by Michael Todd
There was no response, but the three remaining HUDs came back online with the sound of gunfire over the comms. Shouted orders for the three men to regroup could be heard before the HUD from Blue Leader suddenly flipped on. The image of a massive monster came into view. It was blurred since the movement was so quick, and the footage vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Shit,” he growled and turned to Addison as the two remaining members of Blue Team began to run. He could see Blue Leader being dragged through the underbrush, but he couldn’t tell if the man was alive.
“Calm down, Colonel,” Addison said. Anderson looked at his hands. They gripped the chair so tightly that they shook with the strain and the muscles bulged on his forearms.
“I’m not—” he started, then stopped and closed his eyes as he paused to take a quick breath. The comms went dead again, and so did the feeds. He doubted that he’d get them back again.
“Colonel?” the sergeant asked.
He shook his head. “Fuck. This was a fucking mistake,” he said and shook his head in an attempt to clear it. “We need to send Red and Green Teams in after them. Recover them. Make sure—”
“Colonel, with all due respect,” Addison interrupted, “this is what my men are trained for. They are trained for covert operations. I was on board with them acting as guinea pigs as long as everything was under control and all the problems with these fucking suits were fixed.” He raised his voice at the scientists, who still worked furiously to fix the bugs even though the lives were already lost.
Anderson shook his head. “I understand that. Addison, believe me, I understand that.”
The sergeant nodded and folded his arms across his chest.
“Fuck,” the colonel said again. “This is fucking terrible. This is all on me. I should have realized that going in there without backup was a mistake. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Addison said with a scowl. “Besides, the chances are that if we’d sent the other two teams in with them, they’d be dead too. So really, it’s a good thing that they didn’t go.”
He shook his head. The adrenaline rushed through his body and made his hands shake as odd flashes of memories that he wanted to be repressed forced their way through. He didn’t need this. His assistant would have his pills, but he didn’t want to show weakness by taking them in front of his people. He took a deep breath.
“Okay, Sergeant, call up the teams. Tell them to stand down and prepare for an evac,” he finally said after a long pause. “Pack up the fucking suits and tell the developers that they need a whole truckload of work.” He turned to the scientists. “You got that? Are you working on the bugs?”
The lead scientist turned. He looked more upset than Anderson did, clearly not used to listening in as people died. “We can’t—” he started but cleared his throat as he shook his head. “All the problems that we experienced were on their end. Until we get the suits that they used, we won’t be able to do anything.”
“What can you do?” Anderson snapped as Addison exited the building.
“We can request a recovery operation with the Staging Area,” the man said, and he obviously struggled to stay calm. “They’ll have people trained to deal with the mons…animals in the Zoo, and they stand the best chance of recovering the suits.”
He nodded. Better those underwhelming mercenaries than to waste more spec-ops men.
“We’ve recovered all the footage that they sent out,” one of the other men said, his voice shaking. “Much of it is corrupted, but that plus the location data should give whatever team is sent out there a chance.”
Anderson nodded. Well, they were human beings too. They deserved the best chance that they could get if they would risk their lives to help fix his mistake.
It was his mistake. There was no denying that. Anderson shook his head.
“Look, I’m sorry for yelling,” he finally said with a sigh. “Thank you for all your hard work. I need…I need a moment.”
He stepped out of the room and made sure to close the door behind him before he dropped to his haunches and covered his face with his hands.
He needed to write a report about this, he realized. Not only a report, but it had to be on the armor’s performance, not…not the death of four men.
Fucking bullshit.
Chapter Ten
Sal opened his eyes and groaned softly. His vision adjusted slowly to the light that glared behind the shades that he’d pulled. It was bright enough in the room to make him groan once again and turn away to pull the pillow over his head.
“Too bright,” he growled. “Make the bad yellow face in the sky go away, please.”
Reluctantly, he realized that he was too awake to be able to fall asleep again although he longed for a couple more hours of rest, at least. His eyes opened once more and he scowled at the damn window.
He hadn’t slept very well. As tired as he’d been, he’d dropped off quickly but into the restless kind of sleep in which he constantly tossed and turned and had some intense dreams.
The dreams hadn’t necessarily been bad, though. He pushed himself from the bed with a jaw-splitting yawn that made him close his eyes as he stood and stretched. His body was tender in places that he hadn’t realized he’d used, and even then, some of the painful places weren’t even muscles. He groaned and rubbed his groin tenderly as he shuffled to the bathroom and grumbled about “crazy sex dreams” as he propped the toilet seat up.
His eyes widened when he saw a pair of panties hanging from the shower curtain rod. His brain was still foggy, so it took him a few seconds to put the pieces together. They had definitely not been there when he’d taken a shower before his nap, which meant that they’d been put there afterward. Ergo—
Sal frowned and glanced around. He moved to the door of the bathroom and peered out to make sure there wasn’t anyone on his bed.
There wasn’t, and he blinked. It hadn’t been the first time Madigan had pulled something like this, he knew that, but he thought that she’d given up on the sneaking around. They didn’t exactly advertise their relationship, but neither did they hide it anymore.
