Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (12 page)

“Great! Why don’t you two go handle that,” Charlie said, ignoring me licking her palm to show my vexation at being muzzled. “I’d like to spend some time with my guy, now that he can talk back!”

Baj and Jaya nodded, as if they knew something I didn’t. Hugs and kisses passed around, and they left the room. My girlfriend/partner/caretaker smiled at me and I smiled back. Then she exploded from her chair, landed on my lap, and wrapped all of her limbs around me like a mutant octopus.

“God, I’ve missed you!” She had time to tell me that much before she started sobbing. I held her and made soothing noises, wishing I could do more.

I guess all the accumulated stress of taking care of someone when you don’t know that they’ll recover needed to come out. By the clock in my head, it took her ten minutes and thirty-four seconds to go from wracking sobs to dry eyes. When she turned her face to me, I saw... I can’t even explain it. I knew how much she loved me, and like frogs cheeping across a pond, my heart answered the love.

“Can we go back home?”

“Sure, Charlie.”

“Can you find me a tissue?”

“You got it, m’love.”

We stood up, hand in hand, and left Building 2 behind. Of course, I found a bathroom and grabbed some TP so Charlie could empty her sinuses first. A boyfriend has to make priorities.

As we were walking back to the store, she pointed to a hole in the ground. “Hey, why is there a pothole that smells like blood and shit on the lawn here?”

I told her the story of my walk home from the night before, and her eyes nearly bugged out of her skull.

“I guess those guns really could do some damage, huh?”

“Yeah, I almost wish I’d seen the impact,” and then I thought about it, “but then again, not really.” I tugged her along towards the store. I wanted to be with her, not linger outside and obsess over guards with superguns. “By the way, where’s the Man Scythe?”

“Don’t worry, honey, it’s safe. I’ll get it out for you when we get upstairs.”

“Thanks. I need to see it and,” I waved my hands around in random circles, “reconnect with it.”

“You boys and your tools!” She giggled and I giggled with her. There wasn’t any point in telling her that I’d started planning how to kill the zombie baby with it.

Charlie led me upstairs in the store, after we sauntered down the aisles, being happy that we were together again. I sat down at my desk, pulled open the bottom left hand drawer, and took out the stones. I also pulled out the spray bottle of water, because you really can’t do a good job without getting your rocks wet.

“Darling, my darling? Would you hand me my baby?” I’ll admit that I cooed to her. I hadn’t been whole enough to touch my precious example of carnal brutality during my recovery, or even think about it. That was a travesty. On top of it, I hadn’t been attentive to Charlie either. In all honesty, they both needed some undistracted connection time from me.

“Why in the world do you call it that?” She passed it over to me, wrapped in a towel. “It’s a weapon, not a child.”

“Objectively,” I said, unwrapping her from the cloth, “you’re completely right. This weapon is made out of titanium and steel, with some kind of strange rubber composite on the handle. It lives in a thermoplastic case and is most emphatically not a child, but I feel really protective and possessive about it.”

“It really means that much to you?”

“Yes. A truly amazing person made this for me. I still owe him a debt I haven’t had the chance to repay. I still feel bad about that.” I held up one finger. “Before you even ask, I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

She nodded, and sat down on the sleeping bags on the floor while I gave my baby some positive attention. I didn’t even freak out when I saw the half dozen chips along the edge; I just got out the proper stones and went to work. As usual, I got so lost in what I was doing that I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I’m guessing it was a decent hour at the outside.

“Honey?” Charlie tapped me on the shoulder and I turned my head away from cleaning the Man Scythe. Testament to my concentration, I didn’t even notice her getting up from the floor. “Could we talk for a minute?”

“Always.” I put the weapon down and wiped the mud from my hands. “What’s on your mind?”

I had expected her to just speak out loud, but she blushed from her collarbones to her scalp and pinged me in my head, rather than simply opening her mouth. Something had her unsettled; I could tell that much without using any of the sensory enhancements that our nano-bugs gave us. I did feel a brief surge of my own emotions, because the thought of using those “superpowers” on her seemed incredibly wrong.

I decided to hold that set of moral explorations for a later date.

“So, um. Frank.” It never ceased to startle me to have a clear voice in my head that didn’t originate in my ears. “I didn’t want to talk about this while you were not yourself. Well,” she laughed to herself a little, “you wouldn’t have understood it anyway.”

“Yeah, there wasn’t a lot going on in there.” I tapped myself on the head.

“You were pared down to the minimum and I didn’t think you’d be able to understand me if I brought it up,” she said, without moving her lips. They were set in an almost melancholy smile, and I really couldn’t blame her for that. “I hoped that Shoei would be right, and that you’d come back to me. When you pounced on me that last time, it felt a little like you were on your way back into your skull. Then today, you came back!”

“Just like me, I popped back into my head at an odd time not of my own choosing.” I snorted at myself, and wondered if that translated through the communication link as well as our voices did.

“Frankie Shot to the Head, you are ‘special’ in that way. So, anyway, I wanted to tell you something that might be important. I guess it could be. Eh.”

“You could just tell me and I’m sure it’ll make sense.”

“Ack.” If anything, she managed to blush harder and squish her face up in a very accurate rendition of her brother’s “terribly frustrated” expression. “I’m late.”

“…”

“I’m late.”

“…”

“My period is two weeks late.” Her eyes were bulging out at me by that point, and I thought I saw some wetness collecting in the corners. I didn’t entirely know what to do, but I was pretty sure that freaking out shouldn’t be a part of my reaction.

