Zero's Return (72 page)

“When was the last time
you ate something?” the stranger asked again.

“Yesterday,” she lied,
too quickly.  Rat was highly aware of the fact that most of her weight was
leaning against the tree, but she was doing her best to keep it from showing.

“You gonna get the
bubblegum?”

Mention of the gum made
Rat’s mouth water all over again.  Her knees literally started to tremble with
the need to walk forward and collect it.  She bit her lip, looking at the pink
package, then at her poofy-haired visitor.  After what the others had tried to
pull…

“I’m not that kind of
criminal,” the stranger said softly.

Rat tensed at the
gentleness in his voice.  “I don’t believe you,” she growled.

“Obviously,” he said
quietly.

She eyed the pink
package, her heart pounding.  “Did you poison it?”

He cocked his head at her
and frowned.  “
Poison
it?  No, I
chew
it.  You Congies
do
know what
gum
is, don’t you?”

“Of course I burning know
what gum is,” Rat snapped.  Every
ounce
of her wanted to rush over, rip
the pink package from the ground, and stuff it into her mouth, paper and all. 
It took everything she had to stay in control.

“You’re shaking,
pussycat,” the man noted. 

“No I’m not,” she
retorted, raising her scope to her face again in warning.  “And don’t call me
that.”

“What, ‘pussycat’?”

Rat narrowed her eyes.

“Kitten?” he asked.

Rat’s finger twitched.

“Boots?” he offered. 

Rat scowled.

“Tiger?”  His mouth was
twitching in a smile, now.

It took every ounce of
willpower she had to keep from blasting him.

“Go take it,” he urged,
seemingly unperturbed by the way her finger was twitching on the trigger.  “I
won’t move.”

“Hold up your hands,” she
growled.  “Turn around.”

“I’m unarmed,” he said,
but he did as he was told, completing a slow spin before returning to face
her.  She didn’t
see
any weapons…  Her eyes flickered back to his tiny
pink offering and she swallowed.

Eventually, her stomach
won out.  Rat stepped from behind the tree and sidled toward the miniscule
paper-wrapped package, keeping her gun trained on the stranger and her eyes out
for his friends.  When she reached the square he’d left on the ground, she
quickly dropped into a crouch beside it and, still holding the gun on him with
one hand, snatched the gum from the ground, tore most of the paper wrapper from
it, and stuffed it into her mouth.

The rush of sweetness, of
flavor
, was overpowering.  Rat groaned, rammed her teeth through the
sugary block a few times, and swallowed in a spasm.

The man flinched.  “It
lasts longer if you chew it.”

“I chewed it,” Rat said. 
“Now go away.  I should plant a hole in your chest for what your friends tried
to do.”

“Probably,” he agreed. 
“But I’m guessing, since you haven’t already shot me, it’s been a little longer
than a day since you ate, and you’re probably tired of being alone.  Congies
are never alone.  Must be a new experience for you, Cat.”

Rat glared and, still in
a squat, inched over to her bedroll.  She started rolling her sleeping bag
one-handed, keeping the gun trained on him with the second.

“You wanna come back to
camp with me?” the man offered.

“
Hell
no!” Rat
snapped.  “
Leave
.”

“I looked at the bodies
back there,” he went on blithely.  “Most of them were a knife or a kick to the
head.  Even starved.  You’re really good at killing stuff, ain’tcha, Whiskers?”

…
Whiskers?
  Rat
stopped and scowled at him over the gun.  She stared at him blankly for several
minutes.  The stranger merely waited, watching her calmly. 

“Tell you what,” Rat said
finally.

He raised his frizzy
white brow, obviously listening.

“You tell me what you
want,” Rat said, “and I’ll tell you how fast you’re gonna have to run to
survive the next twenty seconds.”

“Honestly?”  The man
laughed.  “I’d like to convince you to join us.” 

“Not gonna happen,” Rat
snapped.  “I don’t associate with rapists.”

“Tyson would agree with
you,” the man said.  “Me, I find it rather impossible to get it up, so that’s
not a problem.”

Rat scowled at him. 
“You’re not running.”

“Correct.”  He beamed a
winning white smile at her.  “I’m convincing you to join my army.”

Rat cocked her head at
the puffy-haired creep.  “
Your
army?”  She put her right hand back on
the gun, tense.  “So those guys were under
your
command?”

