Joe Pitt 5 - My Dead Body (25 page)

My eye is open, looking at the blade in my middle, and I raise it and see the Count, and I look at the stairs that lead to the loft, and I see the beautiful ivory girl sitting on a step at the middle of the stairs, a cluster of Enclave around her.

And I tell her what’s on my mind.

--Hey, you look great.

She smiles.

--Kill him for me, Joe.

The Count looks at her.

--Get back in your place, bitch.

I stand up, rising, letting the blade cut deeper, until I am on my feet and it is sunk to the haft, the Count’s knuckles pressing into the edges of the wound.

It’s happening fast. Happening in the spaces between my heartbeats. I’m down and I’m up and he is looking at me and I am stepping backward and punching him in the wrist and now I am standing five feet away from him, the blade still in me, but it is my hand on the haft, pulling it free.

The wound in my belly seals as the steel comes out.

I show the Count his blade.

--Lose this?

He shows me my gun.

--Lose this?

I charge.

He shoots.

My thoughts are chasing themselves, trying to keep up with the pace of events. Thinking of Predo’s death, my thoughts are trying to make my body veer, but I am not faster than bullets and the Count has fired twice, and two bullets should be enough to keep me down while he finishes me, but he’s shooting from his hip like a gangster and he may be hot shit with a scythe blade but he’s probably never fired a gun in his life and he just plain misses and throws the gun to the side.

--Fuck this shit.

And I’m going to cut his head off with his own blade and he drops under the flat arc as I swing for his neck and shows me what he’s learned since he came here, squatting and pivoting, one leg extended, going for my legs, that are not there as I hop and realize I’ve put myself in the air and he comes out of his squat and puts both fists in my chest before my feet touch ground and I twist away from the impact but it still feels like two tiny trucks driving into me and I flip backward out of the air and tumble and my face goes into concrete followed by the rest of me and I can feel the Enclave shifting and coming at us, circling and as I’m rolling to my back I realize I’ve lost the scythe and the Count comes into view scooping it from the ground where I dropped it and I keep rolling as he brings it down like a pick again and again chipping the concrete and leaving divots closer and closer faster than me the tip skittering across my ribs and my hand goes inside my jacket for the amputation blade and that slows me too much and the scythe splits ribs and rips my lung and punches out my back and he hauls on it and it tears my side open and I have my feet and I have my own blade and I feel the Vyrus swarm my wound’s gaping hole like a million tiny electric shocks trying to close it up and we’re at the middle of a circle of Enclave where I will die and I lunge at the Count and he spins away from me and the scythe cuts as he steps past me and my hamstring is plucked so I go to one knee and he’s just better at this than I am, just faster and stronger and used to living at the edge of the Vyrus, and I’d really like to see the look on his face when he finds out his whole world has been destroyed and it was me who blew it to hell.

But I don’t think I’m going to get to.

The curve of his blade is so perfect for harvesting.

It travels flat and smooth, a little sharper and it would be slicing through the dust in the air as it comes for my neck.

And I see that I am on a stain in the concrete, a shape I remember, left there when I laid Daniel on this spot and watched him die. I remember Daniel. How he liked to tease me with hints. Suggestions that I was supposed to replace him. Never taken seriously. I remember him telling me the Wraith was something Enclave summoned from someplace else. Remember the old man of the sewers, the old man whose real name is Joseph. Remember how Daniel only called me by the name I was first born with, Simon. Remember old crazy Joseph of the sewers telling Simon that he’d seen a Wraith summoned. Saying that the Wraith was what we become. Remember seeing that blackness in his eyes. Swimming under the surface. I remember dying in that long-ago basement. Dying because I’d been without blood too long. Because my supply had been stolen. But not dead long. Coming back, Vyrus bringing me back, emptying me out to live, forcing me to live, just long enough to get it the blood it needed to live. Remember being on the verge of dying, Vyrus dying too, and the Wraith. Freezing a man through. Cold like space. At the end. And Daniel saying they summoned the Wraith. And Daniel, I get this idea of him in my old apartment, stealing the last of my blood. I get an idea of Daniel, for years, trailing me, walking in my steps and in my scent, erasing traces of himself. I see Daniel, telling me again, they summoned the Wraith. Telling me again that he starved me, to watch me die, to see if I could survive it, and telling me he sent the Wraith to save me. And I get this idea of myself in that basement, cold like dead, black-eyed, doing something inhuman. Something that wouldn’t have been the strangest thing I’ve ever done.

