by Michael Todd
Chapter Fourteen
The long, dark night was not yet over. As Wallace pushed himself away from Frankie’s personal base, he began to hear more sounds and not, he was reasonably sure, human sounds—or the wind. No, he approached a place where the Zoo’s menagerie of creatures was thicker. He was deliberately trespassing in something else’s habitat.
At one point, he reached the edge of a small, partially-moonlit glade, one filled with tall grass that swayed in the night breeze and thick, soft bushes of curling green leaves. Something was there—he could hear it. At the edge of the dense growth, he stopped and waited, hidden behind a tree that was festooned with flowering vines.
Wallace let his mouth hang open and breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. He listened intently to ascertain what it was he was dealing with before he acted.
The thing, whatever it was, probably wasn’t human. Wallace could hear the sounds it made as it…foraged? Hunted? It didn’t seem to be aware of him, in any event. The grass rustled around its legs as it moved slowly, with innumerable stops and starts, to and fro. It probed the earth constantly with a limb or snout—or beak or proboscis, or whatever. It had to be close to the size of a human, perhaps marginally smaller, so it wasn’t a catshark, at least. Wallace would have had to be very lucky to kill one of those things without a gun or his suit.
The creature also made some kind of faint clicking sound here and there. It seemed familiar, but to his own anger, he could not recall what it was. He really had no way to determine what waited for him in that glade. At least, not yet.
After a long while, it turned away from him and moved deeper into the high grass of the glade and toward the woods on the other side.
Wallace grimaced in the shadows. He wasn’t sure he wanted to let it get away alive. In fact, no. He would kill it. There were side benefits to doing so, anyway.
He stepped out and away from the tree. Carefully, he eased himself into a posture that would allow him to advance into the glade while making almost no sound and preserve his ability to strike when needed.
The sergeant stepped beyond the edge of the forest and into the grass, which was almost as tall as he was. He ducked and moved low, his spear at his side but more for balance than for walking support at this point. His legs hurt but the splints definitely helped. Soon, he came to one of the large, leafy green bushes. The creature rustled somewhere on the other side of it. The ground inclined a little to the right so he went that way.
He continued his cautious approach and circled the bush. The grass, now joined by a few more of the flowering vines that had crept up stunted bushes and youthful trees, still hid the creature from sight. It no longer moved or made any sound at all. Had it heard him? He knew it was still there, though. His instincts told him that much. He merely had to be the one who struck first. He drew a slow breath, raised the spear over his head, and crept closer. The glade was silent.
A twig snapped close by. He summoned what strength he could from his legs and used the slightly elevated ground to his advantage. Wallace half-hopped and half-charged forward, his primitive spear poised to descend and destroy. Living plants parted before him.
It was a chimera, one of the bizarre monsters amalgamated seemingly from spare parts of reptile, mammal, and most especially, bird, with their bluish feathered hides and half-wing, half-tentacles. It gaped at him, its beak open and its many eyes wide with the mixture of shock and understanding that immediately preceded any instinctual and reflexive act of self-preservation.
That act came too late.
The point of Wallace’s spear drove down into the creature’s upper breast near the base of its neck. Flesh parted violently around the point and blood flowed as a couple of feathers were torn and dislodged and drifted to the ground. The chimera shrieked hideously and reared back, but the spear remained lodged in its body.
With his grip firm on the wooden shaft, he allowed himself to fall to the left and toward the bush as he saw the chimera rise and lash out with one of its sharp-edged, feathered tentacles. The appendage whipped over his shoulder. He stopped his fall with his left leg and grunted in agony as the limb almost failed him.
He did not allow it to do so and instead, urged himself forward and twisted the spear to grind the point deeper into the alien creature’s body as it shuddered and writhed in pain. Both tentacles flopped weakly, now. Unable to lash out with them, the chimera extended its neck and snapped its beak, but the spear was too long and the desperate attack ended a good two feet from Wallace’s face.
