Chapter Twenty - Feed Me In The Shower

"There are still pockets of French people all across Canada, you just need to look for them.

Try using your sense of smell, it's sometimes more accurate than judging them visually!"

--Rhubarb Pie's Guide to Hating the French, fifth edition, 2051

***

"So, you don't need help?" I asked.

Charles, pronounced with an accent that liked to pretend that the letter R was sexier than it ought to be, shook his head. "Non, ça va. Ouais, les locaux sont des imbéciles, mais je les connais depuis presqus toujours. J'vais m'assurer qu'ils soient en sécurité, et si l'armée peut aider, tant mieux." No, I'm okay. Yeah, the locals are idiots, but I've known all of them almost forever. I'll make sure they're safe, and if the army can help, that's great.

I nodded along. Charles, who really needed a samurai name sooner rather than later because this was getting awkward for me, seemed like a pretty down-to-Earth kind of guy. "Right, do you intend to stay around here forever, then?" I gestured at Saint-Colomban in its entirety. It wasn't a very big gesture.

Charles grinned at that. "Peut-être qu'après, j'irai à Nouveau Montréal, ouais." Maybe afterwards, I'll go to New Montreal, yeah.

I patted him on the shoulder, then took in the space. Charles decided to give me a quick tour, which really wasn't much.

The gas station was their main staging ground. Behind it was a used car dealership, which was probably where they got all of those lithium batteries to act as booby traps, and the cars used to form parts of the wall around the centre of town.

Most of the civilians were sequestered to what Charles called the 'old Medicorp building.' Well, he said it in French, but I got the idea. It was probably a nice, modern-looking building... twenty years ago.

"What happened to Medicorp?" I asked.

"Dead," he replied. "La compagnie est arrivée ici il y a bien longtemps, avant même que je sois né. Ils faisaient des tests sur les enfants et les femmes enceintes dans la région. Mais ils fournissaient aussi des soins gratuits pour les deux." The company showed up here way back in the day, before I was born even. They were doing tests on kids and pregnant women in the region. But they provided free care for both too.

"Okay, I'm assuming there's some very sketchy shit that went down?" That'd track with... everything I knew about pharmaceutical companies.

"C'est de la marde, ça commence même pas à couvrir le truc. Ils essayaient de rendre les gens résistants à ces criss de petits vers extraterrestres qui transforment les gens en zombies." Sketchy shit doesn't begin to cover it. They were trying to make people resistant to those little worm aliens that zombie people.

"Oh, great, human experimentation? That tracks." There was no sane reason a medical company would have a location out in the middle of nowhere like this unless they wanted to be far away from prying eyes.

Charles complained about a few things while giving me the tour. Mostly it was a tirade about the locals being both too eager to help and too useless to actually get anything done right. He was facing some pretty stiff resistance from older community members who'd seen him as a baby, which was... fair, actually.

If one of the Kittens became a samurai I'd probably still baby them a little.

Well, I was also a samurai, so I could get away with it. It would be more accurate if Lucy was the one doing the babying... which she would.

"Alright, so it looks like you've got things... halfway under control," I said. Gomorrah had come over, but the Fury was just hovering there close to my mech. I half expected her to just drive off, but I also wanted to bum a ride back home.

"Je m'arrange, et je peux gérer les choses ici sans trop de problème. Il y a eu moins de plantes aujourd'hui. Je pense qu'on va survivre." I'm figuring it out, and I can manage things here without too much trouble. There have been less plants today. I think we'll survive.

I patted him on the shoulder, then stepped back. "Alright, well, your AI probably knows how to ping mine. Don't be shy. And good luck."

Was I being rude just leaving the kid? Probably.

Was it past ten PM and was I bone-fucking-weary? Also yes. I just wanted to go home, eat something warm, take a shower, hug Lucy... it didn't even need to be in that order.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Gomorrah lowered her car enough that I was able to hop in. "Yo," I said as I slumped into the passenger side seat.

"Did that go well?" she asked with a nod in the direction of Charles, who was being surrounded by his posse again.

"Pretty well. Nice-enough kid. Fuck, I'm calling him kid but he's like, seventeen-ish? Anyway, the locals are overbearing asses, but he's handling them well enough. He needs some space to grow, I think. Oh, and he's super-French. He should learn English."

"Maybe you should learn French?" Gomorrah suggested.

"Ah, fuck, that sounds like a lot of work. They've got like... verbs and shit."

"Catherine... no, nevermind. Are you leaving your mech here?"

I shrugged. "Might as well. Army's only arriving in the morning, right? If shit goes down, I can probably remote operate it, and it has a decent auto-pilot, it can help out if the town gets attacked overnight."

I'd just recall it to Saint-Jérome when I went back there.

"If it helps, I don't intend to head to Saint-Jérome tomorrow," Gomorrah said.

"You don't?"

"For clean-up? It'd be a waste of our time. There's a lot we can do to prepare New Montreal for the arrival of Phobos. Even just being seen at work might help. I have some purchases to make as well. Upgrades and the like. I'm replacing my bones, which will take a moment."

I blinked. Fuck, being with samurai was weird sometimes with the random shit they, we, just dropped into a conversation. "Well, have fun with that," I said with a shudder. "I guess I'll take a day off too."

"I'm not taking a day off, I'm focusing on other work."

"Ah, alright," I said. That was fair, I could think of about a million things I could do tomorrow that would eat up my whole day, and half of those were just checking up on projects. Sure, like, a tenth of those things were also about hanging out with Lucy or the Kittens, but that was important too, for like... my mental health or something.

"Looking forward to being home?" Gomorrah asked. Then she reached up and removed the mask covering her face. She let out a sigh of relief as she placed it on the console.

"Yeah. Man, today felt like it went on forever."

"Just a normal day on the job," she said. "Honestly, though, you handled it well. You're good at the whole leadership thing."

"Nah," I dismissed, but Delilah shook her head and denied my denial.

"You are. You don't want to be, maybe, but you are. You could start something with the momentum you have."

I shook my head. "No. Not that I can't, I'm pretty sure I could start something. Lucy could help, and maybe I could hire some work out to others. Grab some of the newbies we helped today to help too."

"And I'd help as well, depending on your vision," Delilah said.

"Well, that's the issue. I don't have a vision. Unless sitting at home in PJs and cuddling for the rest of my mortal life counts as a vision?"

Delilah glanced my way. "You never dreamed big?"

"Delilah, dreaming big, where I'm from, meant hoping that you'd get adopted by someone who wasn't a freak or a weirdo, getting a cushy corpo job, and eating three square meals a day until your heart gives out. Dreaming really big means maybe adding an apartment of your own to that vision, maybe a kid or two if you're inclined that way."

"Oh," Delilah said. "Sorry, I sometimes forget that we had very different upbringings."

"That different? I mean, I know you have family, but weren't you raised at the convent?"

"Yes, but my family are... upper-middle class, I suppose. They just wanted a well-raised daughter. Most of the girls at the convent are there from families that earn enough to be able to send their children to such a place. It's not exactly cheap."

Huh, right. It wasn't a charity they were running, which naturally meant that it was for-profit. "For-profit religion, huh?"

"Aren't all of them? How much is god worth to you?"

"That's the edgiest shit I've ever heard you say, and you'll wax poetic about burning things," I said.

Delilah sniffed, but there was a slight smile there. "We're almost home. You can hug Lucy, take a shower, and eat. Maybe all at the same time?"

"Ohh, Lucy feeding me in the shower. That'd be a new one," I said.

"Urgh. I regret making the joke now."

I laughed until we were home.

***