Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (23 page)

“You mean they’re afraid of us?”

“Not so much that as very wary,” he grabbed my t-shirt between two fingers, “because we don’t look like your normal run-of-the-mill government contractors. Black t-shirts and BDU pants, combined with an unfamiliar weapon strapped on your back reads as Special Ops. That tends to make people nervous.”

Once I heard him out, it all made sense. It also explained why he was wearing black BDUs with no visible insignia or rank. He was creating a social bubble around us, for want of a better description. Jayashri and Baj stood out on their own, wearing their customary white lab coats. They looked the part of scientists, save for the big blue and orange backpack that she carried. It was an interesting game of manipulating the expectations of a group of people that were likely nervous as all Hell, or wrapped so tightly a good fart might rupture something important.

By the time I finished my ruminations, Bajali had already gloved up and was holding a piece of the wreckage in his hands. Jayashri was looking on, and they were discussing something that appeared to be very interesting. I looked around at the variety of parts and doodads that were strewn across the area and wondered why that particular piece was so entrancing. To my eye, the long cylindrical bit with the strange flanges and antennae poking out of it seemed to be much more worth a look than a random piece of fuselage.

Omura and I walked over to them, and I noticed that all of the Hazmats were giving us a wide berth. Interesting.

“Omura! Look at this,” Baj held the panel up for us to see, but we were nearly blinded by the huge smile on his face. “Multiple layer composite with a honeycomb structure in the center stratum! Do you see the external surface? Crystal structure, but arranged into an eccentric overlapping design–almost fibrous! Thousands of polygonal surfaces per square inch!” It was easy to see that he was having an attention deficit moment brought on by sheer excitement. “May I please take samples back to my lab?”

“Doctor Sharma, I am pleased to tell you that all of the wreckage is being routed back home.”

“Marvelous!” His excitement stuttered for a moment, just long enough to ask, “But where will we put it?”

“We’ll leave it in the trailer and park it in the alley by the multi-function building. That way it is all proximate to your lab and you’ll have all the access you can stand.”

The moment had come. Bajali Sharma reached Nirvana standing at the outside edge of the debris field. Unfortunately, his wife did not get on that flight with him. Her expression was much more grim, as if to say, “Ah, I will not see my husband again for a month at the very least. I must now go out and cultivate my social connections or develop an obsession of my own. Perhaps I will take up basket weaving.” In the end, she opened the pack, extracted a digital camera and set about documenting the crash site and the debris.

I began looking around on my own, but didn’t go so far as to actually touch anything. I imagined that it was all the equivalent of evidence at a crime scene and ought not to be moved until someone told me that it was all right to do so. What I saw was pretty interesting, mostly because I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Periodically, I would see something that looked familiar, but attached to things that didn’t make any sense. For example, down the length of the ruptured cylinder it looked like there were car alternators attached and joined to work in tandem. There was also a large thing that looked like a turbine, wrapped in copper wire.

The soldiers gave all of us quite a wide berth as we walked around. One or two were near me, but none came close enough to speak.

Omura had wandered over to the largest piece of the wreck, which appeared to be part of the leading edge of the craft, and yelled across to us. “There aren’t any marks on the asphalt that indicate that it impacted elsewhere and slid to this position, or wall damage that indicates an impact from the side. It looks like it pancaked straight down onto the corner of this warehouse. The force of the impact was strong enough that it crushed two floors worth of cinder blocks.” He pointed back towards what I assumed to be the rear end of the thing, and continued his commentary. “There’s some sort of gel or fluid soaking the ground underneath that cracked globe and hull shards on this side of the crushed wall. That assembly,” he indicated the big cylinder near me, “is probably the weapon housing. I’ve seen structures like that a few times over the years.”

My eyes tracked from the cylindrical object back to where he was standing. The large hull section was raised off the ground at an angle, supported by the wreckage underneath. I saw something in the shadows under the hull.

“Omura? I think this thing had a pilot.”

“Why do you say that, Frank?”

“Because I see a hand under the shell over by you and that piece of wall.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, guns appeared in the hands of every soldier I could see. Three tenths of a second after that, they opened fire on us. Jayashri was hit by at least six rounds and crumbled to the ground. Baj saw it happen and went mad. He didn’t even register that he’d been shot at least as many times.

He roared, “Nimu chapentra,” a very foul thing to say in one of India’s many languages, and barreled into a group of our attackers.

I was so stunned that I barely noticed the bullets that I’d taken.

There’s something a little bit counter to common sense: standing still while the enemy throws hot lead at you. I was so astounded, I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight of Sir Bajali Sharma, Knight of the Holy Order of Grace and Hospitality, ripping the bedeviled shit out of zombies. It was stunning. It was immensely brutal. He was doing all of it with his bare hands, snarling, shrieking in Hindi, and looking like the second coming of Shiva the Destroyer.

Bang.

One of the bastards shot me in the ass, and it tore my attention away from the exquisite display of righteous mayhem by Bajali. My hand slipped behind my back and popped the Man Scythe free with the ease of muscle memory and gave it a tiny shake to flip the blade into position. I allowed myself a little squirt of evil laughter, slid into a more combat-friendly stance as I turned around, and offered my opponents a toothy smile.

“Afternoon boys! Didn’t anyone tell you that bullets don’t bother me much?”

I didn’t allow the first two of my personal attackers the luxury of time to answer the question; I simply cut them down. For once, I didn’t take their heads right away, I just gutted them so that I could discuss matters with them after things calmed down slightly. My third attacker tried to run away, but it didn’t do him any good at all. Nanotech enhanced nerves and muscles, and ease of practice erased his lead with a 9mm bullet to the back of his Hazmat head.

