by Chris Vola
As she trailed off, Ryan watched her mouth go slack and her face darken with a combination of panic and recognition. She had seen him before, or at least a picture, knew who he was. She dropped her phone a second time and reached for something in the pocket of her jacket. Before she could pull it out, Frank, his clothes covered in organic sludge, appeared out of the shadows that dotted the more bush-heavy right side of the house and stepped behind her, snapping her neck in one clean motion before she could move or make a sound. He hoisted her limp body over his shoulder and headed up the steps and through the open front door.
“Looks clear in here,” Ryan heard him call out a few seconds later. “They rearranged her art collection a little but no real signs of a struggle. And judging by the scents I’m picking up, Natalia hasn’t been here in a while. Hopefully she’s in Red Hook with everyone else.”
The safe house in Red Hook was an abandoned dye factory that Frank and Natalia had purchased and refurbished in the early seventies. They’d hoped that the four thousand square feet of scorched and soot-covered walls, rows of gutted-out chemical drums, and laboratory nooks filled with random pipes, vials, and beakers would become a secret haven, a tribal gathering place in times of trouble and uncertainty. But in spite of their elders’ altruism, the rest of the tribe’s members, it turned out, weren’t much into reunions, and one of the few aspects of being a dead warrior of which you could be certain was that if you were careful, there was very little to worry about. The last time Ryan had heard even a brief mention of the place was in the early years of the eighties crack epidemic, when base-heads and other assorted squatters apparently outnumbered the rats, and were dealt with similarly.
Before following Frank into the house, Ryan picked up the girl’s phone and a small cylindrical object that had fallen out of her pocket. It was a metallic spray bottle, painted black with no markings and nearly full of liquid.
“I think she was going to try to pepper-spray us,” he said as he closed the door and stepped into a large, open foyer.
Frank had laid the girl next to an ornate stone umbrella holder shaped like a pair of wrestling alligators and was bent over, brushing thorns, dirt, and flower petals from his pants. He turned and Ryan tossed him the bottle. He rolled it through his fingers and snickered. “Maybe it’s holy water or garlic juice,” he said, tossing the bottle back to Ryan.
“Or liquid silver,” Ryan said, pretending to twist off the spray top’s plastic cover, trying to prolong a moment of levity in a night where anything resembling genuine positivity—and a chance to relax for even a second—had been totally absent. “Open your eyes real wide and let’s find out.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that at all,” a distorted female voice crackled from the hidden speaker portion of a home-security touchscreen mounted on the wall next to the door. “And I could have used your help an hour ago. If you’re done wanking around, follow the trail of destruction and meet me upstairs. Bring the girl.”
Natalia was never one for small talk.
Frank and Ryan exchanged a perplexed glance. Frank shrugged and started moving across the circular, high-ceilinged room. Ryan reached around the girl’s stick-figure waist, angled her torso against his hip, and carried her toward a set of slightly curving hardwood stairs, letting her wilted arms drag across a huge primary-colored, zigzag-patterned Navajo rug that was littered with bits of glass and other debris.
The walls of the room were made of the same material as the stairs and warmly lit by recessed ceiling lights, giving the space a distinctly rural, ski-lodge feel, if that ski lodge had recently been used as a holding cell for a freshly jacked-up amphetamine freak. The two identical, seven-foot-tall totem poles covered in birds, foxes, bears, and unidentifiable grotesque creatures that normally flanked the entranceway were knocked over, splintered and covered with what looked like axe marks. A giant glass display case, built into the wall that stretched from the front door to the stairs on the right side of the room, was shattered, and its contents—hand-painted lizard and animal figurines, decorative canoe paddles, whalebone pipes, flint daggers and arrowheads—were broken, displaced, or strewn about the floor. A handful of framed photographs were missing from their hooks, their contents torn and scattered across the wreckage.
“Okay, maybe it was more than a little rearranging,” Frank said, leaning over the railing at the top of the stairs. “She must be pissed.”
