Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  He wondered if Jun could see him, knew how far behind he’d fallen.

  The crowd’s movements had become bizarrely random, buoying him forward, then carrying him back, to the left, to the right, with no net forward progress. There was yelling from the front of the line, and finally a guardsman made an announcement, his voice tinny and indistinct through the megaphone.

  The sergeant had instructions to let no one pass; he moved onto the roadway, megaphone at his side, shouting across the full width of the inbound and outbound lanes at the men now stationed there, standing sullenly behind pale blue NYPD

  barriers, automatic rifles slung across their chests.

  Jenner spotted Jun ahead and shuffled through the throng toward him. There were police helicopters above now, and looking over the crowd, he saw lights in the sky over the Brooklyn Bridge. Apparently all the bridges were cut off.

  The subways were closed, the bridges were closed. The city was on fire, and they were stuck.

  *

  *

  *

  Precious Blood

  401

  It was a nightmare, far worse than anything she’d imagined. She should’ve known right away: when she first went under, she felt herself starting to suffocate as she wriggled through the dirt and grime caked under the floorboards.

  She was on her back, the mattress pulled onto the hole she’d made, being swallowed whole by the dark. Grit was spattering from the flooring above her face, raining into her nose and eyes.

  She had to turn over, get herself facedown, protect her eyes and nose and mouth. But when she tried to tilt to her right, her shoulder pressed up against the floorboards above her. She hunched her back and twisted more, tried to screw her torso around, but she couldn’t do it.

  She started to lose it and pushed harder, twisting her hips, trying to lengthen her torso, desperate to turn over. In an instant she was wedged, her left shoulder up against the floorboards, her right arm crushed underneath her, unable to move forward, stuck too tight to turn back. She panicked, flailing with her legs, clouds of choking dust eddying around her. Her head was thumping up against the joist, sending down showers of rotten wood and dirt, spilling into her ear and down her neck, edging her into hysteria.

  She tried to regulate her breathing: breathe in for a count of five; slowly breathe out for a count of six. She calmed, and as she did, she could feel her position easing. After a few minutes, she was able to relax enough to let her left shoulder roll back down flat.

  She lay there, thinking for a while. Then made her decision: she’d have to go back to the room.

  She wriggled backward to the hole, arms stretched toward it, then pushed the mattress up and out of the way, raking her back against the edge as she pushed herself up into the room again.

  She lay on the floor, panting. Here her breath came easily; cold air that had seemed dank an hour earlier now tasted clean and sweet. Lying on her side, breathing deeply, she 402

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  shook as she imagined herself crawling back down into the asphyxiating crawlspace.

  Then she heard him outside. Grinding. Grinding something, sharpening something. Something he probably was going to stick into her.

  And she stopped crying, and got onto her hands and knees, and put her arms forward into the hole, and then her face, and then dragged herself forward, back into the void.

  At around 9:30 p.m., the helicopters overhead stopped circling and moved off in formation. Looking downtown toward the harbor, Jenner saw the helicopters at the Brooklyn Bridge follow them. He and Jun were only a few yards from the barricades when word finally came through that there had been no bomb, that it was an explosion in an electrical substation that had ignited a Downtown 6 train.

  Several people were injured, some critically, but any wider implication to the blast had been ruled out.

  Within minutes the crush at the walkway entrance was un-bearable. The guardsmen hurried to remove the barricades, but they were too slow for the crowd; Jenner saw beer cans and plastic cups flying overhead.

  Just as the bottleneck seemed on the verge of going out of control, an ESU van arrived, and a half-dozen cops in helmets and body armor climbed out. Their sergeant spoke quickly with the National Guard sergeant, then started shouting out commands. Some of the guardsmen were redeployed onto the bridge to help get the cars moving, and the cops began funneling the pedestrians onto the walkway.

  On the bridge, the path was wider, built to carry both bicycle and foot traffic. Jenner turned back to look at the city.

  The sky was dark, the skyline crenellated by blocky office buildings, their facades grids of light and dark metal. Beneath him, Delancey Street was all lit up for the holidays.

  Looking uptown, he couldn’t see any flames or smoke. There Precious Blood

  403

  were sirens everywhere, but they seemed to be responding to the chaos at the bridge; he couldn’t make out anything happening up toward the Union Square area.

  Jenner looked over to Brooklyn. Once they crossed the bridge, it was probably only a couple of miles to where Ana was.

  If she was even there.

  They hurried across amid a streaming tide of people carrying briefcases, Christmas gifts, shopping bags. There was little chatter on the bridge, the crowds moving quickly and quietly, occasionally turning back to judge the distance from the Manhattan anchorage, now lit up with spotlights, or to search the skyline for smoke.

  As they passed the Brooklyn anchorage, wrapped in scaffolding as part of the never-ending structural work, floodlights came on, illuminating the girders and meshwork and throwing shadows on the fabric netting billowing and slacking in the wind.

  The crowd spilled off the bridge onto Continental Army Plaza. Traffic on the Brooklyn side was light; apparently word had got out about the bridge closures, or they’d shut down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Helmeted cops were moving the cars and trucks forward; a platoon of National Guardsmen was assembling in front of the mounted statue of Washington.

