by Michael Todd
“Are you trying to make me feel better by telling me that one of them won’t?”
Gunnar looked at Manny, then back at her. She did not appreciate the look.
“Um…not exactly.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it,” the pilot said. “Ava’s tough. You know, she once faced down a bat six times her size with nothing but a pebble?”
“I saw what these things did to Dervin,” Ava said and tried to keep her voice level. “It wasn’t pretty. Tell me how long I have.”
Gunnar looked at the sun through the canopy, back at the wound, then at Ava. “Given your size, I’d say you have until about sunset before the pain gets out of hand. It might be more but then again, it might not be.”
“But I’ll live?”
He looked away as he adjusted his pack. “You will if we make it to Wall Two. It’s not hard to treat if you have the proper antidote. I know a dozen fellas who survived once they had the medicine.”
“And if we don’t?” Ava asked.
“It’s all the more reason to get moving,” Manny said and grinned like nothing at all was wrong. “I told you as much, Gunnar—talking about taking two or three days, like we was gonna have some leisurely stroll through the Outback. I told you we could do it in one.”
Ava plucked the quills from her leaky pack and dumped the water. There was no point in drinking it now. “You’re saying we’ll have to go fast.”
“We’ll be all right,” Gunnar said. “This way.”
Ava had thought they were setting a good pace before. How wrong she was.
Previously, the soldier had moved somewhat cautiously. He’d slowed before entering a clearing and been careful not to step on too many branches.
Now he moved. Step after relentless step, he guided them through the thick underbrush. He glanced continuously at the sun and back at the nonexistent path. Sometimes, he cursed before he told them to back up and go around a different way. Ava had thought he’d tried to avoid animals, but now, she saw that couldn’t be true. They moved too fast and too loudly. Besides, the two men had fought off a pack of cat-sharks and neither seemed particularly frightened of them. Finally, it dawned on her—he was on the lookout for more of the poison quill plants. That it was dangerous enough to continually force them to take detours was not a good sign.
Manny was equally as fast, although he remained behind Ava, told stories, pointed out dangerous plants over her shoulder, and watched her back. While before, his relentless storytelling and irrepressible optimism had seemed out of place, Ava now sensed a deeper purpose.
She faced a dark future, only a day’s hard march from a night of writhing pain followed by an equally unpleasant death. Manny tried to keep her laughing. He didn’t let her think about the itch in her thigh and the irritating sensation that had begun to spread. Instead, he regaled her with tales of the Outback, failed flights, and missed connections. If she didn’t laugh at a story, he told a different punchline. If she didn’t ask questions, he switched continents and never ran out of things to say.
This must be his life, Ava realized. Danger after danger. He kept the terror at bay by laughing in its face and changing the truth of it if he survived.
She hoped to live long enough to hear his version of this story.
In a split second, Ava knew she’d survive. She could see an end to the jungle.
Up ahead, sunlight streamed in both directions above a wide swath of treeless terrain that could only mean that they were about to reach the desert. She couldn’t make anything out in the blinding sunlight as her eyes were still accustomed to the gloom, but there weren’t any trees ahead. Of that, she was certain.
And Manny had made a joke about it taking two or three days to get out of there. He’d probably said that simply to get her moving. At this rate, they’d make it to Wall Two before she felt anything from the poisonous barb besides a little itch. She’d have to ask Manny how exactly to embellish this one to actually make it exciting.
A few paces ahead, Gunnar burst from the jungle terrain and into the sunlight. Ava followed and shielded her eyes to squint in the blinding desert sun. It smelled so good out there, not like decay and death but of fresh air and…water?
“Fuck!” Gunnar said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“What seems to the problem, oh fearless leader? Did you find a bigger gun and can’t decide which one better accentuates your cheekbones?” the pilot asked as he stepped from the jungle behind Ava. Immediately, he too began to curse.
“What?” Ava asked and looked from one man to the other. “What’s the problem?”
