I offer it to Evie.
She takes it, flicks the cap with her thumb and it spins up and off and onto the ground and rolls away.
– Fuck yes.
She drinks.
– Man. Whiskey.
She hands it to me.
– Almost as good as blood.
Christian fake-shades his eyes and squints at her.
– How’d you lay your hands on that one, Joe?
I take a drink, pass him the bottle.
– You know me, lucky in love.
He shakes his head.
– Not sure I like the idea of you riding with us sporting that look.
Evie gives him the finger.
– Says the man in a top hat.
He nods at me.
– Hang on to her, Joe.
I’ve got her hand in mine, it’s a two-finger grip, but that’s what I got to work with.
– That’s the plan.
A Duster named Tenderhooks lends us his bike, climbs up behind Christian to a chorus of whistles and limped wrists. Evie hikes her skirt a little and gets behind me.
And we ride.
Over the bridge there’s a lady who runs the Bronx. Chubby did as I asked, she’ll know we’re coming. She did like Chubby asked, she’ll have a place for us to hide out the day. And she’ll have made a call of her own. They listened to her, she’ll have a tribe of filed-teeth savages standing by. Match the Mungiki with the Dusters, put them on one side of a thing and anything else on the other side of a thing, I know where I’ll put my money.
Close to the Island, but we’ll be good for the one day.
After that?
What do you do when you leave home?
Figure you put it together. New world. No telling which way it turns on its axis. When it faces the sun, when it turns away. A whole new clock to the day and the night.
New rules.
Terry and Predo, even Digga and Enclave, things running on their rules, I knew where I stood. In the middle. No future. And no room for the lady behind me on the bike.
Want to make room for yourself, knock down what’s there.
I want room for two. I got no other reason to be if it’s not her. If it’s not because she knows me. She knows what I am inside. Vyrus or Wraith. Whatever you believe. Killers both. She knows what I am now.
And the girl likes me that way.
I gun the throttle and she wraps her arms tighter around my middle and all the holes that got stuck in me the last night ache like hell and I hit it again to make her hold tighter still.
It just feels better that way.
A few blocks from the bridge I pull to the curb outside a deli. When I come out I have five packs of Luckys. I peel one open and stick a smoke in my face and my girl digs my old Zippo from my jacket pocket and gives me a light.
Some moments, they’re worth what you go through to get there.
Engines gun, rattling windows and setting off car alarms, a noise that lets everyone know they’re better off getting a door between them and the street.
I’m a mess.
Five, six years back, I was a guy about forty who looked in his late twenties. Nothing pretty, but in one piece.
Look at me now, I look like a guy about fifty who looks like a guy in his forties. Knee is never gonna heal right. Big toe, my fingers, my eye, those won’t be coming back. The hole the Count put in my side, that’s gonna leave a mark. Feels like I’m maybe going the rest of the road on no better than one and a half lungs. And the half is seriously in question. Get some blood in proper amounts the next couple days, that might help things along, but I’ll be a mess no matter this, no matter that. Had enough blood to soak in a tub of it, it couldn’t put me back as I was.
And odds are we’ll be looking at trickles of blood for a bit.
Once the night comes and we start moving, it will be fast and low. Things are gonna be shaking out hard, and until they settle down, we’ll need to stay out from under anything big that might fall on us.
Evie, she’s rigged for lean times. That’s all she’s done the last two years. Never got the full Enclave skeletal look going, but she’s pared down to the sinew. Likes it that way. Likes the way it feels. Says it feels natural. Says I’ll get used to it. Says I got it in me to live that way too. Says Daniel called it right about me.
The way he fingered me as the future of Enclave.
She says I showed Enclave how to live in the light. Showed all of us. Exposing the Vyrus, it pushed us all into the light. Like the old man was saying. Evie says it’s just like the Enclave always wanted, we’re in the light, but we’re not burning. She says prophecy isn’t literal, it’s figurative.
I figure that’s bullshit.
Her, she’s mostly saying it to watch me squirm, laughing at me the whole time. But only half laughing. She takes it more serious than me. Two years in there, living in Daniel’s old room, reading his journals. She read all of them. Going back to before he was Enclave. Before he was even infected. She says she has a different perspective on things.
I haven’t said anything about what happened in the warehouse. With the Count. I haven’t asked her if she saw anything before she pulled the trigger.
Working on how to phrase it.
Hey, baby, before you shot him down, did it look like my eyes turned black and I pushed my fingers inside him and froze him to death?
But I took a look at his body. I touched it. And it was cold. Colder than even a dead body has a right to be.
So what.
So if the Vyrus is where life started, then what? Because it had to come from somewhere, yeah? Amanda, you little crazy twist, the ideas you put in my head.
It isn’t literal.
Enclave and what they believe, not literal. So what’s it mean when you say you summon something? Does it mean you prod some slob till the Vyrus in him mutates again?
Christ it all hurts my head.
Evie says all that Enclave stuff started as practical lessons for survival. Says the whole fasting deal has as much to do with fitting into the ecosystem as it does anything else. Says it’s all like that at its heart.
Whatever.
I say I like a full belly.
But we’ll just let it play out.
Some rumbles on the news: Long-range camera shots from Queens. The gravel quarry. SWAT vans, fire trucks, black-and-whites, some dark sedans. Some cops huddled in a prayer circle. Another cop bent over puking, his partner standing next to him in tears. Some cell-phone video of blanket-draped figures being led into ambulances and commandeered school buses from the depot next door.
Rumor starting up on NY1 is about a secret way station for East European white-slave prostitutes.
Could be a cover story given out by the cops, could just be the shit people make up. Doesn’t matter, it won’t last. The truth wants to be free is what Terry said. This truth will break out the hard way. Then it will go mad dog in the streets.
Look at the clock, running low on daylight. Ready to sleep a little. But Evie’s right, I need to finish this last recording first. Besides, doesn’t look like there’s any room for me to stretch.
Crowded tight.
Esperanza got the call from Chubby, rigged up the upper floors of the abandoned house she squats in. Window boards and the like. Kind of stuff she never did before so as not to draw attention in a neighborhood that festers with superstition. But she figured this hideout will be blown soon anyway. Now she’s got Mungiki, Dusters, odds and ends of her people that she gathered up. Me and Evie. Don’t know which was more terrifying, watching the Mungiki and Dusters square off and sniff at each other, or watching Evie and Esperanza do a stare-down.
Best thing about leaving at sunset will be keeping those two apart.
Esperanza’s not sure what she’ll do. Off the Island, her people have a better shot at laying low than the folks other side of the bridges, but anywhere in the city will be a tough place to be. She’s thinking about hooking up with Lydia. Safety in numbers. From where I am that will just make it easier for them all to be scooped into cages and labs. But I think that way.