Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

by Chris Vola

  Frank walked back to the center of the room and picked up the statue, juggling it briefly between his palms before returning it to the table. “One of the most essential parts of survival is knowing where you’re from, understanding your environment. But it doesn’t end there. You need to know who you are on the inside. It’s just as important. I take it you’re wondering how I’m able to handle the statues?”

  “It did just cross my mind,” Ryan mumbled. As hot as the energy surging through him had become, and as much as he wanted to charge Frank and attack him head-on, he understood that his only chance of walking out of the building alive was to wait for a better option to present itself. He needed to appeal to Frank’s penchant for rambling for as long as he could.

  “My mother was born a slave,” Frank said, “but she didn’t die one. As far as I can tell, she was brought to New Amsterdam on a ship from the Caribbean and sold to one of the first merchants in New Netherland, a man named Christiaensen who needed someone to feed, bathe, and clothe his invalid daughter. When the girl died a few years later, my mother escaped and traveled east for several days until she stumbled upon a Lenape hunting camp, where she was brought before the son of the local tribe’s chief. Apparently they hit it off right away because I was born nine months later. I don’t remember my grandfather’s name or what he looked like but I know that he wasn’t a big fan of me, because when I was five and he sold the tribe’s land to the Dutch, I was part of the deal. My parents didn’t even try to stop him. That was probably the start of some very serious mommy and daddy issues, but I’d like to think it all worked out in the end. I inherited the only gene that matters, the one I share with you, the one we used to share with Xansati.”

  While Frank talked and stared at the maps, Ryan tried to glance around the room without making it too obvious, desperately searching for a way out. He noticed a sudden movement in the corner of his eye. It had come from the image on the computer screen, which Ryan now realized was a live video feed. The reflection of a face appeared in the glass ceiling next to James’s splattered corpse. A few seconds later, it was gone.

  “Are you upset that you couldn’t kill Xansati personally?” Ryan asked, suddenly feeling like it was even more important to keep the conversation going as long as he could. “Would it have brought you closure?”

  Frank shrugged. “There might have been some symbolic justice, but really I just wanted to get the jaguars out of the hands of someone who doesn’t appreciate them for what they are, who doesn’t understand their true mechanics.”

  “I don’t know, Xansati seemed like he had them pretty well figured out,” Ryan replied. He motioned at Nicki’s body. “He made a lot of people look like her.”

  Frank turned to face Ryan head-on. His smile was gone. “He was part of a culture that worshipped the jaguars literally as spirits, and believed that the ability to create dead warriors was a gift from the gods. Any knowledge that Xansati had about the statues would have been the same basic information that had been passed down by his tribal elders for thousands of years, a very small fraction of what the artifacts can do. A visually impressive fraction, but a fraction nonetheless.”

  Ryan could see that his former friend was starting to get visibly agitated. He needed to keep prodding, to get Frank worked up enough that he would let down his guard, if only for a moment.

  “What about the Committee?” Ryan asked.

  “What about them? The Committee didn’t do half of the tests that Rhodes’s information said they did. They probably wanted to, but Xansati took the statues back and hid them before they could. This was years ago. They’d lost interest until I started fanning the flames.” Frank snorted out a bitter laugh.

  “Another aspect of survival is understanding the people in your life,” he continued. “The ones you do business with, your friends, the ones you want to become your friends, the ones you simply need to take something from. You need to uncover their desires, what motivates them, what scares them, how to make them move in the direction of your choice. And when an opportunity arises, you need to take advantage of it. I fed Derrick Rhodes, just like I fed Xansati, just like I fed the Committee, just like I fed you. I gave Van Pelt the idea to start the purge and told him I’d do the same, started building the facility on Columbia Street so that he’d think I was serious, when in reality it’s a sham setup made of Plexiglas and cheap drywall. I sent Xansati a version of the information I was sending to Rhodes, made him wary enough of the Committee’s intentions to get him to leave the tribe and gather his statues in one location. When the seventh statue showed up at the Brooklyn Museum, I got you to give up the location of the eighth.”

