But he was unable to ignore the little voice that had begun chattering away in his mind like some fevered ghost on speed. He’s been waiting for you to come home, Jakey. You thought that he was gone. Maybe even dead. Didn’t you?

Well, guess what?

He’s back.

And you, my friend, are fucked.

5

1,260 miles east of Nassau, Bahamas

Every now and then Mother Nature assembles a performance to show off a little. Or a lot. Scripture labels it Judgment, usually laid down by a vengeful God to keep Man humble. But through progress made in earth sciences, it is now known that natural catastrophes are nothing more than a synchronous assembly of coincidental atmospheric conditions. All that is necessary is patience and the right combination of events.

In mid-September, roughly 500 miles southwest of the Azores island chain, a massive thunderstorm stalled over the ocean. This stall was precipitated by three storm fronts moving in on one another, and they pinned the thunderstorm in place.

The water that fueled this malevolent beast had been lifted off the ocean by solar heating, driven up into the atmosphere in the form of condensation. The act of evaporation generated energy that quickly increased wind speeds over the tropical waters, and the faster winds caused increased surface evaporation, feeding the thunderstorm with even more condensation. This hoarding of fuel swelled the pregnant belly of the beast and the storm clouds mushroomed into the atmosphere, forcing more condensation to form, and a self-feeding monster was born.

The system, affected by the earth’s rotation, began to spin, a massive heat-engine with an endless supply of fuel. The metamorphosis from large thunderstorm to hurricane was complete.

There was more heat.

More evaporation.

More wind.

More condensation.

More.

More.

More.

Then the atmospheric pressure dropped several millibars.

And the hurricane began to move west.

On its journey its eye dilated to the largest in history, outsizing Carmen by over sixty miles. In the tradition of political correctness, the storm had been identified as male, and given the title of Dylan.

Hurricane Dylan was now surging toward the American coast and the water in its path was hammered into eighty-foot waves by winds that neared 200 miles an hour. And he hadn’t really started putting on his war paint.

He was saving that for landfall.

6

Day Two

Montauk, Long Island

Jake stood just above the ridge of foam and seaweed that the Atlantic had spent the night laying across the beach one wave at a time. It was still nice out, the Gulf Stream now bringing up a southern current that pulled the warm air along with it. The whole East Coast was having a good day, one of those fall mornings that let you know that summer was not yet gone. There was no taste of the hurricane that was pushing the warm front north.

He had been up early, and ate a piece of bologna on toast over the sink like he had back in his junkie days. It was funny, even back then, when his mind had been dialed to comatose most of the time, he had never become a slob. The apartment was always neat. Of course that was easy when you didn’t own a second pair of shoes and the big-ticket items in the place were the stainless-steel fork and knife that lay proudly on the cardboard place mat on the kitchen counter. Beside the heat-blued spoon and the surgical tubing.

He had walked across the living room in his bare feet, drinking a cup of coffee out of an ancient A&W paper cup that he had emptied of its paintbrushes. Something about the wax and the heat of the coffee on his fingers and the faint smell of turpentine brought out that the world had changed irrevocably. He hadn’t been here in almost thirty years and now, walking through the bright wedge of space, he realized it was as if he had never really left at all. Because our minds are not built to forget, but to ignore.

The craggy man with the flat black eyes and the tattoo he saw looking back from the big mirror beside the piano was nothing like the boy who had left here all that time ago. Twenty-eight years had been swallowed by the clock and the almost-broken piece of machinery he used for a body had changed its cells a full four times since leaving. Except for the electrical impulses stored as memories, Jake Cole was a different man.

Jake didn’t remember getting the tattoo, or even thinking about it. Back then his money had been spent on coke and heroin; he never would have wasted budgetary considerations on something as inane as a tattoo. But one morning he had woken up in the tiny apartment on Spring Street, four months behind on rent and somehow not evicted. He had come to life in the middle of the kitchen floor, his head pulsing like an infection, shivering in a pool of rusty brown water from an overflowed toilet in the next room. He stood, and when he put his arm out to steady himself on the fridge that was no longer there, he saw it, covering his arm like a black silk shirt. The ink blanketed his entire body. From wrists to ankles, ending in a jagged line just below his larynx. Flat and healed at his feet—puffy, red, and fresh at his neck. And he remembered none of it. Four months erased from his life.

He had stood in front of the mirror for hours, the longest period he had could remember going without the nervous twitches without being high. The script was Italian and after deciphering a few names and phrases, he realized what it was.

The twelfth canto of Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Jake knew the story, of course. When he had been a child, it had been his favorite book in his father’s library. A massive leather-bound tome illustrated by Gustave Doré. He had never made any sort of conscious decision about the best parts, but staring at himself in the mirror, watching the ink that snaked over his frame, he knew that he had made the choice. And when he thought about it, the twelfth canto was the inevitable passage. The violent condemned to hell. The story of the Men of Blood. Like the ones he now hunted.

Like the one he now hunted.

After all this time. And just like finding himself back home, it all reeked of that fucking word destiny. Because some things were meant to happen. Some places were supposed to be revisited. And with that he realized that he hadn’t yet gone upstairs.

Of course the upper floor was as bad as the downstairs, worse because the rising heat had no place to go and it had baked the smell of dust and dirt and despair into the walls. The floor up here was bare, the hardwood stripping dented and the varnish beaten through to now dirty raw wood. Along with more utility knives, a few miserable blobs of canvases were stacked up here, too, leaning against the wall. He stopped and picked one up, trying to figure out what had happened to his father’s thinking. Were these exercises? How long had he been painting these things? How long had he been sick? Why had no one noticed?

He wondered what his father had been thinking while he had been painting these lifeless chips of noncolor. Jake had stopped caring about his old man years ago, but he had never stopped respecting his mind. Of all the shitty things you could say about Jacob Coleridge—and there were enough to fill a football stadium one filthy vowel at a time—you could not say was that he was talentless. Not like the rest of the hacks who had cashed in on being in the right place at the right time, back when showing up had been half the battle. When you added this hardwired brilliance to the equation the whole process of slapping paint to canvas had become something special to behold.