Zero's Return (77 page)

As soon as the words left
his mouth, he realized it was Jim Beam talking and definitely the wrong thing
to say.  Thankfully, though, he’d said them in Congie and she couldn’t
understand a damn one of them.  Saying a little prayer to the Sisters, Joe
opened his mouth to come up with something better.

I translated for you,
Twelve-A said. 
When do I get my six tics?

Joe’s heart gave a
startled hammer at about the same time he flew off his seat on the boulder and
went rolling down the hill in an awkward, tailbone-crushing somersault.

“
I am more Jreet than
you will ever be, Voran!
” Shael screamed at him from somewhere up above. 

In the back of his mind,
he heard Twelve-A’s mental pause. 
Can I start my six tics now?

Why sooting not,
Joe thought, ending his roll on his back, staring at the sky.  
The day can’t
get much worse.

Sure it can,
Twelve-A said. 
You could be beaten until you wheezed blood because your
chief of security was sleeping on the job.

Joe narrowed his eyes. 
You
made
me sleep, furg. 
My
vote was to kill them all!

Twelve-A ignored that.

Sometime later, Joe
limped back to camp, found that his stuff had been again rooted through by
grabby female hands, considered snagging what was left and wandering off, then
crawled back into his tent to sleep it off, instead. 

#

Twelve-A got them moving
again two days later, thankfully giving Joe enough time to recover from his
merry jaunt down the mountain before having to go back to his routine of
keeping the leafmunching furgs alive. 

They hit the road again
at Speed of Slug, giving Joe plenty of time to jog ahead, scout around, jog
back, check their backtrail, jog ahead again to ensure they were all going in
the right direction, then go back to again make sure they weren’t being
followed.  All that before the People made a single ferlii length.  The entire
time, Shael either cast him furious looks or refused to look at him altogether,
though pointedly kept up with him wherever he went, as if he had turned
guarding the People into some sort of contest.  And Joe, being bigger,
stronger, faster, and carrying all the weaponry, was happy to oblige.

Let the little furg
stew on that,
Joe thought, easily outdistancing her yet again.

She could crush you
with her mind,
Twelve-A noted casually.

She’s gotta catch me,
first,
Joe retorted.  Then he crested a rise and stumbled to a halt, seeing
that the People, in between his last trip to the front, had stopped forward
progress altogether and were sitting around on the empty roadside, piling rocks
or chasing lizards. 
Are we stopping
again
?
he cried, disgusted.

Alice was hungry.

Which meant they had
halted everything so an eight-year-old could have a cookie break.  Great.  Joe
fought yet another overwhelming urge to drive his forehead into a pine tree. 
“Tell me when they start moving again.  I’ll be watching the rear.”

There’s nobody
dangerous around
, Twelve-A said.

Remembering Twelve-A’s
idea of ‘dangerous,’ Joe went to the rear and found a comfortable vantage on an
abandoned car anyway.  Shael nonchalantly followed him, lowering herself to a
boulder a couple rods off, pointedly ignoring his existence completely. 

Joe glanced over at the
woman, who was patiently scanning the surrounding landscape with all the
intensity of a border-patrol bot.  He could only imagine what would happen if
she decided she wanted one of his automatic energy weapons to complement his
pants, knife, and new bandanna, which she had tied to her head with the knot
that
Joe
had shown her.  To that end, Joe now slept with
all
his
weapons in his tent with him, stuffed under immovable body-parts.

They sat like that,
neither having anything to say, totally silent except for the occasional
slapping at horseflies or mosquitoes.

When several hours passed
without Twelve-A alerting him they were resuming their march north, Joe got up
and went back to find his friends to figure out what was taking so long. 
Shael, nonchalantly pretending the idea had been her own, got up and followed
him, pointedly taking a seat completely opposite him in their latest ‘camp’ at
the edge of an abandoned road—a place that Joe, had he been given his way,
wouldn’t have come within ten lengths of, much less walked
on
.

