by Michael Todd
Off to Chris’ and Wallace’s right, two soldiers were back to back, slowly rotating as they fired in opposite directions. One was a large black man with an automatic shotgun and the other—Jackson, maybe?—was a smaller mixed-race guy with an M-92 rifle. They made a good team, whoever they were. The shotgunner knew just how fast to fire, and where, to lay down a powerful spread of suppressing fire as the rifleman targeted individual locusts with concentrated bursts. They also seemed to be covering one another as they reloaded.
Then a single locust did something bizarre. Its wings flapping so fast as to be a blur, it descended far enough that its claws were brushing the grass, then it made a beeline straight for the pair, moving at the speed of a sports car with a lead-footed driver.
“Incoming!” the shotgunner said as he quickly popped shells into his exhausted weapon.
They pivoted so the rifleman faced the approaching locust, and the man aimed and fired. The locust dodged so fast that it might as well have teleported to a different position.
“No! That way!” the shotgunner said. He raised his gun.
The locust plowed directly into both of them. The large black man went staggering and stumbling forward, having mostly been grazed, while the smaller man, having taken the full force of the collision, flew literally head over heels up and through the air, spinning and then crashing into the ground six or seven feet from Chris.
The shotgunner reeled. Before he could regain his balance, a locust bowled into him from behind, opened its fanged jaws, and chomped into the small of his back, ripping flesh and severing his spine. He flopped backward as another of the creatures leaped onto him from the front and slashed open his throat.
Chris, horrified, looked down at the man who’d fallen near him. His body was mangled and broken, and blood was everywhere, but he was still alive. Chris raised his pistol and shot the man in the head. His skull caved in and he slumped, now at peace.
Meanwhile, the locust that had rammed the two men was disoriented by the impact of its attack. Wallace got a bead and fired two bursts. The first three bullets tore off the creature’s arm, and as it turned toward the man, it took the latter three full in the face. Its head burst apart in a goopy mass of blueish-green ichor and sparking armor-like fragments.
Chris had no idea what was happening to the soldiers on the far side of Kemp’s palace. The locusts, swarming in their dozens and hundreds, were so thick that he could not see that far. He hoped some of them had managed to flee into the jungle, but he was not optimistic. This was not a battle but a massacre. Sick, nauseating terror filled him and left him unable to speak.
And yet, the locusts were not coming after him or Wallace. He nevertheless stood near the fallen man, firing his pistol at any locusts that got too close. He exhausted his first magazine, popped it out, and then slapped in another. The gun didn’t seem powerful enough to be having much of an effect. After firing off another entire mag, he ran and retrieved the rifle of the man he’d mercy-killed.
“Wallace!” Chris gasped.
“Yeah?”
“Uh, what’s the recoil on these things?” he asked. He pretty much remembered how to fire one—Wallace having personally shown him, long ago now, it seemed—but he’d never handled a live one.
“Strong enough. Keep it tight against your shoulder.” The man’s voice was thick with fear, pain, and despair, and Chris was again almost astonished by his self-control in being able to give instructions like this. Even now, when they were completely surrounded by a horde of creatures that had killed almost their entire unit.
Chris was back at Wallace’s side then, and he aimed the rifle as Wallace had said. Not seeking any particular target among the endless hordes of their enemy, he fired into a large cluster of them.
The rifle seemed to explode in his hands and jackhammered his shoulder. It was shocking, but he forced himself to control it. He kept the barrel down and squeezed off four three-round bursts, followed by the single remaining bullet (he remembered, stupidly enough, that the magazines held forty rounds. He’d asked Wallace why the hell they hadn’t given the mags a capacity that was a multiple of three, given that they’d been designed for burst fire). One or two locusts dropped dead or wounded, shrieking and bleeding, from the cluster, but that was it. The rifle clicked empty.
And under the racket—far fewer guns were firing now, so it wasn’t as loud—Chris could hear a sound that all but froze the blood in his veins.
Kemp was laughing.
“Pretty sure it’s over, Chris,” Wallace offered.
Chris closed his eyes for a moment. Wallace was right. The time had come to shift mental gears from how to survive to how best to die.
“She must have summoned these things as soon as we entered this glade,” Wallace coughed. “Even if you’d let me shoot her, they’d still have come. I wish you would have left me able to go out fighting better, but we were all dead as soon as we started out on this mission.”
Chris opened his eyes. So many of the locusts had begun swirling around them, blotting out their view of most of the clearing as well as the sun and sky, that it was almost like being inside a tornado—dark as night and as loud as a storm. Kemp was still laughing, though. Giddy, triumphant, hateful laughter. The locusts in front of him parted, and Chris could see her then. She’d taken a few more steps down the tree-staircase and was looking directly at him with sadistic amusement.
He’d been wrong. Oh, how he had been wrong. Terror welled back up within him, but now it was fear not just for himself but for everyone and everything else. For the people who would still be around after he died (any moment now, probably) and had to deal with this mess.
Suddenly there was a strange yellow substance wafting through the air. It spun around them in the slight vortex created by the circling locusts, but it appeared to be falling from almost directly overhead. Chris looked up. A prehensile vine, perhaps one attached to the nest/castle, was spitting it down on them. Pollen?
