The Menagerie 2 (Eden) (15 page)

“Can you get a visual on Crazy Drake?”

“
That’s negative,”
he said.
“Too far away.”

“What about Pit Bull?”

“He’s not answering any of the channels. So I gotta consider him lost, boss. Like the other two.”

Whitaker closed his eyes, another quiet moment.
Three down
, he thought.
Almost half my team.
And then: “I want you and Quasimodo to head toward my position to group up,” he ordered over his mike. “We’ll head in your direction. You copy?”

“Copy.”

Communications went dead.

Whitaker addressed Savage and Alyssa. “Grab him,” he said, pointing to O’Connell. “We’re moving forward.”

O’Connell attempted to get to his feet, stumbled, but was aided to a standing position by Savage. O’Connell’s head wobbled unsteadily. Even in the green light Savage could see the raccoon rings forming around the wounded man’s eyes. O’Connell was growing weaker.

“You still bleeding out?” Savage asked him quietly.

O’Connell nodded. “It stopped some time ago . . . But I bled out quite a bit.”

“Alyssa and I will get you out of here.”

“Get real,” he returned. “Whitaker isn’t going to allow anyone of us to get out of here alive. You know that.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a solution for everything.”

Savage and Alyssa got on each side of him, and draped the wounded man’s arms over their shoulders.

Whitaker hunkered down by the recording unit and removed the two flash drives. He then removed the heel of his boot, placed the drives within the dugout recesses, then snapped the heel back into place. He then got to his feet and pointed his weapon in the direction to be taken. “Ms. Moore, thank you so much for your assistance,” he said. “You and Mr. Savage now have the honor to take point.”

“I told you,” said O’Connell, wincing as he spoke. “He’s using us as bait.”

Slowly, they began to move forward with a great deal of prudence.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

K-Clown and Quasimodo had their monocular NVG’s on. Their vision of sight was lime-colored, which added to the blend of green cast by the ribbed walls. It was an odd color, but a color that turned darkness into light.

They could see everything.

At the fringe of the Menagerie carcasses were everywhere. Most died where they stood in stasis. Others at least crawled a few feet away from their holding cell before they were overcome by an atmosphere not favorable to their own. Creatures and botanical horrors were beginning to mottle and decay with mild stenches rising from meat beginning to putrefy.

They kept close to the edges, skimming the walls with their heads on a swivel, their weapons up and ready.

“Things aren’t looking so good,” said Quasimodo. The commando lived up to his moniker, the epitome of ugliness. In 2009, while serving in Iran, he stood on the outer ring of an IED blast, the explosion killing his entire team while he, who was taking point, suffered third degree burns on his face. The following skin grafts gave a somewhat Frankensteinian patchwork look to him. His nose was naturally flattened against his wide face, and his eyes were set too close together, like a ferret. And when he smiled he did so with irregular rows of teeth. But the burns upon his face he wore like a badge of honor, his appearance meaning little to him. “There’s a lot of space between us and them,” he added. “I’d hate to think what’s in between.”

“If there’s anything between us and them, then we’ll just add to the number of carcasses.”

As they were closing the gap, neither commando had any indication that they were being tracked.

The raptors were keeping equal distance behind them, tracking them not by sight but by smell, their olfactory senses pinpointing their exact location like radar.

Yet they stayed out of NVG range, exhibiting saintly patience that would enable them to corner their prey.

And kill them.

#

Communication with McCord
had been discontinued for fear of misappropriation. McCord’s promise to send a sub, however, was kept, the DSRV maneuvering into position beneath the opening to the undersea platform. The pilot carefully placed the sub by its given coordinates, and filled the tubes with air, the sub rising.

Once the sub was secured in the pen, the pilot exited from the cap door and descended the welded-on steps of rebar. He was wearing a Tally-Whacker uniform with the accompanying patches of the grinning skull and crossing tantos. Slung over his shoulder was an assault weapon, an MP5. Strapped to his side was a firearm.

