Big Ape_Lawless Book Two

by James Maxey

  “Shorts look ridiculous with cowboy boots,” said the reverend. “Besides, it’s not like Harry, Sasha, and Bobbie can take off their coats.”

  “Preach, preacher,” I said. “I’ll give you an amen if you tell me I’ve got time for a nap.”

  “Nap it up. We’re hanging out here for at least seven hours.”

  “Amen,” I said. I glanced toward the trees. “All I need is a shady space that doesn’t have a man-eating monster in front of it.”

  “The pterosaurs have a tent mode,” said the reverend. “Trigger, tent mode please.”

  His pterosaur spread its wings forward, crossing the tips, creating a large, shadowed awning.

  “This gets a hallelujah,” I said, slouching into the shade and sitting down, then falling to my back on the gravel. “I suppose it’s too much to hope they also have a pillow mode?”

  The reverend chuckled, apparently thinking I was joking. I closed my eyes, waiting for sleep to claim me. Then, crunch, something big and heavy fell on the gravel directly beside me. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know who it was.

  “A nap is a great idea,” said Sasha, inches from my ear.

  I didn’t answer, keeping my eyes and mouth closed.

  “Trigger?” Elsa asked. “You named your ride?”

  “You haven’t named yours?” he asked.

  “Wasn’t Trigger the Lone Ranger’s horse?” she asked.

  “No ma’am,” he said. “That was Silver. Trigger was Roy Roger’s horse.”

  “The burger guy?”

  I never heard the reverend answer, and with my eyes closed I could only imagine him staring at Elsa in slack jawed wonder. A few minutes later, he started singing, “Happy Trails” in a low, off-key tone, a lullaby which carried me into sleep.

  I WOKE TO THE SOUND of thunder, my eyes opening slowly, my brain needing a moment to remember why I was sleeping on the worst bed ever. I sat up and stretched my arms, my hand brushing against something hard and hairy, which I instantly recognized as Sasha’s shoulder. I looked in her direction and found her staring at me. “Nice nap, sleepy head?”

  I rubbed my lower back. “I’d like to speak to the manager of this hotel. I want to make a complaint.”

  “I give excellent back rubs,” said Sasha.

  Again, thunder rolled across the riverbed, though it wasn’t raining, or even particularly cloudy directly above us.

  Bobbie had her phone in her hand, studying a weather map. “Storm’s going to pass a few miles east of here,” she said. “We’ll need to get going soon. There could be flash flooding.”

  The air felt much cooler than it had when I’d went to sleep. Despite my backache, the nap had done me good. “What do we have to eat?” I asked.

  “Just field rations,” said the reverend. “MRE’s and protein bars.”

  “Give me, like, nine of them,” I said.

  “I’ll get them for you,” said Sasha, rising.

  I noted the scowl that settled on Bobbie’s features.

  The reverend unfolded a map generated from satellite photos, which meant it was mostly an unbroken sea of green. At the scale it was printed, the river we’d landed on was only a faint hairline indentation in the jungle canopy. The only noteworthy feature on the map was another of the big, flat-topped mountains we’d been passing. The jungle atop it was broken by a few large dome structures.

  “This is where Technosaur has her main workshop,” said the reverend. “From the satellite footage, we can tell there’s a dirt road that leads to the base of the cliff just below this big dome. Since there’s no road to the top, we think there must be an elevator dug into the cliff. Even a supervillain has to get supplies delivered somehow. The plan is to find a landing spot on the road, then try to take out any guards or security devices protecting the elevator entrance.”

  “Why not try the direct approach?” I asked. “Drop right through the roof and start smashing things?”

  “Since the Doom Raptor had some fancy lasers it’s dumb to think the dome isn’t protected by them,” said the reverend. “We’d almost certainly be shot down.”

  “If I don’t have at least three crash landings a week I get bored.”

  “Do you have any serious critique of my plan or are you just flapping your jaws?”

  “Jaw flapping, mostly,” I said, as Sasha returned with the food and a water bottle. “My jaw’s going to be busy for the moment. Keep talking.”