He felt a bit drowsy. No, a lot drowsy. Should have expected something like this after the business with the purple Happy Fern of the Exalted Sweet Leaf. He held his breath. Of course, he’d just pass out after a minute or two, and the results would be much the same. Pass out…yes. He slumped into the soft, comfortable grass.
Everything went black.
17
Consciousness returned quickly and easily this time. It was as though a light switch in Chris’ brain had been in the “down” position and now someone had flicked it into “up.” He opened his eyes.
He felt only slightly groggy, and he came alert without delay. He sat propped against something relatively soft and was enveloped in shady green gloom, though definitely in an enclosed space. It almost felt like being indoors. He remembered exactly what had happened before he’d lost consciousness. No immediate danger threatened him, yet he knew he had no reason whatsoever to relax.
The relative darkness was, he saw now, due to a leaf the size of a bedsheet that hung over the rough corner in which he sat. Beneath and behind him was a lattice of vines and green branches. He glanced to both sides. A few feet to his right lay Wallace. Thin, tough, cord-like vines had been tied around the man’s ankles and knees (even though his legs didn’t work), and his arms were tied behind him at the wrists and around the biceps and chest. He did not move or speak. His back was to Chris, his face turned away.
Trying to make no sound, Chris slowly crawled over to Wallace, fearing the worst. No, no…they wouldn’t have tied him up if he was already dead. Still, he had to check. Putting his ear down by the man’s neck, he could hear breathing, and see the man’s chest rising and falling. Chris also pressed two fingers to the side of Wallace’s neck, under the chin, and felt a pulse, albeit a faint one. He fell back on his haunches and sighed in relief.
He and Wallace were alive. They were probably in deep shit, but they lived. There would be a chance for them to get the hell out of here—both of them.
Before he bothered trying to rouse
Wallace, however, Chris thought he should look around. He was probably inside Kemp’s little palace, which didn’t have too spacious a floor plan, so escaping undetected could be a very dicey proposition.
He crawled back toward the leaf that curtained this small corner. With a patient and gentle motion he reached out and lifted it upward, peeking out from beneath it as inconspicuously as he could.
His eyes widened, and then they blinked repeatedly. He had expected to see a nest; a hive, something crude and natural and entirely pre-human. That was not what he saw.
This place had been engineered, somehow. The detritus of Wall 01, originally collected by the mother Chimera, had not only been used to provide a foundation but here, within the shield-wall of trees and thick vines, had been used in something very like actual architecture. Metal struts had been arranged between the walls of plant matter to create something like half-columns or the rib vaults within the basilica of Notre Dame de Paris.
Chunks of concrete had been joined with sections of hardened moss and dirt and arranged in an ascending spiral staircase which led up the side of one of the walls to someplace higher up that he could not yet see since he hadn’t raised the big leaf past the level of his eyebrows.
Opposite the bottom of the staircase was what looked like a fountain. Whoever or whatever had designed this place had cleaned out the scoop of a goddamn crane—what did you call those? Chris couldn’t recall—and it was supported upon a foundation of hardened curling vines. A green plant-spout above it trickled water into it, which overran the edges and pooled somewhere below. The walls of this structure, mostly composed of green-trunked trees, curved and writhed in such a way as to suggest something like a flame pattern in places; and the smaller branches that sprouted from them lay flat against them like the calligraphy adorning buildings from the Islamic Golden Age. Gaps had been strategically left in the wall, creating windows from which shafts of whitish-golden sunlight fell in intersecting patterns of rays from up near the vaulted ceiling.
It all took Chris’ breath away. This place was as much a cathedral as a palace. He would have loved to simply wander in peace, studying and admiring it, although even then something about it would have been frightening. The way it somehow combined human architectural details with organic, living materials which had somehow grown according to plan. The great gardeners and landscapers of the world would have killed for this place’s secrets.
Of course, the place had already killed, and a chorus of buzzing and clicking sounds suggested that the killers were approaching. Chris crawled backward, got down low, and made himself as close to invisible as he could. He lowered the huge leaf down to the point that all he could see was a cone extending maybe seven feet above the floor at its highest point.
Locusts marched in. None of them flew; all walked. They moved in single file like worshipers entering this cathedral of perverse Nature, each carrying an offering: A dead soldier, or part of a dead soldier. Chris’ gut clenched. The scale of the carnage hit home now: Close to forty people had been slaughtered. He and Wallace were probably the only survivors. Kemp had sentenced the rest to death.
The skin on the back of Chris’ neck crawled in tandem with the spiky progression of coldness down his spine. Seeing the locusts with hands that they used to carry the mangled remains of people he had worked with and fought alongside was something he immediately wanted to un-see.
They carried their victims to an open space in the center of the floor. Chris hadn’t noticed it before, but at first, it almost looked like a pool or a jacuzzi, albeit without a wall. It was simply sunken into the floor. But within it was not liquid, or at least he didn’t think so. Rather, it was filled with something like spongy green moss and dozens or hundreds of tiny green creepers, all of them swaying and writhing like the tongues of hungry baby birds. The place was still a nest in some capacity, then.
