Blood Of My Enemies (Birth Of Heavy Metal Book 4)

by Michael Todd

  At first, it seemed there was nothing there. The jungle darkness was too complete to really see clearly. It was impossible to make out anything other than shadows on shadows. He’d almost given up when again, something moved. The flicker of light caught a pair of eyes in the way that it did with animals that were naturally adapted to hunting at night. He squinted and finally made out a bulky shadow that seemed more solid than the underbrush around it.

  He frowned and tried to focus in on the creature, certain that it was something they’d never encountered before. The eyes weren’t high enough to be a panther who watched them from an advantageous position as they all too often did, but about three quarters of the way up—perhaps twenty feet or so. Sal readied his weapon, pinged Kennedy on her comm, and without moving his gaze from the predator, he gestured for her to check her HUD. She did and immediately shifted into a defensive stance.

  “Panther on a low-hanging branch?” she asked, her tone cautious when she contacted him through an isolated frequency.

  “The eyes are too far apart for that,” Sal replied. He’d seen eyes that large, and while the darkness prevented him from being sure, there was still a small part of him that wanted to take his shot. This was easily one of the largest creatures ever recorded in the Zoo, and without any kind of footage, there would be no proof that he’d even seen it. He was recording, of course, but that would be of little help. All he could really see was the eyes, and those even barely. Rather, all he would capture was the reflection of indirect light on those eyes.

  “Fuck,” his partner muttered. “Is it time to get out of here? There is no way we have enough firepower on us to deal with something that big.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Peel off and find another place closer to the edge of the Zoo. This clearly wasn’t our best choice.”

  She took a breath to call it since she was the gunner in their little team, but suddenly, an uproar erupted around them. Monkeys triggered it, followed quickly by the loud calls of a nearby pack of hyenas. He wondered if they had been made and were about to be attacked by a horde of monsters. To his relief, the clamor seemed to move away and the eyes followed as well. He heard and felt the thunderous footsteps of whatever it was that had watched them head off to the east.

  “Do you still think we should get the fuck out of Dodge?” Kennedy asked with real relief in her tone.

  “This is the opportunity we waited for, remember?” Sal said. “The conditions are perfect. We wait five minutes and take the plants.”

  She paused. He could tell what went through her mind and he couldn’t blame her. She obviously questioned his call and it really was up to her. She had the most experience, and if she said no, he would drop everything and get out. All he did was give her his professional opinion.

  “Five minutes,” she conceded finally. “Not mine, though. Only yours. This is a test run to see if these things work. There’s no need to get too greedy too fast.”

  Sal nodded and moved as deftly and as rapidly as he could to scoop up the container she’d left behind before he located his own. The plant had grown as well, but not as much as hers. Maybe that was the lack of direct sunlight? He wanted to know but had no time to investigate.

  “Three. Two. One.” She counted down calmly and gestured impatiently. “That’s five minutes. Pull it up and let’s go.”

  He grasped the contraption and drew a deep breath before he pulled the lever to its full extent. The blades beneath cut effortlessly through the roots and with a soft tug, he raised the plant free of the ground. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help a quick pause to listen and look around for the usual signs that the jungle had suddenly turned from slightly angry to overtly hostile. It was always an instant and complete reaction that assaulted the senses and manifested in even the way the trees seemed to shift like they were as angry as the animals were.

  “Are you good to go?” Kennedy asked impatiently when she noted his hesitation. “I have chatter on comms about a fight going down a few klicks east of here.”

  “I’m good to go. Do you think we should head there and help them? We could maybe cut through some of the beasts that might turn on us when they’re finished with them.”

  “It’s as good an idea as any,” Kennedy agreed. Now that they at least had the assurance that the pilfered plant was securely sealed, she’d relaxed a little. If even a whiff of the pheromones had reached the air, they certainly wouldn’t be able to stand and chat like this. “I do know that I don’t want us to be alone when we leave with something that could break and send the rest of the fucking Zoo down on our heads.”

  “Give Gutierrez a little credit,” Sal said as he stashed the plant in his pack. They moved off in the same direction as the massive beast they’d seen before had taken. “She knows how to build stuff that don’t break.”

  “True,” Kennedy admitted as she slowed her pace.

  “Do you think we should circle to avoid running into what could potentially be a twenty-foot-tall monster?” he asked.

  “About…what, five and a half meters tall?” she asked. “Come on, I thought all you geeky science dudes used metric.”

  “Right. Force of habit. Anyway, about circling?”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” she said. “The team under attack will be on the move too if they have any kind of sense.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered as she adjusted their path around the very visible tracks of the monster that had run down this little trench in the jungle. “Because the guys running these ops are known for their good sense.”

  Courtney leaned back in her seat and the old chair squeaked gently as she rocked back and forth in it. Her dad had bought it and while it was as comfortable as hell, she doubted it was accustomed to the kind of use she gave it, which was basically constant when she was home. There was something comforting about being in the study that her father had used to do all his work. From the notes she’d taken from the other scientists who had worked with him, she knew that he spent most of his days in his den and habitually returned to the office to deliver his own findings every Friday and have a long chat with some of the people involved. He would have a late lunch with the man in charge of the research project before he headed on home.

