by Michael Todd
“They swarm and run into gunfire and in general, act like rabid motherfuckers,” one of the other mercs interjected. Gregor could tell that everyone on the team was on edge. The ones who had wandered the jungle before knew it well enough not to pick a fight that should rather be avoided, but it was a testimony to the training of the first-timers that they were willing to wait things out instead of engaging an immediate preemptive strike.
“If there’s anyone who knows what they’re doing out here,” Gregor continued, “it would be the two who brought me out alive the last time. Now those were some crazy motherfuckers—freelancers on the American side of the Zoo and walked around like they owned the place. They’ve been around here the longest, I think, and they have one of the best scientists on their side too.”
The sergeant looked oddly at him like he hadn’t expected to hear anything good about the American side from someone like him.
“What?” he responded to the unasked question. “I was told to trash the Americans by our new commandant. Since he’s not here, I’ll speak my mind. Most of them are rat bastards, although no more so than the assholes who left me behind to die. Those freelancers seemed like they wanted to make sure that there were good relations on both sides of this fucking jungle.”
The sergeant smirked. “I’ll keep that in mind. If we ever need some Zoo Whisperer motherfuckers to help us to communicate with the jungle, we know who to call. At least we have the technology.”
“What technology?” Gregor asked. The sergeant didn’t grace him with an answer but instead, moved forward quickly to take up point on the team.
When they reached the spot where they’d left Vasili and the other member of their team to fix the man’s suit, it was clear that something was wrong. It had only been a few hours, yet the special force soldier was nowhere to be seen. A body lay in the vicinity and they could assume it was the merc they’d left behind, but it wasn’t a sure thing. The acrid smell of acid on flesh still lingered and the evidence of what had happened was difficult to refute.
Something had spat a large glob of acid that had melted through most of the man’s helmet and the head underneath, which made it difficult to actually identify him apart from his armor.
The Spetsnaz men obviously had some sort of rule about leaving their comrades behind as they picked the body up quickly, hefted the heavy combat armor between two men, and set off through the jungle without another word.
“Shouldn’t we look for Vasili?” Gregor asked the sergeant quietly.
“He would know to head back to the vehicles if he runs into trouble out here,” the man responded in a low tone. “We can only hope that he actually made it—”
“Sergeant!” one of the other Spetsnaz men called. A couple of them were gathered around a second body and Gregor didn’t need to move any closer to know that it was Vasili. They weren’t that deep in the Zoo, so it wasn’t likely that they had come across any of the other teams that had been sent in and had made their way deeper into the jungle. Hopefully.
“Cyka Blyat,” the sergeant snarled.
What was interesting to see was the way he had been killed. Gregor had assumed that he had fallen victim to the same acid flinger that had taken down the other merc. Instead, six extremely narrow punctures had somehow penetrated completely through the chest piece, supposedly the hardest part of the armor. The punctures didn’t look like they were enough to kill a grown man in armor that was supposed to provide emergency first aid, which meant that there was most likely venom involved. The punctures didn’t look like fangs, though, not unless the beast was truly massive and had multiple rows of them.
That was out of character for this fucking jungle, Gregor mused as he stepped in to help carry the second body back to the vehicles.
“At least we still have the technology,” he snarked as he struggled under the heavy weight of Vasili’s armor.
The sun had almost set by the time they slipped out from under the heavy cover of the trees. It washed vivid orange and red over a purplish-pink sky. It was truly a wondrous sight, Gregor realized.
As the bodies and the loot were loaded into the vehicles, the sergeant moved to where Gregor stood to one side.
“About those freelancers you mentioned,” the man said and looked back into the forest with an angry expression. “Do they join trips out of the Russian base or only American?”
“I’ve heard that they’re looking to expand,” he replied and tried to sound casual. “Why do you ask?”
“I think we should contact them,” his companion said with a nod. “Bring them over for our next run. We could do with a couple more veterans in our crew.”
“I’ll pass you their information,” Gregor said with a small smile.
Chapter Seventeen
Airports were usually busy places, and around this time of year, that effect was enormously increased. It was why she had chosen to travel right about now. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Her house and those of all her friends were being watched, with what remained of her family brought in for questioning and watched as well. You didn’t get to fuck the FSB over without consequences. She still maintained that she had been in the right in doing so, and yet she might have profited from having an escape plan in place if she ever got caught.
Which—surprise, surprise—she had.
It had been an impetuous act with a great deal more impulsiveness that kept her doing it over the span of months until finally, she realized that someone was tracking her movements. At the same time, her employers quietly ran checks on her to determine how difficult it would be to find a replacement. It didn’t take a significant mental leap to realize that this would not end well.
It hadn’t been at all difficult to buy an airplane ticket under a fake passport with cryptocurrency. She’d done that to make spending money for years now. The hard part was to make it to the airport herself and from there, across the damn world to someplace that would let her live out the rest of her life in peace. Or with less threat of death, anyway.
