by Michael Todd
Niels held his rifle closer to his chest as his gaze swept the trees again to make sure that he wasn’t followed. A whole fucking jungle of creatures out there that wanted him dead, and he wouldn’t go down without a fight—or be caught unawares.
A flicker of motion caught his attention as he turned. Something moved and triggered the motion sensors, but by the time he managed to focus, it had gone. That made tracking it a lot more difficult and Niels fought to stay calm.
“Fuck, I need a goddamn cigarette,” the specialist whined and pulled at the suit that he wore. It was a little tight considering that he was easily the largest person ever to wear it.
“If you need a goddamn cigarette, why don’t you have one?” Niels snapped and shook his head in irritation. “Save us all from your incessant bitching and maybe cleanse the gene pool by taking yourself out of it while you’re at it.”
“I don’t need to take this kind of abuse.” The man tugged at his suit again. “You’re all out here to make sure I get out alive and well. Anything less would mean that you failed at your job, which means that if I want to bitch incessantly about my needs in this primitive, hellish, piece-of-shit place, you have to take it.”
“Hey, shut up,” the team leader commanded. “If you want to shout, you can use the isolated channels. You’ll attract all kinds of hell our way.”
Niels grinned, tilted his head smugly, and tapped his rifle before he resumed his survey of the treetops. As he moved to the front of the line, another small movement caught his attention. He tensed immediately and aimed his weapon in the general direction because he couldn’t be sure exactly where he’d seen it.
“DidDid you see something?” the team leader asked and squinted into the underbrush.
“Something moved just outside my range of vision,” he replied. “I couldn’t make out what it was.”
“Well, keep your eyes peeled. If we’re walking into a trap, I want to be the first one to know about it.”
“Will do, Sarge,” Niels replied. “I’m not even sure if there was something, but—”
He paused when something twitched the barrel of his rifle. It was gentle at first, which made him wonder if something had malfunctioned in his power armor. These new suits were a lot more comfortable, but all kinds of bugs needed to be worked out. He hated the fact that the soldiers out there were used as guinea pigs to prep the new suits of combat armor that would hit the market soon.
Well, he wouldn’t mind it so much if they didn’t demand that they turn reports in on the combat functionality of the suits that they weren’t paid for. It was a pain in the ass, and it would always be something he objected to. Extra paperwork that got in the way of time in the bar would automatically set him against it.
The odd tweak at his weapon continued and Niels drew back instinctively to examine his rifle. Something had wound around the barrel—something that came from the branches above them.
“What the fuck?” he demanded and yanked the gun away with all his strength. The tendrils wrapped around his rifle gave fairly easily but immediately jerked back, this time with enough strength to drag him off his feet. If it weren’t for the power armor that clamped down on the rifle, it would have been torn from his fingers. Despite that, there wasn’t much he could do other than be dragged by whatever the tentacle things were that now had his rifle in a vice. His finger clamped down on the trigger and he opened fire into the darkness ahead of him. He fell hard onto his stomach, his mind blank for a moment before the consequences of what had happened made him turn quickly. His team had already taken defensive positions—positions that excluded him.
Fucking assholes.
The jungle seemed to hold its breath for a moment before movement erupted all around. The animals had either lain in wait for them or had been drawn by the sudden outburst of gunfire. Niels scowled as the gauntlet closed around the team and left him alone and isolated as the creatures attacked the circle of eleven men. The gunners gathered around the fat specialist, who whimpered and prayed before a volley peppered the first wave of monsters that attacked. Niels clutched his weapon, afraid to open fire himself for fear of hitting his own men. Of course, it also occurred to him that shooting while he was out in the open himself would make him a very easy target. He acknowledged the truth of this but was sure that the main reason why he held his fire was because he didn’t want to hit his comrades.
Well, most of them.
Niels turned as more of the tentacles descended from the treetops and seemed to follow him as he shuffled away and tried to aim at the writhing, rapidly moving vegetation.
“It’s like I’ve stumbled into the world’s worst hentai,” he protested and fired at the tentacle vines as best he could. The few that he managed to hit quickly withdrew, but the others surged closer to wind around his gun again and haul him closer to the fight. A bullet hammered into his thigh as his comrades dispensed with the formalities and succumbed to a desperate frenzy. He yanked at his gun and tried to help them with a few random shots at anything he could even partially aim at. The battle was only a few yards away and he tried to drop the rifle and draw out his sidearm instead. The tentacles surged around his hand and the more he fired, the more insistent they became until they had all but immobilized his arm. He drew his knife with his free hand and attempted to hack the vines loose, but more of them appeared like serpents from the shadows. They encircled his body and he yelled a stream of obscenities when they swung him off his feet and raised him clear of the carnage.