“Indeed,” the man said. 
“I hacked the computer to break them out of a spiritual penitentiary.  The
guards locked the place down when Judgement started and were going to leave us
all to die.  How very Christian of them.”

“I’m not joining you,”
Rat snapped.  “
Git
.”

“You’re hungry.  I have
food.”

Narrowing her eyes, Rat
snatched up her bag, threw it over her shoulder, and tucked her bedroll under
an arm.  “Don’t follow me.  More will die.”  She turned to go.

“If you don’t come back
willingly,” the man sighed, “I’m going to have to acquire you as a prisoner.”

Rat, who had started to
walk away, stopped and turned back to him slowly.  When he just grinned at her,
she cocked her head at him in bafflement.  When he didn’t retract his
statement, she raised her rifle scope to her eyeball and blasted off the poof
of curly white hair in a
whoosh
of explosive, star-making energy.  The
man screamed.

“Acquire that,” she told
him.  Then she turned and, grabbing the last of her things, stalked off in the
other direction.

#

Slade returned to camp
bleeding from the eyes.

Well, not quite, but blood
was trickling down his scalp and forehead and getting
into
his eyes, so
it was still annoying and made people scream.

Tyson’s mouth fell open
as Slade entered the camp, the ever-present piece of straw falling from his
lips in shock.

“I want her,” Slade said,
his chest still throbbing with something between glee and awe.  He’d gotten a
hardon.  The moment he’d met her cold gray-green eyes.  Like goddamn wrought
iron.  Fuck
yes
!

“Uh,” Tyson said slowly,
“Ghost, your—”

“My hair is bleeding,”
Slade snapped.  “Yes, I know.”  He swiped another irritated forearm across his
brow, and it came back crimson.  He wiped the blood off on his pantleg in
annoyance.  “We’re catching the Congie.”

Tyson’s mouth was still
open, his eyes fixed on the wriggling white filaments that had woken up
sometime after half of them had been blown off.  “But your hair is—”

“Writhing?” Slade
grunted.  “Wriggling? 
Squirming
, Tyson?  Yes, I know that too.  They’ll
stop once they get over their panic.”

Tyson cocked his head at
Slade for so long that it almost looked like some sort of mental cog had
cracked in half.  “Are you Human?”

“Not exactly,” Slade
said.  Then, forestalling Tyson’s next question, he said, “It’s complicated. 
Tell me how we’re gonna catch this girl.”  He walked over, yanked a towel from
his personal accoutrements, and began scrubbing the blood out of his eyes.

“Uh,” Tyson said, still
blinking at him.  “We don’t.”

Slade started wiping at
his face.  “I want her, Tyson.  That’s final.  How do we do it?”

“You want her…dead?” Tyson
offered.  He was still staring at the top of Slade’s head under the towel.

“No,” Slade said,
irritated.  “I
want
her.  As in
mine
.  Your fearless leader wants
to take a woman.  Something to warm his bed and keep him entertained on those
long winter nights.  Get me?”

“You want her…crippled?” 
Tyson cocked his head with a frown.  “Maimed?”

Slade wrapped his head in
the towel and secured it to his head in a turban.  “No, I want
her
. 
Preferably disarmed.”

Tyson continued to frown
at his towel.  “You mean her arms cut off?”

“No,” Slade said. 
“Removed of all weapons.”

“You mean her arms cut
off,” Tyson said again.

Slade narrowed his eyes. 
“This is not debatable.”  Already, his boner was subsiding.  Like a sinking
ship. 
Damn
it!

“Better make it her feet,
too.”

Slade squinted at his
second.  “Are you afraid of a
girl
, Tyson?”

“You’re goddamn right,
I’m afraid of a girl,” Tyson blurted.  “She killed twenty of our guys in like
ten minutes.  You ask me, we should be running in the opposite direction.”

“Funny, I’m not asking
you,” Slade said.  “We’re
getting
her.  Now help me figure out how.”

Tyson peered at him, his
eyes flickering from the bloody towel back to Slade’s face.  “Why you want her
so bad?”

“You can say that,
looking down the oiled barrel of her energy weapon, I had a personal
awakening,” Slade said.  He bent and pulled a rifle from the pile beside his
belongings.  Shoving it into Tyson’s hands, he said, “She’s a walking
skeleton.  Starving.  Probably gonna be dead in a couple days.  I want her
now
.”

Tyson shoved the rifle
back.  “Tell ya what. 
You
go get her, and
I’ll
watch the camp
for you while you’re gone.

