Birth of Heavy Metal Boxed Set

by Michael Todd

  Sal wondered if the man’s concept of fun might not be a little warped. His, on the other hand, was a quiet night indoors, playing a game or reading a book. Sure, he was a geek, but at least none of his books tried to kill him.

  That might make an interesting novel idea in its own right, he thought. It sounded like the kind of stuff only Stephen King could pull off, though.

  The sun started to set, and the shadows of the trees grew long before Kennedy paused their march.

  “This is as good a place as any to set up camp,” Kennedy said and looked around.

  Sal did the same, though he had no idea what constituted a good place. Was it high ground? Visibility? Ease of access? He would never admit to even moderate knowledge about this stuff. He could imagine Kennedy in the Boy Scouts and earning every single one of the badges.

  Her earlier comment still perplexed him, but he didn’t feel comfortable talking about it with her. She was right. It was none of his business.

  “So how do we set up camp?” he asked. “Collect firewood? Build tents? Go hunting for food?”

  Kennedy gave him an odd look. “Look, if you want to risk cutting one of these trees down for firewood, be my guest, so long as it’s as far away from me as you can get. Most of the creatures that hunt around here are nocturnal, and their main sense is hearing. No, we have heaters that should keep the cold out. We set up perimeter sensors and a rudimentary shelter. It shouldn’t take longer than ten minutes.”

  “Besides,” Cortez said as he dropped his pack, “None of the animals out here are cleared for human consumption anyway.”

  Sal nodded. “What about the plants?”

  “What about the plants?” the man asked. He drew various heater plates out.

  “Are any of them cleared for human consumption?”

  He shrugged. “There are a couple, but we bring our own rations from the Staging Area. It’s better that way. We don’t have to rely on each other’s hunter-gatherer instincts and end up drooling on the floor when we find something that ends up safe but is still a hallucinogen.”

  Sal grinned and glanced at the others. Everyone seemed to have something to do. Lynch and Addams positioned the perimeter sensors, Cortez the heating plates, and Kennedy appeared to have started on the shelters.

  “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, feeling a little useless.

  Cortez looked oddly at him. “You’re the squad specialist, dude. Poke at shit. Conduct experiments. Try not to get into fights with an alcoholic British dude who claims to work for His Majesty’s Secret Service. Take samples.”

  Sal made a face. “Really? You don’t want my help?”

  The man shrugged and set the plates up on stands. “Well, it’s not so much that we don’t want your help. It’s more about never having had a specialist help with setting up. Go do your thing, Doc. We’ll be finished here in a short while.”

  Sal nodded. “That’s fair enough. Okay, I’ll collect my samples. And if I do find that British guy…I expect him to die,” he called out in what he assumed was a Swedish accent and ducked when Cortez threw a rock at him.

  He examined a couple of the vines that grew around the trees. He wasn’t sure if the pheromone release was exclusive to the Pita plant. While he wasn’t really in the mood to find out, he pulled one of the younger tendrils off and studied it closely. The leaves and flower were very similar to the kind found on Asian wisterias, and from the way it encircled the tree tightly enough to leave indentations in the bark, it would, in a few years’ time, constrict further until the tree died.

  Or it could be tomorrow, for all he knew. The vine was only a quarter of the way up the trunk. He couldn’t tell if the squeeze had already started to affect the tree, or if it ever would. He noted that both the tree and the vine were already in the database, so he made a mental note to check on the vine’s progress in the morning. He didn’t expect anything exciting, but in fairness, Kennedy had picked the most boring place to camp. There was literally nothing in the area that hadn’t already been documented.

  Well, in this case, he supposed that boring was probably exactly what they wanted. Boring was safe, after all, but if he had to trek through an alien jungle, the least they could do was find something interesting for him to discover.

  As the sun sank lower and shadows turned to proper darkness, the group gathered in their little camp with rations handed out for each to prepare as they pleased. It was mostly rice and beef stew with boiled carrots which didn’t need much in the way of preparation. Add a little water and simmer over the heaters for a few minutes, and the meal was ready.

  Lynch still complained about it, though.

  “I really wish the eggheads back in the Staging Area could find a way to send proper steaks out here.” He poked at the food with a plastic fork. “Maybe a couple of beers too. I’d kill for a beer at this point.”

  “Drinking isn’t allowed while in the field,” Cortez growled and fixed his comrade with a sharp look. “But yeah. Things will get damn stressful. I wish we had something to unwind with.”

  Sal ignored the fact that Cortez had probably said that to get him on edge.

  “I was an intern at a university lab,” he said, his mouth still half-full. “I lived on ramen noodles and tears. I can tell you all honestly that this stuff is a massive improvement.”

  “Wait,” Addams interjected. “Since when do doctors intern anything? Isn’t that why they do the doctoring? So they don’t have to intern?”

  Sal could see Kennedy roll her eyes and she grumbled, “Not this shit again.”

  “For the last time,” Sal said and tried to keep his voice even. “I’m a doctoral candidate. That means I’m working on my dissertation. And believe me, I have no idea why I’m here either, but I’m done complaining about it.”

  “Yep,” Kennedy grinned. “And I’m sure that’s all the complaints we’ll hear from you for the rest of this trip.”

