Blood Soaked and Contagious (31 page)

He came through the door, blushing, and looking somewhat strained around the edges.

“Sis, I’ve known you since you were born, and there is not one bit of strange shit I would put past you, if you put your mind to it. Hell, it was bad enough to know you two had been all naked in that tub!”

“Shawn, you’ve got a fuckin’ dirty mind. No wonder Mama beat you so often,” she said. Her voice was not at all congruent with her actions, because you don’t reach out and hug someone that hard when it sounds like you’d prefer to see them kicked to death by drag queens.

Regardless, it was a really warm thing to watch, and I wanted to add my own squirt of amity to the proceedings, but I held myself in check. They broke the embrace, and she elbowed me aside so she could walk her brother down to see the mortar and grenade launcher. Family bonding over military ordinance—I wondered if that qualified as an American value.

“I’m going to change my shirt while you guys are poking around in my drawers.” I set about trying to find another shirt, woefully consigning my favorite one to the Sack of Useful Rags.

“Frank.”

I turned around, said “Shawn,” and waggled my eyebrows.

“Your back has healed and there aren’t even any scars.” In less than a second, he’d thrown Charlie behind him, and his sidearm had cleared the holster with the barrel pointed right between my eyes. “What the Hell are you?”

Oh. Shit.

“Shawn, I’m Frank,” I told him, raising my hands and pitching my voice as carefully as I could. “We were going to tell people about this at the meeting... ”

“What the fuck are you?” He cut me clean off.

“Bajali sent us a nanotechnology early Christmas present with the zombie that blew up this morning. It was Mister Yan, all right? Now put the gun down. I don’t know if I’d survive a bullet to the face.”

“Mister Yan? Nanotechnology? How incredibly stupid do you think I am?”

“Brother, put the gun down. Frank is not lying. I was here when Mister Yan showed up.” Charlie was using a voice much like mine, the sort of tone you’d use to talk to an upset child.

“Charlie, you keep your wide ass out of this. This fucker is going to answer my question, or I’ll end him right now.” Shawn was edging closer to yelling, and that did not seem like a good thing.

“Shawn James Cooper, you will put that gun down right now, or I will,” I heard her pull the hammer back on one of her revolvers, “put a slug through you.”

“Charlie,” he escalated to full yelling, “I will not! You aren’t going to shoot your own brother. You fucking will not do such a thing! Now, shut the Hell up until this shit is settled!”

I kept very quiet. It seemed like a smart way to approach this
awkward situation
. Ho, ho! I am so droll.

“You’re right, I probably wouldn’t shoot you.” She dropped the calm voice and allowed herself to sound as distressed as she felt. “Brother, I love you so much, but if you kill the man I’m falling in love with before you hear us out, I will never speak to you again and I will leave our family forever.”

Falling in love? Me? Charlie? Cherubs started to appear at the edge of my field of vision, and I wanted to get down to a serious jam session of harp plucking.

Important note: Do not let the flights of angels appear until
after
the close-to-murderous brother has chilled out. The harp music will only confuse him and make him angry.

My perturbed friend looked like someone had just shoved a live eel in his boxers, but his gun lowered. I was fine with anyone having an eel in his shorts, rather than be occupied with pointing a weapon between my eyes.

“Because you’re my sister, I’ll give you two minutes to explain before I put a hole through its head. I don’t care if you’re falling in love with
it
or not.”

“Shawn, Frank’s not an
it
and neither am I.” She walked around him, effectively blocking a shot at me by standing between us. “Bajali sent Mister Yan to tell us Hightower is going to try and wipe us out in a few days. We found out Mister Yan didn’t just bring information. Frank’s body started to reject all the sutures this morning after breakfast with Jayashri.”

He did not look like he believed a word she was saying.

Charlie went on, “Mister Yan went to see Jaya before he came here. He left her with a bundle of nanotechnology, and because I was here watching over Frank when he came over I got them too.”

