“Damn. Where’s the office? I got to see that shit for myself.”
“Same building the parking garage is in. You know the one, there’s a New York-style deli out front.”
I nodded, still in his face, still smiling. “Jerry?”
“Yeah, man?”
“You weren’t supposed to mention the location or the dominatrix, were you?”
“Oh, no.” He was almost adorable in a zombie sort of way when he realized he’d given away more than he should have. His responses had been changing throughout the interrogation, and I didn’t think it had everything to do with being invited to answer questions. The viral decay, which he’d mentioned earlier, was probably beginning to impair his cognitive functions.
“You were telling me about the interesting weapons cache you guys have, before you got on about the S&M. Remember?”
“Right! Yeah. We’ve got some shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, a few mortar launchers and this thing in a box that no one gets to touch.” He was nodding while he listed those things, and just kept going. “Lots of machine guns and ammo. Um. Handguns. Three cases of fragmentation grenades and a whole shitload of flash bangs. Ninjas! Dude, did I tell you we’ve got some ninjas?”
Note to self: cognitive zombie impairment starts out with acting like you’re stoned. I was betting if I didn’t wrap it up soon, I’d find him entering the belligerent phase of My Brain is Melting.
“Jerry,” I said and then got out of his face, “I just want to tell you you’ve done a great job and I’m really happy we got to work together on this.”
“Dude! Me too! Me too! You’re really good at this shit!”
“Hey. You’re too kind. I’m going to take this skewer out of your knee, and I want you to stay chill because it’s not going to feel very good at all. Okay?”
“Sure! I’m a man. I can take it.” He was nodding vigorously and it looked more like headbanging from where I was crouched.
“Count to three for me, and I’ll pull it out on three. That work all right for you?”
“Yeah! Let’s go! One.”
I put my finger through the loop of the skewer and got a decent hold on it. He was looking far too eager to be sane.
“Two!”
Headbanging ratcheted up a notch or two. Interesting. I got ready to pull.
“THREEEEEE!”
I whipped it out. He convulsed, screaming, and tore his right arm loose. Before I knew it, his clawed fingernails had bitten into my left forearm. He had a death grip on me and was not about to let go.
I let out a yell of my own. Don’t blame me. It hurt like Hell.
Jerry, on the other hand, was banging his head against the beach chair and denting the frame. That didn’t bother me as much as the insane little laugh wheezing out of his mouth while he slammed his head back and forth.
“Got you now, you fucking piece of shit. Not gonna let you go either. Cut me loose or I’ll tear your arm off.” He didn’t actually say it that quickly or coherently. It came out as bursts of words punctuated by the nasty, almost subvocal, laughter. I knew I couldn’t let him go, even if I wanted to keep my promise.
Whether or not I liked it, I had to end him there, while I still had a chance. I had to get my arm back in one piece, and it was probably going to hurt like Hell to do that if I had to force his grip. Then I remembered the cleaver by my right knee.
“All right, I’ll cut you loose!” I told him. “Just don’t tear my arm off!”
“Heh. Good. Good. Good,” he kept repeating it while denting the chair even further with his head.
I picked up the cleaver, tried to clear my head, and got a feel for the thing. A Chinese meat cleaver. Heavy blade. Good balance.
I swung and cut some of the Ethernet cable that bound his right leg to the chair. He cackled with glee and started chanting “More” as I pulled my arm back for another swing.
As you can imagine, I didn’t swing at the cables, but at his right wrist. I fell into a roll across his arm when the hand parted from his wrist because I was so off balance between the grip on me and the force of my swing. I came back up into a crouch with the hand still attached to my arm, covered in my blood and the spray from his stump.
The whole beach chair was jumping around on the concrete with the force of his flailing. No human noises were coming from his mouth at this point. Whatever was left of Jerry the Soldier had been replaced by some kind of mindless, raging creature. Thank whichever God you want, I still had the scythe on my back.
