What they were doing looked something like a peasant rebellion crossed with a mosh pit. Periodically, the group would force one of their tribe forward into the Denial Area and watch that individual scream and flee back into the crowd. I couldn’t tell if they were having fun with it or if it was some sort of tribal dominance display of tossing the weakest member into the dangerous situation to see if things had become safe or not.
I was deeply puzzled, grateful I wasn’t noticed, and on the verge of laughing at them. Then one of them had a brilliant idea after noticing the field only worked in a rough hemisphere in front of the opening between the buildings. He tried to cut through the custom frame shop, rather than face the heat, so to speak. He walked right into the trap that Gina and her Homeland Defense Forces had set in every one of those empty shops.
The explosion was absolutely deafening. The front of the custom frame store exploded outward in a gigantic belch of flames, smoke, noise, and the strange “zzzzzzz!” of tiny objects shooting outward. From my vantage point it looked like three rows of nearby ruffians were mowed down like dandelions in a tornado. Everyone behind them began yelling and screaming almost instantly and began to flee.
They were running right at me. I was given a grace moment to decide what to do about the bum rush of panic-filled undead peasants, and I settled on flipping the safety off my machine gun. It seemed to me I had been given an opportunity to reduce the number of our enemies, almost as though someone had presented me with a barrel of trout and ordered me to go fishing.
I simply stood my ground and waved my gun across the oncoming rush as if I were watering my petunias. The gun clicked empty, and I slapped another clip in. Twice. When the rush was over I stood in the center of a broad fan of immobile bodies, and zombies on their way to dying a second time. There were some almost capable of running away but for the rounds that had taken them in the leg or hip. Those cried.
Walking in a small circle, I surveyed the carnage, marked where I heard the noises of those who had yet to shuffle off to the happy hereafter, and sighed. I needed to decide if I was capable of finishing off an opponent who was begging and pitiful, because I didn’t want the Critically Wounded Tabernacle Choir wailing until they finally died at some point later on.
“Excuse me, all of you freaks of nature that are too wounded to run away,” I caught their attention with my witty patter and gore-smeared countenance, “if any of you would like to be finished off right now to avoid the rush, please raise your working limb.”
“Are you telling me you want to know if we want to die?” This question came to me from a fellow to my right who looked like he might have been an investment banker before he turned to a life of consuming the undefended. His intestines were everywhere.
“Yes. It seemed to be a polite thing to ask, considering you’re still alive enough to answer.”
“Fuck you. No, I don’t want to die. I want to get up, pull my guts back in, and go find a not-blond woman to suck the blood out of. After that, I want to go screw EVERYBODY... then a blond woman. Then I fucking want to go to Fiji!”
I felt as though I heard sarcasm, so I asked about it. “Are you being sarcastic with me, by any chance?”
“Wow! How long did it take you to figure that out, Einstein? You didn’t blow out any brain cells deducing that, I hope!” He actually propped himself up on his arms in order to harangue me that much better. “You, you sick bastard, shot me in the back. IN THE BACK! At close range! You blew my guts out all over the street! I can’t feel my legs, which means you SEVERED MY GODDAMNED SPINAL CORD! Of course I want to DIE! Fuck you!”
He actually started chanting that short phrase. I put a .45 round through his forehead, and the chanting stopped.
“All right! Anyone else want to shorten your decline and request it a bit more politely? Just wave a functioning limb. Any limb!”
I saw three hands and one foot raised in the air. Only one of them really got to me. He looked up at me and smiled.
“You know, I’m scared to death about this. I don’t want there to be nothing when I’m dead.” I couldn’t tell if the tears were from the pain he was in, or from the existential angst.
“It’s possible, you know,” I said as I crouched down beside him, “that the virus puts you into stasis after you die the first time. Maybe you never actually die, per se, as much as you just stop until the repairs are done.” That was disturbing, because it was so close to the description of what happens when the nanotech army fixes my wounds.
“You mean there might actually be a God and a Heaven?” He looked both incredulous and a little hopeful.
“There might be. No one has ever come back with solid evidence on either side of the issue.”
“In that case, I don’t suppose there’s a priest around?”
I hated to tell him that there wasn’t, but there wasn’t a priest for... I actually couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard of one nearby. “No, there’s not. What do you need one for?”
“I want to make a last confession before I’m done.” I could tell he was completely serious. “So I guess I’m going to confess to you, if you don’t mind taking the time.”
“All right.” I still don’t know why I agreed.
“Ah. Bless me, Sickle Guy, for I have sinned. It has been eight years since my last confession.” He, very literally, told me the story of his life for the previous years leading up to that moment, lying on the sidewalk with several bullet holes in his body.
While I was listening, I noticed Flower walking across the road with his sniper rifle slung across his back. About midway through Andrew the Zombie’s confession, Flower knelt down beside me, made the sign of the cross, and started to listen. When Andrew drew his story to a close, it was clear he was starting to fade.
