by Chris Vola
As she did, Ryan slid the flash drive across the table in her direction. He tried to explain, as succinctly as he could, what had happened to him, going back to being turned by Arthur, his years in Brooklyn and his relationship with Frank, everything he’d gone through after meeting Nicki, up to Karl’s death in the vault. Ryan told Jennifer all that he knew about the statues, what Derrick Rhodes had discovered about them, his own firsthand experience of their unpredictable nature and how the Committee wanted to hijack that energy, how they were going to use her and the rest of the newborns as test animals once they’d sufficiently thinned the herd.
Unlike Vanessa in the coffee shop, Jennifer’s stone-cold expression didn’t change to one of discomfort or fear as he talked. Her eyes remained fixed on his, unblinking, an icy blue barrier that made it impossible to know what she was thinking. Maybe she’d been exposed to so much life-altering outrageousness in the past few days that she was numb to any further, slightly more absurd-sounding developments; for her, it was simply par for the course. Or maybe the story, especially the death of her maker, had shocked her into stoic silence. Either way, Ryan had no idea how she would react to the plan he’d crafted on the way to Vanessa’s apartment.
“I’m going to take the last statue and then I’m driving as far away from the city as I can,” he said. “I’m not sure where, but I can’t stay here. Even if the tracking implant I swallowed was somehow disabled by the energy surge, the tribe has resources that extend far beyond Manhattan. When I leave here, take the flash drive to the nearest copy store, or anywhere that has Internet access. E-mail its contents to the address that’s written on the drive and destroy it. That should keep the tribe occupied for a few days. Go somewhere safe, maybe your old apartment, maybe somewhere uptown, somewhere you can disappear until things settle down a little.”
Jennifer frowned and looked at the flash drive. “I’ll e-mail the files,” she said, “but once you grab the statue, you’re coming back to pick me up. I’m going with you.”
“Absolutely not. I don’t know how to control these things,” he said, motioning at the duffel bag. “They’re unpredictable. And one of them is stuck on me like a giant leech. What happens when it falls off? What if it doesn’t? What if I’m a human IED?”
Jennifer’s expression changed for the first time as she flashed the vaguest hint of a smile. She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, “but one thing’s for sure. You aren’t human anymore. But even if something does happen to you, I want to be there. If what you’re saying is true, there’s nothing for me here. I can’t hide on a thirteen-mile, two-million-person island for very long, even with my … um, abilities.”
Ryan nodded. “You’ll have to leave. Which means you’ll return to your original, mortal state. You’ll be even more vulnerable, which is why it would make even less sense to be anywhere near me.” He sighed. “Please trust me. Everything I’ve done has been to try to protect you.”
Jennifer’s eyes came to life, flashing angrily. She leapt up and sent the chair she’d been sitting in careening across the hardwood floor. “It’s been about me?” she growled. “Are you sure? To me, this just seems like more of the same suicidal martyr crap that made you decide to go to the museum. I didn’t want you to go. You’d already found me. I’d forgiven you and thanked you for what you’d done. All I wanted to do was spend time with you. But you were too wrapped up in the emotional thrill ride you’d been on since you left Brooklyn. It wasn’t about me anymore. It was about how good it had felt for you to break free from the boring drudge of your lonely existence, for your life to finally have meaning. I thought that the reason you were so jacked up was because you’d been confronted with your own approaching death. But even now, when you’ve made it back from the Cloisters, when it looks like you’ve been given a third chance, when you should be curious about what you’ve become, you’re still hoping to play the fatalistic hero. I mean, Jesus, you’re talking about the possibility of literally going out with a bang.”
Ryan sat in silence for a long time. “If that’s how you feel,” he managed, finally, “then I respect that.”
Jennifer’s frown disappeared. Her shoulders sagged as if they’d been weighed down by a sudden sadness. She walked over to Ryan and took his hand in hers. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate you,” she said softly. “I do, way more than when I thought you were some kind of commitment-phobic weirdo who was too scared to sleep over at my place.” She laughed, then turned serious. “But you need to let me make my own decisions. This is about both of us.”
