Zero Repeat Forever

by G. S. Prendergast

  He takes another small step, until his neck is pressed against the tip of the blade. I feel it click between the plates. If I gave a hard push, it would go right through his throat. I want to. After everything I’ve seen these monsters do, I really want to. And I think he’s daring me.

  I pull the knife back, clutching it to my chest. “There’s only one killer here.”

  He hisses abruptly and strides out of the kitchen, across the living room, and out the door into the hallway. After his footsteps recede I notice he’s left his rifle.

  Awkwardly tying a dish towel around my waist, I fashion a kind of holster for the knife, which I tuck into place. I can’t know when he’ll come back for his rifle, but in the meantime I can get a close look at it. Like him, it’s a dull gray metallic color. It even smells a bit like he does, vaguely chemical and smoky, like charcoal. It’s much heavier than any rifle I’ve ever held, so heavy it would be unwieldy for all but the strongest human soldier to carry. But the Nahx are very strong. We know that.

  For months I’ve wanted to get a close look at a live dart. The only ones I’ve ever seen are spent—and they are completely empty, without a trace of the toxin left to study, according to one video I saw. Awkwardly, because of my bandaged arm, I prop the rifle on the breakfast bar and try a few switches and levers. As I flick something, a loud whine begins and a second later a dart thunks into a cupboard door.

  I limp forward to inspect it, but hear him pounding back up the hallway. He mustn’t have been very far away. Turning back to the front door, I’m so surprised by his speed across the living room that I accidentally fire the rifle at him. He snatches the dart right out of the air and hurls it across the room. His hands slash through the air as he lunges at me.

  Break BREAK.

  I recognize that one. And he points at me as I stumble backward, sliding his thumb across his throat.

  Kill you. Break you.

  “Don’t!” I fling the rifle across the floor, sliding down to crouch in the corner, my good arm curled up protectively.

  He stops moving, becoming still, apart from his breathing. After a moment where I stare at him from under my elbow, burning with the rage of being so scared of him that I can barely move, he raises his hands, palms forward, shaking his head. He bends down slowly, retrieving the rifle and slinging it over his back.

  Dropping to one knee, he makes some signs. Break I see again, and he points at me, raising one hand like a half shrug.

  Break you?

  “No, I’m not hurt.” I’m trembling though, and fighting not to. It’s withdrawal, I tell myself. Cold, tremors, nausea. Maybe it’s the lingering infection. I don’t think I was this scared yesterday. But I was drugged then.

  The Nahx pats his rifle. Hurt you, he signs firmly, a warning, not a threat.

  “I won’t touch it again. I just wanted to know how the darts work.”

  He tilts his head to the side again, retrieving the rifle. With a click, one of the darts pops out. He holds it out.

  I’ve never actually seen a veterinarian tranquilizer dart in real life, but this one looks a bit like the ones I’ve seen in nature documentaries. Like a futuristic version of one, and maybe it’s blood rushing in my ears, but it seems to hum.

  Touch. No. Hurt you. Kill you.

  “Okay. I won’t.” I’m surprised how many of his signs I seem to know already. They’re intuitive, and I vaguely remember him talking to me while I was half conscious. I guess I absorbed some of it.

  He slaps his palm on his chest and stands, holding his hand down for me.

  “I don’t need help.”

  He steps back as I struggle to stand. Then we face each other, him towering over me, me small, helpless, addled by drugs, bent with pain. I don’t think it would be much of a fight if it came to that. I have the little knife—that’s something. And I have my hate, my fear, my rage.

  “Are you still using that rifle? Is that where you go in the day? Off to find survivors and kill them?”

  He shakes his head. I want him to go away now, so I can suffer in peace. My head is on fire, throbbing so hard that I’m seeing stars. But I try to think like a soldier, or a survivor, try to ignore the pain and ignore how scared I am. I have to . . . make him care about me? Isn’t that how it goes in the movies? But that’s not really my style. And it probably wouldn’t do any good anyway.

  “Why do you carry the rifle around if you’re not using it?”

