One of the boys takes the kid’s arm and inserts an IV needle into a vein.
—But it is not to be. I will not have him.
The blood cup is fitted to the hose and the blood begins to fill one of the pint bags they have at hand.
—I will not have the brown, black, and yellow in my land. Once, yes, they had a place. But they proved treacherous. And they will not be given a second chance.
The bag is full. One of the boys closes the valve at the end of the hose, slips the full bag free, and connects a fresh one. Blood flows.
—Do you know what you are looking at?
I shake my head.
—There is no reason you should. You are looking at a weapon. A very old weapon.
Another bag full, another attached.
—Although it has never been used as such before. In the past it has always been simply a vice. Albeit a very dangerous one. And very exclusive.
Another bag.
—One wonders where the original inspiration came from, who it was that stuck their finger in the air and declared, eureka!
She picks up one of the full bags.
—I suspect it was an accident.
She walks toward me.
—I suspect it was a Vampyre, crazed with hunger, attempting to feed on someone who had been very, very recently infected. Through some odd set of circumstances, this Vampyre fed only for a moment. And made a discovery.
Behind her, another bag is filled.
—That, when consumed, the blood of one freshly infected will induce the most remarkable sensations. Remarkable, and addictive.
She raises an index finger.
—An unbelievably expensive addiction, mind you. For who can afford to be addicted to blood twice over? Who can bear the risks of hunting not just for sustenance, but for pleasure? Thus the exclusivity.
They’re massaging the kid now, rubbing their hands over his legs and arms, as if squeezing dry a tube of toothpaste.
—That expense lies also at the heart of the secret as to why something like this has laid buried for so very long. Of course, I say something like this, knowing that nothing else like this exists. The point being, our lives are difficult to say the least. And they can be very long. And, if one does not have resources, very boring. An effective distraction from the basic needs for survival would be compelling in and of itself. Even if it were not addictive.
Another bag.
—It was decided some time ago, some very great time ago, that this was an indulgence that could not be afforded. It was declared anathema by the body that governed the Clans. When there was such a thing. In fact, that was the name it was given.
She shows me the bag in her hands, holds it in front of my face so that my nostrils are full of the stink of it.
—Anathema: the name for both the substance itself, and the habit of indulging in it. It was forbidden. The addicts were hunted and slaughtered. It became a crime so heinous, no one even knew of its existence. And so you see my personal values employed.
She turns to face the kid being wrung dry on the floor.
—Employing something of the past in a new manner, in order to shape the future. It flows out of these sacrifices.
She points at the window.
—And we send it onto the streets below. To wear holes in their unity. To create dissent and expose weaknesses. To drive their children to hunt to excess and endanger themselves. Thus, it is a weapon.
One of the boys has hoisted the kid by his ankles. A bag fills in fits and spurts.
Vandewater turns back to me.
—A weapon that, given time, will spur a war.
The kid is dry. They begin to bundle him in the plastic sheet.
—It will drive the Hood to threaten war on the Coalition. Predo, clinging to the status quo as he does, will attempt to avoid this. But he will have no choice. The chaos reigning in the Hood will force him to take action. Especially once I have assured him that I will be taking action whether he does or not. He will not risk losing this settlement. Particularly not when he sees how vulnerable to attack I have made the Hood.
She points at the two plastic wrapped bodies.
—Put them in the kitchen for now.
Two of the boys haul them out of the room.
She shows me the bag of blood again, holds it balanced on the open palm of her large hand.
—And that is what you are looking at.
I look at her.
—Me, I thought I was looking at a lady who’s crazy as a shit-house rat.
She nods.
—Vulgarity. Of course. The refuge of the weak-minded. Scoff if you like. But there is more.
The boys come back and begin replacing the furniture they had moved. She raises a hand and one of them brings a chair. She sits.
—Once the Hood has fallen. Once we have reclaimed our territory and these boys and their brothers and sisters know the security they have never known. The security that would have been theirs if the Secretariat had never bowed to those animals. Once that is secure, my attention will turn south, to our lands below 14th Street.
The room has been put back together. Two of the boys continue to stand watch over me while the others gather together the anathema and pack it in the briefcase.
—In fact, that project has already begun. Gradually, much as we did here, the anathema is being introduced. Which, I would imagine, is the reason you have come so far away from home in the first place.
She looks at me through her glasses again.
—Another thing.
The boys come over to the couch, one of them carrying the briefcase full of anathema.
—While in modest amounts anathema’s effects are essentially euphoric, larger amounts are quite agonizing, if not lethal.
She hands one of the boys the pint she’s been holding.
—It takes an experienced and steady hand to administer the perfect dosage to inflict that agony without inducing an undesired fatality.
The boy unwraps a clean syringe.
—But if done properly, such a dose is every bit as effective as the most savage torture.
He begins to draw anathema into the syringe.
—Minus the mess and inconvenience.
She holds up a finger. The boy stops filling the syringe.
She points at it.
