Half the Blood of Brooklyn

I DON’T LIKE HIM.

I don’t like the way he smells. I don’t like the way he looks. I don’t like his shoes. If I stuck a blade in him and drank the blood that shot out of the open wound, I wouldn’t like the way he tastes.

But Terry told me to be cool.

So I don’t kill the guy.

– You can’t get somethin’ for nothin’, is all I’m sayin’.

Terry nods, waves some of the thick cigar smoke away from his face.

– No doubt, no doubt.

The guy I don’t like blows another cloud off his stogie.

– If I bring the Docks into your thing, I got to know what’s in it for my members. Not like I’m here for my own self. I’m an elected representative, it’s the members decide these things, and they decide nothin’ they don’t know what they got comin’ on their end of the deal.

Terry coughs into his hand.

– Well, like I say, the way we work here, the way we, you know, like to go about this kind of thing, is with the understanding that we’re all working toward a greater good. The Society, it’s not just, you know, a Clan in the traditional sense. We’re not just trying to get along and go along. We’ve got goals. We’re all about, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but we’re all about empowerment for anyone and everyone infected with the Vyrus. And does that mean folks that aren’t even in the Society? You bet it does. But does that also mean achieving our goal will be easier with as united a front as possible? Absolutely. What I’m, you know, getting at is, whether you bring the Docks into the Society or not, you’ll still reap the rewards when we break through one day, but, man, we could sure use as much help as possible right now.

The Docks Boss nods, ponders, chews the frayed end of his hand-rolled Dominican, and glances at the goon he brought with him.

– I think he’s tellin’ me there ain’t shit in it for us.

The goon shifts the baseball bat perched on his shoulder.

– Sounds like it.

– Sounds like he’s tellin’ me he wants somethin’ for nothin’.

The goon nods.

– Sounds like it.

The Docks Boss takes the cigar from his mouth, points it at Terry.

– That what you’re tellin’ me, Bird?

Terry presses the palms of his hands together and puts the tips of his fingers at his chin, a prayerful moment.

– What I’m trying to get across is that there’s something in it for all of us. Me, you, your man there, Joe here, your members, the Society, all the Clans and Rogues and even the folks out there that never heard of the Vyrus. I’m talking about how we’re gonna make the world a bigger and more wondrous place when the day comes we go public and let them know we’re here. I’m saying that there’s something in it for everyone. Every person on Mother Earth, man.

The goon raises a finger, a point’s been proved.

– Yeah, he’s saying there ain’t nothin’ in it for us.

The Docks Boss pushes his chair back, stands, drops the smoldering stub on the floor and stomps on it.

– C’mon, Gooch, let’s get the boys and get the fuck out of here.

Terry shrugs, rises.

– Well, I can’t say I’m not disappointed, but it’s not the first time we’ve been turned down.

He puts out his hand.

– And I just want you to know, we’re still fighting for you, man. Anytime you want to join the struggle, we’ll be happy to have you by our side.

The Docks Boss looks Terry up and down, from his Birkenstocks, past his hemp jeans and his FUR IS MURDER t-shirt, up to his graying ponytail.

– You’re a freak, Bird. We ain’t never gonna have nothin’ to do with you and your hippies and your college kids and your queers and the rest.

He pulls out one of the cigars that stick up from the breast pocket of his cheap suit, bites the end off and spits it at Terry’s feet.

– And I’m gonna tell Predo as much when I go see him.

He scrapes a match alight on the surface of the kitchen table and puffs the cigar to life.

– The Docks are a serious Clan. We make the move over the bridge here and swing our weight behind someone, they’re gonna know their backs are covered. You don’t want to give somethin’ back for that security, to hell with you. Predo knows value. And he’ll pay for it.

He drops the match.

– Hell, I only came to see you out of curiosity. Had to see for myself it was true what they say. How one of the top Clans over here is run by a pansy.

Terry tugs at the soul patch below his lower lip.

– Well, if that’s how you see things, that’s how you see things. Probably all for the best that you set up housekeeping with the Coalition. And still, still, I wish you nothing but health and happiness, man.

The Docks Boss rolls his eyes and heads for the door.

– Fuck you, Bird.

Terry looks at me.

– You mind showing them out, Joe?

I open the door.

– Sure, no problem.

I close the door behind us and lead the Boss and Gooch down the hall toward the front room where his other two boys are cooling their heels.

The Boss steps alongside me.

– A guy like you, a regular-lookin’ fella, what the fuck are you doin’ with that clown?

I crack a knuckle.

– It’s a job.

Gooch laughs.

– A job? Hope you get paid through the nose, havin’ to live in the middle of this freak show.

I stop at the front-room door, rest my hand on the knob.

– What you gonna do, it’s all I know.

– Too bad for you.

– If you say so.

I open the door and stand aside to let the Docks Boss step into the room ahead of me.

Stupid fuck that he is, he goes right in and only stops when he sees the headless bodies of his boys on the floor, and Hurley swinging a fire axe at his face. I got to give it to him, he does manage to get his arm in front of his head before the blade comes down.

As his arm is hitting the floor and Hurley is going into his backswing, the Boss has got his remaining hand in his jacket, going for the iron bulging at his side. Hurley takes his hack Lou Gehrig style and the other arm comes off and slaps into the wall, the gun dropping.

The Boss stomps, splinters the floorboards beneath the sheets of plastic Hurley spread before he went to work. He kicks the body of one of his headless bodyguards.

– Fucker! Useless faggot!

He stands in the middle of the room, the spray from his stumps slowing to a steady trickle as the Vyrus clots the blood, scabs visibly forming over the wounds.

He looks at Hurley, spits blood at him.

– That all you good for, pussy, a fuckin’ ambush? Come on! I can take it.

He sets his feet, turns his face upward, eyes wide open.

– Come on, pussy!

Hurley hefts the axe over his head.

– Just as ya say, den.

The Docks Boss screams as the blade drops. He stops when it splits his head down the middle.

Stupid fucker.

All those cigars, they kept him from smelling anything else. Otherwise he’d have whiffed the reek of blood the second I opened the kitchen door; he would have known there was a problem. In that tight hallway, he could have taken me apart. Another reason to like smoking.

Gooch leans into the room and looks at his boss flopping on the floor. He ducks back as a last jet of arterial blood sprays the ceiling and the dead thing goes still.

– Jesus, that’s gonna be hell to clean up.

Hurley gives the axe a jerk and pulls it from the Docks Boss’ face.

– Ayuh.

Gooch points at the mess.

– I ain’t helpin’ ta clean this. That wasn’t part of the deal.

Hurley wipes the blade of the axe on the Boss’ shirtfront, sees the cigars and pulls one from the dead man’s pocket.

– No one said ya gotta clean nuttin’.

– Just so it’s clear.

Hurley finds a match, thumbs a flame from it and puts it to the cigar.

– It’s plenty clear, boyo.

Gooch points his baseball bat at the corpses.

– So you guys clean up your mess and I’ll round up the rest of the Docks and let them know we’re joinin’ with ya.

Hurley looks at the cigar, wrinkles his nose, and drops it to hiss in the Boss’ blood.

– Boyo, the way ya fellas sell one ’nother out, we would nae have ya ta clean our privies.

Gooch is about as quick as Boss was. He gets the bat up in a hurry to block Hurley’s axe. But the axe never leaves Hurley’s shoulder.

I tickle Gooch’s earlobe with the barrel of his dead boss’ revolver.

– Hey, Gooch.

He doesn’t move.

– Yeah?

– I like this freak show.

I put a bullet in his ear. And when he’s on the floor, I put a couple more in.

Hurley shakes his head.

– What’s da point a dat, Joe?

– No point. Just that he was an asshole.

Terry comes down the hall and looks at the mess.

He takes off his glasses and bows his head.

– What a waste.

I put a Lucky in my mouth.

– If you say so.

– Labor should be our natural ally. They could have been a big help.

– A big help fucking things up. If this is the best Brooklyn has to offer, we don’t have much to worry about.

Terry slips the glasses up his nose and gives me a look.

– The best isn’t the problem, Joe.

He heads back down the hall toward the kitchen.

– The worst is what we have to worry about. The worst is still over the bridge.

He turns in the doorway.

– But they’ll be coming.

I don’t got enough problems.

I don’t got enough problems dealing with the day-to-day shit that rains from the sky in Manhattan, now I got to start worrying about it being shipped in from Brooklyn. That’s what happens when you get a regular job, other people’s shit becomes your problem. ’Course, by the time you got that figured, it’s up around your ears and you’re just trying to keep your fucking mouth shut.

– Cat got your tongue?

I look up from the square of linoleum between my shoes and try a smile. It doesn’t work.

– No, babe, just tired.

– You didn’t have to come by.

– Sure I did. What else am I gonna do?

– You know how to flatter a girl, Joe.

– Not what I meant.

– I know. Just kidding.

Evie reaches out and takes my hand. The IV hose hooks around her pinkie and I pull it free so it won’t get tangled.

– The one on your cheek looks better.

She pokes the tip of her tongue into the pocket of her cheek, pushing out the spot where the first of her Kaposi lesions appeared.

– Yeah. Pretty cool. Now if I can just get rid of the other thirty-six I’ll be in business.

A nurse comes in, looks at the IV, checks the cunna in Evie’s arm, fakes something that might have looked like a smile when she started this job and walks back out.

Evie shows me her teeth.

– I love that one, she’s so sweet. Not a bitch like the others.

– A real Florence Nightingale.

– Yep, she’s the one told me how to use the diuretic suppositories, used visual aids and everything.

She makes a fist with one hand and forces the index finger of her other hand into its grip.

– Very helpful.

She runs a hand through what’s left of her red hair, dozens of strands coming loose, clinging to her fingers.

– Fuck. Fucking hell.

I look at the old lady on the other side of the tiny room, reading her Women’s Wear Daily, sucking down her own chemo, head rolled up in a turban, trying to ignore Evie’s curses, wondering how much longer she’s going to have to stay in this room before they find her another. Just like the two others before her.

– Fucking, fuck, fuck. Hair. My goddamn hair.

– Babe.

– My hair, Joe.

– I know.

– Do I got to lose my hair?-They said it’ll grow back.

She shakes her hand over the edge of the bed, the strands of bright red floating free.

– Fuck them. They said the vinblastine would help. They said the mouth ulcers would stop after the first couple treatments. They said fewer than one in ten had constipation. They said my white count was plenty high to start the chemo. They said not to worry about the anemia, we’d just do more transfusions. They said I was a healthy girl and properly treated HIV didn’t have to become AIDS at all. Fuck them and what they say. They know shit.

She waves at the old lady.

– Hey, I look like I got no AIDS to you, lady? What’d they tell you? What line of shit they feed you before they started in?

The old lady has the magazine out of her lap and in front of her face, blocking Evie out; blocking out the bright purple tumors, the patchy hair, the graying teeth.

– Babe.

– What? Am I making a scene? Am I embarrassing you, Joe? Don’t want to be seen with me? All you gotta do is go.

I stand, bend and put my mouth against hers.

She kisses back for a moment, then moves away.

– Don’t.

I lay a fingertip on one of the sores that rim her mouth.

– Hurts?

– No. It’s just. It’s so gross. I’m so gross. I’m a fucking monster.

– Baby, you’re not even close.

And I kiss her again.

She coughs and I taste the bile from her empty stomach and the blood from the ulcers inside her lungs.

She pulls back again.

– Bowl. Bowl.

I get the plastic bowl and hold it in front of her and she heaves a couple times and nothing comes out.

– Fuck. Goddamn fuck.

I put the bowl aside.

– It’s cool, baby.

She turns from me.

– Bullshit. It’s not. It’s not cool. I’m sick. I’m so sick of this.

– You can take it, baby.

– Are you? I can take it? You have no fucking.

She rolls on her back, talks to the ceiling.

– Go away, Joe.

I don’t go away.

She looks at me.

– Goddamn it, if you can’t do something to help me, go away! You think this helps? Standing there, looking at me like that? You think I feel better about what’s happening, having your sorry ass here moping over me? Do something! Fucking do something!

I reach out to touch her.

She slaps my hand.

– Don’t touch me. You said you wanted to take care of me. Then fucking take care of me. Fucker! Fucker! What use are you? I’m sick. I’m fucking dying and you’re standing there. You, you. Always doing things. Your fucking job. Your job, and you can’t help me. All you can do is put more blood in me for this fucking disease to live in. You don’t help. You.

She’s sitting up now, her pajama top slipping off her boney shoulder, showing the pale skin and freckles.

I stand there.

She yanks on the hose in her arm.

– Fuck this. This can’t make me better. Nothing can make me better. You can’t. You can’t.

She throws the dripping needle at me.

– Go do something! Save me, goddamn it! Fucking save me!

The nurse comes in, sees the mess, shakes her head, gets to work.

Evie flops back into the pillows.

– See, this bitch, at least she can do something. She cleans up after me. She brings me crap food I can’t eat. If I could take a shit, she’d wipe my ass for me.

The nurse glances my way, shoots her eyes toward the door.

I look at Evie’s feet, sticking from beneath the sheet.

– I’ll come by tomorrow.

She has her hands over her face.

– God, I want to be alone. Please let me be alone. Leave me alone. Don’t ask me for anything. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to think about anyone else anymore. I’m no good at it. Leave me alone, Joe. Let me die alone. Go away. Go away.

The nurse faces me, places a hand on my arm, points at the door.

I think about taking her head between my hands and twisting her neck and spitting in her face as I kill her.

The old lady peeks from behind her magazine as I leave, shaking her head.

On the street I fire up a Lucky and look at the people walking around: on their way home after a late workday, on their way back out because it’s Friday night, whatever. Normal stuff. Stuff Evie can’t do these days.

I think about killing them all.

It wouldn’t change things, not for my girl up there on the HIV ward of Beth Israel. But it would make me feel better. A dead body for every blood-corrupting cell invader in her would just about even things out with the world as far as I’m concerned.

A sense of proportion not being something I have much of a grip on.

A Harley grumbles up to the curb and the leather-coated rider touches the brim of his top hat.

– Joe.

I watch a guy walk past with his girl on his arm, both of them giggling at some stupid shit they think is cute. I skip asking what’s so fucking funny and go talk to Christian instead.

– What’s up?

He pulls the aviator goggles from his eyes and lets them hang from his neck.

– Something needs looking at below Houston.

– Off my beat.

Christian takes one of the smokes I offer him. I pop open my Zippo and hold out the flame.

– Not for long, I hear.

– What’s that mean?

– Means everyone knows Terry is talking to faces from over the bridge. Those bridge-and-tunnel types start coming into the Society, Bird’s gonna have to find turf for them somewhere.

– Where you hear that?

He grins.

– Seriously, man, you think Bird could move his action that close to Pike Street, and me and the boys wouldn’t know what’s what?

– Even if it’s so, I only look after Society business.

He takes a drag.

– Joe, we go back?

It’s a stupid question.

We go back to the night I peeled him off the sidewalk after the Chinatown Wall had shredded his gang and left him broken. Some asshole cut his vein and bled him and then bled into him. Thought it’d be cute to leave him breathing. See if the Vyrus would take root and keep him alive. Alive or the next best thing, anyway. Lameass probably figured if Christian died it’d be no harm, no foul. If he lived he’d freak out, be torn up over what happened to his boys and do himself. Go out colorful. Didn’t figure I’d make the scene, do the right thing and clean up the mess before any cops or civilians got involved and found Christian still kicking.

I could have bled him out. Could have tumbled him into the East River, just another floater for the patrol boats to fish out. But there was a time someone could have made the same call on me, so I figured I was due to pay that one off. Figured I’d get him on his feet, give him the score on the Vyrus and let him make his own call.

Well I gave him the score. Filled him in on how the Vyrus was cultivating him. How it’d keep him sharp and strong and fast and pretty goddamn youthful for that matter, as long as he kept it fed.

He asked the obvious questions.

I gave the only answers.

Blood. Human. As much as possible.

Then I gave him some. And he liked it. Hell, we all like it. Just some can’t stand the thought that we like it. And what we have to do to get it.

Tap as many veins as you like. Draw off just enough and leave behind a confused mugging victim or a zonked-out junkie. Hustle the blood banks, buy some green scrubs and lurk around the hospitals. Find a sweet Lucy who’ll open a vein for you as often as she can just because she loves to be used that way. Try lapping at your own slit wrists or sucking on a decapitated rat and get sick as a man guzzling seawater. Try it all to put off the one thing you don’t want to do, but sooner or later you’ll do it.

And once you do, once you pop a blade through warm, healthy skin and feel the hot gush of living blood hit the back of your tongue, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

And then you’ll curse at how long you’re gonna have to wait till the next time. As few of us as there are running around, it’s still too many. We all start picking off civilians whenever we feel hard up, this island’s gonna be an abattoir. That happens, the lid blows off.

We let them know we’re here, we let the real people know what’s lurking just underneath their lives, and we won’t last another night.

We’ll all be in the sun.

And what the Vyrus does to its host when it gets hit by the sun, it makes what my girl’s going through look easy.

And it ain’t. That shit ain’t easy at all.

I smoke and look at Christian and remember how he handled it when he was back on his feet. Way he handled it is, he found what was left of his gang, the Dusters. He managed to infect a couple. And they infected a couple more. After some months, when they had their shit together, they got on their hogs and hit the Wall. Massacre ain’t the word. I don’t know the word for what they did down in Chinatown. But the Dusters own Pike Street now.

They haven’t been acknowledged as a Clan, but they could give fuckall as long as no one messes in their shit. And no one does.

I flick a butt into traffic.

– Yeah, sure, we go back.

He fits his goggles over his eyes.

– Then believe me when I say, What I got to show you, this kind of thing is everybody’s business.

I get on the back of the bike.

– Where we going?

– Rivington off Essex.

I put my feet on the bitch pegs.

– Not the fucking Candy Man?

He taps his toe on the shifter.

– Yeah, the fucking Candy Man.

And he takes me for a ride below Houston.

The basement reeks of blood and ammonia and candy.

– What do you think, Joe?

– What do I think?

I take another look at the poor slob spread all over the floor: arms and legs and hands and feet and head and bisected torso and ripped-out heart all laid pretty much where they should be, but with about a foot or so between various parts that should be connected.

– I think we got a fucking Van Helsing on our hands.

Christian claps his hands to his cheeks and bugs his eyes.

– A Van Helsing? Ya think?

I look at the big white Maytag refrigerator in the corner of the basement. Blood is smeared around the handle and drips from the seal at the bottom of the door, pooling on the floor.

– Don’t be a smartass, Christian. Nobody likes a smartass.

– You would know.

I go to the fridge and tug on the silver handle. The blood around the seal makes a noise: two pieces of overused flypaper being peeled from each other.

Two dozen slashed blood bags drip the last of their contents over the stainless steel shelves. A small flood of it washes out onto the floor.

Christian walks over.

– Any of it still good?

I pick up one of the bags and hand it to him.

He smells the ammonia it was laced with, the same ammonia that’s been splashed around the basement.

He drops the bag.

– That’s fucked up. What’s he think, the ammonia’s gonna hurt us?

I dab my index finger in some of the blood.

– Make for one hell of a stomachache. If he hadn’t poisoned it, I’d be licking the fridge clean right now.

He pushes his top hat to the back of his head.

– Well, sure, me too, man.

He considers.

– And still, might be worth the sick to have a drink.

I smell the blood on my fingertip.

– Won’t do you any good, ammonia killed it. Vyrus won’t want it.

He kicks the fridge door closed.

– Fuck.

I wipe my finger on a piece of old newspaper I peel from a stack under the stairs.

– Can you get a scent?

He flares his nostrils, inhales, grimaces.

– Ammonia’s overpowering most of it. You?

I shake my head. I’ve been sniffing around like a hound and can’t get one good trace of whoever did it. The mess spilling from what used to be Solomon’s belly, the ammonia and the basement overstock are killing the subtler human traces of sweat and skin. If I’d had some blood today the Vyrus might be running strong enough to peak my senses, but I didn’t. And Sol’s is making me damn hungry.

