Blood Soaked and Contagious
Page 21
I staggered backward, not even bothering to bring my hands up to my face, and it was a good thing that I didn’t. I blocked the roundhouse kick that had been speeding toward the side of my head, which I would not have even seen if I’d been concerned about my nose. I used the force of the kick to spin me into a strike to the back of his thigh and tap the back of his other knee to collapse the leg. He went to the ground with a numb kicking leg, which he used to try and sweep my feet out from under me.
Nice move. Too bad it missed. He altered the momentum and took it into a roll, which brought him up a few feet away, facing in my direction.
I watched him lock eyes with me and freeze in place, and I knew precisely what he was looking at. My nose was reassembling right in front of him. I couldn’t wait to tell him that he had my blood all over his face and then explain why my nose was doing fun things.
“Before I need to find food, there are a few things that I need to explain to you, Mister Buttons.”
“Sharma did it. That bastard actually did it.”
“If what you mean by ‘it’ is upgrade my hardware, then you’re right on the money. You just might, in my blood that is drying on your face, have the next best thing to the salvation of mankind. Then again, you might not.”
For once, there was actually some life in this tool’s eyes. I couldn’t tell, and didn’t care to know, whether it was straight avarice or some cracked version of fear.
“As far as that goes, I really hope you don’t, because I don’t like you. I know you’re hiding more than you’re telling me, and I want us to continue to be clear on one major issue.”
The cramps arrived, but I held it in. I wasn’t ready to let this guy go before I was finished, or succumb to whatever it was that my body and critters were craving.
“And what is that issue, Mister ‘Stewart’?” He used air quotes. Gauche.
“If anything you do or say leads to injury or death for any of these good people, I will hunt you down and kill you wherever I find you. Thanks to Bajali, you can slow me down, but you can’t stop me. I will get you.” I was exaggerating, because I had no idea at all what the nano-buddies were capable of doing. Truth be told, I was more than slightly worried about how much they would be able to do in excess of what I’d already seen. It was clear they were forming tighter relationships with my senses and my body’s ability to heal. They were settling in for the long haul. “Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
“Not very trusting are you?” He sneered, which did nothing to endear him to me. “I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your family tree.”
“That’s the truth. Are we clear, or are you going to try to tell me more things I’m already well aware of?”
“Why do you care what happens to these people? Everything your family has ever done has been antithetical to the sort of life these people want to lead. Power. Privilege. More money than people could use in a dozen lifetimes. Do you really expect me to believe you care, or is it the curvy, country whore that has snagged your dick?”
Chapter 25
People talk about “seeing red,” but until that moment, I’d never experienced it. At that moment, I really wanted the full Wolverine Makeover. All I could see in the red that was spread out in front of me was a vision of him in a puddle of his own innards. Strangling him with his own intestines seemed like a fantastic course of action.
I never got the chance to move forward. Charlie had heard what he said when she rounded the side of the building, and she put her hand on my shoulder from behind. I didn’t see her, but I knew it was her hand.
“Buttons, I’m going to tell you this once, and only once. If it doesn’t sink in, and you ever say something like that again, I’ll beat Frank in the race to shove my hand down your throat.” Her voice, the one I was coming to like very much, was an Arctic wind over my shoulder. If I’d found icicles on my earlobe, it wouldn’t have surprised me. “Now then, I have never taken money or anything of material value for fucking anyone. Ever. As far as this good man goes, I intend to screw him until he is a dirty little nub on the floor, and we’re going to exchange our hearts with one another as a durable investment on that interaction. You will never know how good I feel in his arms, or underneath him in the middle of the night.”
The Arctic blast had a certain amount of heat in it, and I found the red receding from my vision.
Charlie continued, “I could not care less if you can make manna fall from Heaven or dry rivers fill with water. We don’t need your fancy toys to win our way out of this mess. More than that, you can’t protect people with all your heart and soul if all you feel for them is some kind of disdain.”
She walked around me slowly, strolled over to Buttons, and got right in his face. “Make your choice. Be with us, protect us, and show us some respect, or keep pushing until one of us puts you through the woodchipper and feeds you to the roses.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I heard him agree to respect and protect. He stunned me by actually offering an apology on top of that.
“See? That wasn’t so hard, Mister Buttons! Was it?” Charlie patted him on the shoulder, but I saw her leg start to move at the same time.
There was a noise, a meaty and almost moist thump, and her foot settled back on the dirt. She followed up the roundhouse kick with a twist of her hips, and a tidy backfist to his nose. Buttons was on the ground making insane, inarticulate noises and holding his groin for dear life with one hand and his bleeding nose with the other.
“So help me God, if you ever call me a whore again, even behind my back, I will cut those off and feed them to you on a bowl full of grits! Have I made myself clear, you greasy little Establishment ass-licker, or do I need to show my whup ass to you again?” I would like to say that she screamed it, but it wasn’t that. Charlie used the up-in-arms, fed-up, and vastly pissed off Yell of the Common Man that drove countless Spartan men into bloody battle.
I was falling head over heels in love.
Charlie turned back to me, walked over, snagged my arm with hers, and led me back into the Spa.
