Joe Pitt 2 - No Dominion (16 page)

She takes the photo from my hand.

--I have no idea why I keep this.

She lifts her glasses to her eyes and peers at the photo.

--To remind me of happier times, I suppose. Although I hate to think of myself as being
nostalgic. Nostalgia rivets you in the past. It keeps you from looking forward. It is
good, I think, to be proud of your history, to honor it, but one should never wallow in
it.

She taps a very short nail against the glass covering the picture.

--That is what I tried to teach those boys.

She has smudged the glass with her finger. She pulls the cuff of her sleeve down and uses
it to wipe the smudge away.

--I'm not certain Bird ever quite got it.

She sets the photo back in its place.

--While Predo, I fear, has taken it much too far.

--Have you ever wondered about the name
Coalition
?

--Not really.

--It never occurred to you that it was an odd name for an organization that shows such
unanimity?

--Like I said, never thought about it.

--Yes. You strike me as one who does that frequently. Someone who fails to think about
things. Some history then, while they prepare.

Two of the boys are moving furniture from the middle of the room. The guy with the bagged
head is slumped in a corner.

--The Coalition was once just that: a Coalition of smaller groups. Over the years those
groups
coalesced;
they became a single, unified entity. For the most part.

The furniture out of harm's way, the boys begin spreading a sheet of plastic over the
floor.

--This is what I mean when I accuse Terry Bird of nostalgia.

She points at the photo.

--He was apt at recruiting. And so there he is, Downtown, trying to repeat the lessons of
the past. Assembling a coalition of disparate groups, with the goal of creating a single,
unified whole. He will fail. The historical moment is different, time has marched, while
he remains in the past. What worked once, will not work again.

They begin taping down the edges of the plastic.

--Predo, it is true, looks forward. But to what end? He sacrifices territory, maneuvers
behind the scenes, probes for weaknesses in the uninfected world that he might manipulate,
looks always to the future. To adapting to the future. But only for himself. Only out of a
desire for power. He is craven. And he disguises this, hides it from himself, by cocooning
himself with influence. But I have seen him cower. From the back of my hand.

They pick up the guy by the wall and carry him to the middle of the plastic.

--Bird, at least, went off on his own, attempted to forge his own kingdom. It will crash
down around him, but he has a sense of vision beyond himself. Predo is narrow.

One of the boys has a briefcase. He opens it. Inside there are works: needles, syringes,
plastic bags, loops of rubber hose.

--Predo is selfish.

She walks over to her window. Daylight glows at the edges of the drapes. It hurts my eyes
to look at it.

--That is why we are caged up here, surrounded by filth. Robbed of our heritage. Unable to
exert our influence as we should. Unable to shape the future.

The boy pulls the bag from the guy's head. It's a young guy. Hispanic. Close-cropped hair,
a hoop piercing his left eyebrow.

--Except by using the tools of the past.

One of the boys on the plastic sheet draws a scalpel from the briefcase.

Vandewater moves to the edge of the plastic, standing over the boys who kneel on either
side of the Hispanic kid.

She looks at me, sitting over here on her couch, arms once again wired behind my back.

--Have you ever infected anyone, Mr. Pitt?

--No.

--Then this will be an education for you.

One boy opens his mouth. He sticks out his tongue. The other, the one with the scalpel,
places the tip of the blade against his partner's tongue and cuts. He pushes the scalpel
until the blade has disappeared inside the healthy pink flesh, then he draws it downward,
slicing it open to the tip. Blood begins to gush. The boy with the butterflied tongue
bends forward, he opens the Hispanic kid's mouth, and covers it with his own. Blood seeps
out around the seal created by their lips.

Vandewater looks at me.

--There are other ways to do it, of course.

The Hispanic kid starts to jerk.

--But this is one of the surest.

His heels kick the floor.

--Ultimately, it all depends on the subject.

His palms slap the plastic and his fingers clench and unclench.

--You see, not everyone can accept the Vyrus.

