Zero's Return (21 page)

“I want my rope
back,” the wiry man in the middle growled.  “That’s
military grade
. 
High-tech Congie stuff.  I’m not leaving it with her.”

“Fine, man,” the
Hispanic said.  He shoved the girl back to him so hard she fell to her bruised
and bloody knees.  “But you want the rope,
you
untie her.”  He took a
pointed step backwards.

From the ground,
the tiny woman screamed, “I will hunt down your ancestors and shit on their
graves!”  Again, in ancient Jreet.  She struggled to get back to her feet.

The tall
Caucasian man behind her grabbed her shoulder and shoved her back down. 
“Fine.  You guys don’t want her, there’s better pickings out there.  The wicked
little she-bitch doesn’t need to live.”  Then he grabbed the projectile gun on
his hip and placed the old steel barrel to the back of her head.  The woman,
oblivious, kept cursing his manhood and his heritage.

The click of the
hammer cocking broke Joe out of his shock.  Even as the man’s finger was
starting to squeeze, he surged out of the trees, caught the shooter by the
elbow and shoved the gun away from the girl’s head.  As the gun went off in
reflex, startling everyone, Joe broke the man’s arm, then his wrist, then his
fingers as he twisted the gun in his hand.  Then he swiveled, threw the man
over his shoulder, brought a heel down on his throat, and, as his blue eyes
were going wide and he started to choke, put one of Jane’s wayward children
through his skull, disintegrating the upper half of his head into the pavement.

As the dead
man’s two thuggish friends were recovering enough to scream and stumble
backwards, Joe casually raised the gun over the woman’s head to level on them. 
He was well aware that he wasn’t even breaking a sweat, and, dressed in the
all-black, alien attire of a Congie, he might as well have been a Huouyt
assassin to the two furgs in front of them.  They stared at him like he was a
demon from the Jreet hells.

Into the
silence, Joe said, “I know you two have the mental density of a furgling fart,”
he hesitated, leveling Jane on their faces individually, “but I’ll put this
into terms you can understand.  You’re going to run.  The one who does that the
fastest lives.  The other one, the
slower
one, I’m going to shoot, skin,
and use his hide for a new belt.  Ready?  Go.”

The two
men—boys, really—bolted, throwing each other to the ground as they each tried
to escape faster than their companion, taking completely different directions
in their bid for survival.

Sighing, Joe
waited until he could no longer hear their frantic feet rushing through the
undergrowth, then lowered Jane.  “You okay there, sister?”  He, unfortunately,
did not know how to flip his odd Jreet habit on, so all he could do was give
her soothing gestures and sounds in Congie.

The woman
twisted to scowl up at him, a spreading bruise swelling one eye shut making it
clear that someone had punched her in the face.  Joe gave her a commiserating
grin.  “Sorry I couldn’t get here faster.”

In a sneer of
complete disdain, the woman said in perfect Welu Jreet, “I’m going to return
with my clan and
annihilate
this pitiful shithole.”

“Yeah,” Joe
said, squatting beside her.  “Sorry about the ashbags.  Lemme see how bad they
hit you…”  He reached for her face.

The wounded girl
lunged up, drove her head into his chest, knocked him backwards on his ass,
then, with a rabid snarl, she sank her teeth into his hand like a Jreet sinking
his fangs into a steak. 

“Ow,
burn
,
ow!” Joe shouted, recoiling from her.  “Let go.  Let
go
!”  Despite Joe’s
repeated, desperate tugging, however, she held on like a Dhasha hatchling with
its first meal, falling backwards onto the asphalt to get better leverage. 
Then, to his horror, she started to ragdoll his hand like she wanted to tear it
off.  As she did so, she began jamming a foot into his abdomen, probably
seeking his nuts.

Joe had to kick
her violently away from him to get his hand out of her mouth, then he clambered
backwards and blinked down at the puncture-marks she had put into his
poly-nannite gloves, panting.  The only reason he hadn’t lost fingers was the
sleek black Congie technology, which was even then sealing the wounds she had
put into it.

Unfortunately,
the same could not be said about his hand.  He could feel it throbbing
underneath the glove, warm wetness oozing against his skin.

