Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (2 page)

Whatever else I knew or didn’t know, it was clear that I’d retained my toilet skills and the proper method to dispatch the undead. Not bad. Not bad.

My opponent’s skull finally gave up. Chuckling, I unzipped my pants and pissed on his naked brain.

“Frank, taking a wee on your enemies isn’t nice!”

When I finished my victory deposit, I turned around to find Charlie watching from the other side of the street. Her tone of voice and facial expressions didn’t match, and I stood there with my happy bits akimbo, wondering what she was attempting to communicate.

I didn’t wait too long. Charlie came over and took me by the hand and led me back across the street, muttering something about men not being able to wait to get their groove on and fools rushing in where others fear to tread. As for me, I was still grinning about successfully ruining my opponent and establishing my dominance by voiding my bladder on the still-warm corpse of my conquest.

Funny how a bullet in the noggin can release such primal things!

A huge man was waiting on the other side of the street for us. He had a ball cap on his head, brim pointing backward, and it didn’t do a single thing to keep the long blond hair from blowing around his face in the morning breeze. His scent was very similar to Charlie’s in some way. I think that made me less inclined to defend my territory.

“Sis, I don’t mean to pry, but why is our boy walkin’ around with his junk dangling out his pants?” You could barely see his single raised eyebrow behind the hair, arching dramatically over a sour expression.

She squeaked and tried to pantomime to me that I should concern myself with reassembling my couture. I wasn’t having anything of it, and walked right up to Shawn’s barrel chest instead. He looked down at me, face full of questions.

“He has a really strange look on his face, Charlie.”

“You think I know what he’s gonna do? He had a hunk of his brain blown out yesterday and it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot going on in what he’s got left!”

“Shit!” Shawn’s face softened, looking down at me. “This nanotech stuff is scary as hell. I mean–he’s unpredictable enough when he’s got all his brains. What’s he gonna do next?”

“Yeah.” She scratched her head with a free finger. “You know, he probably doesn’t remember you, and is trying to figure out who you are.”

Grunting, Shawn pointed a finger at my nose. “You, Frank.” The sausage of a finger changed direction, pointing at his nose. “Me, Shawn. Right?”

“I can’t figure out if he understands language or not. He does get emotions, and does show some of his own. Omura says that he’ll probably come back, but he might be more like Buttons.”

“Frank really would hate to come back like that asshole.” Glancing down at me, several emotions flew back and forth across his face. One of them might have been pity. “I think he’d rather not come back if he had to be that way.”

“Shawn, if I don’t have something to hold on to, I’m gonna go nuts.” I could hear the stress in her voice, but I didn’t turn around. Something about Shawn had my full attention. “I don’t want to think I had someone and then lost him in less than a week.”

“One of these days, I want to sit down with you so you can explain to me how you fell so hard for a guy you’d never met before. It doesn’t make sense to me,” Shawn said, looking over my shoulder.

That’s when I wrapped my arms around him and stuffed my nose in his armpit.

“FUCK!” Shawn convulsed in my grip like a super-sized tuna on the deck of a fishing scow. “He’s huggin’ me and sniffin’ my pit!”

“Just relax. At least he isn’t humpin’ your leg.”

“What do I do if he starts?”

It was a good question, now that I think about it. Had I been functional at the time, Shawn’s terrified squeak would have dissolved me into a goopy puddle of guffaws and I would have given his thigh the old “What fer!” just for the fun of it. At the time, all I did was let him go, step back and grin at him.

With my nose, I’d officially acknowledged him as one of my people, related to my primary person and not anyone to arouse suspicion. I was content. Shawn and Charlie were mystified.

Smiling, I stuffed my bits behind my zipper and secured the hatch. The Cooper siblings appeared greatly reassured.

Charlie explained to her brother that we’d been heading over to Jayashri’s to get an opinion on my slimy mucus. He nodded, looking a little green, but didn’t say a thing. The three of us walked on, not saying anything, until we got to our neighbor’s front door.

