by Chris Vola
They were sitting on chemical drums in the shadow-strewn darkness of the ground floor, where they’d been for twenty minutes waiting for Natalia’s body to heal. Though there were still patches of wet, oatmeal-like clumps on her neck and cheek, they were diminishing. She was beginning to look more or less like she always had. The fire was returning.
“Were they dead when you got here?” Ryan asked.
Natalia shook her head, staring at the floor, her hands forming tight fists. “Seamus definitely,” she said, “and maybe Fiona. I was never in the same area as the rest of them. The first night I heard Asher and Frank talking, arguing, then several voices I didn’t recognize. The spraying wasn’t as frequent at first, but I was still in and out of consciousness. I know that I smelled the girl with the remarkable blood at some point. There were sounds—the wailing of machinery, Asher screaming, begging them to stop whatever they were doing to him, to get it over with and kill him. Then it got quiet for three or four days, maybe more. Then it was my turn.”
Ryan listened to a vehicle on Columbia Street as it drove slowly by the building. He waited for the sudden squeal of brakes, the click of doors unlocking. But the car never slowed down. “What do you mean, your turn?” he asked.
“Frank came into the room, turned off the spray guns. He was smirking like usual, like we were friends, like he hadn’t been lying to my face for God knows how long. He said that he’d made friends, powerful friends. I assumed he was talking about the Manhattan tribe, but he wasn’t really specific about anything. Except that whoever he had linked up with had inspired him to revamp our tribe, to modernize it, to expand. He rambled for a long time, some hogwash about it being our species’ time to take control of what was ours, that he finally had the right tools for a major purge, or something to that effect. He was so calm, like we were having a bloody chat over tea.”
For as long as Ryan had known him, Frank had always been disgusted by humans, something Ryan had chalked up to Frank’s childhood as a slave. But as much as Frank regarded his former species as inferior, he knew he needed them to survive. He’d never seemed like the type to start spouting revolutionary rhetoric, let alone spearhead a revolution. This was about money, plain and simple.
“He said he would give me the opportunity to join him,” Natalia continued, “to sit next to him on a new tribal committee—I think that was what he called it—but that as a show of good faith, I’d need to help him replenish our numbers and become a maker. I asked him what the rest of the tribe had said, what had happened to them. He didn’t say anything, only that you’d fled Brooklyn, followed in the same cowardly steps as Arthur Harker before you.”
“He wasn’t lying about that part,” Ryan said.
Natalia’s brow was now able to wrinkle again, and she made full use of her rebuilt facial muscles to stare at him in disbelief. “But if you’re human,” she said, “how did you lift me? How could you—”
“What did you say when Frank offered you his terms?” Ryan said, cutting her off.
Natalia scowled. “I wanted to say no, of course. I’m quite content with the life I’ve carved out for myself. I have been for a very long time. I imagined we all were. A parent is the last thing I’ve ever wanted to be. Frank had made it clear that refusing him wouldn’t be an option, so I told him I would turn whoever he wanted, but I said I didn’t want any part of a new tribe, that I would leave Brooklyn peacefully once he no longer needed me. He agreed and left the room. He came back a few hours later, pushing a man strapped to a hospital stretcher, a great lumbering goon whose rotten liver I could smell from across the room. I think he was drunk. Frank wheeled him close to where I’d been strung up, cut me open with a scalpel I assume he’d dipped in DXT. I turned the man, or, more accurately, bled onto him until Frank was satisfied and wheeled his new freak out of the room. Instead of coming back to let me down, Frank turned the spray guns on again and left me. I don’t know how long it’s been. Days, a week maybe. I wouldn’t have lasted much longer if you hadn’t found me.”
Ryan’s mind raced. Frank was mirroring the Committee’s protocol, which confirmed that he was in direct contact with them. If he was creating his own tribe of lab rats, and if he hadn’t sold the two jaguars that had come into his possession, then there had to be a base of operations, somewhere relatively accessible but still off the radar. But if not here, then where?
