shrank back. It was a bit like someone had ignited a colossal lightsaber. Then it faded to nothing, and the quality of light around them returned to its natural state.
“Goddamn, Santos!” Jackson exclaimed. “I mean I’ve heard there are certain diseases that cause you to pee fire, but—”
“Dude, she has a fucking plasma flamethrower,” someone else cautioned him. “Shut the fuck up!”
Santos seemed too happy at having gotten to fire her weapon to have even noticed Jackson’s remark.
“All right, quiet,” Wallace said. He turned his megaphone-app back on. “Kemp,” he said again, “consider that a warning. Come out now and surrender to us. If you comply, you will not be harmed. If you fail to comply, we will burn this place down to a puddle of carbon atoms.” He paused. “Don’t make us do that, Emma. Come out. Now.”
Please, Chris thought, listen to him, Kemp. Listen to him and do what he says. If she did, he might at least have the opportunity to negotiate with her before she could do or say anything weird and someone’s trigger finger started to itch.
In the humid heat and bright sunlight they all stood in total silence. Silent, that is, except for the peaceful sounds of the jungle, which seemed to grow louder as their patience waned and their anticipation waxed. The living vines breathed. A gentle wind rustled the grass and leaves. A few regular birds and insects of the Sahara, having unwisely wandered into this dangerous place, zipped and flitted about and chirped or clicked or hummed. It was almost pleasant.
And the plasma-throwers buzzed.
Wallace took a deep breath. They all heard it, amplified by his cybernetic mouthpiece. He was about to give the next order.
“No,” Chris said. “Please, for God’s sake, no!”
Then she complied.
15
Emma Kemp appeared in the dark archway that led into the plant-fortress. Her form seemed almost to coalesce out of the shadows, and it took everyone a moment to realize that she was there.
“Whaaaat the fuck?” the guy next to Chris said. He must not have been expecting…that.
The woman looked essentially the same as she had last night, but it was somehow different in the light of day, not to mention under the present circumstances. She was still naked, her hair loose and flowing, and she still moved with a kind of slow, deliberate grace and grandeur as she descended the bent tree trunk a couple of steps, coming clearly into sight. Her body was, Chris supposed, even leaner than the athletic state she’d been in when he’d first met her months ago. There weren’t a lot of cheeseburgers out here.
There was something else, though—something Chris had remembered but had hoped he’d been wrong about. Had hoped would turn out to have just been a distortion in perspective caused by moonlight and Happy-Fern trippage.
It wasn’t a distortion, though. Her skin was definitely greenish.
Chris raised a hand and looked straight at her. He had to speak but felt frozen. The glade was silent again save for the ambient natural sounds, and those of the plasma-throwers. Something seemed wrong. The “vibe” he was getting from her was different than it had been last night. He should speak up; he should seize the initiative now before anyone else could—
“All right, Kemp,” Wallace announced. “Your cooperation so far is appreciated. I hope you can also appreciate that you are in no position to threaten us again or try to negotiate better terms for yourself. You do as we say; you come with us, no questions asked.”
She took one more step down the tree, now about halfway between the entrance to her lair and the ground outside it. Her arms once again were spread to the sides, hands open and palms facing outward. “Erik,” she said, “since when do you tell me what to do?”
Chris had to admit, he was getting a bit unnerved. That softer side of her he’d seen and heard last night, that welcoming sweetness, was utterly gone. In its place, something else had sprung from bud to full blossom—the cold, haughty, almost vicious arrogance she had displayed right before “Bruce” had attacked them. She seemed totally confident in herself and totally contemptuous of her guests. Something about her demeanor reminded Chris of a wealthy diva actress confronting a drunken ex-boyfriend on the front lawn of her mansion, pausing to toy with him before she called in her private security forces to rough him up before delivering him to the police.
Yet, even given how confident and sometimes harsh she had been in the past, was this not evidence that her mind had been affected? She’d never been like this before, hardass though she was. They had to help her.
“I do what I’m ordered to do, Kemp,” Wallace answered, “as well you know. Except this time, we went through the proper channels and brought a proper force. If you want your old life back, your old authority and the respect you used to have from people—from us—then you need to come with me.”
Kemp tilted her head back and laughed. It was a soft, relatively controlled laugh, but there was a nastiness to it that Chris did not like at all. The other troops, surrounding her while heavily armed as they were, squirmed in place and tensed up. They must not have liked it either. That laugh made it sound too much like she knew something they didn’t. Perhaps the greenish hue of her skin was due to some infection that was making her delirious? Chris had to intervene, somehow.
