by Michael Todd
Rising in the middle of this mini-desert was a large mound— more like a hill, really—also made of sand. It was high enough to tower above most of the tree line.
“Weird,” Gunnar said. “Really, really weird. I’d like to make a motion that we shoot it and throw grenades at it.”
“Let’s not waste ammo until we know what we’re dealing with here, Corporal,” Wallace said. “Powers, take a few steps forward and to the right. I’ll go left. Åkerlund, keep a bead on the center.”
“Yes, sir,” Powers replied. He stepped out onto the sand.
With a rushing, swishing sound, the sand under the man’s feet formed a kind of funnel and the young man vanished. He simply dropped straight into the earth beneath the sand with no sound at all. It seemed unlikely that he even knew what had happened.
“What the hell?” Hennessy snapped.
“Now what?” Flemm asked from toward the rear. “Oh, dear…did we lose someone?”
Wallace was about to give the order to have Powers fished out with a long pole or something when more sand-funnels appeared beside the one that had swallowed the man, and the swishing sound grew louder.
“The whole place is probably going down,” Gunnar said. He backed up and held his shotgun ready.
“No,” said Wallace, “something is coming up. Fall back! Defensive line!”
He had no sooner given the order when large, dark forms emerged from the sand. At first, Wallace thought that what he saw was a pair of demonic, horned heads on long necks rising from each of the funnel-pits. All too quickly, his brain corrected him. Pincer-claws were mounted on two arms attached to glossy chitinous bodies, along with scrabbling, spiky legs. Behind the bodies, long, segmented tails ended in stingers.
“Nawww,” said Gunnar, who appeared to actually be shaking. “Just naw. Did the Zoo hear me saying how much I hated arachnids? Is that it? That’s just unfair.”
“Open fire!” Wallace yelled. “Fall back—fighting retreat!” He raised his own rifle and squeezed off two three-round bursts at the nearest of the scorpions. The bullets sparked where they struck but didn’t seem to do much damage. The creatures were well-armored. Their hideous mouths moved, and they squeaked at the humans in rage.
Gunnar, Hennessy, and a few other troops near the front fired. At least a dozen of the scorpions now formed a wall. They advanced with halting, irregular movements as they squeaked and rustled and clicked their claws open and shut.
The humans backed away from them into the jungle. Their weapons did little damage, but at least the hail of lead seemed to slow them down. One of the arachnids pounced sideways without warning and landed almost on top of Sergeant Hennessy. Both open claws snapped together around the man’s thighs. He screamed and fell backward and his rifle sprayed randomly into the air. His legs dropped to the sides while his upper body sprawled straight back. The creature was on top of him before he could bleed to death from the loss of two limbs and drove its stinger down into his face.
Only one of the creatures seemed to have been seriously wounded. It limped and black blood leaked from its head near the junction with its thorax. This was not a battle they would be likely to win.
“Retreat!” Wallace said. “Maintain formation but retreat!” He walked backward, switched his rifle to full auto, and emptied the remainder of his magazine into the face of the injured scorpion. Its head fell apart in chunks and it collapsed into the sand at the edge of the tree line. The raised tail slumped beside it.
“The Stallions aren’t working!” Akiwe’s voice said.
“And one of them is fucking gone!” Falstaff added.
How could one be gone? Wallace gritted his teeth and reloaded his rifle. Another walk in the park had turned into a disaster in the space of a few seconds. Between deafening bursts of fire and the rabid squeaking of the arachnids, he asked, “Do we still have the plasma flamethrower?”
“Yes,” Peppy said. She ran to the rear compartment of Falstaff’s and Blancheau’s Stallion, opened it, and reached in. Beside her, Blancheau had fallen off his horse again and had now curled into a ball behind it, probably in the hope that it offered him cover.
A scorpion suddenly appeared from the foliage beside them and one of its claws lurched at the Frenchman’s leg. Falstaff and Peppy both fired on it together and it shrank back, bleeding from a few cracks in its armor. Blancheau wailed. Peppy ran toward the front and strapped the plasma-thrower onto her back as she went.