I toe the head on the floor and watch it rock back and forth.

– When’d you find him?

Christian is skirting a spill of intestine.

– Swineheart and Tenderhooks rolled over here right after sundown looking to score. They didn’t know the shop closed for Sabbath and rattled the gates for a while before they went round to the alley side and banged on the trap. Smelled the blood. Twisted the lock off the trap and came down here. Saw this shit and freaked out. Came and got me.

I poke around some boxes, shifting them, looking for God knows what. Moving the boxes releases sugary pink smells.

– Swineheart and Tenderhooks got freaked?

Christian points at the corpse.

– This shit? You bet they did. Who wants to fuck with a Van Helsing?

The answer is no one.

Fuck with some kid who stumbled onto the wrong scene at the wrong time and managed to get out alive and declares a war on the undead and comes after you armed with holy water, garlic, and a crucifix? Sure, no problem. Holy water’s just gonna get you wet, garlic’s just gonna make your breath rank, and a crucifix is just a stick with a guy nailed to it. Nothing special. A Van Helsing like that comes after you, all you got to do is get him someplace dark and give his head a twist. After that, it’s all a matter of how much of his blood do you drink right away and how much do you drain off and mix with an anticlotting agent so you can drink it later.

But a real Van Helsing? That’s a different matter. A real Van Helsing knows that you bring a Vampyre down the same way you bring anyone down; only more so. A well-fed Vampyre won’t like taking a bullet in the leg, but it won’t stop him, not unless it hits the femoral artery and he bleeds out before he can stick a finger in there to plug the hole while it heals. And it’ll heal. Fast. A Van Helsing that knows that? Knows to put some large-caliber rounds into a Vampyre’s face, neck, chest? Or maybe to cut his or her head off? Or strangle him long enough to starve the brain of oxygen? Or has a handy tub of cement around to plant their feet in before dumping them off a bridge? Or has a big truck to run into them and roll back and forth over the broken body before the bleeding wounds can close and the bones knit? A Van Helsing who knows how weak we can become when unfed? Or how vulnerable to the sun? One who knows to look for the signs of feeding, the high mugging rates, the mysterious disappearances, the rumors among the squatters and the winos? A Van Helsing who really deserves the name? No one wants to fuck with that.

I put a couple boxes of Sugar Daddies back in place.

– Yeah, no one wants to mess with that. Funny, though.

Christian is looking in the hole in the guy’s chest.

– How’s that?

I start up the stairs to the shop above.

– Funny a Van Helsing gets all old school with the evisceration and the beheading, and the guy he’s carving up ain’t even infected.

He follows me.

– Yeah. Thought about that myself.

He jerks a thumb back at the corpse.

– Old Solomon never was a lucky one.

I reach the top of the stairs and push the door open and the smells of roasted nuts and dried fruits and caramel and chocolate and high-fructose corn syrup and red dye number 5 and pure cacao and refined sugar and gelatin and all the other stuff that goes into the stock of the Economy Candy Store hits me in the nose.

– Yeah, but he ran a great fucking candy shop.

Christian walks past a counter, reaches into a glass jar, grabs a jawbreaker and tosses it into his mouth.

– No lie there.

Bottle Caps, Big League Chew, Pop Rocks, Almond Joy, Gold Mine bubble gum, candy cigarettes, Pixy Stix, 100 Grand bars, Chunkys and a couple hundred other varieties of packaged candies. And in barrels: roasted and raw cashews, peanuts, almonds, brazils, hazelnuts, pistachios and filberts. And in plastic buckets: dried cherries, apricots, apple rings, peaches and pineapple. And laid out on wax paper inside the glass cases at the front of the crowded shop: bricks of dark Belgian chocolate, turtles, white truffles, chocolate-covered pretzels and strawberries and orange slices.

He bites down on the jawbreaker; his perfect teeth, polished and hardened by the Vyrus, crush it like an eggshell.

– Before I got infected, ’bout half the teeth in my head were ready to fall out because of this place. Growing up off Water Street, my mom used to bring me and my sister up here after church on Sundays. Give us a buck to split between us.

He rips open a Fun Dip packet, licks the white candy wand, dips it into the sugar powder inside and pops it in his mouth and sucks on it.

– Still got that sweet tooth, man. When I first found out the business old man Solomon ran in the basement, the real moneymaker, I was a little disillusioned. Got to say. Kiddies upstairs getting fixed on sugar, Vampyres in the basement scoring. That’s kind of jacked up. Even in my book.

I pick up a necklace, beads of pastel candies strung on a choker of elastic.

– You got over it.

He takes the candy wand out of his mouth.

– Hey, get hard up enough, who isn’t gonna come see the Candy Man? Telling me you never darkened his doorway?

I drop the necklace in the side pocket of my leather coat.

– I was a Rogue. I didn’t have a Clan or a gang backing me up if I went off my home turf. Coming down here before I hooked back up with Terry, that wasn’t an option.

He waves the wand.

– Shit, Joe, we would have had your back.

I go behind the counter and poke around in the drawers and the register.

– Yeah, and that would have cost me something.

He dips up more of the purple powder.

– Never said nothing in life wasn’t free.

I find the hogleg back of the counter and put it next to the register.

– Never said you did.

He points at the sawed-off double barrel.

– Loaded?

I pick up the gun and crack the breech and show him the two 12-gauge shells inside.

He shakes his head.

– Imagine keeping something like that around in a shop fulla kids.

I snap it closed and tuck it into my belt at the small of my back, letting the coat fall over it.

He takes a look.

– Pretty good conceal. Long as you don’t start doing jumping jacks it won’t show too bad.

I find a half-full box of shells and put it in the pocket with the necklace.

Christian drops the remains of the Fun Dip in a wastebasket and wipes the back of his hand over his purple-stained lips.

– Makes you wonder, though.

– Huh?

– Why he kept the gauge up here with the kiddies instead of downstairs where the real dangerous types were coming in.

I walk to the stairs.

– Solomon wasn’t stupid. Some junkie walked in here looking to clear out the register, he could handle that just by showing him the gun. Downstairs? Any infected stupid enough to try and knock out the only dependable dealer south of Houston would have to be stone strung out. Shotgun wouldn’t have been worth a shit. Hit a burner with both barrels, take his head off, his fucking body will walk across the room and rip you in half.

– Know that for a fact, Joe?

I’m half down the stairs. I stop and look back up at his silhouette at the top.

– I know it.

He starts down.

– Still and all.

– Yeah?

– Shame he didn’t have it down here today.

We hit the bottom and look at the corpse of the Candy Man.

– Shit, Christian, he wasn’t one of us. Fuck did he think he had to worry about from real people?

– Got a point.

There’s a box of garbage bags in the corner with the cleaning supplies.

I pick up a mop.

– Ready to get started?

– Sure.

He tears a bag out of the box.

– Why you think they done it?

I stick the mop bucket under the tap in a big slop sink.

– Could be the Van Helsing is only half smart. Killed him before he realized he wasn’t infected. More like, he knew Solomon was the Candy Man. Knew it would cause a shitload of trouble cutting off the supply down here. Did it Stoker style to make a point. Something like that. Fits with poisoning the blood in the fridge.

He squats and starts picking up the smaller pieces.

– Sounds about right.

He drops a hand in the bag.

– Sorry, Sol, you were a hell of a confectioner.

Evie won’t talk to me.

When I call, the night nurse says she’s fine, watching TV, but doesn’t want to talk to anyone.

That could mean anything from she really is watching TV to she’s bent over her plastic bowl with chemo-heaves. I know which is more likely, but I try to pretend it’s the other.

Not that she wants my sympathy. Not that she wants me lying in bed staring at the ceiling, chaining Luckys and thinking about the virus that’s eating her alive. Far as she’s concerned, I can fuck off whenever I want and just stop hovering around asking how she’s feeling.

Or I can do something to save her.

Not that I take it seriously, all that shit. That’s just the chemo talking. The misery and the pain and the acid they’re pouring into her. She doesn’t really think I can do anything. She’s just fucking desperate.

She’s just sick.

Girl was sick the night I met her. I knew the score then and I got in the game anyway. Nothing’s changed between us. She’s still sick. We still don’t sleep together. I still eat my heart out every time I look at her.

The pity party’s in the other room if you feel like joining it.

I won’t be in.

Only thing that’s changed is she’s dying faster. Faster than she was before. And faster than me. She’s dying really fucking fast.

’Course, she doesn’t know I’m dying. She doesn’t know shit about me. The nighttime schedule she chalks up to a sun allergy, solar urticaria. The guns and the rough and tumble and the padlocked fridge in my apartment and the donor blood I get deposited on her behalf so she always has enough for the transfusions she needs because of the anemia caused by the chemo? That’s all because of my job.

Organ courier.

Transporter of healthy tissues between those with perfect kidneys, healthy corneas, melanoma-free skin, pink lungs, unperforated intestines; and the miserable disease-wracked bastards with nothing but money. Nice work if you can get it.

Except that it’s a lie.

Yeah, I told my girl a lie. Just one on a long list. Once you skip over telling someone the part about needing to consume blood in order to feed the Vyrus that’s keeping you alive, there isn’t much room for truth in a relationship.

So it’s built on lies. So if she knew what I am, what I do, she’d slap her hands to her face, scream NOOOOOOOOO and run from the room crying for help. Or not. Being Evie, she might just kick me in the balls for lying to her. Then she might ask a lot of questions. Then she might ask me if having the Vyrus in her would kill the virus in her.

And I’d have to tell her the truth for a change.

It would. The Vyrus will kill what’s in her. It will kill anything that invades and attacks its host.

It will save her.

No more puking. No more hair loss. No more oral ulcers. No more loose teeth. No more chemo. No more Kaposi. No more AIDS.

No more cold showers. No more hand jobs. No more dry humping like the high school kid I never was.

Just me and her and all the time you could want, as healthy as a human being can be. Healthier. As healthy as something not quite human and not quite alive can be. For just as long as we can keep it together. For just as long as we can score and lay low and live with the constant scrabble to find the next hit. For as long as we can stay out of the sun.

It’s a life.

And who am I to bitch. I may not have asked to be infected, but I haven’t hurried to get out of the deal. Been over thirty years now, and I can bow out anytime. A bullet is still a bullet, whether it goes through your brainpan or mine. And dead is still dead. Or so I’m told. I’ll know for sure soon enough. Just like everyone else.

We’re all going the same place.

I’m just taking a different road.

If the scenery sucks, I can drive into a ditch whenever I want.

And I can take Evie with me. All I got to do is one simple thing. I just got to do what she’s begging me for. I just got to save her.

I get off the bed, stub my smoke out in the tray on the nightstand and throw down the last swallow of Old Grand-Dad in the water glass there. I take Solomon’s hogleg from my dresser and put it and the shells in my gun safe with a couple other pieces I’ve acquired in the last year. Used to be I had a pair of handguns that suited me more or less to a tee. The work I’ve been doing lately, I’ve found I go through them in a hurry. It pays to collect an extra or two when you get the chance.

The phone rings and I answer it and talk to someone and hang up.

I head for the door, in a hurry to be somewhere else, to be doing something else. To be thinking about anything else. I go fast and I leave the guns behind.

I won’t need one where I’m headed.

Unless I plan on shooting my boss.

God knows I’ve had worse ideas.

Organ courier.

I wish.

Freelance. My own boss. The way I used to have it.

That was cherry.

It was a scrabble being a Rogue, not having a Clan to look out for you and keep you in the drink, but no one looks over your shoulder and tells you what to do. You fuck up, someone’s gonna put you down. Nothing but blood, sweat and tears. And damn little blood.

Hell, I pine for it.

– The Candy Man? That’s a real bummer.

I get out of my own head and look at Terry, the man whose dime I’ve been on for the last year. Not that he’d put it that way. He’d say I’m simply a pledged member of the Society, serving the greater good. But I know better. After all, it may be a dog’s life, and I may be the dog, but I know whose hand is holding the leash.

– Yeah, whole bunch of SoHo ragtags are gonna have to find a new hookup.

He holds his index finger and thumb an inch apart.

– You’re still taking the short view.

He spreads his arms wide.

– What I’m trying to get you to see is the big picture. Expand your vision, get into your peripherals, man. See the vistas. The trees, they’re beautiful. But the forest, when you see the whole thing? That’s a mindblower.

He shades his eyes with a flat hand, gazing into the distances beyond the walls of this tenement kitchen.

– When you really open your perceptions and take it all in, the view is breathtaking.

I look at Lydia. She’s got her eyes squeezed shut, fingers rubbing her temples.

I tilt my chin at her.

– Got a headache?

She peels her eyes open and flips her hand in Terry’s direction.

– You don’t?

I check out Terry, his eyes still shaded, smiling at us.

– I’ve been listening to it for a long time. Guess I’m building an immunity.

Terry drops his hand.

– An immunity to truth, Joe? I hope not, man. I hope not.

I fiddle with the unlit smoke in my hand. Terry and Lydia don’t like me to smoke in Society headquarters. Like secondhand smoke is gonna kill them. The principle of the thing, they’d say. Like there’s any principle involved in breathing smoke other than it tastes good.

– The big picture, Ter, I’m missing it, so fill me in.

He lowers himself to the floor, slowly bending his legs till he’s folded into a full lotus.

– The Candy Man is dead.

– Got that.

– Sure, sure you do, that’s basic. The Candy Man is dead. Which, you know, he was a guy in a high-risk market. The blood, I mean, not the candy. So getting murdered isn’t like a statistical improbability or anything. But, and this is the down the rabbit hole part, he’s killed in a fashion that suggests a pretty well-versed Van Helsing was involved. A Van Helsing with enough, I don’t know, foresight, savvy, whatever, to poison the Candy Man’s stock so no one could scavenge it. And then the final tree in this, well, not really forest, but grove, maybe, or copse is a better word. The final tree in this copse is the really relevant fact that Solomon wasn’t what a Van Helsing would call a, you know, a vampire. So that’s our copse, our thicket of trees within the forest. The question is, What’s out of place here? What tree, or shrub even, doesn’t belong in the thicket?

I light my cigarette.

– You lost me at copse.

Lydia points at the NO SMOKING sign above the door.

– You mind?

I take another drag.

– Sister, if you can get through this without a smoke or a drink, more power to you. Me, I’m made of weaker stuff.

She crosses to a black-painted window over the sink, pinches the heads of the thirty penny nails driven through the frame into the sill, draws them out with a squeak, the upside-down pink triangle tattooed on her shoulder jumping as her muscles flex, and shoves the window open.

– I’m not your sister. My sisters share my values and concerns. They don’t put money into the pockets of death merchants.

She drops the nails on the sill.

– And, Terry, a little support on the no-smoking policy would be appreciated.

He rests his hands palms up on the points of his knees.

– Trees, guys. Forest. Copse.

Lydia folds her arms.

– The Candy Man wasn’t infected. The Van Helsing killed him like he was infected. He or she knew all this other stuff, but didn’t know Solomon was a civilian. That’s your odd tree.

He snaps his fingers.

– That’s it, that’s what I’m talking about. That particular piece of foliage seen on its own is just another fragment of the ecosystem, just another link in the chain of life. But in context of our forest? It stands out like a sequoia in the Amazon. An uninfected dealer in the forest of the Vyrus. Solomon has always been an exotic, yeah? So now, now something happens, someone yanks that tree, uproots it and salts the earth. But the way they go about it, it looks like they got a handle on the terrain, like they should maybe know better. So why kill that tree like it’s a, and I don’t like this analogy any better than you will, Lydia, but I’m talking here from this gardener’s point of view, why kill this tree like it’s a weed? Seeing as you know the difference. The Van Helsing I’m talking here.

I flick my butt and it arcs out the open window and between the bars of the security gate.

– Because he’s an idiot, Terry. Because he’s the kind of asshole goes around hacking people’s heads off when he could just shoot them. Because he’s a fucked-up nut job who knows just enough about us to be dangerous, but not enough to know Solomon was clean.

Lydia is pointing at the window.

– You planning to go out there and pick that up? Litter doesn’t throw itself in the garbage, you know.

I pull out a fresh smoke.

– It bothers you, go toss it in a can.

– I swear, Joe, sometimes I think Tom was right about you, sometimes I think you’re working for the Coalition, trying to subvert everything we do down here.

– And we all know where thinking like that got Tom.

She comes away from the window.

– That a threat?

That a threat? Am I threatening the head of the Lesbian Gay and Other Gendered Alliance? Am I throwing down on a woman I might not be able to take one on one, let alone if she comes at me with a couple of her bulls behind her?

Fucking no, I am not.

But I have shit manners.

– Fuck you, Lydia.

– Fuck you twice, Joe. Fuck you all over if you ever come close to threatening me. Tom was a spy. A scumbag subverter and a counterrevolutionary and a real asshole. He got what he asked for. But you ever come close to threatening me with the sun again, I’ll bring fury down on you.

– You’ll bring fury down on me? What the hell is that supposed to-

Terry looks at the ceiling.

– Forest! Forest! Forest!

I crush the cigarette in my hand.

– Brooklyn. OK? I get it. Lydia gets it. Brooklyn is what’s going on. Brooklyn is the big picture. So what the fuck? What’s that got to do with the Candy Man?

Terry smiles.

– See, you do have wider vision, man. That’s great.

Knowing it’s the kingdom of the blind around here, what’s that say about me and my vision?

I open my hand and spill tobacco and shredded bits of white paper on the tabletop.

– Great, now we got that sorted out, can I blow?

Terry untangles his legs, straightening them, rising erect.

– Joe. Lydia. Just as we are negotiating possible alliances with these, I guess they have to be called pseudo Clans at this point, just as we’re initiating talks, a Van Helsing appears. On our back porch. An apparently seasoned and knowledgeable Van Helsing who kills in a, you know, potent style. But he does this-

Lydia coughs.

– We don’t know it’s a man. Can we please not assume the male pronoun for a change?

– Right. So the Van Helsing, he or she, kills an uninfected guy like the guy was infected. If he or she does it out of ignorance, it’s kind of, well, incongruous, to use a five-dollar word. So maybe it’s an accident. Or maybe it’s a message that even an uninfected isn’t safe if he’s trucking with the likes of us. Or maybe, maybe, it’s done just to stir up some shit.

The phone rings.

– I mean, these are delicate times. New faces coming over the bridge. Elements no one has had contact with in, like, decades, man. Talking complex ramifications here. Talking old growth forests getting new seedlings. Talking shifts in the balance of power.

The phone rings.

– And the Candy Man, for all his, no pun here, all his sweetness, he was a hard-core businessman. He was a stone reliable dealer below Houston. The only one down there all those Rogues and odd bits of Clans could rely on in a pinch.

The phone rings.

– Think that’s not gonna stir concern down there? I mean, Christian finds out about this, what’s he do? He doesn’t burn the store like would have maybe been the easy thing, he comes and gets Joe. He looks north. He sees a potentially troubling situation near his club’s turf and reaches out for some Clan involvement.

The phone rings.

– He looks for some people who can stabilize a situation and bring a little balance before things can get knocked off kilter. He knows. His riders relied on the Candy Man. So he knows what this could mean.

The phone rings.

– And, yeah, maybe it’s all as simple and screwed up as a Van Helsing. Maybe we can get him, or her, before a little panic takes place. And then, well, market forces will take over and someone will fill Solomon’s void and it’ll all be cool.

The phone rings.

– But maybe, and I’m not talking from any secret well of knowledge here, I’m just saying, maybe.

The phone rings.

– Maybe it’s someone fucking with us.

The phone rings again and Terry grabs it from its cradle on the wall.

– Hello? Hey. Hello. Yeah. How ’bout that? Been a while. OK, OK, the usual. Yeah? Wow. That was fast. Sure. Hey, we all got our ways. Who? No. Not them. Sure the Freaks did. No surprise, but not them. Uh-huh. I know. Old times, kind of. Well, sure, you know, that was different. Yeah. Uh-huh. Hang on.

