Patent was deep breathing like he was fanning a fire with a pair of bellows; it was to make up for the fact that he’d forgotten to breathe while overlooking the particulars of her invention. “How soon will this be ready?”
“Within the next twenty-four hours, sir, barring any mishaps with the alligator wrestling, of course.”
Again, Patent had to resist the urge to crack the smallest of smiles. God knows, if he gave in to the urge, he might herniate himself, being as he couldn’t remember the last time he smiled. Overseeing a bunch of greenhorn cadets didn’t leave him much reason to.
“Providing your device is ready in the next twenty-four hours, you can consider your alligator wrestling duties suspended.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, sir. God forbid the device needs tweaking and you can’t find me because I couldn’t fight off a Cayman the length of a sixteen-wheeler.”
“Practical and brilliant. Definitely grade-A ALPHA UNIT material. But you can’t hide out here forever, soldier. OMEGA FORCE is down too many people as it is.”
“I’ll make sure to add that pressure to the ones I’m already under, sir. Just to make sure my spine grows strong and straight.”
Patent sighed. “Well, the good news is your mouth is definitely ready for OMEGA FORCE. Now if we can just get the rest of you up to speed.”
Patent departed to check on what progress was being made with the other ALPHA UNIT field-tech projects. Their workshop space lay in the shadows of the C-5s, on the makeshift airfield cum peasant farmer’s land where they’d set down.
What was the doughnut-maker girl’s name again? That’s right, Ariel.
***
“I don’t see why we can’t build these suitcases with AI. Give them some foldout legs or wheels and let them roll themselves back and forth to do the resupplying. Built-in GPS…”
“Will you stop your grumbling?”
“They do it with the vehicles!” When he didn’t get any response he mumbled more to himself. “Stop your grumbling,” he says. “I got so many flea and mosquito bites, I can’t find my pimples. Can’t tell if I’m squeezing them or the bug juice. Oh, and did I forget to mention, I think something crawled up my ass, last night? Can’t decide if it’s a dung beetle trying to help me get the shit out, in which case, he’s welcome to try. Or if the critter is just looking for a more stable environment for itself. In which case, it has my complete empathy.”
It was hard enough fighting the incline of the hill in the heat and humidity without having to listen to his partner’s prattle. But he supposed heading up was better than fighting the flood plains down below. In the rainy season, Leon was right, there was no choice but to head further into the highlands.
“Maybe we can attach wings to the silver suitcases; they can fly to their destination like big silver wasps. Fit right in, in this damn jungle, if you ask me.”
“Keep dreaming, Vitalis. Just do it quietly, will ya?” The kid was always rubbing his hair down with Vitalis, hence the nickname. Who even uses that stuff anymore? Of course, his nickname was Rupert, for Rupert Murdoch. Because any change that fell out of the soldiers’ pockets he picked up for his kid’s college fund. He was no less compulsive about it. So maybe he didn’t get to point the finger on nervous tics.
The back end dropped out behind him and he found himself dragging the suitcase single-handedly. It could only mean one thing. “God damn it, Vitalis. Watch where you’re stepping. This suitcase is heavy enough without having to drag you too.”
No response.
From the man who couldn’t shut up.
Rupert didn’t like the feel of that.
He turned to investigate what was going on.
He found Vitalis hanging from a tree branch above him. More specifically, hanging from a black jaguar’s jaws. The jaguar’s fangs pierced Vitalis’s skull, sinking deep into the brain. Rupert watched the life seep out of Vitalis’s eyes, as the blood pulsed down his temples. The animal was poorly lit from one side in the glow of the creosote torches, but Vitalis, white-skinned as he was, could be all too clearly seen. The jaguar continued pulling Vitalis up, higher into the tree. Vitalis didn’t weigh much, a buck fifty maybe, but damn, that cat was strong.
