Blood Soaked and Contagious (36 page)

“Just put me back down. Okay?”

“No! Tell me why! Why aren’t you even a little bit upset?” He was getting substantially shriller as he wound himself up. Charlie moved in from the side and forcibly turned his head to face her.

“Shawn, put Frank down. Put him down. Freaking out is not going to help anyone or get anything done.” Her voice must have had redneck soothing properties, because he lowered me back down to the nice cold pavement and let my shirt go. “That’s it, bro. Now, what are you so upset about?”

“He
ate
their brains!”

“Right. I got that part. I was watching it, just like you were.”

My lumbering friend was pacing in such short lengths that he was almost walking in circles. I had seen my share of people coming unglued before, and it had begun to appear that a certain mini-giant of a Country Boy would be joining that category of my life experiences. The symptoms were classic, including the obsessive wringing of his hair.

Strange thoughts of aprons and chocolate chip cookies danced at the corners of my consciousness, but did not stick around for me to ask what they were doing there. About that time, it occurred to me I was also not thinking very clearly and I probably should investigate that issue before too terribly long.

The soon-to-flip out friend had a significant point about one thing, and I wasn’t loathe to admit it as much as I was numb. I had attacked and killed (and consumed the brains of) five members of the crew sent to harass us. That was an incredibly wild and uncivilized thing to do, and I strongly doubted anyone would debate that issue with me. Sparing the issue of living person versus zombie, I had committed a number of acts of cannibalism.

The idea of eating human flesh is repugnant to me, and I would rationally believe there would be significant emotional backlash after an incident like this. Yet, there I was, flat on the asphalt, not really giving two squirrel shits about anything in particular. Indeed, I was quite relaxed.

“Jayashri?”

“Yes, Frank,” she said and knelt down by my side. “How are you?”

“Shawn has a point and I want to run it by you before I get twisted up into knots about it.” She nodded at me, so I continued. “After losing my mind and going cannibal, I feel as though I should be morally outraged and disgusted at my own behavior. I’m concerned because I feel too calm about all of this, when I really should be pinching loaves like Shawn is right now.”

A thoughtful look crossed her face, and she asked me, “Did you experience any moral issues when your nanotech went scavenging earlier today?”

“No, come to think of it. I didn’t even bat an eye.”

She looked up at Shawn and Charlie, who were still doing the Dance of Sibling Pacification, and she said, “I think you both should listen to what I am about to say.” They went to their neutral corners and paid attention. “We know that the machines are designed to optimize human beings for survival and combat situations. That much is certainly clear, even if we were making assumptions from our observations. It would make sense, then, if they also had some control of, or effect on, our neurochemistry.”

We nodded. What else could we do?

“Frank is not experiencing a moral crisis,” Jaya continued, “because having a moral crisis in the middle of a combat situation is fatal. His package of nanotechnology set out to rebuild him as quickly as possible and to make the psychological impact of what was necessary as gentle as possible. In short, Frank is high.”

It made plenty of sense to me and made me feel much better about the hallucinations of a few moments before. Shawn seemed calmer, and Charlie never looked ruffled to begin with. All seemed to be right in my world, except for a single niggling issue in the back of my head.

My brother had made an appearance. Less than 30 minutes later, we were attacked, and I was singled out to be subdued. Had I not been full of the Milk of Modern Technology I would have either been captured alive, albeit wounded, or killed outright. It looked very much like my dear Stewart had a plan to make things much more personal for me and was not at all bluffing about turning me into his fuck cow.

I pushed Jaya out of the way, rolled over, and threw up onto the pavement.

“Now! See that? That’s what you’re supposed to do when you find out you’ve turned into a fucking cannibal!” I didn’t need to see Shawn’s finger pointing at me or the air of righteous triumph surrounding him like a laurel wreath on any given Caesar; I knew, even if I didn’t see.

When I finished heaving my guts out, I rolled back over, and made a good effort at standing up. I walked right up to Shawn, brains and bile dripping down my chin, and explained matters to him.

“My brother is one of Hightower’s ninja. He popped by for a visit as I was walking over to Flower’s place.” I got as close to Shawn as I could, so he could see and smell my disgust. “He had heard I was here and wanted to come tell me that he would be sure to capture me so I could be his personal cow and glory hole.”

I knew he’d broken out into a cold sweat. My little critters made sure I knew his body temperature, pulse rate, pupil contraction and expansion, and that he smelled afraid.

“I understand my turn toward Long Pig is disturbing to you. At some point,” I was trying to explain, but I think it was coming across more as verbal intimidation, “I may be very upset I attacked those poor zombies who were attacking us. Or, maybe I will never be bothered by it. What I can tell you is I would rather eat
you
,” I told him, as I emphasized by poking him in the chest, “than be a snack cake and hole for my younger brother to amuse himself with.”

Shawn looked away. I think I managed to make the point.

“Dude,” he whispered, “that’s harsh.”

“What? Eating you or being dinner and a show for my brother?”

“C’mon, he’s family. You’ve heard of kissing cousins, right?”

I was agog. Aghast. Abhorred. Absolutely stunned. I just stood there and stammered at him until I looked into his eyes and noticed that they had smile crinkles around them while the rest of his face was utterly blank. Omura had joined us during my soliloquy on cannibalism, and he joined Charlie, Jayashri, and Shawn in snickering at me.

“Shawn?”

“Yes, Frank?”

“That was a horrible way to break the tension. Really disgusting.” I meant every word.

“You’re really not on an even keel, are you? You haven’t even threatened to impregnate my sister with your devil wrigglers yet. I feel... I feel slighted.”

