Blood Soaked and Contagious

by James Crawford

“Don’t you fucking move,” I told him. “We might let you live through this, but if you try and fight back, she’ll shoot you and the top of your head will come clean off. She can’t miss.”

  His eyes bored into me like angry core drills.

  Jayashri removed the barrel from his nose, stood up, and backed away. “Come away. Leave him there.”

  Not knowing quite what was going on, I stood up and backed away. The moment I was clear, I heard a pop and the sizzle of electricity. Baj had Tasered our prisoner, who obliged us by flopping around on the ground a lot.

  No one spoke for a minute, then Baj and Shawn picked up our disoriented guest by the arms and started dragging him towards the back of the house. Jayashri put her hand on my arm as I was turning to go with them.

  “I have to ask you to do things I cannot do myself. Shawn is too gentle and my husband is as well.”

  It was an interesting moment. I stood there, looking at her, and I had the distinct impression I knew what some of those unsavory acts might be. We needed information. We had a potential informant. Someone had to provide the motivation necessary to get him to speak... candidly.

  “What is it they say about the female of the species?”

  She smiled a little bit, “Oh, that we are much more fierce than the males when it comes to protecting our young.”

  I nodded and put her hand in mine, and we walked together to the basement door around the back of the house. A thought occurred to me before we entered the basement, “Do the two of you have anything, ah, more precise than the scythe? I might need to borrow it if you do.”

  “I will speak to Bajali.”

  Chapter 8

  The guys were a marvel of instant efficiency and from the look of things, bondage as well. Our spy was lashed to a fold-out beach chair with lengths of Cat-6 Ethernet cable. They had even straightened out the leg with the shattered kneecap.

  Probably wasn’t comfortable. Sweet!

  Jaya walked right over to her husband and said something to him in Hindi. I could see him go pale, even in the fluorescent light of the basement. He turned and swiftly went up the stairs into the house.

  “Shawn,” I said.

  “Yeah, bud?”

  “You’re going to want a trash bag or can real soon,” I told him.

  “You know we butchered hogs when I was a kid.”

  “Yes, but you’ve never butchered something that looks and sounds like another human being. Just find a bag, or you’ll probably want to leave the room. Better yet, keep Baj upstairs,” I handed him my .45, “and make sure nothing happens to him.”

  I guess Shawn was mollified—being asked to do something important—because the look of annoyance on his face disappeared. He nodded, turned around, and went up the stairs. A moment or two later, Baj came down the stairs with a few things in his hands: a Swiss Army knife, a set of kabob skewers, a cleaver, and an 8-inch butcher knife.

  The look on his face was... it wasn’t good. I took the load from him and laid them out in a line beside the beach chair. He looked green and I didn’t want to push him any further, but there was one more thing I needed.

  “Do you have a propane torch or one of those little butane torches for caramelizing sugar on crème brûlée?”

  I don’t know if it was me inferring there might be fire and burning or if mentioning the crème brûlée was what set him off. I watched him collapse, caught between fainting and vomiting. Instead of a dramatic explosion or falling over, his eyes rolled back in his head, vomit bubbled slowly from his mouth, and he just crumpled to the floor.

  It was a wimpy but eloquent expression of his distaste for torture.

  All I could really do was sigh. I did.

  “Jaya, would you get him upstairs? I’ll start on things here, but if you’ve got that butane torch... ”

  She turned a little green, scooted over to her husband, patted his face, and got him mobile. Sadly, when he stood up, the rest of dinner flowed down his face into an unsightly puddle on the floor. I watched them both look around frantically for cleaning supplies, and I knew they’d mop up the slop and polish the concrete until it was a uniform gray unless I stopped them.

  “Guys! We don’t need to worry about household chores. Both of you get upstairs, clean off, put in a loud DVD, and hang out with Shawn. I’ll take care of things here, and I promise I won’t notice the puddle at all.”

  I got blank looks, but they sped up the stairs. I’d be able to live without a torch, but it would have made things much tidier.