  He kept talking, tapping the map in various locations, drawing lines and arcs showing our planned movements with his finger, tossing around terms like “zero hour” and “soft target.” I retained none of it. I’ve been in a lot of mission briefings. We’d practice them at the Butterfly House, Brain Boy gave me one before our breakout, I got them with the Red Line, the Teen Brigade, and the Lawful Legion, and, honestly, at some point over the years I tuned out. I don’t have the skills needed to, say, hack an electronic lock or disable a security system by gaining access to a terminal. With my looks, I’m never assigned to steal a uniform and disguise myself as an enemy guard. My job always boils down to find a bad guy, hit him. The rest of the plan never goes right anyway. There’s always some unforeseen event—the bad guys have a superpower we didn’t know about, or they have their doomsday bomb stored in a completely different facility, or, hey, one of our own teammates turns out to be a 65 million year old dinosaur genius wearing the skin of a dead racist. Whatever. The plan in the end is always the same: throw punches until all the bad guys stay down.

  “Got it?” Reverend Rifle asked after ten minutes.

  The girls all gave affirmations. I kept eating lukewarm spaghetti out of the fourth MRE I was wolfing down.

  “Got it, Harry?” asked the reverend.

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “Find bad guys, hit them.”

  “That’s leaving out a lot of intermediate steps,” he said.

  “I’ve edited it down some,” I said. “Don’t sweat it. I’m good.”

  “Very well. Let’s all close our eyes and give a prayer for a safe and successful mission.”

  The reverend closed his eyes. Everyone else kept theirs open. Elsa was an atheist and more than happy to tell you all the reasons you should be too, and Sasha and Bobbie, as near I could tell, had no god but their mother.

  “Lord,” said the reverend, “We ask that you, etc. etc.” I kind of stopped listening until he reached the “amen.”

  After the prayer, we stuffed gear back into our saddlebags and mounted up. The storm that had passed upstream made itself known, as the coffee colored water surrounding our little island took on a creamy hue and erased the edges of our island in a slow and steady rise.

  “Hi ho Silver, away!” I cried, digging my heels into the pterosaur’s flanks.

  “What was that?” Elsa asked through my headset as I took to the air.

  “You really don’t know anything about cowboys, do you?” I answered.

  The sky before us was heavy with clouds, tinted red by the hidden sun as it dipped toward the horizon. Lightning flashed within the darker clouds, and we could see long, dark columns of rain directly before us. The reverend’s prayer must have done some good, because the thunderheads broke apart, separating into wisps of white as we neared. By sunset, the sky was clear of everything but high, thin clouds, aflame in shades of red and orange, with a single tall mountain rising in the distance, the top flat as a table.

  “That’s where we’re headed,” said Reverend Rifle, steering his ride into a downward glide. “Keep as close to the treetops as you can. With any luck, we won’t be met by an army of pterosaurs.”

  “You and I have different definitions of luck,” I said. “It would be cool as hell to battle an army of pterosaurs over the jungle.”

  “We’re not here to be cool,” said the reverend. “We’re here to bring Technosaur to justice.”

  “I thought we were here to kill her,” said Elsa.

  “You say it your way, I’ll say it mine,” said the reverend.
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  “And rescue mother,” said Sasha. “Don’t forget, we’re here to rescue mother.”

  “No one’s forgotten that,” I said. I frowned. Yeah, we were all here for a lot of good reasons. But what did any of this have to do with figuring out who was behind the murder of Valentine? I found myself thinking, not of Val, but of John, Atomahawk. The way they reprogrammed him, giving him purpose, direction, and clarity. Not for the first time, I found myself envious. It must feel great to wake up and know how your day fits into the big, master plan of your life. I have no master plan. I didn’t even have the plan the reverend spelled out for today. Sometimes, I feel like life is a pinball machine, and I’m the ball. I go wherever I get whacked until I bounce off something that sends me rolling in a new direction. Would I ever get to a point in life where I felt like I was actually in control?

  Lost in my musings, I didn’t take time to appreciate the sunset. Before long, we were flying in moonlight. The humid air gave the moon a clearly defined rainbow ring. In the dim light, I could see the mountain growing larger as we approached. Below, I spotted occasional gaps in the trees.

