by Michael Todd
He wasn’t too happy about it either, if the truth be told, and it honestly annoyed him how easily these decisions came now. Back in the beginning he would have attacked the creatures only if it meant saving his own life as a last resort, but now, he sacrificed them as a tactical move? It made his stomach churn.
Of course, he knew what Kennedy would have to say about it. At least he still had a stomach capable of churning. That was the idea when going into a place like this. Survive and thrive at all costs. The only problem was, it was the Zoo that did the surviving and thriving better than any of them, and that only made it more and more dangerous to continue with these runs. A time would come when they would need bigger and better weapons to even set foot in there, much less loot the flowers. He didn’t like it. Even so, it seemed like things would change whether he liked it or not, so he would simply have to change with the times too.
He was changing with the times, he realized. That was the problem.
Sal shook the feeling off. Kennedy had berated him enough times about how this attitude would be the death of him to trust her on it. If he hesitated, he died. If he had these thoughts while in the middle of a firefight, he wouldn’t be there afterward, wondering if he’d done the right thing.
Survive. That was the point.
The sun set slowly, but there wasn’t much of a visible change around them. The tiny spotlights that seeped through the trees disappeared and were replaced with the blue spots that appeared on the trunks now that there wasn’t anything else to contest their claim on the visual spectrum. It didn’t do much to light the place up, but the starlight appearance of the tiny blue spots of goop that glowed from beneath the tree bark sure as hell made the sight of the world around them more interesting as they set up a camp.
The duo kept their suits on, not wanting to be caught unawares should anything come across their camp. They set up the motion sensors and a couple of heating plates to prepare their meals.
Sal still wasn’t tired of the rations, even though they tasted rehashed and there were only five variations of the same meal. He refused to forget the days that he had spent pining after better food back in the day and he wouldn’t let that pass. It tasted like it had been frozen and dried, but it was still good food, at least in comparison to the past.
Never forget your past. Grow from it. He’d seen the quote on social media but wasn’t sure where it came from or even if it mattered. All that was important was that the stale ration food still tasted great.
The night passed quickly as the two of them alternated to keep watch. The scenery changed very little as morning came. He might have missed it altogether had their HUDs not alerted them to the time.
“I still can’t fucking sleep in these suits,” Kennedy complained and pushed herself from the hard jungle floor.
“Well, we meet up with the team for a ride back to the Staging Area later today,” Sal told her, “so you really shouldn’t get used to this.”
“Believe me,” she said and chewed on pieces of dried meat as they packed the camp up again, “what I’ll get used to is a nice, soft bed.”
Sal grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Let’s hurry. You probably don’t want to walk all the way back to the Staging Area either, which is what will happen if we’re not there when they need to go. After we stole that other team’s JLTV, they aren’t too understanding about our strange schedules.”
She nodded. “Good point. Let’s get a move on, Jacobs.”
“I was…it was my idea first,” Sal grumbled playfully, which made her laugh as they moved deeper into the jungle once more. The area that had been marked off on the map was only a couple of kilometers away, and even in the tough terrain, they made good time. Soon, they approached an area where the foliage gave way as it usually did and allowed the Pita plants to receive a good portion of sunlight. Even the thick, mucky ground changed quickly into something firmer and more manageable.
Sal crouched suddenly and Kennedy stopped alongside him.
“Look—grass,” he said.
“You’ve never seen grass before?” she asked. “Even if this stuff is blue.”
“That means that it’s not using chlorophyll as an energy source,” he explained with a grin. “At least, not any kind that we know about. Give me a sec. I’ll collect a couple of samples.”
“Take your time,” she said. “I think we may be here a while anyway.”
“What do you…oh,” he said as he looked up. He’d expected to see the usual cluster of dense bushes with the bright blue flowers that were so coveted by men and women around the world. There were the bright flowers, but they were perched up on trees that measured almost ten meters in height.
“Oh, and another problem,” she said and pointed to something bright and shining on one of the lower branches of the tree. He focused with a frown and soon identified the familiar shape of a leg encased in metal armor.
“Oh, fuck.”
“How long has it been since you climbed trees, Jacobs?” Kennedy asked.
“I’ve never climbed trees,” he confessed. “I was too busy trying to figure out what string theory was.”
“What is string theory?”
“It’s a theory in physics that deals with a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles…” he started but paused when she looked oddly at him, which indicated that she’d posed the question as a joke and didn’t actually expect an answer. “Nobody’s really sure, but it used to have scientists really excited, for some reason.”
“Anyway,” she said, “how do you propose that we get up there? Even without the flowers, how will we retrieve that leg?”
“Well, I do have less experience,” Sal said, “but my armor is a lot lighter than yours. Unless you feel the need to strip down?”
“I only striptease when we’re not in a jungle full of creatures that want us dead,” Kennedy said with a grin.
“Big fat bummer.” Sal shrugged his pack off and lowered it gently to the ground. “Wish me luck—and watch my back.”
