I touch her cheek.
—Favor to ask.
She sits up.
—Don’t push it.
I kick off the jeans that are still around my ankles.
—Got anything I can wear?
—Well, white’s not really your color.
—I’ll manage.
She stands.
—Anyway, I have a jacket that’s all you.
She starts for the stairs, picking her way, naked, through the dead.
I stand myself up, my body mostly shocked still to be here.
—Another thing.
She’s on the stairs, waiting to hear it.
I give it to her.
—We got to get out of here.
She looks around the place.
—Well, I didn’t plan on staying at this point.
—Yeah, but I mean the Island.
She folds her arms.
—Manhattan?
I raise my hands.
—I know.
—Leave Manhattan?
I drop my hands.
—I got to ask you to trust me on this.
She frowns and raises a finger.
—You ask a lot, Joe Pitt.
—I know.
She unfolds her arms, swats the air, turns and climbs the stairs.
—I won’t go to Jersey.
I don’t say anything. I just stand there. And look at her ass. There’s not much left to it, but what’s there is choice.
I’m at the door.
White painter’s pants, white T, white boat decks, and my old black leather jacket. Not the palette I’d choose for myself, but I make it work. Evie’s dug in her basket and found white tights, white jersey skirt, white V-neck sweater, white hoodie and white Chuck Taylors.
We’re a pair.
—It took me so long to feel like a New Yorker.
—Baby, I get it. But an island has tunnels and bridges. Tunnels and bridges can be blocked.
—I know.
—Not like my first choice is someplace where the bars close at midnight.
—I’m not complaining, Joe. I just.
She looks out the door at the streets starting to show signs of morning.
—I love this city.
—Yeah. Me too.
The street rumbles, I look up to the corner, and thirteen bikers in top hats, aviator goggles and long duster coats round onto Little West Twelfth and roll up to the loading dock.
The lead rider lifts the goggles from his eyes and lets them hang from his neck.
—Joe.
—Christian.
He puts a hand at his ear, like he’s holding a phone.
—Got a strange call. Said you’d been up to some crazy shit. Said getting lost was a good plan. Said you were the man to talk to about finding a lost place. Said find you here.
He lowers the hand.
—Can’t say I’m pleased about any part of that.
I limp onto the loading dock, packing nothing but attitude.
—Got a problem with it?
He puts a hand in the pocket of his duster, comes out with a pint of Old Crow.
—No one told me I’d live forever.
He takes a drink, screws the cap back, tosses it to me.
I offer it to Evie.
She takes it, flicks the cap with her thumb and it spins up and off and onto the ground and rolls away.
—Fuck yes.
She drinks.
—Man. Whiskey.
She hands it to me.
—Almost as good as blood.
Christian fake-shades his eyes and squints at her.
—How’d you lay your hands on that one, Joe?
I take a drink, pass him the bottle.
—You know me, lucky in love.
He shakes his head.
—Not sure I like the idea of you riding with us sporting that look.
Evie gives him the finger.
—Says the man in a top hat.
He nods at me.
—Hang on to her, Joe.
I’ve got her hand in mine, it’s a two-finger grip, but that’s what I got to work with.
—That’s the plan.
A Duster named Tenderhooks lends us his bike, climbs up behind Christian to a chorus of whistles and limped wrists. Evie hikes her skirt a little and gets behind me.
And we ride.
Over the bridge there’s a lady who runs the Bronx. Chubby did as I asked, she’ll know we’re coming. She did like Chubby asked, she’ll have a place for us to hide out the day. And she’ll have made a call of her own. They listened to her, she’ll have a tribe of filed-teeth savages standing by. Match the Mungiki with the Dusters, put them on one side of a thing and anything else on the other side of a thing, I know where I’ll put my money.
Close to the Island, but we’ll be good for the one day.
After that?
What do you do when you leave home?
Figure you put it together. New world. No telling which way it turns on its axis. When it faces the sun, when it turns away. A whole new clock to the day and the night.
New rules.
Terry and Predo, even Digga and Enclave, things running on their rules, I knew where I stood. In the middle. No future. And no room for the lady behind me on the bike.
Want to make room for yourself, knock down what’s there.
I want room for two. I got no other reason to be if it’s not her. If it’s not because she knows me. She knows what I am inside. Vyrus or Wraith. Whatever you believe. Killers both. She knows what I am now.
And the girl likes me that way.
I gun the throttle and she wraps her arms tighter around my middle and all the holes that got stuck in me the last night ache like hell and I hit it again to make her hold tighter still.
It just feels better that way.
A few blocks from the bridge I pull to the curb outside a deli. When I come out I have five packs of Luckys. I peel one open and stick a smoke in my face and my girl digs my old Zippo from my jacket pocket and gives me a light.
Some moments, they’re worth what you go through to get there.
Engines gun, rattling windows and setting off car alarms, a noise that lets everyone know they’re better off getting a door between them and the street.
I’m a mess.
Five, six years back, I was a guy about forty who looked in his late twenties. Nothing pretty, but in one piece.
