I snap a match and he flinches at the light before dipping his face into it to puff the cigarette alive.
– Don’t need advance word. Got ears, don’t I. Hear it all down here. Want to or not, I hear it all. Hey.
He cocks an ear, bit of gnarled skin on the side of his head that looks kind of like an ear anyway, hand cupped to it.
– Hear that, buddy? Course you don’t. I do. I hear down at West Fourth, I hear a platform announcement that the uptown F is running on the downtown track. I hear over at One Eighty-one, I hear a couple rats fighting over a pork rind someone dropped on the track. Hey, and, buddy, hey, Canal Street, I hear a guy, he’s got his hand in a woman’s back, about to push her in front of a train.
He takes a drag and the cigarette is consumed in one long crackle.
– I hear everything down here, buddy.
I start rolling him another smoke.
– You hear anything up top?
He spits dry, no moisture left to him.
– I hear up top, buddy. I hear an asshole parade marching in the alleys is what I hear. Buddy, I hear wolves what were meant to be, dressing in sheep’s clothes, baa-baa-baa.
He takes the new cigarette. He doesn’t have lips anymore, just a hole slashed in the hide sucked back onto his skull.
– Buddy, I told you once, I told you a hundred, I told you we don’t belong up there. Walking their walk, talking their lingo, living their rules.
He cat-coughs again.
– Know what’s funniest in it, buddy?
I spark another match and he lights up.
– No. Tell me what’s funniest. I could use a laugh.
A tremor rattles through his bones, his body blurs for a moment, then he resolves again.
– What’s funniest is now they’re fighting a war for the right. That’s what’s got me up late slapping my knee, buddy. Idea of all them, them and their values, killing each other over which color sheep they’re gonna dress as. What kind of prey they want to pretend to be for the privilege of living in the flock.
He takes a drag, only sucks down half of it this time.
– Should be ripping their skins off, howling, running pack mad, buddy. Just for fun.
I light my own smoke.
– Old man, got to tell you, you’re getting a little weird being down deep all by yourself.
That laugh.
– Buddy, I’m the real thing. Or close to it. I’m just about the end of the road.
He’s been squatting, knees up by his ear, elbows out, looks like a spider someone sprayed with the wrong chemicals. Now he rises, spider morphing into a skeleton, assembling itself from its own jumbled bones.
– Want to see the future, buddy, look into my eyes.
I’m game. But there’s nothing to see. They’ve gone black. Blacker than the deepest tunnels below our feet. Light sucks into his eyes. Black like I’ve seen only once before. I look in there, and something rises toward the surface.
A cold lance cuts through the heat of him.
I step back, cigarette dropping from my fingers as my hand goes to the gun.
– Right, buddy, pull the piece. That’ll help ya.
He smokes the second half of his butt and exhales.
– We all got it inside, buddy. Waiting to come out. Just it needs to be nurtured some.
I take another step back.
– It’s dark. I didn’t see anything. You’re crazy.
He raises the notched bone of his finger.
– Two of those three is true, buddy. Pretty good average, two out of three. But the one that’s a lie, it’s a doozy.
My hand is still on the gun. Just because it likes being there.
– You’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what you’re thinking.
He looks up at the vents.
– Me buddy? I’m thinking about what I always think about. Daylight.
– Then you’re thinking about dying.
He looks back at me.
– Too late for that.
He takes a step toward me.
– Hey, buddy, know why we burn? Know why we get so damn hot when we finally embrace the Vyrus?
I take a step away.
He comes closer.
– It’s ‘cause of what’s growing inside. Buddy, it’s so cold, it just drives the heat out of you. Tell you, it’s like winter in my bowels.
I’m leaving, I’m walking backward, some lesson about never turning your back on the mad, but I’m leaving.
– There’s nothing inside of you except crazy. Nothing growing except your own stupid death.
He’s still following, shimmering at every step.
– You got one too. Stick around, let it come out. It’s what we’re for. To become what’s real, buddy.
I’m not walking backward anymore, I’m just going, I’m just leaving.
– It’s not in me, old man. I’m infected, not possessed. I’m diseased, but I’m me.
Cat coughs behind me.
– Ain’t that what I’m saying, buddy? Ain’t that the joke of it? It is you. What we are, it’s what we are inside. Just you have to work at it to make it come out.
I’m down the tracks now, looking at the rails to where they fade into darkness ahead of me, meeting at a point I can’t see yet.
He’s crazy. That wasn’t a lie.
It’s dark down here. That wasn’t a lie.
And I didn’t see anything when I looked in his eyes.
Enclave are mad. None madder. And they kicked him out for going apeshit and killing a bunch of his brothers and sisters. The maddest of the mad. What he says carries no weight. Mad and starving and alone in the dark, he’s making up stories to scare himself. The boogeyman, making up ghosts to haunt himself.
Wraiths.
If I saw something once that I can’t explain, that doesn’t make them real. And if a trick of the dark gave me a chill, that doesn’t make them real. And if a madman says what’s at the core of us all is a senseless, flapping quiver of black shade, that’s just one more reason not to believe.
The only killer I’m carrying around is the one I was born with.
I didn’t see anything when I looked in his eyes. I didn’t.
But I see plenty as I run down the tracks.
That memory, it doesn’t sit on top waiting to be picked up and put down. It’s at the bottom. Something digs it up from down there, everything else gets knocked over and spilled about.
Think of the Wraith, think of Amanda Horde and her crazy parents.
The original lost girl. Her mom hiring me to find her. Apeshit daddy Doctor Horde and his biotech millions and his plan to infect people with a fucking zombie bacteria that only he can cure. How I got trailed around on that gig. Something left no trace, left an absence behind itself. Enclave called it a Wraith, I called it bullshit. How I got kicked and stabbed and shot on the gig, starved when the thing with no trace stole my blood bank. Running dry in a basement, I died. Yeah, the real thing. And the Vyrus raised me up. Said, Not fucking yet! Threw all it had left into me, sent me buzz-sawing through dangerous men. But I took too much. The mad doctor had me. Dying the second time in minutes.
And the Wraith.
Black fell over that room and when it lifted, I’m there with a frozen corpse in my hands.
Still pissing myself years later.
Remember that, more comes tumbling.
The Count. Loser rich boy Vampyre causing trouble. Dealing anathema; infected blood getting Vampyres high. Exposing the community. Me taking a job with Terry and the Society for the privilege of putting a proper beating on that punk.
Evie getting sick. HIV sick. AIDS sick. Never knowing what I was. Me never copping to the fact. Never knowing if my blood would kill her or cure her.
Little Amanda coming back around, launching her own crusade. Clan Cure, all comers welcome. Feed the hungry, while the little super genius tries to save them all.
Mad as her father. Twice as smart. Drunk as her mother. Twice as beautiful.
Things heating up with the Coalition.
Me in the middle.
Evie getting sicker, and me making the play.
Taking her to Enclave just in time to see the old master die. Daniel. In the sun. Dying to believe.