Mad as her father. Twice as smart. Drunk as her mother. Twice as beautiful.
Things heating up with the Coalition.
Me in the middle.
Evie getting sicker, and me making the play.
Taking her to Enclave just in time to see the old master die. Daniel. In the sun. Dying to believe.
Ready to bleed into her myself, and having it taken away. The Count taking my place. Infecting her. Keeping her down there. Taking over Enclave.
Badness.
Running years. The Bronx.
Coming back for a shot at something, and finding … What? A hole. A pit. The secret beneath it all.
Using it, spilling the secret, launching a war. And running to Evie.
Finding some things don’t get forgotten. Forgiven. A killer I may be, but I’m worse. I’m a liar. Lied to the only person I cared about. I can live with the blood, but talk about fucking up.
Into the ground.
Go low.
Hide.
Wait.
Now.
Run.
Coming out the entrance of the tunnel at One Twenty-three, the city almost blinds me. Just like she always has.
Far west side, traffic packed both ways on the Hud. Rush hour they call it, even when it’s never been anything but stuck hour. People coming into the city I understand, people leaving it I don’t get. Then again, I don’t know a thing about what’s out there. Could be paradise, but I doubt it. Other side of the Parkway there’s a little glitter coming off the water between the patches of scum floating down the Hudson River to the sea. Above on my right, the tree line topping Riverside Park gets highlighted by the city glow. G. W. Bridge upriver, all lit up.
Picturesque as hell.
A horn blasts down the tunnel, hits my back like a shock wave, and I step from the tracks to let the train through. I could argue with it, but you have to pick your battles.
Headlights flash in the trees above from the shoulder of River-side Drive. I scramble up the slope and find a black 1978 Riviera parked there. Dallas behind the wheel, Chubby occupying the bulk of the couch-size, black velour bench seat.
His window rolls down.
—All well, Joe?
I lean against the car.
—Just saying my farewells.
—To whom?
—No one you know.
He spreads his hands.
—I know most people.
—Not this guy.
—Why so certain?
—You’re alive.
—Like that, is he?
I watch the traffic below.
—Talking about him, Chubby, is liable to attract his attention. And then you can get to know exactly what he’s like.
He nods.
—Another topic, then.
I push off the side of the car.
—Idea where I might find Percy?
He shakes his head.
—As I said, Percy is absent. Start with Digga.
—Sure, I enjoy climbing in the bear’s mouth. Makes it so he can just chew. Where do I find him?
He purses his lips.
—Commanding the siege.
I look down at the entrance to the tunnel.
—The siege.
—You’d like details.
I look up from the tunnel, up and through the trees, east.
—No. I don’t think I need them.
—You know the place, then?
The empty socket where my left eye used to be itches. I’d like to scratch it, but I’d need an ice pick to dig deep enough to make it stop.
—Yeah, I was there once.
—Ah. On your previous uptown visit.
That itch gets a little worse.
Chubby strokes his goatee.
—Well, there should be no need for you to get too close. I understand the Coalition resistance has been rather intense. Digga will be nearby the park.
He goes in the glove box and comes out with a cell phone and offers it to me.
—My number is programmed.
I take the phone.
—Don’t wait up.
I look for an opening in the traffic on the drive.
Chubby sticks his head out the window.
—Look out for her, Joe. Look out for my little girl.
I see my opening between the cars and start across.
I don’t say anything to Chubby as I go. Promises don’t keep, and he already knows how this is most likely to finish. He wouldn’t have dug me up otherwise.
Middle of the park I hit Grant’s Tomb. Coming out of the trees beyond, I’m just north of Columbia. I look down Broadway toward the campus, but I don’t go any closer.
Siege.
Technically, it’s all Hood turf above One Ten. Water to water it belongs to Digga and his people. But the Coalition, they only give up hard what they got. And what they got up here is the top of the rock: poaching rights on the campus, a few blocks of old money addresses, and a school for training their elite enforcers.
Way I know it’s sideways here is because no one has killed me before I got this close.
But I don’t need to test things any further.
I roll downhill on One Twenty-three, going east, and roll right into more of those riled-up memories. The past likes to haunt you, and I’ve come this way before.
Old city full of my ghosts.
Morningside Park on my right, rising steep to the high ground, empty. Street the same. Wind rattling bare branches. The butt of the pistol cold in the small of my back.
There should be people here.
Early in the evening, there should be students in the park, climbing the steep path winding to the top. Should be a couple drunks on the benches at the bottom, adding up the day’s change, mentally converting it into 40s. But there’s no one.
All parks in Manhattan used to be like this when the sun went down. Straight empty but for two types of people: mean people and the stupid people they loved. But by the time I went under, every inch of the Island had been gentrified. Tots played in the parks at midnight.
Seems the tone is different here.
Seems this park has redeveloped its reputation for being a place to avoid after dark. Or maybe at all hours it’s this empty. That would make sense. With what I smell on the breeze, it would make a lot of sense if no one came near this park unless they were profoundly stupid.
As I’m the one wandering into it now, figure I win the stupid crown.
