Blood Soaked and Contagious

by James Crawford

  I knocked on the front door and just let myself in; after all, they were expecting me. Charlie rushed over and gave me a huge hug, ignoring all the dried crap and the shredded shirt. Jayashri gave me a genteel wave, which I returned with gusto. There was a little Asian woman sitting on the floor who was not Grandmother Yan, because this woman was far too young and certainly more attractive. Mind you, Grandmother Yan was lovely for a woman in her 80s, but this woman should have been on the cover of magazines.

  “Well, the nano-critters aren’t right all the time. They told me Grandmother Yan was here with you two, but I don’t believe I’ve met you before.” I walked over, held out my hand, and got ready to be suave.

  The woman covered her mouth with both hands and shook with laughter. Her laugh, even behind her hands, sounded like bells ringing. When she stopped, she looked up at me, grabbed my hand, and used it to pull herself up from the chair. I was a bit surprised when she hugged me.

  “Frank, you are still my favorite! Why haven’t you made big, strong babies with Charlie yet?”

  Sputter!

  “Chunhua dropped by about three hours ago,” Jaya said, “and I can see you understand how surprised we were.”

  Extra sputter with pickle and special sauce.

  The incredibly attractive Asian lady looked up at me, smiling, but didn’t let me out of the hug.

  “Last night, I had cravings for all sorts of food. I ate every dried berry I had been saving, a wheel of Yolanda’s cheese, and three chickens. When I woke up this morning,” she stepped back out of the hug and gestured up and down her body, “I looked like this, and my broken English wasn’t broken anymore.”

  “Why? How? Huh?” My eloquence had decided to take a serious coffee break in favor of trying to be shocked and surprised at the same time.

  “We spoke about that very issue. It appears that the nanotechnology reversed her cellular aging, repaired various kinds of physical damage,” Jayashri did not look happy when she explained all this, “and slightly rewired Chunhua’s brain. She is optimized for combat and survival in a somewhat more grand manner than we are.”

  “Frank, you probably want to sit down for the rest of this. We’ve got a theory that is a little unsettling.”

  I took Charlie at her word and simply plopped myself down on the carpet.

  “Charlie, while he hasn’t fallen to your charms, you certainly have trained him well!” Chunhua giggled and gave Charlie a high five.

  “You know, all the training in the world is meaningless if you don’t have a good foundation to build on,” Charlie was on the verge of laughing hysterically, “and my Frank is superb material for my training program.”

  “Are we going to get to the disturbing stuff now, or are you just going to put a harness on me and ride me into the sunset?”

  The renovated Chunhua Yan broke into applause, and Charlie collapsed over a chair, laughing her ass off. Jayashri didn’t laugh, but her eyes were bright and full of mirth over the whole situation. I remembered what Charlie and I had discussed about laughter and enjoying moments of normal life in the middle of our shared insanity, and allowed myself to share in the laughter. I needed it more than I realized, as is often the case.

  “The disturbing thing that we’ve been talking about,” Jaya began, “is the nanotechnology itself. Have you not noticed how similar it is to the zombie virus?”

  I stopped laughing. “What do you mean?”

  “The critters, as you call them, repair damage and improve the body’s ability to survive extreme situations. You are also gently altered in such a manner that your innate martial abilities are enhanced. Those are also characteristics of what the virus does for the host.”

  “Yeah, but people have to die before the virus really kicks in on the combat improvements.” I wanted to find a reason to support that they’d made a really odd connection, rather than believe it. “I don’t think the virus heals people before they die, and it certainly doesn’t afterward. There’s something wrong with your theory.”

  “We do not know if it heals people prior to death. Very few infectees live long enough to study, but we do know the virus goes into overdrive when they die and rebuilds their body.”

  “Where are you going with this? I know you’ve got a point.” I may have sounded a little harsher than I intended, but it was bothering me that I felt as though she was beating around the bush.

