Zero's Return (12 page)

Tyson tapped the
bars by Slade’s head, looking curious.  “So you called me a Nander-thawl.”

Slade lifted his
head, eyes fixed on the bloody stick the man was holding against the bars.  It
was
somebody’s scalp.  “Yes.  I called you a Neander-
tall
.”

Tyson chuckled. 
“You’re a dick.”

“I’m a
smart
dick,” Slade gritted.  “I’m a dick that can get you out of this place and on
your road to sweet, sweet freedom and back to all that lovely murdering,
looting, and raping you did with your misspent youth.” 

Tyson’s glacial
blue eyes darkened a bit.  “Never raped nobody.”  The look in the man’s eyes
added that he had, indeed, murdered people.

Slade groaned
inwardly and dropped his face back to the bars, resigning himself to his body
consuming its own fats, glucose, and proteins as it starved to death.

Tyson tapped the
bar near his forehead again, smearing more blood and hairs across the steel. 
“You really Ghost?”

“Yes,” Slade
told the stick.  “I’m really Ghost.”

Tyson grunted. 
“Thought so.  You’re the only guy in this place without a bunkmate.” 

“That’s how you
found me?” Slade asked, surprised.

Tyson shrugged,
though it seemed like there was a flicker of something more in his eyes before
he hid it.  “You stick out like a sore thumb.  Figure Ghost isn’t your average
criminal, so he’s not gonna look like your average criminal.”

Meaning he found
Slade by his creepy hairstyle that he’d gotten a Doctor’s Order not to cut, now
at a full six inches despite the prison’s half-inch regulation.

“Huh,” Slade
said.  Slade had
agonized
that the government goons would figure out he
was Ghost by merit of the first cutting—and bleeding—of his creepy hair, but
all it had taken had been a couple greased palms and a quick doctor’s note
detailing a paralyzing phobia of hair-cutting and Slade had been yet another
low-profile criminal awaiting an early parole.  The phobia hadn’t even been
hard for him to fake, either, considering that haircuts caused him
vomit-inducing pain, the loss of each strand kind of like snipping off a
six-inch bundle of raw nerves with a hacksaw. 

Still, the
fluffy white hair went pretty well with his documented age, which was,
depending on the record book, anywhere from seventy-two to a hundred and six. 
Slade was actually ninety-nine in Earth-years, but due to his vast financial
reserves, expensive Congie medicines, and his own drunken experimentation, he
had the body of a twenty-five year old. 

The doctors and
processing clerks usually raised a brow at the apparent discrepancy, but Slade
gave them a sad smile and told them of spending his life’s savings on
rejuvenators only to end up in prison for a nasty case of fraud that really
wasn’t his fault—it was his
dentist’s
fault—and they always gave him
that Holier-Than-Thou look and ushered him onward in line, a fresh new inmate
with an unhealthy case of tonsurephobia to be whipped into shape by the
impassioned sermons of the faithful.  Little did they know that Slade re-read
his favorite novels in his head during the God-talks, flipping through the
pages in his photographic memory as the priests droned on about their Savior’s
will, Human failings, responsibility, yada yada yada.  Since his internment in
New Basil Harmonious, Slade had re-read all of Heinlein’s works twice, Card’s
lifetime compilation, and was currently halfway through Stephen King’s omnibus.

But Tyson
apparently still wasn’t satisfied.  “Okay,” he said.  “Folks say Ghost’s good
at math.  So what’s the square root of seven hundred eighteen?”

“Twenty-six
point seven-nine-five-five,” Slade replied immediately, before he had a chance
to think about it.  He cocked his head with a little frown.  “Why?”

Tyson snorted. 
“No it’s not.”

Slade blinked. 
“Uh.  Yes.  It is.”

Tyson tapped the
bars again with his stick.  “I used a calculator before I went looking for
Ghost.  It’s
not
twenty-six point seven-nine-five-five.”

