The cemetery was quiet.
That was the thing about graveyards that nobody told you. They weren't sad places. They were just quiet. The type of quiet that a city like New York had long forgotten about.
Peter sat cross-legged in the grass in front of the headstone, his schoolbag bunched up behind him into something approaching a pillow. The afternoon light came in low and sideways through the trees, cutting long shadows across the rows of stone. Somewhere behind him, a groundskeeper was doing something with a rake. Somewhere further still, traffic moved, and the world kept its relentless appointment with itself.
Here, though. Here it was just quiet. He liked the quiet.
He'd been talking for a while. For how long? He wasn't sure, he hadn't been tracking it.
He told Ben about Gwen first, because that felt like the most overdue thing. He kept it simple: she's okay, she's on tour, the band's doing well, Captain Stacy's recovering. He didn't mention the cafeteria. Peter figured Ben probably already knew about the cafeteria and had opinions about it that he wasn't ready to hear, even in silence.
Peter told him about Anna. About how she threw a full pack of cigarettes out the car window on the drive back from the precinct, and how she hadn't asked and had just left him with space to grieve. About how she made terrible coffee and kept the heat too high and had apparently never in her life closed a kitchen cabinet all the way. About how she knocked on his door once, just once, and left a plate of food outside it without saying a word when he didn't answer.
He told him about MJ. He was careful here. Peter didn't say certain things. He told Ben she was sharp and funny and angrier than anyone he'd remember and that she trained harder than him now, which was infuriating and also sort of impressive. He didn't say what was underneath that. He didn't say the other part.
He talked about the powers for a while. He wasn't sure where to start, so he started at the beginning, with waking up and the woman in his room with the gold eyes and the how he was technically immortal now. He explained it the way he'd have explained a problem set — methodically, sequentially, one variable at a time. One ability after another. He listed them like inventory. He wasn't sure why. Maybe because it was easier than explaining what any of it felt like.
He talked about the hunger last.
He didn't explain it. He just said: there's something in me now that wants things I don't want to want... And he left it there in the air above the headstone and let the quiet take it.
After a while, he ran out of things to say.
He sat in silence for a few minutes more. The groundskeeper had moved further away. The shadows had lengthened. He felt, not better exactly, but emptied in a way that was adjacent to better. Like a pressure valve had opened somewhere in his chest.
He pressed his palm flat against the top of the headstone for a moment.
"Alright," he said. "I'll see you."
He picked up his schoolbag, slung it over one shoulder, and walked back through the quiet toward the gate.
——00000——
The hospital was six blocks from the cemetery. He trudged there slowly. Each step he took was both eager and heavier than the last.
Peter had told himself on the way over that he was ready. He had rehearsed it in the mirror and in his head many times over. He practices usually went; you walk in. You find the room. You sit down. You say something, or you don't. You just be there…
He made it to the front entrance.
The sliding doors opened automatically at his approach, releasing a breath of antiseptic air.
His feet stopped.
The smell came first. Strong, sterile, and that unique, indescribable odor underneath it all just that screamed hospital. The squeak of rubber soles on linoleum. The low, continuous beep of monitors from somewhere down a corridor. Someone crying — a woman, restrained, low and effortful, the crying of someone who had been doing it for a long time. The overhead lights were the color of no particular time of day.
Peter stood in the entrance.
The doors tried to close. Bumped against him. Opened again. He was blocking the sensor.
He made himself step forward. His hands had started doing something he couldn't seem to stop — a fine, continuous tremor that moved from his fingers up through his wrists. He pressed them flat against his thighs. That didn't help.
Through the lobby and left down the main corridor and then he could see the ward. He could see the door, and through the small reinforced window in the door, through the gap, he could see the edge of a bed. White sheets. The thin, pale architecture of an arm. The tube. The blood transfusions. So many scents. Tasty. Pure. Sweet. Waiting. Wanting. Wanting him to just sink his teeth into that succulent piece of bloody meat. Waiting for him to satiate his hunger. Look at them. Humans. All of them. Living. Breathing. Existing. Walking around without a care in the world. No natural predators. All of them prey. Just waiting for him to sink his teeth into. That smell. Oh, that smell. He could just… He could just…. He could just taste it.
