Zero Repeat Forever

by G. S. Prendergast

When I open my eyes, he is sitting back on his heels, watching me. With the golden light from the window illuminating him, I notice something I haven’t before. He has a short arrow protruding out of one shoulder. A crossbow arrow. I recognize it; it’s unmistakably one of Topher’s.

  I try to point to it. And my movement seems to draw his attention to it for the first time. He reaches up and pulls on the fletched end. It moves a few inches and then stops. He makes a hissing noise as the arrowhead jams back into his shoulder.

  I want to say something, tell him he should cut the fletch off and pull it out from the back, but I can’t seem to get my mouth to work. I watch him stand and move over to the window. Gripping the curtain with one hand, he grabs the arrow with the other and pulls it. The first pull removes it only halfway. With the light coming in from the window, I can see his shape silhouetted in shadow as his shoulders rise and fall quickly. He pulls the arrow again. This time it comes out with a wet ripping noise. A brutal hiss escapes from him and he falls to his knees, pulling the curtain down from the window with him. I watch him as he kneels there, forehead on the glass, looking out into the setting sun for some minutes. If he’s a machine, how can he feel pain? is what goes through my head. Because he looks like a machine. But he’s clearly in pain. He balls up the fabric and holds it on his shoulder. When he pulls it away, I can see it’s stained with something dark, like blood or oil.

  Tossing the curtain and arrow away, he rotates his arm, as though testing it. Then he stares out at the setting sun some more, almost as if he’s forgotten I’m here. The light begins to fade, making him harder to see. He’s becoming a shadow in front of my eyes. All I can see of him is that he holds his left hand out, as though reaching for something.

  I take stock of my condition. My shoulder is back as it should be, but I’m pretty sure that the forearm is broken. Blood is pooling around my ankle, and my breathing is kind of lopsided; broken ribs, I think. Also the side of my face hurts. Nothing broken there, I don’t think, but I bet it’s not pretty. I’ve had injuries before, from karate or other sports, but never this bad, and never so many all at the same time. I try to sigh, but it comes out as a whimper.

  The Nahx turns and looks at me. He stands up and steps in my direction. Somehow, beyond all things plausible, I drag myself to my feet and stumble for the door, ignoring the shooting pain in my ankle and the jangling of my damaged arm. He leaps back over the bench and meets me at the door.

  “Let me go, please,” I say, barely above a whisper. “I won’t tell anyone.” I can hardly breathe. My left lung feels like it is being squeezed with a pair of pliers.

  He steps out of the way as I pull the door open to a long hallway. Without looking back, I take three steps out and stop, swaying, my head filling with sudden heat. He catches me as I fall.

  “Don’t hurt me,” I manage as he eases me down onto the floor and sits back on his heels again. He shakes his head, holding his hands up, palms forward. I didn’t imagine it this time. He really did shake his head.

  “Can you understand me?”

  He nods, leaning over me.

  With my good hand I reach up and press on the hole in his shoulder. His thick blood seeps through my fingers. “The boy, the one who shot you with the arrow? Did you kill him?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Did he get away?”

  He nods.

  I close my eyes for a moment, feeling him pull my fingers away from his bloody shoulder. As I open my eyes, he brushes a coil of hair from my forehead. I twitch back, repulsed.

  “Are you the one from the trailer? Was that you?”

  He nods slowly. And maybe I’m hearing things, but I think he sighs. As he reaches for me, I flinch away again, pulling myself backward, pressing against the wall. He sits back on his heels again, his hands on his thighs.

  Has he been following me all these months? My teeth chatter against one another, sending shivers of pain into the side of my head. What does he want from me? I have to get away. I have to run away as fast as I can, find Topher, and get back to the others, back to the base. Then I have to disappear somewhere this thing can’t find me.

  The hallway is almost completely dark, except for the weak twilight streaming through the open door to the penthouse. The Nahx kneels there, facing me, though for all I know his eyes could be closed. I try to get a good look at him, but it’s too dark and my vision is beginning to blur again. He doesn’t seem as large, kneeling and close up, but his armor and mask, if that’s what it is, still seem to suck what little light there is. The armor makes a dull clicking noise as he moves, and his breathing is a low buzz, halfway between a sick wasp and the purring of a cat.