  Turning around, I locked eyes with our spy, who had been watching everything that went down. There may or may not have been a trace of humor in his expression. Humor was fine with me; I’d rather have him laughing and telling me everything I needed to know, rather than put me in a position to inspire his replies to my questions.

  “They’re all too sweet to be in this,” he said to me.

  “You’re telling me! I’ve known them all for a while and I’m still surprised they’re alive.” I walked over to the chair and stood over him, “I would be sorry about this, but you are the enemy. The most I can do, if you tell me what I want to know, is to splint your leg and let you go after all this is done.”

  “That’s a nice gesture, but the virus die-off is starting. I’ll be raving and insane before Hightower shows up.”

  I shook my head at him. “You guys call this ‘living’?”

  “I know you won’t believe me,” the expression on his face was deathly earnest, “but anything is better than the Dark. I’ve shot women, children, men, and insurgents, and I’ve had good friends blow up in front of me. All of that is better than the Dark. I ate my wife. That was better than the Dark.”

  “That’s pretty profound for an undead snoop.” I just shook my head.

  “Yeah, and I used to write poetry and paint pictures of baby animals. Look, let’s get to the point: I don’t want to die again, here or anywhere else, and I’m not looking forward to torture. The knee’s bad enough. Can we deal here?”

  “Maybe. What do you have to tell me? Give me a little sample. Just a taste.”

  “Okay. This one is for free. There isn’t any visual surveillance, except for our snipers watching your snipers.”

  I nodded. “That’s a cherry piece of data. Thank you.” He nodded as best he could from the awkward position he was in. “I would like location, troop strength, plan of attack, vehicle tally, secret weapons, super-powered sidekicks, and who I’d have to go through to get Hightower’s head. Give me all that, and I will absolutely splint your knee and give you a free pass out of here... provided you don’t go back to Hightower.”

  “Man,” he said, “if I gave you a quarter of what you wanted, they would skin me alive and hang me out to dry. If I get out of this, going back there is not an option.”

  I made some understanding mumbles, knelt down in front of the tool selection, and picked up a kabob skewer. His eyes were trying to track me and watch what I was doing, but he wasn’t having very much luck with it. There wasn’t much point in keeping this guy in the dark about what I was planning. He was probably a grunt soldier before all of this.

  “Did you do time in the sand box?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the Surge and a tour in Fallujah.”

  “That was some nasty shit.”

  “It was.”

  “I am contemplating my own nasty shit right now. See this kabob skewer?” I held it out for him to see. It was a long piece of 1/8-inch square steel bar with a loop in one end. “Your job is to start telling me what I want to know, or I will drive this into your shattered kneecap and pretend that I’m churning butter.”

  He didn’t say a thing, but he did wet himself.

  I looked down at him. He was sweating and a bit more than the expected amount of pale, so I said, “I didn’t know that you all could still pee.”

  “Yeah. We just don’t like to talk about it. Are you some kind of spook from one of those secret prisons?”

  “No. You don’t get
to know who and what I am. Let’s just stick with the abject terror we already have. Hmmm?”

  “Okay,” he said. “The primary staging area is the parking garage at the corner of Fairfax Drive and Glebe Road. We have one outpost at the corner of Route 29 and Glebe, in the old shopping center.”

  “That’s an excellent start. By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Gordon. Jerry Gordon,” he replied quietly.

  “Jerry, I just want you to know that you’re doing a fine job, and if you keep it up, you won’t have to die here,” I patted his left leg in a comforting way, “So, let’s continue. Troop strength?”

  “We’ve got about 30 guys from the unit I was in. Infantry. Demolitions. There are at least two guys with sniper training. There are about 300 or 400 civilian combatants.” He took a deep breath and continued, “I think there are some spooks or black ops guys as well. Like, 12 or 13 of them. They don’t really talk much, you know?”

