by Michael Todd
“Sir,” Wallace had replied, “by the same token, it might help keep some of the dangerous creatures in.”
“Wall One has held,” was all Hall had said. This was true, although a fair number of men and women had died holding it. “We need to be able to continue to send teams in as needed. As it happens, we have a mobile drawbridge kit on the base here. It just arrived. Some assembly is required, of course. Now, I want you to take twenty men and set the bridge up over this new river of ours.”
Hall, who seemed pretty savvy in using particular people for particular tasks, must have assigned the task to Wallace because he knew how he’d respond. “Yes, sir.”
Now, as of mid-afternoon, Wallace had done all he could to do as he’d been commanded, but it hadn’t gone so well.
“What’s the holdup on that end?” he asked Corporal Neaves, the NCO overseeing the assembly of the right-hand side of the bridge’s support structure.
The corporal sighed in disgust. “The holes for the rivets don’t line up right,” he said. “We’ll have to brute-force them. It’ll still work, but it’ll take extra time.”
Wallace frowned. “We have till sunset, and it will be done by then,” he said. Before the troops could complain, he added, “I’ll get us some help, however.”
He called two young soldiers, one from each of the left and right groups. “Private Falstaff, Private First Class Akiwe,” he said.
“Yes, sir?” they asked.
“Take that vehicle over there back to base and find Miss Audrey James from the garage. Explain the situation to her—you heard what the problem is, right?— tell her to grab whatever she needs, and bring her back here.”
“You mean Jimmy?” Falstaff said. “Yeah, I know her.”
“I’m sure you do. Now go,” Wallace ordered.
“Yes, sir.” Both young men did as they were instructed, but the JLTV didn’t start. When Wallace glanced their way, they gestured at the other vehicle and tried it, but to no avail.
“Goddammit,” Wallace muttered under his breath. He already knew what had happened. Nevertheless, he went to check.
The two soldiers leapt off of the second vehicle as the sergeant crouched to look under it. As he had suspected, a thick green vine had grown up out of the bare ground and into the undercarriage of the vehicle. By now, it had likely damaged the hell out of the engine. Car-killers again.
“Uh, I made sure to park the vehicle over a bare patch of dirt, Sergeant,” Akiwe said.
“I know you did, PFC,” Wallace replied. “It’s not your fault in this case. The damn things must have figured out how to burrow underground until they can find a vehicle to destroy.” He suddenly wanted to summon all the considerable power his mechanically-aided legs possessed and kick the JLTV over on its side, but he didn’t. That sort of crap would set a bad example for the men.
“Sergeant!” someone else called. There was actual fear in the voice.
Wallace’s head snapped up, but before he could even ask, he heard it. They all heard it. A buzzing sound grew louder as it moved closer. It was punctuated by the sounds of things running through the woods.
“Combat positions!” Wallace barked. He unslung his own M-92 automatic rifle from his back as the troops, meanwhile, armed themselves and prepared for the worst. Fourteen of his men crouched and formed a semicircle. The other six stood behind them to watch the skies and the rear and offer cover if necessary.
Daylight marked the way behind them—back down the path where the overhanging branches were thinner toward the wall and human civilization. But the other three sides presented little but dark-green shadows. The men scanned their surroundings and Wallace grimaced as someone gasped. Two masses of black approached from their left—within the forest on this side of the river. He knew, without having to see details, that they were herds of the new-and-improved locusts. Directly ahead, weaving toward them mostly on wing, the iridescent blue of a small pack of chimeras glowed definitively.
“There are a lot of them,” Corporal Neaves said. “Should we retreat, Sergeant? At least until reinforcements get here?”
“No,” Wallace stated. Neaves wasn’t a coward, but he was the type who felt that the best strategy was only to fight in easy engagements and avoid risks if at all possible. “By the time we came back with more guns, they’ll have completely torn the bridge to pieces. That will indicate failure of the mission. Stand your ground. We will not fail.”
