by Michael Todd
“I doubt the scorpion queen is completely prepared for this storm either. I know scorpions are more suited to the desert than many of the Zoo creatures, but a sandstorm has never struck the Zoo itself, right?” Ava said and thought back to all the reports she’d read.
Gunnar shrugged. “If she busts through the floor and eats me, I’ll set off every damn grenade I have before she digests me or spits me up for her babies.”
“Do you really think she’s pregnant?” Ava asked Manny and hoped he’d feel differently than she did.
“Positively positive. Confidently confident. I’m telling you, I’ve been around my share of expecting mothers. She has the guarded ferociousness of a cassowary, the skittishness of an ibex, and the breath of a woman who's eaten way too many pickles with ice-cream. Hell, I bet she’d dilated already. Or whatever freaky scorpion ant monsters do before they give birth.” He rubbed his chin as he pondered this image, then shook his head and stuck his tongue out. “On second thought, don’t think too much on that one. It’s not a pretty image. Not. At. All.”
“Do you hear that?” She stood and put an ear to the door they’d barely managed to close.
“It’s coming back?” Gunnar asked. He sounded both excited and terrified.
“No, the wind’s quieter.”
Manny and Peppy both put their ears to the bulkhead of the Flying Bastard and listened for a moment before the pilot leaned back, grinned, and declared the storm over.
Before Ava could so much as protest, he’d opened the door to the bright desert sun. The wind blew across the rolling waves of freshly blown sand.
“It’s a good thing you put that tracker in her,” Ava said. “It looks exactly the same in every direction.”
“How can you focus on miles of endless sand at a time like this?” Manny asked and scurried around the helicopter. On the side that had borne the brunt of the storm, the Flying Bastard appeared to be three propellers protruding from a misshapen hill of sand. They had obviously exited from the door on the leeward side because with half the damn Sahara piled up against the body of the chopper, there was no way they would have been able to open the door on that side.
The pilot clambered up the sandy slope and a flurry of loose grains slid behind him. He reached the top and began to shovel like a dog frantic to dig up a bone.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen to the little guy for a few weeks. I didn’t build elevated air intake manifolds for the damn engines yet. It’s normally not an issue but I planned to do it, I swear I did. I’m sorry, buddy.” He flung more and more sand away as he continued to mumble inaudibly, although his companions did catch the odd colorful word that carried a little more emphasis than the others.
“It’ll be all right,” Gunnar said and scrambled up to dig alongside the pilot. “You’ll see. We’ll get this damn chopper clear and we’ll be airborne before long. Then, we’ll fill that damn scorpion with bullets and spray her guts all over the damn desert. We’ll look back on this and laugh, see if we don’t. Can you imagine the look on Dr. Kessler’s face when we tell him we took the scorpion queen down with this cobbled together, barely functional scrap heap instead of his state of the art mech suit designed expressly for this purpose? It’s gonna be fine.”
The soldier had seemed to help Manny’s hysteria, but when his voice cracked, the pilot gasped and dug faster. Peppy walked the perimeter as the two men worked. Ava followed and hoped like hell that Peppy could tell where they were better than she could. To her, it looked the same in all directions—an endless expanse of sand that they were lost in the middle of.
“Did you make contact?” Peppy asked.
“Yes. Well, briefly. I’m sure someone heard me, but I don’t know how they’ll find us. I didn’t have time to send GPS coordinates. Honestly, I didn’t think of it during the storm.”
The other woman nodded, although it didn’t bring any real reassurance. “Try again.”
Ava scrambled into the Flying Bastard and tried the radio. It was still fried—busted and completely useless. She exited once again and shook her head. Peppy gritted her teeth. Despite her doom and gloom—or maybe because of it—she didn’t like this any more than the rest of them.
To Ava’s relief, the two men descended from the sandy mountain, slipping and sliding.
“Are we good to fly?” she asked.