  “Yeah, I don’t imagine they would. What kind of transportation or combat vehicles are we looking at?”

  “How detailed do you want?”

  I didn’t like the derision that crept into his voice. Occasionally, when you interrogate people, they get little sparks of feeling ballsy. This usually happens if you don’t follow through on a specific threat you’ve used to loosen their lips. Unfortunately for the interrogator, this means you’ve fucked up and let the drama lapse.

  This situation can be corrected once, and only once, in a single-session, linear interview. Unfortunately for the subject being interrogated, the interrogator must now follow through on the aforementioned threat. Any threats after this correction must be executed without fail, unless the subject breaks entirely.

  I stabbed downward with the skewer, lodging it about two inches into the rubble of his shattered knee.

  He screamed and it was a good one. Long and high-pitched, and you might even say that it was “cleansing.” I felt as though he had missed a possible career in professional yodeling.

  I tapped the skewer with my finger and the entire beach chair danced on the concrete with the convulsion that ripped through his body. He stopped moving after a moment but was breathing like a bellows as he tried to keep the pain under control. If he had been a normal human being, I would have been worried about shock setting in, but I didn’t see anything that looked like typical symptoms. I put that worry aside and kept right on going.

  I looked down at him and called him a dickhead. His face turned beet red and he clenched his jaw so tightly I expected teeth fragments to explode upward.

  “I didn’t like doing that. I won’t like anything else you make me do. Your pain is your fault. All you have to do is answer honestly, and you won’t feel anything worse than me pulling that skewer out before I splint your leg.”

  He started chanting “Fucker” at me in a very low voice. I could tolerate that, because it meant he was capable of being vocal and the skewer had done what I wanted: re-established the order of business.

  “Vehicles?”

  “Cars, one armored Bradley, a couple of SUVs, and seven Humvees. Three school buses.”

  “A Bradley? Nice. How about the plan to come and wipe us off the face of Arlington?”

  He rolled his eyes, and I reached for the skewer. He stopped rolling his eyes.

  I took a deep breath.

  “There isn’t a plan to wipe you all out. There’s just a plan for a surgical strike to snatch and grab your friend and his wife. The rest of you aren’t on our radar, unless you become food.”

  I nodded. It did sound reasonable from a tactical standpoint. A bunch of suburban sharecroppers is not much of a worry for even a semi-trained military; at least, that is what you would think if the world were remotely normal. All I could think about was Bugs Bunny saying, “Eh, he don’t know us very well. Do he?”

  Their poor intelligence about our little community was a possible saving grace in the midst of a steaming pile of gopher intestines. We had some interesting aces up our collective sleeves, in the form of our population and our products. For example, Gina Halperin, five houses over, makes nitroglycerin. On top of her skills, a few of our group have done extensive study of improvised explosive devices in the Middle East.

  Don’t ask what is in the bottom of the trash bin you pass on your way into the neighborhood from the Route 29 side. There are about 50 similar surprises around the major entry points into the community. I like it here.

  “Do you think you could tell me where the strike will penetrate?”

  “Before you grab that skewer or anything else, I can’t. I just go where I’m told. The black ops guys have that job, not us.”

  Again, I nodded. Black ops personnel were trained to go into unknown situations and do nutty things, like extract people while keeping them alive in the process. I wasn’t entirely sure that my boy was being completely on the up-and-up, but I also had to consider the possibility he didn’t know anything beyond the general details of a mission he wasn’t involved with. Sure, he was a veteran who came home in one piece, but he certainly wasn’t trained for recon.

  I decided to let it slide.

  “For our next magical trick, I sense you want to tell me how many layers there are between your average Joe Zombie and Warren Hightower,” I intoned with great gravitas and mysterious arm motions.

  “You are one sick fucker. You’re enjoying this!” His tone was both surprised and accusatory.

  “In point of actual fact, Jerome, I am not enjoying myself. My idea of a good time is much like yours. I like to paint pictures of cute baby animals, but my real passion is flower arrangement. Now answer the question or I’ll make butter inside your knee here.”

