“Frank, you might be high on your own juices, but don’t make me kick you to the floor again. All right?”
“Yeaaaah.” Concrete feels good when you writhe all over it. “This is like the best back scratcher in the world!”
“Great. Tell you what? You stay right there, and I’ll go look over the dead bodies. Does that work for you?”
“Yeaaaah.”
I continued to chill and let the self-made groove cocktail slosh through my body. Really, if this is what I could have for getting shot, then I’d need to rethink my desire to dodge projectiles. It was mellow, thick, rich, and as gooey as freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Then again, like most instances of being high, it ended less pleasantly than it began.
The cramps came back.
It was a different feeling that curled me over into a fetal position on the floor and completely evaporated the endorphin high I’d been enjoying. I didn’t hear Jayashri come back in the room, but I did vaguely process that Charlie was examining the corpses’ gear in the buff. That was strangely erotic for about four seconds, before it was swept away by the next cramp.
Jayashri knelt down beside me, pulled down my eyelids, and checked my pupils. I would have made smart remarks about the pupils not being the source of my discomfort, but she waved a can of full-sugar cola in front of my face, and my attention rapidly changed focus. I reached up, grabbed it, popped the top, and chugged it.
The cramps started to subside almost instantly. When I put the can down on the floor, the paint had been stripped off of it in a perfect handprint. Apparently, my little friends wanted sugar and whatever was in the paint on the can. However, they didn’t want whatever that bullet had been made out of; they’d just made it into easily disposable goo.
“Thanks. I think I needed that.”
“It certainly looked like you did. I would have been here sooner, but I knew the two of you had handled the situation.”
“Yeah. I think our little friends have some kind of sensor package, or they’re processing our input in a way that we don’t. The science is a little much for me right now.”
“Hopefully, we will speak to my husband about all of it before too terribly long.” She looked over at Charlie and asked, “What do the party crashers have to say for themselves?”
“Not a whole lot,” she replied. “We do have a nice AR-15, a couple of grenades, three Beretta military-issue pistols, and a pile of combat knives to add to our collection. If I were going to hazard a guess, I’d say that these three were probably regular Army before they went over.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Well, they’re wearing urban camo BDUs, and they’ve got Army rank insignia in all the right places.”
“Oh.”
Charlie got a really strange look on her face, scooted across the room, and vaulted into the tub.
That’s when I heard, “Hey guys! Y’all okay in there?” Shawn was not far away, and my mini-friends informed me that there were at least six other armed people with him. Our cavalry, just a little late.
“Yeah! We’re good! Had some unfriendly visitors.”
Shawn rounded the corner with Nate and four other people I wasn’t sure I knew. They were armed, and three of their firearms had been discharged recently. It took me a moment to realize why Shawn’s eyeballs were bugging out; I was still on the floor, naked, and my junk was looking right back at him. Nate and the others weren’t as fazed by it.
“Oh, put your eyes back in their sockets! I know I’m a vision of manly beauty and all that, but, fuck, you were raised a nudist!” That got serious laughs from the rest of the guys and a chortle from inside the ofuro.
The trademark laugh caught Shawn’s attention. He turned a few shades of pink, turned around, and swiftly walked away. Nate turned to watch him go, and the other guys started examining the bodies.
“Oh, fuck me,” one of them said.
“What is it, Ramos?” Nate turned and walked over to where Ramos was examining a set of remains.
“Ah, I was in basic with this idiot. It’s a shame to see this.”
“I hate to interrupt,” I said, “but some of your weapons have been fired recently. What all is going on?”
Nate stood up, walked over, and crouched down beside me. “I think we just got a small tactical assessment from our good friends across the way. We were walking back to my place and Boyle, over there, saw someone fiddling with the trigger on one of the IEDs. Boyle yelled, and the guy raised a weapon. We took exception to that.”
“Did your target have any friends?”
“No. There was just the one. They definitely got intel on our perimeter from somewhere.”
“Well,” I said, “they have been watching. The morning zombie blew himself up while doing recon, and I would imagine that they had a sniper watching him all the while.” That is what I wanted to think. The other option was that they’d squeezed information out of Bajali or had been observing every move he made.
Thinking about someone dear to me being tortured did nothing to improve my mood.
“I’ve got a thought,” Nate said, smirking down at me.
“What’s that?”
“You might want to put on some pants if you want to keep fighting zombies today.”
I frowned a most foul frown. “Just how long have you been waiting to say that to someone?”
“Man!” Nate laughed and said, “I’ve been wanting to do that for at least two years,” and then looked at me with a certain amount of gravitas. “But seriously, having your junk pointed at me like that... It’s disturbing.”
I know I blushed, I could feel the heat in my face, and Jayashri was snickering gently. Nate stood up, chuckling, and wandered back over to give the corpses his own once-over. Since I didn’t really have any choice, I rolled over, stood up, and went in search of pants.
