“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said sourly.
“No, you tell me. Why’d you do it? You had a fucking good life. Nice house, steady job, a chick to warm your bed, even this shitty cat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you fucked up. You pissed me off from the start, but I never thought you’d make it so easy for me. So, why’d you do it?”
“Because I’m not an animal like you. Because this place is immoral and sick. It’s all gonna blow up in your face one day. I don’t want to live in a place that saves my body but destroys my soul. That’s why I did it. I’m just sorry I won’t be there when the helots rise up and a couple of those guys fuck you till you can’t stand up. Considering all the time you spent in prison, you might enjoy it.”
Grapes’s face turned bright red and I thought I’d gone too far. His hand squeezed my poor cat’s neck and he shook him like a rag doll. Lucullus struggled, weakly meowing in pain, nearly suffocating.
“Tomorrow I’ll make sure to lock up a few helot crackheads in your train car,” he growled. “Then we’ll see who gets fucked up the ass.”
There was nothing I could say to that. Grapes held all the cards.
“This isn’t a courtesy call. Here. This’ll last you till morning.” The Aryan dug something out of his pocket and tossed it to me.
I snatched it out of the air and stared at it. It was a clear plastic bottle about the size of a soda can. Inside was a white liquid.
“It’s Cladoxpan. You’ve been infected for eight hours, so you’re showing the first symptoms. You’re sweating like a pig even though it’s freezing down here.”
His words confirmed my worst fears. The extreme heat I’d been feeling indicated that TSJ was overwhelming my immune system.
“What do I have to do?” I asked in a hushed voice.
“You have two choices. Give me back that bottle and when I come for you in the morning, you’ll be just another rotten Undead. We’ll shoot you in the head, burn your body in the town dump, and that’s that. Or you can drink the Cladoxpan slowly. The longer it lasts, the longer you’ll last. You’ll eventually die in the Wasteland. You decide.” Grapes shrugged.
“I choose to live,” I said faintly, looking at the floor. My whole life was ruined.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“I choose to live,” I said, a bit louder.
“Thought you’d say that. But I want an additional guarantee you’ll behave yourself.” The Aryan pulled a knife out of his boot, and before I had time to blink, stretched Lucullus across his knees and pressed the knife blade against my cat’s tail.
“No!”
Everything happened in slow motion. Grapes’s wrist arcing upward as he sliced Lucullus’s tail in half. The knife covered in blood. Blood spurting from the stump of Lucullus’s tail. My cat’s eyes wide with pain and panic as he let out a long meow. Grapes’s sadistic, satisfied expression.
My knuckles were white as chalk as I shook the bar. “You fucking son of a bitch! I’ll kill you! Hear me? I swear I’ll kill you, you asshole!”
“Tell that to someone else.” Grapes calmly stood up and put the knife back in his boot. “Don’t worry about your cat. One of the guys’ll bandage what’s left of his tail.” His tone became menacing. “Control yourself till tomorrow if you don’t want me betting with pieces of Persian cat at our poker game tonight. Got it?”
Lucullus’s blood dripped onto the dirty tile floor, leaving huge, flower-shaped drops. I couldn’t look away from those spots. I’d never hated anyone so much.
“I’ll leave you alone to think. Have a good night.”
That evil fuck Grapes walked down the corridor, a steel grip on Lucullus, whistling as my cat’s cries of pain got weaker and weaker.
And then I was alone, the bottle of Cladoxpan in one hand and the piece of Lucullus’s tail in the other. My heart was racing, but I couldn’t cry. All I wanted was revenge.
32
The first two hours of the morning were hectic. Mendoza set up headquarters at the Red Rooster and sent messages to the four corners of the ghetto via wily young kids. With fast legs and a hungry look in their eye, they slipped past the militia and the Green Guards. The kids memorized the messages so that if they were caught, they wouldn’t be carrying any evidence.
Lucia and Prit crouched in a corner and watched. Alejandra found a first-aid kit and gently tended the Ukrainian’s cuts and bruises. He’d recovered pretty well except for his broken ribs, but the former soldier could tolerate that. As he wolfed down a stew of mystery meat, his gaze flitted around that crowd, trying to decipher the group’s plans.
“What’s going on, Prit?” Lucia murmured uneasily.
“Not sure. But it has all the signs of an uprising.”
“An uprising?” Lucia shrieked in alarm. “When?”
“In a few hours, I think,” Prit said. “My guess, they’ve been planning it for a while. Today’s raid just moved up their plans.”
The Ukrainian was right. The plan had been brewing for months. The majority of the helots were far from defeated by the reverend’s tactics. Greene and his men always kept in mind the possibility of an uprising—and feared it. At least four times, the helots had been about to revolt but had called it off at the last minute. Greene always got wind of their plans through a network of snitches that he’d bribed or blackmailed to work for him. Mendoza suspected that the Green Guards bugged the houses during raids. Mendoza and his men had checked every inch of the Red Rooster, but still he knew there was a chance the Aryans were on to his plans.
The morning’s unforeseen raid had derailed all their planning. They had to act. Now.
Forty minutes later, thirty men and women crowded into the bar, trying to make themselves heard over the growing din. They all told an unsettling story. The Greens had taken over six hundred people from the ghetto.
“This raid was the worst yet!” roared a tall, leathery Latino. “They didn’t just take the weak! They took adult men and women!”
“It was random,” complained another. “They even took those with proper ID.”
“When did ID ever stop them?” a voice in the back replied bitterly. “They’re exterminating us little by little, like in those fucking Nazi ghettos.”
“But we had a deal!” the first guy replied stubbornly. “We just needed to have ID!”
“You’re a real idiot if you believe that bullshit. And a fucking sellout. You busted your balls to get that worthless piece of paper. Stop your whining.”
“Who you calling a sellout, you son of a bitch?” The man reached for his knife.
Everyone was shouting at once, so Mendoza got up on the table and yelled himself hoarse, trying in vain to get control of the crowd. Finally, he picked up a broken computer and tossed it through the building’s last window. When the crowd heard the breaking glass, they stopped midsentence and looked up at Mendoza, whose eyes were shooting sparks.
“You’re a bunch of idiots! We don’t have to wait for Greene’s men to kill us. We can do it ourselves. Now shut up and listen if you want to keep living.”
The crowd whispered and coughed. The two guys shot angry looks at each other. Clearly, their argument wasn’t over, but everyone obeyed Gato Mendoza.
Mendoza cleared his throat. “The moment we feared—and hoped for—has come. The raids are getting worse. The Green Guards treat us like sacrificial lambs. We can’t put up with this any longer. We have to act now.”