“Pérez!” Wallace barked. “Do you know how to use that thing?”
As he asked the question, a scorpion lunged without warning. Its tail bolted forward and the stinger found its mark in the stomach of the man beside him, a private whom he didn’t know. The man doubled over and spat blood, and his veins bulged and turned black as the deadly poison filled him. Wallace fired his rifle at the creature’s beady eyes, which forced it to cringe and retreat.
“Yes, sir, I do,” Peppy said. “Sorry.” She flicked a switch and a loud electric buzzing filled the air. Without hesitation, she fired.
A blinding stream of white-hot plasma tinged with blue-violet flames erupted from the weapon. Two of the front-and-center scorpions were swept back by the force of the blast and squeaked horribly as it consumed them. Their vitals boiled within their exoskeletons and melted parts of their armor. Peppy moved the stream back and forth as if watering grass with a hose. Other scorpions roasted or fled before it as the men shrank back from the weapon’s intense brightness and heat.
“Cease fire,” Wallace said. There had been no time to make special preparations, and she was almost as likely to kill or injure her comrades with that thing as the scorpions.
Peppy obeyed. As the quality of the light returned to normal, they saw the last few creatures scamper away to disappear into the sand. Others had been burned to death. Several trees and patches of greenery had also been reduced to charcoal, although the surrounding foliage was too damp to catch fire easily.
“Peppy, the light of our lives,” Gunnar said.
“Shut up, Åkerlund,” Wallace snapped as relative silence settled in.
The arachnids had been driven off, but they’d taken losses. In addition to Hennessy and the man who’d stood beside Wallace when stung, they’d also lost three more men. One’s face had been split in half by a pinch from a scorpion’s claw, another had his ribcage clipped open in two places, and the third had been stung in the leg but died of toxic shock as quickly as the man who’d taken a barbed tail to the stomach. The damage these creatures were able to inflict was beyond horrifying.
“More excellent news,” Peppy reported as she returned to the rear to unstrap the flamethrower. “In addition to one of the Stallions being gone, so are the German chick and the British guy.”
Chapter Nine
Things did not look particularly good, Wallace had to admit. One had to make a realistic assessment and resist any urge to indulge in false optimism, especially when in command, It never helped to vaguely hope that things would improve. You had to tell yourself the truth, even when it sucked.
The truth, in this case, was that they were lost and had their asses kicked, more or less. They had only the vaguest idea of where in the Zoo they might be and were stranded without functional communications equipment and without working vehicles. Five people—a quarter of their force—had been killed in a skirmish that had lasted only about a minute or two. Assemblyman Blancheau was wounded—his leg had been badly slashed by one of the scorpions’ claws—although at least he hadn’t lost the leg. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t be able to walk. The other two of the three all-important politicians were missing in action.
They’d been confronted with a new enemy, one clearly not to be fucked with. These scorpion-like creatures, while they lacked the power of flight of locusts or chimeras or the speed of kangarats or catsharks, made up for these deficiencies of movement by their sheer toughness. Finally, the Zoo had produced killing machines that were resistant to bullets—exorbitant amounts of ammo wou
ld be required to kill these things, Wallace realized, even if they now knew to aim for the heads and the bases of the legs. At least they weren’t resistant to temperatures that could liquefy steel in seconds. There was only one plasma-thrower, however, and it would run dry after a couple more uses.
Unsurprisingly, all these facts added up to and contributed to, another equally dismal fact. Everyone was freaking out and on the verge of panic.
“Fucking Jesus Christ Almighty tap-dancing God, man,” Falstaff raved. His eyes bulged and flicked from side to side. “Those things came right up out of the ground. How do we know they’re not burrowing under us right now, man?”
Falstaff was a vehicles guy. The thought of the ground beneath his feet—or wheels—being unstable and dangerous must have been especially tough for him.
“Falstaff,” Wallace said, “go and assist Audrey James in looking at the Stallions. Let me worry about the ground. You worry about helping us to get those things running again.”