I pulled it out, snapped the blade into place, reversed my grip, and put the spike right between his eyes. The thrashing stopped.
Then I did something I’d never done before because I didn’t know if the structure of the weapon could take lateral torsion. I leaned my right knee into the body of the scythe and pushed. I half expected the pins and screws that held it together to pop out and go bouncing around the room, but they didn’t. The spike twisted in the hole it had made going in, crushing things as it went. As long as I live, I never want to hear a noise like that again.
I pulled the weapon free, saw the brain matter on the spike, and decided I needed to sit down.
I put the Man Scythe on the floor. Then I sat down. The last thing I remember is the concrete floor impacting the back of my head as I passed out.
Chapter 9
There was darkness, and I think it was cold. Definitely not warm, like the kind of darkness you get from huddling under the blankets on a Sunday morning in the wintertime. This was a chilly darkness with a certain moistness. Lo, even a sense of things dripping.
Did I mention the dripping, cold darkness was soft and smelled exotic in some way? It was really soft. If I were pressed to describe the scent, I would have to use phrases like “warm spices” and “freshly washed girl.”
Don’t give me shit. There is a “freshly washed girl” aroma. I smelled it, spices, in a soft place that was drippy, moist, and dark. Overall, aside from the dark aspect of everything, it was pretty pleasant.
Then I opened my eyes.
“I’m blind!” I yelled and thrashed my head around, heaving myself up into a sitting position.
There was a cold compress flopped over on a big, bandaged sausage in my lap. Things weren’t dark anymore, or soft, or cold and drippy. In fact, things were well lit, tastefully decorated, and two of my dear friends were composing their faces at the foot of the bed.
“You’re awake now. That’s splendid!” Bajali was smiling at me from the end of the bed, and Shawn clapped him on the shoulders, looking pretty pleased as well.
“Oh. How long was I out?” I looked around a little bit, but not very much because the back of my head hurt like a stone-cold son of a yak-buggering whore.
“About four hours,” Shawn answered, looking a little bit green around the eyes and jaw.
“Ah. Knocked myself out on the floor. Is Jerry dead?”
“If you mean the zombie that you were interrogating, yes. I think that may have been related to the hole that your spike made in his forehead, and that his hand was still attached to your forearm.” Bajali pointed to the big white sausage in my lap. I noticed the sausage started at my elbow and had a hand attached to the opposite end.
The fingers wriggled. I winced. It was my hand and arm, not a mutant bologna from Hell. I breathed a sigh of relief that it was there and functioning, if more than a bit painful.
“Hey? Is Jayashri all right?” I didn’t see her and got a flash of serious paranoia that something had happened while I was out.
“Yes,” I heard from behind me, “I’m fine. Thank you for being strong enough to do what I could not.”
I scooted around on the bed, and discovered that the soft, spicy place where my head had been was her lap. She wasn’t meeting my eyes, and that bothered me more than I could cope with at the time. I put my finger under her chin and lifted her face so that I could see she was all right. There were tears in her eyes and no small amount of embarrassment with them.
&nbs
p; “I was very worried about you after we heard all the noise in the basement.” She wiped her eyes.
Something about that statement perplexed me. “Which noise? Him screaming, or the breakdancing beach chair noise?”
“Dude, we didn’t move until we heard you holler,” Shawn piped up from behind me. That made a lot of sense, so I dropped the issue.
“I had to put some sutures in your arm, I hope you don’t mind.” Jaya gestured at the bandage-wrapped thing attached to my elbow.
“Do I want to know how bad it was?” I wanted to know how bad it was.
“Well, once we used the bolt cutters to remove the fingers,” Baj mimed using a substantial bolt cutter, “it did look quite nasty. No major nerve damage that we could see, but he missed your artery by about a millimeter. It looked like Jaya put in… darling, was it three internal sutures and four external for each puncture?”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Oh. No wonder it hurts.”