  The face of his mask is vaguely humanoid, large, glassy, reflective black eye shapes, a ridge where the nose would be, and a kind of grille over the mouth. It reminds me of a gas mask from World War II. There’s no sign of the movement in the segmented plates that I remember, no sign of the sharp spines on his face. Maybe that’s something that happens during an attack, or when he’s frightened. And why would he be frightened now? He could kill me with one finger.

  Neither his helmet, mask, nor the rest of his armor looks shiny or new. Instead, it’s dirty and there are marks and abrasions like healed scars all over him, including a star-shaped mark on his chest. Is it possible this is his skin? Does it heal? I consider the arrow hole in his shoulder. The bleeding seems to be slowing down. But it doesn’t look like blood.

  What is he? What does he want? The possibilities are too much to contemplate.

  I realize I’ve been holding my head up. My neck spasms, and I lie back, saying the first word that comes to my mind.

  “Tuck . . .” Then the tears are pouring out of my eyes. I stare up at the dark ceiling and give in to it, crying out all the horror that I haven’t given full vent to since that day we buried him. The Nahx watches me for a moment, then stands, and leaving the door propped open so some faint light can trickle into the hallway, leaves me there and goes inside.

  Who knows how long I lie there? Maybe I pass out from blood loss, or maybe I fall asleep from exhaustion, but when I wake up, I’m lying on a bed, my good wrist shackled to the bedpost.

  EIGHTH

  I watch her in the dim light from some candles I found and left burning on the little table by the bed. It feels wrong to touch her as she sleeps, but I want to try to treat her injuries. I seem to know things about treating injuries, without knowing how. I focus on her, on the details of her, her smell. Without that effort I will lose myself.

  She twitches and gasps. Before I even reach her, she’s wailing and tugging at the restraint.

  “No . . . uhh, no . . . untie me, please. . . .”

  As I kneel beside the bed, she pulls herself as far away as she can get, her shackled arm stretched out. The speed and strength of her emotions is slightly surprising to me. She’s crying and furious at the same time.

  “Untie me, you piece of shit! You son of a bitch!” Then she closes her eyes and turns away from me, curling up, her bleeding ankle leaving a streak of blood on the sheet. I move to the other side of the bed to face her, but she turns away again. I move back and she turns away. Finally, in desperation, I grab her face and turn it to me. She snarls something I don’t quite understand, then spits on me.

  I won’t hurt you, I sign.

  Her good leg swings up and curls around my neck. Before I know what is happening, she has flipped me down on the bed and is crushing my neck between her knees. As I pry them apart, she kicks me hard in my injured shoulder and then in the side of the head. I tumble backward on the floor, my helmet banging on the edge of a chair as I fall.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” she yells. I stand, head throbbing, shoulder stinging, and take two steps back. Focus now. This is going to be harder than I thought. I didn’t really think at all. I just grabbed her and ran. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I take a moment to reconsider my options.

  I could leave her, let her die.
/>   No, I can’t do that. Not after finding her again. That has to mean something.

  I could hope that her injuries aren’t as bad as I think they are.

  I’m pretty sure they are.

  I could try to find her people.

  They would kill me. Or worse, my people would kill her.

  I could try to knock her out again, like I did in the trailer.

  Ah no. Anything but that. Think.

  I can overpower her. I’m much stronger than her, despite her fighting spirit. But the thought of it makes me feel sick. There will be screaming and crying. As it is, the scent of her fear nearly chokes me.

  Please, I sign. But of course she doesn’t know the signs.

  Her face is soaked with blood, mucus, and tears. She lifts her injured arm to wipe it, but I think both the bones of her forearm are broken. She gasps and whimpers as her hand flops unnaturally.

  There’s a bath in the next room. I step in there to grab towels, and when I come back she has hauled herself up to the bedpost and is biting at the binding on her wrist. Her mouth is already bloody.