Slade grimaced down at
the rifle, making no attempt to take it.  “I have no idea how to use a gun. 
Besides.  I want to
capture
her, not
kill
her.”

“And that,” Tyson said,
shouldering the rifle, “is why I’m staying right the hell here.  When you die,
I get your stuff.”

Slade glared at his
second.  Then he turned to look at the rest of his flock, many of whom were
staring at their Fearless Leader as if he had just grown tentacles from his
head.  Which he had, sort of.

“All right, fine,” Slade
said.  “But
don’t
eat my gum.  I know exactly how many pieces are left.”

“I want one pack,” Tyson
argued.  “For keeping order for you while you’re gone.”

Slade carefully weighed
the benefits of letting the orangutan eat his gum, then reluctantly went over
to his case of Bubble Manium, grabbed a couple handfuls of packs, stuffed all
but one into his cargo pocket, then offered the last to Tyson.

As Tyson went to reach
for it, Slade jerked it back out pointedly.  “Just one,” he warned.

The huge Aryan gave him
an irritated look, but nodded.

Slade slapped the gum
down in the man’s hand, then went about gathering up food and camping supplies.

“Don’t take too much food,”
Tyson complained.

Slade paused and raised a
brow as he shoved bundles of matches and rope into his backpack.  “You really
don’t think I’m coming back, do you?”

“Uh,” Tyson said, “not
really, no.”

Slade snorted.  “Gimme a
week.”  At that, he threw the backpack over his shoulder.  “Stay here until I
get back.”

“A week, huh,” Tyson
said.  “And if you don’t come back by then, the gum and the Society is mine?”

“Yeah, sure,” Slade
said.  “One week.  Otherwise known as seven days.  Or one hundred and
sixty-eight hours.  Or ten thousand and eighty minutes.  Or six hundred and
four thousand, eight hundred seconds.  Starting right now.”  He hit the timer
on his watch.

Tyson gave him a dubious
look.  “You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Slade said. 
“Pretty sure that particular screw came loose in my teenage years.  Been a wild
ride ever since.”  He grinned and gave Tyson a sarcastic salute with his
survival handbook.  “Later.”

At his back, Tyson
shouted, “You don’t even know how to light a fire!”

Inwardly, Slade grinned. 
There had been…
concern
…in Tyson’s voice.  Poor fool had no idea who he
was dealing with.  Even then, Slade could feel the formidable gears in his head
coming to life and starting to turn.  Ghost, for the first time in thirty-two
turns, had finally found something interesting to do.

CHAPTER 24 – Ticktock

Rat started out of a
restless sleep and sat up, her heart pounding.  Immediately, the wave of
exhaustion returned and she had to prop herself up with an arm to stay upright.

She’d only made it a mile
or two.  The alien trees above her seemed to whisper at her as she sat there,
blinking away her exhaustion.  It was well past dawn, the strange yellow star
already halfway to its zenith, and still she was tired.  It had still been
light when she’d fallen asleep.

Rat had been sitting
there for several minutes before she noticed the bright pink square on a rock a
few dozen rods off, down by the creek.

Instantly, she lunged to
her feet, pistol in one hand, rifle in the other, and backed up until she had
her spine against the trunk of the oak beside her bedroll.  “Who’s there?!” she
shouted.

Silence hung around her,
ringing.  Only the trickle of water in the dried riverbed broke the calm.

Rat’s heart was pounding,
now, wasting energy she didn’t have.  “Hello?”

Nothing.  The whole place
was eerily quiet.

Looking at the gum, Rat
licked her lips.  That the fuzzy-headed cretin had followed her was setting off
a dozen internal alarms, but the sight of
food
was completely overriding
them.  It was all she could do to keep her spine glued to the tree.

“What do you want?” Rat
shouted into the forest around her.

No response.  She waited
several minutes, listening to the babbling of the creek and the breeze in the
treetops, before she reluctantly moved away from the tree.  She had picked
another good location—she had a three hundred and sixty degree view, and again,
unless the bastard was a Jikaln or a Jreet, she was alone in the camp.  Very
slowly, she started walking down the hill to the creek, expecting some sort of
trap.

She found nothing but a
piece of gum.

