“I don’t know,” I said.
They wanted to go for a drive, hit the gym, go pick up a hooker, go to AC and play blackjack, roulette, get a pedi. No matter what the threat might be I could still picture Johnny and a few of the others going over the wall or crashing out the gate, just to go to Coney Island and walk on the boardwalk for a while, see if they could still get a Nathan’s hot dog.
My phone rang. It hadn’t run in almost two days and the sound of it tightened the muscles in my back. I let it go a couple more times, my scalp itchy with icy sweat, before I answered. It took a moment before anyone spoke. “We need help,” a woman said.
“Who is this?”
“Sister Maeve. We’re dying. We’re hungry. Please come. Please help us.”
She whimpered and I heard Mother Superior’s footsteps ricocheting all around the place like wild gunshots behind her. I didn’t hear her laughing though.
I knew that if I was burning then so was my aunt. Mother Superior took the phone. She said nothing for a moment. Sister Maeve continued mewling. I tried to imagine what had been going on in the convent and the church. If they’d left the doors open then everyone would be dead or infected. So they’d shut and blockaded the doors like I’d told them.
Mother Superior said, “Sister Abigail has become… greatly disturbed.” Her voice was hoarse with thirst. I’d heard that kind of rawness before. I’d suffered through it myself.
I said, “She’s been greatly disturbed for a long time.”
“You always did have a mouth on you. She’s worse now than she has been in years.”
“How so?”
“She says the devil is visiting her.”
“Maybe he is.”
“We’ve had to lock her away.
“You should be seeking the Lord’s forgiveness.”
“What’s been happening over there? Are the biters trying to get in?”
“The… sick… the ill have withdrawn. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“And the others in there with you?”
“Some of the children… we were forced to lock them in the chapel.”
“Good. Do you have enough food and water?”
“No, we’ve run out.”
“Drink the holy water.”
“We can’t.”
“Do it and stay alive and strong.”
She decided not to argue. “And the power has gone out as well.”
“I’ll come with some men. We’ll bring you back here to the Ganucci estate.”
I knew her body language so well that even over the phone I knew what she was doing by the sound of her clothing rustling. She squared her shoulders. She was a powerful lady. I remembered the damage she could do with a yardstick. She held her chin up proudly. Most priests and nuns I’d met had chosen the cloistered life out of tradition and cultural legacy rather than any true spiritual calling. They were as down to earth as anyone else. Mother Superior more than most. She taught Health. She lectured on STD’s.
“My aunt,” I said. “Don’t go near her.”
“We–”
“Don’t feel bad about it. Just stay away from her. I’ll deal with my aunt when I get there.”
“You’ll have to move a lot of furniture,” Mother Superior said. “We blocked the door to her room.”
Johnny came around a minute later with his legbreakers. He saw the look on my face and somehow we were kids again, friends again, brothers in arms. He asked what was going on and I told him.
He said, “We’ll go with you. Me and my boys have been cooped up long enough. I think we should get outside the compound and stretch our legs.” He grinned and then his eyes caught mine and he let his smile go and his face hardened. “You’ve been right about everything so far. Loss of communication. CDC can’t contain shit. No government action. No National Guard. No emergency broadcasts. They want us dead. They’re all in on it.”
I had to agree.
“Your aunt still okay?” he asked.
“No.”
“She one of them things?”
“She’s the main one of them things.”
“Shit.”
He looked to the screen.
“Nothing much is happening out there. There’s hardly any biters at all.”
“It could be a trap.”
“You said their mental faculties were down and their bodies didn’t respond well. You think they can actually plot and plan?”
“I don’t know.”
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “It doesn’t matter, right? No matter what, we’re going to get Mother Superior. I used to hate that bitch when I was in school, but I have to give it to the old broad, she taught me to be hard for a hard world, and goddamn if it isn’t one. Those yardstick beatings came in handy after all.”
