Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

She didn’t say anything.

All right. But that’s not fair, is it, because I think I really want to go and I rigged things, and what are you going to do, talk? Let’s be fair. If I should stay, just be really quiet again.

She didn’t say anything.

But someone else did.

“Town meeting.”

I looked up at the missing bricks and saw Old Boy’s dully glowing eyes peering in at me.

“How’d you find me?” I said.

“Your bird smells.”

“I left the bird.”

“I know. But you still smell like him.”

“Hey, I heard you,” I said. “How come? I heard your foot on gravel. You’re normally so quiet.”

“Shut up,” he said, but not unfriendly. “Town meeting is at dawn. At the water pipe. Margaret’s pissed.”

“When is she not?”

He smiled and went away.

“What the fuck is that?” Margaret said.

“It’s an African gray parrot.”

“I can see what color it is.”

“That’s part of its name.”

“Just keep it quiet.”

“Quiet!” Gonzalo said.

She narrowed her eyes.

“Get it out of here before I kill it.”

“Quiet!”

“Have I got time? Before you start the meeting?”

“No, you trivial little man, you haven’t, but run.”

She didn’t look at me. I didn’t like that.

I ran the bird back to my room, put a shoestring around his leg, and tied him to the stand. He said something to me in German. Something like Lext Un-Fayger only the x was more like the ch in L’chaim . I thought that was weird, I didn’t see the Bakers popping out any foreign languages, and then I remembered Gary Combs was kind of an egghead, had some foreign-language books.

“Want to groove on Miles?” I asked him, but he didn’t, just bobbed his head at me, and off I ran to the meeting, afraid I was going to be found out for any number of things that would cost me my life.

“Some of you’s been feedin’ ’em, and there’s more than one. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about, neither.”

More than a few of us got really uncomfortable just then. All of us were there except the kids. Ruth had them at the 18th Street station, no doubt boring them stupid, frowning them into lassitude. She was old and strong enough to keep them in line and loyal enough to Margaret not to need a pep rally.

“I don’t want to go callin’ out individuals by name because, to be plain, there’s too many of ya. You know who you are. But it stops now. Either they hunt on their own without makin’ a mess or they die. It’s brutal, but that’s how it has to be.”

I pictured the Bakers in the bathtub. I pictured the Asian lady on top of the stack at the theater. I pictured the blind rabbit. Cvetko and I exchanged a look. Cvets smelled like smoke and mortar.

“We got it too good down here to have the law comin’ down with thirty fuckers and a dozen dogs, cleanin’ us out, wallin’ off tunnels, makin’ patrols in force. Which is exactly what’ll happen if people up there start dyin’ and they figure out where it’s comin’ from. It was hard enough last year with that crazy kike shootin’ people cause his dog told him so, and the cops all jumpy and nobody goin’ about alone no more.”

“Last year wasn’t all bad,” Billy Bang said. “The blackout was fun.” That got a laugh. He and Luna and I went out on a spree that first night the power went out, just biting the fuck out of everybody like it was Halloween. All the cops were cracking skulls in Brooklyn, so there we were climbing through open windows in the Upper East Side, knocking dead electric fans out of the way and bleeding the wealthy, tasting their fear and their salt, the veal in their blood, enjoying how inconvenienced they were by it all, how embarrassed to be caught with messy hair, sweating through tank tops just like their employees in Astoria and the Bronx.

“That’s as may be,” Margaret said. “But I want to hear from each of you that you understand me.”

“I understand,” that Edgar fellow said.

“I got it,” Billy said.

Then she stopped.

I swear she tilted her head like a dog hearing a silent whistle, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“And who the fuck is this?”

Baldy was standing near an actual bald guy. A very Italian-looking bald guy, clearly a fresh vampire, lots of scars. Shoulder muscles like he juggled engine blocks. Clearly good at getting places without being noticed; even Old Boy had missed him. Dominic stood on the other side. All of them had visible guns, one in a belt, two under the arm in shoulder holsters.

Balducci said, “I figured the meeting was a good time to introduce my friend Paulie.”

The Paulie guy nodded, barely. It’s the way you nod at somebody you’re probably going to try to kill later. Margaret just stood there for another second looking so outraged she was almost amused.

Before I tell you what happened, I’m going to tell you what I think Baldy was thinking. The hardass on his left was none other than Paulo “The Screw” Milanese, a hit man with thirty jobs under his belt. His calling card was to twist a corkscrew into your head, what was left of it, you get the idea. This guy was in the papers. An FBI sting had busted six other guys in his immediate circle, but the Screw shot his way out and went to a safe house, Balducci figured out where. Gave him a proposition. This sounded like a good way to avoid prison and put off hell. Baldy kept him in hiding above-ground, taught him a thing or two, then figured he’d introduce him when Margaret was in trouble. Figured he was a good counterbalance to Old Boy, who wasn’t on top of his game just lately because he was letting the kids feed off him too much. He figured Margaret wouldn’t go to the mat with the odds evened up and the group divided.

He figured wrong.

Margaret pulled the gun out of the Screw’s holster and shot Baldy in the head. Fast. While he was stunned and the Screw was gunless, she grabbed her shovel. Dominic ran. Old Boy’s knife was out and he went to work on Milanese; they rolled into the water-pipe area, slammed against the moldy wall right next to where it said RUST. Before Baldy could recover, Margaret shot twice more and scrambled his brains again. She dropped the gun and launched herself. Her approach with the shovel was almost like ballet. Leap, leap, half leap, crouch, uppercut.

Baldy was dead so fast his body took two steps and fell.

Old Boy finished with his man, flung the hacked-off head against the wall. It was still trying to talk.

I had never actually seen anybody get their head taken off before, now it was three in two days. I had to get out of the tunnels. Everything was going to hell.

If you’re not a vampire yourself, or have never seen one move for real, you’re thinking, What was everybody doing standing around? If your experience is a little broader, however, you know how fast these things go down. As fast as two BOMP-BOMP-Shh s in Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” As fast as a car wreck.

But I’m getting to that.

Something else had happened.

When Old Boy and Milanese went thumping up against the wall, they scraped a bunch of mold off it. It turns out some long-ago wall-scrawler had not written RUST near the busted pipe that served as our fountain. There was another letter there. Luna scraped more mold away to reveal a T.

TRUST

“Look there,” Billy Bang said, pointing where the Screw’s head had bounced off the wall at another point just to the right of TRUST. A tennis ball’s width of white paint shone through the caked-on greenish-black carpet of schmutz.