by Michael Todd
“Look everywhere,” Sergeant Wallace had said. “There isn’t a single part of this place we can afford not to watch. Is that clear?”
He didn’t need to say it. Miller and Gronski had even stopped making wisecracks about Venus mantraps.
Soon, the foliage grew dense enough that they’d have needed three times the napalm and pesticide to burn, blast, melt, and poison their way through it. They were forced instead to weave along the path of least resistance, wherever that might be. They relied on compasses to keep them bearing south whenever possible.
Chris had tried to focus on taking notes and pictures. The minor flash from his phone camera didn’t seem to disturb the Zoo’s equilibrium. Steadmann was now his guard. He was quiet and largely indifferent to Chris’ presence, which at least was an improvement over the late Chad.
The scientist shuddered. He wouldn’t particularly miss the man, but he’d never seen a human being actually die before. Certainly not as a result of being munched and slurped by something akin to a giant boa constrictor, only with little flowers growing out of it. And lips. Dear God, the carnivorous vine had actual lips.
And yet, though the team seemed uninterested, there was plenty there to fascinate a biologist. Several of the plants were clearly mutated versions of the local flora. He wasn’t very familiar with North Africa’s plant life, but they resembled things he had seen in the capital city of Tunis during his brief stopover, or even at scattered oases as they flew over the Sahara. They had all been altered beyond easy recognition, however.
They saw virtually no animal life. Once or twice, Chris thought he saw a small lizard scuttle through the weeds or a tiny insect buzz from branch to branch, but that was it. Otherwise, it was simply a startlingly complex plant-based ecosystem that was coherent and well-developed. Incredibly, despite the Zoo’s only having existed for a matter of weeks, the plants all seemed locked into a state of symbiosis and equilibrium. That was something usually seen only in ancient forests.
“Halt,” Kemp said from the front. They stopped and Chris tensed and looked around to try to determine what the problem was. There seemed to be none. “Break for lunch,” she explained. “You have ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes, just what I always wanted,” Gronski quipped and wiped the sweat from his narrow brow with his sleeve.
Chris sighed with relief. He retrieved a protein bar and ate it quickly, then washed it down with water from his canteen, which was nearly empty. He refilled it from the big green jug on the ATV and he drank again. After checking for locusts, death-vines, and other such abominations, he stepped behind a tree to take a piss.
Looking down at the stream of his own urine vanishing amidst the undergrowth, Chris saw a flower. After a quick shake and a zip, he knelt to examine it. It was beautiful. The blossoms that sprang from its almost violently green stem were a strange alternating pattern of red and blue petals, and it seemed surrounded in mist. After a moment, he determined that the mist was in fact rising from the flower’s stem. He blinked in surprise and peered closer. A dim blue glow shone faintly from the buds of its flowers. He rushed quickly to the front of the squad.
“Dr. Kemp,” he said.
She turned to face him, looking impatient. Their ten minutes must be almost up.
“I found a flower that looks like it might be generating goop,” he went on.
She cocked an eyebrow and strode past him at her usual brisk pace and knelt to look at it.
“Huh,” she said. “Do you have your gloves on? Get a sample container from the vehicle and pluck it. We need a sample of these things.”
Chris’s brow furrowed. “Will the goop it’s making be safe to carry?”
“It should, so long as it doesn’t touch anything organic. Hurry. We need to move out.”
The scientist quickly found one of the containers in question and borrowed Sgt. Wallace’s hunting knife. He tried not to spill any of the AG forming tiny pools in the blossoms. and cut away the earth around the plant’s base. Carefully, he yanked it up and out.
To his surprise, its roots seemed incredibly long. They still touched the ground even when he brought it up to the level of his knees. The tendrils were slimy and almost pulsating. Without thinking, he severed them with a swipe of the knife, deposited the flower in the container, and shut it up nice and tight.
As he turned to rejoin the squad, he thought he heard a low hum or buzz and something like a breeze rushed through the trees.
