Already Dead

by Charlie Huston

  There's a patrol car parked out front of the abandoned P.S. on 9th Street. A couple police barricades fence off the courtyard and the doors are sealed with yellow tape. The crime scene has been worked already, but the cops will keep it sealed until curiosity dies down and they don't have to worry about any freaks breaking into the building to party in the death room. As it is, a few people are on the sidewalk across the street, pointing at the school and taking pictures with their phones. If the Coalition hadn't fingered the kid this place would be rabid with cops and newshounds, and I wouldn't be able to get anything done at all.

  I circle around to the 10th Street side of the building. The rear entrance has been long boarded up. No cops necessary here. A trio of club kids walks loudly west. I wait for them to turn the corner, then I take three running steps, jump six feet straight up, grab a window ledge and clamber up the security screen that protects the broken glass behind it.

  It takes me less than a minute using the window screens and bricks to scuttle up the wall to the roof of the school. The two pints I drank today have me peaked. I walk on the balls of my feet to the roof access door and inspect the lock. Old, rusted, I could force it easy. Instead I slip the picks from my back pocket. I wiggle the tension wrench into the lock then tease a hook past it and rake the pins. This keyed up, I can feel and hear each tiny click as I slide the remaining pins into place. I rotate the wrench, the lock pops open and I'm inside. Pitch dark. I leave the door ajar to admit the ambient light of New York City. My pupils grow to the size of dimes. It's not exactly clear as day, but I'll be fine.

  The air is dank and thick with mold. Graffiti covers the walls. I hear a scamper of rat claws ahead of me, and then the rat freezes, sensing something large and dangerous. It's right, I am

  dangerous, but not to it. Animal blood may as well be salt water as far as the Vyrus is concerned.

  I feel a slight shifting of the air. The door I've left open is drawing the warmer air up and out of the school. I follow the draft backward and find the stairwell. I descend three flights to the ground floor, sniffing at the thin trail of air wafting up past me, picking out details from the last twenty-four hours. I can smell the decay of the zombies, the urine of Ali Singh, the nameless blood and brains of the other boy. I can smell my own slightly feral scent and the Ivory soap I use in the shower. Fresher than the rest is a heavy overlay of sweaty cop, coffee and fingerprint powder, and the excited tang of news reporters. Under it all, the heavy, damp rot of the building.

  I retrace my steps to the room where the killing took place. The door has no lock, but the cops have sealed it with the inevitable yellow tape, the era's icon for tragedy. I tear it off and open the door. It reeks inside.

  Normally in these things someone would have been here by now with a bucket of bleach to get things sterile, but I guess the cops want to leave the crime scene intact until they have a confession out of Singh. Result: taped body outlines, dried blood, dried urine, dried vomit from whoever found the slaughterhouse, and oh yeah, dried brains.

  I pick out the zombie smell from the others and walk slowly around the room separating the scent into three distinct strands. There's the girl's musky undertone, the rank underarm stink of the one whose neck I snapped, and the hair product used by the guy I stepped on. Now that I have the zombie smell isolated into the three individuals I know of, I sniff for any other signatures hiding in the mix. It's not there. No sign of another zombie, the carrier.

  But the girl's musk.

  Why musky? A stale musky sex scent. That's what I smelled on her last night before I got distracted by Singh. Zombies don't have sex, do they? Shit, I don't know. I walk over to where the taped shadow of her body is outlined on the floor and take a deep breath through my nose.

  I filter out the other smells and focus on hers. The youth of her flesh. She was young, maybe seventeen, eighteen. The rot under the living flesh, brought on by the bacteria that was eating her alive, eating her dead. The acid smell of the cosmetics coloring her eyes and mouth and nails midnight black. The compost odor when her bladder and bowels released after I stabbed her in the neck. Perfume, sweat, a fungus in her Doc Martens. All that, and a sweaty musk. Someone rubbed against her, touched her. Someone fucked her. Not today, but recently, since she was infected. I try to imagine the sicko that would have sex with one of these things while it pawed at him and tried to take a bite out of his brain, the bastard that would mate with the bacteria inside this dead girl.

