by Chris Vola
Vanessa began folding up the blueprints, as if she’d suddenly become nervous and her hands needed something to do. “After I’d been turned,” she said, “and after I killed my maker, when I became a real part of the tribe, it was obviously a culture shock. It was hard enough trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I’d become something out of a comic book or a horror movie, without having to try to figure out what I was going to do, what my next step would be. The Committee made it easier, made me feel like I was a part of something special and sacred, the whole ‘gift’ thing. For the first time in my life, someone had given me a direction, a purpose. Of course I was going to do what they told me, undergo the training. I thought that was just the way it was, how the world I’d stumbled into had always operated. I wasn’t going to ask questions.”
“You had no frame of reference,” Ryan said. “I probably would have done the same thing.”
“When I became a maker and ran into you, that frame of reference shifted. The idea that you could survive and thrive as a blood-eater on your own, without the tribe looking after you and directing your daily life, it’s mind-blowing. I started thinking back to some of the assignments I’d done, the lives I’d ended, things that I’d seen or heard that had seemed inconsequential at the time. Why all of us younger members of the tribe, out of nowhere, had been given humans to turn. I want answers, but I’m afraid of what will happen if I ask, if they think I’m no longer a happy drone. I don’t want that for Jennifer. I want her to be able to make her own decisions. Also, I need to figure out what I’m going to do with this.”
She picked up a clear plastic baggie that Ryan hadn’t noticed and slid it across the table in his direction. Inside was a tiny, circular white capsule, smaller than an aspirin.
“What is it?” Ryan asked. He picked up the baggie and examined the pill closely. Its surface was smooth, like a candy shell, with no discernible markings.
“It’s a tracking implant. You swallow it and it binds to your stomach lining instantly, at least that’s what Conrad told me. He said that the Committee voted on a new protocol. All newborns have to swallow the implants, for safety purposes. So they can be easily located during the transition period. So they aren’t a danger to—what did he say?—our species’ anonymity. Maybe it’s because of the whole Derrick Rhodes thing. Maybe it’s something they’ve been discussing for a while. But if the Committee was so scared about disclosure, why wouldn’t they give implants to all of us? Do they think that because they’ve beaten their dogma into our heads for so long, those of us who have been around a while are no longer threats? I don’t like any of what’s been going on. It smells like bullshit.”
“You’re right. It is bullshit,” Ryan said.
He opened the baggie, lifted it to his mouth, shook out the implant, and swallowed. He washed it down with the rest of the water from the glass that Vanessa had given him.
She stared at him in silence for several moments, as if she were trying to figure out how to put together a puzzle where none of the pieces fit. “What the fuck did you just do?” she finally whispered. She was trembling, not out of anger, Ryan realized, but pure, uncontainable fear.
“I gave you another option,” he said. “When we leave to go uptown, it’ll look like you took her with you. When you get back, you can tell Van Pelt or whoever that you made a mistake, that you thought she was ready to fight, however you want to spin it. In reality, you’ll be able to let her go off the radar. She’ll be free to make her own decisions, whether she wants to stay or start again somewhere else as a human. It’ll be her choice, not yours or the Committee’s.”
“What happens when the mission’s over and you come back with us? How are we going to explain that? You going to throw on a wig and makeup? You’re a decent-looking guy, Ryan, but somehow I doubt you’d be able to pull it off.”
“I’m not planning on coming back.”
Vanessa’s demeanor immediately shifted to that of a senior officer about to berate a disorderly grunt. “The last thing I need is some suicidal cowboy to go in guns blazing and get the rest of us killed in the process,” she snarled. “Whatever doubts I might be having about the leadership, the team is made up of other soldiers, people who are just following orders. I’m not going to sacrifice them because of your insane death wish.”
“I’m going to do the job I’ve been assigned to do,” Ryan replied, calmly. “I’m not going to jeopardize anyone else. Van Pelt may be lying to you about a lot of things, but you know he’s right that my role will make it easier for the rest of the team, lower the risk of any casualties.”