“Of course,” Ryan said. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is,” she replied. “Oh, and I’m going to need to eat you.”
“What?”
Jennifer gripped Ryan’s wrist, lifted his forearm until it was even with her face, and inhaled deeply like she was smelling a warm baguette fresh out of the oven. “You told me that something in your DNA, in your blood, is what allows you to hold the statues. And maybe the jaguar that’s bonded with you has amplified those genetic traits. What if I were to drink your blood? Wouldn’t it be possible for me to sort of absorb your abilities, at least temporarily?”
Ryan thought back to the meals he’d had—the varying degrees of freshness, the rarity of the types, the age of the donors. It was true, the quality of the meal did make a huge difference. Her idea was a little odd but it was worth a shot.
“Might as well see what happens,” he said.
He bent over and rolled up one of his pant legs until he could remove his knife from its holster. He laid his left arm on the table, palm facing up, and made a deep incision in his wrist, slicing through the ulnar artery.
Before the blood had a chance to spurt, Jennifer was on her knees, her lips clamped tightly around the wound, gorging herself. Ryan gasped at the urgency of the fluid leaving his body, though he felt no pain after the first few seconds. Instead, there was only the sensation of being totally joined to someone else, of reciprocation instead of draining, of sharing life instead of taking it. The longer he let his guard down, the more he let her take, the deeper the connection felt, until it got too deep. She wasn’t going to let him go until he was dry.
“That’s … that’s enough,” he stammered, suddenly feeling like he was on the verge of passing out.
She started sucking harder, as if she hadn’t heard him, her eyes narrowed in greedy concentration.
“Stop!” he shouted. He grabbed the back of her neck with his free hand and ripped her off him with the last bit of strength he had left. She gulped as blood spilled across the table and onto the front of her white V-neck T-shirt. Still kneeling on the floor, she began rocking loosely, back and forth, as if she were somewhere else, in a profound trance or a drunken stupor.
“Oh my God,” she murmured when she eventually came to her senses. “I’m sorry, but that tasted … incredible.”
As Ryan’s wound closed and his light-headedness began to clear, Jennifer stood up and unzipped the duffel bag.
“Don’t—” Ryan started.
But before he could move to stop her, she quickly picked up a jaguar, one that was giving off a lime-green glow. Its eyes burned like two tiny orange flames. She rolled it around in her fingers, then gripped it tightly for several seconds. She put it back in the bag. “A little hot, but nothing I can’t handle,” she said, smiling, wiping excess blood from her upper lip.
Ryan looked down at his wrist, expecting it to be bubbling with scar tissue. It was already healed, nothing but smooth skin, no sign of an incision. He stood up and reached for the duffel bag.
“I’ll keep an eye on these,” Jennifer said, putting her hand on his arm. “If they’re still able to track you, they’ll do it sooner rather than later. You don’t want to be caught with all of the statues. It’ll be better if we split up. You drive to the bridge, pick up the last jaguar. I’ll leave here, e-mail the files, and head to my apartment. I found my keys and phone in Vanessa’s room.”
“What happe
ns if you run into someone from the tribe?” Ryan asked.
Jennifer shrugged. “Between the massive cover-up that’s probably taking place right now at the Cloisters and the information we’re going to be releasing into cyberspace, I think that most of the tribe will be preoccupied for the foreseeable future. And if someone stops me, I’ll tell them the truth. I’m a newborn who’s stopping by my old place to pick up a few things that I’ll need for my new life. I mean, I am going to need to pack some clothes. Vanessa may have been a badass, but her fashion sense had a long way to go before it caught up with her killer instinct. Do you have a phone?”
“Yeah.” Ryan opened a small pouch on the side of his backpack. His phone had been turned off, for how long he didn’t know. When he powered it up, he saw that the battery was at fourteen percent. “It’s got enough juice,” he said, pressing the airplane mode icon.
“Okay. Call me when you’re on your way back to Manhattan,” Jennifer said.
“I will,” Ryan agreed, slinging his backpack over his shoulders. “We shouldn’t leave here at the same time. I’ll go first.”