“Look for yourself.” Gunnar pointed into the glaring sun.
Ava’s heart dropped into her gut and burned a hole into it on its way to a pit of despair as deep as hell itself. It hadn’t been sand that had reflected so much sunlight, but water. Specifically, a river at least fifty feet wide and with a current so swift she immediately sensed that none of them would be able to swim across it. If nothing else, she knew where the smell of water was coming from.
“But, how…” Her mouth worked dumbly. “I thought you came this way? I thought you said this was desert yesterday, and the Surge changed all that…and that…that… The Zoo couldn’t have made a river.”
“What the fuck else could have made it?” Gunnar snapped. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s just…this is fucking rich. Peppy will love this. We try to escape into the desert only to be stopped by a Saharan river. It’s fucking classic. I’ll have to scratch it all out on some tree bark so she can laugh her ass off when she finds our corpses.”
Ava did not appreciate the man’s sense of humor at the moment. Not at all.
“So, we find somewhere to cross,” Manny said, either to himself or Gunnar, Ava couldn’t be sure. “We’ll go downstream a little find somewhere narrower, and we’ll cross. We probably won’t even have to get our toes wet.”
“Do you hear that?” Gunnar asked and pointed downstream.
“Nope,” Manny said.
But Ava heard it. A low roar rumbled beneath the ever-present drone of insects. She hadn’t heard it before, which meant it had to come from the river. “A waterfall?”
Gunnar nodded. “Or at least a mess of rapids. This river wasn’t here a day ago. That means all this water is coming from the Zoo. And that means it’s either sending it someplace special or trying to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Either way, we don’t wanna go that way. The river’s only gonna get bigger.”
She didn’t like what he had implied—that the Zoo was somehow capable of thinking and could direct parts of itself the same way she could direct a finger. But she didn’t say any of that. Now was not the time. “So, we go upstream?”
The soldier nodded. He seemed to have collected himself and glanced at the sun once more. It was well past its zenith and already sank toward the horizon. They had a few hours, then, before the poison from the quill became worse than a bad itch. “And we hurry unless we want to have a reunion with your new friend.”
Chapter Fourteen
To Ava, it seemed like they walked much faster than they had before, but it could have been the poison that caused her to cramp up and jabbed a stitch in her side. They didn’t have to force their way through undergrowth anymore, however. Only trees grew right beside the rushing water, so instead of waist-high brush, the ground was a mess of twisting roots. At first, Ava had wondered what had happened to all the bushes and tangles of vines, but then she realized there was simply no space. As these trees grew over the years, they must’ve choked out all the other plants…except these trees hadn’t taken years to grow.
It was almost impossible to process, but yesterday, this had all been sand. Hardly any plants had lived out there, and those that did had no thick, twisting roots that reached right down into a raging river. Yet it seemed that these trees knew exactly what they were doing. They anchored the shore in place, clutched to it as if they’d fought this battle or erosion for centuries rather than hours.
She tried not to think about what sort of plants could grow to this size in less than twenty-four hours. She tried to think even less about what kind of poisons those same plants might produce.
They stopped only when Gunnar did, which wasn’t nearly often enough for Ava’s taste. They continued the relentless pace—no longer pushing through brush but instead, being careful not to trip—when Gunnar called, “We’ll cross here. Let’s move!”
The soldier ran out onto a small peninsula that protruded into the river. Ava followed. No trees grew on this outcropping, only strangely undulating blades of grass and a few little bushes covered in bright blue berries.
“It’s not so deep right here,” he said and paused on the very edge. He took a tentative step into the water and submerged one of his boots into the fast-moving current. “The bottom is solid,” he said. “Well, solid enough.”
With a ripping sound, the ground beneath Ava’s feet shifted.
She fell on her ass, which shafted a spike of pain from her crotch down through her leg. The wound was much worse.