“I would tell you not to use it seriously for at least a week,” she said, looking at her own forearm, “but that may not be a realistic suggestion at the moment.”
“No, I don’t think we’ll have that luxury.” I shook my head, hoping to clear out some of the concrete-induced cobwebs, but all it did was make bright white starbursts behind my eyelids. “Nnng. Okay. Give me a minute and I’ll try to lay it all out for you. We don’t have a whole lot of time to waste.”
Frankly, I’m not sure how long it took me to get my brains back together, but I was able to report everything I’d learned from Jerry the Zombie Grunt. My friends were a tough crowd, and I know it wasn’t a performance they particularly wanted to be a part of. For my part, I was right there with them.
“All right. This is not a wonderful situation we’re in, but we might be able to do something with it,” Baj was doing his most thoughtful face. “We need to pull in our snipers before they get killed. They might be more useful elsewhere, or if we could keep them mobile at the very least.”
“Not to put too fine a point on this, Baj,” all I could do was wave my right hand around in a vague sort of way, the left hurt too much, “but what the fuck are we going to do?”
He sighed. “We are going to do what villages have done since people started gathering in groups. We are going to round up everyone we can find, have a meeting, and present the issues to everybody as we understand it.” He looked really noble, standing there like a statesman, in the old sense of the word. “Then, the community will decide what we will do.”
“Bajali and I can escape,” Jaya said, “and that would take the brunt of any attack away from the community. It might not mean Hightower’s plans are foiled, but it would give everyone we care about a little extra time to make their own plans.”
“I’m gonna tell the two of you, right now, that you’re spouting bullshit.” Shawn was a plain speaker, no one would ever argue that point, but he had never delivered words with that much... I’m not even sure that there’s a word for it. The closest I’d ever heard to his tone of voice came straight from movies.
Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments.” Yul Brynner in “The King and I.” If Shawn had suddenly intoned, “Pharaoh, let my people go,” I would have sprung up from the bed and started looking for Hebrew slaves to free. As it was, I was glued to the mattress, and I could tell that Baj was just as stunned. Then again, he may have been thinking something like, “And who is this crazy, mountain of a redneck I have invited into this house? Is this moonshine I smell?” I doubted that, but it was a possibility.
“There is not a single man, woman, child, or even family fuckin’ pet who would have the two of you run away if we could keep you safe.” Shawn pointed one finger at Jayashri behind me and poked the other salami-size index finger at the end of Baj’s nose. “Yeah, we’ll have your meeting and tell everyone about what all is goin’ down, but You. Are. Not. Running. Away. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
All three of us answered with a quiet, “Yes, Sir.” I don’t know why I said it. I wasn’t going anywhere.
“You,” he said, moving the Jayashri finger to point at me, “Go make some space in the store so we can all talk about this and make some plans. If you’ve got a whiteboard and markers, set ‘em up. We’re gonna need ‘em.” He moved the finger back to Jayashri, and continued, “You two, round up our neighbors and anyone they see fit to bring along. They’ve got an hour before I come lookin’ for ‘em. Tell everybody to meet at the hardware store in 45 minutes. That’s all. SCRAM!”
We scrammed.
Before I made it past him, he handed me back my .45. “Boy, you don’t scram as hard as all that. You’ve had a shitty evenin’.”
“Yes, Sir.” I just nodded and made my way outside.
Chapter 10
Night had fallen all the way, and I wasn’t even sure what time it was anymore. There were more stars in the sky since the world changed. The air was crisp, and I felt like I was really living in the moment. Even the sound of my shoes on the pavement was more real. Somewhere in the back of my head I remembered the sorts of poetry written by warriors who were about to go out and do battle with very little chance to return home alive.
You would get words that conjured up the transitory nature of being alive, how splendid it was to be in that moment, maybe even some yearning they felt would never be realized. I thought a bit while I walked and wished that I were a poet. Words were not my art, but every now and then I stretched myself in hopes I would find them in my heart, ready to be spoken.
