by Chris Vola
“Where the fuck did you get this?” she growled, waving the knife two inches in front of Ryan’s face.
He didn’t say anything as he tried to twist out from under her, but it felt like he was being smothered by a small pile of boulders.
“It doesn’t make a difference now,” she said. She dropped the knife, reached into her fanny pack, and retrieved the beige tube. She put it between her lips and lowered her face until it was a foot away from Ryan’s.
He closed his eyes, waiting for the warm kiss of moisture that would send him into the true darkness.
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes and looked up. The woman was studying him perplexedly, sniffing the air around his face. He could see the outline of her eyes widening behind her sunglasses as a flicker of recognition crossed her face.
Cringing in pain from—he assumed—the knife wound, she grunted disgustedly and pushed herself off him. She paused for another brief moment, then shot off down the path and out of sight.
After a long coughing spell, Ryan forced himself into a sitting position. When he finally was able to stand, he gathered up his backpack and the knife and stared at the steaming, fluorescent puddle that had once been Derrick and his hiking bag.
20
The first thing Ryan noticed after opening the unlocked door to James’s apartment was the smell, or the lack of it. The rank postparty stench that he had woken up to had been replaced by a sterile hospital nonscent, the faintest chemical whiff.
He entered the hallway, gun cocked and pointed, and peered into the kitchen. The beer bottles, the dirty dishware, and the Campus Girls USA calendar James had tacked to the wall were gone. The cabinets were closed and the countertop and appliances were spotless, buffed clean. The room where he had slept and James’s bedroom were both empty, with glistening hardwood floors and walls that looked freshly painted. Nothing in the closets. The armchair was the only piece of furniture left in the living room. It had been moved from its central location to a corner by the now-shuttered French windows.
Ryan lowered his gun, but his adrenaline remained as high as it had been since he’d sprinted back from the park. It would have been far less disturbing if the place had been totally ransacked, he thought, if all of James’s stuff had been lying out on the floor, if the wall hangings and his desktop computer had been shattered and the kitchen drawers turned out. This was something else entirely, the cherry on top of the mindfuck sundae.
It looked as if James had never existed.
After making another fruitless sweep of the apartment, Ryan headed into the kitchen and peered out a narrow window that overlooked a vacant courtyard and lifeless adjacent building. He emptied his backpack’s contents onto the countertop. Setting aside the items he’d brought with him from Brooklyn and the flash drive, he sifted quickly through the rest of the stuff in the plastic bag that Derrick had given him until he found a folded index card that had mixed in with the other papers. One line of text had been scribbled with a black ballpoint pen: 17 East 80th Street.
Not wanting to spend a second longer than he had to in a place that was making him more and more uneasy, he attached the silencer to the gun, checked the magazine, and stuffed everything else into the backpack. He slipped silently into the hallway and out through the front door he’d left ajar, gun pressed inconspicuously against his side in case one of James’s neighbors happened to pass by. It turned out to be a needless gesture; the floor was as empty as the apartment.
Part of Ryan wanted to remove the silencer and spray a few rounds into the wall, to wake the building from the silence that was strangling it, to jump-start whatever was coming to him, but ultimately he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. This wasn’t the calm before anything.
He was already in the storm.
21
“Come on,” Ryan muttered under his breath as he paced along the sidewalk, repeating the words for the hundredth time, not quite sure of the response he was expecting.
He paused the next time he was directly across from the building—a five-story, gray-stone Georgian Revival embellished with ornate windows and Greek columns flanking the front entrance. While it was individually striking, the structure was just one of a hundred nearly identical ones in the ultra-posh Upper East Side enclave of residential buildings that formed the Metropolitan Museum Historic District, a stone’s throw from the museum that gave the neighborhood its name.
Ryan didn’t care about late-nineteenth-century architectural styles or old-money recluses wasting away in their crumbling gilded chambers. He was here to end the convoluted string of events that had started with a picture message, and to terminate as many of the lives of those who were responsible as he could.