Slade peered at
him.  Then he cocked his head, a couple more of his massive mental gears lazily
clunking into rhythm with the first two, leaving the vast clock-tower of his
mind still sleeping as he re-calculated and looked for flaws.  “You said the
square root of seven hundred eighteen?” he asked.

“Yup,” Tyson
said, utterly smug.

“Twenty-six
point seven-nine-five-five,” Slade repeated.

“It’s thirteen
point eight five nine,” Tyson said.  “Dumbass.”

Slade stared at
him.  He could find no way that even a drunken, lobotomized primate would have
mashed so many incorrect keys on a calculator to come up with
that
answer, instead of the correct one.

With a smug
grin, Tyson snorted and turned to go.

“Thirteen point
eight-five-nine squared,” Slade said to Tyson’s very broad back, “is not even a
whole number, you unreasonably stupid jackass.  Next time you decide to test
me, actually do your research first.”

Tyson hesitated,
then turned, an intelligent gleam in his eye before it was quickly hidden
again.

“Or maybe that
was
your test,” Slade suggested. 

Tyson gave him a
long, appraising look, then almost reluctantly went over, inserted the warden’s
key once more, and hit the button again.  Slade’s door slid delightfully open. 
When Slade cocked his head and peered out into the hall, Tyson gestured with
his stick.  “This way.”

“So,” Slade said
slowly, glancing down the hall.  Seeing no one watching Tyson’s back, he didn’t
step out into the hallway with him.  Warily, he offered, “Where’s
your
bunkmate, Tyson?”

In reply, Tyson
held up the stick and casually picked a clump of scalp and hairs off of it. 
Looking at the hairs, Tyson said, “He got bored at night.  Started tellin’ me
about all the girls he kidnapped on a lonely stretch of highway and dragged out
to the woods for a few days before he left ‘em, wandering in the wilderness. 
Apparently, the feds only got him for tax evasion.”  He flicked the bloody
clump of hair aside and gave Slade a flat look.

Meaning Tyson
didn’t like rapists, either.

When Slade just
swallowed, Tyson pointed the broken haft of the stick at Slade’s left eyeball,
which rested only slightly higher than Tyson’s—both of them were very tall
men.  “You got stories like that, you keep ‘em to your fucking self.”

Slade, who was
skinny and geekish to Tyson’s badass, meaty thuggery, blurted, “I’ve never hurt
anyone.”

Tyson raised his
platinum-blond brow in obvious skepticism.

“Well,
physically,” Slade quickly amended.  “I’ve
physically
never hurt
anyone.”  He’d stolen billions of credits from Huouyt family ‘corporations’ and
Jahul ‘businessmen’, but he’d never actually punched someone in the face.  He
figured that would probably hurt his fist.

Tyson grunted
and twisted the mop handle in his hand.  “Heard you drove some guys insane just
by looking at ‘em.”  He didn’t seem too impressed.  Just…curious.

Slade snorted. 
“I did a bit more than
look
at them, but yeah, that was the general
idea.”

Tyson peered up
at him, the shouts of indignant inmates still chorusing around them.  “How?”

Slade rolled his
eyes.  “I couldn’t possibly explain it to you.”

Tyson, a nearly
three hundred pound thug who was quite pointedly blocking his way to freedom,
crossed his impressive arms over his impressive chest and said, “Try.”

Slade took a deep
breath, then sighed and said, “I started subtly making them question their own
self-worth, their safety, and their grasp on sanity.” 

Tyson squinted
at him.  “Sanity?”

