by Hugo Navikov
“I’m out,” Ravi said, and turned to go back to the tunnel.
But his partner stopped him. “No you don’t,” Stefan said, camera still glued to his eye, his arm extended to halt Ravi without him even looking at anything but the frame that the dead commando had just been dragged out of. “I’m getting every second of this on video, and the storage media stayed nice and dry in the case with the camera. We got days of memory space, man—this is gonna put TMI on the map. You cannot back out now. We need you, me, and Ellie. All of us.”
Ravi looked at Ellie. “We’re not going to be famous if we’re frickin’ dead, come on.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ellie said, and Brett hoped he was a little bit of the reason for that. Then he stopped and chided himself: That is not why she’s here. Then added, a bit more harshly, Or why you are, either, pal.
When he called himself “pal,” he knew he had let his thoughts go to places they shouldn’t. He hated being called “pal,” and only used it on people he was fed up with. Including, in this instance, himself.
“Unfortunate,” Lathrop said with an insincere-looking shake of his head. “However, an acceptable loss. Let us keep moving—keep our eyes on the prize, yes?”
Brett stared at him and muttered, “Whatever you say, pal.”
~~~
There was a path between the blue leaves, some fern-like, others broad like the one that had attacked Junior, some splayed out like maple leaves, and every member of Brett’s party stuck right to the middle of it. At both edges of the path were scorched ends of plants; the earlier Organization troop must have burned their way through. This was helpful in moving through the terrain without being dissolved by a thousand brushes against the plant life, but it wouldn’t do to just follow where the others had gone. They were most likely dead, eaten by God knew what, and Brett wasn’t anxious for them to follow that example.
He looked around at this complete underground ecosystem. The sky was that bioluminescent blue, making everything look unreal. Maybe it was the teal foliage, too, but everything was dreamlike … or maybe nightmarish, considering what just the plants were like.
“Mister Russell?” Popcorn called, mincing around people to get to the front of their single-file line while avoiding the edges of the killer vegetation. “I have an alarming thought.”
“Oh, goody.”
“Actually, it is to complete a previous alarming thought: I realized that these plants exhibiting … um, carnivorous characteristics is a logical outgrowth of this sky’s bioluminescence being insufficient for photosynthesis. I’d wager the plants down here evolved from ancestors in the surface world, making a transition from photosynthesis to gleaning energy from consuming meat. That’s how the acid developed; the Venus Flytrap is our best-known carnivorous plant, and it uses acid to digest its—”
“Okay, that’s plenty,” Brett said. “That’s disgusting, but how is that any more alarming? We know the things want to eat us. Knowing why makes it at least make sense.”
“That’s not what I mean is alarming. What I mean is that, if these plants get energy from consuming insect and animal flesh, then there must be plentiful animals here, enough to feed every plant we see and a lot we don’t.”
“And some of those animals might be hungry themselves. For, say, the catch of the day, a bunch of humans.”
Popcorn nodded but then shook his head. “Not some of the animals. Unless they have some kind of magic ability not to be burned by acid—and they don’t, because the plants wouldn’t be able to eat them—all they eat is meat. That means that every plant, insect, and animal here wants to kill us and eat us … and not necessarily in that order.”
The final commando, Todd, with a shaved head and a tattoo above his left ear that said ALWAYS FIGHING (sadly, not FIGHTING) must have heard this, because he abruptly stopped walking and actually stomped his foot as he said, “This is BULL! We could die down here!”
Everyone’s eyes darted to the others. To Brett, Ellie mouthed the words, What the hell?
Brett tried to tamp down a smile and failed. After a moment, he recovered his composure and said to Lathrop, “Some real West Point valedictorians you got there.”
“Crane! Get your man together, for Christ’s sake!”
Brett thought Commander Crane may have been as stunned as anyone at hearing the words coming out of Todd’s mouth, but he was able to shake himself out of it, took three steps back in line to get to the merc, and punched him straight in the face. Todd fell, but wasn’t knocked out. He felt his bloody nose, looked up at his boss, and nodded that he needed the attitude adjustment. “Sorry, everyone,” Todd said like someone arriving late to a meeting. “Got a little extra freaked out there.”
