by Chris Vola
“Jessica,” Ryan repeated. “Sucking down people’s bodily fluids for an eternity isn’t exactly everything it’s cracked up to be. No offense, yours was pretty good. But it’s got nothing on this omelet.”
“This place is pretty dope, right?” James said, winking at the redheaded, college-aged waitress who had come to refill their waters. She groaned and sped away. “Well at least you’re rich,” he continued, “good looking, and technically still young. You can do whatever you want, go wherever you want to go. Which is why it’s even weirder to me that you’re settling for this one chick, a chick who, from what you’ve told me, might not even feel the same way about you.”
“So this Rhodes you were talking about last night,” Ryan said, changing the subject. “You’re saying he can trace the location of where a call came from, even if the number is private?”
“Derrick?” James shrugged. “The guy is legit, OG hacker status. He could find a dick pic you took ten years ago on a digital camera, accidentally uploaded on MySpace, and deleted five seconds later. He’s that good. Not trying to burst your bubble—I don’t know how out of the loop you are when it comes to dating in the modern world—but when a girl you’ve supposedly been in love with for an extended period of time starts calling you from a private number and then suddenly stops contacting you, it’s not a good sign. Maybe you should try sending her a Facebook message or an e-mail or something. The last thing you need, now that you’re like, fully back in the world, is to get a stalker reputation right off the bat. Not a great look, Ry.”
“I think she might be in trouble,” Ryan said, stabbing through the last sausage with his fork. “Can you set up a meeting or not?”
James held up his hands. “Yeah, yeah sure. Take it easy. I got you. I can probably set something up for this afternoon. But you need to know a few things about Derrick Rhodes. First of all, he’s super strange, not the easiest person to get a read on, Asperger’s to the max. He’ll want to meet somewhere relatively off the grid, probably Central Park.”
“That’s fine,” Ryan said. “I can deal with it.”
“Also,” James continued, lowering his voice, “he’s a fugitive. Like, pretty high up on the Most Wanted list. Used to do some joint contracting work with Homeland Security and the NSA, then decided to, um, borrow a hefty amount of money, as well as a hard drive of sensitive information, some of which he’s already leaked; the rest he’s planning on releasing to the Internet once he’s out of the country.”
“What the hell is he doing in Manhattan of all places?” Ryan asked. “And how are you able to contact him if the feds don’t even know where he is?”
James grinned, adjusted his crooked tie, swept croissant crumbs from the front of the wrinkled navy sports jacket that made him look like the overgrown boarding school brat he was, and signaled for the waitress to bring the check. “He’s a client. Came to the city to get his financials in order before he continues up the coast, backpacking through the woods to Nova Scotia, where he’s going to hop on a boat to Ireland or somewhere. Sounds pretty fucking ridiculous if you ask me, but it’s not my problem. Plus, he owes me.”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Sounds like you guys have a great vetting process at Van Doren and Associates.”
“We’ve never had a moral issue doing business with entities that aren’t necessarily legitimate in the eyes of the federal government. Our company was founded on that very principle. You of all people should know that.”
Ryan nodded. He didn’t have a comeback for that.
James stood up to leave. “I’ve got to get to the office before my secretary starts scouring every rub-and-tug parlor on Canal Street for my corpse. Stay put at the apartment and I’ll call you on the house phone when I hear from Derrick. The tab’s on you today.” He scooted out of the booth, making a point of brushing against the backside of the waitress, who had just arrived and was removing the check from the front pocket of her apron.
“What a dick,” she murmured after James had exited the diner. “He a friend of yours?”
“Nope,” Ryan said as he handed her some cash.
17
Ryan had never been religious, even before he was turned. Especially before.
