Leon and Crumley stared at one another in silence. For now, letting the crackling of static on the COM line speak for them.
Finally, Leon said into the COM, “We’ll keep moving further into the highlands to get away from the swampy lowlands. That should take us away from the critters who feed off the polluted rivers. When you say a prayer for the boys, say one for the beasts too. They didn’t deserve their fate any more than our men did.”
“Way ahead of you, sir.”
“Remind me again why we have them risking life and limb to cart these supply cases back and forth?” Crumley said. “We could fight this war with our bare hands if we had to, and we can live off the land as well as these demons of the forest.”
“Natty likes to tinker with his toys at night. Keeps his paranoid ideation off of the bird men. The calmer he is, the better for everybody. Besides, all of the prototypes he brought need additional work before they can be field tested. With any luck, one of them will make up for all the lives lost if we ever need it.”
Crumley must have read from his face how he felt about it, so didn’t ride him further on the issue.
As an afterthought, Crumley added, “Hey, those C-5s are parked far enough away from the flood plain, right?”
“They should be. If not, can’t see that a bunch of poor cancer-ridden creatures are going to be much of a threat, even to ALPHA UNIT. A few isolated soldiers with nothing more than a rifle and a cutlass, maybe. But they’re sitting on enough munitions to start World War III.”
“Yeah, guess you’re right.”
***
The ALPHA TEAM member on guard duty, shaking from the tremor running up his spine at surveying the forest, decided it was time for a cigarette break. He dropped the night-vision goggles and turned at the sound of the mooing to stare at the cow, practically glowing in the light of the full moon, as he lit his electronic cigarette. “Tell you one thing, staring at your sorry ass is a might sight better than staring at that jungle. At least you don’t give me the creeps.”
More errant sounds came from the forest behind him. That was the problem, the jungle wouldn’t sit still. And chasing everything down with the night-vision goggles was frigging exhausting. He chose to ignore the sounds this time, content to settle into his smoke.
A soundless flash of lightning caught the electronic cigarette and sent him flying.
He managed to pick himself up off the ground with some effort. “I’ve heard cigarette smoking is bad for your health, but that’s ridiculous.”
He looked up and the cow was gone. “Hmm. Must have been spooked by the lightning. You and I both, buddy.”
Cigarette break over, however prematurely, he advanced along the periphery of the farmer’s field where he was supposed to be guarding the C-5s to where he had not one but three cows in sight. He’d linger here awhile. If anyone asked, he’d say something over here drew his attention. As opposed to the fact that he needed a security blanket to deal with night patrol in the jungle and staring at the cows and hearing them moo was it. Besides, they’d likely respond to any sign of menace long before he would. So he wasn’t slacking, he was taking his protection detail to the next level.
He struggled with his night-vision goggles. Before he could put them back on he had to wipe all the condensation off them. Helping him with his stress of fighting impatience, fatigue, and the weather, was a crescendo of cow moos. Better than New Age music for settling the nerves. If anything, the chorus was over a little too soon for his liking. Job complete, he gazed up at the cows for one final bit of relaxing reassurance, and they were gone. Not a sound. “What the hell?”
He ambled closer to the edge of the field where the cows had been.
Donned the night-vision goggles.
And scanned the jungle.
“Holy shit!” A giant anaconda was pulling one of the three cows into the water. Where’d the water come from? A pair of giant Caymans were doing the same with the other two cows. He didn’t think those reptiles could get that big.
He screamed as loud as he knew how, “Get up!” Then he fired his automatic rifle into the sky to better alert the others. That would be the story. As opposed to the fact that he’d just panicked and lost control of his rifle.
***
Patent’s eyes popped open at the first scream. The cry had been followed by machine gun fire, almost without hesitation. It was a good sign. At least the poor bastard hadn’t frozen up.
