Blood Soaked and Contagious (43 page)

“Sounds like an excellent reason to do a preemptive strike at niiiiii,” I tried to finish the sentence, but someone had shoved an ice pick into the middle of my skull. The ground came up and hit me while I clutched at my head.

I could tell people were crowding around me, checking my eyes, pulse, and things like that, but I was too involved in the agony that was churning in between the hemispheres of my brain. There was a feeling of cognitive static, like little electrical charges popping on and off, and the pain started to let up. I was able to open my eyes and rapidly discovered my field of vision was occupied by a large redneck.

“Shawn, would you please give me some room to breathe. I can smell the chicken salad you had for lunch.”

“Oh.” He was kind enough to give me the space I asked for. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. That was really nasty, whatever it was.” I closed my eyes again and took a few deep breaths. I had a passing thought that I wish I knew where Charlie had gotten off to, and my internal point of view shifted.

There was a ghostly map in my head, filled with bright sparks. I could tell I was sitting in a patch of eight sparks, and there were other twinkling lights grouped all over the gossamer view of the entire neighborhood. A spark I seemed to know belonged to Charlie was sitting in the map’s representation of Jayashri’s living room with another spark telling me that it was Jayashri herself. The third spark in that group announced itself as Chunhua Yan.

“Oh. Wow.”

“What is it, Frank?”

“I think that instant migraine was a new nano-tech goodie coming online. I know where everyone in the neighborhood is. Charlie, Grandmother Yan, and Jaya are sitting in Jaya’s living room. Nate’s wife is over in Barry’s basement with almost all of the kids. This is so cool!”

I had a sudden urge to look at the Charlie spark, so I let the vision float up in my head. It was as though she was an icon on my computer screen, and I wanted to mouse over her or touch the icon. There was a desire to interact with the image, not in terms of moving it to a different place, as much as it was a sense that there was more data to be had. The funnier, or stranger, feeling was that Charlie was interacting with the spark that represented me.

“Frank?” I heard her voice and felt her presence inside me. My ears didn’t register actual sounds.

“Oh. Jesus.” I looked up at Shawn, and he gave me a quizzical look back. “I think I just got cellular service in my skull.”

Charlie laughed. It was almost as clear to me as it would have been if she’d been standing beside Shawn. “Yeah, this little function showed up for us a little earlier today. Tell my brother and the rest of the gang that we need you over here. All right?”

“Okay.” I didn’t have much more than that to say, as shocked as I was. “Shawn, I just got pinged by Charlie. They need me over there. I’ll be back in a bit.” I got up, feeling extra shell-shocked, and headed over to Jaya and Baj’s house. I walked over in a daze, looking like something that had been spewed out of a pet food factory.

I knocked on the front door and just let myself in; after all, they were expecting me. Charlie rushed over and gave me a huge hug, ignoring all the dried crap and the shredded shirt. Jayashri gave me a genteel wave, which I returned with gusto. There was a little Asian woman sitting on the floor who was not Grandmother Yan, because this woman was far too young and certainly more attractive. Mind you, Grandmother Yan was lovely for a woman in her 80s, but this woman should have been on the cover of magazines.

“Well, the nano-critters aren’t right all the time. They told me Grandmother Yan was here with you two, but I don’t believe I’ve met you before.” I walked over, held out my hand, and got ready to be suave.

The woman covered her mouth with both hands and shook with laughter. Her laugh, even behind her hands, sounded like bells ringing. When she stopped, she looked up at me, grabbed my hand, and used it to pull herself up from the chair. I was a bit surprised when she hugged me.

“Frank, you are still my favorite! Why haven’t you made big, strong babies with Charlie yet?”

Sputter!

“Chunhua dropped by about three hours ago,” Jaya said, “and I can see you understand how surprised we were.”

Extra sputter with pickle and special sauce.

The incredibly attractive Asian lady looked up at me, smiling, but didn’t let me out of the hug.

“Last night, I had cravings for all sorts of food. I ate every dried berry I had been saving, a wheel of Yolanda’s cheese, and three chickens. When I woke up this morning,” she stepped back out of the hug and gestured up and down her body, “I looked like this, and my broken English wasn’t broken anymore.”

“Why? How? Huh?” My eloquence had decided to take a serious coffee break in favor of trying to be shocked and surprised at the same time.

“We spoke about that very issue. It appears that the nanotechnology reversed her cellular aging, repaired various kinds of physical damage,” Jayashri did not look happy when she explained all this, “and slightly rewired Chunhua’s brain. She is optimized for combat and survival in a somewhat more grand manner than we are.”

“Frank, you probably want to sit down for the rest of this. We’ve got a theory that is a little unsettling.”

I took Charlie at her word and simply plopped myself down on the carpet.

“Charlie, while he hasn’t fallen to your charms, you certainly have trained him well!” Chunhua giggled and gave Charlie a high five.

“You know, all the training in the world is meaningless if you don’t have a good foundation to build on,” Charlie was on the verge of laughing hysterically, “and my Frank is superb material for my training program.”

“Are we going to get to the disturbing stuff now, or are you just going to put a harness on me and ride me into the sunset?”

The renovated Chunhua Yan broke into applause, and Charlie collapsed over a chair, laughing her ass off. Jayashri didn’t laugh, but her eyes were bright and full of mirth over the whole situation. I remembered what Charlie and I had discussed about laughter and enjoying moments of normal life in the middle of our shared insanity, and allowed myself to share in the laughter. I needed it more than I realized, as is often the case.

“The disturbing thing that we’ve been talking about,” Jaya began, “is the nanotechnology itself. Have you not noticed how similar it is to the zombie virus?”

I stopped laughing. “What do you mean?”

