Forging Zero

by Sara King

  Commander Tril stepped closer to Joe and held both four-fingered tentacles spread wide, narrowing his escape route. On either side of him, his friends were also moving forward, ready to surround Joe. They moved slowly, with no sudden movements, like horse trainers trying to calm their animals.

  “I said back off!” Joe screamed. He backed up two feet, until he ran out of hallway. The aliens laughed again and kept coming.

  “Look at it,” Tril said. “It’s as terrified as a Takki.”

  Joe ducked and rammed himself into the speaker, intending to knock him over and keep on going. Instead, like a five-hundred-pound lineman, Commander Tril never budged. He garbled a curse and wrapped stinging tentacles around one of Joe’s arms, tightening them like miniature pythons, depressing the muscle and making the fingers in that hand instantly numb. Joe gasped and tried to jerk away, but the alien remained rooted in place, watching Joe writhe with its sticky brown eyes narrowed in a satisfaction that did not need to be translated.

  With his free hand, Joe yanked the little black gun out of his aggressor’s belt. The tentacles strangling his arm loosened suddenly and Joe wrenched himself free. He had the gun in both hands and was desperately trying to figure out how to fire it when an alien grabbed his throat from behind.

  The gun went off, an echoing burp that made every alien in the hall jump.

  The glowing blue shot hit the scarred alien in the neck, dissolving one of the writhing tentacles that dangled from either side of its head. With a roar of rage, an alien wrapped its snakelike arm around Joe’s neck, tightened its stinging grasp, and shook him like a toy. Joe dropped the gun, the edges of his vision going black.

  “The burning furg shot Kihgl!”

  The alien holding Joe by the throat wrenched him forward and, between the grip on his throat and his forward momentum, almost snapped Joe’s neck. Joe dropped to one knee, his lungs burning for air, his vision closing to tiny, blurred windows. Other aliens converged on him, grasping his arms, pinning him down.

  All too quickly, Joe’s world shrank to an inch of the glossy black floor under his face, then faded to total darkness.

  Then, out of the void, he heard the scarred one speak. “Stop, you Takki! It was just a hahkta. Give the ignorant creature some air.”

  The stinging tentacle around Joe’s throat loosened just enough to allow him to breathe. Joe gasped in a desperate lungful of air, coughing in frantic, whooping breaths as his vision slowly started to come back into focus.

  When his mind began to register shapes again, the alien he’d shot was staring down at him, his sticky brown gaze unreadable. A clear, brownish liquid was dripping from the dissolved tentacle on the side of his head, landing in little spatters on Joe’s jeans, but Joe couldn’t have moved if he’d tried. The three aliens holding him down seemed bent on trying to pull him apart, and the bones in Joe’s arms were screaming, on the verge of snapping from the pressure. Joe closed his eyes and felt the welling of a sob in his chest. He struggled against it, forcing it back down. He wasn’t gonna cry. Not for them.

  “Commander Tril, until we kill him, fit him with a modifier. I don’t want to have to chase the asher down again.”

  The grip on Joe’s arm released suddenly.

  Then the alien behind him was yanking him onto his back, holding him down as Commander Tril fitted a bluish band around his ankle. Once it was secured, they all released him at once.

  Panicked, confused, Joe dove away from them and ran.

  He was maybe fifty feet down the hall when, all at once, his body stopped responding. Streaks of pain lanced up from his ankle, into his stomach, chest, and eyes, balling him up, emptying his lungs in a scream. He fell into an awkward, shrieking tumble on the floor, unable to think or feel anything but the awful pain consuming him from the inside out.

  Then, as quickly as it had started, the pain was gone. Joe felt a warm wetness on his stomach and realized he had vomited bile and algae-flavored water down his chest. He panted on his back, staring up at the domed scarlet light above him as he gripped the sticky black floor beneath him with both trembling hands.

  The pale, scarred alien he’d shot came into view as he lay there, panting. For a long moment, they just stared at each other.

  “Are you finished?” the scarred alien finally asked. In his tentacled hand, he held a small device made of the same bluish metal as the band around Joe’s ankle.

