The leeches, as long as the American’s forearm and as thick as his wrist, were bad enough, but then there were the mosquitoes. They were the size of ravens and their needle noses reached the length of fencing foils. The men had shot them out of the air as the gargantuan insects dove toward them. The mutants exploded in a fantastic display of body bits and magenta blood.
The plant life was not to be outdone by the insects. Sword grass swayed in giant clumps, sharp enough to cut the air around it. That wasn’t unusual, but Zoo sword grass had a taste for blood. It wanted to ensnare, to shred, to let the blood of any living thing seep into the soft soil or black water around it so it could drink it in. The giant lily-pad-like plants wanted to drown the men, the vines lashing out at their ankles or any other body part that got close enough. Charles had almost been dragged in twice already and his left leg was covered in welts, the fatigue leg in tatters. The encounter left him limping slightly.
“That’s about as good as it’s going to get,” Booker said. He made a few deep knee-bends. “Let’s move out.”
Roo sloshed forward through the murky water. After he’d gone a few steps, the water deepened to his waist and he half-turned to look back at the others. “Go back. The water wasn’t as deep on the other side.”
His teammates retreated to the hummock. The Australian took two steps forward, then plunged under the surface.
They stared at the point where he had disappeared. The water frothed and his hand appeared, then submerged again. A thick, scaly body cut above the surface of the water where the man struggled.
“What’s happening?” Charles asked. He aimed his shotgun at the roiling water.
Booker gripped the barrel and pushed it away. “You can’t shoot! You’ll hit Roo.”
“I wasn’t going to shoot him! But we have to help somehow,” he said.
Roo’s head broke through the surface and he gasped. “Do something!” He was pulled back under the dark water. They could see the creature’s body looping in circles. Its body wrapped tightly around him, keeping him submerged and threatening to break his ribcage.
The two men waded toward the struggling man. They got a better look at the snake-like creature that had a death grip on him. Its scales were black and deep-green. The head rose above the water. It was the size and shape of a spade. Two lidless, glowing yellow eyes with vertical pupils glanced at the approaching men before it opened its mouth. Fangs unfolded from the roof of its mouth, each about eight inches long and slightly curved.
Booker threw a knife and it sunk into the thick flesh just under the beast’s head. It reared back, writhing in the air and hissing madly.
The other man lunged forward and gripped Roo’s upper body, trying to pull him from the animal’s coiling grasp.
The Aussie sputtered and coughed. He was covered in mud and algae. His legs were still in the creature’s grip.
Charles pulled harder, but the animal responded by holding tighter to Roo. Its head plunged beneath the surface of the water once again.
“Get me away from this thing!” Roo yelled, struggling harder against the animal. He kicked and tried to pull his legs free, but the monster coiled tighter.
“Booker!” the American ground out.
The Brit plunged his arms into the water. He felt around, trying to get a grip on the slimy body, drew his knife, and began slicing.
“Jesus! Be careful!” Roo said.
“I am, but we have to get it to release you,” he explained. He jabbed and slashed at any part of the monster’s flesh he could reach. He was careful to avoid areas where Roo and the animal were tangled. He glanced at their surroundings. The sound of the struggle was bringing other predators forward. He saw dark bodies sliding through the water toward them.
Booker’s knife sank deep into the animal’s back, glancing off bone. It hissed, releasing Roo, and disappeared beneath the black water to leave only ripples behind.
Charles helped him stand upright. The Aussie put his hands on his knees and gasped for air.
“What…the fuck…took you…so long?”
“We had to be delicate about it,” the Brit said as he wiped his bloody blade off on some reeds.
“Delicate? It was crushing my fucking ribcage. There was nothing delicate about the whole goddamn thing.”
“We got you out, didn’t we?” Charles reminded him. He surveyed the dark water, trying to see where the creature had disappeared to—or where it had come from—but saw nothing but muck and black water.
Booker started laughing.
“What the fuck is so funny, you piece of shit?” Roo asked, glaring. He wiped mud from his face and arms, only managing to smear it deeper into his cuts.
“Sorry. It just reminded me of that terrible horror movie. You know, Anaconda? The one with J-Lo?” the man asked. “Also, I don’t appreciate being called a piece of shit. Especially after I just saved your sorry ass.”
“Still think it took you too damn long.”
"Next time we save you, we’ll try to do it in a timelier manner. How’s that sound?” Charles asked, his arms folded over his chest.
“A thank you would be nice,” Booker added. “Especially since I lost one of my favorite knives rescuing you.”
Roo growled and muttered. The Brit suspected it was “fuck you” and maybe something about his ancestors, but the Australian’s accent had thickened too much to tell.
“Not that arguing about Roo’s questionable manners isn’t thrilling, but we need to keep moving,” he said.
Charles chose the next route forward, wading carefully into the black water. Roo flipped off the swath of water he’d been sucked under before he turned to follow his teammates.
As he turned, the snake shot out of the still water, its mouth open. He stumbled backward but managed to bring his Ari B’Lilah up. He thrust the knife upward as the animal’s large head struck. The blade jammed under its jaw, through the soft tissue beneath, and speared into its brain with a crunch of skull and cartilage.