Having your friend put the barrel of his gun in the middle of your future main squeeze’s chest is not something for which many people are prepared. I certainly wasn’t. There weren’t many choices available that didn’t involve someone dying; in this case, it was likely to be Shawn. Charlie and I would probably survive, although I was doubtful about living through a bullet to the head. Nanotechnology rebuilding brain tissue did not seem like a reasonable thing to expect.

“Why have you pointed a loaded gun at me?” Charlie asked him that question, and I couldn’t tell whether or not there were tears running down her face, but it certainly sounded like there ought to be.

“Because I don’t know if you’re my sister anymore.”

“Yeah, I’m your sister and I always will be. I’m just a little more than that right now, and we’ve all got a lot to lose if we don’t get this right. I need you to see something, and it is going to freak you the Hell out.”

“What is it?” my mountainous friend asked, looking like someone told him they were about to eat their own vomit with a spoon.

“I’m going to ask Frank to hand me a sharp knife, and then I’m going to show you something a zombie can’t do. I am not going to cut you or stab you. Can you watch before you decide you need to kill me or Frank?”

Shawn nodded in a vague sort of way, Charlie turned to me and nodded, and I tracked down a knife. For whatever reason, things were incredibly quiet and tense. Likely, it was the fabled calm before the storm, because the opportunity for a tornado of tragedy seemed to be in the forecast if things went the wrong way.

It only took me a minute to put my hands on a knife, a sharp lockback folding knife that had been sitting on my desk. I had some idea of what she was planning to do, and I probably would have done something similar if she hadn’t put herself between me and her brother.

I had a mini-moment of Alternate Universe in which life was normal, and I saw how dramatic a family holiday dinner with these people could be. It was enough to give anyone pause.

The knife I’d handed to Charlie had a 3.5-inch blade. She held out her left arm and plunged the blade in, up to the handle.

“Ow! Holy Mother of God,” she screamed it out and proceeded to hop around with her left arm out and her right hand over her eyes. “Jesus! Fuck this bad-ass heroine bullshit! No lube! Ouch! Fuck! Fuck!”

There wasn’t much blood because she didn’t pull the blade out. I think it was bad enough, however, considering Shawn’s delightful Aryan skin tone had gone white as a sheet with tints of green. This isn’t to say that I was at all thrilled with the tableau, because I wasn’t.

“God! Shawn, pull out my Dramatic Statement! Right now!”

He was on automaton mode, because he probably would have complained about it any other time. Instead, he reached over, grabbed the handle, and pulled it straight out. I watched his eyes change focus from Charlie to the knife in his hand. Half the blade was eaten away, and there was not a single drop of blood on it.

On one level, it was gruesome and disturbing as Hell, and on another, it was sickeningly funny. Shawn’s eyes got huge. It was like looking at a hairy china plate with two green-brown spots on it.

I really, really hoped that he wouldn’t spew all over my floor.

“Earth to Shawn!” Charlie waved at him from less than four feet away and managed to catch his attention. “Look at my arm. Stop looking at the knife and look at my arm. Arm. Here.”

It took him a minute, but he looked. There wasn’t a drop of blood or anything to be seen other than smooth skin. The hairy china plate of his face developed a small jaw-hitting-the-floor problem.

“That’s the gift Bajali gave us. Frank healed, I can heal, and I bet Jaya can, too. I’m still your sister, and they’re still your friends. Now put the gun away and give me a hug and a kiss.”

With motion that would have been more typical of a remote control robot toy, Shawn put the gun back in the holster and his arms around his sister. She kissed him on the cheek with an odd look of concentration on her face. He relaxed a little bit and hugged her even harder.

They stepped back, smiled awkwardly, and I suddenly had a large country boy giving me a bear hug and patting me on the back hard enough to dislodge my lung on that side. Damn me for not paying better attention to my environment.

