“You think so?” I stood, but didn’t bother to turn.
“Very much so,” he said. “I’m rather impressed.”
“Impressed enough to let me go?”
“No. Not that impressed. So sorry.”
There was a loud bonk and the sound of someone falling over. I turned around.
The Englishman was lying on his side, no longer conscious and no longer holding his gun. Standing over him was Clara. She was holding a large piece of deadwood and looking jumpy.
“Did I kill him?” she asked, hopping from foot to foot the way one might if one desperately needed to pee. I leaned over him and checked. He was still breathing, but there was a nasty wound at the base of his skull. The way his hand was twitching, there might have been some nerve damage.
“No,” I said, “but he may have trouble walking for a while.”
“Okay.” She dropped the driftwood. “Okay. Okay, let’s—”
“How far away is home for you?” I asked.
“Not far.”
“If we try and run there, can you keep up?”
“I… um…”
“Focus, Clara. I need first aid for my wrist, and I need to get out of the park as soon as possible, and the only friendly place I know of is too far. There are more bounty hunters out tonight, and they’re probably all headed here. Not to mention the police, who are probably interested in the gunshots. Can you help me?”
She snapped out of the stunned reverie she’d been caught up in. “Yes. And… and I jog. I’ll be all right.”
“Good,” I said, shedding the red parka and picking up my bag. “Lead on.”
Chapter 16
We went through the science again this morning. Viktor wants me to understand how it works—how I work—for some reason. I keep explaining to him that if he wants to really get me to understand medicine, he’s going to have to start with leeches and work up from there. I exaggerate, but only slightly. I mean, I understand what disease is and what causes it, and I have a vague comprehension of how the human body fights disease, but his tedious lectures approach a complexity I just don’t care to absorb. Although he did have a few interesting thoughts on my metabolism and why it seems like I can’t get any fatter or stronger. But I’m never going to get the thing about telomeres. He should just stop trying.
* * *
For our mad dash through the northern portion of Central Park, we stayed away from well-lit paths as much as possible and basically waded through every bush, shrub, and bramble we could. It wasn’t just a matter of evading whatever remaining bounty hunter types who might surface. New York’s Finest had finally gotten their act together. Seems the sound of automatic gunfire in the middle of Central Park causes them to mobilize in fairly large numbers.
The street surrounding the north entrance to the park was, perhaps not surprisingly, lined with cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. And bystanders, fortunately for us. We were able to merge effectively with the steadily increasing mass of onlookers, and once we’d pushed through them, we were basically home free.
We walked the remaining three blocks to Clara’s apartment. She lived in a nondescript building on a street full of nondescript buildings. I honestly didn’t know how she told them apart.
“It’s on the top floor,” she said as we climbed into an elevator that didn’t look like it was up for a trip all the way to the top. “It’s not much, but I have roof access, which is cool.”
“Not much” turned out to be only a little bit bigger than Brenda’s hole in Chinatown. The kitchen, living room, and bedroom were basically all the same room. And Clara’s bachelor-like tendencies made it seem even smaller than it was. To wit, there was a stack of pizza boxes in the corner, and that was the only spot on the floor not covered in unwashed clothing. At least she had her own bathroom, small though it was. (Sink, toilet, shower, but no tub. Again, only a small step up from Brenda’s, but a step nonetheless. Plus, this bathroom was clean.)
I helped myself to the bathroom sink, rinsing my wrist carefully. I’d taken a good bite out of myself, but it looked like it was already starting to heal.
“I don’t have any bandages,” Clara called from the kitchen area.
“How about some ice and a hand towel?”
“That I have.”
She appeared momentarily with ice bundled in a towel, offered with a slightly trembling hand. I’d have worried that the towel wasn’t clean, but infection is another one of those things that I don’t have to worry about.
“Let me see,” she said, pointing at my wrist. I held it up. “Ugh. Didn’t that hurt?”
“Not as much as getting peeled by a demon would have.”
She reached out to touch it.
“Don’t.” She jumped back. “My blood might still be toxic.” I pressed the ice up against the wound and stepped past her and out of the bathroom.
“Are you okay?” I asked, stopping beside her as she used the doorjamb to support herself. Her cheeks were flushed with blood and her hands were still shaking.
“Yeah, I… just…”
“Take some deep breaths,” I said. “You look ready to faint.”
“It’s the adrenaline,” she said. “I’m still a little buzzed.”
“Near-death experiences will do that,” I said. “Even to me.”
She nodded. “Was that thing… that was a demon?”
“Yeah. Aren’t they fun?”
“I didn’t think… I mean, we talk about them on the MUD, but I never…”
“I know. It’s like discovering Santa’s real, isn’t it?” I was looking for a place to sit. My options were the bed or an uncomfortable-looking bar stool in front of the kitchen counter.
“Yeah,” she smiled, relieved to have it put into context. “Um, but Santa isn’t real, right?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“Oh, good. Because I’ve been sorta naughty. Here.” She swept a pile of clothes off the bed. “It’s laundry day.”
