It All Falls Down Read online

  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, July 2019

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-392-3

  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

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Connect with Michael Todd

  Other Zoo Books

  Books written as Michael Anderle

  It All Falls Down Team

  JIT Readers

  Micky Cocker

  Dave Hicks

  Jeff Eaton

  Jeff Goode

  John Ashmore

  Diane L. Smith

  Deb Mader

  Nicole Emens

  Peter Manis

  Kelly O’Donnell

  James Caplan

  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

  A Small Airfield Near Chernobyl

  The world shifted under his feet as the helicopter took off. The shudder that usually accompanied a vehicle heavier than air taking flight registered on his suit as if it were an earthquake. The computer in the gear quickly corrected that and soon, the craft leveled out. He would never call a helicopter flight anything like smooth, but it was at least tolerable. Besides, his armor was advanced enough that it provided a few creature comforts like shock absorbers that protected him from being knocked around. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough.

  Andy Smythe had a hard time remembering the last time he had been heloed into a drop zone. It had to have been about ten years earlier, back before they used full body armor suits which made it so much simpler to drop people from excessive heights. Special forces in the US had also begun to perform practice runs of literal orbital drops. That was the rumor, anyway, but of course, the Yanks refused to confirm nor deny whether or not they attempted anything of the sort.

  The concept was intriguing, he wouldn’t dispute that, but Smythe was in his thirties and already too old for something like that. By the time orbital drops became the norm, he wanted to be behind a desk somewhere, make six or seven figures, and come into work three days a week. He’d spend the rest of his time rebuilding classic American muscle cars.

  That was the dream, anyway. Security companies would pay through the nose to have the expertise of a man like him. Even in this day and age of electronic security, there was still a place for bruisers like him to have their say.

  Or he could simply take the money he was paid for this job and retire. He’d heard music like that in his ears before, but this time, he had been paid in full and in advance. That didn’t usually bode well for the level of difficulty in a mission like this, but after reading through the details, he thought they’d been through worse. Of course, the other members of his usual team had passed on the opportunity. Their client had a habit of keeping the facts of the mission to herself. In this instance, all he’d been told was to enter a location where they tested the Zoo goop and retrieve data, but to proceed with care as the facility had gone dark. Simple enough, he supposed, and he assumed the site wouldn’t have had time to become anything like the Zoo he was familiar with. Still, the amount of money involved did raise a few red flags.

  Smythe looked at the rest of his team. The ten men were all geared up in heavily armored and armed suits exactly like he was, and all possessed similar military and combat experience. He’d been told to select his team for the mission, and while they would all be well-compensated for it, he was paid more and in advance since he was the only one among them who was actually qualified to lead them. The reason for this was because he knew—more or less—what they would face.

  “What do you think we’ll find when they drop us there?” one of the newcomers asked. He was a former SAS operative recently out of the service and in need of the cash. “I’ve heard all kinds of stories about what goes on in the Zoo. The videos I’ve seen are all the wrong kinds of crazy—you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Half of those videos are fakes.” A veteran member chuckled. “You do know that, right? It’s simply marketing for all these new movies and series they’re putting out about the Zoo, only very lightly based on the stuff that actually happens in there. You should read some of the databases they have on creatures that have actually been documented from inside that fucking jungle. They even have short footage shots of the creatures actually doing their thing. That’s equally as terrifying and far more realistic.”

  “If I wanted realistic, I wouldn’t have been a soldier,” another member—who sounded like he was from the French Foreign Legion—grumbled. “I’d have gone into some kind of business that actually makes money. But no, I had to be the dumb guy who goes out there and runs out of bubblegum and thus must kick ass and work for people who think doing so must very much be its own payment.”

  “Is that why you’re here, then?” Digby, the ex-SAS man chuckled. “Because you want to be violent regardless of remuneration?”

  “Fuck, no.” The Frenchman laughed. “Jean is worth the money that he’ll be paid. Jean got a half-million Euros to spend before coming out here and you have to know that Jean spent every cent of it. Jean—”

  “Likes to refer to himself in the third person?” Smythe asked.

  “Occasionally.” He grinned, apparently unperturbed by the slight sarcasm. “But Jean knows what he’s worth. And now that I’m in the private sector, you have to know that I’ll get that sweet, sweet cash.”

