Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02

by James Crawford

  I told her the story of my walk home from the night before, and her eyes nearly bugged out of her skull.

  “I guess those guns really could do some damage, huh?”

  “Yeah, I almost wish I’d seen the impact,” and then I thought about it, “but then again, not really.” I tugged her along towards the store. I wanted to be with her, not linger outside and obsess over guards with superguns. “By the way, where’s the Man Scythe?”

  “Don’t worry, honey, it’s safe. I’ll get it out for you when we get upstairs.”

  “Thanks. I need to see it and,” I waved my hands around in random circles, “reconnect with it.”

  “You boys and your tools!” She giggled and I giggled with her. There wasn’t any point in telling her that I’d started planning how to kill the zombie baby with it.

  Charlie led me upstairs in the store, after we sauntered down the aisles, being happy that we were together again. I sat down at my desk, pulled open the bottom left hand drawer, and took out the stones. I also pulled out the spray bottle of water, because you really can’t do a good job without getting your rocks wet.

  “Darling, my darling? Would you hand me my baby?” I’ll admit that I cooed to her. I hadn’t been whole enough to touch my precious example of carnal brutality during my recovery, or even think about it. That was a travesty. On top of it, I hadn’t been attentive to Charlie either. In all honesty, they both needed some undistracted connection time from me.

  “Why in the world do you call it that?” She passed it over to me, wrapped in a towel. “It’s a weapon, not a child.”

  “Objectively,” I said, unwrapping her from the cloth, “you’re completely right. This weapon is made out of titanium and steel, with some kind of strange rubber composite on the handle. It lives in a thermoplastic case and is most emphatically not a child, but I feel really protective and possessive about it.”

  “It really means that much to you?”

  “Yes. A truly amazing person made this for me. I still owe him a debt I haven’t had the chance to repay. I still feel bad about that.” I held up one finger. “Before you even ask, I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  She nodded, and sat down on the sleeping bags on the floor while I gave my baby some positive attention. I didn’t even freak out when I saw the half dozen chips along the edge; I just got out the proper stones and went to work. As usual, I got so lost in what I was doing that I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I’m guessing it was a decent hour at the outside.

  “Honey?” Charlie tapped me on the shoulder and I turned my head away from cleaning the Man Scythe. Testament to my concentration, I didn’t even notice her getting up from the floor. “Could we talk for a minute?”

  “Always.” I put the weapon down and wiped the mud from my hands. “What’s on your mind?”

  I had expected her to just speak out loud, but she blushed from her collarbones to her scalp and pinged me in my head, rather than simply opening her mouth. Something had her unsettled; I could tell that much without using any of the sensory enhancements that our nano-bugs gave us. I did feel a brief surge of my own emotions, because the thought of using those “superpowers” on her seemed incredibly wrong.

  I decided to hold that set of moral explorations for a later date.

  “So, um. Frank.” It never ceased to startle me to have a clear voice in my head that didn’t originate in my ears. “I didn’t want to talk about this while you were not yourself. Well,” she laughed to herself a little, “you wouldn’t have understood it anyway.”

  “Yeah, there wasn’t a lot going on in there.” I tapped myself on the head.

  “You were pared down to the minimum and I didn’t think you’d be able to understand me if I brought it up,” she said, without moving her lips. They were set in an almost melancholy smile, and I really couldn’t blame her for that. “I hoped that Shoei would be right, and that you’d come back to me. When you pounced on me that last time, it felt a little like you were on your way back into your skull. Then today, you came back!”

  “Just like me, I popped back into my head at an odd time not of my own choosing.” I snorted at myself, and wondered if that translated through the communication link as well as our voices did.

  “Frankie Shot to the Head, you are ‘special’ in that way. So, anyway, I wanted to tell you something that might be important. I guess it could be. Eh.”

  “You could just tell me and I’m sure it’ll make sense.”

  “Ack.” If anything, she managed to blush harder and squish her face up in a very accurate rendition of her brother’s “terribly frustrated” expression. “I’m late.”

  “…”

  “I’m late.”

  “…”

  “My period is two weeks late.” Her eyes were bulging out at me by that point, and I thought I saw some wetness collecting in the corners. I didn’t entirely know what to do, but I was pretty sure that freaking out shouldn’t be a part of my reaction.

  I nodded. That didn’t provoke much of a response from her, other than her eyes resuming their normal dimensions. I reached up and took her hands in mine, not squeezing, but just holding them. The color started to recede from her face, and I was grateful for that. Charlie didn’t look at all comfortable with a nearly purple complexion.

  “Thank you for telling me. I love you. How do you feel about this?”

  “I really hope you’re not using communication management techniques on me, Frank. I’m feeling really weird about this to begin with.” The first tear took a long time to go from the corner of her eye down to her upper lip.

  “No, I do want to know how you feel. I love you.”

