by Michael Todd
Wallace looked at Chris. He was already close to death.
“That’s an order!”
The sergeant looked at Hall. He felt like he might throw up. But he also felt, strangely, a sense of excitement—the tantalizing naughty-child notion that he was about to do something forbidden. Still, it was also something recommended, as he recalled, by Ambassador Aade Graf. As she’d said, sometimes it was best not to comply with bad orders.
“With all due respect, sir,” Wallace said, “fuck your orders.”
He turned his attention to Kemp, who stared at him from her subtly but hideously inhuman face that hovered above her ravaged body, and fired.
Three shots rang out, and all three found their mark. Her head shattered like a soft, rotting melon or a jack-o-lantern dashed against the pavement. It spurted not red blood, but green. Even the skull fragments and chunks of brain had a distinct plant-like look to them. The mass of organs no longer throbbed and pulsed, and as they grew still, fluids leaked down the gnarly stem. The tree did not seem to object.
Chapter Nineteen
The cavern immediately began to shake.
“Shit!” Wallace exclaimed and stumbled as the heaving and vibration of the very earth threw him partially off balance. His vision turned fuzzy for a moment as the rock shuddered beneath him. It seemed to stabilize for a moment before it shook again, a second or two at a time, and cracks appeared in the cavern walls. Dust, rocks, and shattered stalactites plummeted from the ceiling.
The trees erupted into growth as if someone had recorded the maturation of a houseplant over the course of weeks and played it back at super-high speed. Trunks thickened, cracked the stone, and dislodged the dirt around their roots as branches extended outward and up. Grass elongated at an alarming rate and vines curled around masses of rock, seemingly from out of nowhere. New plants sprouted all around.
“This is not good,” Wallace muttered as he ran to Chris.
He was sure he had seen a movie as a kid in which one of the villains had a device implanted in their heart that would detonate a bomb if it stopped beating. Kemp must have had a similar arrangement with the Zoo. In her case, however, the bomb was simply the Surge. She had intended it to go off anyway, no matter what. Odd that he now thought of it with a capital letter—although seeing it happen with his own eyes made it a real Event rather than an expected one.
The scientist was mostly unconscious at this point but still alive, thank God. The vines no longer sucked at him, apparently. They had in all likelihood acted on Kemp’s command and had aborted when Wallace had blown her brains out.
“Goddammit! God fucking dammit!” Hall screamed, his usually deep voice high and raw in total fury. It even cut through the grinding roar of the earthquake and the slithering, rushing sounds made by the hyper-accelerated growth of the Zoo’s flora. “You failed, Wallace. You’ll be court-martialed for this. And you should be fucking shot for treason. We’re all fucked!”
He ignored the director for now. He wouldn’t simply leave him—tempting though that was—or anyone else he could save but first, he would save his friend.
The sergeant immediately attacked the vines that had invaded the scientist’s body. He yanked them off and out to leave holes that shone red and wet but did not actually bleed much. That done, he tore at the spongy, pale-green moss and interrupted its gradual feast on its meal of human skin and flesh. He cast it aside and a rock fell on some of it and crushed it to slime.
“Uhh…” Chris moaned. His eyes were still closed and he didn’t move much, but he might come round in the next few minutes. He’d need water. More importantly, they all needed to get the hell out of the cave before it packed the soil debris into solid earth around the roots of the second-generation forest.
One of the branches of the huge tree that had encompassed Queen Kemp grew directly toward the shelf of rock above where Wallace now crouched and where Chris was still trapped. The sergeant dug both his natural and the augmented hands into the ground to rip stones aside and shovel the dirt and sand away. He put his arms under Chris’s and heaved to drag the scientist out of the hole. Something above them fell.
“Oh, crap!” he muttered and threw himself backward, bringing Chris along for the ride. A jagged chunk of rock the size of a chair plummeted past them, barely inches away, and crashed into the depression where the other man had been imprisoned.
