The other C-5s were already taking off. Satellite would know to move them to not just any higher ground but some place with strategic access to OMEGA FORCE without being told.
Patent slid down the fuselage to the wing. And from there jumped to the ground and rolled to help absorb the impact of the fall. Rotating to standing again in one fluid motion.
As soon as his feet hit the loading deck, the gate at the rear of the C-5 he’d been standing on was closing. They hadn’t even waited to start the engines until he was back on the ground, figuring he could get back down with the added obstacle of the whirling propellers. That was a good call.
As the gate closed behind him, he said, “You handled yourselves well, kids, for the most part. There’ll be several commendations in this and promotions to OMEGA FORCE.”
“We wouldn’t think of leaving you, sir,” said one. Followed by a chorus of, “Hell, no.”
He smiled. He knew no one wanted to confront what OMEGA FORCE dealt with. He didn’t push it. It was just a proverbial pat on the back, in any case. They’d need to survive a lot more of these encounters as star performers before anyone took them seriously for OMEGA FORCE. And when the time was right, they’d ask to be assigned; they wouldn’t need to be offered.
He patted the shoulders of his star pupils as he went up the line. Their Bow and Arrow Woman. Flame Thrower. Flash Bang Grenade Guy. Teen Chic Anaconda Wrestler. And of course, Ariel, who’d designed the doughnut.
Their triage guys had the anaconda wrestler pretty much squared away, her broken ribs clearly on the mend despite some wincing, courtesy of the nano-juice they all used for rapid-healing. Tasted like radiator coolant, but it did the trick. Patent even gave Cayman-Mouth-Eaten Guy a pat on the shoulder. At least he hadn’t whined over the whole ordeal, and taken it like a man. He was drinking his second bottle of nano-juice.
“Go easy on the nano-juice,” Patent said. “It doesn’t grow on trees. Or maybe it does in these parts, but might take scientists another hundred years to isolate it.”
“Yes, sir.” The kid immediately stopped drinking it and stowed the bottle.
To Patent’s surprise the group towards the front of the plane, dangling from their hammocks, was still fast asleep. He shook his head slowly. “I’d forgotten that teenagers could sleep through the end of the world. God, to be that young again.”
One look at them, and one glance back at the crew lined up on either side of the plane, and he was reminded of what an international, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, straight, LGBT force they were. As rainbow coalitions went, he figured his would be hard to beat. More than one gay couple lay arms entwined in the hammocks, fast asleep. A drag queen, or whatever that was, maybe an actual hermaphrodite, was struggling to apply her lipstick, strapped into her seat along the far side of the plane. She wasn’t taking kindly to the air pockets the pilot was hitting and what they were doing to her face with the lipstick in her hand.
Patent sprayed himself down with a nano-mist. A lot of his lacerations from the jaguar were fairly severe. So he drank one of the nano juices as well. And lathered on the nano-paste. The full trifecta. Ordinarily he’d tough it out with a bottle of iodine and some gauze pads and torn tee shirts for bandages, and call it a day. But babysitting this many kids meant he needed to be at a hundred percent for their sakes.
The C-5 was in the air.
The Doughnut flew itself home, its mission completed, slipping in through the slit in the loading door left ajar just enough for it to return to the roost, before closing all the way.
Finally, Patent took his seat to the side of the plane, this one outfitted like Leon’s C-5, that is to say, more like a C-130, to leave room for the precious cargo running up the entire center length of the fuselage. “Where we headed, Satellite?”
“To some place where the eagles will have to look up at us, sir.”
“That’s my boy.”
***
The humming in Natty’s vicinity drew the soldiers. They were currently standing in a circle about him, hang-jawed.
“It’s a solar-powered generator with battery backup,” Crumley explained, investigating the source of the noise more closely.
The rest of them were regarding the isolation tent. Crumley stuck his hand inside to take a measurement. Showed Leon the gauge. “It’s fifty degrees inside the tent with just twenty-percent humidity.”
