The Found World

by Hugo Navikov

  In the moment after the monster tripped but before the next ones slammed into it, Brett was able to regain his footing and sprint around the huge tree on his side, using the rifle itself as a lock to keep the loop closed. An instant after he let go of the rifle, the tree was mightily squeezed by the force of the second, then third and fourth, and then the rest of the megapedes running into the backs of the ones that had already stopped.

  Brett smelled smoke, or at least some kind of vapor from something burning. It smelled like leaves burning in the fall. He looked at the tree with the rope around it and saw that the acid was eating through the fibers of the rope.

  Aw, hell. He saw that the rest of the group had just about made it to the smoldering wasp carcass in the middle and that Popcorn had regained his legs and was doing his best to speed-walk there as well. This was good, because the megapedes in back were already trying to move around the pileup, and once the rope burned through, all of them would be able to come after the group again. He ran like a demon to join the rest of them, shouting, “Get behind the wasp! Guys, open fire when they get close! Go!”

  The ten other survivors of the expedition did just what he said, with Crane and his three commandos peering over the top a few seconds after they all dove behind the long and thick carcass. Brett could see them hacking the nearby plants away with machetes.

  They have machetes? I’m going to kill them, Brett thought, but that could wait, given that four AK-47 muzzles were pointed at him—really past him since he was between the commandos and the megapedes, but it didn’t feel like a safe place to think bad things about the mercenaries right then.

  He didn’t have to look back to know that the rope had snapped and that the monsters were approaching again: every person looking over the dead mega-wasp jerked in reflex at the same time, and the commandos lined up their eyes with the sights of their weapons. The rope trick had been done about 150 feet from the wasp, and Brett was now about twenty feet from the rest of the group. That meant the fast-moving things would probably be about 100 feet away by the time Brett was able to get out of the line of fire. Could the rent-a-soldiers actually do something right? Could they take out ten enormous killer cryptids in the fifteen or so seconds before the things would be upon them again?

  Brett got there and fell to the ground in front of the wasp barrier; he’d crawl around to get behind it, but those bastards needed to get shooting now.

  Which they did: in real life, nobody goes “rock and roll” with submachine guns. It wastes an amazing amount of ammo and provides less accuracy than aiming and firing, then firing again, each shot distinct. The fact that the Organization paramilitary soldiers did this made Brett feel a little less doomed about the mission.

  Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! The four guns cracked with shot after shot, and the squeals and shrieks from the huge creatures was music to his ears, even as he kept his palms flat against them to keep from going deaf from the dozens, then hundreds of shots a few feet away.

  The megapedes had size on their side when it came to attacking, but that very hugeness were there undoing here: as each shell slammed into their membrane-wrapped gel, the entire body of the victim tried to curl around the injury, the pain cramping their bodies around wherever they were hit. This stopped their forward motion almost immediately, and the more shots the commandos landed, the further each megapede closed in upon itself. The shooters weren’t ready to stop, however; they kept firing until the things stopped moving entirely. Even then, each man took a couple of extra shots just to remind this underworld nightmare realm who was boss.

  Brett gave a thumbs-up and yelled, “Good shootin’, boys!”

  Brett couldn’t hear his own words or anything else, but he saw a strange look on Commander Crane’s face and could read the words on his lips: No way.

  Brett looked and saw what Crane must have been affected by: vines extended from the plants next to the massive bug corpses and started feeding. The sizzling sound was unmistakable, and soon the acrid stench would reach them as well. Everybody in the group saw it and gagged or looked beyond horrified or both.

  “Hey,” Popcorn said through his still-heavy breathing, “why aren’t the plants eating this thing?” He was looking at the body of wasp, which had been singed by the acid of the plants it had landed on, but for which no vines had been extended. The plants that the commandos hadn’t cleared away with the machetes may have ended up touching the carcass just by the lay of their leaves, but other than a small scorch mark at the point of contact, the potential meal was entirely ignored.

  “That’s interesting,” Ellie said.

