Zero's Return (87 page)

“I s…sw…swe…”  The man
couldn’t seem to get the word past his chattering jaw and he swallowed again,
tears streaming down his face.

“Good,” Slade replied
before he could start stuttering again.  “Now go clean yourself up in that
stream you saw, then report to Tyson for your gun.”

Klyde’s eyes went wide. 
“You’re giving me back my gun?” he whispered in disbelief.

“You are still a priest
of the Society,” Slade said simply.  “This debacle has prolonged your promotion
to cleric, but in time, you might still earn it.”

The relief in the man’s
face was so intense that Slade was afraid the man might attempt to hug him,
piss-soaked pants and all.  He was relieved when Klyde simply bowed as deeply
as he could go and ran off to the north, doubtless to take clean pants from a
member of the flock.

“You went easy on him,”
Tyson told him after Klyde was out of sight.  “If it were me, I’d have killed
the bastard.”

“I think that one
might’ve actually deserved to get eaten,” Rat said. 

Slade gave her an
irritated look.  “Well, I was perfectly willing.”

“Then again,” Rat said,
casting his camp a disgusted look, “if it were me, I probably would’ve already
killed most of the guys here.”  Her eyes stopped on Tyson and she looked him up
and down, then made a grunt of what almost sounded like approval.  “You play
cards?”

“What kind?” Tyson asked,
showing no fear at the Congie’s perusal.

“Jahul Sixty-Six or
Takki-Toe.”

Tyson cocked his head
slightly.  “I play spades.”

“Don’t play spades with
him,” Slade said.  “You’ll lose.”

But Rat said, “You’ll
have to teach me to play spades so I can kick your ass.”

“You’re on, Congie.”

Slade ignored them and
started to follow Klyde’s path up the slope.  He reached the crest and searched
the clusters of people for Klyde’s face.  He located his wayward priest running
up to the group furthest from any of the others, away from all law enforcement.

Tyson and Rat followed
him to the ridge, talking about spades.  When Tyson saw what Slade was looking
at, he grimaced.  “So what are we gonna do about him, seriously?” Tyson asked,
following the man’s progress with his Aryan blue eyes.  “I mean, he’s a
despicable shit in the first place if he’d just start shooting at people for
the hell of it, like they’re target practice or something.”

“Some people need to be
target practice,” Rat said.  She was scowling out over the field at Klyde.

Indeed, the man slowed at
the last cluster of HSG followers.  As they watched, he shoved a gray-haired
man to the ground and started kicking him.

Narrowing her eyes, Rat
said, “Excuse me.”  Shoving her rifle at Slade, she started off down the hill.

“A
snare
?” Tyson
demanded, as the Congie broke into an easy jog toward the scene.

“Among other things,”
Slade said distractedly.

“
What
other
things?”

Before Slade could
answer, Rat smoothly stepped between Klyde and the bleeding old man on the
ground, then twisted and delivered an alien-kung-fu kick to the side of Klyde’s
balding head that made Slade’s own head ache in recognition.

And, apparently, without
a towel to shield his brain, it really
would
have killed Slade.  He
blinked when the man collapsed like a rag doll and didn’t get back up.  In the
meantime, Rat bent and started helping the old man back to his feet.

“I like her,” Tyson said.

Slade felt himself grin,
despite himself.  “She’s warming my bed tonight.”

Tyson peered at him. 
“Why?”  As if Slade had just told him the Congie would be sharing bedspace with
an undead, brain-eating leper.

Rat finished righting the
old man, then turned and started back towards them, a swath of flock quickly
getting out of her way on both sides.  Seeing the tides part before her,
Slade’s grin just widened.  “Because it’s Tuesday.”

CHAPTER 29 – Wednesday

Slade woke with a groan,
his cheek pressed in a puddle of slobber on his pillow.  Sex. 
Good
sex.  He’d had it. 
Lots
of it, unless he was completely delirious—or
he’d been dreaming.  But he didn’t think he’d been dreaming because Mr. Woodrow
was back and reporting for duty.

Blearily, Slade rolled
over to check on the Congie, then grunted in surprise when he found her side of
the bed empty.

It was then that he heard
the distinctive
shink
,
shink
,
shink
of a whetstone being
pulled across a blade.

