Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 by James Crawford Page A

whole. Everyone kept to themselves, except when absolutely necessary. I was an exception, since I was the lab rat of choice in the medical tent. Charlie came with me most of the time, but there were days when she didn’t get out of bed with me.
    But the neighborhood was a hive of activity, even if we were all stuck between our own ears. It seemed like there was something new every fifteen minutes, between sections of prefabricated walls moving here and there and insane amounts of concrete being poured. All the houses in our little walled city were disconnected from Virginia Power’s lines and set up to run on our local power source. The builders were everywhere.
    I imagined that we were living in an ant farm, populated by orange biohazard ants. It made me wonder who the larvae were.
    By the middle of the second week, the gigantic, block-long, multi-purpose building was complete across the street from my hardware store. On that Friday, the second building over on 23 rd and Buchanan was completed. I’d never seen supplies airlifted into anywhere, but I did over those three days.
    On Saturday afternoon the Corps of Engineers disappeared as though they’d never existed, and the only signs they’d left behind were the buildings that had sprung up in two weeks. Saturday night, Yolanda and Ómer invited everyone over to Building 2 for dinner and a tour.
    No one had told me that they were building us a cafeteria, library and a school. Apparently Yolanda and her husband had been assigned to that facility as chefs and building supervisors. They seemed pretty happy with that decision–the rest of us were delighted by Yolanda’s ropa vieja, fried plantains and tomato salad. The lady can cook.
    The building itself was impressive and equipped with every high-tech gadget I could imagine to facilitate food service, distance-learning and storage. I was impressed. The community’s children were less excited than the adults, because they’d suddenly discovered that their lives of informal schooling were over.
    Barbara Banks, for her part, was pleased to be de-facto Principal of our community school and hand off the actual teaching to people on the other end of fiber-optic cable. I can see how it was a relief for her, and her enthusiasm for being able to offer the children better education was contagious. I even found myself smiling.
    It was a good night, and it felt as if we were starting to become a community again. No one could have told me how stressful it would be having your family of choice not getting along well. I would have laughed heartily at their expense and trundled off to do whatever was pressing on me at the time. Pride goeth before a fall, and this one was a short drop. I was grateful for that small favor.
    After the tour wrapped up, everyone moved off to get on with the daily process of living in a community undergoing huge changes… under the watchful eye of armed guards. Some of us decided to hang out in the cafeteria over some adult beverages. God! It felt so good to hear everyone catching up on the ins and outs of their lives over the preceding two weeks, and everyone was full of juicy updates. Even Bajali, who eschewed alcohol (except on very rare occasions), was rattling off the list of scientific apparatus that graced his new lab in Building 1.
    “Do you know? They are transferring a team of researchers here to work with me on the nanotech, and the medical staff will be remaining as well.”
    “Are they going to stay cooped up in plastic suits? Or will they interact with you like people?” Fitzgerald asked over the rim of a beer stein. It was a family heirloom and went with him wherever he traveled, or so they said.
    “Not at all.” Baj smiled, gesturing with a half-eaten carrot stick, “I will have the propagation issue fixed in the next day or two. Once that is rolled out, we will no longer be infectious.”
    I sipped on a Corona, and nodded, pleased to hear that progress was happening. I couldn’t