The young soldier swallowed, took a deep breath, and aimed his gun.
“Fire,” Wallace said.
Gunfire burst and crackled and the sonic, as well as physical violence of it, shattered the deceptive peace of the lush jungle around them. The first few locusts went down with shrieks and chittering as they emerged from behind the trees. Sparks and black blood flew. Rifle fire and shotgun blasts chipped wood from trees and shattered branches.
“Grenade!” Wallace said. Their first barrage had herded most of the locusts into the same general area. PFC Wizniewski, who had the best throwing arm, tossed an armed grenade into the writhing mass. The locusts actually seemed to pause for a second as if they knew what it was. Even if they did know, they weren’t fast enough.
The explosion knocked two men to the ground but the rest held. Fire and smoke bloomed upward and fragments of trees and giant insects churned the air. Before they could draw breath, the chimeras were upon them. The six men in the back had managed to eliminate about half of the creatures, but even the last four could be extremely dangerous. They were a strange hybrid of bird, mammal, and reptile, and they flew on half-wings, half-tentacles which doubled as weapons, much like bladed whips.
“Everyone left, locusts. Right, chimeras,” Wallace barked. Men pivoted accordingly.
The new concentration of fire on the chimeras reduced three of them, screaming and yowling, to piles of chunks and feathers. The fourth leapt and glided across the river where it pivoted to lash out with one of its wing tentacles at Private Falstaff.
“Down!” Wallace grabbed the man by the shoulder and threw him bodily aside. In the same motion, he raised his right leg. The tentacle’s barb crashed against the armor of his exoskeleton. It left a few dents and chips but otherwise, deflected off the metal. Wallace grabbed the tentacle and genuine alarm showed on the creature’s face as it struggled to remain airborne. Someone had the presence of mind to blow its head off. Wallace released the tentacle and the chimera splashed into the river.
To the left, the troops had killed most of the remaining locusts but had fallen back, and three of the insects had diverted to attack and destroy the JLTV.
Wallace pounced. Aided in both speed and strength by his exoskeleton, he seized the edge of the vehicle and tipped it to crush two of the locusts and drive the third directly into his men’s line of fire.
As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The humans had lost no one. The Zoo had lost its entire force save two or three locusts that had retreated and vanished amidst the greenery. The only casualty was the slight damage to Wallace’s leg-plate.
The breathless silence was broken by the sounds of twenty men exhaling their breaths at once, followed by a collective deep breath. A couple laughed, glad to be alive. Several rookies were among them. Wallace knelt briefly and examined his leg. It would need some minor repair, but it should still be functional. When he stood once again, everyone looked at him as if waiting for something.
“You have all had a good minute or so to recover from our victory,” he told them. “Now stop staring at me and get back to work so we can finish by nightfall.” He immediately obeyed his own order and turned back to the drawbridge.
2
It took them until half an hour past nightfall, actually, but they finished it. Thankfully, the Zoo declined to attack again. Exhausted but victorious, they dragged themselves back to the base, looking forward to food and rest, and wondered in the backs of their minds if the bridge would hold if the Zoo’s creatures decided to assault it. It was made of strong, heavy stu
ff, but locusts, chimeras, and kangarats had all demonstrated the ability to damage metal. There was nothing more they could do today.
Food, rest, and even a shower would have to be delayed for Sergeant Wallace, however. He had completed the mission itself, as he always did, but that wasn’t the end of it. Several new duties awaited him which Director Hall had introduced. Paperwork, mostly—accounting-based shit, tying up loose ends, and making sure they could keep track of every single thing that happened there. Hall’s leadership was defined, it seemed to Wallace, by his need to know everything instantly.
The sergeant sat at a small table in the corner of a large office where other officers were engaged in similar tasks, all their faces grim with tedium. He wrote some things on papers and plunked other things out on tablets. Hall wanted to know everything from the number of rounds fired—Wallace had to estimate this, of course—to casualties and major damage sustained to base tech.