  The fact that her father had died on a Thursday night was not lost on her, but she’d run that past the criminal lawyer who had helped her with the home invasion and the police themselves. There was all kinds of evidence but everything was strictly circumstantial. There was very little that they could actually do at this point until she unearthed something solid for them.

  She looked up when the doorbell rang. Her first instinct was to reach for the gun she now kept close to her at all time, just in case. If anyone planned to attack, they would logically do it at night. Still, that wouldn’t stop them casing the place, though. They had to know what happened to the last team that tried something, so they would want to make sure nothing like that would welcome them too. She gritted her teeth and pushed away from her table.

  Or it could simply be that Robinson had ordered pizza. It was about that time, and he’d made sure to stipulate that if he had to help her work from home, he would charge her for the lunch. And he’d mentioned that it would be pizza.

  “Praise the lord for the wonders of modern technology.” She turned the computer screen and checked for the cameras that covered the front door.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” she hissed. An older woman in a dress that was way too tight for her age rang the doorbell again. She was about to key the speakerphone connected to the camera when the door started to open.

  “Dammit, Robinson!” She was in the basement, so of course he couldn’t hear her shout, but the sentiment was appropriate. Her time was valuable and had to be focused on a matter that might end up a life and death situation for herself and people that she loved. Honestly, she didn’t have the time to deal with the woman.

  She shoved out of the chair and jogged to the stairs without bothering with her
shoes. It occurred to her that she wore a shirt that long since needed the washing machine and a pair of jeans with her hair tied up in a bun at the back of her head. Her glasses were in place but almost forgotten until they sagged too low on the bridge of her nose. She sighed and pushed them back up as she grumbled at the irony. For the first time in her life, she had the money to correct the shit out of her myopic vision, but who had the time these days?

  On the main floor, Robinson seemed engaged in a pleasant conversation with the woman. The visitor was well past the age where her hair should be streaked with gray, but there wasn’t so much of a hint of it in the artificially blonde mess. Courtney ground her teeth in distaste. This was California, land of the prefabricated bimbos, but there wasn’t much the woman could do that wouldn’t piss her daughter off.

  “Dr. Monroe,” Robinson said and looked more than a little relieved. He clearly disliked the woman as much as she did. “Your mother is here. I did try to tell her you weren’t available.”

  He added that last part in almost a whisper, given the awkwardness of the situation and his obvious need to offer some kind of apology.

  “Did she tell you to say that?” the visitor asked and leaned forward. “Do you hate me so much that you prefer to use your lackeys to keep me out than actually speak to me face to face? I’m your mother.”

  Courtney took a deep breath and forced back a definite urge to lash out at her. “No,” she said and tried to keep her voice as low and calm as she could. “You simply happened to give birth to me. You never actually looked the side Dad or I were on—unless it was to use us to benefit your grand social reputation—and basically left him to raise me on his own.”

  “Oh, come on, that happened so long ago,” her mother drawled and shook her head as she took a moment to inspect Robinson. “Are you really mad about that? Your father wanted a child so I gave him one. You should thank me that I didn’t stand in the way of your ridiculous obsession with continuing his passion. You could have done so much better for yourself.”

  “You mean I could have done so much better for you,” Monroe snapped. “Your gold-digging ass realized that I was your passport to the good life. You certainly tried hard enough to mold me into a simpering little sorority sister and it so burned your butt when I didn’t play ball. But you couldn’t interfere, could you? Without me as your little trump card, Dad and his family would have cut you off without a dime.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I won’t have this conversation with you again, Jasmine.”

  “Maybe I should…” Robinson ventured.

  “I could do with some coffee, dear, if that’s where you’re headed,” Jasmine said with a flirtatious tilt of the head.

  “Don’t bother,” Courtney commanded. “She won’t be here that long. I have some paperwork ready for you downstairs, Allen. Why don’t you pick that up and spell-check for me?”

  “Of course, Dr. Monroe,” he said with a nod. The poor man felt the tension in the air and had needed for any excuse to leave the conversation and never return. It had been cruel for her to keep him around this long.

  Courtney drew a deep breath. She should have known that this moment would come. After all, she knew her mother well enough to know that it wouldn’t be long after her father died before she peeked in to see if anything was left over so she could slink off with a hefty bonus to the very comfortable hole her father had—too generously—provided for her.

  “That was incredibly rude of you, Courtney,” Jasmine said.

  “If you try to pull that parent shit on me, I swear to God, I’ll throw you out by those fake gold hoop earrings you have on,” she retorted in real warning. “What do you want here, Jasmine?”

  “Well,” her mother huffed with an attempt to adopt the face of a victim, “I suddenly remembered that he had sent me some intellectual property documents a few weeks before he died. He wanted me to sign them before he sold them off to provide a…well, an additional investment for me.”

