Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (10 page)

The building itself was impressive and equipped with every high-tech gadget I could imagine to facilitate food service, distance-learning and storage. I was impressed. The community’s children were less excited than the adults, because they’d suddenly discovered that their lives of informal schooling were over.

Barbara Banks, for her part, was pleased to be de-facto Principal of our community school and hand off the actual teaching to people on the other end of fiber-optic cable. I can see how it was a relief for her, and her enthusiasm for being able to offer the children better education was contagious. I even found myself smiling.

It was a good night, and it felt as if we were starting to become a community again. No one could have told me how stressful it would be having your family of choice not getting along well. I would have laughed heartily at their expense and trundled off to do whatever was pressing on me at the time. Pride goeth before a fall, and this one was a short drop. I was grateful for that small favor.

After the tour wrapped up, everyone moved off to get on with the daily process of living in a community undergoing huge changes… under the watchful eye of armed guards. Some of us decided to hang out in the cafeteria over some adult beverages. God! It felt so good to hear everyone catching up on the ins and outs of their lives over the preceding two weeks, and everyone was full of juicy updates. Even Bajali, who eschewed alcohol (except on very rare occasions), was rattling off the list of scientific apparatus that graced his new lab in Building 1.

“Do you know? They are transferring a team of researchers here to work with me on the nanotech, and the medical staff will be remaining as well.”

“Are they going to stay cooped up in plastic suits? Or will they interact with you like people?” Fitzgerald asked over the rim of a beer stein. It was a family heirloom and went with him wherever he traveled, or so they said.

“Not at all.” Baj smiled, gesturing with a half-eaten carrot stick, “I will have the propagation issue fixed in the next day or two. Once that is rolled out, we will no longer be infectious.”

I sipped on a Corona, and nodded, pleased to hear that progress was happening. I couldn’t contribute anything to the conversation beyond noises and pantomime, so I just nursed my beer. Charlie, Jayashri and Chunhua had decided to make use of my Japanese bathtub, and left us men to fend for ourselves. I missed her presence, but was also a little glad for the space.

“I heard those researchers are bringing in one of their pet projects,” Shawn drawled. He was on beer number 5, if my math wasn’t off. “Anybody heard anything about that?”

“Yes,” Buttons answered from farther down the table. “It’s a live subject that was discovered locally. They’ve been keeping it alive for almost a year.”

“Man, that just gives me the shivers,” our country caveman rumbled, downing the rest of his beer.

“They tell me that the subject is an anomaly,” Buttons said with a noncommittal shrug, “and we shouldn’t worry about it.”

I tended to agree with Shawn on the issue: it gave me serious cold chills to think that we’d have a zombie, or “Eater”, up close and personal. What I felt wasn’t hate, exactly. It was more like visceral revulsion, and I decided to put the beer down on the off chance that the chills made me clumsy. To my relief, the conversation veered off into Shawn’s territory, otherwise known as the “Garage” of Building 1.

After a few more laughs, I stood up, mimicked sleeping, and wished everyone well with a goodbye grunt. Something was eating at me, and I figured that I’d had one beer too many with a still-recovering brain. My bed was probably the best place for me, and that’s where I headed.

I’m the kind of man that enjoys an uneventful walk. I used to enjoy uneventful rides on my old Buell motorcycle until I put the bike down into a crowd of zombies. It wasn’t evident to me that they were standing around a drum full of kerosene until it exploded a second later. It would have burnt my eyebrows off if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet with the visor down. I really miss that bike.

When I rounded the corner at Buchanan, I saw something I’d never seen before. Two of our guards were leaning on the porch of the empty house that sat on the corner of Buchanan and 23
^rd
. Their visors were up and it looked like they were sharing a smoke on their watch. Pretty benign, if you ask me, but I had to wonder if they were allowed to be visible. Shrugging, I prepared to walk right by them.

My heightened sense of smell gave me some extra information: they’d both been drinking. Pretty heavily, too.

