Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

And that leaves one option. Get him clean. And only one place to do that.

– He was going cold turkey.

Daniel casts his eyes on the Count’s body cradled in my arms, half-wrapped in the sleeping bag I stuffed him in before dropping it in the trunk of the cab that brought me to the West Side.

– Really?

He bends and looks at the Count’s crap-smeared face.

He looks at me.

– A friend of yours?

– Hardly.

He scuffs the floor with his foot.

– Well. Bring him in.

He brushes his fingers at the Enclave manning the door and it slides open, revealing the dark cavern of the warehouse.

I stay on the loading dock.

Daniel takes a step toward me.

– Something giving you pause, Simon?

I shift my feet, hating it when he uses my real name, but not wanting to get into it again.

– Yeah, see, I need him alive.

He raises the skin where his eyebrows used to be.

– Alive. In truth, he’s rather close to actual life in this state.

– Daniel, I need him alive in the usual sense. I need him alive and awake and able to talk to me in all the usual senses of the words. I need to know if I bring him in there you’re not going to decide he’s a pariah or some shit and drain him and burn his body and make the ashes into tea or whatever you do.

A smile jumps across his face.

– A pariah?

– Whatever, I don’t know the lingo.

A frown follows the smile.

– You may as well bring him in, Simon. We won’t sacrifice him to our dark gods or anything. And it’s too late for you to do much else.

I bring him in and pass him to the waiting arms of another Enclave and watch him carried away into the candlelit darkness. White shapes move deep inside the concrete-and-steel chamber. Bodies drawn thin by fasting, paled to ivory, shedding hair.

I think of Evie.

Daniel walks out and drops his mantis body on the edge of the loading dock, legs dangling, hands tucked beneath his thighs, a thin white poncho made from an old sheet draped over his shoulders hanging to his knees.

– Nice night.

I tug my jacket close.

– It’s fucking freezing.

He looks up at me.

– Still a nice night.

He pats the concrete.

– Have a seat.

I stay on my feet, light a smoke.

Daniel looks away from me and to the gray glow above the rooftops.

– What’s his name?

– Calls himself the Count. Don’t know what his real name is. I told you about him before.

– Did you? Hm, I’ve forgotten.

I blow smoke and steam into the cold air.

– You don’t forget shit, Daniel.

He closes his eyes.

– Don’t I?

He opens them.

– It seems to me that’s all I do these days. And what a relief it is. All the nonsense washing out on the tide. I’m a bit confused by the common perception that it leaves one cloudy, old age. I’ve found a great deal of clarity. The years refining my mind, focusing it on a single thought.

I sidelong him.

– A bit past old age, aren’t you?

He swings his legs, bounces his heels off the painted front of the loading dock.

– Well, it’s all relative. I’d be inclined to say that I’m pretty damn young as this all goes.

He waves a hand at the universe.

– But that’s a sorry cliché. Overused. And maybe not even accurate.

I tap some ash from the tip of my cigarette.

– How old are you, Daniel?

He ducks his head.

– Old enough to know better. At least that old. And old enough to forget. So remind me. The Count?

I spit a flake of tobacco from my tongue.

– Spy. Coalition spy. Got sent down to the Society to cause trouble. Terry flipped him. He’s got a load of money in some trusts. Terry flipped him to get at the money.

– And the state he’s in?

– I didn’t like some things he did. So I hit him with a heavy shot of anathema. Hooked him to the bad dose.

The corners of his mouth drop down, drawing the skin tighter over his skull. If you can draw skin tighter over a skull when it looks painted there in the first place.

– And the procurement?

– Not my problem.

Not my problem. The going out and finding some slob to infect, someone who the Vyrus doesn’t kill outright, and harvesting his infected blood and getting it to the Count while it’s still fresh enough to shoot, the entire manufacture of anathema, not my problem. But it’s been happening anyway. After I declined, Terry had to have someone doing it. Hurley, I’d imagine. Keeping the Count alive and on the bad dose, keeping access to his fat accounts open.

Daniel keeps his frown.

I drop my butt.

– It bothers you?

He looks at his feet.

– Not the deaths. The useless cattle the Vyrus rejects aren’t to be mourned. I pity them perhaps, for the half-lives they’ve been given. But the ones harvested for the anathema, the ones the Vyrus takes and doesn’t cast off, they have been wasted. It all smacks of waste. And manipulation of the Vyrus. I know that’s my own perception, and a limited one, but I feel it nonetheless. Even though I know the Vyrus cannot be manipulated. It uses us, not the other way around.

I grunt. At a loss for anything else to say.

He taps my thigh with a finger.

– But no lectures tonight, yes?

– Fine by me.

He stretches his neck.

– I’m tired. Finish the story. Why do you need him?

I look at him, see Evie again, wasting in her bed.

– He was premed in school. Terry loaded him up with medical books. Had him studying. Trying to maybe figure out some stuff about the Vyrus.

He sighs. - Medical books. Poor Terry. He’s so…material.

He brings his feet up on the dock and rises.

– And if that’s what you need from him, his medical knowledge of the Vyrus, you should have let him die. In the usual sense.

I look at the litter in the gutter.

– I have to ask him some stuff.

– Well, whether you had stuff to ask him or not, we’d help him.

– Didn’t know ministering to the weak was your new line.

He gestures at the darkness in the warehouse.

– It’s not, but he’s Enclave.

– The fuck?

He scratches his head.

– Not that I knew him before, but, yes, he’s one of ours.

– So, what, you look at him and you just know he’s in the club?

He shrugs.

– That’s all it took when I first met you. You’re either Enclave or you’re not, it can’t be hidden or mistaken. Believe in Enclave or not, it believes in you. And the Vyrus tells me.

– The things you believe, Daniel, I don’t know how you remember how to stay out of the sun.

– And what do I believe, Simon?

– Got me, man. Got me.

He shakes his head.

– It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I’m asking for you to articulate it, my beliefs. You want my help, this is what I’m asking for. Tell me what I believe.

I look around, at everything but him.

– It’s, man, it’s complicated.

– No, it’s simple.

– You, you guys, Enclave, you believe the Vyrus is, what, spiritual? Supernatural. You believe it, man, it consumes us and when we die we pass into its world. You believe that if you starve it, take in just enough blood to keep it alive as it consumes you, that you can be made, Jesus fuck, I don’t know, into something like it, but stay in this world. For what reason you’d want that, I do not fucking know.

He stares at the ground.

– One by one, Simon, all Enclave test their limits. Wean themselves from this world, give up more of their physical selves to the Vyrus by forcing it to consume more of its host than it would do were it fed well. One by one, reaching their limit, they fail, wracked by their own insufficiencies, dying in the dark. But it will not always be that way. This is what will happen, Simon.