Jayashri’s original attackers tried to bring the fight to me, but life threw them a bloody, gorgeous, lab coat-clad interruption. Their prey was up and moving, and it was pretty clear that her survival systems had kicked in. She was snarling, wide-eyed, and gleefully tearing open the skull of her prey. Unfortunately, she’d come to at some point and realized that she’d broken her vegetarian traditions with a luncheon of brains.

Bajali had done quite a bit to make sure that her survival was more likely. No doubt, he’d be right beside her, luxuriating in hideous moral conflicts over eating the brains of their opponents in order to survive.

Get used to it, chums.

About the time I took down two more zombies by lopping their legs off at the knee they got reinforcements from inside the two Chevy Suburbans that were parked nearby. I discovered that one of them carried a large caliber rifle, perhaps something around a 50 caliber, because I got hit and did a little impromptu flying through the air, losing my weapons in transit.

It was a good shot. The last thing I was consciously aware of was a strange awareness that my aorta had been punctured, T4 through T6 vertebrae were paste, and the bullet was resting against the inside surface of my sternum... and my friendly nanomachines were on the job.

I wanted to reply, “Thanks boys,” but I didn’t get the chance to say anything. My survival systems had kicked in and thinking was not really possible. Instead of witty patter, I offered the new set of attackers something a little more visceral than verbal sparring.

The rifleman showed a lot of concern when I landed on his companion’s shoulders, grabbed him by the head and tore it off, ripping most of his spine free in the same breath. His concern was cut short when I used the spine and head like a morning star and beat the second life out of him. I don’t think he felt anything when I French-kissed the hole in his forehead and sucked the goo out of him.

For me, the moment was tinged with a little regret. I’d used the first head to shatter the second one, and ruined the brains in the process. That was sad! Luckily for the survival systems, there were two or three more potential donors nearby who were so stunned by my performance that they hadn’t even raised their weapons. Never, ever, be so shocked that you can’t defend yourself from a friendly superhuman enemy that has his sights on sucking your brains out like a foie gras milkshake. Take my word for it.

Sitting in the observation chair inside my own head, trying to chill out while my body did horrible things, I took note of a spectacularly spine chilling ululation coming from somewhere outside of my field of vision. I felt my jaw open slightly and my nostrils flare, as though I was a cat that had just smelled something interesting. My body pivoted, moved by inspirations other than curiosity, to take in the vision of a blood-soaked Goddess taking her just revenge on the pitiful creatures that defiled her earthly avatar.

My body found it… exciting to watch. As for me, over in the peanut gallery, I was stunned silly to see Jayashri doing violence that was well beyond my imagination, and completely chagrined that my body was sporting an erection of unnerving rigidity.

The body that I usually inhabited heaved a sigh of deep satisfaction, with tones that reminded me of admiration, when she shoved the sundered arm of her opponent straight up his own anus. I would even go so far to say that my dirty underbelly of animalistic behavior fell a little bit in love with her when she blew his skull open with the heel of her foot and fed herself with dainty little pinches of brains. I felt my lips pass a sigh of adoration, and I hoped that no one else in our dandy band was conscious enough to notice it.

I made the executive decision to let my physical body do whatever it was that it needed to, especially since I wasn’t sure that I could stop it in the first place, and moved on to a niggling question that was dancing in my forebrain. Why did we not know that these soldiers were zombies in the first place?

That led to a second, related question. Did our mysterious superiors monitor our actions, and were they aware we were going to land in a dangerous situation full of replaced soldiers?

Of the two available questions, the second one seemed like the easiest to answer. I guessed that they wanted to see if we could perform horrendous acts of violence in self-defense. It seemed to make a lot of sense, considering that we were outnumbered at least three to one, if not five to one. Hell, I’d want to know what the capabilities of my soldiers were if I were in charge of… My brain came up short because I’d suddenly found myself identifying with the Establishment instead of being flamingly incensed that I’d been used.

My body responded to my angst by angrily beating the flatulence out of another zombie up against part of the wreckage. The opponent in question was shredded in no time at all. It seemed incumbent upon me, stuck in the copilot seat of my body, to take note that the craft’s hull seemed to break into very sharp pieces when subjected to repetitive impacts. In reality, I just didn’t want to pay a whole lot of attention to the gory happenings under my fingers.

By the time I returned to the first question, my little friends had either accumulated more data or I had settled down enough to notice it. Our friendly ambush squad had body temperatures that were within a tenth of a degree of normal. Those we had faced in the past had body temperatures that were well under normal for a healthy human being and were easier to pick out without visual confirmation.

I looked down at the face of my recent kill, absent-mindedly noting that my body was back under my conscious control, and lifted up his slowly cooling upper lip. His gums looked pink and healthy, rather than receded and whiter. He didn’t seem to smell like a normal zombie either, but it was harder to tell underneath the coppery smell of blood and awful tang of diced intestines with a side order of piss.

“Frank!” I looked up and saw Omura on the other side of the wreck and gave him a nod. “Back in your head?”

“Yes.”

“Is it like that every time you get wounded enough that the critters have to work overtime to repair the damage?”

“Yes. Sometimes you get a serving of endorphins with cherries and whipped cream on top, and that cushions the blow a little.” I tried to give him a cheerful smile, but I think it was something closer to a blood-smeared grimace in execution. “Lately, though, I’ve had occasions when I don’t get the brain chemical cocktail.”

“Don’t ever smile at me like that again. Okay?” I just nodded and watched him try to wipe the gore off his face using an equally bloody shirtsleeve. Sad, really… it didn’t improve his appearance in the least.

The local display in my head told me that Bajali and Jayashri were about four meters behind me, huddled together. My first two attackers still registered as heat signatures between the Sharmas and me. I expected that I’d see them lying in puddles of their own innards when I turned around. That isn’t at all what I got.