He unsheathed the daggers strapped to each upper arm and in the same fluid motion slit the sides of his hammock and mosquito netting. He’d been sleeping in a standing position, hanging from the tree branch like a giant seedpod. He slipped out of the cocoon like a butterfly eager to test its new legs and wings. Landed on the leaf-covered ground about twelve feet below.
It didn’t take him long to size up the situation. He’d gotten the big picture on his way down; it was why he chose the sleep location he had, so he could keep an eye on the entire camp.
A monstrously large black Cayman had charged from the tree line, gotten its jaws around one of his men and was dragging him back towards cover. The kid trying to help his fallen comrade, bless his heart, was giving him a piece of his mind with the automatic rifle. Plenty of balls. Not much sense. But that’s why he was here. It was his job to stamp some sense into them.
Patent marched over to the soldier, yanked the weapon away from him, shoved him to the ground. He reached down and drove both his hands into the eye sockets of the Cayman and yanked out the eyes in one fell stroke. The animal slacked its jaws around his prey in an effort to cry out. Patent finished ripping its mouth open for him, snapping its jaw.
He pried the still-alive soldier out of the belly of the giant reptile that flailed and cried out, but it couldn’t do much without eyes or a working mouth. And it was in too much shock to even retreat into hiding. “You triage medics, attend to this man.” They hopped to without further prodding. They earned some points for that. Last go around he had to slap them out of a state of shock to get them moving.
Patent held up the Cayman’s eyes for the group. He turned around three-hundred and sixty degrees to demonstrate for his audience that had dragged their sorry asses out of bed, a little too slow for his tastes, but at least they hadn’t panicked. Of course, they were still a bit sleep-deprived, the panic might still be around the corner. “You go for the eyes on a Cayman. The only vulnerable part, unless you’re unfortunate enough to be inside one or under one. In which case you’re also away from the armored hide.”
He tossed the eyes, turned back around to examine the creature more closely. “This reptile is diseased,” he said. “See the tumorous growths growing out of it? If you see another of these things you can try and target one of the tumors. The flesh there is likely more vulnerable. Just make sure you don’t get any of the back splatter on you in case… You know what, screw the speculation.”
He grabbed the rifle away from the soldier he’d knocked aside earlier. Slipped another clip in. “Stand back,” he said. “Further than that.” Stepping back himself, he fired at the biggest tumor on the suffering, but still-alive eyeless Cayman. The creature howled but then fell quickly quiet. The exploding cyst seemed to finish it off, digging into the beast as much as splattering outward.
Patent retreated further still and put his arm over his nose and mouth to protect from the gas smell. It was worse than the acrid tang of napalm. “Yeah, forget targeting the cysts. They may as well be carrying their own chemical grenades. Unless you’re far enough away and upwind to blow it to hell with them.”
He tossed the rifle back to the soldier. “Nice work earlier by the way, keeping your balls on.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir! Patent, major, sir! It’s an anaconda. A big one.”
Patent turned in the direction of the voice. The snake was an adult, a big one, maybe a forty-footer. Its body was covered with cysts too. Tennis ball-size lumps. It was slithering along the forest floor towards the smorgasbord of
humans. “Satellite, get on the RevoCorp sat network and let me know if the swamping is reaching us. These creatures like to do their takedowns near water.”
“Yes, sir,” Satellite said, springing into action, reaching for his communications equipment pack. He was just tall and reedy enough to pass for a human radio antenna. All the better; the faster he could cover ground now, the better.
“Okay, let me show the rest of you what to do if you ever end up in the loving arms of an anaconda.”
The kids were chuckling nervously, giving Patent a wide birth. He weighed putting on a frog suit to protect from the exploding cysts. But they didn’t look all that ripe, and time was of the essence. So he just marched towards the thing and gave it a gook provoking kick to the face.
