by Michael Todd
They focused on building an airtight shelter in what little light remained. Kemp had a smallish tarp in her pack, which they strung between two trees and relatively low to the ground. They anchored one corner of the tarp tightly to the earth with a stone covered in blue lichen.
“I don’t suppose you have any sleeping bags or inflatable mattresses in there, do you?” he mused and gestured at the pack.
“No,” Kemp replied curtly. “I have a blanket. That’s it. We’ll sleep in our clothes, and that should be enough. It isn’t likely to get much colder than it is now.”
Chris hoped she was right.
“I have three MRE’s,” Kemp said. “I suggest we split one tonight and save the other two.”
“All right, fine,” he agreed. While he hadn’t eaten much for either breakfast or lunch and had spent all day walking through sand or running through the jungle, he knew she was right. They had to preserve their supplies.
The two companions ate in silence. The forest continued to breathe around them. It was somehow worse in the dark.
“You were going to tell me something back there,” he reminded her, “after I demanded to know what it was you’ve held back from me.”
Kemp nodded. “Yes.” She swallowed a large bite, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “It isn’t only the general reports I need—the data that Dr. Marie collected on the AG and its properties. There’s more I haven’t told you about it. In case you hadn’t already guessed, it’s pretty highly classified shit. The kind every other government or any number of private corporations would want to get their grubby paws on.”
“I’m listening,” he pressed.
The lieutenant sighed. “Before the Day of Locust struck, Dr. Marie was running some tests on some of the mutated fauna produced by the goop,” she explained. “That was before the locusts and whatnot and only a few experimental creatures they were messing around with. What she found was…potentially earth-shattering. I don’t simply mean the agricultural stuff. That was the tip of the iceberg.” She finished eating and put the empty MRE tin back in her pack. Chris noted the wisdom of this. They had no idea how the Zoo might respond to food crumbs or what kind of bacteria might grow.
“These mutated creatures, these quasi-aliens,” Kemp went on, “had a remarkable ability to regenerate their own cells at a rapid rate. It not only made them hard to kill but meant they didn’t always stay dead. Levels of trauma that would be fatal to most organisms would seem to put them down, but they’d essentially come back to life after a short while.”
Chris blinked. “My God...” he breathed.
“That’s why we’ve used the heavier-caliber guns or incendiary weapons,” she said. “Based on what we already knew about AG-mutated creatures, you had to totally destroy them to ensure they didn’t come back. It’d be like if you put a bullet in someone’s brain and all it did was knock them out for a while, so you had to come back and blast their whole skull apart with a shotgun to finish the job. Chunky salsa rule.”
“I’ve actually heard of that,” Chris said, suddenly amused. Some of the gamer geeks he used to hang out with had mentioned it—the idea that any living thing had to be considered dead if sufficient force was applied to reduce its head to the consistency of chunky salsa. It kept the combat in tabletop role-playing games more realistic. “Uh, go on.”
“They could regenerate tissues,” Kemp resumed, “and were highly resistant, maybe even immune, to parasites and infections. Somehow, the goop seemed to have strengthened their immune systems to the point that they were able to repel any invading alien organism.”
“Ironic,” he quipped.
“Shut up and let me finish,” she said tiredly. “There was even something about how they might have been able to distill a serum out of the AG, based on their observations of the aliens’ biochemical processes, which they thought might be able to cure diseases of all kinds, even reverse aging…”
“You believe this?” he asked. “I mean, we’ve already seen that this crap has all sorts of seemingly-impossible properties, but that’s pretty far-fetched.”
“It’s worth the chance,” the lieutenant shot back, and now she was actually annoyed again. “Do you realize what this could mean? Dr. Marie and her team may have unlocked the secret of life itself. Cure for cancer, cure for death, even. The data she has in that base—” Kemp gestured vaguely to the south. “It could save the entire world.”