She hadn’t bothered to bring any luggage. A backpack contained one of her laptops and whatever clothes she’d been able to get her hands on the last time she’d been home. For a brief moment, she wondered how suspicious it would look for someone with a ticket to Casablanca international airport.
“Ticket and passport, please,” said the bored-looking woman who managed the customs line. She presented both with a small smile, careful not to look shifty or uncomfortable.
Well, who was she kidding? Everyone felt uncomfortable at the port authority, right?
“Reason for leaving St. Petersburg?” the woman asked as she typed the name and passport number into the computer in front of her, which could easily have been from the seventies.
“I’m visiting my brother who works in the embassy there,” she said smoothly. The ID had been stolen from someone with connections in the foreign ministry, but the woman was currently on an illegal spending spree in Monaco. The ID would be safe for as long as she needed it.
“Please put your baggage through the machine.” The woman indicated the x-ray machine to her left. “Remove all electronics to be scanned separately.”
She did as she was told, removed her laptop, and placed it beside her belt, keys, and phone in a small bin that went through separately from her backpack. The woman’s bored look shifted in a moment. Traveling that far with only one piece of luggage was suspicious, no matter who your brother was. She checked the ID again, this time against the federal database on a no-fly list, but when nothing came up, she leaned back in her seat and assumed the expression of a bored airport official once more.
The passenger smiled, collected her belongings on the other side, and slid her laptop quickly into the backpack before she jogged toward her gate.
While she did have family in that area, it wasn’t her brother, and she really hoped that the flight wouldn’t be late. She had no money and no other connections and now headed off to a different continent with only the sligh
test assurance that she would be able to make a living in one of the quickest growing markets in the world.
The harsh reality was that she didn’t look forward to being that close to what ZooTube told her was one of the most dangerous places to live at the moment, but at the same time, it was a new adventure. And she was nothing if not an adrenaline junkie.
Sal blinked a few times in an effort to force his pupils to function as they should. With the shades drawn, he was unable to actually focus on anything. The light that shone between the cracks told him that it was daytime, although he wasn’t sure what time. If the truth be told, he wasn’t even sure what date. He’d taken some melatonin to help with the jetlag, but it had the small side effect that he woke up like he’d come back from the dead. His brain was fuzzy, and he wasn’t sure if anything in the world made sense anymore.
It didn’t really matter, Sal reminded himself with a yawn that seemed determined to dislocate his jaw. He pushed himself out of bed.
“I need to clean this place up,” he muttered. He located his phone, which told him that the alarm that he’d set the day before had gone off fifteen times and was thirty seconds away from another attempt. He growled, shook his head, and turned the alarm off before he slipped the device into the pocket of the pants that he’d slept in. It was nice to know that his sleep had been deep enough that the notoriously loud alarm in his phone hadn’t woken him—although not for lack of trying, evidently.
As he stumbled out of his apartment, he realized he could smell breakfast. He paused to sniff the air—a mixture of the instant waffle batter that had too much vanilla and the dry-frozen bacon that almost smelled like bacon but not quite.
Sal shuffled down the steps and rubbed at his eyes to force his pupils to contract as he moved to the shared kitchen area. He could have complained that the living situation was much like the one where he’d shared an apartment with five other dudes while working on his masters. But in all honesty, with the amount of space that they had out there, it was nice to have one place where they were all bound to congregate eventually.
He found only one member of their team in the kitchen when he reached it. Their new arrival listened to some eighties rock on her phone while she moved around the space.
“You look like you’ve made yourself quite at home,” Sal said and fought back the urge for another yawn.
“Well, I know that this is all our shared living quarters,” Gutierrez said with a grin. “I thought I might welcome you two back with some breakfast. It’s the same quality stuff as what you’d find stocked in the apartments at the Staging Area but still, it’s the thought that counts, right?”
“Absolutely.” Sal wandered to the counter and picked up one of the pieces of bacon that were already cooked. He bit into it and chuckled. It tasted almost like bacon too. There was something else in there—probably some kind of preservative—but he still couldn’t make out what it actually tasted like. Almost like maple, but not quite. It was interesting, and after having had it a few times, he’d acquired a taste for it. That didn’t mean that he’d give up real bacon, but this would do in a pinch.
“So, how was the flight?” Amanda asked as he heaped his plate with more bacon, a couple of waffles, and some jelly packs and butter.
“Loud, crowded, and full of uncomfortable silences,” Sal said with a grin. “Your average plane flight, I suppose—or I assume so, at least. I didn’t do much traveling before I came here, and that was on one of those huge fucking Hercules planes, so when it comes down to it, that sums up my average flight experience.”
“Wow,” she said as she filled a couple of mugs of coffee from the machine. “You’re much better at small talk than I thought you’d be.”
“I hate awkward silences more than I hate small talk,” he admitted around a mouthful of butter-and-jelly-smeared waffle. “So I learned to make sure that if some item of small talk was offered, I could carry it until the conversation was interesting. It took some doing—a whole lot of practice and awkward silences caused by my failed attempts—but I’m happy with the results.”