For once we actually had to knock. In all the time that I’d known the Sharmas, their ability to be right there before you even decide to rap on their door was as uncanny as it was subtly unsettling. People aren’t supposed to be that aware of their neighbors, or so attuned to an arrival that they could be waiting in advance. Then again, for all I knew they tuned the boards of their front porch to squeak when weight was placed on them. It was a question that I never thought to ask, so it remained a mystery.

Bajali answered the door, looking haggard, as though he’d not slept a wink since we liberated him the day before.

“Hi Baj,” Charlie said quietly, letting go of my hand and hugging him gently.

“Good morning, Charlie. Shawn,” he said, looking at me over Charlie’ shoulder and it was the saddest expression that I can remember seeing. “Frank. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“We dropped by to ask Jaya if she could look up Frank’s nose.”

“That is a very interesting request, Shawn.” If I’m not mistaken, Bajali’s eyes crossed ever so slightly. “I will fetch her for you. Please come in and be at home.”

We settled ourselves in the living room and watched him disappear into the kitchen. Charlie turned to her brother and sighed heavily.

“He doesn’t look good.”

“Well, from what I got from Omura last night, he don’t have much reason to look perky. I mean, sure, y’all brought him home, but his stay with Frank’s daddy weren’t all that sociable.”

“No. I’m guessing that it wasn’t.” She wrapped her arm around my shoulders and I certainly didn’t complain. “Did you notice that your accent’s gotten thicker? What’s bugging you?”

“Is that my kid sis that’s askin’, or is it my kid sis, the Psych Major?”

“Knocker, I’m both and you know it. I’m just worried about you.”

“I fuckin’ hate that nickname.” The barrel chest expanded and propelled a giant sigh into the room. He popped the cap off and shook out his hair, suddenly looking like Cousin It. “It’s been a rough couple of days. We got pounded while y’all were out rescuin’ our science boy. When you guys come back, y’all tell us Frank got a chunk of his brains blown out, and Bajali got a ton of ass-sugar from Frank’s Mommy and her friends. Now, we’ve got a bunch of angry ‘Eaters’ out there and we don’t know when or if they’ll hit us back. It is freakin’ me out to hell and back.”

Jayashri floated into the room on Shawn’s last words. “What are ‘Eaters’, Shawn?”

“Hey J. Well, it’s what we started calling the zombies just yesterday. The boys and I decided that they’re not really ZOMBIES because they don’t wander around doing the whole…” he rolled his eyes back in his head, stuck his arms straight out and intoned, “… ‘BRAAAAINNNS! Uhhhhhh! Braiiiins’, thing.”

Jayashri shuddered, frowning. “Please do not ever make that face again, if you value my sanity. Not even if it is Halloween. It is much too disturbing!”

My body stood up.

The strangest thing about looking back at the memories from my… recuperation… is that I don’t have any rationale for anything that I did. There isn’t a mental record of my thought processes, and I find that it is a stark contrast to at least having some sort of general feel for why I did any particular thing. I guess that I was working on instinct as much as anything else that might have been sloshing around in there.

The body that my conscious mind wasn’t using walked over to Jayashri, knelt down at her feet and wrapped its arms around her waist. I remember the feeling of her fingers in my hair, gently caressing my scalp, and it felt like the surface tension of my emotions broke. A salve to my conscience is that she was wearing jeans that day, not a silk sari, because I would hate, even in retrospect, to have wept on silk.

“Oh my goodness, Frank!” Jaya put both her hands on my shaking head and tried to sink to the floor with me, but my grip on her waist was far too strong for her to do anything more than slouch. “Please show me how I can help you!”

“He can’t,” Charlie told her, with a voice that began to crack with emotion. “He can’t talk. I don’t even know how much he can think or understand.”

