Forging Zero (4 page)

“We
can fix that.”
  Tril raised his gun, aiming at
Joe’s leg.  The other aliens grunted with laughter as Joe hopped out of the way
in a panic.

“Commander
Tril.”
  The warning in the pale, deeply-scarred
alien’s tone was clear.

Tril
immediately tucked the little black gun under his belt and said to Joe,
“Lower
yourself to the ground and place your arms behind your back.”

 “No.” 
Joe’s heart was hammering like gunfire against his ribs.  He desperately
scanned the hall behind them, trying to judge whether or not he could make it
past their barricade of bodies before they shot him.

Commander
Tril stepped closer to Joe and held both four-fingered tentacles spread wide,
narrowing his escape route.  On either side of him, his friends were also
moving forward, ready to surround Joe.  They moved slowly, with no sudden
movements, like horse trainers trying to calm their animals.

“I said
back off!” Joe screamed.  He backed up two feet, until he ran out of hallway. 
The aliens laughed again and kept coming. 

“Look
at it,”
Tril said. 
“It’s as terrified as a
Takki.”

Joe
ducked and rammed himself into the speaker, intending to knock him over and
keep on going.  Instead, like a five-hundred-pound lineman, Commander Tril
never budged.  He garbled a curse and wrapped stinging tentacles around one of
Joe’s arms, tightening them like miniature pythons, depressing the muscle and
making the fingers in that hand instantly numb.  Joe gasped and tried to jerk
away, but the alien remained rooted in place, watching Joe writhe with its sticky
brown eyes narrowed in a satisfaction that did not need to be translated.

With
his free hand, Joe yanked the little black gun out of his aggressor’s belt. 
The tentacles strangling his arm loosened suddenly and Joe wrenched himself
free.  He had the gun in both hands and was desperately trying to figure out
how to fire it when an alien grabbed his throat from behind.

The gun
went off, an echoing
burp
that made every alien in the hall jump.

The
glowing blue shot hit the scarred alien in the neck, dissolving one of the
writhing tentacles that dangled from either side of its head.  With a roar of
rage, an alien wrapped its snakelike arm around Joe’s neck, tightened its
stinging grasp, and shook him like a toy.  Joe dropped the gun, the edges of
his vision going black.

“The
burning furg shot Kihgl!”

The
alien holding Joe by the throat wrenched him forward and, between the grip on
his throat and his forward momentum, almost snapped Joe’s neck.  Joe dropped to
one knee, his lungs burning for air, his vision closing to tiny, blurred
windows. Other aliens converged on him, grasping his arms, pinning him down.

All too
quickly, Joe’s world shrank to an inch of the glossy black floor under his
face, then faded to total darkness.

Then,
out of the void, he heard the scarred one speak. 
“Stop, you Takki!  It was
just a hahkta.  Give the ignorant creature some air.” 

The
stinging tentacle around Joe’s throat loosened just enough to allow him to
breathe.  Joe gasped in a desperate lungful of air, coughing in frantic, whooping
breaths as his vision slowly started to come back into focus. 

When
his mind began to register shapes again, the alien he’d shot was staring down
at him, his sticky brown gaze unreadable.  A clear, brownish liquid was
dripping from the dissolved tentacle on the side of his head, landing in little
spatters on Joe’s jeans, but Joe couldn’t have moved if he’d tried.  The three
aliens holding him down seemed bent on trying to pull him apart, and the bones
in Joe’s arms were screaming, on the verge of snapping from the pressure.  Joe
closed his eyes and felt the welling of a sob in his chest.  He struggled
against it, forcing it back down.  He wasn’t gonna cry.  Not for them.

“Commander
Tril, until we kill him, fit him with a modifier.  I don’t want to have to
chase the asher down again.”

The
grip on Joe’s arm released suddenly.

Then
the alien behind him was yanking him onto his back, holding him down as
Commander Tril fitted a bluish band around his ankle.  Once it was secured,
they all released him at once.

