One Crazy Rescue (Apocalypse Paused Book 8)

by Michael Todd

  “Peppy…that’s rather compassionate of you.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to get my lungs ripped out of my chest in my sleep because some one-time survivor of the Zoo decided to rest her eyes instead of asking for help.”

  “I won’t fall asleep,” Ava said and meant it. She didn’t want anyone ripped apart either and understood very well that Peppy, Gunnar, and Manny were her best chance to prevent that unpleasant future. They needed their rest.

  “Good.” The private laid down, stretched out, closed her eyes, and was gently snoring in less than a minute.

  Ava allowed her eyes to adjust to the dull light. There was a break in the canopy above the rock formation, so the stars and a crescent moon provided some illumination. She stood and checked the sleeping forms of her friends. Finding them all there, she decided to make a quick perimeter walk. It was crazy to think they all slept there together, under her watch. Last time she’d been to the Zoo, she’d felt so helpless—like anything and everything was trying to kill her. She supposed that was still true. Virtually everything in the Zoo was trying to kill her, even the soldiers now, apparently. But it felt different to be up at night, to share the watch and to help keep her friends safe while they prepared their bodies to survive another day in the Zoo. It made her feel proud.

  As she paced the rock, as incongruous to the jungle landscape as a smoking volcano projecting from waves and waves of blue water, she thought about her last day in the Zoo. It really had been insane. The constrictadile itself was a mystery. Ava still didn’t understand how the Zoo obtained the DNA or blueprints or whatever it used to make its strange amalgamations of creatures, nor did she understand how this particular monster had come to be so large.

  If it ate people, that might explain its size, she supposed, but it also opened up a whole host of other questions. Why had it been in the patch of zomberries? The name was too good for her to think of them as anything else. Why had Abbott run into the thing’s mouth? Was that an effect of the zomberries or something else entirely? The predator had been in that berry patch—right in the center. Did that mean something or was it merely coincidence?

  Ava had no doubt that the berries affected a person’s mind. All the people who attacked them had stains on their mouths and hands from the zomberry juice. Was it that the juice made one want to share the bizarre fruit? Perhaps some soldier had unwittingly tasted one—accidentally, Ava told herself quickly. It had to be accidental. No one could be so stupid as to knowingly or willingly eat something that grew in the Zoo. They would have been compelled to make another eat the berry, and another and another until they’d all been infected. That was a terrifying hypothesis and it rang true for her, but what was the connection to the constrictadile? She felt that there had to be one, but she couldn’t tease it out. It was frustrating to have so many questions and no rational explanations.

  She wished she had an answer, but she didn’t. Normally, that meant she simply needed more data or better information, but the prospect of gathering that from a bunch of deranged soldiers who wanted to shove mind-altering berries down her throat had little appeal.

  Ava rubbed her face. Not only was she walking in circles around the sandstone formation, she was thinking in circles too. She’d have to discuss it with everyone once they woke up. Maybe Cort had more information than he’d told them. He’d known about Dr. Kessler after all. Surely the lieutenant had access to all sorts of confidential information that would be well above Gunnar and Peppy’s paygrade.

  She sighed, looked away from the Zoo which was deceptively quiet save for the ever-present drone of insects, and glanced at her sleeping friends. Gunnar spooned his assault rifle, his head against the barrel of the gun like it was a scented pillow. Manny had rolled closer to Gunnar in the night and had an arm sprawled across the other man’s chest like they were dogs or kid brothers. Peppy slept on her back, her arms folded neatly on her chest and her hands on a handgun. The woman really was crazy. Cort—where was Cort?

  He’d been with the others, Ava was sure of that, but he was missing.

  Maybe he had gone to relieve himself without telling anyone? If he had, he’d broken protocol, which didn’t seem like the lieutenant.

  Ava turned to scan the Zoo. Wherever he was, he couldn’t be far. He wasn’t exactly the stealthiest when it came to moving through the Zoo.

  She found him almost directly behind her. Standing there silently.