“Move the limos,” I told Winslow. Then to DiMeo I ordered, “Go to the armory. Load up one of the Lincolns with an M-16 and an auto rifle.”
Winslow’s muddy clump of a face squeezed and twinged into his version of looking confused. “I can’t tell those apart.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just grab what you can carry. And don’t forget the ammo.”
Johnny added, “And the .50 caliber M2!” Wilson’s cliff side features continued to mimic puzzlement and Johnny put in, “It’s the really big motherfucker with its own tripod. You can’t miss it.”
“Bring some food and water too,” I told him.
Johnny glanced into my face. He let out a laugh like he liked what he saw. The same way he’d been happy the morning I’d carved my way through Freddy Finn’s mooks. He liked seeing me in killing action. It made him want to do the same thing, and then it made him want to ice me.
I understood the feeling. I felt close to him. We would cover each other’s back. And afterwards it would finally be time for us to go for each other’s throat. One of us wouldn’t be coming back.
I went to my room and got out of my suit and into my uniform. I loaded up with more handguns and holsters, and two more knives in their scabbards. I hadn’t been this packed and juiced since Afghanistan.
I walked downstairs to the kitchen, unlocked the wine cellar and went down into the depths where I found a rare bottle of Amarone. The Ganooch had paid sixteen grand for it. I didn’t know why. I opened it and took a deep pull, enjoying the full-bodied taste of the fat Corvino grapes that they let turn to raisins for a stronger concentration of flavor. Or so the Ganooch told us around the dining room table one evening.
It reminded me of the wine we used to drink at mass during communion. I wanted to confess my sins but there wasn’t enough time. There would never be enough time for that. I grabbed two glasses and found the Ganooch in his office, alone, but clear-eyed. I poured us both a glass of the Amarone.
“You’re leaving,” he said.
“For a while.”
“Remember what you promised, Tommaso.”
“I do,” I told him.
“You’re not paid to protect the nuns. You’re paid to protect my family.”
“You’re not paying me or anyone else anymore, Don Guiseppe. There’s no such thing as money anymore.”
He tried to find something else to leverage against me. “Gina. Don’t leave her here alone.”
“She’s not alone. You’ve got two dozen other men here. All your capos, all the lieutenants, all the arm-twisters, the muscle, the hitters.”
“None of them are as good as you.”
“I’ll be back within the hour. If not, I’m dead, and Johnny will return to do his duty by the family.”
He wanted more wine but left the bottle where it was. He got to his feet. He stood in the center of the room before me. Men had shit themselves here. Men had begged and pleaded, signed away their businesses, offered suitcases of money, traded their wives and daughters, all in an effort to appease Don Guiseppe Ganucci. The carpeting had been cleaned many many times, and replaced many many times.
“That priest,” the Ganooch said. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
That’s what was still most prevalent on his mind.
“He’s not here.”
“I dreamed of him.”
“An hour. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“I dreamed of my mother too. She’s dead. And she’s cold. Have you seen her, Tommaso?”
I could’ve told him that I dreamt of my mother and father sometimes too.
“You look at me like you want to kill me.”
“I do.”
I thought I should do it now. I hadn’t forgotten the real reason I’d come back to Brooklyn in the first place. I might never get another chance.
He said, “You know, don’t you.”
“That you murdered my parents. Yes, I know.”
“It’s how things are done, Tommaso. You’ve done it yourself a hundred times.”
“More than that.”
“Then you know why. You understand.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I still have to kill you. This is what we do. This is what we are.”
It got a sad chuckle up from deep down in my chest. He squared his shoulders like he wanted to take a poke at me. I stared at him and saw a reckless wild-eyed child inside him trying to escape from the machine he had created himself. He looked at all the guns on me, the knives, my hands. He looked everywhere except where he should have been looking. My teeth.
