The Age of Zeus

19. THE EVERGLADES

K nee-deep in swamp and spatterdock lilies, they moved in a staggered line, weapons at the ready. The air wasn't much less foetid and soupy than the water they were wading through. Warbling birdcalls echoed through the tree canopy overhead. Flying insects whined about their faces and stung the few portions of exposed skin available. Spanish moss dangled from the boughs of overhanging oaks and mangroves, brushing their helmets like dry, insubstantial fingers. Forest-pattern camouflage turned each Titan into walking vegetation, human-shaped embodiments of their surroundings. They trod like ghosts, dark dazzle green through dark dazzle green, and the Everglades spread around them, mile upon mile upon mile of it, steaming and overgrown and silty, neither earth nor sea but the worst possible merging of the two elements: unsolid, humid, a vast rotting floorboard of a place.

This had been the home of the Hydra for going on four years now. Originally the monster had been deployed by the Olympians in southern Texas as part of their strategy for dealing with an armed insurrection that was going on there, in and around Houston. Once that was successfully quelled, and the ringleaders treated to a public execution, the Olympians had left the Hydra behind, a kind of memento, a token to remind those rednecks not to get too uppity again, and also something for them to focus on so that further rebellion would be far from their thoughts. A large, multi-headed reptilian creature roaming the countryside, attacking ranches and homesteads and killing cattle and even the odd human was, after all, quite a demand on people's attention, and quite a drain on the state's appetite for violent confrontation.

Soon, however, the Hydra had decided it found the arid Texan climate uncongenial and it had gravitated east towards the Mississippi Delta, a habitat moister and muddier and much more to the monster's liking. For a time it had wallowed contentedly in the New Orleans region, prowling the bayous and lurking in the levees. It was during that period that Kayla Sparks's relatives had had the bad luck to run into it late one night while driving home from dinner at a seafood restaurant in Port Sulphur. Their bellies full of crawfish soup and soft-shell crab, they'd run into the Hydra on a lonely northbound stretch of Highway 23. Or actually, not run into. Sparks's Uncle Hubert had swerved his Ford Taurus off the road in order to avoid a head-on collision with the monster, and the car had ploughed nose-first down a steep bank into a gully.

Had Hubert, his wife and her mother died instantly in the crash, that would have been a mercy. But seatbelts and airbags preserved all three of them from fatal injury and reserved all three of them for a far worse fate. The Hydra descended the bank to the wrecked vehicle and proceeded to devour the dazed occupants more or less simultaneously, reaching in through the smashed-out windows with separate heads, hauling the family members out and tearing them apart. Louisiana PD had pieced the sequence of events together from the available evidence: skidmarks, Hydra spoor — oh, and the appalling bloody carnage of human remains that surrounded the Taurus for several yards in every direction.

Subsequently the Hydra had resumed its journey eastward and southward, passing down Florida's Gulf Coast to settle eventually in the Everglades, which were now a domain it had almost exclusively to itself. Since its arrival, most of the human residents in the southern portion of the state had moved out, leading to, among other things, a grievous property slump, with multimillion-dollar beachfront mansions now going for a song. Other victims of the Hydra's presence were the plethora of local theme parks — for all that they boasted newly erected 20-foot-tall steel security fences and watchtowers with manned machine-gun posts — and, indeed, the Florida tourism industry in general, those airboat rides and those tours of Hemingway's house looking increasingly unattractive to overseas visitors and Americans alike. Only the state's substantial population of retirees, because they were either too old or too ornery to care, were unwilling to be intimidated by having the Hydra on their doorsteps. They, therefore, had become the monster's principal quarry, its primary source of nutrition, a tastier and easier-to-catch morsel, softer in every sense, than its secondary source of nutrition, alligators. Every so often the Hydra would steal into the grounds of a rest home or gated community, using canals as its means of access, pluck some unwary Grey Panther or Silver Surfer from a sun lounger or wheelchair, and drag its screaming pension-age prey back into the water.