Her mouth watering, Rat’s
body responded without her agreement.  She reached down, grabbed the gum,
yanked the paper free, and chewed the blessed sweetness until her mouth again
spasmed and she swallowed, despite herself.  She finished it off with a few
palmfuls of water, keeping watch on the forest as she did, then went back to
her camp.  It took all the effort she had just to climb the hill and return to
her bedroll.  She looked at the sky, thought about trying to get up and move
again, but just sat there, instead, staring down at the rock where the stranger
had left his gum.

She felt the stifling
heat of the day already rising, baking the air to something almost intolerable
without her biosuit. 
And this is considered Humans’ perfect habitat?
she thought, in disgust.  There was no food, the days were too hot, and the
nights were too cold.  She hadn’t seen a single large mammal since she’d landed
on the planet.  All she had found were bones.  Bones of people, bones of
animals, bones of buildings.

Rat swatted at another
fly and leaned her head back against the tree beside her bed.  Never before had
she failed so thoroughly on a mission.  Not only had she failed to locate her
target, but now she was stranded and starving on the very planet that was
supposed to be the cradle of Human life.  What a load of Dhasha flake.

She must have fallen
asleep, because when she opened her eyes, the sun was higher in the sky and
there was another pink square on the rock down by the creek.  As soon as she
saw it, she sat up, alert.

What’s his game?
she wondered, nervous.

The little pink square
sat there on the boulder at the bottom of the hill, baking in the sun, taunting
her.

Carefully, Rat got up and
went down to retrieve it, keeping an eye on her surroundings in suspicion.

When nothing sprang from
the nearby boulders, no shots were fired from the treeline, no explosions threw
her away from her prize, Rat reluctantly lowered her rifle and lifted the piece
of gum from the boulder.  Swallowing hard, she looked up to scan her
surroundings.  “Hello?” she demanded.  “What do you want, you burning furg?”

Nothing.

“I’m not joining you!”
she shouted at the woods.

Her gut was telling her
to drop the gum and
run
, get as far away from here as she could, but
once again, her stomach overrode her good sense.  She unwrapped it, thrust it
into her mouth, and chewed.  She was able to keep it in her mouth a little
longer this time before she swallowed on instinct.

The sweetness, however,
did nothing for her dwindling energy levels.  To get back to her hideaway on
the hill, Rat had to get on all fours and crawl.

Panting, Rat dropped back
to her bed and tilted her head against the tree.  Then she simply slid down
sideways and went to sleep.

When Rat woke, it was to
moonlight.  Like every other Congie in the Army, her eyes had been augmented to
pick up ambient light to better aid her function in tunnels or nighttime
assaults.  The result was that, despite the fact she knew it was close to total
darkness, she could still see the little pink square on the boulder.

And the note.

Rat narrowed her eyes. 
She was so tired that she probably wouldn’t have gone after the gum if it
weren’t for the note.  But curiosity was a Bagan itch, and it nagged at her for
hours until she finally dragged herself back down the hill to the boulder.

Reluctantly, Rat took gum
and note and opened the folded piece of paper—which appeared to be the inside
first page of an ancient book—and was a bit startled to see it was written in
perfect, spiralform Congie.

If you’d like more,
you can always follow me home.  I have food.  Real food, not just gum.

Rat narrowed her eyes and
crushed the sheet of paper.  Dropping it into the creek, she ate the bastard’s
gum, filled her stomach with water, and made her exhausted way back to the top
of the hill.

This time, she slept
until past noon.

Rat sat up, disoriented,
totally unable to concentrate. 
I’m dying
, she thought, more than a
little stunned.  In all her years working for Mekkval, she had never imagined
that she would starve to death on some lonely hill on Earth.  She hadn’t had
the energy to look for a rodent, and now she didn’t think she had the energy to
kill one even if it came within range.

She was just starting to
nod off again when she saw the plate of food sitting on the boulder. 
Instantly, she sat up, every nerve in her body suddenly afire.

Food
.  It was
unmistakably
food
.  Potatoes and onions and bread and what looked like a
leg of chicken.

Her heart thundering, Rat
somehow found the energy to drag herself down the hill, gun in hand, then
hesitated at the plate of food.  She nervously looked it over for some sort of
trap.  She sniffed it, then poked at the plate with her rifle.

When nothing jumped out
at her and another fly landed on the chicken-leg, Rat snatched up the plate and
waited, nervous.  Under the plate was another Congie note.

Fine, I can see you’re
going to be difficult.  I’ll feed you morning and night until you regain your
strength, then we can talk.

