Birth of Heavy Metal Boxed Set

by Michael Todd

  AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

  One of the interesting (at least to me) aspects of my life is the ability to work from anywhere and at any time. In the future, I hope to re-read my own Author Notes and remember my life as a diary entry.

  La Puente, California

  This city is about 30 minutes outside of LA on a good day. An hour in traffic (or more) on a bad day. For the first time in my life, I’ve had rye grass put down on the lawn and it looks damned good.

  I come from Texas, and we use a lot of carpet grass there. So, winter is often a very brown lawn. To have a green lawn in December is just damned odd to me.

  Very odd.

  However, I like it! It took about a month of growing, but the little blades are about 2.5-3” tall already and the big patches of dead grass (my lawn looked like a case of mange had hit it) are all hidden for a few months, now.

  The weather is cool but not cold, so not ridiculous tonight and I am looking forward to going out after a few business calls and some minor publishing jobs (like writing these author notes.)

  We were successful publishing six (6) ZOO books in December, and have seven (7) lined up for January.

  I’ve been told that the JIT readers (*thank you all for helping!*) enjoyed this story, so that was fun. Especially after the sex scene caught a few by surprise in the last book.

  Oops?

  The pen name for this book is Michael Todd. The reasons for choosing Michael Todd are many, but one of the main ones has to do with the sexual content of the stories. In a Michael Anderle book, if we have any sex scenes it fades to black.

  (Kind of like if a restaurant sells Pepsi instead of Coke in a Kurtherian Gambit. book, it fades to black…)

  With Michael Todd books, there is a tendency to be a bit more graphic with the jokes and the … um…. Horizontal Olympics.

  Coming (no pun intended) in book 03 next month we have a situation occur which challenges Salinger and the new team, causing us to lose a contact and of course, it’s a blender of blood out in the ZOO…

  So you know that some people are going to die.

  FAN PRICING

  If you would like to find out what LMBPN is doing and the books we will be publishing, just sign up at http://lmbpn.com/email/. When you sign up, we notify you of books coming out for the week, any new posts of interest in the books and pop culture arena, and the fan pricing on Saturday.

  Ad Aeternitatem,

  Michael Anderle

  Backstabbing Little Assets

  Birth of Heavy Metals Book 3

  Chapter One

  The whole objective of power armor was to supposedly lower the impact of a massive automatic rifle. Sal agreed that it had done its job fairly well, all things considered, as he had fired on and off for the past couple of hours or so. He remembered the time when he had shot these creatures without a power arm to stabilize the weapon for more efficient use and how sore he had been afterward. Given that, his assessment of “fairly well” meant he was simply doing some first-world complaining. Out in the middle of a jungle in Africa, granted, but still.

  His arm still ached from having to maintain the constant firing, and each time he pulled the trigger, it only grew worse. Kennedy had mentioned something about fatigue and how doing the same thing for too long would make your body ache simply from constantly holding the unnatural position. It made sense, but what the hell was he supposed to do about that?

  “This really wasn’t one of your best ideas!” Monroe growled at him from where she knelt on the ground. She had emptied all the magazines of her sidearm and since she hadn’t brought any extra weapons, if she wanted to help them ward their attackers off, she needed to be creative.

  “Come on, Doc,” Kennedy said with a grin, “we all know that you’re better suited for setting up traps now that you’re running on dry.”

  “Pun intended?” Sal asked and reloaded his rifle quickly as a pair of panthers pounced from the trees, their lips peeled back in a snarl. These creatures were smaller than usual but had an odd shape to their venomous fangs which Sal took a picture of before he eliminated them.

  “Fuck yeah.” Kennedy laughed and fell back quickly behind Sal when her own mag ran out. He covered her while she reloaded.

  “It’s still a dumb fucking idea,” Monroe said and shook her head. The new suit that they’d gotten for her was lighter, smoother, and sported some top-of-the-line scientific software. In addition, it was nimble enough to allow for easier tactile dexterity when she conducted experiments. It was a suit fully designed for a specialist and wasn’t easily adapted to a gunner’s role.

  “Hey, it’s old school,” Sal said defensively. “Old school has all the best ideas. You should know that by now.”

  “Not to bother you or anything but we have some angry animals over here that you might want to focus on instead of chit chat,” Kennedy said and sounded annoyed.

  “Right.” Sal nodded and moved ahead to cover her as she once again needed to reload. He tapped the trigger and his gun kicked painfully once more. The slugs struck home in another pair of the panthers, exploded their skulls, and dropped them with a heavy thud onto the ground.

  “Shit,” he hissed. “I should have tried to clip it.”

  “Stop fucking around,” Madigan remonstrated. “When you’re too busy trying to wound them instead of killing them, they’ll end up killing you. So shut up and kill shit.” She activated one of the new weapons functions on her suit. A small, shoulder-mounted launcher jutted from the plate and fired a small projectile which rocketed into a pack of hyenas and unleashed a firestorm of carnage.

  “Classy,” Sal said and shook his head. As much as he detested the brutality of it, he couldn’t say that it didn’t look as cool as fuck.

