“Glad to see you made it.” Watkins said.
Haley nodded. “Me too. Thanks for stopping.” He panted a moment, leaning his weapon against the seat between his legs, the barrel pointing up. “I owe you one.”
They drove on, the screams and screeches of the infected fading. Watkins noticed long faces all around the Humvee. He wondered if anyone else had noticed the civilian freaks. The parasites had already spread to the civilian population.
Eventually they followed signs until reaching the naval base. The front gate looked abandoned, a headless soldier their only welcome. A large explosion rumbled in the distance. Watkins sank back feeling deflated, worn.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Chen complained. Haley passed him a clip. They both readied their weapons.
Lawson clutched his wounded shoulder. “We should keep moving. The base is a lost cause.”
Staniszak tapped the fuel gauge. “We’re not going anywhere without fuelling up first.”
Lawson punched the door.
“We’ve got work to do,” Chen said, opening his door. He hurried past the dead guard and opened the gate.
The Humvee sputtered to a stop just inside the base. “Looks like we’re walking,” Staniszak said, her face paling. It was the first time she looked genuinely afraid.
Watkins exited the Humvee to the sound of distant screams. “What do we do now?” he asked.
“We survive,” Chen said with grin.
Bug Hunt
A Joe Ledger Adventure
Jonathan Maberry
-1-
The last words I heard were, “Something hit us. We’re going down.”
Yelled real damn loud.
Then a big black nothing closed around us like a fist.
We were gone.
If that meant we were going down then I had to wonder, in those last fleeting seconds before the chopper hit the canopy of trees, how far down was the ride? Was it just to the trees, or to the forest floor below? Or would the world open its mouth and swallow us whole, gulping men, weapons, equipment and everything those tools of war signified? Would we slide all the way down into the pit?
Yeah, maybe.
We probably deserved it, too.
I’ll leave that for philosophers.
I was too busy dying. I was by the open door, hunkered down over the minigun. When the Black Hawk tilted I felt myself begin that long, bad fall.
-2-
I have expected to die more times than I can count. Nature of the job. I’m a first-team shooter for an organization that pits special operators against terrorists who have bioweapons based on absolute bleeding-edge technology. In those kinds of fights a lot of people on both sides take long dirt naps. A lot of my friends have preceded me into the big black. Most of them were better people than I’ll ever be, but being a good person doesn’t make your Kevlar work any better. It doesn’t armor plate you, or make you immune to poisons, venoms, and biological agents.
Each time I expected to die and didn’t, I felt like I was cruising more and more on borrowed time. When it comes to counting the grace of God — or whoever else is on call for this little blue marble — I’m overdrawn at the bank. One of these days they’re going to foreclose on me, and I won’t have any luck or grace left to pay the bill.
I thought today was that day.
Today should have been.
Just as being a good person doesn’t give you any added protection, being a right bastard doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll meet the fate you deserve.
The helicopter went down.
I didn’t.
Not entirely.
I woke upside down.
In a tree.
A long goddamn way from the ground.
Not the first time this has happened to me, either.
My life blows.
-3-
The first rule of survival is: Don’t panic.
Panic makes you stupid and stupid makes you dead.
Panic also denies you the opportunity to learn from the moment. You take a breath and judge the immediacy of your experience. You need to assess everything. Mind, body, equipment, environment… all of it.
The bright blue of the sunny sky had faded to a washed-out and uniform gray, so I had no way of telling the time. No way to judge how long I’d been out. Five minutes? Hours? I wasn’t hungry or thirsty enough for it to be longer than that. Our Black Hawk had been hit by something — probably a rocket-propelled grenade — at around ten in the morning.
My mind was fuzzy. That was the easy part to figure out. There was a big lumpy hot spot on the back of my skull where I’d hit something during the crash. My helmet was gone.
Most of the rest of my body felt sore and stretched, but hanging upside down will do that. Plus there would have to be some minor dents and dings from when I bailed out of the Black Hawk.
I paused, frowning.
Had I bailed out? I couldn’t remember doing that, though I must have because I wasn’t crumpled up inside the fallen bird.
Moving very, very carefully, I leaned back and looked down. The floor of the forest was about forty feet below me. Long damn drop.
Then I took a breath and tightened my stomach muscles to do a gut-buster of a sit-up. On good days I can bang out a whole bunch of these. Flat, on inclines, and clutching weights to my chest. Today was not a good day, so it took a whole lot of whatever energy I had left to lift my upper body high enough to see what was holding my feet in place.
I expected to see a tangle of branches. Or something from the chopper — rope, a cable, some of the net strapping used to secure cargo. I stared at my feet, at what held me to the tree.
No rope.
No cables.
Nothing that had been on the Black Hawk.
Nothing that belonged in this forest, either.
Nothing that belonged anywhere.
I was lashed to the branch by turn-upon-turn-upon-turn of glistening silk.
The strands were as thick as copper wire. And far stronger.
I turned and looked around at the rest of the tree. That’s when I saw it. It wasn’t that the day had become hazy and gray with clouds. No, there was more of the silk stretched in wild, haphazard patterns between the trunks and leaves.
All silk.
I wasn’t hanging from a tree.
I was caught in a web.
Yeah.
A fucking web.
-4-
It’s moments like this that make you want to seriously freak out.
I mean go total bug-eyed, slavering ape-shit nuts.
A spider web big enough to cover half a mile of treetops and hold a two-hundred-pound man — complete with combat gear — suspended? Yeah. Panic time. That is not normal, even for me. That is not something you start the day either psychologically- or tactically-prepared for.
Which changed the process.
Instead of letting calm passivity inform you and help you plan, you go bugfuck nuts and get the hell out of there.
Maybe you scream a little.
I did. Sue me.
I snaked out a hand and caught the thickest part of the branch I could, careful not to grab more of the webbing. Once I steadied myself, I reached into my right front pants pocket for my Wilson rapid-release knife. I wear it clipped to the lip of the pocket and it was still there. I pulled it free and flicked my wrist to snap the three-point-eight inch blade into place. That blade is short, but it’s also ultra-light and moves at the speed of my hand, which means it can move real damn fast.
I slashed at the web, terrified that the blade might stick or not be tough enough to slice through the fibers.