Charlie Huston - Every Last Drop

I leave his body in the shadows, his dusty jacket on my torso, his goggles, earphones and helmet on my head. I hadn't planned to kill him, but it was the smart thing to do, taking his blood to make me strong for whatever may be inside.

Things could get ugly in there.

Its louder. The machinery directly overhead amplifying the racket of pulverizing rock, blasting it down to this small, empty chamber. In the middle of the floor a staircase spirals down an ancient shaft, screwing itself into a deep darkness punctuated by the occasional scarlet glow of a safety lamp.

I start down.

Twenty feet below, the noise starting to fade, I come to the first light, a bulb in a cage above an unmarked steel door. I try the handle, it doesn't move.

I feel watched, look up, expecting to find the mouth of the shaft ringed by Coalition enforcers armed with machine guns, and find nothing.

Down.

Another light and another door. Locked.

Down.

The light just below me flashes twice, the door opens, pulled inward.

I tuck my knuckled fist behind my back, collapse my razor and palm it, raise my chin to the goggled and earphoned man coming out the door and dropping something into his jacket pocket.

He nods, waits, holding the door open.

And I slip inside, patting his side in thanks, taking the weight of the door

from him, watching his back as he starts up the stairs, letting go of the door, then catching it before it latches.

I look at the key in my hand, the key that dropped there when I sliced out the bottom of his pocket as we passed in the doorway. Broad and thick, notched along both edges, I slip it into the lock and check to be sure it will get me out. It turns the bolt.

I close the door, steel and the sixty-odd feet of stone above finally giving relief from the noise, reducing it to an insistent grinding in the walls. Walls of moisture-seeping limestone, braced by rusting I-beams. Fluorescent corkscrews stick from old ceramic sockets mounted high.

Doors.

The first stands open on a room lined with cots. Floor covered in linoleum dimpled by nails driven through it and into the stone. Walls decorated by ragged pinups. A small fridge, a coffeemaker, microwave.

I plug each nostril in turn and blow hard to dislodge the dust and grit. I inhale. Room smells of men living in close quarters. Smell like a barracks or firehouse.

But there's more.

Close my eyes, concentrate, I can smell Vyrus.

And blood. Lots of blood.

I open my eyes. Menace may be crazy, but something is here.

I leave the room and start down the hall. Find a bathroom with showerheads sticking from the ceiling, a couple dirty urinals, empty stalls. It reminds me of the bathroom at the Whitehouse.

At the end of the hallway, a storeroom, canned foods, cases of beer, economy-size cartons of snack cakes and candy bars, pallets of toilet paper.

I leave the room, go back to the shaftway door.

Down.

Deeper.

The key opens the next door. I go inside. A similar hallway. More doors.

And more sounds. And smells.

Vyrus here. Recently.

First door. No dormitory this time. A single bed with a mattress. Blood on the mattress. Dried spots and streaks. I kneel. At the four corners of the steel bed-frame, manacles. My own blood beats hard in my temples, each pulse blurs my vision. I open my razor and cut my thumb deep and the pain sharpens me.

Next room, the door is shut, my key opens it.

Another bed.

Manacles.

The naked girl held to the bed by the manacles looks at me. She opens and closes her mouth, makes opening and closing gestures with her cuffed hands, spreads her legs. -Hey, man, this room is occupied.

I turn and look at the man behind me, stripped to shorts and T-shirt and boots, gravel dust deep in the creases of his face and hands. I look at the clothes piled in the corner.

He reaches out and pulls the earphones from my head.

— You hear, man? I'm off shift, I had her brought up for me. Get one of your own.

The girl flinches when the mans blood sprays her.

I find a key on a hook on the wall and unlock the manacles. She lies there, pointing at her mouth, opening and closing it, spreading her legs wider. I sit her up and she tries to grind against me. I pull the man's work jacket from the floor and a plastic-wrapped snack cake drops from a pocket. The girl looks at it and whines. I hand it to her and she unwraps it and stuffs it in her mouth. There are

more in the jacket. I give them to her, covering her with the jacket as she eats, feeling the jutting bones that poke from her skin.

Trying to slip her arm into one of the sleeves, I touch something hard, find a plastic IV catheter attached to her forearm, hoops of surgical steel, body-piercing rings, riveting it in place.

I look at the floor, the dying man has dragged himself into the hall, the blood pouring from his open stomach smeared in a single broad swipe like a giants brushstroke.

He's lucky, dies before I can cross to him and make him hurt.

The girl eats her cakes, a pleased hum coming from deep in her throat. A sound comes from my own throat. I choke it. The room blurs, shivers, I can't catch my breath.

I cut myself again.

Again.

Again.

Vision clears.

/ had her brought up for me.

I leave the girl, go back to the stairwell.

Down.

There's a guard when I open the next door under a red light. He turns to look at me, sees my face, freezes, his mouth slightly open under his thin moustache.

Then he's dead.

Low.

If the kid had never seen me before, he might not have been so surprised, he might have been able to do something to stop me from punching him in the temple five times, shattering his skull and crushing his brain. Instead he sits dead on the floor.

The brass knuckles came dislodged with the fourth blow. The bones in my fingers, that had started to reknit when I drank the mans blood on the surface, are broken again. I tie them back into place.

Low has a ring of keys and a truncheon.

I take the keys.

The noise from above is all but mute here, just a dull thud in the stone. But there are other sounds. Rustling, grunts, coughing, the occasional angry shriek.

First door opens on a white-painted room. Layers of paint, thick on the

stone, the floor marked by boot scuffs, dry maroon stains. Steel tables with blood gutters down their sides, running to drains at their feet. Steel trays filled with used needles, some bent, some broken. Meters of looped plastic hose.

Down the hall.

Another storeroom.

Cardboard boxes filled with empty, paper-wrapped blood bags. Unused needles. Clean tubing. Gallons of bleach. Buckets of white paint. A dusty and broken autoclave, decades out of date.

An incubator.

The noise starts in my throat again. It's harder to stop this time.

The last door. Sounds are louder. Smells of feces and disinfectant and decay.

My key doesn't fit the lock. As I'm trying the keys from Lows ring, the door is opened from within. -What the fuck, Low, it's the key with the piece of tape on it.

A scrappy kid with a Bronx accent.

He looks at my jacket and helmet and the earphones and goggles now hanging from my neck.

— What the fuck. You know your ass ain't allowed down here. You want a piece, call down and we'll send something up.

I don't see him anymore. I see the room behind him. I see the ranks of bunk beds. I see the skinny bodies filling the beds. I see skin waxed to albino paleness. I see a chemical pit at the back of the room that they squat over. I see bedsores and muscle atrophy. I hear their hisses and grunts and caws, their imitations of speech.

The Bronx kid pokes me with his truncheon.

— Motherfucker, time to go. You don't get to window-shop, asshole. You fuck what we send up.