Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (16 page)

Their baby daughter emerged from wherever she’d landed, wailed, and crawled over to her mother’s foot. I got far too detailed a look at her, and she regarded me with those milky, wobbling eyes. I knew I was about to die.

Her tiny nostrils flared, and that little bald head turned with the speed of a cobra.

“Ueeeeeh! Ueeeeh” is what her screech sounded like to my ears. She’d spotted Scott.

“How about that, honey? Our baby knows you already and she wants to come see you!” Mara looked down and nudged the baby with her foot. “Go give Daddy some love, sweetie cakes! I’ll be there in a minute, after I feed this false friend his man parts.”

“Snerk,” the newborn cackled and bounded across the grass like a squirrel playing “Lawn Dolphin”.

“Mara...” I tried to say something to her, anything, just to hold her up for a moment.

“What, Frank? Don’t you like my coffee?”

“Don’t do this. Please.”

She hissed and leapt at me. It was my only chance, and I took it by rolling to my left with as much power as I could manage. Her claws tagged my shirt as I rolled away into a crouch.

When she turned to follow me, the Man Scythe was already raised to strike downward. I dropped my arms as soon as she moved, and the blade sunk into her forehead with enough force to check her forward momentum. In that instant of no movement my friend’s wife died a second time. I killed her.

Before the life was gone she looked at me with the one eye that could focus, and breathed one word at me. “Leah.”

I understood. Scott’s little girl, not the creature that loped across the lawn but the one who never had the chance to live, had a name. Leah.

I heard the cha-chack of a round being chambered in Scott’s shotgun behind me and I tried to pull the blade free of Mara’s head so I could turn around. I heard Scott screaming, and horrible noises that had to be coming from that... thing. I left the blade where it was, drew my katana and turned around on my knees.

Scott was trying to aim. It was locked onto his thigh like a pasty leech, sucking and chewing. He was flailing, trying to aim at an impossible angle, when it bit into something that made him howl like a lost soul. The gun went off.

The slug didn’t hit it.

It hit him in the upper thigh, where the leg joins the body, and the damage was instantly clear. Blood shot across the lawn in time with his heartbeat. The pasty, revived child dropped off him, and rolled right into the arterial spray. It made nightmarish noises of glee while it drank the blood that flew towards its mouth.

I moved as fast as I could, bringing the blade down where it was rolling in Scott’s blood and all I hit was wet grass. It had moved and was already 15 feet away, hissing at me like an angry cat.

All I got was a glimpse of its position, as blood fell on my face and obscured my vision. When I wiped my eyes, it was gone. Scott had fallen to the ground, and I changed my priorities. I could deal with it in a minute.

My dear friend was dying in the grass, and I couldn’t have done anything. The hole in his leg was the size of my fist, and the blood flow had already gone from gouts to short spurts.

I dropped my sword, and pulled him into my arms. He was shivering and pale.

“Thank you,” he said to me.

“I tried, Scott. I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

I could feel him fading in the blood-soaked grass of his own home.

“I promise, I’ll finish it. I promise!” I was weeping down into his face, and he smiled a little.

“I know,” he said, looking up at me with rapidly dimming light in his eyes, “my brother.”

He called me “brother” with his last conscious breath. He died seconds after that.

I wailed like a lost soul, and I heard it wail, too. It was out there, and not far away. I didn’t care; I’d find it soon enough, and it would be weaker. First, there were things I needed to attend to.

I put both bodies in the forge. Before I did what had to be done, I did what I needed to do. It didn’t matter that it was dark outside. There was enough moonlight for my eyes to adjust, and Scott was nothing if not organized. I’d known a smith or two who had shops that were eclectic and scattered, even downright impassable, but my “brother” wasn’t that type of guy.

Our economy, such as it was, worked on trade and barter. Scott’s barn contained far too much in the way of irreplaceable tools to let them go to waste or be looted by people who wouldn’t appreciate what they had.