I see the Wraith.

And.

I’m.

There.

World breaks around me, scrambles, reassembles, and I’m back in the school basement. Holes leaking blood. Naked Doctor Horde about to shoot me. Black at the edge of my vision. Vibrating, writhing, black. And bits of it break off and drift over my eyes.

And I see Amanda in the corner. She’s going to die if I die.

And I think of Evie. She doesn’t know who I am.

And I don’t want to die.

So I do.

Something.

My fingers curl, corkscrew, twist into Horde’s skin, bloodless, piercing, and frost creeps over him and the room pulses with every heartbeat, black, white, black, white, and the black retreats and I close my hands and they are empty fists and my eyes clear and Horde is dead and there is nothing in this world that could have killed a man like that.

The Wraith.

I see the Wraith.

And I see myself.

And the blade is closer.

My hands are on the Count’s stomach.

I feel the dark before I see it. And then it’s in my eyes. Filling my eyes. And I know how to do this. How to become this.

Even if I don’t understand what it is.

Black comes down and the first bullet goes in his back and comes out his chest, opening a blossom of bone cartilage and blood and he starts to turn but a garden of similar flowers bloom there and the scythe shaves some of my scalp as it veers upward and he is thrown into me and I can almost see through the gaping hole that was his chest, right through to Evie, holding the gun that he threw away, pulling the trigger until there’s no point in it anymore.

Black floats away. My thoughts clear.

--That’s my girl.

The Count spins from me, screwing himself into the ground, screams rising and falling like a dying rabbit singing scales, one word over and over.

--Kiiilll, kiiiillll, kiiilll, kiiiiiiiiilllll!

But no one does.

--Tell you, buddy.

I feel the hot wind as he comes out of the sewer cap.

--Tell you, looks to me like something is being decided here.

Enclave are shifting.

He comes into view.

--Kind of a power struggle, looks like to me.

The smell of him is freezing everything. Enclave going still.

Mad old man, a ripple on the air, his words a shiver.

--Remember me?

He moves and everyone moves now, around him, creating distance.

They remember. The Enclave killer. They remember.

He paws the floor with his feet, digging in.

--What’s lacking here these days.

His hands flash open and closed.

--Is a little discipline.

Which he starts to dispense.

And I have just enough in me to roll my head to the side so I don’t have to see it.

All I can see now is Evie, walking to me, one hand alongside her face, shielding her eyes from what the old man is doing.

She kneels next to me, shakes her head.

--I hate fights, Joe.

I’d tell her she shouldn’t have fallen for a fighter.

I’d tell her it’s only because I love her that I make such a mess.

But she’s got her mouth on mine, and I want that to last as long as it will, this kiss, here in the slaughterhouse, I want it to last till I die.

I dream a green and pink egg. It cracks, black ink leaks. Something is writhing inside, forcing its way out.

Amanda looks up from her microscope.

--Once it’s out, you can’t put it back in.

I look at the egg in my hand, the black dripping into my palm, the thing inside pushing the halves of the shell apart.

Terry spins the hand crank on his mimeo machine, turning out handbills for a protest.

--Let it, I don’t know, let it out, but make sure you keep a handle on it, let it out when its energy is aligned with your own desires.

I’m holding the egg in both hands, black dribbling onto the floor, a few fragments of shell falling away.

Predo sits at his desk, flipping through a file marked TOP SECRET.

--Close that thing up, Pitt. You are not suited to making decisions of this scope.

I’m cradling the egg in both arms, knees bent under the weight, rocked from side to side as whatever’s inside thrashes about.

Hurley pats the end of an ax handle into his palm.

--Step on da damn ting dere, Joe. Best not ta take any chances wit it.

It’s on the floor and I’m balancing it, keeping it from rolling over on top of me, a flood of black running off it and pooling over my shoes.

Percy takes a drag from his Pall Mall.

--That’s a problem you got there. Thinkin’ on that one, gonna give your head a hurtin’. Askin’ me, I say use it, before it use you.

I’m backing away from the egg, watching the shell shatter.

The Count looks up from the miniskirted teenager he’s making out with.

--Yo and just fuck it or whatever. What be will be will be.

The shell is breaking open, it’s coming out.

Daniel studies the sun through an open window.

--Simon.

I run to him.

--Daniel, what the hell is that?

The shell crumbles to the floor and a worm, glossy in the black blood of its birth, bursts out, its own tail in its mouth.

Daniel glances at it, shrugs, returns his attention to the sun.