With a friendly wave and smile he called out to the four engineers manning the platform. “How y’all doing?” he said. The soldier had movie-star looks with raven hair, blue eyes and ruler-straight teeth. When he spoke he did so with a Texas twang. “Y’all doing fine?”

They weren’t.

Two Americans and two Mexican nationals closed in. The looks on their faces were appearances that Pretty-Boy had seen many times before, the look of absolute terror.

One of the American engineers stood forward. “You need to get us out of here,” he said.

Pretty-Boy maintained his brazen Hollywood smile and raised his hands, patting the air. “Whoa-whoa, slow down there, cowboy. There’s no need to get your bowels in an uproar now.”

The maintenance worker gesticulated wildly with his hands. “You don’t understand. This platform is on unstable ground. The next tremor or two will send us to the bottom of the crater’s bowl. It’s unsafe.”

“C’mon, cowboy. You need to show some grit.”

“I need to get the hell out of here,” he argued.

Pretty-Boy looked at the other three, smiling. “Y’all feel the same way?” he asked.

The Hispanics shook their heads, so did the American.

“Alrighty, then.” He quickly removed his firearm from his holster and—while maintaining his smile—shot every man in the heart, killing them in neat and rapid succession.

After lining up the bodies side by side along the far wall, Pretty-Boy straddled a chair with his forearms draped across the chair’s back and waited for his team.

The ‘hidden agenda’ had begun.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Hominid had been ambushed.

It had made its way through the remnant’s glowing warrens towards the Menagerie when something feline jumped from the shadows and pinned it to the floor. The Hominid struggled beneath the creature’s weight, defending itself with the natural shield of its forearm as the feline—long and sleek with two saber-like teeth on each side of its mouth, the rear saber less predominate and situated right behind the primary one—attempted to gnaw through its exoskeleton. The Hominid continued to shield itself with the extra thick armor of its forearm, knowing that the feline’s keen sabers could not penetrate that part of its armor. With its principal arm, the one bearing the natural weaponry of running spikes, the Hominid brought it across the feline’s throat in fluid motion, its thorny forearm raking through its flesh as easily as a knife cuts through a hot cake of butter.  

The feline reared back, confused, the apex predator not used to formidable combat as blood sprayed across the Hominid’s armor in arterial streams, its blood glistening like tar in the feeble lighting.

It did not mew or cry. It simply staggered, tried to regain itself, and fell with its chest heaving and pitching a final breath that sounded more like a death rattle.  

Breathless, the Hominid got to a sitting position and leaned against the wall between two rib-like structures that glowed light. For a long moment it sat there musing with its elbows resting on its knees, which were brought up into acute angles, and stared at the dead beast as blood formed a blackened halo beneath the tear of its throat.

And its eyes had gone from red to gray, its emotions signaled not by tears or unbearable wailing, but by the color alteration of its eyes, the sudden hue changes acting as barometers expressing how the Hominid was feeling at the given moment.

In its journey it had seen signs on the walls, some of the script and lettering recognizable and some not. As tribal leader and scribe it had recorded the history of its clan, memorializing facts to be handed down to the tribe’s descendants. But it understood that the discovered writing, although similar, was not of its world.

It was intelligent, an emotional being that had family and responsibilities. It was a creature who had carried the mantle of leadership that had been passed down from its paternal lineage, the scepter of rule to be eventually passed down to its son upon its passing. And suddenly the Hominid anguished, its eyes growing a deeper shade of gray. Its son was dead, it knew, as was its daughter and mate. Their armor-plated hides had gone brittle, and then to dust, long ago.

How it knew this it didn’t know. It simply did.

