by Michael Todd
The animals reacted like they’d waited for a snap of the fingers from some controlling force, and when that invisible command came, they obeyed with a hungry need. They attacked in a single wave without any reliance on tactics like the last battle. Then, they had used the locusts as shields while the stronger, deadlier animals waited on the fringes for the opportunity to go for the jugular.
Not this time. They rushed forward like a solid wall and closed in from all sides, unified ranks of all kinds of creatures that rushed to overwhelm the two invaders.
Their strategy would work. That much was obvious mere seconds into the attack. Sal found weak spots as he and Kennedy stood back to back and fought the animals off after she dropped the smoke grenade. Despite the smoke cover, they would still be able to locate them.
He maintained his fire with his assault rifle as he drew the sidearm from his hip with his free hand. Driven by pure instinct, he used the smaller weapon to push individual beasts back as they tried to force their way in closer.
“Fuck!” Kennedy shouted, and Sal saw in a rear camera that one of the panthers had laid hold of her rifle arm as another gripped the other hand which held a knife. One of the reptiles lunged at her face and spat a foul-smelling acid that instantly ate into her facemask. A scream echoed through their comms as she dropped to the ground.
“Madie!” Sal called. He spun and shot the reptile three times with his sidearm as his rifle sprayed lead into the rest in an effort to drive them clear of her body. It worked for a moment until his guns clicked empty.
He made a mental note to add a quicker reload mechanism to the guns as the creatures’ deadly claws raked his back. The armor withstood the assault for longer than Kennedy’s did, but it wasn’t long before he was crushed face down and the armor was torn off.
“Fuck.”
Chapter Two
“Fuck,” Sal said again and watched the simulation fade around him. The pain in these sims had never been that convincing, but he assumed that was by design. This wasn’t a medical sim, after all. It was meant simply to test the combat software and armor designs in a safe environment, and they couldn’t really do that if testers knew they would be traumatized. Aside from the fact that they’d be unlikely to find volunteers, there were likely moral reasons and also some very real legal reasons that kept the odd psychopath in charge from releasing their inner Hannibal Lecter.
Hopefully.
He felt the disconnect from his suit. It opened enough for him to pull himself free on his own, but Kennedy already stood over him and helped him up.
“I still think your whole testing thing is bullshit, by the way,” she snarked as he stretched. As real as the simulation felt, once you got out of it, you still felt as if you had been lying down for however long it was that the sim ran. A good stretch was definitely required.
“You only say that because you didn’t pass,” Sal replied with a grin but held a hand up to stop her reply. “We can do this all day. We’ve done this all day. It’s obvious we won’t reach a consensus.”
Kennedy shrugged. “Yep, you’re pretty damn right on that.”
He nodded. “Well, I’ll try to be more inclusive of gunners next time I’m asked to help with armor software development in the testing stage.”
“Appreciated,” she said with a grin as they prepared to move outside. As far as testing facilities went, this was relatively a bare-bones facility considering that millions of dollars went into the suits they currently trialed in the Zoo. It was a good place to test them so that they could be mass-produced and sold in other fighting fronts. As with any animal carcasses in the wild, vultures surrounded the Zoo and found dozens of especially creative ways to turn a profit from the disaster that the place had become.
Does that make me one of those vultures? Sal wondered as he studied the EKG results from their time in the sim. His were fairly standard. It wasn’t particularly important for the test apart from the fact that it enabled the control units to monitor the stability of the subjects, but he liked reports on his mental acuity while in a combat situation. There would obviously always be a small part of his mind that told him he wasn’t really in combat and it was all a simulation. The monkey brain in him would inevitably keep him from going full fight or flight, but this was as close as he would ever get to being able to evaluate himself in a stressful environment, and he simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
He forwarded the results to his work email for a more in-depth study when he arrived home and turned to join Kennedy as she made her way out of the tent where they ran the sim. Again, the bare bones operation prevailed with only a tent erected as a barrier to keep the test subjects isolated from the other people in the building. The conditions weren’t as sterile as he liked his testing facilities to be, but he’d already raised the situation a couple of times with those in control and each time, they told him they were working on improvements. He’d now simply stopped talking about it.
They moved out of the tent together, where a team of scientists waited for them. They already had the technical data, but they needed the personal opinions of the people who took part in the tests. That was why they’d brought the whole operation to the Staging Area since they wanted the input from the men and women who were actually in the middle of it all to obtain a better view of what they needed to improve.
“The armor’s still shit,” Kennedy stated first and rolled her shoulder. Sal remembered that it was where one of the panthers had bitten through her suit. Phantom pain was a common effect of simulations. It had people up in arms all across the world regarding the psychological problems that came with it, but when the people in the simulations had endured far worse situations in actual combat, it no longer seemed to be a significant problem.
“Noted,” the scientist said and tapped away at a pad. “Was the performance unsatisfactory?”
