One Crazy Machine (Apocalypse Paused Book 9)

by Michael Todd

  “Can you skip to the part about how you’re tracking the queen scorpion so we can kill the fucking thing before she lays her brood and they devour the nearest town and feed their mother? If we don’t, she makes more and the process repeats in a wave of carnage and death that sweeps across North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia,” Peppy stated with a heavy note of inevitability in her voice.

  “Don’t forget the United States,” the pilot said cheerfully. “If these Zoo creatures track half as good as me, they’ll find a way to get to the land of the free and swallow the families of all the soldiers who’ve killed their mommas and papas!”

  “About the tracking of the queen?” Peppy responded acidly.

  “I waited for one of you to notice, but I guess it’s been longer since you’ve had magic mushrooms than it has been for me. Do you see those tiny ridges in the sand?”

  He pointed through the glass ahead. Ava noticed for the first time that even the windshield was cobbled together from two different helicopters. The front dome was a clear if slightly blueish glass while the flat panels behind it were dingier and yellow. The two pieces of glass were connected with a strip of metal and entirely too much epoxy.

  “Those little scaly things?” Peppy asked and gestured to a line of ridges that stretched in front of them.

  “The very same. Those can’t be caused by anything moving on the surface, so we’re on the right track. But see how the wind blows them away? It’s good that you cut the conversation with Cort short. Heh.” Manny laughed at his rhyme. “If we get a couple of good gusts of wind between us and that queen, we could lose the trail. I have no doubt that my Flying Bastard can catch her. After all, it’s obviously the greatest flying vessel ever built. But we must catch her before we lose the trail, otherwise, there’s no amount of peyote in the world that’ll lead us to her.” He paused and grinned. “Although I’d be willing to test that theory.”

  Chapter Seven

  The next few hours were tense, but Manny was confident that they had gained on the scorpion queen. He swore the ridges in the sand had become more distinct, but they had yet to catch sight of her.

  Ava had no idea that a burrowing creature could move so rapidly. She cursed herself for thinking along such lines because it was yet another assumption about the Zoo she hadn’t intended to make. Still, there wasn’t much to do about it except push forward as quickly as the Flying Bastard would allow.

  While they pressed on, Gunnar assembled two tripods, one near the door on each side of the helicopter. He then mounted his gun on top of one of them. The pilot had made sure to include footholds for the weapons. He knew his friends. Peppy assembled her massive rifle as well but she didn’t attach it to any tripod and instead, held it in her lap.

  Those preparations had been made an hour ago, and for the last hundred miles or however many it had been, they’d sat in a silence that grew more and more uncomfortable. Manny had tried to break it a few times with his wild stories, but no one rose to the bait. Peppy kept her eyes on the desert trail. Gunnar was in a sullen mood and refused to laugh at any of his punchlines. Instead, he pointed out that the stories made no sense at all. Ava kept her gaze trained on the pilot’s hands at the controls.

  At first glance, the Flying Bastard seemed much the same as the other helicopters in which he had taught her how to fly, but she soon saw that this wasn’t the case. Controlling the two back blades required an instrument panel she had never seen. Manny casually flipped switches on this one, and when that didn’t work, he banged it with a fist. She thought she had almost worked out the flipping to banging ratio—it had something to do with all the red lights turning dark—when Peppy spotted their quarry.

  “There she is—the queen bitch.”

  As if she’d heard her pursuers, the creature dove under the desert, sent up a plume of sand, and vanished.

  “Goddamnit. I was afraid of this. She’s stayed near the surface because it makes for easier travel, but she can go deeper if she wants to. You blokes get ready. We might have one more shot at this.”

  “What about Jack Mann, the world’s greatest tracker?” Gunnar asked.

  “Do you really believe everything I say, mate?”

  The soldier grinned. “You’re a real sonofabitch, you know that?”

  “Son of a dingo, mate, but who’s keeping score?”

  “There she is. There she is,” Peppy shouted and immediately scrambled to the side with her weapon. She opened one of the doors and wind and dust swirled into the cabin.

