A New Day in America (9 page)

Violence erupts in the tent. Shots fire. The hound dog has a revolver drawn, and he turns to the zoo-break ruckus behind him. Nos waits, walking forward, sight on the back of his head. When the hound dog turns, his face brightens and Nos puts him down.

Two junkies run past Nos from the tents, their arms full of vials and packets of powder. A cop staggers after them, bleeding badly down his face from empty eye-sockets.

Inside the pigeon coop, three junkies are shot dead and wounded on the floor, and one cop is shot dead, and another is on the ground surrounded by junkies stomping and kicking. Junkie bodies are piled in front of the lab. Romo is red-faced and busily fighting off the swarm as they attack and scavenge needles and vials. The doctor climbs out of the back window with a large suitcase and is gone. Romo screams after him.

“
Doc! You motherfucker!”

Fuck
.

Nos
needs
the doc.

A junkie grabs Nos by his arm and another reaches for Nay on his back, and she screams. Junkies are everywhere. Nos cracks him with an elbows and turns to fire. The junkie on his arm bites down on his wrist and breaks the skin. His gun falls and rattles off the floor. His elbow catches a jaw, his foot breaks a set of ribs, and his heel caves in a chest.

A force slams into Nos’ shoulder—
stupid
. Nos stumbles and catches himself. He turns and Romo is on him, swinging, clipping Nos behind his eye as he backs away—jab, jab, cross—Romo has his guard up and nothing gets through. His shirt is nearly torn off, and his chest is bloody. He’s smiling. Naomi is twenty pounds heavier. Romo cracks him with a hook to the jaw, one in the gut, and then across the nose. Nos’ knees go weak. Naomi is now a thousand pounds heavier.

“Damn, you’re slow!”

He’s right. Slow. Ridiculous
. Romo’s bare knuckles cut his brow and the blood drips into his eye. Nos wobbles back, the doctor getting away.
Stupid
.

Romo comes on strong, fists clenched in front of his face, waving them toward him.

“Come on—Army—bullshit!”

Nos pops him behind the ear and he sees the opening—Romo’s a brawler— easy to read. Nos sees the hook before Romo throws and slips, and the fist
wiffs
. Nos snaps a right, and he doesn’t even feel it land.
How you know you hit him right
.

Romo’s eyes disappear as he staggers back—
guy’s got a chin, I’ll give him that
. Nos clinches the plum of the back of his head. He pulls down and drives his knee through Romo’s skull.

Romo drops. He has a bloody crater where his nose used to be. Nos picks up his gun and slams a bullet in the back of his skull.

The tent is eerily still. Naomi clings to his back. She breathes by his ears.

“Still breathing?”

“Still breathing,” she answers as though she’s actually holding her breath.

The exam lab is completely cleaned out. He looks out the window after the doctor and sees the small man in a full sprint down the hill, at least seven hundred yards off. Can’t risk putting a .50-caliber through his leg—might kill him.

Nos hauls back down to the bike and turns down the hill after the doctor.

He hears an engine start and run from somewhere in the distance.
A fucking engine
. The doc has a
car
.

Nos rides toward the noise and a green Jeep Cherokee flies through the winding Central Park roads.

The Jeep burns north as fast as it can go, and Nos checks Nay and accelerates, the jump throwing them backward before they duck and clutch and ride. They blast through the park, gaining on the Cherokee. The car breaks through the park at 110
^th
street and drives uptown. The doctor seems to know what he’s doing, where he can go, where he can’t. Nos barely keeps up as they blur through the city. The Cherokee breaks a hard left at 155
^th
street and then a hard right north on the West Side Highway.

The straightway is a mistake for the doctor. Nos’ bike is too fast, too nimble. Nos quickly pulls up alongside the Cherokee. The doctor is panicking as he tries to manage the wheel. Nos steadies the bike handles with one hand, reaches to his holster, and pulls the Sig-Sauer. He aims at the doctor, and the doctor ducks and nearly swerves off the road.

