Zero's Return (42 page)

The strong were killing
off the weak.  The psychopaths, the schizophrenics, the murderers, the bullies,
and the sociopathic assholes were turning what was left of Earth into their own
personal playground.  They were accumulating in ever-growing gangs, roving the
burned-out remains of the suburbs in groups of hundreds strong, taking what
they wanted, killing those they didn’t.

Idly, Rat had asked Max
what the hell was wrong with the Human race, to kill each other in a time of
crisis.

“
Logic dictates only a
limited few can survive,
” had been Max’s reply.  “
Thus, the smartest
move is to kill off your competition for resources.
”

Or perhaps they were all
just beasts inside.  That’s what Rat thought, watching the mayhem through her
scope.  Beasts.  No better than animals.  It was impossible to miss the smiles
on faces as they blew away whimpering homeowners, the satisfaction as captives
begged for mercy, the pleasure as they raped the women they collected in their
scavenging, then left their bodies to rot in the sun.

Rat killed the most
bestial of the offenders, but no matter how many she killed, they regrouped. 
There was always a horrible new gang, a barbaric new leader, some monster to
take up the flag of cruelty.  It was never ending, and it was the entire
world
.

Rat eventually gave up.

Now she lay in her
sleeping bag inside the town bell tower, staring up at the massive brass dome
that had been torn open by a half-hearted swipe from a kreenit’s claws almost a
month before, wondering what the purpose of her life had really been.  She
wondered what had happened to her groundteam, and whether or not Benva had
managed to find someone else to Sentinel.  She wondered how Mekkval would take
news of her failure, and if the Dhasha would vote to replace him.  She wondered
if she was going to die of hunger first, or was going to be instead killed by
the gang that she had spent the last two days hunting, picking them off one by
one, to Max’s delight.  Even then, over eighty bodies lay strewn out in the courtyard
below, where Rat had ambushed them from the church tower.

This particular gang had
had the misfortune of doing its raping and murdering within range of Rat’s
scope two nights before, and when she watched them eat their victims’ children
afterwards, something had shifted within her, taking her from a defensive,
stay-out-of-sight position, to an offensive,
hunt-down-every-last-one-of-the-ashers-and-make-them-gurgle-blood position. 
Originally a very ‘powerful’—relatively speaking—gang of four hundred fighters,
it was now down to a hundred or fewer.  Rat was pretty sure that, by the end of
her massacre, they had figured out there was only one of her, so she was
placing mental bets with herself as to whether or not they’d try to sneak in
and overwhelm her while she was napping.

Smart men, having had
over three quarters of their number annihilated with head-shots in the last two
days, would have run screaming.  After witnessing them fighting over the ham of
a child’s leg, however, Rat was pretty sure she wasn’t dealing with smart men.

“
Mistress,
” Max
said, interrupting her thoughts, “
I would like to point out that you haven’t
eaten anything in a day and a half, Standard, and that in order to sustain your
fighting efficiency, you should consume something as soon as possible.
”

Rat, thinking of the
bodies baking in the sun below her tower, felt physically ill.

“I’ll find food, Max,”
she said.  “No need to remind me.” 

“
As you wish,
Mistress,
” her weapon replied.

The stores had been
looted within the first couple days.  The vast majority of resources had been
confiscated by the lucky few who participated in the initial riots, then were
taken back to their hidey-holes and hoarded from the rest of Humanity.  Often,
as Rat had found in four instances so far, the hoarder had hidden his stash,
then, on yet another mad dash to take supplies from the ransacked shops and
homes, he’d been caught, killed, and his stash left to rot under whatever trash
heap, floorboard, or trapdoor he’d stashed it, safe for eternity from his fellow
man.

Kreenit had eaten what
was left.

Unlike Congie food,
though, Human food was heavy, bulky, non-nutritious, and unsatisfying.  Rat had
filled her backpack each time she’d found a stash, but she’d run out again and
the last stash had been two weeks ago.  Some of her victims of the last two
days had carried fresh meat on them, but after witnessing their tug-of-war over
the dead child, Rat was no longer willing to eat meat that she hadn’t killed
herself.

Thus, Rat was lying on
her sleeping bag, staring up at the ruined brass bell, when she heard the
shuffling on the tower steps below her.

