Zero's Return (52 page)

As an atheist, Slade did
not believe in God, and he’d made sure every one of his followers knew it.  The
only higher power he answered to was himself, and thus, God’s word was Slade’s
word, and Slade’s word was that they needed some damn steak, and the Great
Plains had steak.

Tyson still disagreed
with Slade’s decision to name the group the Harmonious Society of God, that he
was crazy to call it that.  Slade tended to agree—after thirteen months of
fervent lectures and heartfelt sermons, with Slade moonlighting as a lowly,
forgotten convict at New Basil after being Earth’s Most Wanted criminal for
most of his life, Slade was pretty sure the shock had knocked a few of his
bolts loose.  He wasn’t, however, sure which ones they were, so there was no
use in hanging around trying to figure out where they had fallen.  He had more important
things to think about than the name of his group, and it was too late to change
it now.

Besides, if any of his
five hundred followers had any objections about the name of their tribe, not
one had mentioned it.  Sure, that might be due to the fact that he kept them
under armed guard and served the dissidents up to the rest of the group, but he
liked to believe that it was because he had picked a good name on the first
try.

Slade felt another
headache coming on and quickly distracted himself with a piece of gum.  Gum had
become his constant companion.  On the way up the three-ninety-five, they had
stopped in Independence, which had basically been what had kept them alive
after their horrendous trek through King’s Canyon National Park.  While the
others went looking for beds, captives, and booze, Slade had found three cases
of sugar-free Bubble Manium in the back of a looted Gray’s Grocery.  All three
were ‘Fruit Variety,’ with fifty packages to a case.  Each package consisted of
six smaller packages, one each of Watermelon, Strawberry, Banana, Grape, Sour
Apple, and Original.  Even though it was a ‘fruit variety,’ they had to stick
Original in there.  Bastards.

That meant he was down to
four thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine pieces of gum, if he included the
piece in his mouth.  He used them sparingly, and shared them with no one. 
Still, if he only limited himself to one piece a day, which he found very hard
to adhere to, he would run out in eleven years and two hundred and seventy-four
days.  Or, if it was stipulated that a month contained thirty days, he would be
out of gum in one hundred and forty-two months and twenty-nine days.  Almost
exactly one hundred and forty-three months.  But, if he chewed one an hour,
which was closer to his current average, he would run out of gum in one hundred
seventy-eight days, seventeen hours.

Slade dreaded the day he
would run out of gum.  After his initial gum-chewing craze upon discovering the
cases of Bubble Manium, he had cut back drastically, aware that some day in the
future, he would no longer have gum to relieve his constant headaches.  He
really
wasn’t looking forward to that, as it would mean he would be alone with the
Human equivalent of lobotomized orangutans still stuck in the shit-flinging
Stone Age.

“Slade,” Tyson said,
interrupting his thoughts like a hippo in a Fabergé museum, “we have a
problem.”

Slade looked up from his
book of survival techniques and frowned at his second-in-command.  “Another
dissenter?”

“No,” Tyson said, “Food. 
We’re out again.”  His beefy new lackey was smart—comparatively—built like a
linebacker, and well over six feet.  He looked like the perfect Nazi, with
bright blue eyes, platinum blond hair, and a chiseled, rectangular face with a
clean-shaven jaw line that jutted out like it had been hewn from granite.  He
even had a cleft in his chin.

Stupid chin-cleft.  Slade
had always wanted one of those.  Instead, his somewhat weak chin had gotten
covered in a white fuzz that came in spotty patches that hurt to shave
and…wriggled…when he wasn’t paying attention.

Disgusted, Slade again
questioned his wisdom in downing that Congie brew, over thirty years ago.  It
had certainly…humbled…him over the years.  Yeah, that was the word. 
‘Humbled.’  Something about having a perpetually limp dick really did that to a
guy.  Tyson, on the other hand, probably got laid every night.  More than a
little bitter, Slade wondered when was the last time Tyson had had sex.  He
wondered if his Second would listen to him if he told him to stop.

Probably not.  The
fucker.

