Birth of Heavy Metal Boxed Set

by Michael Todd

  Executing an animal like this seemed wrong, even cruel, but something with the kind of injuries that he could see wouldn’t live that much longer, even in the Zoo. It was best to simply put it out of its misery.

  “Sorry, bub,” he said and and pulled the trigger a few times until the beast finally lay motionless. He studied it to make sure that it wasn’t playing possum and after a few seconds, he turned to find a new target.

  The animals, however, had finally beaten a hasty retreat. Whether it was from the falling tree or the death of the largest creature around, he wasn’t sure. The one thing that worried him was the fact that the massive, five- to six-meter tall creature hadn’t made an appearance in the battle, not as far as he’d been able to determine, anyway.

  He noticed that the men involved in the fight hadn’t relaxed their defensive position but still took the time to collect the tags of those who had fallen. In addition, others attended to the wounded to ensure that they were well enough to move in as short a time as they could manage.

  Kennedy punched him in the shoulder. Hard.

  “Ow!” Sal exclaimed. It had hurt, even through his armor.

  “If you ever pull bullshit like that again I’ll shoot you myself,” she threatened in mock-fury. “That was some dangerous bullshit and you know it. I won’t save your ass the next time you charge into the very literal teeth of the beast, you hear me?”

  He nodded. While he knew she was joking, in all honesty, he was well aware of the fact that what he’d done was incredibly stupid. And no, he didn’t want her to risk her life to save his crazy ass if he tried to pull something like that again.

  “It won’t happen again,” he conceded and kept his face as serious as possible.

  “Now that’s out of the way,” she continued, her tone lighter as he crouched to collect samples from the creature crushed under the tree, “that was a ballsy stunt you pulled back there. The boys back in the line talked about the Zoo going crazy and that it had rubbed off on you. They even mentioned turning to the Sal-Side before they charged in to help you.”

  He grinned. A couple of the men in the group were familiar so it made sense that they remembered him. Knowing that, he was reasonably sure that they hadn’t expected him to go off-the-hook crazy like he had.

  “It was instinct,” he explained. “At the time, though, I tried to justify it. I didn’t want a certain container unsealed, but at the same time, I also didn’t want them to take it away.”

  Kennedy nodded. “I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t done something similar in the past. More than once. But try and keep the crazy to a minimum, okay?”

  “So, you two.” The team leader approached once they had done what they could with the bodies and the wounded. “We still have a couple of days to go in our mission and could definitely use a specialist in here with us. Do you think you could fill in, Jacobs?”

  “Can do, Daniels,” Sal said with a grin and patted the man on the shoulder. His partner looked at him askance but after a few seconds, she finally understood. All things considered, they didn’t want to risk walking the Pita plant they still had in their possession out of the Zoo with only the two of them. If they could make a little more cash on the side by helping the teams out, what was the harm?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Amanda laid out the various condiments for lunch on the table and looked around. She wasn’t sure if Anja would join her, but she’d taken the time to cook steak, baked potatoes, and green beans. It was the only full meal she knew how to cook from scratch, and while it had taken a fair amount of finagling to find steaks that were as fresh as could be acquired around there, she’d set up the perfect time to break it out.

  Hell, if Anja didn’t join her, she’d eat the whole damn thing herself and not have a single regret.

  She sat and traced her finger over the freshly prepared steak—medium-rare, as she liked it—then looked up as Anja appeared. The petite Russian was dressed in nothing but a tank top and panties and she shuffled and yawned widely as Amanda averted her eyes quickly. The armorer wiped her finger with her napkin rather than lick off the juice as she had planned. That might seem too much like an invitation that she wasn’t sure her companion would appreciate.

  “I found something last night,” the hacker said once she’d poured herself some coffee. She studied the food laid out on the table. “Is this for both of us?”

  “Well, I’d offer some to Connie, but she and I aren’t on speaking terms at the moment.” She motioned for the other woman to dig in.

  Anja gave her an odd look. Either she was crazy, or Amanda was far too familiar with what was supposed to be a tool to help them with their security.

  “What did you find?” Amanda asked as the Russian served a steak and a baked potato onto her plate.

  “I found paperwork that might finger the culprits behind the death of Dr. Monroe Sr,” she replied and cut into the steak first and took a quick moment to inspect the pink center before she put it in her mouth. “Fuck, this is good.”

  “Thanks.” The armorer laughed. “Something that ties the culprits to his death? Are you sure?”

  “Well, not one hundred percent. But there were some shifty businesses deals that were put into place like they knew when he would die. Either they’d sat on that stuff for a long time and waited or they knew when it would happen.”

  Amanda nodded and toyed with her food, deep in thought. “Well, we should probably wait until Sal and Madigan get back. If nothing else, they’ll be able to direct you to someone who will be able to tell you more about the situation.”

  “Dr. Monroe the younger?” Anja asked.

  “Precisely.” She had barely dipped a piece of potato in the gravy when her phone buzzed beside her plate and she scowled as she set her fork down to check the screen. “And speak of the devil. That’s a message from them. They want us to pick them up from the French base. I wonder what the hell kind of a mess they got into that makes it impossible for them to get themselves back.”