Slade shrugged. 
“Yeah.  It’s called gaslighting.  You yank the rug out from under them.  You
change what they perceive as ‘standard’ in their life.  You don’t give them any
constants.  You tell them they sleepwalk and brush their teeth in their sleep,
then move their toothbrush after they go to bed, put it on the other side of
the sink, maybe switch it out with somebody else’s.  I’d turn their pillowcases
inside-out when they were off on visiting hours, put their covers into some new
spot each night, take their favorite necklace and put it around the neck of our
resident Jesus figurine, maybe bribe the laundry guys to sew their nametag onto
clothes that were a size too small, then ask them if they were gaining weight. 
I’d painstakingly add a few fun notes to their Bible in their own handwriting,
slip it under their hand, then casually tell them they had been talking
God-talk on those nights they weren’t sleep-brushing.  Or I’d tell them they’d
acted completely abnormal the day before, then bribe people into accusing them
they’d said things they hadn’t said, done stuff they hadn’t done…”  He gave a
dismissive shrug.  “Shit like that.”

Tyson peered up
at him for some time, a gorilla contemplating whether or not to humor a howler
monkey.  “People say you’ve got mind-powers.”  It was more of a question than a
statement.

“Yeah,” Slade
said, thinking of the gigantic alien lizards that were going to smash down the
walls for the delicious goodies inside.  He gave a flourish.  “The Tesla of the
Congressional Era, at your service.  Can we
please
go to that terminal,
now?  I heard they’re gonna drop kreenit.  We
really
don’t wanna be
trapped in the middle of a mass of caged Humanity when kreenit find this
place.”

Tyson grunted,
showing absolutely no hurry.  “You don’t look like much.”

Slade blinked,
because, with his creepy, ball-lightning eyes and sometimes-wriggly cotton-ball
hair—not to mention his reputation of weird mind-powers—most people peed
themselves when Slade gave them a sideways look.  “Uh…thanks?”

Tyson uncrossed
his arms.  “This way.”

The brute led
him down the barred hall like he owned the place, taking books and
painful-looking personal effects full-on about the head and shoulders without
even flinching.  Slade, on the other hand, ducked and yelped each time a Bible
impacted his sensitive skin—or his even more sensitive scalp.  While Slade
really didn’t fear anything, pain was not his friend, and he generally avoided
it if he could.

Tyson stopped at
the locked janitor’s closet, produced a bloody keycard from his pocket, and
swiped it through the lock.  Then he typed in an 8-digit code in the keypad,
looking completely oblivious to the little scanner screen set into the wall
beside it.

“It’s gonna want
a thumb-scan,” Slade said with a sigh.  Well
that
was a short stint of
freedom.  He wondered if the guy would beat him to death or eat him.  Or both.

Giving him a
sideways look, Tyson retrieved a
thumb
from his pocket and pressed it to
the screen.  There was a loud, audible
click
as the heavy bolts thudded
aside.

“Oh.”  Slade
blinked.

Stuffing both
thumb and keycard back into his pocket, Tyson pushed the door open and gestured
at him to go first with the jagged end of the stick.  Easing his way around his
new friend, Bloody Scalp, with appropriate mention of Possible Brains, Slade
slid past Mr. Stick and into the darkness inside.  Following him, Tyson
switched on the light.

Slade, though,
had already seen the paradisal blue glow coming from the back room and was
hastily stepping over fallen mops, cleaning supplies, and a very dead body in
order to get to the secret computer terminal.  The moment he touched an
honest-to-God electronic device again, Slade almost had a long-denied orgasm. 
It was a very basic emergency deal, hidden behind a painting, set into the wall
with its own tiny keyboard, set much too high into the wall to be ergonomically
friendly.  Slade hastily pulled over the desk and sat down on what remained of
the janitor’s hamburger and fries, facing the wall.

Tyson closed the
main door and came up behind him.  “They said the password was—”

“Shh!” Slade
commanded, holding up one hand.  He ran his fingers across the keyboard,
bathing in the luxurious blue glow of ACCOUNT LOCKED, MULTIPLE ENTRIES OF
INVALID PASSWORD DETECTED.  PLEASE USE WARDEN’S OVERRIDE OR CONSULT TECH
SUPPORT. 

