by Michael Todd
He turned his gaze toward a side window and gaped at the impossibility unfolding before them. A piece of the greenery had detached itself from the rest of the forest and it flew directly toward them. The creature certainly looked like an insect, but its size was massive. He’d have expected this in a science fiction film, not approaching their vehicle at attack speed.
What had he gotten himself into?
The pilot flipped switches and engaged in defensive maneuvers. That, at least, was what Chris assumed as the man jerked the gunship in all directions. They ascended and descended at speeds and angles that gave the doctor some rather keen insights into the condition of motion sickness. His ass scraped painfully against his seat as he almost fell out of it, and his seatbelt cut into his chest. He still clutched the bar in a death-grip and his knuckles were the color of ivory.
“Jesus!” he gasped. The green thing buzzed right past the window. It moved too quickly to get a good look at its anatomy, but it was the size of a Doberman. The pilot pulled a hard right and Chris clamped his mouth shut to keep the contents of his digestive tract from leaping out his throat to splatter on the opposite wall of the chopper.
A flash of green near the rear caught his eye, followed by the shrieking of metal that resembled a rotary saw buzzing into a sheet of steel. The creature rocketed out to the side of them, only to swoop around in midair for another pass.
Chris’ eyes bulged and his breath became even faster. “That thing can eat through metal? Did it hit the rotor? How—”
“Gunner, shoot it down!” the pilot barked.
The soldier nodded. “Finally,” he sighed.
The ammo feed whirred as the turret powered up, and the man pivoted the weapon to train on their attacker. For a moment, the memory of the turrets from Star Wars flashed through his mind. The size, the axis, all of it hinted at a futuristic design.
The analogy proved apt as the gun roared to life. Its voice was deafening in the enclosed space as it spat a stream of red tracer rounds that shone like laser bolts alongside the almost-invisible regular bullets. Shell casings clanked noisily to the gunship’s floor. The green assailant dodged to the side. Down below, the dunes exploded in billowing fountains of sand.
Chris held his hands over his ears and opened his mouth to equalize the pressure. He saw the pilot signal the gunner with a complicated hand gesture. The other man nodded.
The helicopter slowed and wove around in a broad circle. Its tail swung behind them, and the scientist groaned at the sudden sense of vertigo. He could barely make the creature out through the window. This time, it headed directly for them and he had a real opportunity to observe that it did look like a locust, although not quite. The insect swooped toward them at an oblique angle.
“Here we go,” the gunner said. He led the target and fired. This time, the tracers carved through empty air for only a second. The attacker had no time to alter its course. It exploded, shrieked, and burned as it was knocked out of its trajectory by the impact from the shells. The creature fell like a flaring green comet.
The base sat half a mile beyond the point of impact. They were almost there. Chris allowed himself to breathe again for the first time in what felt like hours.
“This time,” the gunner said, “CO came out after I’d snuck into the ship, asked what the hell was going on, and saw her heels resting on my shoulders and her tits swaying in the breeze. Then he said, ‘Good job, son.’”
“Blue balls no more,” Chris gasped. His heart still pounded, but now, he felt more than a little giddy. They’d made it. “What should I call you?” he gasped as he worked to regain control of his breathing.
“Gunnar,” the gunner said.
“Okay, but do you have an actual name?” Chris still wasn’t sure what to make of this guy. At least he was talented where it mattered.
“Gunnar,” he said again. “G-U-N-N-A-R,” he spelled it out slowly, emphasizing each letter. “It’s an old Swedish name.”
The doctor blushed faintly. “Oh, gotcha,” he stammered. “That’s…uhh, ironic, I guess.”
“Nominative determinism,” Gunnar went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Ever heard of that?”
“No,” Chris replied. “I know that determinism is the belief that—”
“People’s destinies are determined by their names.” The man drew again on his cigarette. He was already back to calm and almost bored. “My parents must have wanted me to shoot things. I hope they’re proud.”
