Charlie Huston - My Dead Body

– I can’t say for certain. He said he knew someone keeping tabs on you down there. You mentioned someone watching us when we were in the tunnel. Perhaps?

I think about the old man of the underground. I think about Percy. Enclave and Enclave.

– Yeah, that fits.

He pats his ‘fro.

– Still, I told him I didn’t think you’d help.

He looks out the side window.

– And he mentioned a girl. Sketched a few details. Gave me a name. Mentioned Enclave.

He turns to me, tears, trembling chins.

– Joe, if it hadn’t been my daughter, Joe. If it hadn’t. I would never have. Not just because I have more sense than to cross you. But because. I wouldn’t want to lie to a man about something like that. Not a man I know. Not a friend. Joe.

He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

– Just. My daughter. That’s why.

He catches a sob, huffs it out.

– I didn’t want to cause you all this trouble.

He draws a loose shape in the air with his fingers.

– I’m sorry, Joe.

I look out the windshield. We’re coming up on Gansevroot. I move my feet around, making sure I can still do that. Legs seem to work. Arms. My brain keeps drifting in and out of fog banks. But that’s hardly new. I could keep myself clear, I’d never have fallen for this deal.

Too late now. I was reeled in, cut open, gutted, and there’s nothing left but the grill. No reason not to just put myself on it. It’s only fire. And you can only burn once.

I stick my head a little farther out the window.

I point.

He sees it, taps Dallas.

– Here.

Dallas wheels us around the corner of Little West Twelfth Street.

– You sure, Joe?

I lean against the door.

– Make those calls, Chubs.

– Of course.

I pull the door handle.

– I’m glad you got to see your daughter, Chubby.

He nods, half laughs.

– Yes. Precious minutes.

I push the door open an inch.

– See you around.

– See you, Joe.

Dallas cuts the wheel, rubber breaking traction on the cobbles as he makes his U-turn, and I tumble myself from the car, rolling off the momentum until I rest in the gutter, watching Chubby’s Riviera whip around the corner back onto Greenwich and out of sight.

Alone again. I close my eye to enjoy it for a second.

Got any regrets?

The thing you did? The thing you passed on doing?

I never played that game much. I take something back here, take a little extra there, next thing you know I’m watching one set of bodies rising from their graves, and another set going into the ground. Been a long time since I did anything that mattered when it didn’t involve dying for someone. Some folks I’ve been happy to put away. Some I’ve been OK with seeing them get another day or two. Most I don’t having feelings one way or the other. So why go back and tinker with things that can’t be changed anyhow.

But, sure, I got regrets.

Most all of them are tangled up with this lady. Got one in particular that sits on me. Like to get it off.

Means opening my eye and crawling out of this gutter and finding out if she’ll talk to me long enough to hear what I got to say.

Thought of it, it almost makes me wish I was back in the basement with the monsters. I was scared then, but it was just my life I had to lose.

• • •

– Oh, man, you OK, man?

I open my eye and look at the club kids, boy and girl, matching androgyny to go with their matching homburg hats plastered with Gucci logos and matching bug-eye pink-tint sunglasses and matching loops of fluorescing plastic around their wrists and necks.

– Oh, man, G, they laid a pounding on you.

One of them holds up a camera and snaps a picture.

– I’m putting this on my page.

She looks at me.

– That cool with you?

The other one is dialing.

– Hang on. 911 on the way.

– Give me a cigarette.

He stops dialing.

– G, you probably don’t want to smoke messed up like that.

The girl is crouching next to me, holding her phone at arm’s length so it gets us both in frame.

– Could kill you, a cigarette right now.

– Yeah, a cigarette could kill anyone. Jam a lit cigarette in someone’s eye, it could leak infected pus back into their brain and they could go crazy and die eating their own shit.

They both stare at me.

I put out my hand.

The girl hands me a cigarette, pinching it between finger and thumb, holding it as far from herself as possible. I take it and put it in my mouth.

– Light.

The boy finds a Bic in his pocket and lights me.

– Now fuck off. They do.

It’s a fucking American Spirit Light. Tastes like my ass. I tear off the filter and it tastes like half my ass.

I get out of the gutter and pull the piece from under my jacket and drag myself up the steps of the Enclave warehouse loading dock and, dispensing with a polite knock, I grab the handle on the outside and pull the big white door open, rolling it to the side in its tracks, and I step inside.

Grateful again to Predo for the fingers he left me. Index and middle. The smoking fingers. Letting me take the butt from my mouth and carry it comfortably. Leaving my other hand free for the gun.

A gun and a smoke.

Ask for more, you’re a greedy bastard.

I don’t get to keep the gun for very long.

While I have it, I take in some of the sights. Such as they are. Rows of mats on the floor. Workbenches against the walls. Some big industrial sinks. Kitchen area where I happen to know they boil the bones of their dead before sucking out the marrow. Staircase leading up to the loft where their sleeping cubicles line a long center aisle. Small balcony up there overlooking the floor dotted with the light of scattered candles. Lockers where they store whatever kinds of goods they own. Rags. Cups. Marrow-sucking straws, maybe. Weapons. The cutting and cudgeling variety; they’re not big on firearms here. Couple big drains in the floor. Sewer cap in the corner where they dump the occasional dead body or apostate. Took a ride down the tube once myself. Mostly for being an unlikeable asshole.

All that stuff is much as it always has been. More of everything these days. More than when Daniel was running the show. Signs of all the new Enclave since the Count started expanding the ranks. Geeking them up for the revelation.

Whatever shape that might take.

Supposed to be, one of them will achieve a final adaptation, perfect consumption by the Vyrus. All earthy cells eaten and replaced by Vyrals. The Vyrus understood by them to be from somewhere else. Other than this universe. Another plane.

Whackoness.

Supposed to be, the one who starves himself in perfect discipline and doesn’t die of it, that one will show the others how to do the same. And, made into creatures from another plane, nothing, not even the sun, will harm them.

Cue the crusade.

You die, I die, everybody dies.

Except Enclave.

How it is my girl came to be here is, well, I brought her here. Wanted to keep her from dying of AIDS. It worked, but it created issues. Complicated issues. And I got turned out for being a lying sack of shit who barely told her a word of truth from the night we met.

Speaking of regrets.

So I take in the place, trying to figure what I might say. Trying to figure how long I have to say it before I fade to black. Trying to figure if I’ll get a crack at settling just one more score.

And I almost trip over part of someone’s rib cage and catch myself before I fall and stumble across a hunk of someone’s thigh and just get my balance and have to jump to keep from stomping on a pile of seven livers and that’s all the grace I can muster and I go down with a tangle of gristled spines under me and find myself looking up at the beams crossing under the shallow peak of the sheet-metal roof where an upside-down forest of chains have sprouted, each carrying the flower of a dead and rotting Enclave.