Ah yes.  Tech
support.  Slade closed his eyes and soaked up the long-missed light, counting
the number of days it had been since he’d accessed anything more advanced than
a landline to his lawyer.  Three hundred and eighty-seven.  Almost thirteen
months.  Nine thousand two hundred and eighty-one hours.  Over one year.  Over
one year without even a cell phone.  It had been Hell.  True Hell.

“See,” Tyson
offered, stepping up beside him, “I think the guy was lying so I wouldn’t cut
off his—”

“Shh!” Slade
snapped again, distractedly cutting at the air behind him as the overgrown furg
once again interrupted his Zen.

There was a long
pause, then Tyson said, “But you’re just sitting there.  On that guy’s
hamburger.”

Slade opened his
eyes and scowled disgustedly at the wall.  It was
so hard
to get good
lackeys nowadays.  To the painted concrete, he said, “If I tell you to shut up,
that I need a few minutes to consider the wonders of if-then statements and
irrelevant metadata before I spring your hairy, apelike ass from this
thug-convention, then it’s your job to go to your corner and wait for me to
finish.”

Slade felt Tyson
staring at his back.  The big man sounded confused when he said, “I just beat
three men to death in the last twenty minutes.”

“That’s nice,”
Slade said.  “Go get me a soda or something.”  He reached up and slid his
fingers along the back of the terminal, feeling for a plug or a switch.

He found a
switch.  Hallelujah.  That would make things
so
much easier.

“You know what?”
Tyson growled, “If you don’t get us out of here in the next twenty seconds, I’m
gonna add your brains to this stick.” 

“I’d like a
Pepsi, if you can find one,” Slade said, as he flipped the console’s power
off.  The console monitor went dark, and Slade heard the sweet music of a
processor powering down.  As he mentally calculated the brand, age, and
capacity of the machine in front of him, Slade gave a delighted giggle.  Early
twenty-first century technology was
so
buggy, especially systems using a
Windows environment—which this clearly was.  That meant it was plausible to gain
access with a SQL Injection, which would save him
so
much time.  Realizing
his lackey was still standing around, Slade gestured impatiently and said,
“Make sure it’s plain.  And cold.  With corn syrup, not that fake shit.” 

Tyson was silent
for so long that Slade wondered if he was getting out his Beat-Stick.  Then,
reluctantly, Tyson said, “Pepsi’s expensive.”

After Earth’s
discovery by the barely-concealed alien tyranny known as Congress, Pepsi had
become one of the most valuable substances Humanity had to offer, just beneath
oregano and rosemary in universal demand, though it was the hedonistic Ueshi
who had begun purchasing vast quantities of Pepsi for shipment to pleasure
planets like Kaleu and Tholiba, whereas the more reserved Ooreiki financed the
rosemary perfume trade.   Almost fifty years after it went universal, Slade
still felt more than a little vindicated that his favorite drink happened to be
loved throughout the galaxy, by aliens famous for knowing how to have a good
time.  It did irk him, however, that Pepsi now cost ten times as much as a
regular soda, and had taser-enhanced, AI-embedded vending machines all of its
own, just in case anyone decided to get frisky.

Slade glanced
down at the desk, picked up the janitor’s change dish with the tiny stuffed lizard
in it, ascertained it had enough money in it to buy a Pepsi, then handed the
tray to Tyson and went back to his work.

Tyson didn’t
move.  Still staring at the dead monitor, he said, “Why’d you shut it off?”

“Well,” Slade
said, as he waited for the hard drive to completely power down, “some idiot
came in here before me and, after the computer patiently told him the password
was bad the
first
time, he entered it two
more
times, just to be
sure.”  He flipped the switch back on.  The computer—it was
ancient
,
Slade realized, delighted—whirred back to life.

Behind him,
Tyson squinted at the screen.  “You rebooted?”

“If in doubt,
let the bad out,” Slade said.  As he was waiting for the dinosaur to load, he
felt around the back for an Ethernet cable, but found only a power supply. 
Which meant it was wireless.  Oh, this was going to be
fun
.

