Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (4 page)

Bajali sat down, cradling his hand, and some of the charge earthed itself, giving all of us a little more room to breathe.

“Charlie. Could you take Jaya downstairs and find a steel can in their recycling bin?”

“What?” She sounded dumbstruck. I bet I would have been.

“A steel can,” Shawn explained, slowly and gently, “Baj’s critters are starting to kick in. I think they’d be happier if he didn’t eat the silverware.”

“Is that what happens?” Baj asked him in a small, tight voice.

“Well, most of the time. Mine kicked in and I got this fucked-up urge to lick a shovel. Frank,” he turned and pointed at me, “barfed on his desk chair foot. It dissolved a load of metal, and then he swallowed it all.”

Charlie and Jayashri left the room.

“That sounds dreadful.”

“Surprised him some, I bet.” Shawn sat down opposite Baj at the table. “Is Frank going to get better, or will he stay like this?”

“I have no idea. The machines have exceeded the parameters of the original design many times. Truly, I saw him shot and I was sure,” his voice cracked, “it was a fatal wound. He went down across Charlie’s legs and I saw the hole for a single moment. I thought he was dead, and then he got up.”

“Huh. Sounds pretty freaky.”

“Shawn, he went down the hallway like a Raksha… a man-eating demon… I could not watch.”

“Don’t feel bad, B. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have coped with that either.” Shawn turned to me and waved me over to the chair beside him. “C’mere Frank. Sit down here. You look uncomfortable standing there, and having you stare at us is tripping me out just a little bit.”

I sat. As soon as I settled in, I farted.

“Oh, holy God! Frank, don’t do that!” Shawn exclaimed, attempting to wave the noxious vapors away from his face. “I don’t know why I expect you to have manners now. You never did when your brain was workin’. Damn!”

“Shawn, I hope that my wife and your sister come back soon.” Bajali fidgeted on the chair. “The sooner the better.”

“Why’s that?”

“The silverware is looking appetizing. Also, I am experiencing abdominal cramps. Is that what I should expect?”

“As near as I can tell, that’s what everyone has gone through at some point. It seems to be much worse if you’ve got any physical damage that needs repair.” Shawn took off his ball cap, shook out his hair and ran his hand through it. “I took down a zombie last night after he gut shot me, and it still freaks me out.”

“How so?”

Before Shawn could answer, Charlie and Jayashri came into the room bearing a can. Bajali’s wife went to him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and placed the can in his waiting hands. She didn’t let go of him as he brought the can to his lips, and didn’t flinch when he sighed with relief against the metal. No one looked twice when he began to gently lick the metal, or when the side of the can began to slowly disappear.

Chunhua spoke up from the far corner of the kitchen where she’d been holding up the wall since Shawn crushed Bajali’s hand. “The zombie shot Shawn, and he collapsed. Then he came after me, but my back was turned and I was paying attention to another one that tried to take our position. I heard an inhuman howl behind me and turned to look.” She pointed at Shawn with her hand. “He was on his feet, howling, and he tore the man’s head off. About that time, I took a bullet to my neck.”

Shawn took over the story. “Something animal inside me rose to the surface when I saw that she was in danger. Yeah. That wasn’t as bad as the hunger.” He hugged himself briefly. “I bashed the fucker’s head open and ate his brains like… Damn. Like a little kid with his hands in cake frosting.”

Chunhua shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans as if to keep them warm or to stop the physical memory of a movement.

“I gagged on my own blood and felt it pouring down my body. I couldn’t breathe.” Tears collected in the corners of her eyes. “Then I was filled with incredible rage,” she said, flexing her fingers under the denim, “and I jumped down onto the Eater who shot me. I killed him with my bare hands and sucked his brains out of his eye socket.”

I stared at her, not comprehending the words, but seeing the physical manifestations of her feelings all over her body. The kitchen, specifically Shawn and Chunhua, smelled like a combination of rotting leaves and animal musk. Something about the heat of that smell made me want to run, even if I had no destination. Everyone else sighed and tried to shake the tension off.

“Coffee is ready,” Jayashri said, inserting something normal into the currents of unease that swirled through the room. “Charlotte, do you think that Frank would drink coffee now?”

“Uh. You know, I have no idea. I guess we could give him some and see what happens.” Charlie looked over at me, scanning my face for anything that could be taken as an expression of preference in the matter. “Jaya, hand me that cup and I’ll put it down in front of him. God, I hate treating him like some kind of exotic dog!”

What else could she have done? Let me run around sniffing crotches and humping trees? All I can say is that I’m grateful I had her to keep me out of trouble.

Jayashri handed her the cup, and she put it down in front of me. I smelled the aroma of warm dirt and salty cocoa of a decent dark roast coffee, and my nostrils flapped like a pair of excited barnacles. I suspect that I drooled a little bit, too. My stomach, on the other hand, growled like a lion at the end of a flugelhorn.

“Okay,” Charlie said, acting out the process of picking up the cup and putting it to her lips. “Frank, try it. Okay? Lift it to your lips and sip it.”

I took her pantomime as permission and repeated what I saw. Mere moments later, my mouth was slain in the Spirit and whisked off to the Heaven of Righteous Taste Buds. God was coffee and coffee was God, and all was right in my world despite my brain damage.

“He just made a really,” Chunhua commented, giggling slightly, “uh, sexual noise. Is that all right?”

“It stands to reason that he’d be experiencing sensations more intensely with his major cognitive functions suppressed.” Charlie said, taking a clinical stance in the face of my groan of primal pleasure. “But, you know? I sort of hope to hear him make a noise like that again some other time.”

“Oh God, Charlie! Quit that shit; it’s givin’ me all sorts of feelin’s!”