The crisp autumn air shakes,
the falling leaves,
tumbling to Earth;
White burning stars light
a lonely path,
walking here alone;
A final moment grasping,
the dreams slumbering
between silent breaths;
I never banged Shawn’s sister.
Those thoughts swirled around in my cramped brain, and I realized I needed to find another hobby. Failing that, I needed to find a tribe of suburban Virginia Amazons who would club me upside my head, drag me to their Ikea-furnished boudoir and make me father a whole new generation of busty womanhood.
“I could always take up drinking heavily,” I thought to myself as I opened the store door. I paused for a moment, looked down at the crusty dreadlock head by my foot, and silently remarked that it felt like days since I had decapitated his sorry ass. Then I kicked it down the street like a soccer ball mating with an octopus.
Once inside I headed for the back room. I knew there was a whiteboard back there, and there was easily enough space to fit everyone who might show up. My portion of the event coordination was more of the Friendly Greeter and Concierge, rather than People Herder, at least until things got started.
I was not at all sure I’d be able to add anything of major intuitive thinking with this many brains crunching down on the subject. Then again, every idea counts, even if it is a bad one. For the moment, at least, I could breathe quietly and try to process how my day had gone.
The arm was sore. My head was still pretty achy, and I wasn’t quite sure that all the beans in my maracas were shaking. I was even comparing my brains to South American noisemakers, and that didn’t bode well at all. Instead of thinking about it too hard, I just walked back out to the front of the store, through the plumbing section. In a split second, I thought of 101 uses for PVC pipe.
While words have never been my art, building things is where my art expresses itself. You can tell me what you need to do, and I can figure out and build something that will help you with that job. In the world we’re living in, that is an incredibly useful talent to have. Why do you think I set down roots in an abandoned hardware store? It isn’t the ambiance or the foot traffic; let me tell you.
I got to the front of the store just as Grandmother Yan, Mister Yan’s widow, appeared at the door. She came in, gave me a hug, and said, “You a silly boy. Don’t let monster bite you arm. Meeting in back?”
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“Yes, Grandmother.” You learned very quickly not to call her anything other than Grandmother. She was tough as granite, wrinkled like a dried-up apple, and could move like lightning with a rice paddle.
She was another person I adored, and I would die to protect her.
If our community had a kind of strength, beyond the amazing set of skills available among us, it was the love we shared. I won’t lie and say there weren’t problems, but you expect problems in a tribe made up of so many different kinds of people. Think of it as a big blended family, and you’d probably not be far off. Those issues didn’t stop the love, genuine affection, and loyalty.
Truth be told, it probably made everything stronger.
Gina “Explosivo” Halperin and her husband, Mark, showed up at a dead run, and I funneled them back to the meeting area. They were bickering about using broken glass or gravel in anti-personnel IEDs as they went. It would be difficult to call an argument about explosives and frangible material “cute” but they managed to do it in their unique, lanky geek sort of way.
I looked down the street. Hajj Siddig Muhammad and his family were jogging over. Jim and Darcy Smith rounded the corner, carrying gallon jugs in each hand. Darcy’s cider was one of the best trading neighborhood products. No one knows why it is as good as it is.
Matt “Flower” Wilson was a bit further down the street and a more difficult to see in the all-black tactical gear that he was wearing. I never asked him where “Flower” came from. Matt is another one of those rugged guys, a former Ranger, and our primary sniper.
He had made intimations that his service didn’t end when his enlistment was up. From the way he moved and how he kept to himself, I strongly suspected there was more to him than met the eye. I wasn’t about to corner him and ask pointed questions. He never let any of us down, and that was enough for me.
I heard running from the other direction, turned my head, and saw our second sniper booking it toward the store. Nate Banks. I was willing to bet we wouldn’t see his wife at the meeting, because she’d found herself in the role of community babysitter and elementary school educator. With all the adults at the meeting, someone had to...
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