“Good morning, slave.”

Slade swallowed. 
Nervously, he rolled back over to see her sitting in a fold-out canvas
camp-chair, fully dressed in her ominous black gear.  “Uh.  Morning.”

She continued to hone her
wicked Congie blade.  “Sleep well?”  Hanging from the arm of her chair, Slade
realized, was a purple thong.

Slade’s eyes widened and
he tried to think back to whether he had done anything untoward the night
before.  There had been a little rope, but as far as he could remember, she’d
enjoyed herself.  A lot.  “Uh…”

Her gray-green eyes
sharpened and the whetstone stopped moving.  “I asked you a question.”

“Yes,” Slade managed.

She gave him a lingering,
dangerous look and went back to sharpening.  “Tell me about this experiment
that fucked up your hair.  I want to know everything you know.” 

Slade frowned.  “Why?”

She lifted a perfect,
delicate brow and peered at him over eleven inches of monomolecular death.

Slade started to talk.

When he finished, she
said, “We’re not going to Nebraska.  You’re taking me south to look for this
lab.”

Slade peered at her. 
“What the hell do you care about those experiments?  Congress wiped them all
out.”

She gave him a long,
deadly look and said, “Are you questioning me on a Wednesday?”

Eying the thong, Slade
said, “No, Ma’am.”

“You can start by cooking
me breakfast,” Rat said, examining her knife in the hazy dawn light filtering
through the thin tent walls.  “Then you will gather your flock and tell them
that there will be no slaving on Wednesdays through Mondays.  Anyone who has
taken a slave by force shall release them on those days.” 

Slade frowned.  “Except
you.”

She gave him pleasant
smile over her blade.  “You surrendered in ka-par.”

He had
known
that
was going to come back and bite him in the ass.  Groaning, Slade slumped back
against the pillow and stared at the ceiling.  “I can’t tell them they can only
have slaves on Tuesdays.”

“If you don’t, and I
catch anyone slaving on my days, I will release their captives of their bondage
and give their former slaves guns.”

Yeah,
that
wouldn’t go over well.  “I mean,” Slade muttered, “I can’t tell them only
Wednesday to Monday.  They’ll think I’m insane.”

“You are insane.”

Slade sat up and scowled
at her.  “Only a little!” he objected.

She raised a delicate
eyebrow at him.

Slade groaned, deeply. 
“So what, I just tell all my priests there’s no real benefit to being a priest
anymore?”

“Further,” Rat said, “you
will not be calling them ‘priests’ and ‘clerics’ and your ‘flock’ anymore. 
It’s blasphemous.”

Slade narrowed his eyes. 
“On Wednesdays to Mondays.”

She just smiled at him.

“I don’t believe in God,”
Slade growled.  “So there’s nothing to blaspheme.”

“Oh really?” Rat asked. 
“Have you ever visited an Ooreiki temple, Sam?  Walked the halls of the dead?”

“Holographs,” Slade said
dismissively.  “They do it with holographs.”

She gave him a look that
told him what he had just said was so utterly stupid it did not deserve a
response.  Slade reddened.  “They’re not holographs?”

“No.”

“So you want me to free
the slaves
and
change the very makeup of my Society?” Slade demanded. 
“That’s asking a lot.”

“Further,” Rat said, “you
will institute a no-sex-without-consent rule, starting today.  Those who
violate it will lose their dicks.”

And, he realized, she was
utterly serious.  Slade narrowed his eyes at her, because that was just
sexist.  “And the
females
who violate it?”

“Ka-par doesn’t count,”
Rat said.

He felt his eyes go wide
and he swallowed, hard.  And Willy, loveable little bastard that he was, ate it
up, making it once again almost impossible to think through the sudden lack of
blood supply.  “Uh.”

“I’ve also noticed,” Rat
said, “that you have no women carrying guns.  Why is that, Sam?”

Slade made a nervous
sound.  It had generally been agreed upon by the founding members of his
society that women would be slaves.  He had, after all, been trying to form a
perfect society.

The Congie continued to
give him a cold gray-green stare.

“We can give them guns,”
Sam managed.

“Good.  I have some
picked out.  I also have some males picked out who will lose their gun
privileges or they will disappear.  Are we clear?”

Slade made a face. 
“Crystal.”