  Sal shrugged. “I can only promise to try.”

  The sergeant grinned, and the others chuckled.

  Despite his complaints, Lynch was the first to finish his meal and lean back against his suit. “I still wish we had a pint of something frothy to wash all this down with.” He scowled at his water canteen.

  “If you like, I could probably ferment some of these fruits,” Sal said as he wiped his plate clean with gusto. “If you’re willing to wait some thirty-six hours or so, I could provide something alcoholic to drink. I can’t promise it won’t be chock full of whatever that goop is, or even if it’ll be any good.”

  “If we stay out here too long, you might have a test subject desperate enough to try,” Lynch said with a cackle of laughter. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  “Let me know.”

  With the meal complete and everything packed for recycling, the group withdrew into their respective corners. The only light available now was from the various heaters. Sal moved to where Kennedy was seated on the ground with her legs crossed. She looked at a very robust sat phone.

  “I didn’t know we could get reception out here,” he said as he sat beside her.

  “We don’t,” she said distractedly. “The signal is weak, but it’s enough to get a location on Squad One.” She showed him a collection of red dots on a 3D map. “It looks like they’ve stopped for the night too.”

  “Shocking,” Sal said, and Kennedy smirked.

  “What’s up, Jacobs?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted to talk, is all. I don’t think I have much in common with the other guys.” He nodded to the trio who were deep in conversation regarding which of their preferred sports was better. Addams liked football, Lynch was a rugby fan, and Cortez currently expounded on the virtues of basketball.

  “And you think you and I have more in common?” Kennedy asked.

  Sal tilted his head. “Well, not exactly that, though it does seem that we’re both the odd…um, people out. I’m not sure if you do that intentionally to stay aloof since you’re the squad lea
der, or if it’s something else. Either way, I thought I’d try to figure it out.”

  She smirked, clicked the sat phone off, and tucked it into her pocket. “Okay, I’ll bite, Jacobs. What do you want to talk about?”

  He shook his head. “Would you believe me if I said that I didn’t actually have anything to talk about?”

  She laughed. “I’d say you have something on your mind, but you don’t have the balls to actually come out and say it. To which I say cut the crap and speak your mind, Doc.”

  “I’m not a—”

  “I know you’re not a doctor,” Kennedy growled. “But it’s easier than saying your real name. Who can be bothered with two syllables when one will do?”

  Sal smirked and remembered Davis saying something similar but with a very different point of view. Her statement made him wonder if the man had been talking about Kennedy.

  “What?” she asked when she saw his smirk.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I remembered something Davis said when we first started out.”

  Kennedy chuckled, and Sal realized that she knew exactly what he was talking about. She turned to him. “Don’t you have some sciencing to do? Testing plants and animals, discovering the secrets of the universe or something?”

  Sal nodded. “Probably. But while I decided to turn my life around and stop being a lazy waste of space all the time, it’s a work in progress. I’ll get around to it eventually, but I won’t let the beauty of what I do keep me from enjoying my life if that makes any sense.”

  Kennedy looked thoughtful, then nodded. “I guess I get it. Is that why you’re still not a doctor?”

  “You know that I’m eleven years younger than the average age when people are granted their PhDs, right?” Sal asked.

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “But you’re a bright kid. I saw your files. You finished high school before most kids reach it, you finished your BS before you reached California’s legal age of consent, and you held a masters before you could drink—which tells me you could have gotten your Ph.D. by now if you had really wanted to. So why hold back? Why go through the trouble of explaining how you’re not a doctor to everyone?”

  Sal shrugged. “It’s complicated. The short of it is that I’m not great with people. To get a BS and a masters, it’s basically go to lectures, take the test, write the thesis, and pass. Which I did with flying colors. When it comes time for a Ph.D., there’s no test and nothing procedurally generated. It’s largely influenced by your personal connections. The fast track for most is to become a grad assistant to some great mind in the field while writing their dissertation. You can avoid that, but even then, there’s a whole process in which you must convince the various minds in the field that what you write about is relevant enough for them to give you the fancy piece of paper, and I’m not… I’m not great at that.”

  Kennedy nodded. “I can understand that, I suppose. You’re smart to the point where you don’t have the patience to tolerate the people who might question what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s…” Sal nodded. “It’s almost insultingly simplifying it, but basically, yeah. So instead of having to deal with the people, I come up with a topic and try to understand how to get through the whole process without accidentally insulting one of the geniuses of our time. It’s a work in progress, but I’m sure I can handle it. You know, eventually.”

  Kennedy smirked. “I’m sure you’ll get there one day, Doc. And who knows, maybe insulting one of these great minds will be the way to get them to respect you.”

  Sal chuckled, but it was cut short when they heard a soft ping from their suits. Kennedy picked up her helmet and looked at the HUD.

  “The perimeter alarm’s been tripped,” she barked, and the friendly façade dropped. She was squad leader now, and the men could hear it in her voice as they ended their bickering and snatched their weapons.

  Chapter Nine

  The group waited with weapons drawn and again, Sal felt useless. He hadn’t had any combat training, but he would still have felt better with some kind of weapon on hand. They could even leave the safety on and let him hold it like a security blanket. A placebo gun. Anything.