“Take that, you ugly motherfucker!” he said, shoving the head away from him.
Its body writhed and twitched, its muscles contracting even in death.
Booker moved to the side of the animal’s head and pulled his knife from behind its jaw. “I’ll be taking this back.”
The team slogged through the swamp at a slow pace. They couldn’t risk getting more injured than they already were.
After an hour or so, Booker had the lead again and Charles was in the rear when the hair on the back of his neck rose and the arches of his feet tightened. He turned and his eyes widened. A wave that looked like the bow wave of a massive speed boat was headed straight toward them.
“Oh, shit,” he said and opened fire.
It kept coming, growing larger and picking up speed. The dark water masked whatever was creating the wave. Plants and smaller animals were sucked into the wake as the creature charged toward the men.
Booker and Roo also opened fire, but nothing seemed to be stopping it. They retreated as fast as they could, but the spit of solid ground they were on was surrounded by dense sword grass they couldn’t get through if they didn’t want to be flayed.
Charles took one of his WP grenades and threw it at the oncoming wave. It sank into the water, going off and illuminating a horrendous dark shadow. The black, churning water made the creature hard to make out. Whatever it was it had horns and was bigger than a grizzly bear. The wave spread as the shadowy beast darted away in a different direction.
Ripples and smaller waves lapped toward the men as they stood watching the retreating monster-wave. The water still simmered from where he had thrown the grenade. The waves from the mystery creature’s wake brought other Zoo animals toward them.
A large mouth rose out of the water. Roo fired as the alligator-like predator charged toward them with a throaty hiss.
“It never fucking stops,” he muttered, sending round after round at the oncoming attacker.
Its mouth and teeth resemble
d an alligator’s, but its scaly skin was a deep-blue. Two tails thrashed in the water, and a row of thick spikes trailed down its back.
With a final shot, the creature went down, sinking into the water of the swamp.
“It’s official,” Roo said. “I fucking hate it here.”
“I agree,” Charles mumbled.
Booker sighed. His whole body was beginning to ache. He didn’t need a mirror to know he looked just as bad as Charles and Roo—mud and blood covered with a side of crazy eyes from being constantly hunted and assaulted by alien things that were all killing machines.
“Keep moving,” he said.
It was slow going as the unpredictable soft mud of the marsh forced the men to a cautious pace. They tried to avoid the carnivorous plants as well as not be eaten by the strange things that lurked in the water and tall reeds. They often had to backtrack. They slogged through mud and knee-high water, often taking exaggerated steps in an attempt to stir up whatever lurked beneath the surface.
The terrain seemed to go out of its way to be inhospitable. Neon-green algae oozed in large clumps across the surface, bubbling subtly and polluting the air with the rotten-egg smell of sulfur.
There was no ignoring the fading light, and Booker knew the time to get out of the swamp was probably an hour ago. He thought he could see the edge of it but was uncertain. He was certain that if night fell when they were still in the swamp, their chances of survival would be slim. Those were odds he didn’t want to deal with.
“Is that the end?” Charles asked, his voice low as if speaking louder would make the solid line of trees leap away.
They scrambled up a final embankment and found themselves on a rise overlooking the area they had traversed. A quick look ahead in the dying light reassured them that they’d made it through.
Booker slumped against a tree and scrubbed his hand over his face. “We aren’t going through there again.”
The American glared at the swamp. “I don’t know.”
His teammates stared at him.
Charles shrugged. “Look, it wasn’t on the map, right? So that means it's new. New stuff is where the money is at. Sure, it would be absolute hell to do anything in there, and I’m not exactly tripping over myself to go back, but I’m sure if we made our way in a time or two, it would pay off.” He shrugged again. “Just something to keep in mind.”
“I hate that you’re probably right,” Roo said.
“Probably?”
The man glared. “You know what, Yankee, I like it better when you’re doing your whole silent act.”
He smiled.
The night was uneventful, even if it was full of noises that kept them on edge. Strange warbling calls, thrumming growls, and screeches filled the night air, some simply calls while others spoke of fights and death.
The other side of the swamp was only a klick away from their target’s recorded territory. The men closed in, Booker directing them toward what looked like a hill as a central landmark.
The hill was a hunching rockface that almost looked like a crouching beast. Roo eyed it warily and wouldn’t have been surprised if it unfolded itself and tried to eat them.
Nothing happened. The hill was merely a hill.
“Okay,” the Brit said, looking through his information again, “let’s take advantage of the higher ground and then come up with the best game plan for finding this son of a bitch and bringing it back.”
The view from the top revealed the sameness of the surrounding area. The land seemed relatively flat. Tall, broad-branched trees provided sufficient cover to mask the movement of Zoo life. They could just make out the terrain between the copses of trees to have a better understanding of the objective’s territory.
“Should we split up?” Roo asked, frowning at the Zoo around them.
“Normally, I would say yes, but something about this isn’t sitting well with me,” the Brit said. “Besides, I have a feeling this creature is going to be an all-hands-on-deck situation and we don’t have an effective way of communicating if we split up. No, we stay together.”
