by Michael Todd
The glass ended as they reached the base of the strange sand-hill. It loomed before them, a broad, upright mass of pale yellowish-brown granules. Wallace saw that Gunnar still carried his stick under his arm.
“Corporal, test the consistency of the sand on this hill,” he ordered.
“Yessir.” Gunnar stepped forward and prodded the hill. The stick sunk easily into the first couple of inches’ but slowed after that and stopped after a little less than a foot. “It’s not too bad,” he said. “No worse than trying to climb one of the dunes on a beach. And there aren’t any fucking seagulls around trying to beg for all our food. So we’re in luck, gentlemen.”
“Yeah, sure,” Akiwe mumbled.
Wallace took the lead again. Going uphill through the sand wasn’t particularly easy but he managed it. He had the advantage of technological aid, anyway. Gunnar and Akiwe followed about two paces behind him. They moved more slowly and began to breathe heavily once they were about halfway up. Wallace could sense their fear and he shared it. Several of the scorpions had escaped the earlier fight, and even one might well kill them all if it ambushed them. It was quiet, though, and nothing happened to deter them.
They stopped barely short of the hill’s peak. “Right,” Wallace said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Not at all, sir,” said Gunnar. “When do we go swimming? I forgot my fucking sunscreen, though.”
“White people and their sunscreen,” Akiwe mused. His family was from West Africa if Wallace recalled correctly. Not too far from their current location, actually.
“I take offense to that,” said Gunnar.
As the two of them pretended to argue, Wallace surveyed their location from the high ground. His line of sight was a little above the tree line. Higher would have been better, but this should suffice. Mostly, all he could see was a vast, indistinguishable mass of green, leafy trees with faint moisture-mist rising from them. Sand and bare rock stretched beyond them in all directions. Here and there, he could see parts of Wall One.
“Jesus, it’s hot,” Gunnar said. “At least out in the real desert the humidity goes way down. We’re technically still in the jungle right now, but also directly under the sun. I hate the sun.”
“Shut up, Åkerlund,” Wallace said absent-mindedly. Then, he saw something distinctive. A particularly thick and elaborate green structure, like a tower of twisted trees and vines, ahead and to the left. The plant-castle of Queen Kemp, the bizarre structure that he now thought of as the capital of the Zoo. It was located a little southwest of the Zoo’s exact center if he recalled correctly. And since the trees blocked any sight of the American encampment near Wall One, he was fairly certain he now looked north. That meant…
“Dammit,” Wallace said. “We’re somewhere deep in the southeast part of the Zoo. That stream led us even farther off the beaten path than we thought. Nobody’s even been this far in before.”
“Awesome,” Gunnar said.
“Can we keep heading southeast and get the hell out by the quickest route?” Akiwe asked. “Once we’re clear of the jungle, we could loop around to the north and get back to the US base.”
“Possibly,” the sergeant conceded, “but that would take us through totally uncharted territory.”
Gunnar ascended a few steps past them to the actual summit. “Hey, guys,” he said, “it looks like there’s some sort of—whoa, shit!”
The earth seemed to sigh and groan, and sand shifted beneath their feet. Akiwe wobbled, and Wallace had to will his mechanical legs to dig in to maintain his balance. A rushing, swishing sound made them freeze in place. Not good.
The sand of the hill, starting at the summit, caved in. A circular waterfall of sand appeared around a yawning hole, one which grew and expanded directly beneath Gunnar’s feet.
Wallace pivoted, and his right arm shot out as the man toppled past him. Somehow, he cleared enough of the distance for his hand to grasp him by the forearm, and the cave-in slowed as it neared the place where his own feet dug in. Unfortunately, however, he could not lean forward to gain better leverage to haul the man up without toppling in himself. His arms, naturally strong though they were, did not have the benefit of cybernetic enhancement to their strength and ability. Gunnar was thin but tall enough to be heavy.
