by Chris Vola
Ryan tried to focus, tried to force himself up for one last desperate lunge, but as soon as he lifted an arm, Frank closed his eyes and a fourth tidal wave of agony shot through Ryan’s limbs and gathered in the space beneath his rib cage. He watched helplessly as his T-shirt ignited and the unseen force began prying at the statue that was fused to his torso until it broke free and rolled onto the floor, leaving a messy tangle of skin and tendon. Ryan’s sight became kaleidoscopic, a blaze of colors and fuzzy outlines, as his body went into shock and his conceptions of time, space, and consciousness blurred into dreamlike chaos.
He gradually became hyperaware of his molecules aching, shifting, then breaking apart, of sinking into a mudlike substance that enveloped him and stung his already-festering wounds, of a blank starless sky opening up above him, ready to swallow. He was in a large open space and Frank had been replaced by hundreds of dark creatures with amber eyes and animal-like faces shuffling toward him from a distance, howling from twisted black mouths.
As they approached, their voices got louder and Ryan could see them salivating, froth pouring from their mouths and dribbling down into the dirt. They surrounded him, chanting in a strange, guttural language, creating a whirlwind of noise that accelerated Ryan’s disintegration until something changed and they suddenly went silent.
Two figures seemed to rise from the ground and approach from the opposite direction. One had chocolate-brown hair, the other blond, neither with any discernible facial features or even visible bodies, but Ryan somehow knew that they were feminine. Each carried something in her hands: impossibly bright and undefined objects that wreathed everything around them in a golden warmth that caused the dark creatures to scream, to shudder in pain, to hurl themselves into the sky’s abyss until there was only one remaining, older and bigger than the rest, his hair long and matted, his eyes wild with anger. The creature tried to continue the chant but the women were stronger, combining and focusing their light until the ground shook and the sky erupted and rained down shards of acid.
Ryan forced himself to focus, to shake off the darkness that was threatening to consume him and everything around him, and began moving toward the women. Just as he was almost close enough to make out the details of their faces, the creature howled from where it crouched a few feet away, lashing out against whatever force was emanating from the objects.
A second later, it tensed up for a final attack, its muscles taut and gleaming, foam dribbling from its gaping mouth. It leapt past Ryan, leaving in its wake a thick, exhaust-like substance that began to fill the air, seeping into Ryan’s mouth and nostrils, clogging his ears and shrouding his sight. In the moment before he lost complete control of his senses, he watched as the creature collided with the brown-haired woman, creating a massive shock wave that sent daggers of lightning and chunks of debris flying in every direction.
Then nothing.
When Ryan finally came out of his deafblind stupor, he was back in the building on Beard Street, or what was left of it. Most of the western wall had been totally blown away, leaving an unobstructed view of the seawall and the sunlit Erie Basin. The floor was covered in a thin layer of foul-smelling soot. Spiderweb cracks were expanding across the ceiling, causing flakes of paint and drywall to rain down on the center of the room, where a naked and badly burned Frank was straddling the woman’s motionless body. He was strangling her, a series of subhuman grunts exiting his mostly singed-off lips and the gaping hole in his chest. Four of the jaguar statues lay on the ground a few inches away.
Ryan’s adrenaline spiked and he charged forward, automatic reflex, grabbed Frank by the shoulders, and pulled him off the woman like he weighed nothing, ripping off two large chunks of Frank’s gelatin-like flesh in the process. Frank looked up from the ground where Ryan had tossed him, his face twisted in a grimace of shock and anguish.
“You can’t … you can’t be—” he started to gargle, but before he could finish, Ryan was on top of him, punching him in the head and neck again and again and again until Frank’s windpipe was sticking out of his throat and his face resembled that of a boxer who’d been left in the ring twenty rounds too long. His one remaining eye was open and unmoving.
Ryan pulled himself up and immediately doubled back over. With his bloodstained hands balled up on his knees, he began dry-heaving from the pain, from utter exhaustion, from the smell, from everything.
