by Michael Todd
Wallace cursed mentally. “Move out,” he said. “Faster. And maintain tighter formation. Keep an eye on the man beside you, especially when we pass a branch in the tunnels or a large hole of any kind.”
They moved on again, now at a trot rather than a standard march, and Wallace had to jog to reach the middle. He came up behind Hall’s broad, dark form when someone else screamed near the front of the column.
“Goddammit!” Wallace said. “Keep moving.”
“Left?” asked the female soldier who was one of the two on point. “Something pulled him to the right.”
“Left,” he agreed. “Go.”
“What the hell is this, Sergeant?” Hall asked, his voice rough with frustration.
“I’m not exactly sure, sir,” Wallace replied, although that wasn’t entirely true. He hadn’t seen enough to be confirm it but he was fairly certain he knew. He did not, however, want to cause a general panic. The truth was that they might have run afoul of a small patch of particularly bad luck. Still, they might be able to simply push past it.
The left branch of the tunnel ahead led them down once more and farther into the depths of the earth. He noticed an unpleasant smell.
They pressed on for perhaps another minute before an opening suddenly appeared to Wallace’s right. The man who marched beside him gasped a startled, “Whoa!” and in an instant, he was gone.
“Stop!” Wallace ordered and he darted to the right to shine his flashlight into the side-tunnel. For half a second, he froze where he stood.
A wide burrow-like area before him writhed with glistening, armored, blackish-brown forms that snapped their pincer-claws and brandished their barbed tails in the thick, shadowy air. They chittered as one of them dragged the hapless soldier into their midst. Thankfully, there seemed to be only a handful due to the confined space.
The sergeant darted toward the man but one of the other creatures intercepted him and lashed at him with its stinger. His cybernetically augmented left hand snatched the arachnid’s tail immediately below the barb.
“Sergeant!” someone called behind him and footsteps hurried closer. The victim was already nowhere to be seen.
“You fucks!” Wallace snarled. He yanked violently on the tail, broke it and pulled the creature off-balance, and kicked it in the head hard enough to elicit a wet, crunching sound. Immediately, he fired three rifle bursts at the remaining cluster and the noise was agonizingly loud in the enclosed space. He thought he might have hit one but already, all except the one whose head he’d crushed were gone.
Three soldiers moved alongside him. From what little he could see of their faces in the flashing beams of white light amidst the total black, they were on the verge of panic.
“Go back,” he said. “And once we’re all together, everybody run.”
They didn’t wait but spun to join their comrades. The group needed no urging to race ahead down the narrow tunnel.
Wallace gritted his teeth and fell in behind them. He could easily have overtaken those in the rear, but the confined space prevented him from doing so. Still, this way, he could at least guard the team from behind.
“Why are they attacking so sporadically like this?” Chris’s voice asked farther up the now fleeing column. “They could attack us in a swarm. Something weird is going on.”
That was one way to put it. Wallace had thought for a brief crazy moment they’d simply stumbled upon a small nest of the monstrosities that happened to be hungry, but that didn’t seem right.
Then the truth struck him like a runaway train. They were being herded in a particular direction.
“Stop!” he yelled. “Everyone, halt. It’s a goddamn trap.”
No one responded to his command. Blind, unreasoning terror had finally prevailed and now, they simply bolted forward in dumb, massed, animal panic—the only thought was most likely that to stop was to die. The dark, narrow tunnels filled with creatures from hell were too much, an all too real parody of Halloween nightmares in which a horrifying death became a violent reality.
Around them, the slither and chitter of gathering arachnids grew louder. They passed more and more side-tunnels and more holes and precipices as they zigged and zagged. The soldiers in the rear tried unquestioningly to keep pace with the random choices made by those near the front. The tunnel led consistently downward—a reason for real concern although no one seemed to have registered this awful truth in their panic. Two more people screamed in terror but their screams faded almost instantly as they were dragged away.
“Stop, dammit!” Wallace bellowed and his voice echoed loudly. The tunnel walls were now rock rather than dirt, which clearly showed how deep they were. “We have to fight them off and—”
His words were cut off by the shrieks and curses of the troops as the floor collapsed.
Wallace’s gut lurched sickeningly as though it might actually drop out of his body entirely. He tensed as the earth beneath his feet gave way and chunks of it pummeled him in the dark. The cacophony of his men’s terror seemed almost surreal above the rush of air. Time slowed into a downward spiral of shouts and flailed limbs and a relentless free-fall. Finally, he crashed painfully on solid earth as the world spun and his ears rang.
Others moaned or dragged in ragged breaths all around him. Other strange and subtle sounds slowly penetrated his awareness. The hideous skittering of the arachnids was fainter, though. That was something, at least.
The sergeant struggled to his feet and hoped that he hadn’t broken any bones—and that no one had died or been severely injured by the fall. He held his head between his hands and willed his vision to settle. After a moment, he focused on the vague realization that he could see, even though no one’s flashlights shined anywhere other than the ground. A faint luminescence emanated and his sudden curiosity overcame his inability to think.
They had tumbled into a massive subterranean cavern, which wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was that they had also tumbled into a lush, verdant jungle.
