by Michael Todd
Well, no, not at her precisely, she reassured herself, but in the direction of the mercenaries.
“No fucking way,” she gasped when the enormous creature completely ignored the armored figure and launched into a charge directed at her team. They were a larger target and so made more noise, but it should have been an easy kill. The monster should have demolished the figure and moved on. Instead, it simply looked past it and hurtled into the attack.
“Over there!” Andressa screamed and pointed at the massive beast that thundered closer. “Shoot that one. Shoot it!”
Her warnings came too late, even though she was sure that she had used the open channel this time. Nothing could alter the fact that the giant was on top of them before they could react. The immense tail lashed out, and Andressa shrieked instinctively in horror as one of the mercenaries was cut cleanly in half by the sheer force of it. Massive claws and teeth tore into her men to crunch and bite and savage them in an almost methodical onslaught. Bullets had no effect whatsoever, and she could only stand in frozen disbelief and terror as half her men were systematically decimated by the creature. Finally, a team member managed to launch a shoulder rocket at the beast.
Too much happened before she could react. A bright white flash illuminated the area around them and revealed the stark beauty of the jungle around them for less than a second before it plunged back into darkness. She gasped when something smacked her hand and knocked the rifle out of it. She stumbled and tried to break her fall but immediately felt the full weight of her armor impact on her suddenly unarmored hand.
Andressa screamed as a shaft of pain radiated into her arm. The armor had peeled cleanly away to leave only her hand, exposed and shattered.
“Fuck!” she screamed and clutched the injury protectively to her chest.
She looked up fearfully, as did the few men and women left in the squad. The whip-tailed creature backed away to lick its wounds from the shoulder-mounted rocket. It seemed impossible that it had survived with little more than what appeared to be surface damage to the tough hide.
An ominous whisper heralded the sudden arrival of hundreds of vines that seemed to appear from nowhere. They drifted and writhed relentlessly like tentacles of some monster from the depth of the oceans. Andressa screamed and fired wildly at the sinuous enemy. The squad joined in, clustered as close together as they could without losing too much cover.
Their frenzied defense achieved nothing. In fact, it seemed like the response had only irritated the tentacles further and they now attacked the almost defenseless mercenaries with a terrifying ferocity. Andressa shrieked and continued to pull the trigger on her side arm even when it clicked empty. Vines snaked around her legs and began to haul her upward as she struggled to find purchase on something solid with her uninjured hand to anchor herself.
“No, no…stop!” She flailed in terror and tried to kick to free herself from the tenacious grip of the tendrils. Her efforts only made them tighten around her and attracted others nearby. She was yanked up a little higher before a wash of pain swept through her as something grabbed her.
No…someone, she thought and twisted to see that a leaner, lighter hybrid suit of armor had grasped her broken hand. The figure gripped a long, machete-like blade in her free hand.
“I’m not here to save you, Covington,” Courtney said through the suit’s speakers. “I simply need your fucking hand. This is for my father, you fucking bitch!”
Andressa’s eyes widened as the machete rose briefly before it slashed in a blur to slice her exposed hand off with a single chop. She screamed and the agony briefly swallowed the terror as her captors swung her relentlessly upward into the trees.
Sal recoiled as an instinctive surge of horror rushed up his spine when the tentacles serpentined down from the trees attack the few mercs who were still alive. Their screams echoed on the comm channels for a few minutes, but as they disappeared into the trees, their distress faded one by one until there wasn’t much else to listen to except for the way that the jungle seemed to move toward them.
“We have what we came here for,” Courtney said. She held up a severed hand before she sealed it quickly into a containment bag and slid it into her pack. “We need to get out of here. These critters won’t wait around for us to beat a hasty retreat. Fuck, I forgot how much fun these trips can be.”
Sal nodded and narrowed his eyes at her. She had changed considerably but he could live with that. Where there had been a timid scientist, there was now a confident and slightly terrifying woman of power who was, he conceded, an entirely sexy surprise. Right now, though, they had the DNA they needed to crack the laptop and had to get the fuck out of Dodge.
They immediately initiated an orderly retreat in the direction from which they had come. Their small team fell into formation as they could see the Zoo monsters converge and ready themselves to attack them. This wouldn’t be as intense as most of the other battles they had survived, but there were still too many creatures for them to manage alone.
Sal glanced at Madigan and she nodded. He opened a channel and set it to broadcast as far as possible. It didn’t need to be a complicated message, merely a quick and simple delivery of three simple letters in Morse code.
S-O-S.
As one, the team broke into a run. He realized that even though he was now used to this, there simply wasn’t anything that could prepare a man to watch as an entire jungle seemed to coalesce into a united wave of ferocity. He drew his sidearm and kept it in his free hand to fire it intermittently to cover the moments of lull when his rifle needed to reload. He wondered if there were any options that could feed the rifles like they were miniguns—like a chain that would allow for hundreds of rounds to be fired before reloading instead of a couple of dozen.