His vision blurred at the edges. Red creeped in from every angle.
He was outside himself suddenly, watching from somewhere slightly above and behind his own body, watching this lean kid in sneakers, jeans and hoody standing in the middle of a hospital corridor with his hands pressed flat against his thighs and his chest doing something wrong, something shallow and rapid that wasn't quite breathing. In. Out. It wasn't working. In. Out. The sounds of the ward were very loud all at once, disaggregated into individual frequencies that pressed against the inside of his skull. Saliva dripped from the edges of his lips.
He didn't remember moving.
He was outside. Both hands on his knees, the concrete cold under his palms, the evening air hitting his face. The concrete was wet with his drool. He'd come through the entrance without being aware of moving toward it. There was a woman giving him a wide berth on the footpath, many followed her example.
He straightened. Locked his knees. Made his hands stop.
His eyes stung.
Not strong enough. Not fast enough. Not nearly ruthless enough…
Not like this. Not like this. He couldn't see her like this. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Removed them. Looked up.
The sky above the hospital had deepened to the bruised purple-grey of early evening, the last thin band of orange dying out behind the roofline. Around him, at no distance he could quite locate, church bells had begun to ring — heavy, measured, rolling out across the city in long bronze waves.
Benjamin Poindexter. 2312 King Street, Manhattan…
The thought simply was. It had made its home inside the deepest, darkest depths of his mind. Always there. Always present. Lingering and haunting his every waking moment, as if it had been waiting for him, greeting him like an old friend.
He stood on the footpath outside the hospital. Bells from the chapel a few blocks down rang as if it were some divine signs from above. He turned the address over in his mind with a deliberateness that scared him a little.
He knew the address. He'd memorized it the same way he'd memorized everything else. The route, the time, the routine. Poindexter's morning run. The railings in the park. The way he moved, the way he carried the shoulder holster, the way he smiled.
The fear he'd carried since that smile was still here. He could feel it sitting low in his gut, heavy and corrosive, and he was tired — he was so tired of carrying it. The shame of it. The humiliation of having been broken by that man so thoroughly that the smell of a hospital could reduce him to this. Standing on a footpath. Hands shaking. Sixteen years old and unable to walk through a door because he was sure, not all of this came from the hunger. It couldn't. Not all of it.
The bells rang on.
Why not right now?
The thought arrived with a simplicity that was almost peaceful. Not the frantic desperation of need, or the cold calculation of his basement planning board. This was something else. Something that had been beneath all of it and had been waiting for this exact moment, this exact moment in time. This shade of the sky, this ringing of the chapel bell, this pavement in front of this hospital, these scents, this sight, this moment. It felt right. This primal urge that took hold of him. It felt so right.
All I have to do is go. Right now. Tonight…
He looked across the street.
A vendor on the corner, packing up for the evening. A rack of novelty items, tourist masks, souvenirs. Among them, a row of red plastic oni masks — bright, sharp-featured, horned. The kind children bought. The kind nobody looked twice at.
Peter crossed the street.
——00000——
Benjamin Poindexter arrived home at eight o'clock on the dot.
He always did. The routine was the thing. The routine was the architecture of a life lived correctly — built piece by piece, maintained by discipline, defended against anything that would disrupt it. Eight o'clock. Groceries from the corner store on Ninth. Twelve minutes to unpack and cook. And then, if the evening was cooperative, the light in Julie's window across the way would already be on.
He could see it from the street as he approached. Third floor, second from the left. The warm, constant angle of it.
She always left the window open. Always. As if she wanted him to see.
