by Michael Todd
17
“I do not deserve zis!” Blancheau wailed as they gradually forced him into a lying position, trying to be as gentle as necessity and their patience allowed. They had stretched a bedroll over a rough framework of poles lashed together and mounted on a two-wheeled cart used to transport heavy loads, by hand, over rough terrain. Then, they’d used ropes and straps to make a pair of harnesses that Falstaff and one of the bigger, stronger guys in the bridge’s guard unit had put around their shoulders. These were attached to the makeshift stretcher with other lengths of rope.
“The wheels should help you move him down the trail without too much difficulty,” said the sergeant commanding the guard unit. “Rotate men if you need to, though, since…I mean, he looks pretty damn heavy.” He waved his hand at Blancheau.
“I’ll give him a sedative,” said Glassner. “It definitely seems like he could use one.”
“You people make terrible coffee!” the assemblyman ranted and waved a clenched fist weakly at everyone in general. “And your president is an idiot!”
“Oh, shut up,” said Aade Graf, her hands on her hips. She looked down with a disapproving expression at her fellow European politician. “These people have saved your life multiple times now, Herr Blancheau.”
The Frenchman only snorted as Glassner gave him a blue pill and a small cup of water. He downed it without complaint, presumably in the hope that it would make the bumpy ride back to the base less painful.
The man would have to make do with the hastily-assembled stretcher because Wallace had commandeered the last Stallion. Gunnar and Lord Flemm—if he really was a British aristocrat—might not have time for him to trek all the way back to the scorpions’ hill on foot.
“The mission is almost complete,” Wallace said to his men as he snatched up a few extra weapons, including the plasma flamethrower. “The edge of the Zoo is less than a mile up the road, and this, our main trail, has been relatively quiet lately, from what these men have said.” He gestured to the soldiers in the guard unit. Their sergeant, a man named Zinelli, nodded as he chewed on some tobacco.
“All you have to do is get Monsieur Blancheau and yourselves safely back to the wall, and you may consider yourselves released according to my orders.” He nodded to them as they turned away.
Wallace examined the Stallion briefly before he mounted it. A small but strong-looking stepping-rung was conveniently placed near the back “thigh” of the horse, along with a handle farther up the side of the “torso.” Simple enough. He grabbed the handle, stepped on the rung, and swung himself up and over to settle easily into the middle of the Stallion’s back area. Then he shifted forward, closer to the neck or head where the control console was located. It looked similar to a car or truck. He felt fairly rooted and secure, although Jimmy, who was not exactly a large person, had designed it seemingly with someone of average height and weight in mind. As a result, it seemed a little small for Wallace.
“Wait, you’re riding back there by yourself?” Fernandez asked and looked amazed at either Wallace’s bravery or his stupidity—or both, perhaps.
“No way,” Peppy said as she stepped forward and pushed past Fernandez. “No, he definitely is not.”
“What’s that you just said to your commanding officer, Private First-Class?” Wallace said and deliberately avoided her gaze as he powered up the engine. She didn’t answer, which compelled him to look at her. She had already placed a foot on the rung.
“With all due respect, sir,” she said, “I’m coming with you no matter what, so it would be pointless to try and order me to stay behind. You would be left with no choice but to have me court-martialed, sued in civilian court, battered with shovels by local hoodlums, and eventually, killed and left in a back alley somewhere in the worst neighborhood of Sabha, Libya.” She reached for the handle.
Wallace grabbed her hand instead. “You make a convincing case, Pérez,” he replied and pulled her up behind him. “I therefore order you to obey any further orders I give in the course of you assisting me in the rescue of Corporal Åkerlund and Crown Prince Flemm of Carfax Abbey or whatever it is.”
“Fair enough,” she replied and made herself comfortable.
“Miss James,” Wallace called.
The mechanic pushed through the group of staring men. “Yes, boss?” she said. “Are you getting the hang of the controls okay? I tried to make them as simple as possible. But remember that there’s no gas pedal so you’ll have to use that lever on the left to increase your speed.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I need to go fast, though. Can I trust this thing?” He looked pointedly at her. They’d only seen the Stallions in action at slower speeds.
