One Crazy Machine (Apocalypse Paused Book 9)

by Michael Todd

  “Fuck, you beat me to it,” Gunnar said and grinned at him.

  “I can’t believe we’re headed to Morocco, mate. I can’t play piano worth shit, but you damn well know I’ll sing along.”

  Peppy looked at Manny, then at the ATV, then back at Manny. She did not look impressed. “Okay, it’s nice, but I don’t think it’ll do much to a scorpion queen besides cause indigestion.”

  “I gotta agree, Manny. That thing’s not big enough for me to mount my gun on, let alone for us to ride. Do I need to borrow Dr. Kessler’s suit and leave you all here?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be flying. I merely thought you two would bring enough firepower that you’d be tired by the time we got there.”

  “Thanks,” Peppy grunted and loaded her duffels on the back of the ATV.

  “You know what they say.” Gunnar glanced at Manny and his eyes sparkled.

  “If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die,” the two men said in perfect unison.

  “If you two keep doing this shit the whole time, I will fucking lose it.” Peppy scowled ominously.

  “Just because you hate me—wait, that’s not right.” The pilot frowned and scratched his head.

  “You may despise me, but that’s why I trust you,” Gunnar said, but he too seemed hesitant.

  “Just because you despise me, you’re the only one I trust.” Ava delivered the line in her best Peter Lorre impression. It wasn’t at all impressive.

  “Shoot me in the fucking leg. You like that Goddamn movie too?” Peppy sounded even less pleased than usual, which Ava hadn’t at all believed was even possible.

  “It’s Casablanca—one of the greatest movies of all time.” Ava shrugged.

  “The greatest movie of all time,” Gunnar said.

  “Without a doubt,” Manny added.

  “No, it’s fucking not. It's old and outdated.”

  “Well, what do you like, you damn film snob?” Gunnar folded his arms.

  Peppy shrugged. “Minions was pretty funny.”

  “You can’t be fucking serious. You like Minions?”

  She shrugged again. “I like Kevin. Big fucking deal. Now, if we’re done playing Rotten Tomatoes, let’s go kill a scorpion queen.”

  Gunnar put his arsenal on the ATV and muttered to himself, “Minions? Fucking Minions?” Manny took the wheel and led them through the hangar to a large vehicle of some sort covered by a tarp.

  He pulled the covering off the hidden vehicle with a flourish. “Voila!”

  What confronted her defied what Ava knew about helicopters. She recognized it as a helicopter, which counted for something, but even that was a stretch. The front of it was a cabin, and above that was the typical large rotary blade. That much of the aircraft had been taken from a chopper was obvious, but beyond that, it appeared that Manny had raided every damaged bird in the hangar. A patchwork of metal, windows, doors, and entirely too much duct tape encased a central cargo area. Strangely, two arms protruded from the back and each sported its own spinning blades that somehow, faced the front.

  “The nose is classic Blackhawk. You can’t go wrong with that, but I added some belly space after our rescue mission last time, and obviously, those are osprey wings at the back.”

  “Obviously,” Peppy said dryly.

  “It’s…uh, sleek. Sort of,” Gunnar commented. “Did you sand off all the rivets to give those different metals a smooth surface?”

  “No, of course not. It's solid and has plenty of rivets. Too many rivets, in fact.” The pilot patted the helicopter affectionately and one of the doors fell off. “Whoops. I knew I forget to put those lynchpins in somewhere. Good thing we caught that now instead of in mid-flight—although that would’ve made for a great story. Killing a scorpion queen with a door.”

  “And…you’re sure it’ll make it to the scorpion queen? She was traveling at a rapid pace,” Ava said.

  “I can’t believe this shit.” Manny folded his arms in front of his chest. “I’ve worked on this thing for days. Days! Do you know how hard it is to rip an Blackhawk and an Osprey apart in one week?”

  “Not as hard as patching them back together, obviously,” Peppy said.

  “I take offense at that. Umbridge even!” he said.

  “Umbridge is a villain from Harry Potter.” Peppy scratched her chin as she considered this. “But given what this thing looks like, that makes sense, really. It’ll take magic to keep it in the air.”