The woman was
getting back on her knees, licking his blood off her lips.  With a fearsome
crimson grin, said, “Next time your heart, skulker.”  Again, in perfect Welu Jreet.

The insult,
combined with his wounded hand, combined with the woman who was now licking his
blood
off her
lips
, sent a jolt of adrenaline burning through
Joe’s system that left him somewhere between rage and panic.  “I just saved
your
life
!” he cried, pointing at the headless man sprawled on the
asphalt, broken fingers still tangled in his primitive gun.

Instead of
repenting and apologizing, the woman sneered and slowly looked him up and down
as if he had suddenly and liberally covered himself in shit.  “A Voran.”

“No, I’m a…” 
Then Joe realized he was, indeed, speaking Voran Jreet.  Because he really
didn’t have a comeback for that, he said, “I’m going to free you.  That’s it,
okay?  Sisters’ bloody teks.”

She continued to
look at him as if he were dressed in his own filth.  “I don’t need a Voran’s
help.  Go back to twining your hatchmates.”  She stood regally and started to
walk away, arms still tied securely behind her back with that handy Congie
deathline—‘death’ line, because, once a good knot was tied, your enemy was
gonna starve to death before he ever went anywhere.

Joe narrowed his
eyes.  She obviously had a few screws loose, possibly was even carrying some
sort of weird Earth disease.  Logic dictated that he should let her trundle off
to die.  Joe, however, was pissed.  She’d
bit
him.  With his much longer
legs, he stalked ahead of the woman and stopped in her path, giving her the
choice of halting or falling flat on her much smaller ass as she barreled into
him. 

She stopped,
scowling at the body-armor covering his chest as if she was wondering if she
could bite through it, too.  Glaring down at her, Joe said, “I just saved your
life.  The
least
you could do is not burning bite me while I free your
damn hands.”

In reply, the
woman dropped into a crouch on the asphalt and grinned up at him with predatory
challenge.

Meeting that
feral gaze, listening to her animal snarl, Joe felt his heart give a painful
hammer.  She was, he realized, not acting Human.  Seeing that, what he
wanted
to do was grab his stuff and ditch her there, her teeth bared like she
wanted to sink her canines into his throat.  But, because his mother had always
said he was a good guy, if a bit of a dumbshit, and because leaving the girl
with her hands tied was a death sentence, and—most of all—because God hated a
coward, Joe decided to help her out.

“Don’t bite me,”
Joe growled, scowling at her. 

She snarled
back, emerald eyes filled with a mingling of disdain and challenge.  She
looked, quite frankly, like some wild, vicious alien that Joe had spent most of
his life killing.

“Don’t,” he
warned.

When she just
continued to show her bloody teeth like a feral thing, Joe approached with the
intent of again squatting beside her and freeing her hands.

Before he could
get all the way down, she lunged up and attempted to slam her forehead head
into his.  Though her much smaller head impacting his cranium wouldn’t have
knocked him cold, Joe’s startled upward lunge to avoid her, followed by his
stumble over the dead man’s leg, followed by his long downward arc terminating
in the back of his skull hitting the asphalt, did.

The last thing
he saw before he hit the ground was the woman’s satisfied smirk as she stood
and started sauntering off in the direction of her would-be assailants.

#

When Joe woke,
he was pissed.  No,
beyond
pissed.  Fuming.  Not only had the woman bit
him, headbutted him, tried to crush the family jewels, and left him to bake in
the California sun, but she’d left
Jane
to bake in the California sun,
exposed on the abandoned highway for any drooling furg with a gun fetish to
wander along and take for himself, and that was sacrilege. 

And all this
after Joe had
rescued
the jenfurgling woman.  All he’d tried to do was
help
her.

What was worse,
Joe still didn’t know how the naked furg spoke Jreet.  And she had insulted
him.  And she seemed completely oblivious to the fact he’d saved her life—not
even a damn thank-you!  Joe scowled in the direction she’d taken, her bloody
footprints browning on the asphalt.

He
could
have walked away; she hadn’t taken any of his stuff.  In fact, the rabid
furgling had left all of his gear right there in the middle of the street, like
she didn’t even want or need survival supplies, meat, emergency rations, body
armor, spare clothes…  Yes, he definitely could have walked away.

