Zero's Return (28 page)

“I can handle
it,” Tyson said.

Slade raised his
eyebrows.  “I assure you, you can’t.”

Looking him
directly in the eyes, Tyson continued to eat his steak.

“Ugh.  Fine.” 
Slade rearranged his course of events slightly in his head.  “Just get out of
the way when the theatrics start.”

“Don’t let the
theatrics start until I’m done eating and we won’t have a problem.”  Tyson
continued to eat.

“I just want you
to know,” Slade said, “you are being very inconvenient.”

Tyson gave him a
flat look over his food and kept eating.

“So what do you
think of the name of our gang?” Slade asked.  “The Harmonious Society of God. 
Got a ring to it, right?”

Tyson gave him a
long, considering look as he ate.  “I’d say you’re asking to get shot.”

Slade was
wounded.  “It took me
six minutes
to come up with that name!”

Tyson kept
eating for what seemed like ages.  “I can’t figure you out,” he finally said. 
The thug cocked his head as if piecing together a puzzle.  “Half the time, you
act like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.  The other half, it’s like
you’re batshit insane and just winging it.”

“Good steak,”
Slade said, grunting his approval in the most manly way possible. 

“See,” Tyson
said, leaning forward and glanced at the inmates sitting along either edge of
the massive table, then back at Slade.  “A lot of them didn’t take too kindly
to that whole God-talk they fed us.  It probably won’t go over too well.”  When
Slade just lifted a brow, Tyson said, “How about the Devil’s Tribesmen or
something like that?”

“Harmonious.” 
Slade stuck the steak into his mouth and started chewing it, “Society of God.” 
After all, it was Slade’s society, so therefore, Slade was God, at least to
these brain-dead imbeciles.

Tyson narrowed
his eyes.  “If you tell them they’re gonna be calling themselves the Harmonious
Society of God, they’re gonna shoot you.”

“At which point,
you would shoot them back,” Slade informed him.

“
I
would
shoot you.”

Slade opened his
mouth to complain, but was effectively silenced by three men lunging from their
chairs and the concussive blasts of AK-47s tearing through the tiny space.

As a fine white
powder from the crumbled ceiling plaster rained down on him and all his nearby
tablemates, his good friend Stone leveled his gun on Slade and said, “Look at
this dumbfuck!  Goggles?  A
bib
?  Fucking
cannibalism
?  I don’t
know about you, but I’m
not
letting this crazy asshole lead me through
the apocalypse!  I don’t
care
how smart he is.”

“Now I see what
the baking soda was for,” Tyson commented.

“Showtime,”
Slade agreed.  “Eight and a half feet.”

“He’ll shoot me
if I move,” Tyson said.

He probably
would, at that.  Ugh!  Slade hated it when idiots didn’t do what they were told
the first time.  It almost inevitably threw inconvenient wrenches in perfectly
good plans.

“Gimme one good
reason I should let you live,
Sam
,” Stone growled.  “Yeah, I know who
you are.  Samuel
Dobbs
.  Brother of that dumbass Zero, who can’t even
take a shit without an alien wiping his ass for him.”

“He’s winning my
case for me,” Slade said, delighted.

“Wait,” Tyson
said, blinking at him with confusion.  “Zero’s your
brother
?”

Slade rolled his
eyes.  “Only by merit of my father’s penis.”

“What the fuck
are you two whispering about?!” Stone snapped, shouldering the rifle and
scowling at them down the barrel, finger depressing the trigger.  Beside him,
Queso and Big Phil were brushing the powdery stuff off their arms as they held
their guns with the other.

Slade cocked his
head at Stone and raised his voice to loudly say, “What…  My father’s penis?”

Stone blinked.

“I’m sure it was
rather large, if genetic influences are any indication.”

Stone turned
bright red.  Several men around the room chortled.

“Listen, you ailo
prick,” Stone growled.  “I’m taking over.  You and your gorilla, over there,
can go trundle off.  This ain’t a fuckin’ freak show.”

Slade sighed and
pulled out his Super Soaker.  “See this?”  He held up the neon green device for
all to see.

He got a lot of
blank looks.

Slade pointed it
at Stone.

“Whereas
your
gun contains lead,” Slade said, “
my
gun contains a highly
concentrated, ultra-corrosive form of hydrochloric acid.  One squirt from me—”
he demonstrated on a patch of the table, making the white powder from the
ceiling foam and sizzle, “—and you lose an arm.”  He gave them his most
psychotic smile.  “You wanna lose an arm, Richard?”