  It was more than interesting to Brett. “Guys, let’s drag all the wasps over here. We can make a little fort so we can decide what to do next without being eaten by death plants.”

  “Drag them? They have to weigh a ton! Like, literally,” Ravi said, looking distressed. He spent a lot of time in the field for TMI, but none of it had involved physical labor. At his comment, everyone looked at Brett. The commandos may have had the guns, Lathrop and the Organization woman may have had the power, but Brett was the one who everyone looked to for answers. This was how it should be for the leader of an expedition, but Brett didn’t know if he had ever led one so full of helpless people.

  Brett considered this for a moment, then said to Crane, “You have three more grappling hooks, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Great. Why don’t you guys take your four goddamn machetes and cut down some of the plants between here and the other wasps so we can get to them without being burned by the plants, okay? And why the hell didn’t you use the machetes before? We’re all injured here.”

  Crane shrugged. “Didn’t think of it for plants. We usually just use ’em on people, so it was outside of our usual schema, y’know?”

  Schema? Brett echoed in his mind. Crane was like an idiot savant, but without much savant. All he said was, “Naturally. Maybe your three men could do that and you hang here with your gun trained on any new friends who might come to say hello.”

  “That’s what I was going to command them just now,” Crane said, which was definitely not true but was hardly worth arguing about to Brett right then.

  For the moment, at least, there were no new assaults. (Except on their senses, as the plants made an unholy stank as they consumed the ninety-foot-long line of dead megapedes.) Crane’s men cleared paths between the giant insect they hid behind and the four others, which the commandos found before the carcasses ceased smoldering. The deadly plants really didn’t seem to care about the gunmetal-colored cryptids, a fact that Brett filed away for later.

  Now Brett marshaled everyone except Stefan, who insisted that he stay with the camera in front of him to record everything that happened. Brett had Crane give Stefan a powerful sidearm so the Mysterious Investigator could at least stand guard. Then Brett told everyone his plan: “We don’t know why, but these crazy plants won’t touch the wasp bodies. That means that we can use the wasps as barriers against the plants. What we’re going to do is drag all of the wasps over here and make a square we can all sit inside while we figure out what to do next.”

  “That’s five wasps,” Popcorn said. “Really, we just need to drag three of the corpses over here to complete the square with the one we have.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I have plans for the last one.”

  “Indeed? My apologies.”

  “Don’t worry about that, either,” Brett said, and split them into two groups of three and one of four. The four-person group was made up of Flattop, Todd, Popcorn, and Ravi, since the two civilians were pretty weak physically compared to the others and would need two strong commandos. Crane, Brett, and Ellie made up the second team, with Leavitt and the Organization villains Lathrop and the woman making up the third. While he was at it, Brett decided to ask his burning question: “Lathrop, I can’t keep calling your partner there ‘the Organization woman.’ What’s her name?”

  “Natasha,” the woman said with a pr
obably fake Russian accent and a definitely genuine smirk that told Brett just where he could stick his questions. “I vant to keel moose and squirrel.”

  “Cute. Well, you and Boris go with Leavitt. What we’re going to do is have each soldier shoot a grappling hook into or around a wasp, then all of you drag it back here. Once we have those three in place, Crane and his boys can go back for the last one. Understood?”

  They understood, even if not one of the civilians liked the idea. That was too damn bad for them, in Brett’s opinion. They had gotten here with only one casualty, even though they had just a tiny fraction of the firepower they were supposed to have and no idea where Doctor Merco and his superweapon might be. There hadn’t even been any sign of the earlier extraction mission, which made Brett wonder if there weren’t some very well-fed acid plants somewhere in the vicinity. Plants that probably just couldn’t wait to have another meal of human flesh.

