won’t last. There’s no seniority here. Just willpower. Whoever can take the most, push the Vyrus the furthest, and live, they go to the front row. After that last year riding the bad dose, I can take a lot.
He places a hand on my shoulder.
– Thanks for that, Joe.
I ignore his hand.
I inhale. Smell her. Her new smell.
Knocking his hand away, I go past him. I smell her again. There’s a door between us. I make it go away.
She’s in there. Sitting, back against the wall, legs sprawled in front of her. She’s pulled the trache tube from her throat and holds it and stares at it, as she fingers the already healed incision just above the candy necklace that is speckled with blood. She looks up at me and shows me the tube.
– It itched.
– Sure it did.
She drops it and touches her head.
– My hair feels weird. It feels like it’s growing.
The sores on her face have started to fade. Purple to pink.
It hurts lowering myself to the floor, but I do it.
She wrinkles her nose.
– You smell funny, Joe.
She sniffs.
– Everything smells funny. It all smells bad here.
I look at her neck.
Thinking.
You don’t change things by wanting them changed. You change them by knowing what to do and when to do it. And by doing it.
I never seem to know what to do until it’s too fucking late.
She pinches her nostrils closed.
– I don’t like it here. I want to go home. Can you take me home?
I nod. But I’m lying.
I’ll never get her out of here. I’ll never get her past the maniacs down there. I’ll never get her away from the psycho setting up to take over this madhouse.
I touch her neck.
– Hey, baby, know what?
She covers my hand with hers.
– What?
– I love you crazy.
She smiles at me and opens her mouth to say something and I start to squeeze and this is what I know how to do and this is what I have to do and it is not too late to make this better and she looks at me like she suddenly doesn’t know who I am and grabs my fingers and I can do this I can do this and she looks at me and I can do this and Enclave come into the room and pull me from her and my fingers hook the strand of candies around her neck and it snaps and they scatter over the floor and she screams at me.
And I’m gone.
The Count looks down at me.
– Know much history, Joe?
I sit in two feet of dirty water at the bottom of the sewer shaft where they threw me and look up at him.
He points at himself.
– Not my best subject, but there’s stuff you connect with, right? Like even in the lamest class, there’s bound to be something you get a rise out of. History of Western Civilization was like that for me. That class was like nap time.
There is no ladder. No way back up.
– Monday, Wednesday and Friday, one to two-fifty for an entire year, man. Professor Hocker would start droning and, like, fifty undergrads would simultaneously nod off. You could sell that guy’s lectures on CD and make a fortune from insomniacs.
A feeder runs through here, washing the cold water around me, the occasional clump of waste getting lodged against my back.
– Only time I perked up and took notice? When he started getting into the Roman emperors.
I sit in the water, it soaks my clothes and makes my knee hurt worse.
– Those guys, once they got rid of the senate, know how they ruled? They ruled by caveat. Know what that means? Means they ruled by fear. Means they did whatever the fuck they wanted to.
The water is dirty. Does that mean it’s on its way to the river, or away from it? I don’t know.
– Hey, you know that fear rules the brain? Seriously. Our brains, this is amazing, they devote more space to dealing with fear than to any other emotion. Because, hey, fear is what makes us learn shit and survive. It’s fucking key. Know where it lives? Fear lives in this little thing, ’bout the size of an almond, called the amygdala. Fear in the brain. Something bad happens to you, you got no choice but to be afraid of it happening again. Until it happens so many times that you get used to it.
Iron grates on concrete as he drags the shaft cover to the edge of the hole.
– So tell me, how many people who you love do you think you have to have taken away from you, before you stop being afraid that it’ll happen again?
He looks over his shoulder, looks back down at me.
– Oh, hey, and can you guess which of the emperors was my favorite? No? Give up? OK, I’ll tell you.
He sticks his head into the shaft.
– Caligula.
He laughs through his nose and shakes his head.
– Yeah, sick but true. I am so fucking predictable, right? But I tell ya, once I get my thing going up in here, that’s gonna be the scene. I’m gonna introduce a whole new way of doing things around here. I mean, everybody is scared shitless of these dudes, how can I not find a way to make use of that?
He pulls his head back.
– So anyway, one last thing about fear in the brain. When you fuck up around here, like say you maybe try and strangle a fellow Enclave or something? They don’t kill you. No beheadings or getting put out in the sun. Instead they drop you down this shaft into the sewers. Maybe it’s symbolic. I don’t know. Doesn’t happen often. I mean, really rare. What I gather, mostly when they get cast out they just kill themselves.
I hear something splash in the water. Rats.
– But the story is, at least one of them is hanging on down there. Has been for years. Lone ex-Enclave looney wandering the sewers and living off God knows what. Could be like that alligators being flushed down toilets thing. Urban Vampyre legend. If you get me.
He starts to move the cover over the mouth of the shaft, stops and puts his face into the last remaining gap of candlelight above me.
– Still, pretty fucking scary, huh?
The cover slides and drops into place.
Whatever moves in the water isn’t a rat.
It’s fast and it’s strong and as soon as the darkness is total it’s on me and I’m being dragged through the water, banging off the tunnel walls, hauled up black shafts and flung across chasms I know are there only by the echoes of my screams.
– Hey, buddy, hey, buddy, hey. Got a smoke? Man. Got a smoke?
I can’t see anything. My eyes are open, but I can’t see a fucking thing.
But Jesus I can smell.
Stench. A river of sewage flowing somewhere below where I’m huddled. The stink of the city. Raw. Crackling taint of electricity from the subway train that rumbles past somewhere behind thick concrete. A puff of warm air