  Joe shuddered and turned away, the pain still raw in his mind. He spat out the leftover bile that had accumulated in the back of his throat, shuddering. He wanted to run, but now he was terrified to actually do so.

  As soon as he realized that, he stiffened.

  Dad would fight them, Joe thought. Dad wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t just lay here. Still, though, he couldn’t force himself to make his muscles move, knowing the torment would come again.

  “There’s no shame in it, Human. There’s nowhere for you to go.” Kihgl’s voice held a note of kindness to it, one that made Joe sick.

  Unable to hold still for the alien’s pity, Joe lunged to his feet and ran again.

  This time, he only got a couple yards before he tumbled back to the floor, agony tearing through his body in relentless, unending waves. Somewhere in the thrashing that followed, his bladder loosened and he peed himself. He hurt like his whole body was being thrown into a furnace, inside and out, and every breath was a nightmare he wished would end him. All he wanted, at that point, was to die.

  The aliens left him in pain longer this time. By the time he could finally breathe without crying, Joe lay there, panting, as the aliens casually strolled up to him, his entire body still shaking with the aftereffects.

  Realizing he wasn’t lying in a pool of blood and guts, and that the pain wasn’t actually hurting him, Joe shakily got back to his feet.

  Someday these assholes are gonna wish they’d killed me, he thought, shaking as he stared them down.

  Commander Tril was laughing again. “Think the furgling sooter will try for three?”

  Joe straightened his spine and stared back into the orange-streaked Ooreiki’s sticky brown eyes. You’re dead, he thought. Soon as I figure out how to use that gun. You’re dead. When Kihgl saw he wasn’t going to run a third time, the scarred Ooreiki wrenched his arms behind his back and led him down the hall. They came to a mass of children milling in the corridor with their alien guardians, where Kihgl and his companions shoved Joe into the group, switched off their translators and said a few words in rattling, grunting Ooreiki, then abruptly left.

  Both aliens and children gave Joe questioning looks. He could feel the aliens’ gazes settling on the metal band around his ankle and he reddened.

  I’m gonna get back home. As soon as they give me the chance.

  This time, Joe gave no resistance as they herded them down another tubular black hall and into an enormous room with blinding white lights. His eyes were no longer aching with the strain of trying to distinguish shapes and shadows, but his skin began to crawl when he got a good look at the ship in this new light. Every surface seemed alive with glossy liquid energy. For the first time, he realized that the ship surfaces didn’t look like stone or metal or glass or anything else Joe had ever seen. With the way the gloss seemed to ebb and flow in ebony waves, it almost looked like it was breathing. Seeing that, Joe had to fight down a moment of panic, suddenly wondering if he were trapped in the belly of a space-going monster.

  It’s not alive, he had to tell himself. It can’t be. Besides, he’d seen the outsides of their sleek black ships. They were ships.

  Still, watching the gloss shift in waves, like wind against a field of grain, Joe started to back towards the far wall, his hair standing on end.

  The other kids didn’t seem to notice. They were more interested in clinging to each other and running from the couple dozen aliens that were herding them around like cattle. Within minutes, the aliens had pushed hundreds—if not thousands—of children into the room, their fearful voices rising in ti
des, drowning out all other sound.

  Joe reached down and tugged on the bluish band around his ankle in increasing panic. Like the doors that melted into walls, it was seamless—a paper-thin ring that had no give whatsoever. He wrenched on it in frustration, but eventually gave up and went to hide his wet crotch in a corner, plotting how he was going to kill his kidnappers for making him pee himself in front of thousands of kids.

  About an hour passed as more and more kids were added to the panicked mass. The aliens packed them into one half of the room until there was barely space to breathe, let alone move, before dozens more aliens began pouring inside and a fearful hush descended on the kids. Joe, taller than anyone else in the room by almost a head, was able to see the aliens line up in nine rows against the opposite wall. He recognized the group of five that had chased him down and caught the pale, scarred one’s eyes, the one called Kihgl.

