As darkness fell, they made their camp in a clearing within sight of a ruined motel. The sky was clear, the temperature falling, calling forth dew from the air. Greer knew they were safe for the night; in Amy’s presence he was in a zone of protection. They unrolled their bedrolls and slept.
He awakened later with a start; something was wrong. He rolled to the side and saw that Amy’s bedroll was empty.
He did not allow himself to panic. A gibbous moon had risen as they’d slept, slicing the darkness into spaces of light and shadow, a landscape of menacingly elongated forms and pockets of blackness. The horses were obliviously chewing on a stand of weeds. Greer removed the Browning from his pack and moved cautiously into the gloom. He willed his eyes to parse shape from shape. Where had she gone? Should he call out to her? But the silence of the scene and its hidden dangers forbade it.
Then he saw her. She was standing just a few yards from their encampment, facing away. The rhythms of conversation touched his ears. Was she speaking to someone? It seemed so, and yet there was no one.
He approached her from behind. “Amy?”
No reply. She had given up her murmuring; her body was absolutely still.
“Amy, what is it?”
She turned then to face him with a look of mild surprise. “Oh. I see.”
“Who were you talking to?”
She gave no answer. She seemed to be only partially present. Was she sleepwalking?
Then: “I suppose we should go back.”
“Don’t scare me like that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” She flicked her eyes downward at the gun. “What are you doing with that?”
“I didn’t know where you’d gone. I was worried.”
“I thought I made myself clear, Major. Put it away now.”
She walked past him, headed back to camp.
42
Time interminable; time without end. His existence was a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken. Thoughts floating past like glinting dust motes, darting from wherever he looked. Every day they came. The men with their glowing, blood-red eyes. They unhooked the bloated bags and bore them away on their rattling cart and hung fresh ones on their stands. Always the bags, endlessly needful, constantly filling with their drip-drip-drip of Grey.
They were men who enjoyed their work. They told little jokes, they kept themselves amused. They enjoyed themselves at his expense, like children taunting an animal at the zoo. Here now, they cooed, extending the fragrant dropper toward his mouth, does baby need his bottle? Is baby hungry?
He tried to resist them. He clenched his muscles against the chains, he turned his face away. He mustered every ounce of will to deny them, yet always he succumbed. The hunger soared inside him like a great black bird.
—Say it for Mama. Say, I’m a baby who needs his bottle, I promise to be good. Be a good baby, Grey.
The tip of the dropper wafted enticingly under his nose, the scent of blood like a bomb exploding in his brain, a million neurons firing in an electrical storm of pure desire.
—You’ll like this one. An excellent vintage. You like the young ones, don’t you, Grey?
Tears squeezed from his eyes. Tears of longing and revulsion. The tears of his too-long life, a century of lying naked in chains. The tears of being Grey.
—Please.
—Say it. I like the young ones.
—I’m begging you. Don’t make me.
—The words, Grey. A wave of sour breath close to his ear. Let me … hear … the … words.
—Yes! Yes, I like the young ones! Please! Just a taste! Anything!
And then at last the dropper, its delicious earth-rich squirt on his tongue. He smacked his lips. He rolled the thick muscle of his tongue around the walls of his mouth. He suckled like the baby they said he was, wishing he could make the feeling last, though he never could: an involuntary bob of his throat and it was gone.
—More, more.
—Now, Grey. You know there can’t be any more. A dropper a day keeps the doctor away. Just enough to make you keep churning out the viral goodness.
—Just one taste, that’s all. I promise I won’t tell.
A dark chuckle: And supposing I did? Supposing I gave you just one more dropper? What would you do then?
—I won’t, I swear, I just want …
—I’ll tell you what you want. What you want, my friend, is to rip those chains right out of the floor. Which, I have to say, is pretty much what I’d want in your situation. That’s what I’d be thinking about. I’d want to kill the men who put me here. A pause, then the voice coming closer: Is that what you want, Grey? To kill all of us?
He did. He wanted to rip them limb from limb. He wanted their blood to flow like water; he ached to hear their final cries. He wanted this even more than death itself, though just a little. Lila, he thought, Lila, I can feel you, I know that you are near. Lila, I would save you if I could.
—See you tomorrow, Grey.
And on and on. The bags came empty and went away full, the dropper did its work. It was his blood that sustained them, the men with their glowing eyes. They fed on Grey’s blood and lived forever, as he lived forever. Grey eternal, in chains.
Sometimes he wondered where the blood they fed him came from. But not very often. It wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to think about.
Occasionally he still heard Zero, though it wasn’t like Zero was talking to him anymore. That part of the deal seemed to have expired, long ago. The voice was muffled and far away, as if Grey were eavesdropping on a conversation taking place on the other side of a wall, and all things considered, he counted it a small mercy to be left alone with only his own thoughts for company, no Zero and his talk-talk-talk filling up his head.
Guilder was the only one who took his blood straight from the source. That was what they called Grey, the Source, like he wasn’t even a person but a thing, which he supposed he was. Not always but sometimes, when he was feeling especially hungry, or for other reasons Grey couldn’t guess at, Guilder would appear at the door in his underclothes, so as not to get blood on his suit. He would unhook the bag from its tube, viscous fluid spurting over him, and place the IV in his mouth, sucking up Grey’s blood like a kid taking soda pop from a straw.
He was permanently dying.
Then one day he awoke to find Guilder straddling a chair, looking at him. His tie was undone around his neck, his hair askew; his suit was rumpled and stained. Grey could tell he was late in his cycle. He could smell the rot coming off the man—a dumpstery, corpselike, slightly fruity stink—but Guilder made no move to feed. Grey had the sense that Guilder had been sitting there for some time.
“Let me ask you something, Lawrence.”
The question was going to be asked one way or another. “Okay.”
“Have you ever… now, how do I put this?” Guilder shrugged vaguely. “Have you ever been in love?”