In a lull amidst all the noise, Wallace was fairly sure he heard the chitinous slither of approaching scorpions. They had come to avenge their mistress, perhaps, or simply tried to escape the collapse of the cavern. Either way, it was not what they needed.
“You’ve lost everything we came here for and everything I worked for!” Hall raged. “Goddamn you.”
With his brain carefully in neutral mode, Wallace placed the still-groggy Chris against a fairly solid-looking section of wall where he would be shielded from falling debris by a thick overhang. He ran to where the director was buried.
“Get me out!” the man demanded.
For a brief moment, the sergeant contemplated leaving him until last. He really was tempted to release Garpiel and a couple of the others first—if they were even still alive—but Hall was closest and realistically, he had to save the lives most likely to survive. The man stared at him with eyes that were both blank and blazing with intensity. Wallace recognized it as the look of wrath a person got when they were about to kill someone. Badass exoskeleton notwithstanding, he was, suddenly, a little afraid. Nonetheless, he dug at the director’s earthen prison and finally grabbed the man’s arm to pull him free.
Hall grunted, flexed his legs, and pushed against the solid ground beneath him to pit his considerable strength against his considerable weight. The sheer size of the man built like an especially beefy pro wrestler was almost abnormal. The sergeant pulled in tandem.
Earth split and scattered and Hall was free.
“Go and stand beside Chris,” Wallace said as he turned away from the director. He didn’t particularly want to be close to him right now, anyway. “I need to free—”
Hall moved quickly and the blade of the huge knife he’d brought sank into the soldier’s side.
“Uh—” Wallace gasped. Reflexively, his armored hand lashed out and swatted the knife away before his assailant could stab him a second time. It clattered to the ground and bounced into a widening crack.
The director surged into him, punched him in the face, and bowled him over. Wallace, stunned both by the simple fact of what had happened and the scream of pain in his side, fell. His lip split and cheekbone bruised painfully under Hall’s massive fists.
“You worthless coward!” the man screamed, his voice rasped and cracked and at a pitch that assaulted his ears. “You fucking traitorous stupid meathead son of a bitch. I’ll kill you. Stupid, stupid, stupid asshole—” He straddled Wallace and seized him by the shoulders to slam his head and upper body down again and again.
The sergeant’s brain cleared amidst the searing agony, confusion, and even terror that had almost overwhelmed him. He still had to try to save the other men. That aside, he was not about to be fragged by a politician who had used the military—well, the National Guard, at least—as a stepping-stone to a large mahogany desk.
His suit hummed and whirred as his knee shot up and the metal plating crashed into Hall’s groin. The man gasped and his eyes bulged. Before his attacker could react, the soldier’s other leg rose and he used both to launch him away. The man crashed and sprawled in a heap.
Wallace pivoted and forced himself to his feet. His wounded side howled at him and leaked blood in protest. He placed his right hand over the wound and tried to slow the bleeding.
“Stand aside, sir,” he said to the director. The floor still shook and pieces of rock fell as vines and branches grew around them and surged through the ceiling of the cavern.
Hall, his face livid, charged once more. Wallace side-kicked him in the chest with about half the force he could have used. It was still en
ough to crunch a couple ribs and the aggressor cried out and doubled over to spit blood. He snatched at Wallace’s knee and yanked hard. The soldier simply raised his leg, but Hall rolled over, grabbed a rock, and drove it into the back of his knee joint. That, too, was armored, but the impact was enough to force the sergeant to his knees, which tore again at his injured side. He grunted.
The crazed man suddenly found his feet and slammed the rock into the back of his victim’s head. Wallace fell forward but caught himself and ground his teeth so hard they might have cracked as agony flared up from the knife wound. He shoved himself up and turned in time to catch his assailant under the arm as the man attacked again. The sergeant heaved and shouted with the effort but managed to hoist the large man and hurl him into a mass of rock. His exoskeleton sang loudly as it aided him in this feat of strength and before Hall could strike again, he stepped in and, with his unarmored right hand, punched the director in the face.