He was winning. His prey was nearly dead.
The creature moaned in a pitiful and miserable fashion, but Wallace knew better than to waste time or energy feeling sorry for it. Right now, he had an objective and he had almost succeeded. He forced the chimera back into a thicker patch of grass and vines that would impede any last-ditch effort it might make to escape. With it effectively trapped, he yanked the spear free and stabbed again, higher in the throat this time. Blood poured into the grass and the chimera made a feeble, gurgling squawk before it finally collapsed.
The sergeant drew a couple of deep, heaving breaths. Now that his adrenaline rush was fading, he realized how much effort he’d actually had to put into killing it. His legs, in particular, had to somehow provide him with a firm base from which to stab and wrestle. They had done their job, but they’d paid for it.
The scream the thing had made would, of course, have been audible to anything with ears within at least a klick or two, maybe more. There wasn’t much time. Wallace would have preferred to drag the carcass somewhere else, deep into some shadowy lair in the forest, but it was too heavy for that, especially in his semi-crippled condition.
Instead, he drew the stone knife at his belt and went to work.
As it happened, Erik Wallace’s father had been an avid hunter. So had his uncle, who lived up in Michigan and who had taken all of them deer hunting on three or four occasions. They’d bagged a deer once, a respectable eight-point buck, and the two elder Wallaces had taught him and his brother how to field-dress it.
He sliced the chimera’s belly to expose the useless and inedible internal organs. Removing them would help cool the body down faster—which reduced the likelihood of bacteria forming—and separate the potentially-septic bowels of the creature from the good stuff. It would also give him better access to the edible cuts of meat.
The chimera’s organs, Wallace noted, did not seem terribly different from that of most Earth animals. He was no scientist, but the insides of the creatures were not totally alien based on what he did know.
What was of more concern to him was the muscle tissue.
The U.S. Armed Force Survival Guide recommended cooking all wild game before eating it. Even though the risk of bacteria was low with fresh, properly-handled meat, there were always parasites to consider as these were endemic in the wild. He had no way to make a fire, and even if he did, the heat would draw beasts just as the sight of the smoke would draw men.
The sergeant remembered, however, some stuff that Chris had told him pertaining to his biological research. The goop, it seemed, acted to fortify the immune systems of any creatures associated with it. That was why Kemp had been obsessed with acquiring a sample, and she had transferred her obsession to Chris. He had mentioned that if the AG could be properly distilled into a medicine of sorts, it could cure multiple ailments, including parasitic infections. The Zoo’s creatures might, therefore, be immune to such things, to begin with.
“I always was a fan of rare steak,” he said under his breath and his mouth watered as, with his Stone-Age knife and bloody hands, he cut himself a nice strip of meat.
Chapter Fifteen
Wallace had always been good at estimating how long it would take to do things. However, no one was perfect. His earlier guess that he’d be in the Zoo for another full day had been wrong. It had now been almost two days since his initial capture, and he wasn’t much closer to escape than he’d been when he’d first
waded up the stream.
The problem was multi-faceted. He still could not move at any great speed. In addition, the mercenaries did an effective job of gradually flushing him out, hemming him in, and cutting him off, even if they hadn’t actually found him yet. Finally, the Zoo constantly threw all kinds of other hazards at him. He didn’t even want to think about how little sustenance and rest he’d managed while dealing with all of this.
The problem, in short, was everything.
Frankie’s men loved their motorbikes and continued to use them in their ongoing sweep of the jungle. They must have had plenty of gasoline in reserve at their base camp. The vehicles seemed to handle well even in the rough terrain and obviously gave them great speed and versatility in their search, so Wallace couldn’t exactly blame them. Still, they had one glaring and obvious weakness. He could literally hear them from a mile or two away. It made him wonder why the hell they’d bothered to camouflage the things.
