Natty, just as annoyed at her pulling at his arm with her needle and thread, which he needed to work on his device, glared at her impatiently. “You mind? I'm trying to save the world here.”
“You'll need this arm later to put around me. If I'm still in a generous mood.”
It was the first time Natty had stuttered with his tinkering. “Yeah, okay.” He settled down, moving more slowly with the reparations to his device to give her a chance to stitch him up. “What happened to the nano-camo rub that heals and conceals?”
“We’re running low,” Leon informed him. “Best we save it for run-ins with these lizard men. God only knows what contagions they’re carrying. Assuming the nanococktails are any defense at all.”
Natty finished with his puttering. To Leon, he said, “You need to generate a magnetic field, like so.” He pulled out his cutlass and let it levitate between the two plates of the device.
“What'll that do, besides impress little kids?”
As Natty grew conscious of how nonetheless mesmerized Leon was by the scientific trick, he said, “The invisibility cloaks refract light a hundred different ways, so the enemy can't get a fix on the wearers. But to do that, the cloaks need energy from the sun, which they store in their solar cells. All that electricity will yield to a strong enough magnetic field.”
“How strong?” Leon said.
“Depends on what they're trying to hide. To reveal the soldiers, not very.”
“My people can find them, invisibility cloaks or no. I'm concerned about their compound.”
Natty grunted. “Christ, I didn't even think of that.” Distracted somewhat by Laney rubbing alcohol on his wound, now that she was finished with her stitching, he said, “Overkill for this jungle if you ask me. You can hide an armada in here, and no one'd ever find it.”
Leon thought about it, somewhat distracted by the testy manner in which Natty and Laney were eying one another, looking for a way to establish equilibrium between them again. “Maybe that's the missing piece.”
As Natty regarded Laney more like a man and less like a kid, Natty read the double entendre in Leon’s comment about "the missing piece.”
Natty broke eye contact with Laney to regard Leon.
“You said it yourself,” Leon said, “who needs an invisibility cloak in the jungle? Maybe their compound is someplace away from here where the land is sparse and arid.”
“That would make sense as a way to fend off the lizards. They're clearly genetically designed for the tropics.”
“I'm not so sure. They may not be at their best where the air is dry...” Leon regarded Laney, realizing how well she had adapted to her new situation away from home and her domestic bliss. “But they look like they'd be plenty formidable enough.”
Natty, reading Leon's mind as he followed his eyes to Laney, came to the same conclusion himself. “Yeah, I suppose. Some creatures can survive rather well outside their native environment.”
Leon threw a rock at the ground in the distance in frustration, scaring off a snake. “Ah, it’s not possible. No such mountain in these parts. In southern Brazil, maybe, not in these northern regions. Not until you get into Guyana or Peru.”
“Maybe the air around the compound is kept artificially arid,” Natty suggested, “on account of the kind of work they do there.”
“And what kind of work would that be?” Leon said.
Natty shrugged. “Maybe they’re working with biological weapons. Would explain the fire-breathing Nomads. The kinds of things they don’t want escaping prematurely into a tropical environment, so good at spreading infection. Not before they can focus their contagions on a specific enemy.”
“What contagious?” Leon said, his tone clinical and harsh.
Again Natty shrugged. “Could be the drool of a Nomad or the venom of an Umbrage. Maybe just touching them is meant to be deadly to anything that hasn’t lived alongside them long enough to become immune. It’d be one way to protect their territory. The way Native Americans spread poison oak around places they didn’t want the white man treading. But you’d want to make sure the biological weapons only worked in conjunction with the sentient serpents.”
“So we’re looking for some scarred region then, exposed rock and earth where vegetation isn’t going to get as much of a foothold.”
Natty finished Leon’s thought for him, “Perhaps designed to look natural, say along the slope of some hill, where it might be explained away as erosion, or the aftermath of a lightning strike or fire.”
Leon snorted and threw another rock to dispel one more unwanted slithering intruder. “If it’s some five or ten acre bald patch, it’s still going to be like finding the one bald man in a planet full of people with hair. And that’s looking down from an apache helicopter. God help us scouting for it from the ground.”
“I thought we were already on the mountain in question, sorry, big hill, and that the sentient serpents had narrowed our perimeter even more for us by patrolling the area.”
Leon grunted dismissively. “Assuming we’re not being played, and this isn’t just the region he’s pegged for this particular set of war games.”
Laney turned to stitching Leon's back, behind his shoulder blade. Before she could get to the stitching though, she had to clean the wound of puss and exudate, and inoculate him with antibacterials and antivirals. Just as she’d done with each of them before sewing them up. It was Natty's turn to be jealous. The tender caressing strokes she was making, the extra attention to detail, could be read more than one way.
He noticed Cassandra eying the two of them with similar emotions playing across her face. The easy, comfortable way in which Leon and Laney interacted, the casual intimacy, as if they’d always been together. Even though Cassandra’s physical wounds had healed on their own owing to her nanites, clearly emotional scars that ran deeper were a long way from healing.
***
“You mind, woman?” Leon groused at Laney’s needlework, stitching up his gash. “I’d like to keep some feeling in my back. Comes in handy for knowing when you’ve been shot there.”
