Zero's Return (25 page)

And yet,
scanning the utterly flattened forest marking her passage, he realized he was
looking at very compelling evidence that he’d found another one.  And she was
cold.  And shivering.  And lonely.  And would probably welcome a nice, warm
fire…

Joe shook himself. 
She buried your ass in a wall,
he reminded himself. 
She deserves a
few hours to think about it.

But the longer
he hunched there in the woods—woods that
he
could see by virtue of his
altered eyes, but that would be as dark as the Void to her natural ones—the
more violently she shivered and the more Joe felt sorry for her.

Joe’s soft side
had just won out and he was finally about to go take pity on the miserable
science project when he heard the telltale snaps of something huge moving
through the forest, charging at them at speed.

Soot,
Joe
thought, scrambling to put away his binoculars and grab Jane. 
Soot, soot!

The kreenit
reached her before it reached him, and for a moment, Joe thought his potential
traveling companion had just become lunch.  Then he saw the kreenit’s awkward
stumble and the way the beast’s massive body rolled over the place where the
girl had huddled, and he realized that the same invisible force that had carved
her a pathway had just stopped a kreenit in full-charge.  That was…impressive.

Joe lowered Jane
and let the naked freak fight the beast herself for a few tics, curious to see
what would happen.

It wasn’t, it
turned out, as impressive as he’d hoped.  She screamed, her inviso-wall seemed
to fail, then the beast chomped down on her like a Jikaln with a vaghi.

Cursing himself,
Joe scrambled to get a good vantage point as the beast spun and twisted,
shaking the hapless victim inside its jaws.  He knew she was still alive—or at
least parts of her were still alive—because she was screaming.

When Joe managed
to get behind the kreenit, he leveled Jane at the back of the beast’s head,
where the sexual nerve-bundle lay exposed just below the surface, under and
between the horns.  He said a prayer to the Dhasha Mothers, then pulled the trigger.

The kreenit
shrieked at about the same time its mouth ripped open from the inside and the
experiment rolled out, screaming.

Not oh, haha, it
spit the girl out and lumbered off to lick its wounds.  Its
head
split
apart
like something grabbed it by the jaws and ripped it in
half
.  As the
enormous body flopped to the ground and started to twitch, purple brains
exposed to the nighttime air, Joe blinked and stared down at Jane.  It was a
good Ueshi brand, a genuine blackmarket Nocurna using high-grade plasma, but it
couldn’t do anything like
that
.

Which left him,
once again, with this odd, heart-pounding awareness that this girl could
totally kick his ass…

No way
,
Joe thought, giving himself a spine-snapping mental shake,
no way, no way
. 
His dad had been so full of shit on that one it had been coming out his ears. 
Truckloads of shit.  Cargo carriers of it.  Besides,
he
could kick
her
ass.  Hell, he’d already saved her
life
.  He was turned on because she
was naked and pretty, not because she could kick his ass. 

Then he realized
he really
was
turned on and he backpedaled in panic. 
That’s the
alcohol talking, dipshit,
he told himself. 
She left you to die.  Twice.

Besides, she had
an attitude that made him want to punch her in the face.  Hell, after what she’d
done, she
deserved
to be punched in the face.

Still, when the
girl stalked up to the twitching kreenit and started kicking it with her bare
foot, cursing its heritage in Welu Jreet,
sobbing
,
Joe decided it
might be a good time to make his entrance.  She really looked like she could
use a shoulder to cry on…

What are you
doing, Joe?
he demanded of himself as he hurriedly threw his gear over his
shoulder and started toward her. 
She embedded you in a
wall
and she
just ripped that kreenit in
half
.
  Logic dictated that A) she was
unhappy with Joe, and with Humanity being much less dense than a kreenit,
infinitely weaker, and generally soft overall, she could B) do the same to him.

Maybe it was the
J.B. still warming his system.  Perhaps it was the fact that he’d just spent a
rotation killing kreenit and he’d never seen anything so efficient at
destroying them.  Or maybe it was the simple fact that he was sleeping with a
fully-charged AI plasma pistol at night and was lonely. 

Whatever the
reason, Joe took those last few steps to the wounded girl’s side, stopped, and
said, “I’ve heard Welus were excellent warriors, but that was something the
bards will sing about for ages to come.”  He’d spent enough time around Daviin
that he pretty much had the hang of how to give a good compliment, Jreet-style.

The woman froze,
then slowly turned to him with a blank look.

