“Excuse me,” Laura said to Jan, “are we quite done with our necropsy, then? And will I join this search?”
“We need everyone available,” he explained, “so yes. We could not leave you behind by yourself and unprotected, in any event. And we have found what we need from the dead cerberuscroc. I take it you do not want to continue probing around in its bowels?” He raised an eyebrow and looked evenly at her.
“Oh, hmm,” she said and folded her arms over her chest. “Not particularly. But I will most assuredly let you know if I have a change of heart.”
Chapter Sixteen
“We four will go,” Leutnant Ferris said. She pointed to herself, Soldat Mann, another fellow, and the researcher. “You heard the hauptmann’s orders. Come!” She gestured sharply with one of her thick, strong hands.
“Very well,” Laura said. She thought it odd that she, the civilian, was put on the same team as Mann, whose left arm had been badly injured by a locust and could now only wield a pistol in his right hand. Not to mention that they’d given him painkillers and told him that he would only fight as a last resort. That meant half of their little team consisted of noncombatants.
Of course, the logic could have been that Ferris being in the group made up for the apparent weakness. Laura was fairly sure that even some of the Zoo beasties might have been afraid of her.
The leutnant led the way and moved with almost shocking speed despite her relative shortness and bulk, followed by Laura and Mann, with the other soldier to guard the rear. The area of the jungle they were given to explore lay immediately beyond the log where Laura had dissected the dead cerberuscroc. The other teams were already fanning out in nine other directions.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” she asked in a soft voice. Before Ferris had chosen her team, Jan had instructed them all to avoid excessive noise. Granted, they’d blasted their guns enough for half the Sahara to hear. But, as he’d explained, individual creatures or small packs might flee from that kind of racket, only to then be attracted to smaller noises that suggested easier prey.
“Anything,” Ferris replied. Now that they’d pushed a short way into the jungle, she slowed to allow them to search more thoroughly. “Anything that looks important.”
“Well, that’s not terribly specific,” Laura muttered. “This whole place looks important to me.”
The woman merely grunted and ignored the comment. She studied the area in front of her for signs of movement or other obvious threats and then likely re-analyzed what she saw for any evidence of Klaus’s team or the Americans. Soldat Mann, to Laura’s left, did likewise, and she supposed their fourth member copied them in the rear. She looked to the right.
There were trees and plants, of course. What else did she expect to see? All of them looked fascinating in their own way, but she saw no obvious signs of recent disturbances, no discarded guns or bloodstains, no bodies, no burn marks, and no trash—nothing, in fact, that might indicate the previous passage of the other teams.
“Are we still actually within sight and earshot of the other teams?” she asked as they pressed on. She knew she shouldn’t annoy the others but when it came to the Zoo, she preferred safety in numbers. “I’m not sure how we’re supposed to manage that in a place like this. The jungle is so dense and confusing that I don’t even know where we are. Have we gone in a straight line?”
“Hey!” Ferris spun to face her. “You—shut up.” The woman had planted one fist on her hip, and her other hand was raised to point its index finger at her. She glared, and her mouth was drawn tightly into a kind of puckered scowl. If someone else had done it, it might have looked ridiculous, but Leutnant Ferris made it look appropriately intimidating. In fact, she looked like a bull about to charge.
“Hauptmann Shalwar knows what he is doing,” she went on. “He has saved us all many times and he saved you today. Be quiet and do as you are told.”
“Sorry,” Laura replied. Her voice drooped in inflection a little and sounded sheepish. Ferris was right about Jan having saved her earlier, at least. She couldn’t know the truth of what he might have done in the past, but nothing suggested that the woman was lying to inflate the man’s image. It struck her that the leutnant greatly respected her superior officer, perhaps even loved him in a familial kind of way. Despite her irritation with the man, she knew there must be a good reason for his men’s high opinion of him.
They pressed on a little farther. Laura thought she could hear the shuffles of the other two teams somewhere to each side, but it still seemed that their group had become isolated in the jungle. If their leader did not seem so confident of where she was going, she would have assumed they were lost.
She looked up and a little ahead. To her surprise, she did, finally, notice something worth taking note of. A tree—which looked like a mutated date palm of considerable thickness and maturity—had odd marks scratched into its trunk.
“Huh,” she mumbled. “I’ll…ah, investigate a mark on this tree.” She pushed through a patch of hard, clinging bushes on her way toward it. None of the soldiers responded, but she assumed they must have heard her. The jungle was quiet.
As she drew closer, she realized that the marks were definitely not the result of simple weather cracking or anything of that kind. Each was a cut or gouge, most likely fresh and recent, made with something like a knife or an ax …or a claw, perhaps. She stepped out of the mass of bushes and weeds and now stood only a few feet from the base of the tree. The light was dim but she could see the mark well enough from there.
It resembled a very crude X shape. Someone or something had made two diagonal slashes across the bark, one more or less on top of the other. She squinted. A knife, hatchet, or machete would have been cleaner, she assumed. The gashes were not very deep, and they were ragged as though something had torn through and pulled little pieces of bark as it went. That suggested something hook-shaped. A claw, then.