—This, I believe, would be your ideal dosage. If I were to inject you with this, every muscle in your body would warm and relax. A slight sweat might break out over your face. The worries of your everyday life would cease to have weight. Music would fill your ears such as you have never heard before. Images would light the undersides of your eyelids. Shapes, colors. Fantasies, but also more concrete hallucinations. Communal visions that are shared by all who have experienced anathema. Visions that some would say prove conclusively the spiritual nature of the Vyrus. Though I am not among them. But perhaps you are, Mr. Pitt?
Again she lifts the glasses to her eyes.
—I have heard that you sometimes associate with Daniel and his followers. Are you one of them? I’ve long suspected that Daniel’s interests are not so ephemeral as he claims. It would not surprise me to discover that you are in fact his agent. Predo and Bird running you for their ends, but all the while, secretly, you are an instrument of Enclave concerns. It might be so. It might be so and you might not even be aware of it, Daniel being so subtle as he is. Would you care to have such visions? Unlock a deeper level of meaning within the Vyrus? You’ve been infected long enough to ask questions, haven’t you? The first years of infection being filled as they are with simply learning to cope, deciding if you want to live this life at all. The next several with learning the tools of survival. The next several with learning to fit in, to adapt to being infected in an uninfected world over the long term. And finally, if you have the endurance, the cleverness, some set of tools to keep you alive, you begin to ask questions. What is the Vyrus? What are the Vampyre? How long have we been here? Where did the Clans come from? Are there
more of us out there in the world? How many? Do they all live as we do? And, of course: What am I?
She lowers her glasses and waves them at the syringe in the boy’s hand.
—This might hold answers for you. They would come with a price, naturally. You would arise from my couch with a new hunger, a second need. You would find yourself distracted from the hunt, contemplating how best to use your victim’s blood. Consume it? Or have another Vampyre infect it for you? You can’t use as anathema blood you’ve infected yourself, it will only make you ill. Nor can you use blood infected by the same Vampyre, not more than once or twice. You see how the complexities of this addiction multiply.
She points at the boy again. He pulls smoothly on the plunger.
She tilts her finger upward. He stops.
—With this amount, you will still be granted visions, likewise universal in their nature, but far more unpleasant. And accompanied not with warmth and relaxation, but muscles contracted so tightly they sometimes tear from the strain. Fever. Pain. In your bones. Particularly in the sternum, the spine, the hips, and the femurs. Odd, yes? And when it is over, you will be left not with the same addiction, but with one that demands these higher doses. An addiction that can only be sated through misery.
She moves her finger. More blood enters the syringe. Stops.
—With this amount, things become simpler. Agony. Harrowing phantasms. Blood at war with itself. And a lengthy, wracking, death.
The boy pulls the syringe free, wipes the needle. Offers it to Vandewater.
She takes it.
—Predo wants you. Knowing that, and knowing that I cannot afford to thoroughly alienate him, we can dispense with this dosage as an empty threat.
She presses the plunger, squirting a thread of the blood onto my chest. The smell burns my nostrils.
—Having done so, it only remains to decide.
She holds up the syringe.
—Will it be this? In which case I will save my questions until after you have recovered and are begging for further torture.
She holds her fingernail against the side of the syringe, indicating a smaller amount.
—Will it be this? In which case I will still hold my interrogation, waiting until you have suffered sweetly, and crave yet more sweetness.
She lowers the syringe.
—Or may I begin my questions now? Secure in the knowledge that you are aware I will not brook the barest shadow of a falsehood in your answers. Knowing you understand the price that will be paid.
And she shows me the needle again.
I rub my chin against my shoulder.
—Well, Mrs. Vandewater, it took you awhile to get there, but you finally managed to say, tell me what I want to know or I’ll fuck you up forever.
She waits.
I roll my eyes.
—I don’t know what you’re waiting for, I already told you once to fuck off.
There’s a knock at the door. One of the machine pistol boys answers it. He nods at Vandewater.
She sets the syringe on the tea table. The boy assisting her closes the briefcase full of anathema.
She stands.
—Of course, one of the components of anathema’s effectiveness as a weapon is its brief shelf life. It must be distributed immediately after it is harvested. This batch is meant for the Hood. And the courier is waiting.
She walks to the door.
—But not to worry, the dose in that syringe will last more than long enough to serve its purpose. In fact, a few minutes’ aging will make it much more effective.
She leaves, escorted by Briefcase Boy and one of the machine pistols.
I look at the syringe sitting on the table and then over at the machine pistol boy and the tongue slicer that remained behind. I look again at the syringe, secure in the knowledge that when the time comes, I will beg like a child to keep her from sticking it in my arm.
