Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

I have time.

I believe that right up until I stand at the corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street and see the fire engines two blocks away and the flames pouring out the windows of my apartment.

Exile, I head south, away from home.

– A nail in the leg?

I take the beer Christian offers me and suck half of it down.

– And one in the foot.

A few Dusters move around the clubhouse garage. One cracking the gearbox on his Indian, another throwing knives at a paper cutout of bin Laden, two are rewiring an old component stereo system they found scrapped in a dumpster.

Christian sits down on the edge of a fat, balding tire from an old dune buggy he’s been tinkering with for a year.

– And she really shot Hurley?

– Yeah.

– And took a crack at Terry?

– Yeah.

– And left them both alive?

– Yeah.

He drinks some beer.

– Jesus. Dead she-male walking.

– Yeah.

The guys with the stereo twist a last couple wires together at the back of a speaker and open the clamshell top of the turntable and drop a vinyl disk on the spindle. It’s Television’s Marquee Moon. “See No Evil” plays.

We listen to the song.

Christian taps the heel of his boot.

– The classics.

– Sure.

He stops tapping his heel.

– A nail.

– Two nails.

– Fuck me.

– Yeah.

He works a hand inside his leathers and pulls out a pack of Marlboros and offers it to me. I take one and break the filter off and find my Zippo and light up.

He takes a light from me and blows a smoke ring.

– You’re fucked.

– Yeah.

– Tenderhooks made a run up to Fourteenth right before dawn. Said the fire was out at your place. Said partisans were out.

– Yeah. No doubt.

He’s not wearing his top hat. The crown of his head is bald and weathered. He scratches it.

– Seem to you like it’s getting weirder out there, Joe? Scarier?

I look at the big roll-up doors that block out the killing sun on the other side.

– It’s getting weirder. Scarier? I don’t know.

He spits between his boots.

– Feels scarier to me. Like shit that’s been building up is about to cut loose.

– Terry says there’s war coming.

He smears the saliva across the floor with the toe of his boot.

– Shit.

– Yeah. Shit.

He looks over at me and smiles.

– He mention that before or after you stuck the nails in him?

– Must have been before. He wasn’t waxing too conversational after.

He leans in and clinks his bottle against mine.

– Tell you, man, I would have liked to see that. Smug bastard that he is. I would have liked to see his blood.

– Just like anybody else’s.

– Would have liked to see it for myself.

We drink another couple beers and someone flips the album.

I flex my knee and it hurts like hell, but not as bad. The ribs are burning as the Vyrus heals. Some are gonna knit crooked. The cuts and holes are all coming together, along with whatever Lydia did inside my gut, and I’m starting to see some blurs from my burned eye. Still, I only got two pints off the girl. Enough to get me going and to make her talk crazy talk, but I could use some more.

Who couldn’t use some more? We all want more.

I think about her. Young and hungry. I know how that feels. Even if it was a long time ago.

Clan Cure.

God I hope the name is all about what she’s trying to do and not about the fucking band. I hate that band.

Like the name matters.

They’ll never let her get away with it.

But.

More money than God. Business and legal hooks deep in the straight world. Knowledge of things she has no right to. That no one has a right to. And a woman like Sela at her side. Love at her side.

No one will be able to take them head on.

So maybe they’ll make a run.

Figure once word gets out what she’s planning, what she’s selling, the bill of goods, they’ll get plenty who’ll want to pledge. Young and desperate and feeble and alone, they’ll take in the dregs. And the sly and the lazy who smell a good thing in her money, and her promise to feed everyone.

Yeah, figure they’ll make a run.

Figure they’ll run till everyone realizes that a cure is a dream and she’s out of her skull. A run till Predo and Terry start sending in their people to infiltrate and fuck shit up.

Figure it will end bad.

Like there’s any other kind of ending.

Christian takes two more beers from the case and cracks them open and hands one over.

– A war. That’s a hell of a thing. Think we’d all be together, what with how much we have in common.

He blows across the mouth of his bottle.

– You think about it much, Joe?

I tap my Zippo against my bottle.

– What part?

He points at a scabbed gash on the back of my hand.

– What it is. If any of the looneys are right. Like maybe it’s not a virus at all. Maybe it’s a chemical. Something the government experimented with and lost control of. Or maybe they are in control of it, and they’re watching us all the time to see how we cope with it. Or a curse. Not like some Dracula bullshit, but a real curse from a real God. Like in the Bible. In the Bible, a curse is usually a test. So maybe it’s a test. And the ones that pass it are the ones who don’t give in to it. Like the only way to win is to let yourself die. Or the Enclave and that stuff. What if they’re right? Or is it the next step in evolution or a failed step or is it because somewhere in our past all our grandmoms took the same medication or we stood too close to an X-ray machine or all screwed the same monkey. Shit, I don’t know.

He makes a fist, loosens it.

– Do you ever think about what we are?

I finish my beer.

– Well, Christian, way I figure it, either you’re a Vampyre created by the Vyrus, or you’re a vampire created by a something else. It makes any fucking difference which it is, I haven’t noticed.

He looks down the neck of his bottle, drains it.

– Yeah, guess that’s so.

He tosses the bottle into a garbage can against the wall and it shatters.

– But still, I’d like to know someday.

I toss my bottle after his.

– Don’t hold your breath.

More beer. More good music. The sun is moving across the sky out there. Things will be happening soon.

Things are already happening.

He points at the knife-thrower’s target.

– Remember that?

I look at the photocopied face of the Arab on the target.

– Sure.

He shakes his head.

– That smell. When they went down. Man, that smell. Blood. Gallons. Everyone went berserk. Rogues. Clan members. Losers came out of the woodwork and swarmed down there for days. Man. Looking at the missing-person posters after, I used to wonder how many went in the towers and how many just got taken off the street. Chaos.

– It was a mess.

He nods.

– But you were righteous. You and Terry. Saw right away it had to be stopped. Went down there and cracked skulls. Closed it down. All the cops and emergency services, they had come across a couple of us feeding in that rubble, first thing we would have been rounded up and thrown in camps. Man.

He laughs.

– Would have been all the proof they needed which side the devil was on. Would have thought we were flying the planes.

He stops laughing.

– But it was a mess. You came and told me you needed us down there. We rode. But, man, that was some killing we had to do, wasn’t it?

I pick at the edge of my beer label.

– That was some killing.

He looks at me.

– You can’t stay here, Joe.

I take a drink.