Zero's Return (44 page)

“
I was hoping to be
useful,
” Max said, which was his way of showing disappointment for her
using a
knife
instead of him to kill the interlopers.

“Too close for a rifle,”
Rat said.  “You know that.”  She walked over to the trapdoor and glanced down
the spiral staircase to ascertain they were alone, then went and began
unbuckling gear from the two dead bodies.

Theo and Bobby had sat
up, side-by-side, staring at the dead bodies as they bled out on the floor.

“Dude,” Theo said
hoarsely, “that could’ve been us.”

Rat did not deign to
comment.  The two men she had killed had been carrying what was—for
Earth—advanced weaponry, and were apparently the hit-squad she had been
expecting to retaliate against her last three days’ rampage.  She started
pulling the guns and various grenades loose and buckling them to her own body.

“Why
wasn’t
that
us?” Bobby asked softly.

Rat shrugged.

“No, seriously,” Theo
said.  “You killed those guys in like
ten seconds
.”

“
Three
,” Max
informed them.  Her Rodemax almost sounded…proud.

But Theo was swallowing,
now.  “You’re like some sort of assassin, aren’t you?”

“Some people call me
that,” Rat said, adding the two new laser weapons to her arsenal.  She popped a
charge magazine out, checked its status, then shoved it back into place.  “I
like to think of myself as a professional bad-guy exterminator.”  She eyed the
lens of the gun that the second man had dropped, ascertaining it wasn’t
damaged, then lowered it into her collection of guns and miscellaneous
weaponry.  Seeing the impressive pile she had collected during her stay on
Earth, Rat had the bitter realization that, if rifles were food, she’d eat for
a year.

“Dude,” Bobby whispered. 
“Are you okay with us hanging around?  We can go, if you want us to.”

Rat lifted her gaze to
peer at the two brothers over the corpses of the men she had just killed. 
After a moment of consideration, she said, “I want you to show me the orchards
where they keep Congies, then help me find this mutant.  Do that, and Max and I
will watch your back however long you and I decide to travel together.”

Bobby and Theo glanced at
each other, then at the still-twitching corpses, then Theo swallowed.  “Ma’am,”
he said softly, “you got yourself a deal.”

#

As it turned out, Rat
didn’t have to kill the furgs penning up the Congies for food—a kreenit had
already done her job for her.  The Demons, it seemed, hadn’t bothered to bury
either their victims’ waste or their victims’ bones, and the smell of death and
excrement had drawn one of the massive aliens to their orchard location, much
to the detriment of the Demons and their ‘stock’.

There wasn’t much left of
their camp, now.  Piles of partially-digested bones littered the area, and the
houses that had been scattered along the roadways had all been torn open and
ransacked by the big kreenit that had since taken up residence in the valley. 
And, if the glossy, rainbow-colored scales the size of Rat’s chest even then
littering the valley were any indication, it had fought a territorial skirmish
with another kreenit some time before, obliterating huge swaths of apple trees
and mangling farm equipment in their bid to control the valley.

“Oh God,” Bobby whimpered
from the hillside Rat was using to observe the valley.  “There’s one of those
things
down there!  It
ate
them!”

“Shit,” Theo managed. 
“Shit, shit.  We need to get
out
of here.  It’s
huge
.  Why’d it
leave the city?  Shit!”

“Calm down,” Rat said,
watching the three kreenit through her scope.  “I’m going to kill it.”

There was a long moment
of silence, then Theo whispered, “What?”

Rat glanced over at him
and lifted a brow.

Theo swallowed.  “You can
do that?  Seriously?”

Rat grunted.  “Max?”

“
There is a vulnerable
sexual nerve center at the back of both a kreenit and its close evolutionary
counterpart the Dhasha’s skull,
” Max informed the men calmly.  “
While
the Dhasha have recognized this as a biological weakness and generally have
their Takki remove the pleasure center on males during early infancy, the
kreenit, lacking the intelligence and resources of their ancient food supply,
do not have that luxury.
”

“Wait,” Theo said. 
“You’re gonna just…shoot it?  That’s not possible.”

“Those guys in the HSG
said that their creepy leader shot one,” Bobby informed his brother.  “Like
just walked up to it and blew its head off.”

