“Grr, I tell you. Grr.” I tried to be angry and fierce, but it didn’t quite work with her. “I do have just the table and memory foam padding that you can throw some sheets on. Am I not spiffy?”
“Wow! Keep that up and I might just fall in love with you! How did you get a hold of sheets and memory foam?”
“I was walking by a home store one afternoon and a bunch of zombies were liberating the contents.” I couldn’t help but grin like an idiot. “So, I liberated the contents from the zombies who suddenly didn’t need household goods.”
Her face screwed up in an expression of disgust. “I hope you didn’t get any goo on the stuff.”
“Hey!” I replied. “That’s what’s so great about new products that are still in their clean plastic wrappers! No muss. No fuss. No brains!”
We wandered into my store, and I told Charlie where to find what she was after and suggested that the all-natural hand salve on the endcap of Aisle 3 would probably be an excellent stand-in for massage lotion if it were warmed up. While she was tracking down the body lubricant, I located the accessories and left them with Jayashri, before refilling the tub and coaxing the water heater into blissful operation. After that little spate of activity, I scooted up to my room to hang out while the Spa was occupied.
The first abdominal cramp hit me as I was going up the stairs to my living space. It felt like I’d swallowed the hand grenade that had blown me across the lawn and doubled me over onto the steps. I made it to the door with my eyes full of uncontrollable tears and my mouth hanging open, breathing like an opera diva in the middle of natural childbirth. The Lamaze was doing nothing for the contractions at all. They came in waves.
A cramp hit me like I was trying to push a 25-pound baby through my navel, and I rolled through the door and onto the floor in front of my desk. When I had a moment to think, all that went through my mind were images of Chest Bursters from the “Alien” movies, and that did not help my heart rate nor ease my panic.
I looked up and saw my old chair in front of my face, and something in my head told me that I needed to be much closer to it, and I crawled over to it and rested my face on the steel leg closest to me. The next cramp slapped my face against the metal and I tried to vomit, but all that came out was tons of saliva.
God, my cheekbone hurt!
What I really wanted was to close my eyes and die, but it wasn’t working out that way. My eyes weren’t even working properly, because all I could focus on was where my spit had landed on the chair leg. The liquid wasn’t running down the metal; instead, it looked like it was pooling. Not long after that, it seemed as though my spit was moving back toward my face along the chair leg.
Super! Hallucinations! I really wanted to go back to the raven and nerve endings.
CRAMP!
My tongue was out, touching the metal of the chair, and I was panting hard. I tasted the cold steel and there was something calming about it. The next cramp wasn’t as bad as the one before it.
I nearly screamed when my spit started oozing back onto my tongue and slithering back toward my throat. Looking down, there was a gray worm on the chair leg that was stretching back into my face and doing a fine job of moving toward my uvula. I was paralyzed with revulsion and shattered by waves of cramps.
Centimeter by centimeter, the gray spit slug made a beeline for my throat. The chair leg behind it looked bright and abraded, as if my spit had scoured the metal and then polished the scratches. The cramping was horrible, and each contraction took my breath away. Also horrible was the overwhelming urge to swallow. But I did. I couldn’t help it.
The cramps backed down into waves of full-body tremors. I kept swallowing until the gray mess was gone. A minute or two after the last swallow, the shaking stopped and I flopped over onto my back.
If you have ever been to a horror movie that was so intense that you left the theater unable to form complete thoughts, then you know what it was like to be in my head after that experience. I wasn’t able to think over the storm of wordless emotions that were crashing inside my skull, but I didn’t have to wait for long for some kind of quietude. I passed out, which was happening far too often for comfort.
When I woke up, it was like an electric shock. I sat straight up, alert and ready to go, as if nothing freaky had happened. There was also a sensation of knowing how long I’d been out of commission. I wanted to say 15 minutes, 44 seconds, and 33 milliseconds.
Blocks fell into place.
I wasn’t infected with the zombie virus. I’d been nailed by nanotechnology. Mister Yan appears and less than an hour later, I’m rejecting foreign bodies and healing far too quickly to be human. Just a little while later, I’m doubled over, sliming furniture and slurping the slime back up. Why? The little bastards want to replicate.
Mister Yan went to Jayashri’s house also. Chances are, she’d been “gifted.” Charlie was with me, and if the tech wasn’t typed specifically for the two of us, it would be floating around in her system as well.
I felt a little relief at that thought. I would prefer to tell her something like, “Hey! That bug that turns you into the walking dead that I thought I gave you last night? I was wrong! You didn’t get anything from me! It looks like the little Chinese man gave you nano-critters instead!”
Whether or not that would be better in the end, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that my new inhabitants had cleared foreign material out of my body, repaired tissue damage, and made me feel completely horrible in order to vomit drool all over a steel chair leg, oh, and then have me consume the goo I’d ejected, along with whatever material had been scavenged from the chair. That could make metal detectors troublesome in the future.
“Gosh, sweetie! I infected you with the little wrigglers Bajali sent me! You’ll have horrible morning sickness, and in nine months, you’ll have a bouncing baby Cylon!”