And then it reflected on its life, remembering what its paternal elder told him before handing him the sword of state by offering a brief summary of what life had been like before the civil war, something it took to be nothing but the ravings of a dying elder who wanted to believe in a sense of utopia. Its elder told it that its world was once a planet with the points of gleaming skyscrapers piercing the heavens, where its kind adorned themselves in elegant cloths and wore jeweled crowns, but most importantly, walked along the myriad of botanical paths flanked by riots of blooming colors, the scents from their leaves indescribably sweet. 

And it knew that its elder was speaking from the memory of a story handed down from elder to elder, that the tale was not a fable at all, but the truth of how an ascending species surrendered everything because of political pettiness that became so insurmountable, the prejudices so great to overcome, the intolerances promoting the groundwork for destruction, that its planet had finally succumbed through their actions, which ultimately sent them back to the primordial stage of life, a place of no salvation.

It was a lesson handed down from its paternal elder, a final lesson wrought by its kinds’ inability to wade through narrow-mindedness, which ultimately destroyed a world.

What the planet once provided, the creatures raised in husbandry and the abundance of fruits provided by its environment, had died off as the war waged consistently on, turning its world to a sun-baked planet where its terrain became nothing but sand and stone, with their next meal always coming from the bodies of neighboring insurgents, the natural food chain having died off centuries ago.

It lowered its head, somehow knowing that its planet was completely dead. And that its kind had been rendered extinct by foolish decisions.

It was the last of its kind.

The Hominid stood to its full height and looked down at the carcass of the creature it had killed, albeit in self-defense.

And then it scoped its surroundings. Where there was one, then there’s another. Maneuvering with prudence, the Hominid began to make its way to the aft of the ship.

#

Whenever an opportunity
presented itself for the Mist to feed, it did. Whether the sustenance was living or dead, or whether or not the entity acted as a predator or a vulture, did not matter. It consumed everything in its path, growing every time it fed.

It had no conscience. And rules did not apply to it.

It killed without remorse. Nor did it have a sense of salvation since it held no principles.

It simply was as it enveloped the carcass of something dead, the Mist rolling over the mass and devouring as acid devours any tissue, the flesh bubbling and boiling, the bones and organs sizzling, bursting, then gone, leaving the juicy outline of the dead creature upon the floor, a former shadow of itself, until that, too, was gone.

The creature moved along the floor as ground mist, creeping slowly, searching, the composite flooring sizzling as it crossed mere inches above its surface. And then the spangles of lights within its amorphous shape began to shoot off in electrical bursts, the charges small eruptions of energy as the Mist took to midair, the living horror moving with the painful slowness of a bad dream.

#

Though the Rex
was satiated, it still needed to feed in the same way that a shark needs to constantly nourish itself in order to continue on.

Its massive weight shook the flooring beneath its footfalls; anything remaining alive scurried for safer quarters.

Its hide had been pocked with bullet holes by Crazy Drake’s act of strafing, the mere pinpricks bleeding marginally with the damage done to the Rex equal to it getting caught within a thorny briar patch, nothing more. 

With its need to feed overpowering, the Rex flared its nostrils and pulled, its olfactory senses sending signals as to where its quarry lie, preferring the living over the dead.

It picked up a scent equal to Crazy Drakes, but stronger, the numbers of the Crazy Drakes in this new world moving as a pack.

Rearing its head and opening its grand mouth, the creature bellowed, staking further claim to its ever-expanding territory, and headed to feed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Nothing much scares me,” said Maestro. “But whatever is making that noise is scaring the hell out of me. It sounds too damned big.”

Nobody said anything. No one offered to rebut or send a response. Maestro was right. Whatever it was didn’t have to be seen. Everyone knew it was massive—whatever it was.

“Keep your heads on a swivel,” Whitaker finally said. “I need eyes open for Quasimodo and K-Clown.” Everyone knew it was Whitaker’s way of saying ‘Shutup.’

They moved carefully up the ship’s incline, each man knowing that in order to survive this they had to climb four more levels to get to the sub pen. Worse, they had to do it by navigating through the Menagerie.