“By the way,”
Joe said, “I have meat, but it’ll have to wait ‘til morning.”  When she just
blinked at him, he sighed.  “I also have a good Congie flamestick and could
build us a nice
warm
fire to roast it, but a fire at night is like
lighting up a neon sign to all the predators and bad guys out there that says
‘I’m over here, come take my stuff and eat me.’  I’m afraid it would draw too
much attention.  Not safe.  We’ve gotta wait.”  He also knew, from his time
with his Sentinel and his time hunting Raavor ga Aez, how to flat-out
manipulate the arrogant, stomach-driven bastards.

The woman licked
her lips.  “You have meat?”

“Yeah,” Joe
said, with feigned reluctance.  “But it’s filled with parasites and we can’t
cook it tonight.  We’ll have to wait until morning.”

She wrinkled her
dainty nose at ‘parasites.’  If there was one thing the Jreet hated, it was
parasites.  “Cook it now,” she ordered.  “I will protect you, Voran.”

Grinning inside,
Joe nonetheless put on a sober look.  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.  There
are so many dangerous things out there…”

She gestured
imperiously at the dead kreenit.  “Like this?”

“Well,” Joe
said, looking at the massive, scaly beast, taking the time to sound like he was
considering, “yeah.  Like that.”

She gave an
impatient gesture at the ground.  “Cook it.  I’ll protect the camp.”

Joe kept his
face utterly innocent.  “Are you
sure
?  It could be dangerous…”

Her green eyes
flashed in the darkness.  “
Now
, Voran.”

Ah, the Jreet. 
One just had to know how to push their buttons.  Joe built a fire,
surreptitiously using the kreenit’s front legs and neck to shield most of it
from view of the surrounding countryside, then covertly dropped his bag of gear
and set up his tarp at the front of the fire, to block the rest of the light
from whatever survivors might be out there.  Not that Joe didn’t think Shael
would do exactly as she said and annihilate anyone who came to take her food—she
was obviously hungry—but Joe had fought Huouyt most of his life, and old habits
died hard.

CHAPTER
11 – Dominance Struggles

Along the way to
the shopping center, Slade’s following grew.  The rest of the world, it seemed,
wasn’t yet fully into Group-Up-To-Survive mode, so Slade and his merry band had
a distinct advantage.  They started acquiring motorists, bystanders, and those
brave mall employees who had forgone their own personal safety to secure
another Almighty Dollar, zealously adding them all to Slade’s ravenous group’s
ranks—essentially to carry all the heavy stuff. 

Slade, of
course, found little interest in the looting, kidnapping, and general pillaging
of his underlings.  While his lackeys, under-lackeys, and assorted minions
ransacked the sporting-goods and food stores for supplies, Slade visited the
hallowed halls of Barnes & Noble.

With Tyson
standing beside him with a wide-open US Mail sack that they’d stolen from the
mall post office, Slade began going down the rows collecting books on everything
he could think of that could save his ass in the case of an apocalypse.

Which,
apparently, had started early.  A few minutes ago, he had begun to hear the
sound of Congressional bombs going off in the distance.

“You think
they’re gonna hit this place?” Tyson asked, flinching nervously as another bomb
exploded, this time closer.  He had found a badass-looking black shotgun in the
sporting goods store, complete with a new vest full of slugs and buckshot
shells.  The AK-47 was still firmly slung over his other shoulder.

“Doubt it,”
Slade said, pulling a book on hydroponics off the shelf and stuffing it into
Tyson’s open bag.  “Not a high target.  They’re looking for concentrated
technology, military bases, airports, hospitals, government centers, power
stations—stuff like that.”  He grabbed two more hydroponics books that looked
promising, then moved on to Outdoor Survival.  He started perusing a few,
realized he was going to need more than a couple, and took one of each.  Then
he moved on to Soulmates.

“Yeah,” Tyson
went on, still glancing behind him at the sounds of the distant explosions. 
“But this place is pretty big.  You don’t think they’d hit it just for the fun
of it?”

Slade shrugged. 
“Could.  I’d give it a thirty percent chance.”  He pulled one of the books—
How
to Find Your Soulmate in Ten Easy Steps
—from the shelves and started
perusing it.

Whoever she was,
this Leila-As-Prophecized-By-The-One-Eyed-Freak, she was going to be
smart
. 
She couldn’t possibly be as smart as him—there
was
only one Ghost—but he
needed
someone
who could at least pretend to keep up with him.  Maybe a
doctor or an engineer.  Hell, even a geneticist…

“They’re
probably gonna blow all the fuel depots,” Tyson said.  “We should start
siphoning gas and taking battery packs.  Ain’t gonna make no more of those.”