The People, however—who
still utterly refused to let Joe dress them—didn’t like walking on sticks and
pebbles and brambles with their bare feet, so, in the mornings, before the sun
heated things up, they walked on roads, instead.  When Joe complained, Twelve-A
told him that security was
his
job, and why should the People worry
about where they walked if he was doing his job?  Hence Joe’s frantic jogs back
and forth each morning, just to make sure they weren’t about to run into any
rampaging gangs or kreenit jaws while Twelve-A was busily picking flowers or
raptly mind-reading bugs.

Besides, all the jogging
worked up an appetite, and he might as well get something to eat while he
waited for the furgs to work up interest in walking again.  The fruit that
Eleven-C had made at the start of their ‘lunch’ break was almost gone.  He took
a banana and sat down against his backpack with a sigh.  The People were not
very enthusiastic about walking long distances, despite his frustrated attempts
to speed them up.  ‘Urgency’ simply wasn’t part of their vocabulary, and they
traveled at the same slow walk regardless of how high his blood pressure
skyrocketed—if he could get them to walk at all.

For someone like Joe, who
was used to his every order being obeyed immediately and without complaint,
having to watch them creep along like stubborn, carefree children was almost as
painful as a plasma shot to the gut.  He endured it, but only because there
wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.  Several times in the past, he’d even
gotten frustrated enough to pack his stuff to leave, but each time, he stopped
and thought about that Congressional nuajan machine.

Wasn’t
that
a nice
thought.

We’re not killing
anyone,
Twelve-A warned him.

Stop listening in on
thoughts that don’t belong to you, oversized leprechaun,
Joe snapped.

You told me I could
look,
Twelve-A retorted.
  You didn’t tell me I had to stop.

Joe narrowed his eyes,
realizing the telepath had just spent three days ogling his mind and memories
in exchange for translating something that had gotten him thrown down a
mountainside. 
Stop.

Twelve-A gave a mental
mutter, but Joe felt the tell-tale retreat of his psychic presence like a
sudden pressure releasing in his mind.

You’re like a goddamn
peeping Tom, you know that?
Joe demanded, gesturing with the banana. 
I
give you half a chance and you’re climbing in my window.

You’re interesting,
Twelve-A muttered. 
And I have no idea how long six tics is.  You never told
me.

Joe opened his mouth to
argue, then glared. 
You intentionally never asked.

It slipped my mind.

Which was like saying a
Dhasha forgot to eat. 
I’m about to put a boot up your ass,
Joe
growled. 
Not without my permission.
  Joe finished his banana and
surveyed the camp.  Eleven-C was sitting with Alice and Nine-G.  The little
brat was jabbering away at her adoring masses from atop the giant’s shoulders,
weaving yet another necklace of flowers and grasses as her followers struggled
to do the same.  Nine-G was busy picking seeds from the outside of a strawberry
while Eleven-C seemed to be interested in drawing a picture in the dirt.

Joe had to grit his teeth
not to let his aggravation show.  The People were so
lazy!
  Sure, they
didn’t have the rigorous military training—or the subsequent war flashbacks—but
they didn’t seem to have any drive whatsoever.  Now that the ‘mean’ people were
dead and Twelve-A had given Joe the task of getting them to safety, the minder
had seemed to lose interest in management altogether.

To Joe’s frustration,
even before their run-in with Mike and his gang, it was the best he could do to
get the People to walk ten lengths a day.  That wasn’t good enough, and yet,
every attempt he made to speed them up resulted in them slowing down.  He felt
like tearing his hair out in frustration, but he still didn’t have enough to
get a good grip.

Sometime around the point
when Nine-G had picked the strawberry clean, Joe got up and walked over to
Twelve-A, who seemed to be quite enthralled with a purple flower he had
harvested along the roadside.

Joe squatted beside
Twelve-A, having had several hours to plot out how to get his point across
without killing the pointy-eared bastard.  “Look,” Joe said, as evenly as he could
while wanting to wring the telepath’s scrawny neck.  “We need to get moving. 
The
kreenit
aren’t going to stay in the cities forever, and sitting
along the road like this makes us penned Takki.”

