by Michael Todd
One Crazy Rescue
Apocalypse Paused™ Book 8
Michael Todd
Michael Anderle
One Crazy Rescue (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Michael Todd, and Michael Anderle
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, March 2019
The Zoo Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2018-19 by Michael Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Connect with Michael Todd and The Zoo
Other Zoo Books
Books written as Michael Anderle
One Crazy Rescue Team
JIT Readers
Nicole Emens
Peter Manis
Diane L. Smith
Tim Bischoff
John Ashmore
Dorothy Lloyd
Kelly O’Donnell
Jeff Eaton
Micky Cocker
Paul Westman
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedication
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
Prologue
All that she could hear was the crash of her own footsteps through the jungle, far too loud and sure to alert her pursuers to exactly where she was. And that wasn’t her only problem. Her own wheezing breath was even louder. Still, as ragged as her breathing was, it was hers and she wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to take it from her—especially not this weirdo jungle in the middle of the freaking Sahara Desert.
That was the motivation that enabled her to keep running.
She hurdled fallen branches that shouldn’t even be there considering all these plants were only perhaps a week old. Desperation thrust her past grasping vines with barbs more insidious than anything she’d thought the natural world could devise. She ducked under branches that threatened to scratch her deep enough to add to her collection of tattoos. All of this, however, was simply the malevolent chorus to the nightmare she ran from.
Private Elizabeth Abbott stopped only once—to listen, as difficult as that was when her heart pounded and lungs rasped with effort. She would be eaten by some horrible freaking monster because of her asthma. This was far beyond what every third grader’s nightmare of what bullies grew up to become.
But she’d had asthma since she was a kid and it wouldn’t beat her today. She used valuable seconds to focus and slow her breathing while she scanned the direction from which she had come. Was it actually possible? The silence seemed to confirm that she’d managed to lose whatever had followed her.
“Heck, yes,” Abbott said and allowed herself a tiny fist pump.
Something rustled to the left.
Another something rustled, this time to the right, and then another. Reality crashed in with all the force of a runway train. She hadn’t lost her pursuer, she’d invited more.
“Oh, I’m fucked.”
As much as a part of her wanted to stick around to see exactly what would finally kill her, she chose flight. She ran like every kid who’d ever called her small or stupid or insulted her tattoos was in pursuit. That was a lot of people. She sprinted like every one of them had transformed into monsters that hungered for flesh instead of social embarrassment. Then again, why dwell on those? Maybe she didn’t need their extra motivation to keep moving when she had a malevolent jungle to worry about.
She careened onward in headlong flight and sucked tortured breaths into labored, painful lungs. Her head light from diminished oxygen, she hurdled branches and matted shrubs and shoved through the undergrowth. There was no real purpose, no sure destination. At that point, she simply needed to escape.
The things had gained on her.
Abbott confirmed this when she looked desperately to the right or the left. Shadowy forms moved through the vegetation. The creatures had outpaced her and now initiated a flanking movement on either side. Stupidly, she looked again—all it did was validate her terror—and caught her boot on a branch.
With a shriek of horror, she tumbled through the underbrush to scrape her palms and shred her uniform at one of the elbows. She pushed through the sharp stab of pain in one hand and used both to force herself to her feet. Her wrist hurt and might be sprained, or worse, but it wasn’t like she had never been knocked down before.
She barreled forward once more.
“Up yours,” she added for good measure but didn’t dare to look at her pursuers.
Plants tore at her thick jacket as she ran, and roots snatched at her feet. Branches whipped in her face.
There was no way in hell she would let this place stop her. Not today. It could throw trees at her, or poison vines—or an army of hungry predators, apparently—but it wasn’t going to stop her. Nothing could stop her.
Except maybe a ravine twenty feet across.
“You have to be kidding me!”
Right or left? That was the question. Already, Abbott heard sounds from the left, so she’d go right— Nope, something came from that direction too. She could hear it thrash toward her, making no attempt to muffle its approach. The Zoo was as bad as they’d said. It had outsmarted her, flanked her, and driven her into a trap.
She drew her rifle from her back. Of course, she knew she should’ve held it at all times, but she ran faster this way. Besides, gunfire had unfortunate side effects in the Zoo, but it wouldn’t matter now. Every creature in a ten-mile radius had apparently already homed in on her. She wondered which particular monster would be the one to kill her.
