by Michael Todd
“Much like your American democracy, there ain’t no point in playing in a rigged system.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” the lawyer shot back.
“It’s a rigged system. Most people don’t really care and it’s filled with angry celebrities?” Manny slapped his forehead and shook his head. “I was thinking about wrestling. WWE, right? I mean, it can’t be real, can it, mate? But then again, I’ve seen some crazy moves! Learned a few when I worked there part-time.”
“What the fuck are you even going on about?” Bradley demanded but he remained beyond the other man’s reach. Still, Ava recognized this attitude. When he thought he’d won, he liked to make sure the loser knew it. When she first started at the EPA, it had taken her only a few disagreements with her boss to learn it was better not to argue. The man always got his way.
“We came in from that way,” Chandler said and gestured with his gun in what seemed to be a random direction.
Bradley nodded. Dervin took a few steps away from the tree he’d leaned on. He winced but forced a grin back onto his face. Good, Ava thought. The sprain wasn’t bad.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” the lawyer said.
Chandler looked at Manny.
The pilot scratched his chin and said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, going is the worst thing to do.”
“So, what—you’ll simply to stay here and wait for those things to come and eat you?” Bradley asked incredulously.
“It’s better than walking onto their dinner plate, mate. That’s something I learned from the saltwater crocodile. See, the crocodile doesn’t hunt, not really. He lets things come to him.”
“Are you trying to be the next Steve-fucking-Erwin? The next fucking Crocodile Dundee, is that it?” Bradley spoke so loudly, it set birds still hidden in the jungle to squawking. “For fuck’s sake, you know he’s dead, right? Killed by a manta-ray to the heart like a fucking pussy.”
“I never heard of him, but he sounds like a right ripper,” Manny said, his face—for once—completely serious. “Are you sure you have the name, right?”
“This is fucking ridiculous.” Her boss clenched his fists. “Have fun being eaten by a bug, you piece of shit.”
“I’ve yet to see a dung beetle but your point is taken, mate. You all have a nice romp through the bush. I have some work to do. A pilot’s job isn’t over when the helicopter lands, not at all.”
“You didn’t land, you fucking crashed!” Bradley yelled with such vitriol it sent the hidden flock of birds into startled flight.
They exploded from the top of the canopy and screeched volubly. It was a strangely discordant call like each bird sang a different note but none of them harmonized. It filled Ava with dread, a reminder that the Zoo wasn’t natural.
Part of her wanted to stay with Manny. He seemed so confident and unflappable despite them being in this crazy situation, but the birds had set her off. Surely, other creatures would converge on the crash site. The briefing had listed all kinds of strange animals, many of them dangerous. And then, of course, there could be wholly unimagined monsters hiding out there too.
No, it was better to go with Bradley and get out of there as quickly as possible.
Ava spared a glance at the pilot before she followed the other three men into the jungle. The Australian had his hands on his hips and the pinky on his left hand tapped along to a song he whistled. He turned to her, still smiling, and winked before he started off toward the helicopter as if it hadn’t just crashed and caught alight. He whistled the entire time.
Who was this guy? And was she a fool to leave him?
Chapter Three
Ava was last in the marching order, not that she minded.
Chandler went first, his gun raised and his trigger finger at rest alongside the barrel, immediately above the trigger. He moved like a panther and at times, Ava was sure he had vanished into the jungle. Then, he’d reappear and tell them to change direction and they’d move on again.
Dervin was second. Bradley had insisted that he walk behind Chandler, although she had no idea why. From what she’ seen so far, it seemed likely that her boss wanted Dervin in front of him so he could insult the wounded man as he stumbled along.
Bradley was next. He’d already shucked his sports coat and now worked to loosen his tie. He cursed constantly under his breath, and his rage seemed to be split equally between the jungle and Manny.