“Hey, you,” one of them called out to me as they jogged over to intercept me on my stroll home. “You’re the guy that got his brains blown out, right?”

I nodded, and followed it up with an “Um-hum.”

“What’s it like, being,” the second guard gestured, trying to put sensible words together, “you know?”

I shrugged, because I had no way to give them a better answer.

“Dude, don’t you remember he can’t talk?”

“Aw, yeah.” He laughed and lowered the transparent face shield on his helmet. “They say you’re the one with the most advanced nanotech, though. Like, you can heal almost anything.”

I will admit, honestly, I couldn’t even begin to believe what happened next.

“Let’s find out,” he said, and took a swing at my head. It connected and tossed me about ten feet before I hit the ground.

“Dude! That’s not part of our orders,” the second guard protested, waving black-gauntleted fingers. “The Major will be fucking pissed!”

“Man, this one can’t even talk. Who’s he going to complain to? I want to find out if these suits can compete.” He smiled and stalked over to me. I was waiting for the world to stop spinning. That punch was impressive, and I don’t think a normal person would have survived it.

He kicked me in the ribs. I got more airtime and the sure knowledge that the impact had broken three of my ribs and punctured my right lung. The nanotechnology was kind enough to inform me of the nature of the damage being done to me, but I would have preferred having some way to communicate over the play-by-play commentary. The worst part wasn’t the pain, but my insecurity over whether or not fighting back would be a good idea.

“You gotta stop! The Major didn’t order this and if they catch us, they’ll drum us out of the unit!”

“Fuck the Major. This asshole isn’t even fighting back.” He looked down at me as I coughed up blood on the lawn. “What’s the matter, man? You down for the count? Not such a badass, are you?” His foot teleported between the ground and my abdomen, and I was lifted into the air again.

The tally looked like this. Me: broken jaw, broken ribs, punctured lung, ruptured large intestine, bruised kidney, and immense amounts of pain. Him: annoyance and scuffs on his armor. I wasn’t going to make it any worse, and I stayed where I landed.

The second guard, the one that wasn’t using me like a soccer ball, ran over and tried to hold his partner back. They scuffled, and my assailant punched the other guard in the face. He hadn’t closed his visor, so I got to see the results of a motor-enhanced punch on the face of a normal human being.

He died instantly: I didn’t need nanotech to tell me that. Watching the fist collapse his skull in a spray of blood and brains was sufficient information for me to make that call. The sight of the poor schlub’s body dropping to the ground like a bag of rice was eloquent confirmation.

“FUCK!” The remaining guard looked at the mess on this gloved hand, and turned his crazy eyes on me. “You did this! You fucking killed him and there ain’t gonna be any witnesses!”

Swell. I didn’t have a choice; it was defend myself and accept the consequences or get killed by an intoxicated asshole and be blamed for the murder of an innocent idiot. Sure, that sounds like a choice, but it isn’t. Dying like that is not, I repeat, not a choice I will ever make. I stood up, shook myself off, and got ready for his bum rush.

He came at me, and shocked me by stopping instead of barreling through me. He took a stance that I recognized as some variety of Karate, maybe Kenpo, and launched a kick at my head. I managed to block it, but the sheer force of the impact sent me rolling sideways. I barely had time to get to my feet before he was on me again.

The only saving grace I had to work with was this asshole’s tendency to telegraph his strikes. I don’t know if that was just bad form on his part or related to the power-assist in his armor. Really, in retrospect, it doesn’t matter. I had to do something or this guy would chuck me in a wood chipper as soon as he could.

Aikido teaches you to blend into the force of your opponent’s attack, redirect it, and escalate if their desire to beat the snot out of you hasn’t dissipated. Most of my training had revolved around arts like Aikido, but my Sensei was something of a martial arts prodigy. He could tack on new arts and styles the way most people buy shoes.