  Jenner and Jun headed away from the main mass of people, back toward the river; soon they were walking on empty streets. As they walked, the battered tenements gave way to old brick Victorian factories and warehouses. Nearer the waterfront, there were signs of gentrification, with billboards attached to the scaffolded facades promising expensive condominium loft developments. Downriver, toward DUMBO, cranes dotted the bank, tearing down the old and decrepit to better house the new and luxurious.

  404

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  The neighborhood was desolate, and they were quite alone as they walked down the middle of the road, their shadows shortening before flipping and lengthening as they passed under the streetlights. Jun was tense, his hand hovering by his side as he scanned the empty side streets.

  On Kent, they turned north. At the corner of South Second Street, Jenner paused under a streetlamp to check Farrar’s small painting.

  “Is this the area?”

  Jenner shook his head. “No. It’s a bit nearer to Greenpoint, maybe another mile.”

  They walked on the sidewalk now, neither speaking.

  Farrar wasn’t sure if he could wait until midnight to begin; the urge to start, to pull her out and start, was overwhelming. His eyes scanned the room, a final check that everything was in place.

  He’d arranged large red and white pillar candles around the center of the room; this would be his main work area, the broad expanse of floor in the middle of which lay the cross.

  He’d laid kindling at the foot of the cross to make sure she knew what was coming.

  He’d set his equipment out on a folded black towel on a large tin box. This project was a fairly simple one, and didn’t require any complex instruments or elaborate props.

  The worn lid of his boxed set of six surgical knives lay open, showing off the deep indigo velvet lining, as luxurious now as it had been when it was made back in the nineteenth century. The scalpels were unusually lon
g, each with a traditional blade on one end and a different tool on the other. In a catalogue of antique surgical tools, he’d discovered that one of those implements was a curette, although he wasn’t sure what curetting was. Of course, the intended function of the implement was irrelevant; he had proven himself skilled at Precious Blood

  405

  improvising novel uses for the most obscure tools. The set was the best thing he’d ever bought on eBay.

  He checked to see that he had film for the Polaroid camera (he’d never made the switch to digital, which was too clean, too immediate—he liked the slow evolution of the image on the Polaroid, the way the shapes gradually came into focus, the way a dark blur resolved itself into an open mouth, for example, the red deepening behind).

  Satisfied that everything was in place, he headed for her room; it was time she learned what he would do to her.

  She’d thought it would be easier. Even though her frame was slight, the space was too tight for her to crawl on her hands and knees as she’d hoped. Instead, she had to drag herself along, pulling herself forward with her elbows, and wriggling in a side-to-side motion, like some kind of lizard.

  In the pitch-black, she had no sense of how far she had gone. Worse, with all the wriggling, and after changing direction to get around a large clay pipe, she’d become disoriented.

  She lit her watch again, peering into the crawlspace ahead of her. The orange light didn’t reach far, dying into shadow a couple of feet ahead. She couldn’t see the next column, but assumed they’d be evenly spaced. She was a couple of feet in front of one column: if she moved straight forward, eventually she’d hit a wall.

  Now her plan seemed like the worst plan in the world.

  There wasn’t going to be a hole in the planks, the floor wasn’t going to give way and pitch her into the room below, and freedom. Instead, she would crawl under the floor for hours, maybe days, slowly dying of fatigue and hypothermia.

  She imagined herself curled up in the fetal position to keep warm as the life slowly flickered out of her. Imagined her body, shriveled like an old leaf, being discovered a couple of 406

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  years later when the building was torn down or gut-renovated during conversion into expensive lofts. Imagined her death depicted in a cutaway diagram in USA Today, her body a little cartoon outline in blue, buried in the floor.

  Then she heard his footsteps, felt the floorboards sag as he walked across the floor— over her body. She lay still, flattening her belly into the dirt, right cheek down, listening, hiding as if he might see her. Her heart was banging so hard in her chest, she could barely hear.

  The footsteps stopped, then receded back in the direction from which they’d come.

  There was silence for a second, and then the footsteps again, slow this time, interspersed with a slow grating noise; he was dragging something across the floor.

  He reached his destination, let the object down with a heavy thud, then was still for a second.

  Then he walked back over her, sending little showers of filth onto her hair and back.

  She knew where he was walking: he was heading in the direction she’d come from. He was going to her cell. He was coming for her.

  Astonished, Farrar scanned the empty room again, the beam from his flashlight jumping around crazily.

  Then he saw it: over by the wall, a small hole through the floorboards, about a foot and a half wide and ten inches deep. She must have been hiding it with the mattress.

  The hole was small—too small for him—but there was no other way out. She had to have gone through it.

  He thought it through, considering her options and probable outcomes as if she were an SAT question. He was surprisingly calm.

  If she’d gone through the floor, she’d have to come out at some point. Where did she think she was going? He’d explored the factory pretty thoroughly: there were no other Precious Blood

  407

  holes on this floor. He was pretty sure that the ceiling of the floor below was intact, but he would check. So she had two options: come back up out of this hole, or make a new hole.

  But how had she made this one? He squatted to examine the floor. The boards were rotting in the area, and the nails had largely rusted away. Still, it couldn’t have been easy to get the planks up. Well, whatever: somehow she’d managed to get herself under the floor.

  As he stood, he realized that there was also a third possible outcome: she could die under the floor.

  The last one, of course, was an option for her, but not for him.

  How could he get her to come out?

  He remembered a biology class in fifth grade when they had walked onto the school’s back lawn and poured bleach onto the ground. Within minutes, dozens of worms were writhing on the earth, obscenely pink against the emerald grass, the glistening mucus of their surfaces foamy with ir-ritant secretions.

  He could certainly do that. He’d downloaded recipes for making vesicant gases, chemicals he could release into the crawlspace to make her skin blister and bubble, leave her eyeballs opaque and leathery. But would he be able to control the gas? There would be a significant risk to him. And while gassing her might be satisfying, he wanted her beautiful for the transformation.

  He relaxed. He had a full day to play with her: it would be like playing Whack-a-Mole at the fairground. He would use his new cast-iron spear—it was sharp and heavy enough to go right through the floorboards. And even if he did impale her, he could still use her.

  He went into the main room and picked up the pole. He held it horizontally, loosely in both hands, bouncing it a little, feeling its mass. Where to begin?

  He paused for a second, then ran across the room almost to the door of her cell and drove the bar into the floor with 408

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  all his strength, as if he were pole-vaulting. The tip of the heavy rod slammed through the wood with a splintering crunch, and plunged into the subfloor.

  There was a muffled moan of surprise and fear; he couldn’t pinpoint the origin, but the pathetic little shriek made him laugh out loud. He knew he hadn’t hit her.

  Time to go again.

  He sprinted diagonally across the large room, raised the pole to shoulder length, and brought it down in an arc to plunge through the floor.

  He straightened and stood there, leaning on the pole as he ground it in the hole, smiling happily in the candlelight.

  In the glow of Jun’s flashlight, Jenner squinted at Farrar’s painting, then peered down toward the river, a glinting black ribbon at the end of the derelict street.

  They were there. To their left was the scaffolding and tarp material in the big lot where the Cortland Iron Building had been. None of the buildings on the street were visible in the painting, but the view of Manhattan across the East River—

  up toward the Empire State Building on Thirty-fourth, now lit in Christmas red and green, the slender, hubcap-shoul-dered spire of the Chrysler Building on Forty-second, the slanted top of the Citicorp Building on Fifty-third—aligned neatly with those in the image, like a jungle treasure map in an old adventure serial.

  Jenner felt his stomach tighten. They were well away from the houses and the tenements, with their warmth and light and people; the worn streets of the waterfront warehouse district were desolate and dark. In some areas, old cobble-stones poked through the battered road surfaces. The only light was back at the intersection, where a bare bulb in a protective wire cage dangled like a hanged man from a small plywood yardarm on the front of a small storage facility; as Precious Blood

  409

  the breeze picked up, yellow light flickered weakly on the roadway, making the melting snow glisten.

  Jenner looked down at the picture.

  “Yes. I think this is the street.”

  They stood together looking toward the water. Callyer’s Slip was a dark street of ramshackle warehouses, their leaking roofs covered with corrugated metal sheeting, closed
off from passersby with roll-down steel security gates. Both sides of the street had been fenced off behind tall poles and barrier fencing, with coils of razor wire running along the top. In the middle of the block on their right was a vacant lot, a demilitarized zone between buildings that were derelict and those still clinging to life. Beyond the empty lot, opposite the remains of the Cortland Iron Building, Jenner could make out an enormous old warehouse, staggering on sinking foundations and sagging arches, its windows gaping black shadows in the rotting masonry; it seemed to reach all the way down the block to the river.

  The wind picked up again, and he saw Jun was shivering.

  “Hey, Jenner—you know, there aren’t any phones near here. Last one I saw, like, on Quay Street, about half a mile back, the phone was torn off.”

  “It’s okay—I’ve got my cell phone.”

  “Have you checked it? I’m not getting a signal down here.”

  Jenner took it out and handed it to Jun. Jun flipped it open, shut it, and reopened it. “One bar.”

  He put it to his ear. “No signal.”

  It began to rain, a fine misting rain that chilled their skin and beaded on their clothes. Jun put his hood up. Jenner turned up his collar and said, “I think it’ll be down toward the end, one of those abandoned buildings by the river. It would be safe for him—most days, this street’s probably pretty dead by four p.m. Maybe we’ll get a signal nearer the water.”

  410

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  They started toward the river, their damp footsteps ringing off the corrugated metal sheeting covering the windows of an old garage.

  Ana lay on her belly, panting, face flattened in the oily grime, feeling the pain howling in her thigh from where he’d speared her, feeling the stickiness of the blood soaking her pants.

  How long had he been hunting her? An hour? It had to be more. It felt like forever.

  He’d sliced across her right leg. She was so cold now that her wound was going numb.