Jaya walked over to the tub and peered inside. I overheard part of the conversation, at least the bits that weren’t expressed in the secret language of feminine giggles. For the most part, it involved surprise that Charlie was so bold, that I was so bold, and yet greater surprise that I managed to avoid the “inevitable conclusion,” and the way we enticed our opponents into opening the door. That chunk of the recitation garnered quite a few, “Oh! My! Oh my goodness!” and other such comments from Jayashri.
When I turned around from pulling my pants back on, I noticed a certain Dr. Sharma from across the street was looking at me with an unusual air of consideration. I just shrugged. I couldn’t even imagine what was going through her head, but I realized it would chap my ass until I found time to ask about it. Considering that there were three bodies to deal with, that conversation would have to take a back burner to the pressing issues at hand.
Nate and his guys were stripping the zombies, and one of them was walking toward my ofuro with intent to rinse out a helmet in the convenient water source. Apparently he had been paying more attention to the corpses than anything else that had been happening around him.
“You! Lack of Hygiene Dude!” I pinned him in place with my Erect Finger of Doom like a butterfly on Styrofoam. “If you dunk that helmet in my Soaking Tub of Earthly Delights, one or two things will happen. Number one: a hot blond woman will rise up naked out of the water and slap the shit right out of you. Number two: the irate owner of the tub,” pointing at my own chest, “will levitate over there on a column of blue flame and bitch slap you. Oh, and three: I will never let you use my tub. Ever.”
The guy turned, looked at Nate for direction, and received the following response, “White, Frank does not joke about his tub. I’d find a hose if I were you.”
White turned back toward me and offered, “Sorry, man. Is there a hose I can use?”
“Yes. Go out the door, turn right, and you can’t miss it.” Another thought trickled into the front of my head, and I found the nearest towels. “Charlie, do you want to get out of the tub or have you become a prune with gills?”
“Yeah, but
there’s the whole People I Don’t Know thing going on out there,” she replied from inside the tub.
“Didn’t you tell me that you were a nudist?”
“Nudism doesn’t have shit to do with modesty or exhibitionism. Now bring me a towel before I get fierce.”
“Fierce. Fierce, she says!” I walked over to the tub, blocked the view with one towel, and handed her the other one. Somewhere between getting out of the water and wrapping herself in cotton goodness, she reached around and tweaked my nipple. “EEEEE!”
“Secret for you, Frankie Twin Peaks: never joke about a woman being fierce.”
“Ma’am! Yes, Ma’am!”
“That’s better.” She sauntered off, picked up her clothes and guns, and scooted out of the room with Jayashri in tow. I swear there was more giggling involved.
“Frank?”
“Yes, Nate?”
“She’s Shawn’s sister?”
“Uh huh.”
“She’s got a shot-loaded leather set of nuts underneath that towel!”
“And a sap dangling between, let me tell you what.”
“I hope she sticks around,” Nate smiled in a way that showed extra teeth, “because I like that in a woman. Makes me wonder if I’d like her mom just as much.”
“She’s mine, you man ho.” Nate and I always joked around like kids in the locker room. We often ended up doing neighborhood dirty work, and the ass-slapping humor did a lot to diffuse how uncomfortable it was to dispose of bodies or dig graves. “As for Mother Cooper, do you think you could handle a woman who raised a daughter like that?”
“Shit. I am the Dark Meat. Nothin’ God made that I can’t handle.” He waved me over, “Now get your pasty white junk over here and help me strip these bodies.”
That’s what we did.
Zombie blood is strangely thick and doesn’t quite coagulate properly over time. Once we had the uniforms off, I took them over to the laundry room beside the bathroom on the far side of the loading dock Spa. A little bleach, decent enzymatic detergent, and two cycles of washing would have most of the blood out.
In a barter economy, even if cash still exists and is used, never turn down the chance to clean and hold onto trade-worthy items. BDUs almost always come in handy for such things. The helmets and body armor were also something of a treat for the same reason.
It occurred to me there might be another use for the stuff. We could possibly infiltrate Hightower’s camp in disguise. That was an idea worth discussing with tactically minded people at the upcoming meeting. We needed to find and leverage any possible edge we could get if we wanted to come out alive.
Once again, my little “riders” informed me that an armed human was approaching me from behind. I’d just transferred the BDU load into the dryer and turned around as one of the new guys, Ramos, was about to tap me on the shoulder. It gave him a bit of a start.
“Excuse me. Nate told me to come over and ask what we ought to do with these three bodies and the one we tagged earlier.”
“Probably the best bet is the woodchipper over at Shawn’s garage. I think we’ve got an empty 55-gallon drum around here someplace.” I thought for a minute. “Yeah, that’s probably at Shawn’s too.”
“We’re going to run the bodies through the chipper?” Ramos looked a little green when he asked me that. “And what are we gonna do with the drum?”
“In answer to your first question, yes. In answer to your second question, you chip the corpses into the drum. Then you toss lime into it, cover it, and wait until it turns into compost. If that’s not pleasant enough, pour some gasoline into the drum and light all the chipped-up shit on fire.”
“Ah.” He was really green under the gills and did not look at all comfortable talking to me about this. “Doesn’t that smell really bad?”