Each locust then dropped its offering into this sacrificial pit. At first the bodies, the severed heads and arms and torsos, the bloody bones and heaps of viscera, simply piled up as they would on a solid surface, but then Chris noticed that, slowly, very slowly, they began to sink. What the hell was happening? What was the Zoo doing with them? The locusts continued past the pit and disappeared into the shadows beyond Chris’ range of sight.
He would wait. Sooner or later, the locusts would run out of dead people to use in this obscene ritual or whatever it was. Sooner or later they would leave, and the place would be empty. Hopefully. He would awaken Wallace in a moment and plug him back in, and if that worked, the two of them would have an opportunity to rush the exit and seek cover in the surrounding jungle. At least it was a chance.
Unless…
“You can come out, Chris,” Kemp said from somewhere above. She spoke softly, but her tone was the same nasty, pompous, imperious one she’d used right before the massacre. “I know you’re down there. I see you. Come out and talk to me.”
Damn.
“Yes, Mom,” he said and crawled out from under the leaf.
18
The spiral staircase that hugged the interior wall did not go all the way up to the top of the palace/nest/cathedral, as Chris had suspected at first, but stopped about twenty or twenty-five feet from the floor. At this point, it left the support of the wall and climbed a tall, thick tree that had grown in the center of the palace’s interior.
Chris took a couple of steps out of the leaf-shadowed corner. The towering majesty of Kemp’s botanical castle was quite evident now; he could not help but stare. The “ceiling” of interlocking branches and leaves was at least seventy feet above him.
The tree in the center on which the staircase ended formed the throne on which the Queen of the Jungle now sat, arrayed in glory as she looked over her domain. At her side, lounging on a fat branch the size of most mature trees’ trunks, was Bruce. Chris froze in momentary terror, but the cat-like creature did nothing except regard Chris dully with his glossy black shark’s eyes. He stretched a bit, swayed his tail back and forth, and purred. This creature’s purring sounded a bit like someone feeding a bowling ball into a wood chipper.
“Welcome home, Chris,” Kemp greeted him. “None of my children will harm you now. They obey me. For now, I just want us to…discuss things.” The trunk of the tree split off into branches at the exact point where she now sat, and those branches had been grown to accommodate a human-shaped body in perfect comfort.
“I see,” Chris replied. He wanted to scream at her, to ask why she’d had the entire platoon killed—there was no longer any doubt that somehow the locusts were under her control—but he held his tongue for now. The fact that she’d wanted to spare him indicated that there would be opportunities in the future to save himself, to save Wallace, and perhaps even to save her. Even if the Zoo had done something to her to change her, it could probably be undone. He was a scientist, dammit. Figuring shit like that out was his job.
“So,” he began, “what do you want to talk about? I have to admit I’m curious how you made this place and how everything works now. I mean, like what’s with the plant-jacuzzi there? What is it doing to,” he swallowed, “the bodies?” He gestured to the strange, writhing pit where the pile of human remains was gradually sinking.
“Do you remember, Chris,” she began, her now-haughty voice echoing down from her throne through the green tower, “when I told you about the original Day of the Locust?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied. Dr. Marie’s original well-contained experiment with the Alien Goop here had been utterly ruined by a rare plague of African grasshoppers which had contaminated it, resulting in…the Zoo. The fact that Kemp remembered this, and even remembered telling him about it, meant that part of the old her—the real her—was still in there somewhere. “What does that have to do with this?”
“The Zoo needs biomass to grow,” she replied. “That’s how it developed so beautifully into the jungle you see now, where before there was only a small building and three domes, its potential inhibited by human inte
rference. This place was meant to grow.” As she said this, she again tilted back her head and sighed in pleasure. Chris made a mental note of that. Somehow, he knew it was important.
Chris spread his arms. “Well, there’s plenty of biomass now,” he observed. “Enough that we have to hack through it with a machete just to get anywhere, for Christ’s sake.”
Kemp glared at him. “Hacking living things with a machete… Typical human approach to problem-solving. But that leads me to my point. We need new biomass, and in this barren desert, as it stands now, what is the largest source of protein, water, and organic carbon?”
Chris wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to that. Off to his side, the pit made fizzing, gurgling sounds as it consumed his late comrades.
Kemp answered her own question. “Human beings, of course. Especially with so many having come here recently.”
“Oh,” Chris replied, feeling a bit nauseated.
“You were mostly right in at least one of your speculations,” she went on. “Remember? To some extent, the Zoo really is one huge living organism, the seeming individuals really being extensions or parts of a whole. And it needs to be fed. It requires sustenance and nutrition to grow up big and strong.” She smirked, and that hungry look was back on her face. The Zoo’s needs and hunger were hers now, or at least she seemed to believe so.
Kemp stood up from the ergonomic throne the Zoo had grown for her, spreading her arms, and slowly walked a few paces down the staircase. “Look around you, Chris. Life grows from life. The wasted lives of your friends, lives thrown away in destructiveness and attempts to control Nature, are even now being converted into new, better, purer life.”