Blood Day (21 page)

“Wealthy?” Mike said. He shook his head. “What does that even mean?”

“It means,” said Blake, smashing his cigarette out on the bottom of his heel and pocketing the filter, “that I’m going to be a king.”

“Is that so?” said Mike. “It isn’t often you see a king running around in the dark on his own.”

“Ah, well,” said Blake, and Mike could see the glint of teeth even in the dark. “When you're king of the criminals, it's not like you can trust any of them. I just had the feeling that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from this place. So when it came on the radio that you were on the loose and any sightings should be reported, I tucked myself away in the dark across the street. And waited.”

“But why?” said Mike. “It isn’t like you owe me.”

Blake straightened and brushed himself off. “On the contrary,” he said. “If it wasn’t for you, Deacon would still be around. I’d be guarding a door or a warehouse somewhere wet and cold. I sleep in the mayor’s old house, Novak. I’m warm and rich and it’s all because of you and your Rev friend.”

“I don’t know if Joshua Flynn is a Rev,” said Mike, flinching as he used the name.

“I think he is,” said Blake. “Old Rev, what they were in the Dark Days when you could hear the screams in the streets. You could smell the blood if you were brave enough to go outside. Even Deacon stayed locked up tight back then. Even Deacon.”

“Then Flynn’s worse than they are,” said Mike. “The Revs don’t kill anymore. They take the blood instead.”

“They don’t kill, eh?” said Blake, with mirth. “Do you feel particularly alive since they took over? At least the old ones let us be. They hid in the shadows and you didn’t know what was coming. You could live and forget about them.”

“Until they killed you,” said Mike.

“Everyone dies, Novak,” said Blake. “Give it time and every one of us will be dead. They just did it with style. These sickly bureaucrats, though. They’ve got to go.”

“Won’t that ruin your business?” said Mike.

“I’ve got enough money now to live very well for the rest of my life,” said Blake. “I was an English Lit professor once, if you can believe it. Until they took that away from me. I just want a life where I can sit and read my books and keep my blood all to myself.”

“I can understand that,” said Mike.

Blake nodded to Dez, who had been silent for the longest Mike had ever seen him.

“Can you trust this one?” said Blake. “He’s always been a little shifty.”

Mike looked at Dez. “I don’t know, but he’s been with me this whole time. Joshua Flynn chose him.”

Dez snorted, folding his arms across his chest. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mikey.”

“Hey, you mess with Novak, you’re messing with me,” said Blake. “So what now? You have a plan, Novak?”

“No,” said Mike. “I might have some money hidden away. I was just going to…”

“What?” said Blake. “Run? Where? The bastards are still everywhere. Like cockroaches. You’re a hero, though, Novak. You should—”

But Mike never heard what he should do. Because suddenly an arm appeared around Matthew Blake’s abdomen, squeezing him, and a head was buried in his neck, and suddenly Mike was being sprayed with hot blood. He heard Dez gagging and scuttling around on the cement behind him, with no way out.
 

Joshua Flynn was standing in front of the only door, covered in Matthew Blake’s blood.
 

Eighteen

Viv glared at Tom as he locked her front door. He turned and looked at her, sitting on the couch, angrier than she had been in a very long time. Teeth grinding and fist clenching angry. Wanting to punch someone’s smug face angry. And Tom was smug and smarmy and a perfect target.
 

Viv closed her eyes. She had to get a hold of herself. If Tom worked for the Revs, anything she did to him would be a crime against them. Striking a Rev was an offense you did not come back from. Without meaning to, Viv’s eyes darted to The Book, nestled back on her tiny bookshelf. She thought of the message scrawled on the page. Turned out Griff hadn’t left her with nothing, he’d left her a solution. And she had a way to use it. But first she had to get rid of Tom.

“Why are you asking me about Mike?” Viv said. “Mike Novak was just a neighbor. I said hello to him in passing. Nothing more. You probably know more than I do, you live in his apartment now.”

“Well, I’m staying there, anyway,” said Tom. He pushed sweaty hair off his forehead and walked to the middle of the room. “And I know you and Mike had something more.” He smiled at her. “Didn’t you, Genevieve?”

