Blood Soaked and Contagious (41 page)

I stood up, started walking as though I’d been doing it for a while, and put my hands in my pockets. “Hey!” I called out to him from about thirty feet away. “What the Hell was that God-awful noise a while back?”

He became alert very quickly, and his AR-15 came up, pointing at the center of my body mass. “Stop where you are!”

“Okay. That’s a really classic thing to say to someone, you know! Man, they sent me over here to relieve you!”

“I haven’t seen you before. Who sent you?” He was not looking or sounding terribly convinced about any of this.

“Sarge. Big guy, looks like he could bench press that Bradley back at the office.” I made vague gestures of height and broad shoulders, praying he wouldn’t notice that my fingernails weren’t Zombie Issue from thirty feet away.

“That’s the Major. Sarge is smaller. You’re not military.” Great. Data, but backed by a certain amount of disbelief.

“I’m in Management,” and I pronounced the capital letter very carefully.

“Oh, shit! Sir. Sorry, Sir!” He actually saluted. “Why did they send you up here to relieve me? You guys never come out to the front.”

“Well, it boils down to this. If you never get out and meet people, how can you expect to manage them?” It sounded good to me!

“Yeah. You’ve got a point, Sir!”

I clasped my hands behind my back and started walking toward him. “So, you head back and I’ll take over here until your scheduled relief shows up.” He nodded, slung the machine gun over his shoulder, and looked positively pleased the shift had ended a little earlier than he planned.

“Sir, did you notice if they’d delivered the new bunch of cattle to the pen in the parking lot yet?”

“Which pen?” Chancy question to ask, perhaps, but I knew this would end with me killing him and it didn’t matter terribly much if it was in a fight or some quieter option.

“There was one in the side lot of the church when I headed over here. Did they set up another one?” He didn’t appear to be suspecting much of anything, judging by the tone of his voice, and wasn’t reacting in an aggressive manner as I approached.

I turned and pointed, “They brought out a second one about two hours ago and set it up in the front lot.”

He plunged a knife into my guts as I was turning back around to face him. God as my witness, that knife hurt more than all of the bullets I’d met over the previous couple of days. The intimacy of having this jackass halitosis-breathing zombie in my face, while he twisted the blade around in my innards, was even worse than the pain of being stabbed in the first place.

All he did was smile when I vomited blood all over the front of his uniform. “How stupid do you think I am, fucker? I’m the Sarge, you know.”

“I don’t know. All you undead bottom-feeding sons of bitches have been mighty stupid in my experience.” I don’t believe all of what I thought managed to make it out clearly between the blood and the strange groaning noises I was making.

“Doesn’t matter much now, because I’m going to pull the knife out and watch you die.”

I have to say, having the knife pulled out at an angle, rather than straight back, was a really horrible coda to that experience. There wasn’t any option other than collapsing, so that is precisely what I did. All of the muscles in my abdomen were in spasm, and I was fairly sure that some of my intestines were now squashed between my body and the ground.

Sarge did his best evil laugh. In my haze, I gave it a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

“Wait a minute!” He had the nerve, the bald-faced nerve, to sound chipper about something. “You’re
that
guy, aren’t you?” He reached down and I could feel him pull the Man Scythe out of the rig. If I had been able to kill him for touching my weapon, I would have, but I could barely manage an anemic growl. As it was, the tsuba of the katana was invading the hole in my gut and I was lucky to make any noise at all.

My beautiful baby was being violated by a resurrected grunt and there was nothing I could do to stop it. To call the feelings simple “frustration” could never, ever cover the rage that I felt. It got worse when he snapped the blade open and started swinging her around like the clueless arboreal chicken-shit bastard he was.

“Jesus! If I’d know you were the Sickle Guy, I’d have shot you first, and then used this to chop off your head!” Sarge crowed at his amazing stroke of luck. As for me, I wanted to be able to stand up and stroke his cranium with my rifle butt. “You know... you know, I could still cut your head off with it. Then again, you’d get to die way too easily for the amount of trouble you’ve caused. I got time. We can play Cut off Things until you’re about to die. Then I can cut off your head!”