“He does realize several members of ALPHA UNIT have already…” DeWitt said before being interrupted by Leon’s throat-cutting gesture.
“Shake it off, guys.” Leon spoke the words in a low growl.
Natty flinched on the cot, instinctively rubbing the strained muscles, still more asleep than awake.
“At least the bastard is in pain,” Ajax said.
Natty’s left hand reached for the underside of one of the cot’s horizontal pole frames. The “cot” apparently was a bot. The robotic masseuse attended his pain points without interrupting his sleep, just by scanning his body and knowing where to put its unfolding limbs. “Oh yeah, that’s the ticket,” Natty mumbled. He hadn’t opened his eyes or stirred from sleep yet.
The soldiers flicked their switch-blades in tandem. “He’s so dead.” It was DeWitt sounding off this time.
Leon stifled a smirk. “Consider it an opportunity to learn a new level of self-control.”
“You’d think he’d offer his wife a place next to him at least,” Cronos commented.
“I’m guessing she chose to eschew the entire setup,” Leon spoke curtly.
“How could that woman have anything to do with…” Once again DeWitt was silenced by an upward glance from Leon.
Leon walked off with a snort that ended up as a chuckle.
“It’s not funny!” Ajax shout-whispered.
“Actually, barring the context of what happened earlier tonight, yeah, it’s pretty damned funny. Last I checked, we rewarded ingenuity around here.”
“There’s a spider-bot on ground patrol firing lasers out its feet at insects that manage to get past the perimeter,” Crumley informed them.
Leon came back to take a second look.
“The thing fires with such precision it doesn’t put a hole in the tent,” DeWitt said.
Leon saw the thing in action and just lost it. The rest of the guys were soon laughing so hard they were crying. “Okay, Crumley, just make sure the guys know what suitcase this gear is stowed in. Let him have his little victory over the rest of us for tonight. But this ends here.”
He broke rank and the rest of them decided it was time to turn this latest page in their lives too. They headed back to their comparatively hellacious conditions inside their mosquito-net-draped hammocks.
SIXTEEN
Cassandra Cross elevated her heart rate from its current dormant setting of just five beats per minute to fifty. A few minutes later she popped the lid of the Chinese box she’d encased herself in by strategically sliding about the panels from the inside. She stepped out of the stainless steel coffin, rubbed her neck, and immediately began slithering and contorting to stretch out the kinks.
One of ALPHA UNIT’s soldiers-in-training came up to her. “Whoa! Didn’t know you were so flexible.” He was trying to avert his eyes respectfully, but her nude form was too much of a draw. She tasked her skin nano with procuring her some camo undies. His leering dialed back from 10 to 9.5. He was still trying to figure out how she’d managed to slip them on in the brief time he could keep his eyes off her.
After doing a sweep of the camouflaged netted C-5s and other armored vehicles they were still belching out, she returned her eyes to the soldier. “I need to get to the front lines, where the action is.”
“Ah, Laney, all due respect, I can’t just let you out of that box. Leon put you there for your own protection.”
“Did he now?” Cassandra smiled. “Probably a good call. My sister’s good in most any crisis, except for the one that calls for me.”
“Your sister?” The soldier swallowed hard and raised his
rifle.
She swept the RPK away and got to his other hand before it could reach his knife. “Don’t make me hurt you.” She applied a nerve pinch just behind his jaw at the neck, immobilizing him from the neck down, while she stared into his eyes. “You’re going to forget this little exchange. I’m no longer the stowaway. Now my sister is. Which is as it should be.”
“You’re RevoCorp’s chief assassin. Natty made you with nano upgrades. I read about you.” He barely got out the last words as his knees buckled and he lost consciousness.
Her sister must be close by. It made sense they’d be keeping her in one of the anonymous cases that looked like so many of the others, under armed protection. Nice little shell game they had going. Cassandra could sense her, more than usual. Their psychic connection had always been strong. Even after they became estranged and stopped talking. But the signal, it had been boosted somehow… That mystery for later.