What I smell on the breeze smells like me. Like my blood. In large quantities. Spilled in puddles, dried and frozen over for someone to slip on and break their neck. The fuckers. The stupid, stupid fuckers. They’ve been fighting in the open. Fighting and killing one another out where it can be seen. Thinking on it, I feel the edge in the air. The one Chubby was talking about. Tension. Radiating from behind closed doors and drawn blinds. Showing in the empty sidewalks. A feeling that people are catching. The city isn’t safe. It’s not theirs anymore, if it ever was.
The path I’m following bends around a boulder. I pass behind it, a guy drops from a thick knot of branches overhead, and I step out of the way. As he tries to recover from hitting the pavement instead of me I loop the wire saw around his neck and pull tight and put my knee in his back and ride his face into some broken glass. I draw the saw once to the right, feel it bite through his windpipe, see the bright red splash on the ground, pull my face back as the acid burn of Vyrus hits my nostrils, tense my muscles to see if I can get through his whole neck in one more good yank and a log hits me in the side of my head and I fly off the guy, the saw still clenched in one hand, wire whipping free along with some of his throat, and I slam into the boulder and feel my right shoulder pop out of its socket. That kills my arm and I go for the gun with my left hand, bringing it out, looking for the guy with the log, but all I see is a man with taste in threads to make Chubby jealous.
—Pull that trigga, make a muthafucka angry.
I don’t want to make a motherfucker ang
ry, so I pocket the piece and work on getting my shoulder where it belongs.
—Should tell your people not to wear perfume on patrol.
—Told my people to shoot first on big white guys is what I told they asses. Muthafucka has a thing for ninja movies. Sittin’ in a tree. Thinkin’ he gonna get all silent assassin on some enforcer ass.
—He might have had me if it wasn’t for the personal scent.
D.J. Grave Digga, president and warlord of the Hood, keeps his eyes on the video screen he’s watching and kicks the seat back it’s mounted in.
—Hear that, Jenks? Boy says your eau de cologne tipped him off. Watchin’ that chop-sockey, how many those ninjas splash on some Calvin Klein before they go out to get they kill on, muthafucka?
The guy sitting in the front passenger seat doesn’t say anything. That being a symptom of having most of your throat torn out. He does make a noise, something between a gurgle and a grate, but the mass of cartilage and skin in the middle of his neck is going to need some untangling before it’s of much use.
Digga takes his eyes from the screen and leans forward a little.
—Muthafucka, you best not brought your bleedin’ in here. I know you finished that shit before you climbed your ass back in my Escalade. Oh shit! Take that nastiness outside! Now, muthafucka!
Jenks and his nastiness climb out and close the door, leaving me and Digga alone.
Digga leans between the front seats, licks his thumb and rubs at a spot of blood on the cream leather.
—Use is it, his throat heals enough for him to breathe if his ass can’t swallow? Answer me that. No use. All that blood he just lost. Starve by the end of the week. Start going batshit in a couple days. Need one more like that is what I need. One more batshit muthafucka starvin’ on our turf.
He drops back into the seat next to me.
—Shit.
He runs his hands down the tops of his thighs, smoothing the black wool of his trousers.
—An like I need another harbinger of how shit is fucked up, your ass comes wanderin’ by. Shit.
He redirects his eyes to the video screen.
—Look at this.
He touches the screen and a control bar appears at its bottom. He rewinds the picture, hits play, and we watch a twenty-second clip of a starving Hood launching herself from a second-story window into the path of a bus on the street below. The bus catches her before she hits the ground and she flies fifteen feet and smashes into the security gate covering a storefront. She gets up, broken bones jutting every direction from her shredded skin, and runs down an alley.
Digga shakes his head.
—Fuckin’ YouTube. Muthafucka caught it with his phone an shit. Had it posted in minutes. See the title? Crazy PCP Bitch Won’t Die.
—What’s YouTube?
He looks at me, shakes his head.
—Muthafuckin’ Joe Pitt.
He points at the screen.
—This your fuckin’ fault, this shit is.
I lean forward and look at the screen, shake my head.
—Never saw the crazy bitch before.
He has me by the back of the neck, bounces my forehead off the screen, the picture fractures, screen goes black. I don’t see anything else for the moment because of the gun stuck up against my remaining eye.
—Tell you about that crazy bitch. She a lady. Good lady. Got a high school diploma. College degree. She a pillar of our community. Works with young people new to the life. Helps with they get adjusted to how things is. Loves them kids. Loves them kids so much, when shit gets tight up here last few months an I got no choice but to institute rationing and a strict policy of no more killing the normal muthafuckas till further fuckin’ notice, she lays off her rations on some of her kids. So that they be more comfortable an shit. That who that bitch is. Was. Cuz now that bitch put down with a bullet I had to lodge in her fuckin’ skull on account of this crazy shit we see here. Muthafucka! Muthafucka!
He pistol-whips me a few times. My nose breaks. Again.
He stops. Looks at his gun. Reaches over and wipes the blood onto my jeans.
—Shit.
I pinch the bridge of my nose and force it into place.
—Hey, Digga.
He doesn’t say anything.
I go in my pocket for my tobacco and start rolling a smoke.
