Blood Soaked and Contagious (30 page)

Must. Keep. Calm.

“What did you say, Frank?”

“Oh. Sorry. That was my out-loud voice. It sounds like they went for brains, not other organs. I might not come out of this with the virus on top of needing psychotherapy for the rest of my life.” I thought about it again for a moment. “I bet my mother never expected I’d be happy to have gray matter on the menu. Mmmm. Brains!”

There was a wet burping noise, then she clapped both hands over her mouth and hurried over to the side of the building. If I had the opportunity, I would have liked to join her, because I was feeling incredibly nauseous about it all. What I didn’t expect was a loud verbal complaint from over the side of the building, two gunshots, and Charlie flying backwards onto the roof beside me.

She hit with an explosive exhale and sprang back up into a crouch. After a quick patdown she determined that her vest had caught the bullets. She snarled down in her throat, and I will admit to a moment of genuine pity for whoever had shot at her. I got to watch her unsheathe both of her swords, stand back up, and then jump off the side of the building.

I heard disjointed curses and a few heartfelt screams of pain very shortly after she hit the ground. They probably didn’t notice that she was wearing a vest or expect a snarling hottie to fall from the sky with a sword in each hand. What a unique way to die!

“What did you catch down there, my Luscious Partner in Mayhem?”

Laughter. “Two more. They’re not going to be a problem now.”

“Did anybody go after the dudes with the rocket-propelled grenades?”

There was a pause before she replied. “I think I just got them.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because one of them had it strapped to his back, you goober!”

A positive gain in our group weapons stash, but the cost was mighty high.

“Do me a favor, I need to know what’s going on. Is Siddig’s house still on fire?”

“Looks like it,” she yelled back, “but not fully involved.”

“Who were they working on in the driveway?”

She didn’t answer.

I didn’t ask a second time because I was fairly sure what the answer was, and there was not a single thing I could do about it one way or another. Nanotechnology might let me jump around, heal wounds, and be able to tell you how close an enemy is, but it was not a time machine. Admitting to myself that I was powerless to do anything about the events unfolding in front of me was agony.

You’re supposed to protect people you love and care about. People who love you are supposed to do the same. People you care about aren’t supposed to die horrible deaths. Somewhere, sometime during my life, I started to believe those things and never really managed to grow into a more pragmatic and adult view of life. Consequently, powerlessness and loss didn’t sit well with me at all.

All I could do was wait until I could move again.

“Charlie?” I had to shout because I had no idea where she was. The nano-buddies were so occupied that they weren’t feeding me data. At least, I assumed that was the deal.

“Yes?” She sounded like she hadn’t moved very far at all.

“You don’t have to stick around. You could head back and I’ll meet you when my little friends are finished.”

“No. I’m not leaving you.”

My heart thudded extra hard. Had the situation been different I would probably have started professing my undying affection right then and there, but it was hampered by the grayish-pink stream of goo that was moving into my body. As things stood, I was starting to feel like I’d be able to move in the not-too-distant future.

In the relative quiet of the gas station rooftop abattoir I started thinking about the likelihood that Hightower was not though with us for the day. A large force that could overwhelm us made some sense, but so did small guerrilla attacks like this one. We could be whittled down over the course of a few days, with a larger mop-up operation to follow.

There was a certain “bonus” to small attacks, from an opponent’s point of view, and that was how demoralizing repetitive loss of life would be for our community. I didn’t know if I would go back to the neighborhood to find we’d lost someone, or a few someones. That was frightening to contemplate, even if I was fairly sure it would be the case.

Siddig’s home had been hit in the late afternoon. They were good Muslims and prayed five times a day in their living room. That room faced the road. There were three people being triaged in the driveway. It was very easy to see what there was to be afraid of, and how badly it would hurt to be right.

I wondered whether this might not have happened if Buttons hadn’t decided to show off. I needed someone or something I could vent at, and he was a splendid target. Whether I was right or wrong about the railgun precipitating the attack, it was something I could hang my frustration and rage on. I could apologize later, if any of us were alive to bother with it.

Sometimes you have to give yourself permission to sink into darker emotions.

“Charlie,” I shouted.

“Yes?”

“Would you hop up here? I think I’m almost able to move, and I want to get back across the street before anything else can happen.” I shifted around a little but couldn’t sit up yet. The muscle wall of my abdomen probably wasn’t 100 percent finished being rebuilt with zombie brains. I wish I hadn’t thought that.

Between one thought and another, my valkyrie landed on the roof and walked over to where I was wriggling uselessly.

“Need a hand?” With a smile, she offered me hers and I took it.

“Easy up, now. Don’t strain anything.” She tugged, and I came up on my feet. A bit wobbly, but stable.

“Er, that’s a little uncomfortable, but at least I’m on my feet.” I was able to look down and didn’t appear to be trailing a tail of nano-technological goo. Unconsciously, my hands found the areas that should have had scars or bullet holes, but were met with tender new skin instead. Even the exit wounds were sealed over.

“I’m going to strip the weapons from these bodies. Will you be okay just standing there for a few minutes?”

“Yeah, I think so.” I turned toward her and said what I felt, “Thank you for staying with me.”

That led to a lifetime first for me. Up until that point, I had never been kissed on the roof of a garage with my feet in a pile of entrails. It was so passionate I forgot entirely about everything in my head and at my feet, just so I could enjoy the pure physical delight of that moment. When we pulled away from one another, we were both grinning like fools with flushed cheeks and giddy laughter. The only thing that spoiled the moment was Charlie looking down at her feet, noticing what she was stepping in.