When he lifted his head a few moments later, he saw to his surprise that Frank was still alive, more or less. Both of his arms were flailing weakly, his gnarled fingers searching for the statues.
Ryan walked over and stomped on one of Frank’s hands. The crack of bone wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, more of a rubbery crackle. He reached down and picked up one of the jaguars. He bent down and held it over Frank’s face, feeling the heat surging through his body as the statue began to glow.
Frank’s only response was a twitch that might have been involuntary, a silent, toothless whimper.
“You want this, motherfucker?” Ryan snarled. “Then take it.”
He plunged his clenched fist through Frank’s stomach and deep into his gut. Fighting to stay conscious, channeling the statue’s energy with everything he had left, Ryan watched as the jaguar got brighter, more intense, until it became too hot to hold, until it ignited.
Until Frank was a pile of ashes.
Ryan rolled over and closed his eyes.
After some time—how long, he couldn’t say—he felt a pair of hands grip both sides of his head above his temples and heard a familiar voice whisper, “Relax, it’s almost over.” He tasted a harsh, steaming hot liquid being poured down his throat until he choked and sputtered, unsuccessfully trying to break free of the hands’ grip. A numbing warmth shot through him and he was spinning, sweltering, floating up and out of his body before everything went yellow and then shut off.
* * *
“I think he’s waking up,” Jennifer said. Her voice was muffled, as if she were speaking behind a wall or at the far end of a long tunnel. “Come on. We can’t stay here much longer.”
Ryan opened his eyes. He looked up and saw Natalia standing a few feet away, wearing a lightly stained jacket and jeans. The skin on her face had returned to a smooth, pale sheen. Ryan’s duffel bag was unzipped and lying in the rubble near her feet. The heads of the statues he could see inside the bag weren’t glowing.
He ran his fingers across his naked torso, felt the undamaged skin that gave no indication it had ever played host to an ancient and mysterious version of an Energizer battery, as if that part of the last few days had been nothing more than an elaborate nightmare from which he was only now waking.
A pair of hands lifted him to his feet, steadied him, and spun him around. Jennifer looked tired. There were circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept for several days, and the skin on her neck and cheeks was pink and scaly—the remnants of a burn that was quickly healing itself. She was wearing one of Vanessa’s white T-shirts, covered in splatter marks of various hues and at least two sizes too big, making her look even more worn out. Shrunken.
She was one of the women who had been holding the glowing objects, the one whom Frank had almost managed to choke out.
He stared at her in amazement. “How did you—” he started before she cut him off by placing a palm over his lips. Her hand smelled strange, vaguely chemical, like the bodies in the vault below the Cloisters, the debris that was currently covering the floor of the room. The scent caused him to shudder involuntarily.
Jennifer seemed to sense his discomfort and drew him in for a long embrace. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Natalia lifted her head from the tattered, leather-bound book she’d been perusing. “Yes, thank you,” she repeated. “When that wanker blew me clear out of the room, I thought I might lose both of you. It seems I almost did.”
“How did you know where to find me?” Ryan asked, still more than a little shell-shocked as he tried to piece together everything that had hap
pened.
“I found your phone in the van and charged it when I got back to my house,” Natalia replied. “I didn’t know if Jennifer was another part of Frank’s bullshit campaign, but I took a risk and contacted her anyway. I’m glad I did.”
“When she called, I’d already e-mailed the files on the flash drive you’d given me and crossed the bridge into Brooklyn,” Jennifer said, taking her phone out of her pocket and checking something. “I thought Natalia was a trap, but I went to meet her when she called me. Maybe in hindsight it was kind of stupid, but I’d retained all of my … uh, tribal abilities since I’d left Manhattan and I felt that whatever power was in the statues would protect me, would activate if I came into any danger. That they would show me how I could use them.”
Ryan scanned the room again, zeroing in on the wall that had been partially destroyed. “It looks like they did,” he said.
“Ahem,” Natalia cleared her throat. She bent over and picked up the duffel bag. She put the documents she’d been reading inside and zipped it up. “I don’t want to toot my own horn,” she said, lifting the bag by its strap and handing it to Ryan, “but any sort of ‘activation’ that you may or may not have recently witnessed was due to the efforts of yours truly.”