The scientist sat silently. Based on everything else he’d heard and what he’d seen, it might be possible. It honestly might. Still, he knew better, and he had to call her out on it. The memory of Diaz kicked aside so recklessly still haunted him.
“But you’re not in this for everyone else, are you? You don’t really care about the world.”
Her usual frown deepened and the muscles of her jaw tightened. “No, I don’t,” she admitted, “not really. But I care about myself.” Her chest heaved and her torso spasmed. She clutched her sides as her breathing hitched. The spasms subsided half a minute later. She looked up at him, and there was a trace of pain in her eyes beneath the veneer of stubborn anger. “I’m dying.”
Chapter Eleven
“Dying of what?” Chris demanded.
“A terminal illness,” Kemp said. Her eyes were downcast and something in her demeanor was distant.
That would explain her interest in the medicinal properties of goop serum. Chris was about to ask her for more details when she spoke up again.
“I always wanted to be a doctor. I’d thought about joining the military since I was a kid, but medicine was my passion. My father was an NCO in the Army. He retired and became a security organizer. Thanks to him, I knew about some of this stuff. He knew how much I wanted to help people. So of course, he suggested I join the Army and become a medic. I wasn’t sure about that, though, since I wanted the full experience of being a real doctor.
“‘Well, then,’ he said to me one day, ‘you can still get the best of both worlds. Go to med school and apply to work for MEDCOM.’ I looked into it.”
“What’s MEDCOM again?” he asked. The name was familiar, but he couldn’t remember the details.
She sighed. Even now, she didn’t like to pause to answer questions. “The Civilian Corps of the United States Army Medical Command. MEDCOM,” she said. “Mostly, they treat uniformed service personnel, though as of 2024, Congress okayed us treating civilians who were caught in crossfire. They needed the extra help once we got involved in the civil war in Turkmenistan.”
Chris nodded. That had been a nasty conflict.
“So that’s what I did,” Kemp went on. “I was always good at keeping cool under pressure. Tests, track meets, bullies, I dealt with all of it fine from puberty onwards and I got through medical school with minimal delays.”
He had no trouble believing that. Emma Kemp did not strike him as a loafer or a party girl.
“I wanted to help the people who couldn’t be helped. I joined MEDCOM and accepted work in Turkmenistan, where I volunteered to treat anyone who needed it. Our guys, their civilians, even POWs. It wasn’t easy, but I felt good about it, and I was good at it.”
She paused again. She looked somewhere off to the side before she began again. “That little girl in the picture in my office—the one you were looking at,” she said, “was injured by a stray bullet. Their doctors were busy treating their own fighting men, and same deal with our medics, so I went out there and patched her up. I befriended the family and everything.” The lieutenant’s jaw tightened and she ground her teeth. “I moved out with an Army platoon that had been stationed right beside their village. The day after we left, the insurgents attacked and destroyed the town. Everyone was wiped out, the little girl included.”
Chris leaned back and shook his head sadly. He couldn’t imagine…
“That’s when I decided to drop the med kit and pick up a gun. Because there’s no point in healing people until the sons of bitches who keep hurting them to begin with are put down. So, I
enlisted in the Army.”
The scientist found himself wondering how old she was. He knew the military had age limits on people doing certain things, but couldn’t recall what all they were.
“I moved up the ranks quickly.” She clenched and unclenched her fists. “I was an NCO by the end of my first tour, and I volunteered for officer training. I got in barely under the age cutoff.” She frowned. “But I got in. They packed me off to Fort Benning and sent me back to Turkmenistan as the war was finishing up. That’s when—” She paused, cleared her throat, and seeming to barely avoid another coughing fit.
“That’s when you caught the disease,” Chris surmised.
She nodded, her eyes shining with the suggestion of tears from the irritation caused by the near-explosion of coughing. Or perhaps it was something else.