I reached up, pinched his cheeks like your favorite Auntie would, and explained thusly, “Don’t worry, that’s still the plan. We just haven’t had time to get buck naked and bang the stuffing out of each other yet.”

“I beg your pardon!” Charlie sounded a tad incensed. “We have had a number of opportunities to summon the devil wrigglers over the past couple of days, Mister.
You
,” she gave me a very stern finger pointing, “have evaded every one of them. Damned ‘gentleman’! What a pain in my ass!”

Omura looked back and forth at all of us like a spectator at a tennis match, completely befuddled by all of it. “People, I realize I’m new here, but this seems like an incredibly strange conversation to be having in the aftermath of a zombie attack and cannibalistic healing, and while standing in the middle of the road surrounded by corpses. At night.”

Jayashri put a companionable arm around his shoulder, smiled in her winning way, and said, “They are always like this when something awful happens. I do not understand it either, but I choose to see it as a mark of being touched by the Gods.”

“Touched by the Gods? Like geniuses and artists?” Omura looked like he was starting to get a solid grip on things.

“No, like the insane. They are lovable, but quite mad. You understand?”

“Oh.” The poor guy deflated like a balloon with a slow leak.

“Now, cheer up!” Jayashri jollied him along. “Let us all make our neighborhood a cleaner place and drag these bodies to the street. Hm?”

For a moment, I didn’t feel bad about being a madman. I saw I was not alone in my madness; we were all a good bit around the bend. How could we not be, in a world as insane as the one we lived in?

We followed Jaya’s lead and started dragging bodies out to Glebe Road. Omura remarked that it seemed an odd thing to do, and Shawn explained he knew a guy who came by periodically and picked them up to grind into fertilizer. He continued to explain that all sorts of interesting kinds of work appear in the niches of life when it becomes clear there’s a demand for some sort of service.

I don’t know if Omura was convinced, reassured, or vaguely disquieted by the thought of a local body hauler. It took me a bit by surprise the first time I ran into the man and got a serious look at his bio-fuel garbage truck of doom.

He called himself “Rancid Sam.” I would have to say his heart was definitely dedicated to truth in advertising, based on that alone. Yet, it wasn’t the smell or the name that got to me, nor was it his jovial personality, which was several shades darker, yet distressingly perkier, than my own. Those sterling qualities were compounded by the fact that he was also a “fabulous, raging queer, tranny teddybear,” by his own description. The resulting frothing frappé of fabulous, the quim de la quim of boyish good times, the concoction of ... You get the idea.

I had to stifle a giggle at the thought of our guest getting a serious eyeful of our local color. I had nearly died on the spot when Shawn first introduced us, and I could only imagine how Omura, who appeared to be quite straight-laced, would react to the luminous, flamboyant, Master of the Peppermint Garbage Truck.

Charlie shot me a concerned look from the other side of the body we were carrying, and I looked up at her to reassure her that I was fine. I told her I thought of something funny to share with her later. I looked back down to the ground in between the arms of the body that I was helping her carry.

This particular body was missing a cranium. I was able to stare down into the remains of the upper sinuses, and I was intensely grateful that it was dark outside. Even with the occasional patch of light from the remains of the gently burning Humvee and one or two sodium streetlights, the bloody bones, empty eye sockets, and parade of shredded tissue lost some of the Technicolor impact daylight would have provided.

I felt blessed I didn’t have to face the visceral emotions that sight would have brought forth, had it been the middle of the day instead of the belly of the night.

Something, another tiny thought, clamored for my attention in the middle of my moment of gratitude for being spared a small horror at the end of my day. When I took a closer look at that wriggling tail of a thought, I realized that my memory contained every color of that broken and torn flesh, in pure Hollywood detail.

My eyes started burning when I realized that the last time I’d seen this particular corpse was when I had bashed its head open to get at the brains. This body had been someone, even after she’d been killed and come back to life.

I’d killed and eaten the brains of some poor, silly girl who got caught up in the wrong things with the wrong people... Me, and my family even before I’d brought her existence to a brutal end, since my little brother had set this little raid in motion. I couldn’t even process what I hated more.

My survival high came to a screeching, gut-wrenching end.

Charlie turned around when the top end of the corpse hit the ground and discovered that she was dragging the whole thing by herself. There were probably some interesting and sharp words lurking behind her lips, but they never had the chance to be expelled into the world.

She dropped the feet of the body, rushed to my side, and did her best to comfort me. I was sitting on the pavement, rocking back and forth in silence. I wasn’t able to do much more than stare at the brown remains of the blood dried on my hands. Lady Macbeth would have been so proud of me.

When Charlie put her arms around me, I stopped rocking back and forth, but the emotions were so huge I wasn’t able to make a noise or gesture to acknowledge her kindness. I also noticed I was unable to move because she was embracing me so tightly, but that held so little significance it was shoved away almost as soon as the thought arrived.

There weren’t any words I could have said or thoughts I could have imagined that would have softened the rebound from all of the compounded shock, horror, adrenaline, and sheer emotional exhaustion. I doubt I could have formed a coherent thought, much less strung words together, in the grip of such an overwhelming experience. I just sat there, staring at my hands, wrapped in the arms of a woman for whom I was quickly coming to have large feelings.

Unlike so many other times in my life, I had someone who was willing and able to support me, and it didn’t matter at all if I couldn’t think or speak. There was someone else who would rise to the occasion instead of me if the situation required, and that glorious realization carved a bright line in the miasma of horror that froze my soul.

A second spark of hope joined the one that had illuminated me a moment before. I realized being alive meant having the opportunity to heal from what had hurt me. Not to be undone, the original spark reminded me I wasn’t alone, and I had someone in my life to help me heal and move forward. I could breathe again, but an older issue lingered in the space where the calm was starting to spread.