  He huffs a little breath, like he’s thinking about it. Look good.

  I snort back a laugh, choking on the thought of how very human that is. So like a man to want to be armed for fashion reasons. But as he moves to leave me, my mind trips on another thought. I don’t think he said his rifle “looks good”; I think he said it “looks right,” as though to the outside world he needs to still look like the rest of them.

  “August?”

  He turns in the doorway.

  “Are there . . . others . . . like you? Outside?”

  He nods. You stay. Hurt you.

  A warning. Not a threat.

  We pause there, while I absorb that reality. So, there is some secrecy to whatever is happening here, to what he’s doing with me. Maybe I should be comforted by his protection from others of his kind, but there’s something horrifying, too, about being the secret consort of a monster. I’d probably cry if I didn’t think it would take my headache from merely ball-shrinking to heart-stopping.

  “I can’t take those pills you found for me anymore,” I say, turning away to look out the window, at the fridge, anywhere but him. “They’ll make me sick. I need ones that come in bigger white bottles, not the little yellow ones. Can you look for me?”

  He takes one step forward and opens the narrow cupboard by the sink. It’s full of various medicines, Band-Aids, sunscreen. Plenty of everyday ibuprofen. Whoever lived here was well supplied.

  August trusts me to dose myself with these pills, I guess. He turns back to the doorway and strides off, disappearing into the hall.

  AUGUST

  Humans have photographs. I have no sign for that, but the sound of the word plays clearly in my head.

  Photograph. I draw the shape of it in the air, a rectangle or square. There’s odd familiarity to this peculiar human habit, as though this is something from the hidden parts of my mind. But there’s also something wrong about the photographs I find. The shape of them is off, or the color. And they are treated so carelessly for such precious objects, tossed into drawers, stuck behind magnets on doors, pinned to walls. If I had a photograph of the human girl, I would keep it somewhere safe, I think. Maybe the ones the humans left behind aren’t their precious ones. Maybe they took those with them when they ran.

  For humans, memories can be held inside the mind as thoughts, or outside as objects. I have few memories to keep as thoughts, and no objects to keep at all. I wish I had taken something from Sixth after she . . . died. Or whatever happened. But what? I could have taken her rifle, I suppose, or her knife. At least that would help me remember how violent she was. Sometimes when I think of her I still miss her steady shoulder. I have to keep reminding myself that’s wrong. It’s like the memory of the mission directives humming in my mind. I still hear their echo sometimes, still think I should dart a human if I see one.

  But I see no humans, not alive, at least. The city is quiet. I find evidence of my kind once in a while and occasionally hear the grumble of a distant transport, but so far I don’t encounter any. I don’t know what I will do if it happens. They would want me to go with them, but I can’t leave the human, Raven. She would die without me. Or the others would find her and dart her. Or she would be left alone in a dead city.

  The empty human streets spread out like a maze around the high tower where I took her. My search of them has become a compulsion. I know it’s another echo of the directives—search, search for humans, flush them out of hiding places, and dart them, all of them. Leave none standing. But if I found one, I think I could resist. That’
s my plan—find another human, capture it, and bring it to her. Make it understand that she needs help. Then I could leave her, as she wants. I should have given her to the human who shot me with the arrow. It was a mistake not to; I see that now. The sludge inside me makes every emotion urgent and catastrophic. It is so hard to think in moments like that and without the focus of the directives, without Sixth to guide me. . . .

  I make mistakes. I’ve made many mistakes.

  I’ve searched for days and haven’t found a single living human.

  She is sleeping when I come back to our refuge in the sky. I have other bottles of the pills she wants—I hope they are the right kind. And I have thick blankets I took from beds two flights down. There are darted humans still lying in some of the beds. I leave their blankets in place; it feels wrong to disturb them, and anyway, the directives were to leave them where they fall. I take blankets only from empty beds, secure in the knowledge that the darted humans mean this building has already been processed. There is no reason for any of my kind to come back through here.

