Zero's Return (14 page)

Tyson peered at
him, then at the three thugs in the room.  Each of them carried an AK-47.

Ignoring his new
underlings, Slade walked into the room, sighed in gratitude when he found that
the excrement-happy idiots hadn’t destroyed the warden’s terminal, then sat
down and started entering his override codes.

“Dude,” one of
the gun-toting inebriates growled, “what the hell is going on?”

“He’s going to
kill the kreenit,” Tyson said, shrugging.

“That lizard
attacking the front door?” one of the slackjawed nitwits demanded.  “Naw. 
We’re dead, man.  Nothing can kill it.”

“Yeah,” another
man said.  “Bullets bounce right off it.  It’s eating through the walls.”

“So you take the
last ten minutes of your miserable life to shit on the warden’s desk,” Slade
said, without looking up.  “Lovely.”

There was a
brief silence, then the underlings started talking to each other again.  “Yeah,
man,” the second underling said.  “Guys tried getting past it, but the thing’s
got super-senses or something.  It just whips around and eats ‘em before they
make twenty yards.”

“Aren’t they
early?” another underling demanded.  “I thought we had a few days, yet.”

“I heard three
days from now,” Tyson agreed.

“Probably
dropped them early just to catch us off guard,” the third underling suggested. 
“We’re so
screwed
, man.  We’re like sitting
ducks
in here.”

“Sardines,”
Slade corrected distractedly.

“Maybe we
should, like, let those idiots outside distract it and sneak out the kitchen
loading bay, you know?  That’d be smart.”

“Would you
please
shut up?” Slade demanded, tugging his eyes from the lines of code on the screen
to scowl at the imbeciles.  “You’re interrupting my flow.  Go outside and get
me a soda or something.”

The three men
looked at each other.  The leader gave Tyson a curious look.  “He really gonna
kill that thing?”  Off in the distance, his question was punctuated by more
screaming.

Tyson shrugged. 
“Probably.”

 “So that’s
really the Ghost?” one of the guys asked, his voice lowering to almost a
whisper.

“Pretty sure,”
Tyson said, watching Slade from where he was standing inside the metal-framed
doorway.  “Seems legit so far.”

“He’s wearing a
garbage bag.”

“The soda
machine,” Slade said, “is out there.”  He pointed.

One of the men
sniffed, then glanced at Tyson.  “You want something, man?”

“Nah, I’m good. 
I’m gonna have steak tonight.”  Tyson gave Slade a meaningful look.

His newest
AK-47-toting lackey grunted, gave Slade one last perusal, then grunted again
and gestured for his two newest underling lackeys to follow him out the door.

“Pepsi!” Slade
called at the men’s backs, as they departed.  He was having to type with one
hand, holding his nose with his other due to the smell.  “And Tyson, get rid of
that.  He
definitely
wasn’t eating right.”  He pointed at the pile of
crap on the desk.

Tyson gave him
his patented badass-who-doesn’t-take-shit-from-computer-geeks look.  Without
responding, the beefy man crossed his arms and leaned against the door, the
sides of his jumpsuit actually straining from all the pressure his muscles were
putting against it.  “Do you have water retention problems or something?”

“Huh?” Slade
said.

“Three Pepsis in
an hour?” Tyson demanded.

The truth was,
Slade’s funky hairdo needed a lot of extra liquids to keep from dehydrating,
but he wasn’t going to say that.  “Now let’s see,” Slade said, returning to the
fence security settings, “how Mr. Alien likes our good friend Direct Current.” 
He hit the ACTIVATE button with a dramatic click of his mouse.

Outside, the
lizard let out a long, ear-splitting bellow that shook the air in Slade’s
lungs, then there was complete silence.

“Nice,” Slade
said, grinning.

“You killed it?”
Tyson demanded, looking a little startled.

“Nah,” Slade
said, deactivating the fences before a fuse blew.  “Just testing.”  He started
counting seconds as he began working on increasing the voltage for the next
jolt.

“You scared it
off?” Tyson asked, perking up even more.  He obviously hadn’t been looking
forward to fighting a massive alien transplant for his freedom.

“Doubt it,”
Slade said, still counting.  “Shhh.”

Tyson went
totally silent, listening curiously.

