Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 Read online

  “Woo-woo,” I warbled. I also flailed a little bit with my arms.

  As bothered as I was, it didn’t occur to me to simply tug on the tube to see what would happen. Instead, I batted at my bits, which only served to make me more aware of the distention of my urethra. Jayashri, Charlie, and young Nancy Smith arrived just in time to see my futile efforts.

  “Francis, stop!” Jayashri reached me first and held my hands away from the offending parts.

  “Frank, don’t do that,” Charlie chided and covered my groin with her hands.

  “OMG! Ew!” Nancy stood to the side, eyes bugging out of her head at the unfortunate tableau. “That’s so nasty!”

  “Girl, you aren’t even supposed to know penises exist at your age. Get gone!”

  “But! Ew!” She tried protesting, but it was feeble in the face of Charlie’s Alpha Female power.

  “Get!”

  “Aw!” It was a sad parting shot, but she did as she was told.

  For my part, I was strangely soothed and elated. I understood that I knew these women, and had context for their presence in the room. I knew them.

  “Bbbbbbbbbb!” I babbled excitedly at Charlie. “Muh muh muh muh bbbbbbb!”

  “Hey! You’re making noises! That’s new!”

  “Francis, I want you to lay flat for a minute or two while I get gloves and then I will remove the catheter.” Jayashri smiled at me and squeezed my hands. I understood some of what she said, and complied.

  “Hey baby,” Charlie said, and drew my attention back to her. “Where have you been for the past two weeks? We were pretty worried about you!”

  I could see it on her face, but I could also see the relief as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t answer the question, due in large part to not grasping the concepts. Sensing that she needed some response from me, I put my hands over hers and cooed at her. It got her to smile, and it meant the world to me to see it.

  Jayashri reappeared with a towel and rubber gloves.

  “?”

  “Is that so,” Jaya asked me, by way of a reply to my interrogative noise. “I am happy to see that you are more animated now, but I will say I would prefer if you did not disappear into catatonia for weeks at a time in the future. Shawn was this close,” she held her thumb and index finger about an inch apart, “to standing you up and using your body as a coat rack.”

  “Is that what he told you?” Charlie chuckled to herself. “He told me that he’d stick Frank under the front porch to grow mushrooms on. He misses portabellas.”

  Since words weren’t appearing, and noises were easy to misunderstand, I stuck out my bottom lip and pouted with the righteousness of the Truly Offended. The women laughed at me.

  “Well done! Ah, let us take that catheter out so that you can put on real clothes and join us downstairs.” Jayashri put on the gloves, lifted up Quixote and the Panza Brothers, and slid the towel underneath them. “Now, breathe normally and stay relaxed. Do not bear down as though you need to pee. Are you right?”

  “.”

  “Very good. Take a good breath,” she said, gently taking Don Quixote into her hand. I didn’t look down. “Relax.”

  “Uh! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Ahhhh!”

  “Jayashri, I don’t want to see anything like that ever again,” Charlie said, biting down on her lower lip.

  Jaya patted me on the tummy. “Good job, Francis. That was well done.”

  “?”

  “No, I’m very serious! Removing one from a patient who is suffering from a urethral infection… Say, a vicious case of gonorrhea,” she frowned, “… is quite awful. This was so much more pleasant with a healthy and cooperative patient!”

  “Fh,” I snorted.

  “Why do you understand the noises he’s making? I don’t get any of it.”

  “Francis is making vocalizations like a pre-verbal child. I was the star pupil of my pediatric rotation in medical school. I am using context to ferret out his meaning.”

  “That makes me worry that his cognitive functions are impaired.” Charlie put her hand on my leg and gave it a squeeze. “Although, it’s pretty clear that he’s doing some thinking and not just reacting like before he shut down.”

  “Indeed. He seems much more like himself than before. I will dispose of the waste and the towel if you would see that he gets dressed.”

  “Deal.”

  J. left the room, and Charlie embraced me as soon as the door closed.

  “Frank, please don’t do that again,” she sniffled against my shoulder, “unless you give us a week’s notice. Okay? God, I missed you.”

