Zero's Return (30 page)

I’m finally
going to take that piss in their nuajan machine
, Joe thought.

He’d definitely
killed more kreenit than any man had a right to.  As far as he knew, Rat had
held top honors back before she went private-service, with six.  Twenty-three
was pure love of the Sisters—there simply wasn’t any other explanation.  And
twenty-three dead kreenit was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people
that would survive this year alone because of his efforts.

But, Joe
decided, care of the burning of Jim Beam, not even kreenit killing was very
fulfilling anymore.  He’d enjoyed it for a while, but sometime between the
point where he’d been collectively spit on for saying hi after saving his first
group of Humans from a eighteen-thousand-lobe kreenit, and the moment he’d caught
his first ‘tribe’ with women and children in zip-ties and dog collars, he’d
lost interest.

And there was
definitely something interesting about the girl that was even then curled on
his blankets, snoring like she hadn’t slept in a week.  Arrogant, ignorant,
intensely frustrating—but interesting.

Still hungry,
Joe cooked himself more meat, but his stomach churned more than a little at the
increasingly-pungent reek.  Five days inside his backpack, exposed to the heat
of the day, had not been kind.  It was all he could do to get the stuff down. 
He dozed a little that night, back up against the kreenit’s indestructible
scales, but was already awake again, building a morning fire, before the woman
yawned and opened her eyes.

The first thing
she did, upon waking, was throw a tantrum that Joe had covered her while she
slept.  Screaming profanities that he had, again, tried to dress her, she
hurled the blanket at the flames.

Joe, though, had
had plenty of time to think about how to deal with her expected reaction as he
reminisced by the fire, and, catching the blanket before she could lob it into
the flames, said in his most indignant voice, “These are
valuable
.  With
Earth hit by Congress and everyone stabbing each other in the backs just trying
to survive, we need as many blankets as we can get.  I thought they’d be
safer
with you.”

He was, of
course, banking on the idea that Jreet didn’t need blankets, and whoever had
brainwashed her had done an excellent job, thus she probably didn’t even know
what they were.

Indeed, Shael
stopped screaming and frowned at the hollow-fiber, reflective, ultradown
blanket.  “You weren’t trying to dress me?”

“No,” Joe said,
rolling it up.  “I was trying to safeguard my stuff.”  He shrugged.  “But if
you think it’s too valuable and you want
me
to guard it next time,
that’s fine.  It’s a big responsibility.”

She licked her
lips.  In her sleep, she had tugged the covers closer, and she was obviously
thinking about how
good
it had felt to ‘guard’ his blanket for him. 
Lifting her head with that imperious attitude that Joe was beginning to find
rather cute, she said, “You were right to leave it with me, Voran.  As the one
with the most kills between the two of us, I will protect it.”

Oh, lady, if
only you knew,
Joe thought, remembering Der’ru and Rastari and Neskfaat and
Eeloir and all the other battles throughout his long lifetime.  He resisted the
urge to drag out his canteen again—he was running low—and cleared his throat,
instead.  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Joe said.  “I’ll carry it for you until
tonight.  Wouldn’t want it to slow you down in battle.”

She looked like
she was going to argue a moment, then grunted her assent.  “Good idea, Voran.”

Joe went to cook
them more meat, but, despite his precautions, his prize had finally been discovered
by flies.  In a starving world, Joe was willing to eat rancid meat, but not
wriggling meat.  Shael, apparently, was of the same mind, because when he
offered it to her, she wrinkled her nose in distaste and said they could hunt
something better.  Joe didn’t have the heart to tell her that hunting, in a
land ravaged by kreenit and every Human survivor with a gun, wasn’t really an
option anymore.

Hungry, running
low on whiskey, wondering why he had volunteered to not only feed
himself
in this hungry world, but a naked, utterly ignorant
girl
, Joe loaded up
his gear in a foul mood and started leading them back the way they had come. 
Shael tagged along beside him, oblivious to the fact that he was considering
how much of a Karmic kick in the ass he would get for leaving her behind, or
that she, despite their talk about the hazards of second degree burns,
continued to go stark naked.

