Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (6 page)

“Fffffrb,” I commented.

“Was that a comment or a fart?”

“!”

“Oh. Well,” Nate said, motioning me to a chair, “just sit down and get yourself together. Take your time, all right?”

“.”

Shoei Omura leaned over and gave me a pat on the arm.

“I’ll admit it: you had me worried. I told Charlie that I thought you’d recover better than Buttons has. For a while there, it looked like you were going to make a liar out of me.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I just nodded, keeping my lame vocalizations to myself.

The rest of the evening slid into night that way, people being solicitous of my well-being, and it was strangely comfortable. I’ve always considered myself something of a loner, but our little community changed that. Honestly, I’d never be one for PTA meetings, but I would (and often have) take a bullet for any of them.

I tugged on Charlie’s belt loop

“?” The noise slipped from between my lips like a loving chirp from a trained orangutan.

She got the hint, but I suspect it was my drooping eyelids and not the noise that conveyed the message. I was friggin’ bushed.

There were a lot of hugs and promises to come see me before we were actually able to walk toward the front door. Jayashri brought us up short, reminding Charlie to bring me to the big green tent in the morning.

“???”

“Big green tent?”

“.”

“Well, I’ll show you. Come on,” Charlie said, taking me by the hand and stepping outside into the chilly night air.

Baj and Jaya’s house is on North Buchanan Street, and my hardware store is about a block south on the right side of the road. Looking across from their front porch, towards my place, there in the glare of new halogen streetlights, was a big tent… the kind you always see in movies as the military’s mobile HQ. They’d put it up in the parking lot of my place.

“!” I squeaked as I looked around. No way in heaven or on earth could I miss the 25-foot tall wall that had grown up between us and the street while I was out like a light.

“Yeah, it’s a little tough to adjust to, but it’ll be okay. Come on, let’s go home.”

Going home wasn’t all that easy. The entire block of 22
^nd
and North Buchanan was empty. Sometime during my extended nap they’d bulldozed and cleared the entire chunk of the neighborhood that faced my front door. The only thing left of the houses and stores was a pile of rubble off in the distance and various kinds of utility dinguses poking above the dirt.

“?” I pointed at the empty acreage as we walked by it.

“They tore it all down last week and dropped in some kind of baby supercollider to power the neighborhood.” Charlie shrugged, making her breasts move in a really interesting way. “Omura says they’re going to put in a big multi-purpose building of some kind. Baj is going to have a full lab, Jaya’s getting medical facilities, and I think they’re going to have some sort of garage and armory in it, too. Shawn’s pretty excited about that, ‘cause he’s going to be in charge of all that stuff. Of course, Baj has to get off his ass and get the modifications designed for our little critters, or we’ll be stuck like this.”

She led me right by the double doors of the big green tent. They each had a big white square painted on the front, and in each square was a red “+”. I found this a little curious and pointed at one of the symbols.

“You know? Red Cross.” Charlie soothed my concern by rubbing my shoulder. “It’s the medical tent. There’s also some scientific apparatus that Baj is really pleased about. I’m guessing that Jayashri wants to do a full set of x-rays on you tomorrow. She’s been doing that on everyone since the stuff arrived last week.”

I hate to admit how much of that went right over my head. On the bright side, I did get the feeling that my brain was slowly building back to functionality. It was almost as though the words I didn’t understand made little sparks, like mental bookmarks, that served as flags for links that needed repair.

“What she really wanted was a portable MRI unit.” Charlie smiled and shook her head, looking up at something I wasn’t paying attention to. “Then Baj reminded her that our little friends contain quite a bit of metal. An MRI scan would magnetize the nanomachines and pull them right out of our bodies. Probably not the best thing for us, don’t you think?”

“.”

“Yeah. She was disappointed,” she laughed, wryly, “because MRIs give such good images, not because she wants to turn us into reverse pincushions.”

I opened the door to my store, and was startled to see dust on the floor and lots of clear footprints. It made me feel like I’d been away for years, not just two weeks. I shuffled around a bit, and walked up and down the aisles, glancing to see what had moved or changed. Charlie stood by the cash register, silently watching my progress, and then wrapped her arms around me when I completed the circuit.

“You seem really sad, Frank.”

I had some inkling of what I felt, even if I couldn’t express it. Sure, I’d only been conscious for a handful of hours, but the inability to express myself or communicate effectively made me feel incredibly alone. In the end, I simply took her by the hand and led her upstairs.

Sleep came with surprising ease, considering that I’d been flat on my back for two whole weeks. I did spend a little time listening to Charlie’s breath as she slept, before I rolled over and shut my own eyes.

Dreams appear like old school chums that you never expected to see or hear from again: suddenly and with a lot of surprise. Hugging and bumptiousness is optional.

Then again, with my brain doing random things like shutting me down for two weeks, it ought not to surprise me (even in retrospect) that it would go roaming around while I had some natural sleep. What surprises me is how incredibly vivid the dream was and how completely I believed that it was real.

I was walking through the neighborhood in the early morning. The air had a crisp quality; the sort of dry snap that feels like late November in the Washington, DC region. I was barefoot, strolling along, looking around.

“Are you ignoring me, Frank?”

A voice in the utter quiet of a cold morning sounds so loud, I thought to myself. When my feet touched the ground again, after my short flight straight up, I turned around. Chunhua was lounging on a tree branch about 20 feet behind me, watching me with interest and a small frown on her face. It turned into a giggle after she saw how wide my eyes were.

“I didn’t see you.” I gasped a little, waiting for my heart to slow back down. “Yeah. Hi.”

“Lost in thought on a cold morning?”