  With the paths cleared, the job of dragging the massive insect bodies was only very hard, not actually injurious. Sweating like crazy—the underground world was as humid as the Amazon rainforest, even without a hot sun beating down on them—each team managed to get its carcass to where Stefan stood filming it all and put it into position to make three-foot-high walls of a nine-by-nine square fort. Then the commandos went back and got the last wasp, sliding it to a spot a few feet away from the little encampment and then getting themselves inside the protected area. Now eleven people sat jammed together with their backs against the creepy dead-wasp walls. Maybe they were safer this way or maybe a predator could just swoop in or climb over and get them, but it definitely felt great to everyone there to sit down and take a couple of deep and calming breaths.

  But that was all there was time for. Brett was not thrilled that the dumbass mercenaries forgot they have freaking machetes with them while they were all trying to dance around plants that wanted only to burn, dissolve, and consume them. So he said, “All right, fellas, I need to know what every person on this expedition is carrying on them. Everyone, put your stuff in the center. Empty out the bags, turn out your pockets, everything in the middle so I can see what the hell we have to fight through this place.”

  There was a bit of grumbling, but Crane ordered his men to do as Brett said, and everyone else except Lathrop and Natasha followed his instructions. Inside the bags each of the commandos had managed to salvage off the ship—luckily, their orders were to never allow them out of their sight, so they were right at hand—were one AK-47 submachine gun, two Baretta M9s pistols, five MK3A2 concussion grenades, two M67 fragmentation grenades, one grappling hook with one hundred feet of coiled rope, six MREs, a machete, a pair of binoculars, one huge serrated tactical knife, one huge non-serrated tactical knife, a first-aid tin, one small LED flashlight and one large one, and three hard-plastic water bottles. So they had four times that much in total now.

  The rest of them had wallets, pocket knives, electronic equipment, video memory cards, pens, cell phones, and a bunch of other stuff that wouldn’t help them much at all. Brett threw in his satchel of belongings, the nontrivial contents of which were the only marginally more helpful compass, waterproof matches, tranq gun, and, ironically, bug repellent. He assumed everyone could see the bowie knife and flashlight on his belt.

  “This is what we got to work with, people,” Brett said, waving off the expression of protest that immediately showed on Crane’s face at his and his commandos’ property suddenly belonging to us. “Don’t worry, Commander—everything’s going back to the people who brought it. I just want to know what we can depend on if we need it … whatever the hell that need might look like.”

  They all replaced the items in their bags, satchels, and pockets. Then they sat there for a while and looked at the weird blue sky without a sun.

  Finally, Stefan turned the camera on Brett and Ellie asked in her interviewer voice, “We just got attacked by killer plants, giant wasps, and monster centipedes. How much more do you think we’ll face before we find Doctor Merco, Mister Russell?”

  Mister Russell? “You’re really doing this right now?” Brett said, less annoyed than just feeling the adrenaline seep away.

  “That’s why Mister Lathrop brought us on board,” Ellie said.

  Brett exchanged a look with Lathrop, whose expression showed that they both knew this wasn’t why his ex-wife just happened to be there. It was leverage, pure and simple, but Brett would rather be eaten by a megapede than embarrass his beloved Ellie. So he said, “All right, let me enlighten the viewers of Inside The Mystery —”

  “The Mysterious Investigators,” Ravi corrected like he was quite used to people completely butchering the title. “Just remember: it’s TMI.”

  “It sure is,” Brett said with a smirk, but then got down to answering the question: “We’re at a real disadvantage here. We don’t know where this scientist is or where the earlier team is, or even if they’re still alive. Every single element of this environment is hostile to humans, to say the least. We don’t have any gear beyond basic defense and survival. And without a sun, it’s almost impossible to keep track of direction or what time it might be. Is there night here? If there is, maybe we’ll be able to see cooking fires or whatever Merco uses to light where he lives down here. If he lives at all.”

  “Very dramatic,” Ravi said. “Nice.”

  Brett gave him a quizzical look. “Ellie’s the host, Stefan is the cameraman—what do you do, Ravi?”

  Sitting up straighter, Ravi said with dignity, “I am the producer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I … it means … it means I produce the show! Make sure everything is in place for capturing footage, getting Ellie to stand in front of things, all that sort of stuff. Basically, I make the show happen.”

