Blood Soaked and Contagious (38 page)

In reality, that thought had never crossed my mind. Dad never seemed to give a damn, even if he periodically had us get family portraits done. I guess there was more reason for doing that than I’d considered. A businessman has to keep up appearances, and a pleasant family photo on the desk or the wall couldn’t hurt.

“I am... ” I tried to say more than that, but everything crushed together back around my uvula and the resulting mess was too tight for other words to get through.

“You are a lot of things.” She closed the distance between us, and despite the dried mess on both of us, hugged me. “You’re a good man and absolutely not your father’s son in all the ways that count. Now, we’ve got the bowing ball out of your ass, and it is time to get ourselves cleaned up while we can.”

Belatedly, I realized that I was standing there naked and had just been given a full-body hug by an equally naked woman. If my brain had been capable of processing any more input, I probably would have been jumping for joy, but I was completely crispy from my jaw to the top of my skull. Even my Groin Mariachi Trio was silent on the matter.

In the end, I just sat on the stool and let her sponge me off. Two buckets of water later, she got me a towel and took care of her own sponging. I sat there and watched, feeling like something of a voyeur, but beyond that vague sensation I was operating with nothing more than a head full of static.

She started to dry herself off, turned to me, and said something so mundane it flipped my brain over.

“Baby, the next time you’re out, we definitely need more soap.”

My voice came back online, as did at least a portion of my brain. “Does this mean you’re moving in?”

Her cheeks got very pink and she laughed. “That might be a little, I don’t know, premature?” I love how her eyes sparkled when she said, “I guess you could say I’m hoping to spend a lot of time here, even if I’m living with my brother. Tonight, included, because you’re way too unsteady to be alone.”

This time, when she hugged me with only my towel separating us, I was very aware of the sensual gravity of her heavenly body. I hugged her back, and even with the static in my skull, I loved how she felt in my arms. She was a source of joy in my life I had hoped for and joked about, but never truly expected. There’s a certain stasis that is hard to move past when you’ve decided you’re always going to be alone.

We froze at the same time. Someone was in the store. Armed, and absolutely not human-temperature. My furry brain allowed one large thought to pass into my consciousness. I didn’t care who it was that screwed up my romantic moment, but I was adamant they were going to die for it.

Charlie and I parted, slipped over to our respective piles of clothes, and snagged the closest available weapons. Unfortunately for the store, the firearms were semi-auto. There was a decent knife on my belt, but I wasn’t completely sure I felt like attacking someone in the buff. Then again, Ancient Picts painted themselves with woad and trudged onto the battlefield wearing nothing but evil expressions.

I pulled the knife, waved Charlie back, and moved forward in a crouch. I did not miss the raised eyebrows or the “What the Hell?” expression on her face, and was really gratified when she just shrugged and brought her gun up to cover me. As I approached the door, I got a solid lock on the intruder’s position and, based on my memory of the store layout, put them about even with the checkout counter.

There was enough potential cover between the Spa and their position that I could, if I stayed down, get behind them. Sounded like a plan, so I made a bunch of pantomimed gestures to indicate what I was about to do. Charlie nodded, and I proceeded to hunch down onto the floor with the knife between my teeth and scuttle out the door into the store.

Our intruder was moving toward the back of the store, and I was crouched one aisle away from them, right beside the household cleaning chemicals. Brilliant idea! Squirt them in the face with something nasty, disarm them, and then ask some significant questions. I snagged a squeeze bottle of toilet cleaner, quietly opened the stopper, and waited for my quarry to reach the end of the row before springing into action.

I hate to admit I was enjoying this experiment in naked confrontation. There are not many occasions in a fellow’s life when he gets to really dig into the primal meat of fighting for his life while not wearing a stitch of clothing and armed only with a knife and toilet bowl cleaner. It was satisfying. It was a little more pure than tossing angry pellets of metal back and forth. Then again, I may be completely delusional.

The intruder rounded the end of the row and I sprang up, a naked, snarling, modern interpretation of da Vinci’s X-Man drawing.

“AAAAARRRRRAAGH!”

My opponent levitated and spun around, shrieking. Instead of facing another burly male across the shop floor of battle, I was buck naked in front of Miss Teenage Undead who was wearing a suicide bomber vest packed with C-4.

“AAAARRRGH?” I was slightly taken aback by the turn of events. Thankfully, so was Miss Undead.

Charlie didn’t give the little thing time to press her plunger before her little blond skull was ventilated. Unfortunately, I got the extra spray of bits in the face.

“Honey, I told you to put away that nasty trouser snake! You scared the poor little dead girl so bad her head exploded!”

I made little “ptooey” noises to clear the skull chunks out of my mouth.

“Yes, I know. My rod and staff are fearful weapons in the war against the undead.” You could have eaten my facetiousness with a spoon, it was so thick and creamy.

“I think your staff is pretty nice. Maybe you’d like to help me clean up the body and we could discuss your hiking equipment more intimately?” She just blew a zombie’s head to chunks and was interested in my outdoor gear. I guess love does come in all shapes and sizes.

“I dunno. I’ve had a hard day.”

She tossed her head and laughed at me. The gun was still smoking a little bit from the single round that had turned another undead person into a “returned to deceased” person. I found myself standing there, limp in every sense of the word, and too exhausted to care that there was a body oozing on my floor.

I couldn’t even get excited about the new supply of C-4.

Charlie ended up relieving the corpse of a small 9mm of indeterminate manufacture, the explosive vest (having removed the battery in the electrical trigger first), and some boy’s high school ring she’d been wearing on a chain around her neck. She was pretty for the instant I saw her terrified face before the top part of it became an expanding red cloud.

