Read Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 for Free Online Page B

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