Zero's Return (22 page)

In a bedroom on
the opposite end of the house—the end of the house still standing—Joe found a
bed that looked cleaner than the rest and lowered the woman into it.  First, he
treated her sunburn, reluctantly administering a good portion of his topical
nannite cream.  Then he went about finding her some clothes.  He avoided the
greasy, flea-ridden belongings of the unlucky band and focused on the
relatively unscathed storage closet in a nearby bedroom.  From what he could
find in the mothball-smelling dresser drawers, the house had belonged to a
really
skinny
old man and his similarly old, but very fat, companion. 
Joe grabbed a few sets of the old man’s clothes, figuring too tall would be
better than falling completely off, sliced off the bottoms of the legs, the
arms, and the hem of the shirt, then fitted the clothes over the woman’s body
as she dozed.

After he’d
gotten her pants on, he paused.  The girl’s feet, it seemed, were still oozing
pus and blood from wounds that looked a hell of a lot worse than she could have
done running over a few sticks to escape her captors.  Frowning, he pulled out
his flashlight to get a better look.  He thought the first translucent sliver
was a piece of plastic clinging to her sole until it pricked his hand when he
tried to get a grip on it.

Glass?
 
He grunted with surprise.  She must have walked several
lengths
with
glass embedded in her feet.  That was…odd.

Even odder was
the barcode he had found on the back of her neck.  Once he’d picked the glass
from her feet and sealed up the wounds with nanotape, he rolled her onto her
side to get a better look.  It wasn’t an angsty, for-fun tattoo, either.  It
was an expensive government gene-mod, the cells producing their own jet-black
pigment, much like the glowing PlanOps tattoo on his left hand.  Curious, now,
Joe pulled out his blackmarket PPU and scanned it.

The barcode
read:  S.H.A.E.L. v.2.0.6

Seeing that, Joe
had the gut-twisting horror that he was dealing with some sort of cyborg. 
Carefully, so as not to disturb her, he started checking telltale signs—pulling
her lips back to check the gumline for metal, prying underneath the nails to
look for dataports, pulling back the ears to check for transmitters, massaging
the stomach to feel for hard machinery.

Nothing.  To all
appearances, he was dealing with a perfectly healthy Human girl, maybe twenty
turns old, shaved head, vivid green eyes, bad attitude.

When Joe looked
again at the tattoo, he noticed a discoloration on her neck, beneath the
gene-mod.  Another tattoo, but this one was an older, smaller one he hadn’t
seen on first glance, a barely visible, faded gray ink job that hadn’t been
renewed in decades.  It read simply: 665

Who the hell
are you?
Joe thought, covering the tattoos and standing back to watch her
sleep.  She spoke Jreet, she
acted
Jreet, and she carried a tattoo that
marked her as some sort of android or computer program.  That
was
what
v.2.0.6 meant, wasn’t it?  Joe frowned, wishing his Bagan or Huouyt friends
were there so he could ask them.  Technology had never been his strong suit.

After it became
apparent that she was going to continue to sleep, Joe decided to see what he
could scavenge from the kitchen.  The first thing he found, upon checking the
stove, was a massive pot of large, rancid bones that someone had brought in
from outside—it still had scorch-marks up the sides from someone’s campfire. 
In the bottom, there was a thick layer of spoiled lard covering the surface of
what looked to be some sort of stew—doubtless the remnants of the unfortunate
group’s last meal.  Once again reminded why he never stayed the night in
abandoned houses, Joe went looking for something to supplement the
quickly-spoiling meat from the unidentified Earth animal he had shot.  He
really
didn’t want to have to break into his survival rations unless he absolutely had
to, especially not for an ungrateful furg who had bit him.

Scavenging, for
Joe, was always hit-or-miss.  Even though he had been on Earth a full rotation
already, Joe was still trying to get a grasp on the dizzying array of Earth
foods and what was good for what.  He opened up the cabinets and found himself
entirely out of his league.  He could identify some of the spices—oregano and
rosemary, especially, since the Ooreiki had begun a massive trade of it for
their perfume industry—but most of the actual foodstuffs were utterly
incomprehensible to him.  What was worse, boxes and canisters of pre-made foods
were already ransacked, leaving only the basics behind.