“The critters, as you call them, repair damage and improve the body’s ability to survive extreme situations. You are also gently altered in such a manner that your innate martial abilities are enhanced. Those are also characteristics of what the virus does for the host.”

“Yeah, but people have to die before the virus really kicks in on the combat improvements.” I wanted to find a reason to support that they’d made a really odd connection, rather than believe it. “I don’t think the virus heals people before they die, and it certainly doesn’t afterward. There’s something wrong with your theory.”

“We do not know if it heals people prior to death. Very few infectees live long enough to study, but we do know the virus goes into overdrive when they die and rebuilds their body.”

“Where are you going with this? I know you’ve got a point.” I may have sounded a little harsher than I intended, but it was bothering me that I felt as though she was beating around the bush.

“What Jayashri is trying to say is that she is concerned that Baj built the nanotech along the same lines as the actual virus... A technological version of the biological problem.” I wasn’t entirely sure why Charlie took over the explanation, but I did notice that Jaya looked incredibly uncomfortable.

“All right, supposing that is what he did. What’s the problem?”

“I am not going to call anything that has saved our lives a ‘problem.’ The source of my upset is that I know my husband did not create this technological wonder overnight. He worked on it for years, some of which were prior to the outbreak of the virus.” She was jittering in her chair and pulled her feet up under herself as if they were cold. “How do you create a technological counter for a biological adaptation as perfect as this is?”

My feet grew cold and the hair on my arms tried to stand up and walk right off my body.

“You can’t create effective opposition if you don’t know the nature of the opponent.” I was very glad to be sitting on the floor, because it decreased the possible distance I could fall. “You’re saying my father had samples of the virus years before the outbreak, and Baj began work on the technological counter... no, not counter, really... the technological version of the virus... at about the same time.”

My guts were churning, and the course of my thoughts was uncomfortable, to say the very least. I knew the question I needed to ask and it frightened me.

“Jaya, what happened to Siddig, Miryam, and Little Siddy’s bodies?” I didn’t want an answer. I truly did not, because it had the potential to turn every good thing about surviving completely sideways.

My lovely, gentle, fierce, and graceful friend bowed her head. I heard her answer, even though she said it under her breath. “We had to burn them.”

“Why?” My voice was cold enough that Chunhua and Charlie recoiled in their chairs.

“Their wounds,” Jaya looked up at me, weeping silently, “were severe. Each of them... oh. Each of them had been hit in the head by debris. Their skulls were no longer intact, and neither were their brains.”

“The critters tried to repair them. Didn’t they?”

She didn’t speak, just nodded.

“They weren’t themselves?”

“No. They were feral machines that did not know us. Yolanda and I nearly died that night while we were doing our best to prepare their bodies to be buried.”

“God.” I couldn’t do much more than just shake my head.

“If Yolanda were less skilled than she is, or if I were not as good with a firearm, we would be just what they were... machines hunting in order to repair themselves. We took their heads and burned the bodies and heads separately.”

“What did Bajali turn us into?”

“The perfect weapon against our enemies.” Jayashri’s melodic voice was uncharacteristically flat, and tears were still rolling down her face.

I had asked the questions and received my answers. My father started this whole fucking ball rolling. We weren’t any more human than the zombies, and I had a dear friend to thank for it. I may never be able to say whether that was the crowning moment to a day that was filled with confessions, absurd amounts of violence, and sadism that I could not remotely control. All I knew in that moment was that I wanted the little bastards out of my body, even if it meant the next bullet I took ended everything for me.

My “critters” felt like just another version of the enemy.

“Is this my karma for having been born to a crazy man who wants to turn people into cows? I get to be as horrible a canker as he is, but I get my better living through technology?” I wanted to rage, but I didn’t have the energy. It felt as though the only thing left under my skin was high technology and rancid yogurt.

“I do not know if it is karma or a bizarre confluence of events. I just wanted to—” Jaya broke down all the way, and Charlie had her arms around her before I could finish exhaling.

Chunhua sat back down in the chair and hugged herself tightly, as if she couldn’t be sure more arms would be comforting for Jayashri or if they would be an intrusion. I just sat there, like some kind of trans-human horror show, blank on things to say or do.

Somewhere in the back of my head, a part of me wished I could wave a wand and smooth it all over. We were stuck together, an extended family of hybrid Terminators who refused to surrender to the Machine, and that is how we would have to stay until we completed the one quest that had never changed. We needed to bring Bajali home. He was ours, and he was the one lynchpin that held our shared fate together.

He would be able to do something, give us back our human birthright of pain, healing, and death, if anyone could. I begged a God to whom I didn’t pray that what I hoped for would come true.

It took some time for Jayashri to cry it out and for me to find a little equilibrium in the morass of churning, half-formed thoughts in my skull. Chunhua was probably the most lost of everyone in the living room, sitting there in what amounted to a brand new body and not knowing where to turn.

“Chunhua,” I said, “I don’t think I can call you ‘Grandmother’ now and sound at all convincing.” I was able to give her a shadow of a smile when I said it.

We all laughed a little at that description, and it dispelled a little of the angst in the room. I was a little taken aback when she kept talking about it.

“Really, I used to wonder why women who had plastic surgery wanted to show it off to everyone they know. Now I understand it much better! It was all I could do not to run around the neighborhood stark naked earlier today!” Chunhua stood, pulled up her shirt, and said, “I mean, look at these! They weren’t this perky when I was 16 years old!” She pulled it back down, took a deep breath, and continued. “I’m not sure if I care that I’m a technological marvel, because I’m young again, very good looking, and feeling very... passionate!”

A pin could have dropped on the plush carpet and it would have sounded like the noise that had accompanied the Big Bang. Charlie, Jayashri, and I just stared, completely flummoxed by the display of perkiness. The lovely woman who was the source of our boggled silence looked at all of us and laughed.