Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02

by James Crawford

  The room remained dead silent, but I could tell that some people were catching on faster than others, just by looking around. As he’d explained in Baj’s kitchen weeks before, we’d all become a threat to national security. That was the central issue, and while a deal had been brokered to keep us from turning into a thermonuclear pothole, no one had been cynical enough to consider what quarantine might mean.

  We had become lab rats at the very best.

  Everything Shoei said after his pause confirmed that I was on the right track, but then he dropped a bomb on us that I hadn’t expected.

  “I hate to bring Frank’s family into this, but I have to in order to give you all a better feel for the lay of the land.” He nodded at me by way of apology, and asked Baj for permission to bring up his history as well. Baj nodded, clearly uncomfortable, and motioned for him to continue. “The nanotechnology we possess resulted from a project that Frank’s father and Bajali were working on almost five years ago. Baj, would you give a brief synopsis?”

  “Yes. Mr. Hightower had come into possession of a viral sample and study data which showed that organisms exposed to the virus developed certain attributes.” He took a deep breath before pushing on. “We would recognize this set of characteristics as those of a zombie. His plan was to create a technological equivalent to the biological infection. In short, we created nanotechnology geared to enhancing the combat and recovery effectiveness of any given subject.”

  There were one or two gasps around the room. Fewer than I’d expected.

  “Thank you Baj. I’m sure that wasn’t an easy thing to talk about, and I appreciate your willingness to do so. Now then, Frank’s father had no idea that the virus was sourced from a meteorite impact in Africa.” Omura paced back and forth in front of the room, clearly as uncomfortable explaining it all as we were to hear it. “We knew this meteorite was coming, tracked it, and were on site to retrieve it.”

  “Thousands of meteorites strike the planet every year, Omura,” Baj retorted from his chair in the front row. “How did we know this one in particular was due to arrive, and it was so important our government sent people to fetch it?”

  “Simple, Bajali. It was broadcasting a signal and had been for some time.” When Shoei finished his story, one that would have given countless conspiracy theorists spontaneous orgasmic contractions, we were all dumbfounded.

  Shawn was the first to break the silence with a “Fuck me,” in full Southern drawl. It was repeated around the room like grace before dinner, and I would have added my own to the round, but I couldn’t form the words.

  “Baj, correct me if I’m heading down the wrong sewer pipe,” Shawn croaked from a little farther down the front row. “What you ended up building was the technological version of the biological virus… A virus that was from outer space to begin with. Am I tracking or am I lost?”

  “Yes. Yes on both counts, or so it seems.” Bajali’s voice sounded strained and quiet, a few seats away from me, and I imagined that he was having a terrible time processing it all. “When I started working for Hightower, he gave me a set of project outlines and some very interesting data. I did not ask for the sources of the data. Then he told me to ‘Make That Happen’ using nanotechnology rather than biological source material.

  “Somewhere along the line after the project had commenced, someone unleashed the virus on humanity. Unfortunately, we would probably never know if that was intentional or simply the largest screw up in the universe. You couldn’t even really discuss the ‘death toll’, because they didn’t stay dead. Regardless, that singular event changed the world forever and no one could argue that.”

  Omura looked at each of us in turn and said, “The issue we have, neighbors, is this: we harbor the technological equivalent of the zombie virus. This gift we’ve been given is more contagious than that it is. We have to be contained, and we agreed to it, if I may remind you. Bajali is going to work on modifications to our little friends that will make it impossible for us to pass them on to other people.”

  There were affirmative noises and general nodding from around the room. They’d heard this bit before, I’m guessing.

  “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The problem we have is that we are being observed, guarded, and restrained at gunpoint. Am I right about that?”

  My storeroom erupted into unhappy noises. Shoei, standing at the front of the room, nodded, and gestured for everyone to simmer down. It took a few minutes for the gang to subside into muttering attentiveness.