In the middle of all the numb, exhausted, thwarted lust, I had one coal left in the fire. It was a particularly hot little number, and it burned for my father and my brother.

My father set a machine into motion that took pretty teen girls like this one, killed them, brought them back to life and turned them into attractive explosive devices. It looked like my brother was Hell-bent on assisting Dad, too. The only reason I had a little incandescent coal left was because it was burning on hate.

Those two fuckers, and everyone who followed them, needed to die. While I doubted my power to end every single one of them, I wanted to be absolutely sure Dad and Stu were on the list. As much as I loved and still love Baj, looking down at that bloody high school ring, my dear friend became a secondary goal.

Charlie didn’t interrupt my thoughts or ask me to help with disposing of Dead Tammy. She simply grabbed the body by the fairly expensive shoes and deposited it outside the front door of the store. I was dimly aware this was happening while my Future Main Love Interest was stark naked.

Then again, according to my terribly accurate, technologically enhanced internal clock, it was 3:52 am. Anyone up at that hour, watching out for us, probably deserved a little show for the trouble. God knows, it certainly had been a gruesome day for me.

Of course, if my FMLI (nice acronym, no?) was being watched by a pack of undead frat boys, they were just getting a look at one of the people most likely to deliver them back into their graves. It wouldn’t pay for them to try to mess with Charlotte Cooper, tattooed sex valkyrie.

That thought managed to make me smile, even in the light of my tiny hate coal.

She came back, and we walked back to the Spa in silence. I washed myself off again and gave her a nod, and we gathered up our things. On our way upstairs, I remembered to snag the 9mm and the C-4 vest from where we’d left them on the floor.

The bloodstained concrete could wait for just a little while.

I was unloading the pistol and sorting the ammo into the drawer when she broke the silence.

“Tired?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to talk about it?” She sounded genuinely concerned, and I was distantly grateful for that. I don’t know that I would have reacted well to Therapy Voice at that moment.

I scratched my head and said, “No, mostly because I don’t know what to say. Lately, the daily events have been so far beyond my wildest experiences that I don’t know how to process them, much less talk about it.”

“I think that will be a problem as time goes on. Not just for you or me, but for everyone who survives all this.”

“Do you think anyone will?” I asked, surprised that such a dire question had been lurking around inside me without being noticed.

She walked over to me, put her arms around me, and snuggled as we stood there. I don’t know what I felt like to her, but to me, she felt like the single real thing in a nightmarish tornado of events.

“I think people still have a future. I think love has a future. I know zombies do not have a future.”

“Why do you say that?”

“What happens when the last living human dies, and all that is left to walk on two legs is a zombie?”

I told her I didn’t know.

“Then they’ll die out, with nothing left to keep them alive. Mother Nature will reclaim the world.”

“That’s... unbelievably sad.” I meant it, too.

“Uh-huh. Why do you think I want to believe in love so much? It gives me hope, inspiration, and a place to stand when everything else has gone to Hell.”

She’s a brilliant, brilliant woman, and after listening to what she said, I decided to believe in it, too. I needed someplace to stand. I wanted someone to stand with.

I had both, and all I really needed to do was open my eyes a little wider to see it. My heart was a little more at peace when we went to bed, and I was more grateful for that than I could express.

Charlie rolled over in my arms and kissed me. “I know you’re beat and there’s more on your mind than I want to even try to guess at. I suppose I have one or two things I need to say, if you’re all right with listening to me for a minute.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d listen to you for years at a time.”

She smiled that radiant smile that lit up the darkness of my room and ran her fingers down my chest. It was enticing, and I felt reactions pushing through the dung that had collected around my libido. This gentle play of sensual touch came to an abrupt end when she sank her fingernails into my nipples. I wanted to surge out from under the covers, but I didn’t want to leave my nipples behind.

“Frank, if you ever, ever, ever keep important things from me from this moment forward, you had better make damned sure the bodies are buried. Because if I fall in love with you and find out you have yet another false identity, I will pop these titties right off you and feed them to feral kittens. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”

“EEEEE!”

She nodded, and pinched even harder. I couldn’t help but buck a little under the covers, because my body wanted to do something to cope with the new frontier of torment that was being explored.

“I’m glad you see things my way. The other thing I wanted to say is I really want us to go on a date where you spend all day complimenting me, and we get up to some mad frisky afterward.” She let my man-nips go.

“Yes!” I was enthusiastic. How could I not be? Blood was flowing back into my nipples! It also appeared to me as though the girl of my dreams wanted me to be frisky with her. My geek heart was doing back flips and spinning kicks through the bamboo jungle of my soul.

“But right now, I’m fucking tired. That gets you off the hook for tonight... eh, this morning. Just hold me real tight, tell me you think I’m shiny, and we’ll snooze.”

“You’re so shiny!” I gave her a serious squeeze.

“I like you. You do what you’re told. That’s pretty shiny, too, Frankie the Hiking Staff.”

Sleep came easily with her warmth beside me. A simple thing, like having someone to whom you really have taken a shine in bed with you, is unbelievably comforting. I would call that another hash mark on the checklist of things we find easy to take for granted.

I woke up when she shifted a bit, raising herself up on her elbow, but it was so decadent to be lying there that I didn’t move. She was humming to herself.

“Sunshine in my eyeballs burns my retinas,” she sang softly, “Sunshine on my boyfriend makes me smile.”

“You can still smile with fried retinas?” My ability to warp tender moments should go down in someone’s history books. I cracked one eyelid and looked up at her sleep-tousled hair and silly grin. She was still ravishing, even with crusties in the corners of her eyes.