All’s Fair In War (Birth Of Heavy Metal Book 8) Read online

  All’s Fair In War

  Birth Of Heavy Metal™ Book 8

  Michael Todd

  Michael Anderle

  This book is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2019 Michael Todd, and Michael Anderle

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, September 2019

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-477-7

  The Zoo Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2018-19 by Michael Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Connect with Michael Todd

  Other Zoo Books

  Books written as Michael Anderle

  All’s Fair In War Team

  JIT Readers

  Jeff Eaton

  Dave Hicks

  Deb Mader

  Peter Manis

  Micky Cocker

  Diane L. Smith

  John Ashmore

  Jeff Goode

  Kelly O’Donnell

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Editor

  Skyhunter Editing Team

  Dedication

  To Family, Friends and

  Those Who Love

  to Read.

  May We All Enjoy Grace

  to Live the Life We Are

  Called.

  Chapter One

  By now, she should really be accustomed to the view that came with living this close to the Zoo. Surprisingly, the environment had begun to grow on her, and while she definitely counted the days until she was cycled out of there once again, she had actually adjusted fairly quickly and the various unique aspects of it had become familiar.

  The sun rose lazily in the grey morning sky and brought to mind a song that had been a familiar part of her childhood. Admittedly, the Sahara wasn’t the savanna, but the kind of view that sprawled before her brought that particular song to her head every time she saw a scene like this one. Even now, she could clearly hear, deep within her, the high-pitched singing in Swahili and the sight of animals drifting and gathering to see a lion that had recently been born.

  The paradox in that lingered too. They might well be that little lion’s food eventually, but in that moment, they celebrated the mysterious cycle of life.

  She shook her head and breathed in the crisp morning air laced with the unmistakable and addictive aroma of coffee from the mug in her hands.

  Out in the west lay the Zoo and its powerful reality haunted the collective nightmares of the people who thought too much about it. The jungle was shrouded in mystery—the kind that people lost their lives over. Everyone knew the American government was involved but the question was, why had it all started? No one had ever really addressed the question of why the original missile had been launched to earth.

  News reports had intimated that its origins were the result of an alien missile that had been launched toward the planet a few years before. Some people still considered this merely the platform for conspiracy theories, though. None of these naysayers believed that the goop that had somehow grown a jungle in the middle of the world’s largest desert actually originated from alien intelligence. Of course, the reason might be that this also carried the understanding that it had been deliberately launched toward Earth, so she could understand that people might find that disturbing.

  Of course, Captain Francesca Martin of the French Foreign Legion could see where they were coming from. People who made sure to stay far, far away from the jungle could be the smart ones at the end of the day—although it merely bolstered their blindness. They were able to avoid looking at the monstrosities the Zoo produced and somehow convince themselves that this was totally, one hundred percent natural.

  Anyone who had never been there might be tempted to agree. It was far better than considering the alternative—that an alien race had deliberately set out to create a hell on Earth. Still, it was ironic, really. They called those who told the stories of what they found crazy but hell, anyone who actually studied the facts knew the naysayers were the crazy ones. And if the facts couldn’t convince you, the Zoo could. From the moment you stepped into the jungle, the truth was frighteningly obvious. There were too many indicators—the trees at night when the blue lights seeped through their bark, the monsters that were spawned by the damned place, and the fact that no matter how logically you tried to determine where the fuck they'd come from, all you could really think was that none of it belonged in the sane, rational world.

  Martin shook her head as she tried to decide where the fuck everything had gone wrong around there. Most of the reasons were fairly obvious. Scientists played with shit they didn't understand, and people didn’t really care about the consequences of their actions. They only saw the potential profits that could be made from what they had created out there.

  Which was why, she assumed, they hadn't bombed the absolute crap out of the place when it became obvious that things had become out of control. That was how it inevitably went. All people could see were the possible benefits that came from this jungle, not the fact that it was there to devour them all and had transformed into a living, breathing nightmare no one could escape.

