Authors: Sara King
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Post-Apocalyptic
Zero's Return
The Legend
of
ZERO:
Zero’s
Return
by
Sara King
Copyright © 2012
All Rights Reserved
Sara King
No part of this work
may be photocopied or otherwise reproduced without express written consent of
the author. For permissions and other requests, email Sara King at
[email protected]
Disclaimer
(a.k.a. If You Don’t
Realize This Is A Work Of Fiction, Please Go Find Something Else To Do)
So you’re about to
read about badasses with plasma pistols, a devastating alien apocalypse, and
people who move stuff with their minds. In case you’re still confused, yes,
this book is a complete work of fiction. Nobody contained within these pages
actually exists. If there are any similarities between the people or places of
The Legend of ZERO
and the people or places of Good Ol’ Planet Earth,
you’ve just gotta trust me. It’s not real, people. Really. Yet.
Also! Unlike in
ZERO1 and ZERO2, this book contains profanity, namely because it deals with the
people of Earth, and people on Earth use profanity, especially people on Earth
involved in the criminal element, or, coincidentally, brilliant-yet-reclusive
Alaskan writers. If you can’t stand profanity, or likewise, if you want to
bitch about it, this probably isn’t the book for you.
You have been warned.
Books in The Legend of ZERO Series:
Listed in
Chronological Order
(because nothing
else really makes sense):
The Moldy Dead (prequel)
Forging Zero
Zero Recall
Zero’s Return
Zero’s Redemption
Zero’s Legacy
Forgotten
Author’s Note
WARNING: Unlike the first two ZERO novels, Zero’s Return is not a
stand-alone. As you know, this book was ‘finished’ about eight months ago.
Despite my valiant attempts to contain it, however, Book 3 ended up being so
overwhelmingly huge in the ‘edit’ (A.K.A. The Perfectionist Obsessive Streak
That Would Never End) that I had to break the story arc into two parts (what is
now Zero’s Return and Zero’s Redemption). To give you an idea of just how
mind-numbingly huge ZERO3 got before I split it, each of these ‘parts’ ended up
being substantially larger than any other novel I’ve ever published.
Generally, this wouldn’t have stopped me from gleefully publishing a novel
bigger than The Stand, but for my own sanity, I’m moving on to Redemption
before I edit Return into the next
Collected Works of Shakespeare
.
For those of you who hung around while I obsessed for months over silly
crap, I really appreciate your patience. And please. Do me a favor. The next
time I say I want to ‘edit’ one of my books, please just haul off and slap me.
The Parasite Publications Glossary
(Because Somebody’s Gotta Tell You This Stuff!)
Character
author
– That rare beast who lets his or her characters tell the story.
(And often run completely wild.)
Character
fiction
– Stories that center around the characters; their thoughts, their
emotions, their actions, and their goals.
Character
sci-fi
– Stories about the future that focus on the characters, rather than
explaining every new theory and technology with the (silly) assumption that we,
as present-day 21
st
centurians, know enough to analyze and predict
the far future with any accuracy whatsoever. I.e. character sci-fi is fun and
entertaining, not your next college Physics textbook.
Parasite
– The Everyday Joe (or Jane) who enjoys crawling inside a character’s head
while reading a book; i.e. someone who enjoys character fiction.
Poddite
– Someone who allows other people to tell them what they like.
Furg
– Generally a poddite who believes the best fiction makes your eyes glaze
over…unless the glazing happens because you stayed up all night reading it and
you can't keep your eyes open the next day. ;)
Chapter 1
– Twelve-A
Chapter 2
– A Human Mistake
Chapter 3
– The Legend of Zero
Chapter 4
– Earth on Trial
Chapter 5
– Rat’s Mission
Chapter 6
– New Basil Harmonious
Chapter 7
– Eelevansee
Chapter 8
– Crash Landing
Chapter 9
– S.H.A.E.L.
Chapter 10
– How to Handle a Jreet…
Chapter 11
– Dominance Struggles
Chapter 12
– The Rescue of Furgs
Chapter 13
– The Runaway Rodemax
Chapter 14
– An Alien in an Alien Land
Chapter 15
– The Titans’ Struggle
Chapter 16
– Mind Games
Chapter 17
– One with the People
Chapter 18
– Dreams of Women
Chapter 19
– Bubble Manium
Chapter 20
– The Making of a Warrior
Chapter 21
– First Encounters
Chapter 22
– The Magnanimous Mike Carter
Chapter 23
– First Impressions
Chapter 24
– Ticktock
Chapter 25
– Stragedy
Chapter 26
– Warrior Troubles
Chapter 27
– To Grab a Congie by the Hair…
Chapter 28
– Tuesday
Chapter 29
– Wednesday
Chapter 30
– Shael
Dedication
I owe this one to Kim Burling, the Muse behind the story of S.H.A.E.L.
Without you, her tale would have never been told.
This is our
future.
Though their
bodies were naked, their minds empty, the fearful, half-mad faces that followed
Marie from behind the sanitized bars of their cages were Humanity’s hope.
Marie hurried
her step. Despite almost thirty years on the project, the depraved gazes never
ceased to bother her. They haunted her dreams, peeked at her from beneath her
floorboards, watched her from the other side of her shower curtain, looked up
at her from her morning cup of coffee, stared at her from between the lines of
her medical charts. Unlike the other experts on the project, Marie had never
been able to see past the source material they had used for the project, and
every day, it ate at her.
A familiar voice
entered her head, unbidden.
It will be over soon, Marie.
Marie shuddered
and gripped her pen, her eyes unconsciously drawn to the slender, blue-eyed
experiment in the corner cell. His drip-bag had run out again and he was
awake. Her heart started to pound as she met the deep cerulean eyes tucked
behind the useless titanium bars. She knew, better than anyone, that Twelve-A
could kill them all, should it ever cross his mind.