Unlike the nomadic existence that Ryan, Frank, and the other members of the tribe had always favored, Natalia had sunk her roots in deeply here—with the help of a sizable inheritance—as the house’s sole owner for nearly one hundred years, purchasing it under the guise of a limited liability company. For the last few decades, she’d worn a series of increasingly wrinkled silicone masks in public to simulate a natural aging process, until it was no longer feasible or believable. Now she walked around sans makeup, telling the few people who asked that she was the great-niece of the house’s original owner. Most of her neighbors, immersed in their worlds of earbuds and charter school application forms, didn’t seem to notice or care.
In reality she’d journeyed across the Atlantic as a reluctant twelve-year-old in the 1840s with her father, a master engineer who’d been hired to help oversee the development of one of the fledgling railroads that had begun to expand its metal and wooden spiderwebs across the continent. After a decade roughing it in the American wilderness that included, if you believed her stories, being kidnapped by a band of Sioux raiders, the hanging of her father at the hands of ornery Mormons, and a broken engagement to a gout-riddled provincial governor, she found herself shipping into the same Brooklyn port that had briefly welcomed her as a girl. Her second stopover in the borough would last quite a bit longer.
A lack of any real sense of permanence during her tumultuous youth allowed Natalia to cherish aspects of being turned that others found cumbersome, or simply impossible to live with. Whereas most new initiates looked at their condition as an eternal prison—albeit one that was free of disease and deterioration—she saw an opportunity to finally settle down, to immerse herself in a community that was older and far more fascinating than anything she’d yet encountered. According to Frank, most of her collection of artifacts had been acquired not during her earlier travels but as the fruits of her research, her obsession with what she’d become, not only in a physical or biological sense but in a larger anthropological context.
If Frank, because of his age, was the tribe’s de facto chief, Natalia was unquestionably its historian and high priestess, always with one foot firmly placed in the past, a past whose priceless mementos had been broken and strewn about by someone with the delicacy of a starving rat sifting through garbage.
Yes, she was probably pissed.
As Ryan joined him on the second floor, a loud hydraulic hiss emanated from behind an unremarkable section of the wall to their left. The hidden panic-room door opened soundlessly, revealing a dark steel-walled cubicle with just enough space for a desk that contained a dual-monitor Apple desktop computer and a medical examination table, on top of which a broad-shouldered, lifeless body in a black tracksuit was lying, its shaved head drooping sideways off the far end, its jacket and undershirt pulled up around its chest.
A plump, pale, freckle-faced woman wearing green pajamas, who couldn’t be more than five feet tall and looked like she might be in her late thirties, was standing over the body, pumping an old brass hand crank that was attached to a double-ended rubber tube running from an incision in the body’s hairy stomach to a large glass container on the floor nearby that was quickly filling with blood.
Ryan had seen this exact pump model once before, the last time he’d been a patient in a hospital, when the technology had been cutting-edge. He tried to suppress a shudder.
Natalia looked up from her work, brushing a few strands of dirty-blond hair away from her forehead. “Ah good,” she said with an accent that, even after close to one hundred seventy-five years in the States, still clearly bel
ied her London roots. She sniffed, nodding at the girl who was tucked under Ryan’s arm. “Another O positive, but one can’t always be picky. Thank you, Francis, for the clean kill, one less mess I’ll need to worry about cleaning up in the morning.”
“No problem,” Frank said, still staring around the cubicle in disbelief. “This is really something, Nat.”
“Where should I put it?” Ryan asked.
Natalia pulled firmly on the rubber tube, and it exited the gut of the corpse on the table with a soft slurp. “Just drop her there in the hallway,” she said. “No use crowding the bunker up any more than it already is, especially if another round of idiots comes back to try to finish us off with their squirt guns.”
She moved over to the computer monitors, whose screens were divided into quadrants showing live security feeds at various locations in and around the house. As she leaned over the keyboard and into the much brighter light of the screens, Ryan noticed that her neck and cheeks were covered in pink scar tissue shining with a clear pus, as if her skin had been melted off and then crudely glued back together.