  “This is the point I want you to truly consider: dangerous weapons require tight security. Someone made that mistake with the biological virus, and we are living in the aftermath of that error.” He put his hands in his pockets. “The world will not survive another accident of that kind, even if it manages to get out of this one. As much as I hate to call being held at gunpoint ‘necessary’, the government doesn’t have a better choice. I hope that when Bajali has perfected the updates to the nanomachines, we will be much less of a threat and the measures required to keep us in check will be modified.”

  Matt “Flower” Wilson, sniper and swanky Man About Town, spoke up from his customary seat near the door.

  “What you’re doing is trying to put a polite spin on military reality. Everybody, when the decision was made to join up instead of being nuked, we became government assets and signed away a lot of personal freedom to stay alive.” He uncrossed his long legs and leaned forward, scowling slightly. “I don’t mean to be unnecessarily cruel to any of you, but the situation is very simple: do or die. You are not civilians any longer.”

  Following Matt’s unusually blunt speech there wasn’t a noise to be heard, and the almost-positive spin that Shoei had built for us disintegrated. Shawn stood up with a grunt, and walked out. Chunhua followed right behind him. It was the start of a very sullen exodus.

  Only Baj, Jayashri, Omura, Charlie and I were left to hear the Army Corps of Engineers arrive.

  That week following that discussion was very quiet, at least in terms of our community interacting as a whole. Everyone kept to themselves, except when absolutely necessary. I was an exception, since I was the lab rat of choice in the medical tent. Charlie came with me most of the time, but there were days when she didn’t get out of bed with me.

  But the neighborhood was a hive of activity, even if we were all stuck between our own ears. It seemed like there was something new every fifteen minutes, between sections of prefabricated walls moving here and there and insane amounts of concrete being poured. All the houses in our little walled city were disconnected from Virginia Power’s lines and set up to run on our local power source. The builders were everywhere.

  I imagined that we were living in an ant farm, populated by orange biohazard ants. It made me wonder who the larvae were.

  By the middle of the second week, the gigantic, block-long, multi-purpose building was complete across the street from my hardware store. On that Friday, the second building over on 23rd and Buchanan was completed. I’d never seen supplies airlifted into anywhere, but I did over those three days.

  On Saturday afternoon the Corps of Engineers disappeared as though they’d never existed, and the only signs they’d left behind were the buildings that had sprung up in two weeks. Saturday night, Yolanda and Ómer invited everyone over to Building 2 for dinner and a tour.

  No one had told me that they were building us a cafeteria, library and a school. Apparently Yolanda and her husband had been assigned to that facility as chefs and building supervisors. They seemed pretty happy with that decision–the rest of us were delighted by Yolanda’s ropa vieja, fried plantains and tomato salad. The lady can cook.

  The building itself was impressive and equipped with every high-tech gadget I could imagine to facilitate food service, distance-learning and storage. I was impressed. The community’s children were less excited than the adults, because they’d suddenly discovered that their lives of informal schooling were over.

  Barb
ara Banks, for her part, was pleased to be de-facto Principal of our community school and hand off the actual teaching to people on the other end of fiber-optic cable. I can see how it was a relief for her, and her enthusiasm for being able to offer the children better education was contagious. I even found myself smiling.

  It was a good night, and it felt as if we were starting to become a community again. No one could have told me how stressful it would be having your family of choice not getting along well. I would have laughed heartily at their expense and trundled off to do whatever was pressing on me at the time. Pride goeth before a fall, and this one was a short drop. I was grateful for that small favor.

  After the tour wrapped up, everyone moved off to get on with the daily process of living in a community undergoing huge changes… under the watchful eye of armed guards. Some of us decided to hang out in the cafeteria over some adult beverages. God! It felt so good to hear everyone catching up on the ins and outs of their lives over the preceding two weeks, and everyone was full of juicy updates. Even Bajali, who eschewed alcohol (except on very rare occasions), was rattling off the list of scientific apparatus that graced his new lab in Building 1.