Panthers slunk across the branches, but they didn’t seem to notice him, not even when a round hit one of them and knocked it off its perch atop the trees. He’d managed to regain some measure of control over his rifle and had instinctively fired as he passed the beast. Crazy though the thought was, it seemed that while he was entwined in the vines, the other beasts didn’t seem to mind him at all.
Of all the weird things that he’d learned about in the Zoo, this was one of the most surprising. He clung to his weapon and tried to fire at the panthers as his tentacle captors raised him higher and higher into the trees. The slugs did little damage and although they struck everywhere around the beasts, they still completely ignored him. Finally, he realized that he had been drawn to the very top of the canopy, and for a moment, he could have sworn that he saw a pair of eyes look at him. They weren’t malevolent or…savage, or even primal, for that matter. Almost curious, he thought in a detached, objective way.
Niels jerked back to reality as his vine-cage began to snap or pull away. A cold dread lurched into his stomach when he looked at the ground and realized how high he was. He wanted to scream but the bile that rose in his throat drowned the sound in a gargle of despair. The grip that had supported him released and gravity instantly took hold.
The downward spiral seemed to take forever. The gunfire had ceased as the jungle around the killing field plunged into a dense and impossible silence. Even the roars and shrieks of the angry animals faded entirely as he fell. It couldn’t have taken more than three seconds, but it felt like it would last a lifetime.
Finally, he struck the ground and landed on his back. Even with the armor that was supposed to prevent any kind of shock from affecting the body inside, he could only imagine that the impact of a two-ton suit dropped from thirty feet was not what the designers had in mind. There weren’t many suits of armor in the world that could nullify an impact like that.
A sharp pain seared up his back and knocked the breath out of him. It was almost enough to make him pass out, but as he drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness, his curiosity won out and forced him to focus. Twelve bodies sprawled on the ground beside him, torn to pieces in all kinds of creative ways. The armor had been pulled off some while others simply had small puncture marks where poison had been injected.
“Fuck,” Niels whispered and looked at his legs. He knew that his back was broken, but his arms and neck still worked and he was able to drag himself up onto the roots that he’d landed on.
The tentacles now tugged and nudged at the dead men on the jungle floor. They poked and prodded at the bodies a few moments before they raised them one by one.
There was considerable inspection of the specialist, Niels noted, but it seemed that the tentacles and even the animals avoided him. He could understand why—he was a prick—but there was something oddly poetic about the fact that there was something so wrong with the man that not even an all-consuming jungle would absorb him.
He realized that a couple of the creatures had noticed him. They didn’t seem to be sure whether he was dead or not. A couple of the panthers padded over and licked their poisoned fangs. He raised his rifle and fired at them. The first one died almost instantly, but the second bounded to the left and circled in an effort to avoid the bullets. It bought the panther a few seconds, but eventually, it dropped as well.
Unfortunately, the shooting attracted the other monsters, who looked at him like they were surprised that he was still alive. Maybe he simply made this up and tried to make some sense of it all through a lame attempt to anthropomorphize the monsters that had killed his comrades and that one asshole.
They seemed malevolent enough to charge at him and he realized that his rifle was empty. There were no spare mags in his belt. He fumbled in his pouch and his fingers closed around a pair of grenades that he’d brought along. They weren’t standard issue for people like him, but he’d always made sure that he was as well armed as he could be. He’d acquired the grenades from the weapons dealer in the Staging Area.
Creatures surged toward him as he pulled his little friends clear. The tentacles slithered down from the treetops. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if they attacked him again, so he pulled the pins. Teeth and claws raked and savaged his suit of armor to rip and slash, bruise and hurt. While he couldn’t feel anything below the waist, they began to attack his torso with the same frenzied intensity. He dropped the grenades at his sides and the clips fell alongside.
The creatures seemed to realize that they were in imminent danger, but they had neither the time nor the intelligence to realize exactly how much. Niels closed his eyes and leaned back.
Chapter Twenty-One
Madigan stepped inside the bar and closed her eyes as the cool air-conditioned environment banished the heat from outside. If they ever did retire somewhere away from the Zoo, she would manage to convince Sal to take them somewhere cooler. She wouldn’t mind if it was hot in the summertime when they could go to the beach and take time off there, but only for a couple of months in the year.
She knew, though, that he would pursue this sort of lifestyle until he obtained his doctorate, and probably after that. Like every other person in the world, he liked his creature comforts, but there was something else that drove him. She didn’t know quite how to describe it other than insatiable curiosity. He wanted to fill his brain with as many facts and figures as he could. It wasn’t something that she shared with him, but she could understand it.
He wouldn’t retire anytime soon. And in truth, neither would she. Barring any kind of nasty accidents, she didn’t see herself getting a desk job to run Heavy Metal from a distance. But it still couldn’t hurt to have something planned, right?
She strode to the bar and drew in a deep breath of the cool air as she raised a hand to the bartender. It hadn’t been a lie when she told Sal that she’d been drinking less, but that didn’t mean she had stopped drinking entirely. She was still well-known enough in the bar for the man standing behind it to know what she would order. That plus the fact that she and Sal provided them with a steady stream of good, cheap vodka from the Russian base.
