Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  Again Laney screamed out in misery. Each time she felt herself shutting down, her heart miss enough beats that it might never start again from the guilt over all that she had caused, the pain would cause it to beat again. Back and forth she went, dancing between life and death.

  She keyed in now to the emotional pain caused by what each of the Umbrage saw in their different colored eyes as they ran out of their mother’s wombs. The first sight to greet them in this brave new world was that of the painted warriors of the Ubuku attacking them with every instrument known to man, including their latest device, the Nomads themselves. Laney’s guilt soared in kind for giving the sentient serpents the upgraded nervous systems for amplifying, storing, and transmitting such heightened degrees of torment.

  Old Blue Eyes. He had come out of the Nomad’s womb born an old soul. Maybe Laney had invested him with too much understanding and knowledge. She saw the world as he saw it in that moment. His very first images. Of the Ubuku tribesman throwing a net over him. Then straddling him to choke the life out of him. Then locking eyes with Blue Eyes. Exchanging looks so intense that it actually snapped the Ubuku out of his trance. Rattled him. His entranced eyes filled no more with numbness but with fear. Blue Eyes tore through the net with the talon-like nails on his hands, wrapped the rope around the neck of the one that had him pinned, and pulled so hard with the cord at either end of the rope he garroted the man with one-inch thick nano-infused rope. The head popping like a grape before the rope finished slicing through the neck.

  Born with the headgear on—the device’s own nanoassembly tied to the birthing process as early as the fertilization of the egg—Old Blue Eyes fought against incomprehensible pain soaring through his entire body, across every nerve ending, to resist the kill order of his new masters, the triple threat. But it did no good. He was still little more than a puppet in their hands. His nervous system, three times as extensive as the network in a human body, with hundreds of miles more fibers, had little choice but to respond to the pain coursing through it.

  Again Laney shrieked in torment as she felt what it was like for a nerve impulse to travel along that more elaborate network in Old Blue Eyes’ body. Travel again and again.

  At least Old Blue Eyes had the old soul depth of character to weather the storm.

  The same couldn’t be said for Brown Eyes. It was into his body Laney moved next, her memories continuing to force the sentient serpents’ first person point of views on her when earlier, when the gladiatorial games were actually going on, she had been able to get away with the more detached third person perspective.

  Brown Eyes’ retinas relayed a different first image coming towards him as he crawled out of the womb. An arrow fired from one of the Ubuku. Tipped with an explosive. Brown Eyes caught the arrow in midair inches from his face. Peeled off the miniature missile though it pushed against his hand with the force of a boulder. And shoved the firecracker down the gullet of the Ubuku that had come at him with it. He held the man by the throat lest he had any ideas about vomiting back up the projectile.

  When his body exploded all over Brown Eyes he kept strangling the now detached head at the neck until the life went out of the eyes before he would drop it.

  Laney felt the cold steel hatred of Brown Eyes, a creature born not to love but to strife. His wild desire to exterminate every last Ubuku like cockroaches—a desire she had not implanted in him. And in an instant it was all too clear. Even her precious Umbrage could be pushed too far.

  Her life signs were failing again. She didn’t know how many more first person point of views she had left in her before she expired entirely.

  And then came Yellow Eyes.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Cronos walked a dangerous path. He knew that now because he’d just stumbled upon a trail of dead bodies belonging to soldiers that had hiked it before him. First Crumley, and then DeWitt, and now Ajax. He knew if he kept going in the direction he was headed he was likely to join their number. He refused to veer from the path.

  His survivor’s guilt had started long before today. Long before even the fateful day he’d run into Leon who’d saved his life with the dick swapping idea of his. He wasn’t half the soldier these men were, and yet he kept surviving. High time he threw his body on to the pile of corpses; it was the most fitting homage he could give them now. To live on, to fight in their stead as a shadow of the kind of trained killers they were, it would be a bad joke, is what it would be. An insult to their memories. They’d turn over in their graves if they only knew he dodged bullets because he had some guardian angel none of them had and that he hardly deserved.

  The more he hiked though, the more it became clear that whatever danger lurked here, it had moved on. Finally he’d run headlong into Leon and Cassandra. There was nothing to do now but hold his poker face. He couldn’t add to his shame by whining about his fate when better men had gone to their ends fighting to the last, never a thought for themselves.

  And later, when Laney patched his wounds as she made her rounds sewing them all up, his eyes burned with fire at her. He wanted to rip her tonsils out for not letting him bleed out. Surely she had to see it in his eyes. Did she? Did she share his feelings, carrying survivor’s guilt of her own? He couldn’t abide the thought. Her giving him a pass because she could empathize was even worse. He was like the special needs kid in back of the class who no one expected as much of, so he would keep getting a pass. The shame of that was nothing compared to the shame of surviving, period. He needed to die; it was the only salvation.

  Every way he could think of to martyr himself just took him back to a scene from the past when the idea had simply not worked.