The boy lifts his mouth away, blood still leaking from his tongue. He looks at Vandewater.
She watches the Hispanic kid for another moment as greenish yellow foam begins to erupt
from his mouth and nose. She shakes her head.

The boy with the scalpel places it against the Hispanic kid's neck and shoves it deep into
his carotid, cupping his hand around the entrance wound to keep the blood from spraying
the room. The Hispanic kid's tremors subside. In less than a minute he is still.

The boy with the sliced tongue wipes at it with a cotton pad. The wound has stopped
bleeding and a scab is forming. The other boy puts his tools aside and the two of them
begin to roll the plastic sheet with the Hispanic kid inside.

Vandewater steps out of their way.

--And so we will have to try again.

The door opens. Another head-bagged kid is brought in.

--A student body is an invaluable resource.

The new kid is laid out on a fresh sheet of plastic. The bag comes off. This one might be
twenty. Middle Eastern. Khakis and a button-down.

--Away from home for the first time, they become depressed, alienated. Their behavior may
be uncharacteristic. They get involved with drugs. Run away from school. Walk into
dangerous parks after midnight. Commit suicide.

The two boys prepare to repeat their procedure, switching roles so that the one who last
wielded the scalpel will now be cut.

--This is especially true of freshmen. They drop like flies.

More tongue slicing occurs.

--And even more true of the racial minorities. So driven. I'm speaking particularly of
Asians, East Asians, and Middle Easterners now. The internal and external pressures to
succeed, it can be unbearable for a youngster.

This one tremors and shakes, but no foam spews. Instead, his throat works as he sucks the
infected blood out of the boy's split tongue.

Vandewater bends to observe.

--There, we have a match.

After several seconds the boy pulls his mouth free. The Middle Eastern kid's mouth opens
and closes and his own tongue runs around his lips cleaning them of blood. His eyes are
open, but they stare unfocused and sightless at the ceiling.

Vandewater moves closer, stands over the kid, looking at his face.

--Now he has great potential. He could accomplish remarkable feats.

The boys have begun assembling the works from the briefcase.

--With nurturing and care, with a firm hand to steer him, he might become something
worthwhile. A scholar of our kind, one who might someday unlock all the secrets of the
Vyrus. A statesman, to unite the Clans. A poet, to write verses of our plight. An able
soldier, to take arms in the coming battles.

One of the boys takes the kid's arm and inserts an IV needle into a vein.

--But it is not to be. I will not have him.

The blood cup is fitted to the hose and the blood begins to fill one of the pint bags they
have at hand.

--I will not have the brown, black, and yellow in my land. Once, yes, they had a place. But
they proved treacherous. And they will not be given a second chance.

The bag is full. One of the boys closes the valve at the end of the hose, slips the full
bag free, and connects a fresh one. Blood flows.

--Do you know what you are looking at?

I shake my head.

--There is no reason you should. You are looking at a weapon. A very old weapon.

Another bag full, another attached.

--Although it has never been used as such before. In the past it has always been simply a
vice. Albeit a very dangerous one. And very exclusive.

Another bag.

--One wonders where the original inspiration came from, who it was that stuck their finger
in the air and declared,
eureka!

She picks up one of the full bags.

--I suspect it was an accident.

She walks toward me.

--I suspect it was a Vampyre, crazed with hunger, attempting to feed on someone who had
been very, very recently infected. Through some odd set of circumstances, this Vampyre fed
only for a moment. And made a discovery.

Behind her, another bag is filled.

--That, when consumed, the blood of one freshly infected will induce the most remarkable
sensations. Remarkable, and addictive.

She raises an index finger.

--An unbelievably expensive addiction, mind you. For who can afford to be addicted to blood
twice over? Who can bear the risks of hunting not just for sustenance, but for pleasure?
Thus the exclusivity.

They're massaging the kid now, rubbing their hands over his legs and arms, as if squeezing
dry a tube of toothpaste.