“Andrew, I want you to pray with me,” Flower said, making the sign of the cross on the dying man’s forehead. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offended thee... ”
I listened to both of them, noting that Andrew’s voice was getting weaker and his eyes were slowly losing focus. I picked back up as Flower was saying, “... with Mary, the Virgin Mother of God. Never has it been known that anyone who fled to her for comfort was turned away. I forgive you your sins, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I commend you, in this final moment of your life, to join our Lord in Heaven, and to sit at the table of our Lord, Jesus Christ, at his right hand, until he comes again in Glory. Amen.”
Andrew breathed his last about two minutes after Flower was done. I stood up, feeling as though I’d trespassed on something, because I had never been a believer in much of anything, at least as far as God went. My friend Matt, who had a side to him I’d never seen or expected, reached down and closed the zombie’s eyes. Then he put a round through his forehead for good measure.
“I know you, Frank,” he said as he stood up beside me. “You want to know what that was all about.” He looked down at me, being a few inches taller than me, and gave me a wry half-smile. “Haven’t you ever wondered why I’m not married at my age?”
“No. I’d never really thought about it.”
“I was a priest and a chaplain in the Army. I lost my faith in Iraq and left the Church. The only thing I had after my tour was finished was the faith of the gun. I requested Special Forces training when I re-enlisted. I never bothered to look for a life partner, since things got a little busy over the past couple of years.”
He turned and began to walk back toward the ruins of the custom framing store, and I stood there for a minute, trying to process what I’d heard.
I called out to him, “Did you find your faith again?”
He turned around, waved me over, and replied. “Yes. I found my faith again with these people, here. Siddig helped me, believe it or not. Never suggested I become a Muslim either.” We walked through the wreckage of the store together, with nothing but the sig
ht of our chosen home in front of us.
“I notice, Frank, you look like you’ve seen a little activity since you left earlier.”
“Yeah. I never made it out to the overpass to have a good look at the damage. Our little friends have an advance position in the Methodist Church parking lot.”
Flower grimaced, “That could be a problem for our rescue plans. We’d have to go quite a bit out of our way to get over 66 and then change our insertion point.”
“I know.” We were walking up the alley behind the store, and I could see Gina and her husband tinkering with an open wooden wine box. “Are they working on the replacement for the one that just blew up?”
“Yep. Did you like the cookie cutters?”
“Is that what the zinging things were?”
“Oh yes.”
“They’re pretty horrible.” They were. I’d had a look at the bodies before Matt and I walked back through the smoking hole that used to be a store. There’s a Cuban dish called “Ropa Vieja,” or “old clothes,” where the meat has been cooked for hours and then shredded. Something like pulled pork barbeque. That’s what the bodies reminded me of.
“Indeed they are.” We waved at Gina and Mark when we passed them. They nodded as they argued the finer points of appropriate remote triggering action. Ex-chaplains, explosives geeks, nanotechnology wizards... You never know who your neighbors are.
The better I got to know them, the more I was impressed. In one or two cases, the more I got to know some of them, the more surprised I became. Flower used to be a priest. That was easily the oddest revelation about one of my neighbors I’d been privy to in months. Anything could be next. Maybe Shawn was a Chippendale dancer prior to his career as a mechanic?
No, probably not. That was a mental image worth destroying entirely, but with my luck it would stay with me for a very long time.
Flower and I ended up standing around the bay of Shawn’s garage, listening to some of the Home Defense planning. Channing, Buttons, Shawn, and the rest of that division were going over what they’d learned from the Denial System in action. They agreed it worked very well and made things difficult for a large group of potential invaders.
Buttons turned to me when the agreement noises stopped and asked, “Well, what did you see while you were out there?” I gave everyone a quick summary of what I’d learned, at least as far as the church parking lot went. My shredded clothes and fabulous Alice Cooper makeup (consisting of dried blood, brains, and other bodily fluids) were eloquent testament to the resistance I’d faced.
“Well, while you were out getting your balls shot off, we got some decent satellite images of the damage from our last railgun shot.” Buttons looked quite pleased with himself about that.
“Yeah, I wish I could have made it that far, but getting my bowels cut out ruined my attention span. How did we do with that shot?”
Buttons turned his laptop around to me and poked one of the symbol keys, and I got a slideshow of the sort of damage we’d done. The impact was just beyond the 66 overpass, and I’m pretty sure he’d been inaccurate when he estimated the hole would be about the size of a soccer field. Without actually going out there to the site, waving hello to the nice zombies, and standing on the rim of the crater, I could only estimate how big it really was. It was a city block long if it was an inch, and the impact must have crushed the pipes underneath the road, because the images showed it filling with water.
Chapter 36
I said “Wow!” under my breath. It was everything we could have hoped for and a little bit more. When I perused the photos in greater detail, my heart skipped a beat and I was filled with glee. On the far side of the crater from the bridge there was a wreck.
Apparently, our little gift crushed their Bradley Fighting Vehicle, as well as a huge amount of road surface. In the photos there were two long lines of zombies trying to drag the wreckage out of the hole using chains. The armor plate was flattened, and even in the photos I could see the ripples in the surface of the metal. The slug must have hit the front of the Bradley, or somewhere very close to it, because the metal was corrugated in concentric curves like the ripples in a pond after you’ve tossed a stone into the water.
