Oh. Shit.
“Shawn, I’m Frank,” I told him, raising my hands and pitching my voice as carefully as I could. “We were going to tell people about this at the meeting... ”
“What the fuck are you?” He cut me clean off.
“Bajali sent us a nanotechnology early Christmas present with the zombie that blew up this morning. It was Mister Yan, all right? Now put the gun down. I don’t know if I’d survive a bullet to the face.”
“Mister Yan? Nanotechnology? How incredibly stupid do you think I am?”
“Brother, put the gun down. Frank is not lying. I was here when Mister Yan showed up.” Charlie was using a voice much like mine, the sort of tone you’d use to talk to an upset child.
“Charlie, you keep your wide ass out of this. This fucker is going to answer my question, or I’ll end him right now.” Shawn was edging closer to yelling, and that did not seem like a good thing.
“Shawn James Cooper, you will put that gun down right now, or I will,” I heard her pull the hammer back on one of her revolvers, “put a slug through you.”
“Charlie,” he escalated to full yelling, “I will not! You aren’t going to shoot your own brother. You fucking will not do such a thing! Now, shut the Hell up until this shit is settled!”
I kept very quiet. It seemed like a smart way to approach this awkward situation. Ho, ho! I am so droll.
“You’re right, I probably wouldn’t shoot you.” She dropped the calm voice and allowed herself to sound as distressed as she felt. “Brother, I love you so much, but if you kill the man I’m falling in love with before you hear us out, I will never speak to you again and I will leave our family forever.”
Falling in love? Me? Charlie? Cherubs started to appear at the edge of my field of vision, and I wanted to get down to a serious jam session of harp plucking.
Important note: Do not let the flights of angels appear until after the close-to-murderous brother has chilled out. The harp music will only confuse him and make him angry.
My perturbed friend looked like someone had just shoved a live eel in his boxers, but his gun lowered. I was fine with anyone having an eel in his shorts, rather than be occupied with pointing a weapon between my eyes.
“Because you’re my sister, I’ll give you two minutes to explain before I put a hole through its head. I don’t care if you’re falling in love with it or not.”
“Shawn, Frank’s not an it and neither am I.” She walked around him, effectively blocking a shot at me by standing between us. “Bajali sent Mister Yan to tell us Hightower is going to try and wipe us out in a few days. We found out Mister Yan didn’t just bring information. Frank’s body started to reject all the sutures this morning after breakfast with Jayashri.”
He did not look like he believed a word she was saying.
Charlie went on, “Mister Yan went to see Jaya before he came here. He left her with a bundle of nanotechnology, and because I was here watching over Frank when he came over I got them too.”
Having your friend put the barrel of his gun in the middle of your future main squeeze’s chest is not something for which many people are prepared. I certainly wasn’t. There weren’t many choices available that didn’t involve someone dying; in this case, it was likely to be Shawn. Charlie and I would probably survive, although I was doubtful about living through a bullet to the head. Nanotechnology rebuilding brain tissue did not seem like a reasonable thing to expect.
“Why have you pointed a loaded gun at me?” Charlie asked him that question, and I couldn’t tell whether or not there were tears running down her face, but it certainly sounded like there ought to be.
“Because I don’t know if you’re my sister anymore.”
“Yeah, I’m your sister and I always will be. I’m just a little more than that right now, and we’ve all got a lot to lose if we don’t get this right. I need you to see something, and it is going to freak you the Hell out.”
“What is it?” my mountainous friend asked, looking like someone told him they were about to eat their own vomit with a spoon.
“I’m going to ask Frank to hand me a sharp knife, and then I’m going to show you something a zombie can’t do. I am not going to cut you or stab you. Can you watch before you decide you need to kill me or Frank?”
Shawn nodded in a vague sort of way, Charlie turned to me and nodded, and I tracked down a knife. For whatever reason, things were incredibly quiet and tense. Likely, it was the fabled calm before the storm, because the opportunity for a tornado of tragedy seemed to be in the forecast if things went the wrong way.
