I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (2 page)

…
where
were
we
?
Ah
yes
,
you
must
forgive
me
…
is
that
your
real
name
?
Is
it
?
You
won’t
say
.
You
choose
not
?
Or
you
cannot
?
Well
,
I
do
not
think
I
would
be
much
in
the
mood
for
conversation
either
if
I
lay
disemboweled
.
So
I
shall
speak
,
and
you
will
listen
…

…
and
I
will
talk
until
the
end
of
this
day
,
and
then
perhaps
we
will
explore
together
the
sounds
a
man
can
make
in
the
dark
of
the
night
…
so
do
not
die
now
,
I
beseech
you
.
Do
not
perish
,
as
you
yourself
have
destroyed
all
those
around
us
…
a
mighty
warrior
you
may
be
,
and
though
I
detest
your
essence
,
I
cannot
but
respect
your
skill
.
To
do
otherwise
would
be
to
refute
the
irrefutable
…

…
so
lie
there
now
and
listen
,
and
I
will
relate
to
you
an
account
of
a
warrior
the
likes
of
whom
you
have
never
known
,
the
likes
of
whom
I
doubt
I
will
ever
see
again
…
in
this
way
we
shall
pass
the
time
together
,
shall
we
not
?
And
then
will
come
the
night
,
for
the
night
always
comes
…

…
my
master
was
a
cruel
and
terrible
lord
…

The rain fell in torrents from the
grey-clouded skies, pounding the hood of the K-car. The
bleached-out burgundy hood had withstood more than a thousand days
under the merciless sun. The car was parked on the corner of a
blighted Bronx neighborhood, blocks of derelict, boarded-up three-
and five-story buildings looming over the street. One block over
the towers of the projects, cold and concrete, rose up to the
clouds.

There were three men in the vehicle and they
had been there for some time. If anyone had been stupid enough to
approach the Reliant through the downpour they would have seen two
light-skinned men and a black man inside. Their faces were
inhospitable, all business. Their hard looks alone would have been
enough to send away anyone too nosy for their own good.

It wasn’t an unusual site in this
neighborhood, a carful of men looking like they didn’t belong.
People from other boroughs and states visited here every night for
the drugs and women. The rain had sent the whores indoors hours
earlier and their johns stayed away.

Only one building on the desolate block
showed any signs of activity: a bodega down the street, on the
corner opposite the car. The blinking Christmas lights on the deli
were out of place and out of season, an incongruous beacon in a
part of the city the economic upswing had forgotten. A penumbra of
light from the overhead sign cast its arc on the sidewalk out
front. Beyond the light a homeless man lay huddled in his raggedy
clothes and coat, sodden cardboard boxes draped over his inert
form.

More inconspicuous than the 24-hour
stand-alone bodega or the car with its rough-and-tumble looking
inhabitants was the mobile blood van parked across from the store.
A converted recreational vehicle, its windows were shaded even on
this ray-less morning. Placards on its sides and rear identified
the vehicle as a Red Crescent collection unit. A line of people
waited outside the van, resigned in their queue, most without
umbrellas. They were the homeless and the addicted, working girls,
those down on their luck and bereft of hope, shivering in the wet
and damp.

Periodically a door near the rear of the RV
would open and one of those on line would stumble up to disappear
inside, while a door near the front end disgorged another anonymous
form into the rain. The people staggering away from the van
clutched fistfuls of cash as they turned their heads down from the
rain, stepping through the puddles that had filled the potholes in
the street. Most of these bee-lined it straight across the street
to the garish lights of the bodega. The line at the rear of the
vehicle was a row that never diminished, stragglers attaching
themselves to it in their ones and twos. There were always more
people, few of them speaking to one another, some of them
incoherent from alcohol, smack, and crack.

All of them waited their turn to trade red
for green.

Inside the K-car the three men sat and
watched, biding their time. Empty foam coffee cups and cigarette
butts littered the interior.

“You see that guy they pulled out of the
river last week?” Gossitch’s voice was like gravel from years of
smoking. He had a big, crooked nose that looked like it had been
broken a few times in all his years. Grizzled and older than the
other two, he spoke to no one in particular. It was the first time
any of the men had spoken in some time. There was gray in
Gossitch’s short, curly hair. He was drumming the fingers of one
hand on the steering wheel.

“Yeah, that was some fucked-up shit.” They
called the tall, lean black man Santa-Anna. He had run with
Gossitch years back. Santa Anna was a guy no one other than
Gossitch or Bowie could vouch for, and both Gossitch and Bowie had
vouched for him. For everyone else in his crew save one, Gossitch’s
word was enough.

“The newspapers said it might take some time
to identify him.”

Gossitch stroked his stubbly chin and made a
mental note to shave as soon as he had a few minutes to do so,
after this job was done and behind them. He wore a white gold band
on the ring finger of his hand on the wheel. There had been a wife
once.

“Want to know why?” he asked. Neither Santa
Anna in the passenger seat next to him nor the hulking kid in the
back replied, so he told them. “Whoever did him in did him nasty.
Took off his arms, legs. Ripped his jaw off, all his uppers
too.”

Santa Anna whistled. “Dismembered him
and
removed his jaw? Day-em.”

“Dismembered makes it sound clinical, like
they sawed him up neat in some guy’s bath tub somewhere,” Gossitch
corrected. “That ain’t what happened. This guy’s limbs were
torn
off. His choppers too.”

