Read Joe Pitt 5 - My Dead Body for Free Online Page B

man. He catches my drift, spares further comment, takes Dallas’s hand and fucks off up the tunnel at a much better clip than they’d been making before.
    I keep my hand away from the gun. I don’t have any weapons to deal with this. Besides, I don’t think he means to kill me. A pretty big assumption when dealing with the mad, but all I can go on here is past experience. He’s never killed me yet.
    There’s a flutter in the air, it gets hotter, a white blur, and he’s in front of me.
    --Buddy, hey, buddy, leaving somewhere, buddy?
    He’s dispensed with clothes since the last time I saw him. Can’t say why that is. Could be he finally realized that wearing whites down here was a losing proposition. Could be he finally got so skinny there just wasn’t anything he could put on that wouldn’t slip right off. That last time, all he had on was a loincloth and some dirty white rags wrapped around his limbs like bandages. Could also be that he’s white enough now in his own skin not to need to wear any kind of uniform.
    Subway tile white. Glossy porcelain with a thin layer of soot.
    Emaciated doesn’t do him justice anymore. I can see the fibers of his muscle under his skin. His circulatory system so vivid, it looks like a long branching tattoo laced over his entire body.
    He’s at the limit.
    What the Enclave are after as they starve themselves, he’s at the frontier.
    I saw the guy who went furthest. I scooped him off the street when he walked into the daylight believing he had been absorbed by the Vyrus, believing that would make him something the sun didn’t want to kill. He was wrong. But even he, even Daniel hadn’t gone this far.
    The man in front of me shimmers. Like when I was a kid and I’d lie down on the blacktop in summer and watch the air wiggle above it at the end of the playground. He shimmers like that.
    Part it’s the Vyrus, fighting itself and him. Fighting to tear him apart from hunger for blood, and to keep him together so it won’t die with him. Driving him to kill someone and drink their damn blood. And part it’s the heat of that fight.
    He’s what’s behind the missing poster that describes how an MTA worker disappeared in the tunnels. He’s that ghost you see flicker outside the scratched Plexi windows as you rocket down the A express, the one you don’t see clear at all, but still it crawls into your nightmares. He’s what eats the alligators in the sewers. This fucker, he’s the boogeyman.
    He scratches himself and hitches a shoulder at me.
    --Roll me one of them, will ya, buddy.
    I roll him a smoke.
    --Keeping an eye on me are you?
    He laughs. Sounds like a cat coughing up a hair ball.
    --An eye on you. Buddy, no, no buddy. Just I heard you were leaving is all, buddy, an I thought I’d come send ya off is what.
    I hand him the cigarette, half-expecting the paper to ignite when he takes it, but it doesn’t.
    --Must have gotten advance word. Just found out myself.
    I snap a match and he flinches at the light before dipping his face into it to puff the cigarette alive.
    --Don’t need advance word. Got ears, don’t I. Hear it all down here. Want to or not, I hear it all. Hey.
    He cocks an ear, bit of gnarled skin on the side of his head that looks kind of like an ear anyway, hand cupped to it.
    --Hear that, buddy? Course you don’t. I do. I hear down at West Fourth, I hear a platform announcement that the uptown F is running on the downtown track. I hear over at One Eighty-one, I hear a couple rats fighting over a pork rind someone dropped on the track. Hey, and, buddy, hey, Canal Street, I hear a guy, he’s got his hand in a woman’s back, about to push her in front of a train.
    He takes a drag and the cigarette is consumed in one long crackle.
    --I hear everything down here, buddy.
    I start rolling him another smoke.
    --You hear anything up top?
    He spits dry, no moisture left to him.
    --I hear up top, buddy. I hear an asshole parade marching in the alleys is what I hear.