Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (9 page)

“Thank you, sir,” Nate said, sounding surprisingly sincere.

The Major nodded, gestured to his people, dropped his outer visor and became invisible, along with his cadre.

As if by instinct, our group didn’t move for several seconds. Not that it would have made any difference, but I guess everyone felt better for allowing the world to resettle on its axis before doing anything else. We’d lost one of our own, and discovered that our little walled community was a prison, all before noon. It was shaping up to be one Hell of a day.

I hadn’t even had a full cup of coffee. That’s enough reason to downgrade my opinion of things to “shaping up to be one fucking abominable day.”

The day did not improve. In less than 30 minutes, the entire community was packed into the storeroom in my Palace of Hardware/Spa, ready to lynch the Sharma family for giving us the technology that had saved our lives, but cost us our freedom.

Omura, Buttons, and Shawn had the temerity to step forward and propose rational explanations, but none of our neighbors wanted to hear it. The whole mess devolved into a shouting match, and nearly tipped over into violence.

I have never been one for sticking my nose into a volatile situation with the intent of defusing it, but that afternoon was an exception to my normal set of behaviors. There was a single problem that didn’t occur to me until I’d bellowed long and loud enough that everyone took notice: I still couldn’t speak English.

Sure, the angry mob of nanotechnology-enhanced, suburban primitives had quieted down, but standing there and staring at them didn’t improve my case in the court of public opinion. What else could I do but roll with it?

“Wargh.” I nodded at them, and put my right hand over my heart. “Augh, augh yawp wargh gop gop gop zoosh,” I said, doing an impression of someone being electrocuted. “Awwwww! Wargh zoosh. Merp. Awwww!” I kept nodding and punctuating the action with, “Awwww!”

“It’s very sad,” Gina said, wiping tears off her cheeks. “He was such a nice guy, and geeky too!”

Gina Halperin, our resident explosives expert, could have been the centerfold for a nudie magazine devoted to hot, nerdy women. Her heart was almost always in the right place, and it was easy to see that Channing’s suicide upset her. She was also ADD enough to worry people when she started mixing chemicals and combustible materials.

“I mean, he was so sad and nobody really saw it. You know? He just kept to himself a lot. Really! Man! Aw!” Gina stamped her feet and started leaking around the eyeballs in a touching, yet messy way. Her husband reached out and pulled her to his chest. “It’s just so,” sniffle, “so sad. He’s all dust now! Man!”

Barry Klein, former government contractor, now local goat shepherd, stood up. “It isn’t the unfortunate passing of a member of our community that disturbs me,” he began, and quickly received hisses of displeasure for his trouble. “Channing’s death needs no resolution, except in our hearts. We will feel the loss of him, and mourn it, but we have a larger issue at hand. My friends, we are all prisoners in our homes.”

Omura unfolded his arms, cleared his throat, and added his own two cents to the discussion. “I understand how everyone feels, on both issues. He was a good person and an exemplary young officer. I recruited him myself and I will miss him very much.” He gestured at Barry, “Barry, I agree with you. Grief will take a personal course for everyone in this room. What we need to do right now is address the issue of our ‘guards’.”

My storeroom was filled with various noises of agreement, and I even added a grunt or two of my own. Shoei nodded, and gestured for me to come towards the front of the room.

“I want to say this out loud for Frank’s sake. As many of you know, he is still recovering from our adventure a few weeks ago, and his inter-brain communications are still offline.” Omura nodded along with the various affirmative noises that sprung up around the room and continued, “There are some things we need to consider in context of being quarantined as we are. The first is a question I’d like to ask all of you. Do you realize how dangerous we are?”

The question took all of us by surprise. No one had an answer, or even made an attempt at one.

“All right,” he said, “let’s take Frank as an example,” and put an arm around my shoulders. “Frank can shoot grenades out of the air, engage in hand to hand combat with several opponents and win, eat brains and heal almost any wound if given time. He’s also faster and stronger than a normal human being.”

I’ll admit I felt a little like an anatomical model.

“Frank is contagious.” I got a pat on my head with that comment. “He can pass his condition on to anyone he likes. In a day or two, that individual will be as difficult to kill as he is. Indeed,” Shoei went on, “the only thing we know of that could kill Frank with any certainty is enough electricity to burn him to ashes.” He patted me on the shoulder and gestured at a chair in the front row. I took the hint and sat down.

“But, Omura,” Shawn said, but was silenced by Shoei’s raised hand.

“Let me give you a little history lesson, if you’ll bear with me.” Omura took a deep breath and continued. “I’ve come to consider all of you as friends. The situation that we find ourselves in got me shoehorned into the position of Liaison Officer, and I am not thrilled with my life taking a turn like this when I had plans of retiring. You already understand that your neighborhood and neighbors have become something beyond Top Secret.” He looked around at us as if to make sure we were listening and nodding at the proper moment. “What we know as of right now is that we have crossed a line between being human and superhuman. That goes for all of us in this community. While our individual colonies may evolve at their own unique speeds and none of us appear to be at precisely the same point with respect to the sophistication of our enhancements, we are definitely together in the same boat.”

The room remained dead silent, but I could tell that some people were catching on faster than others, just by looking around. As he’d explained in Baj’s kitchen weeks before, we’d all become a threat to national security. That was the central issue, and while a deal had been brokered to keep us from turning into a thermonuclear pothole, no one had been cynical enough to consider what quarantine might mean.

We had become lab rats at the very best.

Everything Shoei said after his pause confirmed that I was on the right track, but then he dropped a bomb on us that I hadn’t expected.

“I hate to bring Frank’s family into this, but I have to in order to give you all a better feel for the lay of the land.” He nodded at me by way of apology, and asked Baj for permission to bring up his history as well. Baj nodded, clearly uncomfortable, and motioned for him to continue. “The nanotechnology we possess resulted from a project that Frank’s father and Bajali were working on almost five years ago. Baj, would you give a brief synopsis?”

