by Michael Todd
As Ava sat atop the rock plinth, she watched the Zoo below her as the moon rose. Even at night, the jungle seemed alive. Like a monster moving in its sleep, branches waved here and there, oblivious to the cold wind that picked up. Not a single monster, she decided, but a whole nest of them.
It grew colder and colder. She gathered sticks and thought she could make a fire before she realized she didn’t have a lighter or matches. Dispirited, she lay down beside her pile of useless sticks and pressed her body against the hot rock to warm herself with what little heat was left in the stone from the sun. There didn’t seem to be much. She wondered if she should try to get below the canopy and out of the wind, but that idea was daunting. Perhaps she could make a shelter or at least a lean-to, but she worried about the noise it would cause. Still, it was better than freezing to death, she thought as the temperature plummeted lower and lower.
Ava stiffened when she heard the clatter of falling rocks.
She fumbled for her pile of sticks and located the thickest one. Thankfully, she’d already broken off its smaller side branches in case of something like this. The rocks had done nothing to the bat demon, but maybe she could stab it with a stick. She actually wanted to know if it had red blood before she died.
“You’d better have marshmallows.”
It was Manny.
Ava ran to the edge of the cliff and helped him drag himself up on the rock with her.
“How did you survive the fall?” she said and examined him in the pale light. Instinctively, she recoiled when she saw his many wounds.
“Please, I can fly anything.”
With that, he fainted and she was barely able to direct his weight onto the stone instead of down the slope behind him.
She checked his wounds quickly and cursed herself for not starting a fire sooner. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do it yet although she desperately wanted to. First, she had to make sure he wouldn’t bleed out. She felt his arms, his chest, and his legs. There was blood, but not as much as she’d first thought. Her hands fumbled across a lighter in one of his pockets and reminded her why she’d never started the fire. She did so now, igniting a scrap of cloth that she’d previously stuffed under her pile of sticks. The wisdom of this was a matter of debate, but she saw no choice. She needed light and she needed heat. Fire would solve both problems. Besides, her most dangerous weapon was currently a stick. If she set it on fire, it would make her that much more formidable.
In the growing light, she was able to check Manny more thoroughly. She found more bruises than she could count, a cracked rib, and a significant amount of congealed blood. He would need stitches in a few places, but mostly on his chest where the bat monster had scratched him. Even those, fortunately, weren’t life-threatening. He wouldn’t die from blood loss. Not tonight, anyway.
Ava found a first aid kit in his pack and went to work. She cleaned his wounds, bandaged his scrapes, and wrapped his rib—mostly so he’d remember it was broken. Manny groaned and opened his eyes as she was about to start on the stitches.
“I feel like shit.”
“You look like shit.”
He laughed at that and coughed but grimaced with pain. “Doctor, you have a terrible bedside manner. Did I ever tell you about the time I had to pull a bullet from an ibis flank with my teeth? Those things are endangered, you know, so I couldn’t use a knife…” He coughed painfully again and Ava shushed him.
“I was going to be a nurse, not a doctor,” she said and began to stitch a wound on his chest.
“Yeah, well, I never been to a doctor,” he said and winced as she drew the needle out. “What the hell’s the difference?”
“You’re supposed to shut up until the doctor gets here.”
“Now you went and found something Jack Mann could never do.”
Ava smiled as she made another stitch.
“Damn it, that stings!”
“You didn’t complain when that monster attacked you.”
“Well, I very much doubted that the monster woulda been able to tell me how it learned to buck up like a horse and crush a man.”
Ava took the hint. “I always wanted a job helping people,” she began and kept her gaze fixed on her work. “Something exciting, you know? Like an army medic or something like that. But my mom talked me out of it. My dad died in Iraq. She said she couldn’t bear to lose me too. She laid on the guilt pretty thick.”
“You could’ve been a paramedic. What do you Yanks call them? EMPs?”
“EMTs. Yeah. I wanted to. But you saw me freeze when that thing got up here.” She finished the row of stitches, tied a knot, and started on the next gash. “I didn’t have the guts for it.”