--That expense lies also at the heart of the secret as to why something like this has laid
buried for so very long. Of course, I say
something like this,
knowing that nothing else like this exists. The point being, our lives are difficult to
say the least. And they can be very long. And, if one does not have resources, very
boring. An effective distraction from the basic needs for survival would be compelling in
and of itself. Even if it were not addictive.

Another bag.

--It was decided some time ago, some very great time ago, that this was an indulgence that
could not be afforded. It was declared anathema by the body that governed the Clans. When
there was such a thing. In fact, that was the name it was given.

She shows me the bag in her hands, holds it in front of my face so that my nostrils are
full of the stink of it.

--
Anathema:
the name for both the substance itself, and the habit of indulging in it. It was
forbidden. The addicts were hunted and slaughtered. It became a crime so heinous, no one
even knew of its existence. And so you see my personal values employed.

She turns to face the kid being wrung dry on the floor.

--Employing something of the past in a new manner, in order to shape the future. It flows
out of these sacrifices.

She points at the window.

--And we send it onto the streets below. To wear holes in their unity. To create dissent
and expose weaknesses. To drive their children to hunt to excess and endanger themselves.
Thus, it is a weapon.

One of the boys has hoisted the kid by his ankles. A bag fills in fits and spurts.

Vandewater turns back to me.

--A weapon that, given time, will spur a war.

The kid is dry. They begin to bundle him in the plastic sheet.

--It will drive the Hood to threaten war on the Coalition. Predo, clinging to the status
quo as he does, will attempt to avoid this. But he will have no choice. The chaos reigning
in the Hood will force him to take action. Especially once I have assured him that I will
be taking action whether he does or not. He will not risk losing this settlement.
Particularly not when he sees how vulnerable to attack I have made the Hood.

She points at the two plastic wrapped bodies.

--Put them in the kitchen for now.

Two of the boys haul them out of the room.

She shows me the bag of blood again, holds it balanced on the open palm of her large hand.

--And that is what you are looking at.

I look at her.

--Me, I thought I was looking at a lady who's crazy as a shit-house rat.

She nods.

--Vulgarity. Of course. The refuge of the weak-minded. Scoff if you like. But there is
more.

The boys come back and begin replacing the furniture they had moved. She raises a hand and
one of them brings a chair. She sits.

--Once the Hood has fallen. Once we have reclaimed our territory and these boys and their
brothers and sisters know the security they have never known. The security that would have
been theirs if the Secretariat had never bowed to those animals. Once that is secure, my
attention will turn south, to our lands below 14th Street.

The room has been put back together. Two of the boys continue to stand watch over me while
the others gather together the anathema and pack it in the briefcase.

--In fact, that project has already begun. Gradually, much as we did here, the anathema is
being introduced. Which, I would imagine, is the reason you have come so far away from
home in the first place.

She looks at me through her glasses again.

--Another thing.

The boys come over to the couch, one of them carrying the briefcase full of anathema.

--While in modest amounts anathema's effects are essentially euphoric, larger amounts are
quite agonizing, if not lethal.

She hands one of the boys the pint she's been holding.

--It takes an experienced and steady hand to administer the perfect dosage to inflict that
agony without inducing an undesired fatality.

The boy unwraps a clean syringe.

--But if done properly, such a dose is every bit as effective as the most savage torture.

He begins to draw anathema into the syringe.

--Minus the mess and inconvenience.

She holds up a finger. The boy stops filling the syringe.

She points at it.

--This, I believe, would be your
ideal
dosage. If I were to inject you with this, every muscle in your body would warm and
relax. A slight sweat might break out over your face. The worries of your everyday life
would cease to have weight. Music would fill your ears such as you have never heard
before. Images would light the undersides of your eyelids. Shapes, colors. Fantasies, but
also more concrete hallucinations. Communal visions that are shared by all who have
experienced anathema. Visions that some would say prove conclusively the spiritual nature
of the Vyrus. Though I am not among them. But perhaps you are, Mr. Pitt?