  “There’s the road,” said Elsa. “Aim for that wide spot to land.”

  I didn’t see anything resembling a wide spot, but held back as Elsa took the lead. She glided down toward a small gap in the trees and vanished beneath the canopy. We had to land one by one, each rider folding their pterosaurs back into balls and pushing them out of the road to give the next rider room to land.

  Using the term road might be a bit of an exaggeration. It was really just a long, straight gap where all the big trees had been cut down. It was almost completely overgrown with vines and scrawny, ankle-high shrubs covered in thorns. If it weren’t for parallel ruts in the vegetation, there was nothing to hint that vehicles ever came through here.

  “Okay,” said the reverend. “You all know the plan. This is where we split up. We’ll rendezvous on the mountaintop in two hours.”

  I raised my hand. “Who do I go with again?”

  The reverend frowned. “Didn’t you—”

  “No,” I said. “Who do I need to go with?”

  “You’re with Bobbie. The two of you are going to climb the cliff and search along the perimeter to take out any guards while Elsa, Sasha, and I commandeer the elevator.”

  “Right,” I said. “Got it.”

  The reverend muttered something underneath his breath as he and Elsa turned away. Sasha looked over her shoulder, saw that they weren’t looking, then leapt toward me and planted a big, wet kiss right on my lips. She hugged me hard. My hands hung by my sides.

  “You’ll be safe with Bobbie,” she whispered. “I’ll see you at the top. Everything will be perfect. You’ll see.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Have a safe elevator ride.”

  She giggled and ran after Reverend Rifle and Elsa Where.

  I turned to Bobbie. “How did we wind up having to climb a cliff? Did we draw straws when I wasn’t paying attention?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You don’t have to play the clown around me.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “This flippant, goofy act of yours. You play the fool.”

  “That’s not really an act,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’ve played the role so long you’ve forgotten how false it is,” she said. “You’re physically and mentally superior to mere humans, yet you adopt the role of an inferior so that they won’t be threatened by you. You make jokes so that they’ll accept you, view you as a harmless plaything instead of the apex mammal you truly are.”

  I furrowed my brow. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a scolding and a compliment blended together so expertly.”

  “You carry our mother’s DNA,” she said. “If you possess even a fraction of her genius and chose to refine it, you’d be the mental superior of anyone you’ve ever met. Physically, what human can match your strength? Who can match your toughness?”

  I opened up fingers one by one as I said, “Golden Victory, Smash Lass, Anyman …”

  “Everyone you named is an alien,” said Bobbie. “Or, at least contaminated with alien DNA.”

  I crossed my arms. “Where do you get off lecturing me? You grew up among other hybrids. On a daily basis everyone you talked to was covered in fur. I grew up among humans who couldn’t quite decide if I was a child or a pet, among people who either feared me or pitied me or hated me because I was different. Maybe I do play the clown. Guess what? It works.”

  “It works by making people accept your mask,” she said. “The true you remains hidden. You don’t need to hide around me, brother.”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Tell me you’re not hitting on me.”

  She gave a short, sharp, snorting noise that I needed a second or two to identify as a laugh. “I’m not Sasha. I’ll follow Mother’s wishes and mate with whomever she has chosen to be my mate. This is not yet revealed to me. Don’t get used to Sasha’s affection. I suspect Mother may have different plans for you.”

  “I have my own plans,” I said. “I’m in love with Jenny, remember?”

  “Another being contaminated with alien DNA. You cannot reproduce with her.”

  “We can still screw each other’s brains out,” I said.

  “There’s no need to be crude,” said Bobbie. “When you finally meet Mother, she’ll explain the fallacy of your irrational lust. Sex is an evolutionary act. It has a purpose, the matching of optimized genetic material to produce offspring bearing the hereditary advantages of both parents. Sex for any reason other than the conception of carefully selected offspring is wasteful.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You obviously haven’t had sex.”

