Lucifer was the first and most beautiful angel.
She reached for me and I thought, No, I can resist.
I will not break. I am rock.
I thought of my capacity to inflict and endure pain. I’d suffered fever dreams for years, and this was only a little different. I’d burned in the desert, I’d sweated on rock floors covered in centuries’ worth of blood. Every minute I managed to abide and bear the agony I was proving that I was stronger than they were. Whoever was destroying me would begin to feel fear and eventually despair because I would not succumb.
A wild giggling in the dark.
I figured Portman or Nicky had infected someone else, or maybe Nolan had gotten inside the complex, or perhaps Azreal had finally come for me. I’d cheated death a hundred times before. I knew his black wings were eager to close around me.
The laughter was an inhuman sound, the titter of a luscious full-bodied woman designed to make me want to roll with her and ignite the sheets. She reached for me and held my face in both hands. She wasn’t a woman or a man. I tried to see if it was Macdonald, but there was too much sweat in my eyes.
Satan said, “Tommy Flowers, drink of my blood.”
The proper response was something along the lines of Like hell, but the irony was just too ridiculous. I didn’t want to start laughing. If I started I would never stop.
The room crowded with legion. The fallen angels pressed in on me. Maybe this was hell, maybe it was limbo, maybe I was going insane from the disease or the weight of my own
I wondered if I should remain silent or let the devil know that I wasn’t going to die as easily as Nicky and Portman and Nolan and the rest of the Earth? I’d made my own blood sacrifices in the past. The mud around Sheepshead Bay was thick with my kills.
“Tommy Flowers, you are a burnt offering.”
I knew the truth when I heard it. I was in agony. Cramps seized me and my guts broiled. My pulse hammered and tripped along. My blood pressure had to be near stroke levels.
“You… can’t… hurt… me,” I gasped.
Lucifer bent over me, perfectly draped blonde hair framing a face so beautiful that I had to shut my eyes against it. As the light-bearer dipped even closer the shadows covered us over. I turned away and crossed my arms over my face while that infernal body pressed against mine and an infectious crooning in my ear. All my love and hate roared up through my brain. My hands, my strong and powerful hands, flashed out for an instant in an effort to shove it away.
It lifted me and danced with me and laughed at me. When dawn broke, it vanished with the darkness but didn’t take any of the pain away.
I laid in bed for the next two hours while the rain splashed blackly against the windows. It covered the glass like paint. I watched the vain efforts of the sun trying to light the sky. When I got up I saw the burns all over me. The hands that had touched me had left welts behind. I didn’t know how I would explain the marks to Gina, or if I should even try. I took a sponge bath and made my rounds across the house the way I did every morning.
The troops fell in line but they could all tell I wasn’t as sharp as usual. Every time I passed a mirrored surface I saw the fever alive just beneath my drawn features.
I walked the perimeter. I listened to the plague-stricken on the other side of the wall, tittering, chasing anything that moved. There was one endless siren slowly dying miles away. A firehouse calling volunteers in. I wondered if it was just a trap set to snap up anybody who might still be alive.
I checked on Portman’s grave. Winslow had been lazy and hadn’t gone very deep. There were racoon tracks in the dirt. It was good to know that some animal life had survived. Portman deserved better than a shallow grave but there were plenty of wiseguys who didn’t even get that much. They were chucked into ravines or dumped behind Kennedy Airport or chained and dumped in the bay. I’d been with squads in Fallujah who didn’t even get that much. They were blown apart into red mist and left sprinkled across the enduring dust. They rode the currents of heated winds stirring sandstorms forever.
The Ganooch sent someone to come after me, and I went. He was in his office again. He’d put the gun away but not the wine. There were two empty bottles and a full one on his desk. He was very drunk and looking through old photo albums. I saw Gina and Nicky as kids. I saw Nicky, Johnny, and me as teens, right before I joined the Ganucci family. Back then we’d just steal cars and go joyriding, put exactly one thousand miles on it and then park it back in the exact space we’d stolen it from.
The don glowered at me and said, “You don’t check in with me? I have to get somebody to chase you down?”
“I’ve been busy.”
He took his time responding. He gave me the slow once-over, trying to figure me out after all this time. He started at my feet and raised his gaze to take me in until he was looking into my face. He saw the kid I’d been. He saw the boy he himself had molded practically from birth. He knew I’d been raised by an insane saint. I wondered what that made me in his eyes. Would he ever take a chance on icing me if it ever came down to it? Or was he too afraid of God to give it a try?
Or was he pissed that he hadn’t given orders to put one in my brain too, along with my parents, all those years ago?
“Busy?” he said. He rolled the word around in his mouth for a while before spitting it out. “Busy? Doing what? Figuring out a way to get us out of here?”
“Trying to keep us safe and alive. There is no way out right now.”
“Those sick people out there aren’t doing anything. They’re not attacking us. Nicky didn’t attack anyone. I think we can go whenever we like.”
He was being petulant because he was scared and missed his son. “There are so many infected out there because they bite anyone who isn’t and pass the virus on. Anyone not infected by now is holed up somewhere deep or behind strong walls.” I thought of Renning sitting safely in some military complex at the bottom of a two thousand foot shaft in the heart of a mountain, staring at pretty scientist chicks in lab coats, ready to repopulate the planet.
