by Chris Vola
Ryan raised the pistol. For a moment he felt a twinge of pity for his former donor. For all his manipulative traits, James really was just an oblivious moron, a giant pawn in a game he would never understand. Then the moment passed.
James snorted. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked. The grin had returned, spreading from cheek to chubby cheek.
“What I should have done to your grandfather.”
“My grandfather? What does he have to do with—”
Ryan fired. James looked down at the dart protruding from his still-sizable belly.
He plucked the empty glass casing from his gut and rolled it between his fingers. “What kind of bullet is…” He trailed off and looked up at Ryan, ashen-faced. The grin was gone. “Oh fuck,” he mumbled as his body started to spasm wildly. He wheeled backward onto the computer desk, shattering two of the computer monitors with his flailing arms before completely losing his balance and tumbling over the safety rail. A second later, the sound of rubber thwacking against Plexiglas echoed throughout the building.
Ryan checked the pistol’s magazine. There was one dart left.
36
Beard Street’s cobblestones looked exactly as they had the last time Ryan had walked over them, but everything else—the rows of boarded-up and decaying buildings that had once serviced the previous century’s maritime industry, vacant lots littered with rusting construction equipment, a small marina and docking area for water taxis, the expansive blue and metallic façade of Ikea’s main building—was a disconcerting juxtaposition of advanced urban decay and modern retail, with nothing in between.
Of more immediate concern to Ryan was that he couldn’t find Frank, even after walking the entirety of Beard Street’s five blocks several times. He could still feel the statue’s energy surging through him, felt his senses amplified to the point where he could smell someone sautéing leftover linguini and clam sauce a quarter of a mile away, but there was no sign or scent of his former mentor. He could start systematically breaking into every building on the street, but besides the obvious alarm-triggering issues, that might take hours. The sun and the eyes of morning commuters would be upon him soon.
The doubts began creeping into Ryan’s mind. He should have kept James alive long enough to show him where Frank’s office was. He should have tried to see if he could have learned anything from the remains of James’s computer display. Maybe he shouldn’t have trusted Natalia. Maybe she was just another cog in the fucked-up wheel he’d gotten himself wrapped around. She and Frank might be watching him now, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
Stop it, he told himself. It did no good to think about what he couldn’t control. The past was the past. People were who they were. He forced himself back into the present and decided to start over, to head back to the safe house and see if there was anything there that might be of use.
As he began walking east, the sky shifted from black to murky gray, illuminating the harbor and the trash-covered shoreline to his right. But a minute and two blocks later, it was something in the darkness to his left that caught Ryan’s eye. Sandwiched between a pair of nondescript two-story brick buildings was a narrow alley that was fenced off from the street. Between the fence’s metal grates, he could see the rear end of a black BMW, its bumper glowing with a freshly waxed sheen.
He wasn’t entirely sure, but it looked like the same year and model as the car Frank had torched. Moving closer to the alley, he caught the faintest whiff of vaporized marijuana and remembered the device that Frank had been using in Prospect Park. He pulled out the pistol from under his shirt, clicked off the safety, and walked up to the front entrance of the building on the left.
He tried shouldering into the rust-covered door, but as weak as it appeared, it wouldn’t budge. It was as if some kind of blockade had been set up behind it, or it had been reinforced with an uncommonly resilient alloy. Ryan looked up from where he was standing. There was no fire escape and the windows on the second floor had been barricaded with the same metal as the door.
As his frustration began to mount, he felt the statue’s heat surge through him, the same heat that Xansati had used to burn his enemies, the same heat that had dissolved Karl’s skin and muscle when Ryan had grabbed his wrist. He had an idea.
He gripped the door’s handle, closed his eyes, and tried to corral his anger and anxiety, to focus all of it down his arm and into his hand. A second later he felt the handle getting hot, hotter, boiling and finally liquefying. He heard a loud clicking noise, followed by the release of air. Ryan gasped from exertion and uncurled his fist. He opened his eyes and glanced down at his hand. It looked like it had been doused in silver spray paint, the same color as the shallow hole that had been scorched into the concrete near his feet.