  The pale alien and eight others moved forward and began sorting the kids like captains on a playground team, barking orders to each other in their harsh, guttural language while other Ooreiki hurried to obey. Joe felt a twinge of fear when he realized the aliens had turned off their translators. He ducked low and moved as far to the back of the group as he could, his gut instincts telling him that, whatever was about to happen, it was not good.

  Eventually, the nine ‘captains’ had all but Joe and a few others standing in groups behind them. Joe noticed with growing concern that, aside from himself, the remainders all looked weak or sickly in some way. One of the kids had an angry red gash in his leg that ran from his knee to the base of his calf, laying open a deep section of muscle and skin tissue. A wound from the hellish days of the Draft. The kid had long ago given up on standing on it and instead, the boy sat on the floor, his red-rimmed eyes watching the aliens nervously.

  Joe’s breath caught when he recognized him. Little Harry Simpson. He’d seen him a dozen times a week, riding his tricycle out in the road at the end of his subdivision. The boy always leaned on the fence when Joe, Sam, and their dad played football in the front yard, sucking down a Freeze-Pop, acting as the ref when they had a foul.

  Now Harry looked like a skeleton with skin. The little fingers that had offered Joe popsicles were now bony protrusions bunched in his shorts as he fought off pain and fever. He had dark hollows under his eyes and his cheeks were wet from crying.

  Seeing the discolored pus oozing from Harry’s wound, Joe knew he needed to go to a hospital. Joe had read about wounds festering. If he didn’t get help, Harry was going to die.

  Joe sucked in a breath as an alien with orange features stepped toward them. The last thing he wanted was to be chosen by Commander Tril. Already, Joe’s arm was turning into a huge purple bruise where Tril had held him down.

  Tril walked up to Harry and gestured at him, looking back at his alien companions as he spoke in his alien tongue. None of them moved. Tril gestured again and Harry looked up at him with hopeful, pain-brightened eyes.

  Why isn’t Tril taking him back with him? Joe wondered, dread beginning to form a cold knot in his gut.

  Commander Tril activated the translation device hanging his neck and turned to speak to the entire gathering.

  “The battalion leaders have made their decision. Twice I requested a place for this one, and twice I was denied. No Congressional soldier will take him into his fold. Thus, he has no place in the Army.”

  The alien pulled his gun from his belt and shot Harry in the face.

  For a long moment, Joe was too shocked to move. Then a primal yell erupted from the pit of his gut and he jumped to his feet. Heart hammering in terror, he began backing away from the scene.

  Harry’s emaciated corpse slumped to one side, oozing purple slime down its Sesame Street T-shirt, half his head missing. Joe stared at the body, beginning to hyperventilate. They’re going to kill us all, he realized. The other twelve kids in the center of the room began to scream. The aliens quieted them ruthlessly, slamming several of them into the glossy black floor to shut them up. One sat up bleeding from his ear, blinking desperately.

  Tril waited for silence, then spoke to his companions, the translator once again switched off. An alien had to hold a freckled kid in place in front of him while he screamed and writhed to get away as they made their exchange.

  “Stop it!” Joe lunged forward to help the kid.

  Before he had taken three steps, an Ooreiki grabbed him and yanked him back.

  “Don’t!” Joe said, “Don’t do it!”

  Tril ignored him and turned back to the freckled kid. Like he’d done with Harry, he said, “The battalion leaders have made their decision. Twice I requested a place for this one, and—”

  “Please don’t shoot him!” Joe cried. “He’s just a—” The alien holding him wrapped a tentacle around his throat and tightened it, silencing him.

  Tril cast Joe a dark look. “—and twice I was denied. No Congressional soldier would take him into his fold. Thus, he has no place in the Army.”

  Joe kicked his aggressor and struggled free. “Don—”

  The little boy’s scream ended in a wet burp.

  “You son of a bitch!” Joe screamed at Tril. “You evil son of a bitch!” Three aliens converged on Joe and dragged him to the ground, their stinging tentacles biting into his skin, leaving bloody welts in their path as he struggled against them.