  The scorpion queen breached like a whale. First, her clawed arms thrust from the sand, followed by her face. Her tentacled mouth tasted the air before the segmented body that went on and on and on emerged until she plunged into the sand once more.

  “I don’t think she’ll dive deeper,” Manny said. “Nope, there she is again. She must need to breathe like an orca. Did I ever tell you about that time—”

  “Not now, Manny!” Peppy and Ava yelled in unison.

  Gunnar said nothing as he positioned himself at the rotary cannon.

  “I’ve never been particularly interested in regicide, but I find myself fairly excited at the idea,” Gunnar said as he warmed up the huge weapon.

  “Hold off, Gunnar. The turret’s the wrong move. If she goes beneath the sand, your bullets won’t do a thing,” Peppy said and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “With all due respect, you might get off two rounds with your fancy elephant gun while I get off a hundred. Even if you do pierce the sand, two bullets won’t do diddlysquat to a monster like that.”

  “Who said anything about bullets?”

  Peppy stood directly behind Manny, looked out the open door, and adjusted her sights. Silence fell over the crew of the Flying Bastard and a gust of wind buffeted the ship.

  “Damn it, Manny, hold her steady!” Peppy snapped.

  “The Bastard’s a boy!”

  “It can be a they for all I care but keep the damn bird still so I can make this shot.” She positioned her gun against her shoulder.

  “The problem with your little request is the freaking desert storm kicking up.”

  “Gunnar, take your cannon down so I can have that spot.”

  “But…I wanted to riddle her with holes!” He sounded like a kid denied his Halloween candy.

  “You’ll get your chance if I make this shot. If I miss…well, this hunt will end in the wrong kind of massacre.”

  “I damn well better get to shoot this gun,” Gunnar said but hoisted the rotary cannon and carried it to the tripod on the other side of the helicopter. Wind shook the Flying Bastard again and he almost dropped it, but he managed to catch the huge weapon and cradled it like a child.

  To Ava’s utter amazement, Peppy didn’t mount the rifle on the tripod. She was somehow steadier than if the weapon was mounted on the helicopter itself. As the winds increased in speed and fury around the Flying Bastard and the craft began to lurch and rock in the wind, Peppy compensated. Her legs bent and straightened in time to the erratic motion of the helicopter that seemed less and less capable of sustained flight.

  It wasn’t enough, unfortunately. She resembled a kingfisher anchored to a bobbing blade of grass and despite the fact that she’d held the incredibly long gun nearly perfectly still, she didn’t take a shot.

  “I could’ve filled that damn thing with more holes than one of Manny’s damn stories by now,” Gunnar complained from the other side of the chopper. He held tightly to the open door, his knuckles white with exertion although Ava couldn’t be sure if it was to avoid a fall out of the Flying Bastard or a desire to avoid being eaten by the creature below. She supposed that, in the end, the distinction was irrelevant.

  “A hole in a story’s like a hole in a donut. It gives it more flavor, lets the imagination run wild, and it's funny if you stick your tongue through it.”

  “Just hold the damn chopper steady, Manny,” Peppy said, still half-crouching and stretching in place.

  “I’m
doing the best I can. If this was any bird but the Flying Bastard, we’d be doing flips right now. Which I can do by the way if you’re interested.”

  Peppy didn’t respond. She drew in an incredibly slow breath, held it, and waited. The queen scorpion erupted from the sand. A low groaning and a scraping sound rumbled beneath the shifting gales of wind that shook the Flying Bastard harder and harder.

  She exhaled and fired.

  Ava whipped her head to look at the creature below them. A single splash of white goo spurted from its massive body. With a screech that transcended even the growing roar of the wind, it dove back beneath the sand.

  “Nice shot,” Gunnar said. “What was it? Delayed explosive? No…too obvious. Some sort of electro-shock inducer? Nah…if that existed in a bullet big enough to be shot from your damn mammoth gun, I’d know about it. Was it…filled with Raid or some shit? Bug killer?”