Look at me now, I look like a guy about fifty who looks like a guy in his forties. Knee is never gonna heal right. Big toe, my fingers, my eye, those won’t be coming back. The hole the Count put in my side, that’s gonna leave a mark. Feels like I’m maybe going the rest of the road on no better than one and a half lungs. And the half is seriously in question. Get some blood in proper amounts the next couple days, that might help things along, but I’ll be a mess no matter this, no matter that. Had enough blood to soak in a tub of it, it couldn’t put me back as I was.
And odds are we’ll be looking at trickles of blood for a bit.
Once the night comes and we start moving, it will be fast and low. Things are gonna be shaking out hard, and until they settle down, we’ll need to stay out from under anything big that might fall on us.
Evie, she’s rigged for lean times. That’s all she’s done the last two years. Never got the full Enclave skeletal look going, but she’s pared down to the sinew. Likes it that way. Likes the way it feels. Says it feels natural. Says I’ll get used to it. Says I got it in me to live that way too. Says Daniel called it right about me.
The way he fingered me as the future of Enclave.
She says I showed Enclave how to live in the light. Showed all of us. Exposing the Vyrus, it pushed us all into the light. Like the old man was saying. Evie says it’s just like the Enclave always wanted, we’re in the light, but we’re not burning. She says prophecy isn’t literal, it’s figurative.
I figure that’s bullshit.
Her, she’s mostly saying it t
o watch me squirm, laughing at me the whole time. But only half laughing. She takes it more serious than me. Two years in there, living in Daniel’s old room, reading his journals. She read all of them. Going back to before he was Enclave. Before he was even infected. She says she has a different perspective on things.
I haven’t said anything about what happened in the warehouse. With the Count. I haven’t asked her if she saw anything before she pulled the trigger.
Working on how to phrase it.
Hey, baby, before you shot him down, did it look like my eyes turned black and I pushed my fingers inside him and froze him to death?
But I took a look at his body. I touched it. And it was cold. Colder than even a dead body has a right to be.
So what.
So if the Vyrus is where life started, then what? Because it had to come from somewhere, yeah? Amanda, you little crazy twist, the ideas you put in my head.
It isn’t literal.
Enclave and what they believe, not literal. So what’s it mean when you say you summon something? Does it mean you prod some slob till the Vyrus in him mutates again?
Christ it all hurts my head.
Evie says all that Enclave stuff started as practical lessons for survival. Says the whole fasting deal has as much to do with fitting into the ecosystem as it does anything else. Says it’s all like that at its heart.
Whatever.
I say I like a full belly.
But we’ll just let it play out.
Some rumbles on the news: Long-range camera shots from Queens. The gravel quarry. SWAT vans, fire trucks, black-and-whites, some dark sedans. Some cops huddled in a prayer circle. Another cop bent over puking, his partner standing next to him in tears. Some cell-phone video of blanket-draped figures being led into ambulances and commandeered school buses from the depot next door.
Rumor starting up on NY1 is about a secret way station for East European white-slave prostitutes.
Could be a cover story given out by the cops, could just be the shit people make up. Doesn’t matter, it won’t last. The truth wants to be free is what Terry said. This truth will break out the hard way. Then it will go mad dog in the streets.
Look at the clock, running low on daylight. Ready to sleep a little. But Evie’s right, I need to finish this last recording first. Besides, doesn’t look like there’s any room for me to stretch.
Crowded tight.
Esperanza got the call from Chubby, rigged up the upper floors of the abandoned house she squats in. Window boards and the like. Kind of stuff she never did before so as not to draw attention in a neighborhood that festers with superstition. But she figured this hideout will be blown soon anyway. Now she’s got Mungiki, Dusters, odds and ends of her people that she gathered up. Me and Evie. Don’t know which was more terrifying, watching the Mungiki and Dusters square off and sniff at each other, or watching Evie and Esperanza do a stare-down.
Best thing about leaving at sunset will be keeping those two apart.
Esperanza’s not sure what she’ll do. Off the Island, her people have a better shot at laying low than the folks other side of the bridges, but anywhere in the city will be a tough place to be. She’s thinking about hooking up with Lydia. Safety in numbers. From where I am that will just make it easier for them all to be scooped into cages and labs. But I think that way.
Whatever she does, the Mungiki will join in. They follow Skag Baron Menace. And Menace loves Esperanza. Deal done.
Christian’s got no confusion in him. The Dusters are for the road. Biggest question they’re gonna face is do they break up the gang and have a shot at staying under the radar, or do they ride tall and feed as a pack and go out in a blaze of glory? I read the look in Christian’s eyes right, there’ll be some headlines about crazed biker gangs in a few small-town papers the next weeks. And then maybe one big national headline about how they go down hard and take a lot of law along with them.
Christian likes being hard.
I get that.
