by Michael Todd
“So, you come armed, Jacobs?” Carlson asked, and Sal could see Waters, a powerful if shorter man with dark skin, also listened for an answer.
Sal nodded and drew the pistol from the holster he’d fitted to his suit. It was a Ruger thirty-seven with a fifteen-round magazine. With the shredder rounds Sal had asked for, it had a pretty decent stopping power at under twenty meters.
“Do you know how to use that?” Waters asked in an accent that indicated that he was from deep Georgia.
Sal nodded again. “I’ve had it for a couple of runs into the Zoo already, and I take it to the shooting range whenever I can.”
“That’s not the same thing as knowing how to use it,” Carlson said with a sneer.
“I can vouch for his fighting ability,” Kennedy said quietly. “I’d trust Jacobs with my life in the Zoo, and I’ve had to the couple of times we’ve gone in together.”
Sal was worried that the two would mock him for having her back his skills with a gun. He thought they might even wonder at their relationship if she was willing to go out of her way to make sure they trusted someone who was as unreliable as a specialist was likely to be in a gunfight.
But it seemed like she had earned their trust and respect, so when she said she trusted someone with her life, they didn’t bother to challenge her or Sal on it and quickly quieted. The drone of the APC had a calming effect on the raw nerves of the squad, and the complaints about being hungover decreased over time.
They headed in a different direction than Sal had in his previous three trips into the Zoo. This time, they traveled toward the wall, which made sense since their task was to protect it. He had never actually been close enough to appreciate how huge it really was.
What appeared to be a single structure from a distance was actually three. The one in the middle rose much higher than the others. All of fifty meters high, it was made of a similar material to the prefab they used for the buildings in the Staging Area but was a lot denser and thicker. It looked like it could probably stop a tornado in its tracks. Sal had lived in LA for the past couple of years, so he was accustomed to huge buildings, but he was now used to the squat little buildings in the Staging Area. Seeing something that high and stretching across that much space was truly breathtaking. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how much work went into it. While he wasn’t an engineer, he could still appreciate it. He leaned closer to his window as they approached it.
“Pretty impressive, right?” Waters asked. “They’ll set it up in a tier system. The first wall will let the Zoo through, but barely, and use electricity to prevent the effects from spreading. The goop won’t be able to get through the second wall, and even if it does, the third one goes down instead of up and blocks it underground. They’ve positioned seismic sensors to make sure nothing slips through.”
Sal looked at the man. “How do you know about this? I assume it’s classified.”
“My brother works as a foreman for Wall Three, the one going underground. He’s an engineer, and he actually invented the detectors that they use.”
“That’s impressive.” He looked at the wall, which stretched far beyond what the eye could see to the east. It had to reach all the way to the Indian Ocean, he realized. That was a magnificent feat of engineering. The most impressive part was how fast it was being built. And maybe the most dangerous too. Rushing something like this had been how they created the whole Zoo situation in the first place.
Sal could see the construction work progressing at a frenzied pace as hundreds of workers set up the massive steel frames that the prefab material would be connected to. It all looked very solid and very professional.
“Something’s happening,” Kennedy said. The rest of the squad peered out the windows. A tall barbed wire fence surrounded the construction site, but a number of six-legged panthers prowled the area. Gunshots and yelling could be heard even from a distance.
The most awe-inspiring sight, though, lay about fifteen meters from the fence. It appeared to be one of the massive creatures they’d narrowly avoided on his first trip, but it was already dead, which explained why the panthers tried to attack the construction site. The barbed wire kept them away, though, and the security team made quick work of them.
“Why are the animals trying to stop the construction?” Carlson asked rhetorically.
“It’s hard to explain,” Sal replied, “but it’s like they know that the wall stops the goop’s expansion, so they’re trying to clear the path ahead.”
“That’s not how animals act, though, right?” the man asked and looked at Sal, who shrugged.
“The Zoo is changing all the rules,” he said quietly as his gaze drifted to the massive dead monster. “All we can do is adapt.”
They pulled the Jeep to a halt a few feet from the barbed wire fence. The squad dismounted quickly and looked for more of the creatures. They were too late, though, as the surviving panthers ran back into the jungle, apparently losing their stomach for a fight. He doubted that would be the end of it, though.
“What’s the situation?” Xander asked the men guarding the perimeter. They wore combat suits, but Mark Tens, the oldest in production. Still, they could cut the mustard, as the old adage went, when one had a barbed wire fence between themselves and the animals that tried to kill them.
Sal gripped his pistol but didn’t draw it yet, although he watched the tree line. He didn’t have enough confidence to be this close to the Zoo and not be on edge.
The perimeter guards were men brought in by third parties. As a rule, they weren’t trained soldiers, since the corporations assumed that security would be covered predominantly by the massive military base nearby. They weren’t wrong, but at the same time, they obviously weren’t aware that the Zoo would get as close as it had.
The security team didn’t much like the amount of work they had.
Sal didn’t care, though. They were paid twice as much as he was and complained that the squad should have been there earlier? Irritated, he focused on his work. Sure, he was paid to be a gunner, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t do his thing.