“You said that Frank hasn’t been here in days,” Ryan said. “Where would he have gone?”
Natalia had slipped off the emergency blanket and was pulling on the leggings of a blue plastic hazmat suit that had been lying folded in a box nearby. “Down the street, I suppose,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Down the street?”
“At one of his warehouses on the Erie Basin.”
The Erie Basin, when Ryan had worked there, had been a major commerce center of New York Harbor, a mandatory stop for commercial ships and barges on their way to the Erie Canal. Now, save for Ikea, it was as decrepit as the rest of the surrounding neighborhood, a hodgepodge of broken docks and storage facilities that made the safe house look sturdy by comparison.
“If this had been two weeks ago I would have been surprised if you’d told me you didn’t know about them,” Natalia continued, “but now that we’ve had a glimpse into what Frank truly is, it’s not all that shocking. A few years ago, he bought properties on the water, three or four at least. They were purchased without incident, except for a grain elevator that got him involved in a lengthy bidding war with Ikea. I never asked him where he got the money, or why he wanted to keep boosting his real estate profile with ghastly fixer-uppers when he hadn’t even done any work on the safe house in three decades. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to know. Frank had always been paranoid; I thought that maybe he was just getting worse in his old age.”
“He is worse,” Ryan said. “But this ends tonight.”
Natalia chuckled bitterly. “And how do you propose to do that?” she asked. “You don’t know what he’s got in those buildings, how many people he’s turned. Even if both of us were at full strength, it would be suicide to walk in there. You’re better off calling the police, though it’s likely they’d doubt the validity of your claims.”
“I’m beyond full strength,” Ryan said. He lifted up his shirt.
Natalia’s eyes widened as they fixed themselves on the jaguar. She lifted her hand to touch it, but Ryan grabbed her before she could.
“You probably don’t want to do that,” he said.
She nodded, still mesmerized. “You knew where to find it,” she said. “And you know how to use it.”
“I’ve found all eight of them,” Ryan replied. “Frank has the last two. I know how to use them enough to get them out of his hands. Or at least I’m betting on it.”
“We have a lot to talk about,” Natalia murmured.
Ryan reached into his pocket, fished out the van’s key, and handed it to her. “And we will,” he said, “as soon as I finish things here. It’ll be safer for you if you go back to your house and wait for me. Then we’ll have a nice, long chat.”
Natalia nodded and stood up, slowly, trying to remember how to balance herself. “How will you know what building he’s in?” she asked.
“I’ll know.”
“Good.” She passed Ryan and began walking in the direction of the stairs.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She turned and smiled sadly. “There’s an incinerator on the third floor. I’m going to give our friends downstairs a proper burial. It’s the least I can do.”
Ryan watched her disappear belowground. He had some flames of his own, burning through his veins, begging to be released. But unlike the cold corpses hanging in the basement, Frank would be alive to suffer their full intensity.
35
Ryan leaned against a metal railing in the shadows beyond Columbia Street’s dull orange lampposts, observing the long, peak-roofed and otherwise nondescript commercial facility across the str
eet that was completely encircled by a large parking lot and a chain-link fence. Behind him, the black water of the Erie Basin lapped gently against the concrete seawall. He could feel the after-hours energy of Manhattan and hear its pulse across the harbor, an incessant buzz that seemed light-years away from the silent industrial desolation he now faced.
He heard something approaching. A bicyclist came into view, pedaling around a sharp bend where the road curved to match the contour of the harbor, moving at a brisk pace and humming along with the music in his earbuds. The man was heavily bearded, wearing a beanie, a neon tank top, and bathing trunks. A fishing rod was strapped to his backpack, bobbing above his head like a CB radio antenna.
Keep going, keep going, Ryan said to himself.
The bicyclist noticed Ryan, slowed, and pulled up next to the sidewalk. He took out an earbud and waved. “You looking for something?” he asked, with a loud but friendly Southern accent that cemented his identity as a non-native, if casually stopping to speak to a stranger at three in the morning hadn’t already made it excruciatingly obvious. “You know Ikea doesn’t open for like five hours, right?”
