Zero Repeat Forever

by G. S. Prendergast

  “What’s an NKV?” I ask.

  “Nahx kill video,” Xander says. He has produced a bag of raisins from somewhere. His chewing makes his whole head wobble on my thigh. “Remember in the early days, how those dudes were always trying to get a video of someone taking one out? Wait till you see these new ones, Rave. They’re wicked.”

  At first when the video plays, it’s hard to recognize what I’m seeing. Dark figures on a blurry background go in and out of focus. As the picture quality improves I realize it is a group of four Nahx picking their way down a steep embankment. The two larger Nahx walk with one hand on the shoulders of the smaller ones. The video has no sound, so there is nothing but Xander’s chewing to accompany what happens next. One of the larger Nahx jerks backward, its free hand grabbing at its throat. As it falls, it pulls the smaller Nahx down with it.

  The other two Nahx fall to their knees with their rifles raised and begin firing. The camera rolls and falls and the picture goes dark. There follows a slow-motion recap that shows a spray of something black as the Nahx gets shot in the neck. Blood?

  Liam pauses the video. “That was the first confirmed sniper kill ever, about two weeks after the invasion,” he says. “Hunting rifle and deer killer bullet right in the neck. The cameraman paid for that one with his life. But that’s how we know that they don’t get up from a shot to the neck.”

  Emily appears in the doorway as Liam scrolls through a list on the laptop.

  “Oooh, are there new ones?” she says, curling up on the floor in front of Topher’s legs. I glance over at his face, noting his blush and his tense posture. He’s always been a bit cool with Emily. I never thought anything of it before. But now . . . God.

  It’s true. He was telling the truth.

  “The scan hasn’t finished yet,” Liam says. “I’ll download any new ones from the mainframe later.”

  My brain does the equivalent of shoving piles of crap into the closet and under the bed and calling it a cleaned room. I can’t deal with the thought of Emily right now, so I just push it aside, biting my lip, wondering if everyone knew but me. I realize I’ve been sitting perfectly still with one hand resting on Xander’s hair and the other twisted in Liam’s bedcovers. Next to me, Topher leans forward, elbows on his knees, his eyes on the laptop screen.

  Liam starts a video. “Here’s a more recent one. This one is a high-caliber assault rifle, military issue, armor-piercing bullets. Check it out.”

  This one is a better quality video, high-powered zoom, digital focus, and sound. Two Nahx cross a clearing to a transport. There’s a deafening crack, and one of the Nahx falls. I’m not sure whether I blinked, but it looked like . . .

  “Did you see that?” Liam says. Topher and Xander are shaking their heads in admiration.

  “Its head just disintegrated. Direct head shot with high-caliber armor-piercing rounds. They don’t get up from that, either. Look, I’ll play it again.”

  I force myself to watch, so I know I saw what I saw. The Nahx’s head literally disappears in a cloud of blood and shrapnel before its body crumples to the ground.

  “Awesome,” Emily says.

  I feel a bit nauseous.

  Xander produces a bag of chocolate chips now and passes them around. I take a handful and close my fingers around them. They start to melt on my palm as Liam lines up another video. I have to force myself to look at the screen and not at the back of Emily’s head with her long blond ponytail.

  “This one came yesterday,” Liam says. “But it was encrypted. The tech dude just unwound it this morning. I haven’t even seen it.”

  Chocolate melts and melts in my hand.

  The video starts up with a page of text:

  On September 9, armed human militia came upon a group of Nahx in the mountains north of Vancouver, Canada. Reports vary on how it was achieved, but the result was that one Nahx was taken and held prisoner for a period of approximately four hours. The militia attempted to interrogate the prisoner, but it either couldn’t or wouldn’t communicate. The prisoner was executed when attempts to restrain it failed. Under attack from approaching Nahx, the captors were forced to flee. Because of the danger of returning through occupied territory, the body has not been recovered.

  “Jeez,” Xander says, chewing, as the video starts.