“Heavens to Betsy, you glorious side of man meat!” Chunhua swatted Shawn upside the head, laughing. “It isn’t as though YOU don’t make noises like that!” An impish smile toyed with the corners of her mouth, and she added, “Then again, it was more like a Maori battle cry than a groan.”

The laughter around the table even melted the wall that Bajali was busy creating around himself, if only slightly. With the joyful and stinky oleoresins of the coffee in my mouth I smiled with them. My people, my pack, were meant to be like this: happy with each other.

Baj got a strange, faraway look on his face, stood up and walked away from the table. Everyone except Jayashri had the psychic equivalents of question marks on their foreheads.

“It is nothing to worry about. My husband has always been strangely attuned to visitors. He is going to greet whomever is about to knock on our door.”

“That’s got to be a little strange,” Chunhua imagined.

“Oh? Believe me when I tell you, that is nothing compared to his father. Pita Sharma is an eerie, eerie person. My father-in-law knew that I was the match for his son the very moment he read my name aloud from the list of available candidates. He would not allow Bajali’s mother to contact anyone but my family.”

Everyone turned their attention to the voices in the living room that were slinking their way into the kitchen.

“Thank you for coming to visit, Mr. Omura.”

“Really, Bajali, you can call me by my first name: Shoei. We’ve been through enough together.”

“If you insist.”

“Is that a Ganesha in the corner?”

“That is very perceptive of you Mr. Omura. I would hardly expect a military man to know one object of devotion from another.”

“You might be surprised about that. Now, try calling me by my first name, ‘Shoei’. It’s easy. Sho-eh. Try it. We’re all friends here.”

“Forgive me if I find that difficult to believe, knowing that your people are assembling to build a wall around us to keep us from mingling with the rest of the world.”

Baj led him into the room and invited Shoei to take his seat at the table. With a gracious nod, he sat down, but Baj took up a position of stony silence on the wall by their larder door.

“Bajali, not to put too fine of a point on this,” Shoei said, “but you of all people should have a concern for the proliferation of untested technology.”

Charlie sucked air through her teeth. “Shoei, that was cold.”

“Probably, but that’s the crux of the issue we’ve got here. The technology spreads through emotionally connected communities. We can’t have the world becoming superhuman in the course of a few weeks. Civilization as we know it would crumble, and it doesn’t have that far to go.”

“So why put a wall around us, and quarantine the neighborhood?” Shawn asked over the cup of coffee that hovered about his lips.

“Ah. That was the best option of the two that were offered to me.”

“Excuse me?” Shawn put the cup down.

“I overstepped my mandate to get involved in this fight. My team was only supposed to provide technical support, not assist you with space-based weapons. More than that, Channing, Buttons and I got infected with your local critters. Our superiors have seen, in living color, just how dangerous we all can be.”

“That’s fine, man, but what’s the deal?”

“At present,” Shoei sighed, “we are a threat to national security. To my superiors, we are no less frightening than a new strain of the zombie virus. I was given an ultimatum, and I made the best choice I could. That’s why I’m here talking to you.”

“A gulag or what?” Bajali’s voice was icy.

“The other option would be to neutralize us completely.” He ran his fingers through his crew cut hair. “In answer to your next question, they were and are prepared to drop a baby nuke on us if we don’t accept quarantine and the associated requirements.”

Brain damage or not, I was astounded at the colors that spread across Shawn’s face. Charlie blanched. Chunhua closed her eyes, exhaled, and pushed herself away from the table. From where I sat I couldn’t see Jayashri’s reaction. Bajali muttered to himself in Hindi. I sat and watched things unfold.

“You wanna tell us what those requirements are, on top of being shut away like lepers?” Shawn’s voice was tightly controlled, low and colorless. He forced himself to breathe, and his face slowly faded back to normal.

“I know that this will sound like a sales pitch, and I really wish we had a choice, but here it goes.” Shoei put both his hands on the table and continued, “This entire community goes to work for the government, in a new special division. Bajali will create an upgrade to the nanotechnology that will prevent it from being spread beyond our wall. Ideally, it is preferred that bug fix also contains some sort of limiter on how transhuman we can become. A self-destruct feature would be good, too.” He turned his palms up on the table. “The government, in turn, will provide us with any and all resources we need to study our condition, support ourselves, and whatever equipment is necessary to our mission.”

“What’s the mission?” Charlie asked.

“That’s the easy question.” Omura smiled and replied, “We keep doing what we’ve done on a broader scale. Our mandate would be to disrupt any and all organized zombie groups.”

“Well, there are worse things,” Shawn commented.

“On the positive side of the equation, the quarantine would be lifted once the ‘bug’ is fixed. We would also have access to resources that are well above Top Secret. All we would have to do is follow orders, do the job, and receive all the backing we need to get it done.”

“I do not like this proposed self-destruct feature,” Baj said from the wall.

“From an emotional standpoint, neither do I,” Shoei said, folding his fingers together on the tabletop. “Rationally, I can see the point. If any of us go rogue, the chances of stopping that individual are on the low end. Normal people, and even trained professionals would have a hard time bringing one of us down. If we can expect the range of recuperation and repair that,” he indicated me, “Frank is exhibiting, or more, then there should be some sort of failsafe.”

“Have you told everyone else all of these things?” Jayashri spoke up from across the room. Her voice was tight and quiet.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll be up front with all of you. I don’t think that you realize this, but the people that live around you look to you for guidance. All of you are central to this community, and if I can present these things to all of you in a way that is acceptable, then I believe everyone else will agree.” He sighed, sounding tired. “Could I trouble you for a glass of water or something?”

Jayashri murmured and brought him the coffee that she had poured for herself.

“You are too kind,” Shoei said, smiled and bobbed his head in gratitude.

“What you’re sayin’ then is that if you can sell us, then you expect everybody else to fall in line?”