Zombie Team Alpha: Lost City Of Z Read online

  Her mother had been a very gracious host. She could cook a simple fare of citrus-marinated meats and stone-ground, homemade tortillas that tasted like nobody’s business. For the good of his health, though, he knew he had to get out of there—fast—or he would have blown up like a tick and been in need of one of those motorized scooters advertised on late-night TV just to get around.

  But once he’d escaped, he’d had plenty of exercise to work off all that good food.

  The rest and relaxation had also served to wash much of the bad tastes from his mouth that Russia had left behind. With all of his various injuries now almost healed, he’d found a bit of peace for a change and wanted to hold onto it and forget about the harrowing experience they’d had running from all those zombies. He still didn’t understand their reason for being, or how they even came about in the first place, which was probably the same thing. It was just a Scooby-Doo mystery for another day. All he knew now was that he never, ever wanted to see another one of those damned things come shambling at him again. Not for the rest of his life.

  That level of intense strife was all in the past now. He had a cool million dollars plus squirreled away in an offshore bank account, a beautiful, intelligent woman to spend his days with—and sun, surf, and good beer. Life couldn’t get much better than that.

  Squinting against the glare, he scanned the pale-white beach, sweeping from left to right. Fat tourists and locals exchanged money for trinkets. Beautiful, topless women displayed their assets for all to see. Waiters moved with purpose through the sand, balancing trays of cold, fruit-filled drinks. Directly ahead of him, a red, white, and green parasail rose gracefully above the waters, towed by a growling speedboat cutting white-capped furrows through the surf.

  His eyes eventually landed on his greatest prize—Reyna Martinez. She’d gone to the water to cool off, and while he planned to join her shortly, he hadn’t yet finished his beer and didn’t want it to get warm. Moreover, he had been content just to sit back and watch her as she’d walked away from him toward the water. She moved like a jaguar, with a lithe, sensual, and sleek prowl. It was hypnotically powerful and had given him shivers whenever she dipped her head below the lapping waves and let the water roll off her back.

  Shivers of pleasure, not pain.

  Over the past few months, she’d also given him something which he’d not had in a long time—a reason to keep living after his wife had died so unnecessarily, which had been well over a year ago.

  Reyna had also given him an aching soreness in the muscles of his back. They could take no more wild exertions. His mouth was dry and his tongue was rubbed raw from overuse. The days had also become a mix of joy and agony due to the two precious lemons he had dangling between his legs.

  She’d squeezed them almost dry.

  His biggest fear now was if he would ever be able to perform that most primal sexual act again. He was a man, certainly, right straight down to the bone, and he knew that he would eventually overcome the tragic condition from which he suffered—or, at the very least, would valiantly die in the process of trying.

  She had to be hurting as well—a little, if not more. The whole sexual marathon thing they had going together had become a win-at-all-costs contest for her. It was one in which she planned to beat him senseless with daily, even if that led to his youthful demise. While he had not been letting on about his complete and total exhaustion over their constant lovemaking, she could probably taste sweet victory already because her sultry walk on the beach and subsequent dive into the water had been just another way of rubbing his nose in it.

  She was Evil. Pure, Capital-E, Evil.

  He watched as she emerged from the foaming water and onto the beach. His memory filled in the details he’d spent hours and hours studying. Her smooth and sexy curves, the soft, yielding nature of her smooth-as-butter skin, the sensual scent of her hot, animalistic sweat. But it was the way she strode up the beach, hips swaying back and forth, that hypnotized him and kept him entangled in her web.

  She stopped briefly to comb her wet hair back with her widespread fingertips, then reached down to adjust the top strap on her tiny white bikini that left so little to the imagination. She then adjusted the bottom strap, pulling it aside just enough to expose the lighter skin underneath, and teased him with a hint of what he desired most—the world’s greatest treasure chest of all time.

  He licked his lips again, and took another sip from his beer.

  A shadow blocked the sunlight coming from above and to his right, and he sensed a new presence to his left, a much larger presence.