Speaking of which, he had been wrong. His leg was not functioning as well as it ought to. About two hours before they’d finished the drawbridge, it had begun to lag slightly, which meant more mental and physical effort were required to move his right leg in time with his left. Typical of advanced technology, he thought morosely. He didn’t seem to recall having that problem with the original leg, but a giant kangarat had all but paralyzed him a few months ago. He was lucky to be able to walk at all.
“Dammit,” he muttered under his breath. He really needed a proper night’s sleep and a day off. He left his paperwork on the table, stood wearily, and forced himself, with his now-halting and irregular, mechanical gait, in the direction of the research lab. He had no other choice.
Wallace limped down brightly-lit halls of white plasteel and soon arrived at Research, where a bevy of whitecoats was hard at work, doing whatever it was they did lately. He had stopped paying as much attention to the scientific element at the base ever since the former head researcher, Dr. Christopher Lin, had left—deserted, really—in disgust.
To Wallace’s chagrin, half of the floor space in the main lab had been given over to tests run on captive Zoo creatures. He tried to ignore it. Scientists looked at him—and at his exoskeleton, which never failed to draw stares—as he proceeded past them.
“Heyy, how’s that thing working?” a younger whitecoat, possibly an intern, asked.
“Fine,” Wallace replied, “it’s just…accumulating mileage.”
Soon, he stood before the executive lab in the back corner. Dr. Marla Kessler, the new Director of Research, had insisted on having her own private room within the larger one used by those who’d work under her. A crew was brought in to install walls and everything else required. Wallace knocked on the door.
“I’m busy,” said a woman’s voice, slightly singsong but heavily sarcastic.
“It’s Sergeant Wallace,” he replied. “I have some problems with my suit.”
It sounded like she muttered something under her breath but she walked over and opened the door. She was a short, slim woman with dark hair in a sort of beehive who would have been attractive but for the fact that her face only had two expressions, both of them unpleasant—a frown of condescending irritation and a smirk of triumph.
“What?” she asked. “Oh, it’s you. Your suit. I thought you were one of the radiation guys and needed help to tighten the groin on your hazmat suit.” She turned and went back to what she was doing, leaving the door open. Wallace followed her in.
“The right leg is damaged and will need to be repaired,” he stated. “It’s gradually become harder to move the leg over the course of the last few hours.” He looked up and instinctively tensed for a second.
Kessler had been running tests of some sort on a catshark in a cage. He had heard that more of those things had been sighted, but the last time he had personally seen one, it had been the only one. And it had damn near killed him.
This one was considerably smaller, about the size of a large dog like the older type of locusts. It must have been a juvenile. The one Wallace had fought to the death had been almost three times the size of a man. Still, even this smaller one looked every bit the dangerous, sleek, and intelligent predator it was. Its body was long and muscular and covered with bristly fur, the color of which seemed to alternate between deep-brown and deep-purple. The pointed ears were alert to everything. Its paws ended in knife-like talons and its glassy eyes were more like a shark’s than a feline’s. Wallace knew that its mouth would be filled with multiple rows of shark-like teeth—this species’ maw was almost like an organic garbage disposal.
“I’m busy,” Dr. Kessler said again. “And you told me that you can, in fact, still walk. Might this wait till tomorrow, or could your therapist or one of the grease monkeys handle it? I have a lot of important work to do learning to pacify these creatures.” She did not look at him as she spoke but instead, moved to a table and picked up a nasty-looking handheld device. The catshark watched her, trembling with tension and barely-suppressed rage.
“At the rate I’m losing function,” Wallace explained, “the leg might be dead weight by morning.”
Kessler, still looking at her prisoner rather than her guest, tapped something on the device in her hand and blue electricity crackled at its end. “Oh,” she said. “Well, then…” She aimed the thing at the catshark and fired.
