– She thinks they’re important? The baby and all that?
He licks his lips, pushes out the lower, sucks it back into his mouth, and bites it.
– She said they’re kids and they need help.
I stop messing with the gun.
– I want to see her.
He looks at the floor.
– She says no.
I watch him.
– There something you’re neglecting to tell me, Chubby?
He shakes his head.
I step close.
– Is she in trouble?
He shakes his head.
I step closer.
– Only if there’s something you’re leaving out, and I dig to it later, I might be upset if it turns out to be important.
He looks up from the floor.
– She said to tell you to crawl out of your fucking cave and do something, you son of a bitch. She says find them. She says maybe then she’ll see you.
I nod, adjust the gun one last time.
– What do you got for me?
He sticks his hand inside his jacket and comes out with an envelope.
– Money. Their names.
I take the envelope and look at the scrap of paper inside.
Ben Forest.
Delilah Cooper.
– Your real last name Cooper?
He adjusts the knot in his tie.
– My name is Freeze. As everyone knows.
I look at Mr. Chubby Freeze.
– Any idea where they’d run to with the heat on?
– Having failed to find safety in the Society, it would be natural for the children to seek it within a racially familiar community. The Hood.
I slap the envelope into my palm.
– There a reason Percy isn’t dealing with it himself?
– He is occupied with Hood politics. And since telling me how I might track you down, he has stopped answering calls.
– So the kids might already be on Hood turf?
He shrugs.
I shake my head.
– Not where I’m most welcome.
– From what I gather, Joe, you no longer have any turf at all. In any case, if that’s where they are, you’ll not have far to go.
I stick the envelope in the pocket with the cosh full of sand.
– Walking under Harlem is one thing. Walking on top of Harlem is another. Grave Digga may still have issues with me.
Chubby makes for the door.
– Who does not, Joe? Who does not.
Can’t argue that, so I follow him out.
Find the kids and maybe she’ll see me.
First thing I’ve had worth dying for in a long time.
I don’t have any goodbyes to say. Nothing to keep me from following Chubby and Dallas up the tracks toward the north entrance to Freedom Tunnel. The locals give me the same wide berth they always have. I took care of some trouble once or twice down here, but they won’t be sad to see me go. Couple days after I’m out, they’ll figure Q-line’s shack is vacant again and someone will move in and start renovating. Bring in a new color dirt or something.
Neither Chubby or his boy are doing too well with the rail ties and rocks in the darkness. Chubs isn’t built for it, and Dallas is still a little sloppy on his feet after the concrete to the head. Still, I’m not in a hurry. I dawdle behind, letting the flashlights they brought show the way. Now we’re on the tracks, I can see it’s night up top. The vent shafts are blue-black, moonlight washed out by what the city is shining up there itself. Come late morning, bright columns will cut the dust. You can see the edges of them, sharp and clear. See the line exactly where you’d cross into that light and start to fester.
One of the flashlight beams picks out some letters on the walclass="underline" OBSOLETE MACHINE. Further, the American Way mural. A Dick Tracy figure pushing an armed man out of frame, shouting, Drop the gun, mole! The cover from Dark Side of the Moon, captioned: You shout and no one seems to hear. A Unibomber portrait. Always one of my favorites.
I smoke and kick some rocks. I’d say I was thinking about Evie, but that would be redundant. She’s my white noise. Always there, crackling static in my brain. Inescapable. Mostly you tune it out. The second you focus on it, it drowns out everything else. This occasion, it drowns out the one guy down here I should maybe say goodbye to. Swallows up the thought of him right until Chubby pauses to loosen his tie.
– Is it getting hotter down here, Joe?
I feel it then. Should have felt it before the fat man, but I feel it.
Heat and carbon dioxide reveal life, and the thing panting in the darkness beyond the reach of the flashlight beams is screaming in this silent language that it is fucking well alive.
Or about to die.
Close at the edge of both.
I freeze.
– Chubs, you and your boy go on ahead.
He turns to look at me, the beam of his light rippling over rocks.
– Speed, Joe, is of the essence.
I’m looking at the darkness, wondering if it will explode.
– Pace you two are making, I should be able to catch you up.
– I’d not like to lose track of you after just finding you.
I take a step into the heat and the darkness.
– Chubby, go fuck off up the tunnel. Now.
No one ever accused Chubby Freeze of being a stupid man. He catches my drift, spares further comment, takes Dallas’s hand and fucks off up the tunnel at a much better clip than they’d been making before.
I keep my hand away from the gun. I don’t have any weapons to deal with this. Besides, I don’t think he means to kill me. A pretty big assumption when dealing with the mad, but all I can go on here is past experience. He’s never killed me yet.
There’s a flutter in the air, it gets hotter, a white blur, and he’s in front of me.
– Buddy, hey, buddy, leaving somewhere, buddy?
He’s dispensed with clothes since the last time I saw him. Can’t say why that is. Could be he finally realized that wearing whites down here was a losing proposition. Could be he finally got so skinny there just wasn’t anything he could put on that wouldn’t slip right off. That last time, all he had on was a loincloth and some dirty white rags wrapped around his limbs like bandages. Could also be that he’s white enough now in his own skin not to need to wear any kind of uniform.
Subway tile white. Glossy porcelain with a thin layer of soot.
Emaciated doesn’t do him justice anymore. I can see the fibers of his muscle under his skin. His circulatory system so vivid, it looks like a long branching tattoo laced over his entire body.
He’s at the limit.
What the Enclave are after as they starve themselves, he’s at the frontier.
I saw the guy who went furthest. I scooped him off the street when he walked into the daylight believing he had been absorbed by the Vyrus, believing that would make him something the sun didn’t want to kill. He was wrong. But even he, even Daniel hadn’t gone this far.
The man in front of me shimmers. Like when I was a kid and I’d lie down on the blacktop in summer and watch the air wiggle above it at the end of the playground. He shimmers like that.
Part it’s the Vyrus, fighting itself and him. Fighting to tear him apart from hunger for blood, and to keep him together so it won’t die with him. Driving him to kill someone and drink their damn blood. And part it’s the heat of that fight.
He’s what’s behind the missing poster that describes how an MTA worker disappeared in the tunnels. He’s that ghost you see flicker outside the scratched Plexi windows as you rocket down the A express, the one you don’t see clear at all, but still it crawls into your nightmares. He’s what eats the alligators in the sewers. This fucker, he’s the boogeyman.
He scratches himself and hitches a shoulder at me.
– Roll me one of them, will ya, buddy.
I roll him a smoke.
– Keeping an eye on me are you?
He laughs. Sounds like a cat coughing up a hair ball.
– An eye on you. Buddy, no, no buddy. Just I heard you were leaving is all, buddy, an I thought I’d come send ya off is what.
I hand him the cigarette, half-expecting the paper to ignite when he takes it, but it doesn’t.
– Must have gotten advance word. Just found out myself.