  “Minions and now Harry Potter?” Gunnar was dumbfounded. “You think you know a girl…”

  “Well, what do you call the thing?” Ava asked and forced a note of optimism into her voice.

  “The Flying Bastard. I liked the sound of it since he don’t have a proper mother or anything, but maybe I should’ve named him the Solo Bachelor since apparently, you all want to stay behind while I go out on my own!”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Peppy said. “If you manage to catch up to the scorpion queen, you can crash this mess of a ship into her. I’m sure that would do the job.”

  “Not if she’s burrowed under the sand, you Goddamn pack of ingrates. I swear this is the worst damn Christmas ever. You don’t respect a man’s greatest achievement. Honestly, you pricks would’ve looked at Edison’s lightbulbs and asked for candles.”

  “Candles were more reliable for years,” Peppy said.

  “I’ve had enough of you.” Manny hopped on the ATV and gunned it. He obviously tried to look cool, but the high-pitched squeal of the engine added no value to the effect. Still grumbling and muttering to himself the entire time, he drove the vehicle to the back of the helicopter and drove up a ramp. Ava didn’t make out much of what he said besides curse words, but she did catch “Peppy? More like Poopy,” before he vanished into the belly of the Flying Bastard.

  But, despite their lack of faith in Manny’s Frankenstein helicopter, the familiar spin and whine of its engines as it sucked in air was a little reassuring. Its rotors—all three of them—began to spin.

  “I’ve seen him fly weirder things,” Ava said.

  “Yeah, he has. But I was always more than happy with factory models,” Gunnar retorted.

  She was about to lead the soldiers aboard when Lieutenant Cort arrived.

  “I’m impressed that he actually managed to salvage all the parts he said he would. We had written most of that off as scrap,” Cort said by way of greeting. She found it was interesting how much more in control the lieutenant was there than out in the Zoo, but it made sense when she thought about it. He was a numbers and figures man who liked well-planned orders delivered to soldiers in a timely fashion. Tactics and spreadsheets were his happy place and he excelled at supply lists and debriefings.

  “You’re doing wonders for my confidence, Lieutenant.” Gunnar squinted morosely at the Flying Bastard. One of the back rotors on its Osprey arms had failed to rotate upwards. Manny currently straddled it and banged on it with a hammer. Ava was impressed—but mostly terrified—when he pounded something in the right spot and the propeller rotated until it pointed upward.

  “Confidence is why I convinced Captain Taylor to send you out there. The rest of us need to stay here and guard Wall Two. He still thinks it could be another feint.”

  “There are people out there—civilians not stupid enough to try to see the Zoo firsthand,” Peppy said, unsmiling, and her reflective sunglasses were a mirror as hard as her face.

  “And we’ve contacted other militaries in the undamaged parts of the wall. They’re preparing the civilian populations in her projected paths, especially in Morocco.”

  “You’ve been in the Zoo so you damn well know that will do shit.” The soldier had to raise her voice over the growing roar of the Flying Bastard’s engines, but that simply allowed her to put more anger in it.

  Ava cut in before she resorted to death threats. “You’ve been out there, Cort. You know that unless you’ve faced the Zoo creatures before, there’s nothing you can do to
prepare someone for them.”

  He nodded, his confidence shaken at the memories of his own trek through the Zoo. There was no escaping the truth that he’d be dead a dozen times over if not for the four people he now sent out into the desert to slay yet another unimaginable creature. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you all before you left. Your experience…let’s say I value it in a way I didn’t previously.”

  “That’s a damn understatement, pencil-pusher,” Gunnar said.

  When Cort would’ve once balked at the nickname, he now smiled. “Ava, do you really think the queen will lay her eggs out there?”

  “I see we’ve gone from being unsure if it’s a queen to wanting an egg-count,” Peppy snarked.

  “I agree with Captain Taylor’s assessment that we can’t abandon the wall in its current state, but I’d also be a fool not to listen to your counsel. Ava?”