Covered in the
white residue, Stone hesitated behind the sights of his gun.  “How’d you know
my name?” he managed, looking a bit unnerved.

“Same way I know
Big Phil’s dead mother’s name was Rose.”

Phil frowned.

“You can’t read
minds,” Stone growled.  “
Nobody
can do that.”

“On the contrary,”
Slade said, holding up his free hand to his ear.  “If you’ll listen to the
bombs going off in the background, the Congressional Space Force says
otherwise.”

“Listen,” Stone
said, sounding slightly less confident, “you ain’t got what it takes to be a
leader.  I do.  I been out runnin’ cattle my whole life.  I know how to lead a
team.”

“Running
cattle,” Slade suggested, “…and people?  How many trips
did
you make out
of Mexico, Stone?  San Antonio was on your route, wasn’t it?”

Stone’s gun
wavered, his eyes flickering sideways at the people watching.  “So I did a
little smuggling.  Big deal.  Everybody knows that.”

Slade continued
to smile at him.  “Yeah, but they think you were a
drug
smuggler.  Does
everyone know that you never delivered the women that looked like your dear old
mother?  What was it you liked?  Dark hair, dark skin?  What was she,
Cherokee?  Bet those Mexican women really turned you on, didn’t they?”

Stone went
utterly pale.

Slade lowered
his voice, totally sober, now.  “How many did you kill, Stone?”

“Wait,” Queso
said, his Spanish accent thick.  He was frowning at Slade, now.  “Did you just
say he was a fucking coyote?”

Slade gave Queso
an innocent look.  “What, did he tell you he was a cowboy?”  He pursed his
lips.  “He did, didn’t he?”  Slade tisked.  “Seriously, homie, why else you
think an uneducated gringo spoke such fluent Spanish?”  The language barrier
was, of course, one of the reasons Queso had fallen in with Stone.

“Don’t call me
‘homie’,” Queso growled.  He was looking at Stone, though.  “That true, you big
fuck?  You a fucking coyote?”

“Fuck no,” Stone
growled.  “He’s lying.”

“I suppose if
you find that boring, we could talk about how Big Phil doesn’t really know how
to shoot a gun…do you Phil?”

Phil jerked,
suddenly looking like a Takki whose butchering number had come up.

“See,” Slade
said, still smiling at Stone, “you’re not a murderer, Stone.  Of men, anyway. 
You like to hide it, do it all alone, when no one’s around to hear her scream. 
Makes you feel real good, like you’re stickin’ it to that bitch of a mother.”

“Shut up,” Stone
said.

“Hell,” Slade
said, turning to Big Phil with a little frown, “your big, bad, backup isn’t a
murderer, either.  He’s an accountant who got put away for fraud.”

“That true?”
Queso demanded, the vehemence in his pitch increasing.  “That true, Phil?  You
get put away for fraud?”

Phil, for his
part, was looking queasy.

“In fact,” Slade
went on, “the only one who’s ever killed a man, between the four of us, is
Queso, there.”

But Queso wasn’t
listening.  He had raised his gun and placed the muzzle against Stone’s temple,
“You fucking
puto
, Stone.  You tell me.  You a fucking coyote?  You run
women to San Antonio?  What about a girl named Rosa Delgado?  You run her cross
the border, man?  You fucking kill her?”

“I’m not a
fucking coyote!” Stone snapped, distracted by the gun muzzle in his ear.  “The
freak’s lying.”

“Or maybe not,”
Queso growled, leaning in close next to the barrel of the gun.  “Maybe you go
kill Rosa, eh?  Maybe you violate her like those other girls you told me
about?”

“Now Phil,”
Slade said, ignoring the other two, “we both know you’re a follower, not a
leader.  You never could bring yourself to excel, after your parents were so
hard on you.  You spent so much time studying, so much time doing exactly what
they wanted, that you never got to live.  You never got to
relax
.  You
just wanted a few more days in Hawaii.  And they put you in jail for
eighteen
years
.  When rapists and murderers like Stone, here, got six.  That wasn’t
really fair, was it?  Your life was
really
hard.  All that pressure…” 
Slade tisked and shook his head.

“Come on, man,”
Phil said, his voice breaking.  “Just stop it, okay?”

“Yeah, fucking
shut up,” Stone snapped.