Nos slows, drops back, steadies the wild, rumbling bike, and fires—four shots, six
pops
. Concrete kicks up and the rear tires blow out. The Cherokee slams on its back end and swerves. The axels scream against the highway. The Jeep turns—the doc jerks the wheel too hard—the wheels skid out and the Jeep spins out.
Too goddamn fast
. The car body bangs the waterside railing. It spins and crunches through the railing. The massive vehicle is gone.

No
. Not the doc. Nos
needs
the doc.

He turns the bike around to the broken railing. The van bobs and sinks in the river. The green water of the Hudson looks maybe thirty yards down. Maybe the doc is alive.

Maybe. Worth a shot
.

Nos sets Naomi down. Without time for a word, he dives from the highway, and the water’s surface rushes up to meet him. He smacks and tunnels through the dark. He swims around the falling Jeep. The doc is still belted in. Nos pops the door and the doc is swallowing too much water—the doc—he should know better. Nos grips the open door, and the Jeep hurdles down lower and drags him along. The water pressure pounds against his head. The door closes on his torso like he’s in its jaws. He reaches across the driver’s seat and clicks the belt, grips beneath the doc’s armpit, kicks back against the door, and rips the doctor from the seat. As the Jeep falls into the depths, he kicks one more time up against its hull to the surface.

Nos rolls the doc over on the soaking dock and pumps his stomach and huffs in his mouth.
Live, motherfucker
.
Live
.

When the doctor awakes, he still sees nothing. He can feel the high breeze coming in off the Jersey side of the Hudson. Nos knows because he can feel it, too. Nos knows when the doctor wakes up because his breathing goes from even to sputtering. He chokes on panic.

“What is in the suitcase?” Nos growls.

“Nothing—inoculation,” the doctor says, spitting out the words. “You don’t need it.”

“I don’t think you understand what kind of position you’re in,” says Nos as he slowly pulls his hand away from the doctor’s eyes.
Let him see it
.

The doctor screams as soon as Nos’ fingers separate. He screams down through the hundreds of yards below to the surface of the Hudson River. He screams as if there is nothing between him and the water. He screams because he knows that a fall from this height would obliterate his bones to powder, because he knows he will remain conscious until the very last moment.

It was a pain driving the doctor up to the George Washington Bridge and hog-tying him up to the beams, but the scream makes it worth his trouble.

The doctor’s hands are tied behind his back. His feet are tied to a support beam. His head dangles at the last edge of the bridge. Nos crouches and holds him by his hair, the skull on the grill of the ski mask up in the doctor’s face.

“What’s in the suitcase?” Nos roars.

“Treatment! Treatment!” cries the doctor.

“Treatment for what?”

“The disease—I have it! I have it!”

“Does my daughter?”

“No!”

“Do I have it?”

“No! No!” the doctor yells as tears and snot fall from his face, thick all the way down to the street. “No, it’s all fake, a scam. I need that treatment, please.”

“Fucking liar.”

Nos cranks the doctor’s head by his hair to face the bottomless waters.

“OK!”

“Is my
daughter
sick?

“I don’t know!”

“Am I sick?”

“
I don’t know
!”

They’ve passed too many dead for Naomi to count them all, so she stopped trying. But she can count the people her father has killed. Four back at home. Another four just now. Eight total. She wonders if this will be the ninth. Then she remembers all the gunshots that were so loud she is still half-deaf and realizes she doesn’t know at all
.

Nay watches as her father pulls the man up from the side of the bridge. The high air is open and loud. The man was so quiet before, but now all he does is cry and cry. Pa is so angry, and it makes her angry, too. A little scared but more angry. She wants to cry, but she isn’t sure why. She’s wanted to cry this whole time. But she won’t
.

The doctor breathes with his legs stretched in front of him and his hands still tied behind his back
.

The suitcase is next to him, open, with rows of vials of clear fluid and needles
.

Pa crouches in front of the doctor, who looks away
.

“Look at me,” says Pa, and finally, the doctor looks. He has tiny eyes
.

Pa holds up a pink vial. “I found this in your coat. The treatment wasn’t all you took, was it?”

“Please, don’t kill me,” he says
.

