Every Last Drop

by Charlie Huston

  He places the book back on the shelf.

  —Skag is a word I know not the meaning of. Nor do I deign to seek it out. So sure am I that it is some foul slang for vagina or penis.

  His chair creaks close and he butts me with the wheels.

  —And you, were you in my charge at an early age, what should I have named you?

  His lips purse, dry flakes of blood, and grease from the trotters, mingle in the whiskers on his chin.

  —Shiftless. Yes, Shiftless. Lazy and contemptible. Placing yourself outside the structure of things. Imagining yourself better than your place. Adding nothing to the common good and weal.

  He reaches behind the chair and comes up with a short cat-o’-nine-tails and prods me with the wood handle.

  —You are a burden on us all. We strivers, we reachers and dreamers, without us, without our mighty efforts at forward progress, you and your slovenly kind would perish in your own filth.

  He dangles the knotted leather cords of the whip in front of my face; I can see the dry blood clotted thick.

  —Parasites. Sucker fish. Tapeworms. Reveling in the bowels of the citizenry. Living off our wastes. Upsetting the smooth functions of the body politic that we nourish with hard labors.

  He raises the whip and lashes it across my face.

  —Shiftless. Useless. Leech.

  I flinch, draw up my shoulders and duck my face into my chest.

  He prods me again with the handle.

  —Yes, huddle and hide from the light and truth, Shiftless. Is that shame? No, I think not. Fear. Simple fear of pain. Well, fear is a good forge. We can work many a useful tool with fear at hand. I have done so for years. In good service.

  He shoves the end of the handle under my chin and forces my face up.

  —Sharp tools I made. Even if they have never been appreciated. Good tools and able. Suited to their task. And I would have made more and better. But for interference.

  He pulls the handle away and bangs it against the floor.

  —Had I been left to my own methods, Menace would never have shunned his conditioning and reverted to his nature. Under my own auspices and left unmolested here, the Mungiki would never have manifested.

  He throws the cat-o’-nine-tails, upsetting a pile of newspapers that sloughs to the floor.

  —Skag Baron Menace! With no Mungiki he was nothing. I told them, Leave off and let me attend, yes? But they would not listen. Insisted in meddling. All but created the Mungiki with their own hands. Intrusions. Invasions.

  He takes his hair in fistfuls.

  —And who must then negotiate with the savages? Who must settle them in their place? And at what price?

  He puts his hands on the arms of the wheelchair and pushes himself up on twisted legs; frozen at the waist, he stands cocked at nearly ninety degrees, waving arms as warped as his legs, all the bones of him corkscrewed.

  —Mere seconds in the sun, yes? Cancers in my bones, yes? Mad growths, yes? All because I went out to negotiate, to compensate for failures and oversights that were none of my own.

  He drops back into the chair, sending it rolling a few feet across the moldering room.

  —Mr. Lament.

  —A misstep, did I say? On my own part, yes? Surely it was a misstep. The misstep was loyalty. Listening to the simple caw and cries, yes? I should have followed truer stars. My own heart and mind I should have followed!

  —Mr. Lament.

  He heaves air in and out, wipes spittle from his mouth, fingering the blisters that pebble his cheeks.

  —A life in service. For me, who should have been a prince in my own right. This is the price of sacrifice. This is the price of loyalty, Shiftless. The wages paid by an ignorant sovereign.

  —Mr. Lament.

  He turns to Low, the boy standing in the open door.

  —You have something to say, idiot boy? Something that can’t wait till your better concludes his business? Come here, thing.

  Low doesn’t move.

  Lament crooks a finger.

  —Come here now, Low. Or risk my displeasure.

  Low comes slowly into the room, his tongue probing the ends of his moustache.

  —Sure, Mr. Lament.

  Lament’s hand ducks into the pocket of his robe and comes out with a honed carpet knife. It flashes once as he uses it to hook the underside of Low’s upper lip.

  —Something to say? Something pressing, yes? Say it, boy! Say it while you still have lips to make human sounds! Say it before I cast you into your proper station as a maker of animals mewling!

  —Honestly, Alistair, the boy is simply doing as I asked. You might try an ounce of civility just now and again. We are none of us above the use of good manners and simple kindness.

  Lament and I look at the door where the old woman stands between an efficient-looking young man and woman in matching black suits, holding matching machine pistols that look every bit as efficient as they do.

  —We are not savages, after all.

  She takes a step into the room, into the light, luster on the single strand of pearls she wears at the neck of a white cardigan with buttons that match the necklace, a faint greasy sheen on the warty gray orb that’s half grown from the scarred pit that used to be her right eye socket.

  —Put the knife down, Alistair. Try to effect the gravity of your years.

  Lament removes the blade from Low’s mouth.

  —This is my domain, Maureen. How I conduct affairs is my business.

  She places a hand on Low’s head and looks at his face.

  —How you conduct your business has proven ineffectual. At best.

  She shakes her head.

  —A dismal failure is a far more accurate assessment of your affairs.

  She pushes Low toward the door.

  —Go out there with your friends.

  Low looks at Lament.