The slender
experiment said nothing more, merely watched her from his thin, military-issue
mattress.
Fighting the
gut-deep urge to drop her charts and run, Marie hurried back through the
foot-thick leaden doors separating the holding area from the lab and slapped
the glowing red button inside the monitoring room. She allowed herself a soft
breath of relief as the massive hydraulics of the holding area hissed shut,
locking the experiments in their silent bunker of lead and concrete.
“Twelve-A needs
another dose,” she told the techs at their stations, trying not to sound as
unnerved as she felt. “He’s awake again.”
“Colonel Codgson
wants him awake,” Sunny Carter, a young blonde Army lieutenant, said. The
woman gave the holding area a nervous glance, then her eyes flickered back to
her vitals monitor. “Codgson’s got us monitoring him, making sure his patterns
stay level—he’s scheduled another demonstration for this afternoon.”
Marie cursed.
Codgson was a bureaucratic furg. Ever since he had discovered their prodigy’s
unique talents, the man had made every attempt to show him off to the board in
every brutal way possible. Twelve-A had been pitted against everything the
other labs could throw at him again and again—and had lived.
“Do you think
Twelve-A will survive this one?” Lieutenant Carter asked, her face etched with
worry. She cocked her head at the monitor that showed him hunched around his
knees in one corner of his cell, staring at the wall. “What if they find a
better minder and he doesn’t survive? Don’t we need him?”
Marie knew the
lieutenant was partial to the handsome, blue-eyed young man in the last cage on
the right. She didn’t think of him as a killer. Marie, having seen the
lifeless bodies Twelve-A left behind in the Dark Room, knew better. She also
knew there was nothing that could stand against Twelve-A. By some luck of the
draw, it was
their
lab, of all of them, that had hit upon the lucky
combination that no amount of desperate cloning had been able to reproduce.
“He’s survived
all the others,” Marie said. Still, Marie felt dread creeping into her soul.
Twelve-A hated the Dark Room. If left awake after he was pitted against
another experiment, Twelve-A would go broody and silent—or sometimes just curl
into a ball and cry for hours. Ridiculously, ‘Mental Fortitude’ was Codgson’s
lowest rating for Twelve-A, just under ‘Emotional Resilience.’ What if, one
day, their star performer just decided not to cooperate? What if he one day
sat down and let the inferior creatures Codgson pitted him against simply end
his misery? What if he just stopped caring? What if he grew angry? Or
worse…what if he grew
vengeful
? Just the tiniest slip by the
technicians monitoring him and he could wreak destruction on the whole lab. He
could
escape
.
That, right
there, introduced a whole new wave of horror to Marie’s nightmares.
“I know,”
Lieutenant Carter said, observing the rows of monitors displaying the
experiment wing. “That’s what bothers me. He doesn’t like it…it
hurts
him. What if he doesn’t—”
A male voice
behind her interrupted them. “We have his DNA. We can always make another, if
he fails to cooperate.”
Marie stiffened
and turned. The colonel stood in the hall, his perfectly crisp blue uniform
accenting a bored demeanor, as if they were talking about cloning rats.
You don’t
have a clue, you stupid furg,
Marie thought. “We’ve tried that,” she
reminded him, having to physically stop herself from adding something
unpleasant. The colonel’s dull black eyes reminded her of the rodents they
used in the early days of the project. Though she had said it a thousand times
to the gun-happy thugs running the military side of the project, she explained
it again. “Even an exact genetic match is no assurance of the same abilities
manifesting in a clone. There is something more at work here, something that
makes it all the more important to protect Twelve-A until we can figure it out.”
The colonel
caught her gaze and smiled, a wormlike twisting of his lips that chilled her to
the core. “The first rule of this project is not to become attached to the
subjects, Doctor.”
Marie’s anger
spiked, as it always did around the colonel. As usual, he had completely
disregarded that there was more to their project than simple genetics, as it
didn’t fit within his tiny mental box. Despite the outrageous and ingenious
successes of the project, he had written off their failure to reproduce Twelve-A’s…unique…capabilities
as simple Human error and fired a few technicians. Then, when the second,
third, and fourth clone batches had failed to manifest more of Twelve-A’s
special abilities, only telekinetics or telemorphs instead, he had reported it
as ‘mechanical malfunction’ and ordered more equipment.
They were on the
eighth and ninth batches now, though they were still in the pre-fetal stages.
Several times, when walking past the incubation tubes, Marie had considered
sabotaging them herself, to spare them the fate she knew awaited them if they
disappointed their benefactor. Several months ago, after the seventh batch had
been tested and confirmed negative for Twelve-A’s minder qualities, Codgson
spent a night in the lab destroying all the previous clone batches—after Marie
had made a specific request to keep them alive for study. Eighty-four blond,
blue-eyed young men, some only five years of age, most with the strongest mover
or maker abilities they had ever seen. Dead.
Security footage
had shown Codgson stalking from the building that night drenched in red because
the sadistic shit had used a combat knife, sort of a manly coup he could tell
his drinking buddies about in the Officers’ Club. The next morning, because
there were too many bodies for the technicians to take care of before they
began to stink, Marie had been one of the ones on her knees mopping blood from
their cells with a crimson rag.
For months,
Marie had wanted to kill him.
Looking into
Codgson’s glinting, hollow eyes, she still did. It took all of Marie’s control
to keep her anger in check as she said, “You shouldn’t leave Twelve-A awake.
He could kill us all right now if he wanted to. He could empty our minds, make
us all stop breathing just like he does in your Dark Room.”