So it hadn’t been a dream. He plucked the underwear from the rail and inspected it closely. There was nothing to indicate who owned it, but who else could belong it to? The panties had to be Madigan’s.
He shrugged and hung them up again before he concluded his business in the bathroom. After washing his hands, he picked them up again and studied the pink lace as he returned the bedroom. Madigan didn’t usually wear pink lace. Sal had enjoyed a fairly wide selection of her underwear over the past few months. She usually wore black, and…well, lacy, but more often than not, she varied between hot and racy to utilitarian and comfortable. It was odd how both made her look fantastic, although maybe that was more about what they encased than the actual fabric or design.
Pink and cute simply didn’t seem her style, though, Sal thought as he sat down on his bed. And it wasn’t like she had a lot of opportunities to invest in new clothes out there.
Then again, what the hell did he know about women’s underwear? Sal nodded and conceded the point as he opened his closet to reveal the safe that had come with his room. He wondered if they expected people to have something that they needed to put in a safe. Then again, there were some fairly high-profile folks who lived there, and since they were assigned random living situations, maybe it was a good idea to put a safe in every house.
Sal sure was thankful for it. He punched in his twelve-digit code and waited for the device to catch up with his quick dialing. Finally, it beeped, and green light glowed across the buttons before it unlocked. He put the panties beside the ones that Madigan had left behind and reached in deeper. His hands closed around the sealed container and pulled it out.
It had once been one of the environment containers, but after a few months of caring for a plant that was probably worth somewhere over four million dollars, he had devised a few interesting methods to keep the plan
t alive during the frequent trips he took. It needed indirect light, so he fitted a small grow lamp that he’d “borrowed” from one of the labs on base to turn on and off in time with the sun outside. After a few different attempts, he’d also managed to find a way to pump the water in through a small device at the bottom that infused the soil rather than dripping over the Pita plant.
It wasn’t the best solution, which was why it took a little while to grow, but two flowers had already bloomed on it, and he could see a third take shape among the leaves. Everything was clear and green, and the flowers gave off a gentle glow that was consistent with what they were observed to do in the wild.
“Nice to see you happy and healthy, Madie,” Sal said with a smile and moved the container out in the sunlight she’d been deprived of while being hidden inside the safe. He refilled the water pump, which had enough water to last for almost a full month. This was something he always did diligently at regular intervals, but it was easier to do it whenever he took her out of the safe since he did that regularly to run his tests.
He donned his gloves and opened the container. A quick scan made sure that none of the horror pheromones had been released. He ran a quick check on the artificial soil to make sure that it still had all the nutrients needed and also tested the acidity level. There was nothing out of the ordinary, thankfully. It had taken a fair amount of testing to find the perfect combination that would keep Madie happy and healthy.
Was it odd that he considered this plant more and more like a child or beloved pet? Well, he didn’t have either, but he assumed that this was how he would treat any future children or pets he might have.
“Getting waaaay ahead of yourself there, Salinger Jacobs,” he said to himself as he found a syringe in his pouch and pressed the tip into the bud of the flower. That had taken a lot of testing too, but eventually, he had eventually identified where the flowers had the heaviest concentration of the goop he wanted. It was different when they were picked since the goop was flushed out into the petals and therefore diluted.
He stopped at three milligrams when the area that he thought of as the goop sac under the flower began to lose some of its glow. He needed to run more tests to see how much could be withdrawn and still leave the blossom unaffected. With the first that had bloomed, he’d gone too far. After he’d drawn every last drop of goop, the flower had wilted the next day. He’d proceeded with a lot more caution after that.
Sal left Madie to soak in some sunlight through the shades, moved to the kitchen with the syringe, and opened a package of water crackers that he’d otherwise ignored until now. Depressing the syringe plunger, he coated a cracker with the blue, glowing goop. Well, not all of it. There wasn’t enough of the stuff to cover the entire surface of the snack, but it was enough for a trial run. He inhaled. The goop had an odd smell. It wasn’t a bad smell—fresh and light, the way blueish-green might smell if it were an odor and not a color. But at the same time, it wasn’t appetizing, in much the same way that the smell of soap was nice, but you didn’t want to eat it.
The scientist grinned when remembered the one time his grandmother had washed his mouth out with coconut soap after he’d said a few choice words about not being able to spend the night at the house of a friend who had received a PlayStation for his birthday. He hadn’t been able to taste anything else for a week afterward.
“Well, down the hatch,” he said and winced as he realized that he had started to talk to himself more and more over the past couple of months. If he kept this up, he would become an evil, demented scientist within the next year or so if poorly-thought-up backstories in bad action flicks were to be believed. That or he would invent something that would be evil.
Either way, the end of the world by this time next year wasn’t an impossibility.
He bit down on the cracker and managed to take the entire thing in one bite. There wasn’t enough of the stuff on there to taste much. Hints of freshness much like a breath mint immediately released, and as the stuff made contact with the skin inside his mouth, it burned like a hot pepper and made him chew and swallow quickly. He filled a glass of water and gulped it down.