“Why are you
grinning?” Tyson growled.  “Something funny?”  Instead of acquiring an ice-cold
Pepsi like he’d been told, the big man had come to stand beside Slade, peering
into the hidden computer cubby like a very large dog that had no compunctions
with being in the way.

“I’m grinning,”
Slade said, pushing him bodily aside, “because I’m thirsty, and you are going
to get me a soda.”  No sooner had he spoken than the access window appeared,
fresh and new, sans the Colossal Dumbass Screen, with a cheerful little
USERNAME AND PASSWORD? prompt to welcome him to the New Basil Harmonious
Security System.  Instead of slogging through that particular clusterfuck,
Slade entered the SQL Injection test 'OR''=' in both the username and password
fields to determine whether or not he needed to waste his time building a
password generator.  Immediately, the computer logged him in as the very first
user in the database, a gracious Mr. Alvin Mathers.  Slade knew him as a
part-time security officer with an attitude problem who liked to work Sundays
and holidays for the extra pay.

Using his
newly-acquired admin capabilities, Slade began dismantling the woefully
vulnerable prison system from the inside.  The imbeciles who had programmed the
software, it seemed, had been operating under the assumption that a prisoner—or
any other ne’er-do-well with half a brain and an afternoon of programming
experience—would simply never have access to the system itself.  How quaint.

Twenty minutes
later, Tyson brought him a soda.  Pepsi.  Cold.  Because Slade had unlocked the
doors to the main halls, the warden’s office, the armory, and the staff
breakroom.  It was the staff breakroom that interested Slade the most.  He
hadn’t had a good Twinkie in
forever
.

Tyson had gotten
real quiet the moment the Doors Open alarm had gone off in the main hall, and
hadn’t said much since, except a gruff, “Here,” as he handed Slade his soda,
his new body Kevlar and an AK-47 from the armory strapped to his body.

“You put it in a
cup,” Slade complained, taking a drink.  He grimaced.  “And you poured it
straight in.  Why do people
do
that?  It loses sixteen percent of its
carbonation when you do that!”  He took another sip and continued tapping
commands into the keyboard with his free hand.

Tyson scowled at
him.  “It’s easier to drink quickly in a cup.”

“Yes,” Slade
whined.  “But I wanted to
savor
it.”  He took another swallow and
studied the maps of the cell blocks, trying to determine the best system of
releasing the seven stories of inmates without getting killed in the process. 
Ever since the Doors Open alarm had gone off, inmates had been howling at the
bars, thrashing and screaming like animals.  It made Slade ever-more-sensitive
to the fact that about half the guys in the block knew or suspected he was
Ghost, and almost all of them would jump at the chance to try and coerce a few
million credits out of him before they bashed his brains out on the polished
concrete floors. 

Tyson squinted
at him, then at his monitor, then at the flattened cheeseburger that Slade had
shoved to one side of the desk after he’d peeled it from the seat of his prison
jumpsuit.  “You wanna move this operation to the warden’s office?”

Slade snorted. 
“I couldn’t do anything there that I can’t do here.  Besides.  I hate the
warden.  If anything, I’d shit on his desk.  I’d rather not stare at pictures
of his grandkids if I can avoid it.”  He kept perusing prison schematics.

“So what are we
doing?” Tyson asked.  “Can you get the gates open?”

Slade made a
dismissive gesture and took another sip of his one-sixth flat soda.  “I
could’ve gotten the gates open twenty minutes ago.  I’m trying to figure out
where the nearest Armani store is.  Looks like L.A..”

Tyson peered at
him so long Slade turned around to look.  When he did, Tyson said, “Armani?” 