He found a tub
of ‘sugar’ hidden behind some kitchen appliances on the counter, which he
immediately grabbed.  ‘Sugar,’ he had discovered, after seventy-four turns away
from home, was delicious.  Other Earth foods, however, were not so desirable. 
‘Flour’ just made a pasty, tasteless mess in his mouth.  ‘Cornmeal’ was the
same.  ‘Baking soda’ was absolutely disgusting.  Canned foods were generally
good, ostensibly because it took so many more resources to preserve them,
therefore Humans would only expend the extra effort on the more valuable—and
tasty—foodstuffs. 

Unfortunately,
the good stuff in this place had obviously been picked clean by the Human
scavengers who had met their untimely end upstairs.  Whereas a kreenit would
simply eat can, wrapper, and contents whole, these cans had been carefully cut
open, emptied, and discarded in a haphazard pile in one corner of the kitchen. 
Even then, the reek of old fly larvae still stank up the kitchen from the heap.

Not that the pot
of bones was any better.  Joe had to hold his hand over his mouth each time he
walked past it to keep from gagging.  As soon as the girl was awake, he was
going to get them somewhere much less tempting to a predator’s delicate
palate.  He was actually surprised that the house hadn’t been ransacked a
second time, by a kreenit looking for the source of the rancid meat.

Skirting the
stove, Joe found some ‘flour’ and ‘cornmeal’ in the cupboards, but he left it
behind, having found little use for the stuff.  There was a canister marked
‘beans’ in the cabinet over the sink, filled with little glossy red nodules,
but when Joe tried to bite into them, not only were they incredibly hard, but
they tasted bitter and disgusting.  He tossed the canister aside, irritated
with Humanity.  At least the rest of Congress knew how to eat well.  The Ueshi,
especially, with their very short lives and extremely big brains, knew how to
live it up.  They wouldn’t have put up with this tasteless crap.

Not that Joe’s
foggy memories of childhood on Earth dredged up anything particularly
tasteless, but he attributed that to memory loss, nostalgia, and generally not
knowing any better.  Aside from the meat—which he shot himself—he hadn’t found
anything very good to eat on the whole damn planet, the supposed cradle of
Humanity.  Well, aside from sugar, which he always rationed because it gave him
an odd high, almost like an eighth a karwiq bulb.

Joe had finally
gotten to the closet with the rats when he heard a thump upstairs. 
Immediately, he felt a little surge of adrenaline, knowing he was finally going
to have some answers from the moody little wretch.  And that, he realized in
alarm, was a hundred times more important to him than getting back to his task
of playing Joe the Kreenit-Slayer across half of North America.  North America,
Joe had disgustedly found, didn’t give a crap if he killed kreenit or not.  He
could be standing over a dead kreenit, gun in hand, arm out, smile on his face,
and most of the survivors would spit on him as soon as shake his hand, blaming
Congies
for their predicament, as if
Congies
were somehow responsible for the
genetic experiments that had gotten Earth its Sacred Turn of quiet time. 

It was like it
always was—each Draft, Humanity whined and complained and sent loving notes and
care-packages for the new recruits sent to bootcamp, but it ultimately blamed
the kids who got taken for everything Humans hated about Congress.  Like most
of the sentient world, people refused to look inward, refused to acknowledge
their own failings.  Most Congies, Joe had found, had ditched their black Congressional
uniforms to fit in—less chance of being vendetta-shot by a stranger that way.

Thus, after
eradicating twenty-two kreenit only to have been spit on eleven times, attacked
thrice, and offered a meal exactly once, Joe was a hell of a lot more interested
in why this stranger spoke Jreet than he was in going back to his thankless
monster-hunt.

He didn’t want
to appear desperate, though.  A few minutes of disorientation would do her
good.  Knowing there was only one way for the girl to get out of the house
unless she wanted a broken leg, and that that one way happened to be the
staircase behind him, Joe yanked open the pantry closet to finish his food
search.

The door opened
on a wave of putrescence.  As Joe gagged, his eyes located a tall, very skinny
corpse curled up in one corner of the closet, bound hand and foot with
zip-ties.  Rats had eaten away his face, flesh, and eyeballs.  Sitting neatly
on the floor in front of him was the corpulent, rotting, rat-chewed head of a
woman.