  Ryan bit his lip, tried to stay outwardly calm. He listened as a car passed by the building, slowed, but didn’t stop. “Seems like a lot of work for a few old pieces of rock,” he said. “What were you planning on doing with the statues once you got them? World domination? A tea party at the safe house? You must have something figured out.”

  “A few old pieces of rock,” Frank repeated, chuckling. “I guess that is what they are. A composite of numerous elements, some of them without names. And they play host to numerous colonies of bacteria—the stuff that causes the glowing effect and makes the statues deadly for most people—that predate, well, almost everything.”

  “I never took you for someone who was interested in microscopic organisms.”

  “I’m interested in a lot of things. I was interested in Arthur Harker’s research, not only his handwritten observations, but also the collection of ancient maps and manuscripts that he deposited at Natalia’s house when he left Brooklyn. I was interested in the progress that Arthur and Xansati had made before Arthur abandoned their project, which is why I made contact with Xansati years ago, convinced him that I was an acolyte of Arthur’s.”

  “I mean, you kind of were his student,” Ryan replied in a smart-ass, matter-of-fact tone, trying to get a rise out of his former mentor, prodding at his less-than-stable emotions in the hopes that Frank might let his guard down for a moment. “You basically just absorbed everything Arthur—and later, Xansati—discovered and are using it for yourself. The only thing you added to the equation, as far as I can tell, is your penchant for manipulation, which you’ve been kind enough to share with me.”

  “The only thing,” Frank repeated slowly and softly, his lips curling into a self-assured grin. But Ryan could see his muscles flexing involuntarily, his body glowing from the heat that was surging underneath, the heat that Ryan was pretty sure would be difficult for Frank to control no matter how much time he’d spent with the statues. The jaguar on the table next to him shone brighter, pulsing in time with the surges under Frank’s skin.

  “There are more than a few things,” Frank said after a few moments of silence, his smile gone and his voice slightly increasing in volume. “But you’re partially right. Manipulation is at the top of the list. And not just people. I manipulated the research of others to suit my own needs, manipulated the Internet to further my own investigations. Arthur and Xansati never discovered how to manipulate the magnetic currents that travel through the statues, that surround us, that possess the power to influence everything we do, to subvert gravity. They never figured out how to merge their brainwaves with the statues’ energy. But I did. My predecessors were obsessed with studying the history of the Lenape, thinking they’d find their answers in the oral traditions of mushroom-addled shamans, but they should have gone back much further in time. They should have ventured way beyond the scope and experiences of one tribe. Have you heard of the Coral Castle in Florida?”

  “You’ll have to excuse my fourth-grade education,” Ryan said dryly. “Don’t think I ever made it to geography class, or spent as much time online as you clearly have.” He took another quick look around the space. The computer screen on the desk behind Frank went black, switching to power-saving mode, he assumed.

  Frank, seemingly unaffected by Ryan’s impudence, riffled through the papers on the desk in
front of him, pulled one free, and tossed it to Ryan. It was an eight-by-ten photograph of several carved stone structures—a crescent moon, a massive obelisk, a spherical object that looked like a planet encircled by rings.

  “In the early twentieth century,” Frank said, “a Latvian immigrant named Edward Leedskalnin built a monument to his ex-fiancée on a stretch of rural land that bordered the Everglades. He quarried more than a thousand tons of coral and used it to construct a house for himself, a megalithic castle, and a sculpture garden. He built it alone, with no heavy machinery or other modern equipment. For years he worked at night; no one ever saw how he’d managed to do it except for a few local kids who said he lifted fifteen-ton blocks like they were hydrogen balloons. When people would ask him how he’d managed to complete his seemingly impossible project, he’d tell them that he’d discovered the secrets of the pyramids, or something that sounded equally insane.”