He’d grown up in places that wouldn’t be habitable by any stretch of the twenty-first-century, first-world imagination, seen the people around him governed by, at best, a kind of harmless pettiness, and at worst, an animalistic viciousness beaten into them by the unending drudgery of the coal-smeared industrial landscape. Words like faith and salvation were as useful to him as an empty plate or a worn-out boot heel; a prayer was the ultimate waste of breath. When he’d been given a reprieve from the death that so many self-proclaimed believers sought in vain to transcend, it wasn’t because of divine intervention. The simple (if little understood) biological process would have been seen by Ryan’s familiars only as a kind of savage witchcraft, the worst heresy.
But walking north along the leafy residential sprawl of Central Park West under the auspices of regal apartment buildings whose impressive towers rose skyward in an unbroken display of prewar opulence, he felt like an unseen hand had reached down and given him a second chance.
He couldn’t smell the blood or the underlying medical conditions of the people he passed—the women pushing strollers in yoga pants or business-casual skirts, the elderly men snoozing on benches and against the low stone wall that separated Central Park from the sidewalk, the occasional soccer player or jogger—or read the numbers on any of the approaching street signs until they were almost directly overhead. And though he felt somewhat replenished by the seemingly endless supply of frozen burgers, Gatorades, and untouched fruits and vegetables in James’s refrigerator, he still had a nagging cough that wasn’t getting any better, and with each step he took, the invisible weights that seemed to be attached to both of his ankles got heavier, as if he’d spent the last century cheating not only death but also gravity.
But he was armed, not only with a firearm and a blade but with a renewed sense of purpose, a hope that he still had enough time to find Jennifer, as long as the lead that James had given him panned out.
Ryan had Googled Derrick Rhodes on the desktop in the extra bedroom in James’s apartment while he waited for James to set up a meeting. There were hundreds of images of the lanky, bespectacled former computer professional (along with accompanying news articles), and in all of them he had the same close-cropped, blasé haircut, the same deer-in-the-headlights stare, looking at least a decade younger than his thirty-four years.
Rhodes had been busy during his four years as a government contractor. He’d gathered information about secret military expenditures and weapons projects, black ops orchestrated by privately held companies with no ostensible ties to any of the world’s intelligence agencies, improper relationships between hedge fund managers and members of the judicial and executive branches. The files he’d sent to a handpicked selection of multinational journalists also included sinister memos regarding the Big Brother scope of government surveillance, the OxyContin and gambling habits of a posse of New Jersey police commissioners, hundreds of assassinations that had been carried out by spies but officially blamed on terrorist cells and other extremist groups.
As impressive as the sheer volume of data he was able to unload on the public over the fourteen months was Rhodes’s ability to totally remove himself from the grid, to remain an at-large fugitive with no discernible trail to his whereabouts. Tracing a call sent to Ryan’s phone to a physical location would be like child’s play to someone like Derrick, he assumed, as long as the fugitive didn’t spook first.
Ryan entered the park at 103rd Street, following a paved pathway to a grassy hillside that sloped down to a large, algae-covered pond ringed with weeping willows, oaks, and the occasional spruce tree. Continuing across a bridge that overlooked a small man-made waterfall, the path rose up a more heavily wooded hill and across a larger road being used by a few bicyclists and runners. After another section o
f forest, the landscape changed to an open expanse of baseball and soccer fields, handball courts, and glacial deposits in the form of massive rock formations. It was called the North Meadow, according to the map that Ryan had printed out from the desktop in James’s apartment.
Over the years, Ryan had absorbed plenty of images and video footage of the park, enough to form what he thought was a fairly accurate sense of the place. But here, in the park’s northern reaches, it was nothing like the ultra-crowded Great Lawn or the tourist-clogged path that circled the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. There were no horse-drawn carriages, caricaturists, or meandering Shakespeare troupes dressed in period attire. Besides the occasional group of two or three pedestrians, a few couples with strollers and/or dogs, and a handful of sunbathers lounging on the grass, the area was empty of humanity. The constant urban undercurrent of traffic and phone noises, the blare of secondhand music, and the drone of voices had been replaced by the quiet chatter of birdsong and the ripple of wind through the leaves. The only life form that could be said to be bustling was a gray squirrel barreling down a tree trunk, its cheeks fat with seeds. To Ryan, it seemed like he had been transported to a different time, one that might have been familiar to a young, pretribal Frank.
