Dress code for the day? Basic black. You can never go wrong with black. Handgun. Machine gun. Sword. Man Scythe. Insatiable curiosity for more data about our opponents, and a willingness to remove offending heads... All go!
I went out my back window and dropped to the ground below. Sure, it was over two stories, but the nano-critters seemed to be good at things like jumping and landing. There’s nothing wrong with taking every advantage you can get and then doing slightly superhuman things with it.
Dodging the trips and triggers for the IEDs was simple, since I knew the positions of each little surprise. For example, the explosive at the very end of the alley was underneath a recycling bin filled with glass bottles. If you nudged the bin too far, or put any weight on it over 50 pounds, it would explode. That was the first “deterrent” in a series that became progressively nastier.
In fact, the one Mister Yan detonated was large enough and nasty enough to leave very little of him behind. That was one of Gina’s “Number 4” explosives. Her husband let it slip one night that she was planning a “Number 8” based on either magnesium or thermite. I believe his drunken confession involved the words “flaming magnesium pellets.”
They’re an odd match, but at least she’s still got all her body parts after a few years of being an improvised demolitions specialist.
Standing at the side of the road, looking across towards the gas station where Charlie and I had dealt with the mortar launcher the other day, I could see the cloud of dust from the orbital slug’s impact slowly drifting towards us. That would probably give us some crap in terms of cleaning up the neighborhood, but then it would be nice to do something simple like sweep up dust instead of coping with the bodies of undead interlopers.
I watched for any oncoming vehicles, didn’t notice any, and walked across the road. Then I realized it was early afternoon on Sunday, and that cut down the likelihood of car traffic quite a bit. People were not all that interested in leaving home unless they had jobs, and on some level I think that was beneficial to familial cohesiveness. Whether or not that was the case, it was a positive thing to wish for.
My family was not that warm, tight-knit place I often wished that it were. If I went to the trouble of breaking down my motivations for sticking around anywhere in my life as an adult, I strongly suspect it would be tied to creating a feeling of home and family for myself. That certainly rang true for our little enclave of survivors.
Route 66 is between our neighborhood and the Ballston area of Arlington. The building where my dear Papa set up shop was in an office block on the other side of the bridge that crosses over 66, give or take half a mile. I strongly suspected the reason Buttons chose the section of Glebe Road in front of the office buildings for the latest railgun target was because that stretch of road leads right up to that bridge. It would limit the directions the attack could come from, unless they had a good way to get around the crater and onto the bridge.
If that were the case, it would be a straight shot for them to drive right on up to the corner, unload whatever, and try to lay waste to us.
We could have targeted that bridge instead, but 66 was still a major route for anything going into or leaving DC. The debris would fall directly onto the road below and probably block it solidly for quite a while before the Armed Forces could remove it all. To say nothing for the potential fatalities of anyone driving on that stretch of the road when the bridge collapses, of course.
The road right beyond the bridge provided a reasonable target to create annoyance and delay for the enemy without going too far. While I might not like the man, on a personal level, Buttons did seem to have his head squared away as far as tactical decisions were concerned. That merited my grudging respect, if nothing else.
Between the gas station and the bridge was another neighborhood that was mostly, as far as we knew, abandoned. Flower and Nate often used the bell tower of the Methodist Church as an observation and convenient sniping point. I ducked into the neighborhood as soon as I was able, because walking down a road in broad daylight seemed like an excellent excuse for someone to take potshots at me. Body shots didn’t concern me too much, unless there were enough of them to overwhelm my advantages, but the risk of getting a round to my skull wasn’t worth the shortcut. Having nice brick houses, shrubs, and trees around me for cover made a lot more sense than just exposing myself willy-nilly to the idiots.
My nano-buddies perked up after about three blocks. Male. Zombie. Armed. According to my critters, he was forty feet away, roughly at my 2 o’clock. I looked over that way and saw him standing, leaning really, on the front porch of one of the nearby houses. He was not looking my way and did not appear to have seen me. Thank goodness for little favors. I took cover and had a better look.
With no pings on my internal network about other bodies nearby and having no clue what the range was, I had to assume that this one was alone. A lookout? Why else would he be hanging around on someone’s front porch? I suppose there was a slight chance that he was the original homeowner, but I had to wonder why we’d never encountered him before.
Also, the digital camo fatigues and AR-15 rifle didn’t look all that typical for Tom Suburbanite.
Next question: Where are the rest of them, if this guy is a lookout? Unfortunately, I couldn’t just run around and have a look and see if there were extras nearby, because I’d likely run into them in the process. My brother did the whole Ninja Death from the Trees thing; I was prodded into more direct martial arts. Stealth is not a strong suit of mine. Although, God knows, there are days that I wish I were better at silent scuttling and hiding in plain sight.
When you can’t answer your second question, it would be well to consider asking someone who might have the answer. The only candidate for my proposed line of questioning was Tom “Leaning Sentry” Suburbanite. I was feeling a little more like taking a direct approach with this fellow, mostly because I didn’t want to get into torturing someone. Instead, I decided to rely on my wit and charm. Sometimes you just have to make a change to keep your life interesting.