--Got me. I’ve never seen such a thing.

--But you know everything.

He shakes his head.

--I fake a good game, Simon, but I’m just making it up as I go along.

It eats itself and grows and eats itself and grows and I back into a corner and someone puts a hand on my shoulder and I turn and look at Evie.

I shake my head.

--Baby, you’re not dead.

She nods.

--OK, well, neither are you.

Which is news.

I wake up with blood in my mouth.

I swallow and lick my lips.

--More.

Evie pushes the cup against my mouth and I drink the rest and lick the inside clean and nod and suck it from my teeth.

--More.

She holds the cup upside down.

--All gone.

I wince.

--Shit. I need. I’ll never make it without.

I feel for the wound the Count opened in my side and find a deep gnarled dent, slivers of bone poking through fresh skin.

--That’s not as bad as I thought.

Evie shows me an empty two-liter soda bottle with an interior glaze of tacky blood.

--You’ve had quite a bit.

I roll my head to the side, we’re still on the killing floor, but the killing looks like it’s done. New bodies scatter among the parts that had fallen from the hanging corpses. And living Enclave, in rows, unmoving, facing the old man at the front of the warehouse, like they used to do with Daniel.

But the old man’s not Daniel.

--OK, buddies, tell you what for and then some. Living up here, listening to ten kinds of bullshit. Buddies, forgetting what we’re made for. Made for killing and death. Made for the dark. Made to become strong in the light. Make a religion out of that when it’s supposed to be life. Do you doubt me?

He picks up a corpse in each hand and shakes them back and forth.

--Do you doubt me?

No one seems to doubt him.

He drops the corpses.

--Buddy over there.

He points at me.

--Buddy over there, he’s cracked your world in half. Let in the sunlight. Trust me he has. You don’t know it, but you’re standing in the sun right now. Buddies, everyone can see you now. And look at yourselves, are you burning? Do you melt?

He stomps, tosses his head around, screams.

--I can feel my skin being eaten by the Vyrus!

He plants himself and a grin slashes his face.

--I like it!

He starts walking through them, pulling them to their feet.

--Buddies, this is not where we live. Playing church games. We live in our natures. True to ourselves. We’re in the sun, and it’s not killing us, not a one. Only thing that kills us is one another. That’s over. Buddies, we’re going down now. Live like dark things live. Discipline doesn’t grow because you nurture it. It grows because you need it to live. And you!

He’s standing over me and Evie.

--You two.

He smells the air around us.

--You two got dead all over your smell, buddy. You ain’t gonna last.

I push myself up on my elbows.

--None of us are.

He gives his cat cough.

--Oh, buddy, look into my eyes.

He bugs them at me.

I look.

And I see it there.

--It doesn’t scare me.

He slides his lids closed, slides them open.

--And why should it, buddy, it’s just who we are.

He looks at Evie, grunts, nods.

--Yeah, buddy, I see, I see. I’m old, but I’m not gone. I see.

He waves a hand, flickers off.

--You cling to that life as long as you can, it’ll drag you down, both of you.

He’s at the sewer cap, waving the Enclave down into the ground.

--Told you before, buddy.

He clambers down himself, only his head visible.

--You belong down here.

His head drops.

--With us.

And quiet. Creak of dead-bearing chains above, slow trickle of blood. And the breathing of my girl.

She turns from the sewer cap and looks at me.

--Always interesting when you pay a visit, Joe.

I wave a hand at the havoc.

--Got to be the life of the party, that’s just me.

She puts a hand on top of her bald head.

--I shot the Count.

--Baby, you killed his ass.

She hugs herself.

--I never killed anyone.

She hugs herself harder.

--God, that felt good.

She holds up a hand.

--Not just anyone. Him. Killing him felt good.

She smiles.

--Reeeally good.

She hides the smile with her hand.

--Awful. I’m awful. Terrible.

--Naughty even.

She takes her hand from her mouth.

--His own fault. Such an asshole. Such a titanic asshole. Two years. Two fucking years in this place with him. Constant back-and-forth. Just trying to keep some kind of stability to the whole thing. And he just keeps bringing in more Enclave. Kids clearly not capable of adapting to this life. Pushing all the limits of what we can bear. And then he started these gladiator matches. Pitting them against each other. Said it was to strengthen the whole. He just pulled that stuff out of his ass. He just.

She draws up her knees, rocks back and forth.

--I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop it. Not without. My people, there weren’t enough of us. So. I could have tried. But. We all would have. And then what? Because no one would have been here to keep things.

