by Michael Todd
Once he was among his men, the sergeant spoke in a tone pitched low enough that only they would hear. “Back toward that pond.” They’d passed it on the way, and he remembered it well. There, he had fought and killed Kemp’s pet giant catshark, the one Chris had nicknamed Bruce after the shark in Jaws.
The men nodded and began an orderly retreat. He could not help but take a little pride in how well they seemed to keep their cool. A couple of them fired bursts toward the ridge as the mercs’ bullets zinged past their heads and made splintery holes in nearby trees. Wallace waited for his team to retreat so he could cover the rear.
Most of the platoon had moved out when a small, dark-colored object landed about two feet to his right with a metallic clank.
“Shit!” he hissed. His left arm, mechanically aided, snatched the grenade and hurled it back toward a slight terrace on the slope, where two more mercenaries had appeared. Both froze in sudden fear in the split second before the grenade exploded in midair directly between them.
Wallace flung himself into a roll as the heat, force, and sonic impact pushed him along. It rattled his exoskeleton and singed parts of his skin, but speed and a thick, slimy tree saved him from the worst of the blast. His ears rang and he knew he would not, for some moments, be able to hear if the enemy tried to approach them from multiple directions. He would have to rely upon his men but so far, at least, they were doing well.
“It could be worse,” he muttered. As if on cue, a rocket-propelled grenade whizzed angrily past him to explode amidst the trees ahead.
Chapter Five
Over the course of half an hour, they had made their way slowly and painstakingly back toward the pond. By the time they reached it, five of their people had been killed and another two wounded. Wallace’s one consolation was that the mercenaries’ casualties had been at least twice that. But there were still too many of them, and they had too much goddamn firepower.
The RPG had killed PFC Carrera, their medic, and another private had some pieces of wood shrapnel in his hip. They’d patched him up as quickly and as well as they could, but he struggled to keep up and a burst of heavy machine gun fire had finished him off, along with the man beside him. The mercs must have brought a mounted gun of some sort into the jungle with them and set it up on the high ground. They fired indiscriminately and mowed down large swathes of the jungle itself in their bid to kill those in retreat. Or, failing that, they might have settled simply for intimidating them.
Every time the enemy came within firing distance, Wallace and his team picked off at least one or two of them, but that was also when the sons of bitches lobbed more grenades. Despite what had happened back on the ridge, they seemed to operate under a policy of cause explosions first, ask questions later since Wallace could not throw every one of the fucking things back before it went off. One of the grenades had killed another two of the men and injured a third.
“We’re getting killed here, Sergeant!” Falstaff had said. He’d pointed out the obvious but understandably, the man had begun to crack. He’d taken a stray bullet across the cheekbone during the last skirmish.
“That’s why we’re in retreat,” Wallace had replied. “And they are getting killed at a faster rate than we are, thanks to you men doing your jobs. After the pond, we’ll have enough breathing space to head straight for the Wall.”
Their destination lay at the base of a relatively steep cliff with only a narrow, overgrown ridge beside it by which men could descend, and then only single file. It was the perfect place to lay a trap. The sergeant had the men hide behind trees well beyond the water and remain silent while he planted a couple of herbicide bombs in the earth below the cliff. He chose to hide close to the pond itself and clutched a grenade while he waited. They would be unable to see him until they either went the long way around or started down the perilous ridge.
Barely a few seconds after everyone was in position, the sounds of men—at least twenty of them, by his estimation—running through the jungle wafted over the cliff. These private contractors, whoever they were, did not seem much concerned with stealth, and Wallace wondered if maybe he’d been wrong to judge most of them to be professionals. Perhaps they were merely overconfident in their numbers and superior hardware. It was also possible that they too had faulty intel and assumed that they were dealing with only a squad or two of American troops.
He stared at the coating of thick green slime on the pond. The battle against Kemp’s little pet had possibly been the most ferocious of his life. He’d never have been able to defeat it without the suit, and Chris had helped as well. The memory of that helped him to keep things in perspective. Now, he had an even better suit and most of a platoon of trained warriors with him instead of only a single scientist. Things were not over yet. Far from it.
Once the mercs came into sight above, the soldiers opened fire from their hiding places. Men screamed and cursed. One fell over the edge of the cliff, directly past where the sergeant hid, and splashed into the pond itself. The green slime splashed on Wallace’s suit on the small extra plate Jimmy had added to protect his heart.
The enemy returned fire with their rifles and submachine guns. The time to spring the trap was now—before they used explosives of their own.
He pulled the pin on the grenade, dropped it at his feet, and raced away to the right. As he ran, he aimed his rifle toward the ridge and fired on full auto. A good half dozen of the mercs were taken by surprise, and one went down with multiple bullets to the chest and throat. He rolled down the ridge ahead of his comrades. Wallace thrust into a massive powered leap that strained his suit to the full extent of its capabilities. The components whirred more loudly than usual as he hurtled forward before he landed in a hard roll. Behind him, the grenade went off.