With a loud groan, she pushed herself up but the ground turned to mud beneath her hands as fissures of water cut through it. Manny yanked her backward and they scrambled toward the shore from which they’d come as the peninsula dissolved into mud and debris that washed away downstream.
Ava jumped and landed bodily on the twisted roots of the trees as the pilot doubled back.
Gunnar was already up to his waist in water and had made no forward progress.
Manny waded out to him and together, the two men trudged back toward solid ground. They had barely hauled themselves out when the current picked up and washed away the last remnants of the peninsula. It looked as if it had never been.
“Do you still think I’m crazy for saying this place is out to get us?” Gunnar demanded, his tone dark.
“I think you’re crazy for a whole mess of reasons, not the least of which is why we’re sitting here jabbering like a couple of kookaburras when we have about fifty-two reasons to get out of here before the sun sets.”
“Fifty-two?” Ava said.
“I reckon that bat had about sixteen claws and thirty-six teeth,” Manny said matter-of-factly. Ava appreciated that the wound in her leg remained unmentioned. She certainly didn’t need a reminder over and above the throbbing pain.
“All I’m saying is that not one of these trees bothered to grow any roots into that little sandbar. That whole thing washed away like it had been set to be demolished. It’s suspicious, is all.” Gunnar said. He moved upstream once more.
They didn’t find any more peninsulas or muddy banks or much of anything besides tall trees with thick roots that anchored both sides of the river. Now that the soldier had pointed it out, it really did seem intentional. To think that this river wasn’t there yesterday made it all the more jarring.
Gunnar fixed his gaze ahead—for a fork in the river, he’d said, but Ava wasn’t sure how that would help them.
Manny maintained his position at the rear and watched her back, though he seemed distracted. His gaze remained glued to the canopy above them. He constantly tripped on the mess of roots at their feet, but that didn’t seem to affect his fixed concentration.
“What do you see up there?” Ava asked and dreaded the answer. Manny had said the bat demon wouldn’t come out in the day, but he could be wrong—or worse, he could have lied to make her feel better.
“I’m looking for a bloke who knows how to stand up straight if you get my drift,” he replied.
Ava didn’t. Any further questions were answered with a similar response. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your surprise birthday present,” or, “Don’t they teach you yanks about posture?” All the while, he scanned the tops of the trees.
“Maybe I should try the radio,” Gunnar said after what seemed like forever.
Ava nodded. A break sounded great. She was way more exhausted than she thought she should be. Could the poison have taken effect already? It was either that or fatigue from a day of terrifying life or death survival hiking, followed by a battle with a mutant bat, then a refreshing few hours of sleep on a nice comfy rock followed by even more life or death hiking. She couldn’t be sure exactly why she was so tired, but when the soldier offered her a sip of water she accepted it gratefully.
While she caught her breath and drank, Gunnar retrieved a radio that looked a little more modern than Manny’s. He began to fiddle with it and she tried not to notice the look of desperation in his eyes.
“Yup. There he is,” Manny said and grinned like he’d spotted an old friend at a rock concert. “Say, Gunnar, you still got them grenades?”
“What kind of a soldier would I be to come into the Zoo without grenades?” the other man asked. He didn’t look up and simply patted a grenade on his belt.
The pilot winked at Ava and snuck up on Gunnar in an elaborate cartoon cat burglar pantomime while the soldier focused on the radio.
Manny got right behind Gunnar and snatched a grenade off his belt.
That pulled the soldier back to the moment. “What the hell are you up to?”
The Australian said nothing and instead, ran to a tree that hugged the shore, looked up its tall trunk, and began to dig at its base.
He dug furiously like a dog hunting for a bone. Great big fistfuls of dark soil were flung aside at first, but after a minute of digging, he bent over and threw handfuls of sand back between his legs. The sand was another sign that a day ago, none of this had existed—not this tree, not this river, not this part of the Zoo at all. The jungle had somehow created a layer of topsoil, and in less than a minute, Manny had worked through it.