  “All I can say for sure is that I’m done underestimating the Zoo. I don’t think it has a nefarious mind like so many of your soldiers seem to, but whatever’s guiding it—whatever programming or algorithm—is obviously learning and adapting to our behavior and our world. At this point, after everything we’ve seen, I think it would be beyond foolish to ever assume the Zoo isn’t capable of creating our worst-case scenarios. I can’t think of a reason why a pregnant queen would bother to go out into the desert unless she’s confident her offspring will either survive or find a food source.”

  He nodded. She was actually pleased to see dread and apprehension flicker across his face and startle his blonde mustache.

  “Ava, so…uh…how many scorpion eggs are we talking here?” Gunnar fumbled a cigarette and tried to light it repeatedly despite the wind that blew around them from the helicopter. After a moment of useless endeavor, he recognized that he was attempting the impossible and finally shoved the pack into his pocket. “I’m not supposed to smoke around aircraft anyways, right pencil-pusher?”

  Cort offered him a tight smile but said nothing. He knew what had happened to Gunnar as well as anyone. He’d probably read the report as soon as the scorpion queen had crossed the wall in hopes of gleaning clues on how to defeat her.

  Ava shrugged. “There’s no way to know for sure. I took an etymology course when I was an undergrad.”

  “I took history of film and I still can’t tell you what a damn auteur is,” Gunnar snapped. The topic of conversation plus the lack of nicotine really bothered him.

  “Some people actually paid attention in college,” Peppy said. “I know I did in my embalming class.”

  “You didn’t really take a class on dead bodies,” Gunnar said, and the grin snuck back into his face.

  Ava felt bad because she knew she was about to wipe it off again. “Scorpions don’t actually lay eggs. They give birth to live babies. An average brood can be as large as a hundred babies.”

  She looked at Peppy and Cort, ready for horror to suffuse their expressions, but the woman didn’t look too concerned. “That’s actually not that bad, is it Gunnar?”

  “No…no, that’s not terrible,” he said hesitantly. “They’ll be smaller than adults, too, right? Like probably dog-sized instead of man.”

  “We killed about that many chimesaurus earlier, and they’re way bigger and tougher than any baby scorpion will be,” Peppy added.

  “Right,” Ava said and already wished that she didn’t have to say more. But she wouldn’t underestimate the Zoo or let her friends underestimate it either. “But this is the Zoo we’re talking about. The babies might be fully formed killers, even if they’re slightly smaller than adults.”

  “Still. A hundred’s not that bad,” Peppy said. “It’s not a reason to hang ourselves yet.”

  “Exactly,” Gunnar agreed and tried to sound cheerful. “Especially if we stay aloft in Manny’s…uh, Fucking Bastard.”

  “I agree that a hundred babies would be a best-case scenario,” Ava said carefully.

  “A best-case scenario?” Gunnar swallowed. “I thought you said scorpions could have up to a hundred babies.”

  “We need to keep in mind that we’ve already established that these scorpions have characteristics of ants as well given the hive where they captured, uh…soldiers.” She pointedly avoided looking at him when she said this. “Plus, they work together, which isn’t characteristic of scorpions at all. If we work under the assumption that the queen is as much ant as she is scorpion…well, an ant queen can lay up to three hundred thousand eggs.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “A day,” she finished over his exclamation.

  “So somewhere between a hundred and three hundred thousand hungry killer giant scorpions…got it.” He nodded like he’d received results from a cancer test with a no-hope prognosis.

  Cort nodded and seemed to catalog all the information. “I’ll relay this to Captain Taylor. Stay in touch. If you have visuals on anything besides the queen, we want to know.”

  “And if it’s only the giant fucking queen that crawled under the wall?”

  “Then kill it, obviously,” Cort said with a small smile. “And Godspeed.”

  He saluted, then left. Peppy and Ava led a shaken Gunnar onto the experimental helicopter.

  Chapter Six

  They climbed onto the craft to be greeted by the smell of cigarette smoke.

  “Someone’s breaking protocol and I won’t tell my superiors,” Gunnar said and hurried toward what should have been the cockpit although that was too generous a word. The entire interior of the helicopter had been gutted, so no walls separated the flight control area from the rest of the craft. Well, that wasn’t entirely true either. Roll-down metal paneling was secured at the ceiling like a garage door. Ava moved beyond this optimistically protective provision, more curious about this new development. The last time she’d seen Manny with a pack of cigarettes in his hands, he’d methodically destroyed them to torture Gunnar. Could the scorpion queen be such a threat that he had been driven to smoke?