  “Nope, nope, and nope,” Peppy said. She didn’t smile because she never smiled, but she did look as pleased with herself as Ava had ever seen her.

  “Well, how the hell are you gonna kill Queen Bitch?”

  “I’m not,” Peppy said and retrieved a tablet, of all things, from her bag.

  “It was a tracker?” Ava asked.

  The other woman nodded. “And its lodged deep enough in its body that the only way it’ll come out is if takes its organs with it. Or whatever it is scorpions have. Goo, I guess.”

  “What? You didn’t let me blast the damn thing because you wanted to place a tracker? We’re not in a damn 007 movie!”

  “I gotta admit, Peppy, I am a little upset too. I told you I could track that thing so long as the wind didn’t—hold on tight!” Manny wrestled with the controls of Flying Bastard. He barely managed to keep it horizontal and the winds continued to strengthen.

  “If I had blasted her, this thing would all be over.” Gunnar tried to get a bead on the scorpion queen with his rotary cannon. “You ruined our first date. I was gonna score.”

  “You obviously know nothing about women,” Peppy yelled over the wind. “If you go into a first date with all guns blazing and blow your load before you’ve even introduced yourself, what happens? Your date buries deeper beneath the desert sands and doesn’t surface until she’s well beyond the limited range of your weapons. She then devours an entire village, thereby growing the brood of monstrous offspring inside into an ever-larger colony.”

  “Jesus, Peppy, and you think I don’t know about women?” Gunnar said.

  “I hate to shoot you down, what with the irony an’ all, Gunnar, but Peppy’s right. I once met the princess of Iceland. Beautiful girl—well, woman really. When I met her, she was sixty-eight. Anyway, I was as nervous as they come and let’s say the princess could see it on my face. So what did I do? I stole her bracelet right off her wrist of course and made for the damn hills! Now she chased me on horseback like a Goddamn romance novel. It never would’ve happened if I tried to seal the deal on the first date.”

  “Exactly,” Peppy said, although she didn’t sound like she meant it all. “The point is, you can blast her all you want right now, and if you don’t manage to kill her and merely mangle her nicely, we’ll be able to follow her and finish the job.”

  “Yup, exactly like the princess of Iceland. ‘Mangle instead of kill,’ exact same lines.”

  “Uh…guys? I hate to be the one to end our post-date analysis, but what the hell is that?” Ava pointed into the desert.

  It looked like the wall had followed them, only instead of fifty feet high it was five hundred, and instead of concrete and steel, it was made of wind, sand, and the raw fury of the Sahara Desert.

  “That’s a sandstorm.” The pilot swallowed and for once, he seemed to have lost his habitual bravado. “And it’s coming in fast.”

  Chapter Eight

  It turned out that comparing the storm to the wall had been an apt analogy, for when the mass of dust and sand and wind caught up to them, it was as if they’d been struck by something as unyielding as concrete.

  The Flying Bastard plummeted thirty feet and almost tipped over in the process. Ava and Peppy held on for dear life while wind and sand whipped through the interior of the helicopter. Manny screamed obscenities and fought to keep them aloft. When a thousand warning lights began to blink in the cabin, Ava was actually relieved—at least Manny hadn’t been so arrogant as to build a helicopter without a warning system—but he kicked a panel at his feet, and they all went black as quickly as they’d lit up.

  Only Gunnar seemed unfazed by the storm, and that was because he was focused on another monster entirely. He fired his rotary cannon at the scorpion queen, screaming victory chants and threats of revenge as he did so. She had no idea if he had even hit it. That seemed impossible with the turbulence that shook them around like a dog’s chew toy and the sand that obscured the ground below them more effectively by the minute.

  The soldier, in his rage, seemed to be able to see through the sandstorm. “We have her on the retreat. She’s almost dead,” he bellowed over the roar of his cannon.

  Ava had no idea how he could still focus on their quarry. The winds seemed strong enough to tear the helicopter apart. She would’ve been a wreck if not for Manny at the controls. He’d landed damaged helicopters enough times for her to know that he could get them through this. As long as he was confident, she knew she had nothing to fear.