It only took me a minute to put my hands on a knife, a sharp lockback folding knife that had been sitting on my desk. I had some idea of what she was planning to do, and I probably would have done something similar if she hadn’t put herself between me and her brother.
I had a mini-moment of Alternate Universe in which life was normal, and I saw how dramatic a family holiday dinner with these people could be. It was enough to give anyone pause.
The knife I’d handed to Charlie had a 3.5-inch blade. She held out her left arm and plunged the blade in, up to the handle.
“Ow! Holy Mother of God,” she screamed it out and proceeded to hop around with her left arm out and her right hand over her eyes. “Jesus! Fuck this bad-ass heroine bullshit! No lube! Ouch! Fuck! Fuck!”
There wasn’t much blood because she didn’t pull the blade out. I think it was bad enough, however, considering Shawn’s delightful Aryan skin tone had gone white as a sheet with tints of green. This isn’t to say that I was at all thrilled with the tableau, because I wasn’t.
“God! Shawn, pull out my Dramatic Statement! Right now!”
He was on automaton mode, because he probably would have complained about it any other time. Instead, he reached over, grabbed the handle, and pulled it straight out. I watched his eyes change focus from Charlie to the knife in his hand. Half the blade was eaten away, and there was not a single drop of blood on it.
On one level, it was gruesome and disturbing as Hell, and on another, it was sickeningly funny. Shawn’s eyes got huge. It was like looking at a hairy china plate with two green-brown spots on it.
I really, really hoped that he wouldn’t spew all over my floor.
“Earth to Shawn!” Charlie waved at him from less than four feet away and managed to catch his attention. “Look at my arm. Stop looking at the knife and look at my arm. Arm. Here.”
It took him a minute, but he looked. There wasn’t a drop of blood or anything to be seen other than smooth skin. The hairy china plate of his face developed a small jaw-hitting-the-floor problem.
“That’s the gift Bajali gave us. Frank healed, I can heal, and I bet Jaya can, too. I’m still your sister, and they’re still your friends. Now put the gun away and give me a hug and a kiss.”
With motion that would have been more typical of a remote control robot toy, Shawn put the gun back in the holster and his arms around his sister. She kissed him on the cheek with an odd look of concentration on her face. He relaxed a little bit and hugged her even harder.
They stepped back, smiled awkwardly, and I suddenly had a large country boy giving me a bear hug and patting me on the back hard enough to dislodge my lung on that side. Damn me for not paying better attention to my environment.
He finally let me go, looked at us both, and said, “I’m gonna go downstairs and puke. That okay with you guys?”
“Oh yeah, don’t let us hold you up! We’ll see you in a few minutes at the meeting,” Charlie said, patted him on the back, and led him gently over to the door. He went through, and she closed it behind him. After a long count of 30, she walked over to me and put her arms around my waist.
“Uh, hi there. What was that about falling in love with me?”
“Shush, Frank. I just didn’t want him to try and kill you. Seemed like the best thing I could say at the time.”
“No,” I retorted, poking the end of her upturned nose. “The best thing to
say at the time would have been, ‘Don’t kill him, he’s your best friend,’ not tell him I’m the guy you’re falling in love with. You’re silly.”
“What? You didn’t like my solution to the problem?”
“No.” I was all serious. “I liked it very much and I want it to be real.”
“Oh. I see. Lucky for you, I’m just giving you shit about it.”
She kissed me like she meant it. It was the sort of lip-lock that turns boys into men, launches a thousand ships, burns topless towers, and makes being alive completely worth the pain and hard work.
When our tongues finished their Judo tournament with four out of five falls going to me, we took a moment to catch our breath. I am a shameful man, because I couldn’t stop watching her breathe, even with a bulletproof vest on. Some part of my brain wanted her dressed in an apron, with a plate full of warm cookies, a lewd expression on her face, and a long Saturday afternoon to enjoy that experience.