  “What Jayashri is trying to say is that she is concerned that Baj built the nanotech along the same lines as the actual virus... A technological version of the biological problem.” I wasn’t entirely sure why Charlie took over the explanation, but I did notice that Jaya looked incredibly uncomfortable.

  “All right, supposing that is what he did. What’s the problem?”

  “I am not going to call anything that has saved our lives a ‘problem.’ The source of my upset is that I know my husband did not create this technological wonder overnight. He worked on it for years, some of which were prior to the outbreak of the virus.” She was jittering in her chair and pulled her feet up under herself as if they were cold. “How do you create a technological counter for a biological adaptation as perfect as this is?”

  My feet grew cold and the hair on my arms tried to stand up and walk right off my body.

  “You can’t create effective opposition if you don’t know the nature of the opponent.” I was very glad to be sitting on the floor, because it decreased the possible distance I could fall. “You’re saying my father had samples of the virus years before the outbreak, and Baj began work on the technological counter... no, not counter, really... the technological version of the virus... at about the same time.”

  My guts were churning, and the course of my thoughts was uncomfortable, to say the very least. I knew the question I needed to ask and it frightened me.

  “Jaya, what happened to Siddig, Miryam, and Little Siddy’s bodies?” I didn’t want an answer. I truly did not, because it had the potential to turn every good thing about surviving completely sideways.

  My lovely, gentle, fierce, and graceful friend bowed her head. I heard her answer, even though she said it under her breath. “We had to burn them.”

  “Why?” My voice was cold enough that Chunhua and Charlie recoiled in their chairs.

  “Their wounds,” Jaya looked up at me, weeping silently, “were severe. Each of them... oh. Each of them had been hit in the head by debris. Their skulls were no longer intact, and neither were their brains.”

  “The critters tried to repair them. Didn’t they?”

  She didn’t speak, just nodded.

  “They weren’t themselves?”

  “No. They were feral machines that did not know us. Yolanda and I nearly died that night while we were doing our best to prepare their bodies to be buried.”

  “God.” I couldn’t do much more than just shake my head.

  “If Yolanda were less skilled than she is, or if I were not as good with a firearm, we would be just what they were... machines hunting in order to repair themselves. We took their heads and burned the bodies and heads separately.”

  “What did Bajali turn us into?”

  “The perfect weapon against our enemies.” Jayashri’s melodic voice was uncharacteristically flat, and tears were still rolling down her face.

  I had asked the questions and received my answers. My father started this whole fucking ball rolling. We weren’t any more human than the zombies, and I had a dear friend to thank for it. I may never be able to say whether that was the crowning moment to a day that was filled with confessions, absurd amounts of violence, and sadism that I could not remotely control. All I knew in that moment was that I wanted the little bastards out of my body, even if it meant the next bullet I took ended everything for me.

  My “critters” felt like just another version of the enemy.

  “Is this my karma for having been born to a crazy man who wants to turn people into cows? I get to be as horrible a canker as he is, but I get my better
living through technology?” I wanted to rage, but I didn’t have the energy. It felt as though the only thing left under my skin was high technology and rancid yogurt.

  “I do not know if it is karma or a bizarre confluence of events. I just wanted to—” Jaya broke down all the way, and Charlie had her arms around her before I could finish exhaling.

  Chunhua sat back down in the chair and hugged herself tightly, as if she couldn’t be sure more arms would be comforting for Jayashri or if they would be an intrusion. I just sat there, like some kind of trans-human horror show, blank on things to say or do.

  Somewhere in the back of my head, a part of me wished I could wave a wand and smooth it all over. We were stuck together, an extended family of hybrid Terminators who refused to surrender to the Machine, and that is how we would have to stay until we completed the one quest that had never changed. We needed to bring Bajali home. He was ours, and he was the one lynchpin that held our shared fate together.