“I want options,” the don said.
“So do I.”
He made a strangled, drunken sound of repressed anger, jumped up from his seat and swept out an arm, knocking the two empty bottles onto the floor. They both rolled across the carpet gently until they clinked into the floorboards.
“Don’t give me any back talk, Tommaso!”
“I’m not.”
“You are! You are right now! Even now! You’re doing it right now!”
I said nothing more. I let him calm down on his own. He sat back down behind the huge desk and continued drinking. He seemed almost eager to see if I’d leave before being formally dismissed. I just stood there.
I’d once stood before my captors for three days straight while they waited for me to waver and pass out so they could beat me awake again. I outwaited them. I could outwait anybody.
Finally the Ganooch pushed his glass away and looked at me steadily. “I haven’t seen Cole for two days.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
A wave of despair contorted the don’s expression. It crimped his face as if a taloned hand covered it, grasping, squeezing. Then his features softened as if the hand had opened again. He looked like a child who’d just lost his dog, or his father. “Dead?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Dead? How? Was he sick?”
“He slipped in the shower, took a header through the tub door, and broke his neck. I had the boys bury him.”
“You had him buried already? Where?”
“Behind the shed.”
“Behind the shed?” His voice cracked. A whine threaded through it. He brought his fist down on the desk top but he struck so lightly that his glass of wine wasn’t even disturbed. “Why there? What kind of a fitting grave is that for him?”
“It’s not. But there was nowhere else, unless you wanted him in your wife’s garden or out on the lawn.”
His lips framed the
words again. He closed his eyes trying to imagine Portman gone from his life. Swiped, extracted, stolen away as his son had been. I was glad and heartened for his pain. He tried to pour himself the rest of the wine but his hand shook too badly. I did it for him. I even brought the glass up to his quivering lips so he could sip. The red wine ran down his chin. I humbled him further by using my own shirt cuff to blot it away.
The Ganooch said, “He’s my consigliere. He was my friend for almost thirty years. And you don’t tell me about this? You don’t let me know before you put him in the ground? I have to ask you?”
“Don Guiseppe, you were already grieving for Nicky. You wept on your mother’s lap. I didn’t think it was the right time to let you know that your friend of thirty years was gone too.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“You had other things on your mind.”
His fist came down again, almost silently. “That doesn’t matter. You give me all the information, Tommy, and then you let me handle it as I see fit. You don’t hold things back. You don’t keep secrets from me when they’re about my family. You wait for orders and I’ll give them. That’s how it’s done.”
“All right,” I said.
He liked proving to himself that he was still capable of giving orders and someone like me would follow. “Doctor Beltrando is checking our people to see if anyone might be infected.”
“There’s no way to check for the virus.”
“How do you know that, Tommaso?”
“Because if there was it wouldn’t be an epidemic that’s wiped out the city and beyond in just a few days.”
“He says there’s symptoms.”
“By the time the symptoms show the infection has already being passed on.”
“You’re the last one. He’s set up in Nicky;’s bedroom. Go to him.”
“Sure.”
I turned and headed for the door.
“Another thing,” the Ganooch said. “I want you to off the priest.”
“What?”
“Father Macdonald. I don’t like his eyes. I don’t like the way he prays. I don’t like the way he sings. I want him out of here.”
“We don’t off priests.”
“I do whatever I want. You do what I tell you to do. Kill him or throw him out and let the infected take care of him. I don’t care. Just get rid of him. I don’t want him around my people anymore.”
“Ma and Grandma like him.”
“Not as much as you’d think. He gives everybody the creeps.” He caught my eye and held it, strong, resilient, full of pride and enjoying the power he wielded. He was his old self again, just like that. It didn’t take much to get men like the Ganooch back into form. Just the pull of a trigger or the ordering of a man’s murder.
“Sure,” I said.
Even torpedoes had rules, and Don Guiseppe knew them. You don’t kill a man in front of his family. You don’t snuff him in church. You don’t ace nuns or priests.
I went to Nicky’s room where Doc Beltrando had his little black bag open on the bed and a couple of the lights with their lampshades off pointed at a chair in the middle of the room. He told me to take my shirt off and sit.
I did. I flashed a little on Iraq. Sometimes I was in the chair. Sometimes I had someone else in the chair. I took off my shirt. He looked at the burn welts all over my chest and arms and said, “What have you been doing? How did this happen?”
Good question. I didn’t know how to answer. I thought he was full of shit about knowing what symptoms to look for besides mad laughter, ashen faces, lost muscle mass, and bloodthirsty biting. He was probably lying just to make himself seem more useful than he was. His shoulders sloped up and his neck tilted at a severely crooked angle. He had a stethoscope and a thermometer. He wasn’t going to cure the plague. He wasn’t going to save anybody. He wasn’t going to save me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
How did I explain that I thought an angel or the devil had visited me in the night? Or maybe death itself? Or perhaps the pretty priest hiding in my room in the night, tempting me with beauty, demanding sacrifice, naming me a burnt offering? I was thinking more and more that I had been infected early on in my life, by the church. Maybe some Vatican experiment. Or that I’d brought the disease back from the Middle East or that I had a built-in resistance to it now and while everyone around me turned to biters I might be able to stave off the plague.