She smiled. “Big, tough guy. Cronos, get me that hook you use when you’re river fishing, for reeling in anacondas. I think this one might be too small.”
Cronos smiled. Leon finally laughed. “Fine, make me suffer at your expense. That makes you officially part of the gang now. It’s what everyone else does.”
She closed another loop of the stitch and said, “Remember when you were helping me across the river? I slipped from your hands and went skidding along the bottom of the river bed, the one lined with rocks, not even being able to scream for fear of drowning.”
“You bring that up?! I seem to recall in an effort to rescue you feeling a pecking at my dick the entire time. I was sure there was a piranha nibbling at it. But did I stop? Oh no! That’s…”
“That’s what?”
“That’s love for you,” Cronos said, mumbling the rest of the line for Leon absently as he multitasked fishing debris out of his wound, making a face at each item, before tossing it aside.
“I was going to say that’s heroism for you,” Leon remarked.
“Nice cover,” Cronos said, eyes still on debriding his wound with his dirty fingers.
“Seems that’s not the only one I owe you,” Laney said, pulling another loop closed on the stitch and making him wince. “I recall the time when a boa had me around the neck, dangling off the ground. I couldn’t scream for help. When you turned you said, ‘It’s not time to play hit the piñata yet; it’s too early to celebrate.”
Cronos laughed. “No he did not,” he said, fishing a leaf out of his shoulder wound.
“I seem to recall uncoiling the snake from around your neck!” Leon protested.
“You did it so gingerly you’d think you were a conservation expert. And the few extra seconds it took to set me free was well worth it.”
“Wasn’t it?”
Cronos made a buzzer sound. “Wrong answer,” he said
, eyes marveling at the bug he was pulling out of his flesh wound, its legs scrambling for purchase.
Leon winced again from her needle work.
“The way you two carry on about the good old days and peck at one another, a person would think you’re the married couple,” Cronos said, fishing the maggots out of his gash and making a sour face. The grimace grew worse when he glanced down at the fungus taking up permanent residence on his toenails. He looked away from tending his wound finally at the suspicious silence and lack of pushback. To see Leon eying a tense Natty, busy snapping twigs as if preparing a fire as opposed to venting his rage. He noticed Cassandra run her nails along a tree trunk like an animal marking its territory, only to disguise the action as a desire to nibble on some tree bark. “Um, my bad,” Cronos said.
***
Natty noticed the rain was coming down now as it so often did in these parts. The raindrops louder and more consistent than machine gun fire. It bounced off the leaves adapted to channeling it like a bongo drummer’s hands off the skins of his drums. It would mask their scent, and soundproof their conversation that might also give up their location. Perhaps in the cosmic scheme of things there was more upside to it than downside, though it didn’t exactly feel that way.
One could argue that the rains came to wash away the sins of the past. Natty doubted they would. It wasn’t exactly the right tool for the job.
***
Eventually Laney had their wounds all cleaned and sewn up, Cronos’s too. And that emotional roller coaster ride Natty was sharing with Cassandra over the relationship ups and downs between Laney and Leon had come to an end.
Unfortunately for the soldiers and civilians alike, another ride, no less taxing, was just starting. It involved dear friends recently departed.
Now that they no longer had their physical wounds to distract them, there was the matter of the emotional ones to contend with. They were the real killers.
FIFTY
Leon roared with anger over his failing strength as he lifted the rubble away, frustrated by the time this was costing him. He roared, moreover, for the sheer energy boost he knew the outburst of fury would bring him. Why couldn’t the building have had the decency to explode in smaller chunks? He coughed out the cement dust as he threw another baby boulder-size block out of the way. That last one had to be a hundred and fifty pounds at least. The smallest had been closer to eighty. He was standing on top of a mountain of rubble they should damn well be raising a flag on, as they’d won this exchange.
Finally, he could see Crumley crawling his way up to him. “I had this. Why did you have to go and steal my thunder?”
Leon collapsed back on his duff, laughing and shedding tears of relief. “A building collapsed on top of you, Crumley.”
“Yeah, top that.”
Leon wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and only got cement dust in them for his trouble, which caused him to tear up more. “How many times have I saved your ass now?”
“This one doesn’t count. I told you, I had this one.” Crumley finished crawling out of the hole and found a slab of rock to catch his breath on.
Leon regarded him. “You look like a real silverback now,” he said. Crumley’s hairy, grey-follicle body had earned him the nickname of Silverback because he looked so much like a silverback gorilla. Between the thick muscles and frame and the patch of gray hair running up his chest and back. But covered in cement dust as he was now, the nickname seemed all the more appropriate.
Crumley regarded himself. “That’s my favorite nickname, by the way. Don’t see why you guys just can’t pick one and stick with it.”
Leon chuckled. “That’s what you get for being such a well-rounded guy, I guess. Now, if you could just be shallow, like the rest of us, the boys wouldn’t be tempted to keep reaching.”
Crumley handed him a mango. Leon’s eyes lit up. “They had a pretty decent fridge on the second floor. Too bad I had to fall through five floors to get to it.”