Rat snorted.  “It’s not
that easy.”

“Told you,” Theo said.

“I don’t know,” Bobby
said, sounding unconvinced.  “A lot of the guys I talked to had the same
freakin’ story.  The guy’s like some sort of savant.”

Rat, who didn’t recognize
the Earth word, frowned at Bobby and said, “A what?”

“Savant,” Bobby repeated. 
“Like a prodigy.  Someone really good at something.  Except…”  He frowned a
little.  “He’s good at
everything
.”

“And he just walked up to
a kreenit and blew its head off,” Rat said, unconvinced.  “With what?”

“Uh.  The way they tell
it, an AK-47,” Bobby replied.

Rat laughed.  When she
ran out of breath, she paused, took several deep lungfuls of air, then laughed
again.  Then she stopped suddenly and gave Bobby a flat look.  “No.”

“Told you,” Theo
chuckled.

Bobby was flushing.  “I
dunno, man.  You guys never
saw
this guy.  He was crazy smart.  A lot
like those psychopath aliens that stir up so much shit in Congress.  What do
they call them?  Whi-yte?”

“Huouyt,” Rat said
distractedly, already dismissing reports of the man’s mythical intelligence. 
She had
dealt
with Huouyt.  Nothing Earth had to offer could compare to
a Huouyt.  Nothing.

Movement on a ridgeline
caught her attention.  Down in the valley below, a big group of gun-toting men
were cresting a hill, oblivious to the kreenit on the other side.  Rat’s
attention sharpened.  “Soot, look at that.”

“Man, those are Demons,”
Bobby said, peering at the group through his binoculars.  “They got the armband
and everything.”

“They don’t see the
kreenit,” Theo said.  “Gonna walk right into it.”

Which would have been
fine for Rat except they were escorting a group of what looked like two or
three hundred men, women, and children in padlocks and choke-chains toward the
hidden valley containing the annihilated orchard and former death-camp.

“Aw crap,” Bobby said softly. 
“There’s kids in there.”

“I can’t watch this
shit,” Theo said, looking away.

“Max,” Rat said, “how
many bad guys with guns?”

“
There are two hundred
and eighty possible targets, Mistress,
” Max said.  “
Fifty-six of them
are carrying weapons.
”

“Strike the non-weapon
carriers from the queue,” Rat said, irritated.  “I already told you.  A
permanent
no-kill order is in effect for all non-combatants.”

“
As you command,
Mistress,
” Max replied, sounding not the least bit contrite.

Rat narrowed her eyes,
deciding to have a talk with her Rodemax later, once she took care of the
current problem.  Down in the valley, the group of Demons had hesitated and
were staring at the fat, sixteen-rod kreenit stretched out in the sun in what
remained of the apple orchard.  It was facing away from them, its huge rainbow
sides rising and falling in the sun as it napped.

Unsurprisingly, once they
caught sight of the kreenit, they started backing up, leaving their captives
behind as an offering.  Then, as Rat watched, one of the Demons shot several of
the last prisoners on the chains in the head.  The men and women went down,
bleeding and twitching on the end of their fellows’ ropes.

“You see what they’re
doing?” Bobby demanded.  “Those disgusting ailos!”

“Yeah, I see it,” Rat said
grimly.  Already, the kreenit was starting to wake, drawn by the terrified
whimpers of the remaining captives.  Rat raised her Rodemax.  “Max?” she said.

“
Yes, Mistress?
” 
Max sounded almost…eager.

“Respond in kind,” Rat
said.  “Feet, if you can get them.”  She began painting targets and squeezing
the trigger.

And Max, the gleeful
sadist he was, did exactly as she asked.  Down in the valley below, Demons
began to fall in swaths, screaming and clutching their legs.

The kreenit, who had been
lazily lumbering toward the whimpering captives, tightened its scales and
sprang into a run, its predator instincts triggered by the Demons’ screams. 
Those men and women that broke from the others and ran, Rat picked off with
Max’s help, until the fifty-six gunmen were dead or dying, acting as very
enticing distractions for the sixteen-rod kreenit.

