by Michael Todd
They tried to run, but the surprise attack prevented evasive action. The RPG exploded in their midst, and Wallace raged as two of their bodies were flung through the air by the blast, already flaming and blackened. The third had been blown to pieces.
Unfortunately for the man with the RPG launcher, however, it took far too long to drop one of those things in time to draw another weapon. The sergeant raised his pistol and shot him twice in the face before the merc could even aim his submachine gun. Half his head came apart like a hammered melon.
The motorbikes roared down on the four of them who remained. Their drivers and passengers both strafed them with rifles, SMGs, machine pistols, and shotguns as the vehicles raced by. Wallace dropped to the ground and pulled into a ball so his armored gauntlet could shield his head and his armored legs would protect his front and sides. Several bullets struck his suit and he thought he heard something on one of his legs crack, but he was far from dead.
The sergeant uncurled and shoved himself to his feet as another of the bikes drove past. He lunged out with his left arm and clotheslined the man who sat in the side-car. The merc fell back and squawked, his throat crushed by its impact with the fist, and flopped onto the ground. An enraged kick to the man’s head caved his skull in and released a fine spray of crimson mist.
They’d gunned down another of the troops, meanwhile. Wallace, Falstaff, and one other man remained. What was his name again? Branson or Branding or something like that? He was angry at himself for not being able to remember.
The mercenary force surrounded them and launched a violent and concerted attack.
The sergeant fired his pistol until it was empty. Two men fell and another dropped to clutch his leg and moan in pain. Before he could move forward to finish him off, someone at the side fired a taser into Wallace’s ribs.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed as both his suit and his muscles seized up and unbelievable pain left him temporarily paralyzed. Sparks erupted from his exoskeleton. Someone came up behind him and drove the butt of a rifle into the back of his head. He staggered and fell, unable to move his limbs. Above and around him, more gunfire resounded and someone screamed. It was a death scream, he realized impotently. Probably one of his two remaining men.
Wallace forced himself to his hands and knees although his teeth chattered and his muscles still tried to spasm. He smelled something burning and it dawned on him that it might be attached to himself. He looked up and flinched. Branson/Branding had been shot about twenty times and lay dead in front of a tree. The kid stared upward with glassy eyes.
Fighting the nausea that roiled within him, the sergeant looked to the side. Falstaff had been disarmed and was surrounded by goons, who’d forced him to his knees. One held a knife at his throat. The young man’s eyes were wide but curiously dull, and the nasty gash along his cheekbone was purpler than ever.
“I don’t think we’ll make it out of this one, Sergeant,” he said in a near-whisper.
“Yes,” the man with the knife—another lanky North African—agreed. He cut Falstaff’s throat. The private gurgled horribly as blood spilled down his chest before he slumped face-first into the grass.
That was it, then. Wallace was alone. Once again, he’d lost everyone. Part of him almost hoped that these men, whoever they were, would get right down to business and finish him off as well. That was clearly what they were there for. Someone had sent them not to raid the Zoo for profitable specimens, but to kill. For all intents and purposes, the United States military was now at war.
“You didn’t believe me!” a piping, high-pitched voice said, and the tattooed leader of the group pushed his way forward. “It is very rude to assume someone is a liar. I say, we only killed all your friends because you told them to attack us. But now, you have surrendered, like I said. So we will not kill you. At least, not yet.” He grinned and aimed his shotgun at Wallace. The North African with the bloody knife moved closer, as did a few other men with rifles.
By now, the effects of the taser had begun to wear off. The sergeant wondered idly if his suit had protected him from it or made it worse. He rose to a kneeling position. “So you’re not going to kill me,” he said.
“I am not a liar,” the tattooed gentleman repeated as though he’d told a hilarious joke. The North African man who’d slit Falstaff’s throat stepped in front of him.
Wallace’s armored fist lurched out and landed directly in the African’s groin. He gasped and dropped his knife. The gauntlet continued in an uppercut which shattered the man’s jaw and catapulted him back a few feet.