  “We’re going to be late if we don’t move,” she said, turning and running into the jungle. I followed. She was nearly invisible in the shadows of the trees. Luckily she kept talking. “We’re assigned to climb the cliff because Elsa is needed to cloak the team that invades the elevator shaft. The reverend can dispatch any guards from a distance, and Sasha provides the needed muscle to force her way through any physical barriers they might encounter.”

  “That’s normally my job,” I said.

  “True. But the reverend has selected his teams to avoid having Sasha and myself work side by side. He doesn’t trust us.”

  “Should he?”

  “I suspect we have different goals,” she said, her voice showing no signs of strain despite our all-out run through the jungle. “The reverend views Mother as a threat he must bring to justice. We will not allow her to come to harm.”

  “He’s not going to shoot her in cold blood,” I said. “That wouldn’t be very cowboy of him.”

  “Perhaps. But, I need to know… if he did raise a hand against her, would you defend her?”

  “I… sure. I mean, I don’t think it would happen, but if she’s, like, chained up in a prison cell and he aimed his gun to shoot her, I’d stop him.”

  “Then you don’t hate her as much as your file indicates?”

  “You know,” I said, panting, “I’d really like to see a copy of this file.”

  “That can be arranged. While you were at the Butterfly House, your therapists made notes detailing your feelings toward Mother. You resented her, disavowed her, mocked her as mad and cruel. She didn’t choose to abandon you. You were taken from her by force.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “She’s just another mad scientist. I shouldn’t even have been born.”

  “Is your life truly of so little value to you?”

  I didn’t answer. There was no way I was going to admit to Bobbie that I was happy to have been brought into the world by a mad-woman who thought her children would look better with fur. But… sure. When I checked my gut, I was pretty happy to be alive. My life wasn’t easy. My future didn’t look so hot. But, man, day after day, the crazy shit I got swept up in… I loved it. Forget my earlier funk about feeling like a pinball. Did I value my life on a day I’d ridden a robotic pterosaur across a s
torm-filled sky? Fuck yeah.

  In the darkness ahead, I heard Bobbie come to a halt. I caught up to her, gasping for breath as I leaned against the cliff face to steady myself. Christ, it looked like a mile straight up.

  “Ready?” she said, glancing at her watch. “We’re behind schedule.”

  “One more minute,” I said.

  “Just one,” she said, crossing her arms, looking impatient. “You ate too much at camp. A full belly is slowing you down.”

  “Nah,” I said. “If anything, I didn’t eat enough. My resting metabolism burns, like, seven thousand calories a day. Overeating isn’t really a problem for me.”

  “Minute’s up,” she said, leaping onto the cliff wall, her claws clicking on the rock. She started racing up the cliff like a squirrel on a tree trunk.

  Even though I was sure she’d shortchanged my minute by at least thirty seconds, I followed. I’d never climbed an actual cliff before, but I’d been up the sides of enough buildings that this wasn’t any kind of a challenge. With my arm span, there was always a handhold within reach, and my sense of balance lets me stand on tiny, nearly invisible ledges no thicker than the edge of a dime. Plus, I had the advantage of seeing Bobbie’s path, so I knew what handholds she was using. With her cat eyes she saw what she was doing better than I could. As fast and fluidly as she moved, it was almost as if she’d climbed this cliff a hundred times before.

  It took me about twenty minutes to get to the top. Bobbie bent down and offered me her hand to help me get past the outcrop. I climbed up onto bare rock, with the wall of a large, domed greenhouse only a few yards away.

  “I’ve surveyed the area while I waited for you,” she said. “We’re all clear.”

  “That’s disappointing,” I said, panting. “There’s nothing I look forward to more after climbing a tall cliff than fighting an army of henchmen.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm,” she said.

  “I can’t tell either,” I admitted.

  “I found a way in,” she said. “Follow.”

  I followed, happy that things were working out so well. The reverend’s prayer continued to pay dividends.

  We crept along the outside of the dome. The greenhouse was filled with jungle trees and flowers, which was sort of stupid, I thought. I mean, why build a greenhouse in the middle of a rainforest? What, exactly, could they be trying to grow that didn’t already grow here year round?