A gun and a smoke.
Ask for more, you’re a greedy bastard.
I don’t get to keep the gun for very long.
While I have it, I take in some of the sights. Such as they are. Rows of mats on the floor. Workbenches against the walls. Some big industrial sinks. Kitchen area where I happen to know they boil the bones of their dead before sucking out the marrow. Staircase leading up to the loft where their sleeping cubicles line a long center aisle. Small balcony up there overlooking the floor dotted with the light of scattered candles. Lockers where they store whatever kinds of goods they own. Rags. Cups. Marrow-sucking straws, maybe. Weapons. The cutting and cudgeling variety; they’re not big on firearms here. Couple big drains in the floor. Sewer cap in the corner where they dump the occasional dead body or apostate. Took a ride down the tube once myself. Mostly for being an unlikeable asshole.
All that stuff is much as it always has been. More of everything these days. More than when Daniel was running the show. Signs of all the new Enclave since the Count started expanding the ranks. Geeking them up for the revelation.
Whatever shape that might take.
Supposed to be, one of them will achieve a final adaptation, perfect consumption by the Vyrus. All earthy cells eaten and replaced by Vyrals. The Vyrus understood by them to be from somewhere else. Other than this universe. Another plane.
Whackoness.
Supposed to be, the one who starves himself in perfect discipline and doesn’t die of it, that one will show the others how to do the same. And, made into creatures from another plane, nothing, not even the sun, will harm them.
Cue the crusade.
You die, I die, everybody dies.
Except Enclave.
How it is my girl came to be here is, well, I brought her here. Wanted to keep her from dying of AIDS. It worked, but it created issues. Complicated issues. And I got turned out for being a lying sack of shit who barely told her a word of truth from the night we met.
Speaking of regrets.
So I take in the place, trying to figure what I might say. Trying to figure how long I have to say it before I fade to black. Trying to figure if I’ll get a crack at settling just one more score.
And I almost trip over part of someone’s rib cage and catch myself before I fall and stumble across a hunk of someone’s thigh and just get my balance and have to jump to keep from stomping on a pile of seven livers and that’s all the grace I can muster and I go down with a tangle of gristled spines under me and find myself looking up at the beams crossing under the shallow peak of the sheet-metal roof where an upside-down forest of chains have sprouted, each carrying the flower of a dead and rotting Enclave.
– We’ve been separating the chafe.
I roll toward the voice, gun first, and that’s when I lose it, something white winking close, taking it from me, and winking back into the dark.
I open and close my hand on the emptiness that used to be the gun, then bring my other hand to my face and take a drag and thank fuck they took the piece and not the smoke.
– Hey, Count.
Spindle thin, wearing just the slacks from his white suit, a belt wrapped almost twice around his waist, and a matching vest that slips half off the high point of one of his shoulders, the Count strolls into the light of one of the candles.
He’s carrying a twenty-inch bush blade from the end of a scythe, bringing it like a blood-crusted talon to his forehead; the tipping of a hat.
– Joe.
He lowers the blade, sniffs the air.
– You smell like you’re just about ready for the pot.
I’m one of them.
Not by choice, just how Daniel called it.
Daniel said you were Enclave, that was a sealed deal. It doesn’t wear off. Even if you don’t want to play, you’re in the game. Can I say it another way?
When you’re a Jet…
Like that.
I never had any use for it. Gave me room to tap Daniel for a little news of the world. Gave me a bolt-hole once or twice. Mostly it was just strange baggage to be hauling around.
But if not for the Enclave thing, Daniel never would have baited me years back. Starved me out. Drew me to the edge and pushed me into the deep end. Never would have cared to find out if I could cope. Never would have sent the Wraith to make a killing and keep me alive. And if none of that had ever happened, I wouldn’t know just how close I am to over, and what to do when it happens.
Course it also means they’ll be eating my marrow pretty soon.
Just hoping to keep one fucker from tucking in.
He grazes my forehead with the tip of the scythe blade.
– What did I tell you, Joey Joe Joe Joe?
He drags the tip from brow to brow, scraping bone.
– Told you never never come back. Utterly clear on the concept, man. Nothing vague.
He strikes a pose, pointing the blade in the air.
– I remember it like it was yesterday, man. Said, You go out, you don’t come back. Pretty sure I put a distinct verbal period at the end of that sentence. But, hey, give the benefit of the doubt. You tell me, did I mumble?
I got about two inches left on my smoke. I suck away a quarter of that.
– No, you were clear enough, just that I don’t take you seriously. You being a bad cliché and all.
He nods.
– Yeah, OK, yeah. I’ll bite.
He squats next to me, resting the point of the blade on my chest.
– Tell me how it is I’m a punch line? Cuz I live for this kind of shit.
I suck a little more smoke.
– You’re a punk kid who got infected and named himself Count. Textbook asshole.
He smiles.
– Ever tell you the last name I picked for myself?
I wave my butt.
– Vlad?
He shakes his head.
– Count.
I study the last of my cigarette.
– OK, I’ll give it to ya, that shows a little sense of humor.
– Count Count. You get it, right? You’ve seen Sesame Street?
I lift a hand.
– I get it. It’s not bad.
– Cuz I can laugh at myself, is the point.
– Sure.
He taps his own chest with the blade.
– I’m not the type takes himself all serious.
I nod.
– So laugh at this.
I jam the cherry of my last cigarette into his eye.
Nasty little hiss, drip of blood and something else rolling over his cheekbone, and him just sitting there and staring at me from the eye that I haven’t turned into an ashtray.
Then he opens his mouth wide, drops his head back.
– Ha! Ha! Ha!
He brings his head up and plucks the butt from his eye, looks at it, and flicks it away.
– You know.
He reams drippings from his eye socket with a knuckle.
– Truth is.
He wipes the knuckle on my jacket.
– I barely even use my eyes anymore.
He closes the good one. The other has blistered over, covered in a cluster of tiny bubbles of skin.
– Everything is so lit up at this point. My senses? I feel, like, micro-changes in air pressure on my skin. Hear things. Smell like a hunting dog. My sense of taste, man, I wish I had a couple bottles of nice wine in here.
He runs a fingertip over the concrete floor.
– And the tactile. Telling you, I had any kind of sex drive left, it would blow away any crazy rave ecstasy orgy I ever got my ass into at college. On the subject of the senses, let me ask you.
He stabs the tip of the scythe blade into my biceps, through, until it tinks against the floor.
– You feel that?
I look at the blade, no blood welling around it, like a giant scalpel stuck in a corpse.
He pulls it out.
– No.
He rises.
– You are faaar gone, my main man. But that’s not news.
He points the blade down at me.
– You got fat. Old. Tired. Beat. You are beat. I’m not just talking about you being all cut to chunks, I’m talking about how tired your story is. Man alone. Yojimbo. Get out of the middle of town and let the big boys do business. Only big enough for one operation. We aim to be that operation.