– Ever tell you the last name I picked for myself?
I wave my butt.
– Vlad?
He shakes his head.
– Count.
I study the last of my cigarette.
– OK, I’ll give it to ya, that shows a little sense of humor.
– Count Count. You get it, right? You’ve seen Sesame Street?
I lift a hand.
– I get it. It’s not bad.
– Cuz I can laugh at myself, is the point.
– Sure.
He taps his own chest with the blade.
– I’m not the type takes himself all serious.
I nod.
– So laugh at this.
I jam the cherry of my last cigarette into his eye.
Nasty little hiss, drip of blood and something else rolling over his cheekbone, and him just sitting there and staring at me from the eye that I haven’t turned into an ashtray.
Then he opens his mouth wide, drops his head back.
– Ha! Ha! Ha!
He brings his head up and plucks the butt from his eye, looks at it, and flicks it away.
– You know.
He reams drippings from his eye socket with a knuckle.
– Truth is.
He wipes the knuckle on my jacket.
– I barely even use my eyes anymore.
He closes the good one. The other has blistered over, covered in a cluster of tiny bubbles of skin.
– Everything is so lit up at this point. My senses? I feel, like, micro-changes in air pressure on my skin. Hear things. Smell like a hunting dog. My sense of taste, man, I wish I had a couple bottles of nice wine in here.
He runs a fingertip over the concrete floor.
– And the tactile. Telling you, I had any kind of sex drive left, it would blow away any crazy rave ecstasy orgy I ever got my ass into at college. On the subject of the senses, let me ask you.
He stabs the tip of the scythe blade into my biceps, through, until it tinks against the floor.
– You feel that?
I look at the blade, no blood welling around it, like a giant scalpel stuck in a corpse.
He pulls it out.
– No.
He rises.
– You are faaar gone, my main man. But that’s not news.
He points the blade down at me.
– You got fat. Old. Tired. Beat. You are beat. I’m not just talking about you being all cut to chunks, I’m talking about how tired your story is. Man alone. Yojimbo. Get out of the middle of town and let the big boys do business. Only big enough for one operation. We aim to be that operation.
He swings the blade.
– Time to cut down the old and make way for the new. Know what the new is.
He runs his fingers down the ripple of his ribs.
– The new is lean and sleek. It is hungry. It is wild. It is dangerous to the old. New is always dangerous to the old. And you, Joe Pitt, you never read the headline. You met me and you just saw punk kid. What you should have been seeing is what the dinosaurs saw when they looked at the sky and spied that big meteor dropping on their heads. Know what they thought when they saw that rock?
He points up.
– Thought, That is gonna hurt.
He raises the scythe blade over his head.
– What you thinking now, Joe?
He brings the blade down and puts it in my stomach.
Goes through, pins me to the concrete, don’t feel the cut, but I feel the cold of the steel, feel that because it’s the only thing colder than the meat of my dead body.
And what I’m thinking is, Man, I’m glad I died before he did that.
I died about the time he started talking about how old I am. Was. Whatever. It’s hard to figure what tense to use. Mix in the fact this is the second time I’ve died, it could get confusing in a hurry if I tried to think it all the way around.
So I don’t.
I don’t think around. I don’t think up, down, in, out, over or under. My thoughts, they become a straight line. He’s talking, and his words, what I’m seeing, the past, any kind of future, the concrete under my back, it all collapses into a sheet of black that becomes a horizon before it drops over my body and sucks me inside.
And I think just one last thing.
Damn, I didn’t get to see Evie.
And I fall up and out the other side of the black sheet.
Everything expands until it is touching me everywhere and I feel the Enclave back in the shadows, watching, count their numbers by the way the air shifts when they breathe. All sound amplifies until I can separate the vibrations in the air as they strike my eardrums and name the key to which each is tuned, harmony and dissonance of the Count bragging, city waking outside, wax melting from a candle across the warehouse. Smells untwine, each has a color, fabric, leads to a source that I can see in my mind. I taste the rotting meat dangling overhead, the flaking rust on the upper curve of the Count’s blade, the night’s accumulation of grime on my clothes. I see into the dark, how the Enclave move without the purpose and control they used to own, jittery, gnashing, I see there are more of them hanging from the rafters than walking the floor. But that’s not for me, the pot, a dangle from the ceiling. I’ve got better ways to die.
My eye is open, looking at the blade in my middle, and I raise it and see the Count, and I look at the stairs that lead to the loft, and I see the beautiful ivory girl sitting on a step at the middle of the stairs, a cluster of Enclave around her.
And I tell her what’s on my mind.
– Hey, you look great.
She smiles.
– Kill him for me, Joe.
The Count looks at her.
– Get back in your place, bitch.
I stand up, rising, letting the blade cut deeper, until I am on my feet and it is sunk to the haft, the Count’s knuckles pressing into the edges of the wound.
It’s happening fast. Happening in the spaces between my heartbeats. I’m down and I’m up and he is looking at me and I am stepping backward and punching him in the wrist and now I am standing five feet away from him, the blade still in me, but it is my hand on the haft, pulling it free.
The wound in my belly seals as the steel comes out.
I show the Count his blade.
– Lose this?
He shows me my gun.
– Lose this?
I charge.
He shoots.
My thoughts are chasing themselves, trying to keep up with the pace of events. Thinking of Predo’s death, my thoughts are trying to make my body veer, but I am not faster than bullets and the Count has fired twice, and two bullets should be enough to keep me down while he finishes me, but he’s shooting from his hip like a gangster and he may be hot shit with a scythe blade but he’s probably never fired a gun in his life and he just plain misses and throws the gun to the side.
– Fuck this shit.
And I’m going to cut his head off with his own blade and he drops under the flat arc as I swing for his neck and shows me what he’s learned since he came here, squatting and pivoting, one leg extended, going for my legs, that are not there as I hop and realize I’ve put myself in the air and he comes out of his squat and puts both fists in my chest before my feet touch ground and I twist away from the impact but it still feels like two tiny trucks driving into me and I flip backward out of the air and tumble and my face goes into concrete followed by the rest of me and I can feel the Enclave shifting and coming at us, circling and as I’m rolling to my back I realize I’ve lost the scythe and the Count comes into view scooping it from the ground where I dropped it and I keep rolling as he brings it down like a pick again and again chipping the concrete and leaving divots closer and closer faster than me the tip skittering across my ribs and my hand goes inside my jacket for the amputation blade and that slows me too much and the scythe splits ribs and rips my lung and punches out my back and he hauls on it and it tears my side open and I have my feet and I have my own blade and I feel the Vyrus swarm my wound’s gaping hole like a million tiny electric shocks trying to close it up and we’re at the middle of a circle of Enclave where I will die and I lunge at the Count and he spins away from me and the scythe cuts as he steps past me and my hamstring is plucked so I go to one knee and he’s just better at this than I am, just faster and stronger and used to living at the edge of the Vyrus, and I’d really like to see the look on his face when he finds out his whole world has been destroyed and it was me who blew it to hell.