Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02

by James Crawford

  “Oh! You’ve got a great point there.” I grinned, and scratched my gore-encrusted hair. “Anybody got handcuffs or some such plastic restraint before we take up lives of aimless zombie wrangling?” Sue me. I was really amused.

  “No, but I’ve got paracord.” Omura had walked up behind me, looking a bit the worse for wear.

  “Will that work?”

  “Oh, I think so.” He pulled a rolled-up hank of black cord from somewhere on his person, almost manifesting it out of nowhere. I made a point to ask him about that trick one day because it looked immensely cool.

  The only thing I know I saw for sure was that he made a loop with one end. He snagged one of the zombie’s hands, put the loop on it and pulled in a shoulder-wrenching sort of way. It must have been effective, because the undead object of our attention came up off the ground, flipped over in the air and landed hard on the asphalt and crumbled cinderblock. Omura did more odd-looking things and Mister Cricket had both arms tied behind his back, a loop around his neck and the whole thing magically tied to both ankles.

  Cricket flopped around, snarled and struggled. I guess the cord was arranged to pull more tightly, because every time he tried to stretch out his face started changing colors. Sweet!

  “It’s hojojitsu.” Omura said, answering my unasked question.

  “Really! I heard about rope martial arts, but I’d never actually seen any demonstrations.” I nodded with appreciation, because it was just that swanky. “If you ever want to teach me any of that, I’d love to learn it.”

  “We’ll talk about that later. Do you want to cope with the Sharmas while I discuss life with your little friend? I’ve already called for back-up, so we only have to hold this area for about five more minutes before we’ve got support.”

  I was reluctant, to say the least. My ability to be compassionate with Bajali was crippled. He gave us the happy little life-changing package in the first place, without testing, and without a serious look at what the long-term impact would be. Yes, we get to survive a lot of damage, but we certainly pay for the privilege. The only person in our little community cadre of trans-human commandos who might be able to get an adequate picture of that cost would be Charlie, our resident psychology guru.

  My train of thought was depressing the shit right out of me, and I turned around to look at my two wee, newly born, brain-munching Shapes of Things to Come. They did not look good, and I don’t mean that in a physical sense. Bajali and Jayashri were clinging to one another, alternately sobbing and trying to express themselves in two or three different languages. I didn’t have a clue about how to cope with them.

  “Sharma family!” I yelled, squatting down right in front of them. “I need you to listen to me right now!”

  Two pitiful tear and vomit streaked countenances turned to me with the sort of glazed expressions one would expect from gentle people that have stared down into the abyss to find personalized stationery and chocolates waiting on the pillows. I felt that this was a key moment and did not want to mince words or try to finagle their attention with complex concepts. The situation didn’t offer many options for a pleasant segue from venting their horror to becoming active participants in getting our feces together. I decided to go with being direct, which is what I am generally best at, yet least likely to prefer.

  With a firm (but not unkind) hand, I smacked them each across their faces.

  Once.

  Twice.

  On the third slap, Jayashri blocked my hand.

  “Do not slap me again,” was what she said to me, and her voice was as chilling as a teabagging session in dry ice. Not being overly masochistic, I nodded my acceptance of her decree and sat back on my haunches.

  I was about to screw my compassion to the sticking place, but Mister Cricket started screaming somewhere behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Omura was up to something icky, because I saw the reactions on the faces right in front of me. Jayashri went pale underneath the blood and dirt. Bajali passed out. I waited patiently for the noise to cease.

  “All right, I know that you both went through Hell a few minutes ago, but I need you to put dealing with it aside for,” I hunted my bare wrists for a watch that I wasn’t wearing, oblivious to the fact that my brain had a clock as standard equipment, “as long as it takes us to get back home. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, I can do that.” Jaya looked down at her husband, who was still dead to the world. “I will take care of my husband and help him do what needs to be done. We can suffer the horror later today.” She turned away from me and started jollying her husband back into consciousness.

