Old schoolest of the old school. Bunch of top hat and evening cape boys sitting on the top floor of Coalition HQ. Fancy Upper East town house just around the corner from the Guggenheim. Calling shots that knock balls over the whole Island.

Used to be, I pictured them smoking big cigars and drinking port. Like from a nineteenth-century political cartoon. Red noses, round bellies, resting their feet on the backs of the slobs. Nothing wrong with it if you can get a seat at the table, I suppose. Not my style, but I get why people want to be on top. Means there’s no one overhead to drop a load on you when their bowels get loose.

Got a different picture of them now.

Lean. Burnished. Dipping fingers into bowls of something that looks like looped purple licorice ropes. Putting them at their lips and sucking.

Sucking cord blood from harvested umbilicals.

Hole-raised kids with chains on their necks scattered around the room.

Not a picture from satire, but something literal. Like I’m thinking that’s what it’s really like up there on that top floor. Very much just like that.

Types living that way, you might figure they have a vested interest in avoiding the kind of headlines Hurley mentioned. So yeah, figure again that Predo’s feeling heat, needs to get the situation under control. Minimize risks and exposures. Start with what’s right there in the middle of their turf. The Cure house.

A quiet play. Clandestine. That’s what he’ll be going for. The fake cops, they won’t lead, they’ll hold back for an emergency. Whole thing will be invisible if Predo has his way. Commandos first, dead of night, figure between three and four. Time for us to make the scene before it goes down. Get inside, make a deal with Horde and Sela, and be waiting for Predo’s enforcers when they come in.

And once they’re in and the bullets fly, I grab the girl with her baby, try and take the boyfriend if I can, and get the hell out.

Who’s thrashing?

Not me.

I have a plan.

– You said you knew the way.

– I do.

– It’s almost three in the morning.

– Just be quiet, I’m trying to smell something.

– Oh, I’m sorry, is my voice interfering with your sense of smell? Is it getting in your nose and distracting you?

– Lydia.

– Joe.

– If you’d had given me that gun, I’d be shooting you again right now.

She turns to Terry.

– He’s lost. He’s cracking wiseass now because he’s lost and it’s what he does when he knows he’s fucked up.

Terry sloshes closer.

– Joe?

I hold up a hand.

– Just shut up for a minute and back off.

A cramp hits my gut and I fold over it.

Terry presses the heel of his hand into his forehead.

– How long since you had anything?

I unfold.

– Too long what with the ass-kicking I’ve been taking. So I’m maybe not at my sharpest. So I need maybe a little space and quiet here.

He turns to Lydia.

She looks at me, jabs a finger.

– Time’s almost up.

And works her way through the water back to her Bulls.

Terry tugs the edge of his watch cap.

– Getting late. Another thirty minutes and the risk and reward elements on this will have seriously eroded. We’ll have to turn back and, I don’t know, negotiate some kind of settlement. Me and Lydia, I mean. You.

He looks at the water.

– To be honest, Joe, you’ll be staying down here. Metaphors aside, saying it like it needs to be said, get us the fuck up into the Cure house or Hurley is going to beat you to death with his hammer.

A few yards away, Hurley turns. Shows me his hammer.

– If it must be, Joe, so it will. An nothin’ personal.

I nod.

– Yeah, sure, I’ll play the nail. No problem. Just give me a shot at this with no one on my back.

Terry raises his hands and backs away.

– Hey, I’m the last one to want to get on anyone’s back, man. That’s not my thing. Just that we have a timeline. Structure is tough, but once you get into it, you have to stay there.

Another moment when it might be better I don’t have a gun, but I’d still be happy to see one come floating by on a raft of shit. Nothing pops up, so I close my eyes, try to ignore the ache that’s creeping into my marrow, try and find a scent of dry air.

Something sears my cheek.

I open my eyes.

A flicker of white at the edge of my vision, down the tunnel.

I look back at Hurley, leaning against the far wall, hammer cradled in his arms, whistling Irish war ballads to himself.

The heat wavers in the air. I touch it, feel it dissipating, but know the course.

I raise my arm and point.

– This way.

Seven minutes later we’re in the Second Avenue line above Sixty-eighth. Minutes after that we’re in the access shaft, making our way past Phil’s corpse.

Terry looks at the mangled body.

– Sela did that?

I walk away.

– I did that. Finally had enough of his double crosses.

Could be I hear a chuckle in the dark. Crazy old man chuckle. Laughing at what I said, or at what he’s leading me back to. Or could be I hear nothing at all. Nothing but me laughing at myself.

Hurley widens the hole I made when I came this way before. Hunched to make our way up the sewer line, we straighten when we reach the storm vault, looking up at the drain hole I shoved Phil through.

We study it, picked out in crossed flashlight beams.

Grate I removed is still off. Still dark as hell up there.

Quiet.

Terry stands directly under the hole, sniffs, pulls a face, steps back and waves us to him.

– What is that?

I shake my head.

– What’s what?

He points at the hole.

– Smell.

I step under the hole, make a show of raising my face and scenting, come back to Terry, Lydia and Hurley.

– Smells like a lot of dead people to me.

He frowns.

– Joe, without this meaning to sound like a brag, because I wish it wasn’t the truth, but I’ve smelled piles of dead in my life.

He points at the hole again.

– That’s not what they smell like.

I find my tobacco, unseal it and start to roll.

– And when was the last time you smelled over a hundred Vyrus infected who all died of starvation?

I seal up my smoke.

– ’Cause that’s what’s been going on in there.

I pat my pockets, looking for a light, and realize I never grabbed a dry pack of matches before we set out.

– Shit.

Lydia goes to the hole herself, gets a whiff, comes back.

– It’s Vyrus. Dead. Something else.

I fiddle with the unlit smoke, holding it between my fingers like it might make me feel a little better.

– Could be the shit-smeared walls you’re smelling. The bile they puked up when they died. Could be the wood rot in the walls. Wait a little longer and all you’re gonna smell is Predo’s boys coming through the front door.

Hurley is under the hole now. He inhales, flinches, pinches his nostrils closed.

– A proper reek it tis, whatever it may be.

He unpinches his nose, takes another whiff.

– Hard to say an all, but could be a hint o gun powder as well.

Terry pulls a whisker from his soul patch.

– I don’t like to be overly suspicious in a team endeavor like this, but, I don’t know, I just don’t like climbing into a dark basement when I can’t really smell what’s in it.

He points at me.

– You first, Joe.

I look up at the hole.

– As if there were any doubt.

The ache is in my fingernails now.

Cramps haven’t hit the point where I’d rather die than feel the next one, but I can sense them stacking one after the other like waves ready to pound the shore. Bones alternate between freezing and scorching.

I shiver, sweat, stand under the hole rubbing my stomach.

Lydia kneels a few feet away, an old wood-stocked carbine in her hands, aimed at the hole.

– Sooner you go up, sooner you might eat.