"It's quicker'n cancer," commented one octogenarian Floridian, when asked by a TV reporter why she continued to live where she did after having watched two of her closest friends succumb to Hydra attack on separate occasions. "You get to my age, you begin to think it's better to go fast, and while you've still got most of your inner organs and all of your marbles. Hydra wants to take me, like it did my gal pals Annie-May and Elvira? I say bring it on. Hope the damn thing chokes on my hip replacement."

As for the Olympians, they appeared oblivious to the fact that the Hydra was at large, bringing impoverishment and euthanasia to the Sunshine State. Hermes could have come any time to retrieve it. He, along with Hera, who had power over the monsters, could have whisked the Hydra back to its pen on Mount Olympus, had Zeus instructed them to do so. Zeus, however, was not bothered, it would seem. Either he'd forgotten the Hydra was still out there, or else, perhaps, he simply had it in for America's Deep South.

The last confirmed sighting of the Hydra had been at a location just north of the Tamiami Canal, not far from the city of Copeland. That was just over a week ago, when an intrepid — some would say foolhardy — wildlife documentary film crew looking for footage of the creature had got exactly what they were after. Unfortunately their encounter with it had been a little more up-close and personal than they might have liked, and only one of them had emerged unscathed. The other two had been savaged to pieces and partially eaten, their deaths recorded for posterity on hi-def video by the surviving member, who was traumatised by the event but not so traumatised that he hadn't managed to auction the tape to the highest-bidding TV network for a seven-figure sum.

Landesman had made the Titans watch the gruesome video clip prior to embarking on the op.

"That is what you'll be facing," he had said after they'd sat through it a harrowing three times. "Be under no illusion: the Hydra is a hellish lethal beast. Hard to kill, too. It's capable of regenerating lost or damaged tissue almost instantly. No one's sure how. Some biologists have posited that it has huge quantities of self-organising blastema cells, which give it an exaggerated form of the ability of many reptiles and amphibians to re-grow lost legs or tails. Or it could, of course, be a magical creature of myth, and therefore has abilities that are beyond the powers of rational empiricism to account for."

"It can be killed, though," Sparks had said.

"Oh yes," Landesman had replied. "I believe it can."

A few hours since venturing into the Everglades, the four Titans had seen a couple of alligators but nothing larger or more alarming than that. The 'gators had slithered away at their approach, seeking refuge in underbrush or deep water, and Barrington had remarked disparagingly about how small they were "compared to the crocs back home." Their snaggletooth grins were unnerving, though, and Sam was glad to be kitted out in armour that they hadn't a hope of biting through. She was gladder still of the substantial firepower that she and her cohorts were carrying.

Near midday, she called a rest stop. The Titans clambered out of the swamp onto the shady, dry elevation of a tree island, and broke out energy bars and bottled water. Removing her helmet, Sam felt the stagnant, damp Everglades air close in around her head, unbearably clammy, like being swaddled in a hot wet towel.

"Now I really appreciate these suits' microclimates," she said. "We'd be roasting alive otherwise."

Barrington concurred. "I'm as chilly as a brew in an eski."

"If you'll excuse me," said Sparks, standing, "I need a comfort break. This may take some time."

"Five minutes, no more," Sam said.

"I'll need that long just to get my drawers down. These darn suits, they ain't toilet-friendly, you knowum saying?"

"Ten minutes, then. We need to get moving again soon."

Sparks disappeared into a dense thicket of saw palmetto.

The time ticked by. Hamel occupied herself by checking her weapon, a lightweight, self-contained flamethrower fuelled by capsules of liquid hydrazine. Sam did likewise with her recoilless submachine gun. Not long ago Landesman had enthused to her about the beauty of the gun's design. It was constructed so as to direct the force of the recoil downwards, rather than into your shoulder. Where a. 45-calibre weapon typically had a kick like a mule, and you had muzzle climb to contend with, this one fired straight and true with scarcely a twitch in your hands, while still spitting out the rounds at a rate of over 4,000 per minute on full-auto. To Sam it looked like a gun that had been stripped down to its bare essentials, flensed, inelegant. She couldn't deny, though, that it was a joy to fire. There was something almost obscene in the way it could rip apart paper targets and yet, to the wielder, it might as well have been a water pistol for all the handling trouble it gave.