Ryan slung the bag over his shoulder. “How is that possible?” he asked. “Did Frank show you how to—”
“Frank didn’t show me anything. Over the years, we only talked about the statues in the vaguest terms. But I knew Frank was far more interested in them than he ever let on. I knew that Arthur was wary of that interest, which is why I never told Frank about the messages Arthur sent to me, about the knowledge I received. I saw how you looked up to Frank as a kind of surrogate father figure, knew how close the two of you were, so I couldn’t very well tell you about any of it if I wanted to keep it from him.”
“But Arthur disappeared,” Ryan said, suddenly annoyed at what was beginning to sound like another instance of him being left out of the tribal loop. “How could he send you anything?”
Natalia frowned. “Arthur left,” she said. “Leaving isn’t the same as disappearing. It’s certainly not the same as dying. There were letters throughout the years, phone calls, faxes—if you can believe it—and later, e-mails. Arthur forwarded me everything he knew about the properties that govern the statues and other objects like them. He sent me a vial of a concentrated serum that contained the same unique genetic markers that allowed you and Frank—and now Jennifer and me—to handle the statues. I daresay I know more about what we’re dealing with than Frank ever did.”
“E-mails?” Ryan sputtered, incredulously. “A serum? Frank said he lost contact with Arthur in the forties or fifties, and by that point he’d already been out of the tribe for almost thirty years. If he’s still alive, that would mean he’d be—”
“Incredibly old?” Natalia interjected. “I’m not entirely sure myself how it’s possible. But he may not be alive. The last message I received from him was about seven years ago. I believe he was somewhere in the Southwest, New Mexico, Nevada, something with an N. I’ll show you all of our correspondences once we get out of here.”
“Which we need to do now,” Jennifer said. In one hand she was holding the extracted hard drive from Frank’s desktop. In the other, an unused road flare. “You can continue the chitchat later.”
Natalia nodded and started heading for the stairs. “You’re right,” she said. “We still need to sweep the other warehouses, dismantle a few more computers and one or two more bodies. Torching this hellhole should give us enough time to do it.”
Ryan paused as Natalia disappeared down the spiral staircase, still trying to process everything that had happened, where they were going, what would happen next. He looked at the vaporizer pen lying a few inches from a gnarled hunk that had once been a fist. He watched Jennifer spark the flare and fling it across the room, watched the corpses and the floor around them ignite in a massive blaze.
As the flames consumed the room, and as Jennifer shouted and motioned frantically at him to make for the exit, Ryan braced for a rush of emotions that never came. There was no lingering anger, no cathartic release, no pang of survivor’s guilt. There was only a hazy disconnect, like the first seconds after waking, when the boundaries between the dream world and your own are uncertain, when you don’t want to pinch yourself because you’re unsure of what might—or might not—happen.
The statues in the bag began to glow. Jennifer grabbed Ryan’s arm.
He woke up and ran.
37
Ryan took one last scan of the apartment, making sure that there was nothing he’d missed that he might want to take with him. But the space in Crown Heights he’d called home was as barren as it had been the night two weeks before when Frank had woken him up, as it had been for years, the last in a long line of temporary, white-walled Brooklyn hideouts.
He was standing in the kitchen near Luis, who was hunched over the island countertop wielding an electric drill. Luis was trying to reattach the false bottom to the torn-apart drawer that had once held Ryan’s gun, humming a merengue tune that Ryan had often heard him blasting on his boom box, drowning out the MSNBC news report on the TV screen.
When Ryan had shown up at the building’s doorstep a few hours earlier, the normally jovial superintendent, sitting in a folding chair with his usual cerveza, tensed up like he was ready to bolt, as if he’d come face-to-face with a ghost. After Ryan assured him that he was very much alive, Luis’s expression shifted to one of uncharacteristic disappointment.