Then he remembered that the bastards had lain in wait with the bikes, which, when they weren’t actually revved, he and his men had failed to see until it was too late. He gritted his teeth.
Every time he’d heard that racket draw closer to his position, Wallace had barely enough time to secure himself in a decent hiding place. The Zoo was full of those. It was one of the two things about the place that he’d come to appreciate—a rare instance in which the Zoo seemed almost to help him rather than trying to kill him as it usually did. He’d squeezed his large form into a hollow beneath the exposed roots of a tree. On another occasion, he’d found a hole that had probably been occupied by a pupal locust as it incubated on its way to maturity and wriggled in. Or he’d simply crouched in the bushes where the foliage was too dense for the bikes to traverse and prayed for the best.
So far, he was still alive.
The other thing he appreciated was the rain, although it did mean he had to replace his mud coating when it washed off. Another squall had drifted in and he now definitely leaned toward the conclusion that the Zoo had begun to produce its own weather patterns. The jungle there was already lush and the science guys had theorized that the plants actually distilled water out of the air. Was the rain, then, some effort to prepare the soil of the surrounding desert for expansion? It was hard to say.
What immediately concerned Wallace was that it allowed him to drink. Using leaves as spouts, he’d drank as much of the runoff as he could while it lasted. He had even managed to save about a cup’s worth in a quickly-constructed bladder-pack made of said leaves. It was inadequate to transport the water over any great distance—especially given the way he had to hobble and sometimes crawl—so after only an hour or so of very slow and careful progress toward the wall, he’d drunk the rest of it. Overall, he’d managed to drink almost a gallon from the rainstorm. It wouldn’t be enough for him to last much longer in the jungle’s heat, but it had kept him going for now.
As for food, he’d not had any since the raw flesh of the chimera. Which, so far, had not made him sick. He thanked God for that. If he had tried to carry extra, though, it would have spoiled, so that was out of the question. His stomach rumbled and groaned with need.
The creature had also provided him with one further gift, though—its hide, or at least a good portion of it. Wallace had taken to wearing it like a cloak, inside-out. He’d coated the exposed interior with mud to further camouflage it while the bluish feathers within kept him warmer at night.
Wallace had been incredibly lucky thus far. And, he felt, he had comported himself well. Luck alone did not explain his survival since his escape. But slowly and inexorably, he was losing and they were winning.
The mercs had seemingly stopped searching some parts of the jungle at all, and of course, there was never any reason for them to bother with parts too distant anyway. The simple truth was that they hunted a man who’d had only the barest of head starts and was half-crippled besides. They had doubtless figured that he would head for the edge of the Zoo and the wall. There were only so many paths from Frankie’s mesa to the edge and that meant a limited area in which he would be. More and more of the motorbikes now raced and roared ever closer to his position.
Worse yet, with his legs the way they were, Wallace knew he’d left tracks and marks that would identify his path. There was too much undergrowth and too many things for him to disturb when he passed through or tried to hide. He didn’t think the mercs had any truly expert trackers, or they’d likely have found him already. But they’d probably seen enough telltale signs of his presence to help them pen him in.
The walkie-talkie was no longer any help. Even when the static-laden reception cleared, he could hear nothing. They seemed to have stopped using it. This might have been due to the terrible interference by the Zoo or it may have been because they actually realized he’d listened in. Either way, it made no difference. He turned the device off and buried it under some mud beneath a tree— if they saw or heard it, they’d be that much closer to finding him.
Near dusk on the second day, as the sergeant ascended a gentle slope toward a pair of large trees where he planned to rest, three motorbikes that had buzzed around close by suddenly changed course and headed directly toward him.
“Shit,” he gasped and struggled into a patch of weeds and bushes. Amidst them was a rut in the ground where a tiny, narrow creek flowed. He rolled into it and covered himself frantically with mud and loose plant matter.
The bikes drove around his position in a loop and finally reconvened in the relatively clear area whose edge he’d just skirted. Utterly silent, he listened from his hiding place.