Jayashri reached down and forced me to look up at her, and I saw her tears through the blurriness created by the waterworks on either side of my nose. “Why are you crying? You brought my husband home to me, just as you said you would,” she stopped speaking, and seemed to realize something, “but your whole family is gone. Oh, I am so sorry!” Her gentle weeping gave way to something more brutal.

I let her sink to the floor in front of me and we curled up, holding on to one another until the storm could pass.

“All right, y’all. Quit it, or I’m gonna start gettin’ misty over here.”

“Shawn, you’re just bitchin’ because crying like a baby isn’t macho,” Charlie said. She gave a dramatic sniffle to punctuate her comment. “We’re just letting out all the feelings that have crawled up our asses.”

“Come on! It ain’t like I’m not moved by all this, but we did come over here to have Jaya look up his nose. Right?”

“Well, yeah. We were going to come over to your place and get some coffee before scrounging in your larder, too, but we got sidetracked.”

“Damn it, Chuck, can’t you mooch off someone else?”

“Don’t call me ‘Chuck’ or I swear by my pretty pink nipples I’ll nut you.”

I will digress, and tell you for a fact that Charlie’s nipples are pretty. They’re my favorites, really. Chunhua’s are pretty swanky, too… At least the set she ended up with when the nanotechnology reversed her aging. I try really hard not to think of the other set. Honest.

“You Americans are so casually violent with your siblings,” Jayashri commented, her head pressed against mine. “The first people that one should be generous with are your family members. You are our family, and I will make us coffee and food after I have examined our Francis’ nose.”

With a little effort, she extricated herself from my mindless embrace, made the universal “Stay There” gesture to me and went to fetch something in another room. By that point, I’d turned off my face faucet and was sitting on their hardwood floor with the passivity of a man that has been through the emotional wringer. The one thing I can say for being brain damaged in that way is my actions and emotions lined up with a kind of congruency that I never experienced before or since.

Score one for brain damage.

Jayashri came back into the room with one of those cute little lighted things that doctors use to look up your nose and in your ears. She checked the battery by shining light on her hand, and looked up at us with some confusion.

“I seem to have forgotten why I should be looking up his nose.”

Charlie related the morning’s episode of pink sticky snot, and told her not to worry about my bloodstained clothes. I’d dispatched an interloper and made a mess of myself.

“Ah. I do not know what it says about me, but I find bloody clothing less of a concern than I did a few days ago,” Jayashri said, cupping my chin in her hand and raising my face up for easier access to my nostrils. I didn’t resist when the cold black plastic went up my nose. “Well, I do see some irritation and one or two small blood clots.” She shifted to my left nostril and commented, “This is about what you would expect to see in any patient who was experiencing sinus inflammation from breathing cold air or a nasty cold… Of course, there would be mucus if it were a rhinovirus.”

“Ok, but did he blow brains out his nose earlier?” Charlie asked.

“Without a sample and a microscope, I would not be able to tell you. As odd as it might be to say so, I am going to make the assumption that if his body got rid of it, then it was not something that it needed. Remember, I am much more accustomed to people who are not superhuman. They are not as mobile and functional after traumatic ballistic impacts to their frontal lobes.” She shrugged.

Her answer mollified Charlie a little, but I could feel her concern from across the room, even if it didn’t make a single lick of sense to me. Jayashri sat back on her haunches, and flicked the light back and forth in front of my eyes, making me wince slightly.

“On a positive note, his pupils are reactive and symmetrical. Bright light makes him want to close his eyes. I should ask, out of curiosity, did he have a bowel movement yet?”

“What’s that got to do with a bullet to the head?” Shawn queried, shuffling around in the chair.

“We doctors joke that voiding your bowels is a sign of life.” She chuckled a little bit, adding, “The irony is it is also a sign of death. If Francis’ body is working, it will be processing bodily waste products. Feces. Urine.”

“He made a trip to the potty on the way over here,” Charlie squeamishly commented. “I was pretty surprised that he understood toilet paper and flushing. Then he took a pee on the brains of the intruder that we almost had.”