Blood Soaked and Contagious (23 page)

We started walking again. By pheromones, non-verbal communication, or telepathy, we all decided to descend on Shawn’s place. Like my hardware store, his garage was on the industrial side of the street, as opposed to Baj’s house, which was one of the center showplaces on the residential side.

Charlie was about ten steps ahead of us and had already begun a friendly familial negotiation on the use of nicknames.

“Bullshit! I’ll call you whatever I want to call you, you overgrown, lily-white—”

“Charlotte Marie Cooper, don’t you fuckin’ start that shit when I’ve got guests,” Shawn retorted, just as we poked our heads into the first bay of the garage. Sure enough, there were four faces I’d never seen before.

“Dude! You’re up and movin’!” Shawn had either forgotten our fight from a few days ago, or he had replaced those concerns with wondering what his baby sister and I had gotten into.

“I’m up and moving around, that is certainly true. Who are the new guys?”

“Hey, that’s right, you’ve been incommunicado since the boys brought friends over.” Shawn pointed a meaty finger at the first guy to my far right. “This is Jackson, Fitzgerald, Kim, and Buttons.”

My curiosity was piqued, so I figured I might as well ask. “Buttons, is there any reason they call you that?”

He was a compact guy, middle aged, high and tight, wearing always-fashionable tactical black. My question rated a smirk, and he replied, “I push buttons. You the guy who didn’t run away from the grenade fast enough?”

“No, that’s the other guy.” Buttons pushed my Smart Ass button. “I’m the guy that flies through the air with the greatest of ease.”

He looked at me sideways. “Daring young man on a flying trapeze?”

“Dropping on zombies, quick as you please.” I gave him a shit-eating grin.

I shook hands with the other three guys. Solid grips, equally solid stances. “You guys Special Forces?”

Fitzgerald answered, “Yeah. How did you know? We’re wearing civvies.”

“I trained with some guys who stood just like the three of you do. Plus, if you know Nate, it was a decent guess.” I turned back to Buttons. “I’m going to bet you and Flower know one another.”

“Good guess.” His posture changed slightly, as if he’d decided I was something worth noticing.

The testosterone must have been elevated to nearly poisonous levels, because the other three guys backed up, along with Charlie and Jayashri. Shawn just sat behind his precious M-50 and looked clueless. Something was happening and I had no idea what it was, other than that Buttons and I needed to have a talk.

“Buttons. Let’s walk, you and me.” I turned around and strolled down the street in the direction of the hardware store. I didn’t have to wait long before he was walking right beside me.

“Francis Stewart.”

“Yes.”

“I know who you are.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know who you are, and I sort of expect that. You’re a few notches higher up the chain from Flower, aren’t you?”

“That is correct. You want to start by telling me why the little Asian zombie didn’t blow up on the way
into
the community but took a deliberate header on the way out?”

“That little Asian zombie used to be one of us. I don’t know how he managed to get in, but I do know why he chose to exit like he did.”

“Care to enlighten me?”

“Not especially. Let’s just say that, what do you guys call it, the ‘sitrep’ has changed a bit.”

“Do tell, Mister Stewart.”

“The nanomachine project has either stalled or is moving slower than they anticipated. Hightower is considering an alternate plan to infect the water supply. The third bit of information is that this community will be attacked, with intent to wipe us out, three or four days from now.”

We stopped alongside the door to my store. He looked up at me with the flattest gray eyes I’ve ever seen and showed me far too many teeth for my comfort level.

“We know about the nanomachine project and why they’ve hit a wall. As for the water supply, that’s already been tried several times around the world, and it doesn’t work. As for wiping you all off the map,” he ran his hands over his buzz cut, “that’s just Warren Hightower being petty.”

“Petty? He’s willing to kill all of us because he’s petty? What about his dream of herds of human cattle? I’m sure we’d make great pets.”

“Facetious much?”

“Whenever I can muster the energy.” We strolled into my store, and I was feeling less and less comfortable with this guy. Clearly, he worked for, or had worked for, one of the Initial Agencies.

In DC-area parlance, an “Initial Agency” is one that is most commonly referred to by initials, rather than the full name. Central Intelligence Agency: CIA. National Security Agency: NSA. You get the idea.

Although I’ve always wondered why no one calls the Secret Service by its initials. Too many awkward feelings about that, I suppose.

There was no polite way to ask this “Buttons” person more about his background or current loyalties, so I decided to ask him in my own unique way. I kicked him up against the counter, pulled the Man Scythe free, and snapped the blade open in the same motion. The edge was resting against his neck when I stopped moving. Unfortunately for me, he had pulled a gun from somewhere on his person and it was pointed right between my eyes.

At that range, if I twitched, I’d open his jugular, and he would have time to aim and fire before he lost consciousness. We’d both be dead.

“Nice moves. I didn’t think that behemoth of yours could be deployed that fast.” He actually smiled at me. Very straight, white teeth.

“The benefits of a lot of practice. Before we kill one another, I wouldn’t mind knowing who you are and what your investment is in all this.”

“You’re familiar with Section 41 already,” he said. I nodded, feeling a hole open up in my stomach. He continued, “I’m with Section 23. Now we both have a better idea of who we’re dealing with. Want to put that chopper down?”

“You first.” The gun vanished. He was just that fast. I moved my weapon, folded the blade down, and nudged it back into the plastic scabbard at my back.

“I’ll give you credit, you’ve done a lot with an improbable weapon like that. A .45 loaded with the proper ammunition would be faster and easier. Even a sword.”