  A Nahx kneels, hands on head, in the center of a circle of armed and masked men. Each of them has a nasty-looking rifle pointed at the prisoner’s head. All I can think is, where did they get guns like that in Vancouver and why are they wearing masks? The sound is muffled, scratchy. You can hear someone yelling things, and occasionally one of the gunmen prods it . . . her? There’s something subtle about the shape of the armor. Maybe if I hadn’t had such a close look at the Nahx in the trailer park, I might not have spotted it, but this one is noticeably more slender, and smaller, the shoulders narrower, the neck thinner. It . . . she still seems very tall, even though she’s kneeling.

  One of the gunmen approaches closer. He has an automatic handgun in one hand and something in the other. It’s hard to see.

  “Is that a sword?” Mandy says.

  “Machete,” Emily answers. “A big one.” She mouths a handful of chocolate chips. “I have a feeling this doesn’t end well for our Nahx mate here.”

  I’m dimly conscious of the small pool of melted chocolate in my clenched fist. I want to turn away from the screen. I feel like I’d rather look at almost anything than what is about to happen, but I can’t look away.

  The machete-wielding gunman yells something at the Nahx. The sound is too distorted to hear it clearly. But when the Nahx turns her head to him, we all clearly hear her response. She growls. Like a cat or a wolf. The machete man recoils. Another gunman steps up behind the Nahx and kicks her hard in the back. She tumbles forward, stopping her fall with her hands so she’s on her hands and knees. She lifts her head up, turning it slightly to look at the man with the machete. It’s not an aggressive position. More like . . . supplication.

  “God, no . . . ,” I hear myself whisper. Machete man makes a split-second decision. He throws his gun to the side, raises the machete with both hands, and brings it down on the back of the Nahx’s neck.

  Separating her head from her body as neatly as clipping a bud from a rosebush.

  There’s a collective gasp. I slap my hands over my mouth, stifling a whimper, then furiously wipe the chocolate from my face with my sleeve.

  The decapitated Nahx lingers on her hands and knees as her head rolls away and black sludge pours out her neck. Machete man gives the body a swift kick, and it tumbles in a dead pile. There’s a shout from one of the men, and they scatter, leaving the dead female where she lies.

  The camera jolts into motion as the video ends.

  Finally, I’m able to tear my eyes from the screen. Liam is grinning madly, his eyes bright. “That was awesome!”

  “Didn’t really look like they tried to restrain it,” Topher says, popping a chocolate chip into his mouth. “Play it again.”

  I leap to my feet, feeling like I might scream. I need to get to a toilet, or a sink, or outside fast. Eyes streaming with effort to keep my breakfast down, I push out of the room, tripping over Mandy’s chair.

  “What your problem?” Liam snaps as I leave.

  Faintly, I hear someone calling after me, but I barrel down the hallway, barely able to see where I’m going. If this men’s quarters is anything like the women’s at the opposite end of the residential wing, there should be a bathroom . . .

  I throw a door open, finding myself instead in a kind of garage, with two thick blast doors open to a long passageway to the outside. The door blows shut behind me. The cold and fresh air allow me to take some control over my stomach, and I gaspingly manage to suppress the urge to vomit.

  Two guards outside the blast door notice me. “Are you all right?” one of them calls out. I wave him away, resting my hands on my knees, hanging my head. I hear the door open behind me.

  Expecting Topher, I’m
surprised it’s Xander who has come after me. Well, am I surprised? Not really. For some guys there’s nothing more interesting than a girl who is about to completely lose her shit.

  He puts his arm around me, leading me out into the snow-dusted passageway. “Come get some air,” he says.

  Just inside the door there are reflective coats hanging on hooks. Xander helps me into one before donning one himself.

  The guards nod at him as we exit. They’re smoking, despite not being quite outside. “Light?” Xander says as we trudge over to them. When one of them produces a lighter, Xander pulls a neat little joint from his pocket.

  “This won’t be a problem?” he asks lightly.

  “Not if you share,” the guard says, flicking his cigarette into the snow.

