by Michael Todd
“Hey! Over here, you giant fucking fossil!” Sal called and released another fusillade at it. Body hits did no damage at all and only made its anger worse, but it pulled away from Kennedy and snaked rapidly in his direction. It looked like a huge serpent in the darkness of the jungle, the four eyes frighteningly visible. They glowed and reflected what little light there was as it powered toward him.
It was all he could do to not react like a deer caught in the headlights. He sprinted forward again and ran despite the agony that defined his body at that moment. Sure, the goop did have an effect and healed him much faster than was humanly possible, but it wasn’t instant. The broken ribs would heal in a week instead of six to twelve.
That was assuming that he made it out of there alive, he suddenly realized as the scent of death and decay surrounded him.
Something caught on his foot from behind and tripped him. The gyro in his suit prevented his fall the first time. The second time was much more difficult to avoid as one of the creature’s feet with the massive claws dug brutally into his back and shoved him down to the ground. The claws sliced through his armor like it was made of paper mache. Thankfully, while the weight of the creature pressed down on his body and made his ribs and lungs scream in agony, the claws weren’t cutting into his abdomen. Something pinched in his shoulder and arm, but aside from that—
At that moment, Sal looked up and the massive jaw descended slowly toward him. Well, far be it from him to judge a massive reptile that liked to play with its food, but he really wanted it to be over quickly.
The fangs lowered on him with surprising gentleness. For something that easily weighed a bajillion tons, it still felt like he was being licked by the world’s largest housecat. The reptile tore off his pack and the entire mechanism that attached it to his suit. The pack ripped open and Sal narrowed his eyes as the creature picked something up. It was shiny and looked a lot like a leg.
Wait, was all this about that piece of armor?
He felt the pressure on his chest increase when suddenly, something loud sounded right next to his ear. It wasn’t one of the hissed, high-pitched roars that he’d heard earlier. No, it sounded suspiciously like a gunshot.
A gunshot?
Sal looked up as the pressure suddenly lifted from his chest. His ears rang, along with the horde of other messages sent to his brain by his abused nervous system. Someone lifted him up—this time by the collar of his suit—with actual fingers. He wavered on his feet as he stared at Kennedy.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I’ve been better,” he gasped and winced as his lungs pressed painfully against his broken ribs.
“Too bad. Let’s get going.” Kennedy reached down, lifted the ruined pack, and stuffed it full of the stuff that had spilled out—including the piece of leg armor—before she pushed it into his chest.
Normally, Sal would have taken that without even a flinch. This time, though, he stumbled back a few steps, his fall prevented when he dropped onto the collapsed corpse of the monster that had squeezed the life out of him only moments before. He looked at it in bemusement. Three of the four eyes were shut and the fourth sported a massive, still-smoking hole where the eyeball should have been.
He gritted his teeth and tried not to hurl, although he wasn’t sure if it was from the smell, the sight, or the sensation that his body was about to fall to pieces. Or maybe a combination of all three. He was usually a lot sturdier about this, but he really felt like he simply couldn’t take another step before he dropped and fell asleep. Forever.
With a determined grimace, he pulled himself to his feet and struggled to remain upright despite how hard he tried.
At the moment in which he knew he would faceplant on the ground again, Kennedy slid her shoulder beneath his to support him.
“Thanks,” Sal gasped.
“No problem,” she grunted. “You’re the one with all our loot so it’s the least I can do. I mean, I do need to get paid.”
“Right,” he said. “This is a purely selfish action on your part. I understand.”
“Absolutely,” she agreed as they picked up the pace. “Totally selfish. By the way, has this armor held up under pressure or what?”
He glanced at her armor and saw the same teeth marks on the metal as he’d seen on the tree after the monster’s tail had lashed over it. The teeth had peeled the metal off to expose the circuitry beneath.
“Yep,” he growled and tried to keep his breaths shallow. “It looks like we already have more than enough work for Gutierrez when we get back. She’ll be so happy.”
Kennedy chuckled. “What the fuck was that supposed to be?”
“And why did it want the leg of armor that we retrieved?” Sal asked.
“Oh, yeah, I noticed that it tried to take that before I pumped a couple of bullets into its eye socket,” she said. “Is it simply an animal that likes shiny things—or this particular shiny thing?”
“It seemed like that leg was what it was after in the first place,” he said as he struggled to keep his body in forward motion. “Maybe it has something to do with this new metal that it’s made up of?”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “Come on, buddy, you’re lagging a bit. Focus on running and we’ll be out of this fucking jungle.”
He nodded. This was the kind of thing that could be thought about once they were out of danger and he no longer had a hard time sucking in air.
Chapter Seven
Morning came too early for Madigan’s liking. It had been a rough trip out of the Zoo, especially since she had to get Sal out. She’d almost carried him toward the end and they barely managed to reach the JLTVs in time to get a ride back to the Staging Area. Sal had dipped in and out of consciousness during the whole trip. His suit was supposed to have rudimentary first aid capabilities that protected his open wounds from infection. From the way he had breathed, at least neither of his lungs had been punctured by the broken ribs, but that was it for the good news. He’d been sluggish and passed out periodically as they traveled.
