by Michael Todd
“Hear that, everyone?” Falstaff announced. “Akiwe hates cockroaches. It’s good to know it could be so much worse, am I right? Instead of dealing with cow-sized scorpions with battle-axes for hands and stingers filled with VX poison stalking us through this goddamn jungle, we could deal with roaches scuttling around on someone’s kitchen floor.”
“Shut up, Falstaff,” Akiwe said.
“Shut up, Falstaff,” Wallace echoed. It felt strange and wrong to tell someone else to shut up. Falstaff must have felt obliged to fill the void left by Gunnar. He didn’t want to dwell on that fact.
Peppy, meanwhile, was still quiet. She hadn’t slept all night and did not have any of her usual despondently amusing commentary to offer, either. Wallace hoped she’d be back to her old self soon.
The other good news, aside from the obvious fact that none of them woke up as inhabitants of the afterlife, was delivered by Jimmy James.
“I fixed them both!” she said, beaming. She looked tired but still sprightly with apparently inexhaustible energy. “It wasn’t easy, but that British guy didn’t have enough time to completely ruin them. I mean, the wiring is a little wonky now, so they might fail again if they get hit really hard or flooded with water or some crap like that. but for simply heading back through the jungle, we should be good to go.” She put her hands on her hips and frowned. “It pisses me off that we lost the third one, though.”
“They even blew its poor body up with a grenade,” someone said.
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Jimmy grumbled.
Graf’s face almost broke into something vaguely resembling a smile at that.
“All right, everyone,” Wallace announced, “time to move out. Our little sight-seeing trip is over. Time to head out and return to base. All of us.”
“I will be put on ze Stallion, yes?” Blancheau asked. He looked frumpled and slightly terrified that he might be asked to walk on his injured leg. Glassner had stabilized the wound but it was still swollen and nasty-looking, and the man was barely able to stand. He could move only by limping and with the aid of a wooden branch he used like a crutch. These factors combined poorly with his age and obesity. Wallace had to admit that making him walk would have been extremely inefficient, even if it would at least have been somewhat entertaining.
“Yes,” Wallace said. “We’ll get you some help to get you mounted on one. There’s nothing we can do to make the ride any smoother, though, so I warn you in advance not to waste your own breath or energy with complaints.”
The elderly Frenchman muttered something under his breath in his native tongue but at least had the decency not to protest. Glassner supervised a brief operation to hoist the man carefully onto the Stallion’s back without making his leg worse. PFC Akiwe had the honor of driving the Stallion and sitting directly in front of the wounded assemblyman.
“I’ll take this as a compliment to my ability to drive even with distractions and shit,” Akiwe said.
“Your attitude is commendable,” Wallace stated. “Falstaff, drive the other one. We can mount two other people behind you if anyone gets tired. Ambassador Graf, would you like to ride?”
“I will walk, thank you,” she said.
“So be it. Falstaff, Akiwe, I want you to take it slow and careful.” Wallace gestured emphatically as he issued this order. “We’re all looking forward to getting the hell out of here and back to the mess hall and the dorm, but we don’t want to chance pushing the vehicles too hard.”
“They should be fine, honestly,” Jimmy assured him.
“Be that as it may,” Wallace retorted, “no chances. Slow and careful.”
“Yes, sir,” the two drivers said.
They started off. Wallace pushed them westward a little and intended to continue in this direction far enough to be well clear of Kemp’s capital before they turned north. This would be a detour, but it ought to get them clear of the eastern river and its tributaries which had already caused them so many problems. They’d never encountered any running water in the western part of the Zoo, or so far, at least. There was that slimy green pond where he’d fought and killed Kemp’s enormous pet catshark, Bruce, but that would be much easier to go around than a goddamn river.
Things went well throughout early- to mid-morning. Even Wallace would have liked to go faster, but any failure of their Stallions would be disastrous. If it took them all day to get out, then so be it.