“I won’t kill you, doctor,” says Pa, filling a syringe with what’s left of the thick syrupy pink
.

The river is there with its open sky and snaking clouds. But that doesn’t matter anymore
.

Pa pulls the doctor’s wrist to him and grips his arm and a blue vein pops up from his white skin. He sticks the needle in and presses the plunger
.

The doctor drifts off someplace, and Pa looks jealous. Pa takes off the ski mask and runs his fingers through his sweaty hair. Naomi watches him. She’s shaking. Though she’s really glad he took off that mask
.

“Are you OK?” Pa asks
.

“I don’t like that mask,” she says
.

Nos holds the skull face in his hands and looks at it. He drops the knit mask off the bridge. It sways in the wind on and disappears into the river
.

“Are we OK?” she asks
.

“Yeah, hon,” he says, looking up and down at the clear vials. “I think so, I think so.”

“What’s that in the suitcase?” she asks
.

“This? Treatment. Just the most valuable thing in the world,” he chuckles
.

“Please,” says the doctor, grinning off in dreamland. “Please don’t take my treatment,” he says, suddenly polite
.

“Why don’t you get some more where you got this?”

“I can’t. He’s gone,” smiling, polite
.

“Who’s gone?”

“The Chef.”

“The Chef?”

“Yes. Brilliant, brilliant man. The Chef, the Chef, the Chef,” he sings
.

“Where’s he gone to?” asks Pa
.

“West,” he said. “San Francisco, where the money is. He came after the Lieutenant shot my wife and made me work for him. He sold us all the drugs and medicines. He showed me how to make more of the cure and kept traveling. Him and his mercenaries. Ole ‘Frisco.”

The doctor is comfy. He rambles about cocktail parties and Oysters Rockefeller and dinners with the wife and sleeping with Dominican assistants and weekend medical conferences in Arizona
.

Pa looks at him curiously. “Doctor, how is your treatment going?”

“Oh, it’s fine. I’m due for a shot, come to think of it.”

“How often do you need them?”

“Every day. Or until I see the rash again.”

Pa looks at her. She is unsure whether she should speak. The grown up talk sounds pleasant, but it still seems important, so she’s quiet
.

“Doctor, how do I know if my daughter is sick?”

“The rash. That’s the only way.”

“Nay, come here honey.”

Her pa takes her in his arms and takes off her shirt. It’s
freezing
cold in the wind, but he’s serious so she doesn’t say anything. His fingers are dirty, but his arms are gentle again. The crying man is now smiling, and it’s like he’s put Pa in a good mood
.

Pa runs his fingers along her back until he feels something, like a few bumps, but she can’t see
.

Nos takes an exit off I95 and cruises toward downtown Philly.

Nos stops once at a house with a sign in sight—RICE $10. A tall windmill made with red and white slats of a scavenged home circles on the rooftop of a boarded up warehouse. Nos draws his scope and surveys the surroundings. Leaves tremble with the breeze. A flock of blackbirds spring from phone wires in sudden unison. Squirrels trace the sides of tree trunks and disappear into the green. He finds a woman moving at the opposite side of the house in a hood.

San Francisco
, the doc had said. About as vague as can be. Once Nos saw the pink sheen of the rash on Naomi’s shoulder, traced his fingers over the raised bumps on her smooth skin, tears had overcome him.
Worst possible case scenario
.

He pressed the doc for info. The doctor rambled. Nos was about to string him back up on the bridge. When he threatened to do just that, the doc became more forthcoming.

“The
inoculations
and the
treatments
are legit. The ‘cure’ is pure bullshit. Just a scam to calm the dying. Enslave the rest
.”

“Is there a cure? A
real cure?
” Nos demanded.

The doctor slowly shook his head. “If there was, I would be cured. But the Chef claimed he was close. He said he could make a cure that works. But he left, and now, there is only
treatment
. The treatment has kept me alive for eight months. Please, don’t take it. That’s all there is left.”

“Your medicine is mine,” Nos told him.

“Don’t,” the doc pleaded. “You’ll kill me. I will be dead within days.”