  “Gotcha. So I’m like the producer of this little expedition, making things happen if they’re going to happen at all.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Like if people have goddamn machetes that could help us cut through a whole mile of acid-oozing killer plants, I have to remind them, for instance.”

  “Hey!” Crane said with feathers ruffled. “Are you talking about us?”

  “No, of course not,” Brett said, his anger having the chance to surface now that they were out of immediate danger. “I’m talking about the other idiots who almost got all of us killed.”

  Crane relaxed. “Oh, okay, good.”

  “So Lathrop was the casting agent, and I’m the producer,” Brett said, then came around to what he really wanted to ask. He turned his gaze to Natasha. “And what’s your story? The Organization needed two weasels here?”

  Natasha replied by saying something very unladylike, indeed.

  Brett laughed. “Yeah, I didn’t really expect an answer.”

  “Why don’t you concentrate on getting Doctor Merco instead of trying to get information you wouldn’t even understand, Mister Russell?” Lathrop said. “How is the producer of The Found World going to get his cast and crew to find the real star of the show?”

  “Fine.” Brett sat up straighter himself, took out his big Bowie knife, and drew a small square in the dirt in the center of their tiny encampment. “This is us, right here. My compass doesn’t work down here—maybe Popcorn can tell me why—so I’m going to call the mountain we can see from here ‘north.’” He drew a peak and an N at one edge of the cleared soil and continued, “I think this is the best candidate for where someone could hole up for an extended period of time against the monsters and killer everything here. These are mountains underneath a volcano, so maybe Doctor Merco was able to find a cave within a mountain under a mountain, if you get me.”

  “Those mountains are also far from the portal, so anybody coming for Merco would have to trek through all of this horrible place,” Ellie added.

  “Exactly. There are some hills, lots of forest and low-lying vegetation, but that mountain is singular. Plus what Ellie said, all of this says to me that the only thing to do is go north. I b
et that if we can get to the mountain, we’ll find Merco and maybe the earlier mission, too.”

  “I don’t know,” Ravi said. “It seems like the further we get from the portal, the nastier the monsters become. Acid plants are bad, but giant wasps are worse, and bus-sized centipedes are even worse than that.”

  “What do you suggest we do, then?”

  “Maybe cut our losses and head back. We have a whole season’s worth of footage already.”

  “You ignorant ass!” Lathrop cut in. “We’re not here for your ridiculous program! The only reason you’re even part of this mission is because of Ellie White in the first place.”

  “What?” Ravi said, looking completely befuddled. Stefan shared his confusion, even taking his eye away from the camera for a moment. Ellie’s mouth hung agape.

  “For God’s sake, Lathrop, you brought my ex-wife as bait to get me here?” Brett scoffed, but immediately realized that he didn’t know she was coming until they were almost to the island. “No, not bait … then what?”

  “Insurance,” Lathrop said. “Now, enough of this monkeyshines. Mister Russell, how are we to get to the mountain in one piece? I doubt that giant bugs or evil greenery took apart every last living thing in Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. Whatever did that—not to mention sea monsters—could lie in wait for us. I hired you because I was told you always have a plan and, like a Canadian Mountie, you always get your man. Or cryptid or what have you. Hmm, Scout Leader, are you prepared? Do you, in fact, have a plan?”

  Of course he didn’t have a plan, except to work through whatever obstacles were necessary to get to Doctor Merco and retrieve his reward from Lathrop, and even that plan was complicated beyond reason by losing ninety percent of their mission supplies when the boat sank. But saying that might inspire some dissention in the ranks, and they were fractured enough already. “I just told you the plan. We go north to the mountain. When we get to the scientist, we put him in cuffs, ransack his supplies, and then use whatever safe method of travel he used to get to the mountain in the first place, only we use it to come back across this place to get to the portal and get the hell back to the surface. Then the Organization sends a boat or choppers or whatever and gets off Tristan da Cunha and back to Cape Town, where you pay every one of us or I will kill you with my bare hands.”