“No, man,” Queso
said, leaning back so that his gun was extended at arm’s length.  “I wanna hear
what the freak’s got to say.”  He turned to Slade.  “He kill my sister, man?”

“Probably not,”
Slade said truthfully.  “Just about a dozen other women he mutilated and buried
in the desert.”

“Mutilated,” Queso
said, hesitation in his voice.  It was obvious that the language barrier didn’t
carry the meaning across.

“Yeah.  It means
he liked to slice up their faces and cut their fingers off with pruning
shears,” Slade said.  “He started a collection, after his third one or so.”  He
wasn’t
sure
on that, but if Stone fit the psychological profile of
someone with that kind of severe mommy issues—severe enough to kill—he’d
definitely disfigured them somehow.

This time, Stone
went red.  “I never cut their fucking fingers off.  See?  He’s fucking lying. 
I never cut their fingers off.”

Queso was
instantly back at Stone’s head, jamming his gun into his ear as he whispered
against his cheek.  “But you did kill them, is that it?  You
told
me you
like to slice on ‘em a little.”

“So Phil,” Slade
said.  “When they convicted you, how’d your family react?”  When the man just
gave him a nervous look, Slade said, “I bet it was awful, wasn’t it?  I mean,
they had such high hopes.  Made you go to Harvard for business when you really
wanted to go take art in some nice, chillaxed town like Eugene.  You ended up
crunching numbers, straining your eyes on balance sheets to pay off a debt you
never wanted.  And when they found out…  They never even bothered to show up to
your trial, did they?  They just
left
you there.”

“Shut up,” Phil
whimpered.

“They didn’t
care
,
did they?” Slade said.  “They never
cared
about you.  They only had
expectations
. 
You weren’t their kid, their
child
.  You were their
robot
.  And,
as soon as you weren’t useful to them anymore, they cast you off.  They never
even returned your calls, did they?  You never had a childhood, and because of
that, because of the
pressure
, you were going to be put away for
eighteen years.  Kind of ironic how fucked up the system is, isn’t it?”

And, right
there, Phil started bawling.

Queso glanced at
Phil, then at Slade, then at Stone.  Then, with a dark look, he pulled the
trigger.

At the retort,
several of the impromptu waitresses screamed and dropped their dishes.  Brains,
blood, and other unpleasant matter sprayed across the room to coat the window
to the parking lot outside in a macabre showing of translucent gore.

Then Queso
turned and pointed his gun at Slade.  “So you can read my mind, man?” he said,
with an almost crazed sound to his voice.  “What am I gonna do?  Eh? 
Homie?
”

“Eight and a
half feet,” Slade said.

Queso blinked. 
“Huh?  No, that wasn’t what I was thinking…”

Tyson,
thankfully, was not an idiot.  He backed up, Slade hit the joystick button with
his foot, and every piece of metal in the area slapped to Queso’s table with a
speed and effectiveness to crush knuckles.

Queso started to
scream and slap at his hand, trying to free his fingers from the mess.  Other
patrons were also screaming, their limbs, or, in one unfortunate
jewelry-thief’s case, their ring-bedecked fingers slapping to the table along
with Queso’s gun.

“So you see,”
Slade said, strutting up to the pinned man, “I
could
read your tiny,
pathetic mind, furg.”  He picked up the gun at the same time his joystick timer
released, yanking it out of Queso’s ruined fingers.  “And now…”  He pointed the
gun into the air and fired the semi-automatic rifle at the ceiling directly
above his head until whole sections of the ceiling came down on them in a wash
of white dust.  Then he gave Queso, who was nursing broken fingers, his best
psychotic smile as he levered the gun between his eyes.  “I’m giving you a
chance to read mine.”

Queso, after
staring at him for a moment in wide-eyed panic, bolted.

Phil, seeing his
one friend dead, his other run away, just whimpered and ran out the door after
him.  Slade sighed and handed the gun he’d acquired over to Tyson, who was
walking up behind him.

“Now,” Slade
said, unscrewing the cap of his squirtgun, “any of the rest of you unpleasant
fuckers get any vastly uninspired ideas, I want you to think about something
really long and hard before you do anything stupid.”  At that, he upended the
contents of the Super soaker over himself, to a pleasing array of a roomful of
gasps as the vinegar reacted with the half-pound of baking-soda that had fallen
on him from the ceiling where he and Tyson had stashed it, leaving a bubbling
wash of foam to horrify the masses.