Blood Soaked and Contagious by James Crawford Page A

whore.
    “About four hours,” Shawn answered, looking a little bit green around the eyes and jaw.
    “Ah. Knocked myself out on the floor. Is Jerry dead?”
    “If you mean the zombie that you were interrogating, yes. I think that may have been related to the hole that your spike made in his forehead, and that his hand was still attached to your forearm.” Bajali pointed to the big white sausage in my lap. I noticed the sausage started at my elbow and had a hand attached to the opposite end.
    The fingers wriggled. I winced. It was my hand and arm, not a mutant bologna from Hell. I breathed a sigh of relief that it was there and functioning, if more than a bit painful.
    “Hey? Is Jayashri all right?” I didn’t see her and got a flash of serious paranoia that something had happened while I was out.
    “Yes,” I heard from behind me, “I’m fine. Thank you for being strong enough to do what I could not.”
    I scooted around on the bed, and discovered that the soft, spicy place where my head had been was her lap. She wasn’t meeting my eyes, and that bothered me more than I could cope with at the time. I put my finger under her chin and lifted her face so that I could see she was all right. There were tears in her eyes and no small amount of embarrassment with them.
    “I was very worried about you after we heard all the noise in the basement.” She wiped her eyes.
    Something about that statement perplexed me. “Which noise? Him screaming, or the breakdancing beach chair noise?”
    “Dude, we didn’t move until we heard you holler,” Shawn piped up from behind me. That made a lot of sense, so I dropped the issue.
    “I had to put some sutures in your arm, I hope you don’t mind.” Jaya gestured at the bandage-wrapped thing attached to my elbow.
    “Do I want to know how bad it was?” I wanted to know how bad it was.
    “Well, once we used the bolt cutters to remove the fingers,” Baj mimed using a substantial bolt cutter, “it did look quite nasty. No major nerve damage that we could see, but he missed your artery by about a millimeter. It looked like Jaya put in… darling, was it three internal sutures and four external for each puncture?”
    “Yes, my dear.”
    “Oh. No wonder it hurts.”
    “I would tell you not to use it seriously for at least a week,” she said, looking at her own forearm, “but that may not be a realistic suggestion at the moment.”
    “No, I don’t think we’ll have that luxury.” I shook my head, hoping to clear out some of the concrete-induced cobwebs, but all it did was make bright white starbursts behind my eyelids. “Nnng. Okay. Give me a minute and I’ll try to lay it all out for you. We don’t have a whole lot of time to waste.”
    Frankly, I’m not sure how long it took me to get my brains back together, but I was able to report everything I’d learned from Jerry the Zombie Grunt. My friends were a tough crowd, and I know it wasn’t a performance they particularly wanted to be a part of. For my part, I was right there with them.
    “All right. This is not a wonderful situation we’re in, but we might be able to do something with it,” Baj was doing his most thoughtful face. “We need to pull in our snipers before they get killed. They might be more useful elsewhere, or if we could keep them mobile at the very least.”
    “Not to put too fine a point on this, Baj,” all I could do was wave my right hand around in a vague sort of way, the left hurt too much, “but what the fuck are we going to do?”
    He sighed. “We are going to do what villages have done since people started gathering in groups. We are going to round up everyone we can find, have a meeting, and present the issues to everybody as we understand it.” He looked really noble, standing there like a statesman, in the old sense of the word. “Then, the community will decide what we will do.”
    “Bajali and I can escape,” Jaya said, “and that would take the brunt of any attack away from