She closed the case she’d slipped out of so it would blend in with all the rest. Situated the fallen soldier against a tree so he looked like he just fell asleep on guard duty, which he would be in no position to deny while the hypnotic suggestion remained in place.
Cassandra instructed her nano to clip her hair at the roots, and she just flitted her head to shake off the follicles, like a dog getting out of the tub. Then she disappeared into the woods.
One of the soldiers who thought he’d heard something had come charging after her. But she disappeared right before his eyes, which really freaked him out. Her skin nano just painted her over better than any camouflage paint could hope to. Her eyes dissolved into the camouflage pattern as well. She froze, staring right back at him until he moved on. Then she finished slinking off.
***
Natty felt the ripping sensation in his hand. A half-second or so before his brain registered that his penlight had been lifted from him. “What the…?”
He looked up to see the monkey laughing at him. Flicking the light on the pen off and on. Getting off as much on the clicking sound as the bright light. Shining it into his eyes like he was giving himself a retinal exam, and screeching.
“Oh, oh. You’re in trouble now,” Leon said, laughing.
“Hey, give it back!” Natty pleaded with the monkey. Gesturing to him in case he understood sign language better. He got off his tree stump when the monkey, fairly big and black, nearly his size actually, didn’t take the hint.
The monkey scurried off and up the nearest tree and perched in a branch. Gesturing at Natty in the same way to “come here.”
“Will one of you guys go chase after that thing?” Natty said.
He wasn’t getting any takers.
“Seriously, guys, worldwide civilizations rise and fall on me, remember? Global collapse. Complete apocalypse without my penlight.”
“Nice try,” Leon said.
“Seriously, dude.”
“You want to try and outrun a monkey in a land of trees, you go right ahead. But my money is on the monkey.”
“Well, shoot it!”
“Remind me again who the animal rights guy is?” Leon said.
“If one must die so others must live, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I’m trying to save them all.”
“Ah-hem.” Leon lit his pipe, took a relaxing puff, and cracked open Jules Verne’s THE GIANT RAFT: Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon. It was practically falling apart from overuse. And fungi were threatening to finish it off this time for good. Mold that started growing on it, same as on everything else, from as soon as they entered the Amazon rainforest. He clamped his penlight over the page he was on, after he’d summoned enough courage to see how many of the master’s words fate had eaten away.
“Hey, look at that, you have a penlight too. No wonder you’re so relaxed. Now, give it here.”
Leon gave him a look that settled the matter once and for all.
“Turncoat,” Natty muttered before it occurred to him he could gather up enough fireflies in a bottle to use as a nightlight. Suddenly he was alive with vigor again and had forgotten the monkey entirely.
Leon laughed, watching him scurry around after the fireflies. “Just so you know,” he said, “it’s monkeys that are famous for their short attention spans.”
About the time Leon was settling into his next chapter, Natty had his nightlight assembled and was returning to his project at hand, tinkering away on some device or another.
“You better be careful with those toys of yours,” Leon said, “now that the monkeys have gotten wise to your booty. They’ll steal the entire collection away from you the instant your back’s turned if you’re not careful.”
“Yeah, right.” He looked up at Leon to make sure he was joking. His face said he wasn’t. “Great! Just great! The whole point of this little project is to chase away the nightmares. Not give myself more.”
Leon glanced up from his book, catching a scent. It smelled like Laney and yet not. He decided to go investigate.
The instant he was out of camp the boys were bouncing their eyes off one another and gesturing towards Natty.
“How many rivers did we cross to get here, Crumley?” Ajax asked.
Crumley whistled like a teapot letting off steam. “I lost count.”
“Wish we’d paid more attention to those needle fish,” Ajax said, his eyes on Natty the whole time, making sure to keep his voice clear and properly thrown so he overheard every word.
“Ah, I’ll play the odds. Not like we dallied. We crossed those rivers like men with a purpose.”
“Needle fish?” Natty said, finally taking the bait, looking up from his nerve-settling tinkering with one of his inventions.