I’m a dead man. And not just in the way that I’m always sort of a dead man. Once I’m in Predo’s hands there will be considerably less talking and much more thrashing and questioning. And after that, I’ll get to see my first sunrise in a quarter century. That should be worth something, but I expect I’ll be distracted by the sensation of my eyelids melting. Being addicted to this shit will be the least of my concerns. Hell, the smart play here is to volunteer for the light dose. Lady wants to offer up a last gasp of nirvana, who am I to say no? That or just answer her damn questions outright. Figure I got no one to protect. Not like I owe anything to Digga. Not like I can tell her a hell of a lot about his setup anyway. Figure she won’t stop with questions about the Hood. That’s her obsession, but she’ll get around to asking about the Society, too. Figure I don’t much care about that either. Why should I? Only reason I ever stuck on that turf is because I like the neighborhood. Sell Terry out? Yep, no problem. The thing to do here is let her shoot a little of that shit into me and go out with something soft on my mind. And who knows, maybe there are some answers in that needle. I don’t really believe that, but a lie can be just as sweet as the truth. Sweeter, nine times out of ten. Yeah, all in all, I got no good reason to be hardass here. I’m a dead man and the lady is just giving me a chance to decide how hard I want to go out. Most guys, they’ll never be so lucky. No reason to be a hardass at all. No secrets worth keeping. No one worth protecting. Just me. Figure a better deal ain’t gonna come around for a long while.
Vandewater comes back in alone.
She takes her seat. Lays a hand over the syringe.
—You’ve had ample time for thought?
I shrug, feeling something that resembles freedom.
Her fingers curl around the syringe.
—If, by any chance, you should need any additional incentive to make this easy and less time consuming, I could point out to you that our distributor in the Society tells me you have a girl whom you are—
She doesn’t get to finish. It’s hard to finish what you’re saying when a guy lunges at you and bites one of your eyes out.
The boy who wired my hands together in the car knew what he was doing. He looped it around each wrist several times, then crisscrossed it back and forth between both wrists, drawing them tightly together, knotting the loose end and mashing that knot with a pair of pliers. The boy who rewired them after they had clipped me free for tea time? He didn’t take the same class. Probably the one who drove around the block over and over. He should have started with fresh wire. But he didn’t. He should have made sure my wrists weren’t flexed when he bound me. But he didn’t. No, he used the same wire that had already been stressed by all my wiggling and twisting when I was figuring out how good a job the first guy did. He wrapped it around my flexed wrists so that when he was done I could relax those muscles and have a little slack so the wire didn’t bite so deeply into my skin. And he took those loose ends and twisted them together like the bit of wire used to close a bag of sliced bread.
If I ever find out which of them it was, I’d like to give him my thanks. Because it’s his shitty job that makes it possible to wrench my hands free and keep this crazy witch from clawing my ears off when I spit her eye in her face.
I’ll give it to her, she doesn’t scream, much.
The one by the window is circling, looking for an open shot, a shot that won’t have to go through Vandewater. The tongue slicer is closer, his hand is inside his jacket, going for a weapon that is less indiscriminate than the machine pistol the other boy has. Vandewater is blind, one eye somewhere on the floor, the other covered in blood, she’s still raking her nails at my face. I throw her at the tongue slicer. He has his hand out of his jacket, holding a tiny automatic that looks like a mechanical wasp. The old lady is coming his way. He lets the gun fall from his hand and holds out his arms to catch her. I don’t watch what happens next, I’m busy picking up the tea table and throwing it at the boy with the machine pistol.
He’s young and he’s well trained, but he hasn’t had too many opportunities to put that training to use, so he�
�s worried about getting hurt. Dumbshit little boy, he hasn’t been around long enough to develop new reflexes, his brain is still living in a world where large objects fly at you and you flinch; doesn’t get it that pain doesn’t matter. Something hits you, it’s either gonna kill you or it ain’t. The table doesn’t kill him. I do.
He puts his arm up, easily knocking the table out of the air, but I’m right behind it. He wastes time trying to bring his gun back down, centering his aim on my torso instead of simply pulling the trigger and waving it around. I’m on top of him before it can matter. The gun is out of his hand. He’s on his back. My knee is slamming into his crotch. He’s strong, keeps going for my face. One of those other boys is gonna come in here any second. I put my hands in the boy’s armpits and heave, sliding him on the wood floor, and his face disappears under the hem of the burgundy drapes.
The room instantly reeks of rotted meat being scorched by a blowtorch. I hold him there for a couple seconds while he shrieks and tries to pry my hands loose. When he stops struggling I’m off him and turning to see what’s become of Vandewater and the tongue slicer. He sits up. The drapes tent around him for a moment, flashing sunlight over his body, before they swish back into place. Then he sits there, the hole that used to be his mouth oozing cancer, his hands clutching at his peeling scalp, pushing at the tumors that have erupted across it, trying to force them back inside.
The tongue slicer is on his back, trying to restrain Vandewater, trying to keep her from mauling him while not hurting her. That pain thing again. If he’d been around a bit longer he would have pounded her unconscious by now.
The door is opening.
I look at the floor, see the syringe, pick it up. The door swings wide, two of the boys coming through it, weapons up. I bend over and loop my left arm around Vandewater’s neck and bring her up. She’s still blind, still trying to hurt someone. The boys are in. The tongue slicer is picking up his automatic. I’ve got the old lady in front of me; windpipe caught in the crook of my elbow, toes just grazing the floor. Her remaining eye is open, blinking the blood away. She sees her boys.
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