“Just taking a walk,” Ryan replied, brusquely.
The man craned his neck and scanned the dimly lit street and the totally obscured waterfront. He shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat, man. Just make sure you keep an eye out. There’s been some weird stuff happening around here.”
“Like what?”
“Couple days ago my buddy caught a catfish with three eyes in the Gowanus Canal. I’m not shitting you! He took a video, you can look it up. It’s gone viral. Anyways, that’s where I’m heading. I figure if he can catch something like that in the middle of the day, who knows what kind of critters will be lurking now.”
Ryan noticed a light go on above the entrance to a loading dock across the street. “Good luck,” he said absently, focusing on the building to see what would happen next.
“Well, okay, have a good one.” The bicyclist reinserted his earbuds and took off into the night, leaving behind a thick aroma of sweat and recently imbibed weed.
Ryan didn’t have to wait long. Two young men dressed in black tracksuits exited a door to the left of the loading dock and lit cigarettes. An identically clad woman joined them a few seconds later. She said something and the men laughed. The three of them took out their phones and began scrolling around.
They didn’t hear Ryan as he entered the parking lot through a traffic barrier several yards away, bending a metal rod so he could slip through the gate. They didn’t notice anything until he clicked off the safety of the pistol and fired. A dart hit one of the men in the shoulder. Another nestled near the woman’s throat. By the time the second man looked up from his phone, his colleagues had already liquefied. The cigarette fell out of his mouth. He turned to run but slipped on the slick ground. Ryan walked over and stepped on the back of the man’s neck, keeping his face pressed into the steaming puddle until his muffled screams turned into wet gurgles and then silence and his body stopped twitching.
Ryan wiped his shoe on the pavement and walked inside the building, through the door that the group had left open when they’d started their cigarette break. A narrow, unlit hallway led to the bottom of a cramped stairwell, with no place to go but up. At the top of the stairs, Ryan found himself on a wide landing area that seemed to run along the entirety of the building’s four walls. The ceiling, only a few feet above where he was standing, was covered in rows of ultra-bright halogen tube lights, giving the space the same sense of clinical sterility as Conrad Van Pelt’s office.
Walking to the edge of the landing and leaning over a safety railing, Ryan looked down at the facility’s lower level, a massive patchwork of white-walled, rectangular enclosures with Plexiglas ceilings and no discernible entrances or exits. It looked like a human-size rodent labyrinth, or an ultra-sanitized version of the slaughterhouse pens Ryan had seen on a television documentary. Whether the space would be used for experimentation purposes or as holding cells for newborns, it was impeccably (and expensively) built, a testament to years of planning, and a disturbing reminder of how deceptive Frank had been.
About fifty yards down the landing, a broad-shouldered figure obscured by a royal-blue hooded sweatshirt was sitting at a stainless-steel computer station with multiple monitors, adjacent to the safety railing and overlooking the enclosures. As Ryan approached, the person—who appeared to be male—kept watching the monitors, oblivious to everything around him, occasionally typing something on a wireless keyboard, or sipping from a metal, canteen-style water bottle. When Ryan moved behind the computer station, he saw that three of the four screens were occupied by various sports-betting websites, showing the lines for several NBA playoff games that would be played the following evening. The fourth screen looked like a typical Facebook news feed.
“Andy, you back already?” the man at the desk asked in a crackly, booze-soaked drawl without swiveling around in the black leather chair he was sitting in. “That was fast, bro. You sure you smoked the butt or just ate it? Well, since you’re back, what do you think about Denver at Golden State? I was going to take the under but now I don’t—”
The man stopped in midsentence, made several loud sniffling noises, and swung around in his chair. It was James Van Doren. He was still plump but looking healthier than he had in years. He was clean-shaven and his skin was smooth and pale, with no trace of circles under his widening eyes. Ryan could see his muscles tensing under his Knicks sweatshirt and too-tight track pants, closer to the athlete he had once been than to the obese slob he had become.
