Zero's Return (86 page)

“Hundreds!” Klyde cried. 
“They killed everyone in the back.  They’re headed our way…”

Rat immediately sliced
through the rope holding her to Slade’s belt and shouldered her rifle, turning
to stalk out towards the grasslands.  Slade held up his arm to stop her.

“I can kill them,” Rat
growled.

“Stay here,” Slade said. 
“I’ll handle this.”

Both Rat and Tyson looked
at him as if he’d lost his mind.  Well,
more
of his mind.  Carefully,
like he was a cerebrally-challenged infant, Rat said, “I need to find a good
sniping position.”

“I said I’d take care of
it,” Slade said.  “Just stay here and protect the Society.”

Rat cocked her head at
him and looked like she was going to go stalking off into the grass anyway.

“Tuesday,” Slade reminded
her.  Something about the idea of the Congie putting herself in danger made
Slade’s gut clench.  Of course, he was smart enough not to tell her as much. 

“So what’s your plan?”
Rat reluctantly asked.

Slade stuck his finger in
his mouth and lifted it to check the direction of the wind.  Seeing it was was
headed out over the dry, brown, amber waves of grain, Slade grimaced, “Wind’s
headed in their direction.  They can probably smell us.”

Tyson and Rat frowned at
him.

“It’s in the book!” Slade
cried in, thumping his survival manual in exasperation.  Then, returning his
attention to Klyde, he said, “Okay, so let me guess.  You saw a big party
hanging out in the countryside and you didn’t bother trying to round them up to
join our Order, or—God forbid—doing any reconnaissance.  You just started
shooting.  Because you were hungry.”

“There were too
many
to round up,” the man complained.  “I mean, it would have taken ten of us to
even get half of them.”

“So you started shooting
at them,” Slade said disgustedly.  “And at what point did you realize they were
armed?  When one of you received a plasma shot through your chest?”

The guard bit his lip and
did not respond.

“We’ll talk about this
later,” Slade said, dismissing the man as his attention was drawn by a surge of
armed men rushing over the grassy ridge, obviously having followed Klyde back
to his source.  They slowed down once they realized the size of Slade’s band,
then braced themselves against the dry earth and opened fire.

Slade recognized the
skull-and-dagger emblems on their ripped and dirty jackets and muttered a
curse.  It was the remnants of one of Los Angeles’s most notorious street
gangs, Satan’s Creed.  They must have headed towards the mountains once they
realized that they’d once and for all been kicked out of town by something
bigger and badder and hungrier than them.  Just his luck.

“Oh
shit
that’s a
lot,” Tyson said, backing away.

There were at least a
thousand of them, and all were carrying weapons of one form or another. 
Several carried plasma or rifle pistols, and were currently mowing through the
HSG’s ranks.  Everywhere in the grass, people were exposed and screaming.

“Get everyone over the
hill behind us!” Slade shouted at Tyson.  “Get them into cover in the trees!” 

Rat calmly ignored him,
stepping forward to get a better firing position.  Slade grabbed her arm and
she glanced at his hand with a frown, then lifted her gray-green eyes to his
face.

“Get behind me,” Slade
said.  “Over the hill with everyone else.”

Her eyes darkened.  “This
is the best firing position.  We run, we die.”

“Tuesday,” Slade reminded
her.

She gave him a long,
irritated look, then shouldered her rifle and said, “Wednesday will be fun.  If
you live.”  Then, like the calm killing machine she was, she turned and jogged
after Tyson, who was shouting orders to the terrified masses fleeing the
oncoming gang.

Slade took a long look at
the dirty, weapon-toting masses flowing over the hills and swallowed down a
rush of panic at the sheer numbers.  Already, they were starting down their
hill, chasing down the fleeing survivors.  He took a breath, steeling himself,
and thought,
God hates a coward. 
Letting it out in his best impression
of a war-cry, Slade ran forward, toward the maniacs with guns.   As soon as he
got past the last retreating members of his Society, he pulled out his lighter
and, trusting the wind at his back to take the fire to his foe, lit the grass
at his feet.

After several decades of
drought, the grass burst into flame as if it were made of jet fuel.  Slade
grabbed a handful of grass, lit it, and ran along the ridge, touching his torch
to the golden ocean.  Then he dropped the grass and ran to the safety of the
other side of the ridge, ducking down behind a fallen pine to hide with Tyson
and Rat.