Rupert just collapsed where he was, listening to the cat eat its meal. The sounds of bones cracking. Tongue slurping. Flesh tearing. Jaws grinding. It would have hurt Rupert less to get bamboo shards shoved under his fingernails. But this was the last time he was going to get to commune with his friend and he was damned if he was going to cheat himself of the opportunity. The smallest audible sign the cat was just enjoying his meal was one more chance to revisit those scenes from their past together when Rupert had a chance to treat the kid better, and hadn’t. This was his penance. This was his torture, and he deserved it.
Finally, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he wiped his eyes, stood up, and aimed his RPK with its attached banana clip at the overhead tree branches and fired away at the black jaguar, which he really couldn’t see. Too damned well camouflaged in the dead of night. He stopped firing. Only to hear the cat resume his eating.
He emptied the rest of the clip. Dead silence. “Yeah, take that you piece of shit!” As soon as the ringing in his ears had died down a bit, he could hear the cat chewing away.
He was screaming his lungs out, “Ahhh!!!” when the anaconda got him. Shot out of the water’s fringe like a bullet. He couldn’t believe in the short time he’d spent bemoaning the loss of his friend that the river’s edge had crept up to them. Downpour or no downpour. They were hiking a trail well away from the water’s meandering flow, getting higher with each step. What the fuck?! But he lost track of the insane logic of it in the crushing grip of the snake. He could feel the shattered ribs piercing his inner organs. Realized even without looking that the liquid spilling out of his mouth was not spittle.
He thought the other two ALPHA UNIT suitcase haulers coming into view would save him. But they barely had time to see what was going on and gasp before the snake took him down into the murky depths of the river. He could hear their “Shit! Shit! Shit!” shouted loud enough to penetrate the water. They were shining their flashlights at the turbid flow. But in this darkness? Hell, he’d given up searching for the black jaguar in the tree with his flashlight and just started shooting. Their chances of finding him were even worse.
Rupert was secretly glad the snake had such a strangle hold on his lungs that he couldn’t breathe. Because he heard drowning alive really sucked. He laughed silently at his own joke as he lost consciousness.
***
“We gotta do something,” Centipede said staring at the waterline where the anaconda had just taken down Rupert. They could hear his bones cracking right through the water. Centipede had gotten his nickname because of his freakishly long fingers and toes. And because “Piano Player” was already taken, because that guy moved his hands like a piano player when he got lost in his fugues to resuscitate the dead. Right now, Centipede wished he had as many limbs as his namesake; he’d use them all to climb the nearest tree.
“What the hell we gonna do?” Stampede snapped. “You see the current of that water? He’s a half mile downriver by now. All my flashlight is showing me is my own reflection.” He wiped the tears from his eyes. “I tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna get to hell away from this waterline.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Centipede said, regaining his senses. He helped Stampede hoist the heavy case up the incline.
They’d only gotten a few paces with the case when the winds started gusting. The trees were groaning in protest, each branch mouthing off in the pitch suitable for its hard wood type. The soldiers literally had to lean into the incline and switch to their fast-twitch power muscle fibers to get their legs moving again against the air currents. So when Vitalis’s half-eaten body fell out of the tree from above, they were already looking down to fully appreciate the effects of the jaguar’s handiwork. The missing brain from the ripped open brain pan. The excavated stomach with
its half-eaten entrails. Each disfigurement made all the more ghoulish in the flickering light of the burning copal torches slotted in to either side of the suitcase they were carrying.
Stampede didn’t have to tell Centipede to set down the suitcase. He felt Centipede’s end drop the same time his did. Stampede had gotten his nickname from the panicked way he ran when he spooked the first time he got hazed. A small matter of a stuffed grizzly roaring with the help of an attached tape recorder and looking like a live grizzly in flickering campfire light not too unlike these torches. He’d worked hard on conditioning that reflex out of himself since then, but it had never been this difficult to suppress the desire to flee before.
They looked up at the black jaguar on the branch of the tree thinking twice about reclaiming his prize, staring them down.