He pushed the door and it swung open easily. Stepping inside the building, Ryan was immediately overcome by the stench of human decay that permeated every corner of the room, a brightly lit, windowless space with blood and excrement-stained walls that looked like they were made from the same material as the ones in Conrad Van Pelt’s office.
There were corpses everywhere. On the floor, slumped against the wall, bodies stacked on bodies. Men and women, an entire spectrum of ages and ethnicities. Most of them had been stripped of clothing, and none of them were intact. There were cavernous, gangrene-colored gashes in chests, throats, and torsos, leg and arm bones that had been cracked and partially detached from sockets, thighs covered in smaller incisions that looked like they’d been gnawed into the flesh.
And there was something else. Something breathing.
Ryan saw her leap from the periphery of his vision, so fast that he didn’t have time to react. She was on top of him, ripping his pistol away and crushing the barrel with her bare hand, clawing at his chest, gnashing at his shoulder blade. Her eyes were bright but unfocused, animal-like, her black hair falling over her face in wild ringlets. Pink foam was dribbling from her mouth and had left large stains on the front of her tattered T-shirt and gym shorts. She was strong, stronger than anyone he’d had to fight off. But not strong enough.
Ryan kneed Nicki in the gut as hard as he could. She flinched and howled and in that moment he wrapped his fingers around her neck, channeling the fire that had re-ignited inside him. He stood up, continuing to hold her as she writhed in agony, the smell of her boiling skin filling the room. She tried to kick and lash out at him a few times, weakly, before slumping to the ground, completely subdued by the pain.
“Where is he?” Ryan asked, wiping her drool off his face with his free hand.
She stared at the floor and let out a bloodcurdling moan.
“Where the fuck is Frank?” he shouted, gripping her tighter, but Nicki only screamed louder. She was useless, totally consumed by the hunger.
Ryan looked around the room. There was a door on the far wall, nearly identical to the one he’d just come through. As he walked toward it, dragging Nicki, her screams became more intense, almost inhuman. Clearly she wasn’t fond of what was on the other side.
“Please, not again,” she groaned, her voice hoarse, lacking any trace of the snarky self-assurance she’d displayed when they’d first met. “No more, not him, not, no…”
Ryan ignored her pleas and gripped the handle, mentally preparing himself to liquefy it, but the door swung open easily. It had been unlocked. Just like with Jennifer, he said to himself, before quickly erasing her image from his thoughts. He needed to focus on the task at hand.
The room he and Nicki entered was identical in size and shape to the previous one, only it was spotless, almost like it had just been constructed, and there was a spiral staircase in the far corner that led to the second floor. The air was pure except for a hint of the vapors that Ryan had smelled outside the building. The Ramones’ “Rockaway Beach” was blaring from unseen speakers.
“Stand up,” Ryan commanded.
Nicki cringed and made another weak attempt to crawl back toward the entryway. She shook her
head. “No,” she whispered, the same pink spittle caking her lips.
Ryan clamped down on her, harder than he had before, until he touched bare spine. She shot up immediately, yelping in agony. They walked to the stairs, Ryan holding Nicki an arm’s length in front of him. As they started climbing, the music got louder, then suddenly shut off.
Nicki stopped in midstride. She tried to turn her neck to face Ryan, but he wouldn’t let her. “I’m sorry for what I did to you,” she said softly, sounding more like her old self. “Just let me go. You don’t know what he’ll do to us. You can’t stop it. You can’t—”
“Whatever choices you had, you’ve already made them,” Ryan said. “Walk.”
