Vespers

by Tom Piccirilli

  “Tommy Flowers, you are not St. Peter. We devour St. Peter.”

  “Eat this.”

  I emptied my clip, reloaded, emptied that too, reloaded again, and emptied that as well.

  As if on cue, the moment the final cartridge ejected the other guards came driving up in the limos and parked where I’d ordered. I marched to the booth, reloaded, and stuffed my pockets with extra ammo. The bulletproof black Lincolns blocked the morbid faces at the entrance, but the hushed and hateful whispering of my name went on.

  I went and listened to the police scanner. There was buzzing and unintelligible speech. I checked on our supplies. Both the Ganooch and Grandma Ganucci were paranoid in their own ways. Grandma had stores enough to last fifty men two solid months in the pantries and down in the basement. She’d lived through some rough times and promised never to let her family go hungry the way she’d once been.

  One of the legal businesses of Ganucci Enterprises was a string of gun shops all across the five boroughs. We had a well-stocked armory with serious hardware, although I was pretty sure nobody but me had ever shot anything with more kick to it than a .357. Some of the old-timer wiseguys never used anything but a popgun .22. They were the guys who’d walk right up, stick the barrel in your ear, pull the trigger, and walk off while the bullet was still rattling around inside your skull.

  The complex was exploding with activity and fear. No one knew what was happening. The televised special reports offered no new information or insight. It looked like those who contracted the sickness took several days to fall ill, losing a high percentage of body fat and muscle mass, while their reflexes and cognitive capacity burned out with fever. Some scientists proclaimed the biters were falling into a walking stupor as the virus reproduced in the brain tissue, slowly destroying personality, memory, and higher mental functions while stirring the more basic instincts to eat and kill. None of it sounded right to me.

  I got the underbosses and crew together, organized the security detail, and sent them out on patrols across the estate. Nobody wanted to believe things were as bad as I believed. Gina let out a grunt of real pain when I told her about Nolan, and I realized then where else he’d been sticking his moustache.

  Grandma Ganucci was back on her feet. Ma Ganucci helped her in the kitchen, making ravioli for dinner, zeppoles and cannoli for dessert. We had to start conserving, but I kept my mouth shut. They were both on the edge of hysteria but hadn’t flipped over the big ledge yet. I didn’t want to be the one who pushed. They stood there in their lengthy aprons and black dresses, sleeves rolled up and forearms covered in flour, their hair in black nets. They told anecdotes about Nicky and laughed. Every time their laughter went on a second too long I looked at their mouths and the muscles tightened across my shoulders.

  Cole Portman called together the capos to thrash out our immediate concerns. Four of them alongside their lieutenants sat with the Ganooch and Portman in the immense library, around an antique table like Arthur’s knights, everybody drinking whiskey and packed with at least two pieces each. At the best of times this would be a precarious set-up destined for a Wild West shootout. These guys argued over every dollar, every woman, every minor insult whether real or imagined, and bitched and broke each other’s balls whenever they all got together.

  But now they were a somber group, quiet except for terse comments as they tried their phones and couldn’t get through to family or friends here in the US or abroad. They stared out the windows, looking at the sedate scenery of manicured lawns, sprouting flower gardens, and beautifully trimmed bushes.

  I looked around at the unread books and wondered if this was how it had all started. Most of the wars in the world began because of somebody’s words.

  Johnny Tormino had really gotten his shine on. He had a four thousand dollar suit on and smelled of expensive cologne. It was a strange time to care about jockeying up the line of promotions, but now that Nicky was gone he wanted to be the right hand of the Ganooch. He hadn’t realized yet that everything had already changed. Or he just didn’t care.

  Gina walked in and sat down. Everyone looked at her. Nobody said anything. Even the mob had been forced to deal with women’s lib. About forty years too late, but they still dealt with it. Syndicates had plenty of daughters and wives who had taken over some arm of the business. Gina wasn’t going to school for Renaissance Poetry. She was going for hotel management so she could take over some of the Atlantic City and Las Vegas investments. With Nicky gone, she moved up too. Nobody was sure what new position she filled, except that she was now the Ganooch’s only living child.

  Portman tried to stick out his recessed chin, ran a thumb against his widow’s peek, and took a deep breath that rattled in his pigeon chest. All his slick calm had fallen away in just the few hours since Nicky’s death. His eyes looked like they’d been rubbed in blood and then pinned to his face. He went with the big question first. “What the hell is going on?”

  No one answered him. No one knew. They eyed each other trying to dig out secrets. They kept watch but continued hitting redial on their phones, hoping the lines would clear.

  The Ganooch said, “Johnny?”

  Johnny perked up. He looked good. He smelled good. He was ready for his promotion. He seemed almost happy. He realized it and brought himself under control. He grimaced. He tried to look sad, like the depth of his personal sorrow was breaking his heart. I nearly burst out laughing.

  Johnny said, “I got no idea.”

  Don Guiseppe shifted his gaze to me. “Tommaso?”

  “What do you want to hear?” I asked.