“Christ, that’s one big jaguar,” Centipede said. “You ever see a jaguar that big? That thing must be twice normal size, two hundred pounds if it’s an ounce.”
“I think you’re missing the far more glaring mutation, pal.” They were both afraid to move and both trying to talk to one another without moving their lips either, like a pair of fool ventriloquists. The thought had occurred to Stampede to reach for his rifle. But somehow he just knew the jaguar would be faster. Maybe just let it decide to move on without provoking it further. That was the decision he’d come to when he noticed the really freaky thing about the cat. He inched the torch out of its carry-slot to show Centipede.
“Holy shit! The thing has two heads.”
“I think it’s deciding if it’s worth risking taking us on now that it’s belly is full. Jaguars usually keep their kills in trees for prolonged periods, returning often to feed on it. This one doesn’t much care for us fast-tracking its hunting schedule.”
The jaguar bounded into another tree, and then disappeared.
Both men let out a collective sigh.
“Okay, help me with Vitalis’s body. I guess this carry-case is doubling as a stretcher now.” Stampede grabbed Vitalis at the shoulders, “Help me, I said!”
He glanced back at Centipede in time to see him in another stare-down contest with one big ass black Cayman. He was frozen in shock, which was probably the only thing keeping him alive. In the dim flickering light throwing wild shadows over him, with the wind blowing the wrong direction, maybe the creature was trying to determine if he was really looking at a meal or not.
“Don’t move a muscle,” Stampede coached.
“No worries there,” he muttered breathlessly. “But one of us better do something, there’s more than one of them, and they look like they got all the exits covered.”
Stampede dropped Vitalis, or what was left of him. Inched his way towards the torch, figuring he’d shove it in the Cayman’s face to get it to back off. If the light didn’t spook it, the flash of heat sure as hell would. The second he shone the torch closer, he saw what Centipede was talking about. “That’s just one Cayman.” Stampede swallowed hard.
“The juveniles are sticking out of its belly! It’s like some kind of Siamese triplet.”
“If I hadn’t seen that cat bound off earlier, I’d swear the guys were punking me again, the same way they did that night with the stuffed grizzly.”
“We gotta get away from the waterline,” Centipede said. “Anything living in that river, or feeding off of what’s in it must be getting DNA damage from all the heavy metals flowing downriver from the mining operations. I guess it’s a good thing we got lost, trying to hike up hill, only to end up heading downhill. Otherwise we’d have no knowledge of these things.”
“I hope we parked those C-5s far enough away from this flood plain, or that safe, far-away-from-the-front-lines-haven, is going to turn into a surreal nightmare real fast.”
“I know we’re a pair of engineers. But could we debate the science behind all this and the other implications, you know, from high up in a tree somewhere?”
“Where the jaguars are, you mean?”
“Fine, just chase the damn thing away already!” Centipede’s voice had a whine to it just like those mosquitoes that were constantly dive-bombing them.
Stampede charged the Cayman before he could think too hard about what he was doing. Shoving the fire stick in his mouth and screaming, “Ahhhhhhh!”
The thing didn’t move. Didn’t even blink.
“What the hell?” Stampede stared at the creature curiously. “Isn’t a startle response to fire an irrepressible reflex?”
“I thought we weren’t playing scientists anymore.”
“Just saying.” Stampede flicked his fingers as it hit him. “Maybe the heavy-metal load in its brain has effected what’s considered normal behavior for these guys.”
“What’s normal for them?”
“They usually just hunt by the water’s edge and pull their prey into the water.”
“So like leaving the cases behind and running uphill away from the water won’t help?” There was that mosquito whine to Centipede’s voice again. “It might just break from normal behavior and chase us?”
“I say we try it anyway.”
“Damn straight.”
They both bolted at once uphill. Forgetting the suitcases—their contents more valuable than gold—as if given a choice between eating breakfast and cleaning their grandmother’s dentures floating in a glass by her bedside.