  I take one more deep breath to fix the musk smell in my mind so that I can pick it out when I find it again. That's when I notice something is missing. I take another whiff, and I catch it. An absence. Throughout the room, little patches of nothing in the matrix of odors. Slight erasures sprinkled across the air where something has absented itself from the catalogue of the room's history. I close my eyes. I inhale and try to capture one of the absences, to trace it step-by-step across the room and re-create what this thing might have done here.

  And it is this deep level of concentration that allows someone to sneak up behind me and hit me on the back of the head with a somewhat immature whale.

  The sound of bickering wakes me and tells me exactly where I am. I peel an eye open for confirmation, and sure enough, here I am in the squalid tenement basement headquarters of the Society. I'm on a dingy cot in an alcove. In the middle of the room three people are standing around a rickety card table under a single bare lightbulb. The two guys doing the bickering are Tom Nolan and Terry Bird.

  Tom reads about twenty-five, but carries a few more actual years. He's got the blond dreads and washed-out clothes of the downtown radical, along with the requisite number of piercings and tattoos. Terry is older looking, say fifty or so. His style is more old school: ponytail, beard, John Lennon glasses, Earth Day T-shirt and Birkenstocks; that kind of thing. The third is Lydia Miles. Call her twenty, short dark hair, leather pants, white tank top, bodybuilder muscles, and an upside-down pink triangle tattooed on her shoulder. Just another ragtag band of East Village radical-socialist-anarchist-revolutionaries hanging out and plotting the overthrow of The Man. Of course this band of revolutionaries also drinks blood.

  Lydia stands there watching while Tom goes at Terry and Terry pulls a passive-aggressive mellow hippie thing in response. Guess who's the topic of discussion?

  —I'm telling you he's working for the fucking Coalition. Why else would he be there?

  —Well, Tom, that may be. But to me, the real question here, and I think Lydia may agree with me, is what were you doing there? I was under the belief that we had agreed.

  —Fuck your agreement. You agreed, I didn't agree to shit. This creep is hip-deep in the Coalition. He's their ratfink spy down here and now they have him, they intentionally have him causing trouble on our territory. He's a saboteur, he's a fucking saboteur and we should execute him right now.

  Terry pushes his slipping glasses back up his nose.

  —Well I, for one, certainly think that would be more than extreme. Even, for the sake of argument, even if it came to the point where we might execute him, I think our first step should be to question him.

  —Fucking fine, let's interrogate him then. Let's wake his ass up and teach him a lesson about the revolution.

  He picks up a short length of pipe from the card table. Lydia is looking right at me. She's staring me in the eyes just as she has been since right after I opened them. She smiles and turns to the boys.

  —He's awake.

  They both turn to look at me sprawled on the cot. Tom takes a quick step in my direction, the piece of pipe still in his hand.

  —OK, fucker.

  Terry reaches out and lays a hand on Tom's shoulder.

  —Easy, Tom, just mellow out a little, guy.

  Tom stops and squeezes his eyes shut. He turns to Terry as if he'd like to wrap the pipe around his head instead of mine.

  __How many times do I have to tell you? How many, man? Don't tell me to mellow out. You be as mellow as you want, but don'
t tell me what to do. Terry smiles.

  —Sure, Tom, no prob. I'm not trying to disrespect you. I just want us all to calm down a little here and find some things out before we think about resorting to violence. There are always options, man, we just need to explore them.

  I sit up.

  —Yeah, Tom, let's explore some options.

  He turns back to me.

  —You just shut up, Pitt. You want to stay alive, you just shut up until someone tells you to speak. You got practice shutting up, taking all those orders from the Coalition. I look at Terry.

  —Hey, Terry, what are you doing letting this kid run around loose, anyway? People could get hurt.

  I look at Tom again.

  —He could get hurt.

  Tom makes a move at me, but Terry and Lydia pull him back. I sit on the cot being bored. Some people's buttons are so easy to punch it's barely worth the effort. Terry and Lydia get Tom into a chair. Lydia stays next to him while Terry walks over and drops down on the cot, a big smile on his face.

  —Tom's a hothead, Joe, we all know that, it only takes the slightest provocation to set him off. But we're adults here, so what say we put aside the immature mind games and name-calling and just have a little communication, air things out?

  —How 'bout you buzz off and show me to the door so I can go about my business.

  Terry shakes his head sadly.

  —In a perfect world, that's what I'd like to do. After all, it was never my plan that you get dragged here, but here you are, and I have to say that as hostile as Tom is toward you, he does raise some valid points. So I think, and this is just me talking, but I think there is a real need here for some open and honest communication.

  I start to get up.

  —So sit here and communicate, Terry Me, I got places to be, so I'll just be on my way.

  Terry puts an oh so gentle hand on my forearm.

  —Sorry, Joe, but there really are some questions I need to have answered.

  He tilts his head in the direction of the stairs and Hurley steps out of the shadows. How the fuck I missed Hurley is a tribute to my lack of awareness. The guy is a giant. Really. Six eight and over three-fifty. And on top of that he just happens to be one of us. So what you got here is your basic gargantuan Irish Vampyre. Oh, and he's retarded. I shouldn't say that. What I mean is he's dumb as a sack of hammers. Whether he's actually retarded, I don't know.

  I sit back down.

  —Sure thing, Terry. You got questions. Shoot.

  Terry smiles and nods.

  —See, man, that's the way it should be, just two guys sitting and talking. People, people talking about their problems with each other, finding solutions. If everybody could do this, if we could get the world together like this, we could change everything, man. Like, for instance, my problem is this thing last night, this whole hassle over at the, well it used to be a community center, man, but pretty soon it's gonna be another yuppie co-op. But anyway, this thing over at the old center, this hassle with the kids and the zombies.

  Tom jumps out of his chair.

  —That's what I'm talking about, that right there. We rejected that term, man. We voted. They're not zombies. That belittles their status as victims, man. They're infected, not in control of themselves, and creeps like this stooge are still going around slaughtering them.

  Terry bobs his head.

  —Well, you have a point there, Tom, the term zombie does put the onus for their actions on them and implies blame. So what was the term?

  —VOZ. Victim of Zombification.

  Lydia finally pipes in.

  —I'm still opposed to the use of the word victim. It suggests weakness, helplessness.

  Terry holds up his hand.

  —I think you may be right there, Lydia. But for now, as regards the conversation I'm having here with Joe, could we agree that VOZ is a valid term?

  Tom and Lydia look at one another and nod.

  —Good, good. See, Joe, people solving problems. So anyway, this hassle with the NYU students and the VOZs. Something like that happening right in our backyard is cause for concern. We can't really afford that kind of noise when we're trying so hard to integrate into the community, you know? So what can you tell me, you know anything about all this?

  I sigh with regret and shake my head.

  —Sorry, Terry, wish I could help you, but I really don't know anything.

  Tom is back on his feet.

  —Bullshit! Bullshit! He was there, man. He was poking around when I got there with Hurley to take a look. So what were you doing there, stooge? What were you doing there?

  —He has a point, Joe, what were you doing there tonight?

  —Same as you guys, taking a look. I live down here too, and I've done as much as anyone to keep this neighborhood a quiet place; more than my fair share. Do I do some favors for the Coalition? You know I do. Just like I do favors for the Society when you ask me. This thing last night, that kind of mess is bad for all of us. So yeah, after the cops cleared out I went over there to take a look.

  —And what did you find?

  —Well I don't know, Terry, I didn't really find anything. Which is not to say I wouldn't have found something if this joker hadn't popped up and had Hurley clock me. Far as I know it's like the cops said and that kid Singh did it.

  —Really? Does that sound reasonable to you? I mean, knowing what we know about the world and the way it works? I mean, being an open-minded kind of guy, does that sound like a reasonable story?

  I look him in the eye.

  —Terry, I got no reason to lie. Far as I know the kid did it. But could this be, and this is what I think you're asking, could this be a Coalition deal? A setup? Well you know as well as I do it could be. Hell, it could be a Coalition op all the way down the line from the zombies.

  —VOZs, please.

  —Right, from the VOZs right down to the frame on the kid. But as far as I know . . .

  —It's just like the cops say.

  —Far as I know.

  Terry looks down at the floor and nods his head.

  —Well, Joe, that's fair enough. I respected you and asked you a straightforward question, and I can only hope that you've respected me and given me an honest answer.

  —You know how I feel about you, Terry.

  A slight smile visits his mouth and he looks at me from the corner of his eye.

  —Yeah, I guess I do at that.

  He gets up off the cot and gestures toward the door.

  —Well that's it, you can take off.

  I get up and brush off the seat of my pants as I head for the door.

  —You mind if I get my guns back before I go?

  —Hurley has them. He'll walk you out and give them to you on the street.

  —Thanks.

  Tom is glaring at me.

  —That's it? We're letting him go after that lame bullshit?

  —We're letting him go because it is not our nature to hold people against their will, Tom.

  —But he knows something. Look at him, he's gloating. He knows something and he's making fun of us right now.

  I glance at Tom as I walk past him.

  —What's eating you, Tom? Still can't find a vegan substitute for blood?

  He lunges at me and Lydia throws an arm bar on him. She locks him up tight and looks at me, tsk-tsking her head back and forth.

  —Tacky, Joe.

  —Yeah, well.

  I'm halfway up the stairs, Hurley behind me, when Terry calls after.

  —By the way, what happened to your face?

  —Rolled out of bed this morning and pulled open the curtain. Don't know what it is, I just keep thinking I'm still alive or something.

  —Be careful about that, Joe. Thinking like that, it gets us dead.

  —So I hear.

  Then I'm through the basement door, into the hallway, and out onto the street, Hurley right behind me. We're on Avenue D between 5th and 6th. Hurley starts walking north toward 6th and I follow him. />
  —So how 'bout my guns, Hurley?

  —Terry says I gotta walk ya a ways first.

  —OK.

  We turn west onto 6th.

  —Sorry 'bout clobber'n ya from behind an all.

  —Yeah, sure.

  We're about halfway down the block when he stops and turns to me.

  —Sorry, Joe.

  —So you said, Hurley.

  —Naw, I mean sorry bout dis.

  —Sorry about what?

  —Terry says I got ta rough ya up some.

  I blink.

  —When the hell did he say that? I didn't hear him say that.

  —He told me when ya was still out.

  —What the hell for?

  —He said it was fer ben a smart mout.

  —What the hell? I was out cold, I hadn't even had a chance to smart off.

  —Yeah, but he said ya would. He said yer always a smart mout.

  —This ain't right.

  —Like I said, sorry, Joe, but I got ta do it. It's my job.

  —Calling it your job don't make it right, Hurley.

  —Whatever.

  And he goes to work on me. He's pretty good about it, stays away from my face, and only cracks a couple ribs. When he's done I'm slumped down on the sidewalk with my back against a building. He tosses the guns on my lap and heads back to Society headquarters.

  —Keep yer nose clean, Joe.

  —Yeah, thanks for the advice.

  I could go back, take my guns, kick down the door and blast away. With any luck I'd take out two of them. With a lot of luck I might get them all. But what would be the point? Their people would come after me. And Terry and me really do go back a ways. Hell, there was a time I almost bought all that Society line of crap. Terry's dream of uniting all the Vampyre and taking us public to live like normal people; maybe get the resources of the world to help find a cure for the Vyrus. Yeah, I believed all that. For awhile. Then I figured what I was around for, the kind of jobs Terry handed me, and was gonna keep handing me. So I got out.