We eventually fly over what I can only surmise to be a portion of the mighty Amazon River. It resembles a monstrous mud snake, slithering its way through a forest of vegetation. A few miles away from the river is a monstrous farm, surrounded by scorched and deforested land. A bunch of these farms have just recently started popping up all over the rainforest. I never thought I would have something nice to say about Klaxton, but she was definitely a staunch environmentalist. She never would have allowed such vulgar degradation of protected land on her watch.
We fly for another 30 minutes or so before reaching another encampment, this one right on the outer edges of the rainforest. The encampment consists of a small compound surrounded by a 10-foot tall electric fence. There is a small runway located just inside the electric fence, at the end of which are two helicopter-planes and four flying cars. What really catches my eye, however, is what lies beyond the encampment… and that is pretty much nothing. Where once before was the continuation of the Amazon Rainforest, now there is nothing but dry savanna for what must be dozens of miles. And way, way off in the distance, I can make out the Great Amazon Desert. This is what happens when deforestation and climate change both run amok. A tropical rainforest that once spanned over two million square miles is now reduced to but a pittance of its former size, with nothing but a desertified graveyard to remind us of what once was. It’s tragic and sickening, and it makes me want to turn back around and carpet bomb the sprawling farm we flew over half an hour ago.
Grenade barges past me and thrusts his head into the cockpit. “Take her down, Krystal. We have reached our destination.”
“No shit, cyborg Sherlock,” Krystal grunts, ignoring her trashy reality TV show long enough to take us in for a landing. She takes us into a dive, causing Grenade to tumble into the cockpit and me to fall out of my chair. Lance curses as he, too, stumbles onto the floor.
“Damn it, Krystal, you caused me to spill my beer!” Lance hollers.
Krystal pulls up at the last second and slams the wheels of the plane onto the runway. We all bounce up and down as we careen toward the helicopter-planes and flying vehicles sitting at the rear of the airstrip.
“Krystal,” Grenade says, unable to hide the fear in his voice. “Slow down! SLOW DOWN!!”
The plane suddenly lurches to a complete halt. Grenade flies up against the windshield, cracking it with his cyborg arm before plummeting onto the ground. Krystal chuckles as she removes her seat belt and steps over his moaning, cursing body.
“Y’all are a bunch of pansies,” Krystal says as she stomps past me and grabs her gear in the cabin.
I stagger to my feet and head into the cockpit to check on Grenade.
“You okay?” I ask, holding out my hand.
“I’ll be just fine and dandy after I slam your friend’s face into a windshield. Let’s see how she likes it,” Grenade growls, grabbing ahold of my hand with his non-metallic one. It takes all the strength I have to pull him up. All the metal in his body makes him way heavier than he looks (and he doesn’t exactly look light).
I glare at Krystal as she makes her way into the cabin and say, “This is a helicopter-plane. Why didn’t you just use the propellers to land?”
Krystal shrugs and says, “I like to do things old school.”
I’m at a loss for words. Truly.
“You think we should be ready for trouble?” Lance asks as he slings his machine gun over his shoulder. “After all, we don’t know too much about the people we’re meeting up with.”
“I wouldn’t be too worried,” Grenade says, opening the hatch door. “Dallas said they’re a bunch of professionals. I trust his judgment.”
We all walk down the hatch ramp and make our way down the runway, back toward the encampment. A group of people start walking toward us, all of whom appear to be holding guns.
“Everyone be on guard,” I say, my finger gingerly touching the trigger of my gun.
“Relax, kid,” Grenade says. “Like I said, I’ve known Montgomery for years. We go way back. He would never…”
Grenade trails off and his ruddy red face turns ghostly pale. His eyes glow as brightly as red-hot coals and his lips curl into a snarl.
“Grenade? Are you okay?” I ask.
Lance suddenly says, “What the hell?”
I glance at Lance, confused. Then I turn back toward the group of people heading toward us. The person in the center of the group turns out to be the last person I ever expected to see here… someone I thought I’d never see again.
“Pitbull?!”
“Well well well, look what the cat dragged in,” Pitbull cackles, marching up to us with a shit-eating grin on his gleaming, metallic face. Pitbull is essentially a living robot, having undergone so much cyborg surgery that he is far more machine than man. His entire head is encased in metal. His eyes glow like Grenade’s, but because of his metallic face he looks like some sort of robot assassin from Hell. The rest of his body is also encased in gleaming, silver metal… his arms, his legs, his chest…. He’s wearing a Kevlar vest, but I’m not entirely sure why. The last time we saw him, during our now-legendary gun battle in Alaska with Klaxton and her goons, bullets were bouncing off his metal body like they were nothing but pebbles.
Grenade points a quivering finger at Pitbull and growls, “You!”
Pitbull’s fiery red eyes widen in surprise. “Grenade?! LeBeau didn’t tell me you were coming!”
I glance from Pitbull and Grenade and say, “Wait, you guys know each other?”
“Know each other?!” Grenade shouts, pointing his machine gun directly at Pitbull’s head. “We hate each other!”