Jennifer leaned in and kissed him. She pulled back and grabbed the front of his shirt. “You’re coming to my apartment tonight,” she said forcefully, her shining eyes belying her stern expression. “No more excuses.”
“I’ll be there,” Ryan said.
33
He parked the van near the corner of Wythe Avenue and South 6th Street, on a part of the block that was located almost entirely under the eastern terminus of the Williamsburg Bridge. He got out and walked to a fenced-in commercial parking lot bounded by two large pillars and a stone abutment. It was well past sunset and the permanently shaded area was almost entirely obscured by shadows. The parking lot and its attendant booth were vacant and there were no nearby pedestrians to welcome Ryan back to the borough of his birth, which was exactly how he wanted it.
He leapt easily over the eight-foot fence and jogged across the cracked, sooty pavement to the abutment, a massive wall that supported both the bridge proper and the walking path that ran alongside it. It was composed of large, identically sized bricks that were each about two feet wide and a foot tall. He ran his hand along a row of chest-high bricks until he found one that was loose. Using his knife as a wedge, he pried the brick out of the wall and reached into the space behind it. He pulled out the shoebox from Urban Outfitters and opened it.
Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, were a pair of small rocks identical to the hundreds that were scattered among the parking lot’s debris piles. The statue was gone.
One word flashed across Ryan’s brain: Frank.
He reached in his backpack, picked up his phone, and took it off airplane mode. There were no new voice mails. The only new text message was from Jennifer: Sent the e-mail, back at my place. See you soon!
He turned the phone off to conserve its battery and started walking back to where the van was parked.
Jennifer wouldn’t like it, but he had to make a detour. If Frank still had the eighth statue, Ryan needed to take it from him. Even if he’d already gotten rid of it, it was time for Ryan to finish things with his old mentor, to break him the way he’d broken the Brooklyn tribe, to return him to dust.
There were only so many places Frank could hide. And Ryan knew where to start looking.
34
The clock on the van’s dashboard read 2:14 A.M.
Ryan glanced across the street from where he was parked, at the dilapidated, three-story brick building with busted-in windows, graffiti-covered walls, and scrubbed-out early-twentieth-century signage—only the word CHEMISTS was completely legible. Someone had tacked up an advertisement for bedbug removal services on a garage door that was as cracked as the pavement that surrounded the building and its similarly desolate neighbors lining the street. The area had gained some notoriety for being one of the hardest hit during Hurricane Sandy, but Ryan had seen it crumbling for far longer, since he’d shoveled coal at the now-abandoned shipyards that were a stone’s throw away from where he was sitting.
He opened his phone to text Jennifer the address, as he’d done for the previous three locations he’d visited.
545 Columbia Street. Hopefully last stop.
The screen went black as the battery died. Ryan opened the glove compartment and dropped the phone inside.
In hindsight, he told himself, he probably should have started here, at the safe house in Red Hook. But it had seemed too obvious, so he’d gone to the last two places that Frank had called home (or the last two Ryan had known about), a white-shingled row house in Canarsie and the bottom floor of a brownstone in Bensonhurst. The first had been empty and the second had been occupied by a Cantonese family. And when he’d stopped at Natalia’s house in Flatbush, it was as ruined as it had been the night he’d left it, devoid of life.
Ryan checked the magazine of the dart pistol he had taken from the Cloisters. There were four cartridges left. He tucked the pistol under his shirt, got out of the van, and walked across the street, touching the jaguar that had fused to his chest and scanning the building for security cameras. None were visible. He shoved aside a concrete traffic barrier that was blocking a smaller door next to the garage. The door looked like it had been partially torn from its hinges. Ryan pressed it lightly and it swung open, releasing a strong, musty waft of stagnant air.
