Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

I look at the Enclave arrayed around us. All of them.

I tug at the waist of Axler’s pants.

– Daniel, I’m not going out there without her.

He puts his other hand on the door, lays both palms flat and leans his forehead between them.

– If you’d ever listened once. If you’d ever observed for the slightest moment what happens here, you’d know what an ass you’re making of yourself.

I reach for him and I am pinned suddenly to the door and it takes a moment to realize that Daniel has taken me by the throat and snatched me to his side.

– Look, Simon, look around and what do you see? What do you ever see here?

I look. I see Daniel. I see Enclave.

I try to move. His grip tightens, threatens to tear off my head.

– Yes. You see always one thing. Enclave. In here. Always the same. Enclave. Nothing else comes in. Nothing else leaves. Only Enclave.

His fingers loosen.

– And you ask if the girl is like you. She is as much like you as I am or any of us here.

He takes his hand away.

– You are Enclave.

Tears, viscous and white are filling his eyes.

– As she is here, as I let her in, so she is Enclave too.

I break for the stairs.

And am in the grip of Enclave. Held fast.

Daniel wipes the back of his hand over a cheek, smearing the tears. He shakes and his teeth chatter and he clenches his fists and a bone breaks in the back of his hand and juts from his skin and he exhales slow and stops shaking. But the tears keep coming.

– As for leaving. She’ll have the chance to make that decision for herself.

He looks up at the black skylight.

– For the moment, I’m the only one going out.

He turns to the southward-facing door and takes the handle and pulls and it slides open on well-greased tracks and the light washes in and the Enclave rustle back from it and Daniel walks out onto the loading dock and steps off and drops to the street and walks across the cobbles that peek through the worn tarmac of Little West 12th and the sun crests the tops of the tenements at the east end of the street and hammers him and he turns into it and lets the thin white robe fall off his shoulder and to the ground and the light reflects off his white skin and he smiles and his head turns our way.

And watching him there, smiling in the sun, for a moment I believe.

Then purple blossoms like the ones that cover Evie climb over his face.

Cancers boil out of his nostrils and his ears.

His eyes swell and puss drains from them and steams.

The Enclave release me as they scuttle farther from the sunlight and I tear a white shawl from one’s shoulders and the bones Daniel shifted in my knee come loose and I drag my leg outside and into the street and wrap the shawl around my head and when I grab Daniel’s wrist the skin slips off the bone and I get my arms under him and scoop him off the cobbles and for the second time I lurch into the darkness with a diseased and wasted thing in my arms.

But no one takes this one from me.

Noises come from the misshapen clot of tumors that used to be his face and I put my ear to a bloody and bone-rimmed hole and he reeks poison.

A mass that used to be a hand touches my face. - Be seeing you, Joe.

And he laughs and coughs his throat out on the floor and he dies.

The room is quiet except for the sound of the door rolling shut. As the light is cut off, glass breaks, and a large black bird falls dead a few yards from us, pinned to the ground by a shaft of morning sunlight.

– OK, man, now that was just plain freaky.

I look up and watch as the Count comes down the stairs, dressed all in white.

– I don’t know about you, but I have had one weird fucking night. I mean, no shock there, right? Not in this place. I’m guessing nothing that passes even remotely as unweird has happened in this joint for a loooongass time. But look who I’m telling. Oh, oh, man, do they always do that?

I watch as the Enclave that has placed the bucket under Daniel’s hanging corpse slits its throat. Nothing comes out of the gash.

I pat my pockets. Find my cigarettes. I put one in my mouth and try to find my lighter. Stop looking. Watch as the Enclave begins to cut Daniel open from crotch to neck.

The Count leans over and snaps a Bic in front of my face.

I flinch. Blink. Lean in and light my smoke.

He takes the lighter away.

– Are your hands shaking, Joe?

I put the cigarette in my mouth and tuck my hands into my armpits.

– I’m cold.

He feels his own skin.

– Tell me about it. Like an icebox in here.

The Enclave begins pulling viscera from the corpse.

The Count turns his head and whistles.

– Oh, man, that is rude. I mean, who needs to see that shit? Nasty.

He takes a seat on the floor next to me.

– But that’s the way they rock it here. One of them dies, doesn’t matter what they were before they went out, they get gutted and nailed to the wall. Some kind of lesson thing. That’s what the guy told me when I asked.

– They’ll boil his bones and eat the marrow.

He looks at me.

– No shit?

I pull a hand from my armpit. It’s stopped shaking. I take the smoke from my mouth.

– Yeah. That’s the deal.

– Whoa. Man. Can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

He nudges me with his shoulder.

– Then again, check this out. You know the bones, that’s where blood gets made. In the marrow. Like, by the time we’re adults, it’s only made in a few places. Your spine, sternum, pelvis, some little patches in your upper arms and legs. That’s where you get your good old, controversial pluripotential hematopoietic stem cells. Try saying that shit five times fast. Stem cells manufacture blood cells, determine that they will be blood cells. So think about this. Drink another Vampyre’s blood and get sick as hell. Unless it’s super freshly infected and has been made into anathema. In which case you get high as hell. So what happens when you eat a dead Vampyre’s marrow, man? His stem-cell factories?

He licks his lips.

– I’m guessing you get some weird deep Amazonian Carlos Castaneda shaman fungus high.

He shakes his head.

– I’m not saying I’m gonna be thinking about where that shit came from, but I’m dying to try me some of that soup.

The Enclave pulls a wad of tumors from Daniel’s body.

The Count turns his head again.

– What say we move this conversation?

He stands.

I watch pieces of Daniel hit the floor.

I stand. The Count reaches to help me and I pull away and stumble, but I keep my feet.

He raises his hands.

– As you wish, man. Just trying to help.

I follow him.

He limps on that foot I ruined for him. I limp on the knee Daniel tried to fix for me.

– Wanted to thank you, by the way. I don’t remember too much about what went down at my place. But from what I can put together, probably would have been easiest thing just to waste me.

He grins.

– ’Course, knowing I still hold the purse strings on my trust fund, that was unlikely. I mean, experience has taught me you can knock me around if it amuses you, but Terry would be steamed if you ever kacked my ass before he can get his hands on those accounts.

He stops, blinks a few times, takes a couple deep breaths.

– Sorry. Whew. Shit I went through the last twelve hours, wrung me out, man. Going cold turkey on the anathema. Bleeding the Vyrus dry. That was some extreme shit. I mean, I knew I was asking for trouble, but damn.

He snaps his head from side to side.

– Whammywhammywhammy! Shit had me on the ropes. Oh, check this out.

Ahead of us two Enclave are sparring.

A whirl of blurred white limbs.