“Yeah, they usually live in the gills of other fish. But they love a good urethra to swim up. Once inside, they spread their gills, lodging themselves in. Only way to get them out is to cut off your dick.”
“Ah, you guys are just messing with me, right?” No response. “Right, guys?”
“Hell of a way to go too,” Ajax confessed. “It dams the flow of urine, you see? With all that back up, bladder gets infected. Kidneys get infected. Hear it’s more painful than a gut wound.”
“About the only thing that is.” DeWitt nodded, chiming in.
“Oh, shit!” Natty unzipped his fly, got out the flashlight and started examining.
The others bit their lips like a bunch of loyal theatergoers who knew their favorite scene was coming up and they didn’t want to blow it for anybody else.
***
Each time Leon tracked Laney’s scent to the source, she wasn’t there. Nor was there any sign of anyone being there. He figured he’d hiked around the woods long enough to realize when guilt for stowing her away in a suitcase was getting the better of him.
Without further ado, he hiked back to camp.
Upon arrival, he took a quick look around at what was going on. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he said.
The others finally lost it. The outburst of laugher might actually have been more deafening than the ongoing ruckus of bird calls and howler monkeys.
“You’d be surprised what passes for comic relief around here after a day of battle,” Ajax said, “and in a place like the Amazon jungle, that includes doing battle with the elements.” He said it by way of apology.
Leon went over to Natty, took the torch out of his hand as he whispered in his ear. “It’s no joke, I tell you!” Natty insisted, stealing back the flashlight. Leon sighed. He could already tell he was going to have trouble talking him down.
***
Later that night, as Natty worked on his latest tech toy project, he’d look up from time to time to take in the men. Each of them had an ugly face for him when they caught him gazing their way. He was wondering why he wasn’t so chummy with any of them anymore and thought about the prior night, when he’d hogged all the AC for himself.
Finally the guilt caught up with him and he set down his device.
In an effort to summon the group, Natty went out an
d stood in the middle of camp, and put his fingers in his mouth and tried to whistle. It came out more like he was trying to trigger a vomiting episode. Leon was doing his best not to laugh. “A little help?” he said with pleading eyes to Leon. Leon rousted himself, came and stood beside him, and produced the whistle for him. The men flocked to the call.
“I understand my stunt the other night with the generator and the AC didn’t go over that well with some of you,” Natty said. “In an effort to redeem myself I thought I’d share with you a small token of my appreciation.”
They were hitting him with the folded arms and cockeyed expressions usually reserved for juries determined to sentence a man to death despite all the defense attorney’s wild prevaricating.
So, without further ado, he unsnapped the fasteners on his latest silver suitcase. Inside was a stockpile of shimmering white toilet paper. There was a delayed reaction. Note to self, Natty: Shock apparently slows responses. Some jaws went limp. Others gasped. They all fell to their knees in a mockery of bowing to their new god. “Yeah, yeah. I thought this might go over.”
Then they promptly forgot about him and charged the suitcase. From the noise and the tussling, Natty wasn’t sure if he’d triggered a fight.
“Leave it to you to find the one thing that has my men killing each other,” Leon said with a groan and a grimace. When he finally stepped in for his share there was nothing left but an empty toilet roll. He held it up and gave his men an ugly look.
“Don’t worry, pal, I got you.” Natty showed him what was behind door number two. “For the Lion of Sparta, only the very best.” He cracked open another suitcase. Inside was a toilet, more like a throne chair, really. “Please note the standout features. The water for flushing is kept circulating by the built in generator and filtration unit. Also, it’s paper-free, the bidet function just rinses you, and of course we have air-drying currents and jets adjustable to your preferred setting. Its self-cleaning features are second to none; you can drink out of it, even after you’ve done your business. And, of course, as soon as you sit on it, it engages the bug-zapper neutralization feature, essentially an energy shield, so you don’t have to be harassed by bugs drawn by the, you know…” He looked up to see the men were gathered around again, rolls of toilet paper in hand, mouths slacker than ever.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 13