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Sure, baby,” the Southern Hotness replied.
“Ask for an inexpensive knife next time. Please?”
“Don’t worry your high and tight little head about it, Sugar Nuts. I am never, ever going to pull a stunt like that again. Never. Ever.” She was shaking her head and smiling ruefully. I don’t doubt that stabbing yourself like that has to be a seriously painful experience, and I certainly wasn’t going to be macho and try it myself.
“So! Race you to the meeting?”
She didn’t say a word, but she took off out the door and started down the steps. My macho took the form of jumping off the platform in front of my door, onto the floor below. It worked just fine, inhumanly so. For the moment, I shoved that to the back of my head and concentrated on the fact that I had won.
I got chased into the storeroom by a friendly, yet irate, blond woman.
Chapter 26
Grandmother Yan was already there, setting out coffee mugs and jugs of cider and water, and I went directly over to her because I had made a promise. She saw me coming and smiled with such happiness and warmth that I nearly froze solid. Periodically, you get to see flashes of just how much you mean to someone else, or a clear view of precisely how they feel about you. That qualified as one of those moments and all I could do was hug her.
I leaned down to her ear, the left one, because the right one didn’t work quite as well as it used to work. “Grandmother, Chunhua, you know Mister Yan loved you very much. Don’t you?”
“Yes. I always know this. He come visit you?” Chunhua Yan, looked up into my face and must have seen what I didn’t say, because she simply nodded. “He was very ashamed to be zombie. I know he love me with all his heart.”
“How did you know?” I had to ask.
“Ay-yah! Young people know nothing about love!” She gave me the Grandmother Yan trademark pat on the cheek and went on. “You see shadow on you wall before sun comes up, is maybe two thing: you have dirty person in neighborhood, or you zombie husband looking in on you. No dirty people here look at old Chinese lady, so is zombie husband.”
All right. Her English was alternately good and bad, whenever she felt like it, but her brain was working just fine all the time. I couldn’t see any point in not going for full disclosure.
“He set off one of the bombs after he came to see me.”
“Ah. Not surprise for me. He was a good man, always.” I got another cheek pat. “You much like him, a good man. Maybe you find good woman now? Tattoo girl, not much on tattoo, but look like good choice to Grandmother Yan.”
“You are too wise for me, Grandmother.”
She covered her mouth and giggled at me.
“No. No. I too old for you. She look healthy, fun in sack, make you strong baby. You know, you never stop thinking, you get old, then people tell you, ‘Oh, you so wise. Grandmother.’ Make me laugh!”
Fun in the sack and make strong baby for me. I tried not to sputter. Then I noticed something: she looked better and was moving more easily than usual.
“Grandmother? How is your arthritis?”
“You know, I feel very good today. Nothing hurts. Feel so good, I want to have,” she made the classic sake, little cup drinking gesture, and grinned in a very evil way, “good wine and handsome old man.” I got another pat on the cheek and she said, “So, you find handsome old man, you send to Grandmother! Now, you go kiss pretty girl and make me happy!”
I got turned around and shooed away.
What else could I do, I walked back over to Charlotte Marie “Fun in Sack, Make Strong Baby” Cooper and gave her a decent kiss. Grandmother clapped and whistled behind me.
“What was that about?” Charlie wondered.
“Well, I think her husband dropped some nano-pixie dust on her windowsill this morning before visiting Jaya and the two of us. Her arthritis has let up, her cheeks are pink, and she’s interested in getting drunk and tripping up a cute old man.”
“Oh my goodness,” she laughed in an endearingly merry way, “I’m almost worried about what a Nanotechnology Grandmother could do!”
“I bet she could kick some ass. She’s scary smart and sly. I’d be worried to find her an old guy to go drinking with. She’d give him a heart attack.”
People began filtering in. Gina and Mark looked a little gray after the day’s events, and I strongly suspected that most everyone would be similarly subdued. Nate and Flower came in together, with sidearms very apparent on their belts. The rest of Nate’s crew tumbled in shortly after.