  We pass it around, puffing furtively. The guards bluster and boast about nothing, trying to impress me, but I can barely hear them over the pounding of blood in my ears. When they finally giggle off to check something back inside, Xander gazes at me.

  “It’s because they’re shaped like us,” he says.

  “What?” I’m having one of those buzzes that are more paranoia than any kind of pleasure. I’m deeply suspicious, among other things, that Xander is trying to get me into his bunk, but he seems willing to talk first. And I want to talk, for once.

  “They’re shaped like humans. They walk and move like humans, mostly. Even some of the things they do, the way they walk with their hands on each other’s shoulders. It’s unnerving. But they’re not human, Rave. I felt a bit sick when I saw the exploding head one too, but, well, they’re not human.”

  I’m having second thoughts about my desire to talk, to Xander anyway. But my mouth seems to have other ideas. “Dolphins aren’t human either. Do we blow their heads off for entertainment?”

  Xander looks pretty convincingly impatient for a stoned dickhead. “Dolphins aren’t predators. We shoot . . . I don’t know . . . mountain lions in the head. If they’ve killed someone.”

  For some reason this is the moment where the Nahx from the trailer crashes back into my mind. I combine my dim memories of him with the decapitation video and what I have just learned about Emily into a thought so horrific I have to grab Xander’s shoulder to keep from falling over.

  “Jeez, Rave, are you okay?” he says. “You look a little green. Also, you have chocolate on your face.” He reaches out to wipe it, but I pull away. Apart from Topher, I haven’t told anyone about my encounter with the Nahx, and I’m not about to start with Xander.

  “We don’t shoot mountain lions for entertainment,” I say instead. “I know this is a war, and people are going to die on both sides, but those videos are sick.”

  Xander considers me quietly. My balance back under control, I take my hand off his shoulder.

  “There’s only people on our side, Rave. The Nahx aren’t people. They’re like machines or something.”

  “We don’t know what they are,” I say. “They breathe, you know, and they bleed.”

  “That oily stuff? It’s some kind of lubricant or fuel or something.”

  Nothing he’s saying is making me feel any better. Being high as a cloud and churning with paranoia isn’t helping either. I need to get back to my bunk alone and try to sleep it off. But once again my mouth has a few more things it wants to say.

  “They took her prisoner. Even in a war, we don’t just execute prisoners of war. She didn’t resist or fight back. She . . . she . . .”

  Xander looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Oddly, he also looks surprised. “She?” he says, shaking his head. “Rave, you either need to stop smoking this stuff or start smoking a lot more.” Then he leaves me alone in the long passage, shaking his head again as he walks. “She . . . Jesus, that’s funny.”

  EIGHTH

  Each time the transports touch down in the city, I march down the gangplank with the others, rifle raised, convincingly emotionless, though I’m bristling with fear. I hate the city. There are survivors here, humans who didn’t evacuate but somehow survived the ground assault and firebombs. They crawl out of holes, and our job is to dart them and leave them where they fall. But each day I slip away, down a dark alleyway, or into a stairwell, empty my rifle into a drawer or pile of garbage. Then I curl up somewhere hidden and wait for the transports to come back. I occupy my mind with capturing memories and trying to fix them in place. But the armor and the black syrup make them slippery and quick to escape, like eels in a rushing river.

  The human girl floated away down the river. I remember that easily enough. And the feeling I had when I thought I might have killed her. I do more than remember that. I relive it, my heart jumping in my chest, making my notched ribs ache. I choke on the tube in my throat, but I can’t take it out and disconnect, not at this low elevation. The syrup calms the gag reflex and my heart rate after a moment, but leaves me giddy and confused. This happens at least once every day.

  The directives have changed slightly. Search for humans. Dart them. Leave them where they fall. And because it is a fresh transmission, it is loud, persistent. I have to focus to resist.