  I held her while she got some of the emotions out and made soothing noises, which she later informed me sounded like a cat with gas. Burbling felines or not, I needed to let her know that I cared and it was the best way I could express it at the time, until I had a brilliant idea. I kissed her.

  As far as kisses go, it was not so grand that a sonnet was required in the aftermath, or so poor that licking the rim of a fish bowl would be an accurate comparison. I did my best to make it honest and loving, since all I had were juvenile noises to get my point across otherwise.

  She got the point. It led to a few more honest, loving repetitions.

  We made me presentable, all the while grinning like explorers in the land of exotic narcotics. Neurochemistry is a miraculous thing, and mine appeared to be back online.

  “?” Eloquent, I know, but it was the best I could do to get across that I wanted to know what was coming next.

  “Ok, I’m going to guess what you mean,” she said, taking me by the hand. “We’re going to go downstairs. Omura, Baj and Nate are playing cutthroat Scrabble. Buttons was teaching Chunhua, Jaya and me a little Krav Maga. You know, the Israeli combat system? Nasty stuff, I mean really nasty. No pretty circular movements or anything!”

  I nodded, because I only grasped part of what she was talking about. The names made sense, and I got a little from context. “Playing” had meaning for me, but everything else may as well have been deep Differential Calculus for all I caught. Understanding or not, I did have a desire to see people, my people, so I didn’t resist as Charlie led me down the stairs.

  We encountered Buttons first, chatting in a nearly animated manner with Chunhua over glasses of what appeared to be lemonade.

  “Triple word score, bitch!”

  Everyone turned to look towards the dining room.

  “Sounds like Nate is winning,” Buttons commented in his typical flat voice.

  “His wife would be upside his head if she heard him swearing,” Chunhua said.

  “She has a problem with it?”

  Chunhua giggled and replied, “A little.”

  Both of them turned to see us reaching the bottom of the stairs. Buttons’ face assumed an impressively flat expression, but Chunhua squeaked and pounced on me with an epic embrace. Luckily for me, she’s small, but the force of the collision nearly knocked me off my feet.

  “!!”

  “It’s good to see you, too!”

  “Chu, why does everyone understand him and I don’t?” Charlie asked, sounding miffed in the extreme.

  “Grandpa Yan and I had a son,” she replied, and I felt the tension in her body increase by orders of magnitude. I knew something else was coming. “He chose to stay in Hong Kong when we emigrated.”

  I felt the lie.

  “Oh, so it’s a parent thing or experience working with babies?”

  “Exactly.” Chunhua’s tension eased with the closing of the topic. “Let’s get Frank something to eat and drink. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “.”

  “That’s pretty noncommittal for someone that hasn’t had a bite to eat in two weeks.” She linked her arm through mine and led me into the kitchen, leaving Buttons and Charlie behind. “Jayashri told me that you dissolved every needle she tried to use to run an IV to hydrate you. She started leaving 1000ml bags of saline on the bed after the second day, and they would be empty in three hours or less.”


  “Nnnn?”

  “Yes. That’s why she had to put the catheter in.”

  “Uhhhh!”

  Once we got into the kitchen, there was a bum rush from the table to greet me. Shawn slapped me on the back, nearly knocking me over and into Nate. Bajali waited until I found my balance again, and gave me a gentle hug. Nate messed up my hair.

  “Look at the geeky white boy getting all the attention for being Mister Comatose Drama,” he said with a cheesy grin plastered across his face. “Most people pass out, wake up, and go about their business. Not my Frank! He’s got to show us all how it’s done and spend two weeks stretched out like a plank, all unresponsive.”

  “Fffffrb,” I commented.

  “Was that a comment or a fart?”

  “!”

  “Oh. Well,” Nate said, motioning me to a chair, “just sit down and get yourself together. Take your time, all right?”

  “.”

  Shoei Omura leaned over and gave me a pat on the arm.