I stood up, started walking as though I’d been doing it for a while, and put my hands in my pockets. “Hey!” I called out to him from about thirty feet away. “What the Hell was that God-awful noise a while back?”
He became alert very quickly, and his AR-15 came up, pointing at the center of my body mass. “Stop where you are!”
“Okay. That’s a really classic thing to say to someone, you know! Man, they sent me over here to relieve you!”
“I haven’t seen you before. Who sent you?” He was not looking or sounding terribly convinced about any of this.
“Sarge. Big guy, looks like he could bench press that Bradley back at the office.” I made vague gestures of height and broad shoulders, praying he wouldn’t notice that my fingernails weren’t Zombie Issue from thirty feet away.
“That’s the Major. Sarge is smaller. You’re not military.” Great. Data, but backed by a certain amount of disbelief.
“I’m in Management,” and I pronounced the capital letter very carefully.
“Oh, shit! Sir. Sorry, Sir!” He actually saluted. “Why did they send you up here to relieve me? You guys never come out to the front.”
“Well, it boils down to this. If you never get out and meet people, how can you expect to manage them?” It sounded good to me!
“Yeah. You’ve got a point, Sir!”
I clasped my hands behind my back and started walking toward him. “So, you head back and I’ll take over here until your scheduled relief shows up.” He nodded, slung the machine gun over his shoulder, and looked positively pleased the shift had ended a little earlier than he planned.
“Sir, did you notice if they’d delivered the new bunch of cattle to the pen in the parking lot yet?”
“Which pen?” Chancy question to ask, perhaps, but I knew this would end with me killing him and it didn’t matter terribly much if it was in a fight or some quieter option.
“There was o
ne in the side lot of the church when I headed over here. Did they set up another one?” He didn’t appear to be suspecting much of anything, judging by the tone of his voice, and wasn’t reacting in an aggressive manner as I approached.
I turned and pointed, “They brought out a second one about two hours ago and set it up in the front lot.”
He plunged a knife into my guts as I was turning back around to face him. God as my witness, that knife hurt more than all of the bullets I’d met over the previous couple of days. The intimacy of having this jackass halitosis-breathing zombie in my face, while he twisted the blade around in my innards, was even worse than the pain of being stabbed in the first place.
All he did was smile when I vomited blood all over the front of his uniform. “How stupid do you think I am, fucker? I’m the Sarge, you know.”
“I don’t know. All you undead bottom-feeding sons of bitches have been mighty stupid in my experience.” I don’t believe all of what I thought managed to make it out clearly between the blood and the strange groaning noises I was making.
“Doesn’t matter much now, because I’m going to pull the knife out and watch you die.”
Chapter 34
I have to say, having the knife pulled out at an angle, rather than straight back, was a really horrible coda to that experience. There wasn’t any option other than collapsing, so that is precisely what I did. All of the muscles in my abdomen were in spasm, and I was fairly sure that some of my intestines were now squashed between my body and the ground.
Sarge did his best evil laugh. In my haze, I gave it a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10.
“Wait a minute!” He had the nerve, the bald-faced nerve, to sound chipper about something. “You’re that guy, aren’t you?” He reached down and I could feel him pull the Man Scythe out of the rig. If I had been able to kill him for touching my weapon, I would have, but I could barely manage an anemic growl. As it was, the tsuba of the katana was invading the hole in my gut and I was lucky to make any noise at all.
My beautiful baby was being violated by a resurrected grunt and there was nothing I could do to stop it. To call the feelings simple “frustration” could never, ever cover the rage that I felt. It got worse when he snapped the blade open and started swinging her around like the clueless arboreal chicken-shit bastard he was.
“Jesus! If I’d know you were the Sickle Guy, I’d have shot you first, and then used this to chop off your head!” Sarge crowed at his amazing stroke of luck. As for me, I wanted to be able to stand up and stroke his cranium with my rifle butt. “You know... you know, I could still cut your head off with it. Then again, you’d get to die way too easily for the amount of trouble you’ve caused. I got time. We can play Cut off Things until you’re about to die. Then I can cut off your head!”
“Sickle Guy? Did you just call me ‘Sickle Guy,’ you misbegotten sack of creamy monkey turds?”
“What did you just say, soon-to-be-dead Sickle Guy?” He punctuated things by swinging Her around like a baboon with a broom. He didn’t notice, because I was down on my front, that I was starting to heal. Apparently, wooden porches have something nano-critters can break down into useful raw material.
“I said I’m going to punch you in the balls so hard your granddaddy will feel it, you poly-orchid, seagull-raping, toe-jam licker.”
That did it! He really started pacing and growling then, muttering obscene things about raping my mother and pissing on the face of my dead father. I started to laugh, because I actually liked the idea of someone pissing on Warren “The ‘F’ is for ‘Fuck You’“ Hightower. I got clear on one thing very quickly: Sarge didn’t share my sense of the absurd.
My right hand was stretched out on the porch supporting me, and it suddenly had the blade of my scythe growing out of the back of the palm. I howled in pain; anyone would have done the same. It was especially nasty because the pain in my guts was starting to subside and I had room in my brain to process fresh sensations.