In spite of the rage that had guided his most recent actions and was still surging through his bloodstream, he knew that it wouldn’t be an ideal strategy to simply walk up to the door, break into the building, and start firing. But in the half hour or so that he’d been pacing the block, no alternative had presented itself.
He was done waiting. It was now or never.
“Fuck it,” he said, loud enough that a postal worker pushing a letter cart stopped and stared at him curiously for a moment before continuing on her route. He waited for her to disappear into the lobby of a nearby podiatrist’s office before turning his attention back to building number 17.
Just as he was about to cross the street, a metal door that had been built into the ground just to the right of the building’s front entrance flew open. Ryan reached under his shirt and gripped his gun as a barrel-chested Hispanic man in a navy-blue superintendent’s jumpsuit emerged from an unseen flight of stairs carrying a large cardboard box. He walked to a nearby pile of similar boxes and black plastic trash bags near the edge of the sidewalk and dropped it on top of them. He turned and went back down the stairs, leaving the door open to what Ryan assumed was a service entrance to the basement.
He strode quickly into the street, still gripping the gun under his shirt, and nearly collided with a passing taxi. The driver slammed on the brakes and let out a loud string of curses. Ryan ignored him, stepped over the curb and around the trash pile, paused, and looked down to see where the stairs led.
The man in the jumpsuit reemerged, carrying another box. He walked to the trash pile, then dumped the box and turned left on the sidewalk, heading toward Madison Avenue. Ryan watched him until he disappeared around the corner at the end of the block, then turned and approached the top of the stairs. They led to a narrow, concrete room lit by a series of partially burned-out halogen bulbs that ran along the ceiling. Dozens of metallic pipes crisscrossed the lights and the chipped and scarred walls that were covered in dust, grime, and numerous scribbles of graffiti.
Ryan drew the gun and headed down the stairs. The space was larger than it had seemed from the street, maybe twenty feet long with an eight- or nine-foot ceiling. There were dozens of cardboard boxes on the floor, lining the walls, filled with what looked like a random assortment of clothing, shoes, and lingerie. At the far end was an open doorway that led to a smaller, darker corridor. Three men stood in the passage. Two of them, facing away from Ryan, wore the same superintendent jumpsuits, and the other was dressed in a charcoal suit and a black shirt, the first few buttons undone to reveal a bronzed, hairless chest. His short black hair was gelled into an intentionally chunky faux-hawk and he was holding an iPad that the three of them were staring at, their faces illuminated, nodding and speaking in low voices.
Ryan recognized the man in the suit immediately. It was Nicki’s bodyguard-slash-lover, the young man he’d seen fucking her when he’d approached her building for the last time.
Without hesitating, Ryan fired a series of shots. The first one missed but the second ripped through the temple of one of the jumpsuited men, spraying the wall behind him with bits of bone and gleaming brain matter. The third bullet found its way into the torso of the other superintendent. He dabbed at the singed fabric around the hole in his gut, the
n looked up, confused. Ryan finished him off with a direct hit through the trachea. The man’s eyes rolled back as he slumped to the ground, spewing fluid from his mouth and the hollow tangle of muscle where his neck had been.
The man in the suit hadn’t flinched. He kept staring at Ryan with a clinical, emotionless interest as he used his shirt sleeve to wipe his colleagues’ blood from his face and the iPad screen.
Ryan knew that if the man was a dead warrior, the bullets probably wouldn’t kill him. But a head shot would debilitate him, or at least slow him down enough for Ryan to try to do some serious damage with the knife.
The man took a step forward. Ryan aimed methodically and fired a shot that he thought would end up somewhere between the man’s eyebrows, but the bullet didn’t seem to reach its target. The man paused—not in shock or pain—his face unblemished, and scrunched up his nose as if he were trying to wrangle out an uncooperative sneeze. The wall behind him was free of any impact craters from an errant blast.
That was because, Ryan realized, he hadn’t missed. The skin that had absorbed the bullet had healed itself at a seemingly impossible rate, quicker than his eyes could process. He watched as the man gave a loud snort, spit out a square of metal that looked like it had gone through a miniature trash compactor, and smiled at him.