As it was distracted with
squirming new meat, Rat found the back of the kreenit’s head through the scope,
sighting in on the sexual gland between the horns as the kreenit tore helpless,
screaming men in half.  She pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Rat blinked and checked
Max’s charge status.  The chamber was hot, as it always was.  A perpetual,
self-contained power source capable of lighting up a Jahul carrier.  Thinking it
was a fluke, she pulled the trigger again.

Below, the kreenit
continued to shred terrified gunmen unobstructed, blood and gore painting the
mountainside as it feasted.  She could hear their death-screams even from over
a mile distant.  It was then that Rat realized what was happening.

Max was watching them
die. 
Enjoying
it.

“Max!” she snapped.  “
Fire
.”

Her Rodemax sizzled to
life and fired six times, so quickly she had trouble counting the shots.  All
six landed true, hitting the huge beast squarely between the horns.  The
gigantic beast went down in a pile, crushing the unfortunate Humans caught
underneath it.

Disgusted, Rat slammed
her Rodemax into Theo’s hands.  “Watch my back.  I’m going down there to kill
it.  It gets up, Max knows what to do.”

“
You mean you’re not
going to have me make the kill, Mistress
?” Max demanded.

“You,” Rat snapped, “are
cooling your heels for a while, you goddamn psychopathic machine.”  As Theo and
Bobby blinked at her in confusion, Rat grabbed her arsenal of confiscated weaponry
and threw it over her shoulder.  To the brothers, she said, “Just keep him
trained on the kreenit.  I’ll be back in an hour or two.”  Then she took off
down the hill at a jog.

The second and third shot
that Rat needed to keep the kreenit down long enough for her to reach the beast
never came.  By the time she had gotten within range, it had levered itself
back to its feet, shook itself dazedly, and went back to ripping wounded men
apart.

Scowling, Rat turned to
look at the ridge over her shoulder, wondering how they could have screwed up
such simple instructions.  She could barely see the two men on the ridge, just
shapeless lumps of desert-colored gear.  The Rodemax, however, was easy to
see.  All black, it stood out amongst the shrubbery.  The fools hadn’t even
bothered to cover it with brush.

“Damn it,” Rat muttered,
pulling out a military-grade plasma rifle. 
Nothing
she had would come
close to the power or accuracy of her Rodemax, but at that point in her life,
she was willing to adjust her own windage and magnetics in order to have a
weapon that did what it was told.

It took her longer to get
a bead on the kreenit, but by the time she did, Rat was pissed.  The Rodemax
hadn’t fired, not
once
, in ten minutes of wholesale slaughter, and the
kreenit had moved to the bound captives before Rat got another chance at the
back of its head.  This time, when she hit it and it went down, she rushed
forward out of the trees, pulled her knife, and started working a hole into its
chest.  She was leveling her rifle into the bleeding purple flesh, about to
pull the trigger, when she felt a stab of that odd warning instinct hit her gut
hard enough to drive her into a sideways roll.

A moment later, the
kreenit’s chest exploded in a blast of high-grade plasma.  Right where Rat had
been standing.

“Max, you mother-twining
ashsoul!” Rat shrieked, getting to her feet.  On the hill, the two men still
had the Rodemax pointed her way.

She felt her shoulders
tighten like someone was shoving a needle through it, the odd tug nagging at
her gut again, that sensation that she was about to face a choice that would
either mean her life or death.

Knowing what lay on the
other end of that hillock, Rat chose life.  She dove out of the way just as
another blast hit the ground where she’d been standing, aimed at her guts.

“Soot!” Rat snapped,
snagging up her gear and hitting the thicker brush as quickly as she could. 
She kept to the pines and orchards, doing a big circle to get behind the
ashers, praying the backstabbing sooters weren’t watching their backs.  Higher
up in the valley, she saw a brief flash from the crest where she had left Max
with the two young men.  Behind her, she heard the sizzling wet burbs of plasma
dissolving the land behind her.

Praying for mercy of the
Mothers, Rat ducked her head and ran for all she was worth.

By the time she had
circled around and reached the hilltop again, it was dark.  Rat, through virtue
of her augmented eyes, could see the two men still lying on their stomachs,
still watching the valley where Rat had disappeared.  She pulled a pistol from
her belt and leveled it on the back of Theo’s head, fully intending to send him
back to whatever unforgiving hell he had come from.

“
If you’re aiming that
at me, Mistress, I suggest you reconsider.
”