Vanessa nodded, grudgingly. “It’s true, as much as I hate to say it. Do what you have to do, just don’t fuck us over.” She motioned contemptuously in the direction of the containment chamber. “Have fun explaining that to her. Karl’s picking us up in three hours.”
“Thank you,” Ryan said, already heading back across the living room. He took a deep breath and walked into the containment chamber where Jennifer was still sitting on the floor, hugging herself.
It was time to say good-bye.
29
The so-called munitions warehouse wasn’t as impressive as Ryan had expected. Although, if he was being honest with himself, those expectations were based solely on sixty years of half-watched science fiction and spy thrillers, the police procedural dramas that Jennifer had forced him to sit through, and the formfitting body armor that Vanessa had given him before they’d left her apartment: a moisture-wicking, Kevlar-reinforced compression suit that he was currently wearing under a black long-sleeve T-shirt and a pair of black track pants.
Ryan and Vanessa entered the side door of an abandoned, graffiti-covered gas station on East 2nd Street after Vanessa simply opened it with a metal key. There were no body scans and no chain-smoking doormen to impede their progress, just a vacant, dingy lobby. They walked through a set of unlocked double doors and into a large gutted room that had once been an automotive service garage. Two oil-smeared car lifts lined one wall, sharing floor space with dozens of cardboard boxes, rusted fuel drums, and random pieces of severed machinery.
Near the center of the room, four male figures sat at a table under an epileptic halogen ceiling lamp, similarly dressed in black athletic gear, the chunky outlines of their body armor suits clearly visible underneath. There was Rodney, Ryan’s would-be maker; an even larger superjock with a bald head and a goatee; an identically sized—and equally follicularly challenged—Nordic monster; and a smaller, though no less fit Hispanic guy whose neck and hands were completely covered in floral tattoos. If this was a representative selection of the Manhattan tribe’s muscle, Ryan thought, they could have done much worse.
All four of them had been silently fiddling with phones or tablets when Vanessa entered the room. As she and Ryan made their way toward the table, they put down their devices and noticeably stiffened their postures, like well-trained soldiers who had just been alerted to the presence of their commanding officer. Rodney stood up, nodded at Vanessa, and scowled at Ryan before heading toward a walled-off section on the opposite side of the garage that looked like it had once been an office.
“Troy, Gunter, Ramon,” Vanessa said as Ryan shook hands with each of them and sat in an unoccupied chair. “Veterans of Normandy, Gettysburg, and the Mekong Delta, respectively, which they will tell you all about in excruciating detail if you spend more than five minutes hanging out with them.”
“So you’re the one who broke Rodney’s heart,” Troy said, grinning at Ryan. “He really was looking forward to being a father. But I think I speak for all of us, and—unfortunately—as his roommate, when I say that it would have been a major disaster. Unless you’re really, like creepily, into Jason Statham movies and actually believe that you’re a real-life version of the Transporter. Then you might want to reconsider.”
“Or Justin Bieber,” Ramon chimed in. “Remember when we were doing recon on that development near the Port Authority and he started lip-syncing to that
shitty-ass song on the radio, how did it go, ‘As long as you touch me,’ or something?”
“‘As long as you love me,’” Gunter corrected, “but I think for Rod the difference is insignificant.” He broke into a belly-shaking laugh. The others joined in.
“You guys are fucking dicks,” Rodney said from across the room, pushing what looked like a large laundry cart covered by a blue plastic tarp. He parked the cart next to the table and returned to his original seat, slapping the back of Troy’s neck as he did.
Before Troy could retaliate, Vanessa cleared her throat loudly and every drop of levity in the garage evaporated. “All right, children,” she said. “Playtime’s over. Do we have a report from the scout team?”
Gunter opened his iPad and started scrolling. “They did a drone flyover twenty minutes ago, five minutes after the museum opened. Thirteen nonhuman thermal signatures, three of them located in the vault. One of those is different. It’s, um, hotter. Xansati and all of his defectors, minus one or two. We can expect the same number of blood-eaters to be present at the close of business hours, in addition to maybe fifteen human hostiles, all of whom will most likely be armed, at least with DXT spray.”
