by R. K. Syrus
The same thought was bugging Bryan. As the ringing in his ears from the firefight settled down, his suspicions piped up. He tracked Draco into the jungle.
The contractor was taking the prisoner, Najeer, right to the excavation site where the child soldiers had grabbed the WWHI scientists.
Bryan had past experience with WWHI and their weird obsession with underground ruins. He didn’t trust them. On the other hand, Draco had saved all their asses. He hoped this wasn’t going to get awkward.
The access road was too straight. Following right after the contractor, he’d be spotted. Bryan went into deeper underbrush. He pushed aside some leaves.
Something he thought was a twig skittered through his fingers. His cyber-eyes were not much help. There was too much bio matter all around. Special wavelengths just returned clutter.
He picked hi-res optical view and followed an herbivore trail. A few steps later, he came face-to-face with beady eyes and a wrinkled nose.
A small monkey munched on some kind of fruit. The noise and drama of the firefight had only interrupted the jungle’s routine. The normal measure of the place had settled back down on it like dusk.
Along with it came a realization. Bryan was alone for the first time since they’d arrived.
To his right was a gourd plant. Its clinging vines attached it to a big old tree. Without preamble, it released a mess of liquid down the trunk.
To his left, something thrashed its tail. It was trying to get its head out from a smothering cocoon of sticky grass. The long grass was like green quicksand. Real animals knew to avoid it. This lizard was mechanical, one of Draco’s drones. He left it.
Far beneath his feet, nuclear coals glowed. Those permanent slow fires were tended and stoked by man-sized robots that would never leave the containment capsule.
Wind blew down off a low hill. The eddies and currents carried a name. His.
Shetani zeru.
His old name, his first one.
He thought he heard feet padding behind him. He whipped around. Nothing.
No, not quite. He was being followed. He flicked through his cyber-eyes’ special vision modes. IR—nothing. UV—nothing. Particle decay—whatever that was. Nothing.
Fear seized him. Annoying at first, like heartburn out of nowhere. Then Bryan had to fight to control his breathing. Panic was the sure way to become combat ineffective.
He reached for his .45. To shoot… what?
A little zephyr. A heat shimmer passed right by him.
Wait a sec. Heat rays don’t gather into a ball and float.
They also don’t go through things. This one did.
It also knew his name.
ZERU
ZERU
Cold and fear laced its way up and down the length of his body, thin and biting as a straight razor’s edge. It slid up him like the last ray of an ice-cold sunset. Bryan’s teeth clenched. His hands shook.
It passed. He remembered the weather. It was hot and humid. His sweat warmed up.
He listened for his name. That name. He didn’t hear it.
After catching his breath, he checked the map display on his forearm. He pinged the others on his wrist unit. Rex, Nobu, Whitebread, and Snakelips retuned his signal right quick.
He’d been wrong. He wasn’t alone. He moved on.
The chances of avoiding harsh words with Draco dimmed. The piece of trust and cautious camaraderie that Bryan thought he had with the WWHI contractor whittled away with every muffled scream that came out of the dig entrance.
Lookin’ more awkward every second.
He went in.
Najeer’s agony continued. Bryan tried to look on the bright side. Some of Najeer’s child soldiers had whip marks on their backs. From the scarring, he judged these were half as old as the boys themselves. Who knew how many preteen candidates were captured from villages but didn’t make the cut? They would be tiny skeletons in ditches along the road behind Najeer’s marauding caravan.
Bryan’s mind softened to the idea of torture. If this was just a straight-up fingernail pull or a clean waterboarding, he could probably let it slide.
What awaited Bryan inside the archaeology pit was a scene that featured neither of those humdrum torments. The roof of the cavern dripped moisture from the earth and the curling sinewy roots of trees above. These were held in place by metal mesh and underground construction pillars.
Under his feet was really smooth concrete. It belonged to the buried generator. The area of interest to the WWHI scientists was at the end of a concrete support structure. This served as a walkway down. At the end of it were a series of man-sized divots, more than a dozen. Najeer lay in the nearest one.