“Close that door on the garbage outside, will you, Frank?” Between the cramps that I was still swallowing and my general feeling of awe toward her, I wasn’t about to balk at the request or sass back in any way. I just closed the door.
My large intestine started to slap the crap out of my liver, and I know it showed on my face. She took one look at me, snagged my arm, and hauled me upstairs to my room and stash of food. With a tiny push I was deposited in my desk chair, and she started hunting through my larder.
After a few minutes of confusion on my part, she brought me a glass of water, a box of dried milk, and a bag of granola. My stomach felt like talking to her in a more direct manner than using my tongue and made a noise that sounded like a walrus farting inside a metal box. I knew if I didn’t grab at least one of her offerings that I’d end up with my saliva rushing off to find precisely what it wanted, and then having it come back with whatever it had scavenged.
Granola.
After about two handfuls I could tell that they wanted the dry milk. Calcium. The little guys had leeched calcium from somewhere in my body in order to rebuild my nose, and now they were keen on putting back what they’d used. Clever.
I popped the box open and started pouring it into the glass of water, slowly, just for the sake of experimentation. I wanted to see if they’d tell me when to stop, or how much of whatever material was enough. Eventually, the glass of water looked like lumpy buttermilk, and I felt no inclination to pour in anything more than that. I did want to drink it, as horrible as it looked, so I did.
I knew Charlie was watching me while I did this, but she wasn’t saying anything. Once I finished with my glass of white mud, I’d see what was up with her... beyond the tongue-lashing and nut massage she’d delivered outside.
“Dried milk mud is not tasty,” I said, trying to gum around the gooey mass in my right cheek.
“No, I didn’t think it would be
either, but you seemed to know what you were doing.”
“Bleh.” I made faces as I got the bolus to actually go down my throat. “What did I miss with you two?”
She smiled a little and it brightened up the post-Buttons mood a little. “Jaya and I talked about a lot of things and passed around a couple of theories about how the little nano-dudes work. She thinks you can have some kind of control over how they work, because she and Baj had quite a few discussions about this sort of thing over the years.”
“Control would be nice. I’d hate to think I gave that bag of shit his own set of critters.”
“You probably didn’t. That was one of the things Jaya felt was likely to be controllable, or at least limited. Bajali didn’t want to make a nanotech virus that didn’t have some sort of discrimination about where it went or with whom it started a symbiotic relationship.” She held up a finger on each hand. “You’ve got two major possibilities. One, the nanotech spreads like wildfire. Two, either the nanos are targeted, or the person with whom they’ve set up shop has some sort of impact on how they move through a population.”
“Isn’t that three options?”
“No, ya goober. One is no control, and the other is some sort of control.”
“Charlie, that’s stretching it.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. What else is a guy to do? I reached over and grabbed it. She said, “Mmmp?!”
“Sorry. It looked so good that I wanted to keep it for my very own.” I let it go, and she smiled.
“Play your cards right, boy, and you never know what you might get to keep.”
I had to grin right back at her. At that moment, I didn’t want to think about nanotechnology or impending doom; all I wanted was her in my arms.
“Just let me know what I can do to stack the deck in my favor,” I told her.
“I will do that.”
“Damn. Why does romance have to happen when death is on the line?”
“Frank,” she gave me a penetrating look, “when you think you might die, you look for things that make you feel alive. It’s human behavior.”
“We’re not just ‘human behavior,’ Grandmother, are we?”
She reached out, cupped my unshaven cheek in her hand, smiled gently, and told me, “No. I think we’re more than that, or that we’re going to be more than that. We just have to keep ourselves alive long enough to see it for certain. That’s my plan, anyhow.”
“If I don’t pull this conversation back around to nanotechnology, I’m going to end up getting seriously romantic at you, and we probably don’t have time for it before the meeting.”
“Doesn’t it just fuck things right in the ass, when you’ve got stuff you want to do but there are plans you can’t change?”
“Yes. No lube at all,” I said, utterly frustrated that there was so much going on and I couldn’t find a reasonable stopping point to really dig into the feelings we seemed to share. “You were saying Jaya feels as though we might have some control over these little guys? Do we just talk to them or leave notes on the fridge?”
“Brat. She says they respond to damage, but we’d need to run actual experiments to see what else they respond to. Bajali had talked about linking them to the endocrine system for transmission between hosts, white blood cell count and T-cell response, and some other something about the body’s electrical system.”
“That part about us being hosts sounds really sinister.” Actually, the thought gave me chills. It sounded far too much like these little guys had minds of their own and I had nasty images of waking up some morning to find that I’d been given an overhaul while I slept.
“I said the exact same thing.”
“Why the endocrine system? Are we supposed to get some kind of boost of adrenaline and start spewing nano-pollen all over the place?” I waved my hands in the air and swayed back and forth, singing, badly, “Oh, aren’t I just a lovely daisy! Aren’t I just a lovely daisy! Sniff me! Oh, sniff me!”