“I was a second lieutenant at the time, serving under a first. We were on a mission to bring supplies to an isolated village. They were on our side, but they wanted more aid and protection because the insurgents kept harassing them. Dangerous shit, but useful work. Once again, I volunteered to help treat some of the Turkmen civilians while we were short of trained medics. There was some disease raging in the area, a new mutant strain of malaria that broke out after an unusually warm and rainy summer, as it turned out. I was treating a man and he must have been delirious. He flipped out and stabbed me in the chest with a needle I’d used on him.
“I didn’t get the full brunt of the disease, but what I got instead was some kind of interaction effect—latent effects from the malaria strain combined with sarcoidosis, which is an overreaction of the immune system. It almost always hits the lungs hardest. I didn’t see anything like it during my practice, and none of the Army’s doctors have really known what to make of it either. The prognoses I got ranged from three months to two years. And that was about seven months ago. I very likely have less than a year to live, at most.
“All I ever wanted to do was help people. I know life isn’t fair, but this… I was going to go down fighting, try to go out with a blaze of glory before it finished me off. Then I heard rumors about a secret mission in the Sahara and stuff that could alter the course of life on earth, change the world. With my record, I was able to get a position here.”
“I see,” Chris said.
“It’s for me, yes, but it’s also for everyone. I know everybody dies eventually, but I do not like the idea of basically getting murdered in my sleep by something I can’t even fight back against.” She clenched her fists again. “Now, I have the opportunity to fight back against it. And saving myself could also mean saving the world. Dr. Marie’s breakthroughs could lead to the end of war.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We have to try.”
The scientist didn’t respond to her immediately. They sat in silence for some moments but the air between them felt clearer somehow. And yet, she had lied to him about her true motivations and had abandoned her own team to death. The only reason he himself was there now was because he happened to be in the ATV when Kemp had seized it. That was all.
He rose to his feet as he wrestled with the rising anger. “I’m going to take a walk,” he said, and turned around.
“Don’t go far,” was all she said. She had already curled up under the tarp and wrapped herself in half the blanket she’d laid on the ground.
Chris struggled to keep an eye on his surroundings as he wrestled with a dozen thoughts at once. He stayed low to the ground, moved in circles to avoid losing sight of the camp, and climbed over fallen trees to kill time.
Kemp, a woman who had been a total mystery to him not long ago, made far more sense now. Assuming everything she’d told him was true, it was impossible not to respect her, at least begrudgingly, for her goals, accomplishments, and perseverance. But how much would that mean now? What would it mean to the families of Wallace, Miller, Diaz, Connolly, Margheriti, Steadmann, and Gronski? Hell, even Chad. What would it have meant to Chris’s own parents if he had been abandoned too?
And she hadn’t revealed what she was really after. Was there anything else she’d lied about? He kicked a branch and noticed with a sudden cold pang of fear that it struck a thick, moving vine. Slowly, he backed away and walked toward where he was sure he’d left the camp. It occurred to him that he had forgotten to bring a gun with him. Brilliant.
He stepped over a small ridge and froze in place. A familiar burbling trickle reached his ears. There was a stream there. Running water, like you’d find in any normal forest. It was small, and the rush of its flow was faint enough that it had blended in with the other sounds of the jungle, but there it was.
“My God,” he breathed. The waters sparkled faintly in what little moonlight penetrated the canopy. This place had changed the entire landscape. The goop truly was a terraforming agent of astonishing power. If it could create an entirely new ecosystem with a functional hydrology in a matter of weeks, perhaps it really could cure obscure and aggressive diseases, as well. If only they still had Dr. Marie’s notes—
Chris looked up. Standing beside the stream, about twelve feet away from him, was a locust.
He tensed immediately and cut off a small sound that threatened to burst from his throat. Nevertheless, the creature heard him. As he took a step back against a tree behind him, it hopped in place at a slight angle and its bulging eyes stared directly at him. It lifted its machete-like forelimbs, waved them in some primitive display, and opened its gaping, fang-filled maw and hissed.