  I didn’t feel as though I’d become irrelevant; I knew it. Omura was “interviewing” our survivor, and the Sharmas were reassembling themselves. I didn’t have much to do at that moment, other than look around and find something useful to do while life went on without me. Then I remembered the hand in the wreckage.

  Something to look at! Hooray!

  I tromped back through the pieces and parts on the ground to the large curve of hull that hid the object of interest and then squatted by the side where I’d seen the hand. Feeling along the low edge of the shell, I didn’t get the impression that any of the surfaces would cut me if I tried to shift it and gave it a tentative lift. The whole chunk moved as if it didn’t weigh more than a few pounds; so I gave it a little flip with my wrists.

  It certainly moved, flipping up and over to rock on the convex side a few feet away. When I looked back down after being smug about my object moving capabilities, I began to wish that I’d let someone else do it.

  There was a body. It wasn’t an adult body.

  The little person was strapped into the remains of an acceleration couch that had broken in half on impact. His head was encased in a helmet of some kind, and I was not at all looking forward to removing it. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure that I could remove it, because there weren’t any visible seams, latches or even screws. It seemed to be made from the same material as the craft’s hull, with all the little facets and fibers.

  I had to call him “Midget Pilot” in order to keep from losing my shit. The sight of this little form strapped into a weapon of war moved me with pity and fucking pissed me off fit to kill. It was pretty difficult to tell which feeling was on top of the roiling pile inside me at any given time.

  Midget Pilot was bent upward at the waist by the two halves of the seat that he’d been strapped to, and was pierced in more than a few places by shards of hull and less identifiable objects. The remains of the seat were leaking blue gel on the ground, but the body wasn’t leaking anything. I couldn’t see or even smell blood. I wasn’t about to touch the body without gloves to see if I could feel anything.

  Sure, there really was no reason to worry because the critter colony would take care of almost anything that might infect me… At least that is an assumption that we all made, and no one had run into anything that made us think otherwise. It was a simple atavistic, irrational response to something I wasn’t consciously aware of. I really, really didn’t want to touch Midget Pilot.

  What do you do when you don’t want to do something? You ask someone else!

  “Jayashri? Baj? Could I get you both to come over here for a minute?”

  They arrived with all the excitement one might expect from a mad scientist and his charming bride. Baj rambled on in Hindi, interspersing it with words that sounded like technical gibberish in English. Jayashri’s response to the sight that greeted them was much closer to my own.

  “They did not do this to a child. Francis, please tell me that those beasts did not strap a child into their flying saucer. You must tell me I am not seeing this.”

  I felt her fingers digging into my shoulder, and I truly wished I had something else to tell her that conflicted with the truth of her eyes. “I can only tell you that it looks that way to me.” In lieu of eloquence, I just told her the truth. “I couldn’t touch the body and I hoped that you guys would have the clinical det
achment to,” all I could really add was a flurry of non-specific hand-waving, “have a closer look.”

  Bajali moved before either of us could say or do anything else. His hands found the straps that held the body in place and he tore them away with the strength that only technology could lend to him. The little body rocked with the violence of being released so abruptly and pulled away from the shattered acceleration couch just far enough for me to see something more gruesome than I’d imagined. Hearing Jaya’s sharp intake of breath behind me, I could tell that I wasn’t alone.

  The little body wasn’t merely strapped in. Two metal shunts, each one as thick as my thumb were plugged into Midget Pilot’s back, and the jostling pulled him loose for an instant before he subsided back onto them again. That was bad, but the blue fluid that had dribbled down from those holes struck me as being just a smidge more awful.

  On top of whatever else they’d done to this little person, they’d been pumping his little body full of the blue shit from inside the seat he’d been strapped into… or worse, they’d replaced his blood with it and had been circulating it into and out of the awful workings of this UFO. Regardless, I couldn’t take any more and, despite all the things I’d seen and done over the previous two years as a freelance zombie remover, I staggered to my feet and got as far away from the evidence as I could before I threw my guts up all over the ground. The dry heaves were the worst I can remember.