No matter how high they climbed up the hill and how fast, the Cayman stalked them. And it could run faster. The only thing that had saved them so far was that the trail twisted and turned worse than a sidewinder snake making its way across a desert flat top, and the Cayman couldn’t charge real fast except in a straight line. Every time it had to put itself back on course, they gained a little time.
But in the end it caught up with Centipede. They just fatigued faster than it did, that was all. The irony was that he’d never honed his skills running like a bat out of hell like his friend who’d earned the nickname of Stampede.
The half of Centipede, above the waist, that had survived the severing, clamping jaws of the Cayman, crawled towards Stampede. “Run!” he said.
“Screw that! That’s how I got my nickname and I refuse to live up to it, even when it makes a hell of a lot more sense than hanging around to watch your sorry ass die.”
Centipede laughed at his insensitive remark. His laugh merging with coughing up blood.
Stampede just dropped his butt on the ground and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Keep crawling toward me. I could use my dick sucked to help with all this stress.”
Centipede chuckled, near silently from his winded state. He kept inching towards Stampede, using his elbows to worm his way forward.
The Cayman turned around to go back down the hill. Stampede was surprised to find a creature that big would be satisfied with the half rather than the whole. But he’d misread the situation.
The head growing out of the tail—which neither of the soldiers had detected before—snapped at Centipede and held on, allowing the head in the front of the Cayman to drag the rest of its meal back toward the water. Once the beast submarined below, Centipede would lie at the bottom of the river, tucked under some log somewhere, rotting, until the four-headed-not-three creature got good and ready to finish his meal. Stampede lost it just thinking about it.
He rose up with the surprise ferocity of a jack-in-the-box cranked one too many times and emptied his RPK on the Cayman. The creature couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the pace. The bullets bounced off its armored hide like those fake bullets bounced off the cars in a cop show, to keep the budget down.
“For future reference,” Centipede said, “go for the eyes or the soft underside, just under its jaw.”
The advice came too late to do either of them any good. Stampede was out of bullets. And Centipede was out of life. With that kind of blood loss, it was a miracle he’d hung on as long as he did. Stampede would like to think it was on account of his priceless humor. That’s how the story would be told henceforth, in any ev
ent.
By the time Stampede got it in his head to don his gloves and grab the muzzle and use the rifle as a club he’d lost sight of the Cayman and Leon was calling on the line. He decided that vengeance would have to wait, and it’d have to find a surrogate target.
***
Leon arrived back at camp after his little rumble in the jungle with the jaguars, noticed right away a shipment request he’d put in had gone unanswered.
Crumley, leaning against a nearby tree, took a whiff of the air; he could smell the ants on Leon, and no doubt the jaguars too. It was rather difficult to get much past that guy. Leon’s expression was all he needed not to press the point at this time.
Leon held on to his bulbous breath to squeeze more life out of it before raising ALPHA UNIT on the COM. He was almost afraid to ask. “What’s the hold up?”
“Sorry, Sir,” Leon heard over his ear mike. “Lost another three guys. One to an anaconda. One to a black Cayman. One to a jaguar. It’s nothing you want to see up close, I can tell you that.” The irony did not get lost on Leon. He’d just returned from a bout of self-sacrifice to the forest gods to keep this shit from happening.
Responding to the tremulousness of the kid’s voice, Crumley gave Leon a nudge. “You need to bolster the kid’s spirits.”
Leon balanced precariously between fury and empathy. Finally, he let the pent up emotions go and spoke into the COM, “Look, I know you ALPHA UNIT guys get needled a lot. But this is the Amazon jungle. It can take the best of us at any time, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” Crumley gave Leon a reassuring thumbs-up, more reassuring than the kid who had answered him with a “yes, sir.”
“One more thing, sir. The creatures that attacked us, they were grossly mutated. The black jaguar had two heads. The Cayman had four, one in front, one at its tail end, and two coming out its sides, all alive. The anaconda had golf-ball-size bumps on it like cancerous lesions. Like a really long version of one of those dildos they make for a little extra stimulation.”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 11