Viv swallowed and looked away. This man didn’t have the right to know about that. No one did. It had been a well-kept secret between her and Mike Novak. A flash of a memory of Mike holding her, comforting her soon after she’d been forced to move from her home and into this apartment. Her desperate tears for her son and her husband and her life. Tears turned to kissing, and kissing turned to…

Viv crossed her arms and dug her nails into her shoulders.
 

“Have you had contact with him, Genevieve?” said Tom, bending down to look into her face. She saw he wasn’t handsome at all. The lines beginning to crease his face were cruel and his hairline was starting to recede.
 

“Of course not,” she said, putting as much venom into the words as she dared. She could feel the panic begin to fill up her chest.
 

Tom narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t a game. You need to tell me about Novak.”

“If you know all about him and me, you should know that I haven’t seen him,” she said. There were knives in the kitchen. She wondered how far she could get before he caught her. She felt wetness under her fingers and realized she was cutting into her skin with her fingernails. She put her hands down and folded them tightly in her lap. She forced herself to smile.

“Let me make us a pot of coffee and we can talk about this,” Viv said gently. “Civil. Like humans.”

“I don’t give a shit about civil,” Tom said. He reached down and grabbed a handful of her hair and forced her head back, making her shriek in surprise and pain. “TELL ME WHERE MIKE NOVAK IS.”

“I don’t know!” she screamed, trying to grab his hands, to keep him from pulling harder on her hair. “H-he was a widow,” she said quickly. “He worked for a n-n-newspaper. I don’t know wh-which one. Ow! Stop it, please!”

“There has to be something you know about him that I’m not seeing,” Tom growled into her ear.
 

Viv tried to shake her head, but yelled when he pulled harder on her hair. Her eyes landed on the radio that was hiding The Book. A calm slid over her then. An odd sort of calm that held her anger at its core. She knew what to do.

“Okay, yes, okay!” she shouted.

Tom eased up on her hair and smiled. “There now, was that so hard?”

“He left something here,” she gasped. “Something he asked me to hide. Please don’t tell them. Please don’t turn me in.”

“It depends what it is,” said Tom, letting go of her and standing up. He had a chunk of bloody hair hanging from his hand that he shook off onto the floor. Viv could feel blood dripping down her scalp. She felt oddly calm now, though. She could think when there was pain. The pain meant there would be no panic. And she found that she could pretend to be panicked just as easily as she could pretend to be calm.

“It’s something he stole from a hospital,” she said. “Something to do with the blood.”

“Something the Revs didn’t know about?” said Tom, his eyes lighting up. He rubbed his hands together. “Something I can bring to them?”

Viv raised an eyebrow, forgetting to fake panic.
 

“They don’t know you’re here,” she said. “You’re a bounty hunter.”

“So?” he said, irritated. “That means I can turn you in, or I can choose not to. Depending on how sweet you are to me, Genevieve. You know, that part was true. I have a thing for black girls. You’re a bit long in the tooth, but you seem like you have a nice body under all those blouses and slacks. I mean, would it kill you to put on a dress for a date?”

“It wasn’t a date,” she hissed.

“You didn’t know that,” he said, smiling again. Viv wanted to wipe that smile off his face. She wanted him to remember how he’d looked her up and down like a side of beef. She wanted him to remember how scared she looked right now. All she had to do was to get to the kitchen.

“I don’t know what it is, this thing I’m keeping for him. I’ll get it for you.”

“You think I’m stupid?” he said.

I hope so,
Viv thought. She made herself smile again. “I thought I’d mix us some drinks and we could have some fun.” She felt her skin crawl as Tom took the bait.

He nodded after a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s do that. I can see you wanting to be nice to me now. That’s smart.”

You don’t know the half of it,
she thought. But she kept smiling as she stood up from the couch. She made her hips sway as she walked to the kitchen with Tom following behind. She opened the pantry and took out all the cans of vegetable soup and pinto beans and creamed corn and set them on the counter. Then she reached back into the cupboard.

“Easy,” Tom said, watching her. “Slow, so I can see what you’re bringing out.”