  “Well, you can take the man out of the lab but not the test tube out of his ass,” Kennedy said with a grin as the launcher retracted into her suit.

  “Hey now,” Courtney said and pulled herself up from what she was working on, “I think if that was what he liked doing, he would have brought it up with us by now.”

  This was why he shouldn’t have gotten physically involved with his business partners, especially when it meant trips into the Zoo with both of them. He had moved past the fear of a shot in the back but now, he had to deal with the snide comments and the double entendres that flew as fast as the bullets.

  He liked to be the one to hand out those little gems, damn it. Since he was still relatively new to all this, he simply didn’t have the mental dexterity to keep up with them while he fought for his life at the same time. Maybe multi-tasking was a particularly feminine attribute after all.

  Sal simply muttered and shook his head as he examined the steel trap that Monroe had worked on. “I thought…the rules—”

  “Yeah, rules are to keep personal and professional lives separate,” Kennedy said through their private comm connection. “I guess you’ll have to spank her when we get back.”

  “Wha— Damn it, Kennedy,” Sal growled before he turned back to Monroe. “Are you finished setting the trap up yet?”

  “Yep, all done.” She made a gesture of wiping her hands clean. “Your stupid traps are set and ready.”

  “They’re not stupid,” Sal growled. “There’s a GPS marker on each of them with a trigger that will alert us when the traps are activated so we can bring more live specimens back to the Staging Area. Need I remind either of you of the kind of money we get when we bring live specimens in? Maybe in the form of our nice little complex?”

  “Show off,” Kennedy said. “It looks like we’re in the clear for the moment.”

  “And one of our traps just went off,” Sal said and grinned victoriously. “What were you saying about stupid traps again?”

  “Your traps are still stupid.” She shrugged. “Even if they do work. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.”

  “Clock,” Sal corrected as they moved toward the trap that had been tripped. “Digital watches are wrong every second of the day.�
��

  “Nitpicker,” Kennedy accused and shook her head. It was nice that even though they bickered constantly, they were still able to keep things mostly professional and at least some part of their minds on the job. Kennedy took point quickly and handed Monroe her spare sidearm as Sal brought up the rear.

  The sounds of gunfire and snatches of comm conversations, shredded by the interference around them, could be heard as they gradually moved closer to where the trap had been triggered.

  “It looks like we’ve run into another squad,” Sal said. “Should we go ahead and give them a helping hand?”

  “Do you think they’ll pay us for the trouble?” Kennedy asked.

  “I doubt it.” Monroe rolled her shoulders and eased her pack into a more comfortable position. “They’ll be really grateful and buy us a couple of rounds back at the Staging Area, but other than that, in terms of actual monetary compensation? No, I don’t think so.”

  A moment of silence fell as they proceeded cautiously through the tough, dark terrain.

  “We’ll help the useless bastards anyway, won’t we?” Kennedy asked and sounded resigned to their inevitable goodwill actions.

  “Well, we are out here a lot,” Sal rationalized, “and if we got into the kind of trouble where we needed help, wouldn’t we want those useless bastards to come to our aid too?”

  Kennedy rolled her eyes. “Ugh, fine. We’ll help them out of trouble. But I still don’t think that they’ll jump to return the favor if we are up shit creek with no paddle.”

  Sal looked at her and tilted his head with a small grin. “Come on. Up shit creek without a paddle?”

  “I know, I know,” Kennedy said and shook her head. “I heard it too.”

  They reached the spot where the trap had been set and looked around.

  “Where’d you leave the damn trap, Monroe?” Kennedy asked.

  “You guys asked me to make them hard to see,” Monroe pointed out. “That’s what I did. It’s right over there.”

  She pointed a little to Kennedy’s left. The woman turned and looked where the cage had rested above a woven mass of roots rather than on the ground proper. It had, in fact, been triggered and a smaller reptile was captive inside. The creature had four legs and a long, whip-like tail that now wrapped around the steel bars.

  “I wonder what they’ll pay for this little guy?” Kennedy asked thoughtfully. “What do you think we should call him?”

  “Two very irrelevant questions,” Sal said. He tensed instantly and took a few steps back. “It’s calm now, but if you move any closer, it’ll be agitated. And you don’t want to agitate that one.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “It’s not like he’ll be able to break through the bars or anything.”

  As if it could understand what she had said, the reptile immediately acted to prove her wrong. Round flaps unfurled from under its jaw and fanned upward around its face, which made it look a lot bigger than it was. The bottom half of its jaw parted down the middle and a pair of fleshy blue jets spurted a foul-smelling liquid at the bars. The fluid dissolved the metal in seconds and made a hole large enough for the reptile to squeeze through. Once it was out, it rose up onto its two hind legs and raced away into the underbrush.

  “You had to go and jinx it, didn’t you?” Monroe asked and rolled her eyes at the other woman.

  Kennedy shrugged. “I don’t believe in jinxes.”

  Sal tried to slap his face with his palm but was prevented from doing so by the helmet he wore. “This is why we end up in so many fights. Some people who shall remain nameless simply have no respect.”

  “You’re nothing but a pair of babies,” Kennedy retorted and checked her weapon again. “Now, do you guys want to give me the whole speech about how jinxes are real or do you want to come along and help some useless bastards out of a mess they probably caused all by themselves?”