That little toy of theirs was the one thing I was most afraid of, at least as far as a potential attack went. Certainly, if my father had a suitcase nuke hanging around, he could turn us all into charcoal, but that would be incredibly fast in comparison to being blown to bits by the guns of a Bradley. Then again, we might survive a fusillade from machine guns!
I thought about what sort of situation we’d be in if there were a dozen of us, reduced to our nano-critters running our bodies, while we scavenged for whatever they decided was necessary to fix us up. Icky. Very icky, indeed.
“The laser satellite will be in the proper orbit in about six hours.” Buttons’ mention of that retaliatory goodness popped me out of my reverie headfirst.
“Laser satellite? As in, ‘zap, zap, zap’?” Shawn hadn’t heard about that, or so it seemed.
“Yes. A tactical, space-based, solar-powered laser weapon.” Buttons sounded as if he’d explained that several hundred times already and that one more time, just one more, would make his kidney stones start to pass. It was a cocktail of boredom, irritation, and surrender to the lowest common intellectual denominator. I decided to forgive him because he didn’t know Shawn was a crazed mechanical genius, and I was still freakishly happy about the demise of the Bradley.
“Is there an upward limit of how many times we can fire it, or does it just keep going until you burn it out?” That question came from one of Nate’s compatriots, Fitzgerald, I think.
“The batteries will give us six shots at high power, which is what we would want for something like this. They’ll recharge completely in 24 hours, but we would be able to get one or two low-power activations before the full-charge mark.”
“What would low power get us?” Fitzgerald was looking thoughtful. “How many low-power shots on a full charge?”
“Low power from orbit is the equivalent of fusing glass at ground zero. We could get as many as 40 on a full charge. Fairly rapid fire as well, but that wouldn’t be fantastic for the local weather.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“You get channels of superheated air, water vapor, and atmospheric disturbances in very small areas. Depending on the weather, a grouping of five or six shots within a small target area will cause small, extremely intense thunderstorms when the cooler air causes the superheated air to cool. Serious lightning strikes.” Buttons shook his head as if he had remembered something uncomfortable.
“I don’t know about you all, but that sounds like a very interesting way to distract a large number of armed opponents at the same time.” Fitzgerald was smiling. He did have a point, especially if the laser were used at night. Much cooler temperatures could make for some very impressive thunder and lightning.
“Sounds like an excellent reason to do a preemptive strike at niiiiii,” I tried to finish the sentence, but someone had shoved an ice pick into the middle of my skull. The ground came up and hit me while I clutched at my head.
I could tell people were crowding around me, checking my eyes, pulse, and things like that, but I was too involved in the agony that was churning in between the hemispheres of my brain. There was a feeling of cognitive static, like little electrical charges popping on and off, and the pain started to let up. I was able to open my eyes and rapidly discovered my field of vision was occupied by a large redneck.
“Shawn, would you please give me some room to breathe. I can smell the chicken salad you had for lunch.”
“Oh.” He was kind enough to give me the space I asked for. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. That was really nasty, whatever it was.” I closed my eyes again and took a few deep breaths. I had a passing thought that I wish I knew where Charlie had gotten off to, and my internal point of view shifted.
There was a ghostly map in my head, filled with
bright sparks. I could tell I was sitting in a patch of eight sparks, and there were other twinkling lights grouped all over the gossamer view of the entire neighborhood. A spark I seemed to know belonged to Charlie was sitting in the map’s representation of Jayashri’s living room with another spark telling me that it was Jayashri herself. The third spark in that group announced itself as Chunhua Yan.
“Oh. Wow.”
“What is it, Frank?”
“I think that instant migraine was a new nano-tech goodie coming online. I know where everyone in the neighborhood is. Charlie, Grandmother Yan, and Jaya are sitting in Jaya’s living room. Nate’s wife is over in Barry’s basement with almost all of the kids. This is so cool!”
I had a sudden urge to look at the Charlie spark, so I let the vision float up in my head. It was as though she was an icon on my computer screen, and I wanted to mouse over her or touch the icon. There was a desire to interact with the image, not in terms of moving it to a different place, as much as it was a sense that there was more data to be had. The funnier, or stranger, feeling was that Charlie was interacting with the spark that represented me.
“Frank?” I heard her voice and felt her presence inside me. My ears didn’t register actual sounds.
“Oh. Jesus.” I looked up at Shawn, and he gave me a quizzical look back. “I think I just got cellular service in my skull.”
Charlie laughed. It was almost as clear to me as it would have been if she’d been standing beside Shawn. “Yeah, this little function showed up for us a little earlier today. Tell my brother and the rest of the gang that we need you over here. All right?”
“Okay.” I didn’t have much more than that to say, as shocked as I was. “Shawn, I just got pinged by Charlie. They need me over there. I’ll be back in a bit.” I got up, feeling extra shell-shocked, and headed over to Jaya and Baj’s house. I walked over in a daze, looking like something that had been spewed out of a pet food factory.
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