Vanessa nodded. “The building closes to the public at five o’clock,” she said. “We’ll be giving the museum visitors as much time to leave as we can afford, but we’ve got to get in there no later than five thirty. According to our intelligence, Xansati stays pretty close to the vault most of the time, but we need all of his people there, too. This is our best chance to erase the threat to our tribe, all of that threat’s components, in one quick sweep without it making headlines. Anything you see moving once you’re inside, regardless of age, gender, or species, you eliminate it.”
The soldiers grunted affirmatively, without questioning anything Vanessa had said.
The naïve, artsy girl who had run crying into Ryan’s arms forty years earlier was totally gone, he now saw. She’d been replaced by a stone-cold killer, made ruthless because of what she’d had to do to survive, but also because doling out death was in her nature as a dead warrior, just as it had been in his, as it was in everyone who had ever been turned. But Vanessa wasn’t only a killer, she was a leader of killers, commanding the respect of people who had seen action in some of the most brutal conflicts in history. For Ryan, her transformation was as impressive as it was frightening.
“I know that all of you are at least moderately familiar with the museum’s layout,” Vanessa continued, “and hopefully you read the briefing we were sent. Are there any questions about what’s going to happen, our team’s specific role?”
“Seems straightforward to me,” Ramon said, leaning back casually in his chair. “We have Ryan walk in, element-of-surprise-style. They won’t smell him coming. Or at least they’ll smell—no offense—a sickly dude with subpar blood. That’ll be their mistake. Ryan will clear the entrance and then we’ll come in and clear the rest of the museum’s main level, make our way to the treasury vault from above while the other team—of whom I’m definitely not envious—digs through the tunnel system below the museum and enters the vault from below. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem, unless Rodney goes full Michael Bay and starts blowing the bosses’ family heirlooms to shit.”
“That’s a good point,” Vanessa said, glaring at Rodney. “Try to limit damage to the exhibits.”
“That all depends on what they’re going to be coming at us with,” Rodney said, a little defensively. “What kind of heat you think they’ll be packing?”
Gunter looked up from his iPad. “Darts,” he said, “same as us. Except theirs will be the old models, from the armory. Neither the scouts nor the drones have detected any signs of fortification or weapons shipments. As far as we can tell, they’re operating under the conditions of the truce. We should be able to take out most of them before they realize what’s happening.”
“And even if they do realize, it won’t matter,” Troy said, standing up and flinging the tarp off the laundry cart, revealing the Hollywood-quality cache that Ryan imagined.
There were layers of small crates filled with pistols, rifles, flare guns, boxes of clear plastic ammo cartridges, and metallic grenadelike spheres. Troy reached under the weapons and pulled out black nylon utility belts with multiple holsters and compartments and distributed them to each member of the group, including Ryan.
Vanessa walked toward the cart. She picked out a handgun and two ammunition cartridges and tossed them to Ryan. The soldiers stood up and began zestfully rooting around the cart like bottle scavengers on recycling day, examining the firearms and shoving cartridges, spheres, and pistols into specific compartments of their utility belts with mechanical precision, as if this were an act they’d performed hundreds of times.
To Ryan, the pistol that was now in his possession looked similar to other semiautomatic handguns he’d owned, albeit a little more high-tech, made of polymer with a chrome lining and featuring an infrared sight and a twelve-round magazine. But the bullets in the cartridges were like nothing he’d ever seen. They looked like pointed oval shells made of clear glass that were filled with a brownish-yellow fluid.
“They aren’t bullets,” Rodney said, reading his mind. He was standing over Ryan, holding one of the spheres, his belt already fastened and loaded. “They’re darts. The liquid part is a DXT concentrate. Strongest version they’ve come up with so far. When one of these little guys pierces the skin of a human, things tend to get messy real fast, we’re talking seagull-eats-Alka-Seltzer messy. If your target’s tribal, there might not be any combustion, but it’ll have the same effect. Can you shoot?”