  “Do you know? They are transferring a team of researchers here to work with me on the nanotech, and the medical staff will be remaining as well.”

  “Are they going to stay cooped up in plastic suits? Or will they interact with you like people?” Fitzgerald asked over the rim of a beer stein. It was a family heirloom and went with him wherever he traveled, or so they said.

  “Not at all.” Baj smiled, gesturing with a half-eaten carrot stick, “I will have the propagation issue fixed in the next day or two. Once that is rolled out, we will no longer be infectious.”

  I sipped on a Corona, and nodded, pleased to hear that progress was happening. I couldn’t contribute anything to the conversation beyond noises and pantomime, so I just nursed my beer. Charlie, Jayashri and Chunhua had decided to make use of my Japanese bathtub, and left us men to fend for ourselves. I missed her presence, but was also a little glad for the space.

  “I heard those researchers are bringing in one of their pet projects,” Shawn drawled. He was on beer number 5, if my math wasn’t off. “Anybody heard anything about that?”

  “Yes,” Buttons answered from farther down the table. “It’s a live subject that was discovered locally. They’ve been keeping it alive for almost a year.”

  “Man, that just gives me the shivers,” our country caveman rumbled, downing the rest of his beer.

  “They tell me that the subject is an anomaly,” Buttons said with a noncommittal shrug, “and we shouldn’t worry about it.”

  I tended to agree with Shawn on the issue: it gave me serious cold chills to think that we’d have a zombie, or “Eater”, up close and personal. What I felt wasn’t hate, exactly. It was more like visceral revulsion, and I decided to put the beer down on the off chance that the chills made me clumsy. To my relief, the conversation veered off into Shawn’s territory, otherwise known as the “Garage” of Building 1.

  After a few more laughs, I stood up, mimicked sleeping, and wished everyone well with a goodbye grunt. Something was eating at me, and I figured that I’d had one beer too many with a still-recovering brain. My bed was probably the best place for me, and that’s where I headed.

  Chapter 8

  I’m the kind of man that enjoys an uneventful walk. I used to enjoy uneventful rides on my old Buell motorcycle until I put the bike down into a crowd of zombies. It wasn’t evident to me that they were standing around a drum full of kerosene until it exploded a second later. It would have burnt my eyebrows off if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet with the visor down. I really miss that bike.

  When I rounded the corner at Buchanan, I saw something I’d never seen before. Two of our guards were leaning on the porch of the empty house that sat on the corner of Buchanan and 23rd. Their visors were up and it looked like they were sharing a smoke on their watch. Pretty benign, if you ask me, but I had to wonder if they were allowed to be visible. Shrugging, I prepared to walk right by them.

  My heightened sense of smell gave me some extra information: they’d both been drinking. Pretty heavily, too.

  “Hey, you,” one of them called out to me as they jogged over to intercept me on my stroll home. “You’re the guy that got his brains blown out, right?”

  I nodded, and followed it up with an “Um-hum.”

  “What’s it like, being,” the second guard gestured, trying to put sensible words together, “you know?”

  I shrugged, because I had no way to give them a better answer.

  “Dude, don’t you remember he can’t talk?”

  “Aw, yeah.” He laughed and lowered the transparent face shield on his helmet. “They say you’re the one with the most advanced nanotech, though. Like, you can heal almost anything.”

  I will admit, honestly, I couldn’t even begin to believe what happened next.

  “Let’s find out,” he said, and took a swing at my head. It connected and tossed me about ten feet before I hit the ground.

  “Dude! That’s not part of our orders,” the second guard protested, waving black-gauntleted fingers. “The Major will be fucking pissed!”

  “Man, this one can’t even talk. Who’s he going to complain to? I want to find out if these suits can compete.” He smiled and stalked over to me. I was waiting for the world to stop spinning. That punch was impressive, and I don’t think a normal person would have survived it.