Deliver me, Oh Lord, from my own imagination. Why can’t I give someone something simple that requires two weeks of antibiotics?
Oh, that’s right. I’m not living in a normal world.
Chapter 22
I stood up, brushed myself off, and made my way back down to the Spa to tell my friends about the latest development. I confess, I was feeling a tad frustrated by all of it.
When I slid the door aside, there was an interesting tableau in front of my eyes. Charlie was passed out on the floor with the heater vent pipe in her left hand and soot all over her face. Jayashri was thrusting her hips, vigorously, against the water pipe and licking gray drool as it slid back down toward her lips. It was made 1,000 times more erotic because she was naked and covered in pearls of bath water.
Crotch Quixote and the Panzas began a rousing Mariachi rendition of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” My frontal lobes gave up the effort to keep the music down, poured a strong one, and sat back in their recliner.
The effect was only slightly ruined when Jaya passed out, slid off the water pipe, and flopped onto the floor in a curvaceous tan pile.
I decided it was a splendid time for a mantra. “It turns and walks out of the room and closes the door behind it. It puts the lotion in the basket.” I repeated those lines over and over and over again. Then something in my head changed the disposition of the lotion, and I ran out of the room before it could alter my course of action.
Standing outside of the room, on the other side of a large sliding steel door, felt much safer even if the House Band was encouraging me to go back inside. I could wait for fifteen minutes and then make snarky comments when they wake back up! What a great idea! No.
There are some things that even the painfully horny should never risk, even if there are lovely little nanomachines that will heal you up in a pinch. Of course, there was no way to know precisely how powerful the little buggers could be without testing of some kind. It seemed a smarter course of action to simply forget that they were around, but be safety conscious and cautious, rather than walk up to an IED and hope to stand back up afterward.
That being said, if the little
bastards could give me claws and coat my skeleton in some fantastical metal, as well as heal any and every injury known to man... Let’s just say I wouldn’t bitch about it in the least. Unless it hurt like Hell to do it. Then I would bitch loudly, cry, wail, complain, and go throw myself off a building and then get up and do it all again.
I never said I was sane. Most people aren’t.
What I really wanted was some kind of explanation for why Baj decided to do this without even asking. Of course, he probably couldn’t have asked considering the position of being under scrutiny and having to hand off the “goodies” to Mister Yan to deliver. But that didn’t answer the primary “Why” of the problem.
Could it be as simple as he wanted to give us an advantage in terms of surviving the coming attack? Possible, I suppose. That would have to do until I could ask him in person.
My brain perked up. Someone was approaching the door from the other side. I knew that they were at a 45-degree angle to my position and approximately five feet away. At current speed, that person would have their hand on the door in 4.5 seconds. The door would slide, and in .12 seconds, I would be able to turn and attack if necessary.
I also had the impression something inside me was waiting for a decision as it was counting down the hundredths of a second before I could assess the target. New information showed up, a pheromone signature—it was Charlie behind the door. That strange part of my brain, the nanomachines, I assume, disappeared from the edge of my consciousness.
“Hi Charlie.”
“Frank, what the fuck was that all about?”
I turned around to face her. She was still covered in soot, but the tears were fresh. All I could do was pull her into my arms and hold her. I don’t know if she needed it, but I did.
“Jaya’s husband, Bajali, sent us a gift,” I whispered in her ear. “I didn’t give you the virus, because I didn’t have it. What we’ve got are nanomachines.”
“When did this happen?”
“Mister Yan was probably the carrier. That’s why my body started rejecting the stitches; at least, that’s what I think is going on.”
She let out the breath she was holding and sagged into me just a little bit. “Then what was the deal with the cramps and licking metal?”
“My best guess is that the nanos wanted to replicate enough to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do. Baj wanted to give us the best chance he could to survive the attack, and this seems to be a way to do that.”
Charlie lifted her head up from my chest, looked up into my eyes, and said, “If we get him back, can I punch him really hard and yell at him a whole bunch?”
“If Jayashri leaves anything for you to punch, sure.”
“Okay.” She looked a little confused for a moment. “Why do I think someone is about to walk around the door and then up behind me in under eight seconds?”
“Probably because someone is. I got the same sort of information before you even slid the door open.”
Before she even came around the door, we heard Jaya say, “No one is allowed to beat my husband into a pulp but me. I cannot find a towel and am not going to reveal myself to the prying eyes of someone who is not my cursed spouse. Where can I find something to cover myself with?”
“The plastic cabinet,” Charlie and I said in unison.
“Thank you. I will tell you when it is appropriate for you to come in.”
I looked at Charlie and we smiled, doing our best not to laugh. She was still in my arms, and I liked it. She was curvy, warm, strong, and feminine. Unfortunately for me, my brain started playing back the memory of Jayashri and the water pipe, and my anatomy stood up to share an opinion on that recollection.
It seemed that Charlie could feel my... editorial, because both of her eyebrows shot straight up and her mouth formed an “O” shape. Any sane man would have expected what I did, that she’d extricate herself from my embrace and slap the crap out of me. We would have been distinctly wrong.
