God help them.
"Dawson, take two and hold the rear until Foxtrot can regroup," Taylor commanded and opened fire on the monsters that now surged toward the hole in their defenses.
There was no time to question the orders and certainly no time to wonder if they shouldn't simply leave the mercs behind for being dumbasses.
Dawson was quick to respond and hastily pinged two men from the Gamma group, whom he led to where Foxtrot had moved out of the defensive line.
It wouldn't be enough but it would buy them a little time, at least.
Taylor unhooked two grenades from his belt and slipped the first into the launcher under the barrel of his rifle. He delivered them in quick succession into the swarm of beasts that attempted to overwhelm the temporarily weakened human resistance.
"What the…where did these locusts come from?" Dawson demanded. “I never heard them fly in!”
"Nope, they're jumping from the trees," Taylor confirmed.
He’d been in the Zoo enough times to know that they could easily fly above and below the canopy and could glide fairly efficiently for short distances when things were heavily overgrown. They could also scuttle and leap at incredible speeds on the ground, but this was the first time he’d ever seen them attack from a stationary position in the trees.
Despite the heat of battle, it was still interesting to watch. There had been almost no movement from the canopy until Foxtrot broke formation and now, the bugs launched their ambush from the higher position.
It meant they had hugged the trees and were still high enough to not be seen in the motion sensors.
Now that was some terrifying shit. There had to be hundreds of them pressed up against the tree trunks all around them that had simply waited for some kind of signal for them to attack. They clearly made up most of the numbers of the assault but certainly weren't the only ones.
"Do we have any way to clear to Foxtrot?" asked Alpha leader. The entire team had formed up into defensive positions when they were attacked from all sides.
Alpha squad was made up mostly of the higher-ranking officers of the group, and they were armored almost exclusively in heavy mech suits. They were already hunkered down to provide secure positions for the teams around them to make use of their enhanced abilities as well as provide covering fire.
Taylor assessed the situation.
Foxtrot had almost completely isolated themselves by their precipitous pursuit of the enemy, and they definitely wouldn’t make it back without an offensive push from the rest of the team.
"Not without sacrificing this position," he called. The brak brak brak of his weapon muted over the comms while he continued to provide covering fire. The rest of his men worked to seal the gap in their ranks.
"Shit." Alpha leader growled with obvious irritation. "All right. All squads, withdraw to Foxtrot's position and provide them with covering fire while flanking the attackers."
"Flank them?" asked Bravo leader. "How to you flank something when they're all around us?"
"This won’t end well." Taylor allowed himself a low curse of frustration before he called on the team comms. "Form up. We’ll hold the position indicated."
He highlighted the area where Dawson and the other two already stood their ground, yanked the last two grenades from his belt, and fired them to clear the area for his troops to advance. The team was coordinated enough to fill the path the explosives caused without actually being caught in the blasts.
They worked in unison to eliminate all the monsters before they advanced to where Dawson and his two teammates awaited them.
A ground-shaking roar bellowed above the sounds of battle, the kind Taylor could feel in his bones and even through his armor.
“Oh shit!” one of his men called out.
“Bathroom break later, Williams!” Taylor snapped.
He had been around the Zoo long enough to know what the fuck those were.
Still, he needed to look to see the living, walking fossils that would soon assault their line. Having dinosaurs in the world again would have been far more awesome if they weren't ready and able to swallow people—in armor no less—in a single bite.
And this time, there were three of them, perfectly alive and terrifyingly angry.
"Fuck me," he whispered as the building-sized creatures lumbered toward the combat mechs that still tried to stand in defiance, apparently convinced that they had the wherewithal to overcome the titans.
It took only a single blow from each of the massive heads to topple the mechanicals. They fell, one after the other, and while the limbs moved immediately to push them off their backs, they were too heavy and cumbersome to recover quickly. The dinos lunged to take advantage of the heavy mechs’ vulnerability.
The yelling was crowding the comm’s on all sorts of channels.
“Take this you tit-fucking lunatic!”
“Lead poisoning works every time!”
“Godammit! Someone shoot that big sumbitch!”
Massive teeth savaged the reinforced armor that had been developed exactly for this kind of an attack like it was cardboard.
The spectacle was terrifying and haunting, yet a little impressive. It was like the Zoo had evolved these creatures specifically to destroy what mankind had engineered to defeat it.
Terrifying and haunting soon won out, though. The screams of the men inside the mechs were the worst as they were still connected to the commlinks with the rest of the teams.
Thankfully, the tortured sounds cut abruptly but left those alive visibly shaken.
A colossus swung ponderously from the mangled remains of its victim and turned its focus to the officers in their powerful mech suits. The other two followed—driven, it seemed, by an uncanny ability to target their leaders and the strongest resistance. They bulldozed through the desperate fusillade that greeted their approach and appeared utterly untouched by the assault, even with chunks of their flesh blasted off their hides.