Frank cleared his throat, a little uncomfortably. “Did they do that to your—”
“Like I said, I wouldn’t recommend getting sprayed,” Natalia hissed, cutting him off, eyes remaining fixated on the screens. “Honestly, I don’t know what it is, but it burns like hell, and it’s taking way too long to heal. After you called last night, Francis, I locked myself in here to do some research, check the usual forums and gossip rooms, as I’m sure you did. Then I began exploring some more, ah, esoteric avenues until I was interrupted”—she patted at her chin lightly and winced—“by these children and their toys.”
“How bad does it hurt?” Frank asked, as he stared a little too hard at the container of blood resting a few feet away on the floor, like he hadn’t eaten recently.
Natalia ignored him. She rewound the video feed of the yard until it showed two figures in matching tracksuits opening the front gate. She used a mouse cursor to manipulate the frozen image, zoomed in on the faces, and highlighted them. A box appeared on one side of the screen showing the area she’d marked with enhanced clarity, the vague pixels mostly smoothed away. If part of Natalia remained fixated on the past, the rest of her interests and talents pulled her in a completely opposite direction.
“Stupidly,” she continued, “I unlocked the front door from up here because I wanted to see if I might be able to learn something by observing them, if I could remotely access their phones or something, I don’t know. But then I saw this fat cunt destroying in two minutes what I’ve spent the last century and a half acquiring, and I’m afraid I lost my wits. He was at the railing over there taking a picture of something with his phone when I opened the door. Scared the hell out of him; he dropped his phone over the railing and it shattered. He had time to get one spray off before it was over. I was lucky he missed my eyes or you two might have walked into a much different scene. I waited for the girl to come inside, but either she lost her nerve or she was only supposed to be a lookout.”
Ryan approached the desk and placed the girl’s phone next to the keyboard. “This will probably help,” he said.
Natalia snatched it up and scrolled around for a few moments. “Yes, it will,” she murmured, the faintest hint of a smile framing the edges of her singed lips for the first time. “It certainly will.” She moved away from the monitors, picked up the container of blood, and headed out of the room. “Let’s talk somewhere that’s a little more comfortable,” she said.
Ryan and Frank stepped over the girl’s body and followed Natalia down a long hallway lit by stylish chrome sconces. As they walked, Frank gave her a rundown of everything that had happened to them after they’d left Ryan’s apartment. She remained silent, her face taut and emotionless, betraying none of her thoughts. The three of them turned a corner and entered a high-ceilinged room featuring the same hardwood flooring as the downstairs foyer. Several plush leather chairs were arranged in a semicircle around a rustic oak coffee table and facing a large brick fireplace. An enormous, pencil-thin television had been hung above the mantel, its screen divided into the same live security feeds Natalia had been studying earlier. The other three walls were completely covered by shelves containing thousands of old books and manuscripts in various stages of disintegration, their spines cracked and moldy.
Natalia motioned for them to sit and began pouring blood from the container into champagne flutes that were resting on a tray at the center of the coffee table. She filled one, handed it to Frank, and started pouring a second glass until Ryan stopped her. “I’m fine,” he said, “still full from yesterday.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “This one’s for me, then.” She finished pouring, then sat down in the chair between Ryan and Frank. “Let me know how this tastes to you,” she said to Frank before they both took a sip.
Frank’s eyes narrowed as he pursed his lips into a sour contortion, swirling the remaining blood in his flute around like a wine connoisseur. “A ridiculously tart O with notes of methamphetamine, OxyContin, and low-grade cannabis, with more than a hint of anemia and early-onset kidney failure.” He wiped his mouth with his hand. “All jokes aside, Nat, this is truly disgusting. If I weren’t so hungry I would have spit it out.”
Natalia took a sip and made a similar face. “Like I said before,” she said, “one can’t always be picky. If you were paying attention you would have noticed that the girl smelled just as rancid, if not worse. I doubt I’ll even bother draining her.”
“So they’re just a couple of junkies,” Ryan said, thankful that he had abstained from the impromptu tasting.