Joe thought back
to the pot of stew on the stove, then took out his canteen of J.B. and took a
deep swig.  Without examining the rest of the closet for food, he shut the door
and backed out of the kitchen.

If there was one
thing he had learned upon dropping back on Earth, it was that Humanity was
barbaric, and over the last rotation of witnessing brutality, savagery, and
cruelty, he had forgotten why he had wanted to save it in the first place.

Joe was sitting
on the base of the steps, staring at the bones jutting from the pot, reacquainting
himself with Jim Beam, when the woman burst from the upstairs room, snarling in
Welu Jreet.

“You!” she
snapped, as soon as she saw him.  “What are you doing here?!”

Joe glanced over
his shoulder, then frowned when he realized she’d taken off the clothes he had
painstakingly acquired for her from a man who had apparently starved to death
with his wife’s head at his feet.  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded,
the flask paused halfway to his lips.  “Put your clothes back on.”

“Where am I?” she
snapped.  “Where is Doctor Philip?  I need to tell the worthless furg that his
softling services are no longer needed and that I am ready to go back to
Welu.”  She wrinkled her nose.  “And that I’m
hungry.
  The skulker left
me on his miserable planet without
food
.”

Her breasts
bounce when she’s angry,
Joe noted, taking another swig of whiskey.  “Who’s
Doctor Philip?” he asked, once the burn settled in his gut.

“He’s my
subordinate on the S.H.A.E.L. project,” she growled.

Joe’s attention
sharpened when she sounded out the acronym in Congie letters, her words
sounding foreign and awkward.  “S.H.A.E.L. project?” he asked, as casually as
he could.

She grunted.  “I
was to instruct the lazy, backward fighting base of this race on how to be good
warriors, but they’ve obviously got no aptitude for it.  I’m going home.”

For a
nerve-wracking moment, Joe thought perhaps she was a Huouyt, and that his
universe-renowned ‘Huouyt-radar’ had failed him.  Again.

“And where’s
home?” he asked, unobtrusively reaching for his gun.

She raised her
head and straightened her back as if she were a queen, putting her light pink
areolas on excellent display.  “Welu, home of the highest race of Jreet.  It is
time I return to my warriors and rally the clan.  I intend to come back here and
wipe this pathetic planet clean of soft-skinned scum like you.”

For a long
moment, Joe just stared at her over his canteen, wondering if she’d fried a few
brain cells somewhere along the way.  Then, because she looked utterly certain
of what she was saying—and because she was speaking flawless,
ancient
Welu Jreet—Joe said, “You want to come back and kill off Humanity.”

“If that’s what
you call your miserable, softling existence, yes.  By the time we’re done, the
fields will be full of staked corpses, and your children’s children will tell
stories of my wrath.”

Joe took a last
swig of whiskey, then capped it, contemplating her.  “And just who do you think
you are?”

“There is no
think
,”
she spat at him.  She raised her head in another regal pose.  “I am Shael ga
Welu, prince of Welu.”  She paused dramatically, obviously waiting for him to
acknowledge that she was the ancient Welu hero, apparently back from the dead
and condensed into a body that was barely five digs if she stretched.

If Joe hadn’t
been one and a half rods from a woman that had been boiled and consumed by her
own kind, he would have laughed at that.  As it was, he just glanced down at
his canteen and wondered what he was going to do when he ran out of whiskey.

“I want to go to
a spaceport,” Shael said, in a tone that demanded obedience.

“I want you to
put some clothes on,” Joe said.  The idea that she planned to run around naked
again after he’d used up almost half his nannite cream on her burns left him
more than a little irritable.

Shael narrowed
her eyes and started down the steps toward him—and almost fell on her face.  As
Joe watched, curious, she grabbed the rail and held tight, her vibrant green
eyes widening as she seemed to do a double-take.  “What…
is
…this?” she
whispered.  Her entire body had gone utterly stiff, and she held the railing
like she was afraid she was about to hurtle the rest of the way.

She’s never
seen stairs before,
Joe thought, more than a little stunned.  It raised the
hairs on the back of his neck a little, as well as gave him a wave of
goosebumps across his arms.  What kind of woman—especially a woman on
Earth
—hadn’t
seen stairs?