by Michael Todd
Blood Of My Enemies
Birth Of Heavy Metal™ Book 4
Michael Todd
Michael Anderle
Blood Of My Enemies (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Michael Todd, and Michael Anderle
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, February 2019
The Zoo Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2018-19 by Michael Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Connect with Michael Todd
Other Zoo Books
Books written as Michael Anderle
Blood Of My Enemies Team
JIT Readers
John Ashmore
James Caplan
Kelly O’Donnell
Peter Manis
Nicole Emens
Micky Cocker
Crystal Wren
Jeff Eaton
Paul Westman
Dorothy Lloyd
Editor
Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedication
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
Chapter One
She looked around, her weapon at the ready, and checked her ammo reserves to immediately determine that she had run low. Not critically so, but it would turn dangerous should this shit go on for too much longer. The motion sensors went crazy as she looked around, but it seemed the animals were content to skirt the very edges of her vision as if to let her know they were there without actually coming close enough to be shot at.
Of course, it was unlikely that they were competent enough to take a crack at basic psychological manipulation, but at this point, it didn’t really matter. What did matter was that this kind of behavior was in play and she would have to take it up with the designers. So far, there had been no indication that the animals actually toyed with the people in the Zoo like this so the simulation was incorrect.
At a soft roar from behind her, she spun to see a massive panther. The creature was larger than usual with a hint of pale gold in the fur—which made it a lighter hue—and the suggestion of a mane, too.
She raised her rifle, pulled the trigger once, and felt it kick back into her shoulder. The armor was meant to absorb a rifle’s kick but it was somehow reassuring to feel it in her arm. They’d toyed with the design and allowed her to add her input for this run.
The single hollow point round tore through the creature’s skull and opened a massive hole in the panther’s head as the animal fell.
“Heads up.”
Kennedy knew who it was. There was only one person who had her comm signal in there. The familiar voice was a bit of a giveaway too.
She turned as Sal dropped from the upper branches of the trees at high speed in the same instant that she saw another of the lion-panthers charge out of the jungle. He managed to twist sufficiently to slam his knee down on the creature’s neck and crushed it under the weight of his suit as he hammered it to the ground and executed a perfect three-point landing.
“And that, children, is how you do a superhero landing,” Sal said with a grin as he pushed to his feet. “Perfect dunk, home run, drop curtains, and Elvis has left the building. Uh…thank ya, thank ya very much.” His Elvis impersonation was on point, Kennedy had to admit.
“Well, those were some terrible sports references, but it’s nice that you try,” she said with a grin.
“Ordering all those sports channels for the compound has been good for something after all.” Sal chuckled. “This is a pretty damn good simulation. They worked out all the physics kinks that we saw in our last run, and looking around…” He paused to take in a deep breath. “You can almost smell the decaying corpses all around us—”
He was cut off when she looked above him, raised her rifle and tilted it upward, and fired at something that had caught her eye. As it turned out, the somethings were a couple of locusts that dropped into the background.
“This hero of ours might want to watch his back,” Kennedy sniped. “He might want to protect his ass or he’ll have a tentacle enema.”
“I don’t know.” He turned to face the direction that the creatures had come from. “I can imagine that having an enema from the Zoo can only be good for your intestinal health.”
“Oh, God, that’s disgusting.” Kennedy shook her head as more creatures appeared and they both raised their weapons. “And it was my joke too.”
“Well, turning people’s jokes and making them cringe at their own humor is my superpower,” Sal said cheerfully as he fired at the first of the creatures that attacked. He’d loaded in armor-piercers, which sliced easily through the tough armor carapaces that protected the centipede. A piercing roar emanated from it as it buckled and curled into a ball that the other creatures vaulted easily.
“Will you fight crime with that?” Kennedy asked. She allowed the suit to reload her rifle before she opened fire again to drive the line of monsters back. “Take crime bosses down by cringing them to death?”
“Well, I thought that I could at least distract them to make things easier for when the heroes with real powers come along,” he responded. His voice lost some of its focus as he ducked to avoid a pair of tentacles that swung from the branches and tried to reach his head. They pulled back almost immediately and disappeared into the shadows where they wound around the trees.