Whether it was the thought of his former friend or the sudden silence that surrounded him, Ryan paused for a moment as a shiver went down his spine. He had always felt most comfortable in the loudness of the city, swept up in the crowds, one anonymous face in a sea of millions. But the farther into the park he’d gotten, the more he felt trapped by nature, his inner self exposed to the trees that seemed to whisper and point to each other, like they were watching him.
Like they knew he didn’t belong.
Ryan started moving again, told himself to shake off any further insane thoughts about malevolent plants. As he continued through the meadow, the trees receded and the buildings lining Central Park North loomed to his left, soothing him a little, reminding him that he was only a quick jog away from his native terrain.
He picked up the pace as he walked across a traffic overpass and onto a running path before turning north, through another series of rolling hills and rocky outcroppings, then down a steep decline that bottomed out at a black wrought-iron gate, only a few yards from 5th Avenue, the park’s eastern border.
It was the entrance to the Conservatory Garden, a six-acre enclosure of impeccably manicured lawns, fountains, hedges, flowers, and sculptures that, to Ryan, looked like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland. It was fitting, he thought, that he was searching for someone who might be more than a little mad, in every sense of the word.
He passed a large lawn surrounded by yew bushes and bordered by two rows of crabapple trees and seasonal displays of tulips and chrysanthemums (there was a small plaque denoting the species of each particular plant), with a twelve-foot-high bronze jet fountain at its center. At the far end of the lawn, a bride and groom stood under a flower-covered pergola, posing while a photographer crouched in the foreground and barked out instructions. Ryan walked by a few more rows of trees and hedges, a small Victorian-style brick building, looking for Rhodes, who James had said would be sitting alone and wearing black. He came to a large circular section of the walkway that featured a smaller fountain containing a bronze sculpture of three dancing girls. Displays of sunflowers, daisies, and dozens of other plants formed concentric circles that expanded in size and height the farther they got from the fountain. There were also a few wooden benches scattered between the rows of plants. On one of them, partially concealed by a massive pink rhododendron bush, sat a solitary man, methodically chewing something.
Ryan thought he must have been mistaken, or James had given him the wrong location. The man—or more accurately, the creature—sitting on the bench devouring what Ryan now saw was a corn dog and slurping from a plastic soft drink container was anything but skinny. He belched softly every few seconds, wiping crumbs from his faded black jeans and the expansive gut portion of his black T-shirt that featured the demonic head shots of the Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth. He had bleach-white skin and no trace of hair except for a pencil-thin, reddish-brown goatee. His eyes, unmoving and seemingly fixed on an unknown point in front of him, had white lenses surrounded by thin black circles, an effect created by contact lenses, Ryan assumed (and hoped).
A small ponytailed child wearing pink overalls skipped away from the adults she’d been walking with around the rows of shrubs surrounding the fountain and, not paying attention, crashed into the man’s heavy-duty camouflage hiking bag that was resting on the ground next to the bench. He looked down at where she’d fallen with the same emotionless stare and opened his mouth slightly. The girl yelped, jumped up, and ran back to her group.
The man lifted his head and focused his gaze on a quickly approaching Ryan, who was trying to decide whether to stop or to make a U-turn and go back through the park to James’s apartment.
Sit down, the man mouthed when Ryan was a couple of feet away.
“Derrick?” Ryan asked as he followed the command and noted an intense chemical aroma coming from the backpack, what he imagined a combination of Pine-Sol and formaldehyde might smell like.
“Let me see the phone,” the man whispered in a dry, medium-pitched Midwestern accent, emphasizing every syllable just like he had on the YouTube video Ryan had watched hours earlier, a short clip about a new algorithm used for solving linear equations that Derrick had posted a month before he disappeared.