“You don’t know, Tommy?” Doc Beltrando asked. He picked up the thermometer, shook it, and said, “Open wide.”
I moved from the chair and faced him. “What did you clean it with?”
“Excuse me?”
“The plague is passed on through saliva. What did you clean the thermometer with?”
“It’s not been entirely determined how the contagion is spread.”
I could feel the veins in my neck bulging, black and twisted. “You been sticking that in everybody’s mouth?”
“Well… yes.” He stared down at the thermometer in his hand as if it might be a snake, a serpent loose in the room that he’d somehow captured without meaning to touch it. “I’ve been cleaning it with rubbing alcohol, of course.”
“What if that’s not enough? What if that doesn’t kill the virus? You goddamn butchering quack. You might have passed it on to everybody here sticking that thing in the wrong person’s mouth.”
His white-haired, hawk-faced, emaciated self scuttled away. “No no, don’t be ridiculous.”
It was the perfect word to describe the new world. Ridiculous. No wonder the biters couldn’t stop laughing.
“I’m more concerned about these burns of yours,” he continued. “They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before. They seem… they seem–” He put the back of his hand to my forehead and flinched away. “You’re burning up.” He dumped the bottle of rubbing alcohol on a clean cloth and rubbed it over my forehead, around my cheeks and chin, my chest, in an effort to cool me off.
“This won’t help,” I said.
“We need to–”
“I’ve been sick a long time.”
If anyone in the compound was sick they might all be sick now. I looked at the Doc and his hand quivered as the cloth moved over my belly. His face fell and he backed away a step. He said, “I’ve been a licensed M.D. for fifty-one years. Listen to me.”
I stood. I reached for him.
“No, dear god, Tommy, you–”
I made it quick. I pressed him up against the wall, covered his mouth and nostrils, and smothered him with my hand. Despite a little flailing he didn’t make a sound. As his eyes emptied of fear I thought I saw a touch of gratitude enter them. Why not? His struggle was over. His pain was gone. His responsibilities no longer needed to be met. But mine would go on, for at least a little while longer.
I got dressed, laid the doc out on Nicky’s carpet, and posed him with his hand clutching his chest as if he’d had a heart attack. It would sell. There was no reason for anyone to question it. An old man under such strain, in these circumstances, it would seem like a blessing. I believed, above everything else, that it was.
I looked around for Gina. She was with her mother down in the living room, bored, watching the same newscasts from four days ago, which still read LIVE in the corner. Three of the maids and three members of the crew were sitting with them on the leather sectional couch, all of them drinking sangria and smoking cigarettes and pot like kids whose parents had gone away for the evening. They were all snacking on zeppoles, their lips covered in the fine powdered sugar. I tried to work up the interest to berate them all for relaxing in the situation, but then I realized they were doing what they had to do to handle it.
The guys spotted me and thought about getting to their feet, then thought again and didn’t bother. They watched me to see how I’d react to that. I had no reaction to it at all. I made a note of them and figured when it was time I’d hurt them.
Ma Ganucci saw me there in the door and said, “Tommy, don’t you ever do an
ything? Or do you just watch?”
“I watch over everyone,” I told her. “That’s doing something.”
“You make us feel safe.”
“That’s the idea.”
She sneered at me. Ma knew how to sneer better than just about anyone I’d ever met. “So why do I feel like I could die at any minute? And why do I sometimes think it’s you who might murder me?”
“I don’t know. Why is that?”
Gina said, “Ma, knock it off. If it weren’t for him we’d all be dead by now.”
“You think so, baby?” Ma said with such barbed sarcasm that it set everyone to chuckling. I unbuttoned my jacket so I could draw easily if I needed to. I checked their faces looking for the extended laugh line creases. That fucking doctor. Everyone could be infected now.
But they were just letting loose some pent-up nervous laughter.
“Where’s Father Macdonald?” I asked.
Ma frowned. “Maybe with Grandma. She seems to be the only one who can stand his presence for more than a few minutes at a time. Of all the clergy we’ve had in the house over the years I don’t know how it is we ended up trapped here with him and his hair… his… his curly hair… and his eyes, those plaintive, weepy eyes.”
“Ma,” Gina said, “you’re talking about a priest.”
“I don’t know what that little mezzo finocchio is, but he’s not a priest. He can’t be a priest. He puts the shits up me, that one.”
“Ma!”
“I don’t even know what he’s doing in this house. Who let him into our house?”
“Niko,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure it was true. I just got a sense that it was. That Nicky had someone latched onto the pretty priest, or been latched onto. Maybe the devil wanted to be on hand to watch a family of criminal and murderers like us fall one by one before his golden hand.
“Niko wouldn’t have let him in here,” Ma said. She held an empty glass up and one of the maids lazily pushed to her feet and resentfully took the proffered glass and refilled it from a pitcher on the table. “I thought perhaps you did, Tommy.”
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