“Every time,” he complained and shook his head. He always forgot that it tasted like the world’s strongest jalapeño.
Sal moved back to his room and added the syringe to the used pile in his pouch before he zipped it up and placed it with the rest of his equipment. He sealed Madie’s container and once again made sure that none of the anger pheromones were released before he slipped it back into the safe.
“There’s nothing like an experiment you’re willing to test on yourself, right, Madie?” he asked before he closed the safe once more and made sure to wait until it secured. That done, he pulled fresh clothes on and, with another stretch to try to ease his sore muscles, made his way to the door. It was almost three, and Madigan would already be waiting for him. He wondered if meeting at the bar was a good idea. It seemed like he did nothing more than help her along with her drinking problem, all because it was a convenient place to find work.
He needed money, so she needed to get this under control. He was in a bar all day and didn’t get drunk on a regular basis, after all.
Chapter Eleven
As it turned out, she wasn’t early. He looked for her at the entrance and wondered if she had gone inside. The possibility that she was still in there, drinking or sleeping it off, also crossed his mind, but he put it aside. He already knew that she had taken a detour, at least.
After a few minutes of waiting, he was about to turn back when an JLTV pulled up outside. The driver weaved from one side to the other, which would have been spectacularly dangerous if there had been anyone else on the road. Thankfully, there wasn’t, and Sal had only a handful of nail-biting moments before Kennedy jerked to a stop in front of him. She wore sunglasses and looked a little flushed. He raised a brow and grinned.
“Well…look what the cat dragged in,” he said with a soft chuckle as she pulled herself out of the vehicle.
“Not…not so loud,” she said and raised a hand.
“I’d ask if you had a rough night,” he said as he checked his watch, “but considering that it’s actually three-oh-four in the afternoon, should I ask how your morning went instead?”
“There was drinking,” Kennedy muttered. “And there was talking to a blonde. And then there was…” She paused and shook her head.
“That’s okay,” he responded with a small smile and patted her on the shoulder. “I think I have a good idea of what you did.”
Kennedy lowered her glasses to glare at him. “What did I tell you?”
“Not…so loud?” Sal asked and raised a brow. He was usually allowed to make lewd references to their meet-ups provided that he kept it properly veiled. It seemed like she wasn’t in the mood for that either. Was only a couple of hours of sleep enough to create a hangover?
“Exactly,” she said and patted his cheek lightly. “Anyway, what do you have for us?”
“I just got here myself,” Sal explained as they headed to the door. “I was looking for you since I said that we would meet here at three unless you called me. Since you didn’t, I wasn’t sure if you were still sleeping it off.”
She looked at him again. “You’re acting weird. Why are you acting weird?”
He tilted his head as he pushed the door open for her. “I have no idea what you mean. I’m always weird, remember.”
“No, you’re weirder than usual.” She walked in and waited for him to follow before she continued in a low voice. “If you want to have sex, you’ll have to wait. I’m still a little buzzed.”
He nodded. “Fair enough, but that’ll probably have to wait too.” He went to the board inside the bar. It was used by most the people on base who wanted jobs or had jobs and needed people. Since everyone stationed there essentially haunted the bar at some point or another during the day, it was the only way to facilitate work arrangements without having to use the base’s server—which, like most th
ings, came with a horde of fees.
There were more than a few excuses that he used to escape his sense of guilt over facilitating Kennedy’s problem. He really needed to talk to her about it.
Before he studied the board, he turned to her and tapped her shoulder. “Get us a table, would you? And do me a favor, try not to get too drunk before I get there.”
“No worries on that end, friend of mine,” she whispered, tugged her sunglasses off, and tucked them into her shirt. “What I need is some serious hydration.”
“I think I’m there with you. Could you get me something to drink too?”
Sal held his phone up to the board, took pictures of the various postings, and noted those that would take place within the next few days. One in particular caught his interest—a research trip sponsored by a lab back in the US that would pay top dollar for registration and qualification of the different animal and plant species that had appeared in the last six months.
He guessed that they would probably still search for the Pita plants, but it wouldn’t be the focus of their work. The study and research were what he liked doing most while in the Zoo, and honestly, the necessity to kill things while they gathered the flowers for money seemed like a necessary evil that he had to tolerate to be able to go out there and get data. The job was perfect.
When he walked to the table, Kennedy was already deep in conversation with a couple of men prepping for their trip into the Zoo the next day. A quick look told him that this was the team that would do the research run. Not because they had any physical traits that gave them away, but because he’d worked with them before.
“Jacobs!” one of them said. Because of his short stature and bright orange hair, everyone called him the Leprechaun, even though he had actually been born in southern Michigan and, according to him, had no trace of Irish blood.
“Sergeant Young,” he said and gripped the man’s extended hand. Despite being almost a full head shorter than Sal was himself, the man’s strength was more than prodigious, and he pulled the specialist in for a hug tight enough to leave him gasping at the end of it.