Her shoulders slumped, but she didn’t try to resist. They made it to the top of the stairs and entered a small, loftlike space, no bigger than Ryan’s living room in Crown Heights, illuminated by several rows of dimmed track lights. The walls were completely covered in papers. There were several maps of Brooklyn, many depicting the streets of various neighborhoods. Others were topographical and showed the borough as if the images had been plucked from Google Earth, covered in red permanent-marker scribbles made by a maniacal, childlike hand. There were yellowed, older drawings showing other regions and parts of the world that Ryan recognized—Nevada, Scandinavia, Indonesia—and others that he didn’t. A small desk with a large computer monitor sitting on it rested against the back wall, which was covered by what looked like star charts, depictions of various constellations outlined with paragraphs of the same red writing. Ryan didn’t see any sketches or photographs of the statues, but there were numerous pictures of seemingly random monolithic structures, most of which looked like natural formations.
Besides the desk, the only other piece of furniture was a stainless-steel table in the middle of the room that Frank was standing behind, perusing an open leather-bound manuscript and smoking from a vaporizer pen. He was wearing a black tracksuit. A jaguar statue sat on the table an arm’s length away from him, not glowing, its eyes black and gaping.
Frank exhaled a faint cloud of vapor, looked up from the book, and smiled at Ryan, who was still holding a cowering Nicki.
“I see you tamed my guard dog,” he said calmly. “And it looks like you had a bit of a falling out with your financial advisor.” He motioned at the image on the computer screen behind him. It was a video still of the facility on Columbia Street that Ryan had infiltrated earlier, shot from an angle above the glass-ceilinged enclosures, and focused on a splattered mess of flesh and clothing that had once been James Van Doren.
“Tonight feels like a teachable moment for me,” Frank continued, placing the vaporizer pen on the table. “If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself. I mean, look at you. The lone-vigilante role seems like something you were born for, something I certainly never saw coming. I mean, that kung-fu grip and that complexion. Wow! You really need to tell me your secrets. Is it a new diet? A new workout routine?”
As jovial as his old friend seemed, Ryan understood that there was a purpose to the banter, that Frank would use his prolific bullshitting ability to gain some time, to feel out the situation. Frank had been around at least one of the statues. He would have some understanding of their magnetic properties and sense that Ryan was in possession of one, that Ryan was able to wield it. If Frank had been contacted by the Committee, he would also know what had happened at the Cloisters.
Frank knew he was trapped; his darting, unsmiling eyes told Ryan as much. But a hunted animal was always at its most dangerous when it had been backed into a corner. Though he felt nearly invincible, stronger than he ever had, Ryan had come too far to make any kind of rash decision on how to deal with his former mentor. He needed to do some feeling out of his own.
“Seems like it would have been smarter for you to follow my lead,” Ryan said, “instead of leaving whatever you’re trying to accomplish in the hands of a bunch of cracked-out Run-D.M.C. fan club members. Seriously, what’s the deal with those jumpsuits? You have to admit that they’re a little cheesy, even for you.”
“You know, you’re really dating yourself with that reference,” Frank replied, the old joke sliding from his lips as easily as it always had. “I bought the warehouse—the one you made a mess in tonight—from a group of Korean businessmen who were running a bootleg sportswear operation that had become less than profitable. They threw in the suits as part of the deal. Everyone likes a uniform. People want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. The members of my little, um, militia seem to like them.”
Ryan snickered. “From what I’ve seen, the junkies in your militia would do anything you told them for a few nickel rocks. Is that how you’re paying them? Or did you promise them something else? Maybe they think you’re going to turn them.”
Frank shrugged. “Everybody wants something. Luckily most of the people whom I’ve taken under my wing are relatively simple souls. Their vices are easy to procure.”
“What do you want?” Ryan asked. “Money, right? But you’re smart enough to realize that Manhattan is just using you. What was their offer? To make you CEO of a satellite branch of their tribe? As soon as the experiments are under way, as soon as they’ve made a deal with the military, they’ll take the statues from you, whether you let them or not. Then what’s your play? You can’t stop them.”
