by Michael Todd
Then again, she also had the full use of all four limbs.
“Even if you get out of here,” she said and her eyes blazed with rancor and lips drew back from her teeth in almost a snarl, “someone will see to it that you die next time. You’ll never, ever go back home, Wallace. You’ll fertilize the mud in this fucking place.” With a deft movement, she produced a small, nasty-looking combat knife with a black hilt.
The sergeant drew the Bowie he’d taken from the late Texan. Blood ran down his face from the deep gouge in his cheek. “That was always a possibility,” he said in a low voice. “I assumed that I could die—hell, that I might die—the day I joined up.”
As he said this, she advanced and circled, the knife held close to her forearm. Wallace adjusted his position to give his right arm more freedom and put the tree trunk in the way of any direct strike from her. “I would rather live. It would be better. But I’m not afraid. Somehow, I think you are. You have things to live for. Partying and shit. You still have most of your life to look forward to. Or at least you would have if you hadn’t decided that trying to kill me was the best way to make a goddamn paycheck.”
He suspected that she would take this as a challenge and he was right.
The woman pounced. She swept at him from the side and her knife’s blade lashed and flicked at his face. He pivoted out of range and slashed back with a ferocity that she barely managed to dodge. Before she could recover, he piled into her. He seized her wrist—it seemed so small—and shoved her back hard against the tree. She gasped as the impact thrust the breath from her lungs.
An odd instinctive impulse clicked in and he dropped his other hand to his groin, the palm facing outward, and caught her hand as she tried to crush his testicles.
“Whoops,” Wallace said and headbutted her in the face.
She toppled back, her nose bleeding, spun, and fell around the tree. Somehow, she used the motion to twist on his arm and kick at his left knee again. He tottered and almost fell as she broke free.
“I’ll hire guys to kill that little cunt of a mechanic, you know,” Frankie said and scrambled beyond the edge of the camp and up a slight incline on the far side. “You planned to adopt her and then molest her or something, didn’t you?”
The sergeant merely considered Audrey a friend and so was able to ignore both the threat and the insult for now. Her attempt to distract him had failed, and he focused only on what was important. In that moment, he realized that both of them had dropped their knives. His lay out of easy reach. In the time it would take him to hobble over to it, she’d have vanished into the jungle. Rather than pursue that futile attempt, he launched into an unarmed attack.
Frankie seemed to wait for him but barely for a split second before she ran into the trees. Wallace scowled when he saw her ploy. She didn’t actually intend to flee. Instead, she tried to lure him into a dense patch of jungle, perhaps, where her smaller size would give her the advantage in the obstacle-riddled terrain.
Still, even knowing the danger, he couldn’t allow her to escape. Eliminating these people was the mission. Wary but determined, he followed.
He crested the slight ridge and tried to ignore the agony of his legs—especially his left knee, which sounded like something had come loose in it. When he stepped around a fat slimy tree, Frankie stood directly ahead and tapped gently on the snout of a large purple flower. She spun to safety as it opened and discharged its payload.
“Shit!” Wallace gasped and threw himself to the side with no time to even consider that he might not be able to get back up. He wasn’t quite fast enough.
One of the poisonous white spines of the quill violet jolted into his hip. The bone prevented it from sinking too deep, but it remained stuck there as he tumbled and landed in a crumpled heap when his legs failed him. The other six or seven quills embedded in the trunk of the squat tree.
Frankie reappeared with a long stick. The sergeant struggled to a sitting position as his vision spun and nausea roiled through him. The venom of the quill flower caused severe burning pain, and his legs felt like they had finally given up. He fought to retain consciousness. It wasn’t over yet.
“Chris is next,” Frankie said and stabbed the stick at his face.
Thank goodness, his reflexes were still good. His hand shot up, seemingly of its own accord, and caught the stick. He yanked back on it hard enough to pull the woman forward so she stumbled without jerking it out of her hands. While she fought to regain her balance, he used his arms to roll on his side to face her, grabbed her legs with both arms, and heaved. She fell toward the tree.
Unfortunately, she turned before her head made impact and converted the fall into another roll. Somehow, she gained control of Wallace’s wrist and her legs now wound around his neck and chest in preparation to put him in an armbar. It seemed obvious that she intended to simply break his arm and leave him with exactly one functional limb.
He half-rolled, half-sat, and shifted forward as she pulled on his arm. The motion effectively ruined the tautness she required to execute the move. She released his arm and instead, kicked him in the face, returning the favor of her broken nose. He fell back and actually sneezed on his own blood. Frankie sprang at him and tried to punch him in the solar plexus as she’d done when he was her helpless prisoner, but this time, her aim was off. Instead, her fist crunched with the impact as it struck the metal plate that protected his heart.
“Goddammit!” she spat and her broken hand shuddered.
That gave Wallace an idea. He fumbled back above his head and plucked one of the white spines of the quill violet out of the wood. With a swift, smooth motion, he thrust the business end of it into the totally-unprotected area immediately below Frankie’s ribs and slightly left of center.
“There you go,” he said.
She gasped and staggered back to stare at her chest with bulging eyes as though she literally could not believe that she had been stabbed.