  Cutter wanted to tell those two presences to go away, to—get the hell out of here! He was far too involved with something much more to his liking and didn’t want to be bothered by the two of them.

  “Hi, Jack,” Morgan Crow said from his right. “If that bulge in your shorts is any indication, you’re pretty happy to see us.”

  Kyle Gauge, her constant companion and partner in the business they shared, grunted his form of “hello” from the opposite side.

  Spell broken, Cutter glanced down at his board shorts. Bright, multi-hued tiger-stripes adorned them. They’d been all he’d worn the past week. Just a different style each day with no shirt, no shoes, but plenty of service.

  The big difference today, however, was that Morgan had indeed been correct. The shorts had changed shape. There was a new stiff peak poking up from them, right where his legs met his torso.

  “Well, fancy that,” he said.

  - 3 -

  EYES WIDE SHUT

  “Go away, Morgan,” Cutter groused.

  “Tell me you’re not glad to see us,” a cheerful Morgan said.

  “No, not really.” Jack leaned back in the lounge chair and guzzled the last of his beer. It was mostly foam and had turned from chilled goodness into something warm and soupy and far less palatable.

  Squinting, he swiveled in Gauge’s direction. The big man wore black combat pants, black combat boots, black combat sunglasses, and a big, oversized, red-flower-printed white shirt. His dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and his untrimmed eyebrows stuck up above his sunglasses. He also held his tattooed arms crossed over his chest, which made him look like a cross between a drug-runner and a tourist way out of his element.

  “That’s a Hawaiian shirt,” Cutter commented. “This is Mexico.”

  Gauge shrugged, and Cutter saw the faint outlines of the big handgun at Gauge’s hip. With handguns being illegal in Mexico, doubly so for a gringo, Gauge was more than just skirting the law again. So too was Cutter, not that he had anywhere to hide a gun on his person at the moment. He kept his wrapped inside the extra beach towel at his side.

  A Glock G17, of course.

  “Jack,” Morgan said. “We need to talk.”

  Cutter wanted to laugh but didn’t. A guffaw, a chuckle, maybe. Nothing good ever started with, “We need to talk.”

  He sniffed to clear his nose and wiped under it with the back of his hand. “You always want to talk to me, Morgan, but right now, I don’t much want to listen.”

  He nodded in the direction of the approaching Reyna Martinez. “See that?”

  Morgan folded her arms and changed directions.

  “That, my dear, is why I don’t want to listen.”

  Morgan sighed. “Sorry, but the fun and games are over, boss. You won’t answer your phone, so here we are once again.”

  “Yup, here you are once again,” he repeated.

  She signed noisily. “You still haven’t taken that off yet.”

  He knew just what she meant. His right hand wanted to touch the white-gold wedding band on his left ring finger, almost as if he was still embarrassed by his own fecklessness to remove it. He just couldn’t. Reyna had been okay with that, but he had sensed a growing unease with her as things had progressed between them over the past few weeks. One day, perhaps, he’d take it off. But that day was as far off in the distance as the horizon over the sparkling ocean before him.
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  Morgan cocked her head to one side and looked at Reyna as she approached. Morgan did not look away for several long seconds.

  “It’s time to get back to work,” she finally said, as if she found the words a bit distasteful herself.

  Cutter snorted. “I’m done with all that working stuff. It’s overrated.” He scooted his butt forward on the chair and scanned the beach for one of the strolling waiters. He raised the empty beer bottle and shook it to signal for another.

  Una mas, por favor.

  Tragically, he saw none of the tray-carrying, bringers-of-goodness, so he grimaced and lay back down on the lounge chair.

  “Go away,” he repeated, then shut his eyes.

  “Morgan. Gauge,” Reyna said as she came closer. “What brings you two here?”

  Jack smirked a bit. One thing that could be said about Dr. Reyna Martinez, she always got right to the point. No small talk. Straight to business. He liked that about her.

  “We’ve all been summoned.”