Joe was still
trying to figure out how to broach the subject of sunscreen when they stumbled
across a family of four, hogtied in cheerful purple rope beside a cold
campfire.  They were, like the fire, long dead.  Whatever stuff they had once
owned, even their clothes, had been taken from them.

As Shael’s lips
twisted in a grimace, Joe squatted beside the bodies, looking for some sort of
indication of how they’d been killed.  It was pretty simple to figure out. 
Between the bloody, skinless wrists, their lack of wounds, and the way their
bodies had cracked and wrinkled under the sun, it was pretty obvious they’d
dehydrated to death.

“What kind of
creatures bind their enemies and leave them to die instead of doing them the
mercy of killing them?” Shael demanded, apparently having made the same
conclusion.

Joe grunted and
stood.  “Earthlings.”

Her look of
distaste grew.  “We must kill them.”

“Agreed,” Joe
said.  “But first, we need to find Doctor Philip and make him dance on your
tek,” he reminded her.

Shael nodded
solemnly.  “That is true, Voran.  First Doctor Philip.”  As if she were making
a list in her head.

Seeing the stony
determination in her emerald eyes, Joe wondered what, exactly, they would do if
they actually
found
Doctor Philip, as the first thing
he
would
want to do would be ask the man what the hell he was dealing with, and how many
more of them were potentially out there.  Shael, however, seemed intent on
simply slaughtering the guy and going back to hunting Earthlings.

Leaving the four
corpses where they lay—Joe had come across far too many bodies to attempt to
bury them all—they returned to the road back to Shael’s lab.  Despite Joe’s
objections, Shael walked brazenly down the dotted yellow centerline for the
next few lengths, utterly exposed to any kreenit, government bot, or bad guy
who decided to take a pot-shot at her.  For his own part, Joe decided to
‘skulk’ in the shadows beside her, staying out of sight, just in case someone
opted to take Shael up on her challenge.

Which, not
surprisingly, someone did.  The same swaggering, arm-swinging furg who had
shoved his companion and bolted the day before came striding out of the woods,
a machete on his belt and a sneer on his face.

“Hey bitch!” he
snapped, stepping out of the woods where he’d been camped on a hill, watching
the road.  “What’s the matter…your Congie run off?”  He yanked the machete out
of its sheath, still lumbering toward her in that ridiculous swagger.

Shael stopped in
the road and frowned at the man, sunburned face full of incomprehension.  Joe
reached for Jane.

Jane wasn’t, he
discovered, necessary.  Before the swaggering kid got within two rods, his head
exploded.  Like a zit.  Brains everywhere, blood still pumping out the open top
of his skull, hairy pieces of scalp getting caught in the branches overhanging
the road.  Joe froze as spatters of gore hit him, acutely aware whose brains
could
have been dotting the asphalt, should the woman have decided to pop his zit
rather than put him—and his body-armor—through a wall.  He swallowed hard and
carefully pulled a clump of bloody hair from his jacket.

As if she had
just swatted an insect, Shael turned back to the road, ostensibly to figure out
how far they had to travel.

And that
,
Joe thought, dropping the bloody clump of blond hair to the ground,
is why
you should be running in the opposite direction.
  Even then, the corpse was
twitching on the road, oozing fluids and shit out over the tarmac.

Running the
opposite direction…or maybe teaching her a few moral truths.  Like, “You only
kill them if they’re going to kill you.”  Then again, the guy was obviously
going to do just that, so Joe really didn’t have a leg to stand on.  He just
had the ominous gut feeling that, had it been a toddler, jeering and flinging
insults, Shael would have treated him with the same courtesy.

She and I
need to have a chat,
Joe thought.  Then he winced, wondering how he could
do that without ending up like his headless friend.

“Come, Voran,”
Shael said from the road.  “We’re getting close to the place of the
Earthlings.”

In all reality,
Joe had gotten out his PPU and his map and had narrowed down their target to a
lonely—and government-owned—patch of land near the side of the mountain exactly
three-point-oh-three lengths away, easily reached by cutting through the brush
to the north, but he meekly followed her anyway.