His tactic worked better
than he had expected.  The fire ripped through the landscape, sometimes moving
so fast that it left patches of unburned grass behind it.  Within minutes,
Satan’s Creed had gone from being a mob of well-armed jerks to a mottled patch
of smoking bodies.  Those who survived were running south ahead of the growing
wall of flames, most not fast enough to be overwhelmed by the fumes.

Once the fire died down,
Slade climbed to his feet and dusted himself off.  All around him, people were
staring.  Even Rat.  Which made him grin like a furg…on the inside.  On the
outside, he kept his cool, gave them all a smooth, confident smile.  Surveying
the field of smoking bodies, Slade said, “And
that
, my less fortunate
friends, is why
I
am in charge.”

When none of the awed
masses around him argued with that, Slade began walking down towards the
blackened corpses.  He felt the Congie follow him, keeping pace like a curious
predator. 

“Well,” Slade said,
stopping at a charred body and nudging it with his foot, “at least we won’t go
hungry for a while.”

“We will not be eating
people on my days,” Rat said.  She shouldered her rifle casually and gave him a
flat look of finality.

Slade grimaced.  “This is
a lot of food.”

“This is a field of
corpses.  Not food.”

“People are food,” Slade
argued.

Rat studied him a
moment.  “You have a seamstress in your group?” 

Slade frowned.  “Probably
a dozen of them.”

“Good.  I’m going to need
them to make me a thong.  Six of them, actually.  Change things up a bit.”

Slade swallowed, hard,
into the silence that followed.

“Looks like we’ll eat good,
at least,” Tyson said a couple moments later, jogging up to survey the
destruction.  “
Look
at all that food!  Wonder if we could dry it.”

Rat raised her eyebrow at
Slade, waiting.  For a moment, Slade had an insane urge to ka-par her again. 
Then he remembered what had happened last time.  And that this time, she was
carrying an energy weapon.

“Fuck, fine!” he
muttered.  Twisting his face, Slade turned to Tyson and said, “I’ve just
received a divine epiphany that the Harmonious Society of God will be forbidden
from eating the flesh of his fellow man on the days of Wednesday through
Monday.”

Tyson’s beaming smile,
which had widened to cover his whole face at their unexpected bounty, slid off
his face.  He turned, very slowly, to cock his head at Slade.  “Say what?”

“Wednesday through
Monday.  Human flesh.  Off limits.”

For several minutes,
Tyson just stared at him.  Then his second glanced at Rat.  “What about you? 
You let us eat long pork on Wednesdays?” he demanded.  And in that moment,
Slade realized that he was, very easily, in danger of losing his position to
Rat and getting left for the flies.  Or eaten.  Probably eaten.

“If I were in charge,”
Rat said calmly, “you wouldn’t eat it at all.”

Tyson made a face and
glanced at the heavens for several moments, then turned back to Slade.  “Fine. 
But
you’re
telling the flock that one.”  Then, as if he hadn’t just
offered Slade’s position to Rat, Tyson reached down with a rag and picked up
the hot plasma pistol that the man had been carrying.  A goofy grin was
spreading over his face.  “I’ve always wanted to use one of these things.”

“Wait until you need it,”
Rat replied.  “It packs a lot of punch, but has a shitty recharge rate. 
They’ve only got a twelve-round capacity before they need to recover or be exchanged
for a different clip.”

Tyson gave her an
impressed look and tucked his new weapon under his belt.  “What about the
survivors?  Want us to chase them down?”

Slade moved through the
scorched grass and found another plasma pistol lying only a few yards away.  He
nudged it out of the ash with his foot, then picked it up with his shirt.  It
amazed him how easy it was for the scum of the earth to obtain that which
Congress had been hard-pressed to supply to even its most elite forces.  He
glanced up at the column of smoke moving south and decided that the former gang
members weren’t worth his time.  He had enough problems with felons.  Sooner or
later, he’d like to start acquiring some normal people.  If ‘normal’ people had
survived Judgement.  He found it somewhat doubtful, considering.

“Nah,” he said,
standing.  “Gather up whatever weapons you can find, then let’s get this show
back on the road.”

“What about Klyde?” Tyson
asked, reminding Slade of the priest who had drawn the gang’s attention.