“Well, that’s asking way too much,” she responded. “I can multitask as much as the next guy, but to wish you luck while I watch your back is…and he’s ignoring me.”
He shook his head with a chuckle. While he could never ignore what she had to say, he could piss her off if he made her think that he was. It always got her to talk more, and that could be a win-win—most times. At other times, he could simply tune out her yelling at him until she calmed down.
Sal pushed himself up the trunk, careful to avoid the smaller branches. Had he climbed trees as a child? Of course, although not as much as the other kids. He knew enough to rely on the trunk and only use the branches for leverage. He made slow progress, but at least he wouldn’t fall anytime soon.
“Could you pick up the pace?” Kennedy demanded over their comm when he was five meters up. “It’s not like we could be swarmed by angry hybrid animals at any second or anything.”
“Don’t break my concentration,” he snapped. “Besides, I’m almost at the branch.”
He gripped the trunk between his legs, which left his arms free to pull up on the branches that grew thicker the higher he climbed. The leg was wedged between a pair of branches in a way that indicated that either someone had put the damn thing there intentionally, or the plant had grown over the time that it had taken them to get back to it and simply taken the leg with it.
It wasn’t clear which was the least likely scenario. All he cared about was that he was now close enough to the branch to be able to pull it down. With his legs wound around the trunk, the position wasn’t big on dignity, but it did the job. If it worked, it wasn’t stupid as the old internet adage went.
He felt the trunk move and groan under his weight. Even though his armor was lighter than Kennedy’s, it added a solid hundred kilos or so to his overall weight. As high as he was, he was sure the trunk would definitely take strain. He tugged faster and yanked harder in an attempt to retrieve the leg before the whole tr
ee gave out.
“Jacobs, get out of there!” Kennedy yelled. Sal looked away from what he was doing, and in that moment of distraction, he leaned too far back and the tree bent alarmingly. With a loud and reverberating snap and splinters that seemed to explode around him like shrapnel, Sal sailed downward with a tree trunk still between his legs.
His partner wouldn’t let him live this down. That was his last thought before he struck the ground.
The armor absorbed most of the impact of the landing, but the weight of the tree on his chest knocked the breath from his lungs. A loud crack from inside his suit triggered the prognostic software, which quickly detected a problem.
He had bigger issues, though. His head pounded as he suddenly realized that he had an unimpeded view of the sky. There was no sun directly above him, which meant that it was still morning, but it was all he could do not to fall asleep while he lay there helpless. The massive tree slowly squeezed the resistance out of his armor and ribcage.
A loud creak from the wood as it strained under pressure drew his attention to Kennedy, who put the full strength of her power armor behind her attempt to shove the tree off him. After what sounded like a groan from the tree, the pressure suddenly lessened and finally lifted. Sal sucked in a long breath of the recycled and filtered air from his suit and leaned to the side as a powerful cough wracked him. It hurt his ribs, his stomach, his…everywhere, really, and he felt that it had little to nothing to do with the actual cough so much as what had caused it in the first place.
“Are you all right?” she asked once he seemed to recover.
“Only…what, a five-meter drop?” he said and tried to put on a brave face. “That’s nothing to an experienced climber like me. Well, quasi…I’ve been up a couple of trees. But I’ve never had one fall on me.”
“What can I say?” she asked. “You’ve put on weight. There’s no going back now.”
“Hah!” Sal grunted. “Fake laugh, hiding real pain, both metaphorical and physical. Oh, shit, that fucking hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” Kennedy said with an empathetic smile. “Although if you want to look on the bright side, you did bring the leg and many of the flowers with you on your way down.”
“I’d celebrate, except I think I have a concussion, a couple of broken ribs, and a bruised pelvis, so I’ll leave the cheerleading to you.”
“Why did you climb the tree like that anyway?” she asked.
“I tried to distribute my weight so that it wouldn’t fall,” he explained. “A lot of good that did.”
“Well, I remember a bet made about whether or not the animals would avenge one of these trees if we brought one down. I really don’t want to be here to find out if I was wrong. Let’s get the leg, collect some flowers, and head back to where we can get a ride home to some decent medical care, what do you say?”
Sal nodded, glad that she’d made little effort to tease him for his climbing skills or lack thereof. He disengaged from his power arm and fumbled in his pack for the tools he needed to collect the flowers before they left for the Staging Area.
Some fifteen minutes later, no animals had shown up to attack them as a result of the destruction of the tree, and he wondered if they had worried over nothing.
“Okay, we’ve picked this thing clean of the fucking flowers,” Kennedy said. “Let’s grab our leg and get the fuck out of here. I don’t trust this silence and the apparent contentment of the jungle despite the fact that we felled that damn tree. It doesn’t seem realistic.”
“Agreed.” Sal chuckled. “Let’s get going.”
He moved to where the leg was still entangled in the branches. As he came closer and tried to dislodge it, he realized that there was something different about it. Wiring and mechanics and other pieces of metal had jutted out from it when they’d last seen it. More importantly, chunks had been missing from where they had taken a couple of samples.