His teammates nodded.
“Where do we start?” Charles asked.
If the information Booker possessed was right, the creature’s territory was roughly five square kilometers. It wasn’t an incredibly large area, but it was large enough to make things difficult. He wished he knew how to bait it and make the animal come to them.
“This is the general area,” he said, pointing to a map on his tablet. “Of course, this is all basically guesswork and who knows if this is accurate considering the Zoo landscape keeps changing.”
The others leaned over and studied the map and information.
“Grid work is always the best method. We split it up into three sections, keeping within this map’s assumption of its territory. Then we can expand if need be but hopefully, we won’t need to do that.”
They covered the area, ghosting through the trees, weapons at the ready, looking for anything that said the three-headed beast had been around. There were plenty of signs of other creatures. A tree had been stripped of its bark by the claws of one animal and dens and nests cropped up, the animals inside them either sleeping or making menacing warning sounds if the men got too close. Scat and prints were everywhere, but there were too many to decipher and they soon gave up trying to track it that way. They didn’t recognize any of the tracks anyway and wouldn’t know what the creature’s particular mark looked like.
After a full day of looking, the men were empty-handed. They hadn’t run into any lifeforms at all, which Charles thought was strange. They should’ve encountered something. Granted, there had been moments of sounds and warnings, but he hadn’t laid eyes on anything.
They set up camp on the top of the hill. Booker checked their supplies and scowled.
“We have to find this thing tomorrow,” he said.
“Why’s that?” Roo asked.
“Because we don’t have enough rations. Not to mention the water purification tablets are running out.”
Charles looked up from cleaning his Remington. “How long?”
Booker pressed his lips into a grim line. “Two days of water, on the outside.”
“Well, fuck. We can’t come back empty-handed. Not after all this shit we’ve been dragged through.” Roo scowled his annoyance. “Could we just boil water? I’m sure we can find edible plants in here.”
“Normally, I wouldn’t be worried. But I don’t trust anything in here. I’ve no desire to get some sort of alien strain of giardia,” he said. He shuddered at the thought of what the Zoo could do with a parasite like that.
The three men looked at each other. They had all had better days. Roo still itched from his earlier run-in with the wait-a-minute vines. The struggle with the snake-like animal had only served to widen his cuts. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get the mud out without a proper shower.
Charles wondered if he’d pulled a muscle or strained a tendon because his limp from being yanked by the carnivorous lily-pads was only worsening. The muscles of his leg were aching and tight. Pain shot up to knot between his shoulder blades and down to the back of his knee.
Booker didn’t like how his skin looked when he changed the bandage on his leech bite. His flesh was angry and red-tinged. It smelled, which was never a good sign. He tried not to think about gangrene.
Each man kept their worries to themselves.
“I’ll take first watch,” Charles volunteered.
The others nodded and settled down for another night.
The next morning was as hushed as the day before. The pressure was mounting and all three felt it. Returning empty handed was not an option.
“Grid again?” Charles asked, stretching carefully.
“I’m not so sure,” Booker said.
“What do you mean, you aren’t sure?” Roo asked.
“I mean,” he said, “that it didn’t work last time and we have a tight deadline. We need to think about heading back.”
> “So what’s the new plan?” the American demanded.
“There are a few places that seemed promising. The high-trafficked areas. We check out those areas, and then…” The Brit let his sentence fade away.
Charles rolled his shoulders. “Retreat, hell.”
Roo clapped him on the back. “I’m with the boy scout here. We got this. I’ve got a good feeling.”
Booker rolled his eyes. “Your psychic abilities, right?”
The other man tapped his nose.
“Okay, let’s go find ourselves a three-headed monster,” he said.
The team covered the ground they’d scouted the day before. They kept a sharp lookout but made for the three highly-trafficked areas Booker had marked on the map. One was a sort of watering hole. Another was a huge rock. Roo thought it looked like a shotput thrown and then forgotten by the gods. The men couldn’t figure out the significance of the rock, but the ground around it had been churned and worn-down by the passing of many feet. The last point of interest was another sort of watering hole, though it seemed to be more mud wallow than watering hole.
They started with the giant rock and positioned themselves in the trees to watch, keeping upwind. It was a closer position than Charles liked. The need to capture the objective alive made their weapons useless and the tranq gun they’d purchased from Dan didn’t have a long range. They needed to be close enough to break from the trees and subdue the mark.
The jungle around them was quiet as it had been on their search the day before. After they’d settled into their observation point, there was some movement but the few animals that scurried past were small, all with the regular number of heads. It was a strange thing to watch. Each animal circled the rock as it passed, rubbed its body along the side, and then scurried on.
“It’s a glorified scratching post,” Roo grumbled.
Booker felt the time constraint like a weight behind his eyeballs. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. “We’ll give this spot another hour, then we have to move on.”
The next hour was uneventful, and the sun had nearly reached its peak when they hiked to the mud wallow. They set themselves up much like before—close enough to use the tranq gun and swoop in but far enough to be relatively undetected.
Reprobates (The Bohica Chronicles Book 1) Page 16