Blood Soaked and Contagious (29 page)

“No, I didn’t think it would be either, but you seemed to know what you were doing.”

“Bleh.” I made faces as I got the bolus to actually go down my throat. “What did I miss with you two?”

She smiled a little and it brightened up the post-Buttons mood a little. “Jaya and I talked about a lot of things and passed around a couple of theories about how the little nano-dudes work. She thinks you can have some kind of control over how they work, because she and Baj had quite a few discussions about this sort of thing over the years.”

“Control would be nice. I’d hate to think I gave that bag of shit his own set of critters.”

“You probably didn’t. That was one of the things Jaya felt was likely to be controllable, or at least limited. Bajali didn’t want to make a nanotech virus that didn’t have some sort of discrimination about where it went or with whom it started a symbiotic relationship.” She held up a finger on each hand. “You’ve got two major possibilities. One, the nanotech spreads like wildfire. Two, either the nanos are targeted, or the person with whom they’ve set up shop has some sort of impact on how they move through a population.”

“Isn’t that three options?”

“No, ya goober. One is no control, and the other is some sort of control.”

“Charlie, that’s stretching it.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. What else is a guy to do? I reached over and grabbed it. She said, “Mmmp?!”

“Sorry. It looked so good that I wanted to keep it for my very own.” I let it go, and she smiled.

“Play your cards right, boy, and you never know what you might get to keep.”

I had to grin right back at her. At that moment, I didn’t want to think about nanotechnology or impending doom; all I wanted was her in my arms.

“Just let me know what I can do to stack the deck in my favor,” I told her.

“I will do that.”

“Damn. Why does romance have to happen when death is on the line?”

“Frank,” she gave me a penetrating look, “when you think you might die, you look for things that make you feel alive. It’s human behavior.”

“We’re not just ‘human behavior,’ Grandmother, are we?”

She reached out, cupped my unshaven cheek in her hand, smiled gently, and told me, “No. I think we’re more than that, or that we’re going to be more than that. We just have to keep ourselves alive long enough to see it for certain. That’s my plan, anyhow.”

“If I don’t pull this conversation back around to nanotechnology, I’m going to end up getting seriously romantic at you, and we probably don’t have time for it before the meeting.”

“Doesn’t it just fuck things right in the ass, when you’ve got stuff you want to do but there are plans you can’t change?”

“Yes. No lube at all,” I said, utterly frustrated that there was so much going on and I couldn’t find a reasonable stopping point to really dig into the feelings we seemed to share. “You were saying Jaya feels as though we might have some control over these little guys? Do we just talk to them or leave notes on the fridge?”

“Brat. She says they respond to damage, but we’d need to run actual experiments to see what else they respond to. Bajali had talked about linking them to the endocrine system for transmission between hosts, white blood cell count and T-cell response, and some other something about the body’s electrical system.”

“That part about us being hosts sounds really sinister.” Actually, the thought gave me chills. It sounded far too much like these little guys had minds of their own and I had nasty images of waking up some morning to find that I’d been given an overhaul while I slept.

“I said the exact same thing.”

“Why the endocrine system? Are we supposed to get some kind of boost of adrenaline and start spewing nano-pollen all over the place?” I waved my hands in the air and swayed back and forth, singing, badly, “Oh, aren’t I just a lovely daisy! Aren’t I just a lovely daisy! Sniff me! Oh, sniff me!”

She fell on the floor laughing, covered her mouth, and attempted not to make snorting noises when she tried to breathe between attacks of Ha Ha. I had to laugh along with her because her amusement was contagious. I made up my mind for the 20th time that, if anything happened to her, there would be a rubber room for me before or after my descent into bloody revenge.

We should have expected what happened next. You don’t stir up a hornet’s nest and not end up stung. That is one of the rules of nature that happens to apply to the human animal as well.

The explosion was muffled from where we were, but we heard it, and we knew it couldn’t be far away. Charlie got off the floor, and we snagged our weapons and flew down the stairs. By the time we got to the cashier’s counter in the middle of the store, there was another explosion somewhere closer that rattled my front windows.

We burst out the front door of the store into pandemonium. I could see the fire from where we stood and the shattered skeleton of Siddig and Miryam’s home just down the street. Jayashri was in the driveway with Yolanda and Flower, and there were three wounded people they were working on like mad. Jim and Darcy were trying to douse part of the fire with garden hoses.

I took off running.

I hoped I wouldn’t see what I thought I would, because if I did I would come unglued at someone. By the time I was about even with the corner of Shawn’s place, a large hand came out, grabbed me, and pulled me into the shadow of the garage.

Shawn used his other hand to snag his sister and pull her to the side as well.

“All right, we got three down,” he started in on the data with no preamble, and I was grateful for it. “Nate says it was a mortar, followed by a rocket-propelled grenade or small missile. That means we’ve got a straight line between them and us. They’ve got to be past the store on the other side of Route 29, or someplace with elevation to get over the buildings to hit inside our perimeter.”

“Shawn. Where’s my bag?”

“Where you left it the other day when you got here Charlie!”

She took off into the garage, leaving me with her brother.

“Anyone got a plan?”

“Nate says we either head out there and recon or wait until they lob something else in on us.”

Shawn’s timing was perfect. We heard the whistle and hit the ground. There was an explosion right in the middle of the road on the other side of the garage. If he hadn’t pulled us around the corner when he did, it would have been us being blown to Hell instead of asphalt. It occurred to me they’d actually been aiming for us, but probably stopped direct observation to correct their geometry.

Straight line. They were somewhere over beyond my store, and as soon as I could get there, they’d be dead.

