The man drew it across the inside of his own wrist in a single clean motion. No hesitation. No reaction to the pain.
What ran from the cut was black.
It came down his wrist and over the back of his hand. He lowered his arm, holding his wrist down over Curtis’s upturned face, and Curtis reached up and took the man’s hand in both of his and pressed his mouth to the cut.
Greg got to his feet.
He stood against the wall with his back to the brick and watched Curtis drink from the man’s wrist the way an animal drinks from a stream, urgent and continuous, his throat working, his hands tight around the man’s forearm. The black ran over his lips and down his chin, the smell of diesel filling the low basement space.
The man in the white suit looked up from Curtis to look at Greg.
“You should put him out of his misery,” the man said. “He’s suffering considerably.”
“He was fine this morning,” Greg said.
“He was not fine this morning,” the man said. “He was experiencing the last interval before the suffering began. They’re easily confused from the outside.”
“Who are you?” Greg said.
“You can call me whatever number seems right to you,” the man said pleasantly. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this man is in a type of pain that will not resolve on its own. You bear some responsibility for his condition.”
“I’m not killing anyone,” Greg said.
The man withdrew his wrist from Curtis’s hands. Curtis made a sound of protest but then subsided, sitting back on his heels; the ichor already doing its work. Greg could see it, the pupils beginning their expansion, the black threading moving back into the whites of his eyes, the body’s energy system ratcheting upward like a furnace being stoked.
The man in the white suit reached into his jacket again, but this time he produced a gun. Standard frame, dark metal, nothing Greg could identify specifically but the shape was unambiguous. He held it loosely at his side and looked at Greg with those enormous pupils.
“I’ll give it to him,” the man said, nodding toward Curtis, “or I’ll give it to you. Those are the options I’m offering. One of you will hold this before I leave this room.”
Greg looked at the gun and then at Curtis, who was rising from his knees, the shaking becoming the clenching, the clenching becoming spasms. His eyes were almost fully gone, the irises thin rings around the black.
“You need to die,” Curtis said, his voice gaining the rapid-fire quality back, accelerating, “you need to die Greg. You damned me, you did this to me, you sold me out for twenty dollars and you need to die.”
“Curtis,” Greg said.
“Die,” Curtis said. “Die, die, die…” each repetition faster than the last.
“I’m not going to kill you and I’m not going to let him kill me,” Greg said to the man in the white suit, his voice coming out steadier than he felt.
“Those are not the options I offered,” the man replied.
Greg ran.
He went for the stairwell, the only exit, the only direction that existed, and behind him he heard Curtis’s footsteps start and then accelerate. As he exited the stairwell, the sound of Curtis’s footsteps told Greg he was not far behind.
The shot sounded enormous in the empty building, a flat crack that bounced off the brick walls and the concrete floor, coming back from every direction at once, and the impact hit Greg between the shoulder blades like a meteor. His legs stopped working, the signal chain between his brain and his body getting interrupted by something catastrophic. He went down hard, chin clipping the concrete.
He laid face down, dying.
He somehow got his arms under him and rolled over onto his back.
Curtis was in the center of the room.
He could not be still. The gun was in his right hand, he was trying to point it at Greg, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate, the ichor seeming to drive his muscles in all directions simultaneously, his elbow bending and straightening, his wrist rotating, the gun swinging in arcs that passed over Greg. His feet were moving beneath him in a continuous rapid shuffle, his whole body a system that had been pushed past the point where it could direct itself.
Greg’s lungs were doing something wrong. Each breath came in with less than the breath before it, a slow diminishing, and there was a taste at the back of his throat that he recognized from the one time he’d been badly beaten, iron and salt.
Curtis screamed.
Not the ecstatic scream from the morning. This was pain, pure and structural. Greg watched what was happening to Curtis’s body and understood why. The knee of his left leg bent sideways, the direction knees do not bend, and kept going past the point where the joint could accommodate it. The sound it made was audible from where Greg lay on the floor. Curtis’s right shoulder rotated backward in its socket, the arm swinging behind him at an angle that belonged to no natural movement.
His muscles were too strong for his own body.
They were contracting with a force that the tendons and ligaments and the architecture of bone and cartilage had not been designed to withstand, and the design was failing. Greg could see it progressing in real time, the body dismantling itself from the inside, each contraction tearing something that had held the previous second.
Curtis’s face was the worst of it.
