by Michael Todd
Not that he had many other options.
Wallace dragged in a deep breath, clutched one of the vines with one hand, tugged it, then added his other hand and gripped firmly. He allowed himself to slide off the branch on which he’d perched.
The terrible sense of plummeting without control and the gut-clenching fear that he would crash and break his spine—again—seized him. For a moment, he almost allowed the panic to overwhelm him.
Thankfully, the vine broke the fall. It stretched and allowed him to drop slowly as if on a slightly too-loose zipline, down through the understory and into the relatively more open area nearer the forest floor.
There was a problem, though. His living lifeline might break at any moment and potentially swing him into a tree trunk. If he simply dropped off before that happened, he might shatter his legs on impact or make a loud, attention-grabbing splash as he struck the water.
He eased forward toward a low-hanging branch on a nearby tree, held it firmly with one hand, and used it to secure himself while he pulled harder on the vine. The creeper snapped somewhere up above but only at one end.
“Here goes,” he said. He let go of the branch and swung downward on the now vertically-hanging vine. Air swept past him and he crashed into a tangle of branches about six or seven feet from the ground. He released the vine and clawed at these instead. They bent or snapped, but they slowed his descent. He finally landed beside a tree a few feet from the stream and rolled.
His legs screamed in pain. He didn’t think he’d injured them, though. That was merely how they reacted to everything now. Wallace dragged himself toward the stream and entered the cool flowing water.
Upstream. He would head in the opposite direction to which the mercs had taken. That would take him relatively close to Frankie’s camp, but they probably wouldn’t think he’d attempt that. If he’d had his suit, of course, he would simply have barged in, taken her prisoner, and demanded his own release. But in his current condition, he would have to be careful.
It would be safer and easier on his legs to crawl through the stream but it would also take forever. He would, at least at first, need to walk.
Slowly, he forced himself into a standing position and braced himself against a large root that grew down from a tree and through the bed of the stream. After a few deep breaths, he trudged through the water, upstream and uphill.
It wasn’t easy or fun.
He passed dangerously close to Frankie’s little mesa, but the sound of the stream itself hid the noises he made as he sloshed through it, especially at such a slow pace. There was also enough foliage next to the water to screen him from sight. Soon, he began to ascend the slight hill that lay beyond the mesa, and the camp passed out of sight. What was, in fact, a short journey had required a marathon struggle. Wallace gritted his teeth and breathed heavily. Veins stood out in his neck and on his forehead and sweat rolled down his brow. The agonizing effort had already made his legs numb. Once he was confident that he was far enough from the camp that they wouldn’t see him from anywhere on their own perimeter, he began to look for someplace to take a goddamn break.
Finally, he focused his attention on a small rock face near a protruding low cliff, close to the summit of the hill. It looked like he could climb it—although it would be difficult and painful, of course—and he wouldn’t leave tracks. It lay to his left and on the bank farther away from Frankie’s camp. All the better.
Wallace placed his hands on a couple of outcroppings and heaved himself up and out but used his legs as little as possible. He brought a knee up onto a slightly flat section of the rock. A particularly savvy tracker, he realized, might recognize the wet marks on the rock as having been made by something or someone crawling out of the stream, but enough of the water splashed around in its normal flow that there was a chance no one would notice. He had to risk it. His legs would fail him altogether if he pushed them much more without rest.
He used his arms, mostly, to haul himself up the shelf of rock and over a ledge where a hanging leafy branch would obscure him from easy sight. His arms trembled after the intense strain and he slid into a slight recess in the stone. He was, for now, well-hidden. It was dark and even rather comfortable. He sighed. Sleep would have been nice, albeit suicidal. How did he constantly end up in these ridiculous situations? He envied his brother back in the States who put in eight hours at a desk and then went home to more or less a guaranteed equal amount of time to rest every night.
Erik Wallace, however, could not sleep until the task was done, and it would not get done if he died. He had to think two steps ahead. He remembered the walkie-talkie at his belt and felt for it with a sudden spike of fear. It was still there, fortunately, and hadn’t fallen off or been destroyed during his tumble from the vine. He examined the small device.
Frankie was not completely stupid. She would figure out, sooner rather than later, that he had swiped the gadget from her. Then they’d switch frequencies or simply talk in code. If he wanted to know what they were up to, it was now or never. He identified the volume adjust, conscious of the necessity to keep it very low, and clicked the walkie-talkie on.
At first, he couldn’t hear much of anything. Slowly and carefully, he increased the volume. All that brought was more static and a few garbled fragments of speech.
That figured. Reception on any sort of communications equipment was always terrible in the jungle. It was, at least according to Chris Lin, the combination of remoteness, dense vegetation, and some defensive mechanism created by the Zoo itself. They knew with a large degree of certainty that the Zoo’s plants secreted some sort of pheromone that could call other creatures to the aid of important plants or animals that were under attack. It wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that they might also give off some kind of subtle electromagnetic field that interfered with equipment. Wallace had experienced problems along those lines several times.
