by Chris Vola
Ryan picked up the bra and threw it at her. He extracted the tennis shoes from the clothes that smelled of a gag-inducing combination of sweat, spilled booze, and vomit. He walked across the room to an open closet and pulled out a pair of jeans and a light blue T-shirt that looked, surprisingly, like they’d fit him reasonably well. Probably leftovers from when James’s metabolism could make up for his total lack of control. He put the clothes on and lifted his sunglasses, baseball cap, and backpack from the middle of the floor where they had been lying.
He glanced into the mirror that hung above the dresser. His skin was pale and splotchy, his eyes were ringed by black circles, and his lips were rough and cracking. The stubble that had covered his cheeks and neck had grown into an unkempt rat’s nest of a beard. He looked away, bracing himself as a rush of nausea tore through his gut.
“Tell James that I thank him for his hospitality,” he said after recovering enough. He headed for the room’s partially open entryway.
“Tell Jennifer I say hi,” the girl called out, coyly. Her laughter was cut short as Ryan slammed the door behind him.
19
Ryan washed down the last bite of the greasy, life-giving slice with the Mountain Dew he’d bought with it at a pizza place on Columbus Avenue, and walked into Morningside Park at its southwest entrance on 110th Street.
Located just to the north of the much larger Central Park, Morningside stretched for fifteen heavily wooded blocks along the ridge that separated Columbia University and the neighborhood surrounding it with low-lying West Harlem. As Ryan walked down several sets of wide, multi-tiered stone stairs bordered by dome-capped stone pillars, he felt a pang of anxiety. Derrick hadn’t given him an exact place in the park to meet and he was already running twenty minutes late. At the bottom of the stairs the paved walkway split in two. To the right, it meandered downhill and eventually curved along a basketball court and a pair of softball fields where the only signs of movement came from a couple of kids kicking a soccer ball and a shirtless man sitting in one of the fenced-in dugouts next to a shopping cart filled with empty bottles and aluminum cans, rubbing his belly and howling the lyrics to Aretha Franklin’s “Baby I Love You.” To the right the path took an uphill slant, running parallel with the ridgeline, bending slightly for a hundred yards or so until it came to an ascending set of stairs that were partially obscured by trees.
After a few seconds of nervous deliberation, Ryan decided to head toward the stairs. From a higher vantage point, it might be easier to catch a glimpse of Derrick, if he wasn’t concealing himself in the denser foliage.
Ryan didn’t need to search for very long. As he came around the bend just before the stairs, he almost bumped into the man he was looking for, sitting out in the open on the rock ledge that lined the path, rapidly smoking, his eyes darting in sporadic bursts. His pack was resting at his feet. He glanced at Ryan and seemed startled, as if he wasn’t expecting to meet anyone. He turned away and reached for the pack of Marlboros in his lap, taking one out and lighting it with the remnants of the one he’d been smoking. He flicked the butt onto the pavement and watched it simmer until it went out.
“I get the whole hiding-in-plain-sight thing,” Ryan said as he sat next to Derrick on the ledge, “but don’t you think that puffing on those in a park and blatantly littering might not be the smartest course of action?”
Derrick kept staring into space, as if Ryan didn’t exist. He was sweating, trembling slightly. Flakes of white body paint were peeling off his arms. His clothes were stained with an entire spectrum of crud. The façade he had created was literally crumbling in real time. Ryan wondered what had brought about the abrupt change in demeanor, but he needed to play it cool and not say anything that would freak Derrick out more than he clearly already was.
But as they sat in silence, Derrick smoking and pretending the world didn’t exist around him, Ryan couldn’t take it anymore. “Did you find anything from the phone?” he asked, impatiently.
“You didn’t tell me about the pictures,” Derrick said in a low, monotone voice that seemed on the verge of cracking.
“What pictures?”
“The ones you deleted. The girl and the guy, tied up and blindfolded. You should have told me.”
Ryan tried to maintain his composure. It was too late to try to deny anything. “I didn’t think they would make a difference,” he said, “as far as what I needed you to do for me.”
Derrick looked at Ryan for the first time since the two of them had been sitting next to each other. His lips curled into an awkward, disturbing smile. “No,” he said, “you didn’t think. Neither did I. And now it’s over. For me at least. You may come out of this slightly less fucked if you run away now.”
“What’s over? What are you—”
“I had this great idea,” Derrick cut him off, reaching into the top section of his pack with his cigarette-free hand. “I was going to peel back the layers of what was really going on. I was going to give the conspiracy theorists a hard-on like they’d never felt before and wake everyone else up from a five-thousand-year sleep. If I sent everything into chaos and started a revolution, if no one cared, or if something in between happened, that would be fine. I’d be okay with any outcome because at least I wouldn’t have sat by and watched things continue in the direction they’d been going. I wouldn’t be complicit.”
He pulled out a Ziploc bag from his pack. It contained an index card with something scribbled on it, a stapled packet of standard-size papers folded in half, a small flash drive, and Ryan’s phone.
“And at first it was great,” Derrick continued. “The first stuff I leaked, the results were better than I expected. Shit was beginning to hit the fan at the correct velocity. But that was never the end goal. I wanted to really blow people’s minds. I wanted to break Roswell and JFK, the stuff everyone talks about and already accepts to a certain extent, but I also wanted to expose the tribes, revealing not just a previously unknown subspecies, but also their political ties, the military contacts.”
“Political ties? Military contacts? Where did you find that information? How do you know it’s not just message-board bullshit?”
“That’s not important right now. It’s all in here,” he said, handing the Ziploc bag to Ryan, “though you probably won’t have time to read it. What was important for me was that if I wanted to blow the lid on the tribes, I needed to leave the country. If Homeland Security truly knew the extent of the information I had, if I tried to send that information through a U.S. server, I’d be killed in minutes. The data wouldn’t get out there. Everything would be lost.”
He paused, lit another cigarette.
“To get out of the country I needed money. Money that I’d left in the possession of our good friend James Van Doren a few months before I went off the grid. I’d researched him extensively before we made contact. A misogynist and an addict, sure, but he was unfailingly loyal to his clients, exceptionally discreet. And he seemed like the kind of guy who would get off on holding the bankroll of the most famous criminal in the world. Something he could brag about to his drug buddies when they’d be too fucked up to remember it.”
Ryan nodded. That much was true. A nearly forgotten image from the previous night returned to him—pounding three tequila body shots in quick succession off one of the lesbians’ sweaty, salt-crusted bellies—and he tried not to gag.
“Normally I would have had him send me the funds electronically through a series of offshore transfers. He’d done it for me plenty of times before. But the people who were going to provide my transportation this time are the kind of Luddites who only accept cash. That’s why I had to come to New York. There had to be a physical paper exchange with James or one of his employees. Then I could hike north, follow the railroad tracks, disappear into the woods upstate and ultimately out of the country, eventually to Iceland where I’d made arrangements to stay.
“When I got here and contacted James, he said that I was being paranoid for refusing to
come in and discuss things in his office. I’d managed to avoid getting caught when I’d leaked things in the past. Why would this time be any different? He gave me some bullshit about always having to make sure he was acting in his clients’ best interests, said he would give me the cash only if I could prove to him that what I had was legitimately groundbreaking.”
It made sense, Ryan said to himself. James and an investment were not easily parted. Especially one with a less-than-reputable beneficiary.
Derrick sighed. “I told him that I had proof that vampires were real. I put two or three of the pages from the packet I gave you in his mailbox. Just a taste. The next time we talked he was surprised, but not in the way I’d thought he would be. He told me he was impressed at what I’d been able to find, that he had no idea that the intelligence community had been monitoring the tribes, or that tribal organizations even existed, but he did know someone from Brooklyn who he used to give his blood to, someone who also happened to be his company’s oldest private client. He said you had recently given up your immortality and needed to trace the location of a phone call. He asked if I could help. If I did, he said he’d give me an extra five percent on top of what I was already owed. I could have said no. I could have walked away. I’m carrying enough cash on me to make it to Canada and probably could have bartered my way off the continent. I should have smelled the shadiness. But I was curious. I wanted to meet you. And now I’m fucked because of it.”
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said, his still-hungover brain doing somersaults. “What do the pictures on my phone have to do with you? How would Manhattan know anything about you, unless James…”
“The calls and the pictures were sent by the same number,” Derrick said. “They were sent from the same residential building in the Upper East Side. East 80th Street. The address is written on a note card in the bag. I couldn’t find anything remarkable about the building, but the cell phone number was registered to Van Doren and Associates.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” Derrick said, turning to look at Ryan for the first time, “James is somehow connected to the Manhattan tribe. He set us both up. He took the pictures, or had someone close to him do it. Based on the volume and the substance of the texts between you and ‘Jennifer,’ I’m assuming that there was something going on with you and the woman in the picture. But maybe it was the man, or maybe both of them. I’m not judging. Either way, it was enough for you to leave Brooklyn and your old life behind for some long-shot rescue, even though part of you knew, still knows, that both of them are long dead. Maybe it was out of guilt, maybe love, maybe a little of both. Does that sound accurate?”
It was Ryan’s turn to stare dead-eyed into the space in front of them. He felt worse than sick. Gutted.
“James knew you would get in touch with him. He dangled you in front of me and I took the bait. He might have had one of his employees, or someone from the Manhattan tribe, follow you into Central Park yesterday, even though at the time I didn’t detect anything. We shook hands. Maybe that would have been enough to glean my scent from you. Regardless, they know where I am, or have a very good idea. Did you make direct contact with anyone after you left the park last night?”
“There was a party at James’s apartment.”
Derrick nodded, as if Ryan’s statement had confirmed something that he’d already suspected. “It’s too late to run,” he said softly. There was a long silence while he fished in his pocket for another cigarette. “Or I could be wrong about all of this. About you. Maybe you’re just here to kill me. In which case, I wish you wouldn’t have let me waste so much time babbling on about things.”
“I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to kill James. Then I’m going to kill everyone else.”
“Which makes perfect sense. Revenge would be an appropriate response, regardless of the likelihood of you actually being able to pull it off. What doesn’t make sense is why you’re still alive if they were just using you to get to me. Unless you’re Arthur Harker, or his heir.”
Ryan flinched noticeably at the name. He turned and Derrick was studying him intently. The hacktivist looked curious but oddly relaxed, as calm as Ryan had ever seen him, in videos or in person. Like he’d gone through all the stages of grieving and finally come to terms with an inescapable reality.
“What if I were?” Ryan asked.
Derrick flashed a sad half smile. “Then we’d have to reevaluate who the bait is in this situation. What’s certain is that you would clearly be the bigger catch. The information that I’ve obtained is nothing compared to what you allegedly have.”
“And what is that?”
“The documents are vague about it, like whoever wrote them wasn’t exactly sure. Whatever it is, it’s beyond ancient. Pre-Egyptian. Some kind of artifact that might also be an energy source. The Manhattan tribe seems to want it primarily for experimentation on their own people, to see how it reacts when it’s combined with their DNA. To what end, I’m not sure. Other organizations, contractors, institutions, and private individuals—both obscure and well known—are also very interested. That’s all I know. Any of this ring a bell?”
Ryan debated for a moment about what he would say. The only thought that kept running through his mind was that both of them were already fucked beyond hope.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Derrick said, echoing Ryan’s inner monologue. “You need to leave. Get out of the city. Upload the flash drive. Do it now, while I’m giving you a window.”