“I mean, I won’t be trying out for the Olympic biathlon team anytime soon,” Ryan said, twisting the pistol to make sure the barrel screws were tight. “But yeah, I can handle myself, especially if the targets are stationary and sitting two feet away from me.”
“Let’s hope so.” He handed Ryan the sphere. “If shit goes severely bad, use this. A shard bomb. It’s exactly what it sounds like. The shards have been dipped in, you guessed it, DXT. You activate it by pressing both of the small indentations on either end for three seconds. When you release it you’ve got another five before it detonates. Just make sure you duck behind something solid after you chuck it.”
“Hey,” Vanessa said, a note of concern in her voice as she strode over to them. “I don’t think he’s going to need that. He’s only going to be inside for—”
She was interrupted by her phone, which started belting out a generic beeping ringtone. Gunter’s iPad, resting faceup on the table, lit up at almost exactly the same time.
“Looks like the other team is uptown and ready to start setting up,” Gunter said, checking the screen. “They’re going to head into the park, canvass the area, figure out the best entry point into the tunnels. You want me to stay here and keep eyes on the entire operation, right?”
Vanessa studied her phone’s screen for a moment, then nodded. “We should load the van,” she said. “I’ll have Karl pull it around.”
“Don’t want to go to work on an empty stomach,” Rodney said, his voice quaking with sudden excitement as the soldiers stopped what they were doing and turned in unison, waiting for Vanessa to acknowledge them.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, but make it quick,” she said.
The rest of the team scampered off into the shadows toward the walled-off section of the garage. A few seconds later Ryan heard what sounded like a rush of air shrieking from a balloon, then the rip of fabric. Then a wet, gurgling noise.
“It’s one of Xansati’s disciples, or whatever you want to call them,” Vanessa said disinterestedly as she touched something on her phone’s screen and pressed it to her ear. “Rodney questioned him, tied him up, and left him in there. It’s probably been three days. I’m surprised he’s still alive. Or was. Must taste foul.” She scrunched her nose in revulsion. “But it’s their pregame ritual. God forbid we deny them of that.”
There was a noise that s
ounded like several dozen sheets of bubble wrap being popped at once, followed by a testosterone-tinged cheer. Ryan tried not to visibly shudder, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“You going to be ready to go when we need you to be?” Vanessa asked. “You still can back out if you want.”
“I’m good,” Ryan said.
“Good,” she replied, heading toward the garage doors that faced the front of the building, giving Karl instructions in a low voice. She pressed a button on the wall, and one of the doors began to open electronically.
Ryan fingered the dart cartridges in his hand, visualizing a target for each of them, one in particular, older and stronger, who deserved the poison more than the rest.
Yes, he said to himself. I’m ready to go.
30
They sat in the tree-shaded, cobblestone parking lot, watching visitors exiting the arched wooden doors that functioned as the Cloisters’ main entrance. The five-thirty bus arrived right on schedule. It swung around the circular stop that separated the parking lot from the moatlike walkway surrounding the museum while the last large group of stragglers took farewell pictures of the wide, citadel-style stone and stucco terraces and massive, centrally located medieval tower looming above them. The castlelike architecture was no less imposing than it had been during the previous three drive-bys the team had done in the last few hours. If the Committee had wanted to build a stronghold, they couldn’t have picked a better location: one of the tallest hills in Manhattan, completely surrounded by a heavily wooded park that could only be traversed on winding, labyrinth-like trails, in a sleepy, out-of-the-way residential neighborhood that made Williamsburg look like Times Square.
But a stronghold was only as effective as its gates. And those were wide open.
Vanessa was sitting in the front passenger seat of the white eight-passenger van. She turned to look at Ryan, who was in the second row next to Ramon, closest to the sliding side door. “You’re up,” she said calmly, as if they were playing a board game and it was his turn to roll the dice. She motioned at the smartwatch on Ryan’s left wrist. “Call when you clear the lobby. If we don’t hear from you in two minutes we’re heading in anyway.”