Again she lifts the glasses to her eyes.

--I have heard that you sometimes associate with Daniel and his followers. Are you one of
them? I've long suspected that Daniel's interests are not so ephemeral as he claims. It
would not surprise me to discover that you are in fact
his
agent. Predo and Bird running you for their ends, but all the while, secretly, you are an
instrument of Enclave concerns. It might be so. It might be so and you might not even be
aware of it, Daniel being so subtle as he is. Would you care to have such visions? Unlock
a deeper level of meaning within the Vyrus? You've been infected long enough to ask
questions, haven't you? The first years of infection being filled as they are with simply
learning to cope, deciding if you want to live this life at all. The next several with
learning the tools of survival. The next several with learning to fit in, to adapt to
being infected in an uninfected world over the long term. And finally, if you have the
endurance, the cleverness, some set of tools to keep you alive, you begin to ask
questions.
What is the Vyrus? What are the Vampyre? How long have we been here? Where did the
Clans come from? Are there more of us out there in the world? How many? Do they all live
as we do?
And, of course:
What am I?

She lowers her glasses and waves them at the syringe in the boy's hand.

--This might hold answers for you. They would come with a price, naturally. You would arise
from my couch with a new hunger, a second need. You would find yourself distracted from
the hunt, contemplating how best to use your victim's blood. Consume it? Or have another
Vampyre infect it for you? You can't use as anathema blood you've infected yourself, it
will only make you ill. Nor can you use blood infected by the same Vampyre, not more than
once or twice. You see how the complexities of this addiction multiply.

She points at the boy again. He pulls smoothly on the plunger.

She tilts her finger upward. He stops.

--With this amount, you will still be granted visions, likewise universal in their nature,
but far more unpleasant. And accompanied not with warmth and relaxation, but muscles
contracted so tightly they sometimes tear from the strain. Fever. Pain. In your bones.
Particularly in the sternum, the spine, the hips, and the femurs. Odd, yes? And when it is
over, you will be left not with the same addiction, but with one that demands these higher
doses. An addiction that can only be sated through misery.

She moves her finger. More blood enters the syringe. Stops.

--With this amount, things become simpler. Agony. Harrowing phantasms. Blood at war with
itself. And a lengthy, wracking, death.

The boy pulls the syringe free, wipes the needle. Offers it to Vandewater.

She takes it.

--Predo wants you. Knowing that, and knowing that I cannot afford to thoroughly alienate
him, we can dispense with this dosage as an empty threat.

She presses the plunger, squirting a thread of the blood onto my chest. The smell burns my
nostrils.

--Having done so, it only remains to decide.

She holds up the syringe.

--Will it be this? In which case I will save my questions until after you have recovered
and are begging for further torture.

She holds her fingernail against the side of the syringe, indicating a smaller amount.

--Will it be this? In which case I will still hold my interrogation, waiting until you have
suffered sweetly, and crave yet more sweetness.

She lowers the syringe.

--Or may I begin my questions now? Secure in the knowledge that you are aware I will not
brook the barest shadow of a falsehood in your answers. Knowing you understand the price
that will be paid.

And she shows me the needle again.

I rub my chin against my shoulder.

--Well, Mrs. Vandewater, it took you awhile to get there, but you finally managed to say,
tell me what I want to know or I'll fuck you up forever.

She waits.

I roll my eyes.

--I don't know what you're waiting for, I already told you once to fuck off.

There's a knock at the door. One of the machine pistol boys answers it. He nods at
Vandewater.

She sets the syringe on the tea table. The boy assisting her closes the briefcase full of
anathema.

She stands.

--Of course, one of the components of anathema's effectiveness as a weapon is its brief
shelf life. It must be distributed immediately after it is harvested. This batch is meant
for the Hood. And the courier is waiting.

She walks to the door.