“Is this the pin or do you pricks have some sort of phony trigger these days?” Manny asked and held the grenade up.
“That’s the pin all right, but Manny, do you really want to ring the dinner bell? That’s a big one. It’s more like telling the whole ranch the buffet’s open.”
“I don’t get it. What’s he doing?” Ava asked Gunnar.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t like it. Manny doesn’t ask for explosives unless he plans to use them. Come on.” He stepped back but with his eyes still on the other man, he tripped over a root.
“Manny, what are you doing?” she demanded.
“Gunnar, how long until these things blow?”
“Ten seconds.”
“Is that after you pull the pin or put it down?”
“After you put it down.”
“Oh. We should run.”
Ava ran and when the explosion erupted, she felt the force of it on her back and was able to catch herself as she fell. Unfortunately, her foot caught on a branch and ruined her balance, so she scratched her forearms badly as she landed. Again, she wondered if it was the poison or merely good old-fashioned fatigue that seemed to make her sluggish.
She turned to see a smoking hole where the grenade had been. The tree Manny had decided to attack tilted precariously toward the river.
“Timber!” the pilot yelled as his head popped out of the water maybe twenty feet downstream. Gravity finally kicked in and dragged at the tree. Slowly, with a ripping sound, it fell and spanned the fast-moving water.
The top of the tree landed on the other side with a crash that silenced the ever-present drone of insects and sent hidden flocks of birds on both sides of the river into the sky.
Ava shuddered. The last time she’d seen birds take flight like that in the Zoo, a locust had attacked…followed by cat-sharks and poison quills, and… No, she really didn’t like it when birds flew up in a panic in the Zoo.
The pilot crawled onto the shore, dripping wet, and smiled like he’d emerged from a swimming pool instead of a raging river in the middle of the Sahara Desert. “We have a bridge,” he said smugly.
Chapter Fifteen
Manny pulled his backpack on and tightened the straps.
“You’re going to cross with all that extra weight?” Ava asked.
He shrugged. His eyes remained
locked on the makeshift bridge. “It’s better than coming back and forth. I’ll be the first to admit my engineering skills aren’t the finest.”
“We should cross before the Zoo fines us for building without a permit,” Gunnar said.
“Okay…” she said hesitantly. “But be careful.”
The pilot winked. “Am I ever anything but careful? I’m the spitting image of caution. Why, I once waited six hours to cross a street in Vietnam. There were too many motorbikes and I would’ve caused a pile-up. The problem was none o’ them had ever seen a man like me and couldn’t help but rubberneck. Eventually, I found the root of a banyan tree and had to swing across.”
“And you’re telling us this, why?” Ava said.
“To demonstrate my commitment to safety and patience and make it clear that if I’m gonna cross this log, we really don’t have any choice.”
Gunnar laughed. “Now, that was a good one. Peppy would’ve liked it.”
“Just be careful, okay?” She placed a hand on Manny’s shoulder.
He looked her in the eyes and nodded. “Let’s take this bridge for a spin.”
The root ball of the tree was halfway out of the ground, yanked up when the explosion had knocked the trunk over. Manny used it to climb up. The trunk was about four feet in circumference, so Ava wasn’t worried that it would break, only that he would fall off it and drown or smashed to death somewhere downstream.
Balanced on the trunk, Manny rocked his weight back and forth. The tree wobbled beneath with him, but not much. The exposed roots worked into the ground to further anchor it.
“All right. Well, it’s like walking a tightrope. Which I once did on a bet, by the way.”
“Are you doing this or not?” Gunnar demanded.
Ava didn’t want to say anything but she felt the same way. The wound in her leg now burned with the painful itch. If anything, standing there waiting for Manny to cross made it worse. It was better to keep moving so she could at least try to ignore it. As it was, all she could do was watch and wait. Her leg used the time to remind her that something was trying to kill it.