Panicked,
confused, Joe dove away from them and ran. 

He was
maybe fifty feet down the hall when, all at once, his body stopped responding. 
Streaks of pain lanced up from his ankle, into his stomach, chest, and eyes,
balling him up, emptying his lungs in a scream.  He fell into an awkward,
shrieking tumble on the floor, unable to think or feel anything but the awful
pain consuming him from the inside out.

Then,
as quickly as it had started, the pain was gone.  Joe felt a warm wetness on
his stomach and realized he had vomited bile and algae-flavored water down his
chest.  He panted on his back, staring up at the domed scarlet light above him
as he gripped the sticky black floor beneath him with both trembling hands.

The
pale, scarred alien he’d shot came into view as he lay there, panting.  For a
long moment, they just stared at each other.

“Are
you finished?”
the scarred alien finally asked. 
In his tentacled hand, he held a small device made of the same bluish metal as
the band around Joe’s ankle.

Joe shuddered
and turned away, the pain still raw in his mind.  He spat out the leftover bile
that had accumulated in the back of his throat, shuddering.  He wanted to run,
but now he was terrified to actually do so.

As soon
as he realized that, he stiffened.

Dad
would fight them,
Joe thought. 
Dad wouldn’t
give in.  He wouldn’t just lay here.
  Still, though, he couldn’t force
himself to make his muscles move, knowing the torment would come again.

“There’s
no shame in it, Human.  There’s nowhere for you to go.”
 Kihgl’s voice held a note of kindness to it, one that made Joe
sick.

Unable
to hold still for the alien’s pity, Joe lunged to his feet and ran again.

This
time, he only got a couple yards before he tumbled back to the floor, agony
tearing through his body in relentless, unending waves.  Somewhere in the
thrashing that followed, his bladder loosened and he peed himself.  He hurt
like his whole body was being thrown into a furnace, inside and out, and every
breath was a nightmare he wished would end him.  All he wanted, at that point,
was to die. 

The
aliens left him in pain longer this time.  By the time he could finally breathe
without crying, Joe lay there, panting, as the aliens casually strolled up to
him, his entire body still shaking with the aftereffects.

Realizing
he wasn’t lying in a pool of blood and guts, and that the pain wasn’t actually
hurting him, Joe shakily got back to his feet.

Someday
these assholes are gonna wish they’d killed me
, he
thought, shaking as he stared them down.

Commander
Tril was laughing again. 
“Think the furgling sooter will try for three?”

Joe
straightened his spine and stared back into the orange-streaked Ooreiki’s
sticky brown eyes. 
You’re dead,
he thought. 
Soon as I figure out
how to use that gun.  You’re dead.
  When Kihgl saw he wasn’t going to run a
third time, the scarred Ooreiki wrenched his arms behind his back and led him
down the hall.  They came to a mass of children milling in the corridor with
their alien guardians, where Kihgl and his companions shoved Joe into the
group, switched off their translators and said a few words in rattling,
grunting Ooreiki, then abruptly left.

Both
aliens and children gave Joe questioning looks. He could feel the aliens’ gazes
settling on the metal band around his ankle and he reddened. 

I’m
gonna get back home.  As soon as they give me the chance.

This
time, Joe gave no resistance as they herded them down another tubular black
hall and into an enormous room with blinding white lights.  His eyes were no
longer aching with the strain of trying to distinguish shapes and shadows, but
his skin began to crawl when he got a good look at the ship in this new light. 
Every surface seemed alive with glossy liquid energy.  For the first time, he
realized that the ship surfaces didn’t look like stone or metal or glass or
anything else Joe had ever seen.  With the way the gloss seemed to ebb and flow
in ebony waves, it almost looked like it was
breathing
.  Seeing that,
Joe had to fight down a moment of panic, suddenly wondering if he were trapped
in the belly of a space-going monster.