I lunged and caught the pile of arteries jutting from the cartilage of his throat. I bit down and tore. I spun him away from me in the same motion. It happened so fast he didn’t even feel any pain, and then the blood began to pump and pour like another bottle of expensive wine flowing from the source of his heart. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. There wasn’t so much as a drop of his blood on me.
I let him bleed out. It didn’t take long. He didn’t whimper or cry out. I admired him for that much at least. I left his office and shut the door on my way out.
The house had become near deathly quiet. I passed our soldiers, looking uncertain and clearly planning their defection. I heard Ma inside her bedroom, prowling like a great cat. I wanted to let her know that more pain was coming, but it wouldn’t last, and if she just held on a little longer she might find another life for her waiting down the line. I didn’t think she could though. I suspected she was going to off herself soon.
I advanced down the corridor. I came to Gina’s room. Outside Johnny began to blare the horn of the limo. I put my hand on the doorknob and could feel a kind of electrical buzz go through it. But the strange tingling didn’t really touch my hand. Instead it danced through me and shocked my chest. Maybe this is what normal people understood as love. Maybe I was just crazy or it was the whim of God.
I tried the door and it was locked. “Gina?” I put more effort into it, braced my shoulder against the wood and exerted pressure. I gritted my teeth and kept trying. My forehead began to heat. I clenched my jaws together. “Gina?”
The wood began to crack as I pressed my weight against it harder and harder. I wanted to keep it as quiet as possible. I heard laughter inside the room. I might’ve even chuckled a bit myself. Where there’s grace, there’s depravity.
The jamb began to buckle, the lock gave way, and I stepped in.
Gina was seated at her vanity, wearing nothing but a silken see-through shawl, brushing her hair. The tri-fold mirror situated around her didn’t reflect her face from three sides. Instead, they showed different, shifting images. The creases at the edges of her mouth were splitting her face open. The doc’s thermometer hadn’t infected her. I had.
Gina continued drawing the brush through her gleaming, black hair, giggling to herself or only laughing at me. Her ashen face was drawn, her dark eyes becoming even blacker.
Maybe the devil had whispered all my secrets in her ear. You didn’t have to go looking for him, he would find you.
“Tommy Flowers, you haven’t come to our rescue.” She turned in her seat, the curves of her lithe body accented by the draping of her garment. The love and pain seeped to the surface and darkened and deepened every line of her features. “Your revelation is our revelation.”
“I still don’t know what that is.”
“Of course not, but heaven and hell do.”
“I’m sorry, Gina. I’m sorry I brought this to you. My fever, my infection. I’m a carrier, I think.”
“With your kisses, Tommy Flowers, with your love bites.” Her voice was tight but not bitter. “Tommy Flowers, I was born bloodstained thanks to this family, this business, you people.”
“Everyone’s born bloodstained, Gina. That’s just the natural way.”
“Satan walked among us. The seraph lay in wait in our shadows. They watched. Your verses are not finished. There is more for you to do for the divine will.”
“What’s it like, Gina?”
“We all become one with the fallen. We all become one with God.”
“That sounds like hell to me.”
“We all eat of the cosmic Eucharist.”
“Do you want me to kill you?”
That made her laugh harder than any of the biters had ever laughed. Her mouth tore wide across her entire face and her bottom jaw flapped and her teeth dripped with black venom and poison of the God Plague.
I took another step into the room. It hurt like hell and I almost went to my knees. It was like trying to walk through unseen heated razor wire. I grunted and my blood began to burn. The edges of my vision filled with colorful lights. I tried to shake my head clear. The cramps returned and nearly crippled me.
Johnny honked the horn for me again. You’d think the guy might send someone to find me, order one of his troops to go looking. Instead he blew the horn like an angry old man stuck in traffic while nuns and children filled the crosswalk, the moron.