  Stop. Stop, I sign. I drop the towels and try to pull her teeth away. She twists her head and bites down on my hand. Hard. There’s no way she could bite through the armored glove, but I feel it well enough. I could break her jaw trying to peel her off me. Instead, I pinch down hard on her cheek. She yelps and releases me. A bright red welt blooms on her face. My fingerprints.

  Sorry. Sorry. Very sorry.

  “Can’t you talk? I don’t know what those signs mean!” she snarls through bloodied teeth.

  Of course she doesn’t. I could try to teach her some of them, but I don’t have time. Her leg is still bleeding, her pant leg and boot now soaked with blood. Her arm must be excruciating.

  Kneeling again by the side of the bed, I reach forward with one of the towels. I think perhaps she’s too tired to move, because though she tenses, she lets me wipe some of the blood from her mouth.

  “What do you want from me?”

  I set the towels down on the bed. I want to fix you.

  “What does that mean?”

  I point to her arm. Broken. That’s an obvious one. Broken.

  “My arm is broken. Yes, I know.”

  I turn the “broken” sign upside down and do it again, backward.

  Fix. Broken. Fix. Broken.

  “You want to fix my arm?”

  Ah, thank you. I nod. I point to her leg and hold up one finger.

  “First my leg?”

  My mind floods with giddy relief. I can do this if I can make her understand me. I rest my forehead down on the bed, nodding, trying to keep my thoughts from swirling into vapor. When I look up, she’s staring at me, eyes wide, swollen, and red rimmed.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  I nod.

  She looks sick as she begins to speak, and what little color was left drains from her face. “Did you do this to me? In the stadium? Was it you who beat me up?”

  RAVEN

  He lurches back, like he’s been punched. Holding both hands out, palms up, he shakes his head over and over, slowly at first, then faster. I guess that’s a no. He lifts his hands up and lets his head fall into them, holding it there, still on his knees by the side of the bed. My mind suddenly flashes back to the video of the Nahx girl being decapitated. It’s frighteningly vivid, almost like a waking dream. I must gasp, because he looks up sharply.

  A rush of heat starts at my feet and shoots up my body, over my stomach and chest. My neck and face get painfully hot, and I can’t help but moan. He dives forward, grabbing a candle from the bedside table, and leans down to look into my face. The candle flickers on his eye mask.

  “I feel sick,” I murmur. Maybe for both of us, this represents something of a truce. He quickly reaches over to the restraint on my wrist. I don’t know what he does, but it clicks open. Just as he helps me sits up, I vomit all over myself. He doesn’t even flinch, but pulls a towel from the pile on the bed and mops me up as much as he can. Tossing the towel aside, he places one gloved hand on my forehead. It feels surprisingly soft, almost like flesh, but cool.

  “I have a fever.” He nods, laying me back on the pillows. I press my newly freed hand onto my forehead. It’s as hot as a sidewalk in the sun, almost as if it could burn me.

  He turns and unlaces my boot. My whole leg tingles with pain as he slips it off. The army pants I wear are loose enough that he can push the leg up to my knee, but the blood-soaked thermals underneath are too fitted. He slips a knife from somewhere in his armor. I cringe at the sight of it, then again when he cuts the cloth away, and I see the severity of the wound. It looks like the knife went right between the two bones of my shin, completely through my calf from front to back. It’s swollen and kaleidoscope-colored. The blood still seeping out is red mixed with bright yellow pus.

  “That looks really painful.” The Nahx turns to me, and I imagine a perplexed expression in the tilt of his head. “Just trying to lighten the mood.” My words are starting to slur.

  I lie back and let the room swim around me. When I look up again, he has a bowl of sudsy water and another pile of towels as well as torn strips of lighter fabric, possibly a sheet. Washing the wound involves the kind of pain people probably go mad from, but I’m already pretty delirious, so I giggle through most of it, when I can keep from whimpering. Maybe the pain is bad enough for me to zone out again, because the next time I look at my leg, it’s loosely bandaged in clean, torn sheets.