“Hahaha,” Gunnar laughed, although his morose face was now alive with terror. He dangled over a dark pit that seemed to descend forever—or at least to a point level with the base of the hill and possibly still deeper in the earth than that. “This must be where all the beach bums throw their burnt-out joint roaches.” He swayed in the air as his legs kicked and veins stood out on his face and his arm. They were uncannily mirrored on Wallace’s arm and face.
“I got you,” the sergeant gasped. He tried to readjust his footing but the sand shifted, and he stopped. Both of them falling in would accomplish nothing. “Akiwe!” he said.
The soldier was already beside him. Gunnar was out of his reach, though. “God damn,” he said when he looked into the pit. “This isn’t a mountain, it’s like an anthill! Look!”
Gunnar chose not to look, but Wallace didn’t have much choice. His eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness within the hill that he could now see multitudes of big, glossy, dark shapes moving around. As always, they made scrabbling and squeaking sounds. The pit positively teemed with scorpions.
“That’s what I think it is, isn’t it?” Gunnar gasped as he swayed in the air. “Don’t answer that question, actually.”
Akiwe extended the butt of his rifle toward the dangling Corporal, hoping that he’d be able to grab it and both he and Wallace would be able to pull Gunnar up and out. The glossy forms grew bigger and closer. Somehow, they climbed upward. Fast.
“Shit,” Wallace grunted. “Akiwe, shoot them!”
The PFC shifted his rifle and fired a couple of bursts down into the hill. It seemed that two or three of the scorpions hesitated but the others continued to advance. Their claws closed around Gunnar’s lower body. For some reason, they didn’t snap him in half but simply held on. It soon became obvious that they tried to pull him in.
“Guys?” Gunnar said, his face totally ashen. “I…uh, really don’t think—”
His hand slid out of Wallace’s grasp and in an instant, he had vanished into the roiling black mass of the giant arachnids.
The sergeant stood frozen for a second. He tensed himself, ready to pounce. These things wouldn’t capture a man of his without a fight.
“Sir! No!” Akiwe burst out. He seized him by the shoulder and dragged him back.
Wallace resisted at first but then relented. The soldier was right. The mission. He was in command. There was everyone else to consider.
Scorpions now poured upward and out of the gaping hole, their evil-looking claws raised skyward.
“Run!” Wallace said.
Both men sprinted down the hill, uncaring whether they ran on glass or sand and more than once, almost fell in their haste. The other troops had gathered at the edge of the sandy area. They watched them and tried to get a bead on the advancing arachnids with their guns. Behind them, they could hear the soft, swishing sound of the scorpions’ advance.
Wallace crashed through leaves and suddenly, was back amidst his men. Akiwe plowed through right behind him. Sand whistled and shifted. They looked back but saw only funnels in the small desert. The scorpions had gone.
Chapter Eleven
“Zis is terrible! What is ze matter with you idiots?” Blancheau wailed. He wrung his hands despite the physical effort involved in doing so and sweated through his now grubby suit. “Zis is what happens when too much money gets into ze hands of people whose schoolchildren cannot even score well on math tests! You get other people stuck in total disasters like zis. With your Fahrenheit and inches and miles, America should not even be considered a First-World Country!”
“Whoops,” Private Falstaff said as he broke a branch on an overhanging tree as he walked past the spot where Blancheau lay. The br
anch drooped, and a mass of large leaves fell directly onto the French assemblyman’s face, temporarily shutting him up.
Wallace ignored the man’s pissing and moaning. He ignored almost everything right now—distractions, pain, tiredness, and most of all, emotions. What mattered was that he was on a mission, he had a job to do, and he had parameters to fulfill. Emotions got in the way. They weren’t even real. How he felt about losing Corporal Gunnar Åkerlund was irrelevant to the task at hand. He had to finish the mission.
“Sir,” Glassner said to him, “your wrist is bruised all to hell, and there’s some damage to your leg plate. It’s scraping against your actual leg enough to draw blood.”
Wallace blinked in surprise. The medic was right. Gunnar’s death-grip as the man dangled over the scorpion-hill had turned his lower forearm a nasty blackish-purple. A trickle of red blood ran down the side of his lower exoskeleton from a wound in the mostly-useless flesh within it.