He holds the phone out to me.

– It’s for you.

I take the phone and put it to my ear.

– Yeah.

– Pitt, it’s Predo. I understand there is a Van Helsing in your midst. We will need to address this. Come see me.

Fucker.

Little fucking fucker Predo is, he keeps me waiting in the lobby with nothing but back issues of The New Yorker and Town amp; Country to read.

I fiddle a Lucky out of the pack and stick it in my mouth.

– Uh-uh.

I look at the giant behind the reception desk.

– Uh-uh what?

He waves his pen back and forth.

– Not in here.

I take out my Zippo.

– What’s with everybody? It’s smoke. It doesn’t hurt us. It’s like the best part about the Vyrus. Look, Ma, no cancer.

I snap the lighter open.

He places the pen on his desk, aligning it perfectly with the vertical edge of his blotter.

– Don’t even think about it.

I tap the tip of the unlit cigarette.

– Buddy, it’s too fucking late for that, I’m thinking about it.

He smiles, no doubt dying for me to light up so he can stop dicking around with the boss’ PowerPoint presentation and go to work on me instead.

– Then you best find something new to think about.

I size him up. It doesn’t take long. A guy built like that, you’d have to be blind not to be able to size him up from about half a mile out. I’m a big guy, but one of his suits, the jacket would make a nice overcoat for me. Still, I long to try it, see if I could put a couple in his face before he tears the desk in two, jumps across the room, digs his finger into my sternum and pulls my rib cage out.

Not that I got anything to prove, but the fucker pisses me off. Way he backed up Predo that time they broke into my place and tossed me around, that made me not like him. Not that I ever did in the first place. Piece of Coalition enforcer shit that he is.

But I didn’t bring a gun. And I don’t have the stones to try it even if I was packing.

I drop the Zippo back in my pocket, take a big drag off the unlit cigarette, pull it from my mouth, blow a huge cloud of no smoke in his direction.

– Gotta rule against this?

He slits his eyes.

– Sooner or later.

– What? Sooner or later you’re gonna sprout something from the brain stem that keeps your lungs pumping?

He rises. If we were outside, if it was daytime, he’d blot out the sun.

– Sooner or later you are going to fuck up and be back on the street again. Sooner or later you won’t have Clan protection anymore. Sooner or later you’re going to be a Rogue again. And nobody will care what happens to you. Nobody will care when I pick you up by the ankles and wishbone you.

What’s a guy gonna say to that? Especially seeing as it’s likely true.

Wish I had that gun.

The phone on his desk buzzes. He presses a button on it and picks up the handset.

– Yes. I’ll send him up. Yes, Mr. Predo.

He closes his eyes, frowns.

– Yes, I will, sir. Unforgivable. It won’t happen again.

He puts the phone down, opens his eyes, keeps the frown.

– Mr. Predo will see you now.

I get up.

– And we were just getting to know each other so well.

He looks me in the eye.

– And I am to offer my apologies for my threats. I went far beyond the limits of my duties. A simple request not to smoke would have been more than enough.

He sits, picks up his pen and starts pretending to do something in an appointment book.

I walk to his desk and stand there.

He looks up.

– Yes?

– I never heard the actual words I’m sorry.

His fingers tense, the stainless steel barrel of his pen flattens between them.

– I’m sorry.

I tap invisible ash onto his desktop and make for the doorway that leads to the stairs.

– Keep your fucking apology. First time I get the chance, I’m gonna see how many bullets I can fit in that empty head of yours.

He presses the buzzer that lets me pull the door open, masking whatever it is he’s muttering about my mother.

Like I ever gave a shit about her.

– I’m wondering, Pitt.

I’m remembering what it was like when I was a kid, the handful of times I attended school, the way those days inevitably ended in the principal’s office or a police station. The lectures. The rhetorical questions. The, What were you thinking? The, How do you expect to get anywhere doing things like that? The, Is this how you act at home? The, Do you think you’re scoring any points with that attitude?

– I’m wondering, is there anything you care about at all?

Nights like this, it’s easy to remember those days.

I stop picking at the knot tangling my bootlace.

– I care about getting out of here as soon as possible.

Predo places the pen on his desk, aligning it perfectly with the vertical edge of his blotter.

– If that is your goal, you might try paying attention for a few moments.

I point at the pen.

– You know your receptionist did that the exact same way. What do you think that’s about?

– I wouldn’t know.

– Hunh.

He watches me, the bright blue eyes in his smooth boyish face looking at me, slouched in the uncomfortable small wood chair across from him.

– Any other random thoughts, Pitt?

I give up on the knot and uncross my legs.

– Nothing just now. Why don’t we get to your thing.

– Thing. My thing. That is what I am talking about. A Van Helsing, well versed from what I hear, at large, and you evaluate it as a thing. An object or idea of no value relative to any other thing. No better. No worse. Of no greater concern than a rock or a tree, perhaps.

– What is it with people and trees tonight?

– Excuse me?

– Nothing.

He brushes the flop of dark bangs from his forehead.

– Someone was talking about trees?

I shrug.

The corner of his mouth twitches upward.

– Was Bird speaking on the subjects of forests and trees?

– What’s it to you?

The corner of his mouth straightens.

– Nothing. I have heard similar lectures in the past.

I look back at the knot, give it a tug, pulling the wrong end and drawing it tighter.

– Pitt?

I keep my eyes down. Thinking about Terry and Predo. Hippie Terry. Head of the Society. Revolutionary who organized all the downtown riffraff and Rogues almost forty years back, got them on the same page and broke off a piece of Coalition turf to make their own. And old man Predo. God knows how old, but so well fed, so blooded up he still looks twenty-five. Coalition whip and public face of their Secretariat. The one who straightens the rank and file. Head of the enforcers. The man who counters the Society’s drive to unite all the infecteds and take us public with the Coalition’s doctrine to unite in utter secrecy. A couple of true believers in separate corners. Guys taking potshots at each other every chance they get.

They go back.

Back to a time when Terry was up here. A time when they worked the same side. A time maybe only they and a couple other people know about. Like me.

A time I figure they’d kill to keep hidden.

I put the thoughts away. Blink. And look up into the spymaster’s eyes.

– I’m Society, Predo. I was out, now I’m back in. You want to fish for what goes on behind closed doors, find another place to drop your line. I don’t run your errands anymore and I don’t give up skinny on my people. You want to know do I care about anything, now you know.

His eyes widen.

– Heaven’s, Mr. Pitt, have you seen the light? Are you a believer again? Forgive my surprise. I was under the impression that you had taken over Society security because it was the only way Terry would tolerate you on their turf anymore. My apologies if I’ve been mistaken. I never meant to impugn your devotion to your cause.

– Impugn my ass and tell me what the hell you want.

– There, that is the Pitt I am most familiar with, the one I have come to know and manipulate with such ease in the past.

I think about throwing my chair through the covered window behind him and pushing him after it. But it’s probably safety glass and I doubt the chair would break it. And we’re only on the second floor of the Coalition’s Upper East Side brownstone anyway. So what the hell good would it do? Not like the sun’s shining out there or anything.

– Thinking about hurting me, Pitt?

I nod.

– Most of the time.

– Naturally. It is your nature to think ill of your betters. As to what I want, well, simple professionalism. You handle security for your Clan, I oversee somewhat larger and more complex operations of a similar nature for mine. In an era of détente such as we now enjoy, I merely wish to keep open the lines of communication between our offices when threats emerge that might endanger the well being of all. Something like a Van Helsing, I would have hoped to receive a direct call rather than having to find out about it through sources of my own.

– While we’re on the subject.

– Yes?

– What sources of your own are spilling news about what happens below Fourteenth?

– Below Houston is open territory. We have alliances just as you do.

– Still dancing with the Bulls and Bears?

He blanks his eyes.

– Anything you want to know, Pitt, ask it directly. Attempt to winnow information from me and you will only become frustrated and waste your limited resources.

– Seemed that was a direct question.

He ignores it anyway.

– What can you tell me about the Van Helsing?

I hold up my hand, tick a finger off.

– He killed the Candy Man.

I tick another finger.

– He did it old school.

Another finger.

– He tainted a load of blood.

And my last point I tick off on my thumb.

– And he dumped ammonia around to get rid of his scent.

Leaving me showing him one finger.

– And that’s it.

He nods, looks at a couple papers on his pin-neat desk, ignores the finger, and makes a couple notes.

– Well, then. Dismembered corpse. Two dozen tainted pints. And you are on the job. Very well.

He places a paper in his out-box.

– Good luck finding him.

I lower my finger.

– That it?

He glances up.

– Of course. As I said, a consultation was all I wanted. I have no interest in prying into a matter that lies so close to Society turf.

I get up.

– Yeah, sure, because that would be out of character for you.

He looks back at his papers.

– Have it as you wish. My wish is simply to facilitate the secrecy the Coalition believes is in all of our best interests. I have no desire to advance the goals of the Society, but interfering in a matter like this can only lead to unwanted publicity. That said, should you require any assistance in your investigation, you have only to call.

The fingers of one hand waft in the direction of the office door.

– Until next time.

I look at him, illuminated by the green shade lamp on his desk, surrounded by hardwood filing cabinets, the walls decorated by black-and-white photos of former holders of this office. All of it as it has been for more years than I learned to count in school. And I make for the door.

– Yeah, sure, next time.

– Pitt.

I stop with the door half open.

– Yeah?

– How did things go with the Docks?

I hesitate. It’s a heartbeat. Less than a heartbeat. But I hesitate.

– Docks?

– The Brooklyn Clan that’s looking for a Manhattan ally.

– Sure, I know who they are, just haven’t seen them myself.

– Odd.

– How’s that?

He taps a finger against his chin.

– We had scheduled a meeting with them. Understanding that they were to meet with the Society first.

– News to me. How’d that go?

– They never arrived.

– Hunh.

He watches me.

I shrug.

– Bridge-and-tunnelers, guess they got bad manners.

He lifts an eyebrow.

– I suppose so.

I start to go out the door, turn back again.

– Hey, that thing.

He looks up again. -Thing?

I point at his desk.

– The thing with the pen, the way you put it there, all perfect. The way your boy downstairs does it the same exact way. I got a theory about that.

– Yes?

I purse my lips.

– He’s studying you. Marking your moves, the way you go about it.

– About?

– Your business.

I pistol my fingers at him.

– He’s trying it on, Predo, seeing how the job would fit him. Yours, that is.

And I’m out the door and down the stairs and through the lobby past the giant who’s gonna have Predo’s eyes in the back of his head from here on out, and on the street where I can breathe.

I light a smoke.

Did it tell him anything? That hesitation, did it spill what went down with the Docks? I don’t know. But he’s better at this than I am. He’s better at everything than I am. It probably told him every fucking thing he wanted to know. Every goddamn thing he got me up here to find out from me.

I’m getting screwed.

Figure I know that much. God knows I should recognize the feeling when Predo slips it in. Scumbag’s had his action in my ass often enough.

Manipulate, he said.

Guess that’s the way the polite folks are saying fucked over these days.

Like to say he’s got it all wrong. Like to say he’s never had my number. Never pulled it over on me. Never made me dance on his strings. But I’d be lying. And lying to yourself pays out nothing. Not that it’s ever stopped me before.

Terry and his damn forest. Well, he was right about that. Way Predo snagged me at the end there, asking about the Docks, figure he’s seeing the same landscape as Terry. Both of them looking across the Brooklyn Bridge at all that territory, the couple thousand infecteds that have been living in the bush out there, and how they’ve suddenly started crossing the bridge looking to come back into civilization.

A Van Helsing?

Like Predo could give a fuck.

Pull my ass up here, drag me across 14th Street for a consultation he knows Terry won’t let me bow out of. Do that for a lone whackjob? Bullshit.

Do that to fish for what Terry’s up to with Brooklyn? Yeah, figure that’s how Predo plays his games. And figure Terry’s got that figured just as well.

Now I’m supposed to go home, turn in my report, tell him how it went down so he can take a read on Predo’s hand.

Both of them trying to get an idea of the other guy’s cards by looking at my face.

Fucking job!

Oh. Fuck me.

Two dozen pints. He said, Two dozen pints. Fucker knew what Solomon had in stock. Predo. Van Helsing. Would he do that? Send one of his enforcers down to do a job that looks like a Van Helsing? Do that to get me in his office where he can look me over? Hell yes, he would.

Or.

Shit.

Or it could have been Terry. Could have been he had Solomon done, knowing Predo would try to play me. Terry could have done it to get me in Predo’s office so he could…

What?

Fuckers!

Try to think like them, try to make your thoughts slither and creep like theirs, all you get is tangled and lost. Screw it. Keep it simple.

The Van Helsing is just a Van Helsing, till further notice.

Predo is just an asshole, till further notice.

Terry is just my boss and my oldest friend and a man who I don’t trust for shit, till further notice.

I can’t afford to figure it any other way. I can’t afford to try and play it any other way. Start playing someone else’s game, you’ve already lost. Besides, I got more important things to worry about.

I got a sick girl.

– Joe.

I stop kicking the can I’ve been chasing down the dark Central Park footpath. I look at the woman blocking my way.

She’s black and she’s beautiful and she’s built like a brick shit house.

– Sela.

She toes the can with the point of her glossy black knee-high boots, the slit in her skirt falling open over a bare, muscle-rippled thigh.

– Got a minute you can spare?

I look at my watch.

– Not really.

A long red nail scratches the back of her neck just below the line of cropped, tight black curls.

– Too bad.

I make to go around her.

– Yeah, too bad. See ya around.

She nudges the can in front of me and steps into my path.

– Not what I meant.

I look down at the can, back up at her.

– How did you mean?

Her big shoulders roll under the designer leather of her tailored jacket.

– I meant too bad in the sense that it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a minute to spare or not. I need it anyway.

I take her in: the new uptown threads, the salon cut, the makeup so flawlessly applied that you only know it’s there because you can’t see it. I think about the last time I laid eyes on her: in an Alphabet City tenement, the ripped jeans she’d had on, the Patti Smith T, the mohawk she’d sported then. I don’t have to inhale to smell the money all over her, or the hand it came from. I got no interest in seeing that hand again.

Christ, why didn’t I bring a gun?

– Sela, long time no see, you were a champ that time I needed a hand, but I could give a fuck what you want my minutes for. They’re mine. Top of that, I’m up here on business. Got a transit from Predo. You want to fuck with me, that’s who you’ll have to deal with.

Her tongue wets her lips.

– Look at you. Look at you. Joe Pitt, hiding behind Dexter Predo’s skirt. How’s a thing like that happen? How’s a man like you get that low? Lose himself that deep? Got to be a story there.

I flip my Zippo open and closed a few times.

– Last time I checked, I’m not the one disavowed the Society. I’m not the one came up here and pledged Coalition.

– I didn’t come up here for politics.

I kick the can from between our feet and go around her.

– Like I give a shit.

She doesn’t move.

– I came up for the girl.

I keep walking, kicking the can.

She stays where she is.

– She wants to see you, Joe.

I kick the can, follow it down the path.

– I don’t want to see her.

– She knows, Joe. She knows it all.

I freeze, my leg cocked.

– How’s she know?

Sela pulls the ends of the belt on her coat, drawing it tighter over her waist.

– I told her.

I kick the can and watch it sail into the darkness away from the path.

– Why the fuck did you do a thing like that?

She walks past me toward a limo that has pulled to the curb where the path is cut by the 65th Street Transverse.

– Because she asked.

I watch her back.

– You could have lied.

She stops at the limo, turns to me.

– You don’t lie to people you love, Joe. It doesn’t work.

She opens the door.

– Now get in the fucking car so I don’t have to drag you in.

I get in the car.

– You shouldn’t be mad at Sela.

– Who says I’m mad at Sela?

– No one.

– Right. Know why? Because I’m not mad at Sela, that’s why.

The girl flicks her fingertips at the jagged line of bangs on her forehead, keeping them mussed just so.

– You are soooo mad at Sela. Know how I know you’re mad at Sela?

– No. I don’t.

– I know you’re mad at Sela because you didn’t check out her ass when she went out of the room. And everyone checks out Sela’s ass.

– Except me, I guess.

– No, you too. Because your eyes kind of flicked over to check out her ass, and then you remembered how mad you are at her so you didn’t look. Like that was showing her or something. Which is really funny because all you did was cheat yourself out of a good look at an amazing ass. I should know. I look at it all the time.

She cranes her neck around and looks down her back at her own bottom.

– I do all the same exercises as her. I mean, not the same weights, she’s way stronger than me. Obviously. But I do all the calf raises and presses and leg curls and everything that’s supposed to make your ass pop, and mine just stays where it is. Flatflatflat. I want an ass like Sela’s. Everyone wants an ass like Sela’s. One way or another.

She looks at me, the bangs back in her eyes.

– But yeah, you maybe don’t want her ass. I hear you have a girlfriend or something. I mean, I don’t really believe you wouldn’t want Sela’s ass, but maybe you don’t.

– She’s got a dick.

She frowns.

– Huh?

– Last I heard, Sela was pre-op. She’s got a dick.

She shakes her head. -So? What’s that got to do with her ass?

I put a cigarette in my mouth.

– Christ if I know.

She watches while I light up and take a drag and blow smoke. She watches while I do that, while I stand there and itch all over from the need to get the hell out and do something for Evie and try not to look like I’ve got a care. She watches until there’s a long ash hanging from the end of the cigarette and I’m looking for a tray.

She smiles and points at a low table next to an Eames chair and ottoman.

– Over there.

I walk over, my hand cupped below the ash, and knock it into the silver tray on the table and stand there and smoke some more.

She points.

– Can I have one of those?

I dig the pack from my pocket and shake a smoke out and toss it to her. She catches it and places it in her mouth and walks down the room until she’s right in front of me.

– Light?

I snap the Zippo in front of her.

She places the tips of her fingers on the back of my hand, guiding the flame closer to her, the unbuttoned cuff of her long-sleeve blouse sliding up her forearm and revealing the lone silver bracelet torn from a pair of handcuffs locked around her right wrist.

Her eyes flick from the bracelet and the few links of dangling chain to my eyes and she catches me looking at the cuff, remembering how it got there.

She gives a little smile, like she’s just scored a point, and she draws on the filterless Lucky, and immediately starts hacking.

She doubles, choking and heaving, holding the smoke out at arm’s length.

I pluck it from her fingers and put it in my face as I cross to the bar and pour a glass of ice water from a crystal pitcher and bring it back to her.

I hold it out and she shakes her head, tears steaming down her cheeks, huge phlegmmy hacks shuddering her little body. I push the glass against her lips and tilt it up and she’s forced to open her mouth and swallow, half of it running down her chin. The coughs subside into little hiccups and she knocks my hand aside. I take the glass to the bar and set it there and watch while she wipes her running mascara with the tails of her top.

I drop the cigarette in my hand into the water at the bottom of the glass and pluck the one she started on from between my lips and tally her score.

– You almost had it down, you know.

She looks up at me, the makeup smeared from her face, the teenager beneath it revealed.

– Had what down?

– Your mom’s act.

She stops wiping her face, walks around me behind the bar, drops a couple ice cubes in a glass, pours some kind of triple-distilled boutique vodka from Romania or someplace over it, and tosses the drink down her throat and pours another.

I smoke the cigarette I took from her mouth.

– See, that’s not bad. You got the drinking down pretty good. Except your mom probably wouldn’t have bothered with the ice. But you’re what, seventeen? So you got time to develop. Another twenty years and you’ll be a perfect Upper East Side white trash burnout with a real grown-up booze jones, a trophy husband, a stable of gigolos, and a perfect ass.

She sips her second drink, her breath raising mist from the ice.

– And when I’m just like my mom, will you kill me just like you killed her?

I take a drag. Taste her lipstick. Remember her mother’s kiss.

