Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (24 page)

My former dance partners were chowing down on the limbs of the bodies that were closest to them. Neither of them looked as bad as they had when I cut them down, which meant they were healing much like we did: by consuming nearby raw materials. I completely forgot to notice my friends because I was entranced, mystified, and incredibly disturbed at the thought of them being able to heal wounds like the ones I’d inflicted. It certainly brought up the need to question one of them, and I had a sudden flash of deja vu.

Why, yes, I had questioned a zombie under duress once before. I didn’t feel the least bit jolly about doing it again either.

Nasty memories not withstanding, I did know one thing for sure: I had to get those feeding zombies away from their afternoon snack or I’d probably have to kill them before any of us could ask questions. I took stock of my available tools for moving a human body–a super strong and super fast human body–away from its current activity. My 9mm wouldn’t do a damned thing, and that left me with the Man Scythe. Fair enough.

I approached the nearest of my two new friends, and folded the Man Scythe blade back into the handle, because I wanted blunt force trauma, not flying body parts. He took notice of my approach, dropped his haunch of rare comrade, and snarled at me. I confess that I took his lack of
bonhomie
amiss and played cricket with his face.

He moved a decent distance, right up against Baj and Jayashri. Their high-pitched squeals of surprise were both simultaneous and in tune with one another. I was impressed! Unfortunately for my tuneful neighbors, Mister Cricket was still moving and pretty pissed off that I’d batted him in the chops. Sadly for Mister Cricket, he was disoriented enough that he was having difficulty standing back up. This led to me holding in my laughter at the macabre spectacle of an intestine-trailing zombie groping the people he was lying on top of, trying to find some kind of support to stand back up.

With great reluctance, I turned back to the second of the two surviving creatures. He was rapidly consuming part of someone’s leg, healing, and watching me like a hawk.

I snapped the blade open, took his head off with a single swing, reversed the Man Scythe and slapped the spike down on the head in mid-air. Objectively, it was a gorgeous move, and made a wonderfully satisfying noise when the sundered noggin dropped off the spike and onto the pavement. I did not feel an iota of pity.

More tuneful utterances from the Sharma Family Choir danced in the air and I turned back around to find out what I was missing. They were still struggling with the flailing party crasher.

“Frank, we need to take one of them alive for questioning,” Omura reminded me before I could shamble over and polish off our final opponent.

“Oh! You’ve got a great point there.” I grinned, and scratched my gore-encrusted hair. “Anybody got handcuffs or some such plastic restraint before we take up lives of aimless zombie wrangling?” Sue me. I was really amused.

“No, but I’ve got paracord.” Omura had walked up behind me, looking a bit the worse for wear.

“Will that work?”

“Oh, I think so.” He pulled a rolled-up hank of black cord from somewhere on his person, almost manifesting it out of nowhere. I made a point to ask him about that trick one day because it looked immensely cool.

The only thing I know I saw for sure was that he made a loop with one end. He snagged one of the zombie’s hands, put the loop on it and pulled in a shoulder-wrenching sort of way. It must have been effective, because the undead object of our attention came up off the ground, flipped over in the air and landed hard on the asphalt and crumbled cinderblock. Omura did more odd-looking things and Mister Cricket had both arms tied behind his back, a loop around his neck and the whole thing magically tied to both ankles.

Cricket flopped around, snarled and struggled. I guess the cord was arranged to pull more tightly, because every time he tried to stretch out his face started changing colors. Sweet!

“It’s hojojitsu.” Omura said, answering my unasked question.

“Really! I heard about rope martial arts, but I’d never actually seen any demonstrations.” I nodded with appreciation, because it was just that swanky. “If you ever want to teach me any of that, I’d love to learn it.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Do you want to cope with the Sharmas while I discuss life with your little friend? I’ve already called for back-up, so we only have to hold this area for about five more minutes before we’ve got support.”

I was reluctant, to say the least. My ability to be compassionate with Bajali was crippled. He gave us the happy little life-changing package in the first place, without testing, and without a serious look at what the long-term impact would be. Yes, we get to survive a lot of damage, but we certainly pay for the privilege. The only person in our little community cadre of trans-human commandos who might be able to get an adequate picture of that cost would be Charlie, our resident psychology guru.

My train of thought was depressing the shit right out of me, and I turned around to look at my two wee, newly born, brain-munching Shapes of Things to Come. They did not look good, and I don’t mean that in a physical sense. Bajali and Jayashri were clinging to one another, alternately sobbing and trying to express themselves in two or three different languages. I didn’t have a clue about how to cope with them.

“Sharma family!” I yelled, squatting down right in front of them. “I need you to listen to me right now!”

Two pitiful tear and vomit streaked countenances turned to me with the sort of glazed expressions one would expect from gentle people that have stared down into the abyss to find personalized stationery and chocolates waiting on the pillows. I felt that this was a key moment and did not want to mince words or try to finagle their attention with complex concepts. The situation didn’t offer many options for a pleasant segue from venting their horror to becoming active participants in getting our feces together. I decided to go with being direct, which is what I am generally best at, yet least likely to prefer.

With a firm (but not unkind) hand, I smacked them each across their faces.

Once.

Twice.

On the third slap, Jayashri blocked my hand.

“Do not slap me again,” was what she said to me, and her voice was as chilling as a teabagging session in dry ice. Not being overly masochistic, I nodded my acceptance of her decree and sat back on my haunches.

I was about to screw my compassion to the sticking place, but Mister Cricket started screaming somewhere behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Omura was up to something icky, because I saw the reactions on the faces right in front of me. Jayashri went pale underneath the blood and dirt. Bajali passed out. I waited patiently for the noise to cease.