--But not to worry, the dose in that syringe will last more than long enough to serve its
purpose. In fact, a few minutes' aging will make it much more effective.

She leaves, escorted by Briefcase Boy and one of the machine pistols.

I look at the syringe sitting on the table and then over at the machine pistol boy and the
tongue slicer that remained behind. I look again at the syringe, secure in the knowledge
that when the time comes, I will beg like a child to keep her from sticking it in my arm.

I'm a dead man. And not just in the way that I'm always sort of a dead man. Once I'm in
Predo's hands there will be considerably less talking and much more thrashing and
questioning. And after that, I'll get to see my first sunrise in a quarter century. That
should be worth something, but I expect I'll be distracted by the sensation of my eyelids
melting. Being addicted to this shit will be the least of my concerns. Hell, the smart
play here is to volunteer for the light dose. Lady wants to offer up a last gasp of
nirvana, who am I to say no? That or just answer her damn questions outright. Figure I got
no one to protect. Not like I owe anything to Digga. Not like I can tell her a hell of a
lot about his setup anyway. Figure she won't stop with questions about the Hood. That's
her obsession, but she'll get around to asking about the Society, too. Figure I don't much
care about that either. Why should I? Only reason I ever stuck on that turf is because I
like the neighborhood. Sell Terry out? Yep, no problem. The thing to do here is let her
shoot a little of that shit into me and go out with something soft on my mind. And who
knows, maybe there are some answers in that needle. I don't really believe that, but a lie
can be just as sweet as the truth. Sweeter, nine times out of ten. Yeah, all in all, I got
no good reason to be hardass here. I'm a dead man and the lady is just giving me a chance
to decide how hard I want to go out. Most guys, they'll never be so lucky. No reason to be
a hardass at all. No secrets worth keeping. No one worth protecting. Just me. Figure a
better deal ain't gonna come around for a long while.

Vandewater comes back in alone.

She takes her seat. Lays a hand over the syringe.

--You've had ample time for thought?

I shrug, feeling something that resembles freedom.

Her fingers curl around the syringe.

--If, by any chance, you should need any additional incentive to make this easy and less
time consuming, I could point out to you that our distributor in the Society tells me you
have a girl whom you are--

She doesn't get to finish. It's hard to finish what you're saying when a guy lunges at you
and bites one of your eyes out.

The boy who wired my hands together in the car knew what he was doing. He looped it around
each wrist several times, then crisscrossed it back and forth between both wrists, drawing
them tightly together, knotting the loose end and mashing that knot with a pair of pliers.
The boy who rewired them after they had clipped me free for tea time? He didn't take the
same class. Probably the one who drove around the block over and over. He should have
started with fresh wire. But he didn't. He should have made sure my wrists weren't flexed
when he bound me. But he didn't. No, he used the same wire that had already been stressed
by all my wiggling and twisting when I was figuring out how good a job the first guy did.
He wrapped it around my flexed wrists so that when he was done I could relax those muscles
and have a little slack so the wire didn't bite so deeply into my skin. And he took those
loose ends and twisted them together like the bit of wire used to close a bag of sliced
bread.

If I ever find out which of them it was, I'd like to give him my thanks. Because it's his
shitty job that makes it possible to wrench my hands free and keep this crazy witch from
clawing my ears off when I spit her eye in her face.

I'll give it to her, she doesn't scream, much.

The one by the window is circling, looking for an open shot, a shot that won't have to go
through Vandewater. The tongue slicer is closer, his hand is inside his jacket, going for
a weapon that is less indiscriminate than the machine pistol the other boy has. Vandewater
is blind, one eye somewhere on the floor, the other covered in blood, she's still raking
her nails at my face. I throw her at the tongue slicer. He has his hand out of his jacket,
holding a tiny automatic that looks like a mechanical wasp. The old lady is coming his
way. He lets the gun fall from his hand and holds out his arms to catch her. I don't watch
what happens next, I'm busy picking up the tea table and throwing it at the boy with the
machine pistol.