Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02

• Title Page
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• About the Author
  

A
PERMUTED PRESS
book

published at Smashwords.

ISBN (trade paperback): 978-1-61868-108-9

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-109-6

Blood Soaked and Invaded
copyright © 2011, 2013

by James Crawford.

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Version 3.30.13.1.

Someone was singing, but I couldn’t understand the words. To me, it was just melody and music without any context. Don’t get me wrong: the emotional content wasn’t lost on me. It was loving, but sad, and somehow gave me the feeling I wanted to be near whatever it was the song was about.

I opened my eyes, and she was there. Her voice was making the music, and the emotions behind it were carved into her face and posture as surely as a sculptor hacks shapes out of marble. Of course, at the time, I would never have been able to describe it, mostly due to having taken a bullet to the forehead the day before. All I could do in the moment of recognizing her, with those high and sad emotions, was lift myself off the floor and put my head in her lap.

Salty water dripped on the side of my nose from somewhere above me and the words and images for “rain” and “tears” slid around inside my mind, but couldn’t connect to one another. I wanted to make a noise, so I opened my mouth and inhaled. The salty water went up my nostril, and I sneezed instead.

This upset the singer deeply, because she gave a little scream and shifted position.

“Oh God! Frank, are you okay?”

It was pretty clear that she was talking to me, even if I didn’t understand the words. I didn’t know what the fuss was about, because the water in my nose was gone, along with some kind of blockage I hadn’t been aware of. The only drawback was that my face and her knee were wet. When I reached up to wipe my face, my hands came away pink and sticky.

Sticky doesn’t feel good.

“Shit! Honey, sit up. Please? Ok. Let me wipe your face off, so just sit still.” She sat me up, and not having anything else to react to, I just sat and looked at the colors on my hands. “All right, let Charlie see what’s going on.” I let her lift my face and run a cool cloth under my nose.

The cloth was now pink, moist and sticky, too. It seemed as though cloth shouldn’t look like that, but no ideas condensed into words I could use. Instead of making wry commentary, or even issuing a statement in the form of a resounding grunt, I simply sat and let her wipe my hands off.

“Baby, I hope you didn’t just sneeze brains.” She held my face still and looked into my eyes. Her eyes were bloodshot and moist, which didn’t indicate anything particularly positive from where I was sitting. “I really don’t know what to do. Omura says that you’re going to recover and that I should keep interacting with you, but he didn’t say anything about sticky pink snot. We should go see Jayashri,” she said, standing up and holding her hand down for me to grab onto. “Come on, Frank. Let’s go see the doctor. Hmm? That’s it.”

I took her hand, and we left the room that we’d been sleeping in.

Stairs made sense to me, because we’d gone up them and it seemed appropriate that one should go down them after having gone up. No reason to complain there. I did notice something while we were descending, and I knew that I needed to take care of it before we went anywhere. There was a room here specifically used for such things, and I was pleased that I remembered it.

“What?” She asked me as I took off toward the magical room, towing her behind me. When we got to the room, I slipped the cloth off my lower half and sat down on the white chair with a hole in the seat. It was precisely where I wanted to be. “Oh. You remember how to use a toilet. That’s really great, Frank! Can you let my hand go before you wipe?”

While I can understand, in retrospect, what was going on, the noises she made while I sat on the commode didn’t make any sense. I was aware of three things that were the sole and complete content of my mind at that moment. First of all, I was sitting on the white chair and the pressures in my lower abdomen were being taken care of. Second, my person was with me. I could deal with noises that didn’t make any sense, as long as my person of choice was all right and nearby. The third thing was a baseline need and awareness equal to #1.

I was hungry.

In time, the hind end of my digestive system gurgled to a halt, and we learned that I still remembered the required hygiene procedures for the Water Closet. Charlie made positive sounding noises at me, and everything was right with my world. She led me out of the hardware store while she provided positive reinforcement for my potty performance.

The morning sunlight outside the store was bright, and I squinted up at the big ball of luminescent annoyance. As I looked up, something in the back of my head told me that something was about to be wrong. Something “not right” was nearby, and coming closer with every heartbeat.

Looking at Charlie, I understood she didn’t know what I knew. I didn’t have any reasonable way to communicate with her, so I growled a warning. Standing there with her, growling, and facing Route 29, I must have seemed like a sinister Irish setter.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” I spared her a glance, and I watched the knowledge dawn on her face. Now she knew what I knew. “Shit. Frank, stay right here. Here. Okay? I’m gonna run back inside for just a minute. Don’t move. Stay right here!”

For all I knew, she could have been reciting from the collected works of John Donne, but I stayed put when she let go of my hand and disappeared back into the building. Eight heartbeats later, I was a Bad Frank, because I saw the intruder across the street, bellowed a warning at him, and then took off to defend my territory.

He raised his weapon and fired at me as I propelled myself across the road, leaping the bodies that were still piled around from the days before. I was hit three times, but didn’t care or slow down. He dropped the gun when I closed the distance, screamed unintelligible things at me, and raked my face with his oversize fingernails. The stench of his breath made my nose close up shop and move to Alaska.

Feeling claws shred my cheek didn’t add anything delightful to the experience, but that’s the price you pay for being up close and personal. Even without my usual excess of brainpower, I managed to pay him back for the discomfort with my fists and was grimly satisfied when his right eye socket crumbled underneath my knuckles. I don’t think he was as pleased about that turn of events as I was.

“You fucking bastard!” He yelled at me, groping for something on his belt. I didn’t quite know what the knife was when he drew it, yet something about the gleam of steel in sunlight communicated the potential menace with astounding clarity.

I snarled and found my body moving, blending with his attack. My arms locked his, forcing the blade back toward his neck and sinking it in to the hilt. He made nasty, thick noises as his mouth filled up with carmine sludge. His desire to kill me gave way to panic in the face of dying a second time. The only response it drew from me was a very satisfied, predatory smile.

When his body went limp, I pulled the blade out of his neck, having learned that knives cut, and severed his head. With intense satisfaction, I bashed it against the curb. The cracking sounds made me giggle.