Testing Zero
Testing Zero: book 1 of the Remnants of Zone Four series
by N. G. Simsion
©2016 N. G. Simsion
All rights reserved. The use of any or part of this publication, whether reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of copyright law and is forbidden.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real.
Edited by Chris White of C.P. White Media, Limited Company
http://www.cpwhitemedia.com/
Content Editing by Christian Jordan
Beta readers and proofreaders: Luke Randall, Jenna Lovell, Melanie Elkins, JoBeth Morrison, Amber Christensen, Lori Collins, Cami Hurst, Nancy Farnworth, Betsy Polish
Cover design by Veronica Brighton
Interior ebook design: Russell Elkins
Published by Inky’s Nest Publishing
1st edition
First printed in 2016 in the United States of America
Chapter 1
Zero had been sleeping in the same dorm building, eating his meals on the same patch of grass and running from the same bullies since he was a small child. Other than a few vague memories from when he was a toddler, life within the confines of the schoolyard fences was all he knew. That would all change tomorrow, though. First thing in the morning, he and the rest of the eighteen-year-olds would board a bus and see the outside world for the first time.
He sat at his classroom desk with his eyes unfocused, staring blankly at the clock, waiting impatiently for lunchtime to arrive. Unlike the other students, he had long since finished filling in the bubbles on his test. Also unlike everyone else, he was confident he had every answer right—not that this test really mattered. It was just another practice to prepare for the big placement test he would take tomorrow.
He looked sideways at the boy sitting next to him and wished there was something he could do to help. Lefty was the only friend he’d ever had. Judging from the look of exasperation on his face, the way he was pulling at his hair and concentrating, plus the fact that he had only filled in the answers for half the questions, he could tell Lefty was struggling just as much as the others.
“Time’s up. Pencils down,” Professor Bird said, pointing at the clock above the chalkboard.
Lefty closed his eyes and dropped his forehead hard down onto his desk.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Zero asked.
Lefty said nothing. He grabbed his test and made like he was going to rip it in half, gritting his teeth.
“That bad, eh?” Zero asked. “I can help you study.”
Lefty grabbed fistfuls of his hair with both hands and gritted his teeth until his face turned red. “Studying isn’t the problem. It doesn’t matter if I know the answers if I can only make it halfway through the test.”
“Maybe it won’t matter. I mean, they’re just placement tests. What does it matter if they assign you to a boring job? We can still have fun outside of work.”
Someone smacked Lefty on the back of the head and he spun around to see Flea standing behind him.
“They’re not just placement tests, dummy,” Flea said. “I heard if you fail you’ll get kicked out of society. If you score below a 5.0, then none of the city leaders are going to draft you and you’ll be left with nowhere to go. If you’re not smart enough to be useful to the collective, then you get the boot.” He gestured like he was holding an invisible ball in his hand, pretending to drop-kick it across the room. Then before there was time to react, he snatched Lefty’s answer sheet from his desk.
Lefty grabbed for it as quickly as he could, but it was too late. Flea had already stepped out of reach, and before Lefty could lunge at him, two of Flea’s gang were standing between them. This was typical. Flea rarely went anywhere without his goons close behind. They were always quick to jump in.
Zero wanted nothing to do with the situation unfolding in front of him. He tucked his chin to his chest and squeezed between the desks until he felt his back was up against the wall, far out of the reach of Flea’s gang.
“Hey, look at this, guys,” Flea laughed as he stood at the center of his friends, holding the test high above his head. “He couldn’t even finish half of it.”
Lefty tried to push past the enormous boys standing in front of him, all of whom were laughing at him, but he might as well have been trying to shoulder through a cinder block wall. Lefty was the smallest boy in his year, and taking on a group who all outsized him by at least six inches and sixty pounds just wasn’t a bright idea. Zero ached for him, but he didn’t feel like intervening would help—not when it would be two against a dozen or so.
Lefty dropped back down into his seat and folded his arms. He looked at the empty seat next to him—the one where Zero had been sitting just moments before. He scanned the room and spotted him against the wall—partially hidden behind a bookshelf—and gave him a dirty look.
After Flea and his gang grew tired of poking fun, they made their way through the door, out of sight. Lefty found his test lying on the floor with a few dirty footprints now smudged across the front of it. “Come on, coward,” he said, beckoning Zero to come out from behind the bookcase, and they walked to the front of the room.
They placed their tests atop a stack already rising from the top of Professor Bird’s desk. Zero was halfway out the door when he heard Lefty address the professor. “Sir, is it true that people who fail the test get kicked out of society?”
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“Flea.”
Professor Bird sat on the edge of his desk and folded his arms. He sighed. “After you’re done taking your written test and you have completed your physical evaluations, your scores will be given out to all the city leaders. If they think you would be a good fit for what they need, then you’ll get drafted to their city and assigned to a job.”