She fell on the floor laughing, covered her mouth, and attempted not to make snorting noises when she tried to breathe between attacks of Ha Ha. I had to laugh along with her because her amusement was contagious. I made up my mind for the 20th time that, if anything happened to her, there would be a rubber room for me before or after my descent into bloody revenge.
We should have expected what happened next. You don’t stir up a hornet’s nest and not end up stung. That is one of the rules of nature that happens to apply to the human animal as well.
The explosion was muffled from where we were, but we heard it, and we knew it couldn’t be far away. Charlie got off the floor, and we snagged our weapons and flew down the stairs. By the time we got to the cashier’s counter in the middle of the store, there was another explosion somewhere closer that rattled my front windows.
We burst out the front door of the store into pandemonium. I could see the fire from where we stood and the shattered skeleton of Siddig and Miryam’s home just down the street. Jayashri was in the driveway with Yolanda and Flower, and there were three wounded people they were working on like mad. Jim and Darcy were trying to douse part of the fire with garden hoses.
I took off running.
I hoped I wouldn’t see what I thought I would, because if I did I would come unglued at someone. By the time I was about even with the corner of Shawn’s place, a large hand came out, grabbed me, and pulled me into the shadow of the garage.
Shawn used his other hand to snag his sister and pull her to the side as well.
“All right, we got three down,” he started in on the data with no preamble, and I was grateful for it. “Nate says it was a mortar, followed by a rocket-propelled grenade or small missile. That means we’ve got a straight line between them and us. They’ve got to be past the store on the other side of Route 29, or someplace with elevation to get over the buildings to hit inside our perimeter.”
“Shawn. Where’s my bag?”
“Where you left it the other day when you got here Charlie!”
She took off into the garage, leaving me with her brother.
“Anyone got a plan?”
“Nate says we either head out there and recon or wait until they lob something else in on us.”
Shawn’s timing was perfect. We heard the whistle and hit the ground. There was an explosion right in the middle of the road on the other side of the garage. If he hadn’t pulled us around the corner when he did, it would have been us being blown to Hell instead of asphalt. It occurred to me they’d actually been aiming for us, but probably stopped direct observation to correct their geometry.
Straight line. They were somewhere over beyond my store, and as soon as I could get there, they’d be dead.
Charlie reappeared and was tricked out like Soldier of Fortune Magazine’s idea of a modern valkyrie. Two wakizashi-length swords across her back, Kevlar vest, MOLLE pouches full of clips, and some kind of compact submachine gun that I’d never seen before. Shawn was less than pleased, but I had no time to enjoy the family argument, so I took off back down the street towards our uninvited guests.
Nanotechnology makes you cocky. It also does other things you don’t expect, especially when you didn’t get the instruction manual with your first dose. I was getting used to the extra sensory range and data that they were handing me, because it was so damned useful.
I knew where the mortar crew was by the time I cleared the far corner of the hardware store. I had four targets. Two M-4 machine guns, four Beretta 9mm pistols, a mortar launcher, and a box with six more mortars in it. They were on the roof of the gas station on the other side of Route 29. Fine with me.
You hurt my people, I’ll take exception to that, and then I will make you pay to the best of my ability.
They were firing at me by the time I got to my side of Route 29. Concrete and asphalt chunks were flying everywhere. I was shot twice, in the upper right thigh and two inches beneath my right clavicle. The bullets went clean through, and I did not even slow down.
/> Not only did I not slow down, I got the strangest urge to jump up to the top of the gas station, as if I could take a leap of about 12 feet upward. Snarling, half unhinged from the pain and the rage, I went ahead and jumped.
Nanotechnology will surprise you when you don’t have a drop-down menu of options.
I landed in front of the nearest zombie, tore the machine gun out of his hands, reversed it, and shoved the barrel through his open mouth. I noted that the barrel continued all the way through the top of his helmet. He collapsed like a 200-lb bag of rice, bringing the barrel of the gun into a beautiful position to stitch Mortar Zombie from crown to crotch with bullets and flying brain bits.
Zombie 3 closed the distance with his 9mm and popped me twice in the abdomen from close range. I gave him my elbow to the bridge of his nose and tried not to collapse from the pain. The remaining undead soldier decided to pretend he was in a movie and put the barrel of his machine gun to my forehead. I wondered if he thought that threat would stop me.
Human beings have two hands for a reason. You can do something with one hand and do something entirely different with the other. I chose to grab the gun barrel and pull it off to the side of my head and pull the Man Scythe free with the other hand.
For Zombie 3, it probably looked like Zombie 4 was spinning me on the dance floor with the barrel of his gun while it was firing into the open air.
The blade clicked into position. I pivoted the barrel over my head as I spun into him. The move wasn’t for dancing or looking cool, but to use the momentum for the blade to do the dirty work.
I had expected to sever his spine, not cut him completely in half at the waist. Zombies scream a lot.
By the time I dropped my dance partner’s upper half to the top of the gas station, something very sharp and very fast took Number 3’s hands off at the wrists. The 9mm, still in a proper two-handed grip, hit the roof, followed very shortly thereafter by his head. Charlie stopped moving, a sword in each hand, and did a very fast, formal-looking motion that snapped the remaining blood off the blades.