With relentless efficiency and an almost casual disregard, they proceeded to systematically obliterate the line while shrieks and gunfire erupted around them.
"Fuck—form up.” Taylor yelled and assumed the mantle he had known would fall on him eventually. He merely stepped into the position before things were too far gone. “If you motherfuckers want to survive, you form up now!"
The remaining men rushed to comply and organized their lines of fire to keep the massive monsters at bay for the moment. They were too busy with their savage attack for them to turn and face the barrage directly.
He knew that shit wouldn’t last, though.
Foxtrot was being pulled back into the fold, but they had taken casualties over and above the leaders in the mechs. If they wanted to survive, they had to force a path back and find a way to put some distance between them and the horde.
"Collect the claymores and place them to give us a perimeter to fall back to," Taylor said quickly while he worked some alterations into the assault rifle.
He liked tinkering with his suit and making changes with the applications. With the help of some of the tech experts in the US base, he had made himself a suit that would outperform most of those they had worked inside during past runs.
And from the looks of things, he would need every one of the improvements to work flawlessly if they had any chance to get out of there alive.
The teams knew that leadership was needed, and they moved to follow him in carving out a path for them to work with, laying the mines in a semi-circular pattern that would allow for a retreat.
Taylor looked at the enormous mutants that had now totally obliterated the heavy defenders and tried to think of a way in which he could handle them. He had been around long enough to know how the jungle would react if they burst the blue sacs of fluid in the larger creatures’ spines.
“Don’t shoot the spines!” The current battle was a pale reflection of what they’d bring down on them if that happened.
He would need a way to keep them at bay until the
y were able to pull away behind the mines.
There were enough mutants ranged against them that he knew they would not have a clean getaway. It would be a start, though.
"Pull back!" he called as the dinosaurs began to rush their defensive line. He refitted the launcher under his barrel with a double shotgun barrel, already loaded and ready to fire.
It was called a shotgun but might as well have been twin barrels of grapeshot cannons.
The thought that he would have to buy the engineers in the base a few drinks brought a grim smile. He pulled the triggers and felt the kick all the way to his bones as he was knocked back a step.
It was effective, though. The two massive-gauge rounds drove into the closest dinosaur's head and knocked it away with an earth-shaking roar. After a couple more steps, it collapsed with a shudder and convulsed in its death throes without damaging the sacs.
Thank God.
His moment of elation was shattered when the remaining two attacked the formation and walked through their concentrated fire like it was a swarm of friendly mosquitoes.
They trampled the front line with the ease of a giant wading through toy soldiers, seized the men in larger mech suits, and crushed them in their massive jaws. From what he could see, only Pearle had managed to evade them.
"Fuck." Taylor gasped and forced his mind to focus. "Set the mines off! Now!"
His roar over the comms elicited an instant reaction. The earth shuddered beneath his feet as the powerful blasts lit the forest up enough for him to see exactly how many mutants there were around them.
And how many of the original team were left. There wasn’t much in the way of visible bodies, which wasn’t unusual, but the HUD in his helmet told him that only ten members were alive.
"Fall the fuck back!" he shouted and opened fire on the mass of beasts that surged into a renewed assault. He couldn't tell one from the other. They were merely an amorphous blob of death and hunger sweeping down on him and his men.
Pearle stepped out in front and pushed the supports on his suit into the earth as a massive rocket launcher on his shoulder activated, locking over his shoulder. A stream of rockets seared into the advancing horde.
"Get on my back!" he called over the comms. "The mini-gun’s automatic fire control is fried, but there's a manual override that'll let you shoot it anyway.”
"Sounds good," Taylor replied while Dawson tried to gather the survivors into an organized troop to return to the edge of the Zoo.
It soon became apparent they wouldn’t get far. The killerpillar had returned and it clearly had no intention to back down this time. It claimed two victims before it curled and let its carapace absorb most of the bullets fired at it.
This version of the mutant was a far cry from the stories he’d heard of the original creatures. Those had been fast but cumbersome and had attacked in tandem, each latching onto their prey with huge mandibles that remained locked until the next gained hold. They would move up the body, usually starting at the legs, until they reached the vital organs and slow and excruciatingly painful death was inevitable.
These, however, were fast, worked alone, and had evolved into a formidable creature that had the ability to simply protect itself by curling to shield its vulnerable parts. It was fearless and difficult to kill in a hurry.
"Turn the rockets on that big bastard," he called to Pearle as he took up the mini-gun. "I'll hold the front."
"Good plan," the man replied and complied while Taylor targeted the front line, opened fire with the powerful machine gun mounted on the mech's back, and supplemented it with a volley from his assault rifle.
It was good enough to hold the beasts back, and once Pearle had successfully annihilated the killerpillar, he turned his attention to the heaviest area of the attack.
The rockets had more explosive power than the claymore mines that had ripped a little clear space for them. Launched in the rapid-fire technique he now used, they were enough to turn the jungle around them into a burning wasteland.