  She sighed and took one last sip of her coffee before she returned to her little apartment. Her routine was such that she didn't need long to prepare for the day. A quick shower after which she donned the clothes she'd chosen the day before left her time to run an efficient sweep through to clean. She turned all the lights off since she probably would not return for a while and headed out, making sure to lock the door behind her before she scrambled into the vehicle that had been requisitioned for the mission the day before.

  It took a moment to adjust the seat from when it had been used by someone who was either too big to be human or had worn a combat suit. She could most likely assume it was the latter, but given the sheer degree of strange shit she had been subjected
to over the past few months, she wouldn’t write anything off, at this point.

  They would all have to deal with some strange fucking shit before too long, and she needed to get herself into the right mindset for it.

  Her group was already waiting by the time she arrived at the edge of the French base. They had given her a team of twelve—about the same number they assigned to the deep patrol missions they sent into the Zoo. The Americans liked to do that more often, but her people seemed to think they needed to pull their weight in this fucking hellhole. Thankfully, the mission they'd been assigned was not the simple patrol bullshit that made them risk their lives for absolutely nothing.

  On the bright side, all that time spent in the Zoo—doing nothing and merely marching around while they waited for the monsters to attack them—had provided her with a team that actually excelled at what they did. All were survivors and veterans of at least a dozen missions into the jungle. She wouldn’t have to teach the ropes to even one newcomer.

  Martin disliked newcomers. The fact that they were stupid enough to volunteer for this kind of posting was indicative of the quality she could expect. For herself, she had sat on her ass in French Guiana and run training missions into the Amazon. Which, she assumed, was why her commanders in the FFL had decided she was one of their best special forces choices to join their new base in the Zoo.

  Back in the day, she'd heard all the stories and actually watched some of the videos. Even then, she hadn't believed the kind of crazy shit that came out of it—which had made her one of those stupid newcomers back then, she acknowledged. Experience had taught her how to handle it, though. The jury was still out on what staying there after she realized the kind of crazy shit that really did go on said about her mental health.

  "Good morning, Captain," one of her men said, and the rest of the team looked up from their work on the suits that had been assigned to them. The combat armor was some of the best that could be seen in the army. In terms of defense, functionality, and offense, you could only really get anything better when you were in the private sector, but they still needed to work and adjust each suit individually.

  Simply because they were good didn't mean they hadn't been pushed off an assembly line, which meant they had to deal with the issues that arose from that. These could be anything from the suit being a little too small to the weapons not being properly calibrated. You didn't want to get into the Zoo and only then realize your weapons worked off the hair-trigger settings the last person who had worn the suit had set them to.

  It was a nice combination of functionality and ritual like putting themselves into the mindset they needed to be in before they stepped willingly into the most dangerous place on earth.

  "Good morning, Sergeant," she replied and moved to the crate that was marked as her suit. A couple of Hammerheads had been brought over for their benefit, to drive them out into the Zoo, but she didn't want to think about that for now. At the moment, all she thought about was getting into her damned armor. The helmet came first and she activated the HUD and called up the details. The factory settings were still there, which meant this hadn't been used by anyone. She smiled when she realized that maybe she had to deal with a newbie in there, after all.

  "Is there any word on what exactly we'll do inside the jungle?" the sergeant asked. He’d mostly finished with his suit and came over to help her with hers. "Or will we only be filled in once we're in there? It seems like a stupid way to run things but sometimes, the brass likes to put confidentiality over the lives of the people they send in. We're...almost over that shit."

  "Oh." Martin grunted and strapped her boots on first. "No, I assumed you had all been briefed along with me. There were none of the usual confidentiality markings on the file they sent me, so I'll fill everyone in once we're all suited up and ready to go."

  "We’d all appreciate that, Captain," he replied with a nod and stepped back when she finished putting her boots on and began to work on the other pieces. It took her about ten minutes, by which time she could see the sun already sneaking its way higher into the sky, completely free of the horizon and well into its daily trip up and down again.