  “I think we need to land before this storm rips us to pieces,” he yelled over the roar of the massive gun, the howling wind, and the Flying Bastard’s own rotors.

  Her stomach plummeted far worse than when they’d dropped thirty feet.

  “We almost had her,” Gunnar shouted back.

  “Gunnar’s right. Can’t you get us lower? We’ll dump all the explosives we have on her,” Peppy suggested.

  “I need to maintain an appropriate distance between the ground while traveling. It’s a safety concern.”

  Everyone gawked at him. Ava didn’t think she’d ever heard him say the word “safety” except in the most derogatory of terms. From the expressions on the soldiers’ faces, they hadn’t either.

  “You can’t be serious,” Peppy managed finally.

  “What next, Peppy adopting a kitten?” Gunnar asked.

  “I’ve hung out with you dickwads too long. I’m trying to be sensible, for once! Plus, I’ve never had three engines to work at the same time before today. I can’t lose him on his birthday. We haven’t even had cake yet.”

  Ava’s heart began to pound. She’d never seen Manny express doubt about an aircraft before—ever. That combined with the glaring structural defects of the Flying Bastard made her reach for the radio.

  “Wall Two, this is the Flying Bastard. We are in close pursuit of the queen, bearing northwest toward Casablanca. Do you copy?”

  If someone answered, she didn’t hear it because the Flying Bastard plummeted again. Manny wrestled with the controls, but his efforts proved fruitless. The helicopter careened into the ground with the horrible sound of rending metal. It threw up more sand that immediately blinded them in the wind. Through it all, she could hear him shout.

  His hand pushed on her seat before he stumbled past her and out into the desert. “Secure…have to…propellers. Worse…much worse!” every other word was lost to the wind. Gunnar and Peppy, against all logic, followed him out into the sandstorm.

  The radio blared. “Bastard…this is…Bastard, do you copy?” Ava tried to reply but the static was too intense. She tried to send an S.O.S. by Morse code and wished she knew more. “Bastard…coordinates?” blared from the radio before it belched an angry shower of sparks and went dark.

  She kicked it in the hope that she could fix it like Manny was always somehow able to do but had no luck. Sounds from outside were either the team securing the helicopter or rocks smashing it to pieces. In a few minutes, the two soldiers scrambled inside.

  “It’s too damn strong,” Gunnar said.

  Manny was right behind them. “Close
the doors. Close the damn doors.”

  A screech of metal set her teeth on edge. Hopefully, it was the sound of a door with far too much sand in its track being slid shut—although the claws of a scorpion queen rending metal to pieces like burnt toast seemed about as likely. The sound ceased and there was only blackness.

  Chapter Nine

  Manny cranked a lamp and illuminated the cabin with a yellowish glow. Ava, Gunnar, and Peppy sat in the belly of the Flying Bastard. He plopped down beside them, laid down, sat back up, and peered around constantly.

  “You don’t really make me feel much better about the shape of your Franko-copter,” Ava said.

  “If the Flying Bastard had a first name, it’d be Hugh, not Frank, and yeah, I apologize for the nervous twitchiness. I must look like a koala who got into a coffee plantation. But I never thought we’d be hit by a sandstorm.” He stood once more and went to a long, vertical weld in the wall to plug a spot with his finger. The belly of the Flying Bastard grew slightly quieter. The wind had been howling through the hole.

  “You never thought a helicopter you built in the middle of the Sahara Desert would face a sandstorm?” Peppy raised an eyebrow.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. That’d be like expecting a ship to sink and filling it with little floats and boats and all that. It don’t make a lick of sense. I can’t stand boats. Airships for life.”

  “That’s exactly what they do,” Peppy sighed. “But in most cases, flotation devices do little more than calm passengers before their inevitable death by starvation or exposure, so I suppose I understand your surprise.”

  “You think Queen Bitch can hear us through the storm?” Gunnar asked, his gun in his lap.

  “Nah.” Manny shook his head. “If she could, we’d be dead already.”