"Sam?" said Barrington. "Base is calling in. They want a sitrep."

"Not Sam. Tethys," Sam said as she slid her helmet back on. She was reminding herself about her callsign as much as Barrington. "Base, this is Tethys. We're just taking a breather."

"I know," said Landesman, five time zones and several thousand miles away. "I can see. But why has Theia gone offline?"

"Theia's answering the call of nature. I imagine she wants some privacy."

"I don't like being incommunicado with a Titan in the field."

"Her ten minutes are nearly up. I'll go and see what's keeping her."

Sam pushed her way into the palmetto thicket, shoving aside the long spiky leaves. There was no sign of Sparks — Theia. She forged further in. How deep into the thicket had Theia gone? How much privacy did a girl need? There was shy and then there was ridiculously bashful.

An unsettling feeling came over Sam. How still everything suddenly seemed. Not just still. Silent. The birdcalls were absent. Minutes earlier there had been a cacophony of cuckoo hoots and stork squawks and the up-down trills of mockingbirds. Now nothing. Even the incessant insect hum sounded subdued.

She knew then, without knowing quite how she knew, that the Hydra was nearby.

She lowered her gun from port-arms to ready.

Had it got Theia? Snatched her from the thicket?

There was no sign of a struggle, as far as she could see. The palmetto leaves and the ground underfoot appeared undisturbed, unbroken. But the Hydra was a cunning creature. It hunted alligators, after all, and they were no easy prey. Elderly humans were one thing, but it took stealth and guile to stalk and catch an alligator. The monster might well have sneaked up on Theia and grabbed her without a sound, too quickly for her to put up a fight.

Sam reached the outer edge of the thicket, where it gave onto open ground — a narrow mud beach that sloped down into the swamp water.

Here she found Sparks/Theia, who was in a squatting position with her back to Sam, bodystocking bunched around her ankles to expose the pear-shape of her bare buttocks. Portions of her battlesuit lay near her, neatly stacked on a scrubby patch of grass. Her rifle was with them, just out of her reach.

Theia was staring straight ahead. Her entire body was trembling, gripped with dread, and a stream of faeces was squirting out of her and plopping onto the mud between her feet.

Understandably — because in front of her, rearing out of the water, was the Hydra.

It was like some hideous huge sea anemone. The nine necks that sprouted frond-fashion from its body waved sinuously, balletically alongside one another, sometimes entwining, sometimes vying for position, dripping swamp water as they writhed. Each was capped with a serpentine head into which were set bulbous pus-yellow eyes that glowed with venomous greed. The body itself, mostly submerged, was reminiscent of a lizard's, sheathed in fleshy grey-green scales, with a ridge of finny dorsal spines.

Glaring down at Theia, paralysed and shitting herself with terror, the Hydra opened all nine of its mouths at once and let out a multiplicity of sibilant hisses. Fangs were revealed — nine sets of them, more fangs than Sam could count or wanted to count, and even the smallest longer than her little finger.

For a second — a single, endless-seeming second — Sam just wanted to scream and run away. Never mind that she had watched film of this monster, that she already knew what it looked like, knew what to expect. Seeing a video clip was nothing compared with coming face-to-face with the actual thing. The documentarians' onscreen deaths were preparation but not inoculation. Every bit of her squirmed in primal, atavistic disgust.

