We have a little laugh.
Phil Sax. He’s not all bad. Just he’s an untrustworthy dirtbag is all.
That’s probably why I stick the shotgun in the back of his neck when he starts to unlock the door at the top of the stairs. Why I hiss at him to keep it zipped when someone on the other side asks what’s up. Why I kick him in ahead of me and follow only after he stumbles in and no one blows any holes in him. Why I go in barrel first, crouching, at an angle.
Why it goes all sideways at that point is because when Sela jumps from the blind corner at my far left and I turn and try to put one in her gut before she lands on me, I find out that as bad as things have got in here they haven’t yet got to the point where anyone is giving Phil a loaded weapon.
Shame on me for not checking that one.
Advantage Sela, on me, grabbing a fistful of hair, lifting my head and slamming it into the floor, raising a fist that will likely collapse my face. Good hand is attached to the arm pinned under her left knee, bad hand is free, clawing at her eyes, just enough fingers to do that. Wonder if I’ll feel the second punch, or if the first will do the deal. Fuck, I hope so.
—Sela!
The fist grazes my skull, feels like being grazed by a sledgehammer, splinters the floor next to my head.
—Baby, come here, baby.
Sela’s nostrils open, then her mouth. She leans her face to mine, I’m waiting for her to bite, and she’s gone, jumping like a tick, and I can feel an imprint of her hot skin where her legs and thighs and bottom rested against me.
And I smell blood.
Up on an elbow, those two fucking ribs broken yet a-fucking-gain, I take a gander at what it looks like when everything goes completely off the rails.
The room takes up most of the top floor. Large parts of it have been turned into a lab. Steel tables, refrigerators, computer equipment, things that look like they analyze stuff, test tubes, an autoclave. Hell, there’s even Bunsen burners. Just missing a Tesla coil to make it a complete mad scientist setup. Another part of the room is devoted to another kind of business. There are a lot of guns scattered around, cases of dehydrated high-energy and high-protein meals. Cases of whiskey and vodka, jugs of water, batteries, a couple small gas-powered generators. A bank of flickering CCTV screens, most dead, with an occasional jump to a picture of the front stoop, the stairwell, one of those empty barracks, and a night vision–green view of a row of steel doors in a basement. In front of the screens, a length of 2×4 with a series of knife switches screwed into it, wires running to a hole in the floor. The office consists of a big wood desk covered in papers and uneaten meals, three computer monitors, a model made out of sticks and little balls and geodesic blocks. Across the room are two open doors: through one I can see a bathroom, through the other it looks like living quarters.
A couple things are especially riveting. Start with a row of glass jars, big-ass jars, along one of those steel tables, each with a head floating inside. But that’s not the showstopper. That’s the young lady sitting at the desk.
Young, beautiful, brilliant and rich, Amanda Horde always had it all. Including a bonus set of whacked-out parents. Still, long as I’ve known her, she’s been looking for more. Looking to do something special. Cure what ails us. Even though she’s not one of us. Girl on the edge of things, special she is.
And at the moment, her half-starved Vampyre lover’s mouth is latched over a cut on her forearm.
She runs her fingers across Sela’s forehead.
—That’s right, baby, it’s OK. We’re OK.
She looks at me.
—Joe.
I look at her.
—Hey, Amanda.
She gives a flat smile.
—Can you come over here and give me a hand, Joe? I mean, mostly she’s fine, but sometimes it takes a little extra work to pull her off once she gets started.
It takes a little extra work to pull her off.
She keeps feeding while she swings her fist around, trying to force me back, but I get an arm around her neck and manage to wrench her face from Amanda’s arm. She’s pretty pissed about that and looks to kill me for it, then her eyes kind of roll up and she goes to all four and crawls away and curls up and goes to sleep.
So I get to live another day.
Or another minute anyway.
Time will tell.
—I’d say, if anyone was asking, I’d say he’s working for Predo on this one.
—Shut up, Philip.
—Just I’m saying is all, how those enforcers didn’t exactly beat down the door to get after him is all.
Amanda stops flicking through the slides that zip across her monitors.
—How about that, Joe, are you working for Predo again?
I pause in my rummaging.
—Yeah, afraid so. He’s getting ready to raid the place. I’m supposed to get some quick intel, get out and let him know if there’s anything in here to worry about.
She starts flicking through slides again.
—See, Philip, nothing to worry about.
Phil rocks back and forth in his chair.
—Man, there are like sooo many things in what he just said that I can worry about.
I hold up a carton of shitty clove cigarettes that smell like candy.
—Is this all you laid up?
She glances over.
—Yeah. Help yourself. I totally gave up on that bad habit.
I think about it. I will admit that much, I do think about it. Then I drop the carton back where I found it and grab a bottle of Scotch instead.
—You give up this bad habit?
She shakes her head.
—No. But I’m a total lightweight these days.
Sela is still sleeping, but I cut a path well around her anyway.
—Yeah, wonder why that is.
Amanda fingers the edge of the bandage she put over the fresh cut in her arm. Both arms have several more similar wounds, from well-healed to barely scabbing.
