Zero's Return (35 page)

Twelve-A watched
him, blue eyes scanning the spot between Joe’s eyes like it was an open book. 
Then, without another word, Twelve-A just turned and walked away.  Joe watched
the back of his fuzzy blond head, still struggling with his own fury.

“Pointy-eared
prick,” he finally muttered, shouldering his backpack.  He knew he’d been given
permission to leave, that Twelve-A was more or less dropping the subject, but
he could sense that he’d won some sort of war between him and the blond freak,
or at least a small battle thereof.  And that made him feel damn good,
considering how little he actually had to fight with.

“This food,”
Shael cried, jogging up to shove cookies into his hands.  “It is the ambrosia
of the Sisters themselves, Joe Dobbs. 
Taste
it!”  She gestured at the
cookies excitedly.  When Joe didn’t move, Shael’s excitement waned into a
dangerous thunderhead and she went still.  “You refuse my food?” she growled. 
“After I ate at your fire?”

Realizing he could
either try the cookie or have it forcibly shoved into his mouth and out through
the back of his head, Joe reluctantly took a piece and tried it.

The cookie was
good
. 
Like something he would have eaten at a hugely-overpriced specialty Human shop
on Kaleu. 

“There’s more!”
Shael called, her excitement returning.  “This brown-furred one over here, she
makes
it!”  She pointed at the retreating back of Eleven-C, who was casually walking
along between the enormous Nine-G and his skinny blond sidekick, the Mind-Furg. 
“Come on, Joe Dobbs!  Twelve-A has offered to let us travel with them!”  Then,
like any good Jreet, Shael ran after the food source.

Reluctantly,
more irritated than pissed, now, Joe hitched his backpack over his shoulder
and, after examining their backtrail for a long moment, considering, turned and
followed the group.  He could, he decided, leave at any time.

He caught up
with Alice and held up a hand when she gave him a happy smile.  “Let me get one
thing straight,” he interrupted.  “We’re not gonna eat cookies this whole
trip.  That’s bad for you.”

“Twelve-A
doesn’t think it’s bad for you,” Alice retorted, biting into a cookie to prove
her point.

“It’s bad for
you,” Joe repeated.  “You need to get that busty chick to make something a
little more healthy or even the walking Hebbut over there is going to get fat.”

Alice frowned at
him.  “His name is Nine-G and he’s
not
a Hebbut.”

“Whatever.  The
point is, we need Knockers to make us some real food if we want to stay
healthy.”

“
Her
name
is Eleven-C,” Alice said.

“She’s also got
nice boobs,” Joe told her.  “Don’t really see ‘em like that on Congies.  Means
she’s got body fat.”  Joe had always enjoyed a good rack, and that had been the
one failing he’d seen with just about any Congie woman he’d ever dated—she was
more muscle than curves.

“You aren’t very
nice,” Alice said again, this time with a disgusted twist of her face.

“Never claimed
to be,” Joe replied, cinching a rifle strap tighter over his shoulder. 

“What’s your
name?” Alice asked after a moment.

Joe almost told
her to go screw a Jreet, but realized she could probably simply get the
information by asking Twelve-A, which would probably be even more unpleasant
for Joe than a good Jreet-screwing.  “Joe,” he told her reluctantly. 

Alice peered up
at him.  “You look like my best friend’s dad.  Your last name Porter?”

Joe grew wary,
realizing she probably subconsciously recognized him from a recruitment
poster.  “No.”

“What is it,
then?” She peered up at him with a curious little frown.

Thinking about
the legend of Zero, Joe muttered, “None of your damn business.  That’s what.”

Immediately,
Alice’s eyes twitched towards Twelve-A.

“Dobbs, goddamn
it!” Joe snapped, as the telepath started to turn towards them with a frown. 
Giving the blue-eyed freak an irritated look, he told Alice, “It’s Joe Dobbs.” 
Raising his voice, he shouted, “And turn the soot around and keep walking,
Pointy!  I’m having a chat with the little lady. 
Alone
, if you don’t
mind.”

Twelve-A
narrowed his pretty blue eyes in Joe’s direction, but he turned back around.

“Naked Takki
posy-sniffer,” Joe muttered.

“Thanks for
killing the dragon, Joe,” Alice said.