Grenade fires off a shot. The bullet slams into Pitbull’s head, snapping his neck back.
“Grenade, what the hell are you doing?!” I scream, reaching for his gun. “Pitbull is a friend! He saved our lives!”
“He ain’t no friend,” Grenade says, shoving me to the ground and aiming his machine gun back at Pitbull. “He’s a scumbag who’s overstayed his welcome on this Earth.”
Grenade fires off several more shots, but Pitbull deflects the bullets with his armored arm. He then lunges toward Grenade, yanks the machine gun out of his hands, and punches him in the face with his cyborg hand. Since Grenade’s face isn’t made of metal, I’m sure the blow hurts… a lot.
Grenade confirms this by collapsing to his knees and spitting up blood.
“You goddamn bastard,” he hisses, snatching a dagger from his utility belt and thrusting it toward Pitbull’s gut. Pitbull merely cackles as the blade breaks in two.
Raising his arm over Grenade’s head, Pitbull growls, “You damn teen bounty hunters better come get your buddy before I smash his skull in.”
Lance and Krystal hurry over to Grenade and drag him away. Grenade tries to break free from their grasp, all the while shouting, “Let me at him! Let me at him!”
I step in between Pitbull and Grenade and shout, “Everyone calm down for just a second! Now what is going on?! How do you two know each other? Why are you at each other’s throats? And Pitbull, what are you doing here?”
“You sure do ask a bunch of questions,” Pitbull quips.
I’m about to tell Pitbull to fuck off when I notice the individual standing behind him, a beautiful Asian-American woman garbed in a white ninjitsu robe and wearing a black headband with the yin and yang signal emblazoned in the center of it.
“Yang!” I exclaim. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
I glance at the ninja standing beside Yang. For a second I think it’s her deceased twin sister, Yin. But then I see the face, and the muscular body, and realize I’m in fact looking at a strapping young man, not the ghost of a female ninja warrior. Yang’s companion is a handsome Asian-American dude with an insanely chiseled body. He’s dressed in a ninjitsu outfit just like Yang, but his robe is black, and his headband is white. It’s the same attire Yin used to wear.
“Hello, Boom Boom,” Yang says with a slight bow of her head. She glances
at my partners and says, “Krystal. Lance.”
“Hey Yang,” Lance says, still struggling to hold back Grenade. “It’s good to see you again. I’m so sorry about what happened to your sister.”
Yang bows her head again and replies, “Thank you. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. To honor her legacy, my cousin Marco Cheng has taken up her namesake. He is the new Yin… the yin to my yang.”
“Nice to meet you, sexy,” Krystal says with a wink, still holding onto Grenade’s arm.
“Er, hello,” Marco says sheepishly, not sure how to take Krystal’s flirts. If I were him, I would run away screaming.
I rub my throbbing head and say, “I’m confused. How did you and Pitbull end up down here? The last time we saw you guys, you were down in Klaxton’s dungeon, trading gunfire with Rasputin’s goons.”
“We managed to escape in one of her underground tunnels,” Yang explains. “Pitbull and I decided to stay together since we had grown to trust one another. Shortly after the incident in Alaska, President LeBeau contacted us and offered us an opportunity that we couldn’t refuse. As thanks for helping thwart Klaxton’s plan to start a new world war, LeBeau put us in charge of this Amazonian outpost. Basically we’re getting paid a ton of money to keep peace in the jungle.”
“You mean you’re being compensated to kill innocent South American natives,” I blurt out, unable to stop myself.
Yang narrows her eyes. Her cousin, Marco Cheng (the new Yin, I guess), clears his throat and says, “The natives are not so innocent. You will find that out soon enough. They have already claimed the lives of three of our brethren in recent weeks. And there will be even more casualties if we let our guard down.”
I don’t necessarily agree with Marco’s reasoning, but I bite my tongue. The last thing I need to do is piss off our hosts like Grenade just did.
Yang says, “When we received word that you three were coming down here to go after Klaxton, we became incredibly excited. I’ve been dreaming of exacting vengeance against that monster for the past several months. When I heard Klaxton was possibly hiding with the Chiquito tribe, I almost went looking for the bitch myself. But LeBeau made us promise that we would wait for you guys.”
I gesture toward the small group of heavily armed and armored individuals standing behind Yang and ask, “So this is your team?”
“Yep, it sure is,” Pitbull says proudly. “The finest group of killers in South America. Here, lemme introduce everyone.”
Pitbull points toward a freaky looking lady with white streaks running through her frizzled black hair. The woman is super-muscular, likes she eats steroids for breakfast, and she has white paint all over her snarling face, as well as black eyeliner and black lipstick. 6-inch silver nails jut out of the ends of her gloved fingers, which leads me to believe they are in fact metal claws. The freakiest part about her, though, would have to be her flickering, snake-like tongue. It looks like she took a heated blade and sliced through the center of it, giving it a forked appearance.