“I don’t seem to be seriously wounded,” he replied.
“Let me patch you up quickly,” Glassner said, “and give you a painkiller.”
“I’ll defer to your expertise,” Wallace agreed. He supposed he should take a minute to rest and gather his thoughts. But only a minute. There were too many things for him to do.
Things like, for example, checking on Jimmy’s repair-job on their Stallions and getting the rest of them the hell out of this place in one mostly-functional piece. Not to mention finding the wayward politicians to avoid making unnecessary extra work for the US State Department. There was probably some or another diplomat who had been required to promise the British, French, and German embassies that their people would be in safe hands. God forbid politicians had to accuse one another of lying.
“I patched up the abrasion,” Glassner said as he finished with Wallace’s leg, “but it might break open again if the dented metal keeps scraping it. You might want to talk to Miss James about that.”
“I was going to talk to her, anyway,” Wallace replied. “Thank you, Corporal.”
“No problem.” The medic handed him a painkiller for his wrist. He palmed the pill into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of water from his canteen.
“Check on PFC Akiwe,” Wallace ordered. Then, he walked to where the two Stallions stood, unmoving and useless for now, and where Jimmy crouched with her toolbox. She was hard at work and squinted in concentration. Her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth and a strand of red hair fell from beneath the cap she’d worn to hold it back and protect her head from the sun.
“Jimmy,” he said. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. “How’s it coming?”
“Well, I have bad news, good news, and more bad news,” she reported. Her demeanor was a mixture of fear, embarrassment, and anger but there was still that underlying energy and positivity that shone through her. Wallace was, to be honest, glad she was here.
“Bad news first,” Wallace said. “The first bad news.” He wasn’t sure yet if she was aware that Gunnar was dead. He didn’t feel like telling her unless she specifically asked.
Jimmy nodded, brushed herself off, and stood with her wrench in hand. “Okay,” she began, “the first bad news is that I am pretty frickin’ confident that someone sabotaged the machines.”
Wallace felt his muscles tense. He only nodded, for now. He would ask about the details after he heard the good news…and the second bad news.
“The good news is that I can fix them. The second bad news is that it’ll take a while…like possibly all night.” She frowned, sighed, and hung her head, her gaze fixed on the ground.
“What makes you confident that they’ve been sabotaged?” Wallace asked.
“Well,” she said, “a bunch of wires were cut. And not ripped or broken, but cut, obviously with a knife. Internal stuff that wouldn’t have gotten damaged unless the whole damn Stallion was crushed or impaled on something. Someone had to have opened them, reached in there, and screwed us over. And while they were at it, they tossed some mud and stones into this one that now mess with one of the leg mechanisms. I’ll have to basically re-wire them both in addition to cleaning this one out.” She kicked a rock and it clattered against a tree trunk before it disappeared into the foliage. “Who would have done something like this to us?”
Wallace was suddenly furious. It welled up out of the spring deep within him, the place where his potential for violence lurked, and made him agitated and yet hyper-calm at once. It was how he became when he was ready to hunt, kill, and destroy. The answer to Jimmy’s question was obvious. The person who’d done this was the same one who’d poked around their base, spoken contemptuously of their soldiers, and asked far too many questions about exactly how they responded to difficult situations—not to mention demanded that they enter a difficult situation, to begin with.
“I have an idea,” Wallace said, “and one way or another, they will pay. Keep working on those Stallions, Jimmy.” He spun and strode off toward the forest, his cybernetic brace whirring as it helped him move.
She would pay not only for sabotaging their rides but for getting Gunnar and five other good men killed. Wallace would contradict his own orders if he arranged for her to have an “accident” out there in the jungle…so no. He would not disobey his orders. But he would tell Danvers, and Bokhari, and Hall everything. She wouldn’t get away with this.
He reared his left fist in its gauntlet back and punched the nearest tree. Wood cracked.
