Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 Read Online Free

about you very much.” She reached out and took my hands in hers. “See? I want to give you a hug because I was very scared and I am so worried about you. Would that be all right with you?”
    I felt the pressure of her emotions, even if I couldn’t wrap my head around the words. All I could do was let her pull me into an embrace, and put my arms around her. She was a stranger, but I could tell that she didn’t mean me any harm and something wordless inside me let me know that I cared for her, too.
    The thing that set me a little on edge, in the animal mode that I seemed to be in at the time, was that she had no scent. Everyone has a unique scent signature, something I’d always thought to be true, but now it’d been proven by the nanomachines inside me. While my brain was being reassembled, those little buggers used pieces of my primitive brain to keep me up and functional, and buried in that cache of grey matter is an olfactory wonderland.
    I didn’t need to see my neighbors to know who they were. All I needed was air to carry their unique perfume to my nose. “Perfume,” might be taking it a little far, because it was more like a stench on a few occasions.
    Shawn + beer + sweaty activity = unspeakable aroma. Trust me on this. No “scratch and sniff” can come close.
    Chunhua let me go, stepped back and looked into my eyes as though she was searching for something, a facial expression that I’ve come to know and be incredibly tired of. She was about to say something, but a far away expression replaced the intense searching of my face. I looked over at Shawn, and his face had assumed similar lines.
    A few moments later, he grimaced. “I fuckin’ do not like that one bit.”
    “Neither do I, but I see the sense in it,” Chunhua commented, “until Bajali can do something about how the nanotechnology spreads. We are just as contagious as anyone that has the zombie virus.”
    “Yeah, but that don’t mean that I don’t hate shit like that.” Shawn’s scent changed, and it wasn’t for the better. “Look, let’s take the boy inside and talk to people who can make better sense out of this bullshit. Okay?”
    Chunhua agreed, and we all went back inside. They led and I followed. I didn’t have terribly much choice.

Chapter 3
     
    Bajali had his face buried in his hands, leaning on the table, balanced on the points of his elbows. He smelled like something that was about to die.
    Jayashri stood by the coffee pot, staring off into space. It wasn’t the distant expression that we’ve come to associate with engaging in an internal conversation with one of our own. Her face carried the pole-axed glare of the truly upset. Her scent was full of sharp angst notes.
    Charlie waved Shawn and Chunhua to empty chairs, but pulled me close and wrapped her arms around me. Like a good and responsive bag of bony protoplasm, I wrapped my arms around her in return. The room around us was quiet, deathly so.
    Bajali broke the silence. “I am so terribly sorry. It did not occur to me we would be seen as a threat to public safety. I… damn me… I only wished for the people I love to survive.”
    “Sh ē ng mǐ zhǔ chéng shú fàn,” Chunhua grimly intoned.
    “What does that mean?” Baj looked up at her from across the table.
    “It is an old saying that my grandmother always used when my father did something unfortunate. ‘The rice is already cooked.’”
    “I think there’s a quote in Hillbilly that might be about the same. ‘Shit don’t matter. Y’all are fucked.’ That’s what Charlie’s and my Daddy would say before he hit us with one of his Sunday shoes.”
    “Were it so simple! I would rather be beaten bloody by your father’s shoe than endure this,” Bajali said, venting a noise that was nearly a growl and throwing himself to his feet. “They are quarantining us until I can reprogram the nanos so they will not spread beyond us. A wall! A gulag!”
    “Baj, sit back down, take a deep breath, and I’ll