Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (25 page)

Shoei had backed up beside where I was kneeling on the ground, and he’d un-holstered his sidearm. Me? I stayed exactly where I was.

“SUMIRA! You can’t have our Sumira!” He convulsed on the asphalt, screaming it at the top of his lungs between strangling the hell out of himself with the cord that kept him bound. “SUMIRA IS OURS!”

I heard a nasty, wet noise behind me, and I spared a glance. Jayashri had Midget Pilot in her arms and was lifting it off the tubes and wrecked seat. Blue goo trickled down from between her fingers.

The zombie’s screaming turned into a high, keening noise, and I snapped my head back around. With an insane heave, our captive stretched himself out in the cord much further than the ties had been designed to allow. It decapitated him as it shredded into thousands of tiny strands, accompanied by a memorable ripping noise.

Blood oozed from the stump of his neck and the head rested where it landed, in the middle of my vomit puddle. I was far too stunned to speak, and not keen on getting any of the barf decorating my face back in my mouth.

“Fuck.” Omura spoke for both of us.

My Adam’s apple bobbed like a broken floater in the toilet tank before I could manage to say anything useful. “I, uh,” I said, wiping the cold sweat off my forehead, unsurprised that my hand came back streaky and pink, “don’t suppose you got anything interesting out of him before he… committed suicide?”

“Not too much. He did tell me that the soldiers’ bodies are piled up inside the tractor trailer, but other than that it was mostly listening to a tirade of verbal abuse.”

“Did he hurt your feelings?” I asked that specifically to goad him because I needed something to focus on other than the head that was perched in my chunder, staring back at me with horrible grimace and distended eyeballs hideously intact.

Omura didn’t answer the question, but when I looked up at him, he was staring down at me with an unreadable expression on his face. Then he slapped me upside my head with a derisive snort and walked over to the Sharmas, who were still holding Sumira the Midget Pilot. Thank Heavens for small favors: the body had stopped dripping blue shit.

Having successfully ruptured the bubble of fascination around the head in front of me, I stood up and rambled over to the trio, plus corpse. The expressions on their faces slipped into universal expressions of horror.

“This body is still warm.” Jaya’s voice was flat, like the Mojave after a nuclear weapons test. “Bajali, can you find a way get this helmet off?”

He obliged her by fiddling around under the back of the black, insectile headgear. With a faint “sklik” noise, the helmet separated in two and dropped into his hands. We all got a look at Sumira together.

Assuming that Sumira was female I’ll refer to it using feminine pronouns, if only to keep myself on some illusion of solid footing.

Her skin was a sandy, Creamsicle orange. She had a very tiny mouth, slit nostrils at the base of a very narrow nose, and black almond-shaped eyes. She didn’t have a single hair on her skull, which was narrow and just slightly too long. Looking down at that face, it was easy to see that whatever this child was, human was not it.

We all had some kind of reaction to that realization, because Baj, Omura and I all took about three steps backward. Jayashri hissed and held the corpse as far away from her body as she was able to. I’m actually quite pleased that I moved away as quickly as I did, because little Sumira wasn’t quite dead.

Her black, iris-less eyes bulged, and her tiny mouth unhinged like the maw of a snake, revealing teeth that any carnivore would be proud to have as factory installed equipment. She took a breath, let loose a trilling shriek that made our ears bleed. Jaya added a muted wail to the sonic barrage, dropped the body and literally climbed up onto her husband’s shoulders.

Staring down at the horrible little thing, I noticed something that made me almost lose bladder control. Sumira was staring right back at me.

“Traitor,” was the sound of her final breath as it left her body, pointed straight at my heart.

We didn’t have time to process the final word out of Sumira’s mouth. Two events occurred almost simultaneously around our little group. Our reinforcements arrived, and the trailer doors, across the road from us, exploded outward from the press of the bodies inside. Unfortunately, the bodies were moving.

I found myself staring at everything like a complete lunatic. There were two helicopters in the sky, and black-clad soldiers were rappelling down to the ground. Our “boys.”

Across the way, a whole gaggle of shambling dead people were bumping into one another, trying to sort out the proper sequences of steps that would allow them to attack us. I’d never seen incompletely reconstructed zombies before. After fighting the new and improved Undead Forces of Evil, these guys seemed almost pitiful.

It became apparent, however, once they got their footing, that my original estimate of “pitiful” was spoken too soon. The fuckers were fast and aggressive as all Hell. One of our new reinforcements bought the farm as soon as his feet touched the ground; a pack of them surrounded him and bit him out of recognizable shape. Listening to the screams of some poor soldier that didn’t need to die pissed me off. I shook myself out of my catatonia, snarled, and waded into the fray without even paying attention to drawing a weapon.

I had become very comfortable with getting my hands dirty.

“Outta the way!” I pulled two of the newcomers aside as they were raising their weapons and they looked at me with eyes and faces that were invisible behind full goggles and vented black plastic shields. “Don’t worry, guys, I’m sure there’s enough for everyone.”

I decided to use a different tactic than I normally preferred. The game I settled on was this: one fist, one zombie. My two former enlisted opponents got to meet my hands in a very up close and personal fashion.

On my left side, my hand crashed through his teeth and jaw, penetrating his face like the penis of an angry (and gigantic) lover. I didn’t stop there; I just let the punch continue right out the back of the poor bastard’s neck. Not a gentle way to sever a head, to be sure, but it certainly did the job. On the right, my swing crushed the front of that opponent’s skull, dropping him like a sack of soggy oatmeal. I finished that one off with a solid stomp, completing the job of destroying the brain.

