Charlie Huston - Already Dead - A Novel

A moment's silence.

— Talk.

Jesus fucking.

— Why'd you run away?

Now it's her turn to get all silent.

— If it's like you say and your dad isn't messing with you?

— None of your business.

— OK.

More silence.

— Are you jerking off back there?

— No.

— Then stop getting all quiet, it's creepy.

— OK. Why'd you run away?

— I told you, none of your business.

— Fine.

Silence.

— Fuck do you care?

— I don't. I just want you to piss so I can stretch my legs.

She laughs.

— Stretch your legs, I just went.

She digs through her little backpack looking for something. She's holding her flashlight in her cuffed right hand as she searches with her left. She jerks my left hand this way and that as she rummages.

— Why'd you have to cuff my right hand?

— If I'd cuffed your left you would have to walk around backward.

She stares at me.

— Yeah, right. Like I would have done that.

Our hands bump.

— Your hand is all cold and sweaty.

She gives me a fish-eye.

— Are you sick? 'Cause if I catch something from you I am going to be so pissed.

— Just clammy by nature.

— Gross.

I am cold and sweaty. The Vyrus is downshifting, trying to save energy, storing up for its last big push. But sick is not a big enough word for what I am.

She pulls a few things out of the pack; some extra clothes, an MP3 player, batteries, a bottle of water, and finally comes up with what she's looking for: a handful of diet bars. She holds one in her left hand and tears the wrapper open with her teeth. She catches me watching her.

— You want one?

I do want one. I haven't eaten for awhile and I usually eat like a pig. You have to, just to keep up with the high revs the Vyrus usually runs your metabolism at.

— Sure.

— There's peanut butter or chocolate and coconut.

— Peanut butter.

She hands me the bar and we eat by the dim light cast by her flashlight. She finishes hers, throws the empty wrapper on the floor, and picks out another.

— So my mom was the one who called you?

I chew for a couple seconds. The peanut butter was a mistake, it's hard and sticky and hurts my sore jaw as I chew.

— Yeah.

— What'd she say?

— Said you were missing, said she wanted to find you.

She's picking at her second bar, pinching tiny pieces of the chocolate coating between her fingernails and nibbling them.

— What about my dad, you talk to him?

— Yeah.

She huffs.

— Aaand?

I think about my meeting with Dr. Dale Horde, the way he casually put me in my place like it's something he does ten times a day. The way he mickeyed me so Predo's spook could rob my stash.

— Said he wanted me to find you.

— Yeah, right.

She's peeled about half the chocolate off her second bar, leaving the coconut underneath untouched.

— Mom says he wants to fuck me. Least that'd be something.

Looks at me all the time like he can't figure out where I came from. Only time he pays any attention is when one of my girlfriends comes over. Then he tries to be all supercooldad so he can impress them. Lame.

— That why you split?

Knowing I'm a fool for asking, knowing I don't need to know any of this stuff, knowing this stuff just makes the job harder.

— I don't know. Maybe because my mom gets drunk all the time. Maybe because she told me my dad wants to fuck me. Maybe because I think that makes her jealous. Maybe because my dad is creepy with my girlfriends. Maybe because I stole a pair of my mom's earrings and to punish me she took my computer away and I snuck in my dad's office to use his computer and I found all this porn on it that Whitney did and that grossed me out. Not that she did it, because I knew about that, but because my dad was looking at it. Maybe because I looked in his drawers and found pictures of him fucking Whitney. Maybe because I was pissed at Whitney and came down here to kick her ass. I don't know. I just ran away.

She folds the torn ends of the wrapper around the mutilated bar and shoves it back in her bag.

— God. Hate it when I do that. Just eating 'cause I'm bored. Whitney says that's how you get fat.

She pulls up the bottom of her Che Guevara T-shirt, looks at her flat stomach and pinches a quarter inch of skin.

— Fat.

I look the other way, not wanting to see her healthy tanned skin and the flush of blood that rises as she pinches herself.

— So she call you after Whitney got. . whatever? That freak her out?

— If it did, she didn't say anything.

— She wouldn't. Was she drunk when you saw her?

— Couldn't say.

— Yeah, most people can't. I can. If she's awake, she's drunk. She make a pass at you?

— No.

She looks at me.

— Uh-huh. As if. So'd you fuck her?

— No.

She looks at me some more.

— You'd be the first, then.

— Not according to your mom.

She laughs. But not like anything is funny.

— So.

— Yeah?

— You know what happened to Whitney?

— I heard.

— That for real? That Satanist guy did it?

— That's what they say.

— Yeah. Right.

She reaches in her bag and pulls out the partially eaten diet bar and starts picking at the chocolate again. I watch her. I try not to ask. I fail.

— What?

Fool.

— Nothing.

— You think different?

You fool.

— No.

She picks a piece of chocolate, eats it, picks another and drops it on the floor; then goes on like that, alternating a bite for a drop.

— Just.

— Yeah?

— I got the idea that, maybe. I don't know. That maybe she was blackmailing my dad.

She scrapes off a last bit of chocolate with her front teeth, looks the bar over to see if she missed any, then tosses the coconut remnant into a corner.

It doesn't make any difference.

Say she was. Say Whitney took those pictures of them fucking and threatened him; threatened to show them to his wife, who was looking for some kind of leverage to get Amanda away from him; threatened to take them to the papers and smear his rep. Hell, she might have threatened to just post them for anyone who wanted to gape at Dr. Dale Edward Horde, founder, president, chairman and CEO of Horde Bio Tech, as he fucked an Internet porn star. So say she was blackmailing him. So what?

I know what the kid doesn't. I know her dad and Whitney crossed paths down here, right in this room, right on that square of cardboard not ten feet away from us. But by the time they did, she had already crossed paths with something much creepier than Amanda's pederast father. By the time he found her the carrier had already taken a bite out of the back of her neck. Did he even know?

Figure it this way. He comes down here with some muscle, the same muscle that probably killed Dobbs for him, and they found Whitney. Couple days after being infected, her brain would still be pretty much intact. Her speech centers, even some of her short-term memory might work. She might even have been fighting her new impulses, trying not to become what she already was. Figure Horde and his goons confront her somewhere. She won't answer any questions. They think she's being tough, but she's just having holes bored through her brain by the bacteria. Doesn't matter, they find the pictures and whatever else she has on Horde. But he's not done, wants to teach her a lesson, but wants to do it somewhere private. Figure he remembers the place Dobbs found his daughter last year. Maybe that makes it better for him, having her on the floor in here, makes it easier to think about Amanda, makes it closer to what he really wants. Whitney wouldn't have been easy. The smell of his living flesh so close would have made her crazy. His guys would have had to hold her down while he raped her. And when he was done? What the fuck did he care. He has the evidence now and if she talks to anyone it's just the word of a teenage runaway slut against his. No contest. So he left her there. And the next people to see her were probably the two fashion junkies who came looking for a safe place to fix.