He placed a beer mug in front of her, filled to the brim with a thick malt beer, and she decided she would stick to the counter instead of a table. The bar would fill up quickly over the next few minutes, and she didn’t want to share her table with loud and abrasive recent returnees from the Zoo.
A handful entered as she took her first sip. They discussed something that she was already aware of. News wasn’t slow to do the rounds, even if they were stuck in the middle of a compound.
“They didn’t even get a chance to signal for help,” one of the men said and shook his head. “By the time a team got there, there wasn’t anything left. Most of the bodies were gone.”
“How would you know that?” another of the newcomers asked. “Were you on the team that got there?”
“I was part of the team that had to write the letters back to the family to explain to them that while we were reasonably certain they were dead, we only had a couple of corpses to prove it,” the first man retorted defensively.
Madigan resisted the urge to order a shot of whiskey to add to her beer. It was too early in the day to be drunk, and Sal expected her back at the compound before sunset. She didn’t want to keep him waiting.
“Kennedy, right?” A man settled onto a seat beside her. “Madigan Kennedy?”
“That’s me,” she said with a small smile and raised her glass at the young man in uniform. “How can I help you?”
“Right to business, then?” he asked.
“If you don’t mind”
“Fair enough.” He chuckled. “To cut a long story short, I’m at…let’s call it a loose end. My squad took serious casualties in our last run, and the commandant gave us word that it’ll be a while before they have the manpower to fill our quota again. Of course, they’ll plug those left into other squads when we’re needed, but I’ve been told that it’ll take some time before that happens.”
“And you want to work in the meantime,” she said to bring them to the point the younger solider seemed to want to avoid saying outright. “You’re looking for freelance work.”
“In a word…yeah,” he said with a nod. “The word around the base is that Heavy Metal is looking for muscle and can pay for the trouble.”
“What’s your name, kid?” Madigan asked.
“PFC Brian Abrams.” He grinned. “Like the tank.”
“Nice to meet you, Abrams. Look, the word around the base is right. We will need muscle soon, but the details are still a little sketchy. The basic idea is that we need a twelve-man team and we’ll move…delicate and expensive merch. The pay will be good, so if you don’t mind, you could spread the word about the opportunity so we don’t get the team up and running at the last minute.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “It sounds like something I would be interested in. And quite a few other people. Seriously, Heavy Metal has a good rep when it comes to the people you work with.”
“That’s good to know.” She swallowed the last of her pint, and after a second thought, refused when the bartender offered a refill. “Anyway, here’s my contact info. Let me know if there’s anyone else who springs to mind for the job or if you have to back out for any reason.”
“Will do,” Abrams said with a smile. “And thanks.”
“Jacobs?”
Sal glanced up from his laptop to where Anja hovered at his half-open door. It wasn’t usual for her to come to him for anything. In the past, when she’d wanted his attention, she buzzed his phone with a dozen illegible text messages until he finally wandered to the server room to see what she wanted.
“Hey, Anja,” he said and smiled as he quickly locked his laptop. “How can I help you?”
“First of all, it’s really adorable that you think a simple passcode protection will be enough to keep that data safe,” she said with a grin. “You might want to think about letting me run some encryption software on there to make sure that if anyone did get hold of it, they’d need a couple of decades to get through.”
“And what would happen if I forgot my password or something?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Come on, a genius like you?” Anja asked before she realized that he’d asked a legitimate question. “Oh, well, you could probably simply bring it to me and I’d get it for you without too much trouble.”
“Right,” he said with a soft grunt that might have be
en disapproval. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yes. Yes, there is,” Anja said. “I have the video Courtney needs to deal with Covington ready to go whenever she is. I hoped that you could contact her and let her know.”
Sal regarded her with a little bemusement. “You have her number, and you have already monitored my conversations with her.”
“Well, yes, which is why I don’t feel comfortable talking to her myself,” she explained. “I know a lot about her, but she knows nothing of me so it would be a one-sided conversation.”
“It wouldn’t need to be a conversation at all,” he grumbled and pushed from his seat. “Send her the damn thing, add a smiley face to the message for her to know that it’s a human sending it, and violá, you have yourself a sent video.”
“Perfect. Could you do that?” She handed him a memory stick.
“Fine.” He took it from her. “But if we’re a team, you have to trust the people you work with.”
Anja shrugged. She wasn’t particularly in the mood to handle making friends across the world, but if it would shut him up about it, she would agree and conveniently forget to comply later.
“Hey, are you busy?” Madigan asked from the doorway, pushed it open, and did a quick double-take when she saw Anja in the room. She shook her head and looked meaningfully at him.
“Not particularly busy, why?” he asked and placed the memory drive on his desk.