I drop the butt in the bar sink.

– One other difference, she would have offered me a drink.

She finishes her own and puts the glass on the bar.

– Well, like you said.

She starts for the door at the far end of the room, unbuttoning her blouse as she goes.

– I’m not her. Get your own drink. I’m gonna go change.

– I won’t be here when you get back.

She stops at the door and drops her blouse on the floor.

– Now who’s pretending, Joseph? I mean, of course you’ll be here. You just can’t wait to hear why I had Sela bring you up here. And to see how I’ve grown up.

And so Amanda Horde goes out of the room smiling, wearing thousand-dollar jeans, a scrap of black lace, and the handcuff I once took from my own wrist and put on hers.

Damn me. Damn me if she isn’t right.

Yeah, I killed her mom.

Sort of.

Mostly she was dead before I broke her neck. Mostly she was infected with a bacteria that was turning her into something. Something you can call a zombie. For lack of a better word that describes something that goes around eating people’s brains. Mostly she wanted to die. Afraid as she was that if she was around much longer she’d eat her own kid.

Far as I’m concerned, parents eating their kids sounds like more of the same. Doesn’t mean I want to watch it happen or anything. Killing the woman just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The right thing, or the best option.

But she did ask me to do it.

And she did kiss me.

It was a complicated night.

Think about a night like that often enough, you’ll ask a lot of questions. Most of them about yourself. The kind of person you are. What you’ll do and why and when you’ll do it. What you believe in. What you really believe in.

In the movies, a vampire can’t see himself in a mirror. Just because I can, that don’t mean I got to like looking. What’s inside is inside for a reason. Because you’re not supposed to see it.

The girl, she’s a girl. A kid. She doesn’t know any better. And I know fuckall about what she really wants because she’s a teenage girl and who the hell knows what goes through her mind. Figure she wants everything. She wants to see everything the world has to offer. And being a rich kid, she wants to own it all.

Ah, youth.

I make myself a drink. She comes back after I’ve made a couple more.

– Sela can’t get drunk.

I watch her come to the bar; she’s kept the jeans, pulled on a tight pink tuxedo shirt with ruffles down the front, reapplied the makeup, and resprayed her retro-80s-rocker-grrl-shag cut.

I top off my bourbon and cross to the windows and look down at Park Avenue.

– Then she’s not trying.

Amanda laughs. -Seriously, she can’t.

– We can all get drunk. We just have to work real hard at it. Get enough booze in the system before the Vyrus can clean it out.

– Yeah, sure, she told me that, but I mean in a normal way she can’t get drunk. Because she’s an alcoholic. So she doesn’t drink. That’s what I really meant, she can’t drink. Alcohol, I mean. Not the other stuff. She drinks that.

I drink whiskey, pretend to watch the street while I look at her reflection in the glass, next to mine.

She crosses to the Eames and drops into it.

– But she has to drink that.

I keep my back to her.

She opens a box on the table next to the chair and takes out a clove cigarette.

– Which, it doesn’t gross me out or anything, but I do think it kinda sucks. No pun or anything. I mean, really, when you think about it, people eat cows and chickens and pigs and whatever they want, so what’s the dif? Especially with someone like Sela who’s totally got her shit together. I mean, with what I pay her as my trainer and my bodyguard, she can just buy what she needs. She never has to think about hurting anyone. It would just be so much easier if she could go to a store or something.

She lights her clove with a silver table lighter shaped like a thorn-circled sacred heart.

– Can you imagine, like, blood boutiques? People would get all sniffy about where they bought their blood and stuff. And someone would be making money. And, like, anyone could sell their blood and make some money and it wouldn’t matter if they were sick or anything because you guys can’t get sick.

She blows a cloud of smoke without coughing.

– But it will probably never happen that way.

She sticks her tongue out, an onyx stud dots its tip.

– Because most people are such fucking prudes. They don’t get anything. They think that if something’s different, that means it’s like it’s abnormal. Like there’s any such thing as normal.

She leans back in the chair.

– Like when people see me and Sela out. If they see us having dinner together, a teenage white chick and a big black woman, they can’t help but think it’s all fucked up. And if they notice her Adam’s apple? If they’re clued in enough to know she was born with a penis, you can see the freak-out all over their faces. And the way they love it. The way they just love staring and whispering and thinking how much better than her they are. People just suck that way.

I don’t argue with her about it.

She pulls her bare feet up on the chair.

– So it will probably never be like that. Like with all of you getting to live like everybody else.

She hugs her legs to her chest.

– Not unless someone finds a cure.

I turn around.

She rests her cheek against the tops of her knees.

– Did you know I just won a lawsuit? It was kind of a big deal. In the Journal and everything.

– Must have missed it on my way to the funny pages.

– Uh-huh. Well, I won and I got the terms of my trust altered.

She winks at me.

– You’re right, you know. I mean, I’m kind of surprised you remembered, but you’re right, I am seventeen. But in a couple months, I’m gonna be eighteen. Know what that means?

She bites her lower lip.

– It means that since I won my suit, I start to come into my inheritance. It means all the lawyers and all the board members and all the presidents and the CEOs and everybody has to get out of my ass. It means that all the business and finance classes I’ve been taking at prep, all the biochem courses I’ve audited online, all the tutors I’ve run circles around because they can’t keep up with how smart I am, it means that’s all gonna pay off.

She smiles ear to ear.

– Because when I’m eighteen, I’m gonna exercise my voting shares and take over Horde Bio Tech Incorporated. And I’m gonna put it to work finding a cure for the Vyrus. Because, you know what?

She takes a drag.

– I’m not just my mom’s daughter. I’m also my daddy’s little girl.

She blows smoke out her nostrils.

– And he was a genius.

I polish off my drink.

– He was a fucking loon.

She flutters her fingertips.

– Well, yeah.

I head for the bar.

– And you’re following right in his footsteps with that crap.

She puts her feet on the floor.

– Where are you off to?

I put my glass on the bar and look at her.

– Figure I know now what you wanted to talk about. Figure I know you’ve grown up spoiled as your mother and whacked as your father. Figure my curiosity is sated and I’m leaving now.

– No, that’s not it.

I snag the bottle I’ve been drinking from off the bar and turn my back to her. I’m on my way out.

– Mind if I take this for the road?

– Oh, Joseph, you’re just afraid.

I hear her stand behind me.

– Is it the girlfriend thing?

I stop.

I turn.

She drags off her clove.

– Cuz I get that. Sela says that Lydia says that you have a girlfriend and Lydia thinks that she has AIDS and that you take care of her. Which Sela says Lydia can hardly believe and she thinks you must be using her as a Lucy or something, but I totally believe it because I know what you can be like. I know you like to have something to take care of. But what I don’t get is, Do you really not fuck her? Because that’s what Sela says Lydia thinks because of the way you talk about the Vyrus like it’s something you can catch from a toilet seat or something.

I think about the night I saved her life. I think about that, and it keeps me from doing something to shut her up, something to shut her up forever.

She stubs her clove in the silver ashtray.

– Because you can’t, you know. You can’t get the Vyrus from a toilet seat. Or from fucking. If you could, Sela would have given it to me by now. Not that that’s scientific or anything. But it’s true. You can only get it from the blood. I’ve learned that much so far. But you’re probably just scared of fucking her because you’re scared of, you know, intimacy and all that. Because you know you’re gonna die horribly and you don’t want to take her with you or whatever stupid cliché. But here’s the cool part.

She walks toward me.

– If you did give it to her, if you bled into her and made her like you, that would cure the AIDS. And then.

She stops and reaches for the bottle in my hand.

– If I really can cure the Vyrus like I think I can.

She takes the bottle from me.

– You could give her the cure. And she wouldn’t be sick at all anymore. And neither would you. And you could do anything. You could be as normal as anyone, whatever that means.

She taps the stud in her tongue against the mouth of the bottle and drinks.

– If normal’s what you want.

This child, standing in front of me, talking about things I might want, talking like she knows something about anything, talking about my little life like she understands what any of her words mean or could mean to me.

This child, I do my utter best not to kill.

But that doesn’t stay my hand.

I slap the bottle from her and it shatters against the wall and I bring my palm across her face and send her to the floor.

She looks up at me, blood trickling from her nostril and the corner of her mouth.

– Who’s my mama now?

I’m on my way out when Sela comes through the door. Her jacket’s off, she’s wearing a leather vest over her implants, the muscles in her shoulders and arms cut by iron.

I plant myself and get ready to put my boot in her balls and she blows past me straight for the girl.

– Baby.

– I’m OK.

– Stay there, I’ll get some ice.

– I’m OK.

She props herself up on her elbows.

– He didn’t do anything I haven’t had done to me before.

Sela comes from the bar with a towel full of ice and cradles the girl’s head.

I start for the door.

Amanda bares her teeth, blood smeared across them.

– Don’t leave so soon. We haven’t even talked about what happened that night.

I’m on my way.

She’s still talking.

– I always thought they were nightmares. Till Sela told me what she knew.

Halfway to the door.

– But she doesn’t know much. Only you know all of it. Do you know what I dream about? I bet you do.

At the door.

– Do you dream about it? Is the cold shadow in your dreams too?

I stop.

I turn.

I wish again for a gun, to shut her up.

– Don’t talk about it. It knows you. Never talk about it.

She touches the bracelet on her wrist.

– I dream about you too, Joe. Should I be afraid of you?

But I’m not listening anymore. I’m gone.

What’s inside is inside for a reason.

What’s hidden is hidden for a reason.

What’s buried is buried for a reason.

The cab gets me back down to 10th Street. The keys get me back in my apartment. The code turns on my alarms. The trap door takes me down to the basement room where I live in secret. The combination opens the safe and puts a gun in my hand.

But none of it will protect me.

It’s been in here before.

Doors and locks don’t matter. Hiding places are where it lives. A gun won’t stop it. But I stand there in the middle of the room with a gun in my hand anyway, scenting for it. Searching for dead spots in the air, places where odor has been drawn from the atmosphere by its passing. Dreading that talking about it might have brought it back. Keeping myself from diving beneath the covers to hide from it.

The Wraith.

And to hide from the other things little Amanda Horde had to say.

To be normal.

Like I was ever normal. Like I was ever any different from how I am now. A cure won’t make me better. It’ll just make me more like a regular son of a bitch. Like the Vyrus makes you into something else. It doesn’t. If you get it, if you survive, it’s because you were already the kind of person who will drink blood.

And how do you know if you’re that kind of person? You don’t, not till your mouth covers a fresh wound and you find yourself jamming your tongue in it and sucking.

Is that the kind of person Evie is? If there was a cure, I maybe wouldn’t have to find out.

If a cure is possible.

Now that I got a gun in my hand, I’m gonna go talk to someone about it.

– Jeez, Joe, am I glad ya came by. Been calling you since I got here.

– How long’s he been this way?

– I don’t know. I came around, he was like this.

– Uh-huh. You just dropping by?

Phil rubs his nose.

– Sure, I guess. Just paying a visit.

– ’Cause you guys are tight that way. You pop in every now and then.

– Well. Well. Didn’t say we were tight. Sure we’re friendly, but tight might be a little of a, you know, an overstatement.

– You carrying, Phil?

He runs hands over all his pockets.

– I look like I’m carrying? Don’t I wish.

– Not for you, for him.

He reams out his ear with a fingertip.

– Aw, well, not, not just this moment. But, sure, from time to time Mr. Bird passes me something to bring up here. Not that I know how he comes by the stuff.

– Mr. Bird.

I size him up. A pasty jumble of limbs in latex-tight sharkskin slacks with three inches of white socks showing at the ankles above two-tone patent leather, a jacket matching the slacks stretched over narrow shoulders and an embroidered cowboy shirt with silver caps on the points of the collar, a bolo tie featuring a cockroach frozen in amber snug around his throat.

He fidgets with the bleach-blond pompadour that crests his head and adds eight inches to his height.

– So, long as you’re here to, you know, make sure he’s OK and all, I should get going.

He jitters toward the door.

I clear my throat.

– Phil, you got any idea how many times tonight I’ve wished I had a gun and didn’t?

He flashes eyes at the door and back to me.

– Uh, no, no, got me.

– A lot. Know what else?

– Um, no.

– If you piss me off and make me start wishing I had a gun in my hand so I can shoot you in the knee just because it will make me feel better, my wish will come true.

He chews a fingernail.

– So, um, you’re saying you’re packing, right?

I nod.

– That’s what I’m saying.

– And I’m supposed to stay here, right?

– Yeah, that’s it.

He swallows a piece of cuticle.

– Well, just threaten a man, why can’t you? You make it all complicated like that and I sometimes don’t know what I gotta do to keep from getting slapped around.

I walk toward the Count where he’s pressed naked into the corner of the loft, his lips moving, a jumble of syllables pouring out between them.

– My bad, I figured it’d just be an instinct for you by now.

Phil follows behind.

– Hey, I appreciate the benefit of the doubt and all, Joe, but really, man, unless I’m high you really shouldn’t count on me thinking too straight.

I stop outside the circle of symbols the Count has scrawled in his own blood and feces.

I point with the toe of my boot.

– Any idea what this shit is?

Phil gives a little sniff.

– Just regular old shit, yeah?

– The pictures, Phil, not what they’re drawn in.

– Right, uh, no, no clue. Just crazy stuff, right?

Crazy stuff. Sounds about right.

I squat and put myself on eye level with the Count. His eyes keep spinning, dancing around the patterns on the floor and walls and ceiling, resting for a beat of every orbit on the blade of the knife pressed to his wrist.

– Count.

His eyes flick over me, pass back, continue on their way.

– Count.

No reaction at all this time.

I look at the maul of flesh where his right foot used to be. The knob of half-healed meat, nubbins of bone poking out of it where the Vyrus tried to sprout new toes. But it was too much damage, shattered bone and muscle and skin ripped away, the kind of wound even the Vyrus can’t make entirely right.

I wonder if putting a bullet in his other foot will get him to pay attention to me like it did when I shot that one off.

Instead, I poke in a pile of trash on the floor and find a rat-gnawed chopstick.

I hold it in the air before my face.

– Count.

Nothing.

I whip it down and drag it through the circle of nonsense on the floor.

– No! Nononononono!

He draws the blade of the knife across his wrist, blood runs free as he scuttles forward on all fours and starts painting fresh the lines I’ve broken.

– No, no, no, no, Joe! Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, no!

He freezes, studies the repairs, holds his wrist over the floor to drip the last drops as the Vyrus draws the wound closed.

I tap the chopstick on the floor.

– You’re not looking too good, Count.

He points his gaze at me. His mouth falls open and he tilts his head back and laughs.

– No, not looking too good. Hunh, hunh, hunh! Not too good, Joe.

His teeth snap closed and his head drops down and he points the knife at me.

– Hey, hey, Joe, Joe, Joe Pitt. Know what?

– What?

He cups a hand at his mouth, sharing a secret.

– You gotta rep.

– No kidding?

– Know, know, know what it is, is?

– Nope.

He glances at Phil, leans closer, keeping his body within the lines of his circle.

– You gotta rep, says you kill people.

– Huh, go figure.

He slaps the flat of the blade to his cheek, presses the steel against his filthy skin.

– Wanna do me a favor, Joe Pitt?

I shrug.

– Won’t know till you ask me.

He puts the point of the blade in his left nostril, the handle angled toward me.

– Kill me, would ya? Please, Joe. Pretty please?

I do think about it. About slapping my open palm against the knife and driving it through his sinus and up into his brain. But it wouldn’t kill him, not right away. The angle is wrong. It’d hurt like a fucker and turn him into a retard, but it wouldn’t cut the medulla.

Of course, looking at him, it’s hard to say he’d be worse off.

– Count, I need some information.

His eyebrows jump.

– Sure, great, a swap! Kill me and I’ll tell ya anything you want to know, huh?

I rub my chin.

– How ’bout a compromise?

His eyes narrow, looking for a trick.

– Like what?

– How ’bout you tell me what I need to know and then I kill you, sound good?

His eyes close. They open. He takes the knife out of his nose.

– OK, OK, OK, but no funny stuff. None of your trickery, Mr. Joseph Pitt. If that is your real name.

It’s not my real name. But the Count isn’t his. So who cares anyway.

– Sure, no trickery.

I keep my eyes on his and point the chopstick over my shoulder.

– Get lost, Phil.

– Lost? Like, for real or?

– Go sit in the can and cover your ears and hum real loud so you can’t hear what we’re talking about.

– Uh.

– It’s not code, it’s literal. Go do it.

I wait until I hear the bathroom door close and the sound of “Sweet Caroline” hummed nasal and out of tune.

The Count’s eyes keep trying to peel away from mine. I clap my hands in front of his face and they pull back to me.

– Yeah, kill me, kill me, kill me.

– Soon enough, Count. Questions first.

I point at a pile of textbooks and back issues of quarterly medical journals heaped within the circle.

– Been keeping up on your studies?

– Yeah, yeah, good question. Yeah, I have. More, more, give me more like that.

I watch the pulse jumping in his neck at death-metal tempo; feel the heat coming off his body; smell the sweaty tang under the shit and blood that speaks of a metabolism careening brakeless.

– When’s the last time you ate?

He purses his lips.

– Ooooh, toughie, toughie. Good one, stumper. But I can get it, I got this one, I got it. Uuummmm. Two weeks? A little more? Yeah, yeah, two weeks, a little more than two weeks. Maybe three?

Two weeks, maybe three. Fuck. Two weeks with no fresh blood. And he’s been painting the place with his own. He’s beyond starving.

I look at the closed bathroom door where the tune has changed to “Summer Wind.”-Why didn’t you drink Phil?

He scratches his balls with dirty cracked nails.

– Phil? Phil? Jesus, drink Phil? Who’d drink Phil? Guy’s a Renfield. Total Renfield. I don’t want any of that. Nononono.

– Bull. You’re far enough to try drinking me.

He gives his fingers a sniff.

– Don’t wanna drink you, Joe. Don’t wanna drink Phil. Don’t wanna drink anyone.

– When’s the last time you fixed?

A shudder runs up his body, his bowels open and try to void, but nothing is left in them.

He coughs.

– Sorry about that. Pretty gross. Pretty impolite. Not myself today.

– When’d you have your last anathema, Count?

He bites the air, clacking his teeth.

– It’s bad in there. The anathema is cold, man. It shows you things. I’m on the inside now, man. I don’t wanna be. I don’t wanna know. Want out. Gotta get out. No more on the inside. No more blood, no more blood. Out! Out! Get it out!

He jabs the tip of the knife into his thigh, poking a few holes and watching a sluggish welling of blood before the Vyrus seals them, coveting what little it has left.

I grab his wrist.

– Cool it, man.

He stops jabbing, looks at my hand, looks at the point where I’ve reached across his circle, tries to twist free.

– You’ve broken it! It’s broken! Things get in! No more! Out! I want out! Get it all out! Get out! Get out!

– I’ll get it out, Count, I’ll get all the blood out of you. Listen, cool it and listen.

He jerks and twitches and the muscles in his belly writhe.

– Listen? Listen? I hear it all, man, all of it.

His skin is burning my hand. Air whistles over his teeth and down his throat. Starving the Vyrus, he’s driving it to the edge, pushing it into a corner, forcing it to defend itself. Anytime now, it’ll frenzy and attack.

I put my free hand on the butt of my gun.

– Hear this, man. I need to know, Is it possible? If someone had the resources, is it possible, could there be a cure?

He stops twisting, just his stomach crawling beneath the skin.

– A cure? A cure? Yeah, yeah, yeah, easy one, the old one. Just gotta get it all out, just gotta get the blood out.

I pull the gun, show it to him.

– Sure, gonna cure you, man, but tell me first. A cure? A real cure, could that happen?

His eyes lock, his breath falters, his body goes rigid.

I hear his heart stop beating.

Fuck.

– Phil!

The bathroom door doesn’t open, but the humming stops.

I stand, gun pointed at the Count.

– Philip! Get out here!