  I somehow manage to not forget that I refuse this mission. Though sometimes I still see the humans as vermin, each day my rebellion repeats. If I am discovered, they will kill me, painfully probably, and leave me where I fall. I creep out when I hear the transports return, and blend in with a group of Ninths or Tenths, who are so dull witted they are unlikely to notice me.

  When we return, they ask us about hits. The first time I wasn’t prepared, so I answered forty, which is how many rounds my rifle carries. The Second who asked grabbed my throat, kicked my feet out from under me, and slammed the back of my head down on the hard floor until sparkles floated in front of my eyes. No lies, she signed to me. After that I reported twenty or twenty-five, and once ten, but that got me punished again for not being enough. I lose count of how many days we have been doing this. The winter settles in and coats the bodies left where they fall in drifts of thick white snow.

  I don’t disconnect, so I don’t eat or sleep. I can feel my sense of self being saturated in slug slime, in the oily syrup that circulates through my armor, being replaced with mindlessness and malice. Only watching the snow fall or smelling the dormant trees keeps my mind from dissolving into nothing but obedience.

  Disobedient. Defective.

  Eighth. Will. NOT. Obey. The cloudy-haired girl in my memory gives me strength.

  I crouch in dark passageways, hidden between abandoned vehicles or burrowed into the rubble of ruined buildings, my mind spinning. Some of the memories I grab on to as I wait don’t make any sense. I try to hold on to them anyway, but they slither away.

  RAVEN

  As the weeks pass, the public screening of the videos becomes a near daily event in the cafeteria after meals. Both civilian and military watch, with more civilians volunteering to train as fighters every day. Despite this, we seem no closer to launching any kind of attack even after being at the base for two months. It is because the winter is too harsh, Kim explains to the ones she calls “enlisted,” the pseudo-military ragtag renegades she has assembled—mostly kids, like us.

  The winter is unyielding. It has not stopped snowing for weeks. Giant drifts seal off many of the exits, and all of us, civilians included, are assigned to working parties to keep the other exits clear. Topher and I find ourselves one morning outside the observation windows, digging away at snow that has blanketed them overnight.

  “I’m tired of waiting,” he confides, attacking the drifts with a shovel.

  I pause, leaning on my own shovel. “For what? Going after that Nahx? How are we going to find him after all this time?”

  Topher digs and digs, frowning with concentration. Suddenly, he hurls his shovel far out into the snow. “I need to go after something. To do something.” He lets himself fall backward in a snowdrift, which opens up to a sort of throne for him. He leans forward and holds his head in his hands. “Tucker wanted to go look for our parents. We talked ab
out it before . . .”

  “If he had done that, he would have gotten himself killed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he did get himself killed, of course!” I toss my shovel away too and fall down beside him. The snow is as soft and yielding as an old sofa. If it weren’t for the cold, we could be sitting in Topher and Tucker’s basement lair, playing video games and eating junk food to quell the weed-induced munchies. “We’re not prisoners here. We could go back to Calgary, in theory.”

  Topher stares at me for a second. “But you think it would be suicide?”

  “Not if we were allowed to take weapons, supplies. If we had a vehicle, a Jeep or something.”

  I’m indulging him again. There are ways to make a mission like this more feasible, but I can’t see Kim going for it. Even with a vehicle it could take days on remote snow-covered roads. We would have had a much better chance if we’d left before the real snow started. And went west instead of east.

  “Why now?” I ask. “What brought this on?”

  Topher exhales heavily, surrounding himself in a cloud of mist. “A video,” he says, and I think These fucking videos will get us all killed. “An NKV yesterday. Liam doesn’t know where it came from, but it shows a Nahx getting creamed by a Molotov cocktail.”

  “Charming.” I hoist myself out of the snow throne and revel in the irony that I now have to dig my shovel out with my hands.

  “It looked like it was in Crowfoot Park.”

  I pause, hands full of snow. “Our Crowfoot Park?” Crowfoot Park was a hangout for kids from the dojo and other karate clubs. We had semi-illegal martial arts scraps there some Friday nights. Not exactly Fight Club, but I occasionally woke up with a black eye.