There weren't many opportunities for a choke like this in the Zoo or even hunting cryptids. Hell, humans usually had enough sense to avoid these kinds of situations, but from what he could hear barreling down the tunnel, whatever approached was more than willing to risk it.
The hissing grew louder. He could see the shadows of something moving toward them. It was big and moved fast—a little too fast, he realized suddenly.
"Oh, you have to be kidding me," he whispered. "Change of plans—we'll need explosives instead!"
Chapter Twenty-Six
He wasn’t sure why he hadn't recognized the sound. It had been a frequent flier in his nightmares, one of the few monsters he genuinely dreaded facing in the Zoo.
It wasn't the creature that made the hissing noise but the carapaces gliding and scraping over the walls. With its tremendous size moving through the narrow tunnels, it would grind against the wall no matter how well it could move.
Niki looked at him instead of the hole in the wall. He didn't know what went through her mind, but he wanted her focused.
"Eyes off me!' he roared and yanked a grenade from his belt. He still couldn't see the mutant and could only focus on the twitching shadows within the tunnel.
Waiting for it to circle was killing him. It wasn't fear, he tried to tell himself. He didn't fear these things. But his inner voice contradicted him and left him with only the determination that he would fight it anyway. The self-preservation instinct that nagged and told him that running away was the right option only meant that he was still alive and more or less functioning between the ears. It didn’t mean he had to listen.
"I fucking hate killerpillars," he whispered and froze when he caught a flicker of movement down the passage. He narrowed his eyes to focus as its antennae peeked around to 'see' what was happening at the entry.
The grenade bounced on the wall and circled the corner while the fuse wound down. The flash and explosive were enough to drive the fucker out of hiding and forced it into the fight maybe a few seconds before it would have preferred.
"Come on, you big fat bastard!" Taylor roared and fired at the creature with his assault rifle in one hand while the other pulled another grenade from his belt. He flicked the pin out with his suit's thumb and lobbed it without so much as a pause.
He wouldn’t be able to kill the bastard on his own. The concussive blasts of the grenades kept it slightly disoriented and unbalanced, but it was still about half a ton of monster that should be about the size of his boot, at the most.
At over five meters long, it slithered across the floor toward him at an impossible speed. The carapaces shielded it like armor and prevented his bullets from punching through.
Any weaknesses were in the rear, and as it surged toward him, those vulnerabilities would be exposed to the other three members of his team.
He had to trust them to take the fucker down before it eviscerated him.
Entirely focused on his attacker, he backed down the hallway and away from his team and drew the mutant along with him, firing with every step. Jansen was beside him and while he tried to fight, he didn’t move fast enough. The creature realized this almost immediately and shifted its efforts to tackle him as the weaker adversary.
"Stay on me, dumbass," Taylor snapped at the killerpillar. He fired into its eyes and dragged its attention away from the other man. Damage had been done to Jansen’s suit, but he had more than enough to worry about without adding his teammate’s armor issues to it.
The mandibles cut in first and grabbed and squeezed his legs. He tried to draw back and pull himself free from the mutant as it attempted to run him over.
He dragged his leg out of the monster's jaws and they snapped shut a fraction of a second after he pulled free. The assault rifle clicked empty and there was no time for him to reload it. The dozen or so black beads that passed for eyes were locked on him and the mandibles reached for him again. He was less afraid of those since all they could do was crush him like a hydraulic press. Hopefully, he could recover from that.
His real fear came from the first five rows of legs. The points were stingers and as sharp as razors, thin enough to punch through weak areas in his armor to deliver a fatal dose of venom.
"Fuck no," he whispered when the wall pressed against his back and left him no space to retreat farther. He was out of space and out of time.
"Fucking…get the fuck off me," he demanded, pushed back, and tried to use some of the suit's power to stop the creature from crushing him against the wall. He moved one hand to the mandibles and tried to hold them despite the fact that they were covered in slime. As he was pushed up on the wall by the sheer weight of the creature attacking him, his feet lashed out to shove the poison-tipped legs away from him.
When only one limb was left, Taylor stretched desperately but couldn't reach his sidearm. His fingers closed around the handle of his knife and he drew it and tried to run the blade up the carapace. If he had to, he would climb inside the fucker and cut his way out.
Too late, he realized he hadn’t mentioned the killerpillar’s vulnerabilities to his team. In the moment of impending combat, he had made a rookie mistake and simply assumed they knew. Little wonder that they hadn’t been able to deliver much assistance, and he cursed when he realized he was probably well and truly on his own—unless he could manage to explain what was needed and keep himself alive at the same time.
Explosives detonated somewhere ahead of him, but the noise was lost in the sound of the clacking mandibles of the monster that tried to tear through him and savage what defense he had managed to put up. He was close enough to see that the eyes had been damaged by the first grenade. They were bleeding, and the creature was mostly blind and enraged.