“I’d say they ought to be.” It occurred to Chris that he did not know what his own name actually meant. Maybe he’d find out if he lived through this bizarre excursion. “What was that thing? You called it a locust, but I’m pretty sure bugs don’t get that big.” He swallowed and wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.
Gunnar smiled slowly and without much actual humor. What little there may have been was jet-black. “They do here,” he said. “Welcome to the Zoo.”
Chapter Two
The gunship landed peacefully on the helipad, and Chris was thankful for that, at least. The scene around them at base camp, though, was anything but peaceful. He drew a deep breath and adjusted his tie before he stepped out into the heat, wind, dust, and noise. It was total chaos.
Time seemed to slow as he took in the environment. Smoldering flares blazed around the helipad and crowds of men and women tramped past. Haphazard stacks of crates and barrels lay in what appeared to be disorganized piles. Clouds of brownish dust and sand whirled around the chopper. The buildings held the austere, officious design only a military construction could pull off. The construction was hasty, as evidenced by the trailers and tents that adjoined the buildings. Jeeps, trucks, and glorified golf-carts buzzed to and fro. There had to be at least five hundred people there. How was he supposed to navigate this mess?
And beyond it all, the impossible forest the pilot had called the Zoo reared up beyond Wall One. Were it not for the creature that had attacked, Chris would still be confused over his being called here. Now, it made only too much sense. Insects bred and reproduced at a devastating rate. There would be more, perhaps whole swarms. Gunnar had said that only the one had gotten past the flamethrowers. How many more had come? How many more would rise to try again? Chris shuddered at the thought.
A deep voice broke him out of his trance. “See you around,” Gunnar said from behind. The man ground a cigarette into the earth with his heel, his face an impassive mask. He paused. “You ain’t a virgin no longer. No, sir.” He trailed off and walked away.
The pilot clamped a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Good luck,” he said. “Pay no attention to how some of these guys might act. The type of situation we dealing with is exactly the kind of shit where a scientist is good to have around. Pay attention to your surroundings, do as you’re told, and you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks.” Chris ran a hand nervously through his hair again. “Do you know where I can find Dr. Kemp? Or…uh, Lt. Kemp. Both.” He coughed. “Same person, I mean.” Smooth. Very smooth.
“No idea,” the pilot replied as he unfastened his helmet. “Like I said, Good luck.” He turned and inspected the tail of his chopper. A nasty, ragged gash had been clawed into the metal. It stopped barely short of the rear propeller. Chris gaped. The locust had done that to a military aircraft?
The scientist turned. “All right, then…” he said to himself and ventured deeper into the facility.
An important-looking man in desert fatigues, maybe a sergeant or a lieutenant, stood talking to another man in a civilian suit.
“Excuse me,” Chris called as he approached, “could you tell me where I can find Lt. Dr. Kemp?”
The officer glanced at him, glared, and waved vaguely toward the central building. He resumed his spiel to the suited man.
Chris proceeded toward said building and dodged both humans and equipment along the way. His mind wandered as he took in the sheer scope of the operation. He felt slightly better. At least he wasn’t strapped into a flying sardi
ne can anymore.
Fantasy helped to calm his mind as he passed through the base. He imagined Jackie Chan leaping onto the forklift’s rising platform and onto a stack of crates. Half the bad guys would fall on their asses trying to catch him. He’d swing onto a cable and grab a worker’s hard hat or some other random object to use as a shield. Then he’d do something ridiculously dangerous like backflipping over two guys welding some poles together and pause to roundhouse kick a guy who—
“Watch it!” someone grunted and shoved Chris aside. The scientist blinked in surprise at the burly soldier. Another similar man regarded him with a sneer and watched from where he leaned against a stack of aluminum boxes with US ARMY stenciled onto them.
“Can you tell me where I can find Lt. Dr. Kemp?” he asked, despite that he didn’t particularly want to talk to this individual.
He pointed with his massive chin. “Have fun,” he jeered.
Chris followed the direction of the curt motion to an open space near a pair of tents near the central building. A tall woman with a short brown braid directed a group of men vigorously. He could hear her voice but not her words. Her lean muscular arms made powerful, efficient motions in time with her orders.