  “But it wasn’t insane, was it?” Ryan replied. “He was using a statue the whole time.”

  Frank shook his head. “A man who came directly from Eastern Europe with no possible trace of Native American genetics? No way. An activated statue would have destroyed him before he had the chance to lift a pebble.”

  “I’m European, too.”

  “Like most people born on this continent, Ryan, you’re a mutt. Do you know who all of your great-grandparents were, where they were from? What about your grandparents? You don’t have any idea what you are. The point I’m trying to make is that the statues aren’t unique. There’s a much larger world of artifacts and objects with similar properties, spread throughout the world, able to be accessed by more than just the descendants of one ethno-cultural group. Something Harker would have understood if he’d just opened his eyes. If he hadn’t wasted his time on pointless exercises like turning you.”

  Frank stood up and backed away from the table slightly. If he moves another two or three feet, Ryan thought, I might be able to make a jump for the statue and grab it before he can do anything about it. I need to keep him talking.

  “Arthur turned me because I survived exposure to a jaguar,” Ryan said. “He knew I’d be able to handle the statue he buried in case something happened to him.”

  “Arthur?” Frank snickered as he took another step backward. “Arthur wanted your blood for himself. Nothing more, nothing less. Lacking any real knowledge of hereditary science, he thought that if he could eat enough of you, your physical attributes might somehow transfer to him. Maybe he didn’t drain you all the way because he thought he’d taken enough to effect a change within himself. Maybe he just couldn’t stomach that much A positive. I know I couldn’t.” Frank paused. “Whatever the case, once he’d taken what he wanted from you, that was it. He was done with you. He was done with his tribe. Didn’t care that he’d left us with the burden of raising a bastard.”

  Frank, his face now contorted into a weird, quizzical expression, took another step backward. His ass was nearly resting on the computer desk.

  “So what are you going to do with your jaguars?” Ryan asked, softly. “Going to build a monument for your mother? Maybe your grandfather?”

  As soon as Ryan finished speaking, Frank closed his eyes and Ryan felt a heat welling up inside him, a heat that wasn’t his own. Suddenly it ignited with the force of a hundred bullets fired at once, a searing that tore through flesh and bone, rendering him immobile and, for a few seconds, unconscious.

  When Ryan’s senses came back to him, Frank was sitting at the table, calmly taking a hit from the vaporizer pen. The outline of the statue glowed faintly under his shirt. “To answer your question,” Frank said, “I’m leaving. I’m finally getting out of this city, then the country, freeing myself from a three-hundred-year-old yoke of oppression. That is, once I get my hands on the statues you took from Xansati.”

  “It seems to me that you only need one statue to travel and keep your immortality intact,” Ryan said, trying to buy more time that he didn’t have, trying to shake off the shock of whatever Frank had just unleashed. “What would be the point of keeping the rest of them? Are you planning on selling them to Van Pelt? Maybe some shady character in the military?”

  Frank chuckled as he put down the pen and glared incredulously at Ryan. “Again with the military? No, they’d be much more interested in strapping me onto a laboratory table. They’d probably just lock up the statues. They have bigger and older toys to play with. Like I said, the statues aren’t unique. Now if I happened to take a trip to Syria, Moscow, or Pyongyang, I’m sure that I’d receive a much different welcome than I would in Washington.”

  “You’d sell the statues to terrorists?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m not selling anything to anybody,” Frank replied. “Not yet. The only thing I want is what I’ve always wanted, the one thing I’ve never been able to buy or steal: the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. If I have to start out in a desert or a godforsaken tundra to achieve that freedom, then so be it.”

  “I don’t have them.”

  “Well, duh. I wouldn’t expect you to be that stupid. Where did you stash them? Your apartment in Crown Heights? The cemetery? The Williamsburg Bridge? No, those are all too obvious.”

  Ryan stared straight ahead, unblinking.

