Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 by James Crawford Page B

contribute anything to the conversation beyond noises and pantomime, so I just nursed my beer. Charlie, Jayashri and Chunhua had decided to make use of my Japanese bathtub, and left us men to fend for ourselves. I missed her presence, but was also a little glad for the space.
    “I heard those researchers are bringing in one of their pet projects,” Shawn drawled. He was on beer number 5, if my math wasn’t off. “Anybody heard anything about that?”
    “Yes,” Buttons answered from farther down the table. “It’s a live subject that was discovered locally. They’ve been keeping it alive for almost a year.”
    “Man, that just gives me the shivers,” our country caveman rumbled, downing the rest of his beer.
    “They tell me that the subject is an anomaly,” Buttons said with a noncommittal shrug, “and we shouldn’t worry about it.”
    I tended to agree with Shawn on the issue: it gave me serious cold chills to think that we’d have a zombie, or “Eater”, up close and personal. What I felt wasn’t hate, exactly. It was more like visceral revulsion, and I decided to put the beer down on the off chance that the chills made me clumsy. To my relief, the conversation veered off into Shawn’s territory, otherwise known as the “Garage” of Building 1.
    After a few more laughs, I stood up, mimicked sleeping, and wished everyone well with a goodbye grunt. Something was eating at me, and I figured that I’d had one beer too many with a still-recovering brain. My bed was probably the best place for me, and that’s where I headed.

Chapter 8
     
    I’m the kind of man that enjoys an uneventful walk. I used to enjoy uneventful rides on my old Buell motorcycle until I put the bike down into a crowd of zombies. It wasn’t evident to me that they were standing around a drum full of kerosene until it exploded a second later. It would have burnt my eyebrows off if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet with the visor down. I really miss that bike.
    When I rounded the corner at Buchanan, I saw something I’d never seen before. Two of our guards were leaning on the porch of the empty house that sat on the corner of Buchanan and 23 rd . Their visors were up and it looked like they were sharing a smoke on their watch. Pretty benign, if you ask me, but I had to wonder if they were allowed to be visible. Shrugging, I prepared to walk right by them.
    My heightened sense of smell gave me some extra information: they’d both been drinking. Pretty heavily, too.
    “Hey, you,” one of them called out to me as they jogged over to intercept me on my stroll home. “You’re the guy that got his brains blown out, right?”
    I nodded, and followed it up with an “Um-hum.”
    “What’s it like, being,” the second guard gestured, trying to put sensible words together, “you know?”
    I shrugged, because I had no way to give them a better answer.
    “Dude, don’t you remember he can’t talk?”
    “Aw, yeah.” He laughed and lowered the transparent face shield on his helmet. “They say you’re the one with the most advanced nanotech, though. Like, you can heal almost anything.”
    I will admit, honestly, I couldn’t even begin to believe what happened next.
    “Let’s find out,” he said, and took a swing at my head. It connected and tossed me about ten feet before I hit the ground.
    “Dude! That’s not part of our orders,” the second guard protested, waving black-gauntleted fingers. “The Major will be fucking pissed!”
    “Man, this one can’t even talk. Who’s he going to complain to? I want to find out if these suits can compete.” He smiled and stalked over to me. I was waiting for the world to stop spinning. That punch was impressive, and I don’t think a normal person would have survived it.
    He kicked me in the ribs. I got more airtime and the sure knowledge that the impact had broken three of my ribs and punctured my right lung. The nanotechnology was kind enough to inform me of the nature of the damage