Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (11 page)

Sometime later, my love joined me. I knew, because I got two feet of cold toes against the back of my knees. I nearly wet myself from the shock, but it was quickly forgotten when she wrapped her arms around me. It was easy getting back to sleep.

There was a bleating noise somewhere outside, and it woke me up with chills running up and down my spine. It sounded like “Ueeeh,” and I remembered the last time I’d heard that noise. I sat up so fast that Charlie squeaked and got up with me.

“What’s wrong, Honey?”

“!” I pointed in the general direction of the noise, shivering.

“Yeah, that’s a nasty sound, isn’t it? I guess that’s the study subject that was supposed to be delivered today. Reminds me of a lamb’s cry.” She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and blinked at me. “Hey, where are you going?”

I sprung to my feet, snagged the nearest pants, and threw myself down the stairs to the main floor of the store. Two seconds later, I had the pants on and was outside. What I saw stopped me cold.

A platoon of soldiers was leading a gaggle of our Health Troopers. The Troopers were wheeling a big, vented, plastic cage in front of my store. Inside the cage was a creature from my worst nightmares... a baby zombie.

The virus that turns living people into zombie chow, and the deceased into zombies, comes on like a bad cold or a 24-hour virus. You feel ill, and before too long someone is trying to kill you, and it’s probably a close friend or relative who died recently.

One of the few pieces of information universally disseminated during martial law was that expectant mothers suffering from viral symptoms were to be reported to the authorities immediately so they could be quarantined. What happened as a result of quarantine was not as well reported and became a particularly awful urban legend. It was said that the fetuses were forcibly aborted because the virus was universally fatal to the unborn. The story went on to say that the mothers were never seen or heard from again.

No one ever heard any news or information that contradicted the rumors.

Most people don’t have a dark enough imagination to fathom what a dead fetus in an infected mother might mean. I get it. Let me break it down for you in small pieces.

The baby dies from the virus.

The baby revives because of the virus.

The baby revives inside the body of a woman who has contracted the virus.

Being infected with the virus means you have become zombie chow.

Babies are hungry.

Follow my logic, so I don’t have to connect the dots for you.

This happened to my best friend’s wife, except the baby was stillborn. She didn’t stay that way. The first person she went after was her own mother, who had come to clean her up and grieve. My friend, Scott, who was also infected, had to cope with a set of zombies that wanted to eat him as he experienced unimaginable grief.

I was there when it all went down. I saw what could happen firsthand and it haunts me. It didn’t help that I owed Scott a favor I hadn’t been able to repay.

The thing in the plastic box that was being wheeled across the street to the new building made the same noises that Scott and Mara’s undead baby made. It was also larger than a newborn: about the size of a toddler, but gaunt, clawed, and had big rolling eyeballs.

“What the fuck is that?”

The soldiers and medical professionals turned to look at me, as stunned as I was to hear my voice for the first time in quite a while. I even heard Charlie gasp from somewhere behind me. Even my internal heads-up display that had been dark and silent for weeks snapped back to life.

I had just come back online.

“Didn’t you hear me? What the fuck is that?”

“It’s a juvenile zombie subject,” one of the Health Troopers said.

“How old is it?”

“We estimate that it is under two years of age, but it also exhibits an unusually advanced growth pattern,” another one said.

“Where was it obtained,” I asked, shoving my hands in my jeans pockets to keep from shaking apart. I didn’t want the answer to the question because it could be more horrible than I wanted to cope with.

“It was captured in Fairfax City, proper.”

I collapsed to my knees. “Is it male or female?”

“Female.”

There wasn’t any point in trying to hide my shaking, because my whole body was racked by it. I didn’t have anything in my stomach, or it would have been decorating the asphalt in front of me, but my insides were doing their absolute best to invert anyway. Grief and shame crawled up my ass, and I couldn’t even make a sound as I shook.

Sensing that their impromptu interview was over, the procession started up again, making way to the new building on the corner. Building 1.

“Frank,” Charlie said from behind me, and I knew she was moving towards me. My internal sensor package told me so. “Are you... Is there anything I can do, baby?”

I probably would have answered, or fallen apart all the way, but a crowd of people had appeared. Nate and Barbara. Bajali and Jayashri. Shawn and Chunhua. They circled around me, expectation heavy on their faces.

“I thought,” Jayashri said, “I heard Frank’s voice.”

“I heard his trademark, ‘What the fuck’,” Shawn added.

“He’s here, in my head,” Chunhua said, tapping herself on the forehead, and crying silently.

I reached back and grabbed Charlie’s calf. I needed the physical contact to ground my emotions long enough to say something.

“I’m back,” I said.

My family of choice rushed in, folded me in their arms, and I fell apart. I have never been so sad and so overwhelmed by love at the same time, before or since. At least I wasn’t the only one crying.

In my whole lifetime, I’ve never been to a party that started in the morning. The day I “turned on” became a party, and everyone was happier about it than I was. I was haunted.

The scientists had a creature in their possession that could very well be the closure to a promise I made a long time ago. Killing that beast would be the final payment to a dear friend of mine, the man who made my Man Scythe. He would be able to rest, if there’s an afterlife to rest in, and I might be free of the guilt that dogged me for a promise left incomplete.

There was one other person at the fiesta who was at least as haunted as me, but for an entirely different reason. The monkey on his back had a name: Envy. Buttons, when he looked at me from across the room in Building 2’s cafeteria, had darkness in his eyes the likes of which I’ve never seen in another living person. I could have tapped him brain-to-brain and conducted a little Q&A session with him, but the thought of it made my anus twitch.