“The performance was fine,” she said and tilted her head. “But I think that some bugs need to be worked out. It still moves too slowly. Power armor should increase speed, not bog it down.”
“She’s merely jealous that I rocked it with the new power armor,” Sal said and interrupted her complaint with a grin. The scientist didn’t look up, but Kennedy did with a smirk.
“That armor is too heavy to be used properly in the Zoo, and you know it, Jacobs,” she said with a chuckle. “Unless they scale it up to be basically a tank on two legs, it’ll be way too big and too unwieldy in actual combat.”
“They can’t scale it up,” he explained yet again. “The laws of physics would have some things to say about it as it crunched to the ground under its own weight.”
“We operate outside the laws of physics out here, Jacobs,” she said and emphasized his last name. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
She had a point on two levels. He knew he’d made a mistake when he’d called her by her first name in the simulation. They’d had talks about him never calling her Madie, and certainly not calling her anything other than Kennedy while they were out in the field. It was a matter of professionalism. And the fact that she hated to have her first name shortened under any circumstances.
The scientist nodded and ignored their banter for the most part. “Do you feel any side effects from the run?”
She shook her head. “Only a little phantom pain in the shoulder. It should be gone in a few minutes.”
“Okay, good,” the man said and passed the pad to Kennedy. “If the effects last longer than half an hour, please consult a doctor. Lay out your review of the simulation here and let the biometric scan sign it for you.”
“Will do.” She smiled and took the pad from him as he moved to her partner. He followed the same checkup procedure, but Sal noted that the man conducted it much quicker and with far more professionalism than hers had been run with.
Sal chuckled as he sat down beside Kennedy.
“I think the good doc has a bit of a crush on you,” he said with a grin as the man moved out of earshot. He hoped, anyway.
> “Can you blame him?” she answered absently and tilted her head as she tapped out a quick review of the simulation. “And speaking of crushes, what’s with shouting ‘Madie’ in the middle of the sim, hmm?”
Sal shrugged. “Yeah, I know, I know. Rules haven’t changed, and to everyone else, our relationship is supposed to look platonic—merely friends with no suggestion of anything more. Still, I’d do the same if we were only friends, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
“Don’t think I don’t think it’s cute, because I do,” Madigan said although she didn’t look up from the screen in her hands. “But it’s hard enough to maintain my reputation as a badass around here without you undermining it by coming to my rescue like the world’s most inept knight in power armor.”
He nodded and sighed. “Yeah, I get that. Sorry. And also for using your first name. Always Kennedy while in the field. It’s…reflex, I guess.”
She smiled as she finished her review and let the machine capture her data for the biometric signature as she glanced at him. “I appreciate your understanding, Jacobs. Believe me, I do. It’s why I agreed to work with you in the first place.”
Sal finished his own review, complete with a few notes about the armor that he’d worn since it was his first time in the simulator with that particular suit. Kennedy was right. The armor was too big to be viable as anything but a shield against more agile combatants. He added a few notes that they could possibly fit it with an actual metal shield to help with that, but he doubted it would be put into action. They’d need to run much larger teams into the Zoo than they had thus far for something like that to even be a factor.
Besides, there were lizards out there that could spit metal-melting acid, so a shield was less than useless unless they came up with a reinforcement material that would be strong enough to fend off physical attacks as well as the acid.
He sighed and set the pad down once he had finished. Kennedy waited at the door of the building. She smiled when he moved toward her, and they stepped out into the blazing Sahara sunlight.
“The money’s already in our accounts,” she said with a chuckle. “That’s one of the best things about working for corporations. They may be bastards, but they paid their money out on time. All the military stuff takes hours of red tape before they make payment. I’m surprised that they haven’t already had some congressional hearings about what is spent here.”
“They have…” Sal answered and checked his phone quickly for confirmation that the money was already in their accounts. Five grand for a couple hours’ work in the morning wasn’t too bad, he thought, and it was also a good way to keep one’s reflexes honed between trips into the Zoo.
“Huh?” Kennedy grunted, and Sal realized that he’d trailed off in the middle of his explanation. He blinked against the glare and shrugged as he made a face.
“Oh,” he said with a chuckle. “Yeah, two congressional hearings and one in the Senate, even though those guys have nothing to do with the budget. There’s a lot of press and politics around the Zoo, and there are many people asking questions that they could get answers to with a quick internet search. Anyway, all three hearings ended with the same basic conclusion. This whole operation is run on corporate money, and military spending is kept to a minimum. That added to the amount of money that actually comes out of here made everyone agree that it would be best for their reelection campaigns to keep their paws off the Zoo. If something goes wrong, they can simply blame the corporations, fine them, and sigh in relief that this is happening on the other side of the planet and a long way from American soil.”