He would never intrude, of course. He was not that sort of man. But there was a comfort to it that he could not fully articulate — knowing she was there, knowing the light was on, knowing that somewhere in the ordered machinery of his evening there was that constant warm thing. Julie Barnes. His anchor. His north star. His angel.
He could just take her if he wanted. Enter through the same window she left open everynight. He could, but he wouldn't. He couldn't. No, she was different. He would never. He was not that sort of man. Not like that prick Jeremy Gordan. He was no good for her, so he made sure Jeremy disappeared. She deserved better.
Poindexter shifted the grocery bag to his left hand and turned the knob.
He pushed the door open and had barely cleared the threshold when a hand closed around his wrist.
The grip was iron. He processed this — too strong, amateur approach, coming from behind the door, waited for the sound of the key — in the fraction of a second before the elbow drove into his stomach and the air left his body. The bag dropped. He was already moving to compensate, already reaching for the Beretta, when he was pulled, swung, and his back hit the kitchen counter hard enough to knock something loose in his shoulder.
He rolled over the counter and hit the floor in the kitchen on the other side.
Amateur, he thought, even as pain flooded his side. They'd missed the spot. An inch higher and between the ribs, and they'd have had him spasming from the pain. Instead, they'd hit stomach muscles. Painful. Not incapacitating.
He had the Beretta out before he'd even pushed himself onto his back.
The intruder was in the kitchen doorway. Slight — surprisingly slight, given the strength of that grip. A red mask. Cracked already down one cheek from the counter-impact, he noted. Dressed in jeans and a hoody, nothing remarkable. That balls on this guy…
He fired four rounds before the intruder could even think of moving. Professional grouping. Three center mass, few inches to the top left, three shots to the heart, one to the head. At this range, with this weapon, you didn't miss.
He didn't miss. He never misses.
The body dropped face-first onto his kitchen floor. The back of its head panting parts of his white wall red with blood and brain matter.
He stood over it, breathing through the pain in his side, already calculating. The blood was going to be the problem. His kitchen floor was light hardwood. Difficult to clean thoroughly. He was going to need—
The smoke stopped his thinking entirely. What the hell is that? He watched curiously.
It rose from the body in thin black wisps — not the smoke that came from something burning, not anything chemical either — it was something else, something that moved against the air currents in the room as if it had its own direction. The blood on his kitchen floor began to evaporate. It was evaporating, lifting in the same black particulate, pulling up from the hardwood and dispersing. The spray pattern on his cabinet doors. The ceiling above. The wall. All of it, lifting and gone.
He stood very still. His grip tightened around his gun.
He was not a man given to fear. Fear was a biological subroutine, useful in appropriate concentrations, dangerous in excess. He had learned to observe it the way he observed other things — as information, not instruction. The thing rising in his chest right now, he classified carefully as heightened alertness.
The body moved.
A hand. Fingers splaying against the clean, bloodless floor. Then the arm, pushing.
Poindexter fired twice more — centre back — and the body arched and howled, a raw, broken sound, human and desperate and awful. But it kept moving. It came off the floor in a lunge that crossed the kitchen in a second and hit Poindexter like a truck, and then they were moving through the wall.
Should have gone for the head, he cursed.
The brickwork gave. He registered this distantly while simultaneously registering through the pain that his spine had made contact with the dining table on the way through and that the table had not survived the encounter and that he was now airborne.
His back hit the car's roof first.
The metal buckled under him. He felt his spine compress painfully under his own body weight and felt something crack. The breath he tried to take did not fully arrive. Blood came first, then breath. He coughed it out through blood and saliva. His legs. He couldn't feel his legs.
He lay on the roof of the car and looked up at a city sky and took small, shallow inventory. Spine: compromised. Ribs: multiple, on the right side. His gun was not in his hand. He did not know when that had happened. He couldn't feel his left hand, too.
A thud beside him. Something hitting pavement.
