Charlie Huston - My Dead Body

She wipes her mouth.

– Ready to go to Queens?

Ben comes back with a smoke rolled in a bit of printed paper, and a butane igniter.

– Mister Pitt.

– Yeah, hit me.

I stick the double wide smoke in my face and he burns the end off it and I cough up a chunk of my lung on that first paper hit, but it’s worth it.

I look at Lydia.

– Why the hell would I want to go to Queens?

She’s at the gun rack, pauses in her inventory and points at Terry.

– Know what that is?

I squint at the body.

– Dead people?

– Karma.

She returns to looking for a gun that will suit her mood.

– That was Terry’s bullshit karma finally catching up to him because he delayed and deferred doing the right thing for too long.

– Uh-huh.

– I’m not saying there’s anything mystical about it, just that he sowed and he reaped. Being a selfish asshole gets you nowhere.

– Uh-huh.

She turns to look at me, hefting something that looks designed to efficiently kill people in large numbers.

– Are you on the phone?

I hold up a finger.

– Hang on, this will be fast.

– Who are you calling now? Digga has his hands full. Joe? Who are you?

I get my connection, my voice sounding so strangled through the pain in my gut and my half-crushed windpipe that I don’t even have to act to make myself sound freaked out.

– Yeah, I want to report a shooting. A murder. A cop, a cop was just shot over here. Where they make cement. Queens, I’m in Queens. English Kill. Next to the bus depot, where they make cement. I work. Oh my god. There’s a, some kind of sex slave thing. In the factory, the main building. Chains and. Please, please, they killed a cop and they know I’m here.

I hang up the phone, drop it, stomp it into shards.

– Really, Lydia.

I take a drag.

– If you wanted to change the world.

I blow smoke.

– That was all you had to do.

Lydia kills the thing on the stairs.

Opens the door, starts shooting, keeps shooting, empties a clip into it, pops a fresh one in the gun and empties that one too. Whatever it was, it had finished off the last of the starvings. Monsters out of the way, we spend more time than reasonable getting down the stairs. Mostly that’s my fault. Ben tries to carry me to make things go faster, but I go into a fit of convulsions and the arm wrapped around his neck almost throttles him and he decides he’ll just let me lean on him so he can drop me if it happens again.

Delilah walks just ahead of us, one step at a time, waddling with care.

Lydia is leading the way, gun first, poking it into every open door on every landing.

– Insane. I should. Insane.

I trip down a couple steps, grab the banister.

– You were the one that wanted to be public.

She takes the turn on the second floor landing.

– We always thought it would be an announcement. A press conference. Not a SWAT van driving on an officer-down call and finding a Vampyre concentration camp. It was. We wanted it to be organized. Controlled.

– Sure, a civilized declaration that Dracula is real and there are a lot of him and, oh yeah, it’s communicable.

She leads us down to the ground floor, stepping carefully through the bodies.

– It’s information. We needed to shape it, control the definitions. Why shouldn’t the signified define the signifiers?

– You sound like Terry.

Her head snaps around, gun barrel in parallel.

– Don’t.

– It was never gonna happen like that. No one was ever gonna buy that. It was always going to happen, and it was always going to be a mess.

I step away from Ben, use the wall, start for the back of the building.

– At least this way we blew it up ourselves.

I find the back door, find the ring of Cure house keys still in my pocket.

– Could have been someone else blowing it up under us.

I start trying keys in locks.

Lydia puts a hand on the door.

– How was this better? How is it better we blow ourselves up?

I grin.

– I don’t know. I guess it just feels better than letting someone else do it.

She starts to frown, but it turns to a grin of her own.

– Yeah. Alright. So let’s go deal with the rubble.

I find the right keys and pop the locks.

She pulls her hand away from the door.

– So those enforcers don’t know about the back way?

I shrug.

– Probably they do.

She stares at me.

I shrug again.

– My bet is all the little piggies got called home as soon as Digga hit Coalition HQ.

– And if not?

I point at the basement door.

– If not, that’s plan B over there. Your call.

She pulls the door open and we step into the alley, Ben and Delilah waiting to see if we get gunned down from the rooftops. We don’t. And we don’t get shot up on the street when we come out the front of the Cure-owned building that faces onto Seventy-second. And the Impala is where I left it on First Avenue. And I haven’t lost the key in all the business of the night. And there’s still a couple hours to daylight.

A small collection of miracles.

None of them a cigarette.

You can’t kill the worm.

Wound it, it’ll never be as bad as the hurt it does itself with every bite. It’ll just keep chewing. Digesting itself over and over again.

Calling the cops, sending them into Queens. Blowing it wide. Does that rip a hole in the side of the worm? Will blood run from it? Or does something like that make it stronger? More madness.

A sudden fun house mirror skew to the world. Everyone looking at the new reflection, asking, Do I really look like that? Your friends and neighbors, seeing them with those new eyes, Who are they? What are they?

How bad will it get?

How fast?

Figure it will get as bad as it can possibly get as fast as humanly possible.

Figure it this way. With or without Amanda’s research, once they have actual Vyrussy Vampyres in their labs, someone will come to the same conclusions that she did. So if our very existence doesn’t push the madding crowd over the edge, the idea of rewriting the history of life with sanguivores as the wellspring should be good for at least one holy war.

Then again, I’m maybe not the one you want sitting judgment on humanity. People being inclined as they are to see their own natures in everyone else. A world full of me? Who wouldn’t push the button?

The worm.

You can’t kill it.

It can only kill itself.

– I know about you.

I ignore that.

– As much as he talked about Percy, he talked about you almost as much.

I ignore it some more.

– He made you sound like the world’s baddest man. John Shaft with white skin.

In the front passenger seat, Lydia turns and looks at me when she hears that.

– Go ahead and smile, Joe, no one’s ever going to flatter you more than that.

Next to me in the back, Delilah shakes her head.

– Just said that was the picture my dad painted, I didn’t say it was accurate. Look at you. Look like you were something made to be beat on. It’s like nothing he ever told me was true. Like it’s just one big mess of craziness is all it is.

She shakes a fist at no one.

– I will not stand for more craziness.

I tug on the stump of my left ring finger.

– Girl, you got yourself into a world of craziness the minute you fucked a Vampyre, the rest of this is just what comes with the package.

Delilah slaps Ben’s shoulder and the Impala veers slightly.

– You have nothing to say to that?

Ben straightens the wheel and keeps his eyes on the road.

– Baby, I’m new to the whole experience myself. If I was comfortable with the way things are done, I wouldn’t have been looking for someone outside the infected community. To my eyes, it’s all been crazy. Being infected. Meeting you. Getting into the whole undead scene with you. ‘Cause you know I love you, and the role-playing is fun, kinky, but talking like that all the time, it wears me out a little. And now. Becoming a dad. Crazy is the least of it.