“Think he’s still up
here, man?” a male voice whispered from the staircase.

“No way,” a second male
responded in accented English.  “Those were the Centerville
Demons
,
man.  Nobody’d hang around after shooting up the Demons.”

Rat slid out of bed and,
snagging up Max, took up a position in the shadows behind the staircase, gun
pointed at the entrance.

“Besides,” the second guy
continued, “if there
was
someone up here, he wouldn’t have let us pick
the bodies clean.”  Rat, who hadn’t bothered to speak the obscure language of
her homeland more than a handful of times since being drafted for the Ground
Force seventy-four turns ago, had trouble understanding their exchange.

“I dunno,” the first guy
said.  “What if he got ‘em all and went to sleep?”

“Got all the
Demons
?” 
the second cried.  “Dude, they had like five thousand of them, last time I
heard.  They’d taken over everything worth anything between Centerville and
east-side Fresno.  Real organized.”  The second speaker’s head appeared in the
entryway, along with a sleek Ueshi-made laser rifle.  “Set up satellite groups
along the one-eighty to catch stragglers,” he continued, his leather-clad back
to Rat.  “And that was a
week
ago.”

“All clear up there?” the
first guy asked from below.

The second man glanced
around Rat’s hideaway, but her clothes—energy-resistant black Congie gear—made
her blend into the shadows of twilight, and his unaugmented eyes slid right
over her.

“All clear, dude,” the
first one said.  “Guy’s long gone.”

The second man followed
the first into the room, and he, too, hastily scanned the corner where she
stood, but his natural eyes slid over her, too, unable to see Rat in the
shadows.  Not Congies, then. 

Looking around, the
second man, a six-foot athletic type like his friend, grunted.  “We should get
outta here.  They’re gonna come lookin’ for whoever did this, and I heard the
Demons are even bigger than that mind-reader’s group.”

Rat, who had been steadily
applying pressure to the trigger, hesitated.

The man snorted.  “With
five
thousand
?  Yeah, I’d say so.  That crazy-ass mutie was headed east
with only like four hundred.  Knew he was out-gunned.  Was gonna go live in the
desert until the dust settles.”

Mutie,
Rat’s
starved brain repeated groggily, still having trouble translating their
English. 
He just said they found a mutant.

The second man slid his
gun over his shoulder and made a derisive sound.  “And do what?  Eat sand?  At
least there’s food around here.  Orchards and shit.”

“And water.  Shit, you
ever try to find water in a
desert
?”

“Yeah, but they say he’s
real smart.  Like got them super-genes or something.  Might be able to build
something to make it.”

“Make
water
.”  The
flat tone of his companion’s voice spoke volumes.

“Well, yeah.  I dunno. 
The idiots following him said he can do all sorts of weird shit like levitate
guns and dump himself in acid—hey, look at this!  Someone left some sweet
Congie gear up here…”

Rat chose that moment to
kick the trapdoor shut and depress the trigger halfway, charging her gun.  The
bang of the falling trapdoor followed by the sizzling hiss of charged plasma
made the two men freeze and slowly turn around from where they’d found her
backpack stashed against the wall.

“Uh,” one of the guys
said, staring at the glowing blue charge of her gun.  “Howdy.”

“Put your weapons down
and back over to the opposite wall,” Rat said in Congie.  “Anyone twitches,
coughs, or farts, his head comes off.”

“So, uh,” the closer man
said, in a nervous release of breath.  “That your work down there?”

“You better believe it,”
Rat said, still keeping her trigger in the Charge stage.

The interlopers hesitated
much too long—Rat understood why, as weapons were survival in the chaos
following Judgement—but then slowly lowered their guns to the floor and backed
away.

“You talked about
mutants,” Rat said.  “Where?”

The two men, obviously
thinking they were about to get shot, frowned and looked at each other. 
“Mutants?” one of them asked, his Congie obviously rusty.  “You mean like that
dude with the HSG?”

“Where’d they go?” Rat
demanded.  “Which direction?”

The man who had spoken
blinked at her.  “Well, uh, east, I guess.  Followed the one-eighty to Sequoia
National Park.  Was headed into Nevada.  I think, anyway.” 