“Sickle Guy? Did you just call me ‘Sickle Guy,’ you misbegotten sack of creamy monkey turds?”

“What did you just say, soon-to-be-dead Sickle Guy?” He punctuated things by swinging Her around like a baboon with a broom. He didn’t notice, because I was down on my front, that I was starting to heal. Apparently, wooden porches have something nano-critters can break down into useful raw material.

“I said I’m going to punch you in the balls so hard your granddaddy will feel it, you poly-orchid, seagull-raping, toe-jam licker.”

That did it! He really started pacing and growling then, muttering obscene things about raping my mother and pissing on the face of my dead father. I started to laugh, because I actually liked the idea of someone pissing on Warren “The ‘F’ is for ‘Fuck You’“ Hightower. I got clear on one thing very quickly: Sarge didn’t share my sense of the absurd.

My right hand was stretched out on the porch supporting me, and it suddenly had the blade of my scythe growing out of the back of the palm. I howled in pain; anyone would have done the same. It was especially nasty because the pain in my guts was starting to subside and I had room in my brain to process fresh sensations.

Looking on the bright side of life, the blade was lodged in the wood under my hand. Turning again to the Dark Horrible side of life, the bastard was wrenching the blade around, trying to get it to come free. Needless to say, my right hand was being mangled as he exorcised his frustration with being stuck in the porch.

Sometime during the wrenching I felt my consciousness push free of my skull and settle into Frank’s mental backseat. If things hadn’t felt so calm, I might have genuinely felt bad for Sarge having to face whatever horrible thing was about to occur. Instead, I watched events unfold with a certain distracted interest.

My left hand whipped up from underneath my body and backhanded Sarge in the family jewels. It must have been quite an impact, because he flew backward against the door of the house and the Man Scythe went with him. When he landed, sprawled like a discarded stuffed animal, I could see the front of his uniform pants were turning black over the camo pattern.

He didn’t scream. He wailed, dropped my baby, and tried to comfort himself by putting his hands on his crotch. Then again, maybe he was just trying to see if he was intact or not. Regardless, the pain was so severe he couldn’t touch himself to confirm anything at all. Poor little guy!

My body stood up, and I could feel my mouth open, even if I couldn’t see it. My lungs filled with air, and it rushed back out, contorted by my vocal cords into a noise that I hope I never hear again. It was the jungle nightmare of some simian creature crossed with Satan, bellowing out the rage of every generation of bipedal creatures since they came down from the trees in the first place.

Sarge froze stiff and managed to go from a healthy undead gray pallor to dead white in a fraction of a second.

The body I no longer controlled surged forward with the sort of speed God reserved for venomous snakes, hummingbird wings, and the common cold. Both hands came down on the sides of Sarge’s skull with a sharp cracking noise. My left hand pulled backward and then struck out, slamming two of my fingers into each of his eye sockets.

With a growl I twitched my hand and the top of Sarge’s skull came free like peeling the apron off of a crab at your favorite seafood restaurant. I was lightly surprised, from my vantage point, that I didn’t damage his eyeballs, just popped them out onto his cheeks. Oh! Well done, Body! Well done!

However, just popping his skull open wasn’t enough to make my hindbrain happy. Barely a breath after levering his noggin off, my bleeding right hand snagged his nearest eyeball, flipped it back, and pointed it at his brain. I guess he could see, because he screamed and shat himself.

He didn’t stop making noise until the first big scoop of brains came out.

Abstractly, I considered the situation and decided the whole thing would rank in my Top Three Most Horrible Ways to Die. As usual, my musings were cut short by the sound of a twig snapping somewhere close by. Company had arrived.

