As he tried to strangle this one, however, the others lunged toward him. He broke the neck of the one in his grasp as the others snapped at his arms and head.
With his right arm, he elbowed one that had aimed for his right cheek and it sprawled with a squawk. The other two closed in. All it would take was for one of them to get past his arms and attack his belly or his throat, and he was done.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
Jan’s gaze rolled toward the voice as he struggled to fend the two creatures off. As he had done with the first one, he pounded the one to his right into the ground when it bit into his right arm. This time, his diminutive attacker retreated to plan a new line of attack.
Then three single-shots, definitely from a pistol, rang out and the baby primaraptor’s head and neck exploded in a shower of bone, muscle, brain matter, and blood. One of the bullets kicked up a spray of mud only a few centimeters from his side but none of them struck him.
A form rushed down through the eggs toward him. It lashed out with a booted foot and kicked the last of the four hungry mutants hard enough to careen it out of sight. The one he had elbowed a moment before simply stood and stared dumbly at this intruder. The pistol blazed twice more, and blood spurted as the creature fell dead.
He dragged in a rasping breath and looked up.
Dr. Laura Curie smiled at him in an almost goofy, ecstatic way, as though she were as pleasantly surprised with the situation as he was.
“You know,” she said, “it’s almost unseemly how often I keep saving you.”
The hauptmann allowed himself a dry chuckle, even amidst the pain from his multiple wounds and the noise and chaos around them. “Thank you,” he replied. “Your help seems to…help.”
“Well,” she retorted smartly, “I wouldn’t have to save you like this if you simply followed the damn rules.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Laura stretched her hand out, intending to help Jan stand. Her elation at seeing him alive—and having even managed to rescue him herself at the last moment—faded somewhat when she saw how badly injured he was.
“Wait,” he began and made no effort to take her hand. “I injured my right leg. The calf muscle is badly strained and perhaps worse. I can barely move and may not be able to stand.”
“Well, shit,” she replied. That did complicate things, but she was sure they could manage somehow. “I can help you up the slope, but you’ll need to work with me. Let me see if someone else can…” She looked around. “Gunter!” she yelled.
Soldat Grün walked on the rim of the depression directly above them. He stopped and looked at her.
“I’ve found Hauptmann Shalwar. His leg is badly injured, though. Help me get him up.”
“Ja,” the young man agreed and rushed down toward them. He glanced at the thousands upon thousands of eggs as he wove his way between them, clearly uneasy at the prospect of their hatching. She felt much the same way. At any moment, they might crack open and disclose a small army of miniature assassins that could easily overwhelm them. But right now, she was focused on Jan.
“I should be able to brace myself with my left leg,” he said, “if you two can lift me from either side and keep my right leg from moving too much. Do you have medical supplies?”
“In the trucks, yes, and our medic might have some basic mobile things, but we don’t have crutches with us at the moment,” she informed him with a frown. “We couldn’t bring the vehicles all the way down into the nest and had to come in on foot. I would have liked to simply drive through the wall, but this place is mostly underground, actually, so that wasn’t feasible.”
He grunted, his mind already focused on the struggle ahead.
As Grün came up beside them, she noticed that the sounds of gunfire above and around them had grown more sporadic and the voices of the team sounded more relaxed. There were also sounds of men pulling their knives and working to free the other prisoners, some of whom moaned or wailed, given the pitiable state they were in.
Still, for the time being, they had won. But they had to hurry.
“Gunter, you’re stronger than I am,” she pointed out, “so I’ll pick Jan up on his left side so he can use that leg to partially support himself. You pick him up from the right and be careful not to disturb his right leg any more than necessary.”
Jan repeated and probably clarified these instructions to the young man in German before they set to work.
Laura knelt, wrapped one arm under his left shoulder, and put another hand under his waist. Across the hauptmann’s supine form, she saw Gunter kneel as well and put his hands beneath him. He propped the injured right leg up at an angle and bent the knee, and Jan uttered a sharp, ragged cry of pain. She was alarmed, but she realized that he had probably told Gunter to do this simply to get his leg into the proper position to be lifted and then to avoid touching it thereafter.
“All right, heave,” she said. They both rose and took his weight—which wasn’t actually all that much—between them while he clenched his jaw and beads of sweat ran down his reddening face. His left hand clutched her jacket, but it trembled noticeably. She tried to be gentle as he got his left leg under him and they eased him slowly into a standing position with his right leg still bent to keep it off the ground the way one would carry a leg if it were in a cast.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she remarked.
“My opinion may be different than yours,” Jan responded and panted with exertion and pain. “But thank you. Now, help me up the slope. I will have to hop on one leg. Soldat Grün should be able to mostly support me on the right but having you on my left will improve my balance.”
They did as he instructed and worked their way up, weaving through the masses of eggs. Slowly, the rest of the dome came into view.
The interior of the nest was enormous. It had looked big enough from above-ground as they’d started down into the natural pit into which it had been built, but Laura was fairly sure she’d underestimated its size even then. Furthermore, it seemed to have other, extra chambers that branched off into the depths of the earth.
