Charlie Huston - My Dead Body

Some moments, they’re worth what you go through to get there.

Engines gun, rattling windows and setting off car alarms, a noise that lets everyone know they’re better off getting a door between them and the street.

I’m a mess.

Five, six years back, I was a guy about forty who looked in his late twenties. Nothing pretty, but in one piece.

Look at me now, I look like a guy about fifty who looks like a guy in his forties. Knee is never gonna heal right. Big toe, my fingers, my eye, those won’t be coming back. The hole the Count put in my side, that’s gonna leave a mark. Feels like I’m maybe going the rest of the road on no better than one and a half lungs. And the half is seriously in question. Get some blood in proper amounts the next couple days, that might help things along, but I’ll be a mess no matter this, no matter that. Had enough blood to soak in a tub of it, it couldn’t put me back as I was.

And odds are we’ll be looking at trickles of blood for a bit.

Once the night comes and we start moving, it will be fast and low. Things are gonna be shaking out hard, and until they settle down, we’ll need to stay out from under anything big that might fall on us.

Evie, she’s rigged for lean times. That’s all she’s done the last two years. Never got the full Enclave skeletal look going, but she’s pared down to the sinew. Likes it that way. Likes the way it feels. Says it feels natural. Says I’ll get used to it. Says I got it in me to live that way too. Says Daniel called it right about me.

The way he fingered me as the future of Enclave.

She says I showed Enclave how to live in the light. Showed all of us. Exposing the Vyrus, it pushed us all into the light. Like the old man was saying. Evie says it’s just like the Enclave always wanted, we’re in the light, but we’re not burning. She says prophecy isn’t literal, it’s figurative.

I figure that’s bullshit.

Her, she’s mostly saying it to watch me squirm, laughing at me the whole time. But only half laughing. She takes it more serious than me. Two years in there, living in Daniel’s old room, reading his journals. She read all of them. Going back to before he was Enclave. Before he was even infected. She says she has a different perspective on things.

I haven’t said anything about what happened in the warehouse. With the Count. I haven’t asked her if she saw anything before she pulled the trigger.

Working on how to phrase it.

Hey, baby, before you shot him down, did it look like my eyes turned black and I pushed my fingers inside him and froze him to death?

But I took a look at his body. I touched it. And it was cold. Colder than even a dead body has a right to be.

So what.

So if the Vyrus is where life started, then what? Because it had to come from somewhere, yeah? Amanda, you little crazy twist, the ideas you put in my head.

It isn’t literal.

Enclave and what they believe, not literal. So what’s it mean when you say you summon something? Does it mean you prod some slob till the Vyrus in him mutates again?

Christ it all hurts my head.

Evie says all that Enclave stuff started as practical lessons for survival. Says the whole fasting deal has as much to do with fitting into the ecosystem as it does anything else. Says it’s all like that at its heart.

Whatever.

I say I like a full belly.

But we’ll just let it play out.

Some rumbles on the news: Long-range camera shots from Queens. The gravel quarry. SWAT vans, fire trucks, black-and-whites, some dark sedans. Some cops huddled in a prayer circle. Another cop bent over puking, his partner standing next to him in tears. Some cell-phone video of blanket-draped figures being led into ambulances and commandeered school buses from the depot next door.

Rumor starting up on NY1 is about a secret way station for East European white-slave prostitutes.

Could be a cover story given out by the cops, could just be the shit people make up. Doesn’t matter, it won’t last. The truth wants to be free is what Terry said. This truth will break out the hard way. Then it will go mad dog in the streets.

Look at the clock, running low on daylight. Ready to sleep a little. But Evie’s right, I need to finish this last recording first. Besides, doesn’t look like there’s any room for me to stretch.

Crowded tight.

Esperanza got the call from Chubby, rigged up the upper floors of the abandoned house she squats in. Window boards and the like. Kind of stuff she never did before so as not to draw attention in a neighborhood that festers with superstition. But she figured this hideout will be blown soon anyway. Now she’s got Mungiki, Dusters, odds and ends of her people that she gathered up. Me and Evie. Don’t know which was more terrifying, watching the Mungiki and Dusters square off and sniff at each other, or watching Evie and Esperanza do a stare-down.

Best thing about leaving at sunset will be keeping those two apart.

Esperanza’s not sure what she’ll do. Off the Island, her people have a better shot at laying low than the folks other side of the bridges, but anywhere in the city will be a tough place to be. She’s thinking about hooking up with Lydia. Safety in numbers. From where I am that will just make it easier for them all to be scooped into cages and labs. But I think that way.

Whatever she does, the Mungiki will join in. They follow Skag Baron Menace. And Menace loves Esperanza. Deal done.

Christian’s got no confusion in him. The Dusters are for the road. Biggest question they’re gonna face is do they break up the gang and have a shot at staying under the radar, or do they ride tall and feed as a pack and go out in a blaze of glory? I read the look in Christian’s eyes right, there’ll be some headlines about crazed biker gangs in a few small-town papers the next weeks. And then maybe one big national headline about how they go down hard and take a lot of law along with them.

Christian likes being hard.

I get that.

No idea what Digga will do. I maybe had a twinge about sending him to raid the Secretariat just before I blew the whistle on everything. Kinda hung him out there away from his home base, set him up to have to scramble some. But we’re all scrambling. And when I get to feel too bad about it, I think about the hole in Queens and those kids and I feel better knowing the kind of hit Digga and his rhinos laid down on the Secretariat. I like picturing Digga going in with his pit bulls all juiced on anathema, Vyrus blood-crazed and hungry, running the halls and eating what they kill. No telling if that’s how it went down, but it makes a pretty picture.

Digga is smart, he’ll have cleared out the Coalition armory, put wheels under his people and drove them to Yonkers or some similar wasteland to wait out the first day. Morning will find them in a new diaspora, scattering over Upstate and New England. But he might just take all those guns, seize control of the Columbia campus, and start negotiating for resettlement to a neutral location. They take a few dorms, they won’t lack for eating.

Lydia I don’t think about too much.

Think about that gun she hung onto.

Hang onto that gun, girl. And don’t wait too long to see if the other side greets you with open arms before you decide if the right thing to do is to pull the trigger.

I look at my bad hand and feel that hole in my side and I get thinking on Chubby’s kid. The price I paid to save the blood of a pregnant woman. All those pieces of me. And in the end that blood may get spilled out anyway. Delilah and Ben and their baby.

Either they’re the future or they’re gonna die young.

Crazy kids.

Tired. Up all night getting shot and stabbed and bit, up all day talking into this mike.