  I raised my eyes from the mess on the ground in front of me, and saw Omura backing away from the zombie that he’d been questioning. He was still tied up, but was struggling, and each effort pulled the paracord tighter. Every few seconds he’d flex and his face would turn funny colors and then he’d stop and try something else.

  From what little I knew about the art of Hojojitsu, there were two major ways to go about keeping your captive from getting away. The first was tying up your high-rank Samurai captives in ways that were both artful and functionally inescapable. The second was more about interesting and decorative ways to tie up criminals so that their struggles would either pull the knots tighter, increasing discomfort, or strangle them outright. To my eye, it looked like Omura was using the latter of the two methodologies, and our captive was heading toward killing himself for our benefit.

  In retrospect, I guess our zombie buddy was reacting to whatever Baj and Jaya were doing behind me. I didn’t turn around to see, because his flailing was so impressive. He’d also started chanting.

  “Sumira. Sumira. Sumira.” Each time he said the word, he pulled at the cords, strangling himself while he flopped around. He didn’t stop. He just got louder, and louder, and thrashed that much harder.

  Shoei had backed up beside where I was kneeling on the ground, and he’d un-holstered his sidearm. Me? I stayed exactly where I was.

  “SUMIRA! You can’t have our Sumira!” He convulsed on the asphalt, screaming it at the top of his lungs between strangling the hell out of himself with the cord that kept him bound. “SUMIRA IS OURS!”

  I heard a nasty, wet noise behind me, and I spared a glance. Jayashri had Midget Pilot in her arms and was lifting it off the tubes and wrecked seat. Blue goo trickled down from between her fingers.

  The zombie’s screaming turned into a high, keening noise, and I snapped my head back around. With an insane heave, our captive stretched himself out in the cord much further than the ties had been designed to allow. It decapitated him as it shredded into thousands of tiny strands, accompanied by a memorable ripping noise.

  Blood oozed from the stump of his neck and the head rested where it landed, in the middle of my vomit puddle. I was far too stunned to speak, and not keen on getting any of the barf decorating my face back in my mouth.

  “Fuck.” Omura spoke for both of us.

  My Adam’s apple bobbed like a broken floater in the toilet tank before I could manage to say anything useful. “I, uh,” I said, wiping the cold sweat off my forehead, unsurprised that my hand came back streaky and pink, “don’t suppose you got anything interesting out of him before he… committed suicide?”

  “Not too much. He did tell me that the soldiers’ bodies are piled up inside the tractor trailer, but other than that it was mostly listening to a tirade of verbal abuse.”

  “Did he hurt your feelings?” I asked that specifically to goad him because I needed something to focus on other than the head that was perched in my chunder, staring back at me with horrible grimace and distended eyeballs hideously intact.

  Omura didn’t answer the question, but when I looked up at him, he was staring down at me with an unreadable expression on his face. Then he slapped me upside my head with a derisive snort and walked over to the Sharmas, who were still holding Sumira the Midget Pilot. Thank Heavens for small favors: the body had stopped dripping blue shit.

  Having successfully ruptured the bubble of fascination around the head in front of me, I stood up and rambled over to the trio, plus corpse. The expressions on their faces slipped into universal expressions of horror.

  “This body is still warm.” Jaya’s voice was flat, like the Mojave after a nuclear weapons test. “Bajali, can you find a way get this helmet off?”

  He obliged her by fiddling around under the back of the black, insectile headgear. With a faint “sklik” noise, the helmet separated in two and dropped into his hands. We all got a look at Sumira together.

  Assuming that Sumira was female I’ll refer to it using feminine pronouns, if only to keep myself on some illusion of solid footing.

  Her skin was a sandy, Creamsicle orange. She had a very tiny mouth, slit nostrils at the base of a very narrow nose, and black almond-shaped eyes. She didn’t have a single hair on her skull, which was narrow and just slightly too long. Looking down at that face, it was easy to see that whatever this child was, human was not it.