The door stays closed.

– Um, kinda busy in here right now.

I back away from the Count.

– Philip, get your fucking ass out here!

The door swings open and he comes out, tugging his slacks up over his skinny ass, a scrap of toilet paper stuck to the sole of his shoe.

– What, what? Jesus, man, you send a guy to the john to meditate, you can’t blame him when nature calls.

– Come here, Phil.

He’s crosses the room, looking at me pointing my gun at the Count.

– Jeez, you shoot him or something? Not that I heard it or know anything, seeing as where I was and all.

He comes alongside me.

– Why you still drawing down on him if he’s stiff?

I hear something move in the Count’s chest.

He jerks erect as if strings had pulled him.

Phil takes a step back.

– Oh, oh, shit, I gotta go.

I reach out and grab the leather strands of his bolo tie and yank them up, hauling him to his tiptoes.

He chokes and gurgles.

The Count vibrates, his nostrils flare, his eyes find Phil’s stretched neck and stay there. He takes a step, a flicker, his foot landing outside the circle, and he howls. Another step, speed blurred. Another howl. He shakes all over, every spasm strobed by the impossible flood of adrenaline the Vyrus has released.

I give the bolo a jerk and it scrapes Phil’s skin and the scent of blood hits the air.

The Count comes for him.

He’s too fast to follow, so I don’t try. I keep the gun aimed at a point he’ll have to cross to get to Phil’s blood, and I start pulling the trigger.

Two bullets hit him before he hits Phil and drags him from my grasp, the thin cord of the bolo cutting twin stripes across my palm.

Phil is silent, beyond screaming, eyes wide, mouth stretched, tongue stuck out.

The Count ignores the holes in his stomach and opens his own mouth and lunges to bite out Phil’s jutting tongue.

I shoot him twice in the back and he twists off Phil and flings himself at me, raking his nails at my eyes, wrapping his legs around my waist and squeezing, everything too fast for me to stop it.

But some things the Vyrus can’t change. It’s made him strong and fast and desperate, but it hasn’t made him any more a fighter than he ever was.

His elbow clips my shoulder and I feel it dislocate. Blood runs down my face. He licks it, finds it poison to him, and wails and spits. I wrap my left hand around his throat and squeeze and fall forward and land on top of him and jam my knee into his gut-shot belly and choke the air from him and he bucks and roils and tears half my left ear off. And I choke him and choke him and choke him.

When he’s still, I get up and find my gun and hold it.

Phil sits up, rubbing his throat.

– Fuck! What the fuck was that? What the hell was that about, man? That wasn’t cool. That wasn’t cool at all.

I look at the floor, find the Count’s knife and pick it up.

– Yeah, well, I needed some bait to distract him.

Phil is on his feet.

– No shit! I got that. See, don’t know if you missed this part, man, but I was the bait you used. That was so far from cool. That was like, whatever the opposite of cool is, that’s what that was.

I tuck the gun in my belt.

– Uncool.

Phil points.

– Totally uncool!

The Count makes a wet sound, blood sputters from between his lips.

Phil takes a step toward him and stares.

– Fucker’s not dead, man.

He looks at me as I come over.

– Better put a couple in his brain, man, fucker’s not dead.

I look at the holes in the Count’s stomach. They’re not healing.

– Yeah, not yet, but he’s close.

I tap the blade of the knife against my thigh.

– Hey, Phil?

He’s trying to untwist his collar and his bolo.

– Yeah?

I bring the knife up.

– Speaking of uncool, I really need him to live.

He’s looking down, focused on the ends of the tie.

– Hey, go ahead and First Aid away. Think you’re crazy, but do what you gotta do.

I place the tip of the knife on his chest and he looks up.

– What I gotta do, Phil, is I gotta feed him.

His jaw drops, his head tilts.

– No way, man. Seriously uncool! Seriously uncool!

I grab his wrist and twirl the knife.

– Stop being a pussy, man. I’m not gonna take it all.

If it was just a matter of blood, I’d slash Phil’s wrist and stick it in the Count’s mouth and let him suck the fucker dry.

Phil’s lucky it’s more complicated than that.

He’s also lucky I had some blood yesterday and got a healthy stash at home. There’ve been times, after a scrum like that, I’d have tapped him dry. Not that I want to drink Phil’s blood any more than the Count, but the niceties go by the wayside when you’re hard up. As it is, I spill a couple pints in an empty takeout coffee cup and pour it down the Count’s mouth.

No surprise, it rouses him.

No surprise, he wants more.

But I’ve kicked Phil out by then, a fifty in his pocket for his troubles. With nothing to eat in the room, the Count goes haywire and tries to jump out the window so he can get at all the blood he can smell down on the streets where the night owls are taking the air. I’ve got my boot planted on his neck and I throttle him and pistol-whip him until he settles down.

Phil’s blood is keeping him in the game, the holes in his belly and back aren’t leaking anymore, but he’s a long way from out of the woods. And it’s not like more blood is gonna take care of everything that ails him. I want to get him talking straight, I’ll need him healed, fed and fixed. But the fix he needs, I don’t got. The fix he needs, I don’t got time to find. And I never will.

And that leaves one option. Get him clean. And only one place to do that.

– He was going cold turkey.

Daniel casts his eyes on the Count’s body cradled in my arms, half-wrapped in the sleeping bag I stuffed him in before dropping it in the trunk of the cab that brought me to the West Side.

– Really?

He bends and looks at the Count’s crap-smeared face.

He looks at me.

– A friend of yours?

– Hardly.

He scuffs the floor with his foot.

– Well. Bring him in.

He brushes his fingers at the Enclave manning the door and it slides open, revealing the dark cavern of the warehouse.

I stay on the loading dock.

Daniel takes a step toward me.

– Something giving you pause, Simon?

I shift my feet, hating it when he uses my real name, but not wanting to get into it again.

– Yeah, see, I need him alive.

He raises the skin where his eyebrows used to be.

– Alive. In truth, he’s rather close to actual life in this state.

– Daniel, I need him alive in the usual sense. I need him alive and awake and able to talk to me in all the usual senses of the words. I need to know if I bring him in there you’re not going to decide he’s a pariah or some shit and drain him and burn his body and make the ashes into tea or whatever you do.

A smile jumps across his face.

– A pariah?

– Whatever, I don’t know the lingo.

A frown follows the smile.

– You may as well bring him in, Simon. We won’t sacrifice him to our dark gods or anything. And it’s too late for you to do much else.

I bring him in and pass him to the waiting arms of another Enclave and watch him carried away into the candlelit darkness. White shapes move deep inside the concrete-and-steel chamber. Bodies drawn thin by fasting, paled to ivory, shedding hair.

I think of Evie.

Daniel walks out and drops his mantis body on the edge of the loading dock, legs dangling, hands tucked beneath his thighs, a thin white poncho made from an old sheet draped over his shoulders hanging to his knees.

– Nice night.

I tug my jacket close.

– It’s fucking freezing.

He looks up at me.

– Still a nice night.

He pats the concrete.

– Have a seat.

I stay on my feet, light a smoke.

Daniel looks away from me and to the gray glow above the rooftops.

– What’s his name?

– Calls himself the Count. Don’t know what his real name is. I told you about him before.

– Did you? Hm, I’ve forgotten.

I blow smoke and steam into the cold air.

– You don’t forget shit, Daniel.

He closes his eyes.

– Don’t I?

He opens them.

– It seems to me that’s all I do these days. And what a relief it is. All the nonsense washing out on the tide. I’m a bit confused by the common perception that it leaves one cloudy, old age. I’ve found a great deal of clarity. The years refining my mind, focusing it on a single thought.

I sidelong him.

– A bit past old age, aren’t you?

He swings his legs, bounces his heels off the painted front of the loading dock.

– Well, it’s all relative. I’d be inclined to say that I’m pretty damn young as this all goes.

He waves a hand at the universe.

– But that’s a sorry cliché. Overused. And maybe not even accurate.

I tap some ash from the tip of my cigarette.

– How old are you, Daniel?

He ducks his head.

– Old enough to know better. At least that old. And old enough to forget. So remind me. The Count?

I spit a flake of tobacco from my tongue.

– Spy. Coalition spy. Got sent down to the Society to cause trouble. Terry flipped him. He’s got a load of money in some trusts. Terry flipped him to get at the money.

– And the state he’s in?

– I didn’t like some things he did. So I hit him with a heavy shot of anathema. Hooked him to the bad dose.

The corners of his mouth drop down, drawing the skin tighter over his skull. If you can draw skin tighter over a skull when it looks painted there in the first place.

– And the procurement?

– Not my problem.

Not my problem. The going out and finding some slob to infect, someone who the Vyrus doesn’t kill outright, and harvesting his infected blood and getting it to the Count while it’s still fresh enough to shoot, the entire manufacture of anathema, not my problem. But it’s been happening anyway. After I declined, Terry had to have someone doing it. Hurley, I’d imagine. Keeping the Count alive and on the bad dose, keeping access to his fat accounts open.

Daniel keeps his frown.

I drop my butt.

– It bothers you?

He looks at his feet.

– Not the deaths. The useless cattle the Vyrus rejects aren’t to be mourned. I pity them perhaps, for the half-lives they’ve been given. But the ones harvested for the anathema, the ones the Vyrus takes and doesn’t cast off, they have been wasted. It all smacks of waste. And manipulation of the Vyrus. I know that’s my own perception, and a limited one, but I feel it nonetheless. Even though I know the Vyrus cannot be manipulated. It uses us, not the other way around.

I grunt. At a loss for anything else to say.

He taps my thigh with a finger.

– But no lectures tonight, yes?

– Fine by me.

He stretches his neck.

– I’m tired. Finish the story. Why do you need him?

I look at him, see Evie again, wasting in her bed.

– He was premed in school. Terry loaded him up with medical books. Had him studying. Trying to maybe figure out some stuff about the Vyrus.

He sighs. -Medical books. Poor Terry. He’s so…material.

He brings his feet up on the dock and rises.

– And if that’s what you need from him, his medical knowledge of the Vyrus, you should have let him die. In the usual sense.

I look at the litter in the gutter.

– I have to ask him some stuff.

– Well, whether you had stuff to ask him or not, we’d help him.

– Didn’t know ministering to the weak was your new line.

He gestures at the darkness in the warehouse.

– It’s not, but he’s Enclave.

– The fuck?

He scratches his head.

– Not that I knew him before, but, yes, he’s one of ours.

– So, what, you look at him and you just know he’s in the club?

He shrugs.

– That’s all it took when I first met you. You’re either Enclave or you’re not, it can’t be hidden or mistaken. Believe in Enclave or not, it believes in you. And the Vyrus tells me.

– The things you believe, Daniel, I don’t know how you remember how to stay out of the sun.

– And what do I believe, Simon?

– Got me, man. Got me.

He shakes his head.

– It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I’m asking for you to articulate it, my beliefs. You want my help, this is what I’m asking for. Tell me what I believe.

I look around, at everything but him.

– It’s, man, it’s complicated.

– No, it’s simple.

– You, you guys, Enclave, you believe the Vyrus is, what, spiritual? Supernatural. You believe it, man, it consumes us and when we die we pass into its world. You believe that if you starve it, take in just enough blood to keep it alive as it consumes you, that you can be made, Jesus fuck, I don’t know, into something like it, but stay in this world. For what reason you’d want that, I do not fucking know.

He stares at the ground.

– One by one, Simon, all Enclave test their limits. Wean themselves from this world, give up more of their physical selves to the Vyrus by forcing it to consume more of its host than it would do were it fed well. One by one, reaching their limit, they fail, wracked by their own insufficiencies, dying in the dark. But it will not always be that way. This is what will happen, Simon.

He puts his mouth close to my ear, the heat off his body far more intense than what I felt from the Count, his burning unlimited.

– One day, as many have before, one of us will open the doors of this place and in the bright light of morning, will walk out naked. And not be burned. The Vyrus having consumed entire its vessel and made of it something not earthly. When it happens, when one of us crosses into the Vyrus’ plane, but retains corporeality, that one will guide the others through the same path. And we will be true vessels for the Vyrus. Uncorruptible to the sun, intangible to the weapons of this world, able to project the Vyrus through our physical selves at will. We will bring it to all, the great and the meek. And make the world Enclave, make it Vyrus. As it is meant to be. As it already truly is.

He’s at my side, burning me and crazier than fuck.

I don’t move.

– There’s only a hundred of you.

He steps away, raises his hands.

– Well, we’ll just have to see what we can do.

He turns to go.

– Daniel?

– Mmm?

– The way you know the Count is Enclave?

– Yes?

I watch his back.

– The way you say the Vyrus told you that? Does it tell you other stuff?

His shoulders rise and drop.

– How so?

– If you met someone, could you tell, by looking, could you tell if the Vyrus would kill them? Or, the other thing, infect them? Make them like us.

His head tilts back. I can see the seam of bone where the quarters of his skull meet under the skin.

– Yes. Actually, yes, I can do that.

– If I brought someone here?

He lifts a hand.

– Come back in the morning, Simon. Your friend will be sensible by then. Come in the morning and talk to him. Ask him questions. And anything you’d like me to look at, bring it with you.

He walks into the darkness.

I take a step toward the doorway.

– The morning?

His white shade is fading.

– Just before sunrise. I’ll be going out after that.

I take another step.

– Going out?

A candle flame reflects a last flicker of him.

– I’m done here, Simon. I kept telling you I was failing. Did you think I could hold out forever? Time for me to find out what the Vyrus wants from me. And the sun will show the way.

I step close to the darkness, but I don’t go in there.

Instead I walk east, headed out of the no-man’s-land that surrounds Enclave turf. Turf I’ve always crossed alone, because no one else wants anything to do with it. I think about coming back across it before sunrise.

But not coming alone.

– Joe.

I look up. My foot has just hit the east side of University Place, the edge of Society turf, and Hurley’s waiting for me.

– Hurl.

He moves his toothpick to the corner of his mouth, juts it eastward.

– Terry’s bin callin’ ya.

– I wasn’t home.

– Dat’s what he said.

– Man’s fucking psychic or something.

– Must be, told me ta look fer ya comin’ offa Enclave turf. Me, niver woulda figured anyone ta be over der.

– Yeah. Well. Tell Terry I’ll catch him later, got some things to do.

I move around him and he drops his hand on my shoulder and almost knocks it back out of its socket.

– Said, Terry wants ta see ya.

I look at the hand weighing my shoulder down.

– With all due respect, Hurley, you want to get your hand the fuck off me?

He takes the toothpick from his mouth with his free hand.

– Let’s nae fook aboat, Joe. Yer head o’ security, sure, but Terry’s dah boss, an’ when he calls, ya come to ’im. So, an wit all due respect fer ya an’ yer job an’ all, come da fook wit me er I’m gonna have ta beat ya till ya do.

I lick my lips.

– Sounds important.

He puts the toothpick back in his mouth.

– Fook do I know, I’m just da fookin’ help.

The pie at the Odessa Diner is shit. But I ordered it anyway.

Terry ordered the veggie pirogies.

– Really, Joe, it’s just the kind of thing we have to start getting used to. Whether we like it or not, our world is getting bigger. Trying to stay on our turf won’t change that. And, think about this, if we try to just stay in our space, just kind of cling to what we have from Houston to Fourteenth between the river and Fifth Ave. while the world outside that patch is getting bigger, well, we’ll just be getting smaller the whole time. Think about that, and see if it doesn’t blow your mind.

I pick up my fork, poke the pie, but it doesn’t look any better than it did when the waiter put it in front of me.

I put the fork down.

– However big the world’s gonna get between now and tomorrow night, it’s gonna have to do it without me being involved. I got other things I’m working on, and I am sure as fuck not going to Brooklyn tonight.

Terry cuts a pirogi in half and dips it in applesauce.

– I hear you, man, I hear you. Brooklyn. Wow. I mean, how many years have we been talking about that place like it’s a different world. The undiscovered country. Like only Lewis and Clark would know how to handle a land like that, right? Going to Brooklyn? I must be crazy asking you to do that at a moment’s notice. Something like that, man, we should be planning an expedition with, like, Sherpas and stuff.

He pops the piece of pirogi in his mouth and chews and swallows.

– Problem is, problem is, our debate with the Docks Boss and his people last night, that seems to have caused some ripples.

He pushes the other half of the pirogi through the applesauce and watches me.

I point at his plate.

– Those things are better with sour cream.

He nods.

– I’m trying to stay away from dairy.

I poke my pie again. It’s clearly store bought. The crust flat and shiny, the overhead fluorescents reflecting off it. The filling gelatinous, dotted with three or four clots of apple puree.

He eats the last piece of pirogi and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin.

– So, ripples. Like, the Docks weren’t the first of the Brooklyn Clans to get in touch with us.

– I gathered.

– Right. And now, this other group, well, they seem to have, and I’m not saying I know how this happened, but they seem to have gotten ideas of how we handled our differences with the Docks. And this has made them, I don’t know, leery, I guess. And they want, well, some assurance. Some direct contact with the Society. And they want it soon. Like, and this is where the urgency comes from, they want it tonight. They’re willing to send a representative, but they want us to handle transportation.

I dig my fork into the pie and put it in my mouth. It’s as bad as I thought it would be. I wash it down with thin black coffee.

– So go give them some direct contact. Last time I checked, diplomatic missions weren’t something I specialized in.

He pushes his plate to the side and wraps his fingers around his cup of chamomile tea.

– There’s nothing diplomatic involved. You go, you get their representative, you bring their representative back here, and after the meeting you provide return transit. And hey, you know, I wish I could go. First contact, man. I mean, direct face-to-face contact, I’m not saying it’s Nixon in China or anything, but it’s a pretty major deal.

I look past Terry, out the big front windows of the diner, and watch the Friday-night barhoppers parading up and down Avenue A.

I glance at the clock above the front door. Well past midnight. Way past visiting hours at the hospital. If I call the night nurse she’ll shine me on again, tell me Evie is fine no matter how she is.

The taste of the crap pie and the lousy coffee is still in my mouth.

I look at Terry, blow some air, give with a big helpless shrug.

– Sure, Terry, I get it, and I don’t mean to make light or anything, but I have security issues here on our turf. That’s why you gave me the job, right, to take care of things right here at home? Way I remember it, the deal was I do things the way I think they should be done. Right now, I got to tell you, this Van Helsing is the real deal. What I’ve been poking into tonight, the tension out there in the community is high. Word is spreading and people are freaked out. Those are our folks out there, living in fear, I can’t do something to make them feel safe, well, I should just hand the job to someone else. That’s not even taking into account how riled Predo was when I went up to see him, guy’s got a serious bug up his ass over this. I don’t take care of it quickly, it could screw up all the quiet we’ve been enjoying lately. Just, hey man, just priorities.

The waiter places the check between us, fair warning that he wants his fucking table back. Terry flips the check, looks at the total, goes in his pocket.

– Yeah, the Van Helsing. That’s, sure, that’s a concern. Thing is, thing is, and you know how I feel about pointing fingers, and I could be wrong, but the thing is, Joe, this problem in Brooklyn, it didn’t really exist until you went up to see Predo.

I remember that pause, that half second when Predo mentioned the Docks to me. That one moment when I cracked open and he read me cover to cover.

Sharp bastard.

He places some bills and change on the check, a precise ten percent tip included.

– And, you know, these things happen. He can ferret information with the best, so I’m not saying you could help it. Predo, he’s just doing what comes naturally and putting whatever he got from you to use. If I were to guess, I’d imagine he maybe placed a call to these folks he knows we’re in contact with and suggested that we might be, I don’t know, untrustworthy in negotiations. Which, I’ll grant in this case may have been true, but generally we’re a much safer bet than the Coalition. But try telling that to new faces when the story going around is that we, I don’t know, used a containment strategy on the Docks. Which was really best for everyone. Their attitude and values may get by in Brooklyn, but things are far more sophisticated here. A lead pipe mentality like theirs would have caused trouble for all the Clans.