  “I’ll admit it: you had me worried. I told Charlie that I thought you’d recover better than Buttons has. For a while there, it looked like you were going to make a liar out of me.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I just nodded, keeping my lame vocalizations to myself.

  The rest of the evening slid into night that way, people being solicitous of my well-being, and it was strangely comfortable. I’ve always considered myself something of a loner, but our little community changed that. Honestly, I’d never be one for PTA meetings, but I would (and often have) take a bullet for any of them.

  I tugged on Charlie’s belt loop

  “?” The noise slipped from between my lips like a loving chirp from a trained orangutan.

  She got the hint, but I suspect it was my drooping eyelids and not the noise that conveyed the message. I was friggin’ bushed.

  There were a lot of hugs and promises to come see me before we were actually able to walk toward the front door. Jayashri brought us up short, reminding Charlie to bring me to the big green tent in the morning.

  “???”

  “Big green tent?”

  “.”

  “Well, I’ll show you. Come on,” Charlie said, taking me by the hand and stepping outside into the chilly night air.

  Baj and Jaya’s house is on North Buchanan Street, and my hardware store is about a block south on the right side of the road. Looking across from their front porch, towards my place, there in the glare of new halogen streetlights, was a big tent… the kind you always see in movies as the military’s mobile HQ. They’d put it up in the parking lot of my place.

  “!” I squeaked as I looked around. No way in heaven or on earth could I miss the 25-foot tall wall that had grown up between us and the street while I was out like a light.

  “Yeah, it’s a little tough to adjust to, but it’ll be okay. Come on, let’s go home.”

  Going home wasn’t all that easy. The entire block of 22nd and North Buchanan was empty. Sometime during my extended nap they’d bulldozed and cleared the entire chunk of the neighborhood that faced my front door. The only thing left of the houses and stores was a pile of rubble off in the distance and various kinds of utility dinguses poking above the dirt.

  “?” I pointed at the empty acreage as we walked by it.

  “They tore it all down last week and dropped in some kind of baby supercollider to power the neighborhood.” Charlie shrugged, making her breasts move in a really interesting way. “Omura says they’re going to put in a big multi-purpose building of some kind. Baj is going to have a full lab, Jaya’s getting medical facilities, and I think they’re going to have some sort of garage and armory in it, too. Shawn’s pretty excited about that, ‘cause he’s going to be in charge of all that stuff. Of course, Baj has to get off his ass and get the modifications designed for our little critters, or we’ll be stuck like this.”

  She led me right by the double doors of the big green tent. They each had a big white square painted on the front, and in each square was a red “+”. I found this a little curious and pointed at one of the symbols.

  “You know? Red Cross.” Charlie soothed my concern by rubbing my shoulder. “It’s the medical tent. There’s also some scientific apparatus that Baj is really pleased about. I’m guessing that Jayashri wants to do a full set of x-rays on you tomorrow. She’s been doing that on everyone since the stuff arrived last week.”

  I hate to admit how much of that went right over my head. On the bright side, I did get the feeling that my brain was slowly building back to functionality. It was almost as though the words I didn’t understand made little sparks, like mental bookmarks, that served as flags for links that needed repair.

  “What she really wanted was a portable MRI unit.” Charlie smiled and shook her head, looking up at something I wasn’t paying attention to. “Then Baj reminded her that our little friends contain quite a bit of metal. An MRI scan would magnetize the nanomachines and pull them right out of our bodies. Probably not the best thing for us, don’t you think?”

  “.”

  “Yeah. She was disappointed,” she laughed, wryly, “because MRIs give such good images, not because she wants to turn us into reverse pincushions.”

  I opened the door to my store, and was startled to see dust on the floor and lots of clear footprints. It made me feel like I’d been away for years, not just two weeks. I shuffled around a bit, and walked up and down the aisles, glancing to see what had moved or changed. Charlie stood by the cash register, silently watching my progress, and then wrapped her arms around me when I completed the circuit.

  “You seem really sad, Frank.”

  I had some inkling of what I felt, even if I couldn’t express it. Sure, I’d only been conscious for a handful of hours, but the inability to express myself or communicate effectively made me feel incredibly alone. In the end, I simply took her by the hand and led her upstairs.