In the right light, Slade
was also blond…ish…though he had eyes the color of what he liked to think of as
‘ball lightning.’  They were almost purple, but so bright that they looked like
they were sizzling.  Almost white.  Purple-blue-white.  His fuzzy mass of hair
was also an odd snowy color, and bled like a stuck pig when he cut it.  Damn
those genetic experiments.  Added to the natural, catlike grace of his huge
frame—thank you, Dad—it was easy for him to fit the profile of what his followers
thought to be one of the altered humans that had pissed Congress off so badly. 
Behind his back, they delightfully now called him a ‘mutie’ and talked about
how he could read people’s minds and levitate objects, further adding to his
mystique.  Perfect.

Not that Slade could read
minds—he was just incredibly perceptive when it came to…well, anything.  But
people, especially, were ridiculously easy to read.  They always gave away
something about their thoughts by the way they held themselves, the way their faces
twitched or didn’t twitch, the way they fidgeted, the way they coughed or
smiled or winced, and the longer Slade used those hints and pretended to read
their every thought, the more thoroughly convinced the poddites became that he
could do it. 

Truth was, Slade had been
using these cues all of his life, mostly in the process of moving another man’s
credits into his own account.  He had been very good at what he did, and had
been a very wealthy man up until they caught him—again, and under an alias—and
gave him the option of going to a federal pen for life or spend a few years at
one of the various religious brainwashing centers. 

Slade had chosen New
Basil Harmonious over the longer term at the pen because he knew for a fact
that he couldn’t be brainwashed.  One of his personality quirks that he had
discovered after breaking into a top-secret Congie computer back in his teenage
years, while looking for ways to recall his brother.  The underwitted alien
apes had caught him and done a thorough brain-cleansing, then attempted to
replace his memories with ones they liked better and make him work for them.

Slade, however, despite
all of their ridiculously-pitched voices, fancy machines, and nasty drugs, had
remained perfectly aware of what he had done, and once he escaped their
incompetent clutches, he broke in again and gave himself a permanent,
three-hundred-thousand-turn-dead Corps Director’s pass, which had left the
whole of the Congressional intelligence open to him.

Decades later, after
navigating the colossal, multi-layered, AI-monitored, Huouyt and Bajnan-coded
Congressional systems, hacking Earth’s measly government servers had been like
taking a carrot from a dead rabbit.

Turned out, Earth wasn’t
just researching genetic engineering when Congress caught them red-handed.  It
was also working on a mind-drug that stimulated the cells of the human brain in
such a way to create a Thomas Jefferson, a Nikola Tesla, or a Leonardo da Vinci
in a matter of a few months.  Oh, and it was supposed to bestow immortality
using alien DNA and allow the body to change shape at whim.  What’s not to
like, right?

Slade, who had already
been on par with Tesla—if a highly criminal, hacking-obsessed version of
him—had been bored one afternoon and decided to make himself the first
successful guinea pig.  ‘Successful,’ being the key word, because all the other
guinea-pigs had died in a quivering puddle of flesh and half-formed DNA slurry
the moment they imbibed the moron scientists’ concoction.

So Slade had gotten a
little drunk in his penthouse one night, hadn’t found any porn worth watching,
stared at gyrating bodies until his eyes bled, then gotten a wild hair up his
ass to prove to the government fucktards what they were doing wrong.  His
reasoning?  Shapeshifting could be
fun
!  He spent a couple hours in his
impromptu lab surrounded by old pizza boxes fiddling with their nannite
programming and bumblefucked formulas, then served himself up a cocktail of the
glowing purple concoction.  Cheers. 

Slade had quickly
discovered why it was much more desirable to be the
second
surviving
guinea-pig, rather than the proud first.

In one night, he had lost
all his hair, his eyesight, and his ability to get a hard-on, not to mention
he’d been hit by a sudden, debilitating migraine that still continued to bother
him over thirty years later.  His hair had grown back after a few months, but
had lost all pigmentation and was as frizzy as cotton, hurt like fuck to clip,
and
wriggled
.  His eyesight had taken longer, but when it finally did
start working again, his playboy blue eyes had taken on the look of something
otherworldly, the black of the pupils contrasting so startlingly with the
irises that he wore contacts for the first few years, because it spooked even
him.  And he still hadn’t been able to get it up.  Not once.  In thirty-two
years.