He jogged to the corpse of the massive creature which looked vaguely like a dinosaur. Massive jaws and sharp teeth indicated a carnivorous diet. It was the same type of monster they’d run into before—judging by what he had seen from Monroe’s footage—but it was a lot smaller.
It was still tall enough to reach the roof of a two-story house, though. He recalled that an odd glowing line followed the creature’s spine. Of course, the footage had been taken in the dark while now, blistering sunlight would obscure it. A series of spines up its back followed the line of the vertebrae.
He had a theory he wanted to explore. The animals reacted to the death of these monsters the same way they did to removing the Pita plants, which indicated that they were chock full of the goop as well. It had to be why these creatures could grow so large and not have gravity crush their bones and organs.
Sal climbed over the body and retrieved his scalpel. A quick cut where the skull connected with the spine revealed a heavy sac which contained fluid that glowed visibly, even in the sunlight. It smelled absolutely terrible, though, and Sal tucked it quickly into a vacuum-sealed bag. Further exploration revealed no more of the goop-filled sacs.
He scowled, shook the blood from his suit, and made his way back to the squad, who appeared to be in a debate.
Kennedy looked up from the huddle. “Where were you?”
“Doing research,” he replied and held out his sealed souvenir.
She narrowed her eyes. “What is that?”
“Probably the biggest haul of the Pita juice ever. It was buried in the spine of that big fucker over there,” Sal said as she took it from him. “I need to do some research, but I’m sure that’s what it is. Keep it safe, ya hear?”
“Why give it to me?” she asked, tucking it gently into her pack.
“Well, besides the fact that you have the best armor for the job? I’d say you should probab
ly keep it. Call it a sign-on bonus or something.”
Kennedy smirked. “Or something. We’ll see if this is worth anything before we divvy up the rewards.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sal wondered what the hell was wrong with him that pushed him to constantly enter the jungle. A hint of greed was part of it. He wanted to get rich quick as much as the next man, but there had to be easier ways to do it. If he applied himself to it, he could probably make a fortune in a one-time visit to Vegas. He’d read how it was all about numbers and he was good with numbers. He could probably do it.
But who the hell was he kidding? This was so much more fun than dodging the odd casino bouncer after the corporate equivalent of taking candy from a baby.
Sal held his weapon ready and cast wary glances to either side as they marched through the foliage. Unlike his last trips, this was intended to keep animals away, and the squad would place motion sensors all along the wall. For now, they held to the right of the wall with the Zoo itself to their left. Sal couldn’t help but feel that a puny trio of walls wouldn’t be sufficient. It had shown a degree of sentience—or at least protective instincts—that were more than you’d expect from goop.
Expectations of how the Zoo should or could react were stupid. All he needed was to keep an open mind and a ready gun, and he could walk away.
“So,” Sal asked Kennedy, “where is our suit?”
She looked quickly at her sat phone. “We’re about three hundred meters from the coordinates Boulos gave us, but it’s a bit deeper into the Zoo than the rest of the squad is comfortable with. When we get there, we’ll break off and try to meet up with them later. If we can’t, we’ll head back to the Staging Area, but then we won’t get paid.”
Sal nodded. “I think I can live with either of those options. What do you think?”
“I think we’re not in any kind of position to turn our noses up at a payday,” she replied. “We should stick it out with the squad if we can. It’s only a two-day run so we won’t be gone long, and it’ll give us a chance to try out this new suit of armor.”
“Do you honestly want to put something on that has damaged sensors?” Sal asked.
“Well, we can run a systems check on it, at least,” Kennedy said with a shrug.
Sal nodded. He still wasn’t sure how they would carry a full suit of battle armor around, but they couldn’t afford to leave something like that behind.
“Xander,” Kennedy called to their team leader.
“Yep?” the man replied.
“We’re breaking away to find that loot now. We’ll try to coordinate to meet up with you before you camp for the night. If we can’t find you before then, we’ll head back to the Staging Area.”
The man didn’t answer but gave them a thumbs-up as Kennedy gestured for Sal to follow her. They moved deeper into the Zoo, and the massive wall receded from their view behind the foliage that blocked the sight off after less than a dozen paces.
“It should be somewhere around here,” she said after a few minutes. A handful of smaller creatures had shown some curiosity about the massive wall and the people intruding in their territory. It made things annoyingly eerie. Sal remembered the same feeling from his first trip—they would walk into some kind of trap or, perhaps, into the territory of one of those massive creatures.
“Why do they have to replace the motion detectors?” Sal asked as they searched through the underbrush.
“The forest kind of swallows them up,” Kennedy replied. “I’m not sure how. Maybe the animals pick them up and take them off to nests. But something happens every night to create huge gaps in their coverage, so they need to be replaced over and over again.”
Sal nodded and opened his mouth to answer. He was cut off when the root he stepped on gave way. The entire bush that he’d tried to push through crumbled and revealed a massive drop right in front of him.
“Jacobs!” Kennedy called behind him, but everything he tried to grab onto broke away.
