Every Last Drop (6 page)

Slowly, she lowers herself into a graceful squat that someone who looks as old as her should have more trouble executing. —Being shot is not in your immediate future.

She reaches out and places the tip of her index finger on my cheekbone. —Other things are in your future, but not that.

She presses the finger gently into my cheek, drawing the skin down from the bottom of my eye.

—By the way, Mr. Pitt, you mentioned that Id let you take my eye when we last met. In point of fact, and while I don't wish to be thought ungenerous, I never actually considered it a gift.

She lifts her finger. —And I've always rather believed you owed me something in return.

She opens her mouth wide and goes to work, evening accounts between

There comes a time when you think there are no new territories of pain. After a certain number of stabbings, shootings, clubbings, whippings, beatings, thrashings, cuttings, slashings and eviscerations, you begin to assume you've

had the worst of it and nothing of that nature can really surprise you very much.

And then someone comes along to show you that you re wrong.

And you can do little but scream your thanks and appreciation for the lesson.

So I scream. My eye being gnawed out by a crazed old woman, I scream like I rarely have. Because some things, some things are truly horrifying.

But maybe you have to have them happen to you to get that.

—Because it was due me.

—I am not arguing whether you had grounds, Mrs. Vandewater. I am stating as

fact that you were charged to bring him unmolested.

—Yes, so I was. And I abused that charge. And you have asked me why I

abused that charge. And I have answered. Because it was due me. This seems

to leave little enough to discuss. The only question seems to be, how will you

discipline me for my failure to do as you charged?

I open my eyes.

Correction.

I open my eye.

Seeing as its caked with the blood that spilled out of what used to be my other eye, it doesn't help much. Clotted darkness with a distant blur of light punctuated by two smaller clots of darkness that don't seem to be getting along all that well just now. I close my eye and let my ears do the work, still having two of those for the moment.

—Yes, how will I discipline you. Yet again we come around to the same topic. I am bemused, Mrs. Vandewater, as to how a person so wholly devoted to the concept of discipline can be entirely lacking in it herself. —That is due entirely to your own lack of awareness. —Indeed. Well. Illuminate me. If you are inclined.

Her footsteps sound down the long echoing room as she begins to pace. —Illuminate. I have spent my life in that very effort. And no little part of it in a specific effort to illuminate you. Bright child. Such a bright child. With an utterly dim outlook. You still see no further than your dogma. Maintenance of status quo. This, despite all evidence of the erosion taking place under your feet. Illuminate!

The hard slap of a flat palm on a desktop.

—You fail to make sense of my actions, and you interpret them as disobedient and undisciplined, because you measure them against your own authority. You

refuse again and again to see that I am in the service of a larger order of things. While your eyes continue to be on the path just before your feet, I am looking well ahead to where the path becomes lost and tangled in the woods.

Silence. The impression of contemplation. Then the mans voice. —And yet I am still unclear as to what that has to do with biting his eye out.

Silence again. The impression of a stare-down. The woman's voice. —I took his eye because I have no respect for your authority. Because I do not believe you are long for your position. Because in some few months time I expect not to be forced to answer to you any longer.

A chair creaks as she sits. —Does that clarify the matter?

Leather-soled shoes take a few steps. Another chair creaks. —Yes. Yes it does.

—And so, after an unnecessary digression to illuminate you regarding the obvious, we can return to the matter at hand? I have disobeyed your charge. What cost must I pay? What is due to Caesar? What can you afford to extract with your power crumbling about you?

Papers being turned.

—You are still well regarded by some members of the council. This hinders me somewhat. Limits the scope of what correction I might impose. Yes.

A folder being snapped shut.

—But you force my hand, and I must do something. If you can tolerate another question, let me ask, in similar circumstances, when I was in your care, what would you have done to me had I shown the same lack of regard for your commands?

Whisper of fabric.

—What a coward you are. Unable even to devise your own chastisement. Id have killed you. There is no room for any lack of—

The sound of something sharp cutting the air, a clatter of furniture, breath whistling from a hole nature made no allowance for.

—No need to say anything further, Mrs. Vandewater. When you are right, you are right. And I can complete the thought for you. There is, indeed, no room for any lack of discipline in this life of ours.

The floorboards vibrate as a body thrashes against them. Thick fluid leaks onto wood.

—And you are, as ever, correct in most things. You were correct in thinking that you would soon be released from any obligation of answering to my

authority.

Metal scraping on bone, sawing.

—But giving myself some credit, you were off by several months in your estimation of how soon your release might come.

And a sound not often heard in the natural course of things, but one I've had opportunities to hear on more than one occasion: the soft but solid thump of a human head being dropped to the floor.

—My only regret being that I cannot ask you how the view of the path appears from where you are now.

Footsteps striding down the room toward me, stopping.

I open my eye and look up as a lean, dark shadow leans over me. It kneels, whisking a handkerchief from its breast pocket and using it to ream the caul of blood from my eye. —Open your eye, Pitt, I have a job for you.