Courtney retained her machete in hand and slashed at the hyenas that broke through the lines and harassed the four as they maintained a brisk pace.
“Heavy Metal,” Sal heard through his comm. “Do you boys need some help?”
“You’re damn fucking right!” he shouted when he saw that the name on the comm line was a familiar series of numbers. “Fuck, is that you Daniels?”
“That’s us, Heavy Metal,” Sergeant Daniels said, and he could actually hear the man grin. “It’s our turn to save your asses this time. Watch your fire to the southwest, would you? I’d hate to have to charge you for wounding my men.”
Sal grinned and relayed the orders to Gutierrez, Kennedy, and Monroe while he fired consistently at the undaunted Zoo creatures. Fifteen men decked out in traditional military armor suits thrust through the underbrush, forced their way into the surging monsters, and drove them back. He noticed that they had changed tactics a little to fight in close quarters as if they followed the crazy example he had set. Their headlong charge directly at the monsters seemed to surprise them and made it easier to shove them off balance while they advanced to the rescue.
“That’s right,” Daniels said as he marched over to where the four of them took a moment to catch their breaths. “My boys have embraced the Sal-side of combat, bitches.”
“The Sal-side?” Courtney asked and glanced at the other three in obvious confusion.
“Don’t ask,” Madigan retorted. “It’s a long story that started with Sal being reckless, as usual. Daniels, we left our Hammerheads a couple of klicks to the west.” She scanned their perimeter and noticed with relief that the animals seemed to have taken the hint. They’d obviously had their fill of death and destruction for the moment, which gave the soldiers a reprieve. “If you guys need a ride out of here, we’d be happy to oblige.”
“We were on our way out,” Daniels acknowledged. “If you guys could get us back to where we’re parked, we’d appreciate it, but do you have the extra room for all my boys?”
“Yeah,” Courtney said and stepped closer. “We lost some people back there and would have trouble getting the Hammerheads out on our own.”
“Perfect.” The sergeant turned to his men. “We’re
moving out!”
“We appreciate your help, Daniels,” Kennedy said. “The first and second rounds of drinks are on us when we get back.”
“You’re goddamn right.” He grinned “And don’t think that we won’t charge you guys for the assist, either.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it,” Sal replied and relief washed over him in an awesome wave as they came into view of the four Hammerheads parked near one other.
Epilogue
“How’d the hand job work out for you, Anja?” Sal asked and focused on their resident hacker, who had joined them for breakfast for the first time since…well, forever. In fact, he hadn’t seen her join them for a meal in all the months she’d been there.
“It was squishy and gross,” Anja complained, “but it was more than enough to unlock the laptop and keep it open until I could change the settings to recognize my DNA. I’ve already spread what news I can across the dark web. Pegasus will have a whole ton of legal problems back in the US, and they will probably be shut down in Europe until the investigations end.”
He looked at Courtney, who dug into a pile of bacon strips. “It has to be a relief to know for sure what happened to your father, right? Obviously, it won’t bring him back, but getting revenge on the people who killed him has to feel good.”
“Well, not as good as I thought it would,” she admitted, her mouth full of bacon, “but still pretty damn satisfying. Plus, the knowledge that they will have to answer to corporate espionage and murder feels great.”
“You do know, don’t you, that since they’re a big corporation, they’ll simply be slapped with a fine? Maybe a couple of low-level officials will see some jail time, but everything will be back to normal before you know it.” Madigan shook her head in disgust. “Those motherfuckers always get a slap on the wrist, no matter how heinous their crimes are.”
“Well, it’s something, anyway,” Sal said. “And it gives us something to springboard our attack on them further. If we keep pushing, that damned company will be shut down for good.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Anderson said. He’d been invited to join them for breakfast the day after they returned from the Zoo. “Pegasus has taken a lot of hits recently, yes, but they’re still a Fortune Five-Hundred company. They have all kinds of connections that won’t permit them to fade into the background. They’ll come back for blood, just you watch.”
Sal nodded and leaned back in his seat. “How do you feel now that you’ve resigned at the Pentagon? I can’t imagine that they took that lightly.”
“After everything that happened yesterday, they were fairly anxious to avoid a lawsuit,” Anderson said. He still remembered the footage that came from watching the men and women sent into the Zoo cut down by all the horrors the damned jungle had to offer. He shook his head. “They literally threw severance packages at everyone who was willing to sign an NDA on that.”
“So do you think you’ll work as a consultant?”
“I intend to take a vacation,” the colonel said with a laugh. “I have a wife and kids whom I haven’t seen in months. I’ll take them all to Disneyworld for a couple of weeks. After that, I’ll see what kind of options I have for a future career.”
“You might want to think about still working to take Pegasus down,” Courtney interjected.