“But what about those who score low—really low—on both the physical and the mental stuff? What about those nobody wants to draft?”
“I don’t know. It happens, and they leave on a different bus than everyone else, but I don’t know where they take them.”
“So … there is a possibility that he’s right?”
Professor Bird shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?”
Lefty’s head drooped as he meandered out the door and into the hall. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked ahead of Zero faster than usual.
“Don’t listen to Flea,” Zero said once they reached the sidewalk outside. “He’s just trying to get under your skin. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Yeah, well, it worked.”
“Why? You’ve never let anything he’s said bother you before.”
“Because he’s poking his finger into an open wound. I’ve already been terrified about what would happen to me if I bomb the test. There must be a reason they keep making us take practice test after practice test. And when something is really important that usually means that failing it could be really bad. I’m scared to find out what it means.”
“I hate seeing you like this,” Zero said. “I’m n
ot used to seeing Flea get to you. Usually when he’s being a jerk you just come up with a plan to get him back and you’re over it.”
“That’s it!” Lefty grinned broadly.
“What’s it?”
Lefty looked at Zero—his eyebrows bouncing up and down as if Zero should know exactly what it was.
“Oh, no,” Zero said. “You don’t mean—”
“I sure do. It’s the last day of school. I’ve been wanting to do this for a month now and you keep talking me out of it. It’s got to be today or I’ll never get to do it. Flea deserves it.”
Zero smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Can we at least get some lunch first?”
“Sure.”
“And we’re supposed to get our anti-virus injections before the end of the lunch break too.”
“Fine. Fine. We’ll do that too, but let’s hurry. This is going to be great.”
***
Zero and Lefty took their lunch outside to the far corner of the schoolyard—the same place they ate almost every day.
Zero liked this location because he didn’t want to be around the other kids any more than he had to.
Lefty said he liked it because his favorite crocodile had a tendency to lie there in the sun close to the fence. That was the trouble.
Lefty’s assigned name at birth was J-12. But it was this very crocodile’s fault that Lefty had his nickname. It had bitten off part of his right hand, leaving him with only a thumb, index finger and half a middle finger. Though his so-called friends poked fun at his physical impairment, he reveled in it. A nickname was a rite of passage; it was what made a nobody a somebody. It gave Lefty a reputation, too.
Lefty had been the first thing this crocodile saw after hatching from its egg years earlier, and because of that he always thought they had a special bond. Zero insisted any special bond existed only because Lefty had conditioned it to expect half his sandwich every afternoon.
On the day Lefty got his nickname, back when both boys were eleven years old, there were two crocodiles near the fence instead of just the one. In an attempt to feed only his favorite croc, Lefty reached his whole arm through the fence. He was in the process of trying to place the sandwich gently in its mouth when he felt its jaws clamp down. They played tug-o-war with his hand until the croc successfully claimed those fingers for itself.
“He bit me!” Lefty yelled, looking down at the stream of blood now coming from the place where his pinky, ring finger, and half his middle finger had been. He didn’t cry. He didn’t look around for an adult to help him. His first reaction wasn’t even to stop the intense bleeding. His immediate response was to reprimand the crocodile for betraying him.
“I can’t believe you bit me. After all I’ve done for you and all the food I gave you. I even brought you roast beef today—your favorite. And you bit me!”
That crocodile remained Lefty’s favorite even after that intense act of betrayal. He wasn’t about to let one disagreement over food and fingers ruin their special bond.
That was seven years ago, and although it was the worst of the crocodile bites he would receive it wasn’t the last.
Very little about life had changed since then. They still ate their lunch by the fence between the school and the croc-infested water. Even during the rainy season they would sit out there getting soaked. They preferred to hang out with killer crocs than with the other students.
Today was what Zero would call nice weather—sunny, hot, and humid. On days like this, the potent stink of the swamp that repelled everyone else was especially strong, but Lefty and Zero had come to appreciate it over the years.
Lefty shoved the last bite of a tuna sandwich into his mouth and stood up, brushing himself off. He then began twisting open the wires on the fence.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Zero said, shaking his head.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m opening the fence.”
“Again?”
Lefty looked at Zero with a blank expression. He blinked and shrugged.
“You’d think losing three fingers would teach you a lesson. Are you that stupid?”
“I only lost two and a half.” Lefty held up his right hand and wiggled his middle finger, which was only as long as the first knuckle. He turned back toward the fence and grunted as he reached as far as he could. “Relax, Zero. This guy’s just a baby. He couldn’t hurt a bug.”
“Your hand hasn’t even healed yet from the nip you got last week—from another little baby that ‘couldn’t hurt a bug.’”
