Chapter Twenty - Feed Me In The Shower

Chapter Twenty - Feed Me In The Shower

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, a va. Ouais, les locaux sont des imbciles, mais je les connais depuis presqus toujours. J'vais m'assurer qu'ils soient en scurit, et si l'arme 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-tre qu'aprs, j'irai Nouveau Montral, 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 arrive ici il y a bien longtemps, avant mme que je sois n. Ils faisaient des tests sur les enfants et les femmes enceintes dans la rgion. 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, a commence mme pas couvrir le truc. Ils essayaient de rendre les gens rsistants 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.

"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.

***