"Fuck!" He hissed and felt like the breath was being squeezed from him. The mandibles clamped around his arm and dragged it aside. He twisted his body and pain arced up his spine at the unnatural position as he rammed the knife between the jaws. The beast shrieked with pain as he twisted the blade in place.
Another explosion made his ears ring, and this one reverberated through the creature's body and his. He was shoved harder against the wall until he saw spots all around him.
Suddenly, the weight disappeared. He moved, rolled across the floor, and sucked in deep breaths he had been unable to take while pressed up against the wall by the creature.
"Holy…shit," he whispered, pushed slowly to his feet, and looked to see what had happened to the killerpillar.
The part he had been violently up close and personal with lay bleeding and twitching. It made sense since that was more or less all that was left as the bottom half of the mutant was all but gone.
Well, not gone so much as redistributed through the generous use of explosives.
"I managed to get the doors open," Vickie announced over the comms. "Are you…are you guys all right?"
"A-Okay," he announced but teetered a little on his feet. His suit had taken damage but it was still mostly functional at this point. He flicked his knife until it was no longer covered in cryptid blood and shoved it into its sheath. "How's the rest of the team?"
"Still here," Niki announced and negotiated over the dead creature to pump a couple more rounds into the creature’s mouth to be sure. "We thought you were fucking dead, Taylor. Don't you fucking do that again."
"Well, you should know by now that I'm tough to kill," Taylor replied and straightened with a grimace. "But I admit, I dropped the ball on this. I forgot that you aren’t Zoo-experienced and that you’ve never fought one of these. My bad. And believe me, if you have to deal with one end of those bastards, you'll want to target the back end. The tactic usually dictates that a heavy draws the front while everyone else takes the back. In this case, it was me."
"That means one of us needs to get a heavy suit next," Maxwell muttered and patted him on the shoulder. Jansen did the same.
"Well, I've dived through the software I have access to," Vickie announced on the comms. "Sal's team has been
able to put in some of the fobs I gave him, and I have access to the security system. I…think you guys need to get to the bottom levels. They're about to get themselves into serious shit."
Taylor nodded and focused down the hallway. "Okay, we'll beeline it there right now. Grab your collective shit and let's get going. Jansen, are you good?"
The DOD agent nodded. "You took more damage than I did. I'll be fine."
* * *
The defenders almost seemed like they were giving up. A handful of them continued to fight, but the others hung back and rushed out of the way as soon as bullets were exchanged. It was logical that someone had told them to get the hell out of Dodge, and Sal could only imagine it was because they were prioritizing other locations.
Hell, with their kind of luck, the place they intended to protect so vehemently would be Heavy Metal’s ultimate target area.
"I don't like this, Sal." Madigan trotted ahead of the group and acted as a shield for them. "More and more, I'm starting to feel like we're heading into a trap."
"Yeah," he answered quietly. "I have the same feeling."
"What do you think we should do?"
"Do we have a choice? We spring the trap and get them to come to us."
"How creative of you. Charging head-first into something you know will be a trap."
He grinned. "They'll never expect that."
They reached the lowest level, but it didn't look as he imagined it would. He had expected vaulted ceilings and a wide room, but they stood in a section that appeared to have been merely carved into the rock of the tiny island.
Vickie worked efficiently and the door opened for them as soon as they pushed toward it. Groups of over a dozen security men in suits of varying sizes waiting for them. They used massive crates as cover but didn’t look entirely ready for a fight.
Unfortunately, it seemed they wouldn’t have more time. As Sal stepped through the door, what he had assumed was a wall slid slowly upward with a low mechanical grinding sound that echoed through the massive chamber behind it.
He couldn't help a small seed of dread that planted itself in the pit of his stomach as he looked into the chamber beyond. Massive UV bulbs hung from the ceiling, illuminating the whole room so it looked like they stood in the great outdoors.
His brain recognized the weird relevance of that, given that they stood on the edge of a jungle that grew underground. Trees that would have taken years—decades, even—to grow anywhere else in the world had sprung up in a matter of weeks since the facility had been established. He could think of nothing else other than that it was way too familiar.
"What the fuck?" Davis hissed through clenched teeth and shook his head.
"Yeah, it's a Zoo," Sal responded. "Bite-sized, but yeah, there’s no doubt."
“But how?” Madigan asked, an edge of horror in her tone. “Everyone knows the Zoo needs biomass…” The words trailed off and silence settled around them.
“I…I think I have some of those answers,” Vickie said tentatively. “And yeah, when I get out of here, I’ll most likely be sick.”
“Why?” Sal asked, his scientist mind already clicking into high gear.
“Well…first, they brought in loads and loads of soil from the Zoo—”
“Which contains a huge supply of what a jungle like that would need,” he interrupted. “Sorry. I think aloud. Don’t let me put you off.”
“Okay, this is where the sick comes in, so be warned. That soil was sourced through contacts in the Sahara Coalition and was removed from the Zoo by locals. Some of them, according to this, were criminals and lowlifes. But some…”
“Some were poor people willing to do anything to earn something to take home to their families.” Martin sounded disgusted.