“Nonsense. You got balls, girl.”
“I’m a woman, not a girl, and I don’t have balls.”
“Sure you do. They’re just…” Manny wiggled his fingers at Ava’s belly button. “Tucked away in there somewhere.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I could’ve, but I didn’t. I applied for a job at the EPA, they said yes, so I took it. I didn’t realize who Bradley was when I was assigned to him, but everyone knew who he was, so it seemed like a good thing—well, for maybe a day, anyway. I simply went along for the ride. Can you hold still?”
“Yeah, right. Well, sorry ʼbout killing him. I know I promised to kill him if he asked for it, an’ all, but I didn’t mean to mess up your 401K or whatever.”
Ava shrugged and actually surprised herself. “You know what? It’s fine. He intended to shoot you, and besides, the dude was an asshole.”
Manny nodded sagely. “A gaping one.”
“Oh, gross!” She laughed and inadvertently yanked the thread still connected to Manny’s chest. He winced. “I’m sorry. That was so…graphic.”
“Americans. You can give a man stitches after he kills your boss, but he makes a little joke about a fanny and you are all offended. You know, I’ve held my tongue this whole time.”
Ava didn’t know what to say to that. She supposed he had the right of it. “Your arm needs work too,” she said, snipped the thread from his chest, and shifted beside him.
Manny leaned forward and tossed another stick on the fire. He growled and clutched his ribs. “Oh, yep, sure does.” He’d broken the wound open, and his arm bled freely now.
“Well, enough about me,” she said and eased into a more comfortable position. “You don’t need your arm to talk. So, tell me about you. What made you into the pilot who follows his own rules that you came to be?”
“Shit,” he said. “That’s a big fucking question. Well…” He hesitated for a moment as Ava began to stitch his arm. “You know how they say everything in Australia will kill ya?”
“I’ve heard that, yeah.”
“Well, my mom hadn’t. She was bit by a tarantula when I was six, and I watched her arm swell up like pumpkin. That was the first time I ever tried to suck poison from a wound. It didn’t work.”
“That never works.”
“You gonna let old Manny tell my story or what?”
“Sorry! Go ahead.”
“Well, my old man couldn’t take it. When Mom died—”
“She died?”
He looked at her and she felt like a student interrupting a history lesson. “You gonna stitch me up or what?”
“Yeah, sure, sorry.”
“When Mom died, Dad took me into the Outback. He said he couldn’t raise me, not without Mom. He was a hard man, my dad, and taught me quite a bit about ass-kicking before he came to that conclusion. Anyway, he left me to get strong or be eaten by dingoes. The joke was on him, though. I met one of the pups—Scrapper was his name—an’ he took me to his mom. I drank nothing but dingo milk and ate nothing but kangaroo for years. I learned a lot, mostly that I didn’t need anyone else’s rules. Once I grew big enough to become pack leader, I led the troops through a hole in the fence and found my old man. I showed him what true strength really was. That was the first time I ate human.”
Ava’s mouth was agape an
d she’d stopped stitching halfway through the story.
“Oh, shit, the look on your face!” Manny said and laughed as best he could while he clutched his ribs. “My mom’s fine. She’s a cheese-maker. Actually, before I left, the queen of Spain was supposed to pay her a visit.”
“I can’t believe you!” she said and grinned. She slapped him on the arm. He yelped in pain as she’d hit his wounded arm, but he still laughed. She smiled ruefully. While she’d probably never know a thing about Manny, she knew that she liked him.
A twig snapped and Ava remembered where they were—in the middle of the Zoo, on a rock, out in the open, and with a fire.
She turned as a man stepped into the firelight.
He carried a huge gun and wore a scowl on his face. “Fire’s a dangerous thing in the Zoo. It’s like ringing a dinner bell.”
“That’s my fucking line! The least you can do is not botch the metaphor, you prick.”
“Manny? What the hell are you doing out here?”