—Just like old times, huh?
Digga’s suit is black. Trousers, jacket, shirt, tie, socks, shoes and cuff links. Solid black. Just that much blacker than himself. A good color for hiding the blood that sprinkled him when my nose broke. Still he doesn’t like it.
He dabs at a blood spot with a damp paper napkin.
—Had to make noise, didn’t ya, Pitt? Keepin’ yo mouth shut just a lost art where your ass comes from, is it?
I keep my mouth shut.
He looks at me.
—You bein’ cute?
I shrug.
He shakes his head.
—Cute. Know what happened? You went off half-cocked last year? Know what the result of that action came to be?
He balls some used napkins and throws them into the footwell.
—Society emissary comes up here. Lydia Miles. Comes up here, secret communiqué from the Society. My ears only. Whisper-whisper. Some shit about how they finally found where Coalition gets they blood. How it is they asses always got enough. How they supply the masses between Fourteen and One Ten. Do tell, says I. Thinkin’ this is gonna be some valuable shit to know. Years now we been relyin’ on Coalition to supplement what we got up here. Years we have to put up with they asses holdin’ top of the rock. Payin’ what price they set. Market monopoly. Twistin’ my tits. Then this chick, she leans to my ear and she tells me where they get it.
He’s stopped blotting, scrubbing now, little white bits of paper tearing off a napkin and sticking to his jacket.
—Says some shit about Queens. Says some shit about a hole in the ground. Asks me, all drama like, Know what’s in that hole, Digga? Shit!
He throws the napkin into the front seat.
—Like I’m supposed to know that shit. Asks like maybe I know. Muthafucka! Like she’s checking my shit out to see how I jump. Thinkin’, Did he know or didn’t he? Like it’s a fuckin’ question if I knew or not.
His hands are fists now, he shakes them in front of his face.
—Like there was a question what I’d have to say on that shit.
He pounds the fists into his thighs.
—War! War, I say, muthafucka! War on they asses! War! War! War!
I’ve got a cigarette rolled. I put it in my mouth and light it and inhale some smoke, then blow it back out.
—Yeah, well, that was kind of the point.
• • •
That hole.
About that hole in Queens. Not trying to be coy or anything. Just some things I don’t feel like talking about much. And some people, they get uncomfortable thinking about some things.
Veal.
Veal makes some people uncomfortable to think about it. Baby calves in pens so tight they can’t turn around. Milk-fed, tender-muscled, raised to young slaughter and the table. Put a plate full of it in front of someone, don’t say a word, most folks tuck right in, rub their tummies and say mmm. Same plate, same person, tell them a little about those big-eyed calves and their short and miserable existence, and they’re like as not to go off their appetite.
I go into too much detail on this, I’m liable to get distracted. Start thinking about things I can’t change. So take the above as context, and see what kind of picture gets painted when I mention the following:
Hole in the ground.
Chains.
Breeding cells.
Anticoagulants.
Incubators.
I.V. hose.
Truncheons.
Vampyres.
Veal ranch.
Rape factory.
Paints a vivid picture don’t it? Illuminates some of the strong feelings people might display. But, yeah
, guess I kind of buried the lead at the beginning of the story.
• • •
We’re only human. At least that’s what I think. Just people got infected with this thing that needs blood to survive. We’re not evil. No more than other folks. We’re not soulless creatures of the night. Sure, yeah, mostly anyone can get used to mostly anything if that’s what it takes to survive. And sure, tap enough veins and you start to get a little casual about the process. Still, when I look at the people around me, I don’t feel like I’m looking at cattle. They’re people, sure enough. The fact that I’m looking for a person who’s an easy mark doesn’t mean I think any less of them.
Pretty damn hard for me to think any less of humanity than I already do.
Digga, he’s plenty human himself. He’s a vicious thug, but he likes dogs and children and all that usual stuff. No wonder he took it hard when he found out what he’d been drinking hadn’t been given up by Vampyre-loving volunteers or bled off packs of kiddy-fondling Klansmen.
Sensitive boy.
What he’s got to be sensitive about could be debated. Me, I was in that hole. I saw. I got through it without blinding my remaining eye, and you don’t hear me complaining. But Digga’s his own man with his own concerns.
—What color?
—Not sure I follow.
He puts a finger in my face.
—Don’t pull that ignorant white bullshit with me, muthafucka. You know what I’m askin’. What color them kids down there in that damn hole?
I pick a flake of loose tobacco from my lip.
—I only saw a few.
—Give a shit how many, give a shit what color.
I flick the tobacco flake from between my fingers.
—Color of naked rats raised underground. That color.
He takes his finger from my face, looks me over, leans back into his seat.
—Muthafucka. An you ran away.
I know what I did, so I don’t contradict him.
He looks out his window, up the slope of the park.
—Uh-huh. Joe muthafuckin’ Pitt. Uh-huh.
I smoke.
He fiddles his cuffs.
—People lookin’ for your ass. Be happy to find you in the open. Where they can get a clean shot off. Wrap your ass up, sell it to the highest bidder. Rake some much needed coin for up here.
I nod.
—Maybe swap me for some of that Coalition blood.