One Crazy Machine (Apocalypse Paused Book 9)

by Michael Todd

  She didn’t have to be asked twice and clambered off the four-wheeler. Never before had she felt so thankful to stand on an unfinished and partially exploded structure. Manny, though, didn’t get off. Instead, he twisted the throttle and hurtled away.

  “Manny!” she yelled a split second before he rocketed off the edge.

  Ava made it to the ledge in time to see him push himself off the four-wheeler. He screamed obscenities and his arms spun in circles. The vehicle crashed into one of the chimesaurus and another turned as the hollering Australian crashed into it, grabbed hold, and hung on tightly.

  She started down the ladder as he launched into a very one-sided conversation. “I rode an emu once and I’ll ride you. We’re going somewhere, you damn soon-to-be extinct dinosaur.”

  As soon as she reached the bottom of the ladder, she found a position from which she could flank the creatures and shoot them as they crested the wall. She filled the third one with lead and it screeched as it tumbled.

  Manny held on tight to his unwilling mount, but Gunnar moved closer and fired a volley at its legs. It crumpled under the man’s weight.

  “Goddamnit, Gunnar. I save your life and you kill my mount!”

  “We would have been fine.” Gunnar wiped his brow. “But when this shit’s all over, I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “That sounds good but none of that American piss.”

  “You prefer Foster’s? It’s an extra-large can of bilge water.”

  “It’s better than those damn IPA’s you always try to feed me.”

  “IPA’s are delicious.”

  “As much as I’d like the last words I hear on earth to be a debate about the merits of the beverage that makes you two morons even dumber, we have more pressing concerns,” Peppy said and continued to fire over the edge. She paused to gesture down to the desert sand.

  The others raced to the edge and looked down. Amongst the dead chimesaurus and scattered rubble from the explosion was a monster unlike anything Ava had ever seen.

  It launched from the sand and rose higher and higher on an incredibly long, segmented body—much like a centipede the size of a school bus. Dozens of hook-like legs flailed and grasped the wall to anchor the creature as it heaved its bulk toward them.

  Two massive arms, each longer than a man, ended in giant pincers that looked as sharp as steel and as strong as stone. With these, it grasped the top of the thirty-foot, partially-constructed wall. Frighteningly, the tip of its tail was still buried in the sand.

  Ava stumbled back as the creature opened its mouth and two tongue-like appendages whipped out to the top of the structure.

  A great blast of sand erupted, and the tip of the creature’s tail swung over the edge with enough force to pound a hole in the metal below their feet.

  Frozen in horror, she realized that it was a giant scorpion—a giant, terrifying scorpion with an elongated body lined with centipede legs. She had read about them and knew that Gunnar had faced the creatures, but she knew she hadn’t read or heard about anything like this. One normally remembered tales of a living nightmare.

  The arachnid lurched forward and dragged more of its body over the edge of the barrier, and the weird mouth tentacles flickered and swayed, now with even greater reach.

  As one, Peppy and Gunnar fired.

  Goo erupted from its exoskeleton and it emitted a piercing whine before it scrambled back down the wall and into the desert sand. The barbed tail lunged once more and punched another hole in the steel but didn’t actually strike anyone.

  “That’s right,” Gunnar yelled and ran to the edge to look over. “Go back and get your mama. Next time, bring a real challenge!”

  Ava moved beside him and discovered to both her shock and relief that the creature really had retreated. It burrowed into the sand and puffed enormous clouds of dust into the air as it did so. Once underground, it snaked back and forth along the wall and pushed up a wake like a whale would in the ocean. Finally, after a few moments of this bizarre behavior, it was gone.

  “Do you think it submerged to nurse its wounds?” she asked and tried not to sound hopeful.

  “Are you kidding me? It probably up and died. Did you see us pepper that bitch with bullets?”

  “It's not dead. We hardly scratched it. Those were like wasp stings,” Peppy said as she reloaded.

  “So? Isn’t there some wasp that kills tarantulas? We’re like that guy.”

