He had already tensed, assumed a combat stance, and drawn his knife. They were so close to rescue, and this brute had finally chosen its time to strike when he was completely out of ammunition. Their only hope was to hold it off long enough for one of the truck drivers to notice and come to their aid.
In the split-second before the creature attacked, he noticed two distinctive things about it. First, as he had somehow immediately suspected, it was the same mutant he had wounded and driven off in the jungle. It had two wounds, one in the shoulder and another near the base of its tail. He might be able to exploit those in the confrontation.
The other detail was the color of its fur. These creatures seemed to flush a bright reddish-orange when they fought, but this one had now turned a dark, angry, blood-red. He had never seen this color on one of the beasts before now.
Nor could he ever have imagined that one would venture past the edge of the jungle itself. The entire situation seemed strange and out of even the Zoo’s unnatural order.
The primaraptor lunged and snapped its jaws. It was slower and clumsier than was usual for them, perhaps due to tiredness and its injured shoulder, and Jan was able to dodge to the side. Even so, it retreated too quickly for him to strike at its throat or eyes with his knife.
“Signal the truck!” he yelled over his shoulder. “We need their help.”
Laura did as he said without hesitation. She jumped up and down, waved her hands over her head, and shouted at the top of her lungs in the direction of the closer vehicle. Its engine fired only a second or two later and it swerved toward them and approached as rapidly as could be expected in the deep, shifting sand.
The mutant prepared for another attack, but it seemed to stumble. This was apparently not ground with which it was familiar. He saw his opportunity and surged forward to lash out toward the creature’s left eye with the blade.
Rather than recoiling as he had hoped, it simply closed its eyes and swung its scaly head toward his knife-hand to knock the blade from his grasp. Before he could react, it barreled into him as it had done before it captured Laura, and his brief attempt to wrestle away from it failed. Its jaws closed around his shoulder.
He cried out in pain as the monster’s forelimbs wound tightly around him to prevent him from using even his bare hands to fight. In the next moment, it began to drag him into the jungle.
The truck had cleared half the distance between them, but it was too late. Perhaps the driver had other men with him and they would come after him, but there was no way to know that for sure.
He looked at Laura, who seemed frozen in place and stared at him with a strange expression on her face. It looked like a mixture of fear and concern but oddly combined with indecision, guilt, and some kind of childlike curiosity.
She was momentarily frozen in terror, he told himself. That was all. Any moment now, she’d find a way to distract his captor so he could try again to fight it.
Suddenly, she picked up a branch and raced toward the creature with her pathetic weapon raised.
“Laura, no!’ he shouted. “Save yourself.” There was no way the small woman and a flimsy branch were a match for the primaraptor. At least if she ran and survived, she might be able to return for him with help.
As usual, she ignored him and continued her pointless charge. When she was close enough, the mutant simply raised its muscular limb and batted her aside. She careened away like a rag doll and landed heavily against a tree. Her head smacked against the wood with a sickening thump and she collapsed, unconscious—or dead, quite possibly, given the force of the impact.
“Women. why do they never listen?” he muttered as the monster’s drool flowed over the puncture wounds in his shoulder. As the dark-green shadows engulfed him again, everything went black.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
When Jan woke, he was tired, sore, and badly dehydrated. His mouth felt the way it would on a night after a couple too many vodka screwdrivers—as though someone had stuffed it full of cotton balls soaked in salty glue.
“Ugghhhh.” He moaned and tried not to make noise but found it impossible. His head and shoulder hurt too much.
His shoulder, yes…he remembered now. The primaraptor had burst out of the jungle, disarmed him, and dragged him in, at which point he had passed out. The woman had blindly tried to save him and knocked herself out in the process. Hopefully, when she woke—if she woke—she made it to safety. If so, this at least meant that the rescue mission had not been a total failure. Fifty percent of the personnel involved had reached safety.
His dark, clouded vision slowly returned, although it didn’t exactly grow much brighter. He was in some kind of interior space. Not a building, unless the Zoo intended to shock him beyond even its substantial capabilities, but quite possibly a cave or burrow. There was a definite sense of wide, open space before him, however. He shook his head and looked around.
He was wrong. This was a building of sorts, but not one that had been made by humans.
It was, roughly, a very, very large dome. A circle of tall trees seemed to have been chosen as the site, and the tops of these trees had all been bent and pulled inward to form the foundation of the primitive structure. Between the trees was a chaotic mass of sticks, branches, and copious amounts of a dark-brown pasty substance.
Jan blinked and forced his brain to work, despite its overwhelming demands that he do nothing more than go to sleep.
The gunge that held the dome together and filled the gaps in its surface was the same viscous, adhesive crap that had been used to affix Klaus’s men to the giant tree they’d found on the previous mission. Soldat Grün, he recalled, had said that the primaraptors vomited the goo to imprison their prey. This was the first sign he had seen, though, that it could also be used as a building material.
The hauptmann looked down at himself and tried to move. He failed in the latter objective.