Ava shared his frustration. The going was hard. She had some help in that she could watch the other three men stumble and trip their way through the thick plants and avoid their pitfalls, but it was still exhausting. The humidity was oppressive, and she wanted to remove her jacket, but she didn’t because of how sweaty she was. She couldn’t stand the thought of Bradley leering at her. A skirt was—of course—a poor choice, and her heels had been lost to an unseen pool of thick muck some way back. Fortunately, she’d packed a pair of nurse shoes—slippers, basically. Not an ideal choice for a deadly jungle but better than bare feet. She dreaded the moment that her boss noticed and reprimanded her for them. She’d tied her hair up too. Thankfully, the man hadn’t insulted her for the ponytail like he did at the office.
“This is ridiculous. Why the fuck is there mud in the God damn desert?” Bradley said as he paused to wipe sweat from his brow and flick it in Ava’ direction. She told herself it had to be an accident.
“It’s all the leaves and stuff, sir. They break down and make all this—” Dervin stumbled at that moment and landed hard although he tried to catch himself with both hands. “Mud,” he finished miserably. Now that his boss no longer responded to his jokes, he had grown disconsolate.
“Well, ain’t it nice to have a God damn soil specialist with us. And here I thought you were simply a kiss-ass. You should’ve stayed with Jack-fucking-Mann. You two could have started a nature show.”
The other man laughed weakly.
Bradley chuckled ruefully at his own joke, wiped his brow again, and stopped walking. He straightened, stretched, and pulled a flask from his back pocket.
“Where did you get that?” Ava asked even though she knew.
“That fat fuck Billings, duh,” he replied and grimaced as he wiped the brown liquid from the side of his mouth. “Whiskey. Gross. Still, it’s better than nothing.”
“Would you mind if I had a sip?” Dervin asked and his shit-eating grin had returned. He nodded toward his swollen foot.
“I would give you some if I could, Dervin, but there’s only a sip left. Hardly worth sharing.” He shook the flask back and forth. The other man nodded and kept going.
“Is this cocktail hour?” Chandler said as he stepped from the darkness and surprised Ava. She jumped and her boss snickered.
“I was telling Dervin here that it’s time we got moving,” Bradley said smoothly.
“Right…well, he’s right,” the soldier said and aimed his gun ahead of them. “We have a lot of ground to cover if we want to make it out of here before dark.”
“You heard the man. Let’s go.” Bradley shoved Dervin on the shoulder. He glanced at Ava. “Nice fucking shoes, by the way. White might’ve been a shitty choice, though.”
Ava looked down, even though she knew what she’d see. Her shoes were a mess, equal parts muddy brown and grass-stained green. She sighed and tried to tell herself she didn’t care. She wished she believed it.
As they once again forced their way through the jungle, she wondered why she had ever taken this job. She’d wanted to make a difference—to help people—but didn’t know how anyone could consider working for Bradley helpful at all. He was so cruel. How he landed a job working to protect the environment baffled her. She had thought she’d help corporations clean their factories up, help farmers with more sustainable irrigation, stuff like that, but he wasn’t interested in any of that. He didn’t seem to care about anything. Ava had thought, at first, that maybe working in a less-than-perfect system had made the man jaded. Now, however, she wondere
d if anything made him happy. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the only time she could think of when he looked happy was when he was putting others down. Even there in the jungle, he didn’t stop.
“Fuck, Dervin, do you have to grab every God damn branch we pass? Man up and grow a pair. Who knows, maybe the jungle queen back there will let you have a ride when I’m done with her.” Bradley glanced back at Ava. There was no shame in his eyes. It was like he thought women actually enjoyed this shit.
If she didn’t need this job so much, if her mom and grandma hadn’t cheered when she’d told them she had it, maybe she’d say something. She had a career to think about, though, and despite everything else, it was still a man’s world. And besides, in the office when other people were around, he wasn’t that bad. Sure, he commented on her clothes every single day. But everyone hated their boss, right? Maybe she should say something anyway. She could always blame it on the situation later. Men like him liked to imagine women losing their minds, so it might not hurt her career too much—
“Bradley, watch out!” she shouted.