Hello, Fountain of
Youth.  Goodbye, sex.

When neither eye nor hair
changed back to their original color, Slade ditched the contacts and stopped
caring that he looked like a punk rocker from the Dark Ages.  He kept his
unruly, sensitive white locks under control with enough hair gel to drown a
small village and smiled politely when the waiters at fancy restaurants forgot
to write down his order because they were too busy staring.

Unfortunately, his
strange appearance also made him easy to identify when the feds caught up with
him after he escaped the Congies.  Not that the low-rung idiots had the first
clue about the Da Vinci Project, as the human scientists had oh-so-originally
named the genetics stuff, but they had pieced together a few of his other
dealings—a mere shadow of what he had
really
been up to—and charged him
with eleven counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud.  Joy.

Only Slade had known that
there were no conspirators. 
He
was the conspiracy.  His web had
extended to the most powerful, most encrypted businesses, spiriting away as
much as a million credits an hour during his doughnut breaks.  When he was
really
interested, his victims, Huouyt-run multi-planetary Congressional
businesses—because nobody liked the Huouyt—went mysteriously bankrupt, their
assets prudently transferred to one of Slade’s dozens of accounts in any one of
a dozen Bajnan banking planets. 

It was only when the
business pissed him off in one way or another—usually by not contributing
enough to charity, which Slade did religiously—that he went to such extremes,
however.  He had generally kept himself to a barely noticeable, constant flow,
the totals of which had continued to accumulate over the course of his thirteen
months’ imprisonment, ending in a net profit of five billion, six hundred and
thirty-five million credits despite his misfortunate condition of being behind
bars.

At least, that was the
last approximate count before Congress blew Earth a new hole. 

His fortune had
evaporated with the destruction of Earth’s global communications net.  It had
ceased to exist.  All his hours of toil, every wrist-cramp and mind-numbing
minute of cracking code…  All for jack diddly shit.

Sure, the money was still
out there, sitting in those nice, secure Bajnan banks.  But Slade wasn’t gonna
see it again.  Not unless he made himself a better potion, figured out the
shapeshifting thing, and found a way to get the hell off the planet.

Which, all things
considered, he had about the same chance of doing as getting hard, telling
Tyson to bend over, having Tyson
obey
, and taking his muscular bodyguard
up the ass in front of the whole of the Harmonious Society of God.

What a waste.  Slade
hadn’t bothered using his wonderful brain for anything except memorizing
numbers and patterns.  He had spent his entire life learning every minute
detail of state-of-the-art encryption techniques.  His concept of adventure had
been picking a new entrée at one of the three most expensive restaurants on the
planet.

Now he was left wandering
around in the woods with an archaic survival guide, two and a half cases of
gum, and a group of idiots who thought he was a badass Rambo-Xavier cross who
could read their minds whilst mowing down kreenit with a pellet gun.

“Slade?” Tyson asked
again.  “You fuckin’ spacing out again, man?”  He wasn’t timid like most of
Slade’s other lackeys.  Tyson either didn’t believe Slade could read his mind,
or he didn’t care.  Either way, he made for a likeable fellow, since Slade really
did get tired of all the whimpering and funny looks.

“Yeah, food,” Slade said,
frowning.  They were wandering through a patch of overgrown farmland that
looked like it had been growing onions up until the point those big ugly aliens
tore up the farmhouse and ate whoever was inside.

“Maybe another
sacrifice?” Tyson suggested.

Slade waved off the
suggestion.  “Nah.  Not without cause.”  Strangely, after over three months of
near-starvation, cannibalism had lost all of its previous horror.

“We won’t reach the
Plains if we all starve to death before we get there,” Tyson reminded him.

Slade cocked his head at
the man, more than a little impressed.  “Well aren’t
you
a bloodthirsty
son of a bitch.”  He flicked his wrist dismissively.  “Sure, whatever.  Just
make sure it’s a woman.  The males are too important as workers for us to be
eating them.”  He went back to his book, memorizing the way to make a rabbit
snare with just some string, a knife, and a young tree.