Looking on the bright side of life, the blade was lodged in the wood under my hand. Turning again to the Dark Horrible side of life, the bastard was wrenching the blade around, trying to get it to come free. Needless to say, my right hand was being mangled as he exorcised his frustration with being stuck in the porch.
Sometime during the wrenching I felt my consciousness push free of my skull and settle into Frank’s mental backseat. If things hadn’t felt so calm, I might have genuinely felt bad for Sarge having to face whatever horrible thing was about to occur. Instead, I watched events unfold with a certain distracted interest.
My left hand whipped up from underneath my body and backhanded Sarge in the family jewels. It must have been quite an impact, because he flew backward against the door of the house and the Man Scythe went with him. When he landed, sprawled like a discarded stuffed animal, I could see the front of his uniform pants were turning black over the camo pattern.
He didn’t scream. He wailed, dropped my baby, and tried to comfort himself by putting his hands on his crotch. Then again, maybe he was just trying to see if he was intact or not. Regardless, the pain was so severe he couldn’t touch himself to confirm anything at all. Poor little guy!
My body stood up, and I could feel my mouth open, even if I couldn’t see it. My lungs filled with air, and it rushed back out, contorted by my vocal cords into a noise that I hope I never hear again. It was the jungle nightmare of some simian creature crossed with Satan, bellowing out the rage of every generation of bipedal creatures since they came down from the trees in the first place.
Sarge froze stiff and managed to go from a healthy undead gray pallor to dead white in a fraction of a second.
The body I no longer controlled surged forward with the sort of speed God reserved for venomous snakes, hummingbird wings, and the common cold. Both hands came down on the sides of Sarge’s skull with a sharp cracking noise. My left hand pulled backward and then struck out, slamming two of my fingers into each of his eye sockets.
With a growl I twitched my hand and the top of Sarge’s skull came free like peeling the apron off of a crab at your favorite seafood restaurant. I was lightly surprised, from my vantage point, that I didn’t damage his eyeballs, just popped them out onto his cheeks. Oh! Well done, Body! Well done!
However, just popping his skull open wasn’t enough to make my hindbrain happy. Barely a breath after levering his noggin off, my bleeding right hand snagged his nearest eyeball, flipped it back, and pointed it at his brain. I guess he could see, because he screamed and shat himself.
He didn’t stop making noise until the first big scoop of brains came out.
Abstractly, I considered the situation and decided the whole thing would rank in my Top Three Most Horrible Ways to Die. As usual, my musings were cut short by the sound of a twig snapping somewhere close by. Company had arrived.
I wasn’t able to keep track of how many of them there were because my eyes were taking snapshots of them, their positions, and their weapons far too quickly. I saw my hand had wrapped itself around the handle of the Man Scythe at the same moment they opened fire on me. Everything after that I perceived in jump cuts and strobe light flashes of movement, punctuated by the sounds of guns going off.
The conscious part of my mind that was observing all of it simply had enough and checked out. I don’t blame myself for wanting to blank it all out, because I got to see the results after I regained consciousness. I didn’t stop to count the bodies, parts of bodies, or piles of... remains. I just ran home.
Chapter 35
Having gone through two experiences in which my discerning consciousness had been pushed aside for survival purposes, I felt as if I had a little room to take a look at what went on. The first episode had been, I think, purely to obtain material for use in repairing my body. This most recent occasion was more than a little different.
The first time I attacked a bunch of zombies was brutal, calculating, and maybe even vicious, but it wasn’t sadistic. Making Sarge look at his own bra
in, especially while I was scooping bits out, qualified as sadistic. What’s more, that sadism and brutality remained after I’d consumed the tissue. Perhaps it was because a threat arrived before I could ramp back down into “normal” behavior?
I wanted to believe that was the case. The Wolverine makeover sounded fantastic in my little fantasy narrative, but to be actually ruthlessly savage was a lot for me to bear. I also noticed that, in this instance, I did not feel warm and fuzzy about things as I had the night I got Tasered repeatedly. If anything, I felt a lot of concern.
The nano-critters did not come with a convenient manual or active “Help” function. No one, maybe not even Bajali, knew what they were capable of doing. Optimizing an organism for battle and survival could mean an incredible range of things, from physical changes to neurological and psychological ones. In all seriousness, there would probably need to be changes in all of those areas to stack the deck for surviving combat situations.
I hoped Baj had answers. I hoped Baj had a clue about what the changes would be and if there was some kind of upper limit where no more alterations would take place. These were things every person in our community needed to know, especially the kids.
Children are walking, talking, Freudian Id. What in the name of God would you get by altering a child for combat in this way? If the world was normal, and these children had to go to school, would they be ending playground scuffles by decapitating the other kids?
Every gift is a double-edged sword. Maybe this is why my Japanese language teachers used to say that gratitude was expressed in shades of regret. Because every gift has a price you can’t see until later?
It didn’t seem long at all before I popped out of the neighborhood and arrived at the gas station across the street from our community. What surprised me was that there were at least a hundred undead, armed with “peasant weapons,” groaning and howling as they tried to breach the Active Area Denial system’s force field of Ouch. Thankfully, they weren’t paying attention to me.
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