Blood Soaked and Contagious (16 page)

“You have not cost us anything. We have given freely to you in return for what you have freely given us. I see your hurt has made you blind to the love around you, and that saddens me deeply.” I decided in that moment I never wanted to see a frown on her face again. It was physically painful for me to see the soft curves of her face turn upside down. “Francis, in my eyes, you have cost me nothing. You have not listened to me, but to the voice inside yourself that says you are the cause of bad events. Bajali made a decision. We all have. Each one to their own beliefs. We come together because there are beliefs we share.”

At the time, I could barely process what she was trying so hard to tell me. My pain was the only thing for which I was truly to blame. She was absolutely right; I couldn’t see or hear because I was soaking in the hot water I had boiled for myself.

“I tell you that I love you. Bajali loves you. Shawn loves you. You are beloved of all of us and it would hurt to see you leave, but no one can stop you if that is your choice. When you arrived, you brought so much to our lives, and your intuition saved the lives of our children.” She leaned down into my face, put the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and said, “You are already the hero you wish you could be. I would ask you not to leave us, as a woman who needs a hero and a friend in this most distressing time.”

My face must have been a sight to behold when she pulled back, because she laughed in that delightful way so unique to her. I knew my bloodshot eyes were as wide as they could get, but she shared with me sometime later that my mouth was open and I looked like a surprised fish.

“Now, my Hero Francis, I will leave you to rest. I suggest you do that, drink plenty of water, and I will have someone visit you every day to make sure you eat. When you are ready, come back to us.” She got up, smoothed the lines of her pants, and started towards the door. “And,” she said, “I will be back in two days to look at the sutures and remove the ones in your arm at the very least.”

She left gracefully, much like everything else she does. No matter where I go or what I do, I judge what I see by my memories of her and how she seemed to flow when so many other people look like machines in comparison.

They talk about Geisha and how they walked as if they were floating. Their movements were precise, effortless, and designed to stir the heart even more than the desire of those who saw them. For me, Jayashri Sharma was what Geisha aspired to be, combined with an amazing mind and a depth of compassion for which I have never found a match.

Except in her husband, Bajali.

She left me with a spinning head and the fallout of my own emotions. I still had the dull gray curve of metal in my hand. It had very sharp points.

I fell asleep with that shard of steel in my hand. The thunderstorm was long over.

“Hola, Francisco!” I snapped awake when I heard her, but I was still a little too stiff to bounce to my feet.

“Yolanda. Mi amiga muy querida,” I replied. My beloved friend.

“You are a flirt,” she said and smiled at me. What Jayashri did for grace, Yolanda did with the art of smiling. She was five feet, two inches tall, with curly black hair, and she managed to smile with her whole body. Just, please, remember that I told you: do not ever get her angry.

I still believe I saw her levitate one afternoon when her husband accidentally ruined a batch of her cheese. My Spanish is nowhere near as good as it used to be, but what I understood of her rapid-fire screaming was enough to make me want to build a bunker and hide behind it.

Ómer, her husband, would stand in the face of her fury, smile, nod, and go about his business. I once asked him how he was able to control the urge to flee in those situations. He handed me a cold beer and replied, “You know, you had better know who you marry. Besides, her mother, much worse.”

Yolanda sauntered over to me, a covered plate in one hand and a lidded Mason jar in the other. I smelled something alluring, tantalizing, and remarkably like her cooking. My stomach got the message and growled prodigiously.

She laughed like a waterfall. A serious force of nature, this lady.

She put the plate and jar down beside me, still laughing, and stood back up.

“Now, you listen to me, Francisco, you eat and heal up. Okay? Juanito and Julia miss you, and my husband needs to build a chicken house.”

“Si, Mamacita. Voy a comer porque te amo mucho.” Yes Mommy. I’ll eat because I love you a whole lot.

“Ay! Me encanta ese hombre!” Oh! I love this man!

We bid one another fond farewells, and I pulled the cover off the plate. There, revealed unto me, were huevos rancheros, sausage, and a big block of her queso blanco. Of course, there was also the Mason jar of milk. This was the “Breakfast of Champions,” no matter what the advertising executives said.

If Julia were older... Perish that thought before it starts. There’s no way I could cope with a woman who learned to yell from Yolanda. Sticking to my fascination with Shawn’s younger sister was probably the best bet. Yet there were still a few sticking points to that issue.

First of all, we’d never met. Second of all, I’ve never even seen a photo of her. Shawn had never described her to me. She might have been some sort of radioactive redneck princess with three eyes, two rows of nipples, and perverted desires to hit men with bunnies. Third of all... there wasn’t a third reason. The first two were good enough. Regardless, I could keep up my adoration from afar without disturbing anyone too much. I hoped.

My only breakfast in days took longer to eat than I had imagined it would. I suppose a little fasting was enough to make my stomach shrink a tiny bit, so I just ate more slowly. Not a hardship in the least, because the flavors were worth rolling around on my tongue for as long as I could make them last.

In my experience, there are three situations where food tastes far too good to be believed: when you’ve not eaten in days, when the food has been cooked over a real campfire, and lastly, of course, when you think you’re about to die in the immediate future. This meal fell into the first category. Shawn’s BBQ fell into the second.

No opportunity at that juncture to comment on the third possibility. I suppose I should have felt lucky about that in some way, but I didn’t.

The breakfast that morning in Scotland didn’t taste any better, nor did my lunch in Kyoto a few months after that. Although, I have to say, the Japanese zombies are some of the wildest I’ve run into. It is almost as though you throw people from certain cultures into bizarre situations and they get an attitude of “Oh, well then. Might as well push it for all I can!” In other situations, people revert to their idea of what things “ought to be” rather than carve their own path through a new situation.