– Yeah, well, we’ll never know one way or another, what with how they were contained and all.

He recounts the money on the check.

– You can be flippant about it if you like, Joe. -Flippant?

– But I can’t. I have to take these situations seriously. That forest we were talking about before? That metaphor can be extended pretty far. The forest, the ecosystem, it needs to be kept in balance. Too many new species enter the ecosystem at once, they throw it out of balance. Species that have been there for eons, they can find themselves at risk.

He takes fifty cents off the check and puts it back in his pocket.

I look at the clock again. There’s an orderly at the hospital, if I pass him a pint of gin he’ll get me on Evie’s ward. I try to remember when his shift ends.

– Yeah, ecosystem, unbalanced, got it. All the more reason I need to stay here and deal with the Van Helsing.

I start to get up.

Terry puts a hand on my wrist.

– Joe, sorry, I’m being unclear. Let me focus this a little for you.

He pushes his glasses up his nose.

– Fuck the Van Helsing.

He looks at my chair. I sit in it.

He nods.

– Predo doesn’t give a damn about the Van Helsing. People out there don’t know about the Van Helsing. You haven’t been looking for the Van Helsing. What you have been doing, what you did do, was you went up to Predo and let him, you know, work you. However it played, you tipped him and he knows how we handled the Docks, and he’s pissed. He knows they would have thrown in with the Coalition and he’s pissed we, well, intervened or whatever. Now he’s getting kind of childish and trying to do the same thing with us, and the situation needs to be dealt with.

I watch the waiter come and take a look at the check and the money. I watch the sour look on his face get more sour as he eyes the money. I watch him clear every last plate and glass and piece of silver from our table, leaving the check.

He makes to take the teacup from Terry’s hand and Terry looks up at him.

– I’m not finished. When I’m finished you can have the cup and the table. Until then, stay the fuck away from us. And if you want a better tip, refill the water glasses every now and then.

The waiter takes a step back, touches the ring in his right eyebrow, turns and walks away.

Terry turns his eyes to me.

– Sorry about that, I’m a little, man, a little stressed, I guess.

I wait while he works out the stress.

– See, and that stress, a lot of it has to do with all this Brooklyn stuff. And I’d really like to bring some stability to the situation so I can, you know, decompress. I don’t want to spend my time taking out my issues on innocent bystanders like that kid. So for the sake of everyone around me, before I, I don’t know, start taking people’s heads off or whatever, I need to have this thing dealt with right away.

I remember what it was like, back in the day, when Terry would take someone’s head off. I look at him, old man hippie, and know it’s still in there. The head-taker. One of the best.

I lean in.

– Bullshit.

His forehead creases.

– Um. Excuse me?

– Bullshit, Terry. You didn’t want me to tip our hand to Predo, you wouldn’t have let me go up there. I’ve been played by you two before, I know what it feels like. Whatever you really want, it has fuckall to do with me running to Brooklyn. The Van Helsing? I know that doesn’t mean shit. I already got that figured. I don’t know who’s play it was, yours or Predo’s, but I know we’ve seen the last of him. You want me to do a little dance? Fine. Tell me the tune. Show me the steps. Draw them out on the floor so I know exactly where to put my feet. Because I am goddamned if I’m gonna let you two jerk me all over town again getting my head bounced off hard stuff.

I lean back in my chair and light a smoke.

Terry scratches his cheek.

– Wow. Wow. That was, that was very honestly put. That was a real, I don’t want to say breakthrough, because I’ve always felt like we get each other, but that was such an honest and feeling piece of communication. I’m, I don’t know, touched. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for that.

I go to tip some ash in the tray, find the waiter took it with everything else.

– Whatever, man. As long as we’re clear.

Terry waves a hand.

– Oh yeah, we’re clear, man.

He strokes his chin.

– Thing is, thing is, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

He raises a finger.

– Playing you? Would it were so, my friend, but no, that’s not the case. I let you go up to talk to Predo because I figured you’d been around enough by now to be ready for his game playing. But you’re not ready to deal with Predo on those terms. Enough said. No shame in that. Lesson learned by us both. No, I just really, really need to take care of business.

He leans in.

– It occur to you, Joe, all these Brooklyn Clans coming to us and to the Coalition, it occur to you to ask why? I mean, what’s up, right? And I’ll skip waiting for an answer you don’t have, because rhetoriality is the last thing we need right now. What’s up is that they’re scared, man. Scared bad. Someone over there, someone’s pushing, grabbing turf, squeezing out the little Clans. Years now, guys like the Docks, they wanted nothing to do with, you know, us Manhattanites. Wasn’t just a matter of no one from the Island wanting to cross the river, they had no interest in coming this way. Now they got no choice. They need allies and they got no choice. And if they’re getting squeezed over the river, if sociopolitical forces are sending these refugees our way, we need to make arrangements now. Or we’ll be sitting in the middle of a humanitarian disaster. By which I mean at least a few hundred new infecteds on the Island, all of them looking for blood. That is the kind of impact our little ecosystem cannot absorb. They have to work with the Clans here. There has to be some organization. Everyone knows it, but there’s still gonna be some jockeying. We’re all gonna get a little bigger. And it’s important no one gets too big. In terms of the ecosphere, that’d totally screw shit up. This Clan we’re in touch with, the Freaks?

– Freaks. That’s promising.

– Let’s not start making judgments based on something as flimsy as semantics. Regardless of how they’ve chosen to represent themselves to the world in language, they apparently carry a membership of several dozen. That’s more than enough to cause waves or swing a slight advantage in numbers. They cannot be, you know, disregarded.

He points the finger at me.

– So now, I need the head of Society security to do his job and go out to Brooklyn and clean up a little mess that is, when you get right down to it, pretty much his own damn fault, and make sure the Freaks understand that we offer them their best opportunity for seamless integration into Manhattan.

He drops the finger.

– As for what you’re up to, well, your private life, Joe, this girl you, I don’t know, take care of, that’s all well and good. From what I hear she brings out a real nurturing side in you. And I guess I’ve heard things aren’t going well with her. I’m sorry about that. God knows the Society is more than sympathetic to anyone with any kind of illness, but, you know, some hit closer to home than others. That, however, is neither, you know, here nor there. There’s a security problem that needs to be tended to. The Society needs you to tend to it. If you can’t tend to it, you need to let me know and we’ll, for lack of a better solution, dissolve this relationship and you can go back to your old status. And all that.

He leans back.

I think about all that.

On my own dime again. No more Terry breathing down my neck. No more sit-downs with Predo. No more taking care of everyone else’s business before my own.

Yeah.

And no more easy blood. No more stipend from the Society coffers. Scuffling. Scraping for my own blood, let alone the stuff for Evie’s transfusions. And, sure, no more sit-downs with Predo, but probably seeing him sooner than later. Once I’m out from Society sanction, he’ll be sending his giant to collect me. For accounts past due.

Rogue.

Alone.

God I want it.

God I want to be alone. Please let me be alone. Leave me alone. Don’t ask me for anything. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to think about anyone else anymore. I’m no good at it.

I reach out and drop the butt of my Lucky in Terry’s teacup.

– Where am I going?

He slides the cup away.

– Coney Island.

Coney Island. The far edge of the world. Where the land runs out. Put it on a map, you’d be scrawling Here there be fucking monsters across it.

I don’t say anything, I don’t have to.

Terry holds up a hand.

– Yeah, it’s a bit of a haul. But you’ll have wheels. And company. -Company. So why the fuck do I have to go?

He picks up his cup, remembers I dropped my smoke in it, frowns.

– The company is exactly why you’re going, Joe.

He holds a finger up to signal the waiter who turns his back and continues flirting with the cashier.

He sets the cup on the table.

– My own fault for being a dick. There’s karma for you, Joe.

I look at the clock one last time. If I hurry, I’m pretty sure I can catch the drunk orderly.

– Why I’m going, man? Company?

He pushes the cup away.

– Yeah, company. Well, like I say, their person, the Freaks’, is coming here, but, they’re you know, leery, so, one of ours has to stay with them.

I rise, lean over the table.

– Fuck. No.

– Easy, man.

– I am not going out there to be tied up and sit in a basement with a bag over my face waiting to find out if it all goes cool so I don’t get my head sawed off. You want a pawn, send one. Hurley’s around here someplace.

He puts his hand over his heart.

– Hurley? No, not for this. And you? Sit hostage? No way. Man, that’s like the whole point. They’re sending someone from their hierarchy, Joe. We have to do the same. That’s why you got to go, to make sure she gets back. I can’t rely on Hurley if any, you know, subtlety is called for.

I stay on my feet.

– She?

He glances at his watch.

– Yeah. And she’s, you know, a valuable asset, so handle with care, right?

– I don’t appreciate being discussed like I’m property.

We both look at Lydia.

Terry rises.

– Man, I wish I could be in on this. It’s like a brave new world.

Lydia points at the check and money on the table.

– Is that what you’re leaving for a tip? You know what someone makes in the service industry, Terry? There’s no minimum wage, no health benefits, no pension plan. You ever waited tables?

Terry digs in his pocket.

– My bad. My bad.

I rub my forehead, look at Terry.

– It has to be tonight?

– Yeah. See, these aggressors I’m talking about, imperialists really, they’re kind of everywhere out there from what we hear.

– Great.

Lydia puts her hands in the pockets of her Carhartt jacket.

– Except on Friday night. So if we don’t want to mess with them we go now.

Why couldn’t it have been Hurley?

– It’s political. Not that I’m saying any decision isn’t political, but in this case it’s more so. Every time you put one of those things in your mouth and light it and inhale and then blow the smoke for other people to breathe, that’s a political decision.

With Hurley I could have smoked without getting this shit.

– And don’t look at me like that. Just because it can’t affect me or you, that doesn’t make it OK. We may be afflicted, we may have been infected with a disease that’s enabled us at the same time that it’s disenabled us, but we have to remember that we live in the same world as everyone else. That’s the biggest danger I see to the Society charter. The fact that we need blood to survive, that’s going to be a huge psychological hurdle for non-Vyral people to clear, but the psychological impact of that need on the Vyrally impaired is as big an obstacle. I see it all the time, the drinking of blood, the fact that it comes from uninfected humans makes it very easy to begin seeing the uninfected as somehow less real than us. We can’t afford that kind of, elitism isn’t the word, but that kind of superiority to creep into our thinking. Smoking, just freely spewing your secondhand smoke around to kill people, that’s political, Joe, whether you want to accept the fact or not.

I offer the pack to Lydia again.

– So you want one or not?

She slumps back in her seat.

– Just keep your window down, OK, I hate the smell of the fucking things and I don’t want their stink all over the van.

I light up.

– Sure, window down, of course. I mean, where the hell am I gonna throw the butts if the window’s not down?

She looks out her own window.

– Karma, Joe, it’s gonna shit all over you one day.

– And it’s been so good to me up till now.

– Without you even knowing it.

– Whatever.

I park the Econoline and open the door.

Lydia looks at the sign on the storefront and shakes her head.

– No. No, you will not be drinking and driving.

I step out of the van.

– Keep your panties on, it’s not for me.

At Beth Israel, I find my orderly and give him his pint of Gilbey’s and he uses his passkey in the elevator and takes me up to Evie’s floor. The night nurse rises behind her desk as we approach, a hand reaching for the phone, but the orderly goes to her and slips her the twenty bucks I gave him and she turns down the hall and walks into the bathroom.

The orderly takes a hit off his pint.

– Five minutes.

I go into Evie’s room. Curtains are drawn around her bed and the old lady’s. I duck under hers.

She looks like hell.

I look at the bags in her IV stand. Straight fluids in one. And a morphine drip. She must have cramped badly after the chemo. She must have dry heaved for a couple hours and been unable to sleep. A trache tube juts from her throat. That’s new.

I think about the night we met.

I think about putting a hand over the end of the tube.

I touch the scabs that have grown over the part of my ear the Count didn’t rip off my head and think about peeling them away and leaning over the bed and pressing the wound to Evie’s lips and finding out what kind of girl she really is.

What kind of man I am.

I take the chart from the foot of her bed and look at it. It means nothing to me. I put it back. I put a hand in my jacket pocket and take out the candy necklace from Solomon’s store. I put it on the bedside table and leave, not having the guts to do anything that might help her.

The night nurse is at her station. I stop in front of her. She smells like a different brand of disinfectant than the one they use to clean everything in here.

– Why the trache tube?

She doesn’t take her eyes from the screen of her computer, just raises her hand and rubs her fingers against her thumb. I grab her wrist. With a squeeze and a twist and a pull I could mash her radius and ulna and tear her hand from her arm and drop it in her lap and walk out with her screams as a sound track.

She looks at my fingers wrapped around her wrist.

– You’ll have to let go of me, sir.

This isn’t her fault. Evie being sick has nothing to do with her. She’s just trying to get by.

I squeeze.

She gasps.

I haul her up out of her chair.

– The fucking hole in her neck, why’s it there?

She puts her hand over mine, plucks at my fingers, stops, pats my wrist as if to calm me.

– The herpes lesions have spread into her throat. There was severe esophagitis and swelling.

I let her go and she drops into her chair, cradling her left wrist, staring at the dark ring of bruises around it.

I drop a fifty on her desk. Think about it. Pick it up and put it back in my pocket and leave.

Lydia looks up from the map she’s spread over the dashboard as I climb in the van.

I point at it.

– I want to get there fast.

She traces a line with her fingernail.

– FDR to the BQE.

I grind the ignition and the engine catches.

She raps a knuckle on the plywood wall that seals off the windowless rear of the van.

– If there’s an emergency, don’t try to race back for me. Just park and wait out the sun in the back.

I look out the windshield up at the hospital, and turn in my seat and punch a hole in the plywood and heave and it crashes into the back of the van, leaving it wide open to any light that might pour in through the windshield.

Lydia picks up a scrap of wood, looks at it, sticks it in my face.

– What the fuck, Pitt? What the fuck?

I put the van in gear.

– Incentive to get this shit done before sunrise.

I pull from the curb, running a red light, speeding toward the FDR.

– What are you looking for?

We’ve cleared the eastern end of the Manhattan Bridge and I’m taking us through the insane series of ramps and loops that will put us on the BQE.

– I’m looking for signs.

Lydia takes her foot off the dash, leans over and looks at my face.

– No you’re not.

I point out the windshield.

– The assholes that designed this shit wanted to kill us. I’m trying to find the signs that’ll keep us from plowing into something made of concrete.

She leans back and puts her feet up.

– You’re looking for an ambush.

I tighten my fingers on the wheel.

– No, I’m not.

She crosses her ankles.

– You’re looking for a bunch of savage infecteds in loincloths. You’re looking for zombie parachutists. You’re looking for dragons. You’re in the wilderness and you’re scared the lions, tigers and bears are going to eat you.

I stop scanning the edges of the road and overhanging tree branches and overpasses and cars that pull up alongside us. I stop looking at any of the places I’ve been looking at, searching for ambushes.

– I’m just driving.

She taps the toe of her Doc Martens on the windshield.

– You ever been off of the Island? Before, I mean.

– I was born in the Bronx.

– You’re such a New Yorker, never been anywhere. I traveled. I did a semester in Europe, in Italy. Went everywhere. And I’m from the West Coast. When I came out here I took a whole month to drive crosscountry. Been to Canada. Costa Rica. Mexico. Hawaii when I was a kid. Been to fucking Disney World. Most disgusting place on earth. Consumerism at its worst.

I chain another smoke.

– That radio work?

– Sure.

I toss the spent butt out the window.

– Mind playing something on it?

– What do you want to hear?

– Something that isn’t you.

She flips the bird at me and clicks the radio and settles the dial on some college station that’s playing some chick with an acoustic guitar.

Pet the Cat music, Evie calls it.

– This OK?

– If it includes you shutting up, it’s OK.

She nods, draws a little spiral in the dust on the dash.

– How’s she doing, your friend?

I reach over and spin the dial and put it on a jazz station and turn it up. Coltrane plays “Stardust.”

Lydia ruffles her short hair.

– Just that you never asked about HIV again after that one time and I didn’t know if you’d been able to get her some new meds. And stopping at the hospital just made me wonder?

– She’s fine.

– If she’s in the hospital, she isn’t fine. I told you before, I know people in the treatment community. One of the Lesbian Gay and Other Gendered Alliance members was a hospice worker. If she needs care, we could arrange something.

– She doesn’t need care.

– Hospital’s not the place for someone who’s really sick. They don’t give a shit. Fucking HMOs, it’s all about the bottom line. Get them in and get them out. Free up the beds for another pile of dollars. She could be at home, if she’s that bad.

We grind into traffic merging from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and start crawling through Red Hook.

– She’s not staying in the hospital. She’s gonna be fine.

Lydia tugs on her rainbow-enameled ear cuff.

– You’re not thinking about doing something to make her fine, are you, Joe?

I lean on the horn, cut the wheel and drive up on the shoulder, peel around a line of cars and jump back in the lane beyond the jam and put the pedal down.

Lydia adjusts the strap of her seat belt.

– Just as a reminder, infecting someone, on purpose, that’s a severe abuse of the Society charter. An execution offense. You get the sun for that.

Greenwood Cemetery appears on our left. I know its name the same way I know the names of anything off the Island; I’ve read about it. It’s a hell of a lot bigger than on the map.

Lydia looks at it as we drive past.

– And there’s the moral issue. Do you have the right to infect anyone? Even if you think it might save their life, do you have the right to make that choice for them? Personally, I don’t think anyone has the right to make any decision for anyone.

The cemetery disappears behind us. The road is open. We bend right onto the Belt Parkway toward the bay, the decommissioned docks on one side, Owl’s Head Park on the other.

– And, of course, you never even know if it will work. I mean, I’ve never tried to infect anyone, but I know the survival rate is below fifty percent. And it’s a horrible death.

On the POW/MIA Memorial Parkway, long span and towers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge ahead, a right turn and we’d be heading west.

Solomon’s hogleg digs into my back. The Docks Boss’.44 weighs my left jacket pocket. A round from that in Lydia’s side, lean over and open her door and push her out and take the ramp onto the bridge. See something else.

Lydia puts a finger on the radio dial, takes it off.

– Just acting like you don’t care, Joe, that doesn’t change anything. And it won’t change how you feel if you fuck up and do something cruel and stupid. Something irrevocable.

Kill Lydia and drive away and see something else. Something new.

The first part has its appeal.

The rest of it? Ask me, there’s probably nothing out there worth seeing. Nothing better than a dying girl with no hair.

The bridge slips away and we’re on Leif Erikson Drive. The ocean on our right. I look at it. I’ve never seen it from this close.

Lydia stares.

– I flew over it. I flew over the whole damn thing. Twice. Imagine. And I’ll never do it again.

She leans her forehead against her window.

– Fucking Vyrus.

I glance at her.

– Still talking to Sela?

The muscles in the back of her neck jump.

– Sometimes. She’s Coalition now, but she’s still a friend.

I look at the road, arcing onto Shore Parkway, away from the water.

– She’s fucking the girl.

She turns from the window.

– I know.

I fish a smoke from my pocket.

She looks at the map in her lap, points.

– Cropsey Ave.

I take the exit. Neither of us talks. We hit a red at Neptune and watch the people draining away from the boardwalk where the rides are dark and the arcades are shutting down and the drunks are puking on the sidewalk outside Nathan’s.

She points again and I take a right on Surf.

She starts folding the map.

– Love doesn’t have a reason.

I ignore that nonsense.

She doesn’t.

– Sela and the girl feel something. You can’t do anything about that. And it’s none of your business anyway.

I roll down toward Seagate and pull to a stop and park on Mermaid Ave., around the corner from 37th and the ragged-ass end of the Riegelmann Boardwalk.

– Yeah, funny you should say that about it being none of my business.

I take out the big.44 and flip the cylinder and make sure I filled it with big hollow-point bullets. I did.

– Because I’ve been thinking just those words for the last half a fucking hour.