“And last…”  Rat slipped
the tip of her wicked blade through the thong and tossed it at him.  “Put that
on.  It’ll accent your eyes.”

Slade snorted.  He
flipped it back at her and crossed his arms over his chest.  “Make me.”

He realized too late that
that was the wrong thing to say to a Congie, because she did, in fact, make him.

Afterwards, still
red-faced and breathing hard, she made him do more sit-ups than Sam had done in
his entire life, followed by enough push-ups to make his arms fall off.  After
that, she took him jogging in the thong, then, after Sam could barely struggle
back up the hill to the fire, made Sam cook breakfast in it.  Sam wasn’t sure
if it was his creepy eyes, the fact he’d just killed a couple hundred armed men
with a lighter, or the utterly straight-faced, gun-toting Congie, but nobody so
much as mentioned it to him that he was making breakfast in a purple thong.

That both delighted and
dismayed him.  Delighted, because it meant he was more or less untouchable. 
Dismayed, because it meant they didn’t think it was out of place enough to
mention.  Even Tyson just raised his thick blond brow and went back to what he
was doing.  The Congie, for her part, sat on a log and watched, cleaning her
gun, looking absolutely unfazed by what had to have been a five-mile run. 

Things started getting
tricky, however, when he explained the Congie’s demands to Tyson.

“So let me get this
straight,” Tyson growled.  “We’re not only
not
going to Nebraska, but
women are free, there are no more slaves, no more rape, and you’re changing the
name of the Society to the Survivor’s Guild.”

“You forgot ‘Taking the
guns away from the assholes,’” Rat noted.

Tyson gave her nod of
acknowledgement.  “And you’re taking the guns away from the assholes.  Have you
found your mind?”

Slade, who had expecting
Tyson to say, ‘Have you
lost
your mind,’ had to do a double-take when it
sounded funny.  “Excuse me?”

“Found it.  As in, the
opposite of lost.”  Tyson peered at him like he was trying to look into Slade’s
formidable brain.  “You know, like you collected some of your missing marbles. 
Came back from around the bend.  Got back
on
your rocker.”

“Tightened a few screws,”
the Congie added helpfully.

“Yeah,” Tyson said,
gesturing at Rat gratefully.  “That.”

Slade scowled at them
both.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Tyson met his scowl in silence
for several moments, then his eyes slid pointedly down to his crotch, which was
even then covered in vivid purple spandex.  Slade
refused
to look. 
“That was not my fault.”

His second gave him a
flat look.  “My point is, you ask me, you should’ve done it a long time ago. 
What changed?”

Across the fire, the
Congie started to loudly sharpen her knife once more.

Watching her, Slade said,
“One could say that I had a…divine…awakening.” 

“Divine, huh?”  Tyson
gave him a flat look.  His gaze flickered towards the Congie and back.  “How
divine?”

“I was…stirred…to action,
filled with a dizzying new awareness I never thought I’d have.”

Tyson gave him a flat
look.  “You got your rocks off.”

“Oh indeed,” Slade said,
delighted.  “More than once!”  He sobered instantly at the way the man with the
gun’s eyes narrowed.  His second stared at him so long that Slade started
stirring the oatmeal pot to keep from fidgeting. 

Finally, Tyson said, “If
it was anyone else who just smiled and told me that he’d made socio-economic
decisions for an entire society based off a recent oiling of his pleasure
piston, I would pull out my gun, shoot him in the head, and leave him for the
crows to find.”  He cocked his head at Slade.  “But for you, I somehow think
it’s an improvement.”

Slade felt his face
heat.  “We need to call everyone together, spread the news, and head south.”

Tyson grunted and got to
his feet.  “The Congie and I are gonna go disarm a few folks first.  You stay
here and…” he glanced back down at Slade’s crotch, “…cook.”  Without another
word, his second grabbed his gun, turned, and started down the hill.

“I’m an
excellent
cook!” Slade shouted at his broad back.  Then, muttering under his breath,
“Bastard.”

Rat had stopped beside
the fire, her wicked blade sheathed and her gun slung over her shoulder.  She
was grinning at him. 

“What?” Slade demanded,
his mood deteriorating.

“Day One,” Rat said. 
Then she went to follow Tyson down the hill.