—Don’t be an asshole, Joe. I mean, don’t be that kind of asshole. I mean, please, am I going to let her starve?
I twist the cap from the bottle and find a couple dirty glasses in the mess on her desk and pour a couple drinks.
—That would be my plan.
She takes a glass from me.
—No it wouldn’t. I mean, say it if you need to, but no, that wouldn’t be your plan.
Phil looks up when he hears liquid hitting glass and comes over.
—Yeah, Joe’s plan would be more like to just shoot her.
We both look at him.
He shrugs.
—I’m just saying, but I don’t know anything, so I’m just saying.
He points at the bottle.
—Um?
I drink what’s in my glass, refill it, set the bottle down and find a chair.
—Help yourself, Phil.
I take a sip.
—What we got going on tonight, it won’t happen again.
That worm, I was waxing poetical about, it’s fucking here. Looking at Amanda in her dirty jeans and filthy lab coat as she stares at her monitors, I can just about see it behind her eyes.
Something’s eating her. And I don’t mean Sela.
—I can barely look at you, Joe.
—What’s that mean?
She flicks a couple more slides across her screens.
—I mean, Joe, I mean, come on. We’ve been through so much together. I mean, would I even be here without you. I don’t mean like would I be alive, because, yes, yes, I’d have been dead years ago without you. I mean, would I be here?
Still looking at those screens, she flips a hand, taking in the circumstances.
I empty another finger from my glass. Ha ha.
—Don’t blame me, kid. You got yourself neck deep.
She shakes her head.
—See, and that is why I can barely look at you. Because after all this, you’re still this person I don’t even know. This thing I don’t even know. G
ah. I hate it.
I’m watching the screen myself. Those slides. Some I can tell are blood cells. I’ve seen that kind of thing before. White and red. Little blobs and little donuts things. Other stuff she’s looking at, I don’t know. Could be explosions in space, could be sculpture, could be deep-sea spine creatures, could be mold. Could be anything.
But knowing the girl, they’re all viruses. That’s her bag.
Viruses and the Vyrus.
I look into my glass.
—What’s to know.
She giggles.
—Joe.
Giggles some more.
—Oh, Joe.
Gets ahold of herself.
—If you only knew.
I take a drink.
—Har-dee-har-har.
She spins her chair to face me.
—Spying for Predo.
—Yep.
—Again.
—Yep.
—I mean.
—Yep.
She waggles the fingers of her left hand.
—You didn’t have to do that, Joe.
I set my glass down, go for my tobacco.
—What’s that?
She folds her left pinkie, thumb and most of her ring finger into her palm.
—You didn’t have to sit still for Predo doing that to you.
I flip the pouch at Phil, quietly shaking, drinking his booze and staring at Sela.
—Make yourself useful, Phil.
He picks up the pouch and starts to roll one.
I look back at Amanda.
—I’m sorry, you were suggesting what craziness now?
She unfolds her fingers.
—I was suggesting that you went to some odd length to convince Predo you were desperate and would, I mean, you know, do his bidding.
—Lady.
I snap a finger that has a thumb to work with and Phil hands me my smoke.
—You find new ways of being crazy every time I see you.
She turns to her screen.
—Joe Pitt lets himself be captured by Predo. Lets himself be tortured. All so he can convince Predo to send him in here. And make sure I’m OK.
She giggles.
—And I’m not even your type.
I light up.
—Know what’s funniest about how wrong you are?
—Tell me, Joe, I mean, tell me.
I blow smoke.
—It’s that the missing fingers are supposed to make you believe Predo really tried to kill me and I just barely got away.
She tosses some hair.
—Well sure, but I’m talking about subtext.
Phil comes for the bottle and pours himself another.
—You are both, I’m just saying as a casual observer and not like an expert or anything, but you are both in need of some, what I’d call, some serious help.
She flicks to another slide.
—We have some strange history, Joe and me.
The bottle is almost empty. Not that it took very long.
Sela’s breathing has changed, become less peaceful. I’ve wandered around the room and looked at most everything I can, but I still can’t get a look through the half-open door into the living quarters. Phil’s nodding, not quite passed out, but not for lack of trying.
Amanda’s getting weirder as she gets drunker.
And she’s talking. And talking. And talking.
—So for a while I went on this other trip. I mean, OK, the Vyrus, it just won’t make sense. It won’t behave at all virusy. Yes, OK, yes, it lacks the ability to reproduce on its own. Yes it accesses healthy cells so it can get at the machinery it needs to reproduce. But there’s no, like, modus operandi. Like, take a normal virus, it might do all kinds of stuff to get into a cell. It might pretend to be another cell. It might just jump out from behind something and attack a cell. It might, just, you know, like, anything. But like just one thing. OK. And, the Vyrus, it does everything. Watch it long enough, take enough samples from enough infecteds, you’ll see it do everything.
She flicks through a series of slides that look like gunshot wounds, but they aren’t.
