by Dixon, Chuck
“It is what I have been told.”
I had no time to think about that. The flat crack from three explosions went off. The sound echoed to us from the steel canyon of the stacked containers. Shots from a gun, followed by a voice shouting.
Roxanne’s hand leapt from my shoulder. I craned my neck to see her move quietly to the head of the concrete steps. She stopped there to watch for a few seconds before running back down the steps and past me. She continued down the towpath by the canal, cowboy boots flying.
Something she saw scared the shit out of her. That was enough for me. I struggled to get to my feet and fell on my side. Footfalls were coming from between the containers. There was a high keening scream coming from somewhere. Bouncing beams of iridescent blue light stabbed out of the dark.
My options were shrinking fast. There was one thing and one thing only that I understood about what was happening. I did not want to be here when those beams of light fell on this pier.
I dug into the gravel with a knee to set myself rolling. I rolled over to the edge of the canal and tipped myself over the side.
My body struck the ice sheet that had formed along the stone wall. The ice squeaked and popped under me as I continued to roll. I slid off the edge of the ice shelf and into the black water. I let myself sink into the cold dark. Those blue light beams played through the veneer of ice, dancing back and forth, and then were gone.
I sank deeper and deeper, until the soles of my bare feet touched the muck at the bottom of the canal. I panicked for a few seconds, my body thrashing, my wrists pulling on the cuffs. This lasted until I realized that my body was not reacting to any of this. No feeling of strangulation, no intense desire to breathe. I didn’t breathe anymore.
I couldn’t drown.
My eyes adjusted until I could clearly see the channel of the waterway. The high, smooth walls rising either side, the floor littered with debris of all kinds. A car flipped on its roof. Shopping carts and an old refrigerator. I was aware of the cold, but it caused me no pain or discomfort. With my wrists behind me, I couldn’t really swim. But I could walk.
I’m not sure how far I walked along the floor of the canal. Eventually, I came to a place where there was an indent in the canal wall with a sloping pad rising up to the surface at a twenty-degree grade. A boat slip. I walked up it to find myself on the towpath again with woods along either bank.
I followed the towpath back the way I came. The woods ended, and the towers of cargo containers came into view. Moving low and staying to cover, I reached a row of trucks. I made my way behind them to a place where I could see Chad’s cop car where he’d parked it. The trunk was open, as well as the driver-side rear door. Nothing moved.
I dropped to my hands and knees, and then my belly. I crept along the side of a container until I could peek out to see behind the cop car. No one was here. The container lot was dark and quiet.
No, not entirely quiet.
From somewhere on the other side of the cop car, I could hear a kind of trilling sound. Like a cat or a kitten but not entirely. A cross between a mew and a wheeze.
I moved low, knees bent and fingers on the ground until I reached the cop car. I hoped the car keys were in the ignition. I was vulnerable. I had to get out of the cuffs. Crouched, I opened the car door and felt along the steering column. No keys.
The mewling sound grew louder, more urgent. I went around the rear of the car to find Chad lying on the gravel.
Well, the sum of him anyway.
A fire ax lay where it had been thrown. The broad blade slick with blood. Chad’s arms and legs were scattered around it, where they’d been chopped from his torso. His head and torso were separate in a puddle of red slush.
Following the whimpering sound, I stood and walked to the head. Chad’s eyes fixed on me, and his mouth worked to form words. All that came out was the sound I’d mistaken for a cat. His eyes were pleading, his mouth a red maw with tongue moving and teeth clacking.
I ignored him and crouched by the torso, awkwardly feeling along his pants until I heard the jangle of his key ring. I managed to fish that out, and after a few tries, had the key in the cuffs and unsnapped them. I took his wallet and his handgun. He let out a wet clucking sound as I went for the car. I turned to see him looking at me, eyes like a sad puppy.
With a swipe of my bare foot, I sent Chad’s head bouncing over the gravel to strike the side of a container. It connected with a satisfying bang.
I got my socks and sneakers out of the trunk and slammed it shut. I started up the car and backed it around in a half-circle to gun it between the containers and out onto a surface road that curved left into some woods. The nimbus glow of the city reflected on the ceiling of low-hanging clouds.
I needed to feed, and I needed to hide. In that order.
28
I rented a car with a credit card and driver’s license I took off a guy I caught coming out of a strip club. Roger Thomas Downes.
We looked enough alike for me to pass. I’d be out of the state by the time they found him in the dumpster where I left him. There’s a possibility I left him alive. I only fed enough to take the edge off. I told myself he’d wake up in a few hours.
Before leaving town, I called in a 911 call on a sixty-unit apartment building. I told the dispatcher my father was having a heart attack. I parked outside the building and waited. An ambulance showed up, a pair of EMTs rushing into the building leaving their ride behind, lights swirling. Inside, I found the cooler stuffed with blood packs and plasma. I took the cooler and was in my rental and pulling past the local fire company’s rescue truck as it turned into the lot.
I had food for the road. The trip would take a few days. I could only drive at night, going city to city. I had to find places I could park long term without being towed or ticketed. They might be looking for my car. Long-term parking at airports or hotels that didn’t have valet parking. I’d pull into a spot before dawn, lock up, and climb into the trunk to wait out the daylight hours.
Three nights of driving, and I was in Newark. I left the rental on a street where it would be either stripped or vanish within a few hours and took the PATH train into the city.
The only time I’d ever been to New York was on a school field trip to see Lion King. Two days and one night in the city during my senior year of high school. All I saw then was mid-town Manhattan. I was disappointed that all the porno places had shut down years before. I don’t remember much about the show. Heather Mongelluzzo let me feel one of her tits on the long bus ride back home.
Roxanne lied to me when she told me she and her cop were heading for New York. I knew it was a story just for me. But her reasoning was good. The city was the right environment for me. Nine million souls to hide amongst. Total anonymity. It was a place so big that no one cared who you were or where you came from or why you were there. No one gave me a second glance on the street. Even if they did, they’d forgotten me by the next corner.
There was a whole underground world that never saw the light of day. By train or by foot, I could go almost anywhere without ever coming up onto the street. There were tunnels for the trains and utilities. Miles and miles of them.
I had enough blood packs to last me a night or two to allow me to settle in without hunting. By then, I’d have a plan mapped out. I was on my own with no mentor, no guide. Manhattan was the most forgiving place I could be. I could disappear there. Buy time until I figured my way forward.
There were plenty of disenfranchised there, too. All hours of the night, there were people on the streets. Lots of them were homeless or vagrant. They slept in doorways. Lay dead drunk or high on the sidewalk. When they went missing, they were another statistic. Foul play wasn’t even the first supposition. People would be there one day and the next day... gone.
I read somewhere about people who used the towers coming down on 9-11 as a chance to start over. They saw that day as an exit strategy. They were gone, off to new lives and new names, leaving everyone to assume
they died that day with all the others. Who could say they didn’t? And the city went on. Their places were taken by others. And soon, they were nothing but a picture on a wall. Barely a memory.
This city swallowed people whole.
From Battery Park to Yonkers, it was all an open buffet. And if I wanted to spread out, there was Jersey and four more boroughs.
The smartest choice I could have made was making New York my new hometown. That was what I thought.
Until I found out I wasn’t alone.
29
I got a metro card at Grand Central and caught a subway. At 59th Street, I got off and walked to the south end of the platform where I ducked under the chain. A concrete ledge with a rusting guard rail led away into a dark interrupted at intervals by the muted glow from bare bulbs inside steel cages. The lights stretched away in an endless string to infinity.
It was early enough in the evening to spend some time finding a place to hole up. Once I had a hide, I could go hunting. Now that I was down in the belly of the largest mass transit train line on the planet, I was free to roam over all five boroughs for the cost of one ride and never see the sun or stars. Or is London’s Tube bigger? Like I care.
I didn’t know that I wasn’t the only one hunting.
A dimly lit alcove widened off the narrow walkway. The tile on the walls was ancient and cracked. A door with steel lattice was set into the wall. It had metal signs bolted to it that were unreadable under a decades-thick patina of greasy black residue. I tried the pull and the door swung open, the hinges groaning.
The corridor inside was barely shoulder-width. It ended in a T intersection. I turned right, and the corridor stopped at another latticed steel door. This time I could read the metal signs, although they were fuzzy with rust around the edges. The sign told me that this warren of tunnels was all a part of the Consolidated Edison Steam Conservation Project. I noticed for the first time that the tile walls were damp. There was a puddle of water before the door. I pulled it open and stepped inside.
I had a vague memory of seeing something about this system on one of those “how do they do that?” shows. There were steam plants all over the city, and they generated live steam that was used to heat homes and businesses all over Manhattan.
The tunnel was wider here but not by much. The walls and ceiling were tile. Pipes mounted to the ceiling ran the length of the tunnel. Thick pipes with fat connectors every twenty feet. The floor was metal grates. The condensation ran off the pipes and into a gutter under the grates. I stepped along into the dark and found that there were niches set into the walls. No idea what they were there for. But they were wide enough and deep enough for me to lie supine on.
I couldn’t really feel the heat. I’m not sensitive to changes in temperature these days. I could tell from the continual drip, drip, drip from the pipes that it was sweltering in here. All that meant to me was that it would be too hot for any homeless to coop in here. And I figured it was a pretty sturdy system. It was damn sure old enough. Not much chance of any maintenance men stumbling across me. This would be my starter home.
Welcome to New York.
They jumped me when I was back out in the main subway tunnel.
I was stepping out through the last lattice door. Something shoved me against a wall. Something else smashed me over the head with a bottle. A million shards of glass exploded like a galaxy around me. The combination of sheer force and surprise drove me to my knees were a pair of sneakered feet started kicking and pummeling me.
One of the feet swung for my head and I snaked out a hand to catch the ankle of the wearer. I flipped him onto his back as I stood up. The second tough guy took a step back with a hand under his coat. The hand came out with what looked like a bayonet.
The world filled with thunder then as a northbound train with six cars came rumbling past, brakes squealing as it slowed for the stop at 59th. In the lights flashing from inside the cars, I could see the pair of attackers. Not kids. A pair of older guys with mean eyes and bad teeth. Or maybe old for their age due to drugs or whatever. Could have been brothers.