  “Four bodyguards, and he doesn’t socialize with anyone but group commanders and team managers.”

  I wondered at the flat tone of voice he was using to tell me that. It wasn’t quite bored, but it was questionable. In that quiet space, I found myself wishing I had a stun gun. A stun gun and a kabob skewer would make an impression.

  “How many layers of people was that?” Asking a second time wouldn’t hurt.

  “I already told you, you’ve got managers, commanders and the other guys.”

  He was using a flat tone of voice, but it came off as just a little exasperated.

  “Three layers, right?”

  “Yes. Three layers.”

  “How many people in each layer to contend with?”

  Jerry answered, “Three or four bodyguards. Three commanders. Something like nine group leaders,” but he definitely sounded annoyed with the answer.

  “That’s three bodyguards?”

  “Fuck! Yes! Three goddamned bodyguards!”

  Butter time.

  I admit, I stirred the wreckage of his kneecap around like sugar cubes in tea. I will also report that his screaming and cursing was some of the most intense that I’ve ever heard in either category. To repeat the cursing, just the cursing, would probably cause the Pope’s eyebrows to spontaneously burst into flame.

  “How many bodyguards? Really? Be honest, because you do not want me to escalate this. I’ve only got a Swiss Army knife, more skewers, and two kitchen knives to work with. My options are limited, but they all involve piercing or involuntary amputations.” I leaned over, looked him dead in the eyes, and said, “Things would have gone much faster if they’d had a little cooking torch. Then I could have used the skewers to keep one of your eyes open while I roasted it in its socket.”

  I smiled. He went rigid, and from the look in his eyes I was fairly certain he understood the depth of shit that he was in.

  Very quietly, he said, “There are four bodyguards. Three of them are ninjas. The fourth used to work for him when he owned his company. Vice President, or something.”

  “Ninjas? You’re shitting me, Jer. Let me mix your knee a little... ”

  “NO!” He cut me off. “The guys say they’re ninjas! They’re always jumping around and balancing on strange shit like parking meters!
”

  There was a ring of truth to that. Ninjitsu is big on balance, especially in odd places and situations. You can’t be “Death from the Trees” if you can’t walk around on a limb. In the urban jungle, a parking meter could be a reasonable tool to exercise with. As for the jumping around, even Silent Shadow-san likes to have a good time.

  Ninjitsu is like Parkour, but with death.

  “Thank you, Jerry. That’s very helpful, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I like ninja; they’re crunchy in milk.”

  “Fuck me,” he said, and I just shook my head.

  “Necrophilia is not on my list of joyful pastimes. There’s also the small problem of you being a guy.”

  “Look, can you just keep asking me questions so we can be done with this and I can get out of here? You’re fucking insane and it is really starting to freak me out!”

  Got him.

  “You guys got any superheroes or secret weapons over there?” I asked, grinning down into his face. I didn’t want the psychological advantage to slip once we’d determined that I had it.

  “Fuck no. Nobody’s a super hero. No funky powers or shit like that.”

  “How many team leaders are there?” You always ask questions more than once. Remember that.

  “I told you, there are nine. They’ve all got stupid-ass names like Team Fruit Fly and Team Crunchy Baguette.”

  “I guess this means that our boy Warren has a really odd sense of humor?”

  “Hell yeah!” He seemed to forget that I was torturing him for a minute there, and I didn’t mind. “He’s had these strange parties where the team leads dress up in costumes they snagged from some kinky store somewhere and dance around. I’ve even heard he’s got some kind of dominatrix or something up in his office.”

  “Dude, that’s some sick shit!” I figured I’d keep him going a little bit. Besides, if you’re the living dead and you’re screwing your “food,” you can’t get much kinkier than that. Dominatrixes are small fry when compared to shagging, killing, and then eating people.

  “The team leads always talk about her in really quiet voices. Like they’re in awe of that shit.”