“How they know he was a man? Genitals?”

“No, whoever done him took those off
too…”

Santa Anna pursed his lips and exhaled.

“…they gendered him on account of his flat
hairy chest.”

“Could have been a Mexican broad,” Santa Anna
joked. He thought it funny for a number of reasons, not least of
which being he was back out on the streets now, hooked back in with
his old crew chief, and they were
already
on a job earning.
A job they were calling him
Santa
Anna
on; Santa Anna
the old Mexican general and all.

The young guy in the backseat, the man they
called Boone, noted the way the black man called Santa Anna
pronounced Mexican. Made the
Mex
sound like
Mess
.
Messican. Sounded ignorant, thought Boone. Sounded, to the hulking
young man in the back of the car, like a typical street nigger.

Santa Anna had been locked away long enough
that what he thought was funny wasn’t what the other men
necessarily thought was, and he knew it. These men, hard men like
himself, they weren’t laughing. “Who’d want to do that to another
human being?” he asked. He’d walked out of prison and onto the bus
from upstate less than two weeks prior. Inside he’d seen and heard
of some fucked up shit, from gang fights and shankings to crooked
hacks and outright assassinations. Vamps had been inside too…that
fucking thing, Enfermo. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t think
about that thing.

But he’d never heard of anyone getting their
arms and legs
tore
off.

“Bloodsuckers would do that to a human
being.” Boone watched the van down the block intently through a
pair of binoculars.

Santa Anna didn’t know what to make of the
kid. He was younger than the rest of their crew, maybe in his
mid-twenties. He seemed tight with the old man but kept eye-fucking
Santa Anna. The kid was big as a house, all diesel and shit. Santa
Anna figured Boone was trying for some pack dominance thing, or
maybe all the ‘roids in his system were fucking with his psyche.
Whatever
. Santa Anna would live with him because he was part
of Gossitch’s crew, but if the kid wanted to throw down, Santa Anna
wouldn’t hesitate. Not for a second.

“Nah, vamps don’t operate like that,”
Gossitch dismissed the comment. He was still drumming his fingers
on the wheel. “Sure, they’ll kill you, might even torture you some
first if they think you got it coming to you. But they prefer to
lay low, stay out of the limelight. That’s why we’re able to do
what we do. You know that kid.”

“I get the impression Boone here don’t care
much for the undead.”

“Boone don’t like too many people, period.”
Gossitch put fire to a Marlboro. “Ain’t that right kid?”

Boone made a noise that sounded like
hurn
. He continued staring out the windshield at the blood
collection unit down the street.

“So how they identifying that body from the
river then?” Santa Anna asked. He shifted the Ithaca Model 37 M
pump shotgun from its place on his lap to between his legs, the
twenty-inch barrel resting against the passenger side dash. For him
to be found in a car with the shotgun and two other men packing
fully automatic weapons was enough for the cops to drag his ass
back to prison. Probably for good this time, too.

But Santa Anna didn’t sweat it. Gossitch had
planned this job, which meant they weren’t likely to see any of the
boys in blue. The Law tended to ignore this musty armpit of the
city even when they weren’t paid to do so. Gossitch had it all
under control.

“Gritz says DNA testing,” said the old
man.

“Ain’t that something,” Santa Anna nodded. It
wasn’t a question. Gritz was one of Gossitch’s contacts in the
NYPD.

“Sure is.”

The rain pounded on the hood of the car.

After awhile Gossitch ground out his
umpteenth cigarette and brought up his own pair of Zeiss
binoculars. The line of people outside the blood unit wasn’t
getting any shorter. He’d been around long enough
not
to buy
into that whole there-but-for-the-grace-of-whoever-whatever
bullshit. Gossitch didn’t feel particularly bad for the men and
women lined up out there, a bunch of derelicts, drunks, and chicken
heads, girls who would leave their two-year olds at home alone and
go down on you in an alley for a fin, just to segue right back to
the pipe.

No one had held a gun up to their heads and
forced any of them to smoke rock or get knocked up when they were
thirteen. They were human and they had made choices, and some of
those choices had been bad choices, choices that had damned their
lives. The sad ones had come to realize their past mistakes and how
they were forced to live with them. The vast majority, the idiots,
still didn’t get it. And now they stood here on this strangely
chilly yet muggy summer morning as the rain refused to let up,
standing and waiting to donate their blood for enough of a purse to
afford themselves whatever poison they put into their bodies.

Rock. Smack. Heroin. Booze. It all answered
the same hunger, thought Gossitch. Like his Marlboros.

He refocused his glass and saw that the
homeless guy was still in his box a few buildings down from the
bodega.

“Goose, put on the radio or something,” Boone
requested from the backseat.

The kid was restless. The guy was a man of
action, Gossitch knew, albeit often irrational, extremely violent
action with little thought to the consequences. Especially where
vamps and their ilk were concerned. Soon enough for that.

Gossitch turned the key in the ignition and
the radio came on. He wasn’t worried about draining the battery.
The car wasn’t theirs.

Some guy was rapping.

“What’s this noise?” asked Santa Anna.

“Gangsta Khan,” answered Boone. “He’s big on
the east coast.”

“Never heard of him.” Santa Anna had done his
time out in the Midwest and upstate. Federal. “When I went away
guys on top of the game were EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, Erik B, and
Rakim. What’s this bullshit? This nigga call that a hook? Freddy
Foxx rapped for like five minutes without a break on
The
Master
.”