Viv smiled and slowed her movements. She saw him lick his lips. He thought this was going to be a double win for him. Viv brought out the model pump that she’d stolen from work, wrapped in towels. She passed it to him like it was a baby and he took it, looking confused. She glanced at his belt. He wasn’t even carrying a gun. She smiled and made her eyes soft as he looked at her, confused. He unwrapped the glass contraption, letting the towels fall on the floor.

“What the hell is it?” he said.

Viv shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “He said it was something to do with the blood.”

“Don’t you work at the blood factory?” he said. “The new one, where they’re going to do all the blood at once?”

“Oh, you know about that?” she said, trying to sound impressed.

“I do my research,” he said, turning the pump over and looking down at it. “I’ve been following you for a while.”

But you don’t know me,
she thought. Smiling wider, she took a step toward the stove.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Tom said, watching her. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. She opened the cabinet that was now by her hand and pulled out a bottle.

“Can I make us a drink?” she said.

“Bourbon?” he said, setting the pump down on the counter roughly and walking over to her. “Where the hell did you find Kentucky bourbon?” he said, obviously delighted.

“I’ve been saving it,” she lied. She bought it from a woman who lived in the old Catholic church. She’d heard that the woman had connections to Deacon, but who knew what was true anymore. Even now the papers described Mike Novak as a revolutionary leader. The world was made of lies. Maybe it always had been.
 

Viv unscrewed the bottle and reached for two glasses, but Tom grabbed the bottle greedily from her hand and sniffed at it. He watched her as he lifted it to his mouth and drank. He choked and coughed, spluttering booze down the front of his shirt.

“It’s strong,” said Viv. “If you’re not used to it.”

Tom sneered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He closed his eyes and drank again, more carefully this time. Viv touched the drawer with two fingers. Tom lowered the bottle and looked at her. She thought he was going to offer her the bottle, but instead he grabbed her arm and pulled her to him.
 

“You know,” he said, reeking of whisky, “you don’t look that good to me anymore.”

Viv smiled. “You never looked good to me.”

“You watch your mouth,” Tom said, but Viv was away from him and before he could move to grab her again she was holding the weird glass pump. She watched him stagger. She’d noticed at the bar that he got lightheaded every time he finished a drink and would follow each with a glass of water. He couldn’t even handle Rev alcohol. It was no wonder he was staggering now, trying to focus on her after slamming a quarter bottle of Maker’s Mark.
 

“Oops,” said Viv, and she hadn’t felt this good in years. “You’d better be careful, I might just go and drop this.”
 

Tom raised a finger, touching his head with the other hand.
 

“You put something in this booze,” he slurred, looking at the bottle in his hand.

“No, sweetie, you just can’t handle your liquor. Now, me, I’m an alcoholic. Getting drunk is better than living here and remembering how good it used to be. I drink one of those every few days. The hangover’s not too bad if you drink it straight. If you have a taste for that kind of thing.” She held out the pump, balancing it on one hand. “This is just everything you came for, isn’t it? It would be a shame if it broke into a million pieces.”

“Bitch, you better not,” said Tom, focusing on her. He set the bottle on the counter, but missed and the whisky fell with a crash, sloshing amber fluid everywhere. The bottle didn’t break.

Viv watched Tom, as he took a step toward her. His vision was clearing, but that was okay. She still had time. She pulled her hand away and let the glass object fall to the floor. It was made far more delicately than a whisky bottle, though, and it was almost art the way it shattered into a million pieces, tiny bits of glass catching the light as they flew in every direction. Viv was at the drawer by the time Tom started yelling, his face turning purple with rage. But the knife was in her hand and she had him quiet and sitting in the chair in no time, the point sticking straight into a pulsing vein in his neck. One twitch and he was dead.
 

“I keep my knives sharp,” she whispered, marveling at how easy it had been. “No one knows you’re here, Tom. No one will come.”

“The noise,” he whispered hoarsely. “Someone will call.”

“No,” she said. “No one calls any more. No one brings the Movers into their backyard on purpose. We sort our own problems now and no one bats an eye. No one even knocks on the door to see if everything is okay. No one will come. Not for you, not for me.”