by Michael Todd
She checked the scientist. He was unconscious again but breathing, if only barely.
“You really couldn’t stand the idea of someone doing something even more stupid than you, huh? Had to one-up me?”
Manny nodded, his expression somber. “Next time, you can keep the title of executor of stupidest craziest ideas. Don’t ever let me do something like that again.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ava and Manny each took one of Dr. Kessler’s arms over their shoulder and dragged him to the helicopter. Two of the soldiers heaved him aboard and Peppy reached a hand out for Ava and pulled her up.
“Sorry. Strict dress code, and you stink!” Gunnar said to Manny around a wide grin.
“Fuck off, mate. You already stole my line, now you wanna steal my bird?”
“Yeah, but the title of stupidest fucking thing anyone’s ever done in the Zoo is all yours.” Gunnar hauled Manny up with ease. “Do you have my gun?”
“You’re welcome to go back for it.” The pilot pointed at the constrictadile. “I think I left it near the thing’s spleen. I can’t be sure, though.”
Hyenamites approached the reptile’s body tentatively. One of them nipped at the end of its long tail but it didn’t move. Another bit its lolling tongue with no response. Without further delay, they began to savage their former provider. It took work for their pointed, rodent teeth to pierce the scales on its belly, so most focused on the soft parts—the eyes, lips, and face.
Ava tore her eyes away from the carnage as the chopper lifted higher and higher and out of the tiny clearing. They rose without incident until they were above the canopy of the Zoo.
“Home sweet home, here we come,” Manny said and shifted to make himself comfortable in the pilot’s seat with a series of unpleasant squelches. Ava was grateful for the hole in the glass the super locust had made on their way in there. It helped somewhat with the smell. “You know, I think I’d like to call dibs on one of the showerheads.”
“I think you can probably have a whole wall of showerheads,” she said and adjusted her position so she could lean closer to the hole in the glass. He really did smell horrible.
“Man, I can’t wait to see that fucking captain’s smug face,” the pilot said. “There’s nothing I like more than watching military admit they needed some help.”
“Let’s save the victory speech until we land,” she advised and tried to grab hold of something. Belatedly, she remembered that they’d stripped the helicopter of anything that could help hold them in place. Shit.
As if on cue, super locusts soared from the canopy of the jungle.
“We have company!” Ava shouted.
Manny pushed forward on the cyclic and the helicopter surged forward. They were so low that if they still had landing gear, it would have caught on the tops of some of the trees. They thump-thumped over the treetops and barely cleared the clawing branches. Despite having thrown out virtually everything they could, the helicopter was still heavier than it should have been with all the soldiers on board.
Maybe that was a good thing, though, Ava mused, as being immediately above the canopy seemed to confuse the locusts. They knew enough of the machines to try to fly beneath the spinning rotor and attack the people behind the glass, but with the helicopter so low, they couldn’t do that.
Until they cleared the Zoo, of course, where instead of hundreds of trees beneath them, there would be nothing but open air and sand.
“All clear! These blokes won’t follow us out of their turf. They’re territorial, see, like the clownfish—unwilling to leave their home and live only to ensure its safety.”
“Yeah, you might want to tell them that. Apparently, they didn’t see the nature documentary about clownfish,” she said.
“Nature documentary?” Manny dropped the helicopter even lower over the desert. The locusts followed and divebombed so rapidly that two of them smacked into the sand. It was a small victory, but they were immediately replaced by dozens more. “I spent two years on the Great Barrier Reef living with the dolphins—part of a foreign exchange program.”
“With the dingoes?” Ava tumbled across the cockpit and grabbed onto Manny’s seat as he banked the helicopter. He barely managed to avoid disaster when a locust came frighteningly close to the rotor.
“Don’t be ridiculous. There ain’t no dingo college. They’re a trade-school kind of species. I snuck away from a crabbing ship. Dolphins followed that boat, learning all about crabs, while I stayed out in the reef.”
Manny pulled the helicopter up. Almost immediately, one of the locusts collided with the windshield in front of them and spattered their view with thick goo.
“Don’t they know that’s suicide?” Ava shouted.
“They’re trying to one-up us. But no one’s dumber than Ava and Manny.”
He banked hard into an honest-to-God barrel roll and the enclosing swarm of locusts buzzed away from the chopper.
“I hope we didn’t lose anyone,” he said.
Ava looked behind them. No bodies plummeted to the ground and there was no chorus of screams. “I think we’re all right.”
“Not for much longer,” Manny yelled as one of the locusts careened into the rotors. It exploded into slime and the aircraft immediately lost altitude. “This will be close.”
Wall Two appeared on the horizon and grew rapidly closer as they approached. Ava had never been so happy to see the American flag flying proudly in the wind. Their path had brought them to the right part of the wall and they might still survive.