Jimmy smiled as if she tried to not to reveal some secret joke. “Yeah,” she replied cheerfully. “Floor it.”
“As you say,” Wallace replied, not sure if it was meant to be a joke or not given that she’d told him there wasn’t a goddamn pedal.
“We are both going to die, aren’t we?” Peppy asked. She wrapped her hands around his waist.
“Eventually, yes,” Wallace replied. He pushed the lever forward and down.
The Stallion roared to life, not unlike some giant beast of comparable size. Actually mounted on top of the thing, Wallace could appreciate its power. They jerked forward. A sudden wave of vertigo struck and they swooned in their seats even as the greenery to the sides and above them, and the brown earth below, hurtled past. The four metal legs moved smoothly but noisily below.
“Whoa!” Wallace said. Behind them, the bridge and the comrades they’d left behind had already moved beyond sight. He eased the lever back a little.
It seemed only a couple of minutes had passed—tense, crazed minutes, given how easily they could have been knocked off by a low-hanging branch at this speed—before they were back at the river. The zip line was still there.
“Hold on,” Wallace said.
“Yes, sir,” replied Peppy, “even though that was an entirely unnecessary order.” She grabbed the cord. Wallace pushed the Stallion through the churning waters as fast as he dared and wondered if the strength of his cyborg legs might be enough to keep the machine from falling over if worse came to worst. Fortunately, they forded the river with no other result than getting wet again.
“All right, I think I have the hang of it,” Wallace said as their vehicle climbed onto the opposite shore. “Now comes the part where we need to move.”
“Oh,” Peppy said.
He grabbed the speed lever again and floored it.
18
They’d made it back to the edge of the mini-desert. Wallace had half-expected their Stallion to end up like the one Flemm and Graf had fought for control of—crumpled against a tree and waiting to be put out of its misery—but fortune had smiled on them.
Or maybe it had more to do with Wallace paying very, very close attention to where he was going. Not to mention keeping his gauntleted left hand held up to bash and clothesline branches safely out of their way.
Now, the trees and plants ahead had thinned to expose patches of bare sand beyond—sand which rose upward and formed a broad, hill-like mound. He pulled back on the lever and their trusty steed slowed and soon came to a complete stop.
Peppy suddenly released a gasped breath. She must have held it for a long time. “We-ell,” she said and dragged the word out, “that was a wild ride.”
“Chris said you were the craziest driver he ever rode with,” Wallace pointed out. “Something along the lines of how the Zoo monsters were less of a hazard than you were behind the wheel.”
“Yeah,” she replied, “but I only do unto others. Being a passenger to someone else’s crazy driving is a completely different ball game.”
He bit down on his tongue to hold back a remark about women drivers. Even though it was true.
They both dismounted. Wallace helped Peppy down. Now that their nerve-wracking flight through the jungle was over, she was tense and almost bristled with excited determinat
ion. That she and Gunnar were the best of friends was common knowledge. No two people who insulted each other so often and so enthusiastically could, really, be anything else.
He only hoped it wasn’t already too late.
“Do we need actual strategy for this?” Peppy asked as she opened the ass-compartment in the Stallion and hauled out the plasma-thrower. “With this thing, we should be able to charge in and blaze away, for once.”
“We only have the one,” Wallace replied, “and those things need to be refueled and recharged fairly quickly. You already used it once yesterday. I’d estimate we only have about ten seconds of burn left on it.”
“Darn,” said Peppy. “I guess we’ll have to charge in with rifles, grenades, combat knives, pistols, shotguns, and plastic baggies filled with our own urine and feces.”
“No,” Wallace shot back. “We do this the smart way and we do it right.” He would need to think a moment, though, about what the hell the smart way actually was.
As he rubbed his chin, stared at the looming sandhill, and thought back on all their encounters with the Zoo-scorpions thus far, Peppy checked and assembled their weapons and gadgets. Listening to the clicking and clacking of military hardware, it came to him.