“You’ve got some food on your upper lip,” Ryan said. “You must still be pretty hungry.”
After a few moments of paralyzed silence, James shook off the shock of seeing his former client and reached up to wipe the blood mustache off his face. When he removed his shirt sleeve, the surprised grimace had been replaced by his standard shit-eating grin. “Hey, man,” he said, trying, as always, to inject levity into the situation. “Uh, welcome home. Never thought I’d be seeing you again. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“How long have you been working for them?” Ryan asked.
“Who? Frank? The Committee? Right now things are kind of confusing. I guess it’s been about a year, just after I’d been diagnosed with hepatitis and just before they found out I also had pancreatic cancer.” He sighed. “Looks like I’m going to be working for, um, whoever, a little longer, too, though that wasn’t originally part of the deal. I was planning on my life turning out kind of like yours. You know, chilling, watching movies, taking down the occasional new-in-town twentysomething who doesn’t know any better.”
Ryan took a step forward, his right index finger curling around the pistol’s trigger. “Like Jennifer?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The twentysomething brunette you—or someone using one of your phones—strung up and photographed in a basement on East 80th Street. The reason I came to Manhattan.”
“Oh right,” James murmured. He hoisted himself out of his seat with minimal effort, raising his palms in a placating motion. “If it’s any consolation, we never hurt her. Drugged her, sure. We had to make it look real so you would take the bait. Nicki must have sent you the pictures while she was buttering up that Indian dude, what’s his name, Xander? He had a place on the Upper East Side.”
“I saw the basement,” Ryan growled. “I know Jennifer was there.”
James frowned. “Bro,” he said. “Frank took the pictures. I know you don’t get out much but there are a lot of grimy, horror-movie-quality rooms all over the city. They aren’t hard to find. Maybe he used that spot back up the road where the rest of the old tribe is hanging. Maybe Nicki took some background pics of the basement you’re talking about and used Photoshop to superimpose your girl into the shot. What I do know for certain is that he could have killed her, but he didn’t.”
“Frank knew she was strong,” Ryan said, “so he wrapped her up and gave he
r to the Manhattan tribe as a gift. A sign of his goodwill to let them know that he was on board with the purge they’ve been planning, that he was willing to supply them with whatever they needed.”
James shrugged. “I don’t know about all that,” he replied. “But at least she’ll live forever. That’s good, right? That’ll give you some closure?”
“I’m sure you loved playing the middleman,” Ryan said, ignoring his questions. Frank had picked a perfect lieutenant. As long as he made James think he was in a position of power, if he gave him employees to boss around and created the illusion that his responsibilities were actually important, he would do anything for him. And Frank had done more than that. He’d given James the only thing that was more precious to the financial advisor than money—a way to permanently prolong his wretched existence.
“I had nothing to do with the girl,” James barked, suddenly becoming defensive. “My job, the main thing I had to do so Frank would turn me, was to find Derrick Rhodes and lead him to the Manhattan tribe. I did that, and did it well. I even turned well. I could control my appetite almost immediately. Frank said he’d never seen anything like it. That’s why he’s put me in charge of, um, whatever this place is, whatever projects the tribes are planning. They know they can trust me.”
“Where’s Frank?”
“Close,” James said. “At the old place on Beard Street.”
Beard Street intersected with Columbia Street, a quarter mile back in the direction from which Ryan had come. Was James talking about the safe house, or did Frank own another building nearby? Ryan shook his head. “That’s not particularly helpful,” he said. “Where on Beard Street?”
“Of course there’s a live feed,” Frank said, ignoring him. “He knows what’s going on here. Which is why you showing up tonight, killing my staff members, smelling like you’ve been chugging from the fountain of youth, it’s not a good look for me. I don’t know how you did it and it doesn’t matter. It needs to end. I feel bad having to end our conversation, and I’m sure a part of me will feel bad while I’m eating you, but you’ve got to understand where I’m coming from. I’m not going to die because of you.”