They crossed some invisible threshold and the defenses came to life. Mounted machine guns flashed with the bright light of gunfire. Artillery cannons boomed and their payloads exploded in the air around the laboring helicopter to annihilate locusts in a flurry of shattered exoskeletons.
Manny somehow kept the chopper above them all as it careened unsteadily over that section of the wall.
Soldiers standing on the top cheered as the aircraft almost grazed their heads. They’d make jokes about haircuts for weeks.
“Maybe we should’ve kept the landing gear,” Manny said as he wrestled with the controls and managed to thump the belly of the helicopter into the sand. He pulled back on the cyclic, kept the rotor spinning, and stopped the inevitable roll by tilting the aircraft backward far enough that the damaged rotor struck the ground and shattered.
With a lurch, heavy in its finality, the helicopter stopped moving.
A sharp silence was followed by a collective release of breath from the soldiers. Gunnar and Peppy barked orders for everyone to get the hell off and no one waited to be told twice.
The two privates dragged Kessler off themselves and tied him up again as soldiers approached, their guns at the ready. Medics followed on their heels.
Ava stepped onto the desert sand and appraised Manny’s handiwork.
The rotors were all but gone and only nubby, mangled stumps remained. The windshield was more empty space than glass. While the shell of the helicopter was intact, it was dented and patchy because of all the metal they’d removed. After a quiet explosion from inside the grounded chopper, black smoke began to pour from the wreckage. Manny beamed.
“Now, that’s a crash landing.”
“You’re Goddamn right it was.” Captain Tayler marched forward, already the color of pickled beet, and his mustache twitched furiously. “What in God’s name compelled you to break protocol and fly over the wall with enemy combatants in tow? That’s a liability first class, you moron.”
Cort stepped out from behind the ruin of a helicopter. Peppy and Gunnar came next, guiding a bound Dr. Kessler. The scientist was gagged again and struggled against his restraints, but now and then, he stopped, looked around, and seemed to take in his surroundings. Were the zomberries wearing off? Or was this merely how a madman reacted to such a shocking turn of events?
Captain Taylor stopped yelling when he saw Kessler. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“We simply followed orders,” Man
ny said cheerfully.
When the eight surviving soldiers appeared, the commanding officer actually laughed. “Well done, Lieutenant. Holy shit. Mission accomplished—and you tamed the damn Aussie, too.”
“We could never have done it without Jack Mann,” Cort said, turned to Manny, and reached out for a handshake. “Thanks, Manny. I owe you my life. If we’re able to develop some tech with what Dr. Kessler knows, the whole world might owe you thanks as well.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” the captain grumbled.
“Aww, it was nothing.” Manny shook Cort’s hand vigorously. “You pencil-pushers aren’t so bad, I guess. All that boring crap you read and the plans you make are all right. And you’re the ones who write up everything that happened, right? Make the recommendations for medals of honor and all that?” He waggled his eyebrows.
“And file damage reports,” Captain Taylor said as he studied the grounded helicopter for a moment. Then, he seemed to push it from his mind and began to issue orders. “Medics, I want these eight soldiers afforded every luxury. Stitches, icepacks, God damned antibiotics if they need it, the works.” The soldiers didn’t look particularly excited to be afforded antibiotics, but they said nothing. “And I want this helicopter stripped of anything worth anything.”
“We already took care of that one,” Manny said.
“Don’t push your luck, pilot. Try not to do anything too stupid while we have you grounded here,” Captain Taylor said.
Manny shot Ava a look. “Stupid? You took one right out of my book. Rule number one hundred and six. Try not to do anything stupid.”
Ava laughed. “That one’s made to be broken.”
Epilogue
Barely after dawn, the light made the sand look orange, rather than whitish yellow. The dunes rolled off into eternity, a welcome sight compared to the claustrophobic jungle. It really was funny how one’s perspective could change. Ava used to romanticize walking through the woods and relished the thick misty air of the forest. Now, nothing calmed her more than the wide-open desert. And yet she wasn’t exactly calm at the moment.
“Are you ready?” Manny asked and cradled a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Ava had tried to talk him out of bringing it—honestly, it had seemed profoundly stupid to do so—but compared to what they’d done in the Zoo, maybe it wasn’t so dumb. It smelled good anyway. And that alone made it way better than Manny’s last dumb idea.
“No, I’m not ready. I’ve tried to tell you for the last hour that I’m not ready.”
“That’s the perfect time.”
Manny released the controls.
Ava screamed and scrabbled for the cyclic with her right hand and the collective with her left, while her feet worked the pedals. Despite Manny having let go for hardly a second, the helicopter already plummeted toward the orange sand below them.
It didn’t look nearly as calming now as it hurtled up to meet them. She knew it wouldn’t feel soft, either, not if they crashed into it.