She stops rocking.

--Normal.

She laughs.

--Yeah.

She puts her head on her knees.

--I was so lonely.

She closes her eyes.

--I was alive. I wasn’t dying anymore. I was alive. But I was so lonely. And I thought to myself sometimes, If I was back in the hospital, Joe would come see me.

She opens her eyes.

--I was so lonely.

She unwraps her arms, touches the wound in my side.

--Hey.

I wince.

--It’s OK.

She puts a hand on my stomach.

--Joe.

--Baby. I need to. I’m. Sorry. I think.

She pushes a hand under my shirt.

--I was so lonely.

She runs fingers along the healing scar in my stomach.

It hurts, but I don’t stop her, I just try to get the words out before I can think about them anymore.

--There were these kids, and, they were in a hole, and, I didn’t. I could have, like you here. I could have helped. But I didn’t. And then I gave up. I went and hid. Kids. But. I don’t want to lie. Because. Baby, I don’t care. I don’t. I did what I could for them when I could and if I was a year too late for some of them. I don’t care. What I care about. What matters to me.

I grab her wrist.

--I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I am.

I touch her face.

--Baby, I’m a killer.

She covers my mouth with her hand.

--It’s OK. I am too.

She takes her hand away from my mouth and exhales.

--And, Joe, I’m a Vampyre, we can totally have sex now.

She’s not in the mood to wait.

Everything hurts.

Nothing feels good. Nothing but her.

I don’t tell her what Amanda said, that we could have been having sex the whole time we knew each other. Something like that could kill the mood. Such as it is. And sure, holding that back after just apologizing for years of lies, that’s maybe not how you put your relationship on a healthy new footing. Figure I’m not really looking for a healthy relationship. I just love the girl. So I do what seems the right thing to do at the time. The other stuff, we’ll sort that out later.

It doesn’t take long.

Who wants to linger over it in a place like this.

--Baby.

She pulls her face from where it’s buried in my neck.

--M’tired.

I touch her cheek.

--Favor to ask.

She sits up.

--Don’t push it.

I kick off the jeans that are still around my ankles.

--Got anything I can wear?

--Well, white’s not really your color.

--I’ll manage.

She stands.

--Anyway, I have a jacket that’s all you.

She starts for the stairs, picking her way, naked, through the dead.

I stand myself up, my body mostly shocked still to be here.

--Another thing.

She’s on the stairs, waiting to hear it.

I give it to her.

--We got to get out of here.

She looks around the place.

--Well, I didn’t plan on staying at this point.

--Yeah, but I mean the Island.

She folds her arms.

--Manhattan?

I raise my hands.

--I know.

--Leave Manhattan?

I drop my hands.

--I got to ask you to trust me on this.

She frowns and raises a finger.

--You ask a lot, Joe Pitt.

--I know.

She unfolds her arms, swats the air, turns and climbs the stairs.

--I won’t go to Jersey.

I don’t say anything. I just stand there. And look at her ass. There’s not much left to it, but what’s there is choice.

I’m at the door.

White painter’s pants, white T, white boat decks, and my old black leather jacket. Not the palette I’d choose for myself, but I make it work. Evie’s dug in her basket and found white tights, white jersey skirt, white V-neck sweater, white hoodie and white Chuck Taylors.

We’re a pair.

--It took me so long to feel like a New Yorker.

--Baby, I get it. But an island has tunnels and bridges. Tunnels and bridges can be blocked.

--I know.

--Not like my first choice is someplace where the bars close at midnight.

--I’m not complaining, Joe. I just.

She looks out the door at the streets starting to show signs of morning.

--I love this city.

--Yeah. Me too.

The street rumbles, I look up to the corner, and thirteen bikers in top hats, aviator goggles and long duster coats round onto Little West Twelfth and roll up to the loading dock.

The lead rider lifts the goggles from his eyes and lets them hang from his neck.

--Joe.

--Christian.

He puts a hand at his ear, like he’s holding a phone.

--Got a strange call. Said you’d been up to some crazy shit. Said getting lost was a good plan. Said you were the man to talk to about finding a lost place. Said find you here.

He lowers the hand.

--Can’t say I’m pleased about any part of that.

I limp onto the loading dock, packing nothing but attitude.

--Got a problem with it?

He puts a hand in the pocket of his duster, comes out with a pint of Old Crow.

--No one told me I’d live forever.

He takes a drink, screws the cap back, tosses it to me.

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.