Then again,
Slade found geneticists to be snooty and superior.  They got to play God and it
kinda went to their heads, at least with a lot of them.  Further, it would be
best if the woman wasn’t
too
highly-specialized, Slade determined.  He
needed someone like him—a jack-of-all-trades.  Someone who could understand it
when he talked about relativity and then switched mid-sentence to compare the
pros and cons of different types of gum formulas.  He was particularly impressed
with the one he was chewing now.  It had decreased his headache quotient to
basically nothing.  If he were back in his New York skyrise, he would have
hacked the company’s system to discover their secret recipe, which, with gum,
usually only depended on slight alterations of flavor—the base was usually
exactly the same.  The real difference was in packaging, and how well the
company could convince the poddites of the world that theirs was somehow
special.

“If we stay on
the move, head out through the desert, we should be okay,” Tyson said, still
nervously staring at the western wall like he expected to see the city getting
blown up beyond.  “They’re not gonna screw around with the desert.  Nothing out
there worth shooting up, you know?”

“Kreenit will
stay in the big cities,” Slade agreed.  “At least initially.  More food.”

According to the
book, the first thing to finding a soulmate was to look at the people around
you.  There were, the book claimed, more than one per person, and they showed
up in important roles in one’s life—friends, siblings, family members…

What cheap
shit.  Slade snapped the book shut and tossed it over his shoulder, then picked
up another one. 
How to Find Your Spiritual Partner.

“Yeah, man,”
Tyson said, “that’s why I’m saying we get the hell outta Southern California as
fast as possible.  Hit the desert, maybe head to the Great Plains.  Not a lot
out there, but good farming.”

Slade grimaced
at ‘farming.’  “Generally, the idea of moving into the desert to survive is
ill-advisable.”  True, most common sense didn’t take man-eating lizards into
that equation, but desert travel would likely kill huge swaths of whoever
attempted it.  “Just look at the Oregon Trail.”  The idea of digging in the
dirt for his food was not exactly on the list of his priorities, either.  He
wanted food provided to him, at regular intervals, so he could spend his time
doing more important things, like thinking. 

“Dude, we can’t
stay here,” Tyson said.  “
Listen
to that.”  He gestured out at the
distant chaos.

Yes, Slade
thought, flipping through the pages, she would definitely be good at thinking. 
Maybe, on his bad days, when he was sick and had no gum to alleviate his
headaches, she would be
almost as good
as him at thinking.  That would
be…invigorating.

Yeah, that’s
what he wanted.  Someone invigorating.  Someone that could make his blood rush
and his heart pound.  Someone who could look him in the eye and make him feel
like he
wasn’t
the smartest guy on the planet.  Someone who could make
him feel stupid.

Well,
that
wasn’t going to happen.  Slade sighed and slapped another book shut and threw
it over his shoulder.  His fingers slid over the books on the shelf until they
arrived at another one, this one called,
How to Recognize Your Soulmate.

“I’m thinking we
load up a bunch of trucks and go east as far as we can,” Tyson said.

“The highways
will be blocked,” Slade said.  “Always happens in big disasters—everyone tries
to leave the city and they end up choking off the roads with traffic until
there’s no escape.”  He continued scanning pages.  “Hell, the alien douchebags
will probably even help that along.  Blow up a couple bridges, a few sections
of highway…  Then everyone in the city’s basically a sitting duck.”

“Man,” Tyson
groaned.

“Yeah,” Slade
agreed, digesting a chapter on Random Appearances.  “Besides, after the first
few days, any moving vehicle’s gonna be a target.”

Apparently,
soulmates had a way of finding you, which Slade found to be a load of shit.  It
had been almost a century since he’d been told by that patch-wearing freak that
he would have a soulmate and his brother would go off to fight aliens. 
Joe-the-Douche had gotten his aliens.  Now Slade wanted his girl.  Slade was
relatively patient, but that was a
lot
of time to wait.  Slade sighed,
deeply, and kept flipping through the pages.  If anyone had asked why he found
the subject so fascinating, he couldn’t have told them.  True, he found
all
subjects fascinating, but this one still…vexed him. 

Patch
had
been correct in most of her other predictions.  And they hadn’t been the
normal, vague, “Something dark will happen to you in the next year,”
predictions, either.  They’d been, “Your brother’s going to get his heart
ripped out by a Jreet,” predictions.  Before Humanity even knew Jreet existed. 
How that was even possible was…annoying.

He added the
book to the bag, followed by several others that looked promising.

He stopped on
the book called
Soulmate Sex
and frowned at the pages.  So wait…it was
supposed to be
better
than regular sex?  All spiritual and uplifting and
amazing, yadayadayada…  That was all fine and dandy, but Slade would have
settled for regular sex.  Just one night of regular sex.  That would be nice. 
It had been so long since he’d gotten his wick wet that Slade was surprised
Junior hadn’t atrophied and fallen off from the lack of attention.  Some of the
pictures,
though…they were interesting.