Throwing the note aside,
Rat began wolfing down the food.  She ate until her stomach cramped, then
followed the food with water.  As the first wave of sleepiness hit her from the
sudden influx of food to her system, Rat glanced up at the boulder, wondering
if she could simply curl up around it to sleep.

That’s probably what
he wants,
she thought, thinking about how indefensible the boulder position
was.  After all, the bastard had talked about taking her home with him. 

The thought of being
captured again was what finally drove her back up the hill, crawling whenever
her feet slipped out from under her on the upward climb.  Then, her body numb
with exhaustion, she dropped to her sleeping-bag and lay down.  She slept a
full twenty-four hours.

When she woke, the plate
was back.

Rat knew she was playing
with fire, but this time, upon seeing the plate, her body overrode all her
sense.  She got up, stumbled down the hill, and ripped the plate off the
boulder to eat.

No sooner had she lifted
the plate did she realize it had been holding something down.  She heard
something snap in the brush across the creek, looked up just in time to see a
tree snap upwards, then screamed as something caught her ankles and yanked her
off her feet and whipped her out into the water.  As Rat went under the rushing
current, it dragged her downstream until she came up short abruptly by the rope
around her feet.  Then she found herself pinned there like that, trapped by the
pull of the water, fighting the current, struggling just to keep her head above
the surface.

As she flailed in a
panic, she caught sight of the broad-shouldered, fuzzy-headed sooter wading out
to her, a rope in his hands.

Ash!
her mind
screamed.  She desperately tried to swim away from him, but the rope around her
feet kept her thoroughly in place, her body tugged to its limits by the rush of
the creek.

The freaky-eyed stranger
was standing in water up to his thighs by the time he reached her and made a
grab for her throat.  Choking, struggling just to breathe, Rat couldn’t stop
him.  He caught her by her neck and his impossibly strong arm shoved her under
the water, and Rat realized he was going to drown her.  Her lungs burned and
she started to thrash, slamming her fists against his arms, but he didn’t let
go.  She could hear the flood of water all around her, the air bubbles roiling
against her ears.  She felt herself losing control, her lungs starting to spasm
in the need for air.  Then, startlingly, the stranger yanked her up again and
held her there, her head just above the rush of the creek, his freaky
purply-blue-white eyes scowling down at her sternly.  “Hold out your hands,
Kitty.”

“B-b-burn y-you,” Rat
managed.

He raised a cotton-puff
eyebrow and dunked her again.

“Hands,” he said calmly,
when he let her back up.

“Go to…Hell…” Rat sputtered.

He shoved her back into
the creek.

The third time he dragged
her to the surface, Rat gave him her hands.  He calmly held her head up against
a knee as he started wrapping her wrists in rope, then—to her dismay—feeding
rope between her wrists to tighten it.

Then, to her
worse
dismay, the bastard pulled out a lighter and, still holding her in the creek,
melted the two ends of nylon rope together, giving her nothing to untie.

Casually popping the
lighter shut and dropping it back into his pants-pocket, he peered down at her
quizzically.  “Going to behave?”

Thinking about the way
the water was rushing around her on all sides, and the way that, with her hands
bound, all it would take for him to drown her would be to remove the knee
holding her head above water, Rat reluctantly nodded.

The stranger bent down,
got his body under hers, and lifted her out of the creek.  He spent a moment
fiddling with the rope around her feet—
retying it
, she realized in
horror—and then cut her free.  Thus detained, he carried her out of the creek,
past her discarded rifle, and upriver what seemed like a length or two, into a
camp that with a crackling fire and a blanket.  And more food.

He was prepared for
this,
she thought, miserable.  The fact that he’d planned the whole damn
thing just made her feel…stupid.  And mad.  Really mad.

Lowering her to the
blanket beside the fire, her abductor leaned her against a tree and squatted in
front of her, examining her in silence.  After a few minutes, he pulled a pack
of gum from his front pocket, pulled one free, unwrapped it, and popped the
pink square into his mouth.  Then he offered one to her.

Rat ignored it.

For a long moment, Rat
and the stranger just peered at each other over the gum.  Then, when it was
obvious she wasn’t going to take it, he sighed.  “What’s your name, Tabby?”

Rat looked away, eying
his camp, wondering where he kept his knives.

“My name’s Sam,” he told
her, when she didn’t respond.  Then he seemed to jerk and frowned.  “Slade.  My
name’s Slade.”