During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, he wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.
He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.
Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing, where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as series editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series.
For more information about Dean’s books and ongoing projects, please visit his website at www.deanwesleysmith.com and sign up for his newsletter.
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THE DEATH LEAGUE
by Michael Anderle & David John William
The Zoo is spreading. Humanity is at stake.
When alien DNA finds its way into the desert and starts spawning life, the world leaders dictate it must be contained.
Construction begins in earnest.
The rapidly enacted arena around the phenomenon becomes known as “the Zoo”.
Policed and protected by the world’s milita it becomes a jungle of impossible missions.
As a coping mechanism, the personel tasked with protecting the world from the Zoo set up the Death League on the wall of their bar. It provides a running tally of bets on who is most likely to die next.
Top of the Death League is Captain Jan T Shalwar – a well-respected commander on the base.
But it’s not until he’s joined by Dr. Laura Curie, a stow-away scientist, that the gallows humor and bravado is disrupted, and they realize the Zoo is changing in ways they could never have predicted.
Dangerous ways.
Rapid ways.
Laura and Jan have to overcome their immediate dislike for each other if they’re going to unravel the Zoo’s secrets, and stop it spreading before the danger reaches the only partially complete wall.
If they can’t, their lives, and the whole of humanity, are over.
The Death League (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Michael Anderle
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, 2019
The Zoo (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2019 by Michael T. Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.
Prologue
Lieutenant Kerns crashed through thicket after thicket of dense foliage. Operating purely on instinct, he ducked under and sidestepped the interlocking branches of the seemingly endless rows of trees.
His breath grew ragged and his feet thudded softly and steadily on the jungle floor beneath him. He couldn’t shake the images from his head—the broken bodies of his troops, their mouths twisted in an agony beyond his imagining.
Although cloaked in shadow, he’d seen the events of their downfall in enough detail for his imagination to fill in the rest.
Those creatures—what on earth were they?
Certainly, nothing he’d been briefed on beforehand. They had attacked shortly before the team had set up camp and positioned the motion sensors, having crept up from all sides with soft steps that covered considerable ground while they remained damn near inaudible.
He guessed that even without the talking and chuckling of his troops at day’s end, their ears still would have been hard-pressed to provide them much warning. And had some of those things come out of the trees themselves?
At one point, amidst the sights of his crew being savaged and snatched away in the dark, he could have sworn he saw one of the creatures’ large, nimble forms pounce from above to violently end the efforts of Private Thompson and his shotgun.
Then, all had vanished in a chorus of blood-chilling howls.
The creatures were a hybrid—he felt safe assuming that much—but of what, he couldn’t be sure. Likely two species he would never have put together and which nothing outside the warped perimeter of this alien jungle could have put together. An improbable, uniquely terrifying coupling, exactly like almost everything else in this place.
The Zoo, as his superiors called it.
Kerns had managed to kill—or at least badly wound—a few of the creatures, but the pack had completed its devastating work with such efficiency that he had soon become the last man standing. He didn’t exactly think it wise to try his luck against those attackers who hadn’t already left, carting off the bodies—both dead or barely alive—of his troops. For all he knew, the creatures could still be following him. Or they could be moving parallel to him already, toying with him so he would think he was alone.
The thought triggered a ripple of fear and he stumbled on as quickly as he could.
He had no idea where he was at this point and had deviated from the planned route a long time before. The hyper-real and unnatural sounds of its plant-life confirmed that he was still in the Zoo’s clutches, although it was obvious anyway given that outside the jungle meant the barren sandy wastes of the Sahara. But he’d lost all sense of his relative position and had no way to know how far it was to the outer edges and to safety. Traversing the Zoo was intimidating enough with a platoon of trained soldiers and a sense of direction, but alone and lost in the dark, tired and growing exponentially weaker, he would consider himself lucky simply to survive the next hour.
Spent, he stopped to rest for a moment and panted hoarsely with his hands on his knees. Although he’d put a fair amount of distance between himself and the site of the ambush, if he wanted to have any chance to get out of there, he’d need to give his body at least a small respite. Passing out on the jungle floor would make him an easy meal for whatever lucky denizen of the Zoo happened to lurk nearby.
Kerns gulped the last of the water in his backpack hydration unit. If he’d had a bottle of water, he would have tossed the empty bottle without guilt and he laughed at the inanity of giving a shit about littering at a time like this. Besides, the Zoo had a way to twist everything to its advantage. It would probably turn an empty bottle into some kind of skin-sucking vine—half plant and half recycled plastic—in a matter of days. If anything, he would have done it a service.