“All right, I know that you both went through Hell a few minutes ago, but I need you to put dealing with it aside for,” I hunted my bare wrists for a watch that I wasn’t wearing, oblivious to the fact that my brain had a clock as standard equipment, “as long as it takes us to get back home. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that.” Jaya looked down at her husband, who was still dead to the world. “I will take care of my husband and help him do what needs to be done. We can suffer the horror later today.” She turned away from me and started jollying her husband back into consciousness.

I didn’t feel as though I’d become irrelevant; I knew it. Omura was “interviewing” our survivor, and the Sharmas were reassembling themselves. I didn’t have much to do at that moment, other than look around and find something useful to do while life went on without me. Then I remembered the hand in the wreckage.

Something to look at! Hooray!

I tromped back through the pieces and parts on the ground to the large curve of hull that hid the object of interest and then squatted by the side where I’d seen the hand. Feeling along the low edge of the shell, I didn’t get the impression that any of the surfaces would cut me if I tried to shift it and gave it a tentative lift. The whole chunk moved as if it didn’t weigh more than a few pounds; so I gave it a little flip with my wrists.

It certainly moved, flipping up and over to rock on the convex side a few feet away. When I looked back down after being smug about my object moving capabilities, I began to wish that I’d let someone else do it.

There was a body. It wasn’t an adult body.

The little person was strapped into the remains of an acceleration couch that had broken in half on impact. His head was encased in a helmet of some kind, and I was not at all looking forward to removing it. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure that I could remove it, because there weren’t any visible seams, latches or even screws. It seemed to be made from the same material as the craft’s hull, with all the little facets and fibers.

I had to call him “Midget Pilot” in order to keep from losing my shit. The sight of this little form strapped into a weapon of war moved me with pity and fucking pissed me off fit to kill. It was pretty difficult to tell which feeling was on top of the roiling pile inside me at any given time.

Midget Pilot was bent upward at the waist by the two halves of the seat that he’d been strapped to, and was pierced in more than a few places by shards of hull and less identifiable objects. The remains of the seat were leaking blue gel on the ground, but the body wasn’t leaking anything. I couldn’t see or even smell blood. I wasn’t about to touch the body without gloves to see if I could feel anything.

Sure, there really was no reason to worry because the critter colony would take care of almost anything that might infect me… At least that is an assumption that we all made, and no one had run into anything that made us think otherwise. It was a simple atavistic, irrational response to something I wasn’t consciously aware of. I really, really didn’t want to touch Midget Pilot.

What do you do when you don’t want to do something? You ask someone else!

“Jayashri? Baj? Could I get you both to come over here for a minute?”

They arrived with all the excitement one might expect from a mad scientist and his charming bride. Baj rambled on in Hindi, interspersing it with words that sounded like technical gibberish in English. Jayashri’s response to the sight that greeted them was much closer to my own.

“They did not do this to a child. Francis, please tell me that those beasts did not strap a child into their flying saucer. You must tell me I am not seeing this.”

I felt her fingers digging into my shoulder, and I truly wished I had something else to tell her that conflicted with the truth of her eyes. “I can only tell you that it looks that way to me.” In lieu of eloquence, I just told her the truth. “I couldn’t touch the body and I hoped that you guys would have the clinical detachment to,” all I could really add was a flurry of non-specific hand-waving, “have a closer look.”

Bajali moved before either of us could say or do anything else. His hands found the straps that held the body in place and he tore them away with the strength that only technology could lend to him. The little body rocked with the violence of being released so abruptly and pulled away from the shattered acceleration couch just far enough for me to see something more gruesome than I’d imagined. Hearing Jaya’s sharp intake of breath behind me, I could tell that I wasn’t alone.

The little body wasn’t merely strapped in. Two metal shunts, each one as thick as my thumb were plugged into Midget Pilot’s back, and the jostling pulled him loose for an instant before he subsided back onto them again. That was bad, but the blue fluid that had dribbled down from those holes struck me as being just a smidge more awful.

On top of whatever else they’d done to this little person, they’d been pumping his little body full of the blue shit from inside the seat he’d been strapped into… or worse, they’d replaced his blood with it and had been circulating it into and out of the awful workings of this UFO. Regardless, I couldn’t take any more and, despite all the things I’d seen and done over the previous two years as a freelance zombie remover, I staggered to my feet and got as far away from the evidence as I could before I threw my guts up all over the ground. The dry heaves were the worst I can remember.

I raised my eyes from the mess on the ground in front of me, and saw Omura backing away from the zombie that he’d been questioning. He was still tied up, but was struggling, and each effort pulled the paracord tighter. Every few seconds he’d flex and his face would turn funny colors and then he’d stop and try something else.

From what little I knew about the art of Hojojitsu, there were two major ways to go about keeping your captive from getting away. The first was tying up your high-rank Samurai captives in ways that were both artful and functionally inescapable. The second was more about interesting and decorative ways to tie up criminals so that their struggles would either pull the knots tighter, increasing discomfort, or strangle them outright. To my eye, it looked like Omura was using the latter of the two methodologies, and our captive was heading toward killing himself for our benefit.

In retrospect, I guess our zombie buddy was reacting to whatever Baj and Jaya were doing behind me. I didn’t turn around to see, because his flailing was so impressive. He’d also started chanting.

“Sumira. Sumira. Sumira.” Each time he said the word, he pulled at the cords, strangling himself while he flopped around. He didn’t stop. He just got louder, and louder, and thrashed that much harder.