  “I don’t know if you Frogs know…” Digby laughed before he continued. “But you really shouldn’t eat your money, no matter how rich the sauce is.”

  “Va
te faire foutre, connard.” Jean growled and flipped his British teammate off with his suit’s hand.

  Smythe smirked. He didn’t need the built-in translator software on his suit to know what the intention was behind the man’s comment in his native tongue. It was good to see that he had a solid grasp of the heavy suit’s mechanics and was able to make such minuscule movements as raising his middle finger so quickly and clearly. The individuals had all been selected for their experience with combat suits for a reason, and it was nice to see that at least one of them hadn’t lied on their resumé.

  “It’s not like any of this shit matters, right?” Digby chuckled and looked at the other team members who were held in the helicopter’s bay, locked down until the bottom opened and allowed them to jump clear. “Seriously. We won’t even go into the Zoo proper. For all we know, the biggest problem we’ll face in Chernobyl is the radiation, which our suits are supposed to be shielded against, right?”

  “Right,” Andy replied but he didn’t feel quite as confident in what the man said. Still, logic told him that Chernobyl—the bogeyman brought up every time someone wanted to build a new nuclear power plant—couldn’t be as dangerous as the Zoo was. He’d been in there a grand total of one time, and that was fucking enough.

  That single experience was definitely enough to teach him not to underestimate what people spread around the world for whatever weird reason. It was also a good enough reminder to not assume something would be a cakewalk simply because it looked like it on paper.

  Human nature being what it was, though, it wasn’t enough to keep him from being seduced by the—what was it that the Frenchman had called it?—sweet, sweet cash.

  The red light came on in the bay, and the team immediately ceased the argument which might have otherwise been protracted since most of them were either British or French. While there were certain interesting and historical rivalries between the two nations, when it came right down to it and that red light came on, it was time to put all that aside. Whether they believed there was a risk or not, the group would watch each other’s backs. When their work took them into a hostile environment, working together was a requirement if they planned to make it home.

  He reminded himself that for him, home meant the classic GT40 that waited for him in the garage.

  The red light blinked once as he checked his weapons, made sure he had all the ammo he would need, and took one last quick read-through of the file that had been given to him when he finally accepted the cash and signed that Non-Disclosure Agreement. A lab had been opened out in the middle of the irradiated wasteland in Eastern Europe, all to test the infamous goop’s ability to soak up radiation. As with all things involving anything Zoo-related, it had actually gone well until it went dark a few weeks before. The fact that it had taken so long for a team to be sent in indicated that considerable governmental red tape needed to be cut through before a group of heavily armored and armed mercenaries could enter the area.

  The government in the Ukraine was still a remnant of the Soviet era, and these were men who had gamed the most corrupt governmental system in the world for decades. There was no getting through them until all the t’s were crossed and i’s dotted and everyone who mattered walked away with enough untraceable bills to pay for their vacation at the end of the year.

  The light turned green, and a small alarm sounded at the front of the bay to focus their attention on the doors that now began to open. It was intriguing to watch as the floor opened and slid out from under him while he knew the helicopter moved at what felt like an impossible speed and over five thousand meters above the earth. It looked impossible. Of course, it wasn’t his first jump, but every time felt like the first time.

  To look at the ground from this kind of distance while he hung from magnetic straps attached to his shoulder was something quite…breathtaking.

  Even more so was the sensation when the straps suddenly released and he fell away from the helicopter, which had slowed considerably to allow the men to drop from the bay. There were hundreds of variables that their suits all calculated at the same time as the sky suddenly filled around them. The world rushed up quickly as the two helicopters grew smaller and smaller. Twenty suits were dropped from the sky into a section of the world that had been abandoned for the better part of fifty years.

  From where he plummeted, Smythe wasn’t able to discern anything about their actual target location. The Ferris wheel the reactor four containment dome were obvious, of course, but there was no sign of cars on the network of visible roads and the sun had barely reached its peak in the sky. They dropped rapidly, and the numbers counted down at an impossible speed. A human’s terminal velocity was around fifty-three meters per second or one hundred and ninety-five kilometers per hour. In the suits they wore, the team fell instead at two hundred and forty-six meters per second or eight hundred and eighty-five kilometers an hour. He had taken the time to calculate that speed when he had a little trouble sleeping.