Chapter Eleven
Though Gunnar had castigated the fire, he sat down and warmed his hands at it all the same. Ava already found herself appreciating his company. Compared to Manny’s frantic nature, the newcomer provided a welcome calm. It didn’t hurt that he was obviously military. Although Chandler had already been killed by the Zoo, Ava didn’t doubt she’d be dead already without his help. Gunnar had the same short haircut as the other man but his cheeks were rounder and a little stubbly. He wore fatigues, a backpack even bigger than Manny’s, and his belts and straps were loaded with magazines, grenades, knives, and gadgets. He looked ready for anything.
“So what happened to you? Did you finally find a bird you can’t fly?”
“You wish, Gunnar. That’s a bet you’ll never win.”
“Well, what did happen?”
Manny practically licked his chops, ready to embellish a story that Ava thought was already unbelievable. “There we were, flying across the Sahara Desert, the sand shining up at us like a spotlight as big as Hollywood itself. Sudden, the terrain’s all wrong. Welcome to the jungle, we’ll crash all your planes, but without the awesome baseline. I think I shoulda zagged when I zigged, except I also think I’m the best damn pilot to fly over the surface of this earth, and that ol’ Jack Mann doesn’t make mistakes, mistakes make him. Then, a bunch o’ locusts pop up, like it’s the old testament meets Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Well, that’s when I really get nervous—not scared mind you, on account of being scared is a physical impossibility, but nervous as fuck.”
“Then we crashed. We lost some people. Now, we’re here.” Ava almost felt bad about cutting him off but she didn’t want to relive everyone’s deaths. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “What about you?”
“And I thought Peppy wasn’t one to mince words.” Gunnar looked from Ava to Manny but neither interrupted. The pilot looked like he’d been caught whispering in church and the priest himself had told him to shut up from the pulpit.
“We were out doing reconnaissance near Wall One. Maybe a half mile out from the Zoo, Peppy and me and a few others, all packed up like sardines to be eaten in our JLTV. Driving through the sand, looking for breaches in the wall, desiccated bodies—you know, all the joys the Zoo has to offer.”
“Desiccated bodies?” Ava asked.
“That was a joke,” Manny said. “Gunnar doesn’t have as sophisticated a sense of humor as yours truly. He thinks death is funny.”
“This coming from the guy who shoved a gaping asshole off a cliff,” she retorted.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell your story?” Gunnar asked and looked at Manny in the flickering firelight.
“You first,” the pilot said. “I want to know what I’m up against.”
Ava didn’t know if he meant the Zoo or the story.
“Well, we were outside the first wall, like I said, when suddenly, there was this blast of air—like a hurricane or an A-bomb or something, except there was all this grit. Sand we thought. We realized later it must’ve been seeds.”
“You don’t know what the wind from an A-bomb feels like?” Manny asked.
“And you do?” Gunnar responded dryly.
“As a matter of fact, I was on an island in the Pacific when—”
“Now you’re the one interrupting,” Ava said.
“Ask me about it later,” the pilot said and winked at the other man. “It’s a good one.”
Gunnar smiled and shook his head. He was obviously familiar with Manny’s penchant for storytelling. “After the blast of air came this sound—like teeth gnashing, I remember thinking. Peppy and I got out of the JLTV to try to get a look. Vines came over the wall, except at the time, we thought they were snakes they moved so fast. Fungus spread like…like a ripple across the sand, and one of the men in the JLTV shouted a second before the vines were on us. They swallowed everything that touched the sand, the JLTV included, and sorta covered it in slime. Then, plants grew all over each other as fast as anything you’d ever seen. Peppy and I jumped like a pair of jackrabbits and that’s probably what saved us. We dodged that first hit by barely a second. After that, everything around us grew and rotted and grew again. First the vines, then brush, and finally, trees. Like something out of David Attenborough’s nightmares.
“Someone yelled over the radio. ‘The Surge! It’s the Surge!’ Like that was supposed to explain anything. At the time, I was pissed, but now, I figure that’s what the brainiacs back at the station at Wall Two call it. I remember a while back hearing some folk saying that the Zoo had slowed down, but this guy yelled about ‘a release of energy,’ or something like that. For once, I wish they had taken some time to explain themselves. Of course, no one bothered to tell any disposable grunts this vital, need-to-know information until they were used as fertilizer by the Zoo.”