  We all had some kind of reaction to that realization, because Baj, Omura and I all took about three steps backward. Jayashri hissed and held the corpse as far away from her body as she was able to. I’m actually quite pleased that I moved away as quickly as I did, because little Sumira wasn’t quite dead.

  Her black, iris-less eyes bulged, and her tiny mouth unhinged like the maw of a snake, revealing teeth that any carnivore would be proud to have as factory installed equipment. She took a breath, let loose a trilling shriek that made our ears bleed. Jaya added a muted wail to the sonic barrage, dropped the body and literally climbed up onto her husband’s shoulders.

  Staring down at the horrible little thing, I noticed something that made me almost lose bladder control. Sumira was staring right back at me.

  “Traitor,” was the sound of her final breath as it left her body, pointed straight at my heart.

  Chapter 17

  We didn’t have time to process the final word out of Sumira’s mouth. Two events occurred almost simultaneously around our little group. Our reinforcements arrived, and the trailer doors, across the road from us, exploded outward from the press of the bodies inside. Unfortunately, the bodies were moving.

  I found myself staring at everything like a complete lunatic. There were two helicopters in the sky, and black-clad soldiers were rappelling down to the ground. Our “boys.”

  Across the way, a whole gaggle of shambling dead people were bumping into one another, trying to sort out the proper sequences of steps that would allow them to attack us. I’d never seen incompletely reconstructed zombies before. After fighting the new and improved Undead Forces of Evil, these guys seemed almost pitiful.

  It became apparent, however, once they got their footing, that my original estimate of “pitiful” was spoken too soon. The fuckers were fast and aggressive as all Hell. One of our new reinforcements bought the farm as soon as his feet touched the ground; a pack of them surrounded him and bit him out of recognizable shape. Listening to the screams of some poor soldier that didn’t need to die pissed me off. I shook myself out of my catatonia, snarled, and waded into the fray without even paying attention to drawing a weapon.

&nb
sp; I had become very comfortable with getting my hands dirty.

  “Outta the way!” I pulled two of the newcomers aside as they were raising their weapons and they looked at me with eyes and faces that were invisible behind full goggles and vented black plastic shields. “Don’t worry, guys, I’m sure there’s enough for everyone.”

  I decided to use a different tactic than I normally preferred. The game I settled on was this: one fist, one zombie. My two former enlisted opponents got to meet my hands in a very up close and personal fashion.

  On my left side, my hand crashed through his teeth and jaw, penetrating his face like the penis of an angry (and gigantic) lover. I didn’t stop there; I just let the punch continue right out the back of the poor bastard’s neck. Not a gentle way to sever a head, to be sure, but it certainly did the job. On the right, my swing crushed the front of that opponent’s skull, dropping him like a sack of soggy oatmeal. I finished that one off with a solid stomp, completing the job of destroying the brain.

  There are moments in the madness of wholesale mayhem, as I was learning, when there is nothing in your mind but the progression from one enemy to the other. I never heard the gunfire around me, and I certainly didn’t notice the helicopters departing, much like I hadn’t really been aware that they’d arrived. I know that if I’d wanted to be aware of the passage of time, I could have been through the marvels of technology that inhabited my brain, but none of those things mattered to me. I was in a very pure, and it disturbs me to call it that, state of mind.

  Kill or be killed.

  I didn’t have the time or the inclination to worry myself with bigger moral issues, or the dance of exquisite philosophical debate. I moved, committing atrocity after atrocity in the name of staying alive. It was the clearest, most peaceful thing that I’d ever done in my life.

  When the murdering was finished, I stood there, looking around at the bodies on the ground. We had only lost the one, and someone had been forward-thinking enough to take his head. It was sitting on top of his chest, still encased by the helmet and face protectors. The ground around me was covered in effluvia and offal. I wasn’t even breathing hard or sweating from the effort of turning my immediate vicinity into an abattoir. One thing was pretty clear. If the world ever got up and running again, I would need a really, really good therapist.