He chuckled. “As what, the janitor?”
“Nope, as a CEO,” Courtney said with a cheeky grin. “I wouldn’t discuss this beyond this group because of the restrictions, but this will concern all of us. It’s not confirmed yet, but there’s a buyout in the works. My company has a project to recover the stuff that Pegasus stole from my father by buying up shares in the company. If you were to be our rep inside Pegasus, you could do a lot more damage to them there than anywhere else in the Zoo.”
“What makes you think that they’ll accept a guy like me? It’s not like I have any business experience. I’m a career soldier, for fuck’s sake.”
She shrugged. “A career soldier who knows more about the Zoo than anybody else on their board, I’d be willing to bet. Considering that Pegasus has put a lot of eggs into the Zoo basket, they’ll beg for your guidance, trust me.”
Anderson shrugged. “I’ll do almost anything to serve my country.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Madigan said and raised her mug of coffee with a grin.
She looked around the area she entered with satisfaction. People in Beijing were religious about lunch hour. They spent so much time indoors that on clear days, they were eager to enjoy their meals in what little sun they could find to touch their skin. It was a perfect cover.
The crowd was a little tedious but she pushed through to find a seat as close to the road as she could and located a small spot where she could sit. She pulled her thermos of tea out of her bag, as well as a packed lunch of diced chicken breasts with steamed vegetables. This damned diet would kill her, but she wanted her husband to lose weight. She had to be willing to help him by example.
“Can I offer you some tea?” she asked the woman who had sat beside her. The newcomer had no food with her, and she kept her black motorcycle helmet on.
“No thanks.”
“So let me get this straight,” the businesswoman asked and poked the chicken with her plastic fork. “Not only were you able to get your hands on a copy of Covington’s laptop, but you were paid over two million dollars for your trouble?”
“Two point four million dollars,” the biker replied. “And that shouldn’t surprise you. It’s a seller’s market out there, you know.”
“I should have gone into the thieving business a long time ago,” she responded dryly.
“You already have. You’re in stocks, aren’t you?”
“Very funny,” the businesswoman responded, unamused. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing, personally.” Her companion shrugged. “The eggheads back in the R&D section are still sifting through the data. I do know enough to know that Pegasus is about to have their balls handed to them in a very public way.”
“By whom?”
“Heavy Metal, of course.” The biker seemed to find that amusing. “It always helps to bet on the winning team, you know.”
“Well…uh…” The businesswoman’s stutter gave the biker an opening to stand and nod affably. She walked away, stepped behind a wall, and became invisible.
“I’m going in,” she said, apparently to no one in particular, although the quiet words carried an undertone of determination and purpose.
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
February 21, 2019
THANK YOU for not only reading this story but these Author Notes as well.
(I think I’ve been good with always opening with “thank you.” If not, I need to edit the other Author Notes!)
RANDOM (sometimes) THOUGHTS?
I wrote about this (for last night) in the latest War of the Angels book. Now, I have an update.
So, it snowed last night and this morning here in Las Vegas (on the Strip.) What I didn’t realize until this morning after speaking to someone was ‘we’ up on the upper floors saw snow. Many people on the street below got rain.
Seriously odd. So, the theory is that closer to the ground it was warmer and somewhere in the last ten floors it melted.
So not cool.
Now, the ‘cool’ part of this story is late this morning, we went up to the 37th floor (outside pool area) and it was snowing.
When I went out, there was 3” of snow on the couches and footrests that are up on that level.
Leaving enough snow behind that one could, if one so chose, one could grab some and make a snowball.
Unfortunately, one could also have a wife who rats him out later at the board meeting about ‘Yes, I did see someone throwing snowballs up on the 37th…my husband.’
I don’t understand why she had to go and do that to me. I was just being myself.
At fifty-one.
Maybe that was the problem ;-)
AROUN
D THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
One of the interesting (at least to me) aspects of my life is the ability to work from anywhere and at any time. In the future, I hope to re-read my own Author Notes and remember my life as a diary entry.
Las Vegas, NV, Veer board meeting room, late in the afternoon nursing a headache.
Why are you nursing a headache, Mike?
Glad you asked.
So, walking from the Aria Hotel through Crystals is all nice and fine when one is trying to dodge the wet, cold outside. BUT, if you happen to wish to take a shortcut out the second level just about thirty yards from the condo buildings’ front doors, you should seriously pay attention to the ground.
Just because you thought it only rained at ground level, you might be wrong. Like, enough wrong there was an inch of slush on the ground that is icy enough to cause one to slip.
Like a 51-year-old toddler.
My arm and head hurt like hell.
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Ad Aeternitatem,
Michael Anderle
Get Our Of Our Way
Are you enjoying the Birth of Heavy Metal series? Keep reading with Book 5, GET OUT OF OUR WAY. Available now at Amazon and on Kindle Unlimited.
Available at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited