– Here, take this. I gotta go help this asshole.
She crosses over to the guy who’s been waiting for his drink. I stare at the cigarette she was smoking. She comes back, plucks it from my fingers, puts it to her lips, then pulls it away and hands it back to me.
– Sorry. Didn’t mean to blow up on you.
I take a drag from the smoke.
– What can I do?
She tucks some loose hair behind her ear.
– Honestly. There is something.
– What?
– Do you know your blood type?
– Um.
I take another drag.
– No. I guess not.
– Well, if you could find out that would be cool.
– What’s up?
– The doctor. He’s says I should start, this is so gruesome, he says I should start laying in a supply. For later. If I need transfusions. I can’t save my own obviously, so I need to find donors. I’ll get credits or something in the blood bank. So if you could find out. And then, if you’re a match.
She laughs.
– If you’re a match maybe you could give me some of your blood. Man, that’s about the most fucked up thing I’ve ever had to ask.
She looks at me.
– You OK, Joe?
– Yeah. I’m fine.
The infected population is pretty stable. And it’s that way for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is that it’s hard to infect anyone. It’s not just a matter of a couple bites on the neck. Somehow your infected bodily fluids need to mingle with someone else’s bodily fluids. The amount of mingling is up for debate. But seeing as how the Vyrus can’t survive outside the human body, it’s kind of tricky to get it from one person to another. It’s also not clear if it exists in any fluids other than blood. Not that I’ve done a lot of research into this stuff. My education stopped when I was about twelve. Biochemistry’s not my strong suit. I’m just getting by on the introductory lectures I got from Terry way back when. But I’m not special in my ignorance. Nobody has done any real research into this stuff. Way I understand it, researching a virus under the best of circumstances is a pretty tough proposition. But when the facilities at your disposal aren’t much more than a high school chemistry set, you’re doomed to operating in the dark.
Not that people don’t try.
The Coalition took a crack at it. They got their fingers into a very big pie called Horde Bio Tech, Inc. Took a shot at taking over the whole deal. Wanted to use their labs to start cracking the Vyrus. Didn’t work out for them. That was at least partly my fault. OK, mostly my fault. That’s why me and the Coalition don’t get along so well anymore. That’s why Predo has shifted me from his barely tolerated list to his torture-maim-and-kill-on-sight list. Anyway, they got as close as anyone’s gotten to having a chance to really dig into this thing. The Coalition Secretariat has built up some big piles of money over the decades, centuries, whatever. Money like that creates cracks. And they have become very adept over the years at working their fingers into those cracks and widening them. Once again, that’s the way Terry tells it. And I got no better way of knowing. But that kind of brings up the second reason why Vampyres aren’t cropping up like mushrooms: The Coalition doesn’t want them to.
The Coalition operates on a charter that is the exact opposite of the Society’s: They want to keep the Vyrus under wraps. They’ve been around for a long time, long enough to have a historical perspective of sorts, and they’ve already decided that no one is ever going to accept us as anything vaguely resembling normal. It’s pretty much the only thing I agree with them about. So while their grip on Manhattan may have slipped since the sixties, they still draw some lines, and one of the biggest is about keeping the numbers down. Not that they need to convince anyone. We all get it. This is a pretty delicate ecosystem here. It’s an island for fuck sake; the food supply, as it were, can only support so many predators. But in this case, the problem isn’t that the prey might be hunted to extinction. The problem is that when you get right down to it, we’re not predators, we’re
And that’s why I know Philip is an asswipe.
I think about what an asswipe Philip is while I walk to my place. I think about Philip and all this other crap because the alternative is to think about Evie. The fact that she’s not getting better. The fact that she may be getting much worse. And, yeah, the fact that she’s hoping I’ll be able to donate some of my blood to help her if she gets really bad down the road.
Philip. Think about Philip.
At my place, I duck downstairs and grab the emergency cash. I didn’t need it at Hodown, but at Blackie’s everyone needs cash. I stand there for a second and look at the bed, still messed from last night. Evie didn’t want to come over tonight. Not after I told her I had to go take care of some business and didn’t know when I’d be home. Not the kind of thing a girl wants to hear from her guy the same day she finds out her terminal illness has taken a turn for the worse. Not the kind of thing I wanted to tell her. But I need to knock out this job for Terry, need to get the monkey off my back. I don’t take care of that, I’m not gonna be any help to her anyhow. And I want to, I want to help.
I go in the closet. It’s not blood I need this time. It’s a gun. I unlock the gun safe and take out the.32 snub. I check that it’s loaded and tuck it into the back of my pants. I don’t have any reason to think I’ll need it, but it’s late, and I’m irritable, and I might want to pistol-whip Philip with it. Him or this Count clown.
I lock up and go to Blackie’s.
I push the button next to the anonymous door on 13th. I stand there, knowing someone inside is peeping at me to see if I look OK. The door opens. It’s Dominick.
– Hey, Dom.
– Hey, bud.
He glances up and down the street, checking to see that no cops are nearby, then holds the door wide for me.
– C’mon in.
Blackie’s is a pit. It was probably once the super’s apartment for this building, now it’s as scummy an after- hours joint as you’re likely to find. It’s 4 a.m. and the place has just opened. Lucky me, I’m one of the first in. There’s only the one tiny room, but Blackie managed to crowd it with the bar, a few tables, a couple couches, a pool table and an old-school jukebox that plays real 45s. It takes me two seconds to look over the four or five losers in the place and see that none of them are Philip. I go to the bar and order a beer and a bourbon on the rocks. The beer is a can of Bud that comes out of an Igloo cooler at the end of the bar. The bourbon comes out of a bottle that says Maker’s Mark, but it ain’t. I give the bartender a twenty and she gives me back six and asks me if I need anything else. The anything else being a dime bag of coke that costs twenty-five bucks and wouldn’t get me high even if I didn’t have the Vyrus. I pass. With nothing else to do, I do the usual: sit out of the way, drink and smoke.
An hour passes. The place fills up, but it never gets loud. There are only two rules in Blackie’s: no loud voices and no cursing. The loud voices I get, there are occupied apartments right above us. The cursing is Blackie’s thing. Guess it makes him feel better about running a shitty after-hours coke den. A couple people try to sit at my table and coke-rap my ear off. I stare them down and they leave. Blackie himself shows up at some point: a potbellied black guy in his late fifties sporting ostrich skin boots, a black cowboy hat, and ropes of gold chain draped around his neck. He takes his stool at the end of the bar.
Blackie came to fame back in the day when he opened the first topless club in the East Village. He ran whores and did a brisk business in hijacked booze out the back. He also owned a piece of five or six other bars scattered