  He would be able to do something, give us back our human birthright of pain, healing, and death, if anyone could. I begged a God to whom I didn’t pray that what I hoped for would come true.

  It took some time for Jayashri to cry it out and for me to find a little equilibrium in the morass of churning, half-formed thoughts in my skull. Chunhua was probably the most lost of everyone in the living room, sitting there in what amounted to a brand new body and not knowing where to turn.

  “Chunhua,” I said, “I don’t think I can call you ‘Grandmother’ now and sound at all convincing.” I was able to give her a shadow of a smile when I said it.

  We all laughed a little at that description, and it dispelled a little of the angst in the room. I was a little taken aback when she kept talking about it.

  “Really, I used to wonder why women who had plastic surgery wanted to show it off to everyone they know. Now I understand it much better! It was all I could do not to run around the neighborhood stark naked earlier today!” Chunhua stood, pulled up her shirt, and said, “I mean, look at these! They weren’t this perky when I was 16 years old!” She pulled it back down, took a deep breath, and continued. “I’m not sure if I care that I’m a technological marvel, because I’m young again, very good looking, and feeling very... passionate!”

  A pin could have dropped on the plush carpet and it would have sounded like the noise that had accompanied the Big Bang. Charlie, Jayashri, and I just stared, completely flummoxed by the display of perkiness. The lovely woman who was the source of our boggled silence looked at all of us and laughed.

  “You see? That was the perfect thing to do to break you all out of that horrible mood!”

  “I must say; they are very nice breasts.” Jaya smiled, and that seemed to give us all permission to breathe again. “Where did you learn your comedic timing?”

  “Oh, well before you were born! I was part of a burlesque troop in Hong Kong. That’s how I met my husband.” She put her hands on her hips, did a little jig, bowed, and smiled with theatrical grandeur.

  “It just goes to show,” Charlie added, “you never know who your neighbors are, even after you’ve seen their titties.”

  We all started to laugh when our heads exploded with someone yelling “INCOMING!” Without even looking around, we all went flat to the floor. There was a muffled explosion not terribly far away, but the shock wave rattled us from above rather than from the side.

  I beat everyone to the front door. Omura was in the middle of the street, being rained on by debris, sheltering his head behind his arms.

  “What the Hell happened?” I shouted.

  “I just shot a grenade or a mortar out of the air, and aside from the hot metal falling from the sky, I feel very impressed with myself.” Omura stood up, brushed himself off, and walked over as if nothing odd had occurred.

  “Good job! I’d feel pretty impressed if I’d done that,” I gave him a comradely clap on the shoulder.

  He looked me up and down with a critical eye. “Did you fall into a cat food factory while you were out?”

  “Something like that. What do we have out there?”

  “I don’t know. I think—” He stopped talking abruptly, pivoted on one foot, and fired his gun into the sky almost at the same moment that I heard the telltale noise of another projectile. “I think I just got another one.”

  Nodding, I took off from the front porch and made a running leap onto the roof of my store, landing in the gummy asphalt that had been used to waterproof that surface. I had barely looked up when I pinged on something airborne heading in my direction with a characteristic whistling noise.

  I bellowed, “Fucking Hell! INCOMING!”

  The unexpected seems to happen around me more often than what might be called “normal” does. Instead of diving for cover, I pulled my .45, hit the safety, and squeezed the trigger. There wasn’t a conscious thought in my head, and I’m not sure that I aimed, but something exploded in the sky above my head and little hot things fell like hail all around.

  “What the fuck was that?” Charlie’s voice was so loud in my head that I winced. Another thing went onto my rolling list for Santa Baj if and when we managed to get him back—volume control.

  “I think I just shot a rocket-propelled grenade out of the air.”

  “Damn!” She said and covered my sentiments with precision. “Is there anything else headed our way?”

  “Not that I know of, but ping anybody who has the new iBrain upgrade and find out. Omura is standing on the front porch. Snag him if you need anything.” I had always wanted to coin a new “i” product name. Charlie closed the connection in my skull, and it was another strange sensation to catalog and review after I found out what the latest news was.