Chimeras? Those were horrible, what with all the freaky body parts jigsawed together. Maybe those cat-sharks? Also a bad choice, but she might be able to survive them. Bullets to the head worked well on cat-sharks, not like the locusts. She hoped it wasn’t the locusts. They were strong, relentless, and creepy. Plus, if you shot them, they sometimes kept moving. And, of course, they were common. To be killed by one was totally a noob move.
Abbott didn’t want to be remembered as a dead noob.
She checked her rifle’s magaz
ine. Full up, with a spare in her pocket. Whatever it was that hunted her, they’d have to earn their meal.
Her breathing had eased somewhat with the forced stop so she could at least hear a little better. She focused on one set of footsteps that approached from the direction from which she’d run—the one that had herded her like a dumb sheep.
Why wait for the thing to burst from the undergrowth? She was human, which meant she was smart and knew where it was hiding. Resigned to the inevitable, she squeezed the trigger.
The gun jammed.
That was impossible. The main reason the military had selected those particular assault rifles was because they never jammed.
Abbott cursed and dropped the useless weapon. Maybe she could fix it but being ripped to pieces while she worked on the innards of a gun—never her favorite task at the best of times—didn’t sound like a good way to go.
Instead, she retrieved her radio. The devices never worked in the Zoo, but pehaps, with the gun jammed, some bizarre twist of luck would make it fully operational.
Nope.
Nothing but static surged and crackled in the eerie silence.
Maybe if she climbed one of the trees, she could make contact, but she’d never make it. She didn’t know how tall trees outside the Zoo usually were, let alone how to climb one. These could be a hundred feet tall, Two? Three hundred? She honestly didn’t know or care. Naturalist did not have a place on her resume. She also had no illusions that she could outclimb something that lived in a jungle.
She fumbled in her pack for her tool of last recourse.
A flare gun, for fuck’s sake.
Using it to signal would be even less than worthless. No one would come for her, and definitely not in the time it would take for these creatures to rip her apart. She couldn’t protect herself from these beasts, either, so all she could hope to do was take one of them with her.
The bastard who had herded her there. She found she hated that one far more than the others who’d flanked her. That was the leader, the bully the wimpier kids always feared. Maybe if she could defeat it—or at least shoot in the face with a blinding ball of fire—the others would back off. She’d tried that in school—the offensive tactic, not the flare—and it had worked. Half the time.
Abbott squared her shoulders and readied herself to face the monster that had pursued her to explode from the underbrush. It could be anything, she told herself and listed the bizarre Zoo creatures in her head. If she had to face a monster, it might help to remember some of the details—like maybe the best way to try to kill them.
She would never have been ready for what burst from the undergrowth.
It wasn’t a locust or chimera, nor a pack of kangarats or the newly reported and horrible-sounding bat-wolf mixture dubbed a werepire—because bat-wolf-monster apparently wasn’t terrifying enough.
No, what emerged from the vegetation was more horrifying than anything she had expected.
It was a human—although perhaps “was” in the past tense might be more accurate. A mess of some dark liquid stained his mouth—blood, presumably—and his hands were clenched in fists. More of the liquid dripped from his white knuckles. His clothes were in tatters, and his eyes betrayed only madness.
He resembled a monster squeezed into human skin, and yet Abbott couldn’t shoot the man as he hurtled forward. Nor could she shoot his allies, the other people who seemed to have eaten at the same bloody feast. They thrust from the brush and followed their leader’s charge forward.
So, like a fucking noob, she pointed her flare gun upward and fired into the sky. At that point, all she could do was hope like hell that someone would see it and rescue her before she became the first person in the history of the Zoo to be eaten by people.
Chapter One
Helicopter blades thumped overhead, and the sand shone brightly below. Ava held her harness with both hands at her shoulders. The glorified seatbelt had saved her life last time in the helicopter, and she felt she owed it a measure of respect.
“Are you all right?” Private Gunnar Åkerlund asked over the headsets. He sat across from her but the helicopter’s roar was too loud to hear him without earphones and microphones. “You look a little tense.”
Gunnar held an automatic rifle in his lap, had strapped grenades to his chest, and pistols were holstered snugly under his armpits. He didn’t exactly look relaxed either, not armed to the teeth like he was, but at least he also wore a smile. Although they’d stayed in Wall Two for nearly a week before heading out, it looked like Gunnar had timed his shaving regimen to give him the perfect amount of stubble.