A sense of vertigo filled him as he fell and lost his balance. It wasn’t simply a hole but a cliff face that spanned almost fifteen meters. Trees did grow in places, but there was nothing between him and what looked like almost twenty meters of sheer nothing.
“Oh, fuck!” Sal gasped and flailed his hands frantically to find an anchor. For the longest of desperate moments, his hands found nothing and his downward plunge increased speed. Panic surged, and his attempts to slow his fall seemed to accelerate it. He’d faced all kinds of monsters and dangers in this place. He hated the thought that after all that, he’d be killed by gravity.
A few meters into the drop, something caught his shoulder and spun him around and against a tree that grew from the cliff face. Dirt trickled free at the base of the tree at his sudden weight, but it held. Sal clutched the trunk with both hands and shuddered when he realized how far he could actually have fallen. He tried to focus on the vine-like growth that had caught him and realized that his visor had shattered on impact with the tree trunk.
“Jacobs!” Kennedy called, and he looked up. He’d fallen almost halfway, he realized, which was why his chest hurt so badly.
“Kennedy!” he responded and saw her scan the ground below for his splattered corpse. She finally saw him pressed up against the tree.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and Sal nodded in response.
“Look, stay right there.”
He knew she didn’t have any rope in her pack as they hadn’t expected to climb much but simply gripped his tree a little tighter. Provided he maintained a decent hold, there was no danger of falling. While he waited, he peered below him and squinted at was definitely a foreign object
“Kennedy!” he called, and she poked her head over the edge again.
“What?”
“Look down and a little to the left.” A few plants grew over it, but it certainly looked like a suit of armor leaning against one of the massive jungle trees.
“Do you think that’s what we’re here for?” Kennedy asked.
“Do you know any other pieces of armor that would lie around here?”
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“I can probably climb down from here,” Sal replied, seeing a selection of branches and vines that could provide handholds all the way down. “Can you circle around and meet me down there?”
“Okay. Race you to the bottom?”
Sal looked up quickly to see if she was serious, but she’d already disappeared.
“Fuck.” He felt like he’d bruised a rib but he’d told her he could climb down, so she expected him to find his own way.
Ten meters was still a terrifying height to drop from, so he moved carefully to his left and found footholds in the cliff. It didn’t look like sand but wasn’t rock either, merely dirt that must have eroded.
He found a branch that enabled him to climb lower. Step by step, inch by inch, he worked his way down to the bottom of the cliff. He’d never had a problem with heights although his parents couldn’t stand them and even had a problem with taller office buildings.
Despite that, all that kept him in place was loose soil that had recently been sand, and he wouldn’t take risks. Before long, he reached trees that weren’t clinging to the almost vertical drop, and he gained confidence.
Quicker than he’d anticipated, Sal finally managed to drop to the ground with a grunt. His ribs were definitely at least cracked, but now wasn’t the time to worry that out. He hurried over to where he’d seen the suit of armor.
It was considerably larger than the one Kennedy wore and appeared to be power armor all the way through, which was very useful for survival in a place like this. He wondered what could power it as solar energy couldn’t be relied on given the filtered sunlight. It could be a small nuclear battery. They weren’t cheap, but they were reliable and could recycle energy for close to a decade and a half.
The suit was expensive enough to afford its own dedicated power unit, Sal recalled from what he’d seen in t
he price lists. A man still occupied the suit and judging by the skin discoloration and the desiccated eyes, he had been dead for a while.
“Well, I really hope Boulos reduces the price for the bad smell.”
Vines grew around the suit itself and seemed to move in search of a way inside. They had infiltrated a few holes in the armor and were a possible reason why the sensors had failed as Boulos had told them.
He’d seen a lot of interesting stuff in the Zoo, but carnivorous plants were something of a novelty. Sal searched in his pack for a strip of beef jerky. He peeled the packaging away with his teeth, bit a chunk off, and spat it out onto the ground near the moving vines.
They detected it, and a vine slithered like a snake, wound around the piece of meat, and dragged it into the trees. It wasn’t clear whether the tree itself had initiated this or whether a parasitic vine had adapted to the lack of sunlight and developed carnivorous instincts.
Sal was somewhat creeped out by it but allowed a new idea to distract him. Even though the new suits had a sealed environment, the plant still seemed to detect food inside.
He moved closer and drew his gun although he preferred not to deal with vines attempting to draw him in as lunch.
They ignored him for the moment, which made it easier to approach the suit. An emergency lever would open it should the person inside need medical assistance and couldn’t open it themselves, but it was also a combat suit, and the lever wouldn’t be easily accessible.
He fumbled around the side and found something to pull.
“This won’t smell good.” Sal buried his nose in his sleeve and tugged at the lever. The smell of rotten flesh seemed to soak into the air around him. With his visor broken, his eyes stung, and he retreated carefully. The vines reacted immediately to the suit opening and found the access point. They apparently lacked both taste and smell as they immediately wound around the corpse. All the vines engaged in this process to drag the body up the tree, and after a few moments, it slipped out of sight.