“Get him!” the leader snapped.
The mercs dogpiled the soldier without a second invitation. He struggled but finally, they managed to aim successfully for his head, this time with rifle butts, fists, and feet. His suit could do nothing about the effects of that. He succumbed to the battering and his vision spun as he collapsed and consciousness faded.
The leader leaned over him. “Time to meet the boss,” he said and sounded cheerful, the soldier thought in the moment before darkness claimed him.
Chapter Nine
Wallace came to and immediately thought he’d been blinded due to brain damage from the pounding his skull had taken. After a few moments in which he focused on slow, measured breaths, he came to the conclusion that he was blindfolded. There was definitely some sort of fabric tied around his eyes, which was encouraging.
He’d also been efficiently tied with what he assumed were cords of some kind. They encircled his body near the shoulders and his arms were tied behind him at the wrists. It took a few tentative but ineffectual tugs before he deduced that his wrists were lashed to something else—a sturdy object that might conceivably hold him in place. He was on his knees, and his feet were tied at the ankles. Beneath his legs was what felt like a seat or cushion. And, he realized with a small ripple of shock, he was moving.
“Yeeeeehaaaa!” someone right beside him howled, and an engine revved.
He was their passenger, he realized. They’d tied him up and put him in the side-cab of one of the motorbikes. Obviously, they’d also tied him to the cab itself, which would serve the double purpose of a seatbelt and prevent his escape.
Other bikes growled and roared around him. A convoy, then. The air rushed past his face, which meant they were moving at speed. Wherever the hell the mercs were taking him, only their cavalry was participating, at least for now. The men on foot had been left behind. Then again, Wallace and his troops had killed so many of them that there might have been enough bikes to go around for everyone. That, at least, gave him a certain grim sense of accomplishment. Eliminating these assholes was his mission. He estimated that the mission was about half complete.
Since he had been unconscious for a little while—although probably not too long—he really didn’t know where the hell he was or where they might be taking him. Back to their camp near the center of the Zoo was the most logical assumption. But, as always, it was better not to assume. For all he knew, they might be in Nigeria by now and taking him to an underground gay nightclub for drinks with salt crusted on the glasses and little umbrellas amidst the ice cubes. Wallace did not drink, smoke, or pursue any real vices at all but had been known to make rare exceptions. He could use a drink right about now.
Still, both his four remaining senses as well as common sense suggested that they were still in the Zoo. Something about the quality of the air, the denseness of it, and the smell was subtle but unmistakable. He’d been in and out of the jungle multiple times now, and he recognized it as clearly as he would have recognized the smell of the barn back home near the rear of his family’s property outside of Topeka, Kansas. This was the cornucopia of odors produced by an entire ecosystem’s worth of flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth because it didn’t entirely even originate on Earth.
They drove over bumpy earth, roots, and rocks, up and down hills and slopes and ridges, and occasionally, through water. They slowed for a moment at what sounded like a fast-running stre
am, probably to ford it, and the man driving the motorbike, said, “Whoa!” He swerved to the side to avoid something, and the sergeant felt his stomach lurch as though it wanted to leap out of his abdomen.
“Watch out, you fool!” another voice said. It was easily identifiable as the leader, the burly guy with the tattoos and the piping Scandinavian-ish accent. “That plant will devour you whole. The stupid Canadian walked beneath one and it gulped him down like a dog swallowing a piece of chicken.”
“I’m pretty sure we don’t fuckin’ want that,” the driver replied in a Texan accent. “Unless the boss wants to feed Captain Ginger here to one of them things.”
Wallace frowned. He was only a sergeant—or an acting lieutenant, at best. Captain was a couple of ranks away, and he hated being called a ginger.
