Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston Page B

look at him. —You say that like It's a bad thing.
He waits.
I look at the floor, see the picture. Amanda Horde. Changeling child living somehow in the infected world. Genius. Mad. Not as in angry, but as a hatter. I look at the designer gun that's come to rest next to the photo. Wonder how many shots I could get off if I got to it before him. Wonder if I could get any of the bullets into his head with my one eye. Figure he did Mrs. Vandewater easy. Figure I've felt what its like when his fist hits my jaw. Figure he can take me anytime and anyplace. But I look at the gun for a bit longer anyway.
Then I look at him. —I won't kill her for you, Predo.
He smiles.
—I don't want you to kill her, Pitt.
He bends, picks up the photo, looks at it, looks at me. —I want you to join up.
The Andrew Freedman Home was finished in 1924. Endowed by an eponymous millionaire with ties to Tammany Hall and subway financing. And if that doesn't suggest something about the nature of his fortune and how dirty his dollars likely were, nothing else will. But pretty much everything you need to know about this guy you can tell by the house. A massive limestone palazzo on the corner of One Sixty-six and the Concourse, he left pretty much all of his fortune in trust for the thing to be built as a home for the elderly.
Exclusively for the elderly who had at one time been rich, but who had lost their fortunes.
Luxurious in the manner of a Gilded Age private club for rail barons, the Home kept the busted rich in a manner to which they had become accustomed.
Good old Andrew Freedman, looking out for the little people.
Whatever, it was his money. Man should spend it how he wants. Especially after he's dead. Besides, whatever Andy's wishes may have been at one time, the place ended up a broken-down community center for run-of-the-mill poor
old folks.
Proving again that time gives fuck all about who you are or what you want.
I manage to glean this knowledge from a plaque as Predo leads me from the subsiding   ballroom   on   the   third   floor   through   several   corridors   artfully decorated with sagging plaster and rat droppings. —Dregs.
He points ahead and one of the enforcers flanking us moves to a door and opens it. —That's what she's collecting.
We pass through the door into an echoing stairwell, climbing. —Rogues. Off-1 slanders. The dross clinging to the fringes of the Clans. All those who lack the wherewithal and fortitude to understand that the Vyrus has made us different.
He pauses on a landing, waits as I negotiate around some broken glass with my bare, mangled foot. —That there is no going back.
He starts up the next half flight. —Traditionally, that kind of offal weeds itself from the community. Viewed as
an engine of evolution, the Vyrus is a most powerful instrument for defining the fittest of the species. One can argue at length as to whether we are human any longer. Coalition precepts hold that we are. Regardless, the Vyrus insists on extreme levels of fitness, resilience, adaptability. Without those qualities, the runts die out quite rapidly. Our primary concern is not how best to steel them to this life, to aid in their adaptation, but how to make their deaths as rapid and as invisible as possible.
He stops at the top of the stairs, waiting while one of the enforcers opens the door and sweeps the area beyond with the barrel of his weapon.
I point at him. —He making sure no sleeping pigeons are waiting to get the drop on us?
Predo waits for a nod from the enforcer and goes through the door ahead of me.
—Our intelligence on the Bronx is far from extensive. But we have heard about the Mungiki.
I step out onto the roof, a river breeze in the tops of the high trees that grow from the grounds below, a few hazy stars above. —Mungiki are in Queens.
He stops next to one of the half-dozen TV aerials that sprout from the roof.
—We heard some were still left.
—I hear they're all out. Whole crazy pack of them