  He kicked me in the ribs. I got more airtime and the sure knowledge that the impact had broken three of my ribs and punctured my right lung. The nanotechnology was kind enough to inform me of the nature of the damage being done to me, but I would have preferred having some way to communicate over the play-by-play commentary. The worst part wasn’t the pain, but my insecurity over whether or not fighting back would be a good idea.

  “You gotta stop! The Major didn’t order this and if they catch us, they’ll drum us out of the unit!”

  “Fuck the Major. This asshole isn’t even fighting back.” He looked down at me as I coughed up blood on the lawn. “What’s the matter, man? You down for the count? Not such a badass, are you?” His foot teleported between the ground and my abdomen, and I was lifted into the air again.

  The tally looked like this. Me: broken jaw, broken ribs, punctured lung, ruptured large intestine, bruised kidney, and immense amounts of pain. Him: annoyance and scuffs on his armor. I wasn’t going to make it any worse, and I stayed where I landed.

  The second guard, the one that wasn’t using me like a soccer ball, ran over and tried to hold his partner back. They scuffled, and my assailant punched the other guard in the face. He hadn’t closed his visor, so I got to see the results of a motor-enhanced punch on the face of a normal human being.

  He died instantly: I didn’t need nanotech to tell me that. Watching the fist collapse his skull in a spray of blood and brains was sufficient information for me to make that call. The sight of the poor schlub’s body dropping to the ground like a bag of rice was eloquent confirmation.

  “FUCK!” The remaining guard looked at the mess on this gloved hand, and turned his crazy eyes on me. “You did this! You fucking killed him and there ain’t gonna be any witnesses!”

  Swell. I didn’t have a choice; it was defend myself and accept the consequences or get killed by an intoxicated asshole and be blamed for the murder of an innocent idiot. Sure, that sounds like a choice, but it isn’t. Dying like that is not, I repeat, not a choice I will ever make. I stood up, shook myself off, and got ready for his bum rush.

  He came at me, and shocked me by stopping instead of barreling through me. He took a stance that I recognized as some variety of Karate, maybe Kenpo, and launched a kick at my head. I managed to block it, but the sheer force of the impact sent me rolling sideways. I barely had time to get to my feet before he was on me again.

  The only saving grace I had to work with was this asshole’s
tendency to telegraph his strikes. I don’t know if that was just bad form on his part or related to the power-assist in his armor. Really, in retrospect, it doesn’t matter. I had to do something or this guy would chuck me in a wood chipper as soon as he could.

  Aikido teaches you to blend into the force of your opponent’s attack, redirect it, and escalate if their desire to beat the snot out of you hasn’t dissipated. Most of my training had revolved around arts like Aikido, but my Sensei was something of a martial arts prodigy. He could tack on new arts and styles the way most people buy shoes.

  They say that Bruce Lee was something like that. Bruce took what he knew and created Jeet Kun Do. My Sensei took what he knew, and we just called it “What The Professor Does.” Soldier Boy didn’t know what to do with a combo platter of Aikido, Systema, Sambo and The Professor.

  He threw a punch. I blended his attack into an arm bar and snapped his elbow, exoskeleton and all, as his helmet hit the ground. His helmet muffled most of his scream.

  A moment later, I heard another noise, and discovered that the arm in my hands was no longer attached to anything. There was nothing at the end of the shoulder but a deep pothole, the smell of blood and dirt, and legs attached to a waist. As for me, I was covered in a mixture of dirt and various bodily fluids.

  Another set of halfway decent clothes, shot to hell.

  “That’s what it looks like when someone is cut in half,” I thought to myself, held in the urge to vomit, dropped the arm, and put both hands on top of my head. I closed my eyes, because I was pretty sure that I was next in line to become a pothole.

  “Mr. Stewart,” a voice said from somewhere to my left. “You can stand up.”

  I opened my left eye, but stayed where I was. Major Kenney stood about ten feet away from the hole with his visor raised. He didn’t appear to be armed, but the smoking hole bespoke a shooter somewhere nearby and I wasn’t amenable to taking any chances.