They were all gone. It looked as though the piece had been intentionally plucked clean like the jungle had tried to reabsorb everything one piece at a time.
“That’s creepy,” he muttered. Something about it seemed to sound a warning, a feeling in his gut that told him to leave it alone or to simply take some samples like they had last time. They had the flowers, and a couple of samples would be more than enough to continue his research, as limited as it had been. He wasn’t a geologist or a metallurgist, so he was far from the expert that was needed to study this stuff.
Sal shook the feeling off. It was time to be aggressive and assertive, dammit. What did he really have to fear about it anyway?
He tugged the piece clear and shook some of the plant residue off before he shoved it into his pack. It was still heavy but a lot lighter than it had been. Which made sense.
As he turned to head toward where Kennedy waited for him, movement caught his attention out the corner of his eye. He looked in that direction but didn’t see anything at first. Whatever it had been was lost in the shadows of where the trees closed the sunlight out again. He thought perhaps he’d imagined it but then he realized something that made him want to make use of the waste disposal unit of his suit.
It wasn’t that it wasn’t moving. Rather, it was that it was so large, it seemed like it was in one, long continuous motion. Sal gulped and glanced at his partner when he saw four huge eyes that caught a hint of sunlight and reflected it back fully.
“Oh fuck!” he shouted. “Get back! Get back n—” His warning was interrupted as a long tail flickered out from the shadows and lashed toward him.
“Down!” Kennedy shouted, and he ducked barely in time to avoid having his head taken clean off. Something sharp on the tail latched onto the shoulder of his power arm, though, swept him off his feet, and yanked him toward the jungle.
Not this shit again.
He crashed hard into Kennedy and they slammed into a nearby tree. The impact was hard enough to shake enough leaves free that it looked like it had suddenly starting to snow brown and green. Sal groaned. A couple more ribs had pulverized and pain surged through him. He moaned again, rolled off Kennedy, and dragged his gun out from where he’d stashed it in his pack.
The thing that had attacked them was out in the open now and looked at him with four eyes that were each about half the size of his head. It was a reptile—or so it seemed from the long, forked tongue that flicked out from its mouth and scaly skin that glowed a soft mixture of green and silver in the sunlight. It also had six legs, each of which ended in three toes. The toes, in turn, finished in huge, sharp claws. The creature opened its mouth to reveal a row of dagger-long fangs. Even from a distance of about ten meters, Sal could smell the stink of death on its breath. It watched him and its tail slithered right and left like it dared him to make the first move.
The fact that the reptile was the size of a Clydesdale gave him serious pause, though.
“What the fuck is that?” Kennedy asked as she regained her feet and drew her gun.
“I don’t know,” he whispered, “but I don’t think it likes us very much.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” She raised her weapon cautiously.
Sal nodded and didn’t bother to answer as he leveled his rifle at the monster. As much as he felt that it would only attack if they moved again, he knew they couldn’t continue this stare-off with the massive creature forever. They would have to move, and it would use its tail to cut them in half.
“Please tell me you’re recording this,” his partner whispered.
“Oh, you know it,” he responded and clenched his jaw. “I only hope that we get this footage along with a massive keep-out sign.”
“That may be the smartest thing you’ve ever said,” she whispered with a grin.
“You move first,” he said. “I’ll cover you. When it gets close, you cover me. Does that sound like a plan?”
“Another dumb plan,” she hissed. “But again, it’s not like we have any better options.”
“Unfortunately, you’re right about that. W
e move in three…two…one…go!”
Kennedy sprinted to the left, still heading south where they would be able to rendezvous with the rest of the team that had dropped them off. That was assuming, of course, that this monster hadn’t already eaten them.
As she moved, the monster flickered forward at an impossible speed—way too fast for something that large, although Sal had come to expect the impossible from the Zoo and the creatures it created. He made no assumptions, not anymore, but it was still fascinating—except not so much when it could chomp your head off in one bite.
As it serpentined toward Kennedy, he moved in a different direction—not quite opposite but away from her as he opened fire on it. He’d flicked the weapon to auto before he squeezed the trigger.
He could see the bullets sink into the scales, but he could also see that they hadn’t gone too deep. It clearly hurt, as the creature emitted a hissed roar that was quickly picked up and filtered out by the sound filters in his suit. It still hurt worse than the gunshots, he realized as the creature turned to him and ceased its advance on his partner.
Sal had only a moment to register its attack before he flung himself to the ground. The tail, three times again as long as the rest of the creature’s body, whipped into the trees, circled the trunk of one of them, and narrowly avoided taking his head off again.
As it withdrew, something like the teeth marks of a saw were visible on the wood and almost felled the tree with one stroke.
“What the fuck!” he shouted to nobody in particular as he sprinted to where it now headed toward Kennedy again with another ferocious roar. She directed a barrage of fire at the monster but it seemed that her bullets did no damage either. It was almost on top of her, now, and she ran and fired at the same time. The reptile slithered between the trees and somehow navigated the forest easily despite its size.