by Michael Todd
He, Kemp, and Chris all exchanged a glance.
“The mission,” said the lieutenant.
Chris sighed again. “The mission, I guess.”
Just the sort of sinister place the hero would have to infiltrate to claim the Armor of God.
Chapter Sixteen
“Do you hear a buzzing sound?” Wallace asked and shut the door behind him.
Shadows closed around them softened only by the faint illumination of what little sunlight crept in through the cracks made by the overgrowth. And the stench.
“No,” Kemp said. She and Wallace had covered the interior with their guns as Chris again had the honor of opening the door. As near as he could tell, it was almost totally silent.
“Not in here, outside,” the sergeant continued, whispering now. “Faint, but definitely there.”
“The Zoo makes sounds like that all the time,” she said. “Do you have a flashlight?”
Wallace shook his head. He and Kemp then conferred in low voices on how they would sweep the place. While they did so, Chris looked around. His previous impression of the research base as an ancient temple was not entirely accurate. It was, in fact, a tomb.
The scientists had been totally unprepared. They were aware that the goop was dangerous, but no one, from what Kemp had said, expected anything like the Day of the Locust. And these were researchers, not fighters, untrained and unarmed. There had probably been a few Army guards present but not enough to save the base in time.
It looked like most of the survivors of the initial wave had clustered there in the center of the front room and attempted a pitiful last stand. Their mangled bodies were piled in a mass grave, now covered with dirt, mud, vines, and saplings and buzzed with flies. These insects, Chris supposed, were one species actually native to the region. They practically danced in the air on currents of rot-odor between meals. It was like looking at a compost heap made of human beings.
“God,” he said under his breath. If he had known about this project, he probably would have signed up for it from the beginning. Which would mean he’d be among the poor bastards currently decomposing before them.
“Dr. Lin, wait here a moment. We’ll secure the immediate vicinity,” Wallace said. “Let us know if you hear anything outside.”
“Will do,” Chris replied.
The two soldiers moved through the main hall and took turns opening and aiming into the rooms closest to them. Another side hall led deeper into the base and presumably to other rooms, but they let it be for now. They did not shout or open fire. That was a relief.
The scientist peered out one of the windows near the front door. Or rather, through the narrow gap in the window beside the fat tree-like vine that had grown through it. He could see part of the mass of crates the hybrid had knocked over, and beyond it, the jungle. No movement. It did seem like there was a buzzing sound out there, though.
Kemp and Wallace returned. “I’ll get Sgt. Wallace patched up,” Kemp said to Chris, “then we’ll have you examine the rooms. You’re more familiar with this type of research. And the more people we have standing guard, the better.”
“Okay,” he agreed.
The sergeant stood motionless and silent for a moment as Kemp took a few very basic medical supplies out of her pack. She dabbed at the laceration on his chest and arm with a piece of gauze soaked in disinfectant and bandaged the wounds. They weren’t serious injuries by any means, but all the life forms in this place likely made it an ideal place for infections and parasites to thrive.
“I apologize for leaving you,” she said after a tense pause. “I…everything I’d learned about combat…it seemed hopeless. Someone had to get out of there and finish the job.” There had been a near-tenderness in her behavior, and Chris remembered that she had started out simply as a doctor before she became a soldier.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Wallace replied. His tone was neutral and even. “Let’s complete the mission and get the hell out of here.”
“That’s the plan.” Kemp nodded. “Dr. Lin, we’re ready. No hostiles in either of the rooms to our left or right. We want you to examine the left room first, then the second, unless Dr. Marie’s notes and files are in the first. As soon as we retrieve them, we’re gone.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Chris said.
The sergeant went ahead to the side hall leading deeper into the base and stood guard there while Kemp covered his rear and kept an eye on the front door.
Even though she claimed they’d “secured” the rooms, Chris was suddenly seized with a powerful dread. This dark, filthy, and ruined place, with its alien plant life and piles of reeking dead, was like everything he’d ever seen in a horror film come to life. Now, he had to poke around in it like a designated redshirt. He couldn’t hear the slight buzzing anymore, though. It was quiet.
The door to the left room was slightly ajar. Chris flung it open and looked inside.
Someone was there. “Jesus!” he gasped, and drew his pistol. He fumbled for the safety as the ragged figure in front of him seemed to do likewise.
“What?” Wallace snapped and was suddenly at Chris’s side.
Chris paused. The Asian gentleman in front of him was incredibly dirty and wore tattered fatigues. His hair was mussed and dark circles shadowed his eyes. He looked like a zombie.
“That’s a mirror,” Wallace explained. “It reflects light and creates a near-perfect image of whatever’s in front of it.”
“Right,” said Chris. “Good to know. Thank you, Sergeant.”
The soldier returned to his post, and Chris returned his handgun to its holster. He stepped into the room and tensed again as he saw a corpse slumped in one of the corners. No plant matter grew on this one, so the fact that it was a decaying human was all the more apparent. It had been a balding, overweight man in late middle age, and he had started to bloat. Stab and slash wounds were evident all over his flesh. His glassy eyes looked to the side toward the doorway where the scientist now stood.