Muscle memory and reflexes honed over the last two years of intensive martial arts training saved him. He rolled aside. The green mass of the creature’s body barely missed him and slammed into the tree.
“Shit!” Chris gasped as he sprang to his feet and tried to assess exactly where the locust was. There—it had already half-recovered and moved around the tree to the side. It moved slower, though, and the distance was too short for another full-strength charge. He closed the distance without thinking.
The locust was unprepared for its prey to actually move closer to it. It blundered forward and swung a foreleg at the man.
He pivoted aside. Fluid, circular motions lay at the heart of Hapkido, and he caught the creature’s forelimb, repositioned himself, and used the beast’s own movement against it. Despite its size and weight, it flipped easily. The force of its own body broke the limb, which remained in Chris’s hands as the rest of it spun away. It uttered a feeble half-hiss, half-shriek, and Chris swung it around to slam its head against the tree.
From his prior action, the scientist moved immediately into a simple roundhouse kick to the creature’s head which connected with the left eye. The locust hissed again, and Chris kicked its head against the tree and delivered a resounding punch. The head cracked and flattened, and its blood flowed down the slimy trunk. It slumped and went still.
A hypnotic state of calm had taken over while he fought the creature. Now, normality returned, and he shuddered and gasped, almost hyperventilating. This thing had almost killed him, but instead, he had killed it. He had defeated one of these monsters in hand-to-hand combat.
“Fuck,” he swore under his breath. “Jesus Christ…”
Chris swelled with a sudden sense of pride and hurried toward the camp. He remembered his parents haranguing him for studying a Korean style instead of Taijiquan or Northern Shaolin. They might modify their opinion of Hapkido if they knew that it had saved their son’s life. Hah!
Then again, the martial arts were much alike, in essence. They all had their specialties and their focuses, but all were based on the same principles. The manipulation of inertia, the direction or re-direction of force, weak spots, strong spots, and pressure points. It even worked on giant alien bugs.
After a brief moment of slight panic that he might be lost, Chris sighted the top of Kemp’s tarp. He climbed into the small low-lying hollow and checked to see if she was still awake. He wouldn’t have minded boasting to her over his recent success.
Her gentle snores wafted out of the m
akeshift tent and she was still. The bragging would have to wait. He climbed in beside her and wrapped himself in the remaining half of the blanket.
“All right then,” he said under his breath. “Tomorrow should be interesting.”
Chapter Twelve
Chris awoke feeling a definite discomfort in his side, but peacefully dreamy and well-rested. His back was warm, and someone’s arm was draped over him.
“Whuh?” he muttered as he blinked and stretched.
The arm retracted and a woman’s voice made a throaty sigh. He looked over his shoulder.
Kemp was spooning him but started to wake up now that he had awoken and dislodged her. He had no memory of this happening so it must have occurred reflexively during the night as a way to keep warm in the clammy chill of early morning. He blushed and crawled into a sitting position.
The lieutenant did the same. She seemed to have woken up far more quickly than he had, probably because she’d slept a bit longer. Plus, military types seemed to be good at rousing themselves post-haste.
She cleared her throat. By the way she avoided looking at him, he could tell she was slightly embarrassed. The vibe was all wrong. She sat for a moment in silence, rubbed her eyes, and did a couple basic stretches.
“It looks like it’s about seven or eight,” Chris said. “So at least we got a decent night’s sleep this time around. I’m pretty sure neither of us was properly rested for yesterday.”
“I don’t need much sleep to function,” Kemp muttered, “but you’re right. We’re lucky in a way. But waking up earlier would have been better. We might have had an extra hour of daylight.”
That was one way of looking at it.
Chris excused himself to the men’s room, which in this case lay beyond the nearest large tree. Meanwhile, Kemp immediately set to disassembling their tiny excuse for a camp. He reflected on everything that had happened yesterday as he finished urinating—and, indeed, everything that had happened this whole past week that had led him to North Africa. He needed to talk to Kemp about the course of action each of them would take from there on.