Then the reek of the Hydra's breath hit her. It was quite the most repulsive thing she had ever smelled — worse, far worse, than the smell she had once been greeted by on entering a flat in a tower block in Stoke Newington, where she and Prothero had been called after the discovery was made of the three-day-old corpse of a Nigerian people-trafficker. She had puked then, and thought subsequently that this death stench was the most unpleasant olfactory assault her nose had ever suffered and would ever have to suffer. She'd been wrong. She felt beyond nauseated now, sickened to the core of her being. The smell of the Hydra's breath was the smell of decay and slime and marshes and bloat magnified a hundredfold, something dredged up from the bottom of the most stinking, disease-ridden cesspool imaginable, something that would make flies caper in the air with glee before the noxiousness of it sent them spiralling to the ground stone-cold dead.

But it had one benefit. It was so shockingly repugnant, that smell, that it roused her from her fear-struck stupor. It galvanised her into action. If only to get rid of it, purge the smell from the vicinity, Sam raised her gun and fired. Bullets raked the Hydra's flank. A chain of holes erupted in the monster's scaly hide, spurting blood. Meanwhile, dimly, she could hear Landesman ordering Iapetus and Rhea to go to her assistance.

The Hydra roared in pain, all nine heads abruptly switching their attention from Theia to Sam, which had in part been her intention. The creature launched itself up the beach towards her, and even as it came Sam could see the bullet holes healing, flesh puckering shut as though being sealed from within with putty.

She loosed off another volley of shots, aiming this time at one of the heads. Fragments of skull and gobbets of brain flew away, and the Hydra howled and recoiled. Its other eight heads swivelled to inspect the damaged one. Though Sam had blown it half off, the head rapidly regenerated itself. With astonishing speed the plates of the skull re-grew, knitted together and were patched over with fresh skin. A new eye appeared, popping up to fill a socket that had been hollowed out by the gunfire. It all happened as if in a piece of time-lapse film — from ruin to repair in a matter of seconds — until once more the monster had nine identical intact heads.

It lunged at Sam again with all nine mouths gaping wide, claws propelling it up the beach, gouging furrows in the mud. In her ear Landesman was urging her to stay calm. "Take another head off," he said. "Drive it back. The others are on their way." More faintly she could hear Ramsay, further from the mic at mission control, giving much the same advice.

Sam did as bidden, strafing the frontmost head and all but severing it below the jaw. Immediately another of the Hydra's heads finished the job for her, chewing the loosely dangling head free so that it fell to the ground. This left the way clear for a new head to sprout up from the stump of the neck, flesh and bone swelling and taking shape like a cunningly wrought balloon.

Sam barely paused to register this small miracle. She removed another head. That too was swiftly replaced, as was a third. The Hydra found these decapitations agonising, but each succeeded only in stalling it briefly. It kept on coming up the beach, growing angrier with every step, keener than ever to reach the human who was tormenting it in this way and rend her limb from limb.

Then the gun ran dry. Sam ejected the magazine and groped for a fresh one, and the Hydra, spying an opening, charged at her with redoubled ferocity.

It was mere feet away, and Sam was still trying to slot the new magazine into place, when, to her left, a shotgun blast boomed. The Hydra, struck in the belly, staggered sideways. A Titan appeared from the palmetto thicket. The transponder sensor display in Sam's visor informed her this was Iapetus, although she knew anyway. Not only was Barrington fond of pump-action shotguns, but he was also yelling at the top of his lungs, hurling every insult he could think of at the Hydra, most of them relating to sexual organs, illegitimacy and, in true Ocker tradition, species of native Australian wildlife. "Gift from the Barracuda!" he cried as he unloaded three more cartridges into the monster, hacking fist-sized craters out of it. The wounds of course soon filled themselves in, but they diverted the Hydra from Sam long enough to allow her to reload, and then she joined in the assault again.

All at once the Hydra was looking less enraged, more beleaguered. Its necks thrashed this way and that as it tried to respond to being besieged on two fronts at once. Sam sprayed away with her submachine gun while Iapetus gave the monster buckshot hell. The pair of them were far from repelling the Hydra, let alone killing it, but they were holding it at bay if nothing else.

"Rhea?" Sam said into the comms. "Where the hell are you, Rhea?"