  “Ah,” Courtney grunted with a chuckle. “Of course. Only the scent of money could overcome your maternal revulsion enough to bring you to my door. But why in the name of everything that’s holy would Dad want to pay you off in—hell, what did you call it?—intellectual property sales? I assume it could only be an attempt to pay you off since he no doubt knew you’d do your damndest to get your claws into everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

  Jasmine looked tense, like she wanted to argue, but she plastered a fake-pleasant on face. “I have no idea why your father would approach me about money. I’d certainly not expected this since he made it very clear that I’d have only the little he saw fit to leave me and not a penny more. Actually, in hindsight, I’d have been better off if I’d divorced him years ago.”

  Monroe smirked. “Oh, yeah, like he would have rolled over. Dad didn’t give a shit about the potential scandal. He’d have let you go in a heartbeat and counted himself lucky.”

  “Be that as it may,” her mother said and managed to somehow retain a firm hold on her calm, “the documents arrived without any warning for me either. We had little contact after you went off to that awful place and I finally moved into my own home. When I heard that he died, I assumed that he’d done it to...I don’t know, assuage a guilty conscience.”

  “The only guilty conscience here is yours,” Courtney said. “But, whatever the reason, if you’re looking for a handout from me, you’ve severely overestimated how I feel about you. If you want a piece of Dad’s estate, you should have brought the documents he sent you and a lawyer. I don’t care where his money goes, but if I can do anything to make your life difficult, I will.”

  Jasmine scowled and her pleasant façade slipped fractionally before she withdrew a couple of documents from her purse and handed them over. Courtney took them and with a quick, wary look at her mother, unfolded them and scanned the pages.

  Sure enough, there was her father’s signature in his classic dark-blue felt pen. She would recognize it anywhere, and yet, as she turned to look at the date when the signature took place, she noted that it was three days before he died. For some reason—even though Jasmine had said as much—it niggled at her.

  “Well, this all looks clean enough,” she said, although it physically hurt her to say it. “But I’m not great at all this legal jargon. You should talk to the lawyer who’s handling his estate.” She had regained a little of her calm but she really didn’t want her mother to stick around any longer.

  “Right,” Jasmine said and looked relieved—like she had expected more resistance to her claim. “Honestly, I really have no idea why he would have done this. People rethink their life choices all the time, but you can’t plan for a home invasion.”

  Courtney tried not to allow any surprise to show on her face but wasn’t sure how much she’d let slip. Her jaw clenched and her fingers almost snatched the papers back from Jasmine’s fingers, but she managed to hold back the instinctive response. Whoever had told her mother that her father had died had told her that it was in a home invasion, yet that had never been mentioned—not at the funeral or in any of the meetings related to the estate.

  In all honesty, she herself had suspected this, but if someone else knew about it and had spread the information, it meant that someone—rather than cancer—was responsible for her father’s death.

  It wasn’t confirmation, of course, but the more she learned about her father’s death, the more likely it seemed that the man didn’t have any kind of cancer at all. Or, if he did, it hadn’t been sufficiently advanced to take his life so suddenly.

  “Okay,” she said and fumbled in her pocket for a card. “This is the contact information of the lawyer handling Dad’s estate. You are to direct all your business to him. If you try to contact me or come to this house again, I will make sure that anything Dad ever said or did to keep you in line looks like a slap on the wrist, do you understand me?”

  Jasmine opened her mouth, but Courtney wasn’t in the mood to continue the discussion. She rai
sed her hand and pointed at the door.

  “Get out,” she ordered. “Now. Before I call the cops.”

  Her mother nodded. There wasn’t a hint of regret in the woman’s features, not even the slightest show of remorse in the face of all her daughter’s accusations. She doubted that that woman was smart enough to be involved in whatever it was that had caused her father’s death, but she definitely had a part to play, even inadvertently. After all, she’d appeared out of the woodwork, her nose twitching like the rat she was with the scent of some kind of payout.

  Jasmine nodded, shoved the documents and the card in her purse, and turned to the door. She hesitated once she’d crossed the threshold, her mouth open to say something, but Courtney didn’t give her the chance. Instead, she slammed the door in her face and wiped her hands in a gesture of satisfaction.

  God, that felt good, she thought with a small smile as she turned the lock and headed to her study. Robinson emerged from the stairwell and looked around for any hints that he still wasn’t welcome.

  “Just so you know,” she said while she struggled to keep her eyes from tearing up, “that woman is never welcome in this house again. I know you tried to send her away, and it’s not like you’ll hang out much at my house anyway. Still, it’s something to keep in mind if you ever are here that you have my full permission to call the cops and have her removed.”

  Robinson didn’t reply but he smiled and squeezed her shoulder gently as she passed him. It was all right, she supposed. She wasn’t in the mood to talk much, anyway. Well, not to him. She retrieved her phone when he was out of earshot and quickly pressed the first quick-dial on the screen.

  As she held the phone to her cheek, she scowled at the machine that registered her call and played her Sal’s quick message before it beeped for her to leave a message. She didn’t bother. He would see that she’d called and respond when it was convenient. She wasn’t even sure what time it was in the Sahara.