Whatever she does, the Mungiki will join in. They follow Skag Baron Menace. And Menace loves Esperanza. Deal done.
Christian’s got no confusion in him. The Dusters are for the road. Biggest question they’re gonna face is do they break up the gang and have a shot at staying under the radar, or do they ride tall and feed as a pack and go out in a blaze of glory? I read the look in Christian’s eyes right, there’ll be some headlines about crazed biker gangs in a few small-town papers the next weeks. And then maybe one big national headline about how they go down hard and take a lot of law along with them.
Christian likes being hard.
I get that.
No idea what Digga will do. I maybe had a twinge about sending him to raid the Secretariat just before I blew the whistle on everything. Kinda hung him out there away from his home base, set him up to have to scramble some. But we’re all scrambling. And when I get to feel too bad about it, I think about the hole in Queens and those kids and I feel better knowing the kind of hit Digga and his rhinos laid down on the Secretariat. I like picturing Digga going in with his pit bulls all juiced on anathema, Vyrus blood-crazed and hungry, running the halls and eating what they kill. No telling if that’s how it went down, but it makes a pretty picture.
Digga is smart, he’ll have cleared out the Coalition armory, put wheels under his people and drove them to Yonkers or some similar wasteland to wait out the first day. Morning will find them in a new diaspora, scattering over Upstate and New England. But he might just take all those guns, seize control of the Columbia campus, and start negotiating for resettlement to a neutral location. They take a few dorms, they won’t lack for eating.
Lydia I don’t think about too much.
Think about that gun she hung onto.
Hang onto that gun, girl. And don’t wait too long to see if the other side greets you with open arms before you decide if the right thing to do is to pull the trigger.
I look at my bad hand and feel that hole in my side and I get thinking on Chubby’s kid. The price I paid to save the blood of a pregnant woman. All those pieces of me. And in the end that blood may get spilled out anyway. Delilah and Ben and their baby.
Either they’re the future or they’re gonna die young.
Crazy kids.
Tired. Up all night getting shot and stabbed and bit, up all day talking into this mike.
Part of a package. Something me and Evie are gonna drop in the mail. Still debating an address. Cops, government, newspaper. Esperanza says post it on the Internet. Haven’t thought it all the way around to figure for sure the best thing.
This tired, I don’t think clear. Not that I ever do. But we got to deliver this message, and be sure it gets heard.
The message is, I’m dead.
Evie’s dead.
We’re in the grave.
Whatever lists you’re making when you start interrogations and investigations, you mark us Accounted For.
DOA.
We could make the road our home, we could settle down, but we’re dead either way.
And we want to stay dead.
Saying, if someone in some town wakes up in a strange place with a telltale hole in his arm, feeling woozy, light a couple pints, and it gets reported to the local heat and it gets kicked up to whoever is going to be in charge of Vyral enforcement or whatever it ends up being called, saying that’s a report that should be filed under Do Not Fuck With This Shit.
Let me spell it out.
Lydia kept the USB drive with all Amanda’s proof that the Vyrus exists. Including a file that breaks down and explains her Vyrally activated bacillus. That vial of spun aluminum with a sticker on the side. I got a look at that sticker. Almost laughed myself dead when I read it, the name little Amanda gave her creation.
Ouroboros.
You laughing yet?
Laugh at this.
I kept it.
Someone had to.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave it lying around. Something like that in the wrong hands, who knows what they’d do with it.
But me, I’m dead. Nothing I can do. Only way I could pull the cap from that bottle is if someone picked up a shovel and dug me from the dirt. Someone scraped the clay from off my coffin and found me and my girl lying side by side and stuck a couple stakes in our hearts to make sure we stayed in the ground, that’s the only thing that could rouse me.
Wake the dead, and I’ll let loose the worm.
Figure that’s all there is to say right now.
Got the rest of the story down already. Going back just enough years to give you a picture of what you’re dealing with. Talking about me right now.
Not talking about the Vyrus, the Wraith, who made what and how and is the Vyrus a metaphysical key, the origin of life, or just a nasty bug. Not talking about did Daniel really summon a creature from another dimension to shadow me and save my life. Not talking about do we become the Wraith when we die, or is it in us all along. I’m talking about making you clear on what’s important. Because all that stuff, let me sum it up for you: There’s more things in heaven and earth.
Put it a different way: Who gives fuckall?
What I’m talking about is me.
‘Cause like I always said, I was this way to start. Nothing made me who I am. Nothing made me what I am. I’m a killer.
You’re either the kind who can drink blood to survive, or you aren’t.
And you’re either the kind who would free the mad worm at the heart of the world, or you aren’t.
So back off.
Hey, while you’re at it, hands off those kids and their baby.
Mean, they should get a shot at life same as everyone else.
Yeah.
And just leave me in my grave.
Me and my girl.
Or you’ll find out what kind of a mean son of a bitch I really am.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLIE HUSTON is the author of the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and the bestsellers The Shotgun Rule and The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.