While Derrick was talking, a tall, thin woman wearing sunglasses, black tights, and a pink tank top sprinted by them on the path, her long blond ponytail flapping in time with her steps. Ryan watched her without much consideration as she leapt effortlessly up the stairs, two at once. She paused when she reached the top, inhaled quickly a few times, turned around, and headed back down. At the bottom she slowed to a trot, then a walk, hands on her hips, breathing hard.
Derrick finished speaking and lit another cigarette, the same terrifying look of resolute calmness washing over his face. As Ryan slung his backpack over his shoulders, getting ready to bolt as far away as possible from the park to figure out how he would confront James and then retrieve the statue from the Williamsburg Bridge, the jogger pulled up even with them on the path, seeming to notice them for the first time.
She stared for a moment as if she was trying to decide something, pursed her thin lips together, and crinkled her pinched nose, which looked like it had had some major work done on it. She reached into the fanny pack that was strapped around her waist and took out what looked like a loose cigarillo.
“Probably defeats the whole purpose of everything I’ve done today,” she said as she approached the rock wall, smiling at Derrick, making the do-you-have-a-light gesture. “But when you’ve got a craving, there’s not much you can do, am I right?”
Her voice was cheerful, a chirpy East Coast non-accent, outwardly indistinguishable from the average New York twentysomething. But there was something about it that Ryan found soothing, like a good memory from a simpler time.
Derrick fumbled in his pockets for a lighter, then stopped abruptly. He removed his hands from his pants and placed them on the rock wall on either side of him, bracing himself against the tremors that had started to surge through him, stronger than before. The cigarette he’d been smoking fell from his lips and landed on his backpack, burning a hole into the fabric. His eyes widened as the still-smiling woman placed her cigarillo between her lips.
“It’s over?” he muttered in a child’s frightened whisper.
“It’s over,” she repeated between clenched teeth.
She moved closer to Derrick until she was standing directly over him. Ryan noticed that she wasn’t sweating. She had no body odor and her skin was taut, so devoid of moisture that it looked like she didn’t have pores. The object in her mouth wasn’t any kind of smoking apparatus Ryan had seen. It looked like a beige plastic tube with a hollowed-out tip.
; Ryan suddenly realized that Derrick hadn’t been chain-smoking because he’d been nervous. The smoke that he inhaled would circulate through his lungs, accumulating microscopic particles of blood and mucus that would be expelled into the air and travel intact, far enough so that any Ànkëlëk-ila in the area who had been familiarized with his scent would know exactly where to find him.
Derrick was done hiding. He was giving himself up, drawing the Manhattan tribe to him like a homing beacon. In doing so, he had given Ryan a brief window to escape.
A window that was now closed.
In one swift motion, Ryan pulled Arthur’s knife out from under his shirt and lunged at the woman. The blade—still sharp after however many centuries—slashed into her shoulder, deep beneath the skin. She howled in pain and recoiled, taken by surprise. But in the moment before Ryan could raise the knife a second time she leapt at him, lightning-quick, and delivered a devastating blow to his solar plexus that dislodged the weapon from his grip and sent him crumpling to the ground, gasping for air, coughing up bloody phlegm.
As he struggled to lift himself off the pavement, Ryan watched helplessly as the woman bent over Derrick, who hadn’t tried to flee and who had closed his eyes and tilted his chin skyward, no longer shaking. She adjusted the tube that was still sticking out of her mouth and blew into it, expelling a fine mist that settled on Derrick’s face and clothes. Whatever chemicals it contained reacted almost immediately to the areas it had come in contact with, causing Derrick’s flesh to bubble, then peel, then disintegrate into a pink liquid sludge. Ryan saw yellow globules of fat and cartilage where Derrick’s jawline should have been, then slabs of charred muscle, and finally shards of bone that collapsed and shrank until there was nothing left.
Ryan tried to shimmy the backpack off his shoulders so he could pull out the gun. But before he could make any real progress the woman was on top of him, pinning him to the ground, crushing his throat with her elbow. In her other hand she held Arthur’s knife, still stained with her blood.