“So, like…Captain Support, or something?” She moved closer to him to make sure that they weren’t separated and could at least count on one of their angles being covered by the other.
“That’s a terrible gaming reference, Kennedy,” he responded with a grin. “But it’s nice that you try.”
“Eat a dick.” She chuckled as they moved once more and he dropped a step behind her to cover her flanks and th
eir rear as she pushed them forward. It was a good tactic, one that they had developed over the time that they’d worked together. It made sense. She was the one who usually wore the heavy-duty armor, while he wore something lighter. It was logical that she would do the bull-rushing while he made sure she wasn’t outflanked.
It worked in the simulation too. He tested a lighter suit design, similar to his hybrid set but composed entirely of power armor that was supposed to be more dexterous than even the most advanced hybrid suits on the market. Then again, these suits wouldn’t hit store shelves for a while, so there might be something similar out by then.
Kennedy, for her part, might as well have worn a tank at this point. Her gear relied almost completely on the power implementations to haul the two-and-a-half-ton suit, which moved with surprising ease through the tough terrain. It enabled her to sprint at up to thirty kilometers an hour and maintain that speed for almost ten minutes. The power came from a tiny nuclear reactor mounted into a backpack, which was supposed to—theoretically—last for years and years without needing to be replaced.
While that sounded all well and good in theory, Sal knew for a fact that there would be complications that came with mounting something that volatile into a suit that would be knocked around by creatures the size of buildings. Not for the person wearing the armor, he thought. They had been very adamant that by the time something managed to get through the ton of titanium-reinforced ceramic honeycomb weave to reach the reactor, the human inside would be long dead.
That said, the suit reputedly offered significant perks. Shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, jetpacks that facilitated movement by the back and the legs over rough terrain, and automated movement to avoid projectiles and hostile creatures. In addition, an advanced AI reduced the reaction time lag between movement intention and the action implemented by the power armor to five milliseconds and even less for the trigger finger.
It was like he worked with something straight out of a comic book—which explained why he thought so much about superheroes while conducting this run, he supposed.
He maintained his position behind her and slightly to her left—she was right-handed, after all—as they thrust forward continually and gunned down any of the creatures that decided to enter their path.
“How far away are we from the pick-up point?” Kennedy asked and looked around in a moment of reprieve.
Sal checked the map in his HUD. “About a klick and a half. Why?”
“I’m down to three mags for my rifle,” she responded irritably, “plus a couple more for my sidearm, five rockets in the shoulder…and my knife.”
“You have a knife?”
“Well, yeah.” She drew the weapon from the thigh scabbard she carried it in. “Well, it’s more like a sword-slash-machete really, I suppose, but in the power armor hand, it looks like a bowie knife.”
He rolled his eyes. Admittedly, a combat knife was included in his suit, but he doubted that it could cut trees down in a single stroke like hers undoubtedly could. As it turned out, size really did matter, he thought wryly. When it came to knives, anyway.
“We’re one klick away from the pick-up point,” Sal advised her after a while and noted that he too was running low on ammo. “And all the creatures look like they’ve decided to give us a break.”
“Do you think it’ll last until we get there?” Kennedy asked with a wide grin.
“Not a fucking chance. None of the other teams they had testing this place even reached this far. They’ve probably tried to compensate for how drop-dead awesome we are at this.”
“Truth,” she agreed and enthusiastically bumped the fist that he’d extended with her own as they continued toward the little red spot marked on their map.
They’d barely moved a few steps before the ground shook ominously. At first, only the sensors registered the quake, but as they focused on their surroundings, they realized that they could feel it even through their suits.
“Well, we had to jinx it, didn’t we?” Kennedy snarked and raised her rifle once again as they proceeded to the pickup point. “Can you see anything?”
“Nope.” His good mood had disappeared almost entirely. “There’s nothing on the motion sensors either.”