He did his best to ignore the dead man and scanned the room. There wasn’t much—a basic sink beneath the mirror and some pieces of spare equipment. However, there was a table with a couple of beakers and canisters on it. He traipsed over and examined these briefly.
All were labeled. Spores and Insect Pheromone A were the most interesting ones. He might have to consider coming back for these, but they weren’t his primary thing objective.
“Okay, there’s not really anything there,” Chris said as he emerged. “Let’s try Door Number Two.”
That one, too, contained little of interest, as it was essentially a guard post. Unfortunately, the probably-dead guards had removed all the guns.
“Dr. Marie’s stuff must be deeper in the base,” he reported.
Kemp nodded. “Stay between us and don’t open any doors till we say it’s safe,” she ordered.
They proceeded into the side hall in the same formation. This time, Chris opened the first door while Kemp knelt and aimed and Wallace entered the room itself.
“Dorm,” he said. “Empty.”
They moved farther down the hall and climbed over a pile of debris where part of the ceiling had fallen in and some of the material around a small window had collapsed around another vine. The next door had fallen outward off its hinges. It lay flat across the floor. Kemp motioned for Chris to stay where he was as she and Wallace checked the room.
“This might be it,” she said. There was an edge of excitement in her voice. “It looks like an office.” She motioned Chris over.
He stepped over the fallen door and into the room. It was definitely an office dominated by a large desk with a computer and multiple file cabinets. Near the far corner of the desk was a small placard that read “Dr. Geraldine Marie.”
“It’s her office,” he confirmed. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Kemp step into the room, leaving Wallace to stand guard in the hall. The sergeant switched back and forth between glancing down the hallway and looking out the broken win
dow.
“I’ll check the desk,” Chris suggested, “if you want to check the file cabinets.”
She nodded and began opening the black metal drawers. Some of them seemed to be locked but most weren’t. He suspected she would try all the open ones before deciding whether or not to bash or shoot the locked ones.
The computer was dead, of course. A pad of paper and a pen rested to the side of it. Chris picked up the pad and skimmed it, flipping through the first three pages. Dr. Marie’s handwriting was not easy to read, but he got the gist of it. His hands trembled in excitement and he had to force himself not to blurt out what he’d read. Not yet.
First, he checked the desk’s drawers. They contained mostly junk, but the top one did have a small flash drive marked G on its side. Chris cross-referenced this with what he’d seen in the handwritten notes.
Taking the pad in one hand and the flash drive in the other, he stood straightened and took a deep breath. “We,” he began, a little louder than they’d spoken since entering this place, “are in business.”
Kemp’s head snapped toward him. Her eyes were wide and shining with intensity. “Let me see,” she demanded.
He summarized the contents of the notes even as she tried to read them for herself.
“You were right, Dr. Kemp. They were on the verge of some kind of medical breakthrough. The AG showed properties of being almost like a universal elixir. It didn’t simply kill pathogens. It helped the organism mutate to protect against them, almost like instant evolution of the immune system. If this stuff can’t cure you, nothing can.”
Kemp looked at him, and at the object in his hand. “What’s that?”
“An old-time flash drive. Like you said, she didn’t like keeping up with the times for security reasons. It should have all the details of her findings. We’ll need a computer to plug it into.” He paused. “There’s one bit of bad news, though.”
“What?” Her jaw muscles tightened again, but this time, there was a sort of nervous edge to her that he didn’t like.
“We’ll need a large sample of a very specific plant,” he said, and watched as her face fell. “Specifically, the goop plant, the ones that seem to call locusts when we pluck them.”
“Goddammit,” she muttered.
“Well, if we can get out of here quickly enough, we shouldn’t need to waste too much time till they authorize another expedition to collect those very samples. The goop has to be distilled before it can make a proper serum.”
Kemp nodded. “All right then. Let’s move out.”
“Wallace!” Chris called as she stepped out of the room. “Looks like we have the frickin’ Elixir of Life here after all. This will be worth it—” He stopped when he saw that she had frozen in momentary tension in the hall. He rushed out behind and past her.
Wallace raised his automatic shotgun and looked intently out the window. He glanced back, his jaw set in a grimace. “Don’t get too excited yet,” he said. “That buzzing was no coincidence.”
Now that he mentioned it, Chris could hear it again. Much louder. And he thought he could see—
The sergeant spat on the floor. “We are now completely surrounded by locusts.”
Chapter Seventeen
“We can’t stay here,” Kemp said. “We don’t have the time for this, let alone the ammo, even if we can find more guns.”
Wallace nodded curtly. “I agree. This structure has been compromised by all these plants and trees growing through it, and it wasn’t exactly a fortress to begin with. It’s not defensible and it’s too weak to offer much protection once those things figure out we’re in here.”
Chris blinked. If the locusts weren’t attacking yet, they might have time to plan something. He went to the next window down the hall and peered through.