After fording the stream, the convoy drove up a slight incline, and Wallace sensed that the foliage had thinned out somewhat. The Zoo had a few natural glades and clearings. He didn’t know if they approached one of these or if, again, it was simply the result of the mercs having somehow killed or cleared all the plant life from a given area. How had they managed that back at their main camp?
The ground leveled out again.
“Stop!” the Scandinavian said. The motorbikes’ engines slowed and died, and the rushing air slowed and finally stopped. Wallace felt them grind to a halt. “Dismount!” the man said.
The sergeant listened intently. From the sounds of it, there were about seven men mounted on four bikes, with the eighth seat obviously occupied by himself. He didn’t know where the other mercs would be at this point—there were still quite a few of them overall—but at least he was now in the company of a group of manageable size. If he managed to free himself, he might have a shot. It wasn’t over yet.
He was still restrained, of course, so could not obey the command to dismount. Someone stopped beside him and he heard a small device clicking in their hand followed by the unmistakable crackle of electricity.
“If you try to fight against us or run away,” the leader said, “you will be shocked with the taser again. You didn’t seem to like that the first time, Sergeant Wallace. And then, this time, we will kill you. We don’t have to bring you back alive. That is merely the preference.”
It was true that the taser had been an unpleasant experience. It was also interesting that the man knew his name. He supposed he could have checked his dog tag, but somehow, he didn’t think he’d done that. These mercs must have had intel of their own.
Someone cut the cords that tied him to the side cab of the bike and those that bound his ankles together. They did not, of course, cut the ropes binding his hands behind his back.
“Up!” the Scandinavian commanded. Wallace, for now, obeyed.
He stood and his legs tingled painfully after having been bound in a kneeling position. Cautiously, he stepped over the edge of the bike and hoped he’d gauged his step correctly. Unfortunately, he misjudged the distance between his perch and the ground below, and he stumbled, staggered forward, and made a couple of awkward hopping motions to remain on his feet. Some of the mercs chuckled at the amusing spectacle.
“Forward,” said the leader. “And remember the taser.” He crackled it to make his point
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten,” Wallace replied.
The sound of rushing water once again intruded and a few minutes later, they stepped into a stream. The water was cool and moved fast—and a little downhill, he noticed—but there wasn’t much of it. This must have been one of the sources that flowed into one of the larger streams or actual rivers in the lower-lying areas of the Zoo.
Beyond this creek, the ground felt flat and bare beneath Wallace’s feet and a kind of muffled silence set in. This, he somehow suspected, was their destination.
“We are here,” the Scandinavian announced. “Welcome.” He kicked Wallace in the back of the knees, hard enough to drive him back into a kneeling position. Someone removed his blindfold and he had his first look at wherever “here” was.
They were on something like a flattened hilltop, almost like a small butte or mesa within the jungle and situated alongside a broader elevated area, from which the little creek flowed on its way downhill. Trees rose all around them, but the surface on which they were located was totally bare. Again, this didn’t seem to be a natural feature but something the mercenaries had done themselves. It wasn’t their main camp, though. Wallace had no idea what part of the jungle they were in. A hasty glance confirmed that almost no one was around. Two sentries stood near four tents but otherwise, there were only the seven men who’d brought him there, to begin with.
Wallace was confused, now. The tattooed leader had said they would meet the boss. Clearly, they had some purpose there. These particular men all seemed more organized and prepared than most of the others. The nature of their organization began to take shape in Wallace’s mind as his instincts and training kicked in. There was a core of truly dangerous pros, along with a more ragtag sub-force hired locally or regionally to pad out their numbers and give them more trigger fingers. Many of the men Wallace and his troops had killed seemed to be Northern or Central Africans with minimal training and a flimsy grasp of tactics. Yet the mercenary force as a whole had been as devious as hell with their strategy to trap them.
The Scandinavian walked around Wallace to face him. “The boss wanted to speak to you,” he said and smiled. He turned to one of the tents which, bizarrely, was hung with a bright pink party-streamer. “We have him,” he said.