“How odd…” For a moment, she was lost in thought as something came to her—a memory or rather a fragment of one like an indistinct impression from a dream. She had seen something like this before or heard about it. At some point in her career as a researcher, she was quite certain, she had encountered a theory or hypothesis about creatures that engaged in this behavior or something very similar.
But what? She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
It wasn’t anything she’d read about the Zoo. Of that much, at least, she was certain. There had been no reference in any of the files to Zoo creatures marking their territory by scratching Xs into trees. She would have remembered that. This meant that either the mark was made by human hands, after all—unlikely though that seemed—or that they might be dealing with the emergence of an entirely new species.
Suddenly, she was excited. A feeling of tension rose from her gut to spread throughout her body, but it was a pleasant kind. This was a real scientific discovery, a secret waiting to be uncovered.
Soldat Mann wandered up behind her. He looked slightly dazed and the bandage around his left arm was dark with dried blood. “What have you found?” he asked.
“Ah, well, I’m not sure,” Laura replied. “A marking of some sort, I think made by a species we haven’t seen yet. It could be something important. Where are the others?” When she looked around, she realized they were out of sight. They seemed to have wandered into the densest, darkest part of the entire Zoo that she’d seen thus far.
Mann, with his good arm, gestured vaguely behind them.
“Well, let’s find them then. Or you could bring them here while I take a picture of this. I only hope you’ll be able to find me again. I can’t see a thing in any direction from here.”
“You come with me,” Mann said. He apparently did not want to leave her alone.
“Very well. Oh! There they—” Her eye had caught a flash of motion in the bushes a little behind where Mann now stood. She did not, however, recall any of the German soldiers wearing murky-brown uniforms.
Her eyes bu
lged with horror. “Get out of the—”
The cerberuscroc burst out of its hiding place with a loud growl. Before Laura could even react, the creature had head-butted the soldat in the midst of its pounce. He gasped and fell forward, fast and hard, rolled, and pounded into the base of the nearest tree. His expression dazed, he groaned, and blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. More seeped from his arm where the fall had broken his wound open again. The pistol was still held tightly in his right hand.
“Help!” Laura shouted. “Ferris! Anyone?” She glanced frantically around her for a weapon of some kind.
The cerberuscroc looked at her with three sets of shiny eyes and the three heads worked in bizarre unison as if controlled by a single will. She froze for barely an instant before she and the creature moved at the same time.
It lunged forward and attempted to bite her with one of its venom-dripping fangs as she threw herself to the side. The result was that she glanced off the beast’s shoulder and was thrown aside in an ungainly roll, while the creature was pushed slightly off-course toward the fallen Soldat Mann.
She scrambled up as quickly as she could and snatched up a reasonably sturdy-looking stick. It made for a poor weapon but it was the best she could find. “Over here,” she called, and rustlings suggested that someone approached. She could see parts of suits through the foliage and turned and ran toward Mann, which also meant she ran directly toward the ass-end of the cerberuscroc.
The creature had either decided he was the easier prey or had been attracted to the smell of his spilled blood—or both. It reared and lunged toward him.
“Get away from him,” Laura cried and thwacked its rear as hard as she could. Unfortunately, the stick broke against its haunch and it simply ignored her.
He screamed in the same moment that Leutnant Ferris erupted out of the bushes with her rifle up. She fired almost instantly. The gun crackled explosively in her hands and the cerberuscroc shrieked and toppled. It took at least three rounds in the chest and shoulder and another three in the neck, and although it continued to thrash, it was bleeding heavily. Already, its movements had weakened. It would not get up. The woman shot it once more under the jaw to scatter blood, brains, and bone-fragments onto the vegetation behind.
Laura looked at Mann. They’d been too late. The mutant had already gouged his upper abdomen open with one or more of its heads, most likely destroying his stomach and perhaps his heart as well. His head lolled, his eyes had turned glassy, and as paralysis had already taken over, only one of his feet still twitched.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Shit. Shit. I tried to save him…”
Ferris strode to the fallen soldier’s side as the other man, who’d brought up their rear, emerged behind her. It sounded like troops from the adjacent teams also rushed to their position.
Totally stunned, she barely registered the soldiers. Everything had happened so quickly that even now, her brain seemed to have placed her on hold while it reviewed the recent events and tried to determine what in God’s name had occurred. Ferris examined Mann, checked his pulse, and stood. “He is dead,” she said.
“Scheisse,” the fourth man muttered.
She studied the leutnant and realized that the woman was upset, deep down, but that she had tremendous control and kept herself on emotional lockdown until further notice. That brought home the fact that she had probably seen this kind of thing happen before, as awful as that was to contemplate.
“Our ten minutes are up,” Ferris said, her jaw set and eyes narrowed. “It is time to meet up with the rest of the team.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jan allowed himself to frown but not too much. He should not appear callous in front of the troops, but neither should he seem too emotional or unstable. He hated losing men and he cared about every one of them. At the same time, they looked up to him as their rock, their firmly fixed point where things did not waver or weaken.
“What are your next orders, sir?” The Bull asked. The others watched and waited in silence.