“You talk a lot, don’t you?” She grinned, placed his mug down on the table, and sat opposite him.
“When someone has as much to say as I do, that does tend to happen.” He grinned back.
“And so modest too,” she said with a chuckle. He shrugged, his mouth too full to respond politely, when Madigan stepped inside. She looked worse than he did, with bleary eyes and an almost permanent scowl on her face. Her hair was rather neat, though, which told Sal that she’d kept her drinking in-house the night before.
“I smell coffee,” she croaked.
“On the counter.” Amanda pointed at the pot. “Bacon and waffles, too, if you want them.”
“Bacon and waffles?” Madigan asked and raised an eyebrow. “That’s an awkward combination if I’ve ever heard one.”
“Oh, look whose glass is half empty,” the other woman responded with a laugh. “In all seriousness, though, they were all that was left. We need to get supplies tomorrow, so we’ll restock then.”
Sal smiled. It was nice to hear Gutierrez talk like she was a part of the team. She was, but the fact that she saw herself as that meant that she had fit in better than he’d thought.
Kennedy piled a plate with bacon but avoided the waffles before she joined them with a mug of piping hot black coffee. He knew that she took it without any sugar. She’d once mumbled something about suffering through the bitterness of it without any help being a part of the waking up experience. He wasn’t sure where the logic was in that, but everyone had their own personal morning rituals. Who was he to tell her not to do something?
“So,” he said once half of her mug was empty—which was usually about the time when she was in the mood to answer without any bite or sarcasm. “Should we address the elephant in the room?”
“The fact that Amanda moved all the tools in the suit repair shop?” Madigan muttered, still a little hoarse. Maybe more than half a cup was needed today.
“It’s my job to fix the suits now, so the shop has to be set up how I need it,” Amanda said with a shrug.
“Not that.” Sal chuckled. “Well, maybe that too, later, but for now, we seem to be down one full-time specialist.”
“Isn’t that your job?” Gutierrez asked with a slightly confused expression.
“He’s been a hybrid gunner-slash-specialist for the past couple of months,” Kennedy said with a shrug. “It works better since he has some skill with weapons while still able to pull off being a specialist. It would be better to have someone on that full time, though.”
“I don’t think I can pull the specialist role off in the Zoo,” the other woman stated with a shrug. “I could probably only be a gunner.”
“Good call,” he said. “But at the same time, we might want to find ourselves another specialist until Courtney gets back.”
“If she gets back,” Madigan corrected. Sal didn’t want to openly admit that she wouldn’t, so he didn’t dignify that comment with an answer.
“The ones in the Staging Area are locked up pretty tight,” Amanda said. “They didn’t like how you guys stole their best away, so they rewrote the contracts to keep the geeks happy after Courtney left them.”
“It makes sense,” Sal said. “Still, some must prefer to go freelance rather than be stuck with forced runs into the Zoo.”
“Not really,” Kennedy said. “They’re light on specialists as it is, considering the kind of death rates they have in there.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “No wonder they grabbed my ass all the way from California.”
“As fun as that would be,” Amanda said, “I think we might have better luck if we poach the talent in the new UN base. The folks they brought in are still green, metaphorically speaking. They wouldn’t mind the extra cash that comes in from working for themselves while still being a part of a team that knows a thing or two about how to get in and out of that fucking jungle alive, you know?”
He nodded. “That actually makes sense, yeah.”
Madigan looked thoughtful. “We could probably arrange a visit there later today. I have some contacts who helped to build the base.”
“Any word on our plans from the Russian side?” Sal asked.
“I gave Gregor the green light to bring our new friend over,” she said with a nod around a mouthful of almost-bacon. “He’ll let us know when he’s ready for retrieval.”
Gutierrez narrowed her eyes. “What are you two talking about?”
“A prospective Heavy Metal member should come our way in a couple of days,” he said. “I’m not sure when, though.”
“Would this guy be someone to take the specialist spot?” she asked.
“No, his job will be more focused on security around here,” Sal explained and waved vaguely to indicate the whole compound. “A Russian IT specialist who will help to keep our firewalls in place as well as with some other tasks that we need done.”
“Awesome,” she responded although she wasn’t sure how she felt about someone whom she didn’t know keeping an eye on her stuff while she was in the Zoo. In fairness, the others had trusted her to manage the place while they were gone, but she knew herself. She didn’t know some Russian hacker dude with a neckbeard. Probably.
“I’ll get cracking and arrange visitor badges for us,” Madigan said and shoved her mug and plate aside before she walked off.
“Who will do the dishes?” Sal asked.
“Hey, I made the breakfast,” Amanda said with a laugh. “I think you can afford to get your hands dirty there, Salinger. Or clean and sudsy, rather.” She pushed her plate and mug to his side of the table, stood, and stretched. “Have fun!”