Chapter Eleven
“Everyone, up!” Wallace ordered. He had seen something similar to this incredible spectacle before when he’d crawled under the scorpion hill to rescue Gunnar and the fake British diplomat, Flemm. The underground jungle there, though, had been little more than a backyard garden compared to this.
There was no time to gawk, however. Slithering, chitinous sounds—either arachnoid or insectoid—marshaled once more and drew ever closer to them. Men groaned.
“Up! We need to move,” he ordered again.
In the faint, eerie glow, people struggled to their feet amidst the rubble and ruin of the collapsed tunnel. He was reasonably certain that he had not sustained any major injuries as his suit had likely protected him to some extent. Anxious to avoid delay, he scrambled through the wreckage of the earthen avalanche and counted heads as he helped his troops to their feet.
One man’s head had been crushed beneath a large boulder. Another had a severely sprained ankle and could barely stand, even with help.
“Dammit,” Wallace muttered through clenched teeth. Sounds from the scorpions in the tunnel above indicated that they had begun to crawl down after them. Worse, there might be even more of the bastards wherever the hell they were.
Hall found his feet and gawked in awe at the bioluminescent subterranean trees and plants. Chris stood beside him and stared in equal wonder. Ahead of them and on a slight incline, it stretched on as far as the eye could see and filled the vast cavern with its faint greenish-gray light. The underground jungle seemed to pulse as though breathing, a sure sign that it was definitely part of the Zoo.
“Head toward that vegetation,” the sergeant ordered. “It will give us some cover. Be careful of those plants, though.”
No sooner had he spoken than a flat, shiny, blackish mass seemed to spread across the cavern floor behind them. Curved appendages extended upward into the dim, stuffy air as perhaps hundreds of legs crawled and skittered over broken stone. A veritable legion of scorpi
ons had emerged as if from nowhere and now moved purposefully toward them.
“Move it!” Wallace snapped and indicated that the man with the sprained ankle and the soldier who assisted him should go first, along with two other men to protect them. They struggled slowly in the direction of the glowing jungle. The sergeant and four other men turned away from the retreating force, took aim, and opened fire. They sprayed the advancing horde with rifles on full auto and shotguns that rotated without ceasing.
“Plasma! Do we still have one?” he demanded.
“Yes, sir!” a deep voice responded. A tall, muscular black man ran forward and carried the substantial burden of his plasma-thrower’s backpack as though it weighed nothing. He lowered his goggles into position from their previous place atop his head.
“Sweep this entire area,” Wallace instructed as he ejected another empty magazine from his rifle and snapped a new one in. He didn’t have many left. “And the mouth of the collapsed tunnel up there,” he added and indicated the target area. “Everyone else, shield your eyes and prepare to retreat toward that jungle.”
The group covered their eyes hastily and the plasma trooper opened fire. The bright, white-hot payload unleashed on the army of attackers. Probably at least forty of them screamed in raw animal pain and terror as the intense heat turned their armored, arachnoid bodies into their own miniature oven in which their soft internal organs rapidly overcooked. Their high-pitched, chittering cries weakened beneath the roar of the flames. He opened his eyes cautiously and noted with satisfaction that half the cavern appeared to be burning. The smoke, thankfully, rose high enough that it would not immediately suffocate them in the enclosed space.
“All right, good,” he said approvingly. “Now head that way.” He waved his hand toward the slope where the improbable jungle sprouted.
He and the others ran to catch up with the first few soldiers around the wounded man. The four men in the lead had almost reached the edge of the glowing trees when three enormous scorpions suddenly appeared, seemingly out of the ground itself.
“No!” someone cried.
A pair of giant pincers seized the injured man, who screamed immediately in pain and terror and collapsed. The arachnid went to work and chopped him apart with its ax-like forelimbs in what seemed only seconds. The man who’d supported him reached instinctively for him but another monster plunged its stinger into the back of his neck. He convulsed almost instantly and was already dead before he fell.
The other two soldiers opened fire. Their volley seemed to hold off the third scorpion, but in their panic, they had not repositioned themselves and the rest of the unit couldn’t open fire without hitting them.
“Get out of the way!” Wallace shouted.
One man dashed to the side. The other, a gangly thirtyish man, seemed not to have heard and instead, paused to reload. The now wounded creature surged in to attack. Blood trailed from the cracks ripped in its armor by rifle fire but it seemed oblivious and wielded the lethal pincers with precision. The killing strike snipped the man’s face and upper throat in half vertically and he died on a half-gurgle around the eruption of blood.
“Aim for their heads,” Wallace ordered. The soldiers didn’t hesitate and fired almost as one. The scorpions were well-armored, but they succumbed to a sustained barrage aimed at their weak spots and slumped one after another. Blood oozed from shattered carapaces and heads. Hall narrowly avoided a deadly claw and unloaded his rifle into his attacker’s loathsome face.
Silence descended, eerie after the constant clatter of rifle fire.
“Keep moving,” the sergeant urged them. “We’ll take a short rest when we have some cover. But keep your eyes open in that place.”
An almost tangible sense of both awe and dread spread amongst the diminished force as they jogged into the underground jungle.