Four to six men conferred in low voices and Wallace could not hear what they said. A silent pause followed, and the cold hand of dread clutched at his innards. This might be it. They might well have figured out where he was and had simply prepared to creep up on him and shoot him as he lay helpless in a ditch—or simply toss a grenade on top of him and be done with it.
Instead, they announced themselves.
“Wallace!” a voice bellowed. “We know you’re out there. And we know you can hear us.” It was the Texan, his thick regional accent unmistakable. “You’re going the wrong way, dipshit. This is the long route back to the wall. You have no chance, buddy, so you might as well surrender and we’ll kill you quick and clean. We have your position narrowed down by now. If you wanna keep starving and crawling through the mud, that’s your choice, but you’ll be dead soon anyway. On the other hand, if you wanna come out and make all our lives easier, we’ll say you died like a man, at least. You got my word as a fellow American. That was a good job, escaping and all. But it’s over. You hear?”
He did hear. And he knew that they still didn’t know exactly where he was so did not respond. The silence lay thick on the darkening jungle, as thick as the humidity and the now-dissipating heat and the growing shadows.
“You make us keep up this bullshit charade much longer, though,” the Texan went on, “and we’re gonna make it hard on you at the end. So you got one minute to make up your mind. You just yell, and we’ll come take care of you. Quick and clean.”
A minute passed. Wallace did not yell.
“You asshole,” the Texan said. After a few moments, the bikes revved and sped away.
Finally, he allowed himself to breathe deeply. They’d been so close but they had still failed. He suspected that they had lied about him going in the wrong direction. Based on all his best estimates and past experience, he knew he was fairly close to the wall. He did believe that they had narrowed his position down, however.
When it seemed safe to move again, Wallace crawled out of the ditch and hurried up the slight incline with the two trees. He moved slowly and carefully, constantly alert in case they’d left a sentry. The morons had not, at least as far as he could tell.
Up there, he had a slightly better view of the jungle. To his right, he was certain he could see the wall—less than a mile away, now, but separated from him by some especially dense, wild, and rugg
ed terrain. No wonder the mercs didn’t want to comb through it on their bikes. If he struggled through it himself overnight, he might well collapse from exhaustion when only halfway there. It had already been a long fucking day and he desperately needed to rest.
To his left, in the distance and toward the center of the Zoo, he could see smoke. The mercenaries had, astonishingly, made campfires back at their main base. Wallace supposed that they had the numbers and firepower to repel an attack by Zoo creatures and that they weren’t particularly afraid of their single, solitary human enemy surveilling them as he did now.
And then there was that business with the camp being totally clear of vegetation. They were well-protected, somehow.
Weighing the amount of smoke he saw against the number of bikes he’d heard, and allowing for the possibility that the Zoo might have picked off a few of the bastards itself, he tried to estimate their numbers. Maybe, just maybe, there were as few as a dozen of them left. Two dozen was more likely, though.
That was enough men to finally surround him and sweep him out—or perhaps even burn down this whole section of the jungle.
Tomorrow was when they’d catch him. He made up his mind that they wouldn’t take him without a fight. And this, he realized, was a fight he had to be ready for.
Chapter Sixteen
Wallace crouched low in the bushes, hidden once more. But this time, it was different. He no longer tried to avoid them. Instead, he waited for them.
And they were coming. He’d already confirmed that.
The previous evening, he had made a few preparations and permitted himself a couple hours of sleep. He could function on only a small amount if he had to, although his advancing age made it more difficult. To say nothing of his current injury, hunger, and thirst.
As he’d suspected, the mercenaries had begun their final hunt early in the morning, right at the crack of dawn. By then, he had already chosen his position and made some very obvious tracks leading to it. Some of those dickheads might have been smart enough to grasp that they were being led into a trap but they had clearly grown impatient with him by now. Besides, how afraid did they really need to be of only one man?
