by Chris Vola
Death would be visiting him soon, one way or another. When it came down to it, lying to Vanessa would be no less dangerous to him than telling her the truth, and possibly much worse. If rescuing him hadn’t been part of a larger strategy, it meant that a part of her still felt something for him, or at least she had enough pity—or possibly curiosity—to elevate him above the dozens of souls she’d ostensibly turned into meat without a second thought.
So he told her almost everything. His life in Brooklyn before he was turned, after, the years of gorging with Frank and Natalia and the rest of the tribe, the identity and apartment changes, the years of unbroken solitude, meeting Jennifer and loving her in spite of himself, in spite of what they never would become, finding Nicki on Craigslist and taking her blood at Starbucks, the shitstorm that came next, digging up Arthur’s box in the cemetery, finding out about Frank’s deception, hiding the statue (minus its location), most of what had happened once he’d crossed over into Manhattan, up to what Derrick had told him before Vanessa had interrupted them.
As he talked, he watched Vanessa to gauge her reaction. Her lips didn’t twitch or purse and her brow remained smooth, but Ryan now understood that her seemingly constant lack of emotion was less a product of her occupational training and more to do with the surgeries she’d undergone. Her eyes told a different story. They seemed to shine, then to darken, the pupils expanding, not quite in fear, but with the wariness of someone who discovers that the reality they’ve taken for granted has gone badly askew. A discomfort that was impossible to hide, or to fake.
“We need to get back to my apartment,” she said after he finished speaking, with a palpable sense of urgency in her voice. “We shouldn’t be out here.” She stood up and motioned for Ryan to follow her to the front of the restaurant, scanning the room that suddenly seemed to have gotten larger and gone silent, a tomblike sea of side-staring faces that now seemed anything but innocuous.
Ryan gripped the handle of the knife that he was carrying in his pocket. Vanessa didn’t stop him.
* * *
“This will be a lot easier for you if you admit to yourself that Jennifer and Seamus are dead,” Vanessa said, scanning the block as they crossed an intersection.
They were walking east at a brisk pace on Bleecker Street past a gaggle of dive bars that, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon, had already begun to reverberate with the bleating of buttoned-down yuppies and unabashedly crusty degenerates. “You should probably try to come to terms with that now,” she continued.
“You’re probably right,” Ryan replied, spitting a gob of bright red blood onto the trash-soaked sidewalk. “I think I’ve known it since I saw the picture of her. The whole thing was probably always hopeless.”
He could feel Vanessa’s glare without looking over at her. The indecision he’d seen earlier in her eyes had been replaced by a harsh pragmatism, a distrust of weakness that he presumed was her standard mode of operation.
“There’s no ‘probably,’” she said as they turned onto Sullivan Street. “The basement you walked into was part of a processing plant, the largest on the east side.”
“Processing for what?”
“Food. The harvests come in every couple weeks or so. They’re separated by age, gender, health, blood type. I’m not exactly sure how the actual process works now, but it used to be that once the bodies were completely milked, the meals were pasteurized, cleared of any impurities, and packaged for distribution to the blood banks the tribe operates across the island. Very occasionally one of the selected—maybe one in five thousand—had blood that was so good they would be kept alive and healthy in a residential wing of the facility. A premium option for the Committee and other higher-ups until it died or their palates grew sick of it.”
Jennifer’s blood was O positive, nothing special. To Ryan, the type had always tasted like how he imagined eating an avocado would be: filling and nutritious, but lacking in flavor and texturally disgusting. It was one of the main reasons that he had thought a real relationship with her might be possible. The liquid flowing within her would never stir the urges that lurked just beneath the surface when he caught a whiff of B negative.
Now it appeared that her blood’s commonness had been her death sentence. But appeared was wrong, he told himself, just like probably. He needed to banish the words from his thoughts. She was gone, plain and simple.
It was time to accept it.