He stopped barely in time. He’d walked with his head turned behind him, no doubt so he could see down her shirt.
“Ava, I know you’re not used to situations like this, but it’s Mister Bradley. Got it? Don’t mistake me for one of your little buddies. Now, what the fuck was so important that you needed to stop this whole fucking procession?”
“Sir, that branch you almost bumped into,” Ava said. She’d wanted to say crashed into with your dumb fucking head while you were looking at my gross sweaty boobs, but she didn’t.
“What about it?” he demanded and peered at it like it was a flaming sack of dog poop some kid had dumped on his front porch. Ava had a feeling he would be a target for all the neighborhood kids.
“It’s an, um…poison needle plant? Something like that.” Ava cursed herself, wishing she’d paid more attention to the briefing data, but every time she’d tried to read it, he had insulted her. She should have ignored him and studied it more closely. At the time, she’d been worried that his opinion of her might affect her career, but now, she was concerned her opinion of him might get her killed. “I read about it in the packet. That purple flower on the end of the branch? It’s filled with quills. I think it said that even one can be deadly, but if it gets you with the whole payload, it’s a lot quicker…and less painful.”
“Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, I wasn’t going anywhere near those needles. So you can put your panties back on and calm the fuck down,” he snorted, grabbed the branch, and used it to swing himself beneath it.
The flower on the end of the branch puckered and burst to spray quills that rocketed like darts into nearby trees, the mud, and Dervin’s neck.
“Sir?” the man managed before he collapsed with his hand to his neck.
“No, don’t touch the quills!” Ava shouted and ran toward him.
Bradley stood frozen on the other side of the branch, his jaw agape.
Chandler rushed toward them. “He needs to keep moving. We can’t stay here.”
“He’ll die!” Ava said and unbidden tears rose to her eyes and cascaded down her face to mix with her sweat. Her mind raced. There had to be something she could do. “The whiskey! Mr. Bradley, bring me the whiskey!”
“There wasn’t anything about whiskey in the briefing,” Chandler said.
“Some inflammation can be stopped by alcohol, and if it’s a bacterial agent, it might stop it completely. It’s a long shot but it might work. Mr. Bradley—the whiskey, please!”
He seemed to break from his trance, took a step forward, then thought better of it. He fumbled in his pocket and retrieved the flask, which he tossed to Ava.
She caught it, unscrewed the lid, and upended it on the wounded man’s neck. “Hold on Dervin—”
Nothing came out. She peered into the flask but it was empty. She shook it upside down in an effort to get something—anything—out for Dervin’s wound but there was nothing.
“It’s empty?” she asked incredulously.
“Keep your voice down,” Chandler hissed.
“It has been for a while,” Bradley said, his voice hollow.
“But why did you show it to Dervin? Why? He’ll die because of you.”
The wounded man nodded, his breathing labored. Already, purplish froth had formed at the corners of his mouth. He simply nodded his head like he was laughing at some joke no one thought was funny but him. The motions grew more violent until it sounded like he gagged and more of the purplish foam came out of his throat before he fell still.
“He’s dead,” Ava said, her hand on his pulse. “He’s dead and it’s your fault.”
For the first time ever, she saw regret in Bradley’s eyes. But in an instant, it was gone like a bead of dew crushed beneath a boot.
“Billings had already drunk half of it when I took it from him. The fucker tried to drink it even though he wouldn’t be around to appreciate it. He probably spilled enough on his fucking beige suit to save Dervin.”
Her eyes went wide. Billings hadn’t been dead when her boss had checked him. But, like Dervin, he was now dead. And, like Dervin, it was Bradley’s fault.
Rage grew inside her like a white-hot coal hungry for fuel, but before she could speak, Chandler interrupted.
“Both of you, shut up!” he said and raised his voice even louder than Bradley’s had been. “We’re not alone. We need to keep moving.”