  They found him at the controls, his eyes hooded, a cigarette in mouth, and the collar of his flight jacket flipped up. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, the giant killer scorpion queen had to walk into mine.”

  The soldier laughed and Manny threw the cigarette at him.

  “There’s still no smoking aboard but you can finish that disgusting little cancer stick if you want. I saw you talking to the pencil-pusher. It looked like he almost made you shit your pants.”

  Without any warning, Manny pulled up on the collective and the helicopter lifted into the air. The others stumbled to their seats, except Gunnar, who scrambled to pick the cigarette up. Ava took the copilot’s chair and already prayed that she wouldn’t have to take control of this bizarre parody of a helicopter. Peppy sat in a seat behind them and Gunnar, the cigarette in hand, plopped into an unmatched seat beside her. The pilot flew them out of the hangar and over the desert.

  “How long were you waiting for that damn line?” The soldier took a long drag from the scavenged cigarette and a look of satisfaction spread across his face.

  “Long enough to get bored. What was Cort saying that was so damn scary?”

  “Nothing. It was Ava who had Gunnar scared shitless,” Peppy volunteered gloomily

  “Can we all merely agree that I want to shoot the fucking scorpions from this wonderful contraption you’ve cobbled together instead of from the sand?” He took an angry drag. The scorpion queen pissed him off far more than the lack of nicotine, Ava noted.

  “We’ll have to find it first,” she said. “I don’t even know how you picked a direction. The Sahara Desert is huge, and that thing can travel underground, so how are we supposed to find it?”

  “Ah, kid, I once tracked a killer alligator through the Great Victorian Desert. The thing had evaded every damn pilot and bloodhound in Australia, so they called for yer pal Jack Mann.”

  “A story about alligators that evaded pilots does not do much for my confidence in you, Manny,” Peppy poin
ted out.

  “I haven’t got to the good part yet,” he retorted and banked the helicopter slightly toward the west. Already, the wall had shrunk behind them and merged with the horizon. Soon, they’d be surrounded by nothing but sand. “I recognized that the best eyes and noses hadn’t done a lick against this alligator, so what did I do? I had a couple of mates blindfold me and wiped some petroleum jelly under my nose so I wouldn’t be tempted to use my olfactory senses. Once I was in the proper state of mind, I felt that alligator’s trail and tracked him to a farmer’s pond. Wrestled him to the surface and dragged him out by his tail. The look on that farmer’s face when he came out to feed his goats was priceless.”

  “I thought you said you were blindfolded,” Peppy said.

  “This story’s worse than most, Manny,” Gunnar growled. “There aren’t any alligators in Australia, only crocodiles.”

  Ava was ready for Manny to say something about an escaped alligator or that it really was a crocodile or even a dinosaur. After all, he’d often said worse. But instead, he cocked his head to the side, stole a glance over his shoulder at Gunnar, and nodded.

  “You know, it might have been the Great Basin Desert, now that you mention it. I was high at the time. That’s how I was able to see the farmer’s face despite being blindfolded, you see. And in my experience, there’s nothing quite like peyote when it comes to seeing without one’s eyes. I wish I had some right now!” Manny closed his eyes and wiggled the cyclic back and forth, and the Flying Bastard banked clumsily.

  “Point taken. You’re a gifted drug-addict. We’re impressed,” Peppy said and clutched the armrests on her seat.

  “But you’re not high right now,” Ava said. “Right?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m stone cold sober. Or as sober as a man can be when he’s done as many psychedelics as I have, but I digress. Everything that moves leaves signs. No matter how small or how smart, how quick or how clever, there’ll be a trail to follow. Why, even the great Manny leaves a trail. O’ course, I had to learn that the hard way after pissing off a whole nest of Komodo dragons. I thought that if I left hot Thai peppers on my trail, their tongues would lick ʼem and they’d give up but boy, was I wrong. See what happened was—”