Chapter Fourteen
Jan took a deep breath and composed himself. All things considered, that had gone well.
“How many wounded?” he asked The Bull.
“Only four,” she said. “Soldat Mann will probably not be able to shoot since his right arm is fucked up, but everyone can walk and no one is in any immediate danger of death, I’d say.”
He nodded. Zero wounded would, of course, have been far better. But given the size and strength of that particular attack, he was thankful simply to have zero dead. He’d lost people in smaller skirmishes than that before. Either they had been very lucky or this particular group of men was very good. Or he and Ferris and the Feldwebels had commanded them particularly well. It was most likely a combination of all three.
For a moment, once again, it had occurred to him during the battle that he might actually die. He wondered when his son would call him back.
That thought had no place in combat, however, so he pushed it aside and looked around while he reloaded his pistol. Large swathes of the jungle surrounding them had been decimated by the amount of lead they’d blazed through it, and the ruins of the flora were appropriately decorated with the ruins of the fauna. Dead, mangled, blasted, and eviscerated cerberuscrocs and locusts lay everywhere, their futile effort to halt his expedition a mute, gruesome testimony to humanity’s skill in matters of organization and discipline, technology, and innovation. And, of course, toughness and courage. He was proud of his troops.
Of course, the silly English woman had found a way to stumble directly into the heat of battle and needed saving. She had even picked a rifle up, despite the chances of her actually knowing how to use it being virtually nil. Had she managed to fire it, the recoil would probably have knocked her on her ass. Worse, she might even have kept her finger on the trigger during the collision between her ass and the earth and so sprayed bullets at random into empty air or human flesh.
“Stop,” he told himself. There was no point in dwelling on what might have gone wrong. The important thing was, in fact, that it hadn’t. Nevertheless, that he’d needed to babysit Dr. Curie increased the likelihood of further near-misses and near-disasters as they continued with their mission.
He looked toward her. She was crouched next to Obergefreiter Herzog—the man she’d apparently pulled to safety after a locust had bowled him over—and helped one of the medics bandage the lacerations on his chest. She said something to him and he smiled and laughed gently.
Jan frowned—at himself, for once. He suddenly felt ashamed of his own nasty and cynical train of thought. The woman was doing her best, and she had at least demonstrated some courage and initiative in attempting to fight that locust. He ought to give her the benefit of the doubt, despite her ridiculous behavior earlier at the base. Combat sometimes brought out the best in people.
And when he had been younger, the best in people was what he had seen more of when he looked at them. Advancing age had begun to take that away from him. He ought not to be the type of person who assumed most women—or most humans in general, for that matter—to be useless fools. His mother would have considered that a weakness of character and even now, it offended the romantic streak within him he had inherited from his father. Of course, most people did have a disturbingly large foolish streak.
He walked toward her, having made the decision to do what was fair.
“Thank you for pulling Obergefreiter Herzog out of the way,” he said with his hands behind his back, “and for helping to treat him now.”
Dr. Curie looked up and her face revealed a shadow of surprise. “You’re quite welcome,” she responded. “Isn’t that what everyone is supposed to do?”
“More or less, yes.” He almost smiled but stopped himself. It would be unwise to be too lenient with her. “However, please try to stay out of combat until you receive proper firearms instruction. I say this only for your own good since you could very easily be harmed. Your bravery is appreciated, but it takes bravery and knowledge to deal with such things.”
“I have a great deal of knowledge,” she retorted with a grin, “although admittedly not much of guns. Perhaps someone could show me?”
“We do not have the time now, but perhaps later, yes.”
“Good. Oh, and I couldn’t help but notice,” Dr. Curie said, “that your person who sounded the alarm did so in English. I’m sorry to require special treatment as I simply didn’t have the time to learn German with all my scientific studies. But I want to say how much I appreciate their having done that for my benefit so that even the rookie civilian among the group can react accordingly in…uh, an emergency situation.”
Jan could not help staring at her for a brief moment, during which he dug his teeth into his tongue to stop himself from uttering a barking peal of laughter. “The German word for ‘alarm’ is alarm,” he stated, his expression as deadpan as he could manage.
“Oh!” the woman replied cheerfully. “Well, isn’t that convenient? Never mind, then. It’s funny how things work out sometimes. I had an American friend tell me once about a trip she took to Tijuana in Mexico, and after she got alcohol poisoning she was pleasantly surprised to discover that the English and Spanish word for ‘doctor’ is exactly the same.” She frowned. “Although they pronounce it differently if I recall.”
“I am sure they do,” he said.
Leutnant Ferris came up. “We are ready to go,” she stated, although she glanced at Herzog to make sure he was well enough for this to be true. “What now, Hauptmann?”
“I am not sure,” he replied in English so that he would not have to repeat anything to Curie. “Intel on the missing Americans that Klaus was ordered to investigate indicated that they probably disappeared somewhere in this vicinity, although it might have been deeper in. The chances are they were attacked by these very cerberuscrocs.” He gestured to the mound of scaled corpses. “But there is no way to tell if these attacked them or not.”