“Uhh, yeah,” he gasped and then remembered himself. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said, stiffened, and ran toward Jimmy as ordered.
Glassner, who was normally relatively unflappable, seemed to stare off into space and shook his head constantly. “How could…how could they have been poisoned that quickly?” he muttered. “I didn’t even have time to try anything.”
“Glassner,” Wallace said, “the fact that the Zoo has produced a venom specifically for the purpose of killing people in a minute or less is not any fault of yours. If you can think of any way to give us more protection against the stings, though, implement it. We might also all benefit from a slight stimulant, and Assemblyman Blancheau will need some painkillers and disinfectants. Get to it. There are still things you can do to help us.”
The man blinked. “Ahh, yes, sir. Thank you.” He grabbed his medikit and hopped to it.
He put the other troops to work to create a defensive perimeter around their chosen space—far enough back from the mini-desert to stay out of its immediate threat range but still within sight of the sand beyond the tree line. The scorpions seemed to be land-bound, so obstacles in their paths might well slow them. And they were noisy and easy to spot.
Everyone seemed to calm slightly now that they all had meaningful tasks to perform, and Wallace was free to devote more of his effort and attention to the specifics of those tasks. In particular, he had to determine which ones he could focus on in order to get them safely out of there post-haste. And that helped to calm him. He didn’t like to be surrounded by people who were incapacitated by helpless fear.
He wandered to the Stallion that Jimmy and Falstaff worked on. Getting those things up and running again would probably be one of their best bets. “How’s it coming?” he asked. “And for that matter, what the hell happened to them to begin with?”
Jimmy, on her knees and hard at work in the mechanical horse’s chest-compartment, blushed with shame. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “There’s no reason why they should have simply stopped working like that. Both seem to have had the same kind of problems. It’s technical, but it’s not something I’d overlook twice. At least, I don’t think so.” She glanced at him. “Please don’t be mad at me. I tested these things multiple different times—”
“It’s okay, Jimmy,” Wallace said, “I’m not angry at you. But get to work. It doesn’t matter what went wrong, only that you can fix it.”
“I can,” she responded, “and I will. Falstaff, hand me the three-eighths wrench.”
Falstaff dove into her toolbox and fished around. Metal clanked as he rummaged around, an intent look on his young face.
Next, Wallace went to check on Private Peppy. The heavy lids of her brown eyes normally drooped in much the same way as her voice, but now, both her eyes were wide and she blinked constantly and re-focused on things. She had also lightly singed her nose and virtually burnt her eyebrows off.
“Pérez.” Wallace waved a hand in front of her face. “Can you see okay? If so, I want you to do some quick recon. Can you do that for me?”
“Uh, yes,” she replied. “But everything looks so dark. I mean, for the first time, it’s as though the outside world matches the inner. The eyes see what the soul knows, or something like that.”
“Right, yeah,” said Wallace. “I want you to look for any sign of our missing Stallion, not to mention our missing German and British ambassadors. It would seem most likely that they’ll all be found in the same place, but it’s difficult to be sure. At the very least, check for any sign of something moving past. At least we’ll be able to narrow down which direction they went in.”
Wallace did not mention the possibility that the direction they may have gone in was down. He tried not to make assumptions in general, but the best scenario, in this case, was that the two of them had panicked when the fighting broke out and human blood started to flow, mounted a Stallion, and fled to some imagined safety deeper in the jungle. They could, however, have blundered into a sandy spot and been dragged under, like Powers, possibly along with the Stallion they rode on. He hoped to God that wasn’t the case.
“Yes, sir, will do,” Peppy said. She stood and blinked. “Someone else can handle the plasma-thrower next time. I’m not cool enough to use it safely.”
“Good idea,” Wallace agreed. She hadn’t put the special goggles on before she fired it and, while she had successfully repelled the scorpion attack, she had also come disturbingly close to vaporizing a couple of the humans along with the arachnids. Then again, their situation had been dire, and Wallace had essentially told her to simply grab the thing and fire. Ultimately, the responsibility fell on him.
