by Michael Todd
Whatever the tentacles were attached to was strong enough to drag them for a few meters before Sal’s grip was knocked loose when he impacted with the ground. Gutierrez was harder to dislodge and she was hauled a little farther before she smacked into a tree. Hard.
“Fuck!” he roared and scrambled to his feet. Kennedy moved quickly and fired into the darkness to try to hit whatever it was that was out there, but the effort was futile. They heard one thin scream from Couture before he disappeared into the Zoo.
“What the hell was that?” Gutierrez asked and pushed herself up from the ground.
“I’ve seen some plants with tentacles like that,” Sal said as he hurried over to her. “Are you okay?”
“I banged my shoulder up a little, is all.” She shook his concerned hand off. “It sucks that we have to keep an eye out for the plants now as well as the animals.”
He looked out into the Zoo and ground his teeth. Part of him felt bad since he had wished that the Zoo would swallow the asshole more than once, but it sucked that it had happened under his watch.
“Should we go in and find him?” Kennedy asked as she reloaded her weapon.
Sal checked his motion sensors for any sign of the tentacles or even any motion at all. For a second, they shifted on the very edge of his vision but quickly disappeared, like one person was all that they’d come for.
He was tempted but only for a brief moment. No matter how much he detested that man and his like, this was not the kind of death he would wish on even his worst enemy. If they could rescue Couture from this, it would put him in his place and help him to be more than simply some asshole with a doctorate.
Finally, he turned away and rolled his shoulder, which had been bruised and wrenched in the effort to help the specialist.
“There’s no way to save him from that,” he reasoned aloud. “And there’s no assurance that it won’t come back for the rest of us. We need to keep moving.”
Both women looked a little relieved. For a moment, he had a warm feeling. They would have gone with him into the Zoo to save the bastard, even though at least a part of them wanted to leave him out there to die. It was something a guy could take to heart.
“Let’s hope the next one we test isn’t that much of an asshole,” Kennedy muttered as the vehicles came into sight. Most of the other teams had already assembled and now waited for the rest to return before the trip back to the base.
“Less of an asshole,” Sal said and winced as he pulled the suit-clad body over his shoulder.
“Oh, definitely,” Kennedy snarked and managed to hold her rifle at the ready as she helped Gutierrez along. Most of the left side of Amanda’s suit had been shredded and she tried to repair it as Kennedy half-carried, half-dragged her out while she also provided cover. Sal had helped with that as well, although he had carried the body of the specialist they had brought with them on this second trip into the Zoo from the UN Base.
“It would be nice if these guys managed to be even a little bit competent,” Gutierrez added belligerently. She had been the one closest to the man as he’d stumbled face-first into a pit of angry locusts. In all fairness, it was an interesting discovery to find that the locusts actually built nests.
Too bad it came at the price of the man’s life. It was doubly frustrating because he was a Canadian and very eager to learn and a real pleasure to work with, unlike Couture. Unfortunately, that eagerness had been coupled with complete cluelessness as the man seemed to think that this was a place of wonder and beauty. In all fairness, it was precisely that, but it was also a death trap if you didn’t treat it like an adult and watch your goddamn step.
“At least they can’t argue that we left a man to die out here this time,” Kennedy hissed and swept her rifle to gun down a couple of locusts that jumped out of the underbrush. They hadn’t swarmed, which seemed interesting to Sal since they usually did when they acted like this. They approached piecemeal like some creatures could smell the blood and tried to see if they could get a quick and easy bite to eat before they backed away when they realized that the wounded had friends with guns.
“Well, that was a very short argument,” Gutierrez responded and managed to limp her way through a couple of steps when her power armor began to work again. As frustrating as these jobs had been, at least the woman had more than proved her ability to fix the suits on the fly and under pressure.
Sal tightened his hold on the body as he scanned their surroundings. The jungle had broken barely a few meters back and gave them a full view of the desert in front of them.
He glanced at the two women as Amanda dropped to the ground, breathing hard. There had been more than mechanical damage when she’d dragged the man out of the nest, but with some help from the best mechanic around, the suit was able to keep her more or less on her feet despite a broken leg.
“Are you all right?” he asked and his concern showed in his tone.
She nodded, but the way her hands clenched and unclenched in time with her jaw told him otherwise. He didn’t need to be a mind reader to tell that she was in an enormous amount of pain and barely held it together. He retrieved his first aid kit and drew a syringe full of morphine. After a few attempts, he injected it into the port of her suit. A few seconds passed before she breathed more or less normally again.
“Thanks,” she said and nodded curtly.
“Don’t thank me.” Sal patted the side of her helmet. “I wasn’t the one who dragged your ass out while shooting a whole bunch of ugly motherfuckers.”
She smirked and looked at Kennedy. “Thanks to you too. I guess I owe you one now.”
“You know it, girl.” Madigan helped Gutierrez to her feet again. “And if you think I won’t collect, you’re dead fucking wrong.”