The snake recoiled, then snapped at his arm, only because as fast as the anaconda’s reflex was, his was faster. He let it wrap itself around him. “Now, you ladies aren’t built quite like a Sherman tank as I am, so you won’t have as much time to work your magic. It’ll crush your ribs and bones readily. And more than anything you want to keep your arms free and your hands close to its face. So that when you jab your thumbs into its eyes hard enough, like so…”
He demonstrated by pressing in hard. The snake released its grip and its jaws nearly as fast as he’d grabbed hold of Patent, flinging him wide.
Patent stood up to claps from the audience as the snake took a moment to regroup. “Now since you ladies don’t have the advantage of my beastly size, subtract a second or two for every fifty pounds shy of me you are, maybe another second to account for my muscled armoring, thick bones, and even thicker hide. “Anyone else care to try?”
“Yes, sir!” one of the female cadets said.
“That’s the spirit! Now, remember, kid,” Patent said, slapping her back, “the good ones make it look easy. Whatever happens, don’t panic, just keep focused on your one goal. Expect to get broken up a bit in the process. No pain, no gain.”
“Yes, sir.”
The anaconda had recovered enough of its senses to be trolling the ground for another mark. Aping Patent’s earlier actions, the kid put herself in harm’s way, blocking its path towards the group.
Patent thought of waking the ones still asleep in the bellies of the C-5’s, but decided to hell with it. There’d be other teaching opportunities. Besides, he required that intel from satellite to see how fast he needed to get these birds in the air, and if he did have to move swiftly, they were just where he wanted them to be.
The kid jumped the anaconda rather than giving the snake a chance to jump her, getting her hands around its neck and holding on fast for the ride of her life, as the snake coiled around her. She slid her hands up to the eyes even as Patent heard her ribs cracking. He winced in empathy. In another second the kid administered the optic nerve maneuver she’d been taught, and the snake once again uncoiled violently, throwing her wide.
The chorus of cheers broke out even as the kid lay on the ground feeling anything but victorious. “Me next!” a bunch of them screamed, talking over one another.
But play time was over. Patent sensed something in the jungle. There were more eyes on him. He could tell from the hairs standing up on his neck. “Hold off a second, kids.”
He trudged over to Satellite. “Well, what’s the verdict?”
“It’s a good thing you thought to keep one of the RevoCorp satellites in stationary orbit above us, sir, or we’d really be hurting.”
“Skip the prologue, kid.”
“Yeah, I’d say we have less than half an hour to get these birds in the air before the rising flood plain waters swallows them.”
Patent put his hand out, palm up to the rain. “Shit, it’s barely drizzling here.”
On cue, he heard the crack of thunder and saw the flashes of lightning. And the downpour got serious. The drops falling hard and fast like bee stings.
The outburst of weather was like the signal shot fired at the beginning of a track race for whatever was lurking in the forest.
All of a sudden everything was charging them. “Weapons hot!” he screamed. “And get your asses and the gear back inside the planes!”
He wasn’t sure they’d heard him over the storm. But their instincts were good. Surrounded by an enemy like this, they probably figured out for themselves that was their only option.
Patent tried to buy them some time. He got himself up a tree and then vaulted onto the wing of one of the C-5s. Picked up some gear he had stowed there for a moment like this. Climbed with it up onto the fuselage of the plane.
He hadn’t gotten too far when he heard a coughing sound from behind him. Turned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
A two-headed black jaguar was staring him down. Disappearing and reappearing in the strobing light of the lightning strikes. The thing must have been two hundred pounds, easy.
Patent was undressed from the waist up as it was. He dropped the equipment he was carrying and crouched into a wrestling position, his muscles flexing.
One look at the expanding muscles and the thing took a step back, debating its pounce.
Patent waited for the lightning to pulse again before gesturing the cat towards him.
With all the sense of a good predator, it waited for the darkness to spring.
He stooped, reached for the pipe of the grenade launcher and shoved the pipe into the one of the two mouths. Twisted the pipe hard enough to snap the creature’s neck. As much as he wouldn’t have minded wrestling with this thing for a while—he preferred to take his workouts a few hours before sunup—his boys and girls needed protecting. There was no time to screw around.