  Sleep came with surprising ease, considering that I’d been flat on my back for two whole weeks. I did spend a little time listening to Charlie’s breath as she slept, before I rolled over and shut my own eyes.

  Dreams appear like old school chums that you never expected to see or hear from again: suddenly and with a lot of surprise. Hugging and bumptiousness is optional.

  Then again, with my brain doing random things like shutting me down for two weeks, it ought not to surprise me (even in retrospect) that it would go roaming around while I had some natural sleep. What surprises me is how incredibly vivid the dream was and how completely I believed that it was real.

  I was walking through the neighborhood in the early morning. The air had a crisp quality; the sort of dry snap that feels like late November in the Washington, DC region. I was barefoot, strolling along, looking around.

  “Are you ignoring me, Frank?”

  A voice in the utter quiet of a cold morning sounds so loud, I thought to myself. When my feet touched the ground again, after my short flight straight up, I turned around. Chunhua was lounging on a tree branch about 20 feet behind me, watching me with interest and a small frown on her face. It turned into a giggle after she saw how wide my eyes were.

  “I didn’t see you.” I gasped a little, waiting for my heart to slow back down. “Yeah. Hi.”

  “Lost in thought on a cold morning?”

  “Yeah. That’s probably the best way to describe it.” I ran my fingers through my hair, suddenly aware that I was only partially dressed.

  “I can’t even imagine,” she said, smiling down at me. “How does it feel to be back inside your own head after so much time?”

  Something about her tone of voice was odd. It wasn’t angry, sad, or even wary. It was harder, in some way that I couldn’t put my finger on and was at a loss to classify.

  “Chunhua, I don’t even have words for it.” I shrugged with as much expression as I could manage, feeling as if I were under an invisible magnifying glass. “I’m trying to walk a little of the confusion of
f to see if some variety of clarity will show up.”

  “When I was a girl, we walked a lot. Other, more powerful people, had cars or even bicycles. My family was poor enough that all we had were our feet.” I heard the sadness in her voice, even if I didn’t grasp it enough to sympathize. “I don’t know if it ever brought us any clarity, but it did get us where we wanted to go, in time.”

  I found myself nodding, not even looking at her. Then I heard her ask, “Where do you need to go, Frank?” When I looked up to answer her, she wasn’t there. She didn’t show up on my internal Heads Up display when I checked it; she didn’t even read as being anywhere within range. I couldn’t find her “light” at all.

  Had the world gone quietly sideways when I wasn’t looking? It occurred to me that I might not even be awake, and that my early morning stroll was a really, really vivid dream. After all, I had no clue or experience with the revamped interior of my own head. For all I knew hyper-real dreams might be a part of the way the repaired parts of my brain would work from that point forward.

  It was a more comforting train of thought than believing that I’d had a visitation from someone I knew and couldn’t corroborate by asking them about it.

  Ultimately, I turned back around and started walking again. Whatever I had experienced would not be solved faster by running around and turning over every rock until a smoking-hot Asian woman appeared. Knowing my luck, she’d pop out from under the rock with no clothes on and create a scandal, or there would be enough reason for Charlie to get upset. She had enough to worry about without dealing with jealousy. With any luck, I’d be able to keep the drama down to a simmer.

  Aside from the Magical Chunhua, nothing was stirring in the community. It gave me a little bit of pause, even with the mad flow of bad thoughts in my head. There should have been some noise, but there wasn’t anything in my ears but my footsteps and the sound of my own breathing. The more I walked in the silence, the more unsettled I became.

  I decided that something was wrong. Then the “wrong” showed up.

  “Salaam, Francis.”

  Chapter 5

  I heard the voice and didn’t turn around. The chills started at the base of my skull, shot straight down my spinal column and made my scrotum contract so tightly that I gasped. I started telling myself things, quietly. First, it was not the early morning of November 1st. Second, I do not believe in ghosts. Third, I do not believe in ghosts. Really, I don’t.