She reaches up and runs a finger over the healing cuts that cover my face.

– Lydia told Sela what you did. That you tried to save your girlfriend. That’s got to suck. And now you’re alone again. But you don’t have to be. Nobody should be alone if they don’t have to be. So what if we’re not normal? Normal bites. We can have our own kind of family. All we have to be is strong enough. I think you’re strong enough, Joe. I really do. And you don’t have to be my daddy or anything. Just, whatever, my big brother or something.

She plants her face tight against my arm.

– I just, gah, I love you no matter what.

I look at her.

She’s young and healthy and rich and brilliant and beautiful. And her blood is tonic. She’ll spoon-feed it to me if I ask because she’s as crazed as her parents ever were and I helped her once and she thinks that’s love.

Shit. Maybe it is. Like I’m a fucking expert.

It would be easy. An easy life. Can you imagine such a thing?

But Evie would still be in the warehouse.

And I’ve had a family. One was enough.

I shrug off the girl and push the passenger seat forward and lean and yank the door handle and the door swings open and Sela is rounding onto Park Avenue South and I roll from the car onto the pavement and find my feet and limp into Union Square and hide in the tent city of the homeless until Sela pulls the crying girl back to the car and drives off with her.

On the border of Society and Coalition, the park is not safe.

I walk back onto Society turf.

No one will be looking for me. I couldn’t be so stupid as to come back here after what happened at the Society safe house. They’ll be locking up tight and stripping the house and piling out the back, leaving wreckage that cops will read as a drug deal gone bad. They’ll be busy setting up shop at one of the buildings Terry bought with the Count’s money. The money he no longer has.

I have time.

I believe that right up until I stand at the corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street and see the fire engines two blocks away and the flames pouring out the windows of my apartment.

Exile, I head south, away from home.

– A nail in the leg?

I take the beer Christian offers me and suck half of it down.

– And one in the foot.

A few Dusters move around the clubhouse garage. One cracking the gearbox on his Indian, another throwing knives at a paper cutout of bin Laden, two are rewiring an old component stereo system they found scrapped in a dumpster.

Christian sits down on the edge of a fat, balding tire from an old dune buggy he’s been tinkering with for a year.

– And she really shot Hurley?

– Yeah.

– And took a crack at Terry?

– Yeah.

– And left them both alive?

– Yeah.

He drinks some beer.

– Jesus. Dead she-male walking.

– Yeah.

The guys with the stereo twist a last couple wires together at the back of a speaker and open the clamshell top of the turntable and drop a vinyl disk on the spindle. It’s Television’s Marquee Moon. “See No Evil” plays.

We listen to the song.

Christian taps the heel of his boot.

– The classics.

– Sure.

He stops tapping his heel.

– A nail.

– Two nails.

– Fuck me.

– Yeah.

He works a hand inside his leathers and pulls out a pack of Marlboros and offers it to me. I take one and break the filter off and find my Zippo and light up.

He takes a light from me and blows a smoke ring.

– You’re fucked.

– Yeah.

– Tenderhooks made a run up to Fourteenth right before dawn. Said the fire was out at your place. Said partisans were out.

– Yeah. No doubt.

He’s not wearing his top hat. The crown of his head is bald and weathered. He scratches it.

– Seem to you like it’s getting weirder out there, Joe? Scarier?

I look at the big roll-up doors that block out the killing sun on the other side.

– It’s getting weirder. Scarier? I don’t know.

He spits between his boots.

– Feels scarier to me. Like shit that’s been building up is about to cut loose.

– Terry says there’s war coming.

He smears the saliva across the floor with the toe of his boot.

– Shit.

– Yeah. Shit.

He looks over at me and smiles.

– He mention that before or after you stuck the nails in him?

– Must have been before. He wasn’t waxing too conversational after.

He leans in and clinks his bottle against mine.

– Tell you, man, I would have liked to see that. Smug bastard that he is. I would have liked to see his blood.

– Just like anybody else’s.

– Would have liked to see it for myself.

We drink another couple beers and someone flips the album.

I flex my knee and it hurts like hell, but not as bad. The ribs are burning as the Vyrus heals. Some are gonna knit crooked. The cuts and holes are all coming together, along with whatever Lydia did inside my gut, and I’m starting to see some blurs from my burned eye. Still, I only got two pints off the girl. Enough to get me going and to make her talk crazy talk, but I could use some more.

Who couldn’t use some more? We all want more.

I think about her. Young and hungry. I know how that feels. Even if it was a long time ago.

Clan Cure.

God I hope the name is all about what she’s trying to do and not about the fucking band. I hate that band.

Like the name matters.

They’ll never let her get away with it.

But.

More money than God. Business and legal hooks deep in the straight world. Knowledge of things she has no right to. That no one has a right to. And a woman like Sela at her side. Love at her side.

No one will be able to take them head on.

So maybe they’ll make a run.

Figure once word gets out what she’s planning, what she’s selling, the bill of goods, they’ll get plenty who’ll want to pledge. Young and desperate and feeble and alone, they’ll take in the dregs. And the sly and the lazy who smell a good thing in her money, and her promise to feed everyone.

Yeah, figure they’ll make a run.

Figure they’ll run till everyone realizes that a cure is a dream and she’s out of her skull. A run till Predo and Terry start sending in their people to infiltrate and fuck shit up.

Figure it will end bad.

Like there’s any other kind of ending.

Christian takes two more beers from the case and cracks them open and hands one over.

– A war. That’s a hell of a thing. Think we’d all be together, what with how much we have in common.

He blows across the mouth of his bottle.

– You think about it much, Joe?

I tap my Zippo against my bottle.

– What part?

He points at a scabbed gash on the back of my hand.

– What it is. If any of the looneys are right. Like maybe it’s not a virus at all. Maybe it’s a chemical. Something the government experimented with and lost control of. Or maybe they are in control of it, and they’re watching us all the time to see how we cope with it. Or a curse. Not like some Dracula bullshit, but a real curse from a real God. Like in the Bible. In the Bible, a curse is usually a test. So maybe it’s a test. And the ones that pass it are the ones who don’t give in to it. Like the only way to win is to let yourself die. Or the Enclave and that stuff. What if they’re right? Or is it the next step in evolution or a failed step or is it because somewhere in our past all our grandmoms took the same medication or we stood too close to an X-ray machine or all screwed the same monkey. Shit, I don’t know.

He makes a fist, loosens it.

– Do you ever think about what we are?

I finish my beer.