He was splayed in a roughly seated position, his back against what seemed to be the broken stump of a fallen tree, and his arms were stretched back behind his hips with his hands gripping the stump. Some of the sticky substance encircled his waist and one of his wrists. He could not move his lower torso, hips, or right arm. The left seemed to have some of the adhesive substance on it but it was free. His captor had perhaps rushed the job of securing him to the tree stump. With the use of one hand, he might be able to free himself, but even that might not be enough.
None of the many, many other humans there seemed to have found a way out.
There had to be at least two dozen men and women, possibly more, strewn around the interior periphery of what he now thought of as a nest. It was dark enough that he could not count them precisely, at least not the ones on the farther side of the structure. But after careful examination of those closest to him, he decided that this was a fairly accurate estimate.
The soldiers nearby were all among those who had gone missing in recent times. Some, he recognized as belonging to Klaus’s unit—this, then, was the remainder of that platoon. The primaraptors had killed a few outright and taken others to the tree to set their devious trap. The rest had all been brought there.
But, he wondered, why?
Squinting, he saw that one of the men closest to him was none other than Hauptmann Klaus Grossman himself. He was unconscious—probably, although he might be dead. In the gloom, however, he was fairly sure he could see the man breathing faintly. The soles of Klaus’s feet lay within reach of his own. He moved his left leg in that direction and tapped the toe of his boot against one of his compatriot’s feet.
A low, breathy sound, half-sigh and half-groan, rose from the slumped body, and the man began to stir. A shudder went through him and his eyes opened. For a moment, he stared and seemed to look at nothing before he shook his head and his gaze darted around. He was on his back, his arms up over his head and his hands buried in a mass of dried brown goop affixed to a half-buried boulder.
“Klaus,” Jan whispered.
The two officers locked gazes. Klaus�
��s brows rose in surprise. “Jan Shalwar,” he whispered. “Now we are both equally fucked, it seems.”
“Not yet,” he said. “We are both still alive.”
“That will not matter for much longer,” the man mumbled. “I’m barely holding on as it is. I have not had food for two days. Last time I lost consciousness, I assumed I would not wake up. You had to come along and disturb my rest.”
He frowned. This kind of despondency was not like the man at all. If anything, he would have expected him to try to start some kind of stupid competition to see which of them could escape first. Clearly, he was in very bad shape.
“Klaus,” he said, “we still have a chance and they might even try to rescue us. I need you to tell me everything about your experience so far. Anything that might be of use to determine what we are dealing with here. My left hand is free, and I may be able to cut myself loose.”
“Well,” his fellow-prisoner began, “they only killed a few of us right away. Everyone else, they either brought here or took someplace else.”
“I rescued most of your other men,” he said.
“Ha! Well, good for you. And them,” the man replied.
“Yes, yes. Now go on.”
Klaus tried to swallow, but his throat must have been too dry. “The adult ones don’t seem to eat very much,” he said. “Or they eat other Zoo creatures, I don’t know. But they are saving the rest of us.”
“Why? What purpose do they have in putting so many humans in this place?”
Rather than reply with words, the soldier simply looked toward the center of the chamber and nodded.
Jan followed the man’s gaze. The ground sloped gently downward toward the center of the covered area and seemed to reach its lowest point under the peak of the tree-supported, phlegm-covered dome. There were no humans in this central space that he could see but it was far from empty. He squinted harder and willed his eyes to adjust to the dark-brown shadows.
At first, they’d been almost invisible due to their earthy coloration combined with the general dimness, but he could now make out the indisputable and horrifying reality.
They were eggs—tens, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of them, so many packed so tightly together that they’d at first been easy to mistake for the texture of the ground itself.
He swallowed when the truth registered. They were in the middle of the primaraptors’ main nest.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Remember, you aren’t free to enter the Zoo whenever you want,” the driver said to Laura in his heavy German accent. He looked into his rearview mirror to watch her while he half-focused on the tracks through the desert in front of him. “Civilians need to have clearance for that kind of thing.”
“It won’t happen again, don’t you worry,” she replied and honestly didn’t care if she sounded irritable. Once again, things of real importance were in progress, but everyone seemed to care more about making sure all the rules and regulations were followed to a T. “For now, I’m merely happy I got out of that place alive.”
Jan, however, had not made it out at all. He was probably still alive, though. In fact, if they were quick, they might be able to save him. “Hauptmann Shalwar is still in there,” she told the young man. “Please, we have to go back. One of those awful new creatures captured him and took him away somewhere. They have not killed people right away. Usually, they imprison them for a while. But if we hurry, we might be able to intercept them.”
The driver concentrated on her words and probably needed a moment to parse them and mentally translate them into German. Finally, he nodded, his face grim but set with a kind of satisfaction, nonetheless.
“I can’t believe you managed to get out,” he said with astonishment.
“The creature flung me against a tree and I hit my head, which knocked me unconscious. When I awoke, you were there,” she recalled rapidly, aware that every second they spent talking was less time to rescue Jan.
“We’ll go back to base first, then we can mount a rescue,” he said.