  “What do I want to hear?” His tone demonstrated how offended he was by the question. He lumbered up out of his leather chair, put his fists on the table, and held himself firmly in place. “I want to hear what’s happening. What killed my son? What’s destroying the city? How much worse is it going to get? Is anybody trying to stop it? You were just out there. You went walking in that. So, you tell me. You tell me what it is you walked through. Why are the sick acting the way they’re acting? With the biting? The grouping together?”

  “It could be a midspectrum weapon,” I said. “A psychochemical or controlled viral epidemic of some kind. It’s a way to cripple or annihilate an enemy population and let them kill themselves off without having to lift a finger.”

  “They have that?”

  It stunned me how little an old evil murdering prick like the Ganooch knew about what was going on in the distant corners of the planet. “Yes. It’s typically considered non-lethal, but somebody may have either crossed a line or accidentally pushed the wrong button. There were protocols in place in Iraq in case biological warfare was ever introduced into combat.”

  “This isn’t a war,” Johnny said. The others agreed with him, arguing my point, wanting it to be wrong. So did I.

  “The world’s always at war,” I told him, “or on the brink of it. “The protocols are the same.”

  Nobody asked what they were. Nobody wanted to hear words like quarantine, mononegaviralies, pathogen, and zero containment.

  Johnny had lost some of his shine. Sweat ran down the side of his face and left powdered salt deposits along his jaw line. “You saying this is… what? An attack? Some Muslim fucks doing this to us on our own soil again? Dirty bombs?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “You act like you do.”

  “But I don’t.”

  The Ganooch “Where’s the army? The National Guard? Hell, where are the cops?”

  “They’re busy,” I said. “Or dead. Or they’ve been ordered to withdraw to a safer area. Whoever’s in charge may have decided that our infection zone can’t be suppressed. We’re on our own.”

  “Who is in charge?” Portman asked.

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure. Maybe no one was anymore. I was even more confused than the rest of them. I didn’t know what to say about the biters speaking my name and hissing Catholic doctrine and biblical tenets. I was worried my own
fever might return at any second. I scanned the windows for crows.

  There was silence for a minute, and then an eruption of arguing and talk of wives and kids, and the capos and their men stood and crashed into each other as they made a run for the door. I was ready for them. I had my piece out. I had my knife. The blade shook them up more than the gun. It had an inherent intimidation factor, instinctual, like fear of a snake. I let it waver in front of their eyes like a vicious living thing.

  “Enough of that,” I said.

  The Ganooch met my eyes. We shared a moment. We went deep into each others heads. He knew how serious the situation was. The others wondered whether they should draw on me. But they didn’t want to die. Gina hit me with her fuck-me gaze again. A quiver wanted to run through my body but I willed myself to stand solid as stone.

  “We’ve got a lot of property,” Don Guiseppe said. “You were smart to send out patrols. Why aren’t these poor bastards coming over the wall?”

  “You didn’t have it put up because it was easy to get over. Twelve feet high. Brick and mortar reinforced with rebar. The fencing rails topped by spear points. All the trees on our property are trimmed so the limbs don’t overhang.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I ordered it done.”

  “You were thinking ahead. Did you know this day was coming, Tommy?”

  I ignored the question.

  “The infected are uncoordinated,” I said, replacing my weapons. “The virus seems to take a heavy toll on the body. Their mental function is degraded. They seem enraged and frenzied, cruel like children. It’s passed from person to person through physical contact. Possibly topical. Probably in their saliva, which would explain the biting.”

  “How does that explain the biting?” Johnny said.

  Gina responded for me. “Basic biology. A virus wants to reproduce and spread. An airborne sickness circulates by making its host sneeze and the illness is transferred.”

  “You’re making it sound intelligent.”

  “Only insofar as evolution designed viruses to be one of the most powerful and resilient entities in nature. Why do you think the syndicate makes so much money on pharmaceuticals? Because antibiotics are a twenty billion dollar a year industry. There’s new ones being produced every day because infections are always evolving and growing more strains are becoming resistant.”

  I put in, “That or whoever made the toxic agent genetically manipulated it to decimate us.”

  Johnny was being bitchy and said, “If they’re so uncoordinated, then why do we need patrols walking the estate?”

  “In case somebody else tries to break in. People are scared. There’s already been a lot of looting. Folks are going to go hungry soon. Even if they’re not infected, they’re not biters they’re going to rampage.”

  The Ganooch looked like he’d aged about twenty years in the last twenty minutes. His heavily lidded eyes wanted to close. He gestured vaguely, and when nobody responded he gestured more violently, waving his hand angrily. “More whiskey.”

  Portman poured him another glass. The Ganooch drank it down quickly and some color returned to his face. He glared at me.

  “So why didn’t Nicky become like them?”

  “He might have, eventually, if he hadn’t died first. The disease seems to be mutating. The infected are changing.”

  “You’ve seen this before, Tommy. In the war?”

  “No. Nothing like this.”

  “So it’s not some Arab terrorist group?” Johnny asked. I liked the thrum of fear in his voice. My best friend, a killer like me. Of course we’d always hated each other.