  “I feel really scared and strange about this whole thing. I mean, I never considered birth control and I feel so damned stupid for that, and now I’m two weeks late after you took a bullet to the head and spent a whole lot of time recovering from that so I could talk to you about it and tell you that I love you and that I really want to be with you because you’re the best man I’ve ever met in my whole life and I really didn’t want to continue the family tradition of shotgun weddings and surprise babies, especially since we all have this nano-critter problem and don’t have a fuckin’ clue what we’re gonna do about that in the first place and REALLY don’t know what will happen to a fetus if they can get through the placental barrier and Shawn’s going to lose his shit over this and I don’t even know if you want me or my baby or a wife or anything else now that you’ve got a whole pile of digital shit in your head!”

  I nodded. I was absurdly grateful that she was saying that over the link, rather than trying to do it in one breath like normal people do. I kept nodding because I needed a few seconds to replay everything she said and take a temperature reading of my own emotions.

  “I’m a little surprised, too.” I managed to get that out, using my mouth, because the link seemed strangely impersonal. “I love you. I want to be with you. I never expected to ever be a dad, but it is our child… Yours and mine… I feel really,” I waved my hands a little, searching for words that conveyed what I wanted to get across, “warm about it.” I put her hands over my heart. “I feel warm right here, where your hands are.”

  Her mouth opened and a strange bubbly gurgle came out, right before she dropped to her knees and started bawling against my chest. I hadn’t lied to her about my feelings, so I knew she wasn’t flipping out over that. It had to be all the pent-up angst of weeks of not knowing whether or not I’d recover and what she could possibly say to me if I did.

  Maybe, even worse, worrying what she would have done if I hadn’t come back. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to not know if she were going to recover or not. I am willing to bet that I’d be a little insane until some sign of progress appeared, positive or negative. In that moment, I felt for her, loved her, and just held her close.

  She had done a lot of that for me. She gave me a reason to get well, after all.

  Chapter 10


  Having her in my arms that way, I discovered something new about myself: holding her as she cries turns me on. It is an incredibly awkward thing to discover while you’re trying to comfort someone you love. There’s no good way to approach the issue. I thought about being overt about my interest.

  “Say, honey? All that weeping you’re doing is making the Mariachi Band in my pants do ‘La Cucaracha’ with Barry White fronting the group. Do you think you might want to soothe my Savage Beast?”

  Somehow I suspected saying such a thing would get me beaten to a pulp, and I rapidly decided to lasso the Mariachi Band before they could become an issue.

  This isn’t to say that I didn’t have my own sludge of emotions to waddle through, because I certainly did. I’d just begun the process of reintegrating myself into my own skull, saw my old quarry in a plastic cage, found out that my brain has got a lot of stuff in it, and learned that my self-image would have to expand to include being a father. Add my sudden attack of horny to that and you’ve got a cocktail that would make anyone run for cover.

  I try to stay flexible, but even I get overwhelmed occasionally.

  With southern grace and charm, my love extricated herself from my embrace, sat up straight and wiped her eyes. “I have had a lot of dreams about being a mom over the past few days. I dreamed our baby was cutting his way out of me, complaining that he was ‘done’ and didn’t need to ‘bake’ anymore. Then again, there were a few dreams where it was the government that cut him out of me. I guess you could say that my subconscious mind is pretty obsessed about it.”

  I didn’t want to show her the look on my face, because she’d know her dreams sent ice through my veins. Whether or not it was the best decision I could make, I decided to try to move the conversation a little sideways. I closed my eyes and tossed a conversational minnow into the pond.

  “You think our baby will be a boy?” I asked.

  “I know he will.”

  “Is this one of those mystical ‘woman things’?”

  “No, I don’t think it is. Then again, it might be. It just feels as though it’s going to be a boy.” I felt her pull back a little and knew that she was looking at the expression on my face, even with my eyes closed.

  Crap.

  “Who do we…” we started to ask at the same time. I’d been told that couples throughout the ages have experienced moments like those, as well as taking on little bits of how their partners express themselves. But instead of looking at it as a celebratory moment that marked another milestone of progress in coupledom we just smiled at one another.

  Unfortunately, the smiles didn’t reach our eyes.

  “Who do we go talk to first?” I finished asking her the question. At that point in time, I was more confident in her ability to think clearly than in my own.

  “Ah, I think we need Jayashri and Baj before anyone else. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as privacy anymore, but it wouldn’t hurt if we could find some.”

  “They haven’t found a way to tap into the brain-to-brain stuff, have they?” The mere thought of having my brain listened to made my bladder leaky.

  “Not as far as anyone’s been able to tell.” Charlie looked thoughtful and ran her fingers through her hair, giving it a gentle tousle. “I don’t even know if they’ve looked at how we broadcast, much less what we broadcast.”

  “That’s a relief. I agree with you that B and J need to be the first people on the list. What about Omura?”

  “Uh, ah…” she said, looking a little unsure. “I’d like to leave our government pawn out of this as long as we can. That goes for Mister Buttons, too. We might want to talk to Shawn about the,” she gulped, “baby issue.”

  “How do you think he’ll react to that?”

  “Oh, he’ll react like he always does: big. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t demand that we get hitched ASAP.”

  “shmooog?”