  “Summoned?” Reyna asked.

  “Yes,” Morgan continued, “Mr. Moray has asked that we join him in Atlanta tomorrow.”

  “Atlanta,” Jack said, eyes still closed. “No.”

  “He’s got a job for us. Money, Jack. It’s what pays for your vacations.”

  “Money isn’t everything, Morgan,” he said without opening his eyes. “I thought you would have learned that by now.”

  “No, it’s not everything, but it is something.” She cleared her throat. “This isn’t just about the money, it’s about something else entirely.”

  “What do you mean?” Reyna asked.

  Jack felt the chair he was sitting on sink lower as Dr. Martinez sat down beside him. He opened one eye a crack and took in the generous curves of her magnificent breasts. She pulled at her hair and droplets of cool water fell on his legs. As his skin tingled, something else which had been going away, started to rise again.

  Reyna brushed his inner thigh with her fingertips. He shuddered and opened his eyes. “Stop that.” He pushed her hand away and swung his legs over the side and planted them on the sun-warmed sand. He pulled his hair back with one hand and let out a long, languid sigh.

  If Moray wanted him back in the US so soon, and it wasn’t about money, then there had to be a damned good reason behind it. Cutter trusted the guy and owed him for saving his ass in Russia. If it weren’t for Moray, Cutter, and his entire team, would have been toast. Or worse, turned into those terrible zombie creatures like so many of the Russian miners. There were fates worse than death in the world. Becoming a zombie was right up there near the top of the list. That, or maybe working in a mindless cubicle for some soul-sucking corporation.

  While he’d been trying hard not to think about what had happened in Russia, he had pieced a few things together. It was obvious that those miners had been under the influence of something malevolent, but what that evil something was, he had no idea. He only had some theories. He and Reyna had speculated about the hows and whys late one night during an infrequent break in their intimate relations, but it had been such a turn off that they’d put off the discussion and hadn’t brought it up since. He just wanted to forget.

  Jack looked at Morgan, then at Gauge, then at Reyna. Yeah, he owed the guy. Thinking better of it, though, he glanced about for the waiter again. Not seeing him, he rested his head on the soft towel he’d been using as a pillow and shut his eyes, seeing deep red and what looked like hundreds of forking rivers, all leading to nowhere in particular.

  “Jack,” Morgan said. She sounded far off. As did the surf crashing on the beach. As did his own deep breathing.

  He almost bothered to answer her, but he was too warm, too exhausted, and too close to sleep.

  - 4 -

  HERE WE GO AGAIN

  Cutter drummed his fingers on the hulking conference room table, wondering once again why the hell he had been stupid enough to have aborted his vacation and been dragged all the way to Atlanta.

  Morgan and Reyna sat to either side of him while Gauge was relegated to the last seat, one down from Dr. Martinez. It didn’t seem to faze the man that he’d been moved. He’d been a part of the team since the beginning, and while Cutter’s wife Sharon had always occupied the right-hand spot next to him, Gauge had moved to sit there the last time they’d been assembled around the same table. While Cutter wasn’t certain what Gauge thought of having Reyna replace Sharon on the team, the guy was smart enough not to have said anything about it. Gauge was often good like that. Or, it could just be that he didn’t give a shit, which Cutter figured was more likely. Gauge cared about other things that were far more important to him—like guns and blowing stuff up.

  Cutter had also sensed Morgan’s hesitance with the new team dynamic. On the plane ride to Atlanta, she was acting as if she had a growing unease with Reyna. What all that could be attributed to, was anyone’s guess. It would take time to sort out, he figured, or maybe he’d have to change the dynamic himself.

  Or maybe he could just not worry about it at all.

  His plan, for now, was to listen to what Moray had to say for politeness’ sake and nod along before finding a way to duck out of the meeting and locating a new sunny warm place to take the good doctor. The relationship he was forming with Reyna was far from done just yet. It had barely even gotten started. At the very least, the detour to Atlanta had given him a respite from their engaging, almost circus-like activities.