“Can’t we go back—”
“Getting ourselves killed won’t save him. We go back.” Although his demeanor remained authoritative, he appeared to regard her with something like respect.
Clearly, it had been wise to indicate that she cared about the hauptmann’s fate.
Which, in fact, she did.
She found a medical kit, sifted through it as they drove, and applied antibiotic cream and bandages to the shallow teeth-wounds in her shoulder. They might need more attention, but even minimal care was better than none.
The afternoon had faded to early evening and the sun took on a coppery tint as they plowed through the sand and the long, ragged expanse of Wall Two came into sight. The driver brought the truck to a halt closer to the gate than she recalled him doing last time she’d been driven back. She decided it was so there was less room for her to try to escape.
“You go first, please,” he said.
“Yes, fine.” She stood, walked to the door, and scrambled out. The driver emerged behind her and kept his eyes on her back, just to be safe.
She looked toward Fort Archway and the wall. The gate was open. Sergeant Cooper stood there and another soldier—a German—stood behind him. At least the lockdown appeared to be over.
“What in the goddamned bloody hell do you think you were doing, miss?” Coop asked as she approached. He looked tired, haggard, and downright angry. There was also a noticeable bruise on his face, as though someone had punched him or he’d fallen into a table or something.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have time to argue. Jan has been captured by a new kind of predator,” she began. “And the Zoo is about to go through some very important—”
“Stop,” the man snapped and held a hand up, palm out. “I won’t hear it. You have had enough chances already and can try to explain why you ran off into the jungle on your own to Roden if you like. Hauptmann Shalwar being in the claws of a monster means he’s probably dead.”
“No, he’s still alive in there,” she protested, “and in fact, we might be able to rescue him if—”
“Again, stop,” he interrupted. “We will relay the information and see what we can do for him. But not until we can rest easy knowing that you will no longer be free to keep making this kind of trouble.”
He turned to the young soldier behind him, whom Laura suddenly recognized as Soldat Gunter Grün. He was the man stuck to the tree whom she’d helped treat and whose shoulder wound was much the same as her own.
“You there,” the guard said to him. “Since you’ve simply stood there all day to guard the gate even after I regained consciousness, make yourself useful. Escort Dr. Curie back to her quarters and inform the director that we’ve recovered her.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
Laura took a deep breath. So far, this was not going terribly well.
The soldat approached her with his rifle held in front of his chest and gestured toward the main entrance with a sideways nod of his head. She decided not to resist or argue for the moment. With Coop furious at her, that would be unlikely to yield much benefit. Once they were farther away, however, she could make another attempt.
“Hauptmann Shalwar is in considerable danger, you know,” she said to Grün when they were safely out of Coop’s hearing.
“It is your fault,” he responded almost immediately. His tone was mostly neutral and professional, but there was a noticeable undercurrent of bitterness to it. “You should have stayed where you were supposed to be. He only went out there because of you.”
She frowned and her shoulders slumped a little at that. He might be omitting some rather important details but the main thrust of what he’d said was true.
Of course, that made her think of the egg in her satchel. The primaraptor’s fur had turned dark red with total rage and hate and it had pursued them all the way to the edge of the Zoo itself because it was trying to recover its young. If it had not been for her theft
of the egg, the creature might have simply let them go once it became clear they’d be too much work to simply treat as prey. If that were the case, they might both have emerged from the jungle, which meant he might have been safe right now.
It was, therefore, doubly her fault that Jan was still a prisoner within the Zoo.
“I do not understand,” Soldat Grün continued after a short pause. “I do not understand why you had to go back in there.”
Laura realized in that moment that she had the very evidence of why she’d had to go back in her satchel. She slid her hand into it and cupped it around the egg’s smooth surface. When they came to a shadowed area not far from the main personnel door, she checked hastily to confirm that no one was really watching them and pulled it out.
“Because of this,” she stated. She stopped, which forced him to stop and look at what she now held out for his inspection.
He gaped dumbly at it before he drew a sharp breath. “Is that…one of their eggs?” He looked almost afraid.
“It most certainly is,” she answered. “We have to understand how important this is.”
Grün glanced around in an almost nervous fashion. “Let’s keep moving,” he urged her.
She obliged and walked slowly toward the doors, but she also continued to talk.
“Having an actual egg of one of these creatures will be a tremendous help to our research efforts at this base,” she went on. “In the past, the Americans were able to capture some of the Zoo’s creatures but attempts to study them never got very far. As soon as they were put in captivity, they turned radically violent and things quickly became messy. Their wild nature combined, it would seem, with some directive from the alien intelligence that guides them all, would not allow them to simply languish as prisoners.
“They went crazy and ended up killing themselves in their efforts to escape. They would throw themselves against their cages as hard as possible until they were badly injured. Or they would attack the personnel with such force that they had to be put down for the safety of the researchers. Dr. Kessler at the American base and some of the others were still able to gather data, but it made it impossible to observe their natural behavior patterns.”
Galaxia Page 113