  Manny, for once, didn’t join the conversation. Instead, he turned away from the edge of the wall and scurried through construction equipment and half-finished structures until he reached the other side of Wall Two that faced the outside world.

  “Uh, mates, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t think she’s dead.”

  “Not dead? We shot it in the gut and knocked it back to the desert it came from. If it’s not dead now it will be soon. And what do you mean, she?” Gunnar sounded incredulous but joined Manny quickly to peer out where he pointed.

  Ava joined him and immediately saw that the pilot was right.

  There in the desert, racing away from Wall Two, was a wake of sand so large it could only be caused by the massive scorpion.

  Chapter Four

  The smoke from charred chimesaurus filled the air. Captain Taylor took a deep breath and smiled. “Nothing smells as good as victory.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” Manny said and scratched his head thoughtfully. “What about cinnamon? I once found myself in a cinnamon forest—a wild place, that was. Even the monkey shit in those woods smelled better than them dead chimesaurus.”

  “Will you shut your babbling friend?” the captain snarked at Gunnar and Peppy.

  “We’ve tried to for years,” Gunnar said.

  Captain Taylor scowled at Manny and addressed the other soldiers in the hangar. “We did well today. The final count is one hundred and six…” He flashed Manny a scowl. “Chimeras, all dead. A new record, and with minimal casualties, none of whom were dragged back to the Zoo. For once, we’re taking. In addition, the main portion of the wall is largely undamaged. The worthless chimeras did little except scratch the varnish. Well done. That was an almost flawless defense exercise.”

  “Almost?” the pilot asked in a voice that suggested he resented the officer’s refusal to use of their personally approved name for the creatures.

  “You risked your life and that of a civilian who has demonstrated herself useful to the cause because you couldn’t obey orders,” he hissed at Manny through clenched teeth.

  Ava felt the conflicting emotions of pride and annoyance. She felt strangely honored to be considered “useful to the cause”—after all, she’d killed her share of chimesaurus with her shooting—but it bothered her that the man still obsessed over her friends following orders. Orders that, if they’d followed them precisely, would have been disastrous.

  “If Manny didn’t come to our aid, those chimesaurus would’ve overrun the top of the wall. Even with them there to help us, some big fucking scorpion managed to make it under,” Gunnar protested.

  She grinned. It was good to have friends who thought along similar lines.

  Peppy stepped forward as well. “Sir, I like Manny’s nonsense about as much as the bubonic plague, but I’ll admit, he saved us back there.”

  “From what? One damn creature? I hate to burst your little ego-bubble, but creatures have gotten past Wall Two before.” Captain Taylor looked like he didn’t mind bursting their ego bubble at all. “The Zoo may create some mean damn animals, but they’re still animals.”

  “This was more than an animal,” Ava objected.

  The other soldiers shuffled nervously, discomforted by the argument. Even Lieutenant Cort looked uncomfortable. Actually, he looked especially uncomfortable.

  “Goddamnit, you’re the only one of these knuckleheads I liked, but I see their insubordination has rubbed off on you too.”

  “You didn’t see the size of the thing,” Ava argued. “Maybe you don’t believe
us, but it was huge— even bigger than the constrictadile.”

  “You may not be inclined to believe me because whining against your superiors seems part of your group’s natural state, but I believe you. Still, think about the thing as a damn jungle critter. If it’s bigger, it’ll need more food and water. It simply left the only buffet available to head into the Goddamn Sahara Desert. That thing will starve to death as surely as a drunk waking up six hours outside Vegas. I give it a week, tops.

  “I’ll admit, it’s a fucking embarrassment that your team managed to allow those chimeras close enough to those explosives to damage that part of the wall, but we can repair that. Despite that, we proved that once completed, Wall Two will work. We also have intel on scorpions burrowing under the wall now, which is a best-case scenario. Instead of a whole horde of them things, one made it through—one damn bug. We’ll plug the hole.