“Kemp,” he said, shouting to ensure he was heard across the nearly two hundred yards that separated him from her. “We’re not here to hurt you or anything. It’s me, Chris, okay? I’m here because they knew you’d listen to me. I know you’ve been out here a long time, and maybe you think the Zoo is your friend now. May
be you’ve even started to think that we’re your enemies, but we’re not. We’re all on the same team. America, right? And the human species.”
The woman turned her head slightly to look at Chris. Something in her gaze made him even more uncomfortable. She looked…hungry, like a predator viewing the prey it was about to invite to a meal. She’d probably had to kill things for food out here. Chris didn’t even want to think about what it must do to someone’s psychological state to have to eat a baby kangarat or some such creature, for lunch.
“What makes the human species so special, Doctor?” she asked, her tone dripping with mockery.
That wasn’t something Kemp would have said under normal circumstances, and as a scientist speaking to a medical doctor, Chris suddenly felt downright determined to snap her out of this.
“We can see the big picture,” he responded. “Most creatures just see what’s right in front of their noses. They simply think about food and shelter and mating and running away from scary noises. We’ve learned things about the world we live in. We know how ecosystems work. The breakthroughs that Dr. Marie was making…remember those? We’re close, Emma, we truly are. If you come back and help us, we can work together on all that stuff. Your dream of creating the Elixir of Life from the Alien Goop; it can happen. Please stop acting like this and do as we ask. Wallace doesn’t want to hurt you either. He said he’d much rather you just come peacefully.”
“Everything you’re saying is a ploy to get me to submit and become your prisoner,” Kemp retorted. “You can’t see what’s really going on here. You only believe that things have a right to exist after you’ve taken them back to your base and prodded them in a laboratory or had them interrogated by government agents.” As she said this, an odd shudder went through her body, and she tilted her head back and sighed. It was almost sexual, or perhaps a bit like someone taking a hit of some really good cannabis. What the hell had caused her to do that?
“Enough of this,” Wallace thundered through his loudspeaker. “No matter how much this place may have changed you, Kemp, one thing I am certain of is that you can understand a threat to your life. You have one last chance to submit peacefully and save yourself by doing so. If you continue to offer resistance, we will have to consider you a traitor to the government, military, and citizenry of the United States of America and a threat to the security of Earth. And in that case, though it pains me more than anyone else here to say it, we will have no choice but to kill you where you stand. I mean every word of it. Don’t push us any further.”
“You are the ones,” Kemp replied, “who are pushing against my domain. Why don’t you go home instead?”
Chris froze in place; his heart rate was slow for the moment, yet he was terrified. This wasn’t working. Kemp simply would not come willingly or cooperate, and Wallace would not yield to the notion that she might simply be deluded. Things were moving unstoppably toward a violent confrontation.
The tension was spreading outward as well, boiling over from Wallace to his troops. Chris had spent enough time around soldiers by now that he could see and feel what was happening. The mental shift from them being “guarded” to them being “actively prepared to kill.” They had grown quieter and more still, and yet all of them seemed ready to crack or burst into action at any moment.
Wallace raised his rifle and aimed it directly at Kemp. “This is it, Kemp,” he said, his voice louder and harsher than before. “Come down from there with your hands on your head, or I will shoot.”
Kemp did not react, only stared at him with that disturbing mixture of arrogance and loathing. She wiggled her hands and then put them down by her sides in deliberate defiance of Wallace’s order.
Wallace let out his breath. Chris remembered something that Danvers, Bokhari, and Gunnar had told him back at the base while giving him shooting lessons: the best time to fire a gun is right after you’ve exhaled so that the motions of breathing do not interfere with your aim.
“No!” Chris cried out.
In a single fast motion, without time to think about how stupid his action was, Chris reached around the back of Wallace’s neck and yanked on the cord that connected his lower-body exoskeleton to his headpiece—unplugging him—and then bowled into him from the side, sweeping the acting lieutenant’s legs with a powerful stroke of his feet.
“Hey!” Someone nearby shouted.
Wallace fell in a heap as he fired. The cracking report of the rifle went upward, the three-round burst traveling far over Kemp’s head to disappear amidst green branches and blue sky. The man collapsed, groaning in sudden pain as the metal of his body clanked.
Bodies moved and shuffled, and guns were pointed. Chris, almost as shocked by what he had done as everyone else was, stood gasping in place over the sprawled Wallace. He was now surrounded by four regular soldiers plus Santos, all of them aiming their weapons at him. The buzzing seemed louder now.