  The next few minutes pass in a haze as he helps me sit up and slips off my layers of coat and sweaters. When he lays me back, wearing just a bra and cotton undershirt, the cool sheets soothe my scorched skin. He reaches forward, uncertainly, delicately, and lifts the side of my undershirt. My ribs are eggplant-colored and puffed up like a cake that’s ready to come out of the oven. He runs his fingers over the bruising, and though his touch is achingly gentle, bolts of pain shoot through me.

  By this time I think the fever must have risen dangerously. The daylight is completely gone, the scene lit only by candlelight. When I turn my head from side to side, the candles streak in my vision, like shooting stars. My mouth is as dry as the ashes of the burnt forest where . . .

  “Was that you too?” I ask, then remembering that he’s not privy to my thoughts, add: “By the river. You let us float away?”

  He nods, pulling my undershirt back down. That’s all the torture in that area for now. As he prods my bruised cheek, I find my words getting thick as uncooked sausages. My lips feel like they are inflated.

  “Have you been following me?”

  A second passes before he shrugs. There’s a small part of me that is outraged by this answer; how can he not know? Either he has followed me or he hasn’t. But the fevered part of me understands completely. Sometimes a path is something you float along, not something you make. The path followed me; he just followed the path. That makes a kind of delirious sense.

  I try to look at him in the near dark, but he looks more like the absence of himself than anything solid. He’s like a negation of a person, the blank space left when a person is lost. How many people did he . . . ? But I can’t finish this thought because my eyes fill with tears.

  “Tuck . . . ,” I whisper. “Tucker. . . .”

  And Lochie, and Felix, and Sawyer, and Mandy. And God knows who else. My parents, Tucker’s parents. Xander’s family. Millions, billions. All our shared history, good and bad. Gone. It’s hard to reconcile this gentle one with that level of destruction.

  “Just following orders . . . ,” I hear myself mumble. He wriggles his fingers in front of his mouth, and I must be high as a kite, because I understand this sign immediately.

  What did you say? What are you talking about? Explain.

  “Just following orders, right?” I say, in a wave of lucidity. “I could tell you stories from our history about that. Is that why you do what you do? Walk around with a rifle creating human mannequins? How many of us have you dispa
tched, anyway?”

  He turns away from me, staring out at the dark window. I hear him take a deep, rattling breath in and out. His hands find my broken forearm. The shot of pain makes a red flash in my eyes. He produces a little light from somewhere and shines it down on my arm. I can see a raised, swollen bump there, but no bone sticking out—that’s something.

  “It’s going to really hurt, isn’t it? If you set it?”

  He doesn’t look at me as he nods. He stands, and I see he has the shackle in his other hand.

  “Don’t. Please. I won’t go anywhere. I promise. I can barely sit up.”

  He hesitates, but tucks the shackle away and looks down at me, his head cocked to the side.

  “So,” I say. My voice is like two sheets of sandpaper rustling together. “Should we do the arm with screaming or without?”

  He makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Zero. I guess that means no screaming.

  “Maybe if I had something to bite down on?” He flicks his head back twice, like a reverse nod, and holds out the hand that I bit earlier.

  Really? He’s making jokes? I guess I’d laugh if I could, or smile, if my face weren’t so mangled. The fever is starting make everything look like it’s been decorated in gaudy streamers and glitter, like I’m at a New Year’s Eve party.

  Wait, he signs. Another unmistakable one. He disappears for a few moments and comes back with several kitchen utensils, some for biting and some splint shaped. He also has, mercifully, a bottle of bourbon.

  I don’t really like bourbon. I’m not averse to a little underage drinking, but purloined wine and beer are my usual poisons. Broken prisoners of hostile aliens cannot be choosers, I guess. I uncap the bottle and take a swig. It burns on the way down. I imagine it will probably feel as bad if not worse on the way back up.

  While I drink, he wets a cloth and presses into onto my steaming forehead. I wonder if he knows what the fever means. How much can he know about human medical care?

  “My leg is getting infected, I think,” I say. “Do you know what that means?”