  “Now, men and women, you did well. Get some rest. I’m sure the Zoo’s already planning their next attack and I want you all rested and prepared to stop it as handily as you did today.”

  The assembled soldiers saluted and broke rank to go about their business. The civilians chatted to one another as they wandered away.

  Ava approached Captain Taylor.

  “Sir, with respect, that thing wasn’t a regular scorpion. It was much too big, for one thing—the size of a bus rather than a man. Plus, it looked…I dunno…plump? What if it has fat reserves like a camel or something? It might be able to survive far longer out there.”

  The commander rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he removed his hand, he was scowling yet again. “Why is it that when civilians seek to call my Goddamn experience into question, they always say respect first, like that makes your nonsense any less rude?”

  “Well, disrespectfully then, I agree with Ava,” Gunnar said. She was pleased to see her team hadn’t wandered off with the rest of the crowd. Then again, arguing was in their blood as surely as crazy was.

  “On what point?” He sounded beyond exasperated. “That it has fat reserves and is making for a Goddamn oasis? If it’ll shut you people up, I’ve already given orders to notify the nearest towns and cities in the direction in which it went. If anyone sees the wake of sand you described, they’ll blow it to bits. You did say bullets pierced its armor.”

  “Sir, it’s a fucking scorpion. A big one, but a scorpion all the same. Those things are worse than most of what’s in the Zoo,” Gunnar said and sounded none too happy about it.

  “We’ve all met boogeymen in the Zoo. Don’t think Lieutenant Cort hasn’t briefed me on your particular history with the damn things.”

  “My particular history? Fuck that. Those fucking things are nightmares in armored shells. They captured me and dragged me to their fucking lair. I met a whole swarm of those damn things. That’s a level of shit beyond what any of you have ever experienced. We call them scorpions because of their tail and claws, but they’re more like ants. Do you see what I’m saying? They work together like a Goddamn hive.”

  “Which means that thing must’ve been a queen,” Ava said.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Captain Taylor said and rubbed his face once again. “And whatever makes you think that? Did you notice it lacked a penis when it scaled the wall?”

  Her mind spun with the implications. This wasn’t good, not at all. “Well, when an ant colony makes another queen, she leaves to travel a great distance and start a new hive. What if she really can survive in the desert? What if that’s her entire purpose?”

  “She’s right. I thought I recognized that look in her multiple eyes and the way she favored her belly. I didn’t want to say anything, o’ course, on account of it being rude an’ all to ask about a lady’s weight, even if she is an enormous freaky centipede monster. But Ava’s right. She’s pregnant.”

  There was a moment of silence before Captain Taylor spoke. “You’re fucking joking, right?”

  “When you’ve delivered as many babies as I have, you get a seventh sense about these kinds of things. That bitch was glowing.”

  “It was a damn bug. You can’t tell that a bug was pregnant,” the commander protested, but Ava knew the man well enough to recognize the trepidation in his voice. He now finally considered the implications of a pregnant scorpion and he didn’t like what he thought.

  “Sure you can. I once had a barking spider take up residence in my pack—that’s a tarantula to you American dickwads. The thing lived with me for weeks and took care of its sack of eggs. Time may be of the essence here, so I don’t need to go into all the particulars, but I recognized the same sort of behavior—guarded fierceness and all that. Plus, the smell’s unmistakable.”

  “If you think I’ll have my soldiers abandon their posts to go on a Goddamn bug hunt, you’re crazy. For all we know, that might be what these damn Zoo creatures have planned—another distraction.”

  “Naw, I don’t think we want to share the glory with anyone.” Manny waggled his eyebrows at Gunnar, Peppy, and Ava.

  “Just give the order, sir,” Gunnar said. For once, his grin was even bigger than the pilot’s.

  Chapter Five

  Ava, Peppy, and Gunnar were in the armory, gearing up. To Ava, gearing up meant gathering provisions—weapons certainly, but also rations, water, and a change of clothes. To Peppy and Gunnar, gearing up meant cramming as much ammunition, guns, and explosives as they could possibly fit into duffel bags.

