Blood Soaked and Contagious (24 page)

“First of all,” I began carefully, because I didn’t want to get into my background too much, “our friend Buttons is either part of or is the head honcho of a different secret division that is not happy with our friendly neighborhood zombie leader.”

“So, he is not Section 41?” Jayashri asked.

“No, more like 23. That group started during the Cold War, while the Star Wars defense plan was the big thing on the minds of the people in power.”

“Did he tell you what the Hell he wants with us?” For someone who had only appeared in the community days before, Charlie was sinking her loyalties in very fast. Then again, I’d seen stranger things than that.

“He told me he’s got two reasons for being here. His orders are to eliminate Hightower as a threat and to protect our neighborhood at the same time. It sounds strange, but he seemed pretty sincere when he shared all of that with me.”

Both of them looked thoughtful, and I was glad that the line of questioning was being steered away from me. I didn’t like the fact that I needed to be less than forthcoming about my life story, but that’s the way the cookie tends to crumble. Secrets and people you love are an incongruous combination, like Ken Watanabe dressed as Tinkerbell, singing the theme song from “The Love Boat.”

People have told me that I’m “special.” I prefer to think my mind works in mysterious ways. It must have shown on my face that I’d slipped away from the conversation, because Charlie gave me a vicious poke.

“What are you thinking, Frankie the Lips?” At that very second, I was thinking as quickly as I could.

“I was thinking Buttons being here was a little incongruous. If he’s got access to interesting data or resources, then I’d expect he could take out Hightower without involving us at all.” I felt it was a good save and yet very pertinent to the conversation. Not to mention, true. It did feel odd to me.

Buttons claimed to be from a black project group, ordered to both protect us and bring down our mutual problem child. I am the person who inferred what Section 23 was; all he did was nod at me and disarm me with a compliment. That added a bit of quicksand to the landscape.

I explained my train of thought. We started walking again, sharing an uneasy silence, until Jayashri tapped me on the arm.

“Frank?” Jaya asked.

“Hm?”

“How long does it take for your Japanese soaking tub to heat up?”

“Ah. Two hours, give or take. Why?”

“I was not kidding in the least when I said that I wanted to soak, drink tea, and sort out all of the thoughts in my head. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to allow me that luxury.”

“Jaya, not only will I heat the water for you, I will make you tea to sip while you relax!” I bowed and pointed the way to my store with a completely overdone flourish of my hands. “This way to your après-meeting afternoon Spa appointment, Madame!”

“I will be happy to show off my skills, if you’re interested, Jayashri?” Charlie stretched her arms and wiggled her fingers.

“Dare I ask what those skills are?”

“I went to massage therapy school before I decided to go for my Masters in Psychology. It was a great way to pay my way through grad school. Do you like Swedish or deep tissue?”

“My goodness! Between the two of you, you’re offering me the garden of earthly delights! What have I done to deserve this?” She actually looked surprised and sincere asking that. For my part, she deserved all that and more, and I suspect her humility was what caused me to want to feel that way.

Humble people who go out of their way for others have always been inspiring to me. Coming from a privileged family, humility wasn’t something we saw on a daily basis, at home or otherwise. Certainly, Jaya and Baj were well off, but they managed to not let it get to them the way it often did with others. Then again, “well off” in a barely functioning economy that valued barter over cash was a relative thing.

Still, I’d seen her go out of her way for others. That quality was part of the nobility, for want of a better word, and grace that made her who she was. Heating up a giant bucket full of water was a simple thing to do. I would have slain dragons, skinned them, and made her shoes, luggage, and some hot form-fitting jumpsuits if she’d asked me.

“Hey, Frankie Tub o’ Water, have you got a folding table in the store that would work as a massage table if we put blankets on it for a cushion?”

“Hey, Charlie Green Eyes, are you going to keep adding things to my name or are you going to settle on one thing and stick to it?”

“Hell! I don’t know! It’s way too much fun and you make the best faces when I find a good one!”

Charlotte Marie Cooper. Curvy. Tattooed. Psychologist. Massage therapist. Utterly frustrating combination of too many interesting attributes!

“Grr, I tell you. Grr.” I tried to be angry and fierce, but it didn’t quite work with her. “I do have just the table and memory foam padding that you can throw some sheets on. Am I not spiffy?”

“Wow! Keep that up and I might just fall in love with you! How did you get a hold of sheets and memory foam?”

“I was walking by a home store one afternoon and a bunch of zombies were liberating the contents.” I couldn’t help but grin like an idiot. “So, I liberated the contents from the zombies who suddenly didn’t need household goods.”

Her face screwed up in an expression of disgust. “I hope you didn’t get any goo on the stuff.”

“Hey!” I replied. “That’s what’s so great about new products that are still in their clean plastic wrappers! No muss. No fuss. No brains!”

We wandered into my store, and I told Charlie where to find what she was after and suggested that the all-natural hand salve on the endcap of Aisle 3 would probably be an excellent stand-in for massage lotion if it were warmed up. While she was tracking down the body lubricant, I located the accessories and left them with Jayashri, before refilling the tub and coaxing the water heater into blissful operation. After that little spate of activity, I scooted up to my room to hang out while the Spa was occupied.

The first abdominal cramp hit me as I was going up the stairs to my living space. It felt like I’d swallowed the hand grenade that had blown me across the lawn and doubled me over onto the steps. I made it to the door with my eyes full of uncontrollable tears and my mouth hanging open, breathing like an opera diva in the middle of natural childbirth. The Lamaze was doing nothing for the contractions at all. They came in waves.

A cramp hit me like I was trying to push a 25-pound baby through my navel, and I rolled through the door and onto the floor in front of my desk. When I had a moment to think, all that went through my mind were images of Chest Bursters from the “Alien” movies, and that did not help my heart rate nor ease my panic.