  Sal shook his head. He was a rational man but, as was very clear all around them, there was a lot of shit out there that they still didn’t understand. He couldn’t say for a fact that jinxes were real, but he couldn’t say that they weren’t, either. It seemed to be only good sense to keep all his bases covered one way or another.

  Kennedy obviously didn’t feel the same way and he had no inclination to run her through the science of what he thought. They lapsed into silence and set off in the direction in which the gunfire could still be heard. It was more intense now and the barrage of firepower was impossible to miss. They pushed in deeper and prepped their weapons as they walked.

  Eventually, they moved in close enough to hear the chatter with more clarity, and Kennedy pinged her location in the comm channel before she spoke into it.

  “Unidentified team, this is Team Heavy Metal,” she said. “It sounds like you folks could use some backup there, over.”

  “Roger that, Heavy Metal,” a man’s voice responded over the comm channel. “We’ve got ourselves in some trouble. If you’re in our area, we would really appreciate your support. Over.”

  “We are in your area,” Kennedy said, “and we’re headed your way, heading northeast. Try not to shoot us. Over.”

  “Understood, Heavy Metal,” he replied. “Out.”

  The three of them broke cover and navigated through the animal bodies that the team had left behind for a full minute before they actually reached them. Although the sound of gunfire had now ceased, what they found was a handful of stragglers. They had encountered a couple of people in suits lying on the ground, but considering that they had been left behind, Sal could only assume that they were already dead. The torn and gashed look of their armor confirmed the assumption.

  The team was two down with five left standing but a couple of them looked like they needed medical attention themselves.

  “What’s the situation?” Kennedy asked and immediately took control.

  “I’m Sergeant Jeffords,” the man who had replied over the comms said. “You have no idea how much we appreciate your help. Is it only the three of you?”

  “Yeah, we work freelance out here,” Kennedy told him.

  “This is a dangerous place for smaller groups,” Jeffords said with a furtive look around him. “The critters swarm a lot more often and many more teams have gone missing out there.”

  “Yep,” she replied with a nod. “We’ve been careful, though, and come out here with larger teams. We broke away a short while ago since we had some company business to take care of out here. We were actually on the way to catch up with them when we heard the battle.”

  “We really appreciate it, Sergeant Kennedy.”

  “It’s not sergeant anymore,” she pointed out.

  “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” Jeffords responded. “Besides, we all know you’re among the best around here.”

  “It looks like the critters have had their fill,” Sal said, although he tried not to make it sound like the circle-jerk of military-based compliments that these discussions could end up as. “They’ve backed away for good. We didn’t see any on our way in here.”

  “That said,” Monroe interjected, “there’s no guarantee that they won’t come back at you. We should probably get you boys back to the Staging Area.”

  “Agreed.” Jeffords nodded. They paused for a moment to tag the bodies for recovery and retrieve the dog tags before the two teams headed back the way they’d come. Conversation was almost non-existent as most of the energy was used to help the wounded. They made good time, anyway, and under five hours later, with the sun only about halfway down to the horizon, they reached the outskirts of the Zoo. A quick glance confirmed that the jungle edged closer and closer to the Staging Area, and Sal didn’t much care for that.

  They mounted the six-wheel ATV and set off toward the Staging Area.

  Chapter Two

  “What was our haul today?” Sal asked as Kennedy and Monroe joined him in the common area of their little compound. It was a place meant for at least two dozen people, so it felt rather empty with only the three of them. He
knew that there would be complaints about the lack of space if they added more personnel but when he saw a place as empty as this, it only served to remind him of the dangers that they would face outside.

  “I have it right here,” Kennedy said. She took a seat in one of the loungers and kicked her feet up. Her hair was still wet from a shower which had failed to clean the grease stains she’d acquired when she’d repaired the minor damage their suits had taken. She had dedicated a fair amount of time to learn how to work on them, which kept their repair expenses at a minimum. The haul that had gotten them this place had rapidly been whittled away. There was still some of it left, but Sal had decided to put it into a buffer fund rather than spend it too quickly.

  Which meant that they once again relied on their day-to-day income to keep up with official expenses as well as personal money.

  Monroe stepped in, also damp from the shower with her towel still wrapped around her head. She dropped onto a couch and tucked her legs under her.

  “Well, the Pita sets that we brought in accounted for a little over forty-five thousand,” Kennedy said. “That plus the research grants, which were thirteen. The team we helped out referred us to the commandant, so we might see some pay from that, but it probably won’t come in this week.”

  “All in all, not bad for a half day's work,” Courtney said with a smile and looked pleased.

  “Not bad at all,” Sal agreed. “Even so, I thought about what the sergeant said in there. What was his name again?”

  “Jeffords.” Kennedy tilted her head as she waited for him to speak. “What did he say?”

  “About how the job has become more dangerous,” Sal said and leaned back in his lounger. “The animals now swarm more, attack more, and grow more aggressive with each passing day. It has definitely become more and more dangerous to go out there with only the three of us. We might want to think about signing more people on, preferably gunners.”