After a deep breath, he surveyed his surroundings. It had been nothing but dense jungle for so long, but now, finally, he noticed a new addition to the landscape. He squinted in an effort to see more clearly.
Was it a building? It couldn’t be.
His superiors had made no mention of a station or outpost of any kind within the Zoo territory. But as he drew closer, the structure didn’t reveal itself to be an illusion or anything that would have made more sense—like a tangle of trees contorted into an odd, deceptive shape. It was a building, and in his position, he couldn’t pass up the chance to seek shelter. It might even offer a means of communication to base.
He took cautious steps toward it and scan
ned all around for any kind of trap but nothing launched from the shadows as he approached. It felt almost like he could actually sense the Zoo fading out as he approached the building as if its collective breath moved in the other direction. Kerns reached the door and found it was already ajar.
The last thing he wanted was for it to creak and alert whatever might be inside to his presence. He stepped sideways through the opening and tested the floorboards carefully before he applied too much weight to them. Once past the threshold, he found himself standing in what appeared to be an abandoned laboratory. Before him stood rows of worktables, dirty and crumbling with moss and weeds visible on their cracked surfaces. What the hell had gone on there? It looked like someone had tried to set up a kind of testing site at some point—probably before everyone became aware of exactly how dangerous the Zoo was. There was the original and now overrun lab that had spawned the place, obviously, but since then, no one had even attempted to maintain a structure within the jungle itself.
This place simply didn’t make sense. With its cobwebbed corners, rust-coated walls, and broken glass on the floor, it was the antithesis of the sprawling, vibrant life that crowded around it outside.
Kerns sighed. He could forget about contacting anyone from there. But at least he’d found shelter and somewhere to wait out the night. He stepped across puddles on the floor and made his way toward the back of the room. The structure was like the casket of some cheap high-school biology lab. There was another door at the far-right end, but this one was closed.
From behind it, he thought he could hear footsteps, a soft clanging, and a compression of fabric like someone flopped on a couch.
Were they actually signs of human life or was his mind playing tricks on him, interpreting the noises as pleasant and familiar and so give him what he wanted to hear? In the next moment, there came a clear and distinct sound of someone clearing their throat. His heart lurched and he beat his fist on the door.
“Hello?” he called. “Is someone there? My name is—”
Before he could introduce himself, the door opened and a man stepped out, gave him a nod, and shut the door quickly behind him. He wore a lab coat that only served to make the soldier more confused. The place didn’t exactly seem to be in use, after all. The man turned to him and gave him a plastic kind of smile. His eyes possessed a clinical detachment and he looked at Kerns as if to examine him and weigh his properties for potential scientific study.
“Well, this is strange,” the man said with a heavy French accent. “I was not expecting you, Mr…” He raised his eyebrows.
Despite feeling like he was under a microscope, Kerns stuck his hand out. “Lieutenant Kerns. My men and I came under attack and—”
The stranger raised a hand. “It is okay,” he interrupted. “I do not need to know the particulars of how doom is met.” He gestured vaguely toward the door. “So long as it is, in fact, being met.” He gave a small laugh that trailed off, then put his hands in his coat pockets and gave the soldier that same distant, creepy smile, this time with a trace of pity. Kerns lowered his eyebrows. He didn’t understand the man’s presence there, let alone the words he’d spoken. The interaction felt surreal as if all he had been through tonight had driven him off the edge of sanity and into some form of hallucination. He peered past the man at the closed door behind him.
“What are you doing out here alone?” he asked.
The man pointed at him. “I am not alone,” he stated matter-of-factly.
The truth of that became immediately apparent. He suddenly felt a hulking presence behind him and registered that he stood in its shadow. Panicked, he spun and his eyes confirmed what he’d already suspected. The blood drained from his face to pool in a mass of dread somewhere deep in his chest. He screamed.
Cool and unfazed, the scientist merely stood and watched. He continued to do so until the soldier had taken his very last breath.
Chapter One
“You’re fired.”
Dr. Laura Curie tensed, her mouth open in shock. An imposing man in a military uniform had departed her boss’s office before she’d gone in, but even that hadn’t quite prepared her for this.
She wasn’t sure why the words should hit her so hard—at this point, shouldn’t she be used to hearing them? It seemed like she should have developed some kind of emotional defense mechanism in response to being sent away in one form or another, but it never failed to land like a kick in the gut.
Her hand swept the room and she shook her head. “I don’t understand. I’m doing great work here.”