  ***

  In Syria, Cronos had walked through the city, up and down every thoroughfare, right up the center of the street, without cover and without a weapon. Pulling men who had been shot out of harm’s way, doctoring them, before moving on to the next. The gunfire had never ceased and not once had he been hit. The dust he kept coughing out was doing more to his lungs than their shrapnel and their lead bullets. The heat squeezing more life out of him than the marksmen on either side. Later, he would be told that the sweat extruded along his back and shoulders had formed a crucifix. Some said he’d been mistaken for the Red Cross or simply as a medical triage specialist, and so, off limits. Others told him there was no such exemption for military personnel anymore. Those days of gentlemanly wars were long over. It was open season on medics same as everyone else. Some said maybe it was because he was saving wounded soldiers on both sides of the fight, without exception, and so no one much minded him getting in the way. That was never his intention, but he was not a professional soldier, so what did he know? Men bleeding, covered in dust and blood more than by regimental colors tended to look the same. Still, detractors poo-pooed the idea that that had anything to do with anything. What had really saved him was the idea that he was some kind of holy man. A notion that spooked even the non-Christians and the atheists. Even the God haters. But Cronos knew it was all bullshit. He survived, not on account of their fanciful stories, but because of some son of a bitch he’d wronged at some point in his life, someone he should have saved but didn’t, whose spirit haunted him and would not rest until he was finished persecuting Cronos.

  As a spy and attaché overseas, just how many people had he screwed, all with a smile on his face and a handshake? A mike strapped to his chest beneath his shirt? It had to be one of those bastards come back for him, had to be. Because if it was just dumb luck, that was even worse.

  So much for the thought of throwing himself in front of a bullet. He chuckled. How many times had that not worked? Syria, from Damascus to Homs, was the least of it.

  ***

  In the wilds of Mexico where drug wars had been going on for decades, Cronos had played his part. He wasn’t carrying a gun there either, not like fighting was his thing at the time. He hadn’t picked up soldiering until he’d been drafted into Leon’s unit.

  The drug kingpin and his p
eople were on one side of the field behind the cover of trees. The DEA forces were across the clearing in a stand of trees all their own. The only thing between the opposing sides was the killing field. Where men continued to venture every time the gunplay died down, convinced everyone on the other side was dead. You’d think someone would get wise to the game at some point. But that was mad lust for power and revenge for you, tended to pickle the mind. Eventually the wailing of all the wounded soldiers on both sides was driving Cronos mad. So he set about dragging bodies back to their respective battle lines.

  Fifty-caliber machine gun fire whistled by him trying to take him out from both sides in turn, depending on which line he was dragging the men to. Even the snipers up in the trees had it out for him. But someone always intervened. To take out the sniper. Or the .50 caliber shooter. It might have just been another fool running across the field to give Cronos cover that got them cut down instead. There was no way he could have survived what he did. That was the whole point. No way at all. But survived he did. Why, because what better hell for him than right here?

  Maybe he’d died long ago, and all this was just his soul which couldn’t find rest. He was beginning to sell himself on that idea when Leon caught up with him. There was something about Leon and his boys he couldn’t dream up in a million years. Unless of course, he really had made it to Valhalla. The place where war gods go to be remembered forever. He might well have believed that seeing these men in action. But then, what was he doing there? To even think that he’d died and accidentally got counted among these heroes was a guilt that trumped even his survivor’s guilt. So he put that lunatic idea out of his mind. And instead redoubled his efforts to die.

  ***

  In Guatemala, another war Cronos had gotten implicated in when he was sent in to determine who among the officials was in cahoots with the drug lords, he’d jumped into a quicksand pit to rescue a man being sucked under.

  He dragged the guy out of the pit, thus endearing him to the drug lord and getting the kingpin to almost instantly open up on the subject of who he was paying in government to do what. Cronos’s loyalty, risking his own life to save the drug lord’s son’s, had put him above rebuke. Little did the drug lord know what Cronos was later to find out, namely that quicksand pits do not suck you down. They are more like liquid pools of muddy water. But because mud is denser than water it is next to impossible to sink past your shoulders. Cronos couldn’t have killed himself in a quicksand pit if he tried and neither could the drug lord’s son. The son’s golden retriever could probably have dragged the man out. It was just Cronos’s plight to pass himself off as a hero when he was anything but, yet again.

  ***

  Cronos thought about his efforts to make himself worthy of the company of Leon and his men since landing in the Amazon River basin. He had swum across a river of piranha to pull Ajax’s leg out of an anaconda that was quite determined to swallow the rest of him whole. He’d wrestled with the snake in the water. Killed it there, and continued to unspool Ajax from the coils of the forty-foot long snake, not getting him entirely untwined until he had him back on shore.

  “You swam across a river full of piranha just to rescue me?” Ajax said. “Hate to break it to you, pal. In any other outfit that would have gotten you a medal. In Leon’s, it’s just one of the seven trials of Hercules that passes for an initiation around here. You got six more to go.”