Brett looked at Lathrop, this time smiling, narrowing his eyes, and cocking his head to say, Really?
Lathrop ignored him and said to Crane, “As enchanting as Soldier of Fortune Day Care is, Commander, I’d prefer if we got moving before the meat-eating plants—”
“Quiet,” Brett said sharply, and everyone stopped speaking or moving at his command. He took a slow look around them: there were hills in the near distance, and they looked bare of the blue-green foliage. Possibly animals didn’t venture up there for fear of being eaten by things that flew. In that case, the plants couldn’t survive there. Also, it would make a good lookout place, something they needed since Brett had no idea where to go within this vast underground world other than to follow the path burned open by the earlier mission’s flamethrowers.
Man, he wished they had flamethrowers.
He wished that more than ever because what prompted him to silence everyone was a distinct buzz wavering in the still air. There were no airborne insects pestering them or flying near anyone’s ears … which was bad. That meant the buzz was coming from a distance, and that meant it was big enough that Brett could hear it flying from this far away.
“Something’s coming,” he said to the group.
Everyone seemed to hear what he was talking about at the same time. Each person whirled around, stopped, turned some more, stopped again, trying to pinpoint the direction the sound was coming from. But there was no way to locate the source … because the buzzing was coming from every direction at once.
This, too, seemed to dawn on everyone at the same time. “We can’t take cover under the trees, can we? The trees could eat us,” Ravi said, looking longingly at the taller trees just off the scorched path. He pointed at the same clutch of hills that Brett had been sizing up. “There’s a bald patch on the top of that rise. No plants there.”
“But they’d pick us off easy there,” his partner Stefan countered, sounding a bit panicked. His audio earpiece for the camera amplified the buzz maddeningly. “We can’t be up high and exposed like that.”
Now Brett could see black splotches skimming above the low plants and zipping around the taller trees. They came from several directions, although not from where the hills were. Since the low mountains looked like they would take hours to reach on foot, the hills seemed like the only differentiated area in sight. They were definitely on the menu just standing out there, so a chance was better than nothing. “That way, to the hills, now,” he said in a voice brooking no argument and moved swiftly in that direction, putting his hands up into the sleeves of his shirt stained with blood from the dead commando. He adjusted the rest of his clothing, too, anything to repel incidental acidic contact as they made a dash off the path and through the plant life to get to the hills and, maybe, avoid being attacked by whatever those things were making that ungodly sound. A sound which was growing steadily louder, as the whatever-they-were were definitely coming directly at them. “Fine,” he said to Stefan, “you stay here. The rest of you, move!” He took Ellie’s hand and started running.
“I didn’t mean it like that!” Stefan managed to say while joining the troupe in a sprint for the hills, his camera finally not up to his eye for a minute.
The commandos were already well covered in their tactical gear, but
the rest of them were busy covering their exposed arms with anything they were wearing that could do the job. Even still, the reek of burning fabric enveloped them as they dashed off the trail and through the killer plants if there was going to be any possibility of safety ahead.
All of them ran practically on the balls of their feet as they danced and darted to avoid the touch of the low-lying leaves, making small zig-zags and letting out an “ow!” or other cries of surprise and pain as they moved as fast as they could to cover the half-mile to the nearest hill. Brett had to let go of Ellie’s hand, since not having the ability to maneuver as well around the plants did more harm than keeping her up with him was doing good.
They were still hundreds of feet from the hill—and who knew if there would by any safety there once they reached it—when the buzz became so loud Brett had to turn to see what was happening. “Oh, hell,” he said out loud.
The things that were buzzing out of the sky were giant wasps. Or maybe not exactly wasps, but damned close except that they looked like they were made of brushed gray metal instead of the black of their terrestrial cousins. It made them look like alien robots—alien robots with enormous wings and stingers, that was. Their compound eyes were the same gunmetal color as the rest of them, giving them a horrible, unreal quality.