“Wait—wait,” Dr. Curie interjected and pushed quickly to her feet. “I have an idea, actually.” She raised her hand as she spoke like a schoolchild asking to be allowed to comment on something.
“Really?” The Bull replied, her hands on her hips. “You are a Zoo virgin. Maybe you have ideas that will be useful in the lab, but not so much out here. Please do not interfere with our judgment when we are trying to make a decision.” The woman adopted the tone she usually employed when someone needed to be told to shut up but, by her standards, relatively gently.
The Englishwoman wrinkled her brow in confusion. Again, she seemed anxious with the need to say something. Jan had to admit he was curious and at the moment, he did not have any ingenious ideas of his own.
“Let us hear her out, Ferris,” he said. “Sometimes, the outside observer sees things that are useful to the person who is inside. They see it from a different perspective. She may have something to offer us since we are stuck right now anyway.”
The Bull responded with a sour grimace and a nod, turned toward the researcher, and waited to hear her theory. Behind them, the troops fell into formation once more.
“Well, then,” Curie said and looked pleased to at least be heard if not necessarily appreciated. “I…ah, was able to study the files discussing most of the prior research on and observation of the Zoo,” she began. “It included summaries of the most frequently-sighted creatures and their observed behaviors, and this was then weighed against what we already know about the Earth animals they seem to be patterned after.”
“Yes, yes, we do not need to know all the background information,” The Bull chided impatiently.
The woman flushed slightly but tightened the muscles along her jaw and continued. “Anyway…all the intel that has been aggregated so far suggests that these monsters have a fairly small hunting radius. Packs of them seem to choose a location, claim it as their territory, defend it, and content themselves to hunt only within that area. If the other German unit—or the American unit before them—were attacked by these
creatures, we must be close.”
Jan sighed. “Yes, but how will we know? We cannot check the pockets of the cerberuscrocs to see if they have stolen Klaus’s credit card, can we?”
Ferris chuckled at that. He hadn’t specifically meant to be funny, but he would take what he could get.
Dr. Curie simply shrugged. “Well, they eat people, don’t they? We can simply check their stomachs.”
He raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Yes, Dr. Curie, it would seem you have proven useful after all.” She had probably done enough dissections that such a thing would occur to her. He typically only opened one of these creatures’ stomachs when he used a gun.
Without further comment, he turned to his troops. “Search the bodies of the cerberuscrocs. Look for any who look fat or full as if they’ve had a meal recently.” The men responded with an appreciable lack of curious expressions.
Leutnant Ferris moved closer to Jan. In German, she said to him: “Of course, you would not have thought of that. You don’t eat enough.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Look at this big, fat-ass bastard,” Unteroffizier Wenzel said in English and prodded the gut of a dead cerberuscroc with the tip of his boot.
“Yes, he looks perfect,” Laura agreed. “And his abdomen wasn’t even damaged during the firefight, so that should eliminate any complicating factors.” Indeed, it would make the coming necropsy much more difficult if they had to try to separate bullets, buckshot, shrapnel, or pieces of the cerberuscrocs’s own body from whatever it had willingly put into its stomach. This particular fat-ass bastard had fortunately had his head blown off instead. She wondered idly why the soldiers hadn’t aimed for his torso since it made such a large and obvious target, but that was beside the point. His heads must have simply been in the wrong place—say, right in front of a shotgun—at the wrong time.
Wenzel and another man, whom Laura recognized as the round-faced young Doctor Who fan, took hold of the gruesomely decapitated monster and heaved it up between them while they wrinkled their noses at the stench of its spilled blood. The creature probably hadn’t smelled very pleasant even before they’d killed it. The two of them placed it on a mostly-horizontal fallen log. It lay splayed out with its clawed limbs dangling to the sides and its pale downy abdomen facing upward.
Hauptmann Shalwar and Leutnant Ferris came closer to stand, watch, and listen.
“Right, then,” Laura said and took a deep breath to steel herself. She had performed quite a few dissections in her time but never on something so big or so recently deceased. Not only that, she’d never had to look for chewed-up pieces of people before. “Ahh…” she said awkwardly and looked around, “I don’t seem to have a knife. Could one of you…”
“Of course,” Jan said, although he sounded annoyed. He looked at her with his usual stern, calm, even-tempered expression and reached to his side. “Rule Number Seventy-One. Always carry a knife.” He drew a medium-length, well-polished blade with a simple black grip and extended it handle-first toward her.
“Thank you, sir,” she responded and took it quickly. “How on Earth did you manage to get all the way up to seventy-one rules, though? That makes me curious as to what is between that one and Number Forty-Two.”
“Perhaps you will have the opportunity to learn every last one of them,” he remarked and the corner of his mouth tweaked a little in a wry but infuriating fashion. “I have great faith in your need to be reminded of them all. Now, if you please, begin your examination.”
“Yes,” she replied. To her pleasant surprise, Ferris suddenly handed her a plastic sample bag. The German military must have realized early on that they might need to take samples in the jungle. She thanked the woman and turned to the corpse.