Manny shook his head. “I hadn’t exactly made it as far as installing all the unnecessary regulators and fail-safes installed in modern inferior helicopters. I could fire it up, but if something’s wrong, he won’t power down. He’ll more likely burn up the damn engine and—” He choked on a sob. “I gotta keep digging. Ain’t nothing to do but keep digging.” He swiped at a tear.
“That’ll take, what, a few hours?” Gunnar asked.
“The longest damn hours of my life.”
“It’ll be fine, really,” Gunnar said and clapped a hand on Manny’s shoulder. “We’ll follow that damn tracker and kill that monster, come back for the Flying Bastard, dig him out, and be on our way home. I’m sure you can limp there and get him back up before it’s time for a beer.”
Peppy retrieved her tablet, studied it, and shook her head. “I lost signal in the storm. The tracker has a limited range. I don’t have anything right now.”
“But you shot her with that giant gun. Surely the tracker’s not that small,” Ava said.
“She’s probably underground. There’s no way the signal’s strong enough to penetrate more than a few meters of sand. If she surfaces, I’ll be able to point us to her if she’s within a few miles.”
“A few miles? We’re in the Sahara Desert,” Gunnar said. “It might as well be a needle in the haystack.” He hung his head and looked almost as upset as Manny. Ava’s confidence shook a little under the double whammy.
“No. It’ll be all right,” Peppy responded in a monotone. “Keep in mind that this needle needs to feed its young so will probably come back at some point to devour us if we’re lucky or poison us and feed our still living bodies to its young.”
Everyone looked at her, their eyes wide with horror.
“What?” She scowled. “I only tried to lighten the mood.”
“Well, what about Jack Mann, tracker extraordinaire? Can’t you crawl on your belly or something until you smell the queen and we’ll follow her that way?” Gunnar suggested hopefully.
“I suppose…maybe. I am pretty awesome. That storm did wipe away every damn trace of a trace, though. I reckon it picked up every grain of sand with an iota of her smell on it and threw them to the winds, but maybe… I don’t know…maybe it put them all back down again in a nice trail that leads right to her.” Manny sniffed the air a few times, like a bloodhound. “Nope. Sorry mate. We just crash landed because of a damn sandstorm. If that sucker could ground the Flying Bastard, a faint line of ridges don’t stand a damn chance.”
“And even if we could follow the scorpion queen, would it really matter?” Ava pointed out. “I don’t want to bring the mood down further than Peppy already has, but how could we even mount an assault? We can’t pretend that walking is an option. We barely caught that thing in a helicopter. If we’re on foot and lugging enough firepower to kill her…well, we’ll probably only make forty feet before we’ll have to stop for a water break.”
“There’s the ATV,” Gunnar said.
“It won’t fit all of us. And even if we cram on top of it, we can’t mount your rotary cannon-thingy on the back and hope to actually shoot the scorpion queen with it. She’d simply have to dive under the sand and knock us over and we’d be screwed.”
“Shit. You really are a downer,” Peppy said.
“No joke,” Gunnar agreed. “So, you’re saying we’re stuck? We can’t chase the damn monster and can’t head back to base?”
“Maybe we could head back to base.” Ava shrugged. “But I made contact, and we have food and water. I think the best thing to do is wait for an extraction. The Flying Bastard’s an easier target than an ATV painte
d the color of the desert, and once the sun goes down and the heat dies, we dig out the Flying Bastard to help us keep warm and avoid death by exposure.” She smiled and hoped the plan seemed better than it sounded to her.
“Yeah…” Manny scratched his head. “You have a point there, I guess. It’s damn hot out. We might as well wait for the work to warm us instead of kill us from heatstroke.” He looked at the Flying Bastard like a proud father upset that his pride and joy had broken an arm but proud of the circumstances that led to it all the same.
“So, what? We’re supposed to sit around until dark and make small talk?” Peppy cringed visibly as she said the words.
“There are worse things in the world. Why, one time, I was on an icebreaker ship out in Antarctica. We were looking for penguins or some shit, I don’t rightly remember, when the ice closed behind us. We were stuck there in endless winter and had to wait two weeks in the cold.”
