Zero's Return (13 page)

Obviously having
seen the flash of switching windows, Tyson frowned.  “What are you doing?”

“Opening the
doors,” Slade said, waving a finger over the keyboard with a flair. 
“Like…so.”  He pushed the ENTER key on the command he had typed into the prompt
over thirty minutes before, and suddenly every door in the prison slammed open,
from every single cell to the cafeteria access to the outside gates.  All
around them, freed men began to hoot and run wild, their feet sounding like
thunder as they rushed from their prisons.

Slade, however,
wasn’t finished.  Using the dead janitor’s cell phone, which he had wired into
the prison system as a one-way radio, he put the receiver to his mouth and
said, “Attention, prisoners of New Basil Harmonious.  This is the Ghost
speaking.”

The thunder of
feet quieted almost instantly as the booming remnants of his words continued to
echo down the concrete halls.

“Yeah,” Slade
said, “
That
Ghost.  I figured you guys didn’t want to rot in here any
more than I did, so consider yourself fully pardoned by the greatest mind in
the Congressional Era.  This is an apocalypse, people, so before you leave here
to brave that
completely unarmed
residential center to the west, you
should take whatever you need from the armory, which is located on the third
floor, all the way down the east wing.  I’ve already taken what I wanted from
there, so I’ll be exiting via the front gate, and I expect not to meet any
resistance on the way.  You think I’m good at hacking computers?  You should
see
how good I am with a gun.  Everyone will stay indoors until myself and my
companions have exited, at which point you will be free to leave.  If you have
questions, come see me in the warden’s office.”  He ended the call.

Tyson frowned at
Slade.  “You realize you just told every thug in this building to take a
potshot at you.”

Slade grinned
and palmed the phone.  “I’m also not going to be exiting via the front door.” 
He slid off the desk and stretched, then looked his slightly shorter—but
infinitely more muscular—brute of a lackey over.  “You wanna come with me?”

Tyson gave him
an odd look.  “I’m the one with the gun.”

“True,” Slade
said, “but I’m the one with the Plan.  Capital P.”  He smiled, showing his
perfectly-capped teeth.

“I just fought
the urge to shove my gun up your nose again,” Tyson said.  “What plan?”

“A plan to keep
us alive,” Slade said.  “Beginning with our heroic exit through the kitchen
loading bay and ending with a damn good steak.”

Tyson twitched
at ‘steak.’  “Sounds good,” he said reluctantly.

“Yeah,” Slade
said, handing Tyson a black plastic garbage bag he’d taken from a roll on a
shelf.  “Put your head through the top and your hands through the sides and use
it like a poncho.”  He demonstrated, wrapping himself in another bag, then
wiggled his arms to the crinkle of plastic.

Tyson stared at
him blankly.

Slade blinked at
Tyson, then down at the bag.  “What?  My mother did it for me all the time on
camping trips.”

Tyson gave him a
flat look, then handed him back the bag.  “So we’re going out through the
kitchen?”

“Yeah,” Slade
said.  “I opened up the doors and the gates.  Should be no sweat.  Let all
those other common criminals shoot themselves.  I arranged transportation. 
Real discreet—some people will do
anything
if you pay ‘em enough.  It’ll
be waiting out back with my new suit.”

This time, Tyson
only peered at him a minute or two before grunting and tugging his AK-47 over
his shoulder.  For a minute, Slade thought he was going to shoot him.  Then
Tyson simply went to the door, jerked it open, and held it for him.  “Let’s go,
Boss.”

Slade snatched
up a dustpan, put it over his head, and hurried out the door into the
bloodstained hallway.  Off in the distance, he heard a chorus of manly
screeches as inmates began giving New Basil Harmonious a facelift.  Or killed
each other.  Or both.  Probably both.

Seeing the
dustpan, Tyson continued to squint at him like some sort of talking rodent,
then stepped into the hall behind him, looking utterly badass with his big,
antique gun and his shoulders to stop a linebacker.  Even better, when Slade’s
fire alarm program timed out and the halls from the janitor’s closet to the
kitchen exit began to be drenched with blaring sirens and icewater, Tyson
seemed to be utterly unfazed when the cold water hit him, which Slade found
delightful.  It gave him more ‘street cred’ as a bodyguard if he could keep a
straight face when his nuts were unexpectedly freezing off.