  None was offered, and Sal didn’t want to ask them to give him a weapon to make him feel better, so all he could do was run to where he’d left his helmet, put it on, and hope for the best. It would take too long for him to drag the full suit on, so he could only hope that whatever was out there only went for the head.

  When the squad moved toward where the motion sensors had tripped, Sal stayed in the camp.

  “What are you doing?” Kennedy hissed at him.

  “I’m letting the gunners do what gunners do,” he replied with a nod. “I will stay right here and do some experiments or something.”

  “We can’t leave you here alone,” she snapped. “Besides, we’ll need you out there to identify whatever it is. That’s your job.”

  “Damn it,” Sal growled. He stepped up behind the four, gripped the side of his helmet, and turned the HUD on. It ran a scan of what was in front of them.

  Night had fallen fully by then, and the overgrowth blocked any light from the moon or stars. Even once his eyes had adapted to the darkness, Sal couldn’t see much more than the shapes of the people in front of him. If he focused intently, he could faintly make out the shapes of the trees and the plants barely illuminated by the muted glow that managed to filter through the foliage.

  “Fucking hell, it’s cold,” Lynch said in a rasped whisper, and Sal heard a shiver in his voice. “You hear jungle, and you think tropics all year round, not bloody Halloween weather. Bloody hell.”

  “The jungle is a foreign object,” Sal tried to explain. “The fact that trees grow thick and fast in the area only slightly increases the moisture, which means that despite what you see, we’re still very much in a desert environment.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Jacobs,” Cortez hissed and gripped his weapon tighter. “It’s really not the time for a biology lesson.”

  “That’s geology, actually,” Sal corrected.

  “Both of you, zip it,” Kennedy growled. “I can hear something.”

  Sal froze and allowed the gunners to gain a few steps on him. They moved silently enough, but even so, he couldn’t make anything out. Jungles weren’t quiet places, even alien ones. The silence contained the sound of wind through the trees and of insects and nocturnal birds that drowned out what could be a stealthy predator poised to strike them down.

  A message appeared on Sal’s HUD, asking him if he wanted to turn on the external lights. None of the others had, so he declined. It then asked if he wanted to turn on the helmet’s motion sensor capabilities, and he responded with a very enthusiastic nonverbal yes. The image on the screen flickered and quickly altered into something that resembled night vision but with motion accentuated in bright greens.

  Most of what he saw was initially flooded with green since the trees and the vines were in a state of constant motion due to the strong wind from the open desert. Eventually, the operating system filtered out the plants and focused on anything that didn’t move in time with the trees. He wondered if that was a dangerous feature since more than a few predators used the tops of trees for cover, but for now, his eyes focused on what the screen captured.

  The first thing that came into focus was the flicker of a pair of antennae—gentle movement that could have been an exceptionally tall blade of grass or a bluster of dust. But it was still there when Sal blinked and refocused. As they moved closer, a shape developed as the night vision kicked in and the sensitivity of the receptors was adjusted by the system. It was infuriating that this took so long, but Sal assumed that the suits and the HUD assigned to them were all experimental as well.

  The shape was unusual. Like the little gazelle they’d seen before, it had six legs, and it was about the size of a basset hound. That was where the similarities ended. The antennae led to what could distinctively be described as an insect’s head. Five massive, b
ulbous eye sockets focused on the group approaching it, but like the gazelle, it hadn’t moved away. Instead, it seemed curious.

  “Stop,” Sal whispered, and the rest of them complied. “It’s right in front of us.”

  “I can’t see shit,” Addams growled.

  “Turn on the night vision in your helmets,” Sal replied. Both Addams and Cortez had left their helmets behind in their rush, but Lynch and Kennedy immediately turned theirs on. Sal could tell because of their reaction.

  “What the fuck…” Kennedy breathed aloud.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Lynch eased in a little closer.

  “I may be wrong,” Sal said and immediately realized he was the calmest of his squad. Addams and Cortez were both blind and had to rely on their comrades who had brought their helmets. Kennedy and Lynch stared at what they could only assume was the beginning of a xenomorph-based apocalypse. Lynch raised his weapon at the thing.

  “No, don’t shoot,” Sal said. “I’m definitely not wrong. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a locust.”

  “It’s the size of a three-month-old lamb,” Lynch growled and kept his weapon raised.

  “Well, it’s a very big locust, but it’s still a locust.” Sal rolled his eyes. “All the body markers are there. I can’t tell about the markings or anything—”

  “I can help with that.” Kennedy flicked on the flashlight connected to her helmet. A beam of light cut into the darkness like a hot knife through butter to reveal the creature. Sal could see both Cortez and Addams react in the same way that the other two had and lift their weapons to aim at what could only be described as a monster. Sal growled his irritation.

  “Don’t fucking shoot.” He pushed Cortez’s barrel down and away from the locust, which didn’t seem perturbed by the light in the slightest. He wondered idly if that meant the creature was completely nocturnal and did not rely on vision to move around—which meant that, like most of the creatures in this jungle, it had undergone alterations besides the increase in size.