He had ruined her perfect scenario of breaking him, he had prevented her from going on her date with the tall, dark, wealthy stranger, and now this. She convulsed where she stood as the poison, delivered so conveniently close to her heart, entered her bloodstream. Of course, the blood wouldn’t pump for much longer. The quill was lodged securely and the end was inevitable.
“You-you…” she stammered as she clawed at the air and spat a foamy mixture of blood and saliva. “Coward…traitor…weak—fuck…”
Another convulsion threw her back and she landed still in the throes of the violent seizure. Her limbs flailed and thrashed and the awkward motion segued immediately into a death rattle.
Wallace took a deep, weary breath. It would seem he’d gotten the job done again.
His legs, however, had regressed to square one and he shook with pain. He’d taken only a very small dose of the quill violet’s poison, thank God, but it was enough that it might kill him in a few hours. Or it might simply weaken him to the point that everything else in this vicious place would have an easier time accomplishing the same thing.
He needed to do something other than sit there, and preferably something that didn’t involve an attempt to creep all the way back to the wall. Instead, he crawled to the mercs’ base camp. The small sections of it he hadn’t blown to hell might possibly have useful tools of some sort—a med kit or an emergency flare, something like that. It was worth a look.
There was indeed a med kit in one of the tents, although it was very basic. He gave himself some antibiotics and painkillers, which ought to at least blunt the worst of it.
Wallace found nothing in the line of a flare, but interestingly, they had a new-model electronic megaphone. It was worth a try, he decided after a few moments’ consideration. He propped himself into a sitting position again, lifted the thing and set its volume to maximum, then plugged his ears with dirt before he turned it on, just to be safe.
The ringing feedback was still painful despite his precaution. He spoke slowly and clearly into the megaphone, almost sh
ocked at how deafeningly loud his voice sounded. “This is Sergeant Erik Wallace, U.S. Army, serving at the American base. The mission at the mercenary base is complete. There may still be a few stragglers on camouflaged motorbikes, but only a few. I’m severely wounded and request immediate extraction. I repeat, mission complete, extraction needed.”
Overcome by a wave of nausea, pain, and exhaustion, he set the megaphone down and passed out.
Chapter Twenty
His first thought, when Wallace woke up on a portable stretcher in the back of a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, was that he’d never realized how excruciatingly painful exhaustion could be. As his mind cleared, he registered sunlight overhead and blue sky. He hadn’t seen much of the sun or sky for a few days, merely an abundance of deep, varied greens. Now, those hues had muted and faded as they diminished into the distance. He must have regained consciousness shortly after they’d exited the Zoo before reaching the gate at Wall One.
“Don’t move yet,” said a familiar voice. “You’re in pretty bad shape. Fortunately, I wasn’t specifically on duty by the time you finally were done in there.”
“Glassner,” Wallace said. His voice sounded like he’d drunk three-quarters of a bottle of vodka the night before. He hadn’t done that since he was a stupid teenager, but his head seemed to suggest otherwise. “Good to see you again.” He couldn’t actually see the corporal-medic since he faced in the wrong direction, but whatever. His senses registered someone else in the turret as well.
“What happened to your suit?” Glassner asked over the noise of the vehicle’s engine as they pulled up to the gate and people bustled to let them back into civilization.
“Dry cleaner’s,” Wallace said. “I spilled coffee on it.”
“Hilarious,” the corporal replied. “Your legs were obviously not supposed to be left to their own devices again this soon, in any event. Your physical therapist—what’s her name again?—will be pissed.”
“Yeah, I know.” Wallace grimaced. The painkillers were working, at least somewhat, but a nasty, burning pain still radiated from his hip. “I took a quill from one of those flowers. There wasn’t a lot of poison, but I’m gonna need treatment. Sorry.”
“It happens,” Glassner responded. “I’m simply glad you made it.”
The four gates in Wall One each occupied one cardinal direction and were operated independently by one of the four countries which had been involved in building said wall around the Zoo. The British had the west gate, the Chinese the south, the Russians the east, and the USA the north. They passed through the now open northern gate.
A veritable welcoming committee awaited, although some of its members looked more welcoming than others.
“Sit tight,” Glassner said as he shut the engine off. “I’ll deal with the brass for now. I wasn’t technically authorized to head in after you.” Behind him, the man who’d mounted the turret—a young private whom Wallace didn’t recognize—climbed down as well.
They opened the vehicle and pulled Wallace out on his stretcher. He was immediately greeted by a few familiar faces.
“Only one man,” Gunnar began, “could have made that many big-ass explosions even after you were officially considered dead. Good job, Sergeant.”
“Clearly, you have joined the ranks of the undead,” Peppy offered by way of extra commentary. “This means that even when everyone says we have died, there is still the chance that we will not yet be free of the excessive burdens of life.” She frowned. “That depresses me.”
“Oh, my God,” was all Jimmy said and ran up, about to hug him, but paused when she saw how badly beat-to-shit he was out of fear of doing him further injury.
“Watch the graze on my right arm there,” Wallace instructed her. “And the swollen part on my hip. Other than that, my arms and chest are basically fine.”