His old carpetbag was in the same place he always kept it, and I filled it with every hand tool I could find. Blacksmith-style hammers. Tongs. Even strange pliers I knew Scott had made for himself to do certain things no supplier had ever considered making a tool for.

The thought came to me that there probably wouldn’t be all that much blade-quality steel in the world anymore, all things considered. With that in mind, I grabbed some of the bars from his stockpile, thankful that he’d marked them by type, and dropped them in the bag.

My breath caught somewhere in my chest. The rest of the bar my Man Scythe blade had come from was on his workbench, clearly labeled in his block capital handwriting. There was maybe a foot of the bar left, and there was no way in Heaven or in Hell I would leave that for looters. It was a work of metallurgical genius that might never be seen again.

That bar of steel and my Man Scythe would never leave my side. I vowed it then and there. If for some reason I had a child some day, I’d pass them both on. Somehow, I didn’t think it to be a likely outcome of my lifestyle, so I’ve amended it to include an apprentice Zombie Executioner inheriting my tools.

I heard wet noises right about then, and I knew I had to turn around and finish the job. The undead fruit of my friends’ loins was in the shop with me, noisily licking her father’s body. I had to kill her, it, but what I really wanted to do was throw up and cry my eyes out until dawn.

Rage and visceral disgust were the main things I used to keep myself going as a Zombie Exterminator/Executioner. Those feelings allowed me to put aside the horror of what I was doing, keep a brave face, and keep going. I have never been the sort of man who smiles, does awful things, and goes home to rhapsodize about creating a “Better Day for Everyone.”

The better day never comes.

My heart was bare that night in Scott’s shop, just Leah and me. I couldn’t stop thinking of her as Leah, when I knew Leah wasn’t what had been born two days before. Leah never had the chance to live, grow up, discover love, be even prettier than her Mom, or be an artist who eclipsed her own Dad’s work. I had to turn around, with nothing but my bare hands, and kill that abomination a second time.

“Ueeeh,” it wailed and I nearly pissed myself. Something about that noise sent chills through me so much deeper than anything I’d ever heard. I turned around with my heart in my throat.

It–I had to remind myself to refer to it as “it”–was looking at me with eyes that didn’t want to track properly. Blood covered it from head to toe, and I noticed for the first time that it had teeth. Newborn human babies don’t have teeth. They also aren’t able to raise their heads, or attack like a cross between a Yorkie and a piranha. It wailed again, and hissed at me.

What else could I do but lunge for it?

Coagulated blood does not make a good gripping surface. The abomination squirted out of my hands like a slightly tacky football, and I landed on my best friend’s body. His vile progeny shrieked at me from beyond the workshop doors and loped into the night.

I chanted my old anime mantra, “Must. Keep. Calm,” and lifted myself off of Scott’s corpse. It almost worked. Almost. I lost my shit entirely when I stepped on Mara’s head.

My vomit arced in a graceful curve into the back of the shop, but the tears came down all over my face. I backed up against the workbench, and allowed myself the luxury of weeping like a lost child. When I was done I went through Scott’s pockets and found his house keys. I walked over to the house and locked up.

I still don’t know why I did that. My brain was stuck in neutral and I was working with an autopilot program I don’t remember having set the parameters for.

Once I got back to the workshop, I grabbed a propane torch from the workbench, and set the building on fire. It needed to burn. Then I pulled myself together as much as I possibly could, and started looking for that pasty monstrosity in the light of the flames.

It avoided my search, and my time was limited, not knowing when or if EMS would arrive. I knew I had to haul ass, or find myself in a very uncomfortable position. I vowed that I would find... Leah... and put her to rest, but I’d have to come back another day in order to do that.

I grabbed the bag of trade goods, and lugged it to the garage.

They’d kept their minivan filled with gas and in running condition. Scott was not an idiot, or ever unprepared. I hated myself for taking advantage of his forethought, and cursed myself as I took the back seats out of the car, put my bike and the bag into the cavernous space, and then slammed the hatch shut.