He didn’t like thinking about Chris right now, though.
Amidst the static and fuzz, a couple of men conversed in what was probably Arabic or Tuareg. That faded and Wallace caught a snippet of the Texan complaining about something. The motorbikes still buzzed faintly in the distance. They must still believe that he had gone downstream but had hidden somewhere in the jungle in that direction. They didn’t seem to have turned their search upstream yet. Good.
Loud and clear, Frankie spoke, and he actually startled. Still, it made sense. Her camp was only a short distance away from Wallace’s current position, after all.
“It’s me,” she said and bludgeoned her way into the frequency. Her voice sounded harsher and sharper than her usual, almost cutesy way of speaking. “I don’t know what the hell you guys are doing out there, but you need to hurry up and kill the fucker, all right? He has to die no matter what. Our employer knows that Wallace is dangerous to his objectives. Until he’s dead, I will leave every one of you guys out here to die if I have to. As in, I will leave and take everything with me and come back in two weeks to see if you’ve killed him if that’s what it takes. I repeat, kill—”
A wave of static crested and broke and drowned her voice out, and the reception fizzled into random scraps of nonsense. He turned it off.
Their employer, she’d said. He wanted Wallace dead. Dangerous to his objectives. That cold, numb pain in the gut came back, and he tried not to let it unman him or to seep into his brain and start a chain reaction of emotions. It was difficult, though. Maybe the bitch hadn’t lied after all. Maybe Chris Lin, his friend, really had paid these people to terminate him.
On their last mission together, Chris had, he recalled, unplugged his suit to stop him from killing Kemp. Frankie had known immediately to do the exact same thing. Granted, she could have gotten that information from someone else during her time spying on their base.
Then again, Chris had also saved Wallace’s life later on that same mission.
He shook his head. He didn’t know, quite honestly. He had to concede that it was possible that the man
really did think he was expendable, that he felt the stakes were so high that the contract killing of his own friend might be justifiable. But it wasn’t certain. There was no way, at this point, to be sure one way or the other.
And in any event, he currently had other concerns. He could figure out what Chris did or didn’t do later. It was in his nature and his training to distill the current situation, whatever it may be, down to its most essential objective.
In this case, it was to make sure Frankie failed in her mission.
Chapter Thirteen
As night approached, loomed, and then fell, Wallace estimated that it would take him at least another full day to get the hell out of there. He could not move at any great speed. His legs made it physically impossible to cover ground at the pace he would like, and the presence of the mercenaries who were actively trying to find him and execute him meant he could not risk discovery even to make it closer to the wall.
There was no way he could survive another full day without equipment, weapons, and supplies, and he had nothing. Frankie’s men had stripped him of all his tools, his hydration pack, and obviously, his guns and even his knife.
However, he was in the Zoo. This was quite possibly both the deadliest and the most vital place on Earth. If ever there were an environment that could provide equipment, weapons, and supplies—at least to a resourceful man with proper training—this was it.
After his rest on the rock beside the stream, he’d crawled and stumbled as deep into the jungle as he could without completely losing the sound of the stream. Knowing where it was would help him orient himself. If he couldn’t catch rainwater or find a way to purify groundwater—or steal bottled water from his enemies—he might need to drink from the stream, risky though that would be. Water found in the wild was never to be trusted and doubly so in a part-extraterrestrial environment that humans barely understood. Still, thirst was a guaranteed killer. He’d rather have water nearby.
Once it grew dark and his eyes adjusted to that, Wallace took a deep breath and mentally dispelled the growing fog of tiredness before he went to work.
There were three main tasks he sought to accomplish that night. They had to be done in order, one after the other. The gradual fulfillment of these requirements each became, in his mind, a flashing montage of methodical actions which he undertook with a calm and stoic focus. He would work until he was done.
The first was to accommodate his disability. He could not do much of anything at any speed or without great risk as long as he could barely walk without having to spend half his mental energy fighting down the pain while forcing the muscles and tendons to work beyond their capacity.
Wallace felt around the forest floor with his hands in the dark in search of a pair of sturdy sticks. He kept one eye and one ear on the surrounding area all the while. This was dangerous, but then again, everything was dangerous there. He might stumble onto another man-eating vine or onto the edge of a kangarat nest, or he might over-focus on his immediate task and fail to notice that a chimera or a catshark or even an entire locust swarm was hunting him. To say nothing of the human animals that now shared the charming company of all those less than adorable creatures.
After a few moments, he found a stick that was suitable in terms of its circumference and strength but was almost five feet from end to end. Too long. He could have broken it in half, but that would likely make a loud snapping noise that would draw too much attention. He saved it propped against an oddly-contorted tree for now and kept looking.
It took only about another five minutes to find two more. One was longer and thicker than the other, but that was fine. His legs’ abilities were not, at present, equal. His left leg bent at the knee more easily than the right but also seemed to have even less muscular strength than the other. It would require slightly different aids to balance that out. Wallace then found some thin but fairly strong vines and quickly braided a few long grasses to act as ropes or cords.