Sal grinned. He liked the fact that they were still able to joke about this shit. Gutierrez hadn’t been a veteran of the Zoo before she’d joined them, but damned if she wasn’t one now. She’d shown heart and grit to keep up with them and had saved their lives and worked well to cover and help them out when she could.
She would need some time in the UN base’s hospital, though.
He picked the body up and hauled it over to where they’d brought one of their own vehicles this time.
“Another job, another dead scientist,” Kennedy snarked as they settled into their seats at a table in the corner of the bar. This one was more traditional, at least to Kennedy and Sal’s sensibilities. It looked more like a pub, with an Irish bartender-slash-owner who had been a bartender before he joined up with the military, and it absolutely showed. The man had some panache and showed off his skills in drink-making at every opportunity.
Sadly, in their case, he’d simply poured them a couple of pints and there was little potential to show off.
It didn’t matter. They only needed a drink after they’d booked Gutierrez in for a night of observation at the hospital.
“Did you catch the commander’s attitude, though?” Sal asked and took a sip of his dark beer.
“Yeah,” she replied. There was nothing worse in the world than knowing that your life didn’t mean that much to the people in charge of risking it.
The man had seen them return with one more body, and while he’d asked some pointed questions the last time about why they weren’t able to recover the body and even implied that they hadn’t done their all to save Dr. Couture’s life, this time, there was no such annoyance. He merely seemed happy that they’d brought back another heavy haul of Pita flowers. When they asked him about why he didn’t seem more upset about losing research personnel, the annoying little man had merely shrugged.
“They know better than us,” he said in a thick French accent. “We warn them, and they ignore us. If they are the kind of idiots who want to go in without knowing if they have what it takes to come back, who are we to deny them? They are adults, yes?”
Sal had to grudgingly admit that their physical ages might make someone mistake them for adults, yes.
“I hop
e your payment was to your satisfaction?” he’d asked next.
It was. Over the past couple of days of intermittent trips into the Zoo, they had made more money than on most of their other longer and more arduous trips that usually ended up going deeper and being more dangerous. They were paid in euros around there, of course, but the conversion was still good. They would come away from their time working with the UN base considerably richer for their efforts.
Would it be worth it, though? He wasn’t entirely sure. The death toll of their shorter and supposedly less dangerous trips was now up to two. What was more, he wasn’t sure he really cared for the blasé attitude that the locals had about the loss of life.
He rubbed his temples and tried to forget about all that for one night.
“Hey, you two are the Heavy Metal people, yes?” someone said with a heavy German accent.
He looked toward a couple of men who stood near the bar and stared at them. They didn’t look hostile but he really couldn’t tell. Their whole culture was completely foreign to him.
“Yeah,” Sal said, not in the mood to play games at the moment. “Yeah, we are. How can we help you?”
“You bring in much more money than the rest of the teams,” the man said with a chuckle. “Almost more than the rest of them combined. You know how to run operations into the Zoo. When next you take a trip, let us know if you need gunners, yes?”
He nodded and narrowed his eyes as he turned his gaze back to Kennedy.
“What’s up with these people?” he asked with a chuckle.
She shrugged easily. “They’re mostly mercs out here at this point. Even the specialists. They’re all here to make money. Since they risk their lives anyway, it might as well be with someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
That made an annoying amount of sense, he realized.
“You’re not actually considering their offer, right?” he asked.
“Hell no,” she muttered under her breath. “If we march into the Zoo with a bunch of gunners, you know that I’ll only go in there with people I trust, not some random German dudes.”
“I can respect that,” Sal said with a nod.
Kennedy pulled her phone out of her pocket and indicated that a message had been received.
“They’ve tagged us in for another run tomorrow,” she explained. “Should I turn them down? I don’t think Gutierrez will be good to go that soon unless you decide to give her a lick of Madie.”
Sal grinned. “I’ll hold off on that for the moment. But we can do it with only the two of us. A one-day thing, since we have one more specialist to test. Let’s see if the third time isn’t actually the charm in this case.”
“That hasn’t been my experience,” she retorted.
“Yeah, well…if all else fails, we’ll make one last load of cash before we leave this hellhole.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Kennedy said with a chuckle and raised her glass to clink softly with his.
Chapter Nineteen
She looked around warily. Casablanca, of course, was a city bathed in all kinds of film history, but unfortunately, the city was nothing like the movie that had made it famous. In fairness to the film, it did show that the place was ridiculously hot and crowded, even back then, but most of it had been done inside a café-slash-casino while some very charming not-African people had innumerable conversations about a war that happened on another continent.
When she landed, she came to the not so shocking realization that there was far less appeal than one might have thought. The scenery was fantastic, but it was difficult to truly enjoy all the natural and man-made wonders that the place had to offer when you constantly looked over your shoulder for someone with a gun and a black head bag.