Kennedy gave him an odd look as she hopped into the vehicle that they’d rented for the day. “You’ve put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”
Sal shrugged and clambered up beside her. “I have to, don’t I? Considering that we’re technically one of these independent corporations?”
“I guess,” she conceded and started the engine. He knew from some of their talks that most soldiers around there hated the kind of red tape that went with the US military, and many of them had joined this operation for the simple reason that there was little to no actual oversight and things happened without any real repercussions.
That plus the massive amount of money they could make if they survived multiple trips into the Zoo.
“I’m in need of a drink,” Kennedy said. She put the JLTV into drive and moved across the road as the desert wind blew flurries of sand over it. He looked into the distance and mentally measured the stretch of desert before it faded into the massive green swathe that began to take over more of the horizon each day. He didn’t like that. It was spreading faster than they’d anticipated.
“It’s barely twelve-thirty PM,” Sal said but leaned back and put on a pair of sunglasses. “But I could go for a drink too. They’re serving meals at the bar now, right?”
Chapter Three
I wasn’t made for this.
She’d been called in to do the regular specialist job, but each successive visit seemed to demand more and more from her on every level. The Zoo grew faster than anybody could have imagined or calculated. That truth made all the news channels and received the attention, but nobody wanted to talk about the shit that actually happened inside.
The plants and animals presented a real problem to the teams that made the runs into the Zoo for the Pita flowers. The animals grew more and more dangerous with each mission, and lately, the squads even had to deal with plants that were not only carnivorous but also far more aggressive. The vegetation clearly viewed the humans as a food source and showed little concern about where their meat came from and what it was wrapped in. Teams had often found old suits of armor that had been cracked open from the outside with the user gone.
Seeing shit like that wasn’t good for morale any way you cut it. It was even worse that the bodies very clearly hadn’t been recovered for the purpose of identifying the dead. Were they unregulated bounty hunters or troops sent in from the Staging Area? Did they have family who needed to be notified? What had done the nasty and would the same thing happen to anybody on their squad?
These weren’t questions that you wanted to be asked if you ran a team into the Zoo. Courtney had done what she could to identify the dead. This mostly meant she would identify the pin numbers on the suits and radio them to the Staging Area with her sat phone when they had a strong enough connection. Aside from that, there wasn’t much else that she could do.
And that didn’t help morale either. They needed a specialist, but the gunners did the brunt of the work—or so they thought. Since they didn’t divide the teams into squads and instead, ran as a full unit, they now wondered why it was necessary to bring two specialists when only one would do.
It was a fair question and one that had been answered by the Zoo itself when the other specialist in their squad went down. She was the only one left, but somehow the rest of her team also expected her to be so much more than merely a specialist. When another member of their team—a gunner—went down, the leader handed her his assault rifle, and from that point forward, she had been expected to fulfill the role of a gunner to the best of her ability.
Nobody had been particularly surprised when her doctorate failed to transfer the skills of carrying loads with inferior armor or skills with the firearm.
She gripped the gun tighter. While she knew she wasn’t much good, her team relied on her to do her job anyway. She was a part of the line, and they needed her to hold it. On an earlier run—it felt like centuries ago, now— she’d gained experience under fire. After that first time, she’d begun to take a variety of guns to the Staging Area’s range and practiced firing them there, but that didn’t make her an expert out in the field.
Conway, one of the gunners that she’d worked with before, stood beside her to hold the line and helped to cover her line of fire when it was needed. The animals were a lot more aggressive than they’d been a few months before, but they still hadn’t had to deal with
anything like the waves and waves of creatures that she remembered from that life-changing trip.
There were other reasons to remember that run, she mused. It had been her first time to actually have to handle a gun as a specialist, and that wasn’t the kind of thing someone forgot. But it had also been the first time she’d met Salinger Jacobs.
Youthful and inexperienced as he had been, he’d still left an impression on her that she’d tried to shake ever since. He’d stepped up when his squad needed him and earned respect that way, even though—as she’d discovered when they’d talked later—he’d been tricked into being there.
She remembered thinking at the time that if anything like that had happened to her, she would have been on the first flight out of there and talked to a reparations lawyer as soon as she set foot on American soil. She could probably have retired with the money that came from that. Or more realistically, set herself up in some high-end university with a cushy tenure job where she could pick and choose her projects while occasionally giving lectures.
Sal had stayed. He stuck it out for another job. And another. He was now a very familiar face around the Staging Area, and he and Sergeant Madigan Kennedy had broken away and started their own company. What had they called it again? Heavy Metal? Either way, they had expanded their work and were paid a lot better than she remembered being paid. That showed that despite his age and lack of experience, he had a good eye for business as well as being a kid genius and a much better specialist-gunner than she could ever hope to be.
Courtney had been attracted to him. She even came on to him in the bar once they’d gotten back from that first mission, but he’d rebuffed her, and when he teamed up with Kennedy, she understood why. Some guys simply liked the warrior woman type.