  “Did they lose the Hammerhead?”

  “Nah, the GPS puts it on the other side of the Zoo.” Amanda shoved her phone into her pocket. “It doesn’t seem like they’re in too much of a hurry, though, so we have time to finish our food before we go and pick them up.”

  “Wait—we?” Anja asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll need you to drive their Hammerhead back from where it’s parked, provided that it survives until we get there.”

  “Do you think it’s a good idea for us to leave the base unmanned like that?” The hacker asked, not crazy about the idea. The place was home for her, a safe place for her to lay low in. While she had expected that they might want her to do jobs that weren’t wholly in her job description since they were a bit of a patchwork team, she still hadn’t looked forward to it.

  “Well, it’s either that or let an expensive piece of machinery rot close to the Zoo until we can finally arrange to pick it up,” the armorer said with a shrug. “I don’t think it’ll be too much of a problem. Connie essentially has the place locked down.”

  “I thought the two of you weren’t on speaking terms?”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know she’s programmed to want the best for this place,” Amanda said with a broad grin. “So, are you coming or what?”

  Anja shrugged. “Fine, but you should know that I’ve never driven a vehicle that big before. Not on my own, anyway.”

  “Don’t worry,” her companion said and dug into her steak. “I’ll show you everything you need to know.”

  Sal rolled into the French base and rubbed his shoulder. Even though he had escaped a deadly situation mostly intact, that didn’t mean completely untouched. He’d been able to ignore some twisting and bruising in the heat of the moment, but after the day or so that it took them to reach the base, the injuries had come back to haunt him with a vengeance.

  The bruises became apparent as they came through the gate and finally removed their armor suits. He scowled at t
he collection of purple and red welts across his arms and legs and grimaced when he felt a couple he couldn’t see from when he’d been knocked on his back.

  “Amanda will ream me for treating the suit like this,” he lamented as he inspected the damage done by the hyenas that had munched on his helmet. A few toothmarks had dug deep enough to expose some of the circuitry and the fine crack in the visor was definitely visible, but he was sure that the reason he’d gotten into that mess would more than make up for the trouble he’d gone through to acquire it.

  “Are you sure that that the message was sent to Gutierrez?” Kennedy asked as she packed her armor into crates that were made for the transportation of suits when they weren’t in use. They’d thankfully been able to borrow a couple that had belonged to members of the teams who hadn’t made it home.

  “Yeah,” Sal replied and nodded emphatically. “I even received the notification that it was read. I’m sure she forgot to message us in her hurry to get over here.”

  “Wow, you really do look for the best in people, don’t you?” She grinned.

  “Shut up, Let’s find someplace to get food and drink while the people running this place process our pay for getting their people out of hot water.”

  “Now you’re speaking my language.” They left their suits, packed and ready to be taken back to the Staging Area, in the loading bay. As they delved deeper into the French base, they saw that it was in disarray. A lot more people had arrived since they had last been there and they searched for almost a half-hour before they found what looked like a bar with a sign that read FUBAR over the entrance.

  Kennedy grinned. “You know, as in fucked up beyond—”

  “I know what FUBAR means, thanks,” Sal retorted and rolled his shoulder once more. Maybe there was some deeper injury that he shouldn’t ignore at this point.

  They pushed through the doors and entered an establishment that looked distinctly American. The duo made their way to the bar but a man walked toward them and they paused as he approached. He looked completely at home out there, with graying hair, a moustache, a goatee, and a limp.

  “Welcome to FUBAR,” the man said in a thick, gravelly voice and grinned widely. “They call me JB out here, and you should too. Now, I never forget a face, and I know that the two of you haven’t been here before, so I’ll try my best to make you feel at home. What can I get you?”

  Sal wondered for a second what the initials stood for but it was a passing fancy. He had other more pressing needs than to ask unimportant questions.

  “A couple of beers will be fine,” he said with a smile.

  “Coming right up,” JB said with a quick cough. “Y’all make yourself comfortable and I’ll get right to you.”

  “I think I like this place,” Kennedy said cheerfully as they found an abandoned table. It wasn’t that difficult a feat, considering that the place was all but deserted.

  “Do you think he got his foot messed up in the Zoo?” he asked as he sat opposite her.

  She shrugged. “He definitely has the look of a merc, but perhaps it’s a sideline and this is his real gig? Maybe he needed the money to get this started.”

  Sal shrugged as the man returned with their drinks and immediately headed back behind the bar. No further questions were asked or needed and he sighed as he rubbed some feeling back into his shoulder.

  “Do you think we should have that examined at the Staging Area?” she asked, halfway through her glass already.

  “If it lasts more than a couple of weeks, I think that would be a good idea, yeah.” He took his time with his drink.

  The message that their payment had been processed and deposited into their account prompted another drink and even a round for the bar—which wasn’t a hardship given the handful of patrons. As the time passed, he wondered why a place like this hadn’t opened in the Staging Area.

  Eventually, Sal and Madigan saw Amanda step into the bar. She blinked a few times to allow her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness as she moved over to join her two colleagues.