“Aw, man. That’s just nasty shit.”

“It might be. That’s half a bladder right there.”

Standing right in front of me, she screwed up her face into a combination of Buddha with gas pains and an angry Maori. It was equal parts endearing and horrible. I guess she was at a loss for words and let her fingers do the talking by punching me in the shoulder. I said, “Ow,” and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I deserved it. Probably true.

After a few minutes, she’d collected all the arms and ammo, and we’d hopped back down to ground level. I picked up the other stack of goodies, and we walked back across the street.

I could see Siddig’s house from the sidewalk, and the fire had been reduced to smoldering wood. The bodies in the driveway were gone, and I had no clue what that meant or didn’t mean. It didn’t seem as though we’d been gone long enough for things to resolve this much.

“How long were you waiting for me before I asked you to come up and help me stand?”

“According to my little friends, I was waiting for one hour, forty-three minutes, and sixteen seconds.”

“That’s a lot longer than it felt. Were you watching things over here at all?”

“Yes.”

“They got the fire under control, I see.”

“They did,” she told me, nodding gently.

“What happened to everyone in the driveway?” I had to know.

“Jaya and everyone else stopped working on the... victims... before I got Shawn to let me go.”

Having a feeling that something bad has happened is no preparation for being told, directly, that what you were worried about is exactly what happened. It felt like my heart fell into my stomach, and it was filled with ice cubes.

“Siddig, Miryam, and their son?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry, Frank.”

Must. Keep. Calm.

“Let’s drop this stuff off in the store before we go anywhere else.”

Staying calm is one of those things that, in certain situations, is much easier said than done. Walking into the store, I tried to keep my mind as blank as possible, which is another one of the litany of activities that is nearly impossible when your heart is in your throat.

While the store was my place, it was also a reliquary of every memory I had made in it. It contained them and defined them in a way that reminded me of what cathedrals, with all their art and imagery, did for the lives of the people who worshiped in them. Another comparison would be what someone’s family home might mean for them.

I didn’t have a family home that gave me those things. All I ever wanted was to get away from those places where we had lived, mostly because they had so little meaning. In that store, essentially where I’d taken up suburban squatting, I had found the feeling of home that I’d wandered around trying to find. I also understood the price of “home” for the first time.

The place that I felt was my home now had more memories of senseless loss attached to it.

Months ago, when the zombies came for Mister Yan and we’d lost all those people, I learned that those eight people didn’t mean to me what Siddig and his family meant to me. Those eight people were fighting in a war for our community when they were killed and were part of a different faction in the neighborhood to begin with. I wasn’t at all close to them, and they never made any effort to hold a hand out to me.

I’d bounced Siddig Junior on my knee. There were not a few summer nights when we had all been sprawled on their lawn, listening to Miryam sing. I don’t think any of us spoke a lick of Arabic or Farsi, but it didn’t matter. Siddig, himself, came from a long line of drummers and would often accompany his wife’s gorgeous singing. I cared about these people.

Now. Memories.

Charlie nudged me forward. I didn’t realize I’d been standing dead still in the middle of the store, but I had been. I made some sort of affirmative noise at her, and we kept moving towards the stairs in the back. Somehow, she must have realized I don’t leave weapons out where any of the kids could get at them, because she was taking the lead. I just followed her and was grateful for it.

My room used to be the manager’s office, and it stretched across the back of the store, one floor above the shop itself. Desk, chair, sleeping stuff, and lots and lots of shelves. I lived according to an unwritten rule: If you’re a trader, you’re also a hoarder. My shelves looked that way, but I could always find an open one to start a new category of stuff.

Handguns in the dresser, slides racked, and any bullets “in the pipe” removed before storage. The clips are in a separate drawer with other ammunition, sorted by type of firearm. The mortars and mortar launcher went on a shelf of their own. The new grenade/rocket launcher thing was a tad long for a shelf, so we stowed it in the corner between sets of shelves.

The meeting would be happening soon, and there would be many decisions made that would alter the course of our lives. Worse come to worst, it could mean the ends of lives, not the preservation. Buttons doing his thing had cost us lives and choices, and whether or not it was reasonable of me or even if it was his fault in the first place, I wanted to flay him alive.

More than that, I really hoped that my moment of Sturm und Drang earlier in the day had not left him with a batch of nanotech cooties. It would be a waste to have someone that slimy, useful or not, get a prize for being a creeping example of intestinal effluvia. All I’d be able to do would be to flay him, feed his cooties a live zombie, rinse, and repeat until my rage went away.

My Partner in Completely Justified Reprisal and I turned back toward the door of my space at the same time. Male, at the foot of the stairs, armed, and not a member of the undead minority.

“Frank? Charlie? Any of you people up there?” Shawn, thank goodness. Had it been Buttons, I probably would have blown my own door off the hinges just to jump on him from the top of the stairs. It saved my door and a whole raft of mess.

“Yeah, we’re up here,” Charlie yelled.

“Everybody will be here for the meeting in about half an hour. Y’all good with that?”

“Yeah. We’ll be fine. Come on up and see the new stuff.”

The stairs creaked a little bit as he came up. The Shawn is not a tiny man, and even if he didn’t have a little extra weight he still would have been a miniature giant. This is to say nothing of the muscles, of which there were many.

“I’m going to open the door. Everybody decent?”

“Knocker, the man wouldn’t have invited you up here if we were getting busy!” There’s no love like family love, and no annoyance like being cheesed-off at a sibling. I had lived through my share of that.