I looked at him and tried to put my impressions together so I’d have some kind of clue about Section 23’s purposes. From what I knew about the special groups, they were named by year of inception. Section 41 was started 5 years ago, which means 23 began about 18 years before that in the early 1980s.

The Cold War was still going on, and the US was touchy from the Iran hostage crisis. The Space Shuttle was a reality. They’d started messing around with the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI: space-based satellite and missile killers.

Shit.

Buttons. SDI. Cold War era.

“SDI.” I didn’t ask. I simply said the word.

He nodded, barely perceptible but there. “Your file was surprisingly accurate. Quick on the uptake.”

“You’re not here because Flower asked you. You got in touch with him. Am I right?”

He was actively smiling at me, like I was an apprentice who had done something truly interesting.

“Excellent guess, and dead on the money. Why didn’t you join the Sections when they tried to recruit you?”

A hard topic. Yet, he already had the file on me, so saying the words wouldn’t divulge anything he wasn’t already aware of.

“Like you don’t already know?”

“Of course I do, but it is always interesting to hear things firsthand.”

“Right. Why are you bothering with this neighborhood? S-23 can’t have an interest in saving our asses, and Hightower is S-41’s problem.”

“It’s pretty simple. The parts of the government that are working are still invested in the safety of the living population as a whole. Turning large numbers of Americans into a food source is not in the interest of our country, whether we can emerge from the Emergency as a functioning nation or not. Right now, we still have 30 percent functioning infrastructure in urban areas.” He cracked his knuckles, and leaned back against the counter. “We can’t lose any more of that. Ideally, we’d like to rebuild it. Regardless, Hightower has become too big for his britches, and I’m here to help you stop him. Quietly.”

“You want to play in my playground. We do it my way.”

He laughed. “You’ve claimed this place and these people as yours? Your playground? You aren’t even a bit player in all this.”

“I need to save them. I need to get Bajali back. I have to help defend them. It’s just that simple.”

“You are not a tactical genius.”

“No, but I love these people and am willing to die to try and keep them safe. What I need is a tactical genius, because ours went over to try and buy us time.”

“Well, you’re in luck. I’m a tactical genius.” He said it and looked confident about it, but I found it a hard pill to swallow.

“That’s fantastic, but I don’t know what your game is. I need someone who loves these people and would die for them if it came to that.” His face lost every bit of human warmth as I spoke. In any other person, I would have expected a punch in the eye to accompany that expression.

“You should have joined the military. Then you would understand the oath every soldier takes the day they enlist. I took that oath when I was 18, and I’ve made even more binding commitments since then.” He was not giving me a tongue-lashing. He was explaining the world as he knew it, albeit coldly, to someone he felt couldn’t grasp it. “I came here to do my job. Protecting this functioning micro-society is essential to the success of that job. That being the case, I will protect them with my life and from every demon in Hell if we fail.”

“They’ve got ravens in Hell that bite your nerve endings.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s an inside joke.” I got serious. “You realize I will do my best to kill you if you’re lying, yes?”

“I imagined that would be the case. Are we good at this point?”

“As long as you don’t tell them what you know about me. I won’t tell them about you and your boys.”

He nodded. “Let’s go back to the kids.”

We walked back silently. Everyone was as relaxed as they could be, given the situation. Nate had appeared while Buttons and I were discussing things, and the gang was sorting through how to organize everyone for the next big discussion. Apparently, things were going to be held in my “conference room” after nightfall, but this time the kids would be with us.

Not a bad thought, considering what happened the last time. Barbara would probably be tasked to keep the youngsters under control. No one had the knack for it like she did.

They asked me to do it once. I gave it my best shot and it was a spectacular non-starter. Little Siddig Junior wouldn’t speak to me for a month afterward.

I volunteered to go around to the neighbors and give them the meeting time and location, but Nate and Shawn shushed me. They felt I ought to get a little more rest before the meeting so I’d have enough energy to participate.

“Look, you’ve been blown up. If Jayashri weren’t walking around with you, I’d put you over my shoulder and jog you back over there myself.” Nate gave me his trademark evil eye. “But, with Jayashri and Charlotte here, I know you’ll be just fine. Now, go rest up. We’re gonna need you when the party starts in a few days.”

Nate and his buddies made appropriate “Rarrr!” noises in the spirit of everyone banding together to beat the oily fudge out of a common enemy. Bless their hearts, but they sounded like a bunch of fraternity brothers before a night of binge drinking. I strongly suspected that Barbara wouldn’t allow such behavior, unless these guys had brought their wives. Then she’d hang out with the girls and the boys could get as plowed as they pleased.

It made for some interesting mental documentary footage.

“Don’t you worry, Nate. We’ll drag him back to his place even if he’s kicking and screaming.” Charlie gave him a comradely punch to the shoulder. He laughed, messed up her hair, and backed up two steps when he noticed the look on her face.

“Okay. The females of the Cooper family are even fiercer than the males,” he said.

“You got that right, Soldier Boy. In the sack, or out of the sack: you’ll never go back.” I realized, belatedly, that she was flirting with Nate. I felt vaguely uneasy about it, but couldn’t put my finger on the reason.

Nate’s comrades made appreciative “Ooo!” noises, and he grinned like an idiot. Shawn just blushed.

“All right, Nurse Cooper. Let us take our young charge back to his home.” Jayashri waved her along and snagged me by the elbow.

Shortly, we were walking up the street together, and they stopped me as soon as they felt we were out of earshot of Shawn’s shop.

“Okay, Frank. You want to tell us who that Buttons guy is and what he meant by mentioning he knows who you are?” Charlie was up in my face, asking me that. I suspect she was more interested in what might or might not be common knowledge about me than she was in Mister Buttons.