When Joe blinked
and looked down at her, he realized with a start that Alice was blushing and
glancing at her feet.  Seeing that, he got the uncomfortable idea that he had,
just that fast, become the sudden focus of a pre-teen crush.  He fought
goosebumps of unease and smiled awkwardly.  “It wasn’t a dra—”  Then his words
cut off in the back of his throat with a strangled sound and his mouth fell
open.  He stared at Alice, then at the experiments, goosebumps tightening his
skin in cold, eerie waves.

And while you
shall die in a cave, shamed and surrounded by dragon-slaying innocents, your
deeds will crush the unbreakable, and your name will never be forgotten…

“Soot,” Joe
whispered, his feet stumbling to a stunned halt.  “Oh soot.”

#

Six Six Five had
spent another night sleeping in her friend’s bed, knowing it was against the
rules, yet unable to dream alone in the dark.  Six Two One didn’t seem to mind
when Six Six Five crawled up into the bunk with her, though she always took the
most covers.  Six Six Five didn’t care—lying there alone in the eerie silence,
listening to the sound of her own heartbeat, she would do anything to have
someone to talk to in the pitch blackness of ‘lights-out’.

Tonight was no
different.  Six Six Five always felt like she was missing something, like she
needed more than she had, and the furtive nights sleeping beside Six Two One
seemed to ease that ache when no amount of water, food, or exercise would do
the same.

“So what do you
think our surprise will be tomorrow?” Six Six Five asked into the darkness,
hearing her friend breathing softly beside her, close to sleep.  “Codgson said
we would have a surprise.”

Her friend was
quiet a moment, making Six Six Five think she had fallen asleep.  Desperate to
distract herself from the darkness, she insisted, “What do you—”

“A gun,” Six Two
One interrupted.  “He keeps saying we’re all gonna be soldiers.  Soldiers have
guns.”

Six Six Five
blinked.  She hadn’t thought about that.  The way Codgson had said it, it was
going to be a
good
surprise.  Six Six Five didn’t
want
to be a
soldier.  All the running around the gym was boring.

Six Two One was
right, though.  All the soldiers carried guns as they guarded the doors and
halls to keep the aliens out.  Some had big guns slung over their shoulders,
but
all
of them had littler guns strapped to their thighs or under their
coats.  Six Six Five thought she could carry one of the small ones, though what
she had
really
hoped for was something pretty like Doctor Molotov
sometimes wore.  It was usually sparkly earrings, but sometimes she wore a
glittering necklace or a scarf that changed color from pink to purple when she
moved.  Doctor Molotov had once let Six Six Five touch her scarf.  It had been
so
soft
.  So smooth that it made the calluses of her hands scrape and
catch against it.

“I hope it’s a
scarf like Doctor Molotov’s pink one,” Six Six Five told her friend.  “I want
to be like her when I grow up.”

Six Six Five
felt Six Two One turn to her in the darkness.  “We have to fight
aliens
when we grow up.” 

At the flat
derisiveness in Six Two One’s tone, Six Six Five immediately felt ashamed and
sick.  Yet, she didn’t
want
to fight aliens.  They looked…scary. 
Especially the Dhasha.  They ate people.  Six Six Five didn’t want to get
eaten—she just wanted to have something soft like Doctor Molotov’s scarf.

“You can fight
aliens,” she told her friend.  “I’ll write reports like Doctor Molotov.”

Six Two One
scoffed.  “You can’t write reports.  She’s already
doing
that.  You have
to be a soldier.  Colonel Codgson said so.”

Six Six Five
grimaced.  She really didn’t like Colonel Codgson.  Whenever he came around,
the doctors made them line up for formation.  Six Six Five hated that.  “I
don’t want to be a soldier.  I want to be a doctor.  They need doctors, too. 
If soldiers get hurt, they’ll need people to make them better and write reports
about it.”

Six Two One
seemed to consider that.  “Okay,” she finally said, “but if you get to be a
doctor, I get to be your assistant.”

Six Six Five sat
up in bed, frowning.  “You don’t want to be a doctor, too?”

Six Two One made
a little sound to the negative.  “They won’t let me be a doctor.  They don’t
like how small I am.  They’d make me an assistant.”