“Why did you ask me if I was ready if you intended to do this anyway?”
She wrestled with the controls.
“I was talking to myself.” He laughed uncontrollably, but she could see that he was at least a little scared when he pushed back in his seat as they continued their alarming descent.
“What the hell am I supposed to?”
“I’d suggest trying not to smash into the sand, but everyone learns at their own pace.”
Ava pulled on the collective and the helicopter slowed. She pushed on the cyclic and it moved forward, tilted up from its dive, and cruised out across the sand. “Like that?”
“I might’ve tried to pull up a little sooner, but hey, at least now I don’t have to go to the bathroom.”
She snorted and adjusted the controls so they banked into a wide circle. The last thing she wanted was to get lost out in the desert. Manny would probably refuse to show her how to use the navigational equipment and try to teach her how to read the dunes or something.
He laughed, nodded, and sipped his coffee. Somehow, he’d managed not to spill it everywhere. That must mean that despite his bluster, Ava had done all right.
She banked to the left and grinned as coffee spilled all over his shirt.
“You did that on purpose,” he accused, his mouth wide with shock, but a grin had already begun to form. “It’s a good thing the coffee at the base is served ice-cold.”
“Ever the optimist.”
“But seriously, you’re doing great. A natural if I’ve ever seen one. You remind me of these flying foxes I used to work with. That was when I worked my way back from the outback, picking up the Australian language and trying to get acculturated. They were brave, too, like you and had webbed fingers and really big ears. They liked fruit as well.”
“I thought you were paying me a compliment, but I guess not.”
“Liking fruit is a compliment,” Manny said. “But yeah, sorry. Sometimes, I get carried away. You’re kicking ass flying this thing, Ava. And you kicked ass back there. Rule number twenty-one, always let your blokes know when they’re not being ass-wipes,”
Ava kept her eyes on the controls and the desert in front of them, as much as she wanted to roll them at Manny’s ham-fisted compliments. “Oh no, what do you want, now? Jack Mann always has an angle. That’s something else I learned in the Zoo.”
“Well…now that you mention it, would you mind showing me how to do that thing with the straw through the throat?”
Birth of Heavy Metal
Have you started the Birth of Heavy Metal series in the Zoo? Book one is HE WAS NOT PREPARED and it’s available now, at Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited.
Available at Amazon
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
March 19, 2019
THANK YOU for not only reading this story but these Author Notes as well.
(I think I’ve been good with always opening with “thank you.” If not, I need to edit the other Author Notes!)
RANDOM (sometimes) THOUGHTS?
Right now, things are going ‘well’ enough in the whole publishing empire building. I’m probably level 20 in an 80 level game, and working to stay here and move forward.
It’s kinda hard.
Unlike other games, the one I’m playing is constantly trying to knock you down if you just sit around and do nothing.
If you should decide to sit and putter on something, your books tank in the rankings, and then your stories pretty much disappear until someone finds you randomly and you get some reads.
The effort is a little taxing (taking a page from our British cousins playing down everything) and after a little over three years, I’m starting to feel a bit exhausted mentally.
And that’s ok. It just means a couple days of rest and relaxation will do me good and I will be:
Fine with not opening the laptop.
Fine with skipping Slack messages.
I won’t see what is going on with sales.
I won’t check Facebook….
Who am I kidding? That will never happen ;-)
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
One of the interesting (at least to me) aspects of my life is the ability to work from anywhere and at any time. In the future, I hope to re-read my own Author Notes and remember my life as a diary entry.
I’m in the Las Vegas Condo in the sky (sort of) and typing this out as workers are putting my office back together again.
Every once in a while, the
I’m looking forward to the moment I get back in my safe haven and life is back on track.
High-rise living has received a black-eye. I sure hope we don’t come home to find our condo swamped with water again.
Thankfully, I live and work on my laptop, so I don’t have a big computer box sitting on the floor all dead because of the soaked
carpet.
THAT would have royally sucked.
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Review them so others have your thoughts, tell friends and the dogs of your enemies (because who wants to talk with enemies?)… Enough said ;-)
Ad Aeternitatem,
Michael Anderle
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Other Zoo Books
BIRTH OF HEAVY METAL
He Was Not Prepared (1)
She Is His Witness (2)
Backstabbing Little Assets (3)
Blood Of My Enemies (4)
APOCALYPSE PAUSED
Fight for Life and Death (1)
Get Rich or Die Trying (2)
Big Assed Global Kegger (3)
Ambassadors and Scorpions (4)
Nightmares From Hell (5)
Calm Before The Storm (6)
One Crazy Pilot (7)
One Crazy Rescue (8)
SOLDIERS OF FAME AND FORTUNE
Nobody’s Fool (1)