As Peppy went off to the edge of the forest and disappeared into the foliage, Wallace made a quick round of the men and women guarding the defensive perimeter. “I will assign someone to handle the plasma flamethrower,” he said, “and handle it properly. This means that it will be ready in case those things come back. But remember to take cover before it’s fired and to avoid looking directly at the flame.”
“Yes, sir,” they said.
Wallace assigned the flamethrower to a guy named Suszek who seemed to be good at following procedures. Then, he had another idea, one that might even help them find their way out of this hellhole without further casualties. He and Chris, alone, had escaped before. He and fourteen good soldiers could do the same.
“Corporal Åkerlund,” he said.
“Yessir?” Gunnar replied. The man looked concerned, Wallace realized. Was he worried about Peppy? Of course, he might simply have been worried about all of them, as any sane human being would be.
“You, PFC Akiwe, and I will do some recon ourselves in five minutes,” the sergeant said. “We will head out onto the sand and climb that hill. Obviously, danger may be involved, but it will enable us to survey most of the Zoo from a higher vantage point and determine exactly where we are and what is the quickest and safest way back home.”
“Affirmative,” said Gunnar. He pulled out a cigarette, which seemed to already be lit, and puffed casually on it. “I’m trying to understand the part, though,” he went on, “where you said, ‘danger may be involved.’ That almost sounds like it means that giant, creepy, hideous, alien stinger-spiders might pull us down into the tenth armpit of Hell, or merely jump up and snip us to pieces with their pincers.”
“Correct.” Wallace sighed. Sometimes, he hated being in charge.
Chapter Ten
Akiwe didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the assignment, either. At least it would be over quickly—one way or another.
As the rest of the team half-watched with nervous trepidation between their other tasks or kept an eye on the surrounding jungle, Wallace, Gunnar, and Akiwe stood three abreast at the edge of the greenery where the sand began.
“Powers must have stepped directly into one of those funnels created by the scorpions burrowing upward,” said Wallace. “The bastards looked heavy and managed to stand on the sand themselves once they wer
e up, so there’s no reason to assume that we’ll sink down into it.”
“Wait,” Gunnar said, “what’s that saying about assumption being the mother of all fuck-ups or something? Oh right, I just remembered. ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.’”
“Shut up, Åkerlund,” the sergeant retorted.
“Well, sir,” Akiwe suggested, “we could simply try walking on the glass at first.” He gestured and they saw it glint in the sunlight.
It had been partially masked, at first, by the dead, blackened, mostly-melted carcasses of the scorpions that Peppy had torched. Squinting, though, Wallace saw that the plasma blast had indeed transformed a large section of the sand into glass. He remembered hearing something about how nuclear bombs set off in desert regions had that effect.
“Åkerlund,” Wallace said, “get a stick and poke that glass to make sure it’s solidified.”
“Yessir,” Gunnar replied with immense enthusiasm. He broke a half-dead branch from a nearby tree, advanced a couple steps into the shallow sand at the edge of the mini-desert, and prodded at the gleaming surface of the area Akiwe had indicated. It made a hard thunking sound as he tapped it. “Well, it cooled enough that it won’t melt our feet off,” he said. “How thick or thin is it, though? I wouldn’t particularly want it to shatter as we walk on it, either.”
“Follow me,” Wallace said. “There’s only one way to find out.” He strode out onto the glass.
The first of his heavy, metal-shod feet landed without mishap and then the second, and his smooth, mechanical gait continued unimpeded. The glass had to be at least a couple of inches thick. In places where it warped around the shape of the sand itself, it crunched slightly, but that was all. “It’s holding up well,” he told his men. “But it looks slippery. Be careful.”
Gunnar and Akiwe followed warily. The former held up his automatic shotgun, while the latter held his automatic rifle aimed downward. Wallace wondered if stepping on the glass would make more noise than stepping on sand and alert more of the scorpions to their presence. He almost wished he hadn’t thought of that.