The trees were at least half as tall as the normal ones above ground and a few were perhaps almost the same height. An underbrush had already begun to form from plants that looked like young shrubs, weeds, and flowers, and vines sprouted in places. They were all similar to the usual Zoo plants in their essential appearance. However, all were pale and translucent and had luminescent sap—the source of the uncanny glow—seemed to pulse through their semi-visible veins. Bizarrely, they somehow all had the look of larvae or pupae, which indicated that they were still growing, still maturing—as if they waited for something, which made no sense at all. The vegetation stretched throughout the enormous cavern and Wallace wondered if there were, essentially, an entire second Zoo now beneath the first.
Unease reflected on every face as they followed the incline. Every member of the team hoped to find another tunnel that would lead them to the surface. Wallace kept them in tight formation and admonished them more than once to avoid touching any of the plants if at all possible. To his surprise, the person who looked the most dismayed—and indeed, frightened—was Hall.
“What…what the hell is this?” the director asked in a whisper and his voice actually trembled. Obviously, the sheer weirdness had exceeded anything he’d expected when he’d opted to tag along on this mission.
“I saw something like it before,” the sergeant admitted. “When you had me escort the foreign diplomats, the Brit and one of my men were captured by those scorpion things and dragged into a place similar to this. They had them buried with only their heads free and seemed to drain fluids from their bodies. It wasn’t anything like the size and scale of this place, though. I figured it was only something the scorpions did to create a habitat for themselves. Now, it looks like it’s all through the Zoo.”
“It looks like it’s lying dormant or something,” said the female soldier who’d been on point earlier in the tunnel.
“Yes,” Chris responded. “I…ah, have a hypothesis about all this if anyone wants to hear it.”
Wallace cleared his throat. “Private Park, I do recall you said something about studying—what did you call it?—uh…environmental science before the army. That’s more than the rest of us have, so I’d say go ahead and tell us if you can think of anything that might be helpful.”
“I agree,” Hall concurred.
“Well, then,” Chris said and sounded almost happy to be appreciated. “Here goes. Think back to the locusts that swarmed Dr. Marie’s lab a few months ago and interacted with the Alien Goop to create the Zoo as we know it today. They were a rare and special kind of creature, a species that only turned up every…I dunno, hundredth blue moon or something. They could lie dormant out in the desert for years and wait for the right moment to emerge. Then, suddenly, the sky would go dark with millions of the fuckers.”
“We know this,” said Hall. “Go on.”
“I’ve heard talk over the last two or three weeks that it seemed as if the Zoo has slowed down like it’s gone into remission or hibernation or something. Some have actually said it’s maybe even finally dying off. But what if it simply went into a cocoon, so to speak—like a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly? It could simply be waiting. There might be a…surge coming. Like what the people here saw on the Day of the Locust when the infusion of all that biomass caused the extremely rapid expansion of the jungle outward from the original research base. What if…what if the Zoo has stored biomass and stockpiled it for a huge push?”
Everyone had listened carefully to him as they toiled up the slope. The cavern seemed to narrow slightly as they moved farther into the jungle.
“What I don’t know, though,” he went on, “is why the Zoo would choose to do this now. What is it about this particular point in time—”
Wallace’s gut lurched in the alarming drop-sensation that evidenced real fear. He turned toward Hall, who shook his head in a mixture of bewilderment and irritation, apparently unsatisfied with Private Park’s explanation.
“I know why,” the sergeant said.
“Is that so, Sergeant?” the director asked.
“Because of the relative safety at Wall One these last few weeks,�
�� he explained, “more and more people have arrived. There are now more present than we’ve ever had before. Which means more…biomass than there’s ever been before.” He tried not to shudder.
“Jesus,” someone gasped.
“New bases have been built all along the Wall as other countries joined us. It used to be that the Brits, Russians, and Chinese only maintained a token garrison at their respective gates. But now, they and others are all trying to build their own actual facilities comparable to ours. And they need personnel for that. If there is a surge and the Zoo gets hold of all those people, it could be like the Day of the Locust all over again. The jungle will spread like crazy and spawn monsters everywhere.”
“I think you may be right, Sergeant.” Chris sighed. “Unfortunately.”
“We need to get out of here,” Wallace continued, the sinking feeling replaced by a sense of urgency now that the Zoo’s plans had finally dawned on him. “We need to warn everyone at Wall One to retreat, and then we need to redouble our efforts to complete Wall Two ASAP.”
The second wall had grown gradually for months. Unfortunately, the fact that Wall One had held—so far—had provided an excellent incentive for the politicians to avoid prioritizing its completion.
“Negative,” Hall grated. “We will not abandon Wall One, Sergeant. And we will not abandon this mission.”
The soldier’s teeth clenched. He couldn’t directly contradict his superior’s orders, but he had to try to convince him that—
A telltale chitter yanked him from his frustrated thoughts.
“Shit!” someone exclaimed. By the time Wallace had spun toward the sound, his rifle already poised and ready, the female soldier who’d previously been on point vanished behind a tree and a barbed tail already descended with violent intent.
“Motherfuck!” someone else snarled. Rifles cracked and shotguns boomed as the glowing jungle erupted with arachnids.