Then the sound of effort — the specific, grinding sound of a body doing something it had recently been prevented from doing, namely existing. The fingers came first, curling over the edge of the car roof near his head. Then the slow, agonized haul of weight over metal.
It came around the front of the car.
Whatever the mask had been before, it was cracked and askew now, hanging from one strap, the red plastic split along the cheek. Underneath it, briefly visible, a jaw that was not sitting correctly. An arm with an angle in it that arms should not have. It dragged one leg. Its shirt was dark with blood from the back — from the two rounds he'd put there — and as he watched, it moved, staggered forward.
Slowly and intentionally, it made its way onto the car.
He watched this with the clarity that extreme pain sometimes produces. The scientific, dissociated attention of a man who had accepted certain things about his situation and was now simply observing.
It reached him. It kneeled — collapsed partially, caught itself on the car roof on either side of his head, and pinned his arms under its knees. The weight was considerable. The pain was considerable. He could not move, and he was almost certain he was going to die here, on the roof of a stranger's car, on a Monday evening, with Julie's light still on in the window above him.
The mask was close now. He could see the eyes through the cracked plastic.
He had expected rage. You pushed someone far enough, you expected rage — that hot, consuming thing that made people stupid and loud. He knew rage. He'd used it, managed it, deflected it.
What looked back at him through the mask was not rage.
It was fear.
This creature that had come back from seven bullets to pin him to a car roof was afraid. This undying, ravenous thing was afraid. Trembling with it. The eyes above the cracked mask were the eyes of someone who had driven themselves here on something other than rage — on something harder to name and considerably harder to extinguish — and had arrived here at the terminus of it and found that they did not know what came next.
Poindexter's chest moved with something that started as a wince and became, entirely without his permission, a laugh.
It hurt. Laughing cracked something loose in his ribs that sent white light across his vision. He laughed anyway. He couldn't seem to stop.
The laughter came out dark and wet, with blood in it. Poindexter himself didn't know why he was laughing. Maybe because he knew that he wasn't going to survive this one. Maybe it was because he finally did it. He pushed someone, a child who had never taken a life before, to the point of returning from death itself to kill him. Maybe it was because he found this whole cascade of events funny.
It was the eyes. The eyes that gave him away.
Poindexter knew this kid. The surveillance. The camera in the yellow car. The one who'd come at him with a gun and a plan and about a decade less of everything that actually mattered, and he'd broken him — he'd broken him so thoroughly that the kid had died and come back and dragged himself across the city wearing a plastic party mask and crawled through his wall, and still had the trembling eyes of someone who was in completely over their head.
That kid…
Above him, the mask shifted. The trembling in those eyes changed character — curdled into something hotter, less readable — and the thing above him made a sound that was grief and fury stripped of language. It dropped its head and brought it up and down.
Pain detonated behind Poindexter's eyes. The kid above him grunted, then roared and brought his head down, meeting Poindexter's own like a hummer meeting an anvil.
Down again.
And again.
And again.
Blood and tears filled Poindexter's vision, he coughed and gurgled, and all the while he continued to laugh, and the kid continued to hammer against his skull.
At some point — he couldn't have said when — the strikes changed, became less deliberate, more desperate, and somewhere in the red static of it he became aware that the thing above him was making a sound. A broken, terrible, ugly sound that was not quite crying. No, he knew what this gurgled rhythm from the kid's mouth that matched his own.
He did not know when the kid had joined him in his madness.
Both of them covered in blood and sinew, both laughing, lost in their own madness until finally, one of them stopped laughing.
Above them, the city. The church bells had long since stopped. Somewhere, a car alarm. Somewhere the indifferent machinery of New York doing what it always did. And somewhere even further, sirens.
And filling the surrounding street — still, even now — laughter. High and broken, and with grief at the bottom of it, filling the cold evening air.
Poindexter could no longer tell whose it was. He felt his flesh being pulled off his bones. The last thing he heard was the sound of wet, slushy chewing.
Chapter End