Jimmy nodded and embraced him slowly and carefully. “They took an aerial photograph of the whole unit after the mercs…you know,” she said. “We thought everyone was dead. They weren’t able to identify you amongst everyone else, but Hall officially said that there was no way you could have survived. He wouldn’t allow us to go in to look for you.”
Somehow, he was not the least bit surprised by that. He’d grown to expect the callous and nonsensical from the administration. But, particularly without his suit, he was still only human. A cold rage settled in his belly.
“Peppy and I seriously planned to steal a JLTV and come in after you,” Gunnar added, “but Fearless Leader sent us on an all-important inspection of the GCC section of Wall Two. Anyway, we decided between us that you’d be, you know, fine.”
The man had made an attempt to joke around again, but Wallace noted that both Gunnar and Peppy were about as serious as he’d ever seen them. They were worried about him, even after they’d seen for themselves that he’d survived.
Lieutenant Danvers pushed through the crowd. “Hey, is that Wallace? Wallace!”
“I’m here, sir,” Wallace croaked. “I can’t walk over to you at the moment.”
The man approached quickly and Glassner—who held a medkit he’d snatched hastily from the infirmary—was at his side once more.
“He was hit by a quill violet, sir,” the medic said to the lieutenant. “Not a large dose but let me give him a stabilizer before you debrief him.”
“Do what you have to do, Corporal,” Danvers responded.
Glassner inserted a small needle in Wallace’s arm. “This might have some side effects—nausea, shaking, dizziness, that sort of thing.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” the sergeant replied. At least they’d developed a treatment of some sort. Chris’s notes on the quill violets must have made their way around the research department first and then to medical.
“First of all,” Danvers began and sighed with a kind of dutiful resignation over what he was about to say, “the mission is not technically complete if there are still stragglers around. Although the good news is that two of the bastards took their motorbike a little too close to the wall and a sentry was able to nail them. It seems, in any event, that you successfully destroyed their ability to pose any serious threat to us.”
“Yes,” Wallace said. “There was another guy who fled on foot. He has a black flame tattoo up his arm and neck and his accent sounded Swedish or Dutch or something. He ran south the last I saw, however, so if he’s trying to escape the Zoo altogether, you might have to deal with the Chinese or the Russians.”
“We’ll get on it,” the lieutenant confirmed. “The second thing is…” He glanced around furtively and lowered his voice. “We all wanted to go in after you. Believe me, Sergeant. But we were ordered to stand down.”
Wallace nodded slightly. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he replied in an equally quiet voice. The exchange was followed by a brief and heavy silence that seemed to indicate that all those present shared a mutual belief that Director Terry Hall was a fucking asshole.
“I can’t believe you lost your suit,” Jimmy lamented. “What happened to it?”
“The mercs unplugged me and stripped it off,” he explained. “I don’t know what happened to the components after that and didn’t see them lying around their base camp. It’s possible that they loaded them into a bike with one guy they sent off to bribe his way through one of the gates or something and then shipped them off to God-knows-where.”
Danvers frowned. “That would be bad. That’s not technology we want in someone else’s hands.”
“I agree, sir,” said Wallace. “I truly do not know, though. They might have been stupid enough to simply toss it in the trash pit. After all, they put their base camp directly below an undefended ridge, for God’s sake.”
“God Himself—or at least His duly-appointed representative,” Peppy interjected, “is coming this way.” She pretended to wipe her nose as she pointed behind and to the side.
Everyone immediately ceased speaking. The group stood at attention as the director approached.
Terry H
all was dressed, as usual, in a high-quality grey suit and had also donned sunglasses against the bright, hot glare of the Saharan noon. Two blank-faced guards accompanied him. He was not seen outside his office much and it seemed almost odd to see him walk around like an average human being. He stopped and loomed over everyone, as tall as he was wide, adjusted his tie, and cracked his knuckles.
“Corporal Glassner,” Hall purred in his deep, soft, slightly gravelly voice.
“Yes, sir?” the medic replied.
“You risked yourself and your young companion there, as well as an expensive piece of equipment,” the director said, “to do something you were specifically ordered not to do. Is that right?”
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” Glassner replied. “The orders were essentially vague. It was clear that we were not to go in after Sergeant Wallace because he was presumed dead. However, I interpreted that to be contingent on…uh, the presumption in question. Therefore, when he broadcast to half of North Africa that he was still alive, I assumed that we would then return to standard operating procedure, which is to leave no man behind.”
Wallace wasn’t a drinker, but he would have to take Glassner to a bar sometime and buy him two drinks. One for rescuing him, and one for saying that to Hall.
“Oh,” was all the director said. He turned to Wallace. “Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You were presumed dead—it seemed a very safe assumption in the circumstances. And given that some of the enemy force were sighted after your apparent demise, this confirmed the understanding that your mission was a failure.”
“That assumption was incorrect,” he replied. “I am, in fact, alive. And the mercenaries have been routed. My unit inflicted heavy losses on them before being overwhelmed, and I was able to eliminate all but a handful of them by the end. That included the destruction of their base and most of their munitions, as well as killing their commander.”
Hall nodded but the sunglasses hid his eyes. “I see. Good job, Sergeant.”