He finally let me go, looked at us both, and said, “I’m gonna go downstairs and puke. That okay with you guys?”

“Oh yeah, don’t let us hold you up! We’ll see you in a few minutes at the meeting,” Charlie said, patted him on the back, and led him gently over to the door. He went through, and she closed it behind him. After a long count of 30, she walked over to me and put her arms around my waist.

“Uh, hi there. What was that about falling in love with me?”

“Shush, Frank. I just didn’t want him to try and kill you. Seemed like the best thing I could say at the time.”

“No,” I retorted, poking the end of her upturned nose. “The best thing to say at the time would have been, ‘Don’t kill him, he’s your best friend,’ not tell him I’m the guy you’re falling in love with. You’re silly.”

“What? You didn’t like my solution to the problem?”

“No.” I was all serious. “I liked it very much and I want it to be real.”

“Oh. I see. Lucky for you, I’m just giving you shit about it.”

She kissed me like she meant it. It was the sort of lip-lock that turns boys into men, launches a thousand ships, burns topless towers, and makes being alive completely worth the pain and hard work.

When our tongues finished their Judo tournament with four out of five falls going to me, we took a moment to catch our breath. I am a shameful man, because I couldn’t stop watching her breathe, even with a bulletproof vest on. Some part of my brain wanted her dressed in an apron, with a plate full of warm cookies, a lewd expression on her face, and a long Saturday afternoon to enjoy that experience.

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure, baby,” the Southern Hotness replied.

“Ask for an inexpensive knife next time. Please?”

“Don’t worry your high and tight little head about it, Sugar Nuts. I am never, ever going to pull a stunt like that again. Never. Ever.” She was shaking her head and smiling ruefully. I don’t doubt that stabbing yourself like that has to be a seriously painful experience, and I certainly wasn’t going to be macho and try it myself.

“So! Race you to the meeting?”

She didn’t say a word, but she took off out the door and started down the steps. My macho took the form of jumping off the platform in front of my door, onto the floor below. It worked just fine, inhumanly so. For the moment, I shoved that to the back of my head and concentrated on the fact that I had won.

I got chased into the storeroom by a friendly, yet irate, blond woman.

Grandmother Yan was already there, setting out coffee mugs and jugs of cider and water, and I went directly over to her because I had made a promise. She saw me coming and smiled with such happiness and warmth that I nearly froze solid. Periodically, you get to see flashes of just how much you mean to someone else, or a clear view of precisely how they feel about you. That qualified as one of those moments and all I could do was hug her.

I leaned down to her ear, the left one, because the right one didn’t work quite as well as it used to work. “Grandmother, Chunhua, you know Mister Yan loved you very much. Don’t you?”

“Yes. I always know this. He come visit you?” Chunhua Yan, looked up into my face and must have seen what I didn’t say, because she simply nodded. “He was very ashamed to be zombie. I know he love me with all his heart.”

“How did you know?” I had to ask.

“Ay-yah! Young people know nothing about love!” She gave me the Grandmother Yan trademark pat on the cheek and went on. “You see shadow on you wall before sun comes up, is maybe two thing: you have dirty person in neighborhood, or you zombie husband looking in on you. No dirty people here look at old Chinese lady, so is zombie husband.”

All right. Her English was alternately good and bad, whenever she felt like it, but her brain was working just fine all the time. I couldn’t see any point in not going for full disclosure.

“He set off one of the bombs after he came to see me.”

“Ah. Not surprise for me. He was a good man, always.” I got another cheek pat. “You much like him, a good man. Maybe you find good woman now? Tattoo girl, not much on tattoo, but look like good choice to Grandmother Yan.”

“You are too wise for me, Grandmother.”

She covered her mouth and giggled at me.

“No. No. I too old for you. She look healthy, fun in sack, make you strong baby. You know, you never stop thinking, you get old, then people tell you, ‘Oh, you so wise. Grandmother.’ Make me laugh!”