The team that drove them back didn’t even bother to stop at the commandant’s office but made directly for the hospital to drop Sal off at an emergency room. Once they peeled the armor off him, Kennedy realized the extent of his injuries. His entire torso was bruised to a dark purple interspersed with splotches of bright red where the bruises had been punctured and blood had spilled under his skin. Livid, painful cuts were etched into his shoulder and arms. There were more injuries, including a concussion, but they were less of a priority.
He had saved her life, Kennedy realized as the doctors wheeled him into an operating room. Well, no less than she had saved his, of course, but it wasn’t a competition. Neither would have gotten out of that place without the other.
Courtney arrived at the hospital barely minutes after Sal was taken away.
“What’s happening?” she asked and sounded flustered. “Is Sal okay? Will he make it?”
“He’s in surgery now,” she responded and began to remove her armor piece by piece.
“What happened?” the other woman repeated. Kennedy didn’t reply but retrieved the memory stick from Sal’s armor and handed it to her. She plugged it quickly into her phone and scrolled through the recorded videos until she reached the one in question.
“What the fuck?” Monroe gasped as she stared at the video he had recorded.
“Yeah,” Kennedy growled. “It…attacked us from the shadows. We barely made it out. It seemed like it tried to take the leg of armor back. Like it wanted to keep the metal that it’s made out of? I don’t know. It all happened really fast. We ran for our lives and then I shot it and it died.”
“You guys didn’t happen to get any samples, right?” Courtney asked.
“Nope, I was too worried about getting Sal back alive,” she replied, annoyed. “Look, I need to pick something up at the compound. Can you please call Gutierrez and let her know that if she wants extra work before she signs any contracts, we could r
eally use her help to put our suits back together?”
The other woman nodded, properly admonished, as Kennedy shrugged free from the last of her armor and walked away. She scrambled into the JLTV that Courtney had brought and drove off quickly.
Monroe dialed quickly, the video she had seen still vivid in her head. She only hoped that she still had the armorer’s number right.
“Well, I’m sorry that I cared enough about you to get as much of the goop as I could lay my hands on,” Kennedy muttered.
“Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate that, okay?” Sal said. His voice still carried something of a whine from the tubes that had been in his throat. “I really do. Believe me. And I also appreciate the trouble that you went through to help me.”
She smiled and pressed her fist gently to his shoulder. “I knew that you could use a little more Madie than usual,” she said, her eyes averted.
“It’s not only that,” Sal went on, uncomfortable with the personal direction this conversation had taken. “I know that you practically—and sometimes literally—carried me out of the Zoo, and…you saved my life back there.”
Kennedy nodded. She deliberately said no more so as to not compromise her status as a badass.
“But for next time, when you…milk Madie—”
“Oh, God,” she muttered and rolled her eyes.
“I know, I know,” Sal said quickly. “But when you get the goop out, you need to leave at least half of what the flower made still in, otherwise it wilts and dies. It takes a while for new flowers to bloom, so it means we won’t have any of the blue stuff for a while, is all. I’m not criticizing you or anything. It’s only a heads’ up if you need to milk—withdraw more of the goop in the future.”
She smirked and stroked his cheek gently. “You know that you saved my life in there too, right?”
“Well, I think I did a lot less than you,” he returned with a smile. “So, let’s say that we both needed each other to get out of that place alive. Again.”
“You more than me.” She covered the statement with a cough.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing—a bit of a cold.” Kennedy chuckled. “Get some rest. Just because you recover quicker doesn’t mean that I’ll let you push the limits, Sal.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said with a smile. “How does the armor look?”
“Oh, I put Gutierrez to work on that.” She grinned. “She was really impressed with how much damage the armor absorbed while we got out of the place alive ourselves. Of course, I say impressed, but it’s probably not a good thing.”
“Yeah, let’s try not to run into any more of those big…fucking monster things,” Sal said.
“I gave Courtney your recordings as well as my own statement on what the critter is capable of,” Madigan said. “She didn’t really believe everything I told her, but she’s already writing up a whitepaper about it. It’ll actually be featured. A ton of people will pay to know what the new alpha predator of the Zoo is.”
“I’d contest you there,” he said, “but even those big dinosaur replicas wouldn’t be a match against something like that. I…” He paused and closed his eyes. She noted that his hands shook while he talked about it and that he clenched them quickly into fists.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Sal opened his hand and wiped it over his face. “The doc said that there might be some trouble with nerve damage. It’ll probably all go away as I heal.”
He sounded less confident than she would have liked, but she breezed past it. If he wanted to talk about the traumatic experience he’d had with the monster in the Zoo, she was probably not the one to talk about it with. Her advice would more than likely range from ‘yeah, that’s tough,’ to ‘get over it, you pussy,’ and she knew for a fact that neither would help when someone suffered from something real.
She took his hand gently as Courtney and Gutierrez stepped through the door of his hospital room.