“Well, they certainly aren’t Navy SEALs,” Natalia scoffed as she placed her flute on the table, got up, and walked over to one of the bookshelves. “Which raises several interesting questions.”
“Like how the fuck were they able to get to Seamus,” Ryan said. “Also, it kind of throws a wrench in your theory about this being a military-grade operation.” He looked at Frank, who was trying to choke down the rest of the blood in his flute. “If we’re being hunted, why not send in real hunters? Either this is the worst strategy ever, or you need to brush up on your Dutch.”
“Not necessarily,” Natalia said as she returned to her chair, holding a small stack of crumbling papers tied together with a leather string. “I’ve read the same chatter as Francis, deciphered the same messages. I don’t think that most or any of it was meant for my two houseguests or whoever came after you two earlier. Look at it more like deep-sea fishing than hunting. The tracksuited cretins we’ve dealt with tonight are simply chum, near-worthless pieces of meat used to lure the prize, not catch it.”
“You’re saying that Manhattan offered them some kind of deal, a lifetime of free dime bags and needles to what, scare us before they send in the real cavalry?” Ryan asked.
“Wouldn’t be the worst strategy,” Frank said, shrugging. “We’re here now, aren’t we?”
Neither Ryan nor Natalia needed to say anything to acknowledge that he was right. The three of them sat in silence for several moments, Natalia scrolling through the dead girl’s phone while Frank fiddled with his own.
“Hold on,” Natalia said, scrunching her broad, snubbed nose in befuddlement. “Maybe chum wasn’t exactly the correct word. Her last two dozen or so received texts were from the same unknown number. First, there’s a list of addresses, mine and four others in Brooklyn that mean nothing to me. The rest of the messages are either questions or interrogatory phrases, demands for updates—‘Provide your current location,’ ‘Is the house occupied?’—boring stuff, mostly. But there’s also questions about artifacts, the contents of my collection, if there’s anything to suggest that Arthur Harker has been here recently or is nearby. His name appears several times, and gathering information about ‘Harker’s lineage’ seems to be a main priority. And finally there’s something about a jaguar—‘Status of search re: jaguar?’ ‘Evidence for jaguar’s recent presence or curr
ent whereabouts?’”
Ryan perked up at the mention of his maker, whom he’d always considered to be the tribe’s version of a deadbeat dad, whose self-imposed exile he initially resented, until he decided that it was pointless to resent a ghost. After that, Harker had been surprisingly easy to forget.
One thing that couldn’t be denied, though, was that Ryan was all that remained of Arthur’s lineage, however much he tried to negate it.
“One of Harker’s magic statues he never bothered to show us?” Frank blurted out with an incredulous sneer. “As impressively ballsy an idea as that is, it doesn’t make it any less stupid. If they think they can use it to come over here and—”
He was cut off by the vibrating phone in his lap. He picked it up and stared at the screen. “I think this is one of the burners we left at the safe house,” he said. “I need to answer this.” He got up and walked out of the room.
Natalia followed him with her eyes for a few seconds, a glimmer of curiosity dissolving almost as soon as it appeared. “What do you know about Arthur Harker?” she asked, turning back to Ryan, the quiet scratch of silk friction emanating from her chair as she crossed her rotund, pajama-clad legs.
“He was old,” Ryan said, “older than Frank. One of the original Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam. He was a royal cartographer or something else to do with maps. Other than that, I don’t know, he seemed nice, but distant, maybe because he was already in the process of checking out for good. A couple of weeks later he was gone. Frank’s always felt more like my maker than him or anyone else.”
Natalia nodded. “Did he ever tell you why he turned you?”
“Arthur? He said that before he found me in the hospital he was planning on killing me. That he wanted to eradicate whatever disease I’d contracted before it seeped into his—your—food supply. Maybe he’d started going soft in his old age and took pity on me. Or he knew he’d be leaving the tribe and realized he hadn’t put any thought into finding a replacement. Maybe it was a perfect kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of scenario. Lucky for both of us.”