  “Jesus, Cort, you scared me,” Ava said with a half-squeak and half-laugh. Apparently, he was better at sneaking than she had realized. “Cort?”

  Even in the low light, she could see something was wrong with him. His eyes were wide and what little of the whites she could see were bloodshot. His mouth quirked with the hint of a smile, but his expression left her uneasy. He looked…cruel.

  He thrust forward and somehow leapt high enough to slam his knees into her chest. She landed hard with a painful thump but not loud enough to wake anyone else.

  Ava opened her mouth to scream and Cort immediately jammed his hand into her face. Ava shut her mouth instinctively as the memory of the zomberries came to mind. The man’s fingers scratched at her closed lips—cold and clawing, a horrible sensation.

  She fumbled beside her and closed her fingers around a rock, turned it once in her hand so she had the best grip, and swung it into his head.

  His head snapped back, and he slipped off her. Not unconscious, she noted, like Manny could do with a punch, but not too bad. He mumbled incoherently and tried to straddle her, but she scooted away and managed to keep her legs between her and her attacker.

  She bumped into Manny, who immediately sat up.

  “Is it morning time, Mama? I dreamt we was back in the outback, and I’d been named king of the dingoes. I had to defend my title though…in a cage match near the dingo fence.”

  Cort seemed to forget all about Ava. He shoved past her and tackled Manny.

  “If you want my crown, you’ll have to pin me, pencil-pusher!” the pilot protested. He still sounded groggy and definitely failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

  Ava had assumed he would push off Cort without difficulty. She’d seen him wrestle a werepire, after all, but the lieutenant seemed to possess a reserve of strength he hadn’t demonstrated previously.

  Manny struggled to sit up but Cort held him pinned. He headbutted his victim, and when the other man flinched and tried to grab his wounded head, pinned his arms with his knees.

  “This is like Wrestleslam six all over again. I’m gonna need a tag, Ava.”

  She had already galvanized into action and grabbed her weapon of choice. The thick branch was about four feet long, and she swung it at the assailant’s head with all her might.

  That was enough to knock him off Manny, but he immediately scrambled to his feet and lurched toward the other man with a malevolent hiss.

  Thankfully, the pilot had been able to stand as well. He gestured for Cort to come at him, looking much like a wrestler calling for an opponent to initiate some insane move that would need an absurd level of coordination.

  Cort attacked and lowered his head to ram his target in the gut.

  Manny was ready and fumbled to grab the man’s torso as he let Cort slam into his abdomen. The lieutenant was unnaturally strong, however, and successfully drove the wind from his victim’s lungs. Manny groped ineffectually at his attacker instead of being able to haul him into a wrestling slam.

  “That’s not how…it's supposed to work,” he wheezed.

  Cort tried to shove the other man down but only pushed him backward. Ava used the moment of separation to thump him with branch again.

  He fell bodily onto Peppy’s legs.

  In an instant, the soldier had a pistol pointed at the assailant’s temple. Ava had thought she was asleep, but she’d moved so quickly that she must have been biding her time.

  “Are we done?” Peppy asked.

  The lieutenant ignored the threat. He screamed at her and trie
d to scramble up her body toward the gun.

  “What the fuck is this?” She didn’t shoot and Ava didn’t think she intended to. Cort was still a person, after all, and the private wasn’t as cold as she liked to make others think.

  Gunnar scrambled up and smacked the other man across the face with the butt of his rifle, hard enough to knock him off Peppy and leave him stunned and moaning in pain. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Rifles beat pistols every day of the week.”

  Manny hurried over and grabbed one of Cort’s arms. “That’s great. You’re hung like a horse Gunnar, none of us doubt it, but if you don’t mind giving me a hand instead of hiding behind your little peashooter, that’d be appreciated.”

  The lieutenant shoved the pilot off. He really was strong, but the other two men lunged at him and managed to knock him down and each grabbed an arm. They hauled him to his feet.