Her gun ran dry again. Iapetus gave her covering fire while she smacked a full magazine into place, and just as she did so, Rhea came into view immediately to her left.

"Finally," Sam said. "Ready?"

"Ready," said Rhea. She sparked her flamethrower into life with its magnesium igniter. A finger of fire rippled out from the nozzle. "Let's do it."

Briskly Sam deprived the Hydra of another of its heads, then Rhea stepped up and subjected the neck stump to a concentrated jet of fire. Meat crackled and sizzled, and eight Hydra mouths simultaneously let out eight piercing shrieks.

The two Titans repeated the process again, and again. Hydra heads thudded into the beach mud. The severed ends of Hydra necks became ovals of charred, blistered flesh and bone. The odour of cooking reptile filled the air, oddly pleasant, certainly when compared with the smell of the Hydra itself.

"It's working," Rhea said, slapping a fresh capsule of hydrazine into the flamethrower's reservoir breech. "Landesman was right."

Landesman had theorised that the Hydra would have a much harder time repairing burns than any other kind of injury. "It was Hercules's method, in the myths," he had said. "Behead, then burn."

The cauterised stumps did start to re-grow new heads, but at a greatly retarded rate. The burnt tissue had to be sloughed off first before the proto-head could bubble up and take shape. Now Tethys and Rhea were in a race against the clock. They needed to destroy all nine heads before any of them could renew itself completely. Entirely headless, the monster would surely not survive.

Landesman had made Tethys and Rhea spend a whole afternoon rehearsing this move back at Bleaney. Iapetus was contributing now by taking potshots at the gradually emerging new heads, blowing them to smithereens while they were still just glistening, formless bulges.

All the same it required concentration and nerve to keep the production-line decapitation and cauterisation going, especially as the Hydra was rearing up and all of its necks, beheaded and otherwise, were thrashing to and fro, presenting a set of confusing and highly unstable targets. The monster stood its ground, at least. It seemed fully aware that these humans had discovered a vulnerability which they were exploiting without mercy, but it was either too enraged or too stubborn to think of retreating. Perhaps it simply couldn't believe that after all these years spent at the top of the food chain, during which time it had got used to humans being slow-moving and almost willing prey, it could ever be defeated. It continued to hiss and snap viciously at the Titans even as they whittled its headcount down to three, then two.

At last only a single head remained. Its features had a look of distress and resignation about them, and the baleful yellow glare in that final remaining pair of eyes was suddenly dulled. The Hydra knew the game was up. As if in pique, it swung away from Tethys and Rhea, turning its attention back to the human it had first spotted, the one it had been on the verge of attacking before another of them had so rudely interrupted. If it must die, the Hydra wasn't going to without taking one of these infernal creatures with it, the one it perceived as the weakest.

Theia, however, was on her feet. She had only a few pieces of her armour on. She was, in fact, mostly naked. But clasped in her right hand was a combat knife with a ten-inch blade, and as the Hydra lowered its head towards her, teeth glinting avariciously, Theia said, "This is for Nanna," and she plunged the knife into the monster's throat. "This is for Hubert and Celeste," she said, twisting the knife once back and forth, its tantalum-carbide-coated titanium blade widening the jagged slash she had created. Blood gushed over her arm, sluicing out from both the wound and the Hydra's open maw. "And this," she said, "is for me." She jerked the knife upwards, parting two vertebrae.

The head lolled sideways on the neck. A flap of skin held it on for a few seconds, but the weight was too much for it and it stretched and tore, and the head landed with a thump at Theia's feet.

Nine truncated necks suddenly went limp, and the Hydra swayed for a moment, then slumped heavily into the mud. Its body convulsed, a shudder ran along the necks, and then it lay still.

"Step aside," Rhea told Theia, and Theia numbly obeyed, and Rhea set about incinerating the Hydra, scorching the carcass until her last flamethrower capsule was used up.

Barrington, thumbing his visor up, surveyed the smoking, blackened mound of ex-monster.

"Now that," he said, "is one hell of a barbie."