She smiled like a shark and started to gyrate against me in a distressingly erotic manner. I blushed. I could feel it.
“My, my, Mister Stewart. Is there something you’d like to share with me about how you’re feeling right now?”
“Nargle!”
She dissolved into laughter at my expense, and I was entirely grateful for it. Then we heard Jayashri say, from the other side of the door, “Charlotte, what are you laughing at? Did Frank make a fool of himself in some way?”
Charlie replied, tears streaming down her face, “Oh, honey! No more than he usually does!”
The sad thing is that I was becoming adjusted to being spoken about in that way. I imagined I might find it worrisome if my gonads weren’t having a karate tournament in my reptile brain. She felt really, really good against me, and I wasn’t able to decide if that was a bad thing or not.
We wandered back into “Frank’s Bath and Spa” (as it would later be called) to find our friend sitting on the bath stool, looking amused and thoughtful. I was able to think clearly enough to decide against mentioning that I saw her adventures with the water pipe. It also occurred to me that I should have installed security cameras in the bath area.
“Looks like the little Chinese zombie brought us tidings of comfort and joy,” Charlie said.
“That seems to be the most logical assumption, given recent events. What I cannot decide for myself is whether I am happy that my husband gave this to us, or if I feel as though I have been poorly used by him.”
“Baj, narg narg fwhew love love. Yah!” My frontal lobes were taking their own sweet time in getting up from in front of the widescreen TV. That had to be it. The only other possibility is that the machines stole my IQ when I wasn’t paying attention.
“Should I even try to understand that gibberish?” Mental note: Jaya pronounces “gibberish” with a G sound, not a J sound.
“I think I flirted with him a bit too intensely for his over-stressed brain to cope with. He’ll be back to his normal self in a few minutes.” Charlie looked me over, seemed to assess something I couldn’t quantify, and turned back to Jaya. “If his brain doesn’t come back, then we’ll just find something for him to do that doesn’t require much thought.”
“For example?”
“Paperweight.”
“Charlotte, your brilliance is only matched by your lovely personality and physical beauty.”
“Why, thank you! I’m going to take my bath now, I think. Maybe I’ll have the Brainless One scrub my back. What do you think?”
“Are you sure that he would be capable of such a delicate task, reduced as he is to a barely sentient state?”
“I’m willing to take the chance.”
Jayashri stood up in the towel, walked over to her clothes that were folded so neatly by the opposite wall, nodded to both of us, and started toward the door.
“Grnnah room wa arg!”
“Thank you, Frank. I think I will lounge in your room for a while. Perhaps, if you have some books, I might read for a while?”
“Books, ight elf. Iction, nd row.”
“Splendid!” With characteristic grace, she floated from the room, pausing only to slide the door closed.
Chapter 23
Charlotte started to undress, and I was still in the room. There was something incredibly wrong about that, but my brain was not ticking over fast enough to do anything other than watch her move. Her back was turned, and she didn’t seem to care I was in the room.
Her tattoos fought for my attention. They couldn’t have been old, because the colors were too bright, almost too intense for words. The pinks, reds, and greens stood out against the pale canvas of her skin, highlighting the strong curves of her shoulders and the smooth play of muscles as she moved. The architecture of her back, waist, and hips was more perfect than any set of numbers that could have described it.
She was luminous. Color, lines, forms, and shapes that moved me more than any of the cathedrals I’d visited in Europe.
In my travels, I�
��d felt God in quiet places. I’d heard angels in Bach and Beethoven. Until then, I had never seen art made flesh.
Charlie sat down on the stool in front of the tap with the soap and bucket. I couldn’t see anything more than the change in the play of light on her skin. All I could do was watch while she soaped and rinsed parts of herself that I couldn’t see, and I would not have been anywhere else in the world if I could have been.
“Will you wash my back?” She asked quietly, almost too low to be heard, with vulnerability that I’d never heard before... except the night before, in my arms.
To my credit, I didn’t stumble over, or collapse to my knees. For once in my life, I had a moment of physical grace in the face of overwhelming feelings. She offered me the loofah, and I took it.
She scooted the wash bucket around to her side so I could use it. My thought processes were a little dim and I was grateful I didn’t have to make my mouth work in order to have access to the water. All I could reliably do was what she asked of me, not because I didn’t have some ideas of my own, but because I was so incredibly unprepared for the situation.
I put my left hand on her shoulder to steady myself as I sunk to my knees behind her. Then I did what I was asked to do. I washed her back. It was the fastest eternity I’ve ever lived in.
My hand was still on her shoulder when I put the loofah in the bucket and I was about to stand back up when she tugged my wrist. Charlie pulled my hand from her shoulder and across her chest, which gave me little recourse but to move in behind her, my chest to her back. Then she reached around, found my other hand, and pulled it around her tummy. I was Frank, the Human Cape.
Smelling her skin is what sunk me. I rested my head on her shoulder with my lips touching the side of her neck, and it was the most natural place in the world to be. She sighed, and some sort of tension inside her evaporated.
I needed to speak. I wanted to say things. My guts were filled with poetry and my heart was eager to pump the words out of me, but my tongue felt lifeless.
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