“Well, I talked with the docs here,” Monroe said. “The price of your treatment is astronomical, so I took it out of the money from the sets of flowers that you guys brought back. He said that it would have been a lot worse, but you have some impressive recovery powers stocked in that body of yours, Salinger Jacobs. You’ll have to let me study that in person someday.”
“Someday,” Sal agreed as she hugged him as gently as she could over the hospital bed.
“Well, I won’t hug you,” Amanda said with a chuckle, “but I’m really glad that you’re fighting back. I looked into the amount of stress the armor was put under while the critter pressed down on you, and you have no right to be alive right now. You’re a lucky man.”
“Lucky.” He grinned. “Yep, that’s me. Lucky as hell.”
“Anyway, it should be a little while before the suits are ready to go again,” Amanda continued. “They took a nasty beating out there. The both of you. There will be a lot of welding, and the price of the spare parts needed came out of the sets that you brought in too. I’m afraid that it brings the overall profits of your trip into the Zoo down to nearly zero.”
“Not really,” Courtney said with a smile. “I mean, sure, the flowers paid for all this, but we still have people bidding for the whitepaper on that monster you two faced off against, so that should pay dividends in the near future. That, plus the samples that you collected…not a bad trip. Financially, I mean,” she added quickly. “I’m not…not talking about all this.”
“Okay, okay,” Kennedy interjected. “Sal needs his rest. I need to have a quick chat with him before he goes back to his beauty sleep.”
Sal smirked as Courtney and Amanda made their exits, the two already talking like they were almost fast friends. His face assumed a somber expression once the door closed and Madigan turned to face him.
“You didn’t tell them?” he asked.
“Tell them what?”
“About the papers that we recovered from the bounty hunters?” Sal asked. “The map we took off their bodies that matched our own reports exactly.”
“Almost exactly,” she muttered defensively.
“You know what I mean, Madigan,” he said in a warning tone. “Deflecting won’t make this conversation not happen.”
She sighed and shook her head. “I didn’t feel that I could tell them without you present. Not only do I not know the science behind the tracking system you set up, but we also don’t know who might have used it and why they haven’t made their findings public yet. Or why they use third and fourth-rate mercs to make the run for them.”
“You’re right.” He sighed and shifted to find a more comfortable position. “We need to find out who’s using the tech before we actually put it on the market. Otherwise, they’ll underbid us and we’ll lose everything.”
Kennedy nodded, even though the marketing problem presented hadn’t even occurred to her at all. She usually left that kind of bullshit to Sal and Courtney. It was her job to get them in and out of that fucking place alive and in one piece.
“We need someone new,” she finally said. “Someone who can trace that sort of thing to a source for us to pin down.”
“A hacker?” Sal asked.
“You’re too smart to think that it’ll be as simple as that, but yeah, in essence,” she mused and sat in one of the chairs that flanked the bed. “Someone who can track the signal we know and find out who else is using it.”
“Do you have anyone in mind?” Sal asked.
“I don’t,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t really think that we need more people on our team. We can’t keep supplying food and board to the folk who join us. Eventually, we will run out of room. Besides, what kind of idiot would leave the comfort of their parents’ basement to come out here and put their lives on the line against monsters of alien descent?”
“It’s not like they’d actually go into the Zoo,” he reasoned. “For some guys, they don’t need to be in the jungle itself, merely near it. Imagine the reputation a
hacker would have simply living near the Zoo?”
Madigan nodded. “That is a good point. I know a couple of people on the Russian side who might know people who might meet our purposes.”
“It shouldn’t be hard to find a criminal hacker who wouldn’t mind moving out here where oversight is minimal and Internet speed is optimal,” Sal said. “The kind of guys who need to get very, very far away, where nobody can find them.”
“That is practical, I’ll admit,” she conceded. “But do you really think you’d be able to trust someone with that kind of history? Trust them with your life, I mean.”
“I guess not.” He sighed again as he adjusted his pillows with a small grimace of pain. “It’s exactly like you to ruin a great idea and perfect opportunity with a strong, healthy dose of self-preservation.”
“I keep your dumb ass alive, Sal,” she said with a grin. “That’s my job. That’s what I signed up for, and damned if I’m not good at what I do.”
“The very fucking best,” he agreed with a chuckle.
“Look,” Madigan said. She pushed out of her seat and ran her fingers through his hair. “Gregor on the Russian base owes us a couple of favors. I’ll ask him to throw a net out and see if he can’t catch us something. In the meantime, you get some rest and recover, you hear?”
“Will do, boss,” he said and his eyes had already drifted shut.
He knew they wouldn’t let him out of this place easily. They liked having experienced, underpaid boots on the ground, and they used it whenever they could. They twisted elected officials’ arms and those officials made generals tell colonels like him to stay where he fucking was and not move an inch.
What Anderson had seen and the scathing report he’d sent back on Pegasus’ use of mercenaries who were more than willing to gun people down who were on their side of this conflict of man vs. nature had essentially guaranteed his exile. He should have known they wouldn’t let him back on US soil until they all had their stories squared away.
Why couldn’t he simply lie like the rest of them?