I wasn’t able to keep track of how many of them there were because my eyes were taking snapshots of them, their positions, and their weapons far too quickly. I saw my hand had wrapped itself around the handle of the Man Scythe at the same moment they opened fire on me. Everything after that I perceived in jump cuts and strobe light flashes of movement, punctuated by the sounds of guns going off.

The conscious part of my mind that was observing all of it simply had enough and checked out. I don’t blame myself for wanting to blank it all out, because I got to see the results after I regained consciousness. I didn’t stop to count the bodies, parts of bodies, or piles of... remains. I just ran home.

Having gone through two experiences in which my discerning consciousness had been pushed aside for survival purposes, I felt as if I had a little room to take a look at what went on. The first episode had been, I think, purely to obtain material for use in repairing my body. This most recent occasion was more than a little different.

The first time I attacked a bunch of zombies was brutal, calculating, and maybe even vicious, but it wasn’t sadistic. Making Sarge look at his own brain, especially while I was scooping bits out, qualified as sadistic. What’s more, that sadism and brutality remained after I’d consumed the tissue. Perhaps it was because a threat arrived before I could ramp back down into “normal” behavior?

I wanted to believe that was the case. The Wolverine makeover sounded fantastic in my little fantasy narrative, but to be actually ruthlessly savage was a lot for me to bear. I also noticed that, in this instance, I did not feel warm and fuzzy about things as I had the night I got Tasered repeatedly. If anything, I felt a lot of concern.

The nano-critters did not come with a convenient manual or active “Help” function. No one, maybe not even Bajali, knew what they were capable of doing. Optimizing an organism for battle and survival could mean an incredible range of things, from physical changes to neurological and psychological ones. In all seriousness, there would probably need to be changes in
all
of those areas to stack the deck for surviving combat situations.

I hoped Baj had answers. I hoped Baj had a clue about what the changes would be and if there was some kind of upper limit where no more alterations would take place. These were things every person in our community needed to know, especially the kids.

Children are walking, talking, Freudian Id. What in the name of God would you get by altering a child for combat in this way? If the world was normal, and these children had to go to school, would they be ending playground scuffles by decapitating the other kids?

Every gift is a double-edged sword. Maybe this is why my Japanese language teachers used to say that gratitude was expressed in shades of regret. Because every gift has a price you can’t see until later?

It didn’t seem long at all before I popped out of the neighborhood and arrived at the gas station across the street from our community. What surprised me was that there were at least a hundred undead, armed with “peasant weapons,” groaning and howling as they tried to breach the Active Area Denial system’s force field of Ouch. Thankfully, they weren’t paying attention to me.

What they were doing looked something like a peasant rebellion crossed with a mosh pit. Periodically, the group would force one of their tribe forward into the Denial Area and watch that individual scream and flee back into the crowd. I couldn’t tell if they were having fun with it or if it was some sort of tribal dominance display of tossing the weakest member into the dangerous situation to see if things had become safe or not.

I was deeply puzzled, grateful I wasn’t noticed, and on the verge of laughing at them. Then one of them had a brilliant idea after noticing the field only worked in a rough hemisphere in front of the opening between the buildings. He tried to cut through the custom frame shop, rather than face the heat, so to speak. He walked right into the trap that Gina and her Homeland Defense Forces had set in every one of those empty shops.

The explosion was absolutely deafening. The front of the custom frame store exploded outward in a gigantic belch of flames, smoke, noise, and the strange “zzzzzzz!” of tiny objects shooting outward. From my vantage point it looked like three rows of nearby ruffians were mowed down like dandelions in a tornado. Everyone behind them began yelling and screaming almost instantly and began to flee.

They were running right at me. I was given a grace moment to decide what to do about the bum rush of panic-filled undead peasants, and I settled on flipping the safety off my machine gun. It seemed to me I had been given an opportunity to reduce the number of our enemies, almost as though someone had presented me with a barrel of trout and ordered me to go fishing.