Inside, the ground floor—illuminated by orange streetlight glow—looked exactly as it had the last time Ryan had seen it forty-five years earlier, shortly after Frank had bought the building. Besides a few large chemical drums, discarded pipes, and metal rods that had been piled into a corner, the space was empty, its walls covered in grime and mildew, its floorboards warped and rotting. Across from the industrial debris, a set of metal stairs led to both the upper levels of the building and the basement. Ryan walked slowly across the room, deciding whether to go up or down, when he heard the sharp hiss of air followed by an earsplitting shriek somewhere below him. Then the equally sweet and bitter aroma of chemically corroded flesh, like what he’d smelled in the tunnel beneath the Cloisters.
Ryan reached for his pistol and rushed down the stairs. At the bottom, he found himself in a gutted, laboratory-like space lit by weirdly flickering blue light tubes that lined the ceiling. The outer walls and floor were covered in filthy gray ceramic tiles that might have once been white. There were stainless-steel shelves attached to a wall near the stairs that held dozens of glass beakers and graduated cylinders. Ryan was standing in what had once been, he guessed, a kind of reception area connected to a long hallway with multiple rooms on either side. Those rooms’ walls had been knocked down during a half-assed remodeling effort and had been replaced by semitransparent plastic sheets.
Pistol raised, Ryan headed into the hallway and was immediately confronted by three impossibly tall and immobile humanoid shapes behind the sheet to his right. He paused, watched for signs of movement, listened for heartbeats, smelled the air for sweat, but he couldn’t discern anything. Fuck it, he said to himself as he ripped the sheet from the ceiling and stepped back, ready to fire.
The bodies had only appeared tall because they were suspended in the air, hanging from long meat hooks that had been inserted between their shoulder blades. They were naked. Their skin was almost completely charred, covered in a layer of alligator-scale scar tissue that looked like it had healed and been reopened hundreds of times until it had finally petrified. Their faces, blackened and contorted into grimaces of pain and terror, were barely recognizable. Two were young, barely adults, a guy with high cheekbones and shaggy, port-colored hair, and a blond girl with full lips who was missing both of her eyes that Ryan remembered being dark brown and almond-shaped.
Asher and Fiona.
The third corpse looked exactly as it had in the picture Ryan had been sent. Seamus’s neck was bent forward at an unnatural angle, his long hair draped over his eyes, his mouth slightly open and circled with a crusted-over pinkish fluid.
The last of
the Brooklyn tribe, minus two.
A hiss of air like the one Ryan had heard earlier echoed from somewhere down the hall, followed by another scream, weaker than the first. Ryan left the bodies and returned to the hallway. He’d gone maybe twenty yards when his nostrils filled with the now-familiar sickly-sweet aroma of DXT coupled with the stench of mutilation. There was something moving slightly behind a curtain to his left. He ripped the plastic aside.
The room—or what had once been a room—was smaller than the space where Seamus, Asher, and Fiona were hanging. The only piece of furniture was a large stainless-steel table that had been set up near the back wall. An open laptop rested on top of it. Natalia hung from a meat hook a few feet away, flanked by a pair of industrial chemical spray guns on tripods that were connected to the laptop via USB cables. Her entire body was covered in bubbling pink scar tissue urgently trying to heal itself before the next blast of what Ryan assumed was DXT vapor. She hung as flaccidly as the others, arms at her sides, eyes closed, but her fingers and toes were twitching involuntarily. She opened her charred lips and let out a low groan.
Ryan rushed across the room to the table and ripped the USB cables from the laptop. He shoved the spray guns away and gripped Natalia by her torso, carefully hoisting her up until the meat hook slid out of her back with a low slurping noise. Her eyes opened, widened in fear, and her muscles tensed. She tried to struggle, feebly, for a few seconds until her vision focused and she recognized Ryan. She relaxed, went completely limp.
“Thank you,” she whispered before her eyes rolled back into her head.
* * *
“He came back to my house a few hours after you left,” Natalia said, hugging herself under an emergency medical blanket that Ryan had found tucked under some rubble. “He didn’t say anything, just doused me in that—what did you call it?—DXT, tied me up with bungee cords that must have been coated in the same substance. There was a girl with him. Dark hair, red earrings, fantastic-smelling blood. I remember watching her snoop around my foyer as Francis carried me to his car. Then that bastard brought me here. It’s been more than a week, hasn’t it?”