I looked up and saw my old chair in front of my face, and something in my head told me that I needed to be much closer to it, and I crawled over to it and rested my face on the steel leg closest to me. The next cramp slapped my face against the metal and I tried to vomit, but all that came out was tons of saliva.

God, my cheekbone hurt!

What I really wanted was to close my eyes and die, but it wasn’t working out that way. My eyes weren’t even working properly, because all I could focus on was where my spit had landed on the chair leg. The liquid wasn’t running down the metal; instead, it looked like it was pooling. Not long after that, it seemed as though my spit was moving back toward my face along the chair leg.

Super! Hallucinations! I really wanted to go back to the raven and nerve endings.

CRAMP!

My tongue was out, touching the metal of the chair, and I was panting hard. I tasted the cold steel and there was something calming about it. The next cramp wasn’t as bad as the one before it.

I nearly screamed when my spit started oozing back onto my tongue and slithering back toward my throat. Looking down, there was a gray worm on the chair leg that was stretching back into my face and doing a fine job of moving toward my uvula. I was paralyzed with revulsion and shattered by waves of cramps.

Centimeter by centimeter, the gray spit slug made a beeline for my throat. The chair leg behind it looked bright and abraded, as if my spit had scoured the metal and then polished the scratches. The cramping was horrible, and each contraction took my breath away. Also horrible was the overwhelming urge to swallow. But I did. I couldn’t help it.

The cramps backed down into waves of full-body tremors. I kept swallowing until the gray mess was gone. A minute or two after the last swallow, the shaking stopped and I flopped over onto my back.

If you have ever been to a horror movie that was so intense that you left the theater unable to form complete thoughts, then you know what it was like to be in my head after that experience. I wasn’t able to think over the storm of wordless emotions that were crashing inside my skull, but I didn’t have to wait for long for some kind of quietude. I passed out, which was happening far too often for comfort.

When I woke up, it was like an electric shock. I sat straight up, alert and ready to go, as if nothing freaky had happened. There was also a sensation of knowing how long I’d been out of commission. I wanted to say 15 minutes, 44 seconds, and 33 milliseconds.

Blocks fell into place.

I wasn’t infected with the zombie virus. I’d been nailed by nanotechnology. Mister Yan appears and less than an hour later, I’m rejecting foreign bodies and healing far too quickly to be human. Just a little while later, I’m doubled over, sliming furniture and slurping the slime back up. Why? The little bastards want to replicate.

Mister Yan went to Jayashri’s house also. Chances are, she’d been “gifted.” Charlie was with me, and if the tech wasn’t typed specifically for the two of us, it would be floating around in her system as well.

I felt a little relief at that thought. I would prefer to tell her something like, “Hey! That bug that turns you into the walking dead that I thought I gave you last night? I was wrong! You didn’t get anything from me! It looks like the little Chinese man gave you nano-critters instead!”

Whether or not that would be better in the end, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that my new inhabitants had cleared foreign material out of my body, repaired tissue damage, and made me feel completely horrible in order to vomit drool all over a steel chair leg, oh, and then have me consume the goo I’d ejected, along with whatever material had been scavenged from the chair. That could make metal detectors troublesome in the future.

“Gosh, sweetie! I infected you with the little wrigglers Bajali sent me! You’ll have horrible morning sickness, and in nine months, you’ll have a bouncing baby Cylon!”

Deliver me, Oh Lord, from my own imagination. Why can’t I give someone something simple that requires two weeks of antibiotics?

Oh, that’s right. I’m not living in a normal world.

I stood up, brushed myself off, and made my way back down to the Spa to tell my friends about the latest development. I confess, I was feeling a tad frustrated by all of it.

When I slid the door aside, there was an interesting tableau in front of my eyes. Charlie was passed out on the floor with the heater vent pipe in her left hand and soot all over her face. Jayashri was thrusting her hips, vigorously, against the water pipe and licking gray drool as it slid back down toward her lips. It was made 1,000 times more erotic because she was naked and covered in pearls of bath water.

Crotch Quixote and the Panzas began a rousing Mariachi rendition of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” My frontal lobes gave up the effort to keep the music down, poured a strong one, and sat back in their recliner.

The effect was only slightly ruined when Jaya passed out, slid off the water pipe, and flopped onto the floor in a curvaceous tan pile.

I decided it was a splendid time for a mantra. “It turns and walks out of the room and closes the door behind it. It puts the lotion in the basket.” I repeated those lines over and over and over again. Then something in my head changed the disposition of the lotion, and I ran out of the room before it could alter my course of action.

Standing outside of the room, on the other side of a large sliding steel door, felt much safer even if the House Band was encouraging me to go back inside. I could wait for fifteen minutes and then make snarky comments when they wake back up! What a great idea! No.

There are some things that even the painfully horny should never risk, even if there are lovely little nanomachines that will heal you up in a pinch. Of course, there was no way to know precisely how powerful the little buggers could be without testing of some kind. It seemed a smarter course of action to simply forget that they were around, but be safety conscious and cautious, rather than walk up to an IED and hope to stand back up afterward.

That being said, if the little bastards could give me claws and coat my skeleton in some fantastical metal, as well as heal any and every injury known to man... Let’s just say I wouldn’t bitch about it in the least. Unless it hurt like Hell to do it. Then I would bitch loudly, cry, wail, complain, and go throw myself off a building and then get up and do it all again.

I never said I was sane. Most people aren’t.

What I really wanted was some kind of explanation for why Baj decided to do this without even asking. Of course, he probably couldn’t have asked considering the position of being under scrutiny and having to hand off the “goodies” to Mister Yan to deliver. But that didn’t answer the primary “Why” of the problem.