Zombie Kong - Anthology by TW; T. A. Wardrope Simon; Brown William; McCaffery Tonia; Meikle David Niall; Brown Wilson Read Free Book Online

most treacherous terrain the trail offers, but I’m stumbling along like a scarecrow. The third time I trip and go down on my face with a grunt, Tompkins pulls me up by my soiled camo jacket like a kitten.
    “Get your shit together, college-boy. If you alert them, I’ll let them pull your arms off.”
    We move on. The motto of the Special Forces is De oppresso liber (Latin: To Liberate the Oppressed). In the pit of my shaken, snow-globe stomach, I feel we are on a forced march to liberate the dead and digested, but I cannot bring myself to tell Tompkins this for fear of what he might do. Under a three-quarters-full moon we don’t need our two missing native trackers to follow the trail of crushed foliage, which is initially puzzling. A troop of giant gorillas would have long ago learned how to remain under the radar and not leave obvious trails crisscrossing the countryside.
    We see the bodies of many birds of all sizes. Pigeons, swifts, owls, ducks, plover, and a large, beautiful falcon. All stone dead. Apparently Green-6 has a different effect on avian species versus mammals.
    We keep walking. A lone, brown fox-like dog––a dhole––launches itself from the underbrush and Tompkins kills it with his boot heel.
    “Just what in the hell was in the shit we dumped into the water?”
    I say nothing, head down, miserable.
    Exhaustion sets in. I try not to think of my warm apartment on the cheaper, rundown side of Beacon Hill, or Bethany, the long-legged girl I am dating. I concentrate on placing one boot in front of the other as quietly as possible.
    Four klicks later we are ascending the far side of a deep ravine when Tompkins shoves me to the grass, knocking the wind out of my lungs. Despite my fatigue I’m furious, and I start to squirm and holler, but his hand clamps across my mouth. It stinks of sweat and the grease used to pack automatic rifles. He motions for me to be silent.
    We huddle there for several minutes, and then I hear it––a soft whistling sound on the breeze. We can hear it because we have again entered a sphere of deathly silence. My heart begins kicking inside my ribcage.
    Tompkins scrambles forward, motioning for me to follow. Ahead, the ink-black doorway to hell awaits, the thick vines and foliage that normally obscure the cave’s entrance carelessly pushed askew. Its damp, abyssal breath flows over us, and my panic spikes. Like the mainly Hispanic grunts asked to assume tunnel-rat duty beneath Cu Chi, I cannot go in there, even if means Tompkins will slice my throat open like the steer. Dawn cannot be more than an hour or so away. I try to frame an argument in my mind that we should turn back and hike to the next village to call for reinforcements (as if they will have a payphone). At a minimum we should wait until daybreak––
    Tompkins unsheathes his serrated pig-sticker and cuts a ten-yard section of climbing cord from his pack. He ties one end around my waist and the other end to his belt.
    “In case you slip or we get separated,” he says. He grips my lower jaw where the nerve endings sing, fixing me with wild eyes that reflect moonlight against his grim, black-streaked face. “Try to stay right behind me.”
    Shaking but helpless, I shuffle forward into the creatures’ lair.
    As a kid I read all the Tarzan novels, and the pulpy adventures penned by H. Rider Haggard––tales of swarthy swashbucklers exploring caves filled with diamonds, ivory, and gold. One look at the cavern system we are entering would have convinced Allan Quatermain and Captain John Good to punch out and beat a hasty retreat.
    We half walk, half slide down a wide sloping incline covered in mud and leaves. Tompkins clicks on a small penlight with a red lens and plays it ahead as we carefully descend. After thirty yards, we arrive on a broad ledge overlooking a larger cavity. Tompkins crawls to the edge and briefly shines his light below.
    He crawls back and shakes his head––no creatures in sight.
    We take a