“Yeah, but that’s because I took my eyes off him. I’m watching this time. Besides, I don’t think he can bite hard enough to take a finger off anyway.”
“You don’t think he can bite your finger off? You don’t think.” Zero continued to shake his head as he turned to walk back toward the main building of the school.
“Hey, where are you going? Come here.”
Zero waved a hand and continued to walk away.
“Come on, Zero. I need you to help me get this guy. You have long arms, and all I’ve got are these short ones.”
“No.”
“Zero—”
“I said no.” Zero turned around and crossed his arms over his chest, his lips tight.
One corner of Lefty’s mouth turned upward, one eyebrow climbing half an inch. He said nothing.
Zero shook his head again. “I hate you.” He made his way toward the small opening in the fence where Lefty was standing. “If he so much as snaps at me, I’m letting go and I’m out of here.”
“Fine.”
Chapter 2
Zero looked at the hole, then at Lefty, and then down at the small crocodile. “Why does it have to be a croc, anyway? Isn’t there something better you can do to get back at Flea?”
“No, it has to be a crocodile. Trust me. People are going to be talking about this a hundred years from now.”
“We could put a thousand zompopos in Flea’s desk. That would do it.”
“Really? You think a thousand giant ants in his desk would have the same effect as a crocodile?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re wrong. And there’s no time to catch that many zompopos anyway. It has to be a croc, and it has to be today,” he said again.
Zero began to reach his arm through the fence, but quickly pulled it back. “When Professor Bird writes you up, I had nothing to do with this.”
“Of course.”
Although Lefty’s reach came up two inches short, Zero’s hand was able to extend five inches farther. Zero slowly placed his hand on the slippery, rough skin of the crocodile’s tail. His movements were gentle enough not to alarm the tail’s owner, who didn’t seem to notice that someone was ever-so-slowly pulling him through the tall grass.
“Don’t yank him,” Lefty whispered in Zero’s ear.
“I know. I’m not stupid,” Zero hissed.
“I’m just saying. You don’t have as much experience with crocodiles as I do.”
“I know. Shut up.” Zero continued to pull slowly until the crocodile was up against the fence.
“Why’d you stop? Pull him all the way through.”
“No way. This is as far as I go.” Zero let go and retracted his arm. “You can take it from here.”
“You’re such a coward. You know that?” Lefty began to reach his left hand through the fence.
“Don’t use your good hand. Use your right.”
“I’m not an idiot, Zero. Quit worrying. I can’t grip tight enough with my right hand.”
Zero folded his arms and watched silently as Lefty began to lift the hind end of the crocodile. Once the reptile was halfway through the opening, the croc began to jerk and swing from side to side, snapping its jaws. Lefty quickly pulled it the rest of the way through the fence and held the
flailing beast away from his body. He wrapped the two good fingers of his right hand around the end to hold it with both hands.
The crocodile twisted and rolled until Lefty could no longer hold on. The tail slipped free from his grip. It dropped head first onto the grass, and in no time it was back on its belly hissing and snapping its jaws.
Zero took a few steps back. “We don’t have to do this.”
“What do you mean? Of course we do.” Lefty kept eye contact with the crocodile, jumping back each time it lunged at him. “It’s a matter of principle.”
“Why? What did Flea do this time?”
“Do? What did he do? He doesn’t have to do anything. All he has to do is exist, and that’s all I need to know. He has bullied and tormented us since we were new arrivals—as long as we can remember.”
“But you never come out on top. He goes right through you—he does it every single time. You never win when you go up against him and his gang.”
“Oh, come on. What about that time I loosened two of his front teeth? He steered clear of me for a week after that one.”
“Yeah, but if I remember right, that was also one of the times he knocked you unconscious. I don’t think I’d count you as the winner on that one.”
“Well, Zero, my friend, buddy, pal, maybe that’s true. And maybe that wouldn’t have happened if you would stick around for a fight once in a while. Stop tucking your tail between your legs and running away.”
“I don’t see the point of fighting.”
“I know you don’t, but I can’t see the point of running away.”
They turned toward each other, scanning each other’s faces. They’d had the same argument about once a week since they first discovered what a bully was—ever since the first time Flea and Lefty went rounds out by the teeter totter.
Zero was quick to break eye contact. He never could win a stare-down. Lefty’s eyes shifted back to the miniature dragon hissing in front of him.
Lefty pulled off his T-shirt and wadded it up in his left hand. He took three steps back and walked a large circle around to the back of the crocodile. He opened up his shirt and tossed it over the croc’s head, covering its eyes. Annoyed, the croc jerked his head from side to side, but Lefty pounced on it and locked both of his hands onto its jaws, securing them shut.
Testing Zero: a dystopian post-apocalyptic young adult novella series (Remnants of Zone Four Chronicles Book 1) Page 1