“Oh, good,” a female voice replied. “Thanks, Marcus.” The tent opened and a rather petite but very athletic woman of about twenty-eight or thirty strode out. Her short blonde hair was partially concealed by a black beret, and her demeanor was a strange mixture of girlish innocence and deadly cruelty. She looked familiar.
“Oh,” Wallace said and grimaced as he tried to ease himself more comfortably in his forced kneeling position. “It’s you.”
She placed her hands on her hips. “And who am I?”
“Frances Stoudt, also known as Frankie,” he replied. “Although, according to Chris, that probably isn’t your real name.” He cleared his throat. “He said a few other things about you as well, but I won’t repeat them.”
Frankie laughed. “Stand him up,” she said. “We’ll release him—from everything.”
Chapter Ten
It wasn’t much of stretch to understand that he was about to die. Why, though, would they have brought him all the way there only to kill him right away? They hadn’t interrogated him, hadn’t taken anything from him that he was aware of, and could easily have done the job earlier and more easily. Nevertheless, this might be his only chance. His suit was probably powerful enough to burst the cords around his wrists. After that, Ms. Stoudt and this Marcus guy and their glowering henchmen would never punch a time clock ever again.
However, his plan was based on another faulty assumption, which was that they would stand him up first.
Instead, Frankie stepped behind him quickly and pulled the plug. She did not need to look for it. Instead, she moved without hesitation to the thin, discreet wire that traveled up Wallace’s back from the lower parts of his exoskeleton and yanked it from its juncture with his headset. His suit’s gentle whirring faded like the slurred voice of a drunken man before it fell silent. The sergeant bit down on his tongue to keep the dismay from showing on his face. He could no longer really feel his limbs, only the weight of all the plasteel and other accouterments on them. Dead weight, now.
She returned to her previous position in front of Wallace. “Okay,” she said, “now stand him up. Except—oh, wait.” She folded her arms in front of her and tapped a finger to her lips as she pouted cutely. “Take all that cumbersome shit off him first. The poor dear. Why would they even weigh him down with it, to begin with? His muscles must be so atrophied. So helpless to lift anything without mechanical aid, by this point.”
“I say, off it comes,” Marcus quipped gleefully. He
and two other mercs—the mustachioed Texan and a tall, wiry black man—moved in to yank and jerk at his limbs. Piece by piece, they stripped and disassembled the second body that he had relied upon so much these last few months. Things that he increasingly thought of as parts of himself fell and clattered in the dirt. Marcus removed the headset and tossed it into the creek. The Texan cracked the gauntlet on his left arm apart and yanked it off, while the black man ripped the plating around his lower abdomen and hips away.
Suddenly, he felt heavy and weak. Old, really. For the first time since he’d regained consciousness, he was afraid and he did not know why.
“That leaves the most useless part of him of all,” Frankie observed. She stepped forward, placed the heel of her boot on Wallace’s forehead, and pushed. He fell back and his legs, especially his knees, screamed in pain as they remained in a kneeling position, held there by the weight of the armor. The three mercs extended his legs, splayed them out flat and straight, and tore the armor apart. Everything he needed to move and function as a warrior was broken and ripped off. Only his biological legs were left. They looked pitiful, pale, and withered.
“Mmm-kay, then.” Frankie put her hands back on her hips. “Stand him up. It’s okay, you can offer him a hand. He won’t hurt you.”
Marcus put an arm around Wallace’s waist and hauled him upward. He tried to stand but failed miserably.
“Aww, what’s the matter?” she asked.
The other two grabbed him and settled him more or less on his own legs, which tingled faintly. As one, all three of them let go.
Wallace’s eyes bulged and he swayed at the absurd sense that he teetered on the brink of a cliff. It was like his body—the part of his body that still mattered—tried to balance itself atop two supports made of toothpicks held together with scotch tape. Useless, she’d said. She was right. Dear God—