“Which means that whatever has caused the ground to shake is big enough to do that while out of our range,” she observed. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“Not to make things worse or anything, but I pick up four different sources of comparable mass headed our way,” Sal said. His gaze narrowed as he scanned the jungle. The sensors on his suit registered off the charts. On top of the regular motion sensors that paired flawlessly to the night vision in the HUD, temperature and seismic sensors pinpointed the direction from which creatures might be coming when they were out of the range of everything else.
All the sensory equipment told him very clearly that a quartet of creatures that each weighed more than a pair of elephants now headed their way.
“Oh, that is bullshit,” he heard Kennedy mutter as she stopped so abruptly that he almost walked into her. “That’s not even fucking possible.”
Sal looked up and his mouth dried in instinctive response as he saw what approached. The massive creatures were bi-pedal from what he could discern from the sensors. They weren’t even within range of the motion sensors yet, but their sheer enormity meant that they could see them draw steadily closer. The four monsters moved almost in sync, each on a direct trajectory toward them. Their rapid and deliberate progress made it very clear that they were out for blood.
“Well, I guess we now know why nobody’s ever made it to the pick-up point.” Kennedy glanced nervously at her limited ammo supply. “I knew the creatures had given us too much room.”
He nodded. “That’s fucking bullshit, though. Come on. They look like the dinosaur monsters that we can get the goop from, but they’re—what, almost three times as large as the biggest ones we’ve seen out there? Seriously. There’s possible, there’s Zoo possible, and then there’s this bullshit.”
His partner grinned. “I think we’ve pissed off the dev team in charge of these sims. Let’s piss them off some more, shall we?”
Sal tilted his head and regarded her thoughtfully. He knew that particularly wicked edge to her voice. “Former Sergeant Madigan Kennedy, you wouldn’t happen to have a plan now, would you?”
“I do.” She nodded emphatically. “Remember our little run-in with the German squad a couple of weeks back?”
He chuckled as the penny dropped. “You’d better get the timing right, though.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she assured him. “Get moving.”
Without hesitation, he did as he was told and increased his pace across the open spaces where the huge trees blocked out most of the sunlight. Kennedy’s armor could reach a higher top speed, but he’d found that his own armor could accelerate much faster, as well as maintain that speed through rough terrain. Their attackers appeared, now within both vision and range.
As he ran, he turned on the open speakers on his suit and yelled into them while he fired at the massive creatures as Kennedy remained utterly silent and motionless. While he wasn’t sure what kind of thought had gone into the design of the monsters, they did as most creatures did and simply followed the noisy, quickly moving creature that hurt them and left Kennedy alone.
Sal knew that this probably wouldn’t end well, but they might as well finish their little simulation with a metaphorical—and very, very literal—bang.
He ducked behind the trees and saw with satisfaction that all four of the creatures had turned to follow him. One emitted a loud, ear-splitting roar that would have burst his eardrums if the suit’s noise filters hadn’t quickly canceled it out.
Kennedy, for her part, hadn’t remained idle. Once their attackers’ attention had turned away from her, she moved quickly behind them. She didn’t have enough bullets to follow the identical tactic as when they’d been out there with the Germans. That had been a rough engagement invol
ving one of the massive dinosaur creatures and Sal had wanted it killed without the expensive sacs being burst prematurely. He’d also not wanted to have to fight their way through a horde of angry Zoo monsters, and necessity had birthed an idea. While he and one of the gunners had rushed away to distract the creature, she had remained behind to circle and shoot out the base of one of the trees. She’d then waited until the two men led the monster back. They’d dropped the tree on its back, killed it quickly, and interestingly enough, hadn’t summoned an angry mob.
Sal had made a pretty penny from updating the Staging Area’s database with that interesting piece of information, as well as with the bounty from the sacs.
It had been only a single creature, though, and from the sound of things, Sal and his buddy had been very lucky to have escaped that little romp with their lives. With four of these monsters, things might work out very differently.
Either way, it was her turn to be creative.
She activated one of the rockets mounted on her shoulder and moved quickly to select a tree that could be dropped in time to catch at least one of the fuckers. Thankfully, she located the right one without difficulty and paused to fire the rocket. It spiraled and spun to lock firmly onto the selected target before it exploded in a quick white blast. Splinters erupted with the force.