“What the fuck do you mean, we’re not alone? Has that Australian piece of shit followed us?” Bradley asked.
Chandler remained silent and simply pointed deep into the jungle.
Ava only had time to see a pair of wide, lifeless pupils—shark eyes, she thought—before they closed and vanished with a rustle of branches.
“What the fuck was that?” her boss hissed.
“I don’t know exactly, but they’ve followed us for a while.” Chandler cracked his neck. “We need to get out of here, now.”
“What about Dervin?” Ava said.
“Who gives a fuck?” Bradley said. “He’s dead.”
Something crashed in the brush on the opposite side from where Ava had seen the shark eyes. “That thing had time to get all the way over there?” she said.
“No. They’re not that fast.”
“Then what the fuck does that mean?” her boss demanded, his voice shaky.
“It means they are working together. There are six, I think. They’re trying to surround us.”
“So, what the fuck are you waiting for? Shoot the little fuckers!”
“No,” Chandler said as he checked his ammunition. “We’ll make a run for it.”
Chapter Four
Ava crashed through the undergrowth. Branches tore at her skin and vines grabbed at her feet, but she kept moving. She had to keep moving.
“They’re getting closer,” Bradley shouted. He’d run ahead, which forced Chandler to slow down so Ava could keep up.
She looked behind her. There were more than one, and they definitely were closer.
They stuck to the undergrowth so she never managed a good look at one, but what she did see terrified her. Hooked claws, muscled flanks, too many rows of serrated teeth, and those eyes—those horrible, flat eyes. Shark’s eyes, she was sure of that. Eyes that looked for blood. Those eyes kept her moving.
“Come on,” the soldier said to her and grunted between breaths. He did better than either of them, though even he sweated as much as they did. They’d run for what seemed like forever and at a pace far more pressing than anything she had ever done on the treadmill.
“Can’t you shoot the fucking things?” Bradley yelled. He tripped over a dead branch and fell but scrambled to his feet before Ava could catch up to him. She couldn’t believe it, but it seemed that his daily racquetball practice really did keep him in good shape. Either that or he had a lot of experience in falling and getting up.
“We need a clearing, otherwise
they’ll flank us,” Chandler said.
She didn’t know how the two of them could even talk. Her heart hammered in her chest and her sides burned from the non-stop sprint. She had a hundred tiny tears in her jacket. Each one was a reminder of how deadly the Zoo could be and how easily it had killed Dervin.
“I can’t go much farther,” she wheezed. She really couldn’t, not without falling and being ripped to pieces by those…those monsters. But she had to. Despite the struggle, she continued to run and pushed branches aside without caution.
Chandler yelled at them to stop.
“Backs to the stump—backs to the fucking stump!” he commanded.
They stood in a tiny clearing, much smaller than the one in which they’d left the helicopter. At the center was a massive tree stump, about eight feet tall and as thick as a redwood. The trunk of the fallen tree pointed off in one direction. Ava wondered how long it would take for this bizarre ecosystem to fill in this tiny hole. Minutes seemed a fair guess.
“Do you know how to handle one of these things?” Chandler asked as he drew a pistol and an extra magazine. He thrust them both into Bradley’s hands.
“I’m a card-carrying member of the NRA,” the man said as he snatched the pistol and pocketed the ammo.
“Good,” the other man said and leaned back against the stump.
Ava stood between them with Chandler to her left and Bradley to her right. To the soldier’s left was the massive tree trunk that had fallen. The stump was so thick that another two or three people could have fit beside Bradley before they’d touch the fallen trunk.
“What the fuck do we do now?” her boss asked.
“Whatever happens, don’t let them separate us,” Chandler said.
“Separate us? Do you really think a bunch of animals—”
At a low growl—almost a purr—Chandler screamed and dropped to the ground.
Ava had time to see vertical gashes across the man’s face before he tucked and rolled and fired a burst from his assault rifle directly above their heads.