Breakfast and coffee appeared in the midst of the merrymaking. My stomach required my attention, so I was able to apply myself to the food and take a break from the things that upset me. I’m glad of that, because food tasted better than I remember. Even coffee had a depth and complexity that I’d never been aware of, and it was astounding.

Bajali got up on one of the tables, and I tore my attention away from the maddening delight of butter melting on my tongue to pay attention. Bajali was not the sort of man to stand up on furniture, so it had to be something worth knowing about.

“Everyone! I want to announce I will have the upgrade to our nanotechnology finished today!” He lifted his arms and did a little Rocky Balboa triumph dance on the table. “By tonight, we will not be contagious any longer!”

He continued to dance around to the music of our cheers. I even added my own woots to the chorus, because I was pretty keen on the idea of not being a technological leper.

Jayashri appeared at my side, the side not currently occupied by Charlotte Cooper, and gave me a huge hug. “I am so happy you have returned to us! Although I was beginning to understand the noises you made.” Her smile was radiant, and contagious.

“I know,” Charlie said. “I figured out that ‘ooort’ means ‘bathroom’. I think the facial expressions were the best though.”

“Yes! Remember when I removed the catheter?”

I blushed. They laughed. Bajali arrived, having returned to the world of the floor, and saved me from more recollections.

“So, there are some things I would like to tell you,” he said to me and turned to his wife, “that Jayashri and I have learned by examining you and the huge pile of x-rays, and so forth.”

“What kinds of things?” I had to ask.

“Well, first and foremost, what kinds of changes our ‘Critters’ have made to you.” Baj looked quite serious, an almost instantaneous departure from the merriment of a moment before.

“Oh.”

“Let us all take a walk. Shall we?” Jayashri led the way out of the cafeteria, into the meeting room next door. It was quieter and unoccupied.

“Why does it feel like the two of you planned this?” Charlie looked at them with a suspicious look in her eyes, and shut the door behind us without even turning around.

“Because we did,” was Baj’s answer. “Not Frank’s recovery, of course, but the discussion we wished to have with him after he regained... himself.”

We sat in the uncomfortable plastic chairs and felt appropriately uncomfortable, for a variety of reasons.

“The bullet to your forehead damaged a full third of your brain,” Jayashri began. “You should not have lived, or, had you lived, ever been more than a vegetable. The nanotechnology, we believe, made a backup of your memories and all the things that make you who you are.”

“You’re right.” They gave me astonished looks when I dropped that on them. “The critters told me as much in a dream about two weeks ago.”

“They actually communicated with you?” Bajali’s eyes got wide with excitement, and I swear that he drooled a little bit, too.

“Yes. I haven’t heard from them since, and they told me to expect that their psuedo-consciousness would merge into mine before too long.”

“Gods!” Jayashri breathed it out, incredulous. “This is beyond what we could have expected... As all of the results have been.”

The Sharmas shook their heads, amazed.

“They replaced your brain tissue with a network of hexagonal structures. They appear to contain the liquid remains of your gray matter.” Bajali continued, drawing little six-sided shapes in the air. “Your skull was also rebuilt, fortified, if you will. I do not believe that a bullet would penetrate your head, were we to shoot you right now.”

“Gosh! I am so relieved to hear that!”

“Lord,” Charlie said, “his sarcasm is back, too.”

“Be that as it may,” Jaya picked up the conversation, “there are a number of other physiological changes we took note of. Your blood, for instance, is packed full of nanomachines; several different designs.”

“It is very exciting! We feel that one of the ‘species’ of machines has taken over oxygen transport in your body. Another two or three appear to regulate hormonal function. There is even a ‘battleship’ that supports your white blood cells!” Bajali was almost giddy with excitement, a perfect counterpoint to my sense of dread.

“The only other person who exhibits such a wide array of development is Chunhua, and we are well-aware of how she was altered by the technology!” Jaya beamed.

Yeah. Chunhua had 60 years subtracted from her body. I suppose it would make sense that the nanotech could repair me if it could do a complete overhaul on an 80+ year-old woman.

“Indeed!” Baj clapped his hands. “But there is another interesting quirk to your case. We found nanomachines in your blood that do not bear any resemblance to my design at all. No one in our community has these.”

“Jesus!”

“Remember we were worried you healed quickly from the grenade explosion?” Jayashri asked, reminding me of an earlier episode of heroic behavior on my part.

“Yeah.”

“This other technology is likely responsible for the speed of your recovery from earlier injuries.” My jaw dropped.

“I have a theory,” Baj said, raising a finger. “Your father may have, at some point, used you as a guinea pig for other nanotech experiments.”

“Oh.” Joy? Hardly. My intestines wanted to swim out my arse even at the intimation that my father had another finger in my life.

“What amazed me even more is that I was able to revise my original design with elements from the foreign design.” Bajali’s face was luminous, discussing these incredibly disturbing, at least to me, things. “The design changes, improvements really, are the very heart of today’s upgrade. Once I get back to the lab, I will apply the upgrade, and no longer be contagious. Is this not grand?”

“Stellar. It is stellar.”

Charlie swatted me upside the head. “I think Frankie the Deadpan has reached his data saturation point for the day. Are you going to physically hand out the upgrade after you test it?”

“That is my plan. I imagine it will take about an hour for the revisions to complete,
in situ
. As soon as I am sure, I will call everyone to the lab and distribute the ‘package’ as it were.” He beamed. “Then we will all be able to relax. Dr. Bottsford and his team will be able to take their silly suits off!”

“That’s...” I was cut off by Charlie’s hand over my mouth.