“You’re right,” he said as they stopped in front of Vanessa’s building, a nineteenth-century brick row house painted a light shade of violet with cream accents. “It’s over.”
He followed her down a short flight of stairs to a garden-level entrance and into the building’s small, foyerlike lobby, where she turned back and stared at Ryan before entering the idling elevator. “It’s not over,” she said, a sense of urgency creeping into her voice that was little more than a whisper, even though they were on her home turf. “Not for me at least. I don’t have answers for most of what you told me. The humans that attacked you and your tribe, the pictures, the statues, the girl who said she was working for us who you followed from the subway, the man you said she was with—none of it is like any kind of operation I’ve ever been a part of, like any I’ve heard about. I know you aren’t lying. The mist your friend—what was her name, Natalia?—was sprayed with seems like it was a concentrated version of the substance I used to take out Derrick Rhodes. The lab where it’s produced is part of a university that was founded by the grandson of two of the men on the Committee.”
“You seem pretty well in the loop,” Ryan said, wondering if she hadn’t been playing coy with him the entire time just to verify his value. Maybe a few of her ruling-class friends would be waiting for him when they got out of the elevator he’d stepped into. “And very loyal to your superiors. What good did it do you to take me from the processing facility? That can’t have made them too happy. Sentimentality or curiosity isn’t an excuse, if things are as ruthless here as you’re making them seem.”
The elevator shot up to the top floor of the building. The doors opened and the entire length of the hallway that led to Vanessa’s apartment was made visible. “Things are more complicated than I’ve been making it seem,” she said, seemingly as relieved as Ryan that there was no one there to greet them.
He snorted in sarcastic amusement. “Try me,” he said.
“The processing facility isn’t operated by the Committee,” she said. “At least not anymore. There’s been a split in the leadership. The oldest member left a few months ago, fortified his uptown holdings, and took a few of our youngest people with him to the Upper East Side and Harlem, where they’ve stayed. There hasn’t been any violence. As far as everyone knew, the separation was amicable. But some of the things you’ve told me have made me think about what I’ve been asked to do in the last few months, tasks I’ve had, targets I’ve eliminated. There’s something happening, something that’s been set in motion, but I don’t know where it’s heading, or why.”
“I just want to find the people who killed my girlfriend before I die,” Ryan said, repeating a mantra that was quickly becoming ingrained in his skull, the only thing that mattered. He couldn’t care less about vague Manhattan politics.
“I stopped myself from turning you into liquid sludge and then saved you from becoming someone’s dinner because I was curious,” Vanessa replied, ignoring him. “Curious about why you’d left Brooklyn, why you were with Derrick Rhodes. I knew Derrick was important, it was why the Committee was nervous enough to need me to kill him. You are still a part of this, whether you like it or not. We need to find out how and why.”
“What the fuck is this?” Ryan shouted, exasperated. “You sound exactly like Derrick. What difference do the motives for an elaborate plot make at this point? An elaborate plot we know nothing about? The only thing I want to know is who did this to me.”
“Because how and why have a tendency of leading to who,” Vanessa said, rummaging throu
gh her bag. “I’m going out, going to talk to some contacts who might have a better idea of the Committee’s intentions.”
“Do you trust them?”
“No, that’s why I’m not using a phone. Face-to-face I can deal with. I can improvise if shit goes south. You should stay here, go through Derrick’s packet, see what he had that he thought was worth more than his life. Oh, and I found this when you were passed out.”
She handed him a rolled-up, crumbling piece of parchment, the same color as the papers from Arthur Harker that Natalia had preserved.
“It must have fallen out of the knife’s handle when you were taken down in the basement,” Vanessa said. “I found it lying on the ground next to your backpack.”
Ryan reached in his pocket and felt the butt end of the knife. There did seem to be some kind of cap fused into the bone, so tightly wedged into the handle—and made of the same substance—that it was no surprise he hadn’t noticed it before.
“Everything okay?”
Karl was standing in the open doorway to Vanessa’s apartment, cradling an iPad, his jeans and Guns N’ Roses T-shirt as rumpled as the mop of hair that was threatening to cover his bloodshot eyes.
“We’re good,” Vanessa said, unsurprised by his presence. “We’re going for a ride. He needs to rest.” She turned and looked at Ryan. “You going to be all right? You look way more tired than you did earlier.”
“I’m fine,” he said, pushing past Karl and into the apartment.
“We’ll be back in a couple hours,” Vanessa said, pausing for a moment before shutting the door.
Ryan listened to their footsteps in the hallway until they were gone. Then he ran to the kitchen and vomited into the sink.
25
Ryan took a fourth pull from the bottle of Old Grand-Dad 114-proof he’d found in a cabinet while looking for paper towels to clean up the mess he’d made.
Feeling himself relax a little as the liquor shot through his system, he cleared his throat and sat down at the dining table to start going through the pages Derrick had given him.
The silence in the room was interrupted by an extended period of sobbing and thrashing from Vanessa’s newborn, its noises muffled by the concrete-and-titanium wall that separated the containment chamber from the rest of the apartment. Ryan looked at the chamber’s door and visualized for a moment what would happen to him if it was flung open, and then he shuddered and tried to erase the images from his mind. He looked down and began to read.
The first thing that struck him was the sheer amount of data that Derrick had been able to obtain. There were fragments of financial reports, bank statements, screenshots from corporate websites, memos with Homeland Security and private contractor letterheads, e-mails, text messages, portraits of men and women from the eighteenth and nineteenth century juxtaposed with photographs of what appeared to be the same people walking the streets, getting into cars, and dining out in present-day New York. There were copies of documents handwritten in an unintelligible style similar to Arthur’s; crude drawings of birds, deer, bears, and geometric patterns; and several pages of what looked like scientific and medical data that were beyond anything Ryan had ever tried to comprehend.
The only parts that were familiar to him were several images of jaguar figurines, identical to the one he’d dug up—the same hollowed eyes, mottled skin, and flared nostrils, the bared fangs—their pictures originally appearing in museum brochures, auction catalogs, and news stories that spanned decades. There were at least six different ones, scattered across the country until they’d been meticulously collected.
After briefly skimming through everything once and then starting over in earnest to try to make sense of the massive information junkyard staring up at him, Ryan noticed that the red-ink paragraphs filling the margins of most of the pages were more than just Derrick’s random scribblings. They seemed to function as a sort of layman’s guide, highlighting and explaining certain passages in a logical sequence, how they related to a larger narrative.
It seemed like the Manhattan tribe’s origins were similar to those of its Brooklyn counterpart. The shamans and elders saw the writing on the wall and began moving their people west, but not before one of them turned a wealthy trapper and shipbuilder named Adriaen. He was the cousin of Peter Minnewit, the eventual governor of New Netherland who—possibly erroneously—was said to have purchased Manhattan for twenty-four dollars’ worth of shells. What was certain was that the Minnewit (later Minuit) family flourished in their new home, as did the families of several other Dutch merchants and tradesmen. Once a patriarch had accumulated enough wealth and had sunk his claws deeply enough into the power structure of the era, he—or more commonly, one of his children—would be turned, ensuring a continuity of behind-the-scenes influence that endured through the Dutch and British colonial periods and the gilded age of brutal robber barons and the political pawns who served them, a kind of elite freemasonry for immortals, the only real empire in the Empire State.
As with any group whose net worth was greater than the gross domestic product of most countries, there was internal tension. At first it was arguments about fur quotas and shipping routes, disagreements over which sides to covertly support in various wars of independence, and finally, squabbles over northern real estate in the ever-expanding city that led to outright violence and the deaths of several of the tribe’s oldest members—including Adriaen Minuit—during the 1863 draft riots. The survivors quickly made peace and formed the Committee, formalizing a system of government that appeared to still be in effect in the present day.
Derrick had compiled detailed profiles for each sitting member of the Committee, complete with information about their birthplaces, their education and upbringings, a timeline of their known addresses and professional lives, and speculation as to their rankings within the organizational hierarchy. These were the heaviest of hitters, with names like Van Pelt, Astor, Rockefeller, Gould, and Mellon, the owners of railroads, oil wells, arms factories, and public utilities, whose interests were synonymous with industrial growth that had raised America from its agricultural infancy.
At some point in the late 1800s, those interests had at least partially aligned and they had begun turning women, immigrants, and members of lower social classes, realizing that in order to maintain control of their growing and changing island kingdom, they need to expand their numbers, to infiltrate the ignorant masses from the bottom up, with faces that could blend in but also inspire an appropriate amount of terror if necessary. If any of the newly initiated refused to fulfill the roles for which they’d been chosen, there were others to eliminate them and take their places.
As the Manhattan tribe’s membership increased and diversified, so did its business interests. During the first decades of the twentieth century, they formed mutually beneficial relationships with the police department, state senators, the precursors to the Italian and Jewish mobs, roughneck Irish gangsters, black heroin kingpins in Harlem, and bootleggers of any race and creed. When monopolies went out of fashion, the Committee’s oligarchs expertly dispersed their legitimately earned wealth through shell corporations, trusts, offshore accounts, stock offerings, and charitable gifts to organizations they’d founded themselves. While their descendants publicly distanced themselves from the aggressive capitalism that had made their family names famous, becoming politicians or fading into the periphery as philanthropists, the Committee still pulled the strings that mattered, still kept a death grip on what they’d built.
That grip was tightened by an evolving public relations machine run by hired spin doctors and tech-savvy malcontents. These men and women were experts at maintaining their employers’ anonymity, at manipulating the media with perfectly crafted lies and distortions, at feeding the message-board conspiracy theorists with enough seemingly plausible garbage to keep them looking in all the wrong places, at making anyone who’d stumbled onto something potentially threatening to the tribe look like such an unstable psychopath that any infor
mation they had wouldn’t seem credible enough for the Weekly World News. The tribe was as safe as it had ever been.
It seemed that for the last thirty years or so, the real focus of the Committee members had been their own biology. There was evidence of extensive DNA and blood testing, as well as a wide variety of unnerving experiments on living tribe members and their newborns. These included amputations, immersions in liquid nitrogen and fire, exposure to substances that had previously been used as biological weapons and fertilizer, and forced removals from the island to test the limits of the virus that was responsible for creating the Ànkëlëk-ila.
The results of the experiments had been discussed extensively in e-mails and phone calls with high-ranking contacts in the military and the intelligence community, which made sense. If the virus could somehow be transported, if it could be dissected and its individual properties utilized for healing or combat, if American soldiers could somehow become dead warriors, it would represent the greatest technological advance—in certain government officials’ eyes—since Hiroshima.
But any attempts to extract the virus, to replicate it or to transport it, had failed. The only real advance of any kind had come with the accidental discovery of DXT, the chemical that had been sprayed on Natalia and used to melt Derrick, a highly volatile and corrosive substance that was effective in both liquid and gas form, and was currently being studied in at least two Air Force bases in the Southwest. It was clearly the Committee’s preferred method for executing would-be snitches and the crux of their scientific endeavors. Until they rediscovered the statues.
By Derrick’s exhaustive standards, the information he had about them was fuzzy at best. They were made of basalt, Central American in origin, from a culture that predated the Mayans, possibly Olmec or Zapotec. Figuring out their exact age had been impossible because the substance with which they’d been painted resisted carbon dating. At some point in the last several thousand years, they had traveled from the place of their creation into what was now the United States and were scattered, reemerging much later in the possession of tribes in the Northeast and as far west as the Dakotas.