“Right now?” Ryan asked, scanning the area in front of them, trying to realign himself with the main path, which was obscured by flowering hedges and cherry trees. “Here?”
Derrick calmly extended an upturned palm. At first Ryan thought that the hand was covered in clay or some kind of hair wax, but then he realized it had been burned badly. Each of Derrick’s fingers looked like it had been blowtorched into a leather-charred, shiny mess of rearranged flesh. His fingerprints were gone.
Mesmerized by the scar tissue, Ryan reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, then handed it to Derrick. “You need my password? I can—”
“Not necessary.” Derrick studied the phone for a moment, rolling it around in his ruined claw. He turned the phone on, somehow bypassed the security screen, and scrolled through the call history. His expression remained taut, indecipherable. He unzipped the top section of his pack, placed it inside, and resumed staring into space, as if Ryan were no longer sitting next to him. “When you look like a monster,” he said, apropos of nothing, “you get treated like one. An unpleasant image that’s cast aside and quickly forgotten. Compartmentalized. You’re safe if you remain in the shadows with the other ghosts. When you have the heart of a monster, a real monster, that’s when you’re rewarded for it. You get to carve out the rules. Everyone else is sort of in between. And when you’re caught in between … That’s when it gets dangerous.”
Derrick paused to observe a large white moth that had settled on his knee. He snatched it up and shoved it into his mouth in one lightning-quick motion.
“So, uh, how does this work?” Ryan asked after a few awkward moments of silence, trying to erase the what-the-fuck grimace he knew he was making. “Do you have the equipment you need with you, or should I come back later?”
“Right now’s not ideal,” Derrick said, swallowing the insect. “We’ll need to meet again tomorrow. I’ll be heading north, out of the city, following the greenways. Morningside Park, a little farther uptown near Columbia. That’s as good a place as any. Does ten in the morning work for you?”
Ryan nodded. It worked great, in that it signified a concrete ending to whatever batshit universe he’d stumbled into.
Without warning, and with the same uncanny speed that he’d used to snare the moth, Derrick’s hand shot out and caught Ryan’s wrist in a sandpaper-like grip, which would have been an interesting sensation if Ryan hadn’t been freaked out beyond belief. Derrick was studying him with a sudden intense interest that was
almost as disconcerting. If Ryan tried to break free it might lead to a fight, which might attract attention. If he simply got up and ran from this Marilyn Manson protégé, his phone and his only real lead were as good as gone.
“You’re one of them, or you were,” Derrick whispered excitedly.
“One of what?”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a hint of embarrassment, withdrawing his hand. “I don’t want to presume anything, or be offensive. I’m not entirely sure about the in-group terminology you use—I didn’t know there was still a Brooklyn faction until recently—but ‘dead warrior’ kept coming up in my research of your Manhattan cousins. A more literal translation from the original indigenous dialect would be ‘those who walk in the changeless struggle.’”
“I don’t know if I follow what you’re…” Ryan trailed off, the skin on the back of his neck bristling, the fight-or-flight response kicking into a higher gear.
Derrick’s lips stretched into the beginnings of the tiniest grin. “It’s all right,” he continued. “James gave me a concise rundown of your former business relationship with him, of your current situation. I wouldn’t have agreed to meet with you otherwise. And I can’t do anything to expose you, at least now that you’re human again, out of the real game, so to speak.”
“The real game?”
“I’ve been dying to get a few minutes of face time with someone who’s been exposed to the ancient genetics, even if they were from one of the younger factions. What year were you born?”
“1887.”
“Fascinating. Do you recall what it felt like when the virus entered your bloodstream? Were you able to stay conscious? I’ve heard that in an ideal environment it can open up your inner eye, give you a glimpse of things that no one remembers, things that don’t want to be remembered. A place deeper than time. I apologize again. I’m prying. It’s like Newton being able to actually see and communicate with the gravity that caused the apple to fall from the tree.”