At the twenty-three
second mark, the recovering—and now very pissed—monster outside lunged into the
prison so hard it knocked the picture of the warden’s grandson into the
steaming pile of crap on his desk. 

“What did you
do
?”
Tyson screamed, stumbling as the walls shuddered around them.

“I let it get up
again,” Slade said calmly.  “Gotta do this right, see?”  He began calibrating
the motion-detectors outside the main entrance.

“You’re only
pissing it off!” Tyson cried, as the entire building convulsed around them in
another impact.  The big man huddled in the doorway, hands protecting his head
as ceiling plaster rained down around them.  “Can you turn it off?”

Slade looked up,
frowning.  “Turn it
off?
”  He snorted.  “No, I’m going to go
kill
it.”  Standing up, he walked over and held out his hand.  “Give me your gun.” 
Outside, the kreenit screamed and slammed itself into the prison.  Slade made
an insistent snapping motion with his fingers.  “Come on.  Give.”

Tyson squinted
up at him through the plaster dust, visibly contemplated blowing Slade’s head
off, then reluctantly pulled the gun over his shoulder.  Slade took the weapon
and started to walk off for his date with Destiny.  Halfway down the hall to
face the beast, however, Slade had to pause and look at the weapon.  After a
moment of frowning at two different switches on the gun, he turned and hurried
back to where Tyson was huddled, enduring the building shuddering around them. 
“Hey,” Slade whispered, dropping beside him.  “Is this little lever the
safety?”   He lowered the gun for Tyson’s inspection.

“That’s the
magazine release,” Tyson said. 

“Oh,” Slade
said.  “Well, which one’s the safety?”  He’d watched plenty of shows where the
bad guys—sans brains—tried shooting the good guys—sans gun—when their weapons
were on safety.  That would just be embarrassing.

After eying him
like he was debating whether to take the weapon back, the beefy man reached up
and flipped a switch.  “Safety.”  He flipped it again.  “Boom.”

 “You were
walking around without the
safety
on?” Slade cried, appalled.  “Don’t
you know that’s
dangerous
?”

Tyson gave him a
look like he was, indeed, going to take the gun away from him.  And, since
Slade needed the gun to kill the kreenit, he quickly stood up and hurried down
the hall, towards the exit and the pissed off alien outside.

The front of the
prison had been obliterated.  Men in bright orange prison jumpsuits were hiding
behind whatever rubble cover they could find as the kreenit roared and thrashed
in its tangle of electric fencing and razor wire.  As he watched, the
two-hundred-foot long beast drew itself onto its haunches, lifted its long neck
a hundred feet above the courtyard, and roared with enough emphasis to break
glass.  Mouth open for his perusal, Slade could see the unmistakable orange
anomalies of prison jumpsuits clinging to its scythelike teeth.

That could
kill me
, Slade realized.  He unwrapped his Twinkie and took a bite,
considering.

Apparently
finished showing off, the kreenit finished its roar and its front legs slammed
back to the pavement with enough force to knock over the flag pole.  Its big,
horned head swung to face him, oil-on-water scales rippling in the morning sun.

These people
need a hero,
Slade thought, with a sigh. 
And I’m running out of
Twinkie.
  Taking a deep breath, he strode past the huddled inmates until he
was face-to-face with the kreenit, tossed the remaining pastry at the motion
detector he’d left active.  As the Twinkie sailed through the air, Slade
leveled his gun at the beast’s eye and fired a single shot.

At his shot, the
kreenit jerked, went utterly stiff, and then hit the ground like a downed
carrier, twitching.  A moment later, the Twinkie activated the electric fencing
and the kreenit’s body started to spark and sizzle before the system overloaded
and the lights went out.

Slade blinked
and looked at the barrel of his rifle with a new respect.  There had been no
mistaking that the
shot
had downed the beast, not the electricity.  Having
never fired a gun before, Slade had merely been taking a cheap shot to inspire
the masses, not actually trying to kill it.  From all he’d read, it was
impossible
to kill a kreenit with an AK-47.

And yet, seeing
the beast slumped on the ground, twitching, Slade realized that he’d always had
a penchant for being on the bleeding edge of the world’s learning curve.  He
also realized that the animal was not yet dead, despite its massive jolt, and
was very likely going to prove the conventional wisdom correct unless Slade did
something heroic, and quickly. 