After an hour and a half or so, Wallace, who had marched near the front of their column, fell back toward the center to talk to Graf, whom he’d ordered to stay close to the relative safety of the Stallion ridden by Akiwe and Blancheau.
“Ambassador,” he said.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“I have a few other questions for you.”
She looked at him, patient but unspeaking, and waited to hear what he had to say. He cleared his throat. “Why,” he asked, “would Flemm sabotage our vehicles? It’s not as if the Zoo’s goddamn scorpions are the soldiers of some other country. And by doing that, he risked his own life as well. It simply doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The woman laughed, and there was a cold, hard edge to it. He sensed that she didn’t intend to be nasty. It was simply that she couldn’t help being cynical. She, as a soldier turned diplomat, must have known something that he, as only a soldier, did not.
“You are not very well versed in the ways of politics, are you?” she said. It was more of a statement than a question.
“Affirmative,” he said and frowned darkly. “Politics is an arena I prefer to stay out of. Although I suppose it does affect what sorts of missions the military ends up having to deal with.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Allow me to give you my best guess.”
“Sure.” He burned with curiosity, to be honest.
“This place has enormous potential, especially from a financial perspective,” she began. “So much money is already invested here. The United States has reached out to the international community for help, but your government does not want to give up control. It wants to…how do you say…have your cake and eat it also.”
Wallace nodded. He didn’t particularly like hearing that, especially not from a foreigner, but she wasn’t wrong.
“One of the several reasons why I am here,” Graf said, “along with Herr Flemm and Herr Blancheau, is because the rest of the US’s allies do not like you to have all the control. So long as America retains control, it has all the power, even while other countries have invested money and labor into the project. A failed mission of this magnitude, which cannot be hidden from international eyes, would severely weaken US credibility and make it easier to weaken American control of the Zoo.”
Wallace felt his eyes narrow and his gut clench. Machiavellian power games, exactly as he’d feared and suspected. The lives of common soldiers lost in such a scheme were of no concern. The people behind the power play regarded them as pawns whose only function was to be sacrificed to checkmate the other side’s king.
“Just imagine it,” Graf went on. “The first American mission in which foreign observers are involved, but everyone dies except for the brave British ambassador, Flemm. There would be inquiries into the ability—or the inability—of the US to control the situation. The United Kingdom would be a natural choice to fill the void. The rest of the industrialized world trusts them more than they trust the Russians or the Chinese.”
To the surprise of everyone around, including Wallace himself, he suddenly pivoted and drove his gauntlet-braced left fist into the nearest tree. Its trunk collapsed in on itself in a shattering fountain of slimy chips and splinters, and it fell halfway into a convenient net of interlocking weedy vines.
“That is bullshit!” he burst out. “People are dying in here! We accepted this mission in good faith, as a courtesy to our allies and to international opinion. We do what we’re told, for the good of our country and the world. We simply follow orders. How dare one of our allies try to fuck us like that!” He could sc
arcely believe it. The thought that anyone would do such a thing was bad enough, but the UK? They were the USA’s greatest and closest friends and had been for a century and a half.
“The British…” he said now in a lower voice. “How could they do this? It makes no sense, Graf.” Most of his men either stared openly at him or looked at him out of the corners of their eyes and hoped he wouldn’t notice. Wallace almost never lost his temper like that. He was embarrassed because he knew he’d set a bad example for them.
And yet, it was only because he cared about their lives.
“You should save your anger, Sergeant Wallace,” Graf replied. “We do not even know that it was the British. At least, not the British government. We are certain only of the behavior, so far, of one man. Flemm himself.”
“What do you mean? That he’s acting alone? That’s not possible—”
“Not alone,” continued Graf, “but he may follow the orders of someone else. How do you say…a third party?”
Wallace’s brow furrowed. “Hall introduced him as some sort of aristocrat who was here on special assignment from the British government—a former MP and everything.”