“What the hell is that?” Sgt. Miller asked.
Kemp looked around in a state of near-agitation. “Weapons,” she said.
“What did you do?” Gronski yelled at Chris as if the decision to pluck the flower had been his.
“Quiet!” Kemp snapped.
The scientist practically hugged the ATV with Steadmann in front of him and the other soldiers ringed around, their guns at the ready. The sound rose into a tempest that grew and faded intermittently. Shadows flitted, but it might simply have been the wavering—the breathing—of the trees and vines disturbing the sunlight.
None of the team made a sound. Chris tried not to breathe.
What if this whole place is essentially one interconnected organism?
If it had some sort of a hive mind, it might have registered injury when he removed the plant from the ground.
“Okay,” Kemp said, “I think we’re in the clear. We need to make up for lost time, so let’s get—”
The foliage exploded. Green shapes soared out of it, buzzing furiously and flailing their bladed limbs.
“Fuck!” Chris exclaimed, stumbled back, and almost fell into the ATV.
“Open fire!” someone bellowed, and the air crackled to life with near-deafening gunfire.
A locust sailed over the scientist’s head and through Gronski as the man prepared to fire the mounted gun. With one swipe of the creature’s limb, the man’s head catapulted off his shoulders and left a spurting neck and spasming body behind. A splash of blood landed on Chris’s safari hat as it fountained from the stump.
Steadmann fell back next to the scientist, his rifle spitting three-round bursts furiously as it seemed the forest itself, with all its menacing green shadows, came to life to attack them. Two locusts screeched and fell sparking to the earth in front of him. “Motherfuckers!” he screamed.
One of them got past Steadmann and nearly sliced into Chris. He immediately fell and rolled—rolling had been one of the first things he’d learned in Hapkido, thank God—and found himself now next to Wallace.
“Dr. Lin,” the sergeant said, his face a picture of stony calm as he fired into the jungle, “get into the vehicle.” His gun clicked empty. Two more locusts swooped toward him. Betraying no particular panic, he ejected the magazine and inserted a new one with clinical efficiency. The gun roared to life in time to decapitate the first of the two creatures.
The second only lost a limb as it bowled into Wallace. He somehow blocked the monster with the rifle, pivoted, and slammed it against the corner of the ATV to hold it there with one hand as it writhed and spat. He drew his pistol with the other hand and systematically discharged two rounds into its head, followed by one more into its thorax. It slumped to the ground, oozing green. His hazel eyes flashed at Chris.
“Yes,” the scientist stammered. His voice came louder than he’d thought it would be, though it was barely audible under all the gunfire, battle cries, and death cries. “Yes, sir.” He climbed into the ATV and crouched down behind the gun mounting.
Kemp, Connolly, and Margheriti were back-to-back and fought in three directions simultaneously. Most of the attacking locusts swooped through the small clearing where they’d stopped, essentially performing fly-by strikes, but a few hopped in on foot across the forest floor. One of these dodged to the side of the streams of fire and approached Margheriti at an angle.
“Look out!” Chris shouted.
The locust’s jaws closed around Margheriti’s throat as it crashed against him to knock him aside and flat o
n his back. Its knife-like forelimbs tore his arms apart as it ripped out his Adam’s apple and severed his jugular. He gurgled and trembled for only a moment as his blood flowed beneath him to dye the forest floor red.
“We need to get out of here!” Wallace barked and moved toward the back of the vehicle to help Steadman and Miller. The two men were on the verge of being overwhelmed by a surge of locusts from between two trees.
There was no way they’d be able to shoot down all those things with only their rifles and pistols. Not knowing what he did or why, Chris leapt up behind the mounted gun, pushed Gronski’s headless corpse aside, and heaved himself against the weapon. He turned on the emerald surge and fumbled with the controls. He snarled. “How the fuck do you—”
The machine gun burst into action and discharged anti-armor rounds at incredible speed. The entire front of the locust-wave disintegrated. The gun’s massive recoil, however, pulled it up and to the right and Chris forgot to stop firing. He cut down the right of the two big trees behind them, and it fell to the left and crushed a couple more locusts and threw a few others off course. It pulled a little more right, and more trees exploded.