And heroics, in
this case, were not going to be pleasant.

Aw hell,
Slade thought, considering what was to come. 
God hates a coward.

Disgusted that
he had to resort to brute force, Slade tucked the gun under his arm, jogged up
to the gigantic creature’s head, climbed onto its slimy purple tongue, and
inched his way through the jagged arrays of sword-like teeth, placed the barrel
of his gun to the soft spot between palate and braincase, and unloaded an
entire clip into the creature’s gray matter.  Which, Slade found, in a
man-eating alien from outer-space, wasn’t actually gray.

As a purple
paste of jellied neurons rained down upon him, Slade climbed out of the
creature’s jaws—careful to time it between death-spasms—and stopped in front of
its snout to figure out where he’d hit it the first time to make it go limp.

It hadn’t, he
discovered, been the eye.  As far as he could tell by the smears of lead left
against the scales, it had been the nose.  Or, more correctly, the left
nostril, when he’d been aiming for the
right
eye.  That was…annoying. 
Slade gave the useless weapon an irritated look, then handed it to Tyson when
his lackey walked up behind him. 

When Tyson
didn’t take the proffered gun, Slade eventually turned.

Tyson was
staring at the kreenit, his blue eyes wide.  Behind him, hundreds of men in
orange jumpsuits were standing in the ruins of the prison, looking at him in
similar open-mouthed awe.  Slade chose that moment to rip the useless,
gore-covered plastic bag off his body, sloughing the bloody brain matter to a
wad on the ground at his feet, then took a deep breath and glanced up at the
Congressional bots that were even then annihilating the airborne populace as
they fled the city in their skimmers.

“I’m in the mood
for a latte,” Slade announced.  “Any takers?”

Seeming to
recover, Tyson shrugged the gun back over his shoulder and gave him a beefy
arms-crossed scowl.  “Do I look like a pansy-ass milk-drinking yuppie to you?”

Slade looked him
up and down, then sighed, realizing that kind of muscle mass required consistent
infusions of protein.  “Not really.”  He cocked his head.  “Steak?”

“Steak,” Tyson
agreed.  “You got…”  He cocked his head at the sun.  “Six hours.”

Oh joy,
Slade thought, thinking back to his wayward limo.  He supposed he could hotwire
a car, instead…

CHAPTER 7 –
Eelevansee

 She called
herself Batch Eelevansee.  But, since everyone else was also called Batch, she
thought of herself as Eelevansee.

For as long as
she could remember, Eelevansee’s life revolved around food, water, and
headaches.  The headaches usually came with the food and the water, since that
was when the Keepers came.

Just hearing the
Keepers’ hard feet ringing in the hall made Eelevansee’s heartbeat quicken, her
hands cold and clammy.  They called themselves Caahptin and Aahfiscer and
Kernel, but together, they were the Keepers.  The Keepers discouraged the
People from speaking like them, giving them headaches whenever they tried.

Only Tenef was
different.  She could talk with pictures and feelings that she broadcasted into
Eelevansee’s head, but her thoughts were always maddening things that
frightened Eelevansee and made her cry.   

Tenef and
Eelevansee were two of the only People that woke up whenever the Keepers turned
the lights on to feed them.  Most didn’t need food; these were Dreamers.  All
Dreamers had bluish tubes in their arms that led up to a bag hanging from the
wall, which the Keepers replaced every day instead of feeding them. 

Across the hall
from her, Nynjee’s huge body filled up his two side-by-side beds to
overflowing.  He hadn’t moved since he had broken his cell open and they put a
tube in his arm.  Now he was just like the other Dreamers, blank-faced and
drooling.  Seeing him was a constant reminder not to anger the Keepers, one
that Eelevansee took to heart.

It was several
days after the Keepers made Nynjee Dream when Tenef began bombarding Eelevansee
with a rush of horrible images of pain and terror, pictures of monsters tearing
people apart, people forced to Dream.  Tenef was terrified, and her terror
spread throughout the People, becoming all the more potent when the lights
overhead began to flicker and the ground began to shake.  As the People
screamed and clung to their beds with each terrifying rumble, Tenef fed their
horror, milking it into screams of fear, giggling when they huddled in their
beds in terror, laughing when they cried.