Then you can kill them
with your rifle, furgling,
Twelve-A told him cheerfully. 
Do you know
what this flower is called?
  With the drugs Joe had given him, the minder’s
bruises had faded completely, leaving him looking better than most of the rest
of the group.  Unfortunately, that meant he was once more taking extra time to
do stupid things like picking flowers and weaving hats.

Joe tore his eyes from
Twelve-A’s again-pristine face and squinted down at the flower, having to fight
down the urge to rip it from the telepath’s hand and hurl it into the woods. 
He had learned, from experience, that the minder didn’t react well to that.  “A
posy.”

Twelve-A frowned at him. 
For some reason, you continue to lie even though I can read your mind.

“It’s not lying,” Joe
growled.  “It’s sarcasm.  I lived most my life off-planet.  What the hell would
I know about local flora?”

You’re not telling the
truth, so you’re lying,
Twelve-A told him firmly.

“I’m not the one who was
locked up for the first twenty turns of his life,” Joe retorted.  “In fact, I’m
seventy turns older than you.  Come back to lecture me when you get out of your
swaddling clothes.”

I have other people’s
experiences to look through,
Twelve-A told him, sounding almost defensive. 
If I wanted to, anything you know, I could know.

“Then you know sarcasm is
good for the soul,” Joe retorted.  “And
no,
that wasn’t an invitation to
go back to digging through my mind,” he said, refusing to take the bait. 

Twelve-A, the wily
bastard, made a disappointed sigh and turned back to his flower.  Watching him,
Joe had to give the telepath one thing.  He hadn’t outright broken their
bargain, despite all the loopholes he kept trying to put into it.  Joe’s mind,
it seemed, really was his own domain—as long as he caught the caveats in time.

“What
isn’t
good
for the soul is getting eaten by a kreenit or getting caught in a blizzard,”
Joe went on.  “Winter
is
coming, you know.  I don’t know what the local
weather’s like, but I do know it’s gonna be unpleasant.”

Twelve-A ignored him and
turned the stem of the flower in his hand to glance at it from all angles. 
Twelve-A let out a little breath of pleasure. 
It’s so beautiful.

Because it was obvious
another gun-waving tantrum would only get him put back to sleep, Joe squinted
at the thing, reluctantly trying to figure out what the furg saw in it.  “It’s
probably poisonous.”

Twelve-A flinched and
looked up at him in blue-eyed shock. 
Something so pretty could be
poisonous?

Joe couldn’t hold in his
laugh.  “You don’t judge a Dhasha by his scales.”

Twelve-A glanced at the
flower and, after giving it a long, careful examination, slowly put it down. 
Then he stood. 
I will get the People moving again.

Joe almost hugged the
pointy-eared freak out of gratitude.  “Thank you.”

All at once, every one of
the forty-four naked men and women lifted their heads toward Twelve-A.  Then
they stood obediently and Eleven-C started leading them north again.  Their
pace was a little faster, which was an improvement, but it would still be
several rotations before they reached the place in the mountains that Joe had
marked on his map.

#

Twelve-A became aware of
another group of minds gathering near their hill sometimes towards midnight,
four days after Joe had rescued Eleven-C from the Humans who had stolen her. 
He frowned, realizing that, as Joe kept predicting, Mike and his twenty-three
friends were following them.

That…wasn’t good.  His
first instinct was to tell Joe, but then Twelve-A realized what Joe would do to
them if he did.  Even then, the Congie was plotting out how to kill a few of
them in the most horrible way possible, scaring the rest of them into running
away and never coming back.

But he’d already done
that once, and if it didn’t work the first time, why would it work the second?

Besides, Twelve-A could
see
the goodness in Mike-the-Politician; the desire to feed his family, his love
for his children, the feeling of brotherhood that all the terror and hunger and
dying had instilled in him towards his band of friends.  They, like the rest of
Humanity, were broken, not evil.

They also hated Joe for
what he had done.  Joe and Shael, both.  They wanted to kill them.  They had
lost companions to Joe’s brutality, had been forced to leave friends behind to
die, unable to bring the maimed along through an apocalypse, unable to spare
the supplies to keep them alive after they left.