Charlie Huston - Every Last Drop

I look at him.

Something crosses his eyes. He looks down. Sees my bare feet.

My hands are on the back of his head and my knee is pushing the bones of his nose back through his brain and I twist his neck and it breaks and I think I start crying.

But it's not why you think.

It's not why you think.

It's not why you think.

I'm simply angry at myself for killing him so fast, so easy. I'd have liked to take my time.

But in the whole universe there is not enough time. There are not enough minutes and seconds for what I'd like to do. For the things I could dream up if I had more time.

The things I could do to this world to make it pay for being the way it is.

I stare at the things that might have been people had they not been raised to slaughter. I look at the dead body I'm still holding. I drop it. There's a sound when I drop it, metal on stone. I kneel and find the gun under the kid's arm. I take it.

This gun. I love this gun. There are so many wonderful things I can do with this gun. So many people I can kill.

I turn and leave, eager to begin.

I kill two more workers on the stairs, at a total cost of two bullets. Two bullets for two human lives. I laugh to think that something as tawdry as a human life should come at the cost of something so precious as a bullet.

Climbing, I come to the second door I passed on my way down.

I don't need to go inside and look. I know what III find.

A key lets me in.

And I find it.

Another of Laments creations is guarding this room. She's whippet fast and far more alert than the two I've already killed. Maybe its what she's been charged to watch that makes her so present.

I don't care.

She takes three of my bullets. And snaps off the long scalpel blade she sticks in my right armpit before she dies. If I were left-handed, the blade would be in my heart.

Standing at the door of the room she guarded, I ask myself if I've seen enough.

Tiny things.

In my life I never think about them. Helpless, squirming, bundles of nothing but pure need. They have no place in my world.

Why are they suddenly here?

I turn as the steel door at the end of the hall opens, and I walk toward it, shooting, using the last of my bullets to kill the man in the black suit who is coming through the door.

I have to finish him with the razor, the body armor beneath his jacket having stopped the first two bullets I hit him with.

Groomed, manicured, fit.

Enforcer.

His gun is better than the one I took from the kid. I take it. I take the extra clips in the nylon pouches snapped to the back of his belt.

A fold of papers sticks from his inner breast pocket. I look at them.

Vouchers. Signed.

Nearby, a cooler rests on the floor, waiting, a number written on its top in black Sharpie matches a number on a voucher. I open the cooler.

Purple coils, thumb-thick, nestled in ice packs.

I go up the stairs with my new favorite gun. Ignoring the last door, the one closest to the surface, having no need to see the commercial refrigerators I know are behind it, or what is inside them.

Having no desire to be tempted.

There's a car outside the surface door, a low, black SUV. I open the passenger door and shoot the black-suited man behind the wheel. I take his gun, twin to the one I already have.

On my way across the yard, my feet cut again and again by the sharp rocks under them, I shoot the drivers of three trucks. I shoot the men in the shed.

I stand in the light and shoot the sky and the earth.

Then I run, I tear myself going over the wall and the wire, and I fall into the water and I let myself sink to the bottom, bullets thrumming around me, leaving white trails of bubbles.

On the bottom, clinging to the rusted-out shell of an oil drum, I open my mouth and let it fill and let the water run down my throat.

Only when it hits my lungs and I start to choke and my hands let go of the drum and I thrash toward the surface do I know.

Its not time yet.

Someone s still waiting for me.

— It is what he made us for.

Menace drops a dusty packing blanket over my shoulders. -The final lie of Lament.

He pokes the coals with his machete and drops another dry, broken plank from an abandoned pallet onto the fire.

— We were baited with the promise of being a part of a crew.

The plank catches fire and crackles and spits sparks and Menace shoves it deeper into the blaze.

— Then, when he had prepared us, the secret was revealed. We were infected. Told we would be more than simple gangsters. We would be soldiers in a cause. Enforcers. Specially recruited and trained. Better than the others. Special. If we were worthy.

He thrusts the blade through the handle of an old enameled coffeepot and lifts it from the fire. -And, of course, none of us was worthy.

One of his boys hands him a chipped mug with World's Greatest Dad painted on the side, framed by the stenciled outline of a football. -And one by one we were all sent away.

He fills the cup and passes it to me.

— So when I found myself, and escaped Lament, I followed a trail. Rumors and scents. And it led here.

He puts the pot back in the fire and squats next to me. -Getting in was not difficult. I was, after all, exactly what they were expecting.

Another of Laments products. A street child, strong and vicious. And with a regard for himself so low that he could never be expected to have regard for anyone else.

The firelight reflects off his claws, burnishing them red and orange. -Once inside, I saw.

He looks into the fire.

— Laments creatures, we are meant as herdsmen. To fodder and tend the beasts. Milk them. See that they are bred outside the herd. To keep the line hearty. See the whelps nursed. In exchange, feed at our will.

He closes his eyes. -Though I saw signs that even our appetite can be fed to surfeit.

The fire has yet to warm me, the cold creek water deep in my bones. I drink some of the coffee and it scalds my throat. -Where?

Menace opens his eyes. -You know where, Joe Pitt. You know where they come from.

He points at my eye. -You saw.

He opens his hand. -And now.

He rises. -Will you join us?

His boys come closer, into the firelight, ringing him.

— Will you stay with us, Joe Pitt? Will you file your teeth to bite out the throat of the world? Will you have claws to rake its hide?

I set the cup next to the fire and shrug the blanket from my shoulders. -Where are my things?

Menace comes close.

— You are not the same. You cannot go back now. -Are you planning to keep me here?

He shakes his head. -No. -Then where are my things?

He looks to one of the boys, and my jacket and shirt and boots are dropped at my feet.

Menace watches as I dress. -Wear the same clothes, they will not hide your new skin.

I lace the boots. -There's nothing new about me, kid. Nothing under the sun.

One of the boys dumps a bucket of water over the fire and it hisses out.

Menace stands in the rising steam and smoke. -You cannot go back.

I pull on my jacket.

— Yeah, you keep saying that, and watch me walk out of here, back to where I came from.

He raises a hand, claws against the night.

— You died in there, Joe Pitt. We all die in there. Go where you came from, go to your friends, but it will not be the man who left that they see. It will not be a man at all.

I pull a smoke from my pocket. -Who ever said I got friends to know whether it's me or not?

I start across the glass-covered concrete plain where the Mungiki haunt, smoke trailing from my mouth.

And its me who goes west. I am not changed. I am not.

I have Predo's money in my jacket. I use it when I get to Vernon, waving down a cab that cuts past the parking lot above the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel. The hack boxes the compass from Vernon to Jackson to Fiftieth to Eleventh, and were lined up, paying the toll, and underwater, traveling the exhaust-filled hole that will take me back.