“The military?” Frank asked in between bursts of laughter. “Is that what Xansati told you? No, it was probably Derrick Rhodes, regurgitating all of the crap I … Ha! Oh man, that’s too funny. Of the vague network of interconnected organizations that might be described by the average Joe, collectively, as the military, maybe half of them know about the Manhattan tribe. They certainly don’t have any real idea about the statues. The members of the Committee are imperialists, always have been. By joining the tribe and cheating death, they’ve trapped themselves on an island, literally, unable to expand to a degree that they find satisfactory. Basically, they’re a bunch of old, rich, and bored white dudes who haven’t had anything better to do in two hundred years. They aren’t creating super soldiers for the government. They want to build an army for themselves, ego-less enforcers who can impose the Committee’s will wherever they see fit. It’s all very predictable, very blasé if you ask me. I was only humoring them until I had the opportunity to pry every last one of the statues from Xansati’s dead hands—an opportunity that was apparently taken from me, according to the frantic e-mail I got from Van Pelt an hour ago. Oh well. Long story short, the last thing I want to do is spend my time training newborns for a cause I don’t care about. I like being on my own. Let’s be serious. We both know I’d never be a good father.”
While Frank was talking, Nicki had started rocking back and forth, staring at the floor and whimpering softly. The noise got progressively louder until it became a high-pitched whine that wouldn’t stop regardless of how hard Ryan squeezed her neck. Frank glared at her, his lips curling in utter disgust. Then he smiled.
“Oh, sweetie,” he said, looking at her, “this is isn’t what you had in mind when we started hanging out, is it?”
She shook her head, still staring at her feet.
“I get it. It’s my fault for not explaining things as carefully as I should have. It’s a problem I have sometimes. But listen, if you want to leave, if you want to end this, just say the word. Ryan will release you and you can go.”
She muttered something under her breath, too soft to make out.
“What was that?” Frank asked.
She looked up at him. “Do it,” she growled between clenched teeth.
Frank lifted his arm, closed his eyes, and cupped his hand over the statue’s head. It immediately began to turn neon green. Instead of injuring him, its energy seemed to surge harmlessly through Frank, giving his skin a radiant glow. His facial expression was one of absolute calm and focus.
Before Ryan could do anything, Nicki’s body began to vibrate and then heat up to a temperature so extreme that
he was forced to release her. She collapsed onto the floor in a writhing heap, her mouth gaping, straining to scream, but all that came out was a plume of foul-smelling smoke, as if her esophagus had scorched itself from the inside out. Her hair turned to ash and her skin went from brown to black as her limbs contorted unnaturally and finally stiffened after one last major spasm. She looked exactly like the bodies Ryan had seen in the tunnel beneath the Cloisters. Frank opened his eyes and removed his hand from the statue, which continued to shine, its eyes golden and pulsing.
“Well, that’s a shame,” Frank said. “I liked her. She was no Arianna, though she did have her moments. But like I already said, I’m no father.”
While Ryan stood frozen in disbelief by what he had just seen, Frank walked over to the computer desk and grabbed the chair that was next to it. He slid it across the floor in Ryan’s direction. It skidded to a halt a few inches away from Nicki’s charred remains.
“Take a seat,” Frank said. When Ryan didn’t move, he sighed, walked back to the table, picked up the vaporizer pen, and tapped it against his chest. It made a clacking noise, the sound of two hard objects coming together—the second Brooklyn statue. “Think carefully before you decide to do anything stupid.”
Ryan slumped into the chair, shell-shocked.
Frank took a pull from the vaporizer pen, walked over to the wall to his left, and stared at a three-foot-by-five-foot map of Brooklyn, the largest in the room. “What do you know about the geographical features of Long Island?” he asked.
Ryan didn’t say anything. He stared straight ahead, unblinking.
“I’ll take that as a ‘not much,’” Frank said, looking at Ryan and chuckling softly. “Basically it’s a bunch of loose rocks and soil that were deposited by glaciers as they retreated during the last ice age, meaning that not only is it extremely young by geographical standards, but it also has a unique mineral composition. There are numerous areas where interesting magnetic anomalies occur, where objects that are already magnetically charged seem to change, to increase in strength. You’re sitting over one of those areas now.”