Charlie reappeared and was tricked out like Soldier of Fortune Magazine’s idea of a modern valkyrie. Two wakizashi-length swords across her back, Kevlar vest, MOLLE pouches full of clips, and some kind of compact submachine gun that I’d never seen before. Shawn was less than pleased, but I had no time to enjoy the family argument, so I took off back down the street towards our uninvited guests.

Nanotechnology makes you cocky. It also does other things you don’t expect, especially when you didn’t get the instruction manual with your first dose. I was getting used to the extra sensory range and data that they were handing me, because it was so damned useful.

I knew where the mortar crew was by the time I cleared the far corner of the hardware store. I had four targets. Two M-4 machine guns, four Beretta 9mm pistols, a mortar launcher, and a box with six more mortars in it. They were on the roof of the gas station on the other side of Route 29. Fine with me.

You hurt my people, I’ll take exception to that, and then I will make you pay to the best of my ability.

They were firing at me by the time I got to my side of Route 29. Concrete and asphalt chunks were flying everywhere. I was shot twice, in the upper right thigh and two inches beneath my right clavicle. The bullets went clean through, and I did not even slow down.

Not only did I not slow down, I got the strangest urge to jump up to the top of the gas station, as if I could take a leap of about 12 feet upward. Snarling, half unhinged from the pain and the rage, I went ahead and jumped.

Nanotechnology will surprise you when you don’t have a drop-down menu of options.

I landed in front of the nearest zombie, tore the machine gun out of his hands, reversed it, and shoved the barrel through his open mouth. I noted that the barrel continued all the way through the top of his helmet. He collapsed like a 200-lb bag of rice, bringing the barrel of the gun into a beautiful position to stitch Mortar Zombie from crown to crotch with bullets and flying brain bits.

Zombie 3 closed the distance with his 9mm and popped me twice in the abdomen from close range. I gave him my elbow to the bridge of his nose and tried not to collapse from the pain. The remaining undead soldier decided to pretend he was in a movie and put the barrel of his machine gun to my forehead. I wondered if he thought that threat would stop me.

Human beings have two hands for a reason. You can do something with one hand and do something entirely different with the other. I chose to grab the gun barrel and pull it off to the side of my head and pull the Man Scythe free with the other hand.

For Zombie 3, it probably looked like Zombie 4 was spinning me on the dance floor with the barrel of his gun while it was firing into the open air.

The blade clicked into position. I pivoted the barrel over my head as I spun into him. The move wasn’t for dancing or looking cool, but to use the momentum for the blade to do the dirty work.

I had expected to sever his spine, not cut him completely in half at the waist. Zombies scream a lot.

By the time I dropped my dance partner’s upper half to the top of the gas station, something very sharp and very fast took Number 3’s hands off at the wrists. The 9mm, still in a proper two-handed grip, hit the roof, followed very shortly thereafter by his head. Charlie stopped moving, a sword in each hand, and did a very fast, formal-looking motion that snapped the remaining blood off the blades.

“God. You’re hot!” It came out as more of a croak than my normal suave and debonair diction.

“You know it, Mister. Sorry I’m late. I needed to convince my bro that I could handle the prom without him.”

“Well, I must say, you are the belle of the ball and I’m entirely happy to see you. I do think I need to sit down now.”

“You hit?”

“Four. The first two don’t even look like they’re there. The last two were gut shots, and they really hurt. I think that I’m going to get the cramps any minute.” I flopped down, right on top of the body that I’d bisected. At that point, I was less concerned with the organs and gore than I was with whether or not my nano-buddies were going to be able to fix the latest damage.

My personal Angel of Mercy tore my favorite shirt right down the middle. I didn’t really have enough energy to complain about it, and the pain was getting to be quite distracting.

“Oh. Fuck.”

“Sorry. I think that’s out of the question right now.” It felt good to be just a little flip about the situation, even if it got me a seriously stern expression for the effort. “Hey, I’m just waiting for the boys to go ahead and do their thing. A little humor makes everything go faster.”

The Pearl of my Delight said unto me, “Oh, they’ve started working all right. I think I need to go throw up over the side of the building. Be right back.” She did exactly what she said she needed to do. It sounded horrible from where I was reclining.

“Why, what’s going on?” I tried to sit up and get a better look, but I couldn’t. Whole muscle groups were not paying attention to my brain, and I couldn’t help but feel as though that didn’t bode very well at all. “What are the little bastards doing, and why can’t I sit up?”

Charlie walked back over and looked down into my face, and it was utterly clear to me that she was making an effort to not look back down at whatever had made her toss her cookies.

“I think that the nanos are scavenging,” she said, looking a little green under the chin. With her complexion, it was easy to see the difference. “And,” a look of revulsion passed across that lovely face, followed by a full-body shiver, “they’re carting it back to where you’ve been shot.”

“Oh.” There wasn’t a whole lot I could say to that, but there were still unanswered questions that I needed to ask. “What, pray tell, are they scavenging?”

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard before she spoke. “The body that you’re lying on top of.”

“All right. Which parts?” I used to watch an anime called “Hitman Reborn.” There was a character in it, a hitman no less, named Lambo. He was a 5-year-old little boy who looked like he was the product of crossbreeding with a cow. His trademark line was, “Must. Keep. Calm.” I call it my Lambo Mantra, and I was making great use of it.

“Frank, if I tell you, I’m going to need to run to the side of the building again.”

“Charlie, I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t really freaked out by this myself. If they’re grabbing bits that have viral material, I’m going to be fucked sideways. I need to know what they’re doing, and I can’t get up to see for myself.”

“Oh God. I’ll try.” There was a definite air of girding her loins before she continued, in a very controlled monotone, “There is a gray stream of fluid flowing from the lower hole in your abdomen into the... subject’s ear. There is a second stream of pinkish-gray material flowing from the subject’s nostril, back up your body, and into the hole.”