“This way,”
Slade said, from under the shield of his dustpan.  Between it and the plastic
bag, he was relatively dry, despite the icy drenching.  With any luck, the rest
of the prison hated getting wet as much as he did, and the path to their extraction
point would be clear of bad guys with guns.

Tyson glowered
at him a moment.  “Just so you know,” Tyson said, as they headed for the
kitchen, “if there’s no steak at the end of this, I’m going to shoot you.”

Under his rain
protection, Slade cocked his head at his new lackey.  “Well, that could get
unpleasant.”

“Sure could,”
Tyson agreed. 

Slade made an
uncomfortable laugh, trying not to calculate how many hundreds of different
ways the day could unfold sans-steak.  It was definitely a lot.  He led them to
the cafeteria, which, with its torrential icy downpour, had been utterly
deserted, then opened the staff door to the roomful of plastic cutlery and
ready-made microwaveables.  On the way through, he nabbed an apple from the
‘fresh’ fruit bin and ate it under his makeshift hat as he led the way to the
loading bay.

Hearing the
unmistakable purr of money outside the loading bay, Slade grinned at Tyson
through the frigid deluge.  “You hear that?” he gestured at the kitchen exit. 
“That is the sound of deliverance!”  He threw the door open.  Outside the bay
purred a brand new Rolls-Royce limo, all sleek white curves and regal power. 
The back door was open in invitation.  Two nice, steaming steak dinners sat on
the luxurious white leather seats inside, the smell of Kobe beef wafting over
to them from even that distance.  Sitting behind the wheel, as instructed, the
driver looked a bit frazzled, but Slade supposed that was to be expected with a
two million dollar bid to arrive at the back door of a prison in under forty
minutes.

Seeing the two
suits hanging from the ceiling, Slade grinned and took a deep breath of
freedom.

“Is that a
steak?” Tyson blurted behind him, looking stunned.  “In a
Rolls Royce
?”

“Would I let
myself be chauffeured around in anything less?” Slade demanded.

Tyson blinked at
the car, then at Slade.  “You really
are
Ghost, aren’t you?”

Slade took a
triumphant bite of his apple.  “Did you ever doubt it?” he said, grinning
around fruit debris.  He turned to accept his ride to freedom.

A feral roar
rumbled the concrete under their feet and a gigantic predator with scales the
color of oil-on-water snapped the purring car off the ground and chewed it in
half.  Slade stopped, frozen in place as the Rolls’s thrumming engine sputtered
and died in its gnashing mouth.  Inside the cab, which happened to be dangling
outside the creature’s jaws, the driver was screaming and batting at the
windows.

Staring up at
the beast, Slade’s mouth fell open and his apple dropped from his face.  That
was
definitely
one way the day could end without steak.  “You said we
had three days until they dropped the kreenit,” he blurted, feeling betrayed.

“Fuck me,” was
all Tyson said.

The kreenit
shrieked and rag-dolled the car, sending the driver’s end careening off to slam
into a no-longer-electrified fence, ripping a hole through it as it skittered
off into the well-kept lawn on the other side.  The back-end, with Slade’s
Armani still hanging from the ceiling, it ate.

“You
bastard
!”
Slade cried.  He threw his half-eaten apple at the beast, who was even then
choking down the last of a trunk.  “That’s
mine
!”

The apple
bounced off of the creature’s crystalline green eye and it flinched,
mid-swallow, then twisted to get a look at Slade.  Instantly, it vomited up its
prize and more of its huge body thundered around the building as it came after
him, mouth low and open.  Inside the crushed cab of the Rolls Royce, Slade’s
suit hung in a wash of orange alien saliva.

Thoroughly
pissed, now, Slade started toward the beast.  He’d taken two steps when strong
arms grabbed Slade around the middle and hauled him back inside the prison. 
Kicking the door shut behind them, Tyson yanked Slade forward by the scruff of
his neck, forcing him to run.  “Ow, ow, ow!” Slade cried, struggling against the
Neanderthal’s grip.  “Let go!  Let go let go leggo!”

Tyson paused
beside the refrigerators long enough to reintroduce Slade’s nostril to the wet
muzzle of his favorite beastie.  The water, Slade found, acted as a lubricant
and made the application much easier, and this time Cro-Magnon’s upgrade almost
made contact with brain tissue.

“Do you want to
die?” Tyson demanded.

“Not
especially,” Slade said, swallowing down at the gun.

