He grazes his blond pompadour with the tips of his fingers.
– A man has certain skills, he’s got to maximize them.
I nod and light up.
– So, Phil.
He nods.
– Yeah?
I heft the shotgun and wave it at the hallway and front door.
– What the fuck?
He shakes his head.
– I tell ya, man, I barely fucking know myself.
• • •
The howling, it turns out, is the least of it.
Time to time, something bangs against the basement ceiling and vibrates the floorboards. Every time it happens, Phil jumps. And there’s the smell. Dead being the basic theme. Vyrus, being the key variation. Feces and rot play into it. Makes me happy I emptied my stomach when the pepper juice hit me. Matter of fact, it makes me pretty damn happy about getting hit with the stuff in the first place. Good chance I’m the best smelling thing in here.
– She said you’d come.
– She says a lot of crazy things.
– Sure, I mean, hell yeah and all, but still, she said it. And, you know, man, here you are.
– She can’t see the future, Phil.
He stops at the steel door at the end of the hall and pulls on the chain that’s clipped to his belt, drawing a heavy ring of keys from his pocket.
– I know that. Mean, I’m not a total asshole.
He smiles.
– Mean, sure, I’m a total asshole, but I mean, I know she’s no psychic, she’s just right about a lot of things.
– It’s because she’s smart.
He unlocks three dead bolts.
– More because she’s so fucking weird.
The hall we’re leaving has just the two doors, the front stoop and this one. The hall we’re entering has four or five lining it, and all are broken down. From the inside, it looks like.
Phil closes the door behind us and does the locks.
I think about submarines. How they dog all the hatches behind themselves so if there’s a leak it will only flood one compartment.
He points at the broken doors.
– No one lives down here anymore. Not since the shit storm.
– Evocative.
– If that means effed in the a-bone, Joe, you just hit the nail, man.
Something especially big hits the floor from below and seems to trigger a riot. Howling, screaming, rapid hammering.
Phil skips a couple times, moving ahead of me on his toes.
And I realize that the epicenter of the howling and pounding seems to move with him.
He starts jumping up and down, screaming at the floor.
– Fuck you! Fuck you! Fucking leave me alone, you fucking freaks of whatever the fuck! You can’t fucking have it! It’s fucking mine! I was born with it and I’m gonna fucking keep it! It’s mine! All mine!
The racket from below rises with his screams, crests, and then subsides to moaning and tapping.
Philip Sax, a man who is not at his best without a skinful of speed and a mouthful of booze, slumps against the wall.
– Fuck.
I knock my heel against the floor.
– Friends of yours?
He moves from the wall and starts unlocking the door.
– No.
He opens the door on a stairwell.
– It’s just that they can smell blood through the floor and it makes ‘em crazy.
The stairwell is fun.
The doors to the second and third floors have been torn off their hinges, and through them I can see large barracks-style rooms. Lots of cots and bunk beds. Signs of hasty construction. Bare plaster, wires dangling from unfinished fixtures. Pipes sticking raw from the walls. More signs of hasty destruction. Broken furniture, scattered personal effects, ragged holes in the drywall. There’s also a fair number of bullet holes, dry blood, fingernail claw marks on the wood and in the plaster, some recent cuts in one area of the floor where an axe has been wielded repeatedly. Not in an effort to chop through, but as if someone has been hewing something, the blade cleaving and biting the floor.
I point.
– Someone chopping firewood?
Phil turns his head away.
– Yeah, um, pretty sure that’s where Sela was euthanizing.
– Speaking of big words.
– Yeah, well, you know, I could say she was hacking the heads off spastic Vampyres, but that kind of lingo doesn’t go over here, man.
– A spade is still a spade.
He mounts the stairs to the next landing.
– That lingo don’t fly neither.
There’s some more howling, coming from up ahead now.
Phil pauses with his foot between steps.
– I usually run these next couple flights, man. You mind?
I raise a hand.
– Settle down and join me on the scenic route. Man doesn’t get to see this kind of thing every day.
He hunches his shoulders.
– Not unless he’s me.
We climb.
The next couple floors are still inhabited. In deference to this fact massive slide-bolts have been mounted on the door. Some kind of electromagnet freezing them in place. A cluster of wires running from floor to floor, door to door up and down the stairwell.
I knock on one door and get what sounds like a half-dozen giant rats scrabbling at the other side.
– What about the windows?
Phil is at the edge of the landing, itching to move on.
– Sela drilled into the brick at the sides. Bolted two-inch planks over them. Before it got like this. Said it was heightened security because of, you know, Coalition and all. But she just knew what was coming is what I think. Jesus, Joe. That chick is one tough motherfucker. What’s a chick do to get that kind of tough? I mean, shit.
I come away from the door and follow him.
– Got me. But she scares me shitless.
– A-fucking-men.
I can see we’re approaching the top. Midpoint of the flight, with the howls from the last floor diminishing, I tug the back of Phil’s black and white bowling shirt, says Rick over the pocket, and he stops.
– Joe?
I hand him the tobacco pouch again.
– Hit me.
He starts to roll.
I point the barrel of the shotgun up and down the stairwell.
– So you still haven’t told me what the fuck.
He hands me another perfect smoke.
– Well, fuck, Joe, I thought it was pretty abundantly clear by now. Coalition cut off the blood, and shit got all fucked up.
I light up, take a drag, shake my head and tap the barrel against his chest.
– No, I mean, what the fuck?
He nods.
– Oh, right, yeah, well. You know, man, I guess I just kind of wore out my welcome everywhere else.
I blow a cloud over his head.
– Say it ain’t so.
He nods.
– Yeah, right? Because what have I ever done but try and help everybody out?
– If by help out you mean sell out, then I get what you’re saying.
– Now is that?
He finds some umbrage somewhere and runs with it.
– I’m saying, Joe, is that? Here we are, you and me, some of the last of the old school, here we are, getting reacquainted, I’m rolling your cigarettes for Jesus sake! Here we are and, come on, here we are like almost having a nice conversation for the first time in forever, and you have to take on like that. Like I’ve never been on your side. Like I. Joe.
He shakes his head slow.
– It’s a discouragement is what it is, Joe. That’s what it is.
I raise a hand, the one that’s not all there.
– Don’t wear it out, Phil. You been on my side like you been on everyone else’s.
He lifts both arms over his head.
– Exactly! I’ve done for everyone! Who doesn’t have me to thank for something or other I done to help out? And now when things get tricky out there, when a man was thinking maybe he’d get his chance to really shine, helping out, you know, for whoever needed it, everyone gets all uptight and decides they don’t want me around. Mean to say, Joe, they tried to bump me.
– Who was at the front of that line?
– Terry is who. Calls me up, asks me to come see him. Terry Bird, all polite. As opposed to just telling me to do whatever the fuck or else. I don’t hear or else at the end of a service request, I know the jig is up. I was going out the fire escape, someone was kicking in the door. Tried to use my phone drop to Mr. Predo, got a suspiciously warm welcome to Coalition turf. Nuh-uh. Come in out of the cold. I seen that fucking movie at Film Forum once. Came to last resorts, this was the place. All my old regulars got no love left, I got to find new love. Sad. What kind of appreciation is that? Trying to cap a useful asset like myself. None. It’s none appreciation. It’s, I don’t know what it is.