  “Do you really think we can kill that thing?” she asked, her eyes wide as the other woman lifted the longest gun she had ever seen off the wall. Despite her practice with the carbine, Ava still didn’t know much about guns. To her, the walls of neatly stored rifles, boxes marked with strings of letters and numbers, and cubbies filled with different pistols, clips, and mysterious but probably lethal devices all looked the same. Peppy and Gunnar though, moved like executive chefs in the farmer’s market to select only the finest ingredients. She, on the other hand, was like the amateur cook with her carbine, sticking to the basics.

  “There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted to kill more,” Gunnar said as he shoved what she thought was some kind of mounted artillery cannon into the bag. It didn’t fit properly but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Do you really think you’ll have the opportunity to fire that?”

  “If I know Manny as well as I think I do—and granted, probably nobody but the damn dingoes of the Australian outback really know him—when we meet him in the hangar, he’ll have something to mount this baby on. He likes driving shit almost as much as I like shooting shit.”

  “Yeah, like captain crazy,” Ava said.

  Peppy zipped her bags and didn’t laugh at Ava’s joke at all.

  Gunnar tossed in a few grenades—for luck, he said—and zipped his bags as well.

  “Let’s go. That thing was moving fast—toward Morocco if I’m not mistaken. Let’s get out there before it makes it to Casablanca.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Peppy said. She looked about as annoyed as Captain Taylor had.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Manny and Gunnar are both huge Humphrey Bogart fans. I think they idolize him because he’s handsome, smooth, and a great actor. In other words, nothing like either one of them.” Peppy grabbed a pistol and shoved it into a holster at her hip.

  “What’s that for?”

  “For me, in case we actually kill the queen scorpion and I have to put myself out of my misery on the way home. Do you want one, Ava?”

  “Uh…” She’d had practice with some with handguns. Not as much as with the carbine, but she could see the value of another weapon. But to accept it now?

  Gunnar picked a pistol up and shoved it into her hands. “Ava, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, here we go.” Peppy hoisted her duffel bags and left the armory.

  They made their way to the hangar past soldiers who dissected the battle they’d just fought, crews repairing broken walls
, and damaged electronics. Alongside, custodians cleared the rubble and debris that had fallen through the wall from the battle above.

  Wall Two was abuzz with activity that reminded Ava yet again that this place hadn’t existed a year before. Like the Zoo, Wall Two had grown up in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Despite a lack of water and millennia during which nothing had lived here but sand, a jungle now existed, surrounded by a ring of mankind’s greatest technology. To think either would have existed there even a decade before would have bordered on the insane. Yet the Zoo was so big it had swallowed Wall One, and Wall Two struggled to keep pace.

  As they hustled through the hallways, they passed more repair crews and soldiers, but other people as well. Lawyers talked into phones mounted on the walls—cell service hadn’t made it to the Zoo yet—engineers debated plans for buildings outside the Wall, and people loaded dollies with fruits and vegetables and jars of spices. It was only a matter of time before the Zoo had an airport and its own niche tourism industry.

  After all, people went sky-diving for the fun of it, or whale-watching to bask in the majesty of nature’s largest creatures. Surely there were people out there foolish enough to want to combine both terror and awe by seeing a scorpion queen. Ava told herself she wasn’t one of them, but she wasn’t under any orders to stay there, exactly like the two Moroccan men they passed who argued over the proper way to set up a kebab stand.

  None of those plans would come to fruition, though, if Zoo creatures were able to make it past mankind’s defenses.

  They arrived in the hangar. “Where the hell is that Australian?” Gunnar demanded and poked around at the various helicopters and planes parked there. He spotted Dr. Kessler working on the soldier suit and waved like a kid saying hi to a professional athlete. The scientist ignored him.

  “Did you round up the usual suspects?” Manny asked when he arrived on a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle painted in desert colors.