Chris looked down. Wallace’s face was contorted with the agony and embarrassment of having suddenly lost the use of his legs, and his expression, with its staring eyes and small mouth, seemed to ask: What have you done? Shock, betrayal, and hurt. Chris felt the blood rushing to his ears in shame. Not only had he disobeyed the orders of his commanding officer, but he had also humiliated his friend.
Wallace’s eyes grew even wider and moved above and beyond where Chris stood. The man was now looking at the sky above the jungle, near where they’d emerged into this glade. The sun was getting darker.
The buzzing…
Chris turned around, and so did most of the nearby troops. “Oh, shit,” he gasped.
The locusts had returned. Hundreds of them had risen from the jungle to swarm above and around Kemp’s palace. Chris swallowed, realizing now that Kemp may have simply been stalling for time. The giant insects were different, though—their features had changed, and they were bigger and uglier. They hadn’t died out. They had been molting.
Barely managing to issue the order in a strangled voice as he struggled to sit up, as the cloud of locusts started to descend Wallace said, “Fire at will!”
16
Pandemonium erupted. Men and women shouted battle cries and opened fire with automatic rifles, automatic shotguns, and plasma flamethrowers. Huge, ravening locusts descended, faster now, their buzzing seeming almost as loud as the gunfire, the black cloud of them taking on hideous individual shapes which fractured off from the collective to attack the humans from all sides.
“I’m sorry,” Chris said, almost ready to burst into tears, “Oh God, oh fuck, I’m sorry, Wallace…” He fell to his knees in the grass, retrieved Wallace’s rifle, and handed it back to the acting lieutenant, who had painstakingly risen to a sitting position, his useless legs splayed wide in front of him. Wallace grabbed it and immediately aimed upward, opening fire on a locust only twenty or thirty feet above their heads. Two three-round bursts brought down the creature, which shrieked; the sound was almost metallic, like a car being torn apart. It crashed to the earth right between the two of them.
Chris jumped back, drawing his pistol. In the brief moment he had before the chaos of the sudden battle engulfed him, he stared at the dead monstrosity. These new and improved locusts were almost the size of men, where the old ones had been about the size of large dogs. They were darker; blackish-green instead of bright green. In addition to horns like the old ones, they also had supple antennae like those of an anglerfish, which might mean they had some kind of advanced organic sonar. The construction of their bodies was not as robotic or insectoid as that of their predecessors; it almost looked like they may have developed rudimentary muscles or even internal bones like mammals. And where the old locusts had essentially had giant knives for forelegs, these ones had opposable claws, like a dragon’s, just as sharp and deadly but far more versatile. The Zoo had evolved again.
“Everyone, to me! Rally!” Wallace tried to yell, but the noise of the fight was so overwhelming that only the troops closest to him heard. Already the locust swarm wa
s dividing the humans into small groups, the better to destroy them. None seemed to be converging on the commander or the scientist. Chris took a few pot shots at one nearby and otherwise watched helplessly.
A hundred feet or so to their left, positioned directly across from the opening that led into Kemp’s “palace,” was their JLTV. The gunner manning the turret aimed his heavy machine gun and fired at Kemp, who stood and watched. Half a dozen super-locusts practically materialized out of the air, so quickly did they appear to block the gun’s line of fire. By the time the machine gun had begun to blast them into sparking, steaming fragments of greenish-black waste, other locusts had converged on the turret itself.
The gunner pulled out a machine pistol and one of the creatures used its claws to rip off his arm, pistol and all, while two others grabbed his head, twisted it, and snapped it off. The decapitated body tumbled into the grass. Another half-dozen locusts set to butchering the driver as well as hacking apart the tires and engine of the vehicle.
Santos was ten or twelve paces closer to the palace than Chris and Wallace. She swept the sky, back and forth like a watering hose, with the blinding blue flame of her plasma-thrower, screaming in rage and terror. At least a dozen locusts exploded before the onslaught, their bodies turning into white-burning meteors to crash to the ground in fiery heaps.
Then a buzzing cloud of them was in front of her at ground level. She aimed the plasma-thrower, only for another soldier to run into her line of fire. A locust had attached itself to the man’s back and was practically riding him, the flapping of its wings compensating for the weight it put on him as it clawed his shoulders, neck, and head viciously. Each motion of its forelimbs drew an airborne ribbon of bright red blood.
Santos hesitated for a second. The man was practically dead already, but even someone as enthusiastic as she was about burning things could not instantly overcome the deep conditioning that had taught her never to fire on a comrade. That was all the time the locusts needed. Four of them had suddenly surrounded her and a last-ditch blast of blue-violet plasma destroyed only one, pushing it back even as it incinerated it. The other three tore her body apart into three equal pieces. One even severed the cord connecting her weapon to the backpack that powered it.