And that, more than anything, was what worried her.
“How did you find us?” Jan asked.
“Well, part of it was pure dumb luck, to be honest,” she admitted. “But part of it was also me being a brilliant scientist, of course, and your men being good trackers.”
“That sounds…accurate,” said the hauptmann.
“I remembered almost exactly where that the creature dragged you in at the edge of the Zoo,” she explained. “I thought it would be better to come back for you with proper backup.”
“Yes.” He breathed raggedly, still struggling as he supported himself between the shoulders of his rescuers. “Now go on.”
“We drove the armored trucks straight into the jungle at that point, moved slowly enough that the men could keep an eye out for any disturbances that a dinosaur dragging a grown man might make, and mostly went in a straight line. We did come to an area where they weren’t quite certain which way to go, but as it so happens, X marks the spot.”
“Another marking,” he surmised.
“Yes. Everyone wisely heeded my suggestion that we go that way and soon, we almost literally stumbled onto this…place. It’s really quite extraordinary. The primaraptors found what is essentially a large pit and built this dome from their own phlegm as well as a few trees growing at the bottom, although the top protrudes slightly above the ground. Unfortunately, there was no way in from up above with the vehicles, so we had to dismount and take a ravine that turned into a tunnel. We might also have climbed down the slopes on either side and ended up at the base of the dome, which would have avoided the tunnel. There is a relatively level area at the base and it seems the creatures use at least one entrance there. But it is very steep and treacherous, and we knew we couldn’t carry wounded soldiers up it so had to find an alternative.”
Jan nodded. “That snakecat must have climbed down thinking its
agility would give it the advantage. Anyway, good,” he said, “but a tunnel is dangerous. It can become a trap very quickly like that passage through the bushes we crawled through earlier when the locust attacked us. We must be careful.”
“True,” she replied. “At least we haven’t run into any locusts yet.”
They crested the slope and found themselves among the rest of the team, who were regrouping near the edge of the nest not far from where they’d come in.
“Hauptmann Shalwar!” someone exclaimed.
Soldat Grün replied to this in German, his tone amiable and excited, and a few others discussed their rescue of the man in similar tones. Their eyes shone. They had succeeded at what they’d set out to do—so far.
“Hey!” a voice bellowed, and everyone immediately fell silent. A few soldiers parted to make way for the stout form that almost charged out from between them.
“Good to see you, Leutnant Ferris,” Jan said.
The Bull looked at him, her hands on her wide hips. Then, she extended one hand and began counting on her fingers, starting with her thumb in the odd German way.
“Rule Number One… Five… Eleven… Twenty-Eight… and perhaps a few more,” she snapped.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he retorted but grinned despite his harsh tone. “Be silent, woman.”
A few soldiers laughed and The Bull smiled. She seemed about to pounce and crush him in a giant bear hug and Laura started to raise a hand to discourage this, but Ferris noticed the hauptmann’s injuries at the last moment and settled for a gentle embrace.
“Do not get out of line again,” she said.
“Do not forget your rank,” he chided as he caught his breath.
Laura realized that she had a certain duty to disrupt this pleasant moment. “All right, we need to get moving as quickly as possible,” she said. “It’s not safe to stay here. And I don’t mean for the usual reasons that nowhere in the Zoo is ever safe.”
Jan looked at her with a frown. “Why? What do you mean?”
She was pleased that he considered her opinion worthy of important attention but wished it could be a little more optimistic.
Before she answered, she took about two seconds to scan the scene around them to make sure she hadn’t missed anything important and to form a quick mental summary of their overall situation and the positions of their team.
First and most importantly, they had won their brief battle against the primaraptors that guarded the nest. There had only been five of them versus thirty-odd humans, and although still fast, strong, and deadly, the creatures were not as effective in the open without the jungle’s foliage to mask their tactics. Two men had been wounded but none killed. All five of the mutants now lay dead.
They had also located and freed all the other troops which included Hauptmann Grossman and the remainder of his team, plus a couple of men snatched on previous missions. There were twenty-five of them in all. According to what Ferris had told her during their drive, there should have been slightly more, which meant that the soldiers not accounted for were almost certainly dead, having already been eaten somewhere else.
Furthermore, four of the twenty-five had also died of natural causes over the course of their long captivity and half of the surviving twenty-one barely held on, certainly in no condition to fight. The rescuers had moved the casualties to the center of the formation. There were enough of them that she almost wished they’d brought four vehicles instead of three. It might be a tight fit.
Laura looked at the German soldiers gathered before and around her. “The danger is that we haven’t seen the entire inside of this place,” she began, “and I’ve noticed that the creatures we’ve fought here are all males. Pardon me, but it seems they have mammalian anatomy in addition to fur. I saw that before but it didn’t quite register until now. I’m not sure that any of those we’ve encountered thus far have been female, although I have seen one female—the one who pursued us through the Zoo.”
“Yes, so?” someone asked.
“That suggests,” she continued, “that instead of a usual half-and-half gender ratio, they might have a…queen or something—like bees or ants. Something that’s laid all these eggs. For all we know they might have other nests too—young females could go out and start their own colonies elsewhere as a way to expand their numbers.”