Gina smiled at me then and there wasn’t anything in it that was the girl I knew. “Niko is being flayed by a duke of Hell, who whips him with a cat o’ nine tails made from two thousand year old leather and bone. It’s the same whip used to beat Christ along his walk through Jerusalem to Golgotha, the hill of skulls. You breathed in the dust. You exhaled into my throat, you kissed me with bonemeal on your lips.”
I’d held Gina in the warm night and whispered that I would keep her safe. I had promised to fight God and Satan to protect her. I’d lied.
Nicky was being skinned in hell, and he wasn’t alone. Portman would be there too. And the Ganooch. And maybe Grandma as well. I’d soon join them. I’d been resolved to that for years. I was my own man. I was stone in the night, and I couldn’t be broken.
Sweat slithered into my eyes. Gina drifted to her vanity again, laughing, speaking in tongues, some of which I knew.
I was damned but I wasn’t dead yet. I grabbed her around the wrist and fought with her while she snapped at me.
She reached down and tried to chew my nose off, but I turned her mutilated face aside and drew her forward into an embrace instead. I held onto her. I thought a part of me had managed to love her as much as I was capable of loving any woman or any person. I tightened my hold and kissed her throat. She struggled and beat at my chest and snarled in my face. I kissed her again.
“Tommy Flowers, you answer the call, you spread death and destruction.”
“Goodbye, Gina.”
My hands moved then, doing amazing and savage things almost without my consent. When it was done I was red and wet up to the elbows and some of the fever had left me.
I gripped myself across the belly and stumbled out the door. Johnny was shouting.
The limo was loaded with weapons and Johnny’s two mook legbreakers. There were no biters at the gate. I knew a lot of the capos and other Ganucci troops would be suckered into running. Johnny said, “Where in the fuck have you been?”
“Making sure the family was going to be okay without us.”
“There’s nothing out there anymore. Everybody’s going to be fine.”
We opened the gate
and slid the limo out and turned onto the street in front and slowly cruised down towards the convent. We didn’t see any biters anywhere. There were no uninfected either.
“No bodies on the street. If they’re dying, why would they drag their dead away?”
“Maybe they hold funerals like we do.”
“I thought they were crazy.”
“They are. And they’re still Catholic.”
I kept hoping Nolan or Father Macdonald would be waiting for me. I had a gut feeling that they had all the answers I wanted.
“What’s up there?” the driver asked, craning his neck and glancing up through the windshield.
“Where?”
“Something’s… flying… there, in the sky…”
“Planes?” Johnny offered. “Fighter jets?”
We continued through the neighborhood looking at blood-spattered trails staining the sidewalks. Scuffed chalk-drawn hopscotch boards were splashed with blood and black infection. I looked for kids hiding on the playground, behind trees, parked cars, anywhere. I was more worried about them than anything else.
We might make it to the church in time for evening mass, if only Vespers was being held. I missed the church bells. I missed the folks gathering out in front on the steps, talking their hypocrisy but still willing to give an hour of the week to the Lord. Shaking hands and saying, “Peace be with you” even while they schemed to rob and fuck one another over. Finely dressed, in a giving mood for at least a few minutes, before falling back into the people they truly were. We live by our rituals. We live by the illusion of our rituals.
We pulled up to the convent. The three of us jumped out. The mooks set up the M2 on the hood of the limo, swinging it in every direction, waiting for the biters to attack. The streets were empty and silent. There wasn’t even enough wind to blow trash around.
I looked through the reinforced windows and saw movement inside. I pounded on the door
One of Johnny’s mooks started firing the M16 straight up into the air. The other did the same thing with the pounding, explosive M2.
“The hell are you doing?” I shouted.
“There’s something up there. They’re flying above us.”
Johnny let out a laugh like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He liked the sound of his own boisterous guffaw. I didn’t. He liked the sound of the big guns. I didn’t. I’d used them on long-range snipers hidden away in caves. The mooks kept firing. I wondered if the noise would bring out the biters, but there was still no action anywhere. A cold sweat broke on the back of my neck. I thought I knew where they might be.
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