Lydia points at the gun.

– Planning to use that, Joe?

I drop the revolver in my pocket and take out the hogleg and break it open.

– No plans, just hopes.

She opens her door and swings down.

– Do me a favor, keep it in your pants.

We walk down the sidewalk, windblown sand crunching under our feet. We make for the lights flickering on the far side of the boardwalk.

She inhales sea air.

– Smells good.

I inhale smoke.

– Sure does.

We walk out on the boardwalk.

Lydia stops.

– She could change everything.

I stop.

She’s looking out at the water, a big moon rippling on the waves.

– The girl, Joe. Sela says. Joe. She could change everything.

I drop my smoke and grind it under my heel.

– Don’t talk crazy, Lydia. You’re smarter than that.

And I walk away from her and look down at the canvas tent, painted black and speckled with red gloss, that juts from beneath the edge of the boardwalk, pennants flapping from the center pole, torches burning at the entrance, a big banner cracking in the wind as a tall guy in a top hat and a tailcoat spiels in front of it.

– FREAKS! That’s rightytighty, ladeez and gentilemans! Real! Live! Freaks! Not the cut-rate varietals one finds down the shore! But the Real McCoy! Bearded ladies and tattooed men and wild Borneo savages are best left to the amateurs! Within the folds of this modest tent we will reveal to you actual FREAKS of nature! Creatures that spurn the light of day! Fearful, unnatural sports of fate that were never meant to be! Step up and step in, ladeez and gentilemans! A show unlike any other! A spectacle! A horror show! A festival of disgust and blood! Step! Right! Up!

Lydia comes alongside me.

I look at her.

– Can we leave now, or do we have to sit through this shit?

Apparently we have to sit through this shit.

– Ladeez and gentilemans!

I spill the last unpopped kernels from the red and white striped popcorn box into my mouth and crunch them.

– Know what would make this better?

– Never before on any stage at any time have you witnessed an appetite like the appetite of…The Glasseater!

Lydia is staring through the torch-lit gloom to the tiny stage where the MC gives the tails of his shabby coat a flip and bows as the curtain parts and reveals a scrawny dude in a loincloth sitting at a dinner table with dull silver candelabra and chipped china.

– If it wasn’t utterly exploitive?

Two chubby chicks in thigh-high leather boots, ripped lace corsets, snake tattoos and black lipstick come on stage. One ties a napkin around the Glasseater’s neck while the other places a tray covered by a dented silver dome in front of him. She pulls the dome away with a lackluster flourish, revealing a huge soup bowl piled high with rusty nails, shattered glass, twists of broken spring, bottle caps, chips of razor blades and bent sewing needles.

He takes the soupspoon from his setting, breathes onto it and wipes it in his bare armpit, dips up a helping of the scrap, smiles with broken teeth, shovels it in his mouth and begins to chew with his mouth open as the audience groans and squeals. Blood and bits of torn flesh dribble from his mouth along with shards of steel and glass as he swallows hard and snorts and a fine spray of blood fans from his nostrils.

I toss the empty popcorn box on top of the pile of beer cups, beer cans, beer bottles and corndog wrappers erupting from a rancid trash barrel.

– If I didn’t know he was gonna stop bleeding before he got off stage, and be as good as new tomorrow morning, that would make this better.

The small crowd of Brooklyn hipsters, old-school Coney Islanders, roughnecks and shorties does a collective gross-out and flinches as he spits blood at them and it splashes against the sheet of transparent plastic draped between them and the stage.

The frown on Lydia’s face carves itself a little deeper.

– Waste. Immoral waste.

I poke a finger in the opening of my rapidly thinning last pack of Luckys and count the remainders.

– Not your blood.

She glances at me, shakes her head.

– Is that what you think? Well it is, Joe. It’s mine and it’s yours. And more than that, it’s the blood of the uninfected people watching this spectacle without a notion of what’s going on.

The act comes to an end as the Glasseater autoregurgitates the wreckage, along with a fair amount of blood and fleshy bits, and the curtain drops.

Lydia turns on the bleacher and whispers at me over the hubbub of the crowd waiting for the next act.

– That blood? Someone could have used that to stay healthy another day. And someone, someone completely ignorant of the Vyrus is going to be replacing the blood that asshole just wasted. It’s like watching a Hummer drive by with the windows rolled down and the AC on full blast. Makes me want to puke.

The sound system cranks and Motorhead blisters the speakers with “Jailbait.”

The chubby girls, topless other than crosses of black electric tape over their nipples, sporting ripped satin pantaloons, one carrying twin beds of nails and the other carrying a sledgehammer, come from behind the curtain.

I point an unlit cigarette at the stage.

– Then I’m guessing this act is gonna really piss you off.

The MC raises his arms.

– Ladeez and gentilemans! The esoteric and erotic mysteries of the Far East as revealed by Vendetta and Harm!

Lydia jumps from the bleachers, puts her head down, storms across the stained and threadbare carpets laid over the sand and ducks out of the tent.

I put my last cigarette in my mouth and watch the first girl sandwich herself between the nail beds and the second girl start tap-dancing on top of her, wielding the hammer like a cane. More blood flows.

Having seen enough to know that the point of the act isn’t to demonstrate how one lays on nails without being harmed, I follow Lydia.

The torches planted in the sand outside the entrance whip in the breeze off the ocean, streams of greasy smoke tail up the beach and under the rotting wood of the boardwalk that half the tent hides beneath.

Lydia is stomping over the sand, kicking up little plumes with her Docs, headed for the tide line.

– Come get me when it’s over. If I stay, I’m going to make a scene.

I peek through a gap in the entrance, see what the chicks are up to, and figure she’s right.

My Zippo won’t hold a flame in the wind so I take a light from one of the torches and lean against a piling, listening to the rock ’n’ roll and the gasps and screeches of the audience, smoking and looking at the ocean in the moonlight. Counting seconds till the show is over and I can collect the Freaks Boss and get back to my life. Such as it is.

– Bum one of those?

It takes me a second to smell him, another second to see him. The first because he comes at me from downwind, the second because he’s a fucking midget.

I squeeze the pack between my fingers, feel three left, give him one.

He takes the smoke and pats the pockets of the denim overalls he wears over his bare, blue-tattooed torso and arms.

– Light?

I offer him my smoke and he lights his own and gives mine back.

– Thanks.

I take a drag.

– So what’s it like?

He scratches a wrinkled bald head.

– What’s that?

I hold my hand three feet over the sand.

– Midget Vampyre? How’s that work? Find it a bitch getting to someone’s neck?

He smiles, flashing full sets of steel dentures, canines every tooth, and points at my upper thigh.

– Usually find something I can get to in a pinch.

I think about kicking him down the beach. Wonder if I could get him to the water. Wonder if he would float.

He takes a silver flask from the side pocket of the overalls, swigs from it and holds it up.

– You the guy from Manhattan?

I wave the flask off.

– I’m the driver. One you want is by the water.

He takes another slug of the thick dark rum I smell in the flask and slips it away in his pocket.

– Whatsay you come in and take a look at the finale?

– Whatsay we skip the donkey fucking, or whatever you close with and you grab your boss so we can do the swap and I can get back where I belong.

He looks up at me, blows a stream of smoke that just reaches my face.

– Buddy, I am the boss. And till the show is over, no one goes anywhere.

He drops the half-finished smoke at my feet.

– You can finish that if you want.

He turns and heads for the back of the tent.

– Me, I got an entrance to make.

It’s a showstopper.

People cover their eyes, howl, run from the tent, one or two start crying, a couple who’s been here before laugh and shake their heads, still not believing what they’re seeing.

The midget is standing in the middle of the stage, tugging lengths of intestine from the hole he’s chewed in his own belly and draping them over the shoulders of Vendetta and Harm, who admire them like mink stoles, giving them the occasional lick.

Lydia watches, nothing about her moves except her discontent. That’s all over the fucking place.

The midget brings a loop of intestine up to his mouth, shows the steel teeth, the music crescendos, a full-fledged Guitar Wolf freak-out, he opens his jaws wide, the torches flutter suddenly, his teeth glitter and snap down and the torches go out and red and blue strobes pulse and everyone screams as the midget collapses and the girls fall on him and tear his flesh and stuff their mouths full of it and the guy who did a strongman act at the beginning of the show appears in his executioner’s hood and swings a broadsword and hacks at the girls as they continue to feed.

The strobes stop. The tent goes black. The screams kick up a notch.

I smell the midget’s infected blood, whiffs of his bowels, the kerosene the torches were dipped in, seaweed, salt air, stale beer and corndogs from the trash barrel, cigarette and pot smoke and the blush of uninfected blood freshly drawn.

I grab Lydia and push her behind me and put my hand on the butt of Solomon’s hogleg.

Lights come on, strings of red Christmas lights looped among the rigging wires and poles of the tent.

The people on the bleachers stop shrieking.

The midget is standing center stage, dripping gore, he steps forward, does a pratfall over his own intestines, gets up and takes a bow.

The place goes nuts.

The Strongman lifts the girls, placing one on either shoulder, and they wave at the audience with fake severed arms and legs.

Lydia wrenches free of me.

– Fuck are you thinking, Pitt? There’s trouble, stay out of my way so you don’t get hurt.

I raise my hands.

– Yeah, my bad, forgot who’s wearing the trousers.

– Fuck you.

The Freaks wrap their curtain call. The audience laughs and claps and hoots and hollers and throws crumpled bills and loose change and the performers clear the stage and Tom Waits sings “Singapore,” their exit music, and the show is over.

I count heads as the audience files out of the tent, try to figure who’s missing and how many.

– Unconscionable! Immoral! And fantastically idiotic!

– Oh! Oh sweet Jesus! Oh my Lord in Heaven, fuck me now!

The midget has tucked the last of his intestine where it belongs; gritting his fake teeth, he pinches the edges of the wound together as Vendetta pulls a glowing iron rod from the brazier where it’s been heating in a pile of white coals and presses it against the torn flesh.

The midget drops his head back and laughs and screams like a little kid on a roller coaster.

– Hooooo! Whhooohoooo! Oh my! Oh my God! Sheeeeit!

Vendetta pulls the rod away and the Glasseater pours cold water over the steaming cauterization.

The midget brings his face down, tears running from the corners of his eyes, and exhales. He leers at Lydia.

– Sorry about the language, just that hurts like a motherfucker.

He peels one of the Pabst Blue Ribbons from the six at his feet and cracks it open.

– So now, unconscionable, you were saying? I’m not sure about that part, not knowing what the word means and all, but fantastically idiotic is a phrase I could learn to love. That right there, that just about sums up the whole Freak, whatyacallit, value system in two words. Hatter, what’s a good word for value system?

The MC takes a coverless pocket dictionary from inside his tailcoat and looks at a page.-Ethos.

Lydia has her hands on her hips.

– Make a joke out of it, make a joke out of it, but this is not the way we do things. If you plan on joining the Society, there’s going to be a whole new set of behaviors to learn. Because behavior like that?

She points at the corpse flopped across the table they used in the Glasseater’s act, the chump they snatched and slashed during the finale blackout. The Strongman, still in his hood, pumps the dead guy’s chest, the last of his blood sputtering from the hole gnawed in his neck and filling the mason jar Harm holds against it.

– Behavior like that will not be tolerated. A random act of violence, an outright murder that begs for attention, that will not be condoned in any way, shape or form by any Clan in Manhattan, let alone by the Society. The waste of blood aside, the moral issues aside, there’s just the practical question of exposure. A display like that? In public? You can make it look as fake as you like, but it’s going to draw attention. And what about the legal implications? This is an unlicensed operation. You’re only a half mile from the amusement park. What about the police?

He drains his beer and grabs another.

– Cops we got no problem with. Coney cops, you pitch them a C-note they could give a shit what you do. As for attention, well, that’s the whole point isn’t it? No attention, no audience. We do things the freak show up on the boardwalk can only dream about. Funny thing is, they get up on their high horse ’bout what we do. Talk ’bout how faking is counter to the freak way of life. They only knew, they’d shit little purple HoHos.

– Uh-huh, and what about other kinds of attention? You know we have a Van Helsing in Lower Manhattan right now? What happens if a Van Helsing hears about your act? Do you think he or she will have trouble telling the difference between pig intestine, Karo syrup and red food coloring, and the real thing? What you’re doing, it puts all infecteds at risk. Utterly without sanction. With no mandate at all. With no aim at all. Simple willfulness. Unconscionable.

– Sister, ain’t no such thing as a Van Helsing.

Her eyes bug.

– No such thing?

– You ever seen one? I never seen one. Urban legend. Stuff to scare kiddies with. Trust me, work in this game long as I have, you know a fake when you hear ’bout it.

Lydia looks at me.

– Joe?

I look at my watch, the second hand sweeps around, shaving another sliver from the edge of the night.

I look at the midget.

– Got a guy on Rivington, in chunks.

He looks down at his beer.

– Cut up? How many pieces?

– Fuck do I know, didn’t bother counting.

He swirls the beer in his can and takes a swig.

– Didn’t count ’em, or don’t know how?

I look to Lydia.

– These guys are assholes. We should go before they waste any more of our time.

The midget points at me.

– Watch who you’re calling asshole, shorty.

I tap my watch.

– Terry said there were supposed to be a couple dozen of them. What have we seen? Six assholes. There ain’t no more. They’re carneys. Professional liars. And they’re spastic. C’mon, we both know we’re not taking any of these losers to Manhattan. Let’s blow.

He looks at Lydia.

– Best put a muzzle on your hound, lady.

– Joe’s not a dog, he’s a person. And I am not a lady, I am a woman.

The midget runs a fingertip over the fresh seam of blisters that crosses his stomach. The white tips are already fading, pinking, healing; the Vyrus is putting the blood he sucked from the dead guy to good use.

He sips some beer.

– Hatter, look up woman in that dictionary, tell me if that’s some other way of saying girl.

Lydia folds her arms and looks at the ground. -Girl?

The midget purses his lips and covers his mouth with a finger.

– Oopsy. Did I say a no-no? Did I let slip with a term that doesn’t fit with your lifestyle choices? Honey.

A little snicker runs around the tent. Only the Strongman doesn’t laugh.

A thin stream of air slides between Lydia’s lips. She looks at the midget.

– What did you say your name was?

The midget points at one of the faded blue tattoos on his neck.

– Like it says right here. Stretch. Name’s Stretch.

She squints at the tattoo.

– Yeah. Stretch. OK, clearly I’m not going to be able to make my point with you the way I’d like to. Let me put it another way.

She pauses, looks at the top of the tent’s center-pole, where smoke from the torches and the brazier slips out through a large hole, and looks back at him.

– You are fucked.

He raises his eyebrows.

– Fucked?

She nods.

– Raw. You had a chance not to be, but you are now officially fucked raw.

He blows out his lips, reaches back and rubs a buttock.

– Hell, fucked raw and I didn’t even get a reach-around.

The snicker goes around the tent again, but not as far.

Lydia nods again.

– Yeah, no reach-around. See, here you are, you and your Clan, and you need something. You need something so bad, you have to go outside of your inbred little comfort zone and look for help.

– Help? Ain’t no one asking for help around here. We’re the ones making offers.

She gives him a look up and another back down.

– Like. Hell.

He stands, grimaces as skin around his wound stretches.

– You want to start watching your lip, woman.

Lydia looks at me.

– Finally, he calls me what I am, and he thinks it’s an insult.

She looks at Vendetta and Harm.

– How can the two of you put up with being exploited by this piece of crap?

Vendetta grabs her crotch.

– Exploit this, cunt.

Lydia waves a hand.

– You’re not my type.

Stretch puts himself in front of Lydia.

– You leave them girls out of this.

Lydia squats slowly, puts herself on eye level with him.

– Gladly.

His lips peel from his gleaming teeth, a bit of pink gristle caught between two of them.

– You best start treading softly.

Lydia purses her lips and covers them with a finger.

– Oh, did I say something out of line? Pardon me, let me be clear so I can make that up to you.

She shows her own teeth.

– You are on the ass end of the world. You are all alone out here and someone has your back against it. And you are so fucking terrified you call us for help to get out. Joe’s right, isn’t he? This is it, just a half dozen of you? The way you pathetic, self-destructive dysfunctions live out here, you couldn’t sustain more than six members. And now, now you get a chance, a shot at getting off this sandbar and joining with a real Clan, having some stability, being a part of something real, and all you can do is swing your dick around and try to act like you don’t need the help you’re screaming for.

She shakes her head.

– Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She straightens.

– You’re right, Joe, they’re assholes. Let’s go.

She starts for the exit.

Stretch takes a step after her.

– Hey! Hey, now! Now wait a second.

Lydia stops and turns.

– What?

Stretch licks his lips.

– You got a mouth on you, lady. Some mouth. Come on a man’s turf and talk that way. Some mouth. Takes, know what that takes, takes balls. You got some balls on you. I like that. That’s OK by me. You come back in here and let’s have a beer and we’ll do the swap and get rolling. We’re all introduced now, so let’s do some business.

Lydia creases her forehead.

– Asshole, you missed the point. We don’t want you. You people are a mess. You’re going to have to stay out here where you belong. Until you get kicked into the ocean.

She turns again.

Stretch snaps his fingers.

The Strongman’s eyes narrow behind the headman’s hood. Harm sets the mason jar aside and rests her hand on her sledgehammer. Vendetta’s fingers tighten on the iron poker. Hatter opens his dictionary wide and a derringer drops from the hollowed pages into his hand. Glasseater licks his lips.

Stretch folds his arms over his little barrel chest.

– Tell me, you uptight Manhattan snobs think you can talk to me like that and walk out of here in one piece?

I pull the hogleg from my belt and put it against his forehead.

– Tell me, do you think you clowns can stop me if I decide to blow your stomach open, rip your guts back out, stretch them across the boardwalk, and run my van over them a few times?

Lydia raises both her hands, opens her mouth to chill the situation, and something slaps the stiff canvas of the tent, whispers through the air and imbeds itself in her neck.

I blink.

– Jesus fuck, is that an arrow?

A heavy rain hits the tent, sharp reports followed by chorused sighs.

Fletched steel shafts sprout in the sand. Pepper the table and the corpse. Bristle from the Strongman’s back as he scoops Vendetta and Harm together and bends his body over theirs. Glasseater gnashes his broken teeth on the one that springs out of his mouth, and finds it inedible. They chase Stretch as he crawls under the stage. Hatter pulls one from his foot, turns and runs into a flock of them that pelt his chest and face.

I drop to the ground. One passes through my right biceps and into my side, pinning my arm to my torso.

The storm stops.

Something black flutters at the entrance of the tent. I see the Wraith in my memory, stop breathing, roll onto my left side, fire both barrels of the hogleg, the recoil jerking my arm back, the shaft of the arrow tearing flesh, the barbed tip twisting between two ribs.

The black shape in the entrance sprays a cloud of blood and explodes back into the night.

A man, a man in a cape. Only a man.

I breathe. Smell the Vyrus thick in the fresh blood.

Not a Wraith, but not a man. More are out there.

I get up. Lydia has the arrow in her neck, more in her legs and abdomen. I grab her and drag her toward the rear of the tent, kicking the brazier from its stand as I pass it, spilling flaming coals over the grease-stained carpets and under the dry boards of the stage and the bleachers.

Fire wastes no time, begins to eat the tent and its contents.

I reach the back of the tent, drop Lydia, grab the canvas at its base and heave it up, tearing long iron stakes from the sand. I look back, see more black shapes beating at the entrance, leaping across the flames, the trailing wings of one catching fire.

The Strongman rises, porcupined in steel, and takes his broadsword from the edge of the stage as Vendetta and Harm worm beneath the platform, over the coals scattered there. Two of the caped silhouettes jump, the broadsword arcs, dividing one of the shapes into two bleeding halves and imbedding in the other before it slams into him and drives him onto his back. The heads of the arrows burst from his chest and stomach and he grabs the wounded attacker and pulls him close and fire is reflected everywhere in blood.