  I suppose if her people are all gone, and my people are all gone, then the two of us could stay here indefinitely. There is plenty of food for her, and though the elevation is low, I could recharge if I needed to, if I was quick about it. I could protect her and take care of her until spring. Or summer? And then what?

  Something comes next, and though I don’t know what it is, I’m sure it’s not good, for me, for her, for dandelions or snowflakes or spiderwebs. How can any of this be good?

  RAVEN

  The hallway outside the door is approximately one hundred feet long. I know this because I pace it out several times a day. There are four penthouse apartments on this floor. August has broken the locks and propped the doors open on all of them, and as my leg improves, I wander in and out as I please, sometimes stopping to practice a karate kata with my shadow on the walls. The door to the stairwell has been torn off its hinges too. I usually hobble down a few flights of stairs and back up once a day too, trying to build the strength back in my leg and lungs. I want to keep going, every single day, want to complete the journey down to the street below, back to the stadium and the tunnel, toward my human friends. Away from him.

  But I know to leave now would be suicide. Still, some days even suicide seems preferable to . . . whatever this is.

  Counting the eight days I floated in a fever, I have been here for just under three weeks. I rarely see the Nahx, August, now. He leaves food out for me, usually cold, although sometimes if I happen to be awake when he brings it, he will slip back into the kitchen and return a few minutes later with a steaming bowl. I’m not sure how he heats it. Oddly, when I finish eating, he throws the bowls off the balcony. Once I hobbled out there with my bowl, ate, then called out to him when I finished. When he appeared, I handed him the empty bowl expectantly. He held it over the railing and dropped it, with what I’m almost sure was a sigh.

  Broken, he signed. This was the first sign he had made in days.

  He doesn’t communicate much. He doesn’t touch me or come near me except to check my injuries. But I learn a few signs.

  One, where he waves two fingers in front of his chest, is a useful one. It seems to mean “repeat.”

  Repeat. Speak, he’ll sign if he hasn’t heard something I’ve said. But he also uses it for “more” or “very.”

  Repeat cold, he signed one night as he arrived with a pile of new blankets. It is cold. With the power off, the apartment isn’t heated. The sun blazing in the many windows keeps it warm enough during the day, but at night the temperature drops to close to freezing. I pile the blankets over me and shiver myself to sleep. Sometimes I wake in the night and find him kneeling or standing nearby, never looking at me, but his body radiates heat. He doesn’t seem to sleep. I think he’s trying to keep me warm in the night. It’s kind of skeevy to have him so close to me as I sleep, but I’m so tired and cold that I tolerate it.

  This is how I learn his sign for “sad.” One night a dream of Tucker drags me out of sleep with a sob, tears streaming down my face. August leans down to check on me.

  Feel broken? he signs. The sign means “pain,” I’ve learned. He worries about the lingering pain in my ribs and leg.

  “Just sad,” I say. He draws a finger down his face, like a tear.

  Sad.

  “Yes, sad. I had a sad dream.”

  He draws a swirl on his forehead, and a few cells in the region of my heart flicker at the idea that he has shared his word for “dream.” He says it again.

  Sad dream.

  Something about the way he nods to himself as he leaves me makes my breath catch in my throat. Does he dream? Are his dreams sad? I have a horrible feeling that he knows a kind of sadness I can only aspire to. I have people to get back to, after all. What does he have? He knows I hate him. I know he hates himself. He turned all the mirrors and every reflective art piece to the wall, like a vampire or something. He doesn’t even like his shadow. Once he stood in the doorway to the hall as I made my daily laps. The sunlight streaming in behind him outlined his shape on the wall. I watched him look at it for an instant and then step quickly out of the light.

  He made a sign once, after I changed into some flowered thermal pajamas he found for me. I think he might have done it subconsciously; it wasn’t really directed at me. He glanced at me and looked away, making a shape with his hand. “Pretty,” I took it to mean, because he did it again, one night looking at the sunset, adding the repeat sign.

  Repeat pretty.