Since this creature was, after all, an alien mutant from hell, there was no way to guarantee its anatomy would be identical to that of any particular Earth creature, but the files she’d read had suggested that most of the Zoo’s beasts were fairly similar. It looked similar, anyway. There was no reason to suspect the stomach was inside its leg or some such nonsense. She chose a spot and plunged the blade into it.
Gas escaped around the puncture and made a long, wet farting sound. Most of the troops laughed and a couple made comments to each other in German. Laura would probably have laughed herself had she been among them but where she stood now, the close-up view of the creature’s steaming innards assaulted her and seemed to temporarily paralyze her sense of humor. She was simply glad her helmet meant she couldn’t smell anything.
“Oh, dear,” she said softly as she cut down and to the side. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it…” At least the knife was extremely sharp. Jan struck her as the type who probably tended to the edge on a daily basis. Once finished with her incisions, she reached into the cut itself and folded back a large flap of skin and muscle to expose the mess within.
A soldier behind her said something and among the foreign words, she recognized “goulash.” It was a fairly accurate comparison, she had to admit.
“Right, well,” she began, “this does appear to be the stomach, and it’s far from empty. It looks like the digestion process has already begun, but some creatures digest things more slowly than others, so I can’t be certain how long since it ate last. Let me see if any of…this…ah, looks familiar.” She began to poke around in the slop.
“I will help,” Hauptmann Shalwar said, pulled a pair of gloves onto his hands, and knelt beside her. “I have some experience in identifying human remains.”
“I suppose you do, yes,” she replied, and suddenly felt cold when she considered the implications of that. Still, it would be helpful under their current circumstances.
As he dug through the lower part of the stomach, she searched the upper and her fingers closed around something hard. “Shit,” she muttered. “This feels like…teeth? Part of a jaw, maybe. Ugh.” She dragged the piece forward and up. It was definitely the side portion of a bloody human jawbone with molars still in place.
Jan stopped and looked at it. “We cannot do dental identification ourselves but at least we can take it back.” He took the jawbone from her and placed it into another plastic bag that Ferris had opened for him. “Leutnant, please photograph the teeth. We will take the sample itself with us when we return.”
“Yes, Hauptmann,” she replied.
Laura felt something else and paused. “Yes, I’ve found another…ah, something. It might be tough bodily tissue of some kind, but it almost feels like cloth.” She dragged it free from the rest of the stomach’s contents. To her surprise, it was indeed exactly that. In fact, it looked like part of someone’s uniform. She tried to wipe the blood off it to see if they could identify anything.
The hauptmann glanced at it, said something over his shoulder, and a moment later, accepted a paper tissue from someone behind him. She held the scrap of cloth as he rubbed it.
“American,” he observed after a moment. “Most of the flag decal is even still intact. Yes, this must be from the US team that went missing, to begin with. We are in the correct area.” He took his knife, wiped it on a clean part of the same tissue, and returned it to its sheath at his side.
“Good,” Laura said, suddenly glad that her idea had borne productive fruit. “Does that mean that this other commander…ahh, Klaus I think his name was, ought to be around also?” She supposed it was a stupid, obvious question, but hearing the answer would help clarify exactly what they were looking for in her own mind.
“Yes, it is very likely,” answered Jan. “Klaus is not a complete imbecile. Whatever might have happened to him or whatever mistakes he might have made, he would have at least managed to find the correct coordinates and keep his search in that area. He and his men should not be far if they are still alive.”
He stood and turned toward Ferris and his troops. “Hauptmann Grossman’s unit would have been in this area. We must find out which way they went.” He followed this basic statement with more detailed instructions in German.
Laura stood as well. She wasn’t sure if the hauptmann wanted her to continue the necropsy for further clues, but she guessed probably not. It seemed more likely that they wanted to move out as quickly as possible. Plus, he’d taken his knife. Fairly sure that she’d made the right guess, she removed her gloves and dropped them onto the bloody remains of the cerberuscroc.
A couple of the soldiers conversed with their leader via a private communication channel in their HUDs. They seemed to be trying to decide on a course of action. After a moment, Jan paused, closed his eyes for a second, and nodded slowly. He must have made a difficult decision. A slight fluttering stirred in her stomach as she thought of what it might be and hoped it was nothing too terrible. She was not as scared as she probably should be, but the recent battle had impressed upon her that this was more than a simple nature walk.
“Yes, very well,” the hauptmann said through an open communication channel. “We will split up to search the immediate area. It is normally not good policy to divide a force. If the enemy is present, each smaller group is weakened and may be attacked one by one by a stronger opposing force, which may also cut them off from rejoining the others. But we have very little time and we must cover a large amount of possible ground quickly.
“There will be ten groups of four that will go no more than one hundred meters from our current position. Each one will try to stay within sight and hearing range of the two other groups closest to it so that they can easily aid one another in the event of an attack. The goal is to look for any sign that troops might have marched through your sector. We will spend only ten minutes on this. Do it.”
Ferris and the Feldwebels began to divide the men and repeated the orders in German and clarified them for the benefit of those soldiers who had difficulty understanding English.
Galaxia Page 100