  When she turned, the other members of her team were mounting up and it was obvious that they waited for her to fill them in on the details of yet another mission into the goddammed jungle. She scanned the details of their mission reports—the ones that had been sent to them, which were different from the one that had been sent to her, annoyingly enough—and saw immediately that they simply stated a prolonged trip. The only detail provided was that it had nothing to do with the regular patrol paths and that they would go deep inside the jungle to procure something.

  The fact that they'd told her exactly what the purpose of the mission was and hadn't told the other boots on the ground felt like an attempt to keep the regular grunts in the dark as to what exactly they were doing. She’d been around long enough that she could read an order of confidentiality between those lines, but no matter. If they had told her outright, she would have told them then and there it was a mistake. But, as they seemed to want her to infer it, she would choose to ignore their unspoken orders and let the chips fall where they might. The chances of the team surviving were improved if they all worked together toward a common goal. Of course, that tended to work better if they knew what they worked toward.

  "All right, ladies, listen up," Martin snapped and called them to attention over the team's comm line as their Hammerheads started and they pulled off toward the massive expanse of jungle that spread across the horizon. "I'm not sure why the brass didn't fill you in on what exactly we're doing out here, and I don't give a shit. As it turns out, the best way for you useless assholes to watch my back is to know what it is we're heading in there to hunt, so I'll fill you in."

  She sent the images she had been given to their individual HUDs and gave them a moment to study it. All were of a fleshy monster that looked like it only had a place in the Zoo, unfortunately—like it had a lead role in the horror film all the creatures of the Zoo had been cast in. A couple of curses in a handful of languages were voiced while her teammates flipped through the variety of images that had been pulled by some unlucky bastard who had managed to get closer to the creature than she thought was comfortable.

  At the center of it was a thick, fleshy blob of a creature—roughly oval in shape and dark-green to greyish-brown in color. She couldn't tell the size precisely due to the nature of the images, but a solid guess could be made. Her estimate was that it was around two or three meters in diameter, but from the looks of some of the other images, it seemed to be able to dig itself deeply into the ground. There was no telling as to how deep it could dig itself in, and she didn't really want to think about the fact that what they could see might only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

  Then again, there were more distracting features that were easily discernible to focus on anyway. A horde of mouths were spaced across the fleshy blob that constituted its body almost like it was a conglomeration of somethings that had melded into one creature. Hundreds, if not thousands of tentacles protruded from the body and filled the space around it as if to work as eyes, ears, and limbs all in one. The most obvious—and appalling—truth was that they worked together with the singular purpose of dragging anything that was unlucky enough to be caught in the tentacles toward the waiting mouths lined with hundreds of needle-like teeth.

  "Putain merde," one of the soldiers cursed. "What the fuck is that thing?"

  "That is a monster that was caught on tape during the mission to retake the Russian base," Martin explained. "Yes, I know we all had fun mocking the bastards for losing control of their own base, but now that we know what was involved in it, I understand. Not to say we won't continue to mock them for it, but still.

  “Anyway, in the effort to reclaim the base, a group of mercs they hired to retrieve survivors took the footage you see now. As uncomfortable as it might be, we will have to look at it since that is what we have been sent into
the damn Zoo to find. They don't have a name for it yet and the specialists and researchers are still coming up with something for that. I don't even want to think about what kind of inspiration they'll work with since we all know those guys are fucked in the head, but that's not our problem.

  “What is our problem is that we've been ordered to head into the jungle to fight our pretty little monsters, tear them all a new one, and find evidence as to the existence of the monster in question. It's not that the people in charge don't trust the mercs who were hired, but... Well, okay, the feeling is that while they know they can take their word on it, the brass wants to know if we're likely to run into any more of the fuckers—and, I assume, to finally make the decision to nuke this whole fucking continent from orbit. But that's neither here nor there. For now, we head in, take footage of the beast, and get out, understood?"

  "Yes, ma'am," the team replied in unison. She had the feeling they had all begun to wish she had taken the hint and kept this crazy shit from them.

  Chapter Two