  Other than Anton Moray, there was one other man in the room. The guy was in his early twenties, and Cutter had first met him upon his arrival from Russia. Moray had called the kid “one of my most loyal and trusted advisors.”

  It was easy to see why. The kid was smart. Scary smart.

  His name was Ajay T. Covenant. What the T stood for, Cutter had not asked, nor did he particularly care. Maybe…Tiberius. And maybe he did care a little. As a kid, he wanted to be called Jackson “Tiberius” Cutter. Like Captain James “Tiberius” Kirk. The name had a nice ring to it.

  According to what had been said about the guy, Moray and Ajay had been acquainted for many years. The story went that Moray had rescued Ajay when he’d been orphaned by an explosion near one of the company’s mining operations in India. Ever since, Moray had been grooming the kid, sending him off to the best boarding schools that money could buy. The kid could speak without the hint of an accent, and he could put on various other accents with ease—from British to Australian to Northeastern American, and then all the way to a long, drawled-out Southern charmer. He’d been a good distraction to listen to on the way back from Russia and had briefly taken Cutter’s mind off the horrors. The kid definitely had an ear for accents, and Moray also mentioned that Ajay spoke ten different languages, which was a marvel to Cutter, who struggled with the only language he knew—English.

  But there was still something off-putting about the kid. Cutter didn’t trust him.

  “Thank you for coming. I trust the flight was pleasant?” Moray asked from the head of the table.

  Cutter said nothing. He was too busy watching Ajay. The man was a bit too prim and proper for his liking. A small fault, for sure. But that sort of attitude always made him suspicious. Erudite, pretentious pricks were the worst. Overeducated shit-heads and—

  “Mr. Cutter…?” Moray asked. “Are you listening?”

  “Nothing,” Cutter said, shaking his head and leaning forward. “The flight was fine. Good pilot.” He shook his head again. “So why are we here? It’s not for all this impressive ambiance, I suspect.”

  Moray smirked. “Atlanta certainly has much to offer…if you give her half a chance.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Cutter said, staring at one of the god-awful paintings hanging across from him. It looked like it had been painted by a chimpanzee on acid. “Never mind.”

  Anton Moray then indicated to Ajay. The young man opened a laptop and clicked the remote lying next to him on the tabletop. A colorful graphic appeared on the large monitor hung on
the wall behind Moray showing images of an overgrown jungle. Trees, plants, rivers. Nothing new.

  Moray turned to look at the image, turned back. “Have you ever heard the legend of El Dorado, Mr. Cutter?”

  Cutter took a moment before replying. “Who hasn’t? Lost city in the jungle, treasures, filled with gold. All that. Yeah, I’ve heard plenty about it. We used to get a lot of crackpots wanting us to take them there, or trying to sell maps that were guaranteed to lead us right to it.”

  “Did you ever purchase one of these maps?”

  Cutter said nothing. He licked his lips. Yeah, he had. A few, in fact. But he wasn’t going to admit it. The maps all turned out to be bogus. The allure, though, well that was almost too much for him not to buy at least one. That map was still in a frame in his office in Texas. His wife, Sharon, had thought he’d been suckered into buying it. Perhaps he had. It was a nice map. A damn nice map. Came cheap, too. And he liked maps.

  “Regardless, Mr. Cutter. I can assure you that the legend is based on hard and true facts, though most have been muddled in translation. I’ve been in the gold business all my life, and I can assure you that the Amazon Basin is still one of the last untapped frontiers. It’s filled with riches beyond your imagination. There is gold there. Lots of it. We just have not been able to locate the primary source of it yet.”

  “And that is why we are here?” Cutter asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “No, I brought you here because we found something interesting in our research. Ajay…If you will…”

  Ajay Covenant clicked on his computer, and a detailed map came up on the screen. He licked his lips before he began to speak. “Mr. Cutter, have you ever heard the story of Percy Fawcett and his fabled search for the Lost City of Z?”