Ava smiled but didn’t release the harness. “I like seatbelts, is all. Great invention.” She eased her shoulders, took a deep breath, and made herself relax. The fact that she could relax at all was already a victory. She marveled at how much more prepared she felt for this venture into the Zoo.
It helped that this time, they would only go to the edge of the murderous place.
“If everything goes according to plan, you’ll stay safely buckled up, until…you know, you have to stuff people’s guts back in their bellies and stitch their faces up and tie veins off before they bleed to death,” Peppy said from behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.
She had met the private a few days before, and although Gunnar seemed to think she was hilarious, she didn’t quite get the woman’s sense of humor. It honestly was too dark. Bleeding to death was never a good punchline. Why she went by Peppy instead of Monica or Pérez still baffled Ava.
“Now that’s the most ridiculous thing any of you blokes said all day,” their pilot, Jack Mann, said over the radio. He had signed Ava up to go back out into the Zoo. Despite only flying in a helicopter with the Australian pilot once before—when he’d crashed the ʼcopter into the Zoo—Ava trusted him. She still wasn’t entirely sure, though, if it was because he’d saved her life countless times or because his crazy was contagious. “When does anything in the Zoo go according to plan?”
“I planned to save Peppy. That worked out fine,” Gunnar responded.
“I had planned to jump into a ravine and brain myself before I was saved, though, and that plan definitely did not come true,” Peppy replied. “So, we’ll have to call it a wash.”
Gunnar grinned but again, Ava simply didn’t get the humor. Peppy was intense.
“I have visual contact,” Manny said from the cockpit. “It looks like these Zoo Keepers didn’t read the instructions. Rule number sixteen of the Zoo: never run in when you can run away.”
“Aren’t we running in right now?” Ava asked as she tightened her grip on her harness.
“You got me!” Manny replied and laughed. “Rules are made to be broken. That’s the spice of life after all.”
Gunnar unbuckled himself and moved to a mounted machine gun. He grinned from ear to ear, obviously pleased to operate a weapon larger than himself. “You said at breakfast that the spice of life was cinnamon.”
“There can be more than one spice of life,” Peppy interjected. “After all, death comes in an endless cornucopia of flavors—disembowelment by animal or otherwise, asphyxiation on one’s own blood, dismemberment, electrocution, incineration, not to mention nature’s bevy of diseases. Then there are the things that might eat us. The list goes on and on.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to engage,” Ava said to Gunnar as he fawned over the mounted weapon.
“I’m living the preparedness lifestyle,” he replied sheepishly.
“Leave the man to play with his toy. You don’t want to make him feel inadequate. Now get up here, Ava. I have something to show you.”
Ava unplugged her headset and the crew’s voices vanished. She could see Gunnar yell something to Peppy and the private respond with her characteristic deadpan. He looked revolted.
She unbuckled her harness and made her way to the front of the helicopter. When she entered the cockpit, Manny slapped her on the back. While she appreciated the gesture, she would’ve appreciat
ed him keeping both hands on the controls even more.
It was too noisy to say anything, so she simply sat in the copilot’s seat, buckled herself in, and plugged in her headset.
“—bunch of dumbasses,” Manny was saying. “Fire and insecticide work fine on plants, but for those hot potatoes, you’ll need something more substantial. Rule number nineteen, never bring a lighter when what you really need is a can of gasoline and a bottle rocket.”
Ava peered out through the windshield in front of them. The helicopter approached the edge of the Zoo itself, the thick jungle that had appeared in the middle of the Sahara Desert and only seemed to need one thing to grow—fresh meat.
This team of Zookeepers had burned the leading edge of the jungle. Thick black smoke poured off the orange flames that ate at the plants. Blown away from the helicopter by a tailwind, it obscured the jungle but exposed the Zookeepers, who were easy to spot against the bright sand. Their camouflage was for the jungle, not the desert.
They ran from the inferno, although Ava instantly understood that it wasn’t the out of control blaze that forced them to retreat.
Something large and dark punched through the fire, then another. Three more followed almost immediately.
“What are those things?” she asked and pointed, even though the gesture was unnecessary. She immediately realized more of them were already past the wall of fire and in pursuit of the Zookeepers. They were so big, she’d thought they were boulders or some of the team’s equipment. Now, she saw them for what they were—monsters.