I wrap my fingers in Lydia’s hair and duck under the edge of the burning tent, hauling her through the sand, jerking to a stop as something grabs her and she’s torn from me; dropping the fistful of her hair, snagging her wrist and digging my heel into the sand as she’s pulled back into the tent.

– Pitt.

Lydia, rasping over the arrow in her throat, reaching to me with her other hand.

– Gun. Gun.

I drop the hogleg, force my right hand across my body, ripping the hole in my biceps wider, twisting the barbs deeper. I tug the Docks Boss’ gun from my jacket pocket and toss it into the sand as the things holding her legs heave and we’re both pulled toward the flaming canvas.

She scoops up the huge revolver.

– Let me go. Go.

Three arrows pierce the tent and fly into the darkness behind me.

Lydia twists her arm to free herself.

– Go. Just fucking come back.

I let her go and she’s dragged screaming into the tent and I snag the hogleg and I run into the darkness below the boardwalk, trailing blood, the sound of the revolver crashing behind me.

Lydia, filling the blazing night with lead.

Burrowed deep in sand where it piles up high under the boardwalk, I break the hogleg, drop the spent shells and replace them. I face back on my trail and wait for something that I can blow in half.

Nothing comes.

I watch the tent burn. I watch the fluttering silhouettes hack the lines, tumbling it down so that it burns faster. I watch them gather bodies and parts of bodies. Three of them carry the Strongman and the smaller corpse pinned to him.

I listen.

– Don’t leave anything.

– I’m not leaving anything, Axler.

– We need it all.

– I never buried anyone? I never sat Shiva? I don’t know we need it all?

– Just don’t leave any of Chaim on the ground.

– It’s too late. He was sprayed all over the tent. And half of Fletcher burned before we could get to him.

– Burned. Fuck. Will the Chevra Kadisha be able to do anything?

– Ask your papa.

– Shit.

One of the silhouettes stands at the edge of the firelight, peering under the boardwalk.

– Selig, come away, we have to go.

– Some got away.

– Too late. We have to go. The fire.

– They got away. The one that shot Chaim got away. The midget got away. One of his whores got away.

A siren whines, coming closer.

– We have to go.

– They killed Chaim. They killed Fletcher. They killed Elias. We have to find them. We have to kill them.

More sirens join the first.

– We have to go, Selig.

– Chaim. They killed my brother. Chaim. I have to kill them.

He starts to scramble under the boardwalk.

I train both barrels on his shadow.

He stops, scents, his head turns toward my hiding place. Two of the others come after him and grab him.

– Selig. Ha-Makom yenahem ethem b’tokh sha’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yerushalayim, Selig. We have to go.

They pull him from under the boardwalk, dragging him away from the flames, away from my gun that killed his brother.

Lucky fucker.

I pinch the hollow shaft just below the plastic fletching and flatten it between my fingers. Sitting on the floor of the van, arm tight to my side and braced against the paneled interior wall, I grip the arrow just above the pinched alloy and begin to bend it back and forth, stressing the metal. The tip wiggles between my ribs.

When the metal bends with ease, I wrap my fist around it, take a few shallow breaths, feeling the point dig at the side of my lung, and give a single sharp yank that tears the tail of the arrow away and hurts like a motherfucker. I drop the scrap on the floor and lift my right arm and pull it free, fresh blood running from the hole that had sealed itself around the shaft that juts from my side.

I press my fingers into the hole in my side, feeling for the sharp-edged barbs, finding them. I’m lucky that they haven’t slipped in past the ribs. I won’t have to break my own bones to dig the fucker out. That would have sucked.

I take my switchblade from my boot top and it snaps open. I have to use my left hand to cut short twin seams through the skin and muscle on either side of the shaft, then drop the knife, twist the shaft so that the broad surface of the arrowhead is parallel to the ribs and jerk it and find out that it has two shorter barbs right at the tip that snag on the bone and only come free when I curse and twist my right arm around and get a two-handed grip and pull the fucking thing out along with a hunk of meat and cartilage and muscle and slivers of bone.

I pick up one of the strips I’ve already torn my undershirt into and start wrapping it around my torso. The Vyrus will seal the wounds soon, but the more blood I can keep inside, the better this will go for me. I’ve already dribbled a fair amount. And I’m likely to lose more by the time I’ve killed all the people I want to see dead right now.

Someone puts a hand on the outer handle of the rear door and tests to see if it’s locked. It is.

Out the windshield I can see the whirling lights on the cop cars and fire engines and ambulances reflected on the apartment fronts at the intersection of Mermaid and 37th. No cops have poked around over here yet, just one cruiser that drifted down the street playing its searchlight over the garbage cans and row houses. That doesn’t mean they won’t be going car to car soon.

They tug a little harder on the handle. Someone says something. Someone answers. I try to smell something other than my own blood. Catch the scent.

I edge to the door, picking up the pointy end of the broken arrow, ease the lock button up and the door swings suddenly open and I grab the midget and haul him in and throw him down and push the arrow into his ear farther than it should go and point at Vendetta still crouched outside the van.

– Get the fuck in here and sit in the corner and don’t move.

She climbs into the van and pulls the door closed.

Stretch starts to open his mouth and I twist the arrow and blood runs freely from his ear.

– Close your mouth.

He closes his mouth.

– Show me those teeth again and I’ll clean both your ears at the same time.

Vendetta shifts.

– The cops.

I keep my eyes on Stretch.

– I know.

She moves.

I give Stretch a little more of the arrow.

– He’s already gonna be deaf in this ear, honey, move again and I’ll take the short route to making him deaf in the other.

She stays where she is.

– The cops. They’re looking in cars. Coming down Thirty-seventh.

I look out front. Bobbing flashlight beams are working toward the intersection.

Fuck.

I can shove the arrow through Stretch’s ear and jump the girl and probably break her neck before she screams, and start the van and roll with the lights off and circle around Seagate.

I lick my lips, shift, my left hand tenses on the arrow.

Stretch is looking in my eyes.

– She’s alive.

I poke the arrow deeper.

– Told you to keep those teeth hid.

He winces.

– They got her. But she’s alive. Get us out. I’ll tell you where.

The flashlights are coming closer. Once the cops are at the intersection I’m fucked. They see the van rolling, they’ll be after me. High-speed pursuit in a crap van. Busted. Dead.

I put my knee on his chest, pull the arrow out of his ear, shove it in his mouth, push the barbs into his inner cheek, fishhook him and pull.

He strains his neck, trying to keep his face in one piece.

I tug.

– Where?

He gurgles.

– Fuggckgyooog.

The lights are bright at the end of the street.

I drop the arrow and pick up the hogleg and rise and kick him in the crotch three times with my steel toes and whip the barrels of the gun across Vendetta’s forehead and give her the boot.

– Don’t fuck with me or I’ll kill you bad.

I get in the front seat and start the engine and pull out, lights dark.

– Where?

He turns his head.

– Sorry? That was my bad ear.

– Where, fucking where?

His smile shines bloody as he works the arrow out of his mouth.

– Gravesend.

He’s a talker.

– Pisses me off is that it’s Friday night. Supposed to be safe night. Why it’s the only night we do the act.

He picks at the dry blood crusted around his right ear.

– Don’t suppose you know if eardrums grow back?

I ignore him. Trying to think. Trying to figure how far I can take this. The cost of returning without Lydia.

He points at my own mutilated right ear.

– Just askin’ cuz it looks like you have some recent experience with this kind of thing.

Trying to figure if I can just dump him and Vendetta and haul ass back to Manhattan and tell Terry I did everything I could, but Lydia is gone.

– ’Course, yours look to be more of the external variety.

He snaps his fingers next to his bad ear.

– Damn. Fucker’s dead as dead. Pisser. Years of mutilatin’ myself, never did a stitch of permanent damage. Mind you, there was a period of trial and error where it was more from luck than anything else that I didn’t ever bite off nothing that couldn’t grow back.

I think about the solid Lydia once did for me. How I never paid it off. How it was too fucking big to be paid off in one installment. Till now.

Vendetta looks at him from her spot on the floor between our seats.

– Don’t forget the toe.

He holds up his hands.

– Well sure, the toe. Just the pinkie toe, mind. But that was pure experimentation. Tell you, got no regrets about that toe. I hadn’t tested it out first, I might have bit off a finger or something like that. As it is, I’ve sliced and diced and gnawed my flesh just about every which way you can and kept myself in one piece all the while. Traveled my act far and wide. ’Course that was when this was an open city. That’s when the borough of Brooklyn on Long Island was a free place, where a man could go where he pleased and do as he pleased.

He waves his arms at the avenues reeling past us as we roll down Stillwell.

– Toured from Greenpoint to Brighton to Cobble Hill to Canarsie to Bay Ridge. Wintering in Coney, of course. No turf in Brooklyn then. That’s a Manhattan thing. Here, you just pay a mind to where you are, be respectful to whoever the big dog happens to be on the block. Nothing formal. Just a matter of using your head and slipping a dollar or a pint in the right hand. I’m out Red Hook, pitching my tent, taking a bum or two off the streets, I know I gotta throw something to the Docks.

He looks my way.

– Least that’s how it was. Till the Docks up and went to Manhattan and ain’t come back not a one.

I drive, half listening with my half ear, thinking, figuring, looking for an angle that will send me home before I do something stupid. Stupider than usual.

He talks.

– Not that I give a damn. Bastards always had their fingers in one too many pies far as I’m concerned. And they got damn grabby with the ladies when they came around to see the show. A little touching ya got to expect, but Docks boys tended to ride their flippers a bit high up the thigh for my liking.

Vendetta folds her arms on the dash and rests her chin on them.

– Docks stink. All of them. Of tar. Think because a girl’s in show business she’s naturally a whore. Had to take the burlesque out of the act when we went out there. Would have raped me and Harm to death they’d seen that.

She puts her forehead down.

Stretch touches the back of her head.

– We’ll get her back, darlin’.

Her voice is muted by her arms.

– What they gonna do with her?

Stretch clacks his teeth.

– Gonna do nothin’ to her. Lay a hand on her, gonna find it’s a stump when I come through their turf.

I touch the smoke tucked behind my whole ear. My last smoke.

He shifts his ass and adjusts the pieces of 2×4 he dug out of the back of the van and put on the seat to use as a booster.

– Turf. They started that shit out here. First thing was, they sealed themselves up. Few years back, five or six, you wanted to get from Sheepshead Bay to Sunset Park, suddenly you had to circle through Dyker Heights. Then they started pushing out, clearing blocks for just themselves. Not a matter of talkin’ to the right fella to pass, just no damn passage at all. Try to go straight across Bensonhurst like you used to, a freakin’ boat comes cruising up and a bunch of guys with beards and fedoras come piling out, beat the crap out of you, toss you outside their turf. If you’re lucky. You’re not lucky, you never see the outside of Gravesend again.

I’ve got my fingers on that smoke, I start to tug it from behind my ear, stop, look at him.

– A boat?

He spreads his arms.

– Car. Bigass Caddies and Lincolns an’ suchlike. You know, Jew Canoes.

I put the cigarette in my mouth and put it to work and I get a little less stupid, for the moment.

They don’t go out on Friday nights. Chaim. Shiva. Trying to save the bodies of their friends from the fire. The lingo they were talking.

– Jesus, they’re Jews.

He scratches his chest.

– Well, that’s one way of putting it.

– Thing I can’t figure out, how a man comes all the way out here and doesn’t bring an extra pack of smokes.

– I was planning on going straight back over the bridge.

– Sure you don’t have a spare hiding somewhere?

– I had a spare it’d be sticking out of my face right now.

Vendetta points out the windshield.

– There. There.

We come forward from the back of the van, me crawling, Stretch walking.

I try to see something, but we’re on the far side of McDonald Avenue with all of Friends Field between us and Washington Cemetery.

– What?

She jabs her finger at the playground on the edge of the Field.

– In there. Someone was walking around in there.

– What about in the cemetery?

She points again.

– No, just there in the park. I can’t see shit in the cemetery.

I edge back and sit on the floor.

– This is bullshit.

Stretch comes back.

– Tellin’ you, they got to bury their dead within twenty-four hours. It’s like a rule they have.

Vendetta turns.

– Like not working on the Sabbath.

He kicks one of the pieces of wood littering the van.

– That was pure bullshit that was. Ain’t no confusion about that. Everyone knows they don’t do nothin’ from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Don’t work, don’t drive, don’t answer the phone, don’t turn on a fuckin’ light. Only way anyone gets around anymore in Brooklyn is Friday night. Only time safe to go out and do some foraging. We couldn’t do the act at all anymore they didn’t lie low Friday night.

I pick up one of the wood scraps and pop my switchblade and start whittling.

– Based on the way they fucked your shit up, I’d say that rule’s become pretty fucking optional.

He sticks a thumb in his own chest.

– All I know is, they have to bury their dead, and they got to do it in one of their own cemeteries, and this is the cemetery they use.

Long shavings of wood curl from the stick I’m working on.

– And what if they do it tomorrow night?

He hooks his thumbs in the straps of his overalls.

– They won’t.

– We know that because?

– Because they won’t.

He looks at the stick I’m honing.

– Is that a stake you’re making?

I run my blade along it.

– Yeah.

He lets his arms hang at his sides.

– That like supposed to be humorous or something?

I hold the safe end of the stake to my eye and sight down it.

– Not to me.

– Why you making it, then?

I test the point with my thumb.

– Because I may need to kill more people than I have shells for if your shitty plan gets us that far.

He grunts and turns and goes back front with Vendetta.

– Telling you, this is the place.

I flick the blade across the tip of the stake, wondering if this is the worst play I’ve ever made. The competition is stiff. Sitting, waiting to get lucky. Lucky enough to throw down on guys that favor bows and arrows and fuck knows what else. Hoping to get lucky that they have Lydia with them or know where she is. Lucky enough to cruise over their turf to wherever she may be and get her out. Because I owe her.

But I owe Evie more. For what, I don’t know. But there it is.

I owe her.

I stop carving. I fold the knife away and tuck it in my boot. I feel in my coat pocket for the keys. Finally getting smart.

– Fuck this.

I come forward, drop the stake on the dash and get behind the wheel.

Stretch puts out a hand.

– Whoa, whoa. We drive in there, someone’s gonna see us. We gotta wait till they come and start the service. They start chantin’ and rockin’ back and forth and sayin’ kaddish, we can get the jump on them, take a couple hostages.

I turn in the seat.

– We aren’t going in there. We’re getting the hell to Manhattan. Way to handle this is, we let Terry Bird handle it. He’s a fucking politician. Lydia’s with them, he’ll get her out.

Vendetta rises a little.

– Papa.

He touches her.

– Don’t worry, pumpkin.

I start the van.

– You guys, you can hop out and get killed here or you can ride with me as originally planned.

Vendetta takes his hand.

– Get her back, Papa, we got to get Harm back.

I put the van in gear.

– Bird’ll do what he can. He loves that stuff. Helping out. He can get Lydia back, he can get your chick back.

Stretch puts a hand on my arm.

– You’re not thinkin’ straight. Harm is with them. I’m getting my girl back. Your woman? Who knows she’s even alive?

I look at his hand. -You know she’s alive.

He moves the hand.

– Well, yeah.

I put my hand on the hogleg.

– You said you saw her alive.

He wipes his mouth, smiles.

– Well, it was awful chaotic with the blood and the fire and the killin’ and all that was goin’ on. Could be I confused things a bit.

Vendetta jumps and flops her body across my lap and hits my gun hand and the hogleg falls into the step well and she starts flailing her hands and flicking the headlights on and off and slapping the horn. I put my left elbow in the back of her neck and reach for the stake on the dash and Stretch’s teeth go into my right thigh. I kick and grab his head with both hands and wrench it to the side and he comes off with a mouthful of my leg, spitting it and hissing and vomiting from the taste of the Vyrus and I throw him in the back of the van as headlights shoot through the windshield and something huge and heavy barrels into us and the door next to me crumples and Vendetta is tossed from my lap across the cab into the other door. I reach down into the step well and Stretch slams into the back of my seat and crawls over the top of it and drops on my bent back. People are piling out of the big cars that have us boxed at the curb. I stand and the hole in my leg is jammed into the steering wheel and I pound Stretch into the roof and reach and my fingers find the stake on the dash and I shove it into the meat between Vendetta’s shoulder and neck as she flies back across the cab at me. Her velocity carries her into me and I fall back into the crushed door and Stretch is slashed on the shards of glass that are all that’s left of the driver’s side window. I still have hold of the stake and I twist it and wrench it down and Vendetta’s collarbone snaps and the ends tear through her skin as I pull the stake out and her blood sprays the windshield red, the headlights glowing through it.

Then they’re in the van. In through the rear. In through the passenger door. Pulling Stretch out the window behind me and dragging the ruined door open. Piling on top of me, cutting, pulling, hammering.

Then leather straps go around my arms, keeping me from punching; and around my legs, keeping me from kicking; more around my head and between my teeth, keeping me from biting.

One of them runs at me, screaming, waving a small axe.

– Chaim! Chaim!

Others grab him and take him to the ground, all of them losing their fedoras in the struggle, but not the yarmulkes pinned to the tops of their heads.

Stretch pulls free and runs to where Vendetta is sprawled on the curb trying to push her bones back inside her skin.

– I got you, pumpkin.

A tall one gets up, dusts his fedora, returns it to his head, straightens his vest and the long threads that dangle from beneath it.

– Someone get him away from the girl.

Stretch cradles bleeding Vendetta, my flesh still on his lips.

– To hell with you, Axler. Your cousin is bleeding-out here and you fuck with her father. Now take me to your dad. I want my other daughter back.

I miss the rest of the reunion when the lid of a car trunk slams shut on me.

– Kill them.

– We will, Selig.

– Kill them now.

– Your brother, Selig, think of your brother.

– I am. What else is there to think of? Kill them.

The tall skinny one puts his hands on the little fat one’s shoulders.

– Selig, to talk about killing them here, now, it doesn’t do. It won’t do Chaim any good.

Selig pulls free and turns, his arms spread wide between the tombstones.

– I don’t know, I don’t know what is best for my brother? To have his murder avenged is best. To have his whole body would be best. Not to have parts of him scattered and burned would be best. To have a proper burial would be best. To say the prayers and take the time would be best. None of this is right, Axler. None of it. I didn’t want it. Chaim wanted it. I only came for him. To protect him. Too late. So what if we kill them now? Here? So what? Nothing else is right. Nothing is right in the world.

Axler walks to him and grabs the lapels of his long black coat and shakes him.

– Shut up. Coward. Shut up. Your brother is a hero. A warrior. You are a coward. Shut up. Stop saying his name. You want them dead? You should have been with your brother when he was the first in the tent. You could have killed them then. After, only after it was over, did you become brave. Coward. Help bury your brother and leave vengeance to men.

He pushes the little one and he stumbles back and falls over a low headstone, scattering the rocks piled on top of it.

He gets up on his hands and knees and crawls around, crying, gathering the rocks while the others dig the grave for his brother and mutter hurried prayers.

He places the rocks back on the headstone, one by one, eyes turned from the blood-soaked shroud that wraps his brother’s corpse.

– It was wrong, Chaim. A sin. All of it. On the Sabbath. Working. Making a plan. Driving. On the Sabbath. Small sins leading to greater. Killing on the Sabbath. Killing in the name of God on the Sabbath. I told you you’d be punished, brother.

Axler turns from his digging and spears the point of his shovel in the ground.

– Shut up. There were no sins. This was not work. This was service to God. We didn’t even drive ourselves. And we didn’t use guns. Guns are machines, yes. A bow and arrow is not. An axe is not.

Selig clenches his fist around a rock.

– It’s a tool. A knife, an axe, a bow. They are tools.

Axler picks up the shovel.

– This is a tool. Should I wait to bury your brother if it means I must dig? If we sinned, God will let us know.