  It was the kind of speed that would cause a grown man to shit his pants. And, of course, it hadn’t helped him to get to sleep.

  The fifteen seconds during which they were in free-fall was enough to reach that velocity. Smythe’s body bunched inside his suit despite the inertia dampeners, and the parachutes filled the air above him. He swung wildly for a few seconds before he finally corrected his course and looked around to make sure the whole team was positioned close enough that it wouldn’t take too long to gather together once they were on the ground—and also far enough away to avoid any midair collisions.

  They were a group of mouth-breathers but they were also pros and all had jump experience. It was another thing he’d looked into to ensure that they at least knew what they were doing in the air.

  It took them a few long minutes to descend to the drop zone using their suits to guide them into a bunched formation. They were told to expect resistance of an uncertain nature, which was field language for be ready for anything that might want a piece of them. Accordingly, they formed up in groups of five and held their weapons primed and ready.

  Smythe hadn’t ever been in this section of the world before, of course, but the pictures, movies, and shows about this place had made it live on in infamy across the world. Everyone knew or had at least heard about what happened in Chernobyl in the 1980s. A catastrophe the likes of which had never been seen in the world before or since had left an enormous part of the world uninhabitable for what could possibly be millions of years. Worse, enough radiation leaked into the atmosphere to kill off virtually anything in the world.

  That wasn’t what he saw there. He recalled the pictures that displayed everything as dull gray and captured the way the location looked when it was simply dead. All the trees were lifeless, and the area should have been left a deserted wasteland. Except, of course, that the radiation killed all the bacteria that would normally cause what was left behind to decay. Instead of barren ash-colored desolation, everything remained in an eerie state of preservation in death. He definitely remembered that and had prepared himself for the mental image to become a reality. Now, however, he could only stare at his surroundings in bemusement.

  He’d done a little research which had indicated that Mother Nature had stepped in when man had stepped back. Of course, they were working on reactor four as well and the enormous safe containment dome caught and reflected the sunlight a few miles to the north-west. He’d seen that on the way down. But even that information hadn’t prepared him for the reality that, against all odds, nature seemed to be winning the battle against man’s greatest—albeit inadvertent—destruction. The forest regained life and the underbrush and grasses kept pace, along with smaller shrubs and other scrubby vegetation that pushed resolutely through the scattered snowfalls. It wasn’t completely healed yet—that was the word that came to mind, for some reason—but regeneration was well on its way. He’d heard that animals had moved in again as well. Of course, those pictures seared into his brain began to fuzz a little in the fa
ce of this new reality, and he had to admit he preferred it this way.

  “Okay lads, form up,” Smythe ordered over the comms and the group gathered around him. They were all equally as interested and intrigued by what they saw, but they hadn’t forgotten their battle-ready instincts and kept their weapons in hand.

  “We missed the drop by a couple of klicks, so we have some hiking to do,” he explained, and his gaze scanned their surroundings constantly while he held his weapon up and ready. He could see a sliver of the famous Ferris wheel to the south, which meant they now had to move off somewhere to the east. “Let’s get moving.” He indicated the direction they would go in.

  They remained in the teams they’d been assigned to and took up staggered formations. Despite the warning he had issued, they all appeared to be relaxed. They were being paid in excess of six figures for what was basically a retrieval mission, and they alternated between talking about what a dumbass their client was for parting with that much cash and what they would spend it on.

  He really wished the other members of his familiar team had been up for something like this. It wasn’t that he wanted to subject them to the same kind of hell they’d been through in the Zoo—that Jacobs had gotten them through with help from his friends. But they would have understood in a way the men he was with couldn’t. He really hated the fact that he felt paranoid about his suspicion of being watched as they approached section of the forest where they would locate the lab. He wasn’t sure what the point was to put it so far off the beaten track but assumed it had something to do with the fact that it was Zoo-related. They most likely wanted to avoid too many questions. Well, he’d prefer to avoid them too. It was enough to know that they were researching the goop in a secluded area apparently identified as a hotspot in the exclusion area. The whole point of the exercise, he’d been told, was that they needed to test the goop on all the radiation that had to be soaking into the…well, fucking everything.