Charlie Huston - Every Last Drop

She pushes the door closed.

— And then he infected them. Or had one of his current miscreants infect them. And, if they survived that process, he began a program of abuse.

Preprogramming. His word, not mine. But apt, I will admit. Whatever slight self-regard they might have, he removed it. Amputated it whole and cauterized the stump. The names he gives them. You've heard them? Failure. Distress. Encumbrance.

Her good eye blinks slowly, as if erasing something from the surface of its lens.

— My own fault. What I'd failed to account for was how he would respond to isolation himself. Id forgotten that he'd been a foundling in his own right. Lost and adrift until I brought him to harbor and gave him a purpose. I esteemed the training I'd given him too greatly. And once here, once in this lonely outpost amongst the savages, he became very much a product of his environment.

A finger traces the edge of the mass of scar on her face. -Not the last time, sadly, I was the victim of overconfidence and pride.

She looks at me. -Was it, Mr. Pitt?

Something rustles in my gut. The skin has sealed over the wound, but the Vyrus is struggling inside to reknit my organs. I grunt, exhale, try not to move too much. -If that's what you call pissing me off, then yeah, you were a little full of

yourself that time.

A flutter, a twist, a sensation like sharp nails picking at a knot in my intestines. I grunt again.

She lifts her glasses, looks at me through the narrow lenses. -Some discomfort, Mr. Pitt?

I nod. -Yeah, yeah.

She nods. -Something I could do for you?

I think for a second. Something the Coalition Clans chief recruiter and trainer of their enforcers could do for me?

Sure there is.

— Yeah, lady, you could maybe just shoot me now instead of talking me to death.

She looks over her shoulder at the young woman with her efficient machine pistol. -Shoot you?

She looks back at me.

— No, Mr. Pitt, I think not.

Slowly, she lowers herself into a graceful squat that someone who looks as old as her should have more trouble executing. -Being shot is not in your immediate future.

She reaches out and places the tip of her index finger on my cheekbone. -Other things are in your future, but not that.

She presses the finger gently into my cheek, drawing the skin down from the bottom of my eye.

— By the way, Mr. Pitt, you mentioned that Id let you take my eye when we last met. In point of fact, and while I don't wish to be thought ungenerous, I never actually considered it a gift.

She lifts her finger. -And I've always rather believed you owed me something in return.

She opens her mouth wide and goes to work, evening accounts between

There comes a time when you think there are no new territories of pain. After a certain number of stabbings, shootings, clubbings, whippings, beatings, thrashings, cuttings, slashings and eviscerations, you begin to assume you've

had the worst of it and nothing of that nature can really surprise you very much.

And then someone comes along to show you that you re wrong.

And you can do little but scream your thanks and appreciation for the lesson.

So I scream. My eye being gnawed out by a crazed old woman, I scream like I rarely have. Because some things, some things are truly horrifying.

But maybe you have to have them happen to you to get that.

— Because it was due me.

— I am not arguing whether you had grounds, Mrs. Vandewater. I am stating as

fact that you were charged to bring him unmolested.

— Yes, so I was. And I abused that charge. And you have asked me why I

abused that charge. And I have answered. Because it was due me. This seems

to leave little enough to discuss. The only question seems to be, how will you

discipline me for my failure to do as you charged?

I open my eyes.

Correction.

I open my eye.

Seeing as its caked with the blood that spilled out of what used to be my other eye, it doesn't help much. Clotted darkness with a distant blur of light punctuated by two smaller clots of darkness that don't seem to be getting along all that well just now. I close my eye and let my ears do the work, still having two of those for the moment.

— Yes, how will I discipline you. Yet again we come around to the same topic. I am bemused, Mrs. Vandewater, as to how a person so wholly devoted to the concept of discipline can be entirely lacking in it herself. -That is due entirely to your own lack of awareness. -Indeed. Well. Illuminate me. If you are inclined.

Her footsteps sound down the long echoing room as she begins to pace. -Illuminate. I have spent my life in that very effort. And no little part of it in a specific effort to illuminate you. Bright child. Such a bright child. With an utterly dim outlook. You still see no further than your dogma. Maintenance of status quo. This, despite all evidence of the erosion taking place under your feet. Illuminate!

The hard slap of a flat palm on a desktop.

— You fail to make sense of my actions, and you interpret them as disobedient and undisciplined, because you measure them against your own authority. You

refuse again and again to see that I am in the service of a larger order of things. While your eyes continue to be on the path just before your feet, I am looking well ahead to where the path becomes lost and tangled in the woods.

Silence. The impression of contemplation. Then the mans voice. -And yet I am still unclear as to what that has to do with biting his eye out.

Silence again. The impression of a stare-down. The woman's voice. -I took his eye because I have no respect for your authority. Because I do not believe you are long for your position. Because in some few months time I expect not to be forced to answer to you any longer.

A chair creaks as she sits. -Does that clarify the matter?

Leather-soled shoes take a few steps. Another chair creaks. -Yes. Yes it does.

— And so, after an unnecessary digression to illuminate you regarding the obvious, we can return to the matter at hand? I have disobeyed your charge. What cost must I pay? What is due to Caesar? What can you afford to extract with your power crumbling about you?

Papers being turned.

— You are still well regarded by some members of the council. This hinders me somewhat. Limits the scope of what correction I might impose. Yes.

A folder being snapped shut.

— But you force my hand, and I must do something. If you can tolerate another question, let me ask, in similar circumstances, when I was in your care, what would you have done to me had I shown the same lack of regard for your commands?

Whisper of fabric.

— What a coward you are. Unable even to devise your own chastisement. Id have killed you. There is no room for any lack of-

The sound of something sharp cutting the air, a clatter of furniture, breath whistling from a hole nature made no allowance for.

— No need to say anything further, Mrs. Vandewater. When you are right, you are right. And I can complete the thought for you. There is, indeed, no room for any lack of discipline in this life of ours.

The floorboards vibrate as a body thrashes against them. Thick fluid leaks onto wood.

— And you are, as ever, correct in most things. You were correct in thinking that you would soon be released from any obligation of answering to my

authority.

Metal scraping on bone, sawing.

— But giving myself some credit, you were off by several months in your estimation of how soon your release might come.

And a sound not often heard in the natural course of things, but one I've had opportunities to hear on more than one occasion: the soft but solid thump of a human head being dropped to the floor.