  “It could be,” I told him. “But I never saw it in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or anywhere else in the Middle East.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Run for it,” Johnny said.

  “We dig in,” I said. “Where are you going to run to? It’s the same everywhere.”

  “You don’t know that for sure, Tommy.”

  “Yes, we do. Nobody’s phone works. All of the channels are reporting the same disjointed information.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  He was holding onto hope. Johnny really wanted this promotion. He wanted things to be the way they were last week, last month. He spent years in the can. He still had a lot of living to catch up on.

  “What about our families?” one of the loots said. “My wife? My goomar?”

  “They’re dead. If you leave you’ll die too. One bite and you’re done for. Nolan made a run for it and didn’t get three steps before they brought him down. And he was carrying a shotgun and I was covering him.”

  “My goomar isn’t…!”

  “She’s either dead or she’s somewhere safe. We’re better off here than just about anyone else short of a militia. We’ve got stores, weapons, and manpower. We’ve got generators. We’re going to need it all.”

  ”We’ve got generators? Why the fuck would we?”

  “Because I wanted them,” the Ganooch said. He stared across the table at me. “Who else do we have here? At the compound? Are any of Niko’s doctors still on the premises?”

  “One,” Portman offered. “After Grandma passed out, he stayed behind. Dr.Beltrando.”

  “It’s be good to have a trained medical professional on hand.” Another thought struck him. “Any of those young priests?”

  “One. Father Macdonald.”

  The don scoffed and sneered. “All the guineas in Brooklyn and the only priest on hand is a fucking Scot? Now I know this plague was sent by the devil.”

  Everyone around the table nodded in agreement. Most of them still hadn’t said a word. They were out of their element. They were trying hard to stick to the regime. They wanted to be with their families but were too scared to do anything except dial a number and listen to static. Like Johnny, they were holding onto hope. They were praying I was making it all sound worse than it was. They’d make their own decision when they got out the front door and took a look out at the street. I had a sudden rush of admiration for Nolan, even though he’d been a fucking moron in the end.

  I held out hope too. I still had people to kill before the end of the world. I watched the Ganooch closely, imagining him in a cell in Kuwait, waiting in the dark for someone like me to enter.

  I thought of Renning. His wide, smarmy, doughy face showing a capacity for meting out pain and making destructive decisions coldly. In Kandahar he’d failed to respond to one of my directives, and I’d nearly been beheaded on live television before my own troop broke regs and pulled me out. I should’ve killed him right then. He only pulled me out and set me up to infiltrate my own mob after I didn’t have my neck sawed through. I promised to garotte him and cut his head off with a wire the way I’d failed to do with Bronc.

  Grandma, Ma Ganucci, and a couple of servants came in with platters of baked ziti, cannoli, zeppoles, plates, silverware, and bottles of wine. Everyone tried to smile and act normally while they were here. They also decided to stuff their faces. Most of them were fat, soft men programmed to play hard and eat and drink to excess. But under these circumstances the reasoning was sound. Just like in the desert, you never knew when you might get another meal, so you always ate while you could.

  “Mangia, Tommaso,” Ma told me.

  “In a few minutes,” I said.

  I hung back near the door, leaning against the bookshelves, feeling the hard leather bound spines against my own.

  “So who takes Niko’s place?” someone asked.

  Johnny’s personal legbreakers glanced at each other. Johnny couldn’t contain his smile. He turned it on, full wattage. He touched the double Windsor knot of his tie and made sure it was perfect. He smiled at the don. Johnny had big teeth. When he turned he’d do real damage with them. I thought I should with a pre-emptive strike and shoot him in the head now.

  He kept smiling at the Ganooch. Don Guiseppe didn’t smile back. Johnny swallowed some wine and cleared his throat.

&nb
sp; “I do,” I said.

  Portman groaned under his breath. Johnny looked like he’d just been tasered. His eyes got wide and his body locked. It seemed as if ten thousand watts were going through his brain. I’d been on both ends of being electrocuted. I still had burn scars on my testicles that Gina liked to linger over. I’d interrogated military prisoners with a car battery. It was an effective way to torture.

  Johnny’s boys jumped up and took two steps towards me. The rest of them continued eating and just stared at each other. Night had fallen. There was no screaming outside that we could hear this far inside the complex. You could almost imagine everything was exactly the way it had always been. Johnny tried to rush me. The cannoli hit the floor. I faced him. Someone snarled that they had never trusted me. Whoever it was was the smartest guy in the room.

  “I’m next in line,” Johnny said. His speech was slurred. He’d already had too much to drink. “You think I’ve paid my way up the chain since I was ten years old, stealing soda cans and beer bottles out of old man Diego’s market, just so that someone could cut me out now? You know how much I’ve earned for this family over the years? ”

  “Nobody’s cutting you out, Johnny,” I said.

  “Damn right! You think you’re owed something? You think we don’t know you’ve been shacking with his daughter? This how you make your move?”

  It was the wrong thing to say. The Ganooch wasn’t as angry that I was banging his daughter as he was Johnny announcing it to everyone. There was always going to be a need for discretion, manners, and diplomacy, especially when it came to blood.