Luis explained that since Ryan had disappeared on the same night as the shooting on Nostrand Avenue, he and his buddies from the neighborhood figured that Ryan had been involved, that he’d been—based on their assumptions about Ryan’s career—the victim of some kind of white-collar shakedown gone wrong. It would take at least another month for the apartment to be declared abandoned, and in the meantime, the men decided to mourn Ryan’s unfortunate demise by holding a dominoes tournament to see who would get to claim his stuff. Luis had won the rights to Ryan’s couch and television, the two most valuable items in the apartment, and he’d outfitted Ryan’s front door with a new padlock to protect his future plunder.
When Ryan had informed him that he was, in fact, leaving, that he had only returned to pick up a few articles of clothing (and some documents that he hoped were beyond Luis’s comprehension), and that Luis could have anything he wanted, the portly old man had perked up right away. He’d even offered to fix any structural damages in the apartment so Ryan wouldn’t lose his security deposit. Ryan had tried to politely decline, but Luis insisted, possibly because of a guilty conscience over intending to steal Ryan’s property.
Luis finished reassembling the drawer. As he picked it up and turned to place it in its slot, he stubbed his slipper-clad toe on the camouflage duffel bag near Ryan’s feet, the bag from the Cloisters that was now overflowing with T-shirts, boxers, and socks Ryan had taken from the bedroom closet. Luis howled, handed the drawer to Ryan, and hopped around the kitchen as gingerly as his rotund frame allowed, cursing in Spanish.
The instant that Luis had made contact with the statue at the bottom of the bag, Ryan thought he felt something like a cold magnetic tremor surge through his body. Or maybe it was just a normal muscle twitch. Whatever it was, it was gone in a second.
“What do you have in there, underwear and … dumbbells?” Luis muttered, rubbing his foot.
Ryan shrugged as he slid the drawer into its slot, trying not to laugh. “More like a rock collection. Sorry.”
“Fucking loco white boy.” Luis shook his head, grinning through clenched teeth. He glanced across the living room, Ryan assumed, to remind himself that while pain was only temporary, leather upholstery and high-definition screens were forever.
As Ryan bent down, he heard a familiar name amid the otherwise negligible drone of a TV newscaster. For a second, he thought he’d imagined it, but when he looked across the room at the TV, he saw a screenshot
of Conrad Van Pelt’s Wikipedia page juxtaposed with a photograph of him walking outside the Corbin Building, an image Ryan immediately recognized from Derrick Rhodes’s papers. It was followed by a sequence of nearly identical split screens featuring several other members of the Committee. Then a press conference led by an exasperated-looking Cassius Van Pelt, the current president of the family company and a fatter, older, and less mangled version of his great-great-great-grandfather. Even if the Manhattan tribe weathered the media storm, which it probably would, the elders would have their hands full for the foreseeable future.
Before the newscast cut to a commercial break, there was a preview of an upcoming segment that promised an interview with a man who claimed to be part of a “clandestine vampire syndicate.” An accompanying photograph appeared on the screen—a quasi-homeless-looking, middle-aged guy with long greasy hair plastered to the side of his face, a half-smoked cigarette pressed between his scowling lips.
It was Sean, Van Pelt’s longtime doorman. Finally able to get back at his boss, to take the freak show public.
Ryan snorted in amusement.
“¿Los vampiros?” Luis scoffed, looking up at the TV. He was messing around with his toolkit that was spread out on the kitchen island, taking apart the drill. “What are they going to come up with next? You should have been here in the eighties, papi. I saw plenty of vampires and zombies, only we called them base-heads. You would need more than a stake to take one of those culeros out.”
“Must have been wild,” Ryan said, not really paying attention as he read the news ticker on the bottom of the screen. Cloisters museum closed to public for second straight day due to gas leak. Yankees win 9–8 nail-biter in Houston. No fatalities suspected in Red Hook waterfront fire.
Lying partially hidden in the crevice of two couch cushions, Ryan’s phone began to vibrate, then blast a familiar, obnoxious ringtone. He crossed the room, turned the TV on mute, and picked it up.