I wanted to say it looked like laundry day had passed her by a month ago, but I was a guest. Instead, I sat, which felt uncommonly good. I was fighting a little dizziness myself.
We went through an awkward silence, with her back by the bathroom door and me trying to hold onto my equilibrium.
“Oh, hey,” she said, breaking the moment. She fell to her knees, put one hand on my thigh, and reached between my legs and under the bed. She emerged with a laptop. “We should check the MUD.”
She sat down beside me. It was not the firmest mattress ever built so we ended up sagging together until our thighs and shoulders touched. At around that moment a certain part of my anatomy reminded me that she was an exceptionally attractive young woman.
She flipped open the laptop and started typing away.
“I don’t know a lot about computers,” I said, “but shouldn’t that be hooked up to something?”
“It’s WiFi,” she explained.
“Okay.” No clue.
“Wireless,” she elaborated. “Pirated, actually. The guy two floors down has wireless network access. I’m kinda stealing it.”
I was reminded of a conversation I had with a guy once who couldn’t stop talking about this new thing where you could send your voice through the air and have it heard on the other side of town. I thought he was certifiable. Twenty years later everyone had a radio. So I knew better than to say “oh, c’mon, how does it really work?” even though the concept of stealing Internet access out of midair sounded preposterous.
The familiar MUD frame popped up on her screen. She scanned the messages carefully. “Looks like nobody has posted much of anything yet. Should I say something?”
“No,” I said. “That would be incredibly dangerous.”
“They’d never believe me.”
“Who?”
“My friends. If I told them I had the immortal in my room, sitting on my bed… !”
“You can’t,” I said seriously. “It would put both of us at risk.”
&
nbsp; She checked my face to see how not kidding I was. I tried to look grave, as opposed to tired, hungry, and mildly hung over. Evidently I passed, as she closed the laptop and slipped it back under the bed. “Yeah,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I guess.”
She pushed away from me until she was sitting at the head of the bed, where she sulked for exactly two seconds before returning to the main theme, which was, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here!”
“Is it really that exciting?” Her adrenaline had returned in force, while mine was nowhere to be seen. Ah, youth.
“Yes!” she declared. “Oh, I have so many questions! Like, what do I call you? Do you have a name?”
“I have a lot of them,” I said dully. “I’ve been going by Adam lately.”
“Hah! Like Adam and Eve?”
That hadn’t actually occurred to me. “Sure.” I was fading badly. It had been a very long day.
Clara kept on talking. She had a lot of questions, and they came one after the other in rapid succession with no real pause in between for a proper response, which was okay by me because at some point I leaned backward onto the bed. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep.
* * *
I woke up to sunlight streaming into the room through the un-curtained windows. I was under the blankets and evidently no longer fully clothed. Underwear, yes. Pants, no. Shirt, no. I had no memory of arriving in that state on my own. I looked around and spied my pants and shirt neatly folded atop my bag in the corner where there had been a stack of pizza boxes the night before. And not only the boxes were missing; the whole room had been picked up, revealing a previously obscured hardwood floor.
I could see Clara over the half wall in the half kitchen, whisking something in a bowl. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail—which complemented her high cheekbones nicely—and was wearing a sleeveless half shirt with no evidence of a bra. This complemented her nicely, too.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up and smiled. “Hey! You eat eggs? Scrambled okay?”
“Sure.”
“Great, that’s the only kind of egg I can make.” After fiddling for a second, she got a frying pan heated and the eggs into the pan and then stepped around the half wall, at which point I discovered she was practically naked, wearing only a pair of pink bikini briefs. The rest was long tan legs and a lovely midriff. My goodness.
About the tan. I’ve never been able to understand this. Some women just have tans somehow. And this has always been true, well before tanning salons and whatnot, even at times when tan skin wasn’t the slightest bit in vogue. (For a time, pale skin was the It Look. It meant the woman in question was wealthy enough to never have to go outside without something covering her, like a parasol. It also meant they were generally unathletic, near-starved, and possibly suffering from consumption. Yes, people found that attractive.) My point is Clara lived in New York City, which is not exactly a beach town. And it was early December. So where in the hell did the tan come from? Not that I was complaining in the slightest bit. I was always the guy snapping up the hot-blooded, deeply tanned servant girl in the cupboard while the lady of the house complained of vapors and slept all day.
Clara announced, “It’ll be done in a minute,” acting totally ignorant of her own near-nakedness. “You slept well?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. It’s been a long couple of days.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she chimed.
I sat up. “Um… we didn’t…”
“No, silly.” She returned to the stove. “I mean I could have taken advantage of you, I guess. You were out cold. I did take some pictures for my web site. Hope that was okay.”
“You what?”
“Kidding. But I picked up.”
How to give an immortal a heart attack. “I noticed,” I said. “I was wondering where you hid all the clothes.”
“Stacked in the closet,” she said, pointing to the small closet near the front door. “I wouldn’t recommend opening it. Could be very dangerous.”