Before too long, the monsters chose to beat a hasty retreat. They weren't supported by the larger beasts, and there were no longer enough of them to sustain an effective attack.
Which was for the best as the team had begun to run low on ammo.
"Okay, people," Taylor said and jumped from the back of Pearle's mech. "We need to double-time it to the edge—"
He paused and looked at the group that now consisted of Pearle, Dawson, and himself.
"Sorry, Sarge," the corporal said and looked distraught. "I… They…"
Taylor had nothing to say. He wanted to speak and felt like something needed to be said for the death of so many of his friends and comrades, but nothing came to him. Fifty-three dead. His brain somehow couldn’t move past that single fact. It was somehow made worse by the fact that he’d warned them and the whole clusterfuck could have been avoided if they’d only listened and used their goddamn brains.
While he'd never been much good at this bullshit anyway, it still felt shitty to simply leave them behind without even a word of recognition.
The reality, though, was that they had to run. It wouldn't be long before other creatures found their way in to see what all the commotion was about and they would have to face another attack.
"We have reinforcements due southwest," Pearle said and looked like he tried to not let what he was looking at affect him.
All the explosives had demolished and felled the trees in the area, which gave them only too clear a view of the aftermath of what had transpired. Something for Pearle’s video cameras to take back to headquarters.
"Let them know we'll rendezvous with them as soon as they’re within range," Taylor said. Something choked in the back of his throat and made his voice thicker than it needed to be. He wanted to curl in a ball like the fucking killerpiller and wake up with all this as nothing more than a dream.
But that wouldn’t happen. There was no clicking his magic heels and wishing himself home.
"Let's go," he said roughly and tried to push the feelings down. They would have to wait until they were in the clear again.
Chapter Two
There were people who told him he really needn’t have bothered with the whole song and dance of therapy.
Those were the kinds of people who didn’t know about the internal workings of the military.
After the fighting and the mission during which he had lost forty-three men in a trip into the Zoo to collect seismic data? That sounded like bullshit to him.
However, he still had no idea who it was who wanted to find out about the earth rumblings around the jungle. Nor, for that matter, why it was so important that they threw caution and common sense out the window in what was arguably one of the stupidest missions of all time.
Still, whoever they were seemed moot. They had been more than willing to throw cash at the survivors of the trip and the families of those who hadn't made it out.
There were things people simply couldn't buy back, though.
Taylor had been trapped in the hospital while he recovered from numerous smaller injuries. He had no idea why they had held him there until he received his psyche eval.
Not fit for duty.
That psyche eval was one of the most difficult reads of his life, and it had led to hard decisions. These included accepting a medical discharge with all kinds of honors and full benefits after four tours of duty.
He could now add medals and a speech from the commandant of the US base—telling him how much his honorable service to his country had inspired thousands—to add to his resume.
Amazingly, that didn't really help, given that hundreds had died while he had been in the Zoo with them. He was one of the few who made it out alive—and with one hell of a pension, thanks to four years of collecting the money from the Pita flowers over and above his payout from the military.
But even then, the medical discharge was not enough. They wanted to make sure there would be no option for him to eventually sue them for
damages and would therefore wait for him to be cleared by a professional in the US before they released him to go be a free man.
Whatever the hell that meant with his darkness.
Overall, it was a nice thought, even though it was purely budgetary in the end. Besides, while he waited for the wheels of medical bureaucracy to turn, he was able to live on one of the bases near DC, not pay any rent, and be with the people he actually knew and felt comfortable around.
Four tours had taken up most of his adult life. There wasn't much out in the world for him unless he wanted to make it for himself. Thankfully, he wasn’t the type to whine and kick his heels and had already accepted the challenge.
It was his turn and he would forge a future beyond the military.
The only downside, of course, was that Taylor needed to pay a visit to a shrink who would determine whether or not he would be a danger to himself or others.
How the hell could someone actually determine that kind of shit anyway? It wasn't like they had a test for it. Well, they had about a hundred, but none of them were conclusive enough for Dr. Jane Bedford, apparently.
It wasn't a long way from the base to her office and it was a nice drive through some of the better suburbs around the nation's capital. It ended with him stepping into the small, three-story building where he would spend the next hour or so.
Taylor no longer felt comfortable in civilian clothes. He had even tried to grow his red hair and beard to make him fit in a little better.
For some reason, that didn't really work when you were six-five and built like an ox. Kids pointed and stared at him while he did his shopping and walked around town, thinking he was a part of one of the local professional wrestling franchises.
It had been an interesting idea but not one he had put any serious thought into. Those who participated put themselves through too much training and too much pain for it to be worth it for him. He was large enough to be a linebacker on a football team but probably too old.
No, there were other things for a man of his particular skill set and mentality to get into if only the good doctor would sign off on him so he could get the hell out of the military.
Hired Killer (Cryptid Assassin Book 1) Page 2