“Urgh!” the man snarled as his nose cracked and bled copiously. He fell back and stumbled over a thick, moving vine that seemed to rise from nowhere. His roar of fury cut short as he tumbled into a lower section of the cavern, where half the floor had already collapsed and dark, glistening, many-legged forms emerged from the depths. “Wallace!” he bellowed.
“Sorry, boss,” Wallace said. He turned away as pincer claws and poison-barbed tails—so many of them—closed around Hall, engulfed him, and blotted him out of sight altogether. Soon enough, the director’s screams were drowned out by the sound of scuttling, feasting arachnids. The shelf of rock he’d fallen onto shuddered and, sundered by the earthquake, sank into the abyss.
Wallace hurried toward the place where he’d seen a few men from his unit who were possibly still alive. The section of the floor in which they were buried had collapsed in some places and cracked in others. The entire area had been weakened by the bulk of rapidly-growing trees and a particularly nasty shower of rock fragments rained into the chaos.
The men were all basically dead. There was almost no way he could, with a stab wound to the torso, get to them in time, even if the Zoo hadn’t already drained them dry. He had to save the lives that were savable. This thought entered his mind seconds before a huge section of the ceiling plummeted down and obliterated the whole area. The impact shook the entire cavern and Wallace braced himself against a tree. If he fell again, he might not be able to get up.
He turned to the wall where he’d laid Chris, picked him up, and slung him over his shoulder. The scientist was much lighter than Hall had been, at least. A little unsteady on his feet, he grimaced and looked around for high ground or anything that might lead to the surface.
His gaze finally settled on a diagonal shelf that slanted upward. It had cracked in places but the gaps were already filled with thick new plant life. Wallace limped toward it and used his augmented strength to push himself up and onto it. He winced and dragged in a breath as he adjusted Chris’s weight. For what seemed like an eternity, he struggled along this makeshift natural ramp and stopped occasionally, when it shuddered and groaned beneath him, to hug the wall and pray. He scrambled over jagged and uneven chunks of soil and rock that looked like they might burst apart at any moment and crawled through masses of moving vines that snagged Chris. More than once, they almost pulled the unconscious man off and dropped him over the edge.
“What the hell?” Chris moaned, weakly.
“We’re almost out,” Wallace said.
The earth shook again and Chris suddenly writhed in panic. The man’s struggle cause a muscle in Wallace’s side to twist and, in agony, he deposited his human burden on the shelf.
The scientist almost fell but managed to clutch a semi-stable tree branch and steady himself.
“Come on.” The sergeant gestured ahead and they locked arms and continued the climb, encouraged by a shaft of sunlight that gleamed through a split in the earth above them.
A chunk of the wall directly ahead of them collapsed and blocked their path.
“Shit.” Wallace looked around. A growing branch moved past them and reached upward toward the increasingly visible sky. “Hold on,” he instructed.
“Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me,” Chris gasped, but he nevertheless wrapped his arms around Wallace’s shoulder. The sergeant grabbed the branch with his armored left hand and tightened his grip. His stomach jerked against the pull of gravity as the branch bore them upward to the expanding window of light.
“Uh, Wallace? We’ll crash into that—”
“I see it.” The branch carried them directly toward a jagged mound of dirt and stone, seemingly unconcerned as to what was in its way in its determination to continue the Surge and grow through anything that opposed it. Below and a little to the side was a relatively flat area, and immediately above that, a grassy hole glowed green and orange and yellow with the low sunlight of an early evening in the jungle.
Damn, but this would hurt.
Wallace swung himself back and then forward and turned the motion into a leap.
“Holy shit! What are you doing?” Chris yelled. The soldier swung his startled passenger to keep him away from the point of impact on the flat area below the surface. They landed hard and instantly, it felt as though a bomb went off in Wallace’s side and his brain at the same time.