They say that Bruce Lee was something like that. Bruce took what he knew and created Jeet Kun Do. My Sensei took what he knew, and we just called it “What The Professor Does.” Soldier Boy didn’t know what to do with a combo platter of Aikido, Systema, Sambo and The Professor.

He threw a punch. I blended his attack into an arm bar and snapped his elbow, exoskeleton and all, as his helmet hit the ground. His helmet muffled most of his scream.

A moment later, I heard another noise, and discovered that the arm in my hands was no longer attached to anything. There was nothing at the end of the shoulder but a deep pothole, the smell of blood and dirt, and legs attached to a waist. As for me, I was covered in a mixture of dirt and various bodily fluids.

Another set of halfway decent clothes, shot to hell.

“That’s what it looks like when someone is cut in half,” I thought to myself, held in the urge to vomit, dropped the arm, and put both hands on top of my head. I closed my eyes, because I was pretty sure that I was next in line to become a pothole.

“Mr. Stewart,” a voice said from somewhere to my left. “You can stand up.”

I opened my left eye, but stayed where I was. Major Kenney stood about ten feet away from the hole with his visor raised. He didn’t appear to be armed, but the smoking hole bespoke a shooter somewhere nearby and I wasn’t amenable to taking any chances.

“Or you can stay right where you are,” Kenney said, “if you like. You are not in trouble. He broke 10 or 20 regulations before he killed Thomas and tried to kill you.”

“?”

“Still can’t speak, huh? Well, you and your people are not the only ones who live under the hammer. Step out of line in my unit, and you die. Omura didn’t tell you that, did he?”

“Nnn.”

“I hope you remember this when you can speak again, if you can ever speak again.” He lowered the outer visor and disappeared.

An invisible hand picked up the detached arm and I watched it float away.

The disembodied waist and legs lifted up into the air, as though over someone’s shoulder, and splattered the ground with fecal matter and blood as they were carried away. I allowed myself the luxury of tossing my cookies in the hole before I stood up and walked the rest of the way home.

Somewhere in the back of the store, I heard the gentle cadence of conversation, and it told me that the “spa” was not free. I shrugged, shucked my clothes by the men’s room door, and scrubbed the crap off my face, arms and hair in the sink.

Looking in the mirror, I was slightly startled to see longer hair than I had in years. For most of my life, I’d kept my hair short because it doesn’t require a ton of care and almost anything can be washed out of it. There was a brief bohemian phase when I grew it long, but hair of any length gives zombies a handle to grab. I made sure to keep it short after it nearly got me killed.

There wasn’t any shampoo in the men’s room, so I made do with what was available. Hand soap is not kind to your hair, but it will do the job in a pinch. I made a mental note to take scissors to my scalp when the opportunity presented itself.

My soul patch was another victim of my poor personal hygiene and aggressive pastimes. It had grown long enough to catch fleshy chunks from the Death Express as it passed by. Grimacing, I picked the bits out, washed it and made a second mental note to find a pair of scissors or hedge shears... sooner rather than later.

Honestly, I looked a mess. I hadn’t shaved in weeks, and my manly look of casually disheveled rakishness had begun the slow decline into “Back off, this is my cardboard box!”

I have a tendency to let my appearance go in times of stress. Besides, “Esquire” doesn’t publish anymore, and I don’t believe that anyone ever issued a decree on what handsome zombie killers should wear during a drawn-out end of the world as we know it. There was only one person that I wanted to impress, and she seemed pretty keen on what she saw. Clearly, my lady has taste and refined sensibilities!

Chuckling to myself, if only between my ears, I streaked across the store and up the stairs into our Post Apocalyptic Boudoir. I found myself smiling and strangely at ease for someone who’d nearly been beaten to death or shot with a freakishly powerful gun. I wasn’t even entirely bothered by the Jackson Pollock effect of dirt and offal, but that was easier to explain: I’d cleaned it off.

My march upstairs was uneventful, as was my before bed snack. I figured that Charlie would show up eventually and I bedded myself down for the night.