  Frank looked down at the papers in front of him for a few moments, then looked up, his eyes wide in surprise. “Ooh,” he murmured, “I see what’s going on here. Jennifer’s alive. You destroyed her tracking implant. She never went to the museum with you. I’m assuming she’s still in Manhattan.”

  Ryan stayed silent. He felt beads of sweat pooling, then streaking down his cheeks.

  Frank clicked his lips in disapproval. “She’s still a newborn, Ryan,” he said. “She has no idea what she’s doing. How long do you think it’ll be before the Committee finds her? We need to get to her before they do, before they take the statues.”

  “Why would I help you do anything?” Ryan spat.

  “Because I don’t want to kill you. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear in these last few minutes how little I care about you. I feel even less toward your girlfriend. Take me to the statues and I’ll be on my way. You’ll never have to see me again. You and Jennifer can leave the city, start a life together in a small town with ample parking and a good school system, have two-point-six kids like a couple of normal Americans, forget that any of this happened to you. Or you can wait around for Van Pelt to put your heads on spikes above the Corbin Building. It really doesn’t matter, as long as you give me what I want.”

  Maybe Frank was being sincere, Ryan thought. Maybe escaping the circumstances he’d been dealt had always been his motive, even before he’d been turned. But after everything that had happened, the lies and bodies that had piled up for years, Frank’s promises meant nothing.

  The conversation was going to end now, even if the best possible outcome of facing Frank head-on was giving Jennifer a longer head start, a better chance at getting away from all the assholes who would be pursuing her.

  He needed to test the limits of Frank’s powers, to hold on for as long as he could.

  “I’m not giving you anything,” Ryan whispered.

  Frank sighed. “Okay,” he said.

  Ryan suddenly couldn’t move his arms or legs—or anything else below his neck. But he wasn’t paralyzed; he could feel his muscles straining against whatever gravitational ties were binding him, the dead weight of his torso slumping toward the ground.

  Frank closed his eyes and placed one of his hands on the statue.

  Another magnetic shock wave, much stronger than the first, burrowed under Ryan’s skin and into every one of his cells, causing them to expand until his entire body seemed to be on the verge of a violent collapse, until Frank pulled back and Ryan blacked out again.

  When he came to, eyes open but still shuttered in darkness, Ryan braced for another molecule-shattering round of pain, but nothing happened. As his vision cleared, he heard a series of urgent ele
ctronic bleeps, like a smoke alarm going off. He saw that the computer screen had reactivated and was streaming a live feed of Beard Street, directly in front of the building. A gray Audi sedan was in the process of parking near the adjacent curb.

  “Is that the fucking…?” Frank was standing up, muttering to himself, watching the screen, his back turned to Ryan and the statue.

  Ryan collected all of his remaining strength in an attempt to move himself, but the strain was unnecessary. He watched as his arms lifted easily, as his fingers curled into fists, then uncurled. Whatever control Frank had been exercising over him had been lifted, at least temporarily.

  He leapt forward, sending his chair clattering across the floor, reaching for the statue as Frank quickly swiveled back around. Just before he could grab it, a shock wave went through him, as if he’d touched a high-voltage electric fence but far stronger. He fell to the ground as the now-familiar foreign presence began to work its way through his body, absorbing and spoiling the energy he’d been gathering and sending out excruciating shards of radiation that sent him into a seizurelike trance, distorting his vision in paralyzing bursts.

  After what felt like a long time, when the light patterns in front of his eyes cleared a little and the throbbing decreased, he saw Frank standing over him, holding the statue, mouthing, You shouldn’t have done that, the words echoing over and over until they seemed to amplify and blend together into an earsplitting cacophony that latched on to Ryan’s skull and wouldn’t let go. Frank’s jacket had begun to separate and fray around the chest area; the jaguar that was attached to him was burning through the black fabric, revealing its green skin and yellow eyes that glowed with a brutal, inescapable intensity.