“Those scorpion things seem drawn to noise,” Wallace said.
“Like most things that can hear, yeah,” she observed.
“They don’t seem too smart, though,” he went on. “They’re brute-force type creatures, mostly without the strategic intellect of some of the other creatures here. Maybe Kemp doesn’t control them directly and they act more or less independently, doing their own thing on the side. Or under the surface, I guess.”
As he said this, he stepped forward as gently and as quietly as he could and pushed aside the last few leaf-covered arms of the trees separating the jungle from the mini-desert. There was no sign of the arachnid monstrosities anywhere in sight. They—and Gunnar and Flemm—must all be underground.
“What’s your point, sir?” Peppy asked. Resorting to formality meant she must have been impatient.
“You’ll create a diversion,” Wallace answered. “Act as bait, all that good stuff. Feel free to kill some of them, but don’t get distracted while doing it. The idea is to distract them. And you need to stay alive to do that.”
“That makes a certain amount of sense.” She nodded in a slow and dramatic fashion and pretended that this was a revolutionary idea.
“Use your rifle or sidearm,” Wallace went on. “Once you draw most of the aggro, I will slip into that giant scorpion-hill or whatever it is and rescue our quarry. If you spray plasma around, you could trap me inside a bunch of melted glass. That’s not something I particularly want to happen.”
Peppy agreed reluctantly. “I still get to keep the plasma-thrower, though,” she insisted. “Just in case.”
Wallace had no intention to get into a pitched battle with those things underground, anyway.
They attached the plasma thrower’s backpack unit to the side of the Stallion and hooked the business end into the climbing-handle so that Peppy would have easy access to it if absolutely necessary. She then also took a large supply of extra magazines for her rifle, as well as a couple of flares.
“Those things clearly don’t like fire,” Wallace pointed out, “so you might be able to use a couple of those to corral the bastards. Throw them back toward the holes they crawl out of, so they don’t want to crawl in after me.”
“I’ll do my best, sir,” Peppy replied.
“Good. Now, remember to be loud. Yell and scream and holler, swear at them, act completely insane, whatever. Maybe fire a single shot from your rifle to start out.”
“You mean acting?” Peppy asked, horrified now. Her mouth drooped as her eyes widened. “My parents forced me into drama club for like, a month. It was terrible. Absolutely terrible.”
“Do it,” Wallace said, “not only because it’s an order but for Gunnar.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “Let’s do this.”
Wallace hid beyond the edge of the sandy area as Peppy fired up the Stallion and, to be safe, strapped herself in place near the front. Without looking back at her superior officer or saying anything, she fired a rifle shot ahead and to the right, then switched the gun to burst fire. Something swished and rustled ahead and beneath them. She charged.
The Stallion clomped out onto the sand and kicked up high waves of it. It moved at medium speed first, then shifted to maximum speed. The heavy legs drummed loudly on the loose and shifting earth.
“HEYYY, UHH, FUCK ALL YOU GUYS, YOU, UH, SCORPIONS, YAHOOOO…” Peppy shouted at the top of her lungs. Somehow, even at this volume, her voice was still monotone. “YOU’RE ASSHOLES WITH FAT MOTHERS AND SMALL PENISES AND SO FORTH. FUCK, SHIT, ASS, BITCH, AND STUFF LIKE THAT! YOU’RE SO DESPERATE YOU WERE SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO GUNNAR, OF ALL PEOPLE. UH, YOU SUCK. GO SIT ON A TRAFFIC CONE, FUUUUCCCKKK…”
The swishing sound grew louder and dark, glossy claws and stingers emerged from a succession of sand-funnels, which quickly became black, gaping holes. At least thirty scorpions crawled out of their lair with frenzied squeaks and chitters. They advanced directly toward the apparently-psychotic young Mexican-American woman riding the strange mechanical horse. Their hideous forms coalesced into a mass of chitinous, reflective armor and grasping pincers, which followed Peppy as she began to circle around the far perimeter of the mini-desert.