The enormous explosion was followed by two smaller ones as the cliff collapsed in a burning, smoking mass of soil, rock, fire, and foliage within a cloud of poisonous yellow gas. Dead or dying men were buried in the avalanche, hurled into the pond, or blasted against trees. The cloud of smoke and gas thickened to obscure both the carnage and the damage to the landscape. The next wave of mercenaries halted in confusion.
Wallace sprang to his feet. He motioned his men to follow him in full retreat, south and west, toward the nearest section of the wall. If they maintained their course, they would exit at a section between the American and British bases. Not quite home, but at least they’d be out of the jungle.
“Well, that worked,” someone quipped.
“Yes,” the sergeant responded curtly. “Now move out and—”
Two more RPGs rocketed through the air toward them from two different directions at either side of the cliff. The mercs had fanned out and now approached them in a sweeping motion, and they were obviously pissed off.
“Down!” Wallace barked. He, Falstaff, and most of the others took cover in time to avoid the clumsy trajectory of the first rocket.
The second landed directly in a cluster of his men toward the rear.
“No!” he roared. The explosion consumed at least five or six soldiers and kicked up earth and burning wood in a great cloud of orange flame and black smoke. The jungle around the point of impact burned lazily.
“Up!” Wallace ordered now. “Everyone up. Go!”
They ran. He grabbed one man who had only been wounded by the explosion by the arm and dragged him along.
It took a few moments of flight before they could even assess the full extent of the damage. More RPGs whined through the jungle and destroyed entire patches of it at random but, thank God, missed the retreating survivors. The mercs had slowed their pursuit and fallen behind. Now, however, they seemed willing to burn down half the Zoo if it meant they were able to pick off a few more of the retreating troops.
The man Wallace had pulled from the edge of the second blast had died only a moment after they’d begun their full retreat. He was badly burned, bloody, and riddled with shrapnel. The sergeant gritted his teeth as he eased the body under a low co
vering of ivy.
They were, by now, down to about half the force they’d first gone in with. Fortunately, they still had Corporal Black. So far, at least.
“Black,” Wallace said as they hustled through the woods.
“Yes, sir?” the man replied.
“You’re not injured, right? I want you to run ahead and find us the fastest, easiest path the hell out of here—or at least one that will get us far ahead of those pricks without blundering into a nest of god-knows-what. At this point, our objective is simply to get out of the Zoo with no more casualties.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Falstaff piped up and clutched the wound on his cheek.
Black nodded, took a deep breath, and moved ahead into the jungle. He had a lithe, easy stride and made almost no sound.
They struggled on, and Wallace kept them to some semblance of formation through sheer force of will. They pushed as fast as they could to keep ahead of the mercenaries but their pace was far slower than Black’s would be as they had to accommodate the wounded.
The sky above them darkened. The sergeant frowned when he noticed that it had turned a deep grey. It was still only early afternoon, so it was cloud cover rather than the approach of nightfall. It almost looked like rain clouds, he thought, which had not been forecast at all. Unexpected rainstorms, although rare, were not unheard of even in the Sahara, but he couldn’t help wondering if the Zoo might finally have begun to produce its own weather. It had already produced its own rivers and hills along with its alien ecosystem.
Something moved through the jungle ahead of them. They tightened formation instinctively, their guns aimed and ready.
“It’s me!” Corporal Black’s voice said a moment before the man himself burst through the trees, winded and obviously terrified. “Cats!”
“Awesome,” Falstaff spat.
“Fire now!” Wallace ordered. His men obeyed and fired into the forest directly behind where Black had emerged. They had barely begun when two lean, hungry-looking catsharks skidded into their barrage and shrieked as the bullets ripped into them. Two more of the creatures leapt over their dying companions and attacked without hesitation.
Wallace spun to face them. His gauntlet adjusted his aim almost without him having to consciously request it, and he fired a burst at the first attacker. At least two of the three rounds caught the catshark around the base of the tail. It pivoted to look at the wound, and the sergeant hurtled forward and punched the animal in the face with his gauntlet, then once more in the throat.
While he eliminated the first, however, the second clawed the private beside him. The man screamed as the creature’s talons ripped his throat out and lacerated his chest and back.
“Goddammit!” Wallace grunted and kicked the head of the cat he’d killed in frustration before he raised his rifle. The catshark attempted to launch into a tree, but the sergeant anticipated this and aimed a little ahead of it. Two three-round bursts perforated the monster’s back and it flailed its limbs in midair before it slid back to the earth, already dead.
He turned back. The others had killed a fifth one and driven off two others, but not before they’d bitten most of the head off another soldier. Grimly, the sergeant realized that it was the man who, back at the mercs’ camp, had suggested they surround them and lob grenades in.
At this rate, they’d be lucky to reach the wall with ten men. Wallace felt a slow, seething rage build up within him. “Keep moving,” he said in a low voice and ignored the beginnings of despair on his men’s faces. “I’ve never seen soldiers fight as well as you guys have today. Even on a day like this.”
Rain began to fall, and the muttered responses faltered.
“And the day just got even better,” Falstaff observed.
Chapter Six
The rain offered them some relief from the heat, but very little. Mostly, it simply made everything more of a pain in the ass.
