Blood Soaked and Contagious (14 page)

Zombie Tess was about five feet away from me, which made her about fifteen feet away from the cowering barista and closing. I suppose my brain snapped, too. I got up from my chair and plowed into her.

We ended up on the floor, with me on top. Enjoyment in this was somewhat ruined by the set of long, thick fingernails buried in my side. Tess laughed at me and sunk her other fingernails into the flesh of my forearm. I screamed. You would have, too.

“What, boy? Did I make you so hot you wanted to do me here on the floor?”

It wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t been gyrating underneath me. Her fingernails were acting like a food processor set on “sensual slow,” twisting in my arm and side. I had the steak knife in my hand and I realized I had a decision to make before she decided to stop toying with me. If she was already dead, then it didn’t matter what I did to motivate her to let me go.

She was making all kinds of really lewd noises when I plunged the steak knife into her left eye. I felt it go through the back of the socket and into her head. Her naughty monologue abruptly ceased and was replaced by a wail. Her hands pulled away from me and wrapped around my knife hand, but not before I was able to churn the blade around. Her arms flopped to the ground and she just stopped as if someone had flipped a switch.

Cafe Brutus was very quiet after that.

“Would someone call the police and an ambulance?” My voice was deafening in the silence of the coffee shop. I didn’t move, just stared at my hand wrapped around the steak knife handle protruding from this woman’s eye socket. There seemed to be an awful amount of blood on her.

It took me a very long moment to look at my arm, specifically where she had impaled it with her fingernails. Two of the holes were spraying in time with my heartbeat. I remember thinking, “Oh. I guess that means she punctured the artery in two places,” before my gut instinct took over and I clamped my other hand over my arm. Put pressure on a wound. Pressure.

“Fuck.” Again, a very loud word in the silence, but it wasn’t alone for long. The police and an ambulance arrived. I rolled off Tess’s body onto the floor as the cops and EMTs stormed the cafe.

With my luck, I had the same police officer as before. I always appreciated consistency in law enforcement, and I told him so. He looked at me as though I’d lost my mind, but he rushed the EMTs over anyway. They might have even been the same guys from earlier, but I couldn’t be sure.

I knew I was going into shock. Shock is one of those things you don’t forget after the first time you feel it. If you’re not stuck in panic mode when it happens, you’ll feel the chills, a kind of existential claustrophobia, and how your thoughts get random and slow. I started to giggle gently, and then I just passed out.

Having your vision contract to blackness and your consciousness wink out like a light is another unforgettable human experience. It might be the closest we get to what a quiet death feels like, depending on how you go to sleep every night. For me, I’ve always fallen asleep in the middle of a thought or had sleep sneak up on me. Not the slow decent into blackness.

There weren’t any dreams in that darkness, not even a near death experience, just a return to groggy wakefulness. I could smell the international aroma of hospital ward, so I knew where I was before I was completely able to see again. What surprised me was that I couldn’t raise my hand to touch my face and move the oxygen mask around. There was something hard around my wrist.

Both of them, actually.

They’d cuffed me to the bed. That just didn’t bode well for me. Then again, having been involved in two major crimes in less than 12 hours might make me interesting enough to handcuff to a hospital bed. I set those thoughts aside for a bit to let the rest of my mind come back online. It wasn’t booting up at the usual speed.

I looked down, once I realized I wasn’t flat on my back but actually a bit elevated, and confirmed the sets of handcuffs. My side was sore, and I noticed there was a substantial amount of bandage around my right forearm. That was good, especially since the bandages were white and not red or brown. They’d sewn me up at the very least.

Shifting in the bed, just a little bit, informed me there were sutures in my side too. I was hoping Tess hadn’t punctured my kidney or anything like that, because that would certainly have made my life more complicated than it already was. I didn’t see a tube snaking out from under the sheets or feel anything odd about my groin, which probably meant they hadn’t slid a catheter up Mister Happy, and this added to my confidence that my kidney was okay.

Yes, kidneys okay. New problem: my bladder was also doing just fine. I was cuffed to a bed, an oxygen mask over my mouth and nose, and I needed to pee. GREAT!

“Yoohoo!” I called out from behind the silicone mask. “Yoooohoooo! I need a bedpan! Yooohooo!”

I heard her coming, bedpan clanking, before I actually saw her. I hadn’t been aware that Scottish hospitals hired extras from Japanese monster movies. She was a... grand woman. In her younger days, I was fairly certain she’d been striking to behold. Striking, like a sledgehammer to your big toe. In a fair fight with an Angus bull, this nurse would have won.

“Well, which is it then? Number one or number two?” She croaked out the words as she flipped down the sheets on the bed and flipped up my hospital gown.

“EEE!” I really didn’t have much to say other than that.

“Oh, aye. That sounds like a number one then,” she snapped on a rubber glove from the table beside my bed and I experienced a sort of distress only prescription narcotics could have made disappear. Mister Happy, I’m guessing, saw what was coming and decided to hide as best he could.

No such luck. She reached down, yanked him out by his turtleneck, and bent him over the rim of the cold bedpan. “All right. Let ‘er rip.”

“I can’t.” I had no bravado left. Lady Scotzilla had me by the Happy Part and even my bladder was recoiling in revulsion.

“You called me over here to take a piss, and now you’re tellin’ me tha’ you canna do it?”

“Um. Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, that’s for shite.” She reached down with her other hand and leaned on my abdomen. To this day I’m surprised the urine didn’t cut a hole in the bedpan like an industrial water jet machine.

The humiliation was complete when she gave it a shake, put down the bedpan, and carefully wiped me off with a tissue. She was kind, in her own way. Perhaps, even charming in that rough, plebian, We Neuter Livestock With Our Teeth sort of way. Nothing I thought along any of those lines made me feel the least bit better about the experience.