“That information could be fabricated,” Graf pointed out. “Flemm himself may be British, but I cannot imagine that the United Kingdom actually planned this. It is not their style. Not since the later days of their empire in the last century have they shown this level of subterfuge, as when they turned the Chinese and the nations of Africa against one another. Their military is very effective, but their politicians are feeble-minded virtue-signalers. And their political class has mostly been terrified to offend you Americans ever since George W. Bush snapped his fingers and brought Tony Blair yipping to his heel. They hardly even reacted at all when their queen was blocked from her own photo shoot and instead, their Parliament spent its time debating an offensive joke about Doctor Who.”
She had a point there.
“Someone else is pulling Flemm’s strings,” Graf said. “And that someone has deceived us all.”
“Yes, I can understand that,” Wallace acknowledged. “Director Hall has said that more and more of these power-players would be involved as word of the Zoo spread. It simply makes me very angry that the lives of my men and women are thrown away in someone else’s political games. We don’t serve in the US military to play politics. We are here to do our duty.”
Graf smiled, then, although it was a slow, subtle, and rather sad kind of smile. It reminded Wallace somehow of the look a parent gives to a child when the kid has their first experience with something painful that everyone has to go through—getting bullied on the playground, getting an F in school, or the breakup of a first relationship.
“In matters of duty,” she said in a softer, gentler voice, “there is the letter of the law and the spirit. If the history of my country has proven anything, it is that duty becomes a crutch, an excuse to do things which are wrong or stupid, when one only follows the letter of the law. Sometimes, your honor is only to be found on the wrong side of the law. Take it from the Germans,” she said. and put a hand on his shoulder, “and don’t follow bad orders.”
Chapter Fifteen
Shortly after Wallace turned them north once more, the team realized they were being watched. And followed.
“What the hell is that? Sergeant?” someone asked.
Wallace knew exactly what it was. It was the sound of something large and heavy climbing horizontally through the trees—something furry, powerful, and fast. He also caught brief glimpses of the creatures’ brown, speckled coats and beady eyes reflecting the forest’s dim sunlight. They usually hunted in pairs or trios. He and Chris both hated those things more than any other denizen of the Zoo. The cybernetic brace on Wallace’s limbs and lower back was a direct result of an encounter with one of the bastards.
“Kangarats,” Wallace said. There was no point in lying to his men. “At least one, but probably two or three. Some of you may have heard of or encountered them before. Those of you who have not, stay very frosty. They’re as fast as hell and like to make hit-and-run strikes. They can’t take as much punishment as those scorpions, but it still takes a good amount of firepower to put one down.”
“Oh, God,” someone else said. “I hate those things.”
“We all do,” Wallace went on. “There’s enough of us that they seem to be trying to decide if they’ll risk an attack. Plus, the Stallions might be scaring them off.”
“Ha! Well, that’s good to know,” Jimmy said and twirled a wrench around her finger in a mediocre imitation of what Wallace had done with his pistol in the past.
No sooner had she spoken than the woods beside them rustled and a brown flash appeared next to the Stallion where Akiwe and Blancheau rode.
“Move us away from zere!” the Frenchman said, sweating even more heavily than usual.
Wallace motioned for Akiwe, who sweated visibly and held his rifle in one hand, to do so. Before he could comply, the kangarat attacked.
“Shit!” someone exclaimed.
It happened so fast their minds could barely register it. The hairy brown shape was there in one fraction of a second and in the next, both it and PFC Akiwe were gone.
“Help! Help!” wailed Blancheau, who now rode alone as the Stallion came slowly to a halt with no one to pilot it.
Everyone stopped and guns came up. It was totally silent, save for Blancheau’s pleas and the jungle’s faint breathing.
A round object hurtled from the trees. It soared in an arc from the foliage, left a ribbon of speckled red behind it, and rolled when it hit the ground. It had moved too fast to positively identify, but Wallace knew exactly what it was.