—So, OK, so it’s an RNA virus. Start with that. I did. ‘Cause an RNA virus is fast. It creates so many copies of itself so fast, it makes just a ton of mistakes. More mistakes equals more mutation equals greater variance. And blah and blah and blah. Hardier species, we’ve all read Darwin by now and so OK. But so what? Because this thing isn’t mutating over eons or centuries or years or, whatever periods that normal stuff mutates over. I mean, lasting mutations. Not flukes and sports. Not that a virus can really be a sport, but you know, right. So. Radical and lasting mutations that happen like when you turn your back and then turn back.
She looks over at me and bugs her eyes.
—Creeepy.
She looks back at her screens.
—Cool. But creepy. So I start thinking creepy.
More slides.
I drift closer to the door into the living quarters.
Sela snorts, twitches, settles.
Amanda stops on a trio of slides.
—Really, really creepy. Like, don’t laugh, what if, and I hadn’t slept in like six days when I thought this, but what if it’s a space virus?
She taps a key and the slide in the center zooms and it’s just a smear on the screen.
—And I don’t mean like a drifty space virus that hitches a ride on a meteor and crashes into earth and like somehow is adaptable to our environment and stuff. I mean, what if it’s like a targeted virus. I mean, Joe, I mean, germ warfare from outer space, I mean.
She taps that same key and the smear becomes a blur.
—Not against us. That’s stupid. I mean, I hate calling it this but my dad never gave it a name and just whatever, but look at the zombie bacteria. There’s all this, like, snobbery in the Vampyre community about this stuff. You all act like, oh, Zombie scum created by a bacteria must be eliminated while we higher forms created by a virus must live on. But, ha ha, bacteria are so much more advanced than viruses that it isn’t even funny. I mean, bacteria are alive. Viruses don’t even have a nucleus. But still, the Vyrus and the zombie thing, they have these weird similarities. Like, one thing the Vyrus does is it sometimes mimics bacteria. To get close to other bacteria. And infect them. It burns out like that, but it happens when you put them together. Which is weird. So imagine this scenario where you have, and I already said don’t laugh, you have these aliens at war. And this war it’s on like, a massive scale. Galactic in scope. Which means, ipsy-facty, that it’s slooow. ’Cause of E=MC2, yeah? OK. So what if a big part of this war is about territory. And so they, here, see, they infect whole worlds. They, this is wild, they design bio-agents for prospective territories, places they may want to colonize in like millions of years, and they shoot these weapons at the worlds and they infect certain species and their enemies do the same thing and the idea is that the infected species will fight it out and the one that wins is programmed by the infection, I mean, just in the way it has to exist, what it eats and just the basics, what it does to live will help to make the world more hospitable for the aliens in millions of years if they ever come.
I laugh.
She doesn’t.
I stop.
She looks at me.
—Who are you, Joe Pitt? What are you, Joe Pitt? I mean, are you secretly trying to backstab me by pretending to backstab Predo? Or are you secretly fighting for your alien masters and you don’t even know it?
I lean against the wall.
—You’re not serious.
She tilts her head back and forth.
—Well, not anymore. But I was.
She turns to her screens.
—Just that it’s unnecessary.
A series of slides that look like railroad ties welded together at odd angles.
—Because we know like, what, like one percent of the life on earth. And there are at least ten times as many unknown viruses as there are other life-forms in that rem
aining ninety-nine percent. She shrugs.
—I mean, who needs outer space to explain weird stuff with all that right here.
I edge the door open an inch.
On the bed, a foot. But I can’t tell if it’s attached to anything.
It’s all stuff I can’t follow, but Amanda keeps talking anyway.
Says stuff about how most of the genetic material on the planet is viral. String it all together and you’d have a line that stretched ten million light-years. Talking about three branches of life, eukaryotes, bacteria and archaea, and how viruses just live off those three. Mentions something called LUCA. Says that’s the last universal common Ancestor. The first single life-form before life split into its three categories. Tells me that a virus’s strength is its ability to persist. That most of the human genome is viral DNA. How things called retroviruses program RNA to make viral DNA that splices into host cells’ DNA and how it gets passed on as the cell does its normal replication.
Mostly it’s just words and letters to me.
If I get the sense of one out of ten things she’s saying, I’m lucky. But it’s kind of always been that way. Between how smart and how crazy she is, there’s not much room for a guy like me to understand much of what comes out of her mouth.
I stay busy with whiskey and cigarettes.
And with thinking about that foot on the bed. Wondering if it’s attached to a pregnant girl.
I’d go try and get a better look, but I’m trying not to move around too much because one of Sela’s eyes is open now and I can’t tell if it’s just something that happens, or if she’s awake.
Talk about creepy.
But there’s room for more.
—Want to see something amazing?
I go over to the desk and look at the screens. Moving slow, trying to see if Sela’s eye follows me.
It does.
—What you got?
What she’s got is more blobs on her monitors.
She’s pointing at one, harsh pink and green, rods and blobs.
—This is it.
I look.
—It what?
She looks up at me.
—The Vyrus, Joe. That’s what it looks like.
I look again, but I don’t recognize it. It’s not the face of god or anything, just a picture of the flu I caught a long time ago. The one that makes me need blood to survive.