  “Get the rope,” Manny said and nodded at Ava. For a moment, she was annoyed that she’d been tasked with getting a rope instead of delivering a decisive blow with the branch again, but Peppy delivered a punch to Cort’s gut before she could protest. Despite the lieutenant’s newfound strength, he doubled over from the power behind it.

  Manny and Gunnar dragged him backward and he shrieked viciously and tried to get his legs under him. They slammed him against a tree and the woman bound him securely with the rope. It was difficult with the man’s newfound strength. He thrashed and kicked at them and almost threw Manny and Gunnar off until the pilot managed to slam the back of the enraged man’s head against the tree. That bought them about ten seconds in which they tied him as tightly to the trunk as they could.

  Even after all those blows to the head, Cort came to quickly and was as demented as he’d been before. He screamed at them, thrashed against his bindings, and gnashed his teeth.

  “Cort! Cort, it’s us! What’s wrong?” Ava said although, at this point, she already knew the answer.

  The lieutenant shrieked in response. He seemed unable to actually articulate words.

  Manny took a step toward him and held his face inches from his adversary’s. Cort, unable to move his arms due to the rope, opened his mouth and snapped like he thought he could bite his way to freedom.

  “That’s against regulations, mate,” Manny said. He stepped back as the man’s mouth snapped shut with a loud click of his teeth. Ava thought he might bite his own tongue off.

  The pilot seemed to have a similar thought because he moved forward again. This time, when Cort opened his mouth, Manny stuffed a handkerchief inside and finally silenced the screams and howls.

  For a moment, no one said anything. Manny took a step back, appraised the ropes holding the lieutenant, and tightened a few knots here and there. Gunnar kept his gun trained on the prisoner’s forehead. Peppy sat abruptly—in shock, Ava assumed.

  “Are you all right?” she asked the soldier.

  “He’s not going anywhere, and neither are we—not until dawn anyway—and it’s not my watch.” Peppy closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was Ava’s watch until dawn so she wasn’t supposed to go to sleep anyway, but she was absolutely shocked that both Peppy and Manny were able to. Once it became clear that Cort’s restraints would hold, Manny joined Peppy. That left Ava and Gunnar to watch the man struggle for the next two hours.

  And he never ceased his futile attempts. Not once. He strained constantly against the ropes and let his muscles go slack only long enough to shift his body and strain in another direction. It was, she thought more than once, a good thing he was gagged. Otherwise, he would surely have alerted the entire Zoo to their presence.

  “Are you doing all right?” Gunnar asked after the two of them had stared at Cort for what felt like hours.

  The question was too broad for her to even begin to know how to answer. “Am I doing all right?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I know Peppy can be a bit of a downer and Manny is… Well, Manny’s Manny. I’ve gotten used to them, but I know they can be too much sometimes.”

  Ava laughed. “After everything that happened yesterday, you’re worried about me because Peppy and Manny can be too much?”

  He frowned as if he didn’t quite understand. “You look nervous, is all. The way I see it, you and I are the only two sane ones out here. Don’t get me wrong. I love Manny and Peppy like family, but they’re as weird as hell.”

  “And you’re not?” she teased.

  “Compared to those weirdos? Hardly. Wait, do you think I’m weird? How am I weird?”

  “Well, for starters, there’s a crazed zombie man tied up in our camp, struggling to break free so he can poison us or call for help or God knows what else, and you ask me if I’m uncomfortable because of Manny and Peppy.”

  “The Zoo’s the Zoo. You didn’t have to come back into this fucking crazy mess of a jungle, but you did. I mean, I know you’re doing all right because if you weren’t, you’d be dead. But Peppy and Manny are my friends. If they’re bothering you…” Gunnar shrugged.

  “Yeah, well, they’re my friends too, I guess.”

  He smiled. “That’s good, Ava. I like you. I think you’re a good addition to the team—better than the pencil-pusher, even before he was zomberried.” He gestured a thumb at Cort like he was a drunk who had passed out instead of a man who’d lost his mind to the Zoo.

  “I like you guys too. Even if you’re all crazy.”

  Gunnar winked. “Birds of a feather, Ava. Birds of a feather.”