But they were real. The first of the fifty or more that Brett could see closing in dove at Flattop, the commando bringing up the rear of the group. It didn’t bring its massive stinger to bear on him, instead barreling into him from behind and knocking him down hard into the soil. It then made a high loop that completed with the ur-wasp swooping down low and grabbing Flattop with serrated claws at the end of its legs. It was then that Brett and the others could see the full scale of the monsters: the one that had singled out Flattop was at least half again as long as the six-foot man. It was like an unpainted midsize sedan has flown down to pick him off from the group, lifting him and his heavy bag of weapons.
But it didn’t sting him. Neither that giant bug nor its dozens of compatriots stung anyone. But more were coming in low now, maybe to sting, but more likely to carry more of them off—to what end, Brett didn’t want to think about. “Run!” he shouted, but Ravi and Stefan rushed past him before he could even turn back around to run himself.
Pop! Pow!
Everyone reflexively looked up at the source of the gunshots and saw Flattop put another round through the thorax of the enormous wasp, which sent them spiraling down together into the brush one hundred feet away.
“They can die! Let’s help ’em get there!” Crane hollered, and he and the two other commandos yanked assault rifles out of their own zipped weapon bags and started blasting the other mega-wasps. Blam! The closest one lost its wing and whirled at them like a kamikaze fighter plane hit by anti-aircraft fire.
Ellie was stopped in front of Brett, frozen in place at the sight of the giant insect hurtling toward them. At the last second, Brett grabbed her arm and jumped with her out of the way just before the wasp smashed into the ground and made a fifty-foot-long furrow before it stopped.
Brett found himself on his back with Ellie up against him. It felt nice, but as soon as each of them noticed the other one noticing them enjoying it, they sprang up and brushed the soil off themselves without making further eye contact.
“I’m okay!” Flattop yelled from where he had crashed enveloped in the now-dead bug, lugging his weapons bag and carrying the AK-47 as he ran to them, skirting the dangerous plants all the way. “Boy, I thought those things were ugly from far away! They’re even worse close up.”
Crane laughed and said, “Thank God that’s ov—”
Clicketyclacketyclicketyclackety
There was a strange and very loud moist clicking sound from behind the hill and those facing it lost all color as they saw what was making the noise: a phalanx of jet-black centipedes—each with a body as long as a city bus and slimy antenna reached out like a handlebar moustache over their oversized mandibles, which also happened to be loaded with dagger-like fangs—slithered over the crest and started down toward them at alarming speed.
Everyone was completely paralyzed with fear, including Brett, but he was able to count the number of creatures coming to devour them in an extremely painful manner. There were ten of them—one for each survivor. There were ten people left in the group, he believed, but counted everyone off just in case—Brett, Ellie, Popcorn, Ravi, Stefan, Lathrop, the Organization woman, Commander Crane, and his three surviving commandos Flattop, Todd, and Todd. That made eleven, not ten.
Oh, yeah, Brett thought sheepishly, I forgot about Leavitt. He was focusing too much on Ellie, he knew it, to the point where he wasn’t even aware of how many people were on his expedition.
There were going to be a lot fewer of them in about twenty seconds if he didn’t get them all away from the titanic centipedes—megapedes, Brett named them automatically— rushing at them. It occurred to him that he didn’t know how megapedes killed their prey, so it was hard to know what to do except try to escape their path.
“Avoid those jaws!” Ravi shouted as he and Stefan ran back past Brett the other way.
“No kidding,” Flattop said.
“No, I mean once a centipede gets you into its jaws, they inject you with poison! You don’t want that!”
As Brett joined the rest in running the opposite direction they had wanted—they were now putting as much distance between themselves and the hill as humanly possible—he noticed thin lines of smoke rose from where each of the wasps had gone down over a hundred-yard arc in the foliage. Brett could feel his brain making some kind of connection, but it wasn’t until he saw a coil of rope flopping around inside Crane’s open weapons bag that he came to it.