“Okay, okay…” Chris stammered and released the trigger.
Wallace, Miller, and Steadman had survived the first wave, but would soon face another. Looking back over his shoulder, the scientist saw a third approaching from the front.
Kemp suddenly leaped into the vehicle. “Diaz, get us out of here now!” she screamed at the driver.
He had fired a machine pistol over the windshield. “Just a sec,” he said, “they’re almost clear to—”
Kemp kicked him out of his seat. Chris, who had been about to try to aim the machine gun at the front wave of locusts, froze in shock. Kemp seated herself behind the steering wheel, turned the key, and stomped on the gas.
“What are you—” The sudden jerking motion of the ATV knocked him off his feet. He fell from the gun mounting and crashed into Diaz, who had not regained his feet and rolled out the side door of the vehicle to crash onto the ground.
Trees sped by, along with an ashen-faced Connolly who suddenly found himself left alone at the front. Chris struggled to his knees and clung to one of the seats. The last he saw of the team was the remaining five of them forming a circle in the center of the clearing. They were completely surrounded.
Chapter Nine
Chris clung to the back of his seat for dear life as Kemp floored their gas pedal and surged through the underbrush. This wasn’t a matter of least resistance anymore. She plowed through anything that wasn’t a big-ass tree.
One particularly big-ass tree loomed ahead. Kemp steered right of it, and a giant green root rose out of nowhere in front of them.
“Shit!” the scientist exclaimed. They impacted, sailed over a lower patch of ground, and crashed hard. He lost his grip on the seat and was thrown back into the base of the gun mounting. Pain signals surged through his body like a pinball rebounding off a series of bumpers.
The ATV finally stopped. He rolled forward again. The vehicle was stuck at an angle, its nose down in a patch of mud while its wheels straddled another massive root. The engine was still running.
“Come on,” Kemp grunted. “Goddammit, come on!” She revved the engine, tried to reverse, and pivoted the steering wheel this way and that. It was useless. They were stuck.
Chris struggled to his feet and fought down dizziness and nausea as he tried to determine if his back had been injured. The lieutenant finally gave up and left the key in the ignition. She put her arms by her sides and sighed. He blinked. It was not a sigh of regret or a deep breath to calm herself. This was a sigh of impatience. His emotions froze, but he knew, any second now, they would shatter.
“All right,” she said and glanced back at him. “From here, we’ll have to continue on foot.” She took a moment to secure a few basic supplies and load them into a backpack. Once she’d shrugged it onto her shoulders, she turned away from him. Just like that, she was about to tramp off into the jungle.
“What the goddamn fuck do you think you’re doing?” Chris exploded. He hadn’t thought he was capable of reaching that decibel but apparently, he was. He jumped down behind he, suddenly feeling like her might also be capable of breaking a tree down with his bare hands and using it like a club. “You—you—” he stammered and choked on his own rage. “We have to go back!”
Kemp spun to face him. “No.”
“We can’t leave them there! They were… they needed…” He struggled to find the words. He wanted to grab her, wrist-lock her, and slam the rest of her into a tree. “You—”
“I am here to complete the mission!” she snarled back at him. “Do not try to tell me what I have to do on my own command!”
“But—” He held his hands out. They shook violently as his fingers curved into makeshift claws.
“You’re naive,” the lieutenant shouted. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him bodily along as she continued south. “You are a civilian. You have no concept of loss rationalization. You do not understand these types of situations. They are already dead. Anyone who didn’t leap into that vehicle at the same moment I did—the moment I realized it was hopeless—was already dead.”
She threw him against a tree and he didn’t resist as the weight of her words broke him. The sting of tears rose in his eyes as his body struggled to deal with the shock.