“Okay, then,” he said. He hadn’t expected Dr. Kemp to be a woman. Not that it mattered, of course, so long as she could explain to him what was going on in this godforsaken place.
The last of the men around her saluted and set off on whatever mission she’d given them. She turned toward Chris as he approached her. The woman appeared to be in her mid-thirties and was stern but attractive. Her eyes glittered like hard blue stones.
“I’m Dr. Christopher Lin.” He extended his hand. “I assume you’re Dr. Kemp?”
“First Lieutenant Doctor Emma Kemp,” she stated. Her voice was pleasant, but her tone was harsh. She did not offer her hand. “We’ve no time for formalities, Doctor Lin. Follow me.”
Chris retracted his hand. Kemp had already started toward the central building and he hurried behind her. Pride flared as the shock over her brusqueness wore off. He gritted his teeth and clenched his hands. After all the unanswered questions he’d stewed over since the government had tapped him for this little escapade, and now she couldn’t even be bothered to—
“Watch it!” Kemp barked at a group of men near a large caged enclosure.
Chris froze in mid-stride and gasped sharply. The men wrangled one of the locusts. Two prodded at it with poles and another stood ready with, oddly enough, a fire extinguisher. The fourth held a rifle. The creature reared up and flailed its blade-like limbs. All four men looked frightened.
“Spray it again!” Kemp ordered. She moved closer but kept a safe distance with Chris behind her. “You! Get directly in front of it. They see better to the sides.”
The poles each had a large noose on their end to loop around the creature. The man at the rear had successfully lassoed one of the creature’s hind legs and abdomen.
The man with the extinguisher obeyed the doctor’s orders immediately. The white foam struck the locust’s back and immobilized its wings, which it had tried to expand to take flight. It released an awful sound somewhere between a buzz and a shriek. The creature’s mouth was different from the typical insect. This one had actual jaws and possibly fangs, although it was too difficult to tell for sure with the amount of thrashing. Its antennae almost looked like horns.
The specimen was comparable to the one that had attacked the helicopter. Chris’ eyes widened as he looked beyond to the enclosure. Nearly a dozen more of the monsters buzzed angrily within. He gulped and hoped the cage was made of stronger material than the chopper and electrified for good measure.
Kemp nodded her approval as the men roped more of the beast’s legs and dragged it toward the enclosure’s entry point. She resumed her trek toward the command building and motioned for Chris to follow.
“Hey!” He jogged to keep up. “I want some answers here. Nobody’s told me a goddamn thing yet. How do you expect—”
She spun suddenly to face him, and asked, “What’s your experience in the field?”
“Well,” he began, “most of my research has been lab-based, but I did do an internship in Russia, where—”
“Have you ever fired a gun?”
It took him a second to register the new question. “A paintball gun once in high school,” he half-joked, “but I didn’t hit anyth—”
“What’s the cure for a bite from Hapalochlaena lunulata?” Now, she was half-walking sideways toward the building once again.
“The greater blue-ringed octopus?” he stammered as he continued to follow her. “There is no antivenom, but with pressure immobilization and artificial respiration most victims either overcome the tetrodotoxin themselves or die within—”
Kemp broke into a full, brisk walk and outpaced him again. They were almost at the central structure now.
Chris’s temper broke. Concurrently, he also broke into a run. This time, he bolted ahead of her and blocked off her path. “Okay, stop right there,” his said, his voice barely short of a yell. “Do you treat your soldiers like this on life-threatening missions? How the hell am I supposed to help you if you keep jerking me around? If you called me here, you need me. That means you owe me some answers. Or did you simply hope I would magically come up with some solution for you without any data to work with whatsoever?”
The lieutenant tensed and her mouth hardened into a flat line. She turned and began to move away. Chris laid his hand slowly on her shoulder. He knew better than to provoke a trained soldier. He might have received martial arts training, but he wasn’t about to risk his health so carelessly.
Her gaze flashed to his hand and she tensed but didn’t attack. He braced himself as she fixed him with her icy stare. Either he would get his answers, or he would find himself in a living hell. Possibly both. He was about to find out.