Exerting all the willpower he had left, he turned his reaction to the fiery agony into one final lunge from the hard crouch he’d landed in and through the ring of burnished light. The worst sounds of the echoing quake in the caverns faded away. They were back above ground.
Wallace slammed into a raised section of earth near a tree. The upheaval of the quake had softened it somewhat and it cushioned their impact slightly. He remained in a half-crouch. Again, his side blasted him with pain signals but this time, the damage seemed to have finally reached the point where it numbed a little.
Chris rolled off his shoulders, scrambled to his feet, and staggered as he tried to regain his balance.
They looked around, and even amidst all the other improbable things they had seen, both took a moment to gape and stare, stunned at the incredible result of the Surge.
Chapter Twenty
The wild profusion of blossoms and fecundity that characterized spring seemed to have been multiplied tenfold.
A riot of color and activity surrounded them, the natural, non-human equivalent of a huge, gaudy carnival. Plants and trees grew abundantly to engulf and supplant the older, dying vegetation. The original Zoo was knocked down, subsumed, and used as fertilizer. Flowers bloomed in dozens of colors with petals the size of children’s shirts. These blossoms grew from stems or vines and amidst leaves that were so bright and vibrantly green, they seemed to glow. The uncanny luminescence persisted, even under the sunlight which should have blotted out the lingering phosphorescence of the new species’ subterranean juvenile forms.
Scorpions, kangarats, and catsharks proliferated everywhere while locusts flew and swarmed above the trees. Some animals seemed to stop to frolic or simply run around in circles as if overcome by the raging impetus of new life, but most simply moved. They all headed in different directions, but from the Zoo’s perspective, it was one direction—outward.
None of these awful creatures, all of which had tried to kill both Wallace and Chris so many times, bothered them or even particularly noticed them. They had their orders and acted on a prerogative more important than the harassment of two bedraggled human gawkers. The collective will of the Zoo, as temporarily embodied by the zombified Kemp, had spoken.
Expand.
“Holy crap,” Chris said, his voice ragged after all the fluids he’d lost to Kemp’s vampiric vines. Nevertheless, he seemed somewhat recuperated although still very weak. “I wish I wasn’t actually here and instead, watched this via video feed or something. Look at it. If it wasn’t so terrible, it would be a biologist’s wet dream.”
Wallace hadn’t moved from his half-crouch. Of course, his friend would say something like that at a time like this
. The soldier managed to ignore his pain and how weak he felt and smiled.
The scientist blinked and shook his head. “But yeah, seriously, we have to get the hell out of here. We need to move fast. Come on, Wallace.” He gestured and set off in roughly the same direction as most of the scorpions and locusts now moved. He stopped when he realized his companion hadn’t followed.
“Hey,” he said and glanced over his shoulder.
“I…uh…I don’t think I can do that, Chris.” Wallace clenched his jaw.
Confusion showed on the other man’s face. It occurred to the sergeant that he did not know exactly how old Chris was—probably around thirty or so, but it was difficult to be sure. Younger than himself, in any event. “What? Why not?” the scientist asked and his confusion shifted to concern. “Are you—”
Wallace removed his right hand from where he’d clamped it against his side. It came away sticky and red, and a new wave of blood pumped from the deep stab wound. The damage had been exacerbated by the tearing of the flesh and tissue around it that had happened during his strenuous efforts to get them to the surface. This new wave joined the blood that had already flowed down his side, his hip, and his leg and now began to pool at his feet.
“Wait,” Chris said. “Are you—”
The sergeant fell. His legs, the suit notwithstanding, simply stopped working and no longer cooperated with his brain or its link to the exoskeleton’s functioning. The metal that encased his body effectively became dead weight. He slumped more than he toppled and came to rest flat on his back.
“No!” Chris exclaimed and raced over to him. “Oh, my God, for fuck’s sake—no.”