She emerged from the kitchen with a plate full of eggs and handed it over. I went at them eagerly, as I was apparently rather hungry. She sat down on the bed and watched me eat.
“What time is it?” I asked, mouth full of eggs. All sorts of dining proprieties go out the window when you and your host are both almost naked.
“Around two,” she said.
“Guess I was pretty tired.”
“Yeah… I’ve been up for hours. I’m not real big on sleep.” I would have told her to expect that to change in another seven or eight years, but I was too busy stuffing my face. Can’t imagine that was a pretty sight, but she didn’t seem to mind all that much.
It took me all of thirty seconds to finish off the eggs. She swept the plate off to the kitchen.
“So what do you do?” I asked, because that seemed like a good question, better than why are you walking around in your underwear like that?
“Grad student. NYU,” she clarified, dumping the plate unceremoniously into the sink and returning to the bed. “Economics.”
“That’s interesting.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Okay, no it’s not.”
She smiled. I smiled back. Long smiling pause.
“That was pretty amazing, last night,” she said.
“Which part?”
“All of it. The demon thing and all.” The early morning encounter we shared still had her blood pumping. “Was that the first time you ever…”
“What, killed one? Or met one?”
“I dunno. Either,” she said, her hands fiddling with the sheet. Nervous tic. I made her nervous? “I gotta admit the whole ‘immortal’ thing is kinda hard to get my mind around. It’s like I have to use a whole different vocabulary to get it right. I mean, is there anything you haven’t done before?”
“Well, seen demons before. Mostly from a distance, which is usually the best way to meet one. It’s the first time I ever killed one, or even figured out exactly how. I expected one of those helpful, heavily armed fellows to do it for me.”
“Yeah, who were they? You said something about a bounty.”
“Someone put a price on my head recently. They were there to collect.”
Her expression clouded with something that looked like concern. “And the MUD… you said that has something to do with all of this?”
“It does. I think whoever set it up, did so to keep track of me. To make me easier to find for the people he hired.”
“God… I feel terrible.”
“Don’t. It’s not your fault.” Although I admit, complex Internet role-playing games didn’t sound too healthy to me. Must be a generational thing.
“I guess… I mean, most of them? Most of them think it’s just a joke, or… another make-believe world and all. There are a few of us who had our suspicions. You know, that maybe it wasn’t so pretend, that maybe there was such a thing as an actual immortal man. Especially when that photo turned up.”
“You mean one of those digital images?”
“No, not those. Someone found an old photograph in a book from 1892 and scanned it. Pretty much everyone figured it was a fake, because, you know, you can do a lot with photos nowadays. But I know the girl who posted it, and she swore it was legit.”
I thought about it. “That was… oh, the Chicago World’s Fair.”
“Yeah, exactly!”
It was the first time I’d seen a portable camera, and I didn’t quite believe someone could capture an image with it. Foolishly—and after having had quite a bit to drink at the German pavilion—I dared the photographer to prove it to me. Interesting how a mistake over a hundred years ago could come back to haunt me like that. I’ve since been very careful to avoid cameras. (In hindsight, I should have avoided beer, too.) Or, careful up until I became a wanted man and MUD geeks started hunting me with digital cameras. But short of walking around with a veil on, that was pretty much unavoidable.
“So there are
a few of you who took the whole thing seriously.”
“Sort of seriously. I mean, we never thought we were putting you in any danger or anything. It was all just for fun. We even started up a little mini-group within the MUD.”
“Really.”
She blushed slightly. “We call it the Cult of the Immortal.”
I grinned. “You’re kidding.”
“No, but it was just for fun! None of us ever expected to actually meet you one day.”
“And what did the Cult of the Immortal do?”
“Oh, God, I cannot believe I’m even telling you this,” she said.
“You brought it up.”
She mock-sighed. I couldn’t help but think she’d intentionally manipulated the conversation in this direction. She said, “It’s mostly stuff about what it must be like to be you. All the things you must know, what you must have seen… how you kiss…”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah! You’re an experienced older man with the body of a thirty-year-old. How cool is that?”
I never thought of it that way, in no small part because I’d never been with a woman who went into the transaction knowing in advance that I was immortal. If I ever told—and I rarely did—it was after the fact.
“Are you telling me I’m some kind of sex symbol?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it?”
She thought about it. “Okay, I guess that’s about right.”
“Please tell me this cult is all women.”
“I think it might be. There’s no way to be sure.”
I didn’t know whether to be fascinated, aroused, or nauseated. “Maybe I should be glad you’re the one who found me.”
Clara smiled. Mischief danced in her eyes. “How glad?”
Before I could think of an appropriately pithy reply, she leaned forward and kissed me. Not a peck, but a man-the-guns-and-take-no-prisoners kiss. The kind that comes off as aggressive and soft at the same time, leaving you to wonder how that’s even possible. It was a very good kiss, in other words. I held up my end of the exchange pretty well once my mind registered what was happening and got all the blood flowing in all the right places.
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