“Bring him here,” Slade
replied, turning his new plasma pistol in his hand.  “Our priests of the Back
Order have been failing in their duties, lately.”  He caught Rat’s gaze and
winked at her.  “I need to make an example of him.”

Tyson grunted and stalked
off toward the rest of the HSG, most of whom were standing anxiously on the
edge of the blackened terrain, watching their leader with horror and
fascination.

“What kind of example?”
Rat asked, still standing beside him with her rifle slung over her shoulder
casually.

“I’m gonna have Tyson
eviscerate him, then I’ll eat his heart in front of the entire congregation a
la the Aztecs circa the 14 and 1500s,” Slade said.  That would show them.

Rat eyed him.  “Wednesday
is coming,” she said.

Slade peered back at
her.  “Is that you asking for leniency or wanting to get in on the action?”

She gave him a sweet
smile.  “It’s a statement of fact.”

The smooth way she said
it gave Slade a little thrill of fear.  He swallowed, a mouthful of raw heart
suddenly losing its appeal.  “Uh.  Yes.  Huh.”  Seeing her continued smile,
Slade swallowed again, finding himself once again the proud owner of some
rock-hard human flesh of his own, and was sweating by the time Tyson returned a
few minutes later dragging his recalcitrant priest.

He had Klyde’s gun in his
hands, two guards hauling the man between them, despite his loud
protestations.  The Aryan came to a halt in front of Slade and shoved Klyde
toward him.  “Here he is, Ghost.  Tried to sneak off while you were
distracted.”

“Oh?” Slade asked,
examining the panting, tearful man.  He still itched to tell Tyson to pull out
his knife, but the Congie’s threat was enough that he was able to keep it under
control.

Klyde swallowed hard as
he fearfully met Slade’s electric-purple eyes.  “Sir, I thought I saw a stream
and was gonna go get some water…”  He trailed off, licking his lips.

“You saw a stream,” Slade
said flatly.

Klyde nodded, though his
face had lost all its conviction.  Instead, he was as white as a ghost,
sweating like a stuck pig, his eyes glancing nervously from side to side like
he was waiting for an opening to bolt.

“I have a dilemma,
Klyde,” Slade said, turning the blue metal of the plasma pistol in the sun so
it sparkled.  It was six pounds of a ruvmestin alloy that hadn’t even been singed
in the fire.  In truth, it was a beautiful object.  Almost as easy to
appreciate as a good steak.  He glanced down at Klyde pointedly.  “Ask me
what’s my dilemma.”

“What’s a dilemma?” the
man whispered, terrified.

Slade rolled his eyes. 
Plebs.  “It’s a quandary.  An impasse.  A predicament
.
” 

“A
problem
,” Rat
said, when the man continued to stare at him blankly.

Slade paused, waiting for
the information to register in Klyde’s wet brown eyes.  When it did, he said,
“So ask me what’s my problem, Klyde.”

“What’s your problem?”
Klyde asked in a very quiet, very frightened voice.

“My problem is that
normally, in a situation like this, I would have Tyson shoot you and use your
meat to feed us.”  Klyde gasped and started to shiver.  Slade ignored him and motioned
out at the field of charred bodies.  “
However,
since I have been
commanded to end the eating of human flesh between the days of Wednesday and
Monday, and since we have enough meat here to last us a year of Tuesdays,
killing you would be a waste.”  He paused, leaning closer so that Klyde got a
real good look at his freaky eyes.  “And I am not a wasteful man, Klyde.”

Beside him, Rat made an
amused snort.

Klyde, however, was so
frightened that he peed himself.  The guards holding him jeered, but Slade continued
to hold Klyde’s gaze, eyes boring into his skull.  “I don’t want to kill you,
Klyde, but I also don’t want future members of the Harmonious Society of God to
be corrupted by the genes of morons.”

Klyde was shaking all
over, like one of those miniature dogs that delusional people liked to raise as
pets.

“So I’m going to ask you
to swear to one thing, in payment for your actions and the consequent deaths of
our members.”  Slade continued to hold the man’s gaze.

“Anything,” Klyde gasped.

“I want you to promise
never to have sex with any fertile women for the rest of your life,” Slade told
him.  “If you do, I will be forced to eat you
and
your ill-begotten
progeny.  Do you swear?”