The tip detached itself, dart-like, and a long, thin, black cord spiraled out behind it. The animal tensed and hissed as soon as she aimed it, and the tip struck it full in the breast. Sparks crackled, and the creature yowled horribly. It thrashed and clawed at the air. The paws reached through the bars of its cage as its muscles spasmed. It fell into a heap, still half-conscious and with the fur on its breast smoking a little.
“Better…” Kessler said and made a few notes on her tablet. “More power needed, though. These things have been very naughty and need to be punished.”
The catshark recovered after a few moments and flung itself against its bars as it tried frantically to force its way out solely through the power of rage and will. It failed. Kessler watched it, and her face had now switched from the irritated frown to the nasty smirk.
Wallace observed all this with a face of stone, although he doubted that he completely succeeded in hiding his distaste. “Is that really necessary?” he asked.
Her head snapped toward him, frown mode engaged once again. “It is if you guys doing all the macho shit want to survive out there,” she said as if speaking to a small child. “Especially since we’ll need even more test subjects to be captured alive. We can’t learn much by having you simply kill everything right away.”
As opposed, Wallace thought, to killing them slowly in captivity. All the Zoo creatures that had been brought back to the base alive had ended up dead within two or three days. They went crazy and became increasingly agitated and feral. The animals threw themselves against their own walls and tried to attack anything that came close until they either mortally injured themselves in their desperation or grew so dangerous that they had to be put down. These weren’t domesticated animals. Putting them in cages was torment enough, even before Kessler prodded them or tried weapons out on them. It all struck Wallace as needless cruelty—as sick, somehow.
There was, of course, such a thing as necessary cruelty. Wallace had no illusions whatsoever about how dangerous the Zoo was and what measures human beings had to take to fight its denizens. When he and Chris had been cornered by one of these things—the personal pet of Queen Kemp, which Chris had nicknamed Bruce—Wallace had been forced to become feral himself. He had viciously maimed and dismembered the creature until it was dead. But that had been pure survival and the giant catshark had had a fighting chance. It was an approximately equal contest, as Nature had intended.
And at least Wallace, no matter how savage he could be, was civilized.
“It looks like you have many very important things to catch up on, then,” Wallace said. “I’ll visit some other time.”
“Thank you,” Kessle
r said and again, looked at her test subject instead of at him. “If I give you any new weapons soon, please try not to break them.” The catshark continued to yowl as it tried and failed to burst out and maul her. At least her cages worked well.
Wallace nodded, turned, and left. He didn’t know if the woman had any children, but if she did, he somehow found himself imagining how things would go when the kids demanded a kitten or a puppy. She might cave in eventually, but the day would come when the animal pissed or shitted on a carpet that she happened to like, and she would take her revenge by having the animal put to sleep at the animal shelter while the kids were away at school. And when they got home, she’d pretend to be sad and tell them that Fluffy had been hit by a car.
“I hope you’re happy out there, Chris,” Wallace said to himself as he left the lab. “We could use you back here.” Over the course of the few months they’d worked together, he and Chris had become good friends. They were almost nothing alike and had argued about their last mission. And yet, they worked well together, talked easily, and had grown to respect one another. Wallace knew that not everyone was a fighter. Chris wasn’t one by nature, but he had put up a fight when necessary—they’d been in and out of the Zoo together twice. Back in a civilian environment, he did good things. The kinds of things that fighters fought to protect. His dream was to unlock the Zoo’s potential for advances in medicine, agriculture, and stuff like that. The powers that be, unfortunately, kept getting in his way.
Hence, his departure.
On his way back toward the communal office to finish his red tape, Wallace passed the doorway leading to the garage. He almost literally bumped into Audrey James, the mechanic he’d sent for this afternoon in the hope that she could help them finish the drawbridge quicker.
“Whoa—ha, sorry.” She laughed as she emerged from the doorway and pivoted on one foot to avoid getting run over.
Wallace paused. “Hi, Audrey,” he said.
“Call me Jimmy. Hey, what’s wrong?”