There are moments in the madness of wholesale mayhem, as I was learning, when there is nothing in your mind but the progression from one enemy to the other. I never heard the gunfire around me, and I certainly didn’t notice the helicopters departing, much like I hadn’t really been aware that they’d arrived. I know that if I’d wanted to be aware of the passage of time, I could have been through the marvels of technology that inhabited my brain, but none of those things mattered to me. I was in a very pure, and it disturbs me to call it that, state of mind.

Kill or be killed.

I didn’t have the time or the inclination to worry myself with bigger moral issues, or the dance of exquisite philosophical debate. I moved, committing atrocity after atrocity in the name of staying alive. It was the clearest, most peaceful thing that I’d ever done in my life.

When the murdering was finished, I stood there, looking around at the bodies on the ground. We had only lost the one, and someone had been forward-thinking enough to take his head. It was sitting on top of his chest, still encased by the helmet and face protectors. The ground around me was covered in effluvia and offal. I wasn’t even breathing hard or sweating from the effort of turning my immediate vicinity into an abattoir. One thing was pretty clear. If the world ever got up and running again, I would need a really, really good therapist.

He’d be able to retire in Bali by the time he got me back together.

Lucky fucker.

“Ah, well! Look at you lad,” some one said from off to my right, “can’t stay out of trouble. Can yeh?”

I turned slowly, because it sounded familiar, if muffled. The tall, black-suited and blood damp soldier to my left had his hands on his hips and appeared to be studying me from behind the face shield and goggles. I have to say in retrospect, the accessories did a fantastic job of making him look more like a faceless robot goon than a human being. Without x-ray vision, or clobbering him to the ground and tearing the stuff off his head, there’s no way I could… then again, I could have simply asked him to take it off, rather than resort to violence to solve the problem.

Scary how easy violence becomes when you’re hard to kill.

Before I could adjust and say something, he started taking off the lower part of the mask. That’s when I saw it. It was a huge, salt and pepper colored, handlebar mustache. I’d only ever seen such a mammoth Lip Wombat once before.

“Jeff?” It couldn’t be. My eyes were bugging out of the sockets.

“You’re a sight! Is it tha’ hard to believe?” The rest of the headgear came off, and I was staring at my old friend Jeffry Andrews, the cop I knew back in Edinburgh.

My jaw would have hit the ground if it weren’t attached so completely to my face. He looked at me and enjoyed a huge belly laugh as he walked over and clapped me vigorously on both shoulders.

“Duh,” I said.

“No, really,” he said.

“Nurt?” I asked, stunned into gibberish mode.

“I signed up about a year ago. Looks like you and yours are the lab experiments that they’ve been whispering about at HQ. Over all, I’d say it suits you.”

“Shiiiit,” I said.

“I’ll say this, though, you’re less eloquent when you’re surprised, lad.”

Omura shouted over from across the road where he was standing with the Sharmas, “Jeff, you mean to tell me you know this loser?”

“Aye! Don’ yeh remember me tellin’ you about that lad what knifed the lesbian zombie back home?”

“Yeah, of course I remember that!”

Jeff pointed a gloved finger at my nose. “This is the youngster in question!”

Shoei shook his head, laughing quietly to himself, or so it appeared from where I was standing. “That explains a lot. It really does.”

I couldn’t tell if I was being maligned or lampooned, so I didn’t bother to sort it all out. Jeff barked orders at our reinforcements, took me by the elbow and walked me back to my people. Jayashri had climbed down from Baj’s shoulders sometime during the latest fray, and had taken up a position several feet away from the body on the ground. It didn’t even look like Omura had moved a single step.

The body of Sumira, I am happy to report, had not moved at all.

“So,” Jeff said, “what’s all this then?”

I put my hand on his shoulder and pointed to the body on the ground in front of Bajali’s feet. He sucked air between his teeth, turned around, ordered his people to form a secure perimeter and then turned back to us.

“Francis, God as my witness, I think that shit follows you around like the family dog.”

“Don’t even get me started.” I said it and meant it. “How about you guys help us load up this crap so we can get out of here before more icky things happen?”

“Hmm. Makes a bit of sense.”

With the help of six of Jeff’s people, we got the wreckage and samples sorted and loaded in to the big rig in just under five hours. The four of us that started this lunacy together were hungry, tired and completely worn out. I was amazed that Baj and Jaya were managing to keep their emotional shit together for such an extended period of time, because I remembered how difficult it was to adjust to cannibalistic behavior. It was no comfort to know that the “donor” was already dead, or that the resources were being used to keep you alive.

It was a horrible experience however you looked at it. I don’t know what it says about me that I’d begun to adjust. Then again, I don’t know what it says about me that I was harboring a metric ton of resentment about being turned into a science project with shady moral leanings. Enough anger lurked in the basement level of my psyche that I caught stray thoughts like, “Well, now you get to know what it’s like to be me. Hope you enjoy being a cannibalistic, transhuman, post-apocalyptic warrior! Cheers, babe!”

As I mentioned, we got the loading and transportation issues sorted out, and we sorted life out so that we could head back to our little Maximum Security suburban homestead. Omura, Jeff, a selection of his nameless commandos and I would be in the first chopper. Based on my impressive eavesdropping skills, we would make it back first, and the two other helicopters would escort the truck back.

Jayashri and Bajali had cloistered themselves in the cab of the truck and were being very, very quiet. Jeff tasked one of his “lads” to drive the truck and not interact with the Sharmas unless they initiated it.

“Appears to me that they need a wee bit of quiet time,” is what he told the driver, who gave him a crisp nod and salute. “Come to think of it, Riley, take the headgear off. It might make it easier on them if yeh had a human face instead of all the rubbish.”

Riley complied, and the order made instant sense to me. Underneath the intimidating gear was a red-haired lass with smoky green eyes and an unbelievably sensual lower lip. I don’t know if I would have found her presence comforting in my time of existential angst, but I can certainly say that she could have distracted me for a little while.