“Yes,” the hacker said, her voice much quieter. “But it gets worse. The biomass you mentioned?”
“Oh, fuck no.” Madigan had stiffened and her voice reflected something close to rage.
“I’m afraid so. Those workers were shipped in with the last load and…well, they never left. From what I see from some of the notes here, the researchers had stores of goop sacs they bought, whatever those are, and when everything was ready, the workers…uh, they fed them to the Zoo, which is what kick-started the process.”
Sal cursed and shook his head. He dragged his gaze from the spectacle that had them mesmerized and his brain engaged the reality that they were in a combat situation. Already, they’d spent too much time gaping at what none of them wanted to admit was real. He vaguely registered that the defenders seemed as surprised as his team was. It appeared that they had been out of the loop in the decision to expose them to the mini-Zoo that some dickhead had grown in the area.
After a moment, he recognized the fear they manifested when they backed away from the jungle. The reaction told him that something in there terrified them enough that they didn't want to fight, which explained why his team had been able to stand and gawk like tourists on a Sunday stroll.
They seemed oblivious to anything but the scene directly ahead as if they waited for the something to appear. He had a few theories as to what could generate that kind of reaction, and the trees themselves only factored into a couple of them.
"You don't think they would have been stupid enough to put the creatures inside there, do you?" Madigan asked although he had a feeling she already knew the answer to that. He wouldn’t tell her what to think about what was being done on this island, but the testing he had seen so far made it clear why it had been done on an abandoned island in so much secrecy that intelligence operatives were killed to keep it hidden.
"We'll have to burn this whole facility to the ground," Sal whispered, and almost as if the jungle heard him, a rustle of movement followed that could only have been from the animals inside.
He grasped his weapon a little tighter and gestured for Madigan to move toward the defenders who were still in place. Their team had a job to do, and it wouldn’t be accomplished if these guys were still in position to shoot them in the back.
A couple of rockets streaked into their cover, knocked the defenders back, and reminded them that they had a job to do as well.
"Clear this place out!" Madigan roared and motioned to her teammates to join the action. This meant it was on him to ensure they weren’t attacked on the flank by whatever emerged from the jungle to their right. One of the extra arms drew his sidearm and he focused it in on the men pushed back by his team.
His assault rifle remained at the ready and he began to sweep it across the tree line less than ten meters away from where he stood. The movement was already visible and his heart rate accelerated. His mouth was dry and his whole body tingled with adrenaline as the disturbance registered on his suit's motion sensors and coalesced into a wave that surged forward.
There were too many of them—dozens, he realized—that now closed in on the sound of gunfire. Sal noticed that a small light flicked on above them. He used his HUD to zoom in on what was happening and his gaze identified a group of men in lab coats who took notes on tablets and talked among themselves. Scientists, he thought sourly, who watched, recorded what they saw, and discussed it like it was merely another research project.
Sal’s blood began to boil with the need to kill or destroy something. He wanted to make those guys take notes about what he would do to them when he reached their little observation room.
The creatures moved toward him, focused on the closest origin of the fighting noise.
"Come on, guys," he shouted. "You lived long enough in the Zoo. You come out to die here!"
And with that, he pulled the trigger.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"Three companies."
"What?"
Vickie sighed. "They routed a considerable number of transactions through dummy corporations, but I'm tracking it to three different companies in Serbia, Sweden, and Venezuela. All have pushed their investments through the same bank in the Caymans. I can see that they put a ton of money into this a
nd they won’t be happy to see all that investment disappear."
Taylor sighed and pressed against the wall. "What do they know about what we're doing here?"
"I thought they would get live updates. Well, I hoped since that would let me track them. Unfortunately, the last outward transmission happened around five minutes after they were alerted about us, and I'm still working through that."
"So what you're saying is…"
"These people covered their tracks. As much as they were invested in this, they like their privacy better. Also, if I were a betting gal—which I guess I am now—I'd say they probably spread their investment so not all their eggs are in one basket."
"We'll leave that to the DOD," he muttered. "Are you sure these people are in here? Why would they be this close to the…what do they call it—the eatery?"
"Yeah, and…well, I guess they want to see what their work has wrought so far. Which is why they set up a failsafe on the whole facility to burn it down lest someone discover their secrets. I've used Desk to keep the system from going down now that I could give her access from inside, but it won’t last. They intend to incinerate everything but leave the structure intact. Just in case."
Taylor shook his head. "Well, let's take the trash out quickly, then."
"The door should open in three, two one…"
It clicked on cue, and Taylor pushed it open immediately and stepped through. Going in, he already knew it wouldn’t be a fair fight. Neither was it a fair fight between an executioner and some guy on death row, but it still needed to happen.
The view below almost distracted him from his purpose. He looked out into an area that seemed to have been sliced from the Zoo and transplanted under artificial lights. It was weird to look at it from above like this—empowering seemed like a good word. He could almost see how these people could develop a god complex over it.
Monster In Me: Cryptid Assassin™ Book Eight Page 23