The wannabe African warlord was naked. His straining body dripped rivulets of sweat. That wasn’t weird, much. What was out there was the glow.
Bryan’s eyes saw it coming out of the stone slab Najeer lay on. Also never-before-seen-strange was the stuff coming out of Najeer. That stopped Bryan in his tracks. That made him forget to look over his shoulder.
“These are the hollows of !Xu, the healing deity of the Saan people.”
Draco was behind him. Bryan turned.
With a yell of agony, he slapped his forearm over his eyes. He let go of his pistol. It clattered to the floor. The last image his optics recorded was of one of those lizard robots, its eyes strobing and flaring, overwhelming his optics.
Before he could recover, a booted toe socked him in his midsection. Right on his liver. Bryan’s legs crumpled. He nearly blacked out.
Hands like two vises grabbed him. They were stronger than he’d imagined, stronger than they should be. Draco had taken a bullet through the forearm. They pulled him into one of the hollows. He could barely see the outlines of the rough chiseled stone.
“Now, Draco, let’s not get hasty,” Bryan wheezed as calmly as he could. “My guys know where I am, and we got fifty Rangers inbound. Whatever you’re up to—”
“It would be a waste of time to explain to you,” Draco said pretty darn arrogantly. “You are a national mercenary, here only for your paycheck and whatever paltry benefits they dole out under the GI Bill.”
“There’s also the healthy camaraderie and some pretty good food around the holidays,” Bryan quipped.
Draco punched his liver again. This time he decided to pass out.
He came ’round pretty quickly. Good news was he could see again.
Draco’s mechanical lizard guard dog was only on standby. It was not beaming him with strobes or microwaves. The little fellow was staring down at him from a ledge.
The not-good news was his arms and legs felt frozen. Numb, like anesthetic was coming in. He wasn’t strapped down, but nothing he tried moved his body an inch. That same weird glow that he’d seen around Najeer crept in around the edges of his vision. It was on him and through him.
“This may be the first evidence of general anesthetic in history,” the contractor said while doing things Bryan wasn’t able to see. “A notable achievement using only the given energies of the rocks and the sciencestitions of the Saan people’s shaman doctors.”
Bryan’s eyes had fully recovered. There was Najeer, or what remained of him. The thuggish warlord wasn’t screaming anymore. He was still wriggling. Or rather, being wiggled. Thin spider-silk-looking tendrils came out of nearly every part of his body. They were concentrated around the man-shape’s midsection: kidneys and spleen.
“Whad are you doointh?” Bryan mumbled, feeling like his mouth was full of cotton.
Draco understood.
“To you? Nothing, yet. As you surmised, I wish to have a conversation and gain information.”
Najeer looked like a dropped slice you’d stepped on in an alley behind a really crappy pizza joint, with extra mozzarella sticking to your shoe.
“Good luck wiff that.”
“Of course. You don’t comprehend. You never really will. Suffice it to say I am speaking to not this brute, but something inside him.” Draco was careful to keep clear of
the crystal tendrils. They looked like they might still be growing. “A much better conversation. Possibly enlightening.”
Another cave, another loon from WWHI, Bryan thought.
“This man has malaria. That is what I wish to speak to.”
• • •
Bryan’s ears were still sludgy after the firefight. The living roof of the cavern, all twisted roots and moss and the stuff you’d expect to live in roots and moss, did not have great acoustics. But he was pretty sure he heard the pilot right.
Oookay.
What’s standard operating procedure for dealing with nutjobs? Same as the Army handbook says for dealing with zealots high on drugs like Red Mist: They have an intensely narrow point of view.
Gotta buy time and delay the brainpan microwaving that’s surely coming my way.
“So, is malaria in a good mood today?”
Not a good start. Draco sneered.
Why did you say that, Sarge?
“You can mock what you do not understand.” Draco was getting all worked up, like a tent preacher calling down fire and brimstone before passing around the collection plate. “But even a drudge like you cannot deny its… majesty.”
As a matter of fact, Bryan could completely deny the majesty of the chia pet explosion that was Najeer, but this time he kept his trap shut. Draco stepped carefully around the wreck of the former insurgent leader. He draped mesh fiber-optic filaments over the translucent spines. This net led to a box with some LEDs. It was about the size of a mobile data server.
“Malaria does not live in mosquitos. They are only carrying the vector. To thrive, it must inhabit a host with circulating blood. The more advanced the host, the more realized the potential of the protozoa.”
Draco smoothed down the ends of the artificial filament web.
“The memory embedded in its circular organelle DNA, I am told, is very special in this world. Much simpler, therefore less subject to errors.” The server box lit up. “Humans have only vague notions of what went on thousands of years ago. These protozoans recall every detail.”
Draco was real focused. He believed the crap he was spouting. Sometimes you just had to get on board the looney train.
“Cool. Real cool,” Bryan said, noticing he was numbed up to the knees and elbows now. “It looks like you know what you’re doin’ there. Neither me or any Army people have malaria. We ain’t gonna do you any good.” He couldn’t be sure how long he could keep talking. “But we can messh up what you got goin’ on here, sure ’nuff.”
He tried to take back the initiative before the numbness invaded all the way through his tongue. Then he’d just be mumbling and drooling.
“Day-co, I’ll give you an hour to refuel your flyer and get gomme. We just say Najeer stepped on one of his own land mines. Best I can… do since we owe you wum.”
Draco leaned over him.
“You are not infected. True.” His sunken eyes shone dully in the light reflecting off the floor. “Then what good are you?”
Over Bryan’s head, the mechBrain LEGO lizard poked its head down and aimed right between his eyes. Gill-like fins fanned out on either side of its head. A high-pitched whine started as its power cells overloaded—
BLAM!
A bullet whizzed through Draco. It caught him just over the hip and spun him half around. He dropped the lizard’s remote.
In the passageway entrance was what must have been following Bryan through the jungle—one of the kid soldiers.
BLAM-BLAM!
Two more shots through Draco’s A zone. At least that psycho Najeer taught his boys to shoot good.
Pop-pop-pop.
RIP rounds lodged deep in the contractor’s torso went off.
The boy shouted down at Bryan, “Reste là!”
French was the most common language here. Better than local dialects for traveling marauders.
The energy holding him faded as soon as Draco keeled over into a pool of pretty much all of his blood. Still, Bryan could not move much inside the healing hollow.
The boy took a long look at the ruin of his former boss, Najeer. He turned cautiously to Bryan, looking him over. Probably wanted to make sure nothing was sprouting out of him.
He came closer and lowered his kid-modified rifle.
“Ça va?”
That was like “howdy.”
“Sure kid, sa-va,” Bryan said, getting the distinct impression he was drooling down his chin. Not the impression a senior NCO likes to make. “Helph me out of this thing.”
Bryan could move his legs, also his arms. His fingers felt numb, like they belonged to someone else.
“Thanks, by the way, uh, merci—”
Suddenly a knobby hand rose up from the floor. It grabbed the back of the boy’s head. Bulging tendons quivered through dark blood and blue-black quick-clot.
No way! Bryan thought. Draco had taken three exploding RIP rounds to the torso. His insides were Grade C ground beef. He had to be dead, and then some.
Yet his body, it rose up onto its knees. The hand stuck onto the kid’s close-cropped afro hair like it was glued. The boy’s eyes rolled back in his head. His whole skinny body shook. Then the kid’s own skull drank his face.
Eye, sinus, mouth, and ear orifices made a sucking sound, and the kid’s face slithered inside them. Inside the grinning gash that was his mouth, white teeth poked through dark skin, suddenly dry and paper thin.
The ragged doll figure, bones poking through all over now, coughed. Up out of a small throat hole came pink frothy stuff. Bryan recognized living lung tissue.
The boy’s husk fell. The dead man who killed him got up onto two legs. It shambled over to Najeer. It moved all jittery, not precise, but fast. It ripped the cord out from the computer. Draco’s corpse’s hands held on to the end. For a moment it just stood, swaying.
Draco’s head dangled left. RIP shrapnel must have clipped his spine. Out from the back of the contractor’s crew-cut scalp emerged a heat shimmer. Something alive and pulsating with malice looked at Bryan.
It was the same thing that went by him in the jungle. It might have petrified him, wasted him away in his own flesh. It might have killed him right then and there. Bryan was sure it could have, if he hadn’t still been in the healing hollow.
The malevolence riding the WWHI contractor finished what it wanted its body puppet to do, Bryan guessed. Draco’s bony hands dropped the wires.
Face looking the wrong way, the thing walked toward him. The heat shimmer seemed to be guiding its movements. It was a gap in space about the size of a basketball. To try to make any more sense of it than that or take a shot at any other description, was impossible. The shimmer kept folding in on itself.
It had nothing that looked like sense receptors. No features resembling human or animal or mechanical. Still, Bryan got the notion it could see him. It was fixed on the light of his gold cyber-eyes. It hated him and was ticked off he wasn’t dead yet.
It came toward him.
ZERU.
Bryan couldn’t move.
ZERU!
Step by step, by…
Zer—
BOOM!
The shambler exploded in pink mist. It was like a fist full of M-80 firecrackers going off inside a fifty-pound raw meatball. It was the best sight he’d seen since they’d arrived at TALOS station. It could only be one thing.
With numb fingers, he wiped Draco from his face and looked over to the entrance ramp. Snakelips was there on one knee. The .60 caliber hole at the end of her sniper rifle exhaled a self-satisfied ring of gun smoke.
Bryan laid back down. If there was any of !Xu’s healing juice left, he could sure use it.
10
“We heard an AK go off,” Nobu said.
The team’s techie ignored the gore and was immediately fascinated by the electronics in the excavation pit.
Bryan worked the last of the freezing out of his jaw.
“Prisoners?”
“They got secured and transported.�
�
“By Rangers?”
“No, Sarge,” T-Rex said. “Those jokers too slow to show. A Worldwide Help convoy got here first.”
“We were checkin’ with AFRICOM what to do when we heard the shooting out here,” Snakelips summed up.
Whitebread looked at Cheez Whiz Najeer, at the sad husk of the child soldier which looked like a paper mâché doll except for the ragged uniform, and finally at the former host of this horror show, the bottom half of the volocopter pilot, Draco, his booted feet splayed out in opposite directions.
“Sarge, you got started without us.”
If it hadn’t been for Najeer’s boy, Bryan knew his brain would have been poached inside his skull by the microwave-spewing lizard drone. Plenty, if not most, of those kid soldiers would have malaria in them.
He heaved himself up.
“Okay, Dogs, listen up.” His head got real light real fast, so he decided to sit on the stone ledge. “Our defense of DoD installation TALOS is complete. Your commendations are in the mail. But that was just a warm-up for us, hooah?”
“Hooah!”
Bryan had his team rally at the strong point and rearm. Nobu got him a secure line to Command to get some advice. Not a line to Germany but to North Carolina.
“Lieutenant McKnight?”
“Uncle Bryan,” replied a sleep-cranky voice, “do you know what time it is here?”
“Now that you’re on active duty, you’ll soon learn the fun don’t stop at sundown and don’t wait till sunrise,” he said sagely into his headset.
On his forearm screen, Sienna’s image focused her bleary eyes. She noticed his codename.
“Your ops handle is White Rhino?” She yawned. “I’m glad you’re amusing yourselves.”
Bryan felt something in his vest pocket. It was a piece of bone, maybe a tooth splinter. He decided to skip the more gnarly details of the TALOS op.
Boy, Sienna, am I ever glad you missed this fun.
“Right now, I got what you might call a conundrum. If I wait for AFRICOM’s intel and strategy guys to get back with ideas—”
“It’ll become a conundumb.”
“Y’know, Sienna, I think you and the Dogs are gonna get along just fine.”