No idea what Digga will do. I maybe had a twinge about sending him to raid the Secretariat just before I blew the whistle on everything. Kinda hung him out there away from his home base, set him up to have to scramble some. But we’re all scrambling. And when I get to feel too bad about it, I think about the hole in Queens and those kids and I feel better knowing the kind of hit Digga and his rhinos laid down on the Secretariat. I like picturing Digga going in with his pit bulls all juiced on anathema, Vyrus blood–crazed and hungry, running the halls and eating what they kill. No telling if that’s how it went down, but it makes a pretty picture.
Digga is smart, he’ll have cleared out the Coalition armory, put wheels under his people and drove them to Yonkers or some similar wasteland to wait out the first day. Morning will find them in a new diaspora, scattering over Upstate and New England. But he might just take all those guns, seize control of the Columbia campus, and start negotiating for resettlement to a neutral location. They take a few dorms, they won’t lack for eating.
Lydia I don’t think about too much.
Think about that gun she hung onto.
Hang onto that gun, girl. And don’t wait too long to see if the other side greets you with open arms before you decide if the right thing to do is to pull the trigger.
I look at my bad hand and feel that hole in my side and I get thinking on Chubby’s kid. The price I paid to save the blood of a pregnant woman. All those pieces of me. And in the end that blood may get spilled out anyway. Delilah and Ben and their baby.
Either they’re the future or they’re gonna die young.
Crazy kids.
Tired. Up all night getting shot and stabbed and bit, up all day talking into this mike.
Part of a package. Something me and Evie are gonna drop in the mail. Still debating an address. Cops, government, newspaper. Esperanza says post it on the Internet. Haven’t thought it all the way around to figure for sure the best thing.
This tired, I don’t think clear. Not that I ever do. But we got to deliver this message, and be sure it gets heard.
The message is, I’m dead.
Evie’s dead.
We’re in the grave.
Whatever lists you’re making when you start interrogations and investigations, you mark us Accounted For.
DOA.
We could make the road our home, we could settle down, but we’re dead either way.
And we want to stay dead.
Saying, if someone in some town wakes up in a strange place with a telltale hole in his arm, feeling woozy, light a couple pints, and it gets reported to the local heat and it gets kicked up to whoever is going to be in charge of Vyral enforcement or whatever it ends up being called, saying that’s a report that should be filed under Do Not Fuck With This Shit.
Let me spell it out.
Lydia kept the USB drive with all Amanda’s proof that the Vyrus exists. Including a file that breaks down and explains her Vyrally activated bacillus. That vial of spun aluminum with a sticker on the side. I got a look at that sticker. Almost laughed myself dead when I read it, the name little Amanda gave her creation.
Ouroboros.
You laughing yet?
Laugh at this.
I kept it.
Someone had to.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave it lying around. Something like that in the wrong hands, who knows what they’d do with it.
But me, I’m dead. Nothing I can do. Only way I could pull the cap from that bottle is if someone picked up a shovel and dug me from the dirt. Someone scraped the clay from off my coffin and found me and my girl lying side by side and stuck a couple stakes in our hearts to make sure we stayed in the ground, that’s the only thing that could rouse me.
Wake the dead, and I’ll let loose the worm.
Figure that’s all there is to say right now.
Got the rest of the story down already. Going back just enough years to give you a picture of what you’re dealing with. Talking about me right no
w.
Not talking about the Vyrus, the Wraith, who made what and how and is the Vyrus a metaphysical key, the origin of life, or just a nasty bug. Not talking about did Daniel really summon a creature from another dimension to shadow me and save my life. Not talking about do we become the Wraith when we die, or is it in us all along. I’m talking about making you clear on what’s important. Because all that stuff, let me sum it up for you: There’s more things in heaven and earth.
Put it a different way: Who gives fuckall?
What I’m talking about is me.
‘Cause like I always said, I was this way to start. Nothing made me who I am. Nothing made me what I am. I’m a killer.
You’re either the kind who can drink blood to survive, or you aren’t.
And you’re either the kind who would free the mad worm at the heart of the world, or you aren’t.
So back off.
Hey, while you’re at it, hands off those kids and their baby.
Mean, they should get a shot at life same as everyone else.
Yeah.
And just leave me in my grave.
Me and my girl.
Or you’ll find out what kind of a mean son of a bitch I really am.
Please turn the page
for a preview of
Charlie Huston’s
SLEEPLESS
Available from
Ballantine Books
Spring 2010
PARK WATCHED THE HOMELESS MAN WEAVE IN AND OUT of the gridlocked midnight traffic on La Cienega, his eyes fixed on the bright orange AM/FM receiver dangling from the man’s neck on a black nylon lanyard. The same shade orange the SL response teams wore when they cleared a house. He closed his eyes, remembering the time an SLRT showed up on his street at the brown and green house three doors down. The sound of the saw coming from the garage, the pitch rising when it hit bone.
Techno-accented static opened his eyes. The homeless man was next to his window, dancing from foot to foot, neck held at an unmistakable stiff angle, flashing a hand-lettered sign on a square of smudged whiteboard:
BLESSINGS!!!
Park looked at the man’s neck.
The people in the cars around him had noticed it as well; several rolled up their windows despite the ban on air-conditioning.