The expressions moved across it in rapid succession, each one pulling the underlying muscles to their limit before the next one took over, and the skin, which had been doing the work of containing a face for forty years, began to lose its stance on his head. It started at the corners of his mouth and moved outward, thin splits opening in the skin along the lines of maximum tension. Curtis was screaming continuously now, the sound barely interrupted by breath, as his face rearranged itself over and over beneath a surface that was coming apart.
He dropped the gun.
It hit the concrete and skidded. It was six feet from Greg.
Greg rolled onto his stomach and began to move toward it. The process was not dignified, it was not fast, and every movement of his upper body changed the pressure in his chest cavity in ways that produced consequences he was trying not to think about. He pulled himself across the concrete with his forearms, his legs doing almost nothing, dragging himself the six remaining feet.
He was barely able to reach it.
Curtis was on the floor but the floor did not stop him. He was a continuous motion, the body that could not be still even now, even coming apart, the muscles contracting in waves that moved through him like something trying to get out, his limbs bending in their wrong directions, the skin split across his chest and arms and face, the expressions still cycling across what remained of his features.
Greg raised the gun.
His hands were shaking and his vision was doing something at the edges, a darkening that came and went with each diminished breath.
He fired.
The shot went wide, sparked off the concrete to Curtis’s left.
He fired again. Curtis’s right arm jumped and bent further back.
Again. The concrete by Curtis’s head.
Again. Curtis’s midsection, which changed the character of his movement but did not stop it.
Again. His leg.
Again. The floor.
The seventh shot took Curtis in the head and the motion stopped.
Greg let his arm down.
The silence in the building was very large.
Then footsteps. Measured on the concrete, coming from the stairwell. Greg raised the gun again and pointed it at the man in the white suit who walked into the room.
Greg pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked.
He pulled it again. Click. Again. Click.
The man in the white suit walked toward him without altering his pace. Greg kept pulling the trigger because there was nothing else his hands knew how to do. The clicking continued, each one smaller and more final than the last, until the man was standing over him.
The man looked down at him.
“What a shame,” he said, his voice low and genuinely sad.
He raised his foot and brought it down on Greg’s head.
–
The camp looked the same.
Vic came through the gap in the fence. Trace looked up at him the way she looked up at everyone.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she said.
“I’m looking for Greg,” Vic said.
Trace looked at him for a moment. “Haven’t seen him or Curtis in days,” she said. “Curtis took off one morning screaming. Greg went running after some dude in a white suit when I was trying to help him get some crystal.” She paused. “Not unusual for Curtis. Unusual for Greg.”
Vic nodded slowly.
“You want a hit?” Trace asked, offering him her pipe.
“No,” Vic said. “I don’t do that anymore.”
Trace looked at him with the particular expression reserved for people who say things that don’t compute. Vic crossed the clearing to Greg’s tent and crouched at the entrance to unbraid the zip ties.
Vic quickly found Greg’s money. He counted it without expression. A little under twenty eight hundred dollars, what remained after Greg’s breakfast. He folded it and put it in his jacket’s inner pocket.
“You stealing from Greg?” Trace asked. Not an accusation. An observation.
“He won’t need it,” Vic said.
He left the camp and took the bus north.
The building looked the same as it always did, the water-stained brick, the boarded lower windows, the door standing open at its permanent angle. Vic went through the door, up the stairwell without slowing, to the fourth floor hallway and the door at the end with the light beneath it.
He knocked twice. The door opened.
The apartment was fuller than Vic had seen it. Seven men in white suits occupied the clean space, some standing and some seated, and they were talking among themselves. They looked at Vic when he entered with the same expression they all shared, that patient warmth and welcoming smile, before returning to their conversations.
Fourteen was standing at the window, looking out at the north Portland rooflines with his hands folded behind his back. He turned when Vic came in.
Vic took the roll of bills from his inner pocket and held it out.
“This was Greg’s,” Vic said.
“Yes,” Fourteen said while taking the money.
“He won’t be coming back, will he?” Vic asked.
“No,” Fourteen said. “He won’t.” He held the money for a moment before he set it on the table beside. “You’ve done well, Victor. This is the prophet’s work, what you do.”
Fourteen moved to the bookshelf, and from behind a row of books produced a briefcase, plain and dark, which he set on the table beside Greg’s money and opened. Inside, packed in rows in fitted foam, were vials. Dozens of them, each one filled with ichor, each one catching the apartment’s warm light and giving nothing back.
He closed the case and held it out to Vic.
Vic took it.
Fourteen looked at him with those deep and patient eyes, the irises thin rings around the dark, and put one hand briefly on Vic’s shoulder.
“Go now, Victor, and spread the word of salvation.”