  Lament bares his teeth, snaps his fingers, and Low goes out the door.

  He looks up at the old woman.

  —A dismal failure? I think not.

  She inclines her head at the two young people and they come farther into the room.

  —Fear as a control is limited, Alistair. Your instrument is dulled by it. Incapable of independent actions. They will never serve as anything but your lackeys. Sad prison wards. A pathetic, if necessary, fate for them. Truly, it’s as much as mongrel races can or should aspire to, but the added indignity of being lorded by yourself seems all but cruel.

  He grunts, opens his mouth.

  She shakes her head.

  —No. No further comment is required.

  She lifts a hand and the young man takes the handles of the wheelchair and pushes it to the door.

  —Go join your protégés.

  He twists about in the chair, looking back at her as he is wheeled out.

  —This is my place, Maureen! This conclave is my doing and I should be present.

  The old woman looks about for a place to sit.

  —Yes, Alistair. Yes, yes.

  His further comments cut off as the young man closes the door behind them.

  The young woman finds a folding steel chair with a cracked plastic seat cushion, wipes dust off it with a few tissues from Lament’s box, and places it for the old woman.

  She takes a seat, runs her hands over the legs of her light wool slacks, then folds them in her lap and looks at me.

  —And tell me, Mr. Pitt, how have you enjoyed Alistair Lament’s hospitality?

  I shrug as best I can.

  —He’s not quite up to your style, Mrs. Vandewater.

  I glance at the door and then back at her.

  —I mean, he only let me bite his toe off. You let me take a whole eye.

  —He was, hard to imagine, a quite remarkable student. Attentive, frighteningly able, insightful in a manner quite unique. An eye for weakness. A sense, if you like, for frailty. Vulnerability. Not a virtue, I admit, in the normal course of things, but essential to certain ends.

  She looks
at the floor, raises the glasses that hang by a chain from her neck, and brings the discarded pig’s feet into focus.

  —Over the years, obviously, he has rather deteriorated.

  She lets the glasses hang free.

  —His eye is no less keen, but he himself is blunted. Become vulgar.

  She looks about the filthy backroom.

  —The isolation. He seemed to have inward reservoirs. No lack of self-confidence, I’m sure you have noticed, but more than that. Or so I believed. A mind and spirit suited to independent action. Bold initiative. Yet still responsive to authority.

  She allows a small sigh.

  —Wrong on many counts it seems.

  She rises, looks behind herself and brushes at the seat of her slacks.

  —More willful than independent. When I dispatched him here to see if he might find suitable subjects for infection, I never dreamed how far he’d stray from my prescriptions. Recruiting, identifying those who might take most naturally to the Vyrus, has always required an acceptance of the fact that those most isolated from typical social supports are most likely to embrace an utter change in their circumstances. Offer the unwillingly solitary the opportunity to elevate themselves, to become a part of something larger than themselves, and they will find reserves of emotional and mental resilience they never knew existed. Resilience that can make them capable of the most basic of our compulsions.

  She bends and picks up the cat-o’-nine-tails from where Lament had discarded it.

  —After all, if a prospective recruit cannot come to terms with the implications of the Vyrus’ thirst, what use can we possibly make of them?

  She weighs the lash in her hand, shakes her head, places it on the TV tray.

  —Crude.

  She pulls a tissue from the box and wipes her hands.

  —So like Alistair.

  She looks at me, wound in barbwire, my clothes scabbed with my own dry blood, the marks of the whip on my face barely closed, a crust of tangled meat grown over the stump where my toe was.

  —At this moment, you could serve as the perfect visual referent for Alistair’s methods and mindset. Vulgar and base. And, truly, a fair indication of just how far he has strayed.

  She places a hand at the high collar of her gray blouse.

  —Set to find loners and outsiders, he went too far afield. These delinquents and hoodlums. What use can they come to? He enticed them with blunt offers of power and money. Suggested they were involving themselves in criminal enterprise.

  She sniffs.

  —Narcotics, no less. A context, so he claims, they could understand.

  She opens the door of the fridge, the corners of her mouth pulling down.

  —And he implied a dark rite of initiation. Evoked voodoo. Santería. Again, a context he thought they could embrace.

  She pushes the door closed.

  —And then he infected them. Or had one of his current miscreants infect them. And, if they survived that process, he began a program of abuse. Reprogramming. His word, not mine. But apt, I will admit. Whatever slight self-regard they might have, he removed it. Amputated it whole and cauterized the stump. The names he gives them. You’ve heard them? Failure. Distress. Encumbrance.

  Her good eye blinks slowly, as if erasing something from the surface of its lens.

  —My own fault. What I’d failed to account for was how he would respond to isolation himself. I’d forgotten that he’d been a foundling in his own right. Lost and adrift until I brought him to harbor and gave him a purpose. I esteemed the training I’d given him too greatly. And once here, once in this lonely outpost amongst the savages, he became very much a product of his environment.

  A finger traces the edge of the mass of scar on her face.

  —Not the last time, sadly, I was the victim of overconfidence and pride.

  She looks at me.

  —Was it, Mr. Pitt?