Near the end where Wallace still hid, it was quiet. No further scorpions had emerged. “I can’t believe that actually worked,” he said.
One of the arachnids had crawled out of a hole that had opened only about twenty-five feet in front of him, near the edge of the sandy area. Looking into this ugly little tunnel, Wallace debated bypassing it and trying to enter the hill from the top—as Gunnar had unintentionally done—but no. The scorpions would have too many opportunities to see or hear him. He could only hope that the tightly-packed sand would help muffle the whirring of his exoskeleton. Wallace took a few long strides forward and leapt into the hole.
Darkness and sand closed around him. He was immediately assailed by dank, stale air that smelled like rotting mushrooms mixed with peroxide.
Worse, he remembered something his grandfather had said about the Vietnam War. The North Korean communists had dug an elaborate system of tunnels, a veritable underground labyrinth, beneath the earth, and used it to escape from pursuing GIs or launch sneak attacks on them. A small number of men had been recruited to sneak into these tunnels themselves. They had crawled around and tried to pick off Viet Cong personnel in a form of combat that resembled something from a horror film. The guys who’d done this and came back—if they came back—ended up with the highest rate of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder of anyone in the entire war.
After about five seconds of crawling forward and down into the scorpion’s exit-hole, Wallace could understand why. It was cramped, dark, smelly, and claustrophobic. This was, really, one of the stupider things he’d done as a soldier. If a single scorpion came at him from the front—let alone from behind—he was dead. He wouldn’t be able to outrun them, turn, or even fight. But there wasn’t much else he could do except crawl forward and hope he came to a wider space. Preferably one uninhabited.
Outside and above, he could dimly hear PFC Peppy circle, followed by dozens of heavy, scampering forms.
“YOU ARE ALL CHINGADOS, CABRÓNES, MARICOS, AND STUFF LIKE THAT!” Peppy announced, sounding faint and muffled through the earth although still loud by her standards. “FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK-FUCK-FUCK…”
Wallace could not risk speaking, but he decided that she had summed the situation up well, anyway.
19
The tiny tunnel did, fortunately, open into an area where Wallace had more elbow room. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be an open area where he could actually walk but merely a bigger, wider tunnel.
The scorpions had dug a maze down there—a city, a complex, a military base, or what passed for one in arachnoi
d society. Before reaching the wider tunnel, Wallace had passed several other small ones. Those branched off to God-knew-where, however. The one he’d initially crawled into seemed to head directly toward the belly of the scorpion-hill, and it had not noticeably changed direction as he’d penetrated deeper and deeper. The core—somehow, that seemed like the most probable place.
The bigger tunnel would at least afford him enough space to turn or bring his rifle to bear. He sighed in relief although he did not, however, want to fire a gun unless he absolutely had to. Assuming there were any scorpions left down there—and he had to assume there were—a gunshot would bring the remainder of the entire hive crawling after him.
His eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness now that he realized, with slight surprise, that it was not totally dark. There was a trace of reddish-orange light. After the late-afternoon sunlight—even the relatively dim sun screened by the Zoo’s canopy—these tunnels had seemed pitch black. Instead, they were, in fact, coated with thin streaks and patches of a kind of slime that was faintly luminescent. The scorpions themselves must have produced it to light their own way. He didn’t think they were blind. Hearing was clearly the sense they most relied on, but he’d seen eyes on the bastards. Small, weak eyes, but the Zoo’s hyper-evolution was too efficient to grant a creature an organ it never used.
Wallace progressed down the tunnel and now crawled on his hands and knees rather than trying to inch forward like an oversized worm. Another tunnel, also a bigger one, branched off to his left. As he passed it, scuttling sounds echoed from it, drawing closer to his position.
He swore mentally and bit down on his lip. He put his rifle on his back, fastened by its strap, and drew his knife. It made him feel like a damn fool, thinking he could kill one of these things that resisted bullets with a small piece of pointy metal. Still, it was better than nothing. He flattened himself against the sandy earthen wall beside the intersection and waited.