“Commander—why do you have rope?”
“For the grappling hooks, duh.” He actually said duh.
But his answer was exactly what Brett was hoping for. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “Everybody! Make for the wasp in the middle!” and punctuated his command by running through and ahead of the group so they could follow him to the one he meant. The acid bites from jutting leaves barely registered as their adrenaline pumped to keep them running faster than the glistening, hundred-plus-legged creatures articulating over the hill and onto the ground after them.
They did. But Popcorn, who was not a runner under the best circumstances, was huffing and puffing as he tried and failed to keep up with the rest of the group. The megapede that was racing at the front of the pack was almost to the obese black nerd, its jaws opening in preparation for the big meal. Brett knew that if Popcorn fell into the thing’s mandible, he’d be shot full of poison and die an agonizing and terrifying death. Even if the man was going to slow them down, Brett wasn’t going to just let a member of his team die. Besides, although they didn’t have any tech right now, Lathrop wouldn’t have brought someone on board whose expertise he didn’t expect them to need.
Except Ellie, maybe. Her “expertise” in Lathrop’s eyes may just have been to keep Brett motivated. But she was a fine adventurer in her own right, and the fact that she was here with a team from a show about cryptids and other paranormal phenomena told him that she had never given up the Cryptids Alive! curiosity and spirit that had gotten them together in the first place.
But right now he needed to save Orville Blum. The lead megapede was just about on top of him, and Popcorn was doing that thing where you simultaneously look behind you as the thing gets nearer and slow down because you’re looking behind yourself instead of where you’re going. This was going to get Popcorn devoured before Brett could do what he needed to do. “Popcorn! Hit the afterburners, man!”
Popcorn nodded, mouth open as he gasped for air to fuel a little more running, if possible with a little more speed. He performed admirably—but not quite well enough, as the megapede was going to get to him before Brett got to the large tree he was running toward with the rope and grappling hook. He needed to be able to shoot the hook around the only other big tree wi
thin the rope’s range, but first he had to get the gun itself secured—
“Help! Hurry up, please!” Popcorn screamed, polite even unto his awful doom.
Brett muttered quite the series of curse words as he realized there was no time to secure the hook’s rifle within a tree on his end. He had to fire now if he was going to get the rope across in time. So he took the shot.
The hook and rope exploded away from the rifle, shot across the middle area where Popcorn and the megapede were about to cross, and whipped around the trunk of Brett’s target tree.
“Yes!” Brett shouted and pumped his first. But now came the hard part: he looped the remaining rope around himself with the body of the rifle behind him. Then he took a deep breath and steeled every muscle. He would have to be the other tree now if this was going to work, and he believed it was going to hurt quite a bit.
However, it hurt Popcorn first. He had only two seconds or so to see that a thick rope had been stretched across the lane where he was running from the monster, but it was enough time for him to jump to clear it. Unfortunately, the highest jump that the fat and exhausted indoor kid could make didn’t provide the two feet of clearance he needed. He leapt, but both his ankles caught the rope and he was hurled into the ground, luckily face-planting where there wasn’t a broad-leafed acid plant ready to eat his face. He slid on his face for a few feet, then immediately started crawling forward without even stopping to get the caked soil off his glasses.
Those couple of feet were vital, because when the first megapede hit the wire, it took its first half-dozen legs out from under it and it too, face-planted into the dirt. But only a couple of feet, because most of it stayed behind the rope, stopping it completely.
When the thing hit the rope, Brett had to dig his heels into the dirt like he was competing in the world’s toughest game of tug of war. The impact wrenched his back and almost threw him to become the third face-plant of the day, but he was able to keep his body tight, bending back almost flat to offer the greatest amount of resistance. He couldn’t grab any of the sturdy-looking shrubs or the tree he had originally wanted to tie the rope around because they’d burn his hands at best and probably eat them like they did Junior’s. So he used the ground to help him resist the brute yank of the tripping megapede.