Footsteps.
– I can help.
We’re both looking at her, Delilah, gazing down at Lydia, over the rim of her belly.
– I can help.
– Now, baby.
Ben comes over.
– I’m not sure.
She doesn’t look at him.
– Benjamin, I want to get out of here. You know how to do that?
He points at the door, scratches his head.
– I’m not sure what’s out there.
She nods.
Lydia is shaking her head.
– No, no, no, no. No way. Never.
I lever myself out of my chair, the cramps keeping me bent, and find a few things to lean on till I get to Lydia.
– Here.
I get a hand in her armpit and pull.
– No, I won’t, I won’t.
Even with the bullet in her, she’s in better shape than me.
I look at Ben.
– Kid.
He gets her by her other arm and we pull her off the floor and start hauling her across the room.
– No, Joe. I won’t take a mother’s blood. I won’t, given or not. I won’t.
I get her where we’re going.
– Here.
She looks at Amanda.
– Joe. No.
I point at the lab.
– Girl wanted to find a cure, wanted to help. Think she’d care? She wouldn’t. Go on, before it goes bad.
Her nostrils are flaring, just this close to all that spilled blood, smelling that it’s still fresh inside.
– She said not to.
– She was being pissy and temperamental. She wanted to help. Whatever. Stop talking about it. Do it.
It takes her another second to get over her qualm, and she gets to it.
I leave her there, walk away from the desk, find my chair and sit back down, and try not to look at what she’s doing, or drown in my own saliva.
Delilah comes over.
– What about you? You’ll be more help if you can fight.
The Vyrus rages at the nearness of all that blood.
I wave her off.
– Look who’s the realist all of a sudden. None for me. Dilutes my bodily fluids. Need my strength for later. But I tell you.
I take out my tobacco.
– If one of you kids could roll one of these and find a light somewhere, I think I’d be OK.
Ben takes the packet, unseals the bag, looks inside.
– You’re out of rolling papers.
I wave a hand at some books in the lab.
– Improvise.
He goes looking for a book.
I grunt.
– Hey, see if she’s got a Bible over there. Those onionskin pages at the front work best.
– Classy, Joe.
Lydia is on her feet. Still with a wobble, but shiny-eyed and loose-shouldered.
She wipes her mouth.
– Ready to go to Queens?
Ben comes back with a smoke rolled in a bit of printed paper, and a butane igniter.
– Mister Pitt.
– Yeah, hit me.
I stick the double wide smoke in my face and he burns the end off it and I cough up a chunk of my lung on that first paper hit, but it’s worth it.
I look at Lydia.
– Why the hell would I want to go to Queens?
She’s at the gun rack, pauses in her inventory and points at Terry.
– Know what that is?
I squint at the body.
– Dead people?
– Karma.
She returns to looking for a gun that will suit her mood.
– That was Terry’s bullshit karma finally catching up to him because he delayed and deferred doing the right thing for too long.
– Uh-huh.
– I’m not saying there’s anything mystical about it, just that he sowed and he reaped. Being a selfish asshole gets you nowhere.
– Uh-huh.
She turns to look at me, hefting something that looks designed to efficiently kill people in large numbers.
– Are you on the phone?
I hold up a finger.
– Hang on, this will be fast.
– Who are you calling now? Digga has his hands full. Joe? Who are you?
I get my connection, my voice sounding so strangled through the pain in my gut and my half-crushed windpipe that I don’t even have to act to make myself sound freaked out.
– Yeah, I want to report a shooting. A murder. A cop, a cop was just shot over here. Where they make cement. Queens, I’m in Queens. English Kill. Next to the bus depot, where they make cement. I work. Oh my god. There’s a, some kind of sex slave thing. In the factory, the main building. Chains and. Please, please, they killed a cop and they know I’m here.
I hang up the phone, drop it, stomp it into shards.
– Really, Lydia.
I take a drag.
– If you wanted to change the world.
I blow smoke.
– That was all you had to do.
Lydia kills the thing on the stairs.
Opens the door, starts shooting, keeps shooting, empties a clip into it, pops a fresh one in the gun and empties that one too. Whatever it was, it had finished off the last of the starvings. Monsters out of the way, we spend more time than reasonable getting down the stairs. Mostly that’s my fault. Ben tries to carry me to make things go faster, but I go into a fit of convulsions and the arm wrapped around his neck almost throttles him and he decides he’ll just let me lean on him so he can drop me if it happens again.
Delilah walks just ahead of us, one step at a time, waddling with care.
Lydia is leading the way, gun first, poking it into every open door on every landing.
– Insane. I should. Insane.
I trip down a couple steps, grab the banister.
– You were the one that wanted to be public.
She takes the turn on the second floor landing.
– We always thought it would be an announcement. A press conference. Not a SWAT van driving on an officer-down call and finding a Vampyre concentration camp. It was. We wanted it to be organized. Controlled.
– Sure, a civilized declaration that Dracula is real and there are a lot of him and, oh yeah, it’s communicable.
She leads us down to the ground floor, stepping carefully through the bodies.
– It’s information. We needed to shape it, control the definitions. Why shouldn’t the signified define the signifiers?
– You sound like Terry.
Her head snaps around, gun barrel in parallel.
– Don’t.
– It was never gonna happen like that. No one was ever gonna buy that. It was always going to happen, and it was always going to be a mess.
I step away from Ben, use the wall, start for the back of the building.
– At least this way we blew it up ourselves.
I find the back door, find the ring of Cure house keys still in my pocket.
– Could have been someone else blowing it up under us.
I start trying keys in locks.
Lydia puts a hand on the door.
– How was this better? How is it better we blow ourselves up?
I grin.
– I don’t know. I guess it just feels better than letting someone else do it.
She starts to frown, but it turns to a grin of her own.
– Yeah. Alright. So let’s go deal with the rubble.
I find the right keys and pop the locks.
She pulls her hand away from the door.
– So those enforcers don’t know about the back way?
I shrug.
– Probably they do.
She stares at me.
I shrug again.
– My bet is all the little piggies got called home as soon as Digga hit Coalition HQ.
– And if not?
I point at the basement door.
– If not, that’s plan B over there. Your call.
She pulls the door open and we step into the alley, Ben and Delilah waiting to see if we get gunned down from the rooftops. We don’t. And we don’t get shot up on the street when we come out the front of the Cure-owned building that faces onto Seventy-second. And the Impala is where I left it on First Avenue. And I haven’t lost the key in all the business of the night. And there’s still a couple hours to daylight.
A small collection of miracles.
None of them a cigarette.
You can’t kill the worm.
Wound it, it’ll never be as bad as the hurt it does itself with every bite. It’ll just keep chewing. Digesting itself over and over again.