Ryan stood frozen by what he was seeing, unable to raise the gun for a second attempt or to reach in his pocket for the knife. Unable to process the sound of someone rushing down the stairs behind him.
Until it was too late.
22
The longer Ryan remained hanging, immobile in complete darkness, the less relevant the concept of time became. He subsisted only in terms of what he could feel was happening inside of him, the inevitable corrosion that he had tried to forget about, tried to contain, tried to reason out of existence.
The disease that had finally returned to claim him.
His coughing spells became more frequent and lung-racking, dousing the hood around his head with gobs of blood and phlegm. He could feel the lymph nodes in his neck swelling, his skin turning clammy and feverish, his throat muscles beginning to constrict. Sparks of light appeared in the corner of his vision, then flickered faster, then danced in the space between his face and the hood, then spun and clawed into eyes that might have been open or shut tightly; he couldn’t be sure.
At some point he heard a door open, the sound of a muffled voice, voices. Then a series of loud grunts and the scrape of fabric. Someone was moving the superintendents’ bodies. After another long period of silence, in which the room’s temperature seemed to rise exponentially and sweat started to flow freely from his trembling, nearly dislocated limbs, a latex-gloved hand gripped the base of his neck, then lifted the bottom of the hood above his mouth. The opening of a plastic bottle was placed against his mouth, angled so that the cool water inside it engulfed his parched throat and swollen tongue and flowed down his neck and chest, mingling with the salty discharge from his pores. He bit down on the bottle, suckled on it until it was ripped away from him. Before he could close his mouth, a metal spoon containing a flavorless, peanut-butter-like paste was forced into it, then removed. Then the gloved hand clamped over his mouth and stayed there until he swallowed the substance. Then the hood was shoved back down into its original position and Ryan coughed hard, intentionally, trying to force himself to vomit, but nothing came up. He was left alone with the metallic hum of the pipes and the gurgling of his shrunken belly.
Much later he heard voices that seemed distant, as if carried on a far-flung breeze. There were shards of light beyond the hood, but these were intense and came in short, irregular bursts. He thought they might have been camera flashes, or a malfunction with the room’s lighting, or the onset of a massive seizure.
But instead of being instantly torn apart from within, he felt the fullness in his throat trickle down in slow motion through his limbs, bringing with it a putrefying heat. Then a dizziness like when he was a child and would intentionally spin in a circle until falling to the ground, except now he was trying to stop himself, to fight the downward plummet.
Then a powerful liquid rush coursed through him and he was submerged in a milk-thick sludge, paralyzed, a vision flashing in his brain: an image of a naked figure at the bottom of a pool lying prone, dead, his own self dying.
Then there was only blackness.
* * *
He was thrust back into half consciousness—had he ever been awake at all?—by the voices. This time they were louder, angry, close enough for him to smell stale breath and body odor. And there was something fouler pooling around his suspended toes, something that had probably been of his own making.
He heard a few more indecipherable snippets of what sounded like an argument, then a dull thud, a shout, the squeak and scuffle of footwear, a childlike scream cut short. Another thud. A splash.
After a few moments of silence, the bungee cord connecting his hands was severed and Ryan fell to the ground, flailing in a warm puddle of sludge. His arms were blood-drained and useless, his legs soft rubber. Before he could try to gather the strength to move, someone threw a blanket over him, rolled him around in it until he was completely covered, lifted him off the ground as if he weighed little more than the filth he was caked in, and hoisted him horizontally onto a rock-hard shoulder blade. The hood fell off as they started to move and Ryan caught a brief glimpse of a freshly mutilated body slumped against the wall in a sitting position, its torso and neck split perfectly down the middle so that its ribs looked like the teeth of a Venus flytrap.
Then they were speeding up the stairs and into blinding sunlight and Ryan was tossed into the backseat of a silver SUV that was idling at the curb. A door slammed behind him and the vehicle sped off.