He used the smaller stick to splint his right leg. That would stop it from bending too much and spare him the worst of the pain. It would also make him limp, of course, but that couldn’t be helped.
Satisfied with his progress thus far, he used the bigger stick to brace his left leg. In this case, the idea was to give the leg something like its own kickstand or tripod, a source of extra support for when weight was put on it.
Wallace found a nice angled tree trunk and dragged himself up it to slowly and carefully hauled himself to his feet. He took a few steps forward.
He tottered and wavered at first and had to tighten the brace on the right leg. The movements were awkward, and he would need time to adjust. Essentially, he had to sidestep his way forward, his right side jutted forward and the right leg fairly stiff, while the weaker but more agile left leg did the support work with the help of the other stick and pushed him into the next step.
It was a half-assed job he’d done, in all honesty, but it was better than nothing and there wasn’t time to do much better. He thought back to his physical therapist at the base and imagined her throwing a fit at the sight of him like this.
“It’s very important,” she’d said, “to train the legs to move normally again. That’s the long-term goal. If you train them only to walk abnormally, that’s what the body will learn to do and you’ll end up with a deformed gait.”
Wallace understood this, of course. But a dead man had no gait whatsoever. He would walk like this only for the day or two it took him to get back to safety.
The second task was to acquire a knife, that most fundamental of tools and an acceptable weapon when no others were available.
The gloomy forest had grown quieter now. He no longer heard the sounds of motorbikes, although there was no way to be certain that they hadn’t decided to comb the jungle on foot. Nonetheless, he suspected it would be safer now than it had been earlier to head back to the big rock beside the stream.
Wallace limp-stepped forward and moved slowly to make less noise. Motion with the bare-basic splints was awkward, but he had to admit that it took some of the strain off his withered legs. Soon, he reached the far side of the rock shelf.
Once again, he used his hands to probe the hard surface and felt around for loose pieces. There were a few, but the shapes weren’t right. He did, however, find one that was still partially attached to the main body of the stone. If he could break it off, it would form an acceptable alpha version of a crude blade, which a little makeshift sculpting and whittling ought to improve.
Something splashed lightly in the stream on the far side of the rock shelf. Wallace froze in place and hunkered down in the shadows as he waited and listened. After several minutes, nothing happened and he accepted that it was perhaps the natural burble of the water. He straightened cautiously and, with a quick, sharp motion, broke off the long, flat piece of rock. It cracked along a natural fault line in the stone and made very little noise. So far, so good.
His weapon definitely needed attention, so he set to work and gradually and tediously, ground the back part into a rough but acceptable handle shape. That done, he sharpened the blade end against a harder portion of the parent rock. Once again, he did not have time to do a particularly great job but it would suffice. With this handy, paleolithic tool, he could make others—and one in particular.
The third task was to make a spear—which, he realized with satisfaction, could do double duty as a walking stick. He had already found a piece of wood which would serve. He made his way back through the undergrowth toward the weird contorted tree where, earlier that night, he’d saved the five-foot stick that he’d opted not to break for his splints.
Wallace then applied himself to carving away at one end of the staff. It was hard wood, whatever it was, and his knife was not very well suited to the job. Still, painstakingly and at length, slivers were whittled away and the long stick grew a sharp, deadly point. When he was satisfied that it could be used to kill either man or beast—albeit clumsily and messily—he jammed the stone
knife into his belt. At least they’d left him a belt, for God’s sake. Finally, he hefted the spear and stood tall.
With the business end pointed upward, he moved back toward the stream. The trip was a little faster this time. The staff-spear used as a third leg made the task somewhat easier, in addition to the slight improvement he already felt from the splint. He still performed far below his pre-injury self—let alone relative to his cyborg getup—but it was a great improvement to crawling.
However, crawling did have the advantage of stealth and he needed to go back to the stream.
Wallace hobbled through the foliage and again listened carefully to the sounds of the night. He attempted to blend with them and cover the subtle noise of his passage with the natural sound of the jungle. Soon, he reached the rock shelf and lowered himself to the ground. He crawled around the rock to the edge of the stream.
There was plenty of mud and he recalled, from the daylight hours, that the sludge had even looked a little greenish. It would serve its purpose well. He placed his spear beside him and scooped up a few handfuls of the muck to smear it over his head and face with the exception of his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The process was repeated for the rest of him as he coated his body and limbs, as much as reasonably possible, with a nice layer of nature’s camouflage paint. At least it would obscure his pale skin and red hair, which stood out dramatically in this place under daylight. His ancestors hadn’t exactly had much tropical jungle to contend with back in Scotland.
Finally, he crawled farther upstream, away from Frankie’s camp and, he suspected, closer to the wall. He would have to get some sleep before too long but not yet. He was alone, tired, exposed to the elements, and without supplies save the crude accouterments he had just made. But things had improved. Perhaps enough for him to kick ass all the way out of this hellhole, if he had to.
There was one other thing, though. He was hungry.