There was silence for a brief instant and then, from the middle of the troop where the wounded were being tended to, someone said: “I saw something.”
A few people parted to let the man speak. Laura saw that it was a fellow slightly younger than Jan, very muscular but who looked severely weakened by his imprisonment.
“What, Klaus?” Jan asked.
“Soon after they brought us here…” The man exhaled and seemed to gather his thoughts. “I saw something move around in the shadows. I thought maybe I was dreaming. It was”—he spread his hands expansively before him—“big.”
“Let us get out of here,” Jan ordered. “Move the wounded first. We—”
“That!” Klaus snapped, his voice pitched higher now. He stared, wide-eyed, and pointed somewhere beyond them. “Exactly like that.”
Everyone turned and looked.
At first, Laura noticed nothing. The man had indicated a distant point far toward the other side of the egg-pit and shrouded in deep brown gloom. She squinted and finally saw it, and her heart suddenly felt like it had dropped into her stomach and knocked both organs out her ass to leave a drafty hollow within her.
Within the shadows was another shadow—a silhouette even darker than the ones around it. The creature was enormous, much like a primaraptor but taller and thicker, gross and bulbous. It now moved toward them and increased speed.
“Scheisse…” someone gasped.
“Gehen! Move!” Jan ordered.
Four soldiers ran ahead toward the mouth of the tunnel they’d used to penetrate the dome to clear the way and make sure it was safe. The others helped the injured and unconscious in the same direction, hurrying as best they could without doing further harm. Another four remained near the rear to cover their retreat.
Laura focused on helping Jan limp toward their only route of escape. As she did so, she glanced back.
The huge dark shadow was closer now and followed the outside of the nest to avoid the eggs. Other, smaller silhouettes materialized around it. These approached far more rapidly.
“There are more of them,” she announced and raised her voice. “Coming from that direction.”
“Rear guard—full auto, suppressing fire,” Jan commanded. “No grenades. The dome could collapse on us.”
The three men and one woman who guarded the rear of their formation did as ordered. In unison, their rifles roared to life and illuminated the dark nest with flashes of yellow and orange luminescence as they sprayed their entire magazines in the general direction of the advancing mass.
One of the smaller shadows—undoubtedly another of the male guardian primaraptors—fell and stiffened, and the others in front slowed, possibly wounded. The distance was too great and visibility too low for them to have killed any others, Laura realized. Unfortunately, the massive shadow behind them still pressed forward and picked up momentum as it urged its great bulk forward.
The four rear guards quickly reloaded and hurried to keep up with those in the center. Speed was probably their only chance now. The ground, Laura realized, was echoing with the pounding footsteps.
The first of the troops helped the wounded file into the tunnel. It was only wide enough for them to stand about two abreast, so the formation hit a bottleneck and slowed as they tried to help the worst injured in first but without delaying the egress of everyone else. Ferris and a couple of the sergeants issued orders loudly and provided guidance while they also took a hands-on approach to move the process forward.
Soon, the only people left outside the tunnel were Laura, Jan, Gunter, Klaus, and the four rear guards.
“Slow them again. Burst fire,” Jan said to the four
.
She glanced back. There had to be at least eight or nine more mutants rushing toward them, their shrieking hisses now audible, and behind them, coming into focus now in the dim light, was their queen.
“Gott in himmel!” one of the rear guards exclaimed.
The primaraptor queen was much like her servants in basic physiognomy but at least twice their size in build and morbidly, hideously obese. Such was the bulk of her bloated, corpulent form that she almost resembled a gigantic toad-creature more than a lizard. She had large, sagging, swaying breasts and long pointed nails at the ends of her monkey-like hands. Her huge mouth gaped to reveal razor-sharp teeth and a long purplish tongue, and her eyes rolled crazily in her skull. The fur atop her head resembled a tattered mohawk, and both it and the fur on her body were bright red with killing intent.
“Oh, dear,” Laura muttered.
The queen roared. Somehow, it was both horribly deep and gravel-edged and high-pitched to make it distinctly feminine. It reminded her of what one might expect of a female opera singer who had destroyed her own voice by excessive smoking and drinking. A tremor shuddered through the earth.
“We might need explosives to kill that,” someone exclaimed.
“Just get us out of here,” Jan snapped.
They stumbled into the tunnel. No sooner had they passed the threshold and stepped into the almost total blackness of the subterranean passage than someone toward the front shouted something in German. Whatever it was the man said, he was clearly not happy, and she almost froze in sudden terror.
“The tunnel is blocked,” the hauptmann translated. The bottom seemed to drop out of his voice and he hung his head. “Damn.”
“How could it be blocked? It was perfectly clear only a few minutes ago!” Laura raged. “Either some of those things snuck around and collapsed on us deliberately, or else—”
The tunnel shook. A few particles of earth dislodged themselves from the ceiling and fell onto her head. “Bloody hell,” she said. “That disgusting creature is a hazard to the integrity of its own lair, for God’s sake. Although she probably doesn’t move around very much most of the time.”
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