Mister Happy, for his part, pulled his turtleneck up and retreated behind Prostate Rock to meditate on the cruelty of human suffering.

The nurse trod off with the pan, whistling tunelessly to herself. I considered it great luck that the rest of the patients on my ward were asleep, comatose, or hiding beneath their blankets. God only knows to what sort of madness they had been subject in the days before I had arrived.

We were all captive together. There was a certain gemeinschaft that came from shared terror and equal subjugation under the rule of a Tyrant Kaiju. Or would that be “Bakemono”? Moreover, why was I suddenly remembering Sociology and Japanese in a bed in Scotland?

I’d been sedated. They had sewn me up, after all, and this probably meant that some sort of funky medication had been squirted into my IV. My father had erratic and unusual reactions to sedatives and drugs that ended in “-caine.” Perhaps I’d inherited that quirk from him?

My thoughts continued to swirl around in happy little currents for what felt like quite a long time. I had closed my eyes and was humming to myself. It was delightful.

Nurse Kaiju returned without ceremony and stuffed an infrared thermometer in my ear. Obligingly, I squealed like a pig, a sound I’m sure she knew well, and she put one giant hand on my head to hold me still. It was over in one eternal instant of existential angst. She grunted to herself, noted my temperature on the chart, and slipped the oxygen mask off me.

“Can you tell me your name?” Oh, the litany of questions they use to see if you have any brain cells left! I smiled, because I could take that test and pass it.

“My name is... Bum Stroker. I wrote the bestselling novel... ”

“Look, I know you’re stoned from the drugs, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t mess about with me on this. Am I makin’ myself clear?”

Gulp. “Yes, Nurse,” I strained to read her nametag, “Cruickshank.”

“Good boy. Name, date of birth, place of birth, and age? Now.”

I rattled them off, suddenly feeling very sober. She patted me on the shoulder with one of her giant hands. “That’s a fine lad, then. Are you up to speaking with a police officer?”

“I guess,” I answered her.

Pat. Pat. “Good. Inspector Andrews has been waiting for you to wake up. Good lad.”

Nurse Cruickshank trundled off, thermometer gripped in her hand like she was expecting Klingons to appear from underneath the hospital beds. In my opinion, even if they had, she wouldn’t have needed to worry about anything. They would have either immediately started crooning love poetry or just prostrated themselves in respect for a terrible and vengeful Goddess.

The double doors of the ward parted but did not dare hit her in the ass as she lurched through. Even the doors had learned their lesson.

A few moments later, the doors opened and admitted Inspector Andrews. He looked like Central Casting’s version of a gumshoe detective. The only thing missing was the fedora, and the only extra element was the astounding handlebar mustache. He could have hidden a troop of lemurs in it.

He stopped at the foot of my bed and addressed me. “Looks as though you’ve been having an eventful day. Hm?”

“It looks that way.”

“Well, I do need to explain the customary caution to you before we continue our chat.” He lifted his eyebrows and the wombat on his upper lip puffed up. “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely upon in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence. If you do not have legal counsel, you will be appointed one free of charge. Do you understand this caution as I’ve explained it to you?”

“I do. I am willing to make my statement to you without benefit of a barrister present.” I figured I might as well be as friendly as possible, since I had killed a dead person and was fairly sure the law hadn’t caught up to such things.

“Very good. I’ve already spoken with Officer Randall regarding the incident you were involved with last night, and that you were released without being charged or retained as a person of interest. What happened after you left this hospital earlier this morning?”

I explained my day in detail, including my altercation with Zombie Tess. He nodded, asked for clarification on one or two points, and made copious notes.

“I am curious about something, Inspector Andrews.”

“Go on.”

“Am I actually under arrest?”

“Not as such, no. You are considered a person of interest in this situation.” He looked a little uncomfortable when he said that.

“If I am not under arrest, you didn’t have to caution me or handcuff me to the hospital bed. Why have I been detained in this manner?”

“As an inspector, I deemed it appropriate in light of the possibility that you would flee prior to being questioned.” He actually puffed up his chest.

“And, let me guess. You cautioned me because you weren’t sure you wouldn’t arrest me?”

“A fairly standard procedure. Yes.”

“That girl was already dead.”

“True. Apparently, she came back to life at some point before you put a steak knife through her eyeball.”

“Please confirm for me, Inspector, that I have been detained, cautioned, and suspected in the self-defense killing of a woman who had predeceased the actual altercation.”

“That is a... correct statement.”

“Has the US Embassy been informed of these matters?”

“Not as yet, no.”

“Because I am not under arrest at this time, I wish to contact the Embassy to obtain assistance in this ‘singular’ situation.” I locked eyes with him and bored all the way to the rear of his skull. “Unless you are going to formally arrest me, I suggest you unlock. These. Handcuffs. Now.” I paused. “Please.”

Inspector Andrews was unhappy with me, because I was supposed to be wobbly from the drugs and not someone willing to fight back on the issue at hand. Truth be told, I was still loopy but an entirely different, ass-kicking, portion of my mind had been activated by his presence. Normally, I wouldn’t have had the balls to confront a police officer on his turf like this.

Then again, how much could he possibly do? I’d killed a dead woman. There was no crime on the books anywhere for “re-manslaughter.” It didn’t even fit the parameters of “defilement of a corpse” because the corpse had been moving and fighting back at the time. If I hadn’t popped her in the eye, she might have defiled
me
.

The mind recoils in horror.

The Lip Wombat moved silently, breathing, probably about to stomp down his face and start grazing on his bad tie. His eyes, thankfully, were not breathing, and stayed the same size. They were the absolute definition of a “flinty gaze” in color and expression of restrained frustration. This was not a pleased, Lip Wombat symbiote.