But the jaguar had other ideas. Rolling into the neck twist and rolling the two of them precariously down the fuselage of the C-5. The damn RPG was loaded. The last thing he needed was to unwittingly fire it into the body of the plane or at his own troops. Maybe if he could get the tube to discharge in a direction it might do some good.
He threw the cat off him, and held on to the pipe. He was becoming a distraction for some of the cadets on the ground, unable to tear their eyes entirely away from him wrestling on top of the plane with the jaguar in the strobing light.
The kids were using flashbangs to spook and disorient the monsters intent on devouring them. It was working—somewhat. One of them had gotten his hands on a flame thrower. Points for that. He was using it to good effect to give the boys and girls cover that were trying to load Natty’s precious gear into the plane in time.
One of the female cadets was taking out the giant Caymans by targeting their cysts with a bloody bow and arrow. With spot on marksmanship, the exploding cysts took out the Caymans before they could do any more damage. When the still bigger ones crawled over the bodies of the relatively small thirty-footers, and her arrows stopped working on them, she upped her game by switching to the missile-tipped arrows. “Nice,” Patent thought. Those definitely did the trick, even against the forty-foot monsters. When she didn’t have a good position on a cyst, she fired into their open, snapping mouths. That required some pretty good timing, considering how fast those things could snap their jaws.
The cat made another leap for Patent, or he’d have been just as sucked in by the cadets on the ground’s floor show as they were by his.
He tried the same stunt with the RPG launcher. But this time the other head bit into it, and its jaw crushing capacity was stronger. Its teeth went right through the pipe of the rocket launcher. So much for firing it at this point. The pipe was actually starting to cave under the punishing PSI of the jaguar’s jaws.
As he rolled with the creature he kept banging its heads against the fuselage of the plane and kicking out its legs to keep from being scratched alive. Those talons could flail the meat from his bones effortlessly. But he’d kept control of the rolling, never letting the cat take control of their little wresting bout. Used the fact that it was distracted by its determination to shatter the pipe in its mouth to free his hands so he could sever the creature’s tendon
s with his blades, when he couldn’t outright dislocate its joints or break the legs.
By now the creature was pretty much done for. Its back legs broken and useless. The tendons in its forepaws severed.
The rest was just mercy killing.
He yanked the pipe out of its jaws, the bite now relaxed, its jaw bones shattered by Patent’s clobbering fists.
He sheathed his daggers. Picked the cat up over his head. And flung it into the snapping jaws of one of the forty-foot Caymans coming at a kid whose gun clip had jammed.
The Cayman did the mercy killing for him, snapping the cat’s spine like a toothpick.
Patent strode back to his arsenal of equipment he’d had to leave behind, sitting perched toward the rear of the fuselage. The whole point of being this high up was to better survey the situation so as to arrive at the best way to deal with it.
That mission accomplished, he proceeded to create a perimeter around them, with the aid of the doughnut. It looked just like a thirty-inch-wide ring-buoy they tossed overboard as life preservers on ships. Adjusting the settings on it, he then released it into the air.
The droid was able to fire lasers along its entire periphery. Slicing through enemy targets, animal, reptile, human, mechanized. It had long since been programmed to avoid the good guys and their equipment.
The doughnut maneuvered even around the errant gunfire coming from the panicked kids, or the ones falling back on their weapons as they bit the proverbial bullet.
Flying in ever-widening circles, in no time at all it sliced through the resistance, continued to widen the perimeter around them beyond the clearing. It would keep searching out targets, keep firing on them from above and below the tree line. No tree could stop it. It would just keep spinning and slicing right through them in the odd chance that it had gotten distracted on firing on too many targets at once.
It continued to trace circles in the forest around them at amazing speeds, widening the safety zone right before Patent’s eyes. The feeding frenzy of hundreds of Caymans was no match for it. It could probably have chopped them up into stretches of leather just the right size for boots and purses with a few more lines of code without missing a beat.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 12