  When I looked down, I saw where the projectiles had come from. There was a topless Humvee on the corner by the gas station, and some zombie was reloading a shoulder-mounted weapon of some kind. There wasn’t even a need to aim my weapon, because our side already had things well under control.

  Nate and two of his comrades in arms descended on the Humvee and the occupants like a trio of homicidal cephalopods, all arms and weapons. They were fast, accurate, and brutally efficient. They also managed to take the Humvee without damaging it. Score!

  However, they didn’t seem to notice the five zombies approaching them from the shopping center on the opposite corner. I decided to give the mental address system another try, pulled up my map, slapped Nate’s sparkle around, and hollered at it. “NATE! Watch your six!”

  I took aim and did my absolute best to knock down the enemy’s numbers a bit. From the look of things, I was a helpful distraction, but unnecessary. Nate and his chums moved like a greased killing machine and took all five of the opponents down from a hundred yards away.

  “Thanks, Frank. Do me a favor, not so loud next time. I almost pissed myself.”

  “No problem, Nate!” I cut the connection, took one last look around, and dropped back down to the ground in front of my store. We needed to discuss eliminating our local infestation more than I needed to clean myself up. As things stood, I was still dressed for killing, and there wasn’t any real reason to change if more wet work needed to be done.

  Omura was walking over with the Three Ladies trailing behind him, and I gestured toward Shawn’s garage. That seemed to be growing into the staging area of choice over the past day or so, and I didn’t mind the chance to invade someone else’s space instead of filling my own storage room with rowdy freedom fighters. It was also the most likely place for Nate and the guys to head with our newly appropriated vehicle. They’d probably have to shift an IED or two out of the way, but that was a better plan than leaving the thing on the street.

  We got the vehicle, fair and square, by murdering our enemies in cold blood. Simple. Direct. Eventually, if we didn’t destroy the thing ourselves, another party might turn us into bloody cottage cheese, and then they could have our spoils of war. For a moment, I missed the days when satisfaction happened with a swipe of a credit ca
rd, rather than random acts of violence.

  By the time I turned the corner, Nate was carefully moving the IED closest to the open bay of the garage. I think we all held our breaths a bit, even being aware that the man was a professional and may have actually placed that trap himself. We didn’t need another shock, chorus of pained screaming from grievous wounds, shower of body parts, or funeral. In fact, after my day, I could have used a month-long break from any of those things.

  The guys got the Hummer settled and the IED replaced with no hassle at all. High fives were passed around, and Buttons nodded with satisfaction at the day’s catch. It didn’t seem like ten seconds had passed before Shawn had the hood up, doors open, and every storage area bare to the work lights. I told myself that he was looking for explosives or booby traps, but I was pretty sure he was having a geek moment over examining our acquisition.

  This isn’t to say he wouldn’t find any potential booby traps, because he certainly would. I know him well enough to be sure that his main motivation was curiosity, not whether or not something would likely blow up if it was disassembled.

  Omura turned to Buttons and said, “Sir, I think we need to wipe these fuckers out before they mount the large assault. Unless, you think the larger attack is less likely now, due to the crater?”

  “Unlikely. I’ve been hitting the refresh key on the satellite feed every thirty seconds since we dropped the baby. They’re trying to put together a convoy.” Buttons did not look pleased. “That presents a certain set of options. They’re preparing to create a new staging area for the assault on this side of 66, or they’re going to attempt to nail us early. Alternately, they’re going to change the location of their entire operation.”

  Flower and I chimed in together, harmoniously. “Is that likely?”

  Buttons blinked a few times, and said, “No. There is too much materiel that would require delicate handling if it could be moved at all. Whether or not Hightower himself would change locations is open for debate. His dossier suggests he’s capable of a number of different decision forks when he’s up against opposition.”