Indeed, the
doctors didn’t seem to like much of anything about Six Two One.  Six Six Five
had heard them arguing over Six Two One’s ‘birth defects’ and whether or not
they should ‘cull.’  She had taken that to mean that they were trying to decide
whether or not to give her extra food, because Six Two One had gotten extra
rations the next morning, and had been getting them ever since.  It had made
Six Six Five secretly jealous. 

“So…”  Six Six
Five heard Six Two One sit up.  “…if you get a scarf, think they’d let me have
a necklace?”

Remembering the
sparkly splashes of color breaking the endless whites, blacks, and grays of
their surroundings, Six Six Five felt her heart skip.  She hadn’t actually allowed
herself to consider a necklace, since a scarf was made of cloth, and her
batchmates already wore cloth. 
None
of them wore a necklace.  Until
now, she had always considered that to be unattainable, well out of her reach. 
Still, the idea was making her heart pound.  “It could be a necklace,” she
managed, on a tendril of hope.

As it turned
out, they were both wrong.

When the doctors
woke them to line up before Colonel Codgson the next morning, there was a line
of small cages in the shadows along the back wall, each mostly obscured with a
plain blue cloth.  As Six Six Five stood there, facing the cages, she couldn’t
help but hear the movement within them.

Their doctors
left them alone in the gymnasium, lined up in formation, staring at the cages
for what seemed like an hour.  Six Six Five
wanted
to go see what was
moving inside the kennels, but like her batchmates, she knew that the surest
way to
not
find out what the colonel had in store for them was to step
out of formation before they had been dismissed.

Still, the
longer they stood there—hours, now—the more restless Six Six Five got. 
Something was in there, something interesting, and she had to know.  Her
curiosity was
killing
her.  It seemed like the doctors had forgotten
them in here.  They’d done it before—just lined them up and walked away. 
Remembering that, Six Six Five bit her lip.  No one was around to see her take
a quick peek.  She could make it fast.  And it was obvious her batchmates were
also curious.  If she made it fast and then told them what was in the crates,
they probably wouldn’t even tell on her.

Still, the whole
situation didn’t feel right.  Almost like it was another of Codgson’s tests.

Instinct warred
with curiosity for the next hour, until Six Six Five finally couldn’t handle it
anymore.  She had taken her first step out of line to go check the crates when
one of the boys with funny ears and bright blue eyes burst out of formation,
and, with a quick nervous look around him, hurried forward to go peek under the
nearest cloth.

“Hamsters!” he
cried, sounding both stunned and delighted.  “They brought us
hamsters
!” 
He pulled the cloth off the cage so he could open the door and drag out a
spotted brown hamster.  It looked just like the one that Lieutenant Drake kept
in her office, except spotted instead of pure white.

The shock was
enough to make Six Six Five take another step forward.  So
that
was why
they’d left them there!  To let them pick their surprise!  Six Six Five was
moving toward the row of cages, looking to claim her own pet, when Colonel
Codgson’s smooth, calculated voice cut her short.

“I see you found
today’s surprise, Six Seven Two,” Codgson said in his slow drawl.  He was
walking across the gymnasium towards them, entering from a door that Six Six
Five hadn’t noticed before.  And, while there was a smile on the colonel’s
face, there was something odd about his tone that made Six Six Five freeze, her
heart giving a sudden, terrified thump.  She inched back into formation, glad
that Codgson was facing Six Seven Two and couldn’t see that she, too, had left
her assigned place.

Six Seven Two
hastily put the hamster back into the cage and turned to hurry back to his
place in formation.

“No, stay,”
Codgson urged, still only halfway across the gymnasium.  “They are
your
surprises, after all.  You might as well enjoy them.”

Six Seven Two
gave his empty spot in line a reluctant look, then nervously straightened,
spine rigid as the soldiers had taught them.  Codgson lazily walked up to him
and stopped, looking him up and down.  “So,” he said eventually, “did we do a
good job picking your surprise, Six Seven Two?”

The little boy
gave an impish smile, his dimpled face flexing.  “Yes, sir.  Six Seven Eight
said it was going to be a gun.”

“I see,” Codgson
said, that oddness in his tone again.  “So you’re happy it’s a guinea pig and
not a gun.”

Six Seven Two
must have realized his mistake, because he flushed.  Seeing that, Six Six Five
immediately felt sorry for him—nobody liked being put on the spot in front of
the class, and Codgson did it often.