It’s
not alive
, he had to tell himself. 
It can’t
be.
  Besides, he’d seen the outsides of their sleek black ships.  They were
ships
.

Still,
watching the gloss shift in waves, like wind against a field of grain, Joe
started to back towards the far wall, his hair standing on end.

The
other kids didn’t seem to notice.  They were more interested in clinging to
each other and running from the couple dozen aliens that were herding them
around like cattle.  Within minutes, the aliens had pushed hundreds—if not
thousands
—of
children into the room, their fearful voices rising in tides, drowning out all
other sound. 

Joe
reached down and tugged on the bluish band around his ankle in increasing
panic.  Like the doors that melted into walls, it was seamless—a paper-thin
ring that had no give whatsoever.  He wrenched on it in frustration, but
eventually gave up and went to hide his wet crotch in a corner, plotting how he
was going to kill his kidnappers for making him pee himself in front of
thousands of kids.

About
an hour passed as more and more kids were added to the panicked mass.  The
aliens packed them into one half of the room until there was barely space to
breathe, let alone move, before dozens more aliens began pouring inside and a
fearful hush descended on the kids.  Joe, taller than anyone else in the room
by almost a head, was able to see the aliens line up in nine rows against the
opposite wall.  He recognized the group of five that had chased him down and
caught the pale, scarred one’s eyes, the one called Kihgl.

The
pale alien and eight others moved forward and began sorting the kids like
captains on a playground team, barking orders to each other in their harsh,
guttural language while other Ooreiki hurried to obey.  Joe felt a twinge of
fear when he realized the aliens had turned off their translators.  He ducked
low and moved as far to the back of the group as he could, his gut instincts
telling him that, whatever was about to happen, it was not good.

Eventually,
the nine ‘captains’ had all but Joe and a few others standing in groups behind
them.  Joe noticed with growing concern that, aside from himself, the
remainders all looked weak or sickly in some way.  One of the kids had an angry
red gash in his leg that ran from his knee to the base of his calf, laying open
a deep section of muscle and skin tissue.  A wound from the hellish days of the
Draft.  The kid had long ago given up on standing on it and instead, the boy
sat on the floor, his red-rimmed eyes watching the aliens nervously.

Joe’s
breath caught when he recognized him.  Little Harry Simpson.  He’d seen him a
dozen times a week, riding his tricycle out in the road at the end of his
subdivision.  The boy always leaned on the fence when Joe, Sam, and their dad
played football in the front yard, sucking down a Freeze-Pop, acting as the ref
when they had a foul.

Now
Harry looked like a skeleton with skin.  The little fingers that had offered
Joe popsicles were now bony protrusions bunched in his shorts as he fought off
pain and fever.  He had dark hollows under his eyes and his cheeks were wet
from crying.

Seeing
the discolored pus oozing from Harry’s wound, Joe knew he needed to go to a
hospital.  Joe had read about wounds festering.  If he didn’t get help, Harry
was going to die. 

Joe
sucked in a breath as an alien with orange features stepped toward them.  The
last thing he wanted was to be chosen by Commander Tril.  Already, Joe’s arm
was turning into a huge purple bruise where Tril had held him down. 

Tril
walked up to Harry and gestured at him, looking back at his alien companions as
he spoke in his alien tongue.  None of them moved.  Tril gestured again and
Harry looked up at him with hopeful, pain-brightened eyes. 

Why
isn’t Tril taking him back with him?
Joe wondered,
dread beginning to form a cold knot in his gut.

Commander
Tril activated the translation device hanging his neck and turned to speak to
the entire gathering. 

“The
battalion leaders have made their decision.  Twice I requested a place for this
one, and twice I was denied.  No Congressional soldier will take him into his
fold.  Thus, he has no place in the Army.”

The
alien pulled his gun from his belt and shot Harry in the face.   

For a
long moment, Joe was too shocked to move.  Then a primal yell erupted from the
pit of his gut and he jumped to his feet.  Heart hammering in terror, he began
backing away from the scene.