by Chris Vola
One clear sequence of images kept repeating itself through the last hour’s haze—Frank’s emotionless poise as he lifted Ryan into the passenger seat, as he opened the rear driver’s-side door and pulled out Raj like a piece of luggage, dropping the corpse so that its one remaining ear rested against Arianna’s chest, arms splayed, a grotesque approximation of an embrace, the two or three seconds Frank stared down at them before jumping in the car and pressing the ignition.
The once-bright sky fading to nothing.
“Do you think it was smart to leave the bodies on the street?” Ryan asked, breaking the silence that had become unbearable. “By now the police have probably made positive IDs of their prints, figured out where Raj and Arianna lived and worked. Unless you had their identities forged, too.”
“Do you think it was smart to turn that asshole’s face into a fucking Jackson Pollock painting?” Frank snarled.
“Probably not,” Ryan mumbled, swiveling his neck to focus on the closed businesses and restaurants they passed, most of their entrances and front windows shuttered by metal rolling gates.
Frank was right. In order to survive, especially in a new century of credible forensic science, DNA testing, and ubiquitous hidden surveillance, you had to be as hands-off as possible, literally. When you had to kill, you did it quickly and discreetly, avoiding as much messiness as you could, making sure you already had an efficient disposal plan in place. If you were stupid enough to let yourself get arrested, you had two options: fight your way out and become a highly sought-after, caged-in fugitive who couldn’t hide more than twelve miles in any direction, or allow yourself to become the world’s most important science project and in doing so, jeopardize the survival of your tribe and the anonymity of however many other tribes still existed. It was why you had to take precautions with donors, keep the interactions as short and sterile as possible, deny them any plausibility in case they tried to go public. All it would take was one fallen strand of hair or one carelessly flicked piece of fingernail for someone to go from conspiracy theorist of the week to biological whistle-blower of the decade.
Leaving Raj and Arianna’s bodies on the street was a cold-blooded move, but it didn’t look that different from your run-of-the-mill gang- or drug-related assassination. The shooter’s body was different. There would be fingerprints in places where they shouldn’t be, at least one witness and probably more. Although it was nearly impossible for the small amount of fluid that flowed in his veins to bleed out because of how fast it coagulated when exposed to the air, Ryan had felt a wet discharge from the point-blank second bullet. He couldn’t be sure that all of it had soaked into his shirt and hadn’t dripped onto the sidewalk.
“You weren’t thinking and you’d been shot,” Frank said, lowering his voice. “It was a natural reaction, the fight response that’s programmed into us. I’m actually surprised you didn’t black out.”
“I’m not sure I didn’t,” Ryan replied, trying to slow the roller coaster of his mind, recall what the shooter had looked like, how he’d managed to pull himself into the car and fasten his seat belt, but all that kept coming back to him, reverberating around his head on constant repeat, was a guttural shriek that might have come from someone watching the scene on the street from an apartment window, or maybe from the shooter in the second or two before Ryan snuffed his life out.
“The last time I got hit hard like that, point-blank, it must have been about 1705 or so,” Frank said, taking a left turn onto Ocean Avenue. “I’d already been freed by my master and turned, it might have been two or three years later, I was still living in the woods like a feral beast, no clothes, jumping travelers on the King’s Highway at night when I needed to eat, trying to figure out what to do with myself, how to control my urges. One day I was resting in some undergrowth next to Newtown Creek, the boundary with Queens in an area that today would be Greenpoint, and heard a woman’s voice singing something in Dutch. Johanna. She was young, blond, must have been AB negative, smelled unbelievable. When I stood up a few feet from where she was washing her clothes in the creek, she was scared shitless, of course. But that didn’t last long. She was what you would call, um, open-minded for that time period. If I remember correctly, she thought I was a runaway, and for the next few mornings she would invite me to the kitchen of the farmhouse where she lived while everyone else was out working. It was obvious what she wanted from me, but the craziest thing was that she would cut her wrists, let me drink from her, like she knew what I was, had been with others like me, or could sense it. She also gave me clothes and shoes, washed me and cut my hair. A real sadomasochistic sweetheart.
“One day I walked into the kitchen and was greeted by a very angry farmer pointing the barrel of a loaded blunderbuss at my chest. Whatever projectiles he shot tore through my insides like fire, instantly knocked me out. When I woke up, it could have been days later, I was at the bottom of Newtown Creek, my wrists and ankles tied and attached to stone weights. There was another body next to mine. I broke free and lifted her onto the bank and when I saw her, gray skin turning green, fish-chewed lips and tongue, I lost it. Within an hour there was no one left alive on that farm. But that was a different time, you could get away with losing it once in a while. They’d blame it on Indians or witches or something.”
“Seems like you haven’t had the best of luck with donors,” Ryan said, looking at Frank after the car skidded a little too noticeably to a stop at a red light.
Frank chuckled dryly, then scowled. “True, but that’s not the point. Things could have gotten way more fucked up tonight.”
Ryan rolled his eyes. He’d had more than enough of Frank’s rambling faux-fatherly advice and was wondering if it had been a good idea to have shown his old (former, if he was being honest with himself) friend the picture of Seamus. “Congratulations on keeping yourself alive for so long,” he said, grinning sarcastically. “I can only hope to be half as wise when I’m your age.” He took his phone out of his pocket to see if he’d missed any calls or texts, but the battery was dead.
“How many of us are left, not counting Seamus?” Frank asked, rhetorically.
“You, me, Natalia, Asher, and what’s she calling herself now, Fiona? That’s it, unless someone’s been turning people and hasn’t told me.”
“You know that hasn’t happened. You would have felt it. And they would have called us to help, otherwise there would have been deaths, ugly ones; it would have been a media sensation. Do you remember what you did to that cop near the Gowanus Canal the first night Arthur and I let you out on your own? It would be almost impossible to bury something like that now. One of the main reasons why only two others have been turned since you.”
“I always just thought you guys broke the mold with me, realized it couldn’t get any better after that,” Ryan replied, the bad joke falling flat before it exited his mouth.
Frank turned onto Tennis Court, a quiet two-block stretch of stunted row houses and larger redbrick housing projects with no actual tennis courts in sight, then took a quick left onto East 18th Street and slowed down, looking for a place to park. He continued talking as if Ryan hadn’t spoken. “We’ve always kept our numbers low; makes sense from a visibility standpoint, easier to stay off the radar. But before the last century, there was way more turnover. People left the tribe because they wanted to experience a world they could only read about in less-than-accurate books and newspapers; maybe the idea of living immortally on blood and denial didn’t sound all that appealing to those who had been raised to believe that a clouds-and-haloes eternity with a white-bearded old man was possible for anyone who tricked himself into feeling like he could be forgiven and went to church. Sometimes before leaving the tribe they’d turn someone to continue the family line, so to speak, but a lot of times they wouldn’t. When I was turned there were close to thirty of us.”
At the next intersection, Frank turned right onto Albemarle Road, in the opposite direction of the ONE WAY signs that lined the empty street. A bl
ock later, Albemarle came to an abrupt end: a graffiti-covered concrete wall and a chain-link fence, rust-colored train tracks beyond. Frank put the car in park and turned off the ignition.
Ryan’s annoyance with Frank suddenly turned to anger. “What does any of this—shit I already know—have to do with me eliminating a threat, who happened to be the murderer of your favorite pets?” he asked. “What does this have to do with Seamus, with all of us now somehow exposed and being hunted down? Why did you stop here? Am I a threat now, too?”
Frank opened the driver’s-side door and motioned for Ryan to follow him out of the car.
“We’ve always been good at adapting,” he said as he walked around to the back of the BMW, pushing the button on the key fob that popped the trunk. “We’ve had to be. But it’s not just adjusting how we talk, how we dress, the names we choose, and the ways we make money. It goes deeper. We’ve become totally individualistic, self-serving. We no longer need to worry about boredom, about not seeing the world because we can turn on a screen and everything we’d wondered about is right there, in high definition or on Google Maps. The air is cleaner than it has been in two hundred years, and besides an overabundance of prescription drugs, our food is healthier than it’s ever been. Why jeopardize that by turning someone? Or worse, go on a killing spree that, by its very nature, threatens to expose what we’ve always managed to hide from the authorities with the power to end us. Which is why a coordinated assault from Manhattan is so strange to me, why it doesn’t make sense.”
Frank hoisted two large, opaque plastic containers from the trunk, placed one on the ground, and unscrewed the other’s cap. Ryan instinctively backed away from the car when he smelled the gasoline that Frank began pouring over the car’s roof, windows, doors, and tires.
“Maybe they were feeling retro and wanted to get belligerent like an actual tribe?” Ryan asked, half joking, trying to lighten the disturbing scowl that seemed to have been permanently plastered onto Frank’s face as he opened the car’s back doors, as he mechanically splashed gas around the interior before leaving the nearly empty container on the backseat. “But seriously, I thought you said that the people coming for us aren’t soldiers. They’re Internet geeks who figured out how to track us and spent a few hours at the gun range. They got lucky with Seamus and now have the balls to try to come after the rest of us. Regardless of how tactless it might have been for me to kill that guy—and he made it easy—you have to admit that now they’ll think twice before trying any more home invasions.”
Frank picked up the second container and started fiddling with the cap. “You’re partially right, we are being hunted. And they are nerds, insofar as they know how to operate on channels that aren’t readily available to the average couch surfer. After I saw you in the park I did a little looking around at some places I’d run into over the last couple years messing around on the deep web.”
“Deep web,” Ryan repeated, remembering the term from an episode of a popular crime drama that Jennifer had made him watch the previous week, forty-five minutes of child pornography, arms trafficking, drugs, hired assassins, prostitution, and terrorism all neatly wrapped up with an expectedly unbelievable twist ending. “It’s where you buy guns and Bitcoins from pimply hacktivists hiding in their moms’ basements. Right?”
Frank adjusted the bulge under his T-shirt with his free hand. “Yes, it’s where I purchase my firearms,” he said, “but it’s way more than that, five hundred times larger than anything you can find through a regular search engine. Like the entire part of the iceberg that’s underneath the water. Most of it’s innocuous, just like the regular web, but I was able to download and unlock some encrypted files on a forum that had been set up recently by someone from Manhattan, or someone working with them. The language was complicated, a combination of binary code, English, Dutch, and two or three Lenape dialects. At first I thought it was a set of guidelines, donor qualifications, maybe even a résumé template.”
“LinkedIn for prospective food-bags?”
“That’s what it looked like, but the more I read, I realized it was a sort of blueprint, a game plan for an operation. There was a timeline, a list of targets and their—our—locations, an extraction protocol.”
“So I was right,” Ryan said. “These humans want to take Abu Ghraib porn pics, then cut us up and bring us back across the East River in trophy boxes so they can … what, prove that they’re worthy of being donors, that they’re worthy of being turned?”
Frank sighed, then tossed the gas container’s cap over the fence and onto the train tracks. “This isn’t about unprovoked assaults or groupie dick-measuring contests. Sending you those pictures wasn’t a frivolous threat, it was a calculated move. They wanted you to make contact with what’s left of the tribe, get us close enough together for a much more efficient and speedy elimination. Think of it from a business perspective. For a corporation to continue to be lucrative, it needs to keep expanding.”
The scope of what was happening to them began to sink in. Ryan now understood the terror Frank had shown earlier in the apartment, hopelessly scanning the walls of his cage, nostrils choked with the scent of impending slaughter.
“I thought there had to be some kind of consent thing,” Ryan said finally, searching for some way to invalidate what Frank had just told him, to rationalize it out of existence. “Like a bond between us and the person we’re turning. One of the few things I remember Arthur telling me was that he’d felt some kind of emotional connection with me, an attraction he couldn’t shake.”
“I don’t know, because I’ve never had the desire to turn anyone,” Frank said as he poured gasoline from the second container onto the car’s backseat and kept pouring as he moved to where Ryan was standing, creating a thin liquid trail on the pavement. He tossed the now-empty container and watched it tumble until it came to a stop against the car’s back tire. “We just need to hope that Natalia hasn’t been compromised.”
Frank reached into one of his jeans pockets and took out a packet of matches. He lit several at once.
“Move.”
As they quickly strode away from the BMW, Ryan saw the flames reflected in the rear windows of the cars that were parked on both sides of the street. A tiny, singular light expanding into a massive blaze that, ironically, seemed to be getting closer to him the farther away he got from it, impossible to escape.
Something told Ryan he would have to get used to that feeling.
7
The house at 183 Argyle Road was a large three-story English Tudor with a brown-shingled, steeply pitched roof, cream-colored stucco walls accented with wood trim set in a decorative crisscross style, intersecting gables, and two rows of stained-glass casement windows embellished by ornate metal latticework. A narrow walkway led from the sidewalk to a raised flagstone porch that wrapped around the front of the house, where a gangly, vaguely Middle Eastern woman with close-cropped hair and bad skin, wearing a dark-colored tracksuit, was pacing and periodically staring at her phone. To the right of the open main entrance loomed a large screened-in porch that was partially obscured by the mature, overgrown shrubbery that dotted most of the lawn, the intentionally ignored hedges and vine-choked rosebushes contributing to the sense of opulent decay Natalia was always trying to cultivate.
In any other Brooklyn neighborhood the house and its yard’s distinctly suburban flavor would have been a curiosity, maybe even a tourist destination. But here, a few blocks south of Prospect Park in Victorian Flatbush, it was just one of the hundreds of homes that ran the gamut of early-twentieth-century architectural styles, from Queen Anne and Colonial Revival to Spanish Mission and Georgian.
Ryan had always appreciated the lush, quiet streets that had been developed as an enclave for the country-club set, conveniently separated from the summer throngs of Coney Island and the industrial commotion of places like Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Red Hook. Whenever he found himself walking or cabbing through the area, he often felt blissfully transported,
like he was able to escape some of the restrictions of his condition and spend a few moments somewhere far away like Westchester or Connecticut.
The last thing on Ryan’s mind, as he slowly approached Natalia’s house and slipped through the waist-high, wrought-iron gate that separated her yard from the sidewalk, was an impossible jaunt in the countryside. The woman in the tracksuit—black with red Adidas stripes lining the arms and legs, similar to the gear worn by the shooter, Ryan noticed—was preoccupied with texting and didn’t hear him as he closed in on her in the darkness between the street and the house. “Hey,” he said quietly, stepping onto the part of the lawn that was illuminated by the front porch’s hanging lights, two or three yards from the front steps. “I don’t mean to bother you, but you’re the first person I’ve seen in the last hour who doesn’t look like they want to steal my shit or worse. I’m not from around here and my phone died and I was wondering if you might be able to point me in the direction of the nearest Q train stop. I know it’s close by.”
Startled by his voice, her shoulders stiffened and she dropped her phone. As she bent over to pick it up, she stared warily at Ryan, trying to size him up as he smiled back at her. She stood up, breathed deeply, and brushed her straight, jet-black hair back behind her ears, and even though the shadows cast by the porch light made her dark-hued facial features seem angular and weathered, he could tell she was once cute in a tomboyish kind of way. And younger than the shooter, probably just out of high school.
“I’m sorry,” he said, lifting his arms in open-palmed apology, “I wasn’t trying to scare you. Just looking for directions.”
“It’s okay,” she said, regaining her composure. “I didn’t hear you is all. Where did you say you were trying to…”