I nodded. That didn’t provoke much of a response from her, other than her eyes resuming their normal dimensions. I reached up and took her hands in mine, not squeezing, but just holding them. The color started to recede from her face, and I was grateful for that. Charlie didn’t look at all comfortable with a nearly purple complexion.

“Thank you for telling me. I love you. How do you feel about this?”

“I really hope you’re not using communication management techniques on me, Frank. I’m feeling really weird about this to begin with.” The first tear took a long time to go from the corner of her eye down to her upper lip.

“No, I do want to know how you feel. I love you.”

“I feel really scared and strange about this whole thing. I mean, I never considered birth control and I feel so damned stupid for that, and now I’m two weeks late after you took a bullet to the head and spent a whole lot of time recovering from that so I could talk to you about it and tell you that I love you and that I really want to be with you because you’re the best man I’ve ever met in my whole life and I really didn’t want to continue the family tradition of shotgun weddings and surprise babies, especially since we all have this nano-critter problem and don’t have a fuckin’ clue what we’re gonna do about that in the first place and REALLY don’t know what will happen to a fetus if they can get through the placental barrier and Shawn’s going to lose his shit over this and I don’t even know if you want me or my baby or a wife or anything else now that you’ve got a whole pile of digital shit in your head!”

I nodded. I was absurdly grateful that she was saying that over the link, rather than trying to do it in one breath like normal people do. I kept nodding because I needed a few seconds to replay everything she said and take a temperature reading of my own emotions.

“I’m a little surprised, too.” I managed to get that out, using my mouth, because the link seemed strangely impersonal. “I love you. I want to be with you. I never expected to ever be a dad, but it is our child… Yours and mine… I feel really,” I waved my hands a little, searching for words that conveyed what I wanted to get across, “warm about it.” I put her hands over my heart. “I feel warm right here, where your hands are.”

Her mouth opened and a strange bubbly gurgle came out, right before she dropped to her knees and started bawling against my chest. I hadn’t lied to her about my feelings, so I knew she wasn’t flipping out over that. It had to be all the pent-up angst of weeks of not knowing whether or not I’d recover and what she could possibly say to me if I did.

Maybe, even worse, worrying what she would have done if I hadn’t come back. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to not know if she were going to recover or not. I am willing to bet that I’d be a little insane until some sign of progress appeared, positive or negative. In that moment, I felt for her, loved her, and just held her close.

She had done a lot of that for me. She gave me a reason to get well, after all.

Having her in my arms that way, I discovered something new about myself: holding her as she cries turns me on. It is an incredibly awkward thing to discover while you’re trying to comfort someone you love. There’s no good way to approach the issue. I thought about being overt about my interest.

“Say, honey? All that weeping you’re doing is making the Mariachi Band in my pants do ‘La Cucaracha’ with Barry White fronting the group. Do you think you might want to soothe my Savage Beast?”

Somehow I suspected saying such a thing would get me beaten to a pulp, and I rapidly decided to lasso the Mariachi Band before they could become an issue.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t have my own sludge of emotions to waddle through, because I certainly did. I’d just begun the process of reintegrating myself into my own skull, saw my old quarry in a plastic cage, found out that my brain has got a lot of stuff in it, and learned that my self-image would have to expand to include being a father. Add my sudden attack of horny to that and you’ve got a cocktail that would make anyone run for cover.

I try to stay flexible, but even I get overwhelmed occasionally.

With southern grace and charm, my love extricated herself from my embrace, sat up straight and wiped her eyes. “I have had a lot of dreams about being a mom over the past few days. I dreamed our baby was cutting his way out of me, complaining that he was ‘done’ and didn’t need to ‘bake’ anymore. Then again, there were a few dreams where it was the government that cut him out of me. I guess you could say that my subconscious mind is pretty obsessed about it.”

I didn’t want to show her the look on my face, because she’d know her dreams sent ice through my veins. Whether or not it was the best decision I could make, I decided to try to move the conversation a little sideways. I closed my eyes and tossed a conversational minnow into the pond.

“You think our baby will be a boy?” I asked.

“I know he will.”

“Is this one of those mystical ‘woman things’?”

“No, I don’t think it is. Then again, it might be. It just feels as though it’s going to be a boy.” I felt her pull back a little and knew that she was looking at the expression on my face, even with my eyes closed.

Crap.

“Who do we…” we started to ask at the same time. I’d been told that couples throughout the ages have experienced moments like those, as well as taking on little bits of how their partners express themselves. But instead of looking at it as a celebratory moment that marked another milestone of progress in coupledom we just smiled at one another.

Unfortunately, the smiles didn’t reach our eyes.

“Who do we go talk to first?” I finished asking her the question. At that point in time, I was more confident in her ability to think clearly than in my own.

“Ah, I think we need Jayashri and Baj before anyone else. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as privacy anymore, but it wouldn’t hurt if we could find some.”

“They haven’t found a way to tap into the brain-to-brain stuff, have they?” The mere thought of having my brain listened to made my bladder leaky.

“Not as far as anyone’s been able to tell.” Charlie looked thoughtful and ran her fingers through her hair, giving it a gentle tousle. “I don’t even know if they’ve looked at how we broadcast, much less what we broadcast.”

“That’s a relief. I agree with you that B and J need to be the first people on the list. What about Omura?”

“Uh, ah…” she said, looking a little unsure. “I’d like to leave our government pawn out of this as long as we can. That goes for Mister Buttons, too. We might want to talk to Shawn about the,” she gulped, “baby issue.”

“How do you think he’ll react to that?”

“Oh, he’ll react like he always does: big. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t demand that we get hitched ASAP.”

“shmooog?”

“We didn’t get around to that part of the conversation, did we?”