  When he saw his shadow, he made this sign backward with a shake of his head, negating it. He thinks he is ugly. I might have agreed with him once, but now I think maybe that’s a little unfair. He is what he is, no different from a toad or a hyena, or one of nature’s other less attractive offerings. Still not something you want to get close to, but I’m used to him now anyway. I don’t jump out of my skin every time I see him anymore, though I still don’t like it when he touches me or comes near me. I try to be civil. If I’m civil, I can earn his trust, and maybe get him to reveal things he shouldn’t. If I’m civil, he’s less likely to turn on me. So I do it because my life depends on it. But with all this rage embedded in me like a stubborn, bloated tick, even civility is a challenge.

  Daily, I fantasize about leaving. I imagine marching through the mountains, alone, determined, a crust of ice forming on my face, my eyelashes freezing together. Sometimes the daydreams end with Topher finding me, with us running into each other’s arms in slow motion. Sometimes they end with me dead in the snow. It’s hard to decide which daydream I enjoy more.

  August has other signs, most having to do with my care. “Hungry” and “tired,” he uses daily. “Scared,” which involves a closed fist in front of the mouth, he used a lot early on, when he approached me to check my leg or ribs. Scared, he would sign, shaking his head, subverting it. Don’t be scared. He doesn’t need to use it anymore. I turn away when he tends to my wounds. I’m not scared of him. And there’s nothing else to be scared of up here in the clouds.

  I reach the end of the hallway, my good leg aching with the extra weight I still put on it. A musty breeze blows up the stairwell. I’m about to begin the difficult trip down two or three flights when I hear footsteps coming up. I freeze and edge backward. It’s probably him, but if it isn’t . . . I listen, straining. It sounds like one set of footsteps. It must be him.

  Peering over the banister, I look into the deep, narrow abyss down the center of the railings. I can see his left hand, well, someone’s left hand, trailing on the metal bar. For some reason, I wait, neither descending nor retreating as he reaches the landing below me. He stops as he sees me.

  “Hello,” I say. The dark stairwell makes him hard to see, shadowy. His armor clicks as he nods a reply. He’s carrying a large cardboard box. “What have you got?”

  He carries the box up to my level and sets it down on the floor. Reaching in, he fishes around a bit and then pulls out a small pink tedd
y bear. It’s wearing floral pajamas very much like mine. He hands it to me.

  At first I don’t know what to say. I feel a mix of amusement and revulsion as I look into the bear’s little pink face. It has a wide smile and bright blue button eyes, as well as a little red felt nose. Stitched on the front of the pajama top is a name: Lucy. I don’t know if that is the bear’s name or the name of the child who loved it. Suddenly, I feel a surge of nauseating anger rising up in me.

  “This belonged to a child, you know,” I say. I can tell August hears the accusing tone in my voice. He takes a small step backward. “The child is dead, right?”

  A second passes before he shrugs.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? All the children are dead. Everyone is dead. You killed them all.” He shakes his head.

  Not me.

  “You’re one of them though. One of those that killed everyone here. Aren’t you?”

  His nod is barely there, tiny. I shake the teddy bear in his face.

  “This is pirate plunder, Viking plunder. Don’t pillage on my behalf anymore. I don’t want things you’ve stolen from dead children.”

  I reach forward and drop the bear into the abyss, watching as it sails down and disappears into the dark. When I turn, August is looking at me, still except for the rising and falling of his shoulders. I glance down and see the box is full of sweaters, thick socks, and mittens. Things I desperately need. Struggling to conceal the desire in my eyes, I turn back and stare defiantly at him.

  He moves so quickly sometimes, it takes my breath away. In a flash he picks up the box and disappears into the hallway. I hobble after him, as fast as I can, seeing him stepping into the penthouse we have been living in. By the time I get there, he is out on the balcony, emptying the contents of the box over the railing.

  “Don’t!” I say, but he throws the empty box, leaning over to watch it fall. “You’re being stupid. Stop it!”

  He pushes past me, gathering up the blankets that make my bed, the extra clothes I’ve amassed, slippers, socks, even a cheesy romance novel he gave me, which I’ve been secretly reading, and takes the whole pile out to the terrace.