As expected, the
corpse Joe had left in the road the day before was missing, either consumed by
kreenit or hungry survivors.  When they got close enough, Joe found the man’s
hands and feet hacked off and discarded in the woods beside the road.  Nearby,
bloody sneaker-prints were covering the area, tracking in and out of the dead
man’s blood, and Joe, remembering the same pattern on the dead kid’s upturned
feet, realized
who
had eaten the corpse.

Humans are
disgusting,
Joe thought. 
They didn’t need to give us a Sacred Turn. 
We’re going to be stick-throwing savages in six
rotations
.
  With the
kreenit eating man, beast, and food stores alike, and with the world’s
population—which had been centered away from the food-production areas, barely
able to sustain itself—dropping by millions every day, he was pretty sure that
Humanity’s reversion to barbarism was going to happen a hell of a lot faster
than the bureaucrats on Koliinaat expected.

Six hundred
and sixty-six turns,
Joe thought, staring at the dried puddle of blood
filled with sneaker tracks. 
There’s not going to be anything left.

Humanity, with
its ‘high-tech’ arrogance, ultra-specialization, and disdain for food
production, was going to simply die off.

And, eying the
fly-covered hands and still-sneakered feet that had been discarded in the
grass, Joe wasn’t even really sure anymore that was such a bad thing.

Joe let Shael
lead him back to the compound in silence, surprised when she actually brought
them to the government property he had located on his map.  For someone who
prided herself on her Jreet heritage, she seemed to have a pretty outstanding
sense of direction.

Shael stopped in
a parking-lot strewn with black-windowed skimmers and similarly dark land
vehicles, frowning at the front of what looked like a coffee shop.  “There is
the training compound,” she announced.

Seeing all the
vehicles parked outside, Joe pulled Jane and unobtrusively got behind a van. 
“So that’s a government facility?  How many guys inside?”

Shael snorted. 
“Only the chattel, Voran.  But we can kill them if they stand in our way.”

Over their walk
back to the lab—on those few times his ‘Voran Jreet habit’ seemed to randomly
work—Joe had come to realize that the ‘chattel’ she had spoken of were, indeed,
more experiments, especially an intriguing one she had called Twelve-A.  A
‘minder,’ as the reporters had dubbed them, borrowing from the scientists’ own
petnames for their projects.  What really got Joe interested, though, was the
fact that there weren’t supposed to
be
any minders alive.  By all
accounts,
none
of the experiments should have been alive, but the
telepaths were really,
really
rare.  Like a breeder in a Bagan hive. 
The idea that a minder had survived was oddly thrilling, like Earth was one
step closer to taking a piss in the Congressional nuajan machine.

It also left Joe
leery as hell.  He’d watched videos of the hundreds of Congressional soldiers
that had died with a minder’s thought, eyes rolling into the back of their
heads and slumping to the ground like lifeless dolls.  They were, by far, the
most dangerous of any of the experiments.

“So Twelve-A is
in there?” Joe asked, trying to figure out how to approach the compound without
giving off the vibe of a government goon and therefore getting himself
arbitrarily obliterated.

Shael squinted
at him.  She had made it clear she disliked it when he spoke Congie, and there
was no mistaking the sound of it coming off his lips.

Reddening, Joe
tried again.  Despite how many times he tried, his tongue kept producing the
sounds he’d been raised with.

“If you wish to
speak filth, skulker,” Shael eventually said, with the utmost regality, “do it
elsewhere.”

Joe tensed
again, that muscle in his neck twitching.  “That is so like a Welu, to complain
when another shows more learning and worldly knowledge.” 

Shael squinted
at him, and for a moment, Joe wondered when his bubble was going to burst. 
Then she said, “A
true
warrior refuses to learn the habits and customs
of his enemies.”

“Oh?” Joe
demanded, crossing his arms and glaring at her over the abandoned cars.  “What
better way to annihilate them than by using their own weaknesses against them?”

Shael snorted. 
“By finding their strengths and utterly crushing them in front of their kin and
spearmates, so there is no question who is the greater warrior.” 

Of course. 
Because, to a Jreet, losing a good fight was more worthy than winning a poor
one.