“Yes. Mr. Hightower had come into possession of a viral sample and study data which showed that organisms exposed to the virus developed certain attributes.” He took a deep breath before pushing on. “We would recognize this set of characteristics as those of a zombie. His plan was to create a technological equivalent to the biological infection. In short, we created nanotechnology geared to enhancing the combat and recovery effectiveness of any given subject.”

There were one or two gasps around the room. Fewer than I’d expected.

“Thank you Baj. I’m sure that wasn’t an easy thing to talk about, and I appreciate your willingness to do so. Now then, Frank’s father had no idea that the virus was sourced from a meteorite impact in Africa.” Omura paced back and forth in front of the room, clearly as uncomfortable explaining it all as we were to hear it. “We knew this meteorite was coming, tracked it, and were on site to retrieve it.”

“Thousands of meteorites strike the planet every year, Omura,” Baj retorted from his chair in the front row. “How did we know this one in particular was due to arrive, and it was so important our government sent people to fetch it?”

“Simple, Bajali. It was broadcasting a signal and had been for some time.” When Shoei finished his story, one that would have given countless conspiracy theorists spontaneous orgasmic contractions, we were all dumbfounded.

Shawn was the first to break the silence with a “Fuck me,” in full Southern drawl. It was repeated around the room like grace before dinner, and I would have added my own to the round, but I couldn’t form the words.

“Baj, correct me if I’m heading down the wrong sewer pipe,” Shawn croaked from a little farther down the front row. “What you ended up building was the technological version of the biological virus… A virus that was from outer space to begin with. Am I tracking or am I lost?”

“Yes. Yes on both counts, or so it seems.” Bajali’s voice sounded strained and quiet, a few seats away from me, and I imagined that he was having a terrible time processing it all. “When I started working for Hightower, he gave me a set of project outlines and some very interesting data. I did not ask for the sources of the data. Then he told me to ‘Make That Happen’ using nanotechnology rather than biological source material.

“Somewhere along the line after the project had commenced, someone unleashed the virus on humanity. Unfortunately, we would probably never know if that was intentional or simply the largest screw up in the universe. You couldn’t even really discuss the ‘death toll’, because they didn’t stay dead. Regardless, that singular event changed the world forever and no one could argue that.”

Omura looked at each of us in turn and said, “The issue we have, neighbors, is this: we harbor the technological equivalent of the zombie virus. This gift we’ve been given is more contagious than that it is. We have to be contained, and we agreed to it, if I may remind you. Bajali is going to work on modifications to our little friends that will make it impossible for us to pass them on to other people.”

There were affirmative noises and general nodding from around the room. They’d heard this bit before, I’m guessing.

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The problem we have is that we are being observed, guarded, and restrained at gunpoint. Am I right about that?”

My storeroom erupted into unhappy noises. Shoei, standing at the front of the room, nodded, and gestured for everyone to simmer down. It took a few minutes for the gang to subside into muttering attentiveness.

“This is the point I want you to truly consider: dangerous weapons require tight security. Someone made that mistake with the biological virus, and we are living in the aftermath of that error.” He put his hands in his pockets. “The world will not survive another accident of that kind, even if it manages to get out of this one. As much as I hate to call being held at gunpoint ‘necessary’, the government doesn’t have a better choice. I hope that when Bajali has perfected the updates to the nanomachines, we will be much less of a threat and the measures required to keep us in check will be modified.”

Matt “Flower” Wilson, sniper and swanky Man About Town, spoke up from his customary seat near the door.

“What you’re doing is trying to put a polite spin on military reality. Everybody, when the decision was made to join up instead of being nuked, we became government assets and signed away a lot of personal freedom to stay alive.” He uncrossed his long legs and leaned forward, scowling slightly. “I don’t mean to be unnecessarily cruel to any of you, but the situation is very simple: do or die. You are not civilians any longer.”

Following Matt’s unusually blunt speech there wasn’t a noise to be heard, and the almost-positive spin that Shoei had built for us disintegrated. Shawn stood up with a grunt, and walked out. Chunhua followed right behind him. It was the start of a very sullen exodus.

Only Baj, Jayashri, Omura, Charlie and I were left to hear the Army Corps of Engineers arrive.

That week following that discussion was very quiet, at least in terms of our community interacting as a whole. Everyone kept to themselves, except when absolutely necessary. I was an exception, since I was the lab rat of choice in the medical tent. Charlie came with me most of the time, but there were days when she didn’t get out of bed with me.

But the neighborhood was a hive of activity, even if we were all stuck between our own ears. It seemed like there was something new every fifteen minutes, between sections of prefabricated walls moving here and there and insane amounts of concrete being poured. All the houses in our little walled city were disconnected from Virginia Power’s lines and set up to run on our local power source. The builders were everywhere.

I imagined that we were living in an ant farm, populated by orange biohazard ants. It made me wonder who the larvae were.

By the middle of the second week, the gigantic, block-long, multi-purpose building was complete across the street from my hardware store. On that Friday, the second building over on 23
^rd
and Buchanan was completed. I’d never seen supplies airlifted into anywhere, but I did over those three days.

On Saturday afternoon the Corps of Engineers disappeared as though they’d never existed, and the only signs they’d left behind were the buildings that had sprung up in two weeks. Saturday night, Yolanda and Ómer invited everyone over to Building 2 for dinner and a tour.

No one had told me that they were building us a cafeteria, library and a school. Apparently Yolanda and her husband had been assigned to that facility as chefs and building supervisors. They seemed pretty happy with that decision–the rest of us were delighted by Yolanda’s ropa vieja, fried plantains and tomato salad. The lady can cook.