Buttons, an Asian guy I hadn’t met, and another fellow who at least looked as though I’d seen him at some point or another, showed up with their own folding chairs. I was willing to give them a certain amount of props for that sort of forward thinking, but not much beyond that. I was still seething somewhere underneath my bemused exterior, and the thought of taking Buttons out back and giving him a messy final moment was percolating with increasing vigor.
Shawn and Jayashri arrived at the same time, followed very shortly by Yolanda and her husband. Before too long, the room was as full as it could be, and it was pretty clear that everyone was ready to get things moving forward.
Normally, Bajali would chair the meetings, but his absence made something of a hole. No one looked quite willing to fill it, so I did an unusual thing and stepped up to the plate.
“I’m glad you all could make it,” I began with no small amount of nervousness, “but I’d really like to know that someone is looking after the kids right now.”
Flower stood up and said, “Yes. Barbara is looking after them, as usual, but they’re all here in the store,” and sat back down.
“Okay. I was hoping someone would think to have them closer to hand than the last time we had a meeting.” There were a few muffled affirmative noises in answer to my comment. “We have a few major things to discuss on the heels of today’s events, not the least of which is some major information about what we can expect within the next two days, if not sooner.”
I hated that I had to say all of this, but it looked like no one else was willing to do it. What else could I do but keep going?
“Bajali sent us a message early this morning, in the form of a visitor to our neighborhood who blew himself up on his way out. Warren Hightower will, within the next three days, attempt to wipe us off the map. I suspect today’s attack was one of two things. Firstly, retaliation for our guest, Mister Buttons, who blew up the top of a building where Hightower’s sniper was located. Secondly, today’s tragic attack may well be the first shot in a continuing offensive designed to whittle us down before mopping us up in a few days.”
The room erupted into noise, which I tuned out. Flower had turned around in his seat to face Buttons, and from the look on Mister B’s face, something was about to go down.
“All y’all, shut the Hell up!” Shawn’s voice boomed out into the room, silencing everything but the sound of people breathing heavily. He stood up and walked over to stand beside me. “What you have to say i
s important, don’t get me wrong, but what we do from this moment forward is more important than anything else. They’re coming to kill us all, just like they tried to do today, and we’ve got a serious choice on our hands. Do we stay and fight, or do we all just bug out and head for the hills? That’s what we need to decide first.”
Everyone had their eyes on him, and so did I. I went and sat down with Jayashri and Charlie. It seemed like a sound policy to let the man say what he needed to say.
“If anyone decides to escape this shit we’ve been handed, then I will say to them, ‘God bless you, and I hope you find safety and happiness wherever you end up,’ and that’ll be the end of it. I am not going to ask someone to stand up beside me, and probably die with me, if that is not what they want to do.” Shawn took a deep breath, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and kept right on going. “What I will do is tell you this: this is my home and you are my family. I will stay and defend what we have built together, because I choose to do that. Every one of you who stays gives us that much more of a chance that this will not be the last of us, and every one of you who goes will make us fight that much harder because you’re not here to help.”
Shawn ran his fingers through his hair and looked us all over as if he was making sure all the sheep were in the herd. I wasn’t sure I could have done a better job saying what needed to be said than he was doing at the time. There are only so many ways to raise an army from a diverse group of people, even if a common foe has arrived on the scene at the proper time. My friend was working with a classic paradigm: I’m going to fight whether or not you do, and my unspoken challenge to you is for you to stand beside me.
“I’ve said my piece, but there is one small bit left. If you aren’t going to stay, then you have other things you need to do that are more important than sitting here and listening to us plan. Go home, start getting your lives as mobile as you can make them, and please be safe out there when you go.” He took a deep breath, shook out his shoulders, and plowed right in on the rest of it. “Everybody who is going to stay and fight, we’ve got some work to do.”
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