She stepped into one of the local dive bars and looked around to make sure that she hadn’t been followed. Satisfied, she made her way to a table with two chairs and took the seat that gave her a decent view of the door. There wasn’t really much point in hiding herself in there. If one of the people who hunted her made their way in there, she would rather know about it immediately and be on her way out before they saw her instead of waiting for them to find her while she tried to remain hidden.
It made sense in her mind, even if she wasn’t entirely sure if there were any stats that would define whether she had made a good decision or a mistake. She shrugged and followed the instinct that told her to stay where she was.
He said he could come here. He was a little late, was all.
As the waiter moved away after taking her order, she looked around one more time and scanned the clientele.
Wait.
She blinked and pushed herself out of her seat in a way that she hoped was subtle. There hadn’t been that many expectations, of course. It wasn’t that she had no skills when it came to this sort of stuff, but a cold feeling still settled in her stomach when she saw a couple of men stand when she did.
They were a lot better at this than she was. They didn’t even need to look at her and merely moved calmly to the bar to pay their checks before they sidled in closer and cut off her exit. There had to be another way out, though. The kitchen door was behind her. They couldn’t make a scene while she was in a public place, so if she moved now, it might put some distance between them and her.
All thoughts of escape disappeared, however, when something cold and hard pressed into the small of her back.
“You won’t be staying to eat,” a man’s voice said in English but with a familiar accent. She inhaled sharply and clenched her hands to keep them from shaking as the man guided her away from the table and marched her toward the exit. The other two men followed closely behind them.
She wondered if the rest of the patrons were aware of what had happened or simply blissfully ignorant. Either they were obviously not observant enough to see the gun against her back or if they did see, with this sort of thing as common as it was around there, they simply didn’t want to get involved.
Neither would surprise her, she realized as she stepped out of the café and looked hopefully around for someone who might interfere with this kidnapping. The street was entirely deserted. The two men who had followed them out broke away and walked down the street as the man behind her opened the trunk of a sedan and shoved her inside.
She really hoped that this was all worth it.
Sal shifted his shoulder and scowled at what his HUD was showing him. In retrospect, it might have been a stupid decision to grab the first job they could get their hands on. Maybe they should have taken the time to ensure that Gutierrez was all right, and barring that, maybe take some more time to make sure that their suits were in working order.
He patted the reloading mechanism which was still problematic after it had been attacked by a group of acid-spewing reptiles. Of course, he should count his lucky stars that they hadn’t been fully grown, which was why he only had trouble reloading and not with missing a whole arm.
Power arms were so expensive to fix, he thought with a shake of his head.
“Are you having trouble there, Jacobs?” Kennedy asked and glanced at him with concern.
“Only some software issues while trying to get to the specialist side of my suit,” he responded and tapped his mask, more out of instinct than because he thought that it would actually work.
“Do you think we jumped the gun coming out here?” she asked.
He looked up from the plant he tried to take samples of. “Do you say that because we should have probably waited for Gutierrez to recover and make sure that our suits were back to full functionality, or because it made our specialist prospective bail because he thought our little team here was cursed?”
“You don’t see a lot of superstitious scientists,” she observed and shifted her rifle. “But you’re right. Well, I’m right, and you made a good observation. We certainly jumped it on this one. Maybe if we’d waited the whole operation out, we might have been able to get the guy to come in with us while working with functioning equipment.
”
“Are you having trouble?” Sal asked when she scowled and fiddled with her weapon.
“Yeah, I have a fucking nick in my rifle that makes it jam all the time. How about you? Do you have your suit fixed yet?”
Sal nodded. There were a couple of glitches but nothing that he couldn’t sort out later. Besides, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about having to double as a specialist and gunner for this run. It was supposed to be a smash and grab operation with lower numbers to make sure that the teams moved quickly to collect some hard drives from the suits of those who had died on previous missions. A couple of Belgian companies were willing to bet that there was enough on those hard drives to warrant the amount of money they had sunk into getting them back.
The duo had already found a couple of dead teams. As usual, no animal bodies were found around them, although the sight of half-empty magazines and the heavy tears in the armor suits told them the story of a hard fight which had ended poorly. No carcasses simply meant that the Zoo continued to do its thing and collect the bodies of the dead animals.
He ground his teeth in frustration and pushed forward into the jungle. While he didn’t want to say it, he missed Courtney more than he wanted to admit. Despite that, he didn’t want to irritate Kennedy by bringing the woman up. The two of them had been friends but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who obsessed over having her friends around her all the time. She had more of a love the person you’re with kind of philosophy. Not that there was anything wrong with that.
Then again, he hadn’t actually had the opportunity to talk to her about it, so he might have been completely off base. Maybe she missed Courtney too and only wanted to seem tough about it. That wouldn’t be out of character for her either, he supposed.
Either way, now was neither the time nor the place to have a conversation about their feelings. They were in the middle of one of the most dangerous jungles in the world, if not the most dangerous. They had bigger problems to deal with.