“Did they ever consider that we might have to walk through mud when they designed these boots?” Falstaff asked. “Just wondering.”
“They’re all-purpose, Falstaff,” Wallace replied. “There are worse things in the world than wet feet.” Of course, the man would have gone through mud when training. He was merely complaining for the sake of it. No one could entirely blame him, but it was an attitude that could swiftly demoralize the rest of the men.
They had to deal with the wounded, which already slowed them down, and now, the weather had made things worse. The earth beneath their feet, transformed by the Zoo’s bizarre terraforming impetus from lifeless sand to fertile black loam-like soil, now became a soft, slippery morass. Grey-brown mud sucked at their boots with each step and seemed to reveal roots and low-lying vines that they otherwise might never have tripped over. The injured men moaned and struggled on.
Wallace absolutely refused to leave anyone behind if it could be helped. Lieutenant Doctor Emma Kemp, his former commander and now the Zoo’s figurehead queen, had left him behind once, and the rest of their team had died beside him. That was shortly before the jungle had captured her and made her into its creature. But, as far as Wallace was concerned, it was the true point at which she’d lost her humanity.
“Here, let me take over,” he said to Corporal Black, who’d shouldered one poor bastard who’d had multiple toes broken when a catshark whipped its tail at his feet. The sergeant picked the man up and carried him over his shoulder. He was, at least, confident that they were now far ahead of the mercs. The mud would have slowed them down, too. And if the catsharks attacked again, well, he could still shoot one-handed. His men leaned on their fellows or even carried one another where necessary.
Kemp. The Zoo learned more and more tactics from her, somehow. If only he’d killed her outright instead of trying to capture her alive. When they’d battled the catsharks earlier in the day, they had retreated after only a very brief skirmish. Now, he wondered if it had been a strategic retreat. Maybe the creatures had known they’d have another chance to pick off more of the humans when they were weaker—as, of course, they’d done before the rain began.
Thinking of Kemp, Wallace grew angry again, tightly-controlled though the emotion was. She—and by extension, the Zoo itself—was the real threat here. Why did Hall order him to waste the lives of so many men to fight a bunch of other humans? They were obviously hostile and worked for someone even worse, but humanity as a whole was threatened by the very existence of this place and its horde of monsters. If the Zoo were finally tamed and neutralized, the mercs wouldn’t even be there in the first place.
And how the hell had Director Hall managed to cock up their intel that badly? There were twice as many mercenaries as had been reported. They weren’t as skilled as Wallace’s team, admittedly, but they were not the ragtag gang of bandits the information had suggested. Rather, they had been sent against a small army.
It wasn’t the first time that Hall’s intel had gotten the sergeant into disastrous trouble. The expedition to capture Kemp had been an utter fiasco. Technically, it wasn’t his job to even think about such things. He was a soldier, and it was his duty to follow orders and complete missions, not to question orders and philosophize on the reasons behind it all.
But too many of the people under his command had been killed.
“Stop and rest for ninety seconds,” Wallace ordered. “We seem to have moved ahead of the enemy, but there is no reason to think they won’t still follow.”
Everyone did as he commanded and most sighed with relief at even this very brief respite. He studied them and noted the way they hung their heads, stretched out their shuddering limbs, and breathed in and out. It seemed as if they tried to draw energy in from the surrounding environment to replace the dwindling reserves their fragile bodies had tapped into.
The full measure of their exhaustion and despondency came as something of a surprise. He hadn’t realized that they felt anywhere near as bad. In that moment, he was struck by an odd thought. I don’t feel their pain. He wasn’t even
particularly tired if the truth be told.
Falstaff removed his helmet for a moment and Wallace glared at him, so he replaced it hastily. The PFC leaned against a tree, breathing heavily, and wiped his eyes as well as his injured cheek, which had begun to swell and turn ugly. His fatigue, both physical and mental, was obvious.
The sergeant was almost twice the man’s age and in his early forties now, although most people said he looked a few years younger. There were times when he knew he was getting old and that the years and all their strain and effort were catching up to him. Prior to his almost-crippling injury during the same illegal expedition in which Kemp had abandoned him, he’d been in good shape. Still, he hadn’t felt as strong and as fast as he did in his younger days.
Until recently, he acknowledged. It was the suit—it had to be. He’d adjusted to it more and more and much faster than he’d expected. It, his body, and his brain all worked together seamlessly now. Even his mental fatigue was less than he would have expected under the circumstances. The cybernetic brace kept his body moving in such a state of equilibrium that his brain didn’t seem to need to expend extra effort to maintain or control it. That freed energy up to focus on thought and planning. It made him almost superhuman, and in a way, that notion frightened him. He’d always been the type to be suspicious of new gadgets. The most reliable things were the ones that had been around forever and had always worked.
But what could they have accomplished, Wallace wondered, with an entire troop of men in suits like this? They might have been unstoppable. Gadgets or not, he had to support anything that gave humanity a fighting chance against whatever alien intelligence had spawned the Zoo and might still be plotting against them.