“Jesus, V, what septic tank did you drag this asshole from?” a man’s voice asked from the driver’s seat after a long, disgusted groan. “You’re paying for the cleaning. I’m talking full detailing, upholstery, all that shit.”
“Shut the fuck up, Karl,” a woman in the passenger seat muttered.
Ryan struggled to break free of the blanket. He lifted his head from where it had been scrunched against the elbow rest of the rear driver’s-side seat and looked at her. It was the blond jogger from Morningside Park, the woman who had melted Derrick. She was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt covered in mud and rust-colored stains. Her wavy hair was ponytail-free. The black Ray-Bans she had been wearing the previous day were perched above her forehead. She turned and looked at him with piercing hazel eyes that looked like something out of a once-recurring but nearly forgotten dream.
“Stay down, Charlie,” she said in a reassuring voice. “Just try to relax.”
No one had called him that since 1975. As far as he was concerned, Charles Vincent had died the day he sold the Brooklyn Heights apartment and bought the duplex in Borough Park, using fresh sets of documents that Frank and James’s father had been able to fish up for him.
He kept staring at the woman. The structure of her cheeks was wrong, uneven. The lips were unnaturally full and the nose was a pencil-point disaster. But the hair was right. And the eyes were unmistakable.
“Vanessa?”
She nodded.
The driver, in his midfifties and vaguely Mediterranean-looking with thick salt-and-pepper hair and a finely trimmed beard, rolled his eyes in the rearview mirror and gave another groan. “This is fucking stupid,” he said.
Vanessa glared at him, twirling something between her fingers. The driver mumbled something Ryan couldn’t hear and turned to focus on the road.
She lifted Arthur’s dagger—coated in a thick layer of fresh blood—and licked it clean.
23
“This is completely unnecessary,” Ryan said, flinching as Karl forced the needle into the vein in his left forearm. He eyed the IV bag—sitting nearby on top of a giant cat scratch post—that looked exactly like the one he’d been hooked up to in James’s apartment.
He shuddered.
&nb
sp; Karl ignored him and went back to work prepping the portable ultrasound equipment. He attached the wandlike device via USB cord to a laptop that he’d positioned on a massive cherrywood table. The gorgeous antique formed the centerpiece of the spacious apartment’s kitchen-slash-dining area, where Ryan was lying on a hospital-style cot, shirtless and scrubbed clean.
Vanessa was seated on a black leather love seat on the opposite end of the large, high-ceilinged space whose walls were covered by bookshelves, swirling primary-colored abstract oil paintings, a row of antique kabuki-style theater masks, and a spiral staircase leading to an unseen upper level. She was wrapped in a white bathrobe, her hair limp from the shower she’d just taken. She looked up from the MacBook in her lap and shook her head. “It’s just saline,” she said. “If you could see how you look right now you wouldn’t be arguing.”
Ryan grunted, lay back, and stared at the cream-colored stucco ceiling, still trying to process the situation he’d found himself in. He went over what he already knew. Vanessa, his first real fling, had been turned. How long ago he couldn’t be sure. What was clear was that she had carved up her face to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. She had a large enough role within the Manhattan tribe to be tasked with killing Derrick Rhodes, or maybe she’d taken the initiative herself. But why had she spared “Charlie,” someone she knew for little more than a month in the 1970s? Nostalgia? She didn’t seem surprised or shocked that he hadn’t aged. Maybe she somehow knew about his lineage. Maybe she was a social climber and he was her ticket to the upper echelon of Manhattan tribal society.
But then why wouldn’t she have taken him directly to her superiors? And why would she have this Karl guy pumping him with fluids and checking his vitals and internal organs? Who was Karl? He was human; that much had been made obvious when he’d struggled mightily trying to pull Ryan out of the SUV in the parking garage under Vanessa’s building. He clearly had at least some medical training. Maybe Karl was Vanessa’s donor, or maybe it was something more, closer to what Frank had had with Raj and Arianna.