But she had bit
him.  And she’d mistreated Jane.  That was unacceptable.

Ready to go to
war, Joe snagged up the dead man’s gun, added it to his growing collection, and
followed her.  He found her naked, sun-broiled body face-down on the asphalt
after a thirty minute jog, her naked back exposed to the sky.  The furg woman
hadn’t even had the brains to get out of the sun. 

For a minute,
Joe thought she was dead, and he experienced a weird pang of regret as he
looked at her motionless body.  Almost like he’d missed an important debriefing
or forgotten to take his allotted leave.  Then, as his eyes settled on the
strange barcode—barcode??—tattooed into her neck, he also noticed the shallow
rise and fall of her shoulders against the hot tar.

Again, Joe
realized he could have left her there.  His hand still throbbed where she’d bit
him, and he was going to have to administer nanos to himself that night if his
head didn’t stop spinning from where she had introduced it to the pavement.  Besides,
it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen a million other women die in his lifetime.  Good
women, ones that
didn’t
bite or leave him to die on the tarmac.  What
was the life of one tiny, utterly crazy chick back on Earth?

Yet Joe couldn’t
get over the fact she’d called him a skulker.  In perfect Welu Jreet.  And he’d
understood it.  Not even Daviin, in his crude, misguided attempts to sober him
up, had called him a skulker.  It was one of the worst one-word insults in the
Jreet language, used only on creatures that could never, in a million years, be
considered warriors, and for some reason, coming from
her
lips, after
he’d broken a guy’s wrist to save her, it really,
really
pissed him off.

This time, when
Joe got down to untie her, she never stirred.  He yanked the knots loose
first—her hands were starting to darken dangerously where the furgs had cut off
circulation—then coiled the rope and tucked it into his backpack.  Then, after
nudging her with a foot to make sure she wouldn’t leap up and attack him again,
he bent down, threw her unconscious body over his shoulder, and went looking
for some shade.

Though Joe
generally avoided houses as resting-places due to the way kreenit habitually
liked to rip them open to get to the morsels inside, the girl was obviously in
need of clothes and some bedrest.  He found a small, inconspicuous house tucked
amidst a couple hills, a shattered wooden pen of weed-ridden, trampled dirt all
that remained of some unknown domestic animal.  Humans, Joe realized, his
fingers tracing the massive claw-marks in one of the shattered fence posts,
were going to have a damn hard time making a comeback.  If any domesticated
animals actually survived the hunger of their keepers, with kreenit around,
raising livestock was like painting a bulls-eye on your back.  Within a few
more rotations, Humanity would be, quite literally, back to its hunter-gatherer
days.

Unlike the pen,
however, the house had survived relatively unscathed.  It seemed as though
whatever the kreenit had eaten inside the fence had satiated it enough that it
had only knocked down one corner as an afterthought, leaving the rest of the
well-built old farmhouse still standing.  Lowering the girl to the ground in
the grass, Joe got out his heat-imaging binoculars and took a look at the
building itself.

Though he could
see several rats chewing away at something in the downstairs closet, there were
no tell-tale red blobs of a Human presence.  Returning his binoculars to his
pack, he once more shouldered the girl and started toward the house.

Entering through
the gaping hole beside the kitchen, Joe paused on the tile floor and listened. 
Hearing nothing but the skitter of rats beside the stove, smelling nothing but
rancid lard, he went upstairs looking for a bed.

The first room
at the top of the stairs had six sleeping bags laid out in haphazard disarray
on the floor, with rudimentary survival gear scattered around each bag.  The
far side of the room was open to the air, the wall missing where something huge
had lunged through it.

Seeing the brown
stains spattering the room, Joe grimaced.  Apparently, the penned animal hadn’t
been the only thing the kreenit had snacked on.

In the next room
over, it was the same—a big band had stopped here, possibly as many as two
dozen—and the floors of every room were covered in sleeping bags, the wall
dismantled, every surface covered in dried blood. 

It attacked
in their sleep,
Joe thought, with a grimace.  Another reason why he avoided
abandoned houses like the plague.  Once you were inside, there was nowhere to
run…