Turning back to
Slade, Tyson said, “Okay, so we, what, grab cars to take us as far east as we
can go, then hoof it?  How many cars you think—”  Tyson hesitated.  “What the
fuck are you reading?”

“Soulmates,”
Slade said, holding up the cover for him to see.  “I’m going to have one.” 
Then he grimaced.  “Or so the patch-wearing vagrant said.”

Tyson peered at
Slade for much too long, then glanced down into the bag he was carrying.  He
blinked, looking flummoxed.  “You put them in the bag.”

“Yup,” Slade
said, adding another one.  If nothing else, the photography was entertaining.

“You told me the
bag,” Tyson growled, “was for survival stuff.”

“It is,” Slade
said.  “If I’m going to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, I want to have
a good woman at my side.  A fellow genius who can run facts and figures in her
head for unskilled inebriates like you so
I
don’t have to do it all the
time.”

Tyson squinted at
him for several minutes, during which, Slade went back to reading.  Eventually,
Tyson said, “What if she’s a badass, instead?”

Slade looked up
from
You, Too, Can Have A Soulmate
and frowned.  “You mean like a lawyer
or something?”  He
supposed
he could put up with a lawyer, as long as
she didn’t get pissed off that he knew more about the subject than she did.

“No,” Tyson
said.  “Someone who likes guns.”

Slade peered at
him, the only compatible person he could think of being some sort of
physicist.  “You mean like electron guns?  For particle acceleration?” 

Tyson’s bovine
stare was enough to tell him that a nuclear physicist was not, indeed, what he
had meant.

Slade’s frown
deepened.  That left some sort of creative genius.  “So, like, an artist? 
Someone who could use glue guns and spraypaint or something?”  True, he hadn’t
considered an artist, but they were flighty and generally unstable—at least the
good ones—and Slade already had all forms of creative genius covered.  He could
slap out the next awe-inspiring Mona Lisa in his spare time—if he didn’t get
bored halfway through.  That was usually his problem with art.  It was boring.

“No, an
honest-to-God badass,” Tyson said.  Then, when Slade just peered at him
uncomprehendingly, he said, “like a Congie or something.”

Slade snorted at
the very idea.  “No,” he said.  The
last
thing a Congie would be able to
do would be stimulate him in any way at all.  Congies weren’t exactly known for
their educational prowess.  They knew guns and blowing shit up and killing
things and making perfectly executable threats. 
Totally
not Slade’s
bag.  They would have
nothing
in common.  He told his lackey as much.

“My Ma said
opposites attract,” Tyson said.

“
Nooo
,”
Slade said, rolling his eyes, “that was Charles Agustin Coulomb.”

Tyson stared at
him blankly.

“The
physicist
?”
Slade demanded, at Tyson’s stare.  “Coulomb's Law?  The electrostatic
interaction between electrically charged particles?”

When Tyson just
peered at him, Slade groaned and slapped his forehead.  “Furgs,” he lamented. 
He actually liked that Congie word, as it was
such
an accurate
description of most of the knuckle-dragging morons he had to work with.

“Okay, so how
about a farm-girl?” Tyson suggested.  “Ya know, one of those tight-jeans,
cowboy-hat types?”

Slade shuddered,
but forced himself to say, “I suppose that might work.”

Tyson laughed. 
“So what, you’re placing orders, now?”

“Well,” Slade
said, “if one were to look at the universe and the effect our attention has on
it, I don’t see why the hell not.”  He tapped his chin.  “I want her to be
blonde.  I like blondes.”

“Just like that,
huh?” Tyson snorted.  “Yeah, okay.”

“There’s
something about that
hair
,” Slade went on.  “Especially
platinum
blonde.  Oh, that’s nice…”

Tyson gave him a
long look.  “My Ma also said if you ain’t found your perfect girl by thirty,
you ain’t lookin’ in the right places.  Or you’re gay.”  Tyson cocked his head
at Slade.  “
Are
you gay?”  Not with any malice, just like he was
intellectually curious—if ‘intellectually’ was a word that could be applied to
a six-foot-four slab of hillbilly gorilla.

Slade sighed and
tossed a couple other books into the bag.  “Be sure to tell them to grab stuff
that will keep.  Canned stuff, dried stuff.  Dried stuff is better,
weight-wise.  Oh, and look around for seeds.  If we can’t find actual
seed-packets, a lot of the beans and stuff on the shelves might grow.  We’ll
need that wherever we end up.”