The Japanese zombies were a startling combination of both of those reactions. Deep down in the strange recesses of my heart, that afternoon will always be known as Day of the Cosplay Zombie. Honestly, it still gives me the shivers.

My breakfast settled inside me and I quietly blessed whichever cow the milk came from. The inevitable happened: the digestive system issued a blanket order to the rest of my body. “Shut down non-essential systems. Restart post-grokking of groovy chow.” My brain happily obliged, and I napped-out across the sleeping bag.

I dreamed of my mother. I saw her dancing with a former President at a social reception in the Oval Office. For some reason, it didn’t strike me as odd that he would have a large swing band in the Oval Office, probably because of the other things he did with cigars and dresses. Regardless, there were canapés, champagne, heads of state, and Mom cutting a rug with the Prez.

They looked pretty good together, all things considered.

Zombie Jerry, looking swanky in a mauve tuxedo, offered me champagne from the tray he was carrying. We enjoyed some small talk, and he moved on to serve the head of the UN Security Council.

The dream went downhill quickly after Jerry bit off the guy’s nose. It was all bloody mayhem. Out on the dance floor, my mom was grinding on the Prez from the Female Superior position while clawing out gobs of his chest. The man was a pitiful, pitiful screamer. Shawn appeared out of nowhere, clothed in nothing but a Speedo and sunburn, mowing down the guests with a giant machine gun.

His sister, or what I imagined his sister to look like, tapped me on the shoulder. In the dream, I turned around to take in her Country Amazon goodness, only to find her wearing nothing but some kind of harness and a distressing strap-on. It was black and looked just like H.R. Giger’s Alien, if that critter had been a dildo.

She smiled and the dildo hissed at me, opened its mouth, and stuck out its fangy tongue. The mouth snapped at me. I screamed.

The scream woke me up. I looked over at the empty plate and Mason jar, and I silently cursed them for being psychoactive substances disguised as tasty cooking.

Abruptly, I needed to get out of my room. My bladder and bowels were speaking, but that wasn’t the deeper motivation. I felt the need to see people and find out what day it was.

Getting down the stairs was not as awful as going up them was some days before, and I took that as a positive sign my body was deciding to heal up well. I could see sunlight through the shades on the store windows. A good thing, I thought.

I wandered the aisles a little because it was comforting and seemed to settle my mind. After a while, I went in the back to use the facilities for the first time in a couple of days. The less said about that unique experience, the better.

Strangely enough, it managed to ground me back into my body better than having breakfast did. That, in turn, lead me to wonder where my weapons of choice were hiding, because I’d not taken them upstairs with me. I was also ambushed by a surprising thought.

“Frank?”

“Yes, Brain?”

“You’ve been wearing the same clothes for the better part of a week and you have not bathed. Aren’t you worried you will upset people when you encounter them?”

“Oh my!”

“Precisely!”

I scooted off to the storeroom. I hoped there would be water left in the tub that wasn’t supporting an algae-based ecosystem. There was no point in worrying about the temperature: it would be frigid unless I started a fire, scrubbed myself off, and then started soaking. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with frigid, or if I was concerned enough to cope with tepid water.

Shortly after I appropriated the hardware store, I built something I’d always wanted. An ofuro: a Japanese-style bathtub. I even built a wood-burning water heater, a drain system, and a rainwater barrel. Immensely cool, even if I do say so myself.

Having basic handyman skills is the best way to survive the slow collapse of civilization. There’s no point in going out if you can’t end your final days with a good, hot soak. This is a fundamental tenet of my belief system.

I heard soft singing when I got to the door of the storeroom. Puzzling. There were also muted water noises. Apparently, my desire to rejoin the human race was linked inextricably to a Goldilocks situation.

There was someone in my ofuro. Unacceptable.

I was unarmed and wounded, which was also unacceptable. I was forced to ask myself which of these situations was the most traumatizing to my psyche. The answer, of course, was having someone taking a dip in My Precious without my informed consent. You just don’t fuck with a man’s bathtub.

All I could do was hope it wasn’t a member of America’s fastest growing social group: the Undead. A zombie would definitely finish off what the grenade had started, and I took that into consideration for about ten seconds. But my tub was more important. There are things a man simply must take a stand for, even at the expense of his own life.

Small children. Pregnant women. Really cute women. Women in general. Bath tubs. Good friends. Apple pie. Freedom. Beautiful weapons. Yolanda’s cheese.

I slid the door open a tad, so I could peek. Luck was on my side, because the blond-haired head was facing away from me, still singing quietly. Female. Steam. Some foreign blond tart had fired up my heater and was enjoying the fruits of my labor! Unacceptable!

Just keep facing the other direction, missy. We’ll settle this invasive behavior in just a moment.

Scooting through the smallest space I could quietly make between the door and the jamb proved to be intensely painful. I swallowed the yelp when the lock plate grazed some of the sutures in my back and did my best to control my breathing. There wasn’t much I could do about the tears that sprung to my eyes, so I just kept moving forward.

The plan was a simple one. Get to the side of the tub, right behind her head. Reach over with my right arm and get her in a headlock across the wooden planks. Zombie or person, she’ll grab my arm, which will tell me, by the length of her fingernails, what sort of shit I was in.

I glided across the floor like a ninja with Crisco on his booties. Silent and full of righteous power fueled by my indignation. Ready? Steady? Yeah.

In mere seconds I was in position to execute my plan of identifying and neutralizing the interloper. My arm was up, ready to move, and I was suddenly looking at a pair of green eyes, not the back of someone’s head.

Oh. Damn.

“Um. Hey. I bet you’re Frank. Right?” Even coming from behind the cedar planks of the tub, it was a pretty voice. I really hoped I wouldn’t have to kill her before we could discuss why someone had been in my tub and
was still there
.