  “I swear to God,” she said and dropped into a seat beside Kennedy, “I think we should just sell the compound and find a place to settle in here.”

  Sal narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, because we all know how easy it is to find someone who wants to buy a compound near the Zoo for that much money. Why do you think we should move out here?”

  “Well, it’s French, for one thing,” she responded with a grin. “It’s like Paris out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I feel that’s racist,” Madigan interjected. “Is that racist?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “But what is it about this place that makes you think we should drop everything we’ve fought for out here?”

  “Well, I drove in and one of the sexiest blonde women I’ve ever met was there to interrogate me about what my business was here. And call me crazy, but I think she was very loose with her sexual preferences.”

  He nodded. “The woman makes a good point, don’t you think Madi—ow!”

  Kennedy rubbed her knuckles after she’d punched him in the shoulder—to leave yet another bruise on his skin, he thought morosely. “You’re both fucked in the head. I think we should get going. There’s no time to lose, right?”

  “What?” Amanda protested. “I have to drive all the way here to pick you losers up and I don’t even get a quick drink before we hit the road again?”

  “You’re the designated driver, Gutierrez,” Madigan informed her and shoved off her chair with a low rumble of irritation. “You wouldn’t want me to drive your precious Hammerheads while I’m wasted out of my mind, would you?”

  The armorer pouted for a few seconds but she eventually conceded the point. She remembered the damage the woman had done to her babies while she was wasted in the past, and she had no desire to see a repeat. That aside, she had a feeling that the two would have accumulated enough damage to their suits to keep her busy without having to still repair vehicles as well.

  They paid their tab quickly and left the bar before they wandered to the Hammerhead, which had been parked in the loading bay with the suits already loaded up into it. That left them with nothing else to do but scramble in and drive. The day had begun to wind down and the sun hung about three quarters of the way to the horizon. The green ocean that was the Zoo sprawled magnificently in a breathtaking sun-swathed vista before them.

  “You forget that this is actually a damn beautiful place, don’t you?” Kennedy asked quietly. She leaned back in her seat and drew in a deep breath, grateful for the vehicle’s air conditioning.

  “So,” Amanda said as the silence extended once they reached the highway that led to the Staging Area, “I suppose you’ll find out eventually anyways, so I might as well let you know myself. We had something of a security problem back at the compound.”

  Madigan leaned forward and opened her mouth to release a barrage of questions but Sal, who rode shotgun, raised his hand. It would be best to let her tell her story the way she had clearly rehearsed it.

  “Well,” she began, “in all honesty, I didn’t anticipate that our compound would be attacked by a bunch of mercs in heavy weapons and armor, and it was only thanks to the bitch Connie that we were able to detect them in the first place.”

  The other woman rolled her eyes at the use of the AI’s name, but she fortunately didn’t interrupt.

  “So Connie left a huge space open for them to attack through,” the armorer continued. “We didn’t want them to start a battle of attrition outside the walls, so we let them in and turned all the guns on them from the outside.”

  Sal narrowed his eyes and tried to ignore the feeling that she had kept the storyline tame up until now because things would be a lot worse when the narrative unfolded.

  “As it turns out, the guns have a dart system that delivers a knock-out payload based on weight scans of the people targeted.” She glanced quickly at Sal, her expression still deadpan. “With a little help from Connie, we disabled ou
r new friends but ran into the problem of how we were supposed to dispose of them. The suits were installed with all kinds of tracking tech, so we needed to make sure that they were off our premises. Thankfully, after your endeavor to bring small animals out of the Zoo, I had started to make up a large-ish cage to transport them in. Well, we loaded the sleeping mercs into the cage, drove them out into the Zoo—minus their suits and weapons—and set them loose. They didn’t last very long out there.”

  “You sound suspiciously unrepentant about what you did,” Madigan observed.

  “Repentant?” Amanda asked and glanced at the woman through the rearview mirror. “Hell, it was a lot of fun. Like a videogame version of Home Alone. The first one, anyway, and with an AI, an awesome tech specialist, and many, many guns. I saved the security footage of the take-down. There isn’t any video footage of their trip through the Zoo, but I saved some of the audio.”

  Kennedy leaned forward in her seat. “Is it too late to fire her?” she asked Sal.

  “By a couple of months, yeah,” he replied with a chuckle. “I mean, it’s not like she was the only one who took crazy risks and piled up a crazy headcount over the past couple of days, right?”

  “True. Again, though, you were the crazy one, not me.”

  “What happened in there?” the driver asked as she accelerated.

  “Well, first of all, we picked up some data from our contact with Pegasus,” Sal said. “Next, we managed to get one of the Pita plants out of the ground with one of your little contraptions. You might want to design larger ones, but—”

  “Yeah, there would be a problem to fit them in your packs,” she replied with a nod. “They worked, though? That’s fantastic! So you’re the first one to actually get one of those plants out, huh? That has to be worth some serious cash. So long as we don’t sell it to Pegasus.”

  “Yep. And since I’m the first one to get two of them out, too, I think we’re in for one hell of a payday.”

  Amanda turned to look at him. “You’ve had one of the plants all to yourself all this time and you haven’t taken a shot at the bounty?”