“No worse than a BBQ, and then just like burning meat of any kind. It’s over in about six hours, and you can use the zombie ashes as fertilizer or to fill holes in your yard. The tomatoes love the stuff.” I scratched my head. “What did they do with zombie bodies where you were?”
Ramos turned a little green under the gills.
“Mass graves,” he replied. “We bulldozed them into mass graves.”
The discomfort was as evident on his face as the shine on a new penny. He turned around and walked back over to Nate, who looked back at me and nodded.
Ramos, Boyle, and White each grabbed the feet of a brainless body and started dragging them around the corner to Shawn’s place. Nate waved, told me he’d see me in a little bit for the meeting, and headed off to oversee the disposal process.
That’s all right. I enjoy doing laundry. It is much more peaceful and smells better than ZPD. Zombie-Processing Duty. The acronym just sounds more professional.
The washer pinged, and I slapped the BDUs back in for a second run. From the look of them, they didn’t really need it, but it seemed like a reasonable idea to wash them a second time, even if it was slightly “woo-woo” of me. At least I wasn’t hunting for sage or incense to burn; that would be far too spiritually committed for me to indulge in.
I turned around, looked at my splendid soaking tub and all the brains and goo on the floor, and was filled with a need to put things back into some sort of order. I had just started to mop the floor when my critters gave me a heads-up about someone approaching the delivery door, which was still open to the world. The incoming individual was human, and that was a bit of a relief. In all likelihood, it was Shawn or someone wandering over to ask about something.
“Afternoon, Mister Stewart.”
I looked up to see Buttons standing in the doorway and managed to keep my overwhelming joy at bay long enough to acknowledge him with a surly grunt. He waved me over, and that was curious enough to make me stroll in his direction.
“You’re familiar with the fact that there are thousands of objects orbiting the planet, aren’t you Frank?” Buttons had a particularly inscrutable expression plastered across his face.
“Yes. Why?”
He put his hands on my shoulders, turned me so I was facing the area where our enemies had set up shop. You can easily see the high-rise buildings from here, and he pointed to one in particular. “There’s a sniper in the offices on the top floor of that building. The distance is a bit of a stretch, but he could nail almost anyone in this neighborhood if he wanted.”
“Yes. That’s probably true.”
“Would you also say he’s got a decent vantage point to observe anything you do here?”
I didn’t quite see what he was getting at, but I agreed with him on that point as well.
He looked at his watch, a matte-black tactical number that sported more dials and widgets than I’d ever seen. “Watch the top of the building for the next 11 seconds. You might be pleased if you did. Perhaps a bit more at ease, at the very least.”
I started to think about demanding he spill his beans, when the top four floors of the building in question became an expanding cloud of dust. A heartbeat later, there was a noise that sounded like the bastard child of a thunderclap and a tin whistle. The clouds in the sky above the building looked like they’d been shredded.
“What. The. Fuck?” No amount of eloquence could have covered the shock I was feeling at the time.
“That, Mister Frank Stewart, was an example of the buttons I have at my disposal and my commitment to helping you all get out of this in one piece.”
“That was... what?”
“A shot from a satellite that does not exist and cannot be detected. That satellite does not have an electromagnetic railgun, nor can it be moved into a different orbit as necessary. Did you know that it won’t be in the exact same position in 23 hours, 58 minutes, and some odd seconds?”
“I am, well…” I tried to find something to say, but all I could do was turn back toward the building and watch the cloud of dust dissipate. There were bent girders where those four floors used to be and no windows left for six floors underneath. I wasn’t able to process
what I’d seen, even with the explanation. “I don’t want to know what the other buttons are. Do I?”
“No, you very much do not want to know what the other buttons are.” He gave me a cold but wry smile before he continued, “That is the button I have been granted use of in order to see my mission through to completion. I have access to other resources if that non-existent orbital weapon does not prove to be sufficient to the task. Those other resources are not as precise and will negatively impact your community if they are used.”
“Why haven’t these resources been put to use before now?”
“The intel we had on Warren Hightower and his plans did not merit this sort of action. We had no idea that Bajali Sharma was in country and accessible to the enemy. When it became clear that not only was he in the country but had been abducted, action was authorized.”
“How come you haven’t used those non-existent things to blow all of Hightower’s little operation into dust?”
“We want Sharma alive. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that we believe our opponent has at least one nuclear weapon. A similar strike to the one you just saw has a 99 percent chance of setting off that nuke. We are far too close to the government’s interests and infrastructure to allow that.”
“Thank you for coming clean on this stuff. How much of it can we explain to our people?”
“Friends in high places, but not details. Feel free to make up something,” he waved his hands around, “about a missile, UAV, or something to explain the explosion. Nothing about who I am or why I’m here. They don’t need to know anything more than they can guess.”
I don’t know if it was his dismissive tone of voice or the fact that I didn’t like him, but rage flooded through me when he said that. I shoved my fingers into his armpits and slammed him up against the wall of my store. Not one to be treated in such a way, he brought his forearms down into the crook of my elbows on each side, causing me to bend forward to meet the solid blow of his forehead against the bridge of my nose. I felt it crunch.
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