  Cronos gave him a rueful smile as he pulled the last of the snake, the head and neck still glommed on to Ajax’s foot, off him. Meanwhile, all Cronos could think of was that it was just his luck that the piranha had fed already, witnessed by the fact that they were ignoring the anaconda’s bleeding body as it got sucked down river.

  One time he jumped in front of Crumley to catch about a half dozen poison darts. He kept circling Crumley like a spider, to block the darts coming at him from all directions. He must have had about three dozen in him before the astonished Crumley cleared the area of darts men with his automatic rifle. By then he was turning about on himself three hundred and sixty degrees to pepper them with his bullets, using Cronos as a shield. The ones Crumley didn’t hit simply dissolved back into the forest.

  He laid Cronos on his back, and with his gloves gently picked the needles out of him dipped in the venom extracted from the poison dart frog—a creature of such electric blue and black colors that they were hard for the uninitiated to avoid picking up—and into a cup. “You must be immune to these things. Lucky you and lucky me.”

  When Crumley got them back to camp he held Cronos up before Leon. “Bastard saved my life. Took about three dozen poison darts for me.” Crumley held up the cup with the toothpick-like needles for Leon to take a look.

  Leon nodded. “Get him to Laney so she can extract his antibodies, come up with an immunity shot for the rest of us. And as for you, dingbat,” he said swatting Cronos across the back of the head, “if there is anyone who doesn’t need saving, it’s Crumley. He’d have time run back here with you over his shoulders before those darts brought him down. And even then, they’d probably just give him a good case of the runs. Probably the best thing that could happen to his constipated ass.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cronos said, sounding whipped.

  “Ah, don’t be so hard on the boy,” Crumley said. “His instincts were right. That’s what counts.” Crumley gave him one of his affectionate pats on the back that usually called for a chiropractor afterwards.

  Later, you should have seen Cronos’s face as Laney was extracting blood from him. “Maybe my blood will impart some of my good luck too.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.

  ***

  Lying there, in the wake of his bandaged arm and neck, it didn’t seem to matter how many ways Cronos came up with to kill himself. It was like he’d tried them all already. The Amazon rainforest, if anything, had offered up a bonanza of new opportunities his usually creative mind on the subject would never have thought of.

  As he shot down one ingenious idea after another, so his despair grew.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Natty felt as if he was getting an acupuncture treatment to the head, each flashback like a needle driven between the cracks in his skull deep into his grey matter. It had all caught up to him at once. The real cost of doing business in a world populated by his toys. No doubt the loss of Crumley, Ajax, and DeWitt back to back had triggered the avalanche of recent memories. Maybe by then anything could have gotten it going; it just happened to be them. Because he had hit critical mass with what he could laugh off as part of the fun and games.

  And so the image cut into his mind of the engineer that had been working alongside him atop one of the crashed robots. They were yanking out the component Natty needed to convert yet another Goliath-Bot to self-piloting mode. When a tree exploded near them. It had simply been stepped on by one of the Ubuku wearing a robo-suit. The splinters flew in all directions. One of those splinters hit the engineer holding the item they were seeking up proudly after digging it out. Natty just had time to catch the component as the engineer, taking a splinter to the heart big enough to stake a vampire, went flying into another tree, wedged there by the very same wooden spike that had taken his life. The life hadn’t quite gone out of his eyes before a crow had landed on him to peck out one of the eyes still so full of life.

  Another engineer had quickly filled in his place, before Natty could learn the name of the man whose life had been taken so innocuously and detachedly it barely constituted a micro-event in the larger skirmish going on about them.

  The emotional brunt of the engineer’s death, that Natty did not have the time to process then or the space in his head, hit him now. It sent a wave of nausea rolling along him like high tide moving up the shore until he vomited all over his clothes. He didn’t even have the sense or the will to bend over. The gunk hung on him, sending its noxious vapors into his nose in his own private Auschwitz. Like ammonium carbonate appli
ed under the nose of someone who just fainted, the odors just triggered the next memory to flip over in his mind in a rolodex that never turned up the same memory card twice.

  ***

  The Ubuku tribesmen were frantically trying to get out of the straps pinning them to their seats in the cockpit now that their Goliath-Bot had crashed to the ground. Tripped up in the snare like a fly in a spider’s web. Their sense of urgency in no undue amount owed to the uniformed ALPHA UNIT soldier drilling through the faceplate with a diamond bit drill and inserting a rubber hose.

  As he flooded the chamber with gas he wiggled his fingers at them. Then turned his back on the Ubuku duo, slipped into his foldout chair to read his graphic novel. Actually, it wasn’t his, it was DeWitt’s, his software cobbling it together on the fly for his ten-year-old. Could Comic Book Reader help it if he’d never outgrown comic-strip books? It helped him get his mind around some of OMEGA FORCE’s antics in a less intimidating format. Maybe since watching the hidden camera captures of some of their earlier exploits the shock had age-regressed him to where the mentality of a ten-year-old suited him fine.