I blink as he comes into focus: smooth-faced, a fall of glossy brown hair across his forehead, a painfully flawless bespoke suit splashed generously with blood. —Hey, Mr. Predo.

I rest my head on the floor and sight down the room at the beheaded corpse

lying in a spreading red pool. —If it's her old job, I think III pass.

He's not going to kill me.

It's not that fact of him telling me he's not going to kill me that assures me I've got some time to breathe. Predo could look me in the eye and tell me whiskeys good and cigarettes are better and I'd still need a drink and a Lucky to believe he's not lying. The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.

Stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons, Dexter Predo will be in no danger of revealing the truth. Living so far beyond its borders. —I'm not going to kill you.

Said as we watch two of his own burly enforcers, black rubber aprons, galoshes and gloves protecting their suits, while they bag Mrs. Vandewaters remains and mop her blood from the floor of the rotting ballroom around us.

I finish the big bag of blood Mrs. Vandewater had taken from Laments

fridge, and that Predo has given to me to speed the Vyrus through my wounds. —I can't make the same promise, Mr. Predo.

I toss the empty bag into the bucket containing Mrs. Vandewaters head.

He finishes wiping the last of the blood from his hands and neck and drops the towel in a bag held open by one of his men.

—No, Pitt, nor would I expect you to. But seeing as you spent this evening being waylaid by teenage delinquents, and having your anatomy masticated by the crippled and the aged, you will understand my lack of alarm as regards your threat.

I feel my pockets for a smoke. —Yeah, fuck you too.

He looks down at his blood-ruined suit. —Would you excuse me for a moment, Pitt.

He starts for the door, the question not actually being a question.

I settle in my chair, feeling the drug dealers blood slide deeper into my wounded guts, burning cold as the Vyrus colonizes it and recoups strength. —Take your time.

I raise a hand.

—Hey, don't suppose you've started smoking since the last time I saw you?

The door closes, leaving me with the two button-lipped enforcers, the squeak of their rubber boots and the swish of their rags in the bloody mess.

Naw, he's not gonna kill me. He was gonna kill me, he wouldn't have given me the blood to put me right and get me on my feet. Not that he and his boys couldn't still gang me and take me down, but blooded up like this I'd be sure to make it hurt. Not like Predo to make a job harder than it has to be. He was gonna kill me, he would have done it while I was wrapped in barbwire and leaking all over the fucking place. Or at least he would have left me that way till it got to be daylight so they could pitch me easily out of doors and watch me blight in the sun.

The last of old Mrs. Vandewater goes into the bags and bucket and the enforcers take a look around for anything they might have missed before hauling the remains away.

Of course, figured another way, it would be just like Predo to fill me with blood and get me back to something like health and wellness. Figure he might play it that way if he wanted to keep me kicking while these cleaning laddies found what few bits I have left to hack off. But figure he'd only bother with that kind of production if he had questions to ask me.

The door opens and Predo comes back in, a suit, all but identical to the one

he was wearing before, cinched into place on his narrow frame. Really, it is identical, just without an old lady's blood all over it.

He waits at the open door as the enforcers exit, closes it behind them, comes to the circle of light cast by the bright floor lamp set next to the desk and two chairs here in the middle of the ballroom, and settles into the chair on the boss side of the desk. —So, Pitt.

He makes a slight adjustment to his silver tie bar. —Let me ask you a few questions.

I wait for the arms to encircle me from behind, for the garrote to drop around my throat, the gun to be placed at my temple.

And when none of the above occurs, I let the knife Predo used to kill Vandewater slide from the sleeve where I'd tucked it after the enforcers clipped me from the barbwire and dragged me across the floor past where it had been dropped, and I throw it sharp and hard and straight and it wings past Predo by a good two feet and thunks into the wall outside the light.

He  raises an  eyebrow,  turns,  looks  off at the gleam of the blade  in darkness, and turns back to me. —You'll find it, I believe, Pitt, somewhat of an adjustment now that your vision

is no longer triangulated.

I scratch the side of my neck.

—Well, if you'll just sit there while I go fetch the blade, Mr. Predo, I'm pretty sure I can do better the second time around.

Just because he's not going to kill me right now doesn't mean he doesn't want me dead.

He wants me dead.

I'm not saying my name is at the top of his list, but it is in the upper ten percent. Yeah, he's the kind of guy who keeps a list. That comes with running the Coalition's security arm. An organization like that, they just love lists.

List of friends. List of enemies. List of subversives. List of agents. List of counteragents. List of those at the top. List of those at the bottom. List of people they can kill with impunity. List of people they need to take a little care with before they kill. List of those on the inside. List of those on the outside.

Being inside the coalition means buying the line. The line is secrecy. The line is we don't exist. The line is the people out there who don't know about the Vyrus, they should never know about the Vyrus because if they know about the Vyrus they'll build camps and open labs and start rewriting all kinds of laws and redefining what it means to be created equal.

Frankly, I think they got it pretty much right.

It's not the line I disagree with so much. Its that they got no room for anyone who does disagree with the line. Disagree with the line and you're on that outside list. That list, its pretty much identical to the People to Kill as Soon as Possible List.