In the silence that followed, a radio sprang to scratchy, static-filled life, and a familiar voice wafted out of it. Wallace sprang toward it and reached it even before his men could.
For their radios to work out here, it had to be local—someone nearby and indeed, it was. “…found the Stal…sign of…two hundred yards southwest of…extraction,” Peppy’s voice said, but it wavered in and out, barely audible under the distortion. It was impossible to tell exactly what she meant based on the fragments he’d heard, but clearly, she’d found something important.
Wallace looked up as the radio went dead again. Falstaff, Akiwe, and two other men watched him warily, uncertain but excited. If Peppy had found the third Stallion, that would greatly improve their chances of getting home. Not to mention that they must have wondered where the hell Flemm and Graf had gotten to.
“You men stay here,” he said and looked at each soldier, in turn, to indicate that he spoke to the entire unit. “PFC Pérez isn’t far, and we need people to keep an eye on things and guard the safety of Monsieur Blancheau.”
The Frenchman, for his part, had slumped against the tree where he’d fallen some moments before and now dug the toe of his shoe idly in the mud like a pouting kid. He continued to mutter in French and shake his head.
“Yes, sir,” Akiwe said. “But—”
“Don’t question me, Akiwe,” Wallace snapped. “Corporal Glassner is in command in my absence. I know the Zoo better than anyone else here, and I’m harder to kill anyway.” He tapped his exoskeleton. “I’ll be right back.”
He turned and strode off into the forest and to the southwest. That would be in the deep jungle behind Kemp’s palace. He had virtually no idea what lay there. But Peppy was there, and if he found her, they might finally get some answers as to why everything had gone completely to hell. Again.
Chapter Twelve
PFC Pérez was, as it turned out, closer to one hundred rather than two hundred yards from their camp. Of course, even that short distance seemed like far longer in the dense and uncharted jungle where screens of slimy vines, shuddering leaves, and fat tree trunks blocked human sight at any distance. In addition, the faint but all-encompassing sounds of the forest helped to mask those sounds which the plants themselves didn’t absorb.
“Well, you made it,” Peppy said in her dark monotone as Wallace broke through a curtain of mossy creepers. “Welcome, I guess. Sir.”
“Pérez,” Wallace replied, “are you injured? And did you find our targets?”
“I’m fine, to the extent th
at anyone can be ‘fine.’” She shrugged. “There is no sign of our lost politicians. They have vanished into the black void of oblivion, where at least they’ll probably meet many new friends. Our Stallion, however, is KIA.” She gestured vaguely toward a large mass of crumpled metal slightly behind her.
Wallace advanced into the tiny glade alongside the PFC and the fallen vehicle. Peppy did indeed look to be fine, if not overly cheerful, although that was to be expected. The Stallion, on the other hand, looked like it had been to hell and back. Its crude head-portion was destroyed to the point where it had caved-in, as though someone had run it directly into a tree. Its sides were dented and slashed. The legs were twisted and broken and the back left one was entirely gone. If Flemm or Graf had crashed, it must have been ravaged by scorpions or other Zoo creatures immediately afterward…which suggested that they’d probably done even worse things to the two politicians.
“Dammit,” Wallace said. Losing Flemm and Graf, with Blancheau injured and furious, effectively made this mission a failure. And until he at least got the last of his team back, it might, like the mission to apprehend Kemp and her forbidden fruit, even go beyond failure and into the realm of fiasco.
“Any news from civilization?” Peppy asked. “Not that I expect it to be good news. Just news in general.”
“If by civilization you mean our camp a hundred and twenty yards away, the main news is that we’ll be here overnight while Jimmy fixes the other two Stallions,” Wallace informed her. “We’d best get back.”
Peppy sighed. “Yes, sir.”
Above, them, on a large leafy branch, something rustled.
Both soldiers tensed and instantly adopted battle stances. They backed away from the offending branch, their guns up and ready. A dark form dropped silently from the limb and to the side of them. Wallace held his hand up and forced himself not to fire. He was glad that Peppy wasn’t the itchy trigger finger type.