I caught the arm of the guy with the blade. The other one was rising from where I’d dumped him, seething between clenched teeth. I snapped the elbow of the guy with the blade. It gave way with a wet pop. His scream was lost in the rumble of the subway passing. I planted an open-hand shove into the center of his chest, and he flipped over the guardrail that lined the walkway. His brother moved to shoulder-check me against the wall again.
I sidestepped and caught him around the neck as he breezed past me. A poke and a swipe and his throat was open. The carpet knife moved in an arc, sending out a spatter that turned the light through the windows of the rushing cars a momentary crimson.
He clapped a hand to his neck, blood jetting between his fingers. He hunched away from me. I followed him down steps to the floor of gravel ballast alongside the tracks and kicked him prone. I straddled his back to pull his head up by the hair. I fed on him until long after he stopped moving. His vessels went flat, and there was no more of him left. I dropped his head to the stones.
The train had passed. It was silent again. I stood up, a little groggy, with a bloated feeling. That was a big guy. Like an extra helping of the good stuff. I turned to where I guessed the other man had fallen. He lay still in a heap by the tracks except for the rise and fall of his chest from breathing. His breath was raspy. Something was broken inside.
Next to him stood a little girl, maybe six or seven. I said I’m no good at kids’ ages.
She had an outrageous bushy mane of kinky hair, and wore what looked like a soiled communion dress. She looked at me with dark almond eyes.
“Go away, kid,” I said.
The little girl turned from me to look down at the broken man lying at her feet. She brought her eyes back to me.
“Can I share?” she said.
She blinked, and I saw that her eyes weren’t just dark. They were black from rim to rim.
30
Her name was Lissa.
No last name. If she ever had one.
She was turned in Mobile, Alabama by a man named Crawford. She was a half-black orphan living on the streets after her mother died of croup. A “high yella” is what she said they called her in that other time. This was before Mobile had electric lights. She thinks she was nine years old.
She’s nine years old forever now.
Crawford turned her because she was young. He used her as a lure, bait. Lissa would bring victims to him.
A runaway dog, or maybe she couldn’t find her mother, or she was lost. Sympathetic marks would respond to her story and offer to help a helpless little girl. Some would follow her for other reasons. She had no pity for them. As the years went by, she had no pity for any of them.
The man, Crawford, treated her like a pet; something he owned. She lived on the dregs he left behind. He beat her. He once locked her out of the barn where they were cooping when she talked back to him. He let the sun burn her to an ashen gray before letting her in.
They moved around a lot, mostly jumping trains. Traveling by day and feeding by night. She couldn’t remember how long that went on. It stopped when she locked him in a steel-walled boxcar and took off on her own. Lissa never saw him again, and never knew what happened to him. She liked to think he was eventually dragged out of the car by railroad bulls. She could picture him lying on the ties screaming as the noonday sun fried him to a crisp.
“How long ago was that?” I said. We lay on shelves across from one another inside a steam tunnel.
“Can’t recall. The nights don’t measure like days, you know what I mean?” she said.
She was right. Without the passage of the sun in the sky, the movement of time was harder to measure, to feel. This life was one long endless night measured only by the shape of the moon.
“The movies didn’t have sound yet,” she said after a while.
“You like movies?”
“They’re fine. No one take
s notice of a kid alone in a movie theater at night. They reckon the kid is with his parents. Lots of dark places to coop in a theater.”
“Makes sense.”
“I like libraries better. Even more places to hide, and all those books to read.”
“There’s a big library here in the city, right?”
“Used to be I spent a lot of nights there. Then they put motion sensors in.”
“You can trip those? We can trip those?”
“Can’t fool them like cameras.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“I’ll show you the city when the night comes. Show you things you never seen. Teach you things you never knew,” she said. Her voice was solemn in the pitch-dark.
As the dreamless sleep pulled me under, I wondered if I was up to the responsibility of looking after a kid.
Yeah, I had that all wrong.
Lissa was a child in form but not in mind. She would never grow up in the physical sense. She’d lived three or four lifetimes of experiences. A near-century on her own in the city gave her a wisdom that was as deep as her unshakeable calm. And a profound cynicism that came from seeing the world from the gutter and viewing every soul you met as your next meal.
“I meet other kids like me sometimes. They’re feral things. Trapped in the mind of a child, unable to reckon with the things they see and do.”
“Why are you different?” I said.
“Just because. Folks always said I had an old soul.”
In this new relationship, I was the child, and she was the endlessly patient adult guiding me through this new world.
“This Frenchwoman was a damned fool,” she said. Her little-girl voice was sharp with scorn.
“I didn’t have a lot of choice in mentors,” I said.
We sat together on a bench in Central Park and watched the moon shimmer on the pond under a cold, cloudless sky. It was early evening and couples moved by, huddled together under the amber lights. Joggers trotted past in singles, pairs, and larger groups. We were just a dad and his little girl enjoying a chilly evening on the town. We held hands, her fingers tiny in mine.