  “We didn’t get around to that part of the conversation, did we?”

  “pbt?”

  “Right. Shotgun weddings are alive and well where we came from, and my Bro is a bit of a…” She waved her hands around in the air, as if trying to conjure the proper description from nothing more than nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide molecules. “…Traditionalist.”

  “Oh.”

  She grinned at me, and it was one of the good kind. Sure, it probably had a lot to do with my clear and present discomfort at the thought of adding Husband and Daddy to my list of personal descriptions, but it was a smile. If you’ve got a smile to work with, then things can’t be all bad. That being said, the idea of having her brother shoehorn us into something like that didn’t leave me feeling springtime fresh.

  “So, how about giving Baj a shout and see what they’re up to?” Charlie continued to give me a perky smile that was so big and lovely that if there was anything hidden under it I didn’t clue into it at all. “I know he wants to get the upgrade out, and I’ll be that Jaya is right beside him, helping him out.”

  I nodded, and gave my inner workings a little wake-up call. The map in my head was clearer than before, and vastly more detailed. It seemed like I could get more data on any given neighbor’s surroundings and activity than before, too. I didn’t linger long, pouring over the new stuff, and reached out to the Bajali “spark” on the map. Data appeared.

  His spark and Jayashri’s spark were not located in Building 1. They were in their home. They were... “Oh.” I pulled back from the data and a strange notion that much more information was available to me if I chose to access it.

  “What?” She looked at me with one eyebrow cocked into the air.

  “I think we should wait about 10 more minutes before we call,” I replied.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I know exactly what they’re doing and I’d be really annoyed if I got a call… during… They’re busy.” I couldn’t say more, but I suspect the look on my face carried the rest of the information because Charlie blushed and chuckled to herself.

  “Do you get more information than you did before you got shot?” I was grateful that she asked a question that didn’t require a closer inspection of the data feed.

  “Yes. I think that if I gave my little friends a push, I could probably have uncomfortable amounts of information about our neighbors. It felt like I could have looked through Baj’s eyes or felt everything that he… Uh. Yeah.” This time, I was the one blushing.

  She exploded into gales of laughter, and I couldn’t help but go there with her. It felt good and cleansing, but it didn’t touch the thoughts assembling in my head.

  Before I met Charlie Cooper, even mentioning the concept of biologically produced offspring in relationship to my swarm of single-minded swimmers would have produced a fight or flight reaction in me.

  The idea, even the reality, of her bearing my child didn’t do anything more outlandish than give me a really warm feeling between my ventricles. Where was the fear? Did my head injury change me so much that the possibility that I would be a father cease to inspire dread in the corners of my heart?

  How much had been changed in me?

  What would our child look like?

  The question slapped my frontal lobes so hard that tears appeared in the corners of my eyes. Then I realized why her dream was so terrible. We had no idea what the critters would do with a developing fetus. On top of that, if the baby were born even remotely human, the government would snatch him away from us… Actually, his or her humanity had nothing to do with it. Whatever came out of Charlie’s womb would be studied, tested, and treated like some kind of experiment, not loved like a child should be.

  I sat there beside her with my insides clenching. We couldn’t prevent the Government from taking our baby away, and we couldn’t escape without becoming the latest iteration of Public Enemy Number One. They would find us. Hell, they’d find HER. They don’t need me.

  They could kill me but keep her alive long enough to give birth. After that, they wouldn’t ne
ed a mother, and she could be disposed of for the sake of convenience. While that would get us out of the way, it didn’t do a thing for the rest of the community. If “our people” knew about any of it, they would probably rise up and start a serious fight.

  I couldn’t keep track of all the permutations on the theme of having my child stolen in the names of Progress and Science, but I didn’t want to give them credence or power by voicing them. Regardless of all the ideas slamming around in my skull, one thing was absolutely true. There were two people we needed on our side: Bajali and Jayashri. No plan or strategy could be implemented without them.

  I was completely rattled by all of the thoughts and images that were slithering back and forth over one another like eels in a barrel. Just sitting there with the thoughts was going to drive me mad.

  Luckily for me, I heard automatic gunfire, and my train of thought was completely derailed.

  Chapter 11

  Man Scythe in hand and hot country gal behind me, I jumped down the stairs and made it outside in record time. That’s when it became clear that the bullets were coming from outside our walled city-state, made doubly clear by the small swarm of zombies who were attempting to rappel down the wall on our side.

  “I guess the remains of my father’s group have reorganized enough to retaliate.” I looked at Charlie over my shoulder, and she was smiling in a very feral fashion. Maybe it was the way she had her hands on her hips and matching short swords in her belt, I don’t know... Girl was smokin’.

  In fact, I was so entranced by her charms, the Smokin’ Girl had to break me out of my reverie.

  “Frank, you might want to pay attention. That one is comin’ right for ya.”

  Sure enough, one of our intruders was hauling ass in my direction, and there were a few more behind him. They were yelling unintelligible things that added up to, “We have arrived and wish to commit violent acts upon your persons in retribution for damages done to us,” but sounded more like, “Yeargh!”