The effort to divide the troops in search of clues had been a failure. Not only had they found nothing of definite value, but Soldat Mann had been killed. This was unfortunate enough on its own, but it also reduced the effectiveness of their unit. With every soldier lost, the mathematical odds of the rest of the group’s success decreased. Each death made them that much weaker and by default, the Zoo that much stronger. He always had to calculate this relentless logic of survival.
“We will move on according to our prior course,” he said. “The coordinates we operated on previously were close enough to point us in the right direction. Also, Dr. Curie’s examination of the cerberuscroc’s meal suggests that we are close.”
He paused and looked upward. The sky had begun to darken and the quality of the light shifted. They had been out for too long. The battle with the locusts and cerberuscrocs, the medical attention to the troops in its aftermath, and this search had all delayed them in their quest to reach Klaus’s position. Besides, the missing hauptmann had obviously been too deep into the jungle for a quick in and out extraction, anyway.
He recalled Rule Number Five. Never stay in the Zoo after dark unless absolutely necessary. He wanted to turn back. They could still be beyond the borders of the jungle by nightfall if they retreated immediately. But no, the soldier in him insisted. In this case, staying out there as long as it took to complete the mission was absolutely necessary.
This was not a routine patrol nor a scouting expedition. Klaus and the men and women who had accompanied him might need aid as soon as possible—if any of them had survived. He and his team had a duty to find them and bring them back, no matter what.
“They cannot be far,” he went on. “We will continue the search past nightfall if we must. I will give the order to activate our lights when and if necessary. Until then, do not activate any of them. The Zoo creatures can hunt in the dark, and if we must do the same, we will.”
“Yes, sir,” Ferris said, and she and the Feldwebels resumed their usual duty of getting the men back into formation as they all prepared to continue the hunt. The job would get done. They were still a good group and a strong force. Their odds of success were still reasonable.
As the column began to move out toward the coordinates they’d postulated and according to the rough trail Wenzel had identified, Jan noticed the British woman fall out of formation again and work her way toward him. He steeled himself in preparation for whatever it was she had to say or ask—probably something inane, although she had, on the whole, exceeded his expectations thus far.
“Excuse me, Hauptmann, ah, Shalwar,” she said.
“Yes, Doctor?” he replied.
“I’m terribly sorry, but I actually did find something. That horrid three-headed, crocodile-dog attacking and poor Soldat Mann passing away, was…difficult…and I temporarily forgot.”
He felt a slight inner stab of annoyance. It would have been better if she’d suddenly remembered this five minutes ago. However, he recalled his vague personal pledge to be patient with her. She had very likely never seen a person die before, especially not by violence.
“Yes, what is it you found?” he asked and kept his tone gentle but tried to imply that he did not wish to spend much time conversing.
“Well, it was a marking of sorts in the trunk of a tree,” she explained. “Something clawed an X symbol into it—two diagonal scratches, like so.” She pantomimed two slashing motions that crossed over each other and answered his next question even before he could ask it. “And no, I don’t think it was made by a human being. Somehow, it didn’t look like it had been done with a tool or weapon. More like a claw, I’d say. I haven’t read or heard anything about any of the Zoo’s creatures doing that in the past.”
“That is interesting,” he admitted, “but what does it mean and how might it help us in our present mission?”
“I don’t quite know.” She shrugged. “My best guess is that it means a new species has emerged here�
��perhaps one intelligent enough to use visual indicators to mark its territory.” She paused and seemed to consider something for a moment. “And obviously, it would have claws. Although bloody near all of them seem to have those.”
“This is true,” he quipped. “And that might be of some use to us. If there is yet another deadly creature roaming about here, we will be aware of it and must learn how to fight it.” He glanced around into the darkening jungle, still empty of signs of their quarry. “But it does not do us any good in our main business of finding Klaus and his team. We do not have time for a nature scavenger hunt. Until we have located them, we cannot deviate for other purposes.”
“But it might actually provide some clues as to what’s happened to them,” Curie persisted. “Whatever has happened, it’s very likely that the Zoo’s creatures were involved in it in one way or another—perhaps driving them in a particular direction, even if they weren’t badly attacked.”
“That is possible, yes,” he agreed. “But understand that this is a rescue mission and only a rescue mission. We are here to find them and leave with them. Studying new species or learning to fight them is something we can focus on later.”
“Very good, yes,” she agreed, “but I have a hypothesis—or a theory as most people say, although that’s not really correct in this case—that suggests that there may not be much of a later in which to learn and adapt to what is coming.”
That was a disturbing notion. Even before she began to prattle away as to the nature of this theory—as he had no doubt she would begin to do at any moment—he hoped she was wrong. The Zoo had unleashed more than its share of unpleasant surprises over the past year, though, so hope was really all it was.
Curie proved instantly that his suspicion was correct. She began to talk without being asked or otherwise given permission. He rolled his eyes internally. She was nearly as bad as an American.
“I’ve studied the natural history of the Zoo in some detail,” she began. “From its beginnings at what is now known as Wall Zero deep in the heart of the jungle, through its initial expansion to the edge of Wall One, and into its current phase after the Surge toward Wall Two. Throughout the past and through all these stages of its development, it seems to be the case that it has always behaved strangely right before a massive change occurs.
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