“I knew I saw something like that,” Ava interrupted. “But Mr. Bradley made me think I was crazy,” Ava said.
“Who?” Gunnar said.
“A man I made a promise to,” Manny said.
“And kept it, I see.” Gunnar spat into the fire. Apparently, he knew what kind of promises the pilot made.
“But what about you two? I can’t imagine anyone going by the name Mr. Bradley giving you such a nice makeover.” The soldier gestured at Manny’s bruised face and stitches.
“Nah. The prick that did this was far prettier than ol’ Brad—a big bloke with ears like he wanted to go windsurfing. His eyes were as white as my mother’s cottage cheese and he had flaps of skin between his legs like he won the lottery and blew it all on liposuction.”
“It uses sound to hunt,” Ava said. “Manny distracted it by yelling about mushroom pie.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me the whole story?” Gunnar asked the pilot again.
“There’s not much more to tell. It followed us up here. We tag-teamed it and culminated in an epic piledriver off the edge of the cliff. I grabbed it by the ears and steered it to a picture-perfect landing. It ran off after that—to lick its wounds, I bet—but it’ll come back. I know a predator when I see one, and this fella looks like he thinks he’s the top of the food chain.”
“A piledriver? Really? Your stories are slipping, Manny. Even I find that hard to believe.”
Manny looked at Ava and waggled his eyebrows.
She sighed. “It’s true. He literally yelled ‘piledriver’ when he tackled it off the cliff.”
Gunnar looked impressed. “I think I know what you’re talking about. It followed you and is the reason why I came this way. I didn’t get as cozy with it as you two. Scary fucking thing. We shouldn’t tangle with it without a big fucking gun.”
“That’s not a big gun?” She pointed at the weapon in his hands. Of course, she knew next to nothing about guns but ‘massive assault rifle’ seemed a fair guess.
“This? Well, she’s no pop-gun.” Gunnar patted the butt of his rifle affectionately. “I guess I should’ve said a bigger fucking gun.”
“If you think
that bat demon thing is so dangerous, why do you creep around at night? I had checked this whole place. You must’ve climbed up here in the dark,” Ava said.
“Right you are. Almost broke my neck, too, when I tried to climb a mess of rocks in the dark without knocking anything down. It is not easy.”
“Then why risk it?”
Gunnar released a sad little laugh. “For Peppy. I saw the fire and figured it must’ve been her. I hoped against hope that her heartstrings got the best of her and she lit a fire to signal me.”
“That doesn’t exactly sound like Peppy,” Manny said.
The soldier shrugged. “A man’ll do dumb things for a friend.”
Ava knew the feeling. Like throwing a rock at a flying bat-wolf-demon as big as a horse. She poked the fire with a stick. “You never said exactly what happened to her.”
“Well, we didn’t get swallowed up like the others inside the JLTV, but that didn’t mean the Zoo let us be either. Everything was growing—and I mean everything. Roots like ropes, branches growing and breaking and getting composted into dirt like we were in a wood chipper or some big ugly’s belly. It took all my reflexes simply to stay above all that and not get swallowed myself.”
She shuddered. “It sounds terrifying.”
“Eh,” Gunnar grunted. “We all become fertilizer one way or another. At least this way, I knew it’d be organic.”
“Do you hear that?” Manny asked.
Ava straightened. “Hear what?”
“That’s the sound of me wondering what the point of this story is.”
“Is the great Jack Mann growing impatient at a bunch of small talk? I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. Or dingo. Or whatever you claim to be this month. The point is that Peppy and I were separated. The Surge or whatever it was straight-up pushed us apart. It grew all around us, every which way, right? To try to stay still in that mess would’ve been like trying to stay still in a tornado. I had to focus on not getting eaten by roots, something that is a bit more difficult than it sounds. By the time it all slowed down, Peppy was gone. We had a few landmarks worked out. Piles of stone, boulders, stuff like that. I’ll find her.” Gunnar seemed to say these last words more to himself than anyone else.