“Yeah. That’s probably the best way to describe it.” I ran my fingers through my hair, suddenly aware that I was only partially dressed.

“I can’t even imagine,” she said, smiling down at me. “How does it feel to be back inside your own head after so much time?”

Something about her tone of voice was odd. It wasn’t angry, sad, or even wary. It was harder, in some way that I couldn’t put my finger on and was at a loss to classify.

“Chunhua, I don’t even have words for it.” I shrugged with as much expression as I could manage, feeling as if I were under an invisible magnifying glass. “I’m trying to walk a little of the confusion off to see if some variety of clarity will show up.”

“When I was a girl, we walked a lot. Other, more powerful people, had cars or even bicycles. My family was poor enough that all we had were our feet.” I heard the sadness in her voice, even if I didn’t grasp it enough to sympathize. “I don’t know if it ever brought us any clarity, but it did get us where we wanted to go, in time.”

I found myself nodding, not even looking at her. Then I heard her ask, “Where do you need to go, Frank?” When I looked up to answer her, she wasn’t there. She didn’t show up on my internal Heads Up display when I checked it; she didn’t even read as being anywhere within range. I couldn’t find her “light” at all.

Had the world gone quietly sideways when I wasn’t looking? It occurred to me that I might not even be awake, and that my early morning stroll was a really, really vivid dream. After all, I had no clue or experience with the revamped interior of my own head. For all I knew hyper-real dreams might be a part of the way the repaired parts of my brain would work from that point forward.

It was a more comforting train of thought than believing that I’d had a visitation from someone I knew and couldn’t corroborate by asking them about it.

Ultimately, I turned back around and started walking again. Whatever I had experienced would not be solved faster by running around and turning over every rock until a smoking-hot Asian woman appeared. Knowing my luck, she’d pop out from under the rock with no clothes on and create a scandal, or there would be enough reason for Charlie to get upset. She had enough to worry about without dealing with jealousy. With any luck, I’d be able to keep the drama down to a simmer.

Aside from the Magical Chunhua, nothing was stirring in the community. It gave me a little bit of pause, even with the mad flow of bad thoughts in my head. There should have been some noise, but there wasn’t anything in my ears but my footsteps and the sound of my own breathing. The more I walked in the silence, the more unsettled I became.

I decided that something was wrong. Then the “wrong” showed up.

“Salaam, Francis.”

I heard the voice and didn’t turn around. The chills started at the base of my skull, shot straight down my spinal column and made my scrotum contract so tightly that I gasped. I started telling myself things, quietly. First, it was not the early morning of November 1
^st
. Second, I do not believe in ghosts. Third, I do not believe in ghosts. Really, I don’t.

“In almost every culture I know of it is very impolite to ignore someone when they address you directly. You are not an impolite man. Does that mean you are worried about what you will see if you turn around?”

“Would it make any difference at all if I was honest and admitted that I’m terrified?” I didn’t know what asking a question like that would do for me, but I couldn’t imagine a way that responding might make the situation more uncomfortable.

“You see? You are not impolite, and there is nothing unseemly about admitting fear in the face of the unknown.”

“You’re not an ‘unknown’. You’re supposed to be dead. That’s why I’m not turning around.”

“Oh. In that case, allow me to put some of your worry to rest,” he said, and then I heard his footsteps coming closer. I kept my eyes glued to a point six inches in front of my right big toe.

I saw his shoes in my peripheral vision. The gray hiking boots that he loved so much. That’s when the chills became actual shivers.

“Look at me.”

I did not want to, but I couldn’t help myself. Siddig was standing in front of me, whole, and smiling. His eyes were crinkled. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ve missed you. Oh, and, in the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, and in His Prophet, Muhammad, I mean you no harm. Do you feel any better now?”

“No.”

“Ah. That is unfortunate, but I imagine it would be normal in a situation like this. I have never been in a conversation with a friend of mine that is supposed to be dead, but is looking very good despite that. Then,” he waggled his finger in the air, “if my friend were a zombie, perish the thought, there might be such an opportunity. Before you ask, I am not a zombie.”

“Then what are you?”

“Dead, simply dead. You,” my ghostly companion said, giving me a pat on the shoulder, “are probably suspecting that you have stepped just a little to the left of Sanity.”

My stomach had dropped down to my ankles, just like when an elevator starts moving before you’re prepared. Sanity seemed like a reasonable thing to question at the moment.

I backed away from him. “Have I gone crazy?”

“I did not say that I believe that you are insane. Look around. You don’t see Bruce Willis and a little boy discussing his visions of dead people, do you? To me that means that you’re not insane.” Siddig held his arms wide, turned in a circle, indicating the world around us. “Still, you’re talking to a dead man, and recently spoke to a woman that simply disappeared. Did you not notice the lack of normal day-to-day noises and the stillness of the air? You might be asleep, dreaming this, rather than crazy.”

“I really would like to wake up.”

“No doubt.” He nodded, watching me as I continued to back away

“Siddig, do you know how I can stop this?” Fear was climbing up my spine, wearing nasty strap-on pitons on his shoes.

“Bismallah, Francis! I honestly wish I knew. Where do you need to go? What is it that you need to do?” A cup of mint tea appeared in his hand, and he sipped it with distinct relish. “Ah! While I am enchanted with the ambrosia in Paradise, I find that I miss the simplicity of tea.”

“I need to go back to being sane. I have to find out what has happened inside my head. I need to do whatever is necessary in order to protect my friends.” The strength of those simple words froze me as they emerged from my mouth. It was the solidity of truth and clarity, jacketed by the surety that I had no idea how to make those things happen.