By the time I got back to the bar I couldn’t climb up to the roof. My leg hurt too badly and I was exhausted. I slept in the front seat of the minivan, with the Man Scythe and the katana beside me. The dreams were terror incarnate.

Three days later I went back. The shop and the house had burned to the ground, which argued that the fire department had never arrived. Not surprising in the ongoing Zombie Apocalypse World, I guess. I snarled a little bit to myself, and spent the whole day canvassing the area for that creature. I even had to talk my way out of a neighbor blowing my head off with a .357 Magnum.

He relented when I explained what I was looking for and even helped me look around his property. We found a very annoyed raccoon, but that was the extent of our success.

I went back every day for five days, hoping I’d see a sign of some kind and be able to get the monkey off my back, but I never found it. I suspected that nature and hunger killed it; at least that’s what I comforted myself with.

I used to pray, even if I wasn’t a practicing religious person. It went something like this, “God, if you’re there, please forgive me. Please let Scott, Mara and Leah be at peace.”

Sitting on the floor of my Japanese bathtub, not bothering to breathe and unworried about it, I knew that the prayers had done me no good at all. Leah wasn’t at peace. She was in a plastic box somewhere in Building One. Scott and Mara weren’t at peace, because I hadn’t finished the job.

Me? No peace for me, either. I wasn’t even human anymore and killing had become a pleasure, not a necessary evil. I guess my damnation caught up with me.

Charlie gave me a ping between my ears. “Frank, are you at the bottom of the tub?”

“Yeah,” I sent back, “looks like I don’t need to breathe underwater.”

“Actually, you will have to eventually. They did some experiments with Nate and his friends a few weeks ago. We can stay under for about three hours before we need to breathe again.” Her mental voice was pretty flat, and it echoed my feelings perfectly.

“Special. How’s Shawn’s leg?”

“It’s good. We both got a little freaked watching it reattach, but it was fascinating, too.”

“That’s nice.”

“Hey, Frankie Aquaman, why don’t you come out of the tub? Not seeing you while I talk to you is bugging me.”

I stood up. I didn’t want her feeling any worse than she did already. “Sure. Would you grab me something to wrap around my waist?”

“Didn’t you bring something to change into?”

“No.” I shook my head and scratched my scalp with my free hand. “I didn’t really think about it. Something about having a great time killing people made it slip my mind.”

“Drop the sarcasm, Mr. Warren Francis Hightower, or I’ll pull your pubes out one by one.” Charlie put both hands on her hips and glared. The blood and bodily fluid stains on her clothes intensified the visual impact. Trust me. “I know you feel awful, and the rest of us do, too. It sucks that we survive by killing things that look like us.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?” Her voice softened a little bit, and I was grateful for it.

“I’m not human anymore.”

“All right. None of us are, thanks to the nanotech.” I saw her nodding, and knew that I hadn’t communicated correctly.

“I don’t even know if I’m ME or not. My brain got rebuilt, and I like killing things now. That’s not ME, Charlie!”

“Come down here, wet man,” she said, gesturing with both hands. With a quick glance around, she found a large towel and wrapped it around me when I came into range. “I understand what you’re saying, honey.”

I felt her arms around me and let her hold me close. Despite my angst, I relaxed into her, and it seemed like an eternity since I’d felt that kind of warmth.

“I learned a lot in school,” she said into my ear, “but I learned a lot more from just being alive. You’re telling yourself a story about being a horrible person, and I guess that’s because you can believe it so easily after violence like that.” I felt her lips on my cheek. “I’ve said that we’re not living in the normal world anymore. Why are you judging yourself by the rules of a world we aren’t living in?”

Let me say this: when your lover is a mental health professional, you will get no rest. She’ll keep you thinking and pop your bullshit bubbles whenever she can.