“Motherfuck!” Falstaff blurted out. “No, no!” As if in answer, a gasped, almost cackling sound issued from the jungle.
The kangarat now attacked the rear of the column. This time, though, they were ready for it. Guns blazed and boomed, and the creature was cut down the instant it emerged from its hiding place.
“Laugh at this!” snarled a large private with an automatic shotgun. He and three riflemen fired relentlessly into the now screaming, writhing kangarat. It fell to the ground in a pulpy, reddish mass of chunks, strips, and pieces. The tangled fur smoked and its blood seeped into the mud.
“Goddammit,” Wallace muttered. He heard another creature retreat into the jungle. At least the death of its partner had scared it off. A quick search through the surrounding woods, however, revealed Akiwe’s headless body. They’d lost another person—another good soldier.
“I cannot drive zis thing!” Blancheau protested.
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Wallace said. “Private Thomas, drive the Stallion.”
“Uh…yes, sir,” replied Thomas, a twentyish woman whom Wallace had seen driving a JLTV once or twice. With a mixture of fear and distaste, she climbed onto the Stallion in front of Blancheau and steered it forward. She did not seem to pilot the vehicle as smoothly as Akiwe had been able to, but she did well enough.
Mere moments after the skirmish, Wallace heard a sound that disturbed him almost as much as that of the kangarats—the rushing flow of water.
“That…uh, sounds like a river,” said Falstaff, whose voice was thinner than usual. He and Akiwe had been friends. “Weren’t we supposed to avoid things like rivers?”
Wallace did not tell Falstaff to shut up. Instead, he said quietly, “We have fording equipment, Falstaff.”
They pushed their way forward through a few more layers of plant matter and froze at the sight of the river.
“My God…incredible,” Aade Graf said.
It was incredible—a wide brown mass of flowing water that churned to whitish spray in places and lapped at the roots and muddy banks of the opposing shores. How could the Zoo have produced one so quickly and directed it to the west? Idly but darkly, Wallace thought of Kemp. Back when she was still human, she and Chris had apparently forded a river themselves. She would have remembered that and could have used the memory against
them now. He gritted his teeth.
“What do we do, Sergeant?”
“Cross it,” said Wallace.
From the recesses of Falstaff’s Stallion, they produced a device Wallace had packed in case of this particular contingency. It was a kind of zip line gun, similar to a grappling hook, that fired a weighted stake attached to a strong and lengthy cord. The other end could be fastened to a tree or something, providing a rope support that the troops could then strap themselves to, or at least hold onto while fording a body of water. The cord also changed color when wet, which meant that it could be fired first into the river itself and then retracted to judge the water’s depth.
This was exactly what they did. Wallace himself fired the gun first, upward and on its lowest power setting, so that the stake fell almost straight into the center of the river on its downward trajectory. He then caught the rest of the cord with his hand to keep it above water and retracted it slowly. About three and a half to four feet at the end of the cord had turned bright blue.
“We can ford it here,” he said, “but we need to be careful. I want everyone to loop a length of rope around the zip line, tie it to your belt, and to move slowly and sideways, facing into the current. Feel out your footing ahead of you before you put all your weight in that direction.”
“What about us?” Private Thomas asked. She sounded nervous at the prospect of driving the Stallion, which she now did for the first time, through running water.
“Same thing,” Wallace said. “Slow and careful.”
Again, he fired the stake, this time more laterally and on a far higher power setting. The stake embedded itself deep into the trunk of a tree beyond the opposite riverbank. With the press of a button, the stake ejected spikes that further strengthened its grip. Wallace fastened the other end, and the gun itself, to the nearest large, sturdy tree near the height of his head so that most of the zip line stayed above water.
“All right,” he said, “we’re going in. Falstaff, take your Stallion in first. I’ll follow. Then Peppy and Jimmy right behind me. Then Thomas’s Stallion, then everyone else. Let’s do it.”