“Then run,”
Tyson growled.  He shoved Slade ahead of him, obviously expecting him to do
just that.

Slade righted
himself and grimaced.  Without his dustpan—which he’d dropped in his struggles
with Tyson—he was well on his way to getting soaked, regardless of poncho.  He
felt the icy water running down his scalp and dribbling down his spine and
opened his mouth to complain.

A moment later,
a lizardlike snout slammed through the titanium-reinforced, bomb-proof back
door behind them, massive, scaly jaws snapping at the racks of baking trays and
wash counters as the beast forced its head through the much-smaller entrance.  
Seeing the cracks spreading outward in the concrete wall, the beast gnashing at
the room behind them, Slade let out a scream that ended in a giggle and this
time didn’t struggle when Tyson grabbed him and hauled him out of the kitchens.

Once they were
back in the cell block, with several hundreds of feet of concrete between them
and the beast, Tyson stopped, shoved a meaty finger into Slade’s breastbone,
and growled, “You know, for a super-genius, you’re not very smart.”

“It ate my
Armani!” Slade complained.  “And I’m
wet.
”  He flicked water off his
hair in disgust.  He hated being wet.  Modern man with its huge brains and
platinum credit cards shouldn’t have to get wet.

“Yeah, well.” 
Tyson glanced at the corridor back to the kitchens.  The sounds of crashing and
crumbling concrete had ended, which probably meant the beast was seeking easier
entry into the establishment.

No sooner had
the thought come than they heard the sounds of gunfire and screaming from the
front of the prison.  An instant later, the building began to shake with
massive blunt impacts.  Slade grimaced. 
Damn
that was making his head
hurt.  He would have crashed a planetary banking system to have a single stick
of gum to ease the throbbing, but he’d chewed his last piece in the shrink’s
office two days before.

“So what do we
do now?” Tyson demanded, as the gunfire and pounding went on.  “Go back out the
kitchen?”

Scowling in the
general direction of the uncouth beast that was shattering his wa, Slade started
walking toward the front of the building.

“Hey Ghost!”
Tyson shouted behind him.  Slade ignored him and continued to the barred
windows overlooking the courtyard.  The kreenit was partially wrapped in
razor-wire and torn fencing, snarling and hurling itself at the front gates and
the AK-47-carrying inebriates on the other side.  Men were screaming as they
died, and fools who were trying to make a dash to safety were getting snapped
up and swallowed whole by the beast.

“What are you
doing, Boss?” Tyson asked nervously behind him.  Like any good lackey, Tyson
had eventually followed him with very little complaint.

“I’m going to go
kill a kreenit,” Slade said.  He flicked water off his plastic bag and headed
to the warden’s office.

“With what?”
Tyson demanded.

“With
electricity, a Twinkie, and your gun.”

“You’re not
taking my gun.”

Slade stopped
and held out his hand.  “Give me your gun.”

“No.”

Slade gestured
impatiently.

Tyson gave him a
flat look and kept it stubbornly on his shoulder.

Slade glared. 
“We’ll discuss this later.”  He continued down the hall, through the open exit
doors, past the wide-eyed inebriates huddled behind the Visiting Center tables
and chairs, and stopped at the vending machine.  He squinted at the lack of a
credit-card slot.  He started feeling around for a subtle keypad, any sort of
numerical entry system.  He found nothing.  He had
billions
of credits
in a dozen different high-interest accounts, but he was being thwarted by a
twentieth century relic and a lack of pocket change.  “How the hell did you get
the one in the break room to work?” Slade finally demanded, frustrated. 

Tyson replied by
stepping up beside him and smashing the butt of his rifle through the glass,
then reaching through the shattered face to retrieve a Twinkie for him.  His
lackey held it out to him between thumb and forefinger, a single blond eyebrow
raised.

“Oh, brilliant! 
Thank you,” Slade said, delicately taking his Twinkie and tip-toeing over the
glass.  He continued through the Visiting Center and into the Warden’s Office,
where three mindless furgs were ransacking the rotund little monster’s
quarters, one of whom was taking a dump on his desk.

“Is that
really
necessary?” Slade demanded loudly from the door, startling the desk-defiler
into suddenly pinching one off.  As the man croaked and pulled up his jumpsuit,
Slade made a disgusted sound and gestured at the armed thugs.  “Tyson, get them
out of here.  They’re making my head hurt.”