“What did you do to pass the time?” Gunnar said.
“Sat around telling stories, trying to one-up each other. It was great,”
“On second thought, maybe we should rush out into the desert on foot and hunt this giant scorpion monster down,” Peppy said, a touch of desperation in her voice. When Manny cleared his throat to start a story, she stalked determinedly for the shaded interior of the Flying Bastard. “I’m so glad I brought that damn pistol. I’ll disassemble and clean the thing in case Manny’s stories force us to end ourselves in a more humane fashion than death by boredom.”
It was slightly cooler inside than the outside, but as the sun crawled overhead and peeked into their open door, the difference became negligible.
“It’s so hot,” Peppy complained.
Manny wiped his sweaty brow and grinned deliriously. “Did I ever tell you ʼbout that time in the Outback?”
“No! No more,” Peppy protested.
“Manny, what about that time in the Outback?” Ava said.
“I had been dumped by helicopter but don’t know the reason anymore. I had either made a bet that I could make it back or I’d lost a bet and they were betting I couldn’t make it back. Anyways. There I am, trudging along, when this heat wave hits. Now, you think this is hot? This was a whole ʼnother level.”
“Which circle of Hell?” Gunnar grunted. He’d stripped his shirt off and was now little more than a sweaty pile in a shaded alcove just inside the door. Apparently, he had eaten a pita filled humus and roast garlic immediately before the attack, and in the heat, he reeked of garlic. At first, they’d tried to make vampire jokes but eventually, the smell got to be too much, and Gunnar was banished to one of the few shady corners in hopes that it would help with the smell. Thus far, he still stank.
“So, I’m about hot enough to become kangaroo jerky, when what do you think I saw?”
“A kangaroo,” Ava said.
“What? Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Half your stories involve kangaroos. It’d probably be more but you normally don’t mess the animals and continents up, only everything else,” Ava said.
“Mess it up? Have you been talking to these two? I swear they wouldn’t believe in the abominable snowman if they saw his footprints burned into a piece of toast.”
“Why would his footprint appear on a piece of toast?” Gunnar asked from his stinky corner.
“Because it gets damn cold in the Himalayas. I know that’s hard to believe right now, what with the sweltering, unbearable heat and all that, but think of this. You’re halfway up Everest, huddling together for warmth, starting to see the sense of building an igloo, and shucking your clothes to cling together in a nice big press of warm bodies buried under all your coats. A piece of warm toast would sound good right about then.”
“But…why would a footprint—” Peppy ground her teeth and the sound of her working on weapons grew louder in her frustration.
“Just—never mind that,” Ava said and held a hand up. Asking Manny to explain something logically was like asking a wolf to bake cherry pie. “What happened with the kangaroo?”
“Well, like I was saying, it was too hot to think, so what did I do? I hate to admit it, but I caught that big ol’ hopper just before it died from heatstroke. Damn sun roasted its brain. A sad sight that was, but waste not, you know what I’m saying? So ol’ Jack Mann, resourceful bugger that I am, sliced its belly open and crawled inside to escape the heat. Man, I tell ya, you think those things smell bad on the outside. That damn kangaroo made Gunnar smell like your mother’s cooking!”
“Bullshit!” the soldier protested. “For one, my mom was a lousy cook, and two, you ripped that damn story off from Star Wars! You didn’t even change the punchline.”
“No way. In Star Wars, the planet was cold, not hot, and stinky Gunnar wasn’t on-screen in the original movies—although he is the reason Dark Invader had to wear that breathing mask of his.”
“Hardy-har-har,” Gunnar said. “When we get back to what counts for civilization in the desert, I’ll take you all out for falafel with extra roast garlic. Then, we’ll go dancing.”
A loud ping from Peppy’s corner prevented any response.
“Did you get one of them new-fangled textual messages?” Manny asked.
“Nah, I bet she set a high score in solitaire. Peppy’s a master of anti-social activities.”
The ping sounded again. Peppy leaned forward, grabbed the tablet, and fiddled with it for a second.