“Leave it to you to find the one thing that simply cannot be found in the middle of the damn desert.” Leon bit into his mango.
Crumley pulled out a toucan from under his shirt. “The mango’s for the damn bird, you bastard. Why does everything have to be about you?”
Leon bit both his lips to suppress the smile and handed over the mango to the toucan. “I appreciate you bringing some color into my life, in any case, Silverback.”
It was easy for both of them to lose themselves briefly in the toucan’s delight, using its beak to peel and then bite into the mango.
A glance up at the bombed out Syrian city in the blazing noon sun showed an endless horizon of buildings faring little better than the one Crumley had just crawled out of. “Lucky I found you. Talk about the perfect cover.”
Crumley shared the view and snorted. “Come on, let’s go play some more hide-and-seek,” he said, sticking his bird back in its “cage” of his buttoned up shirt, with just its beak hanging out, and grabbing his rifle. Forcing Leon to chase after him.
“Can’t believe you’re making me rescue your ass twice in one day,” he bitched. “It’s thoughtless is what it is.”
The memory faded in Leon’s mind to raining tears. Another blast from the past wasted no time blowing what was left of his psyche apart.
***
Crumley strained under the dead weight of Leon’s body. Dragging him was turning out to be even less fun than shouldering him. But at least it was working a different set of muscles. “Have you thought of losing some weight?” Crumley said. Leon chuckled. “They don’t call me Silverback for nothing, you know? And if I can’t lug your ass about, who the hell else is going to do it?”
“It’s a terrible burden to carry, I know.”
“How’s the leg surgery coming?”
“I’m still digging shrapnel out. Haven’t gotten to the surgery part yet. I’m going to need a field bandage. Used up my tee shirt making the tournequit. Better grab that anaconda over there and skin it for me. Only thing big enough for the job.”
“That anaconda might have some other ideas about its fate.”
“Never seen a thirty foot snake you couldn’t make your bitch. Now hurry, will ya? I lose any more blood I won’t be good for any more snarky one-liners. And then what are you going to do?”
Crumley let him go. Reached for his knife. “Hate jungle warfare, hate it. It’s all the sweating, I can’t stand.”
“Be grateful. If it weren’t for your body odor convincing every animal for miles around we’ve both been dead for at least ten days, we’d have to fight them off too.”
Leon took his eyes off Crumley to attend his leg, do what he could to stem the bleeding. He looked up at the unhopeful sounds coming from Crumley. “We don’t have time for you to play with that thing! You’d think you were getting enough of a workout dragging my sorry ass around.” Leon stared in disbelief at the Gorilla from Manilla and Sally the Snake going at it in a grudge match to end all grudge matches and shook his head. “You want to grab its head!”
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”
Crumley had started by playing a game of “let’s wear out the snake,” provoking it to strike repeatedly and always making sure to stay just out of its strike range. The problem was, Crumley was wearing out faster than the snake.
That strategy exhausted, he was running through his textbook maneuvers, starting by biting down on the most sensitive part of the anaconda’s body, its tail. The creature should have taken a hint and tried to get away from him at that point, but instead became more aggressive. When the snake finally grabbed on to his leg and started coiling he managed to get a few spirals around Crumley’s chest. He had to avoid the tendency to exhale which would have just encouraged the snake, causing it to constrict more tightly, as he rolled on the ground with the thing.
He tried choking the snake just behind the head next, and trying to pull him off with raw strength. That actually worked for a while. But the snake made judicious use of
his time by coiling so as to strangle that arm in order to force him to release its neck.
Crumley was running out of time.
Finally, he slid the knife under the roof of the snake’s mouth, drove the tip up through the crown of the head and pulled back savagely, splitting the head in two.
Fight over.
He fell back against the ground gasping for air.
Another moment to compose himself, and he proceeded to disentangle himself from the snake.
That feat accomplished, it was on to skinning it.
Leon finished up the surgery on his leg.
“Damn thing was pregnant.” Crumley threw a handful of the live young at Leon, who started slipping them down his gullet. Crumley was doing the same as he finished skinning the animal. From the dozens of newborns disappearing into the forest he’d say revenge was best served cold, even in the heat of this jungle.
“Toss me the bandage.” Leon wrapped his own leg with the snakeskin. Stitched up the ends of the bandage. “Help me up.”
Crumley got him up off the ground, played human crutch for him so he only had to support his weight on one leg. “We better find you some plants to fight the infection.”
“There’s some that way,” Leon said, pointing.
“I swear the natives don’t know this forest as well as you. One patch looks the same to me as any other. Couldn’t find my way out of here with a GPS unit.”
Leon hit him with the flummoxed face he was saving for a moment of genuine awe. “I put someone with no sense of direction in charge of my supply lines? What kind of quartermaster are you?”
“The kind that grabs what he needs where he finds it so he doesn’t have to double back,” he said, handing him a piece of bark to chew on. “That’ll help with the immune system response until we can find something better.” He headed into the forest in the indicated direction, taking Leon along for the ride. Reached into his pocket, pulled out some dates, chewed on them.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 43