“This exotic looking beauty is Cobra,” Pitbull says with a sadistic grin. “She is quite the assassin. She loves to claw out people’s eyes with her razor-sharp claws.”
Cobra hisses at me and holds up her claws. “I’ll cut you, bitch.”
Pitbull cackles. “Charming, as always.”
Cobra’s eyes widen and her flickering tongue starts wagging around like crazy. She looks like a snake that’s gearing up to strike its prey. I gulp and step back.
Pitbull turns his attention to another one of his goons. This goon is a humongous, ripped black dude with bulging muscles. He looks to be close to 7-feet tall, and his biceps and thighs are almost as big as tree trunks. A bullet-proof vest covers his bare chest, which grants me a view of the top of his ripped pectoral muscles. Flexible armored plates cover his arms, abdomen, and legs, and steel boots go all the way up to his knees. What appear to be boomerangs dangle from his utility belt.
“This here is the strongest soldier on my squad, Bobby Lesnar. This crazy motherfucker can deadlift damn near 1,000 pounds. His weapon of choice is the electric boomerang. And just a word of advice, never make him angry. He tends to dissolve into a berserker rage that can only be calmed through various acts of bloodshed.”
Lesnar snarls at me, revealing his gleaming white teeth, which creates a stark contrast with his ebony face. “I pity the fool that fucks with Bobby Lesnar!”
He then marches over to a palm tree dangling over the runway and punches the trunk. The tree snaps in half and falls to the ground.
Krystal starts fanning herself. “Damn, that’s hot! I love a man who can destroy things with his bare hands.”
Lesnar grins at Krystal and licks his lips. I take it he’s as enamored with Krystal as she is with him.
Lesnar confirms this by marching up to Krystal and running his hands up and down her wide hips. “I love me a woman with some meat on her bones.”
“Then he’ll love Krystal,” Lance mutters, causing me to snicker.
“And I love a man with some meat down there,” Krystal says, grabbing the considerable bulge protruding out of Lesnar’s pants.
Pitbull snaps his fingers and says, “Save it for the bedrooms, you nasty fucks.”
Lesnar continues groping Krystal’s voluptuous body, but thankfully the love-struck couple heed Pitbull’s blunt order and keep their clothes on.
I glance at Grenade, who is no longer being held at bay by Krystal now that she’s found herself a new fuck buddy. Thankfully Grenade seems to have calmed down somewhat. He’s still gritting his teeth and fingering the trigger on his machine gun, but he’s also not attempting to disembowel Pitbull and choke him with his own intestines. So all in all I think we’ve made some progress here.
Pitbull gestures toward another freaky-looking dude. He’s an older Hispanic man with scars running up and down his pock-marked face. His teeth appear to be even more rotten than Grenade’s. Disheveled, gray-streaked black hair dangles over his face. A sleek, ruby-red visor covers his eyes. He’s wearing a black trench coat, and two straps chock-full of gleaming daggers and pointy darts crisscross his armored chest. He‘s also wearing a utility belt with even more weapons.
“This here is the most deranged member of our team, Snake-Eyes,” Pitbull says, sounding almost in awe of his buddy. “He likes to play with his prey before killing them… rough em up a little bit. He’s our go-to guy for interrogations of the natives. One of his favorite ways to take out his victims is by tossing poison-dipped darts into their eyeballs. And watch out for his dice.”
Snake-Eyes holds up what appears to be a normal black and white dice cube.
Pitbull points at the dice and giddily says, “It contains poisonous gas. Toss this bad-boy into the jungle and you can take out an entire village.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say.
Snake-Eyes sneers at me and licks his lips. “I like a woman with a little edge to her,” he says in a raspy voice.
He reaches out to touch my hair. I grab his wrist and twist it, causing Snake-Eyes to yelp in pain.
“Don’t touch me, pervert,” I growl, tightening my grip on his wrist.
“Okay… look and don’t touch. I got it,” Snake-Eyes groans, obviously suffering a great deal of discomfort.
“No looking, either,” I snap, applying pressure to the nerve endings on his wrist.
“Okay, okay, no looking, either!” Snake-Eyes howls.
I finally relinquish my hold. Snake-Eyes backs away and glowers at me while his buddies chuckle. Pitbull laughs harder than all of them.
“You’re such a little bitch, Snake-Eyes!” Pitbull cackles, slapping his own robotic knees.
“Shut up, asshole,” Snake-Eyes growls before storming off.
Pitbull waves him off and says, “Ahh, he’ll get over it. We’re just busting his balls.”
Pitbull turns his attention toward the last remaining member of the group, another intimidating-looking black dude with loads of muscles. He
’s not quite as big as Lesnar, but he still looks like he can manhandle several people all by himself. He has a cool looking purple Mohawk and is wearing tattered jean overalls. And in his calloused right hand is a bloodied ax.
“This here is Ax,” Pitbull says.
“How original,” I mumble under my breath.
Pitbull points toward the ax and adds, “His weapon of choice is an ax.”
World War Forever (Highway To Armageddon Book 2) Page 20