His gut clenched. There were dozens if not hundreds of the creatures milling about. They mostly hopped around or fluttered halfheartedly in the air. They were agitated but hadn’t acted with any real purpose. Some of them were actually fighting each other. They reared up and hissed at one another, flailing their forelimbs in a kind of crude war-dance. They must have been attracted by either a disturbance of the plants or by the noise Wallace’s shotgun made when he’d killed the kangaroo-rat.
The scientist backed away from the window. Kemp and Wallace had returned to the entrance hall and sorted diligently through the piles of bodies in search of more weapons.
“Dr. Lin has a theory that the Zoo’s trees protect those flowers by secreting a pheromone or something that calls the locusts.”
The sergeant said something in reply, but he couldn’t make it out. He hoped to God the two of them had some kind of brilliant plan, though. Like a way to—
Wait. Pheromones.
Chris ran down the hall toward the entrance. He veered to the side and ran past Kemp and Wallace where they crouched beside the corpse pile.
“What are you doing?” she barked.
He opened the door on the left to the room with the mirror and the dead bald guy. And, more importantly, the pheromones—the sealed canister, the one labeled Insect Pheromone A. It would have been helpful to know what sort of insect they referred to, but there was no time to review every piece of documentation in the base to figure it out.
The scientist emerged and held up the canister for his companions to see.
“How the hell is that supposed to…” Kemp started but trailed off as the gears in her head caught up with him.
“We might be able to use it to distract them,” he explained. “I’m not sure of the details of how we’d do it, but, uh…somehow, we could maybe launch this thing south, and it might draw the locusts away from us. We could at least have a head start at getting the hell out of Dodge.”
The lieutenant rolled her tongue around her teeth and narrowed her gaze in thought.
“Do you even know exactly what that stuff is?” Wallace asked. “It might be something they got from a dung beetle.”
“I don’t,” Chris admitted, “and yeah, it might be. But does anyone have a better idea?”
“Not really,” the sergeant admitted. “We did find an internal ladder leading to the roof, which might at least act as an alternate escape route so we don’t necessarily have to go out the front door.”
He ran to where Wallace had indicated as the sergeant and lieutenant conferred again on how they might possibly be able to launch the canister a proper distance away from them without attracting attention. The scientist found himself wondering if they could shoot the damn thing out of Wallace’s shotgun, but that was probably a bad idea.
The ladder had been hidden behind a pile of debris, but it was accessible. Wallace might have trouble fitting, but he should be all right. Chris looked out the nearest window. It faced west, he was reasonably sure. The locusts didn’t seem to be as thick out there. Most of them had probably come from the north, the same direction from which the trio of humans had approached the base.
Something else caught his attention. A long, thick vine ran from somewhere above the base and out into the jungle. It might be possible to access it from the roof. Assuming they could reach it, they might be able to use it to escape. The tendril stretched west, rather than north, but it was better than nothing.
As he headed back, Kemp asked, “Do you still have your pistol?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Do you think that if we fired your handgun through the canister, the pheromones might stick to the bullets? The canister might also act as a partial silencer, so hopefully, the locusts wouldn’t immediately swarm on the sound of the gun firing and would instead follow the scent-trail of the bullets.”
Chris was impressed. He hadn’t thought of that. “It might,” he said, “though the trace would be probably be faint and the majority of the canister would probably empty after the first bullet shoots through. However, these things must have a powerful sense of smell to come from all over the Zoo whenever one goop plant happens to be in trouble, so it might work to dis
tract at least a few of them.
“It’s the best we’ve got. Get some duct tape from that room,” Wallace instructed.
He returned to the mirror room, found a gray spool of tape on one of the shelves, and handed over pistol, tape, and pheromone canister. The sergeant went to work immediately. He tore off a few long strips of duct tape and used them to fasten the canister tightly to the end of the gun.
“It might not hold.” Wallace frowned. “And if it’s some kind of pressurized gas, the canister might explode when we fire.”
“We only need to get off one or two shots,” said Kemp, “and it’s not like you’ll actually aim for anything in particular.”
“I?” he asked.
“Correct,” she replied. “I order you to be the one to fire it because you’re the biggest and strongest and therefore will be able to resist an explosion better than I or Dr. Lin could. Aim it blind out the window in the hall outside Dr. Marie’s office and fire it a couple of times while you keep your face behind the wall for protection. Then we bolt for the doors.”
“Actually…” Chris spoke up. “I had another insane idea. There’s a nice, strong-looking vine near the roof that runs into the jungle close to that ladder you found. If we could get a few straps or something, we might be able to ride that thing like a zipline and be a quarter mile away into the woods before the locusts figure out what’s going on.”
“Negative.” She shook her head.
“Lieutenant,” Wallace interjected, “that might actually work. Even if the vine doesn’t hold that far, it would probably at least give us some drag to ride to the ground and roll, and we’d be almost on the complete opposite side of the base from where we fired the gun.”
Kemp considered it. Chris suspected she didn’t like having her orders questioned, but with only the three of them and likely minutes away from being swarmed by mutant locusts, she was probably smart enough to appreciate the value of flexibility and survival.
“Fine,” she conceded. “But that means you’ll have to get across the base and up the ladder fast after you shoot.”