“It’s the scorpion. Queen Bitch finally surfaced.”
“Big whoop,” Gunnar said but made no effort to move from his puddle. “She’s probably miles away and heading toward Casablanca.”
“I’m sorry to ruin the atmosphere, but she’s about a mile out and headed directly toward us.”
Chapter Ten
The storm had scrubbed the desert into a repetitive pattern of undulating hills like a beach at dawn, still devoid of tourist tracks. Nothing broke the uniformity of the view, except for the scorpion queen. It was like an alien planet devoid of life, of survivors, of everything except something that could only be described as an alien.
While most directions featured nothing but tiny hills of sand that rolled endlessly into the distance, the northwest featured a maelstrom of sand as tall as a man that raced toward them. The scorpion queen remained mostly under the cover of the freshly swept sand, but as Ava watched her approach through the scope on her carbine, pincers and mouthparts, extra legs, and antennae poked through occasionally as she moved. It was like a tornado or a tidal wave or some other powerfully terrifying natural force but with traces of something vaguely recognizable as a greater power.
Ava stood out on the desert, farther from the Flying Bastard than she’d like to be. Peppy was the same distance but in the opposite direction. Gunnar—his shirt back on, thank God—stood in front of the downed helicopter with his rotary cannon mounted on a tripod. He was the only one of the team who looked excited that their doom approached them inexorably through the wasteland. Although excited probably wasn’t the right word. It was more like he’d already failed the class once and would be damned if he failed it again. Ava assumed that part of his confidence stemmed from the fact that they were about to use his plan, but standing far enough apart not to be eaten in the same bite didn’t seem like much of a plan to her.
“Hold your positions,” Manny shouted from the top of the Flying Bastard. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of its eyes—or facets, or whatever the hell a pissed-off scorpion has. On second thought, maybe shoot it in the face whenever you damn well please.”
“We have a plan, thank you!” Gunnar said. “You’re supposed to run out there and tell it a damn tall tale until it gets bored and kills itself.”
“If I survived, it will too.” Peppy raised her weapon and fired at the scorpion queen.
She plunged beneath the sand. Obviously, she disliked the idea of being shot and had learned her lesson. At this distance, it was easy to see her target—Peppy.
The soldier stuck to the plan—s
uch as it was—and sprinted toward Ava like her life depended on it. The creature caught up to her easily like a salmon hunting a bug that had fallen to the surface of a river. She surfaced and the monstrous claws snapped at Peppy, and Gunnar opened fire.
The scorpion queen writhed in pain. He had shot her behind her clawed arms on her long, segmented centipede-like body. She dove almost immediately, though, and sucked a great pit of sand in her wake. In an instant, she reappeared, literally in his face.
He was ready and fired, but the creature swung a claw in the path of the bullets, and they didn’t punch through her shell as he’d expected.
“Oh, shit,” he said as his adversary plunged through the stream of bullets, pumping her segmented body like a fish. “There goes the plan.” The monster whipped her stinger from behind her in a great blast of sand. The barb descended and smashed the rotary cannon like it was made of kindling. “Double shit!” he yelled as he ran from the furious attack.
Peppy and Ava opened fire on its segmented body. Some of their bullets did nothing to the thick shell, but those that found their way between her plated segments brought forth spurts of white goo. She wasn’t invincible, Ava kept telling herself, merely probably unstoppable.
The scorpion queen snapped a claw at Gunnar once more and plowed beneath the sand. She moved away from the two women, back into the desert. Ava almost hoped she would abandon them and keep going, but she knew she wouldn’t.
“I owe you one.” Gunnar scrambled into the helicopter and returned with an assault rifle strapped across his chest.
“More like a hundred,” Peppy retorted. She scowled and gestured to the easily recognizable wake that riffled the sand. The monster had made a wide arc and now resumed the attack. “But who’s counting?”
Ava didn’t know how the woman could banter when the scorpion queen now raced toward the two of them.
They’d planned for this, though, and separated. Ava raced back and around the Flying Bastard and Peppy moved out into the desert.