Internecine (50 page)

That leaves what happened to Conrad.

I wish I could tell you, but honestly, I don’t know. He vanished. Disappeared. Went under. In the beginning, my intention was to curry an asset that could be sacrificed so I could conceivably take his place, creating a slot that I could inhabit. By the end, I couldn’t countenance that. Against all my understanding of what people do in their own self-interest, Conrad recklessly flew in to rescue me and would have taken a bullet for me. That kind of asset, you don’t sacrifice, friends.

Of course, I could be lying. You’ll never know.

Instead of my simply taking his place, it appears that we have swapped. Conrad became like one of those dead people who get their Social Security numbers appropriated by con artists. “Dandine” got killed on paper and that was sufficient for certain evil forces to stop dogging the guy.

I come into this world with all the skills and knowledge of my former profession. With acute senses. With abilities that might make you shudder if you really knew anything about me (but then, it’s unlikely you’ll ever talk to anybody as high up as Rainstone, or even suspect who he really is). In a world where nobody is who they say they are, I fit
right in, seamlessly—and you can’t perceive the break between fantasy and reality. I can walk among the walking dead without ever being one of them. In my world, the dead come back to life more routinely than they do in drama, or on television. You just never see it happen, or don’t recognize what’s going on, if it happens right in front of you.

If you were smart, you’d be killing the minions of advertising. Instead, you pay crippling sums of money, tithing the government to kill on your behalf—those rulers who keep you broke, hopeless, and desperate—since you just don’t seem to have any spare time, and isn’t the pressure of day-to-day living too overwhelming, most ways? Instead, you do virtually everything we tell you to. You wait, breathlessly, eagerly, for the next thing we decide to make you do. Why bother with a frontal attack on individual liberties when you’ll give up your most important rights
willingly?
You know that old saying about how everybody is dying to sell out, but there aren’t enough buyers? Legislation is clumsy, corrupt, and glacially slow. Not decisive, or surgical, or comfortably subradar.

So what, if I lied, a little bit?

I know this may not be how you were expecting things to turn out, but I ask you, Look at the unprecedented opportunity that was presented here.

I mean, what would
you
do?

Or rather, when your time comes, what
will
you do?

I could reveal the names of many people who profoundly influenced or augmented the production of
Internecine
, but then I’d have to kill you. It sounds mysterious to say that most of the plot sprang full-blown from long rumination on that very word,
internecine
(which by now, I trust, has become part of your vocabulary), but it’s the truth insofar as an answer to the eternal questions about story sourcing. That, and—strangely enough—the 1899 poem “Antigonish” by William Hughes Mearns.

Such few participants and champions that can be safely identified are as follows: Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime; John Schoenfelder of Little, Brown; Brendan Deneen and Thomas Dunne of St. Martins; the ferociously talented Tim Bradstreet and the just-plain ferocious Thomas Jane; and John Silbersack of Trident Media Group.

For long-in-advance read throughs (spanning years) I am indebted to Peter Straub, John Farris, Peter Farris, F. Paul Wilson, Joe R. Lansdale, Michael Marshall Smith, and Duane Swierczynski. My posse!

Even weirder thanks to the late Vernon Green, who as a teenager in 1954 came up with his own oddball term and used it as a lyric in the Medallions’ R&B hit “The Letter.” Spellings vary but it’s another word you need to run off and learn right now:
pizmotality
.

for

K
ERRY
F
ITZMAURICE

mi pelirroja mejor

and queen of pizmotality

with all my love