“You’ve left me no choice,” Director Jane Wixom replied. “You’ve crossed the line time and time again, and I can’t make an exception for you, no matter how skilled a scientist you may be. And I know that you are skilled, which is the only reason you’ve remained employed here this long. If it were anyone else, they would have been gone a long time ago.” She held the demeanor of someone who was far beyond the point of decision and would not be swayed in a million years’ worth of pleading. But she had to try. After all, she now had all the time in the world.
“I’m one of the hardest-working scientists here,” she protested. “You know that. You know how much I care.”
“The problem isn’t that you care. It’s that you care too much,” Jane declared. The director was a tall, severe-looking woman, and Laura instantly believed her. In her presence, it was impossible not to think of the quote—who was it by? Pournelle?—about how in every organization, the people who cared more about the rules and procedures than about the actual goals were the ones who ended up writing and enforcing those same rules and procedures.
“I never thought I’d be fired for caring too much.”
“Do you really think I’d believe you were the one who caused the explosion in the lab?”
She shrugged and decided it was safer not to respond to this. When her lab assistant, Victor Manis, accidentally added too much of a volatile reagent to a simple experiment, he caused a massive explosion that destroyed an entire lab. His daughter needed costly medication for a heart condition and he couldn’t afford to lose his job over a simple mistake and she couldn’t let that happen. So, she did the only thing she could think of and claimed responsibility for the disaster.
“I can’t prove it, as you well know. But I believe you were covering for one of your colleagues. Someone who had more at stake than you if he lost his job here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Laura declared innocently. The woman couldn’t possibly fire her based on a hunch.
“There’s also the issue of professional conduct. Several issues, in fact. First, there was the incident with the vice-chancellor.”
She scoffed. “Ah, yes, the man with the fancy title and wandering hands. If your arse had been there—quite literally—you would have punched him, too.”
Appeal to sisterhood. That usually works.
Wixom, unfortunately, remained unmoved. “Dr. Curie, you’re a brilliant mind but you still talk as if we operate inside a science fiction novel. We all have to play by the rules in order to make any progress in our field and benefit the advancement of humankind. You should know that by now.”
It was true, at least to some extent. She had received variations of this particular spiel for as long as she could remember but it had never sat well with her. It had never seemed to take up permanent residence within her psyche. Even now, while in the process of being terminated, she could identify nothing in Wixom’s speech that pertained to truth, to discovery, or to the hopes and promises of science—the things that had driven her throughout her life.
She scooted back in her chair and stood. “All right, so I’ve racked up a couple of minor infractions,” she admitted, “and this whole fake-firing pretense has really got the message across. So rest assured, it won’t happen again.” She paused. “Ma’am.” She nodded affirmatively and started to turn away.
“Laura,” Wixom snapped, her voice steeled with a hard dose of not-
messing-around, “sit down.”
Laura sat and put on a hearty public-relations grin of false amusement. “Wow, your commitment here is truly impressive. But I promise, I—”
“Stop, please,” the director interrupted. “Beyond the other infractions we’ve discussed, Dr. Curie, I know about the hacking.”
The air seemed to drain out of her lungs. “Oh,” she muttered. The enervation of defeat spread through her body and her limbs went limp in the chair. This one might be a little harder to get out of.
For months, she’d stayed late at the university to study reports on the Zoo—the dangerous, alien-spawned jungle that had sprouted in the Sahara Desert.
The British government administered a sector of Wall Two, the name of which subtly hinted as its status as the second line of defense against the Zoo’s expansion. The first had failed. While working on this latter and more distant wall, the UK had established Fort Archway from which to conduct operations. Based on what she’d read in the classified reports, she did not have particularly high hopes for the base’s long-term success.
Her means of accessing the data weren’t exactly legal, but she didn’t regret having employed them. She had no choice, mainly because she had to get inside the Zoo. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to continue her biologist sister’s legacy.
Alicia had been working in the initial Sahara project when the Zoo materialized. No human in the area had survived when the jungle appeared—or if they had, they were far from human now. She’d been told to forget Alicia but she wasn’t about to do that.
It had taken months of after-hours research conducted only by the faint glow of a desk lamp, but she had finally found a trace of her sister. Using a facial recognition program to search images from the Zoo, she found a match, a photo of Alicia and her colleagues inside Ground Zero dated a week or so before the Zoo erupted and consumed everyone involved. The picture was blurry, but Laura was sure. Her sister had still been inside the biodome compound before she disappeared. While she wasn’t naïve enough to think Alicia had survived, she couldn’t face the idea of allowing her work to die as well.
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