“Look out!” someone shouted.
Both their heads swiveled. The locust near the enclosure had broken loose from the four men and hobbled and hopped with an odd loping gait. Its wings were still too gummed to fly but that didn’t keep it from barreling forward at inhuman speeds.
“Get down!” Kemp barked. Chris was plastered onto his back in an instant. He grunted as the wind rushed from his lungs. The lieutenant had drawn both guns from her sides and fired the first to unleash a blazing projectile at the locust’s left side. The flare was too slow. The locust reacted instantly to the flame, however, and hopped ten feet to the right to crash into a stack of barrels. It shrieked as it tried to break free of the slippery pile.
“Waste it!” Kemp bellowed and opened fire with her other sidearm, a semiautomatic pistol. Her first shot popped the insect’s eye in a spray of green. The rifleman followed suit, and the locust screeched in pain as the roaring crossfire tore it to pieces. Sparks and emerald blood geysered over the fallen barrels.
After emptying several clips, silence finally fell over the base. What little remained of the monstrosity twitched a leg. The four wranglers ran over to secure the carcass.
Chris stared wide-eyed at the remains, then up at Kemp’s stark expression. She flicked the safety on and holstered her weapons. A hint of a smirk pulled at the corners of her lips.
“You were saying?” she asked.
He propped himself up on an elbow and rose to his feet. “I was saying that I had some questions.” He dusted himself off. “Really, though, they’re all variations on one big question.” He spoke slowly, looking straight at the woman. “What the hell is going on here?”
Chapter Three
Kemp opened the door to her office. The building’s interior felt almost glacial compared to the heatwave in the desert. “Step inside,” she instructed.
Chris obeyed and she shut the door behind them. The office was sparsely furnished with no signs of any form of decoration to differentiate the space from its spartan purpose. One solitary item hung on each of the side walls. To the left, a framed diploma proclaimed that Em
ma Kemp was a medical doctor. To the right, an unadorned case displayed the medals she had earned and her certification as a first lieutenant in the United States Army. The only object that could be considered a personal effect was a framed photograph in the corner of a small bookshelf behind her desk showing a much younger Kemp smiling as she crouched cheek-to-cheek with a small child of indeterminate sex.
Chris pulled up a folding metal chair. “Do I get the privilege of an actual briefing now?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied curtly as she seated herself and pivoted her chair to block the photo. She raised her hands and wrapped one over a fist and planted her chin on top. “Dr. Lin, what do you know about the Missile? You know which one I mean.”
The scientist blinked in surprise. “Just common knowledge. In 2025, something entered the Earth’s atmosphere and was taken down. There was a global uproar, fingers were pointed, and it all just died down.”
Kemp stared at him expectantly.
He sighed. “The thing was sighted in time to intercept it. If I recall correctly, NASA only had a few months to come up with a plan, and of course, we were rushing against the other major powers to be the ones to either grab or destroy it. It seems to have been damaged or it might have hit us too fast for us to react. NASA deployed a gravity snag and caught it about halfway between Earth and the moon.”
“Indeed. As you know, a gravity snag involves releasing a super-compressed bolus of various elements with enough mass density to generate a small gravitational field. That field was designed to slow the projectile and pull it off course. A combination of magnetized liquid metal and conventional snares were used to seize control of the object. I assume you recall the Chinese and Russian reactions to the device.”
Chris nodded. “Of course, the government was all hush-hush about it, which only created a stronger media firestorm, with all the usual conspiracy theories floating around. Everyone thought it was aliens. In the photo that was leaked, it looked nothing like any technology we’d seen on Earth. Every government official’s story was that some other government made the thing. But some of the theories people came up with were so ridiculous that civilians began to laugh it off. Theories like it was the palanquin of an extraterrestrial god come to bless us, that sort of thing. A couple of so-called-experts said it was technology from the future that slipped through a quantum loophole or some shit. People stopped paying much attention after that.” He shrugged. “That’s honestly all I know.”