  The third child, an extremely small toddler, was claimed before Tril could shoot her. Joe looked up to see Kihgl pushing her into his group. The tentacle Joe had shot off ended in a dark brown stain on one side of his head, making him appear lopsided.

  Joe couldn’t watch the rest. He closed his eyes and slumped his head against the floor, waiting for it to end.

  The next two children were claimed by another scarred alien, though this one was paler than Kihgl. Upon seeing his pale face, Joe had an instant of recognition that left him cold.

  Smoke wafted from the burning street. Joe stared at a black boot, his head and stomach on fire, the night exploding in bright, beautiful colors all around them. Sam was gone…escaped with the others. The alien stared down at him through its sleek black helmet with the cold fury of a wasp. “How old do you think it is?”

  “Sixteen, is my onboard’s guess, Commander Lagrah,” one of the glossy, black-suited aliens said. “Maybe fourteen, with growth irregularities.”

  There was cruel purpose in the alien’s pale brown eyes as he said, “I’m sorry, Gokli. What did you say his age was?”

  There was a long pause. “Twelve, sir.”

  Lagrah. His name is Lagrah.

  Then the aliens holding Joe wrenched him to his feet, shattering the memory. When he looked up and saw Commander Tril standing in front of him, all Joe could hear was his own frantic heartbeat thudding in his ears. Tril was looking at him, his sticky brown face a picture of satisfaction.

  “Go to Hell,” Joe said.

  Tril made a guttural rapping in the base of his neck—an alien laugh. Languidly, his big, gummy eyes on Joe, Tril made an alien garble at its companions.

  Scanning their squashed, indifferent faces, Joe knew he was going to die.

  Tril asked again, looking back on his fellows where they stood with their selected groups. None of them moved. Joe could feel the gunman’s satisfaction as he snaked a tentacle to the small black device around his neck and switched it on.

  Tril waited until the room had fallen silent, until every eye single was on him. “The battalion leaders have made their decision. Twice I requested a place for this one, and twice I was denied. No Congressional soldier will take him into his fold. Thus, he has no place in the Army.”

  Joe lifted his head and stared at a point on the wall across the room as Commander Tril raised his gun, determined not to let them see his fear. He knew that begging was worthless. They could have left all of the sickly kids back on Earth, but instead they brought them aboard to use as a warning to the others.

  The sickly kids…and the kids who’d pissed them off.


  Joe felt his bowels churning and he absurdly hoped he didn’t shit himself in front of all the little kids. Most of the kids had shit themselves. Even then, little Harry Simpson had a brown stain running down his twitching, skeletal leg.

  In the silence that followed, Commander Kihgl made a guttural noise that sounded like more laughter.

  Get on with it, you assholes, Joe thought, his fists clenching despite his guards’ tight grips cutting off the circulation in his forearms. What were they trying to do? Make him cry?

  The pale, scarred alien called Kihgl spoke again. Tril turned to face him, an unmistakable look of irritation on his wrinkled, orange-brown face. His weapon never wavered from where its muzzle aimed between Joe’s eyes.

  Joe stared at it. Odd, how it looked like the tip of the gun was rippling like a desert mirage. It reminded him of swirling water, like the meandering stream that ran through his friend’s back yard.

  Joe’s eyes snapped back to the aliens as a flurry of brutal alien words erupted between Tril and Kihgl. Several other aliens joined in, all team ‘captains,’ most of whom seemed to side with Tril. Joe realized the alien he’d disfigured was bargaining for his life.

  He was surprised, knowing that alien, of any of them, had the most reason to kill him. Joe allowed himself an instant of hope, but it quickly faded as he realized that the other battalion commanders were winning the argument. Joe looked at the floor, wondering how long they would drag it on.

  An authoritative tone rose above the fray and the argument stopped with an unmistakable note of finality. Joe recognized the speaker and he suddenly felt his blood coagulate in his veins. Lagrah. The one he had humiliated. The one who had taken him, alone, back to the ship in Sam’s place. The one who had intended to kill him as an example to the others.

  Commander Tril put his weapon away, shoved Joe at Kihgl, and stalked from the room. Joe stared at Lagrah, utterly dumbfounded.