“The mission itself trumps the lives of anyone assigned to it. If you can’t make hard calls when they are necessary, you’ll end up dead too. Do you understand, Dr. Lin?”
He didn’t. His mind refused to accept it and he slumped to the ground.
Kemp rolled her eyes and groaned in exasperation. She pulled him to his feet again and hauled him behind her.
“This was a volunteer mission. Every one of those men had a choice to say no. They chose instead to risk their lives to save the world. Do you understand that? They knew they might die, but they were willing to chance it. Because the stakes are just that high. We’re not fucking around here. When everything we hold dear is in danger, people sometimes have to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
Chris pulled his arm out of her grip. “You could have waited another two seconds,” he said in much softer voice. “At least to give them a chance—”
She shook her head. “If I did, it would have been too late.”
Whether to clear his head or merely escape the trauma, he seized on the memory of the previous night. “There’s something else going on here,” he said breathlessly. “Back on the Wall last night, you almost blurted something out but you stopped yourself. There’s something you’re not telling me. You’re trying to justify this with all the sacrifice stuff, but there’s more, isn’t there?” He looked her squarely in the eye. “I might die here no matter what,” he said, “but if that’s how it’s gonna be, then shoot me, all right? This was a volunteer mission for me too. I’d rather die standing up and doing the right thing than following the orders of a…psychopath, for reasons I don’t even understand.”
Kemp rolled her head, then her eyes, and huffed. It was possible she considered everything he’d said an inconvenience that she was now forced to deal with. Maybe calling her a psychopath had been more accurate than he’d known. She drew a deep breath and Chris braced for another round of yelling, but her voice caught in her throat. She doubled over in a vicious coughing fit.
Chris hesitated in confusion. “Are you…okay?” he asked.
The lieutenant’s body heaved and her throat registered outright torment as she gagged, gasped, and hacked.
Something was definitely not right with her.
A faint buzzing rose behind them and Chris thought he saw something flick by in the shadows. He put his arm around Kemp and led her behind the nearest large tree and covered her hands and mouth with the sleeve of his jacket to muffle her coughs. No locusts appeared and the fit subsided a minute later.
She rose slowly to her feet. Her eyes were red and watered from th
e attack, whatever it had been. The look on her face was striking. She was ashamed. It was as though she’d been caught at something she wasn’t meant to be doing.
“There is more at stake in this mission than you know,” she rasped. Her voice gradually became more even as she breathed. She almost sounded human but that wouldn’t dissuade Chris, however.
“Tell me.”
Emma Kemp took a deep breath, her expression curiously mild. A twig snapped somewhere off to their left from the same direction as the buzz. They both hurried forward, still bearing south, and crouched beneath the edge of a small root-crested ridge.
“Not here, and not now,” she said. “When it’s safer.” She glanced up and he followed her gaze. The diminished light was already fading. “We need to find cover and make camp.”
Chapter Ten
They crept deeper and deeper into the forest of death as night descended. The shady greens darkened. There was no way Chris would ever be able to relax in this place, but night time made it worse.
It was the jungle’s strange, primitive nature or some prehistoric memory embedded in his DNA perhaps. Humanity had lived for centuries in constant fear and dread. Humankind was an interloper. These alien creatures had essentially adapted to the ancient and barbaric way of life that had prevailed on this planet for millions of years before Homo sapiens had arrived on the scene.
“Do you want me to look for, uh, dry twigs?” Chris offered.
“No,” Kemp replied. “We won’t be making a fire. It’s too dangerous. They’d notice and either identify it as a sign of our…infestation of their habitat or they’d regard it as a threat, since we’ve used fire against them from the beginning.”
He found it interesting that she now referred to the Zoo and its denizens as “them.”
Chris understood her reasoning for forbidding a campfire, but he certainly didn’t like it. The temperature was dropping fast. The usual nighttime cooling effect of the surroundings was made worse by the moisture in the place.