  Something rustles in my gut. The skin has sealed over the wound, but the Vyrus is struggling inside to reknit my organs. I grunt, exhale, try not to move too much.

  —If that’s what you call pissing me off, then yeah, you were a little full of yourself that time.

  A flutter, a twist, a sensation like sharp nails picking at a knot in my intestines. I grunt again.

  She lifts her glasses, looks at me through the narrow lenses.

  —Some discomfort, Mr. Pitt?

  I nod.

  —Yeah, yeah.

  She nods.

  —Something I could do for you?

  I think for a second. Something the Coalition Clan’s chief recruiter and trainer of their enforcers could do for me?

  Sure there is.

  —Yeah, lady, you could maybe just shoot me now instead of talking me to death.

  She looks over her shoulder at the young woman with her efficient machine pistol.

  —Shoot you?

  She looks back at me.

  —No, Mr. Pitt, I think not.

  Slowly, she lowers herself into a graceful squat that someone who looks as old as her should have more trouble executing.

  —Being shot is not in your immediate future.

  She reaches out and places the tip of her index finger on my cheekbone.

  —Other things are in your future, but not that.

  She presses the finger gently into my cheek, drawing the skin down from the bottom of my eye.

  —By the way, Mr. Pitt, you mentioned that I’d let you take my eye when we last met. In point of fact, and while I don’t wish to be thought ungenerous, I never actually considered it a gift.

  She lifts her finger.

  —And I’ve always rather believed you owed me something in return.

  She opens her mouth wide and goes to work, evening accounts between us.

  There comes a time when you think there are no new territories of pain. After a certain number of stabbings, shootings, clubbings, whippings, beatings, thrashings, cuttings, slashings and eviscerations, you begin to assume you’ve had the worst of it and nothing of that nature can really surprise you very much.

  And then someone comes along to show you that you’re wrong.

  And you can do little but scream your thanks and appreciation for the lesson.

  So I scream. My eye being gnawed out by a crazed old woman, I scream like I rarely have. Because some things, some things are truly horrifying.

  But maybe you have to have them happen to you to get that.

  —Because it was due me.

  —I am not arguing whether you had grounds, Mrs. Vandewater. I am stating as fact that you were charged to bring him unmolested.

  —Yes, so I was. And I abused that charge. And you have asked me why I abused that charge. And I have answered. Because it was due me. This seems to leave little enough to discuss. The only question seems to be, how will you discipline me for my failure to do as you charged?

  I open my eyes.

  Correction.

  I open my eye.

  Seeing as it’s caked with the blood that spilled out of what used to be my other eye, it doesn’t help much. Clotted darkness with a distant blur of light punctuated by two smaller clots of darkness that don’t seem to be getting along all that well just now. I close my eye and let my ears do the work, still having two of those for the moment.

  —Yes, how will I discipline you. Yet again we come around to the same topic. I am bemused, Mrs. Vandewater, as to how a person so wholly devoted to the concept of discipline can be entirely lacking in it herself.

  —That is due entirely to your own lack of awareness.

  —Indeed. Well. Illuminate me. If you are inclined.

  Her footsteps sound down the long echoing room as she begins to pace.

  —Illuminate. I have spent my life in that very effort. And no little part of it in a specific effort to illuminate you. Bright child. Such a bright child. With an utterly dim outlook. You still see no further than your dogma. Maintenance of status quo. This, despite all evidence of the erosion taking plac
e under your feet. Illuminate!

  The hard slap of a flat palm on a desktop.

  —You fail to make sense of my actions, and you interpret them as disobedient and undisciplined, because you measure them against your own authority. You refuse again and again to see that I am in the service of a larger order of things. While your eyes continue to be on the path just before your feet, I am looking well ahead to where the path becomes lost and tangled in the woods.

  Silence. The impression of contemplation. Then the man’s voice.

  —And yet I am still unclear as to what that has to do with biting his eye out.

  Silence again. The impression of a stare-down. The woman’s voice.

  —I took his eye because I have no respect for your authority. Because I do not believe you are long for your position. Because in some few months’ time I expect not to be forced to answer to you any longer.

  A chair creaks as she sits.

  —Does that clarify the matter?

  Leather-soled shoes take a few steps. Another chair creaks.

  —Yes. Yes it does.

  —And so, after an unnecessary digression to illuminate you regarding the obvious, we can return to the matter at hand? I have disobeyed your charge. What cost must I pay? What is due to Caesar? What can you afford to extract with your power crumbling about you?

  Papers being turned.

  —You are still well regarded by some members of the council. This hinders me somewhat. Limits the scope of what correction I might impose. Yes.

  A folder being snapped shut.

  —But you force my hand, and I must do something. If you can tolerate another question, let me ask, in similar circumstances, when I was in your care, what would you have done to me had I shown the same lack of regard for your commands?

  Whisper of fabric.

  —What a coward you are. Unable even to devise your own chastisement. I’d have killed you. There is no room for any lack of—

  The sound of something sharp cutting the air, a clatter of furniture, breath whistling from a hole nature made no allowance for.