“Yeah, the
clothing?”  When Tyson just continued to stare at him, Slade sighed and said,
“You know, like Dolce & Gabbana, Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren? 
Nice
stuff.  We’ve
got
to get new threads, man.”  He examined his new
lackey’s bloodstained jumpsuit with a critical eye.  “Hell, I’d even spring for
a new suit for you.  You would look totally
bad ass
in black, you know
that?”

Tyson continued
to stare at him.  “They’re dropping man-eating lizards the size of shopping
centers on the planet and you’re worried about Armani?”

“The government
shrinks said I had a flair for drama,” Slade said.  “And what’s more dramatic
than
this
,” he gestured at his freakish wads of cotton-white hair, “with
silver silk in the middle of an apocalypse?”  He grinned a little, considering
what it would be like to wear a real suit again.  “Maybe a maroon handkerchief
or cuffs.  I’m going to have it delivered.”

Tyson squinted. 
“Delivered.”

“To the penitentiary. 
See?”  Slade showed Tyson the order form on the monitor.  “You’re…what…a thirty
at the shoulder?”

Tyson suddenly
had the muzzle of his AK-47 filling Slade’s right nostril, his meaty fist
gripping the back of Slade’s head with enough pressure to scalp him.  “You,”
the thug growled, “are going to open the gates or I’m going to blow your creepy
ailo head off.  I don’t give a fuck about Armani.”

“Creepy, huh,”
Slade said, his voice muffled by gunmetal.  “Seriously, where do people
get
that?”

Tyson’s ice-blue
eyes narrowed and Slade saw his chances of surviving the next three
microseconds decrease by about a hundred percent.

Slade sighed
deeply and closed the order form.  “My first real chance to wear something
decent
for a change and I’m foiled by an Iron Age transplant with access to
twentieth-century weaponry.” 

Tyson had not
removed his gun.  “Did you just insult me again?”

Slade thought
about it.  “No, not really.  Just stating a fact.  You look like you’ve got
more than your fair share of Neanderthal in your blood, but they weren’t
exactly stupid. 
Have
you gotten a DNA test?  They can be surprising,
you know…”

Tyson
looked
like he wanted to shoot him, but he lowered his weapon and stepped back,
instead.  “What do you want?” he growled.

Slade blinked at
him.  “Want?”

“I know how it
works,” Tyson growled.  “They’re dropping those lizards on us in three days and
the whole world left us here to rot, so you’ve got me between a rock and a hard
place,” Tyson said.  “What do you want for springing us?”

Slade thought
about it.  “Another Pepsi would be nice. 
Not
in a cup.  Cold. 
Unopened.  I want to see condensation on the sides of that baby.  Oh, and a
Twinkie.  Those are good.”

For a long
minute, Tyson just stared at him.  Then, in silence, he turned and walked out
the door.

Ah, yes. 
Excellent
lackey material.  As soon as Tyson was out the door, Slade went back to the
Armani order-form he had minimized, placed his rush order, then figured out
where the nearest book store was.  While everyone else would be looting grocery
stores and pharmacies, Slade would be perusing his local Barnes & Noble for
survivalist manuals and then getting other people to implement the concepts
inside.  Ah, the perks of being a leader.

The nearest
Barnes & Noble, it appeared, was four and a half miles out of town, in a
big new shopping center built in the middle of nowhere, one of the many such
places adding to the urban sprawl of America.  Like a vast majority of such
retail temples built during the Ooreiki perfumes boom, it had been erected more
on a wishful, ‘Build It And They Will Come’ mentality, rather than any form of
serious strategy.  It was due to close in two months, selling out to an Ueshi
electronics firm.  It had, however, a Bajnan-run Interplanetary Bank of
Congress.  Which was nice.

By the time
Tyson returned with a Pepsi and a half-smashed Twinkie, Slade had transferred
large amounts of money from his Faelor bank to his illicit Earth accounts and
was in the process of hiring an on-demand hair stylist.  As soon as the beep of
the door announced his gorilla friend’s return, Slade minimized the window back
to the prison schematics.