  She rolled her eyes at him, shocked that she could actually have this conversation while the lieutenant tried unsuccessfully to chew through his bindings.

  They chatted for the next hour and occasionally took breaks to check the perimeter of the camp. Nothing attacked in the night, a small blessing. Despite Gunnar’s pointed derision of Cort, Ava continued to think about him—about what had happened and most of all, how they could help him. Because if they could save Cort, they could save all the other people as well. That, in turn, meant the Zoo would be denied a meal.

  By dawn, Ava had the beginnings of a plan.

  They woke Peppy and Manny as soon as the Zoo darkness faded into grey light.

  Peppy sat abruptly as if she'd been caught napping, rubbed her eyes once, and stood and went to check Cort’s bonds. He strained even harder when she approached but didn’t break free.

  Then, shockingly, he seemed to tire himself out and slumped against the ropes. His eyes were still open, and he pushed almost mechanically against the restraints, but it was like watching a drunk try to read a book. His mind simply wasn’t in it.

  Ava was dumbfounded. How could his behavior have changed so much?

  “He won’t rip our throats out anytime soon. I’m gonna eat,” Peppy said, dug an MRE out of her pack, and consumed it quickly if unenthusiastically. Gunnar was right. The woman was weird. She behaved more like a machine than a person, but then again, everyone had different ways to deal with stress. Coldness must be Peppy’s. That and joking about them all dying horrible deaths.

  Manny was the opposite. When Gunnar tapped his shoulder, he groaned, rolled over, and pulled at a blanket that wasn’t there.

  “Come on, you big lug,” the soldier said and prodded him again, “Peppy’s gonna eat all the kibble.”

  That got the pilot moving. He pushed himself to a sitting position, blinked, and squinted an eye at Peppy. “You don’t have any kibble.” He sounded extremely disappointed. “I’d kill for some kibble. A nice crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, pot-roast-flavored bag of kibble. The environmentalists used to drop bags out there for the family. That was always a treat—like waking up to an ocean of potato chips for you yanks.”

  “That never happened,” Gunnar said, his grin broad. “No one would feed a pack of dingoes in the outback. They’re a nuisance.”

  “Cort’s a nuisance and someone fed him,” Manny said and gestured at the lieutenant. “What happened to him? Did someone sing him
a lullaby?”

  The man looked like he was trapped in molasses. An improvement over him trying to attack them, but Ava still found it unsettling. What had changed?

  “Do you think so too?” she said.

  Manny shrugged and rubbed his eyes. “I figured it was you who sang to him. Are you telling me it was Gunnar?” He reached for his own MRE.

  “No, that someone fed him,” she said.

  “The zomberries, right? It had to be.” Peppy had already finished her MRE.

  Ava was relieved that someone agreed with her. “Exactly. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s behaving like the rest of those people—or at least he was. I wish we knew why it took so long, though.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get as much as them?” Gunnar opened his own MRE. “Either that or it always takes a long time to set in. It’s not like we saw the rest of those folks transform.”

  “I think that makes a lot of sense.” Ava couldn’t believe the rest of them simply sat there and ate like nothing was going on. “The zomberries must have a mind-altering effect. Possibly something viral? It’ll be impossible to tell the exact mechanisms without running tests, of course.”

  “You want us to take him to a doctor?” Manny said.

  “Yes, of course! But I know we can’t. I don’t even know how we’ll get back to the helicopter. That constrictadile and all those people are between us and where we left it, right?”

  The other three exchanged a look. That was all the confirmation Ava needed.

  “So, we have to figure this out for ourselves. Let’s assume the zomberries have caused the transformation. They make people go wild…then, apparently, they fall into a stupor?” Except Abbott had attacked them when they’d roused her, but it was likely that the need to force-feed them had overcome the lethargy temporarily. Ava looked once more at Cort. He was so different than he’d been for the last two hours—like a toddler struggling against a nap. Then it all clicked. “Which is why the constrictadile was in that tree surrounded by berries.”