“How many of them are
there?” Rat snapped.  “How many experiments?”

The two men blinked at
each other.  “Uh,” one said carefully, “miss, when was the last time you ate
something?  You’re lookin’ a little ragged, there…”

Rat narrowed her eyes. 
Her heart had been pounding ever since mention of ‘muties’ and her hands were
literally shaking from the thought of being able to complete her mission, after
all.  “Tell me about the experiments.  Everything you know, right now, or
you’re both gonna die.”

“Oh, uh…”  The taller of
the two coughed.  “We’ve got Spam.  Some crackers, too.  Ain’t much, but you
look like you need it.”

“We ain’t Demons,
neither,” his companion said quickly.  “We’re just passing through.  Hate those
assholes. 
All
those assholes.  Don’t see why everybody’s joining those
damn gangs.  Been stayin’ low ever since the HSG let Bobby go if he’d run the
gauntlet while his henchman killed those shithead sniper kids.  I’d been
following them, figuring I could spring him loose that night, maybe get a
pot-shot on that puffy haired freak, but they let Bobby go first.”

Rat peered at them,
something about that triggering a memory, but in the frantic chaos that had
been the last few weeks, not to mention in a food-starved haze, she couldn’t
dredge it from the sludge of her mind.

“We’re brothers,” the one
called Bobby told her.  “Ain’t been no experiments in these parts since
Congress blew Earth a new hole.  All the labs got blown up, see?  No more
pharmacies, either.  Science is pretty well shot.”

“They weren’t all blown
up,” Rat snapped.  “Where is Sequoia National Park?  I need to find them.”

The two men were silent
for much too long.

“Ma’am,” Bobby’s brother
said softly, “we’ve got food.  Meat
.
”

“
I don’t burning eat
people!
” Rat screamed, violently leveling the rifle on them.

“Us neither!” Bobby
cried.  Both of them had thrust their spines against the far wall, big hands up
in peace.  “We got Spam.  We can share.  Call it a thank-you for what you did
taking out a few assholes.  They’ve been making trouble around here, especially
out in the orchards.  Killin’ the rightful owners, setting up guards like
fucking Nazi camps, you know?”

Rat swallowed, hard. 
Screaming had left her dizzy, and she was hearing her own blood rush in her
ears.  “I need to know where the experiments went.”

The brothers glanced at
each other, faces nervous.  “They, uh…” Bobby started, “…went north.  There was
a lab up there that didn’t get destroyed.  All the biologists are converging on
it, you know?  A big ol’ science convention.”

“Yeah!” the second man
said quickly.  “Berkeley, man. 
Big
labs at Berkeley.  Lots of
experiments.  Up by San Francisco. 
Aaallllll
the science gear you want
up there.  Like butane torches and petri dishes and beakers and everything.”

“Rats, too,” Bobby said
quickly.  “Got lots of rats for experiments.”

“So yeah, you wanna go to
Berkeley,” the second guy added.  “You can get there, right?  Need us to draw
you a map?”

Rat peered at them,
knowing they were lying, but unable to think through the hunger and the
pounding of her heart.  Desperate, she snapped, “I should shoot you lying vaghi
and cut your filthy tongues from your useless mouths as my Second tears out
your nerve endings with a spoon.”

What she actually said
was, “I should—
uungh
.”  As she did, her knees went out from under her
and she collapsed to the floor.  The last thing she heard before the world went
dark was Max, asking her if his autoshutdown command was still in effect.

#

Rat woke to sun filtering
against her face and a couple of male voices chuckling amongst themselves a few
feet away.

In a flash of panic, Rat
rolled out of her bed, drew her combat knife, and had it up and ready in less
than a second.

The two men, who had sat
down on fallen beams to laugh over their open cans of food, hesitated in their
laughter to watch her with palpable nervousness.

“Where is Max?” Rat
croaked.  She didn’t see him anywhere.

“Uh,” one of the guys
said, his blue eyes sliding towards his brother, “if he’s not here, it’s a
pretty good bet he’s dead.”

“My
gun
!” Rat
shrieked.  “The Rodemax.  Where is he?!”  She said it in Congie, too upset to
try and force her tongue to her childhood language.