King Maker

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The sun bled on the horizon with night quickly stanching the wound. Tavon anxiously rubbed his hands together, blowing into them only to see his breath pour though his fingers before shoving his hands deep into his pockets. He needed a new jacket. Eyeing the house from down the block, it drew him in, a black hole of guilt. The hunger brought him home, he'd abandoned his friends. His hands trembled. His skin itched as if centipedes scurried beneath it. The desire threatened to consume him and he needed to get well. Soon.

Li'l Nam was jumping tonight.

The occasional scream distracted him, but as soon as he turned to find the source's direction, gunfire erupted. Deciding to mind his own business, he lowered his head and marched to his spot. No, the ambulances or police had shown up. Wherever they were, they weren't in Li'l Nam. He could almost hear Knowledge Allah go on about no one caring about the plight of the black man, and it exhausted him.

More automatic gun bursts.

Leaning against a tree, its bare branches stretching toward the night sky, Tavon wondered if it was worth going in. Nausea snaked through his system. His palms itched. He felt fingernails scrape along the back of his skull. Only when the wave of sickness ebbed did he notice the door ajar. He cautiously lumbered up the steps, pebbles scattering with each footfall. The slow creak of the heavy door shattered the still of the house. The street light filled more of the room – boards had been ripped from the windows – though the night still left deep pockets of shadow. The room smelled of stale sweat, piss, and unwiped ass. And spoiled meat.

He vomited, wiping the vestiges with his cuff. From what he could make out, the house appeared as if a frenzied work crew had gutted it. Holes dotted the wood slats that lined the walls, like a fist punched through a rib cage. Creeping through the debris, he noticed that many of the walls thrown up to divide the house had been torn down, leaving only exposed wiring (much of it cloth wiring patched into newer) and plumbing (smashed PVC). A staircase, much of the original woodwork intact, stood revealed like a body in mid-autopsy. He feared what the basement might look like.

Tavon staggered back out of the mess. A hand landed on his shoulder. He whirled only to be greeted by Dollar.

"Damn, you trying to give a nigga a heart attack?"

"Could say the same about you," Dollar said, his heavy-lidded eyes studying the scene. He pulled in more in a couple of months than a cop in a year. Only spending money on clothes, he wasn't too flashy, not like his boys. For a young lieutenant, he primped worse than a woman, taking a razor to his head every morning.

"I know I don't look well. I'm sick. Could you hook me up with a blast, just to get right?" Tavon asked.

"How sick are you?"

"How sick I need to be?"

"I mean… have you seen any of your crew lately?" Dollar asked him.

"Naw. I got watered out of those testers you gave us. Then they got to feelin' bad. Real bad. I thought they was OD-ing or something, so I took off. For help. I had just come back to check on them when you showed."

If Dollar spotted all the holes in his tapestry of near-truths, he was too polite or too preoccupied to say anything about it.

"It was a bad package," Dollar said.

"Bad like Widowmaker?"

"No, not quite like that. Night got up with a new supplier and then got word that the re-up was tainted," Dollar said evenly. He rarely got to meet with Night or any of the higher-ups. Being dispatched to the corner left him feeling like an errand boy. "That's when we decided that I needed to come down here and check things out for ourselves."

Tavon followed Dollar out the door. His boys stood on post on either side of the porch. A few gunshots echoed in the night. Like an approaching storm, more thunderclaps erupted a lot closer. Not sure if he bought his earlier story, and rather than regale Dollar with tales of his guilt and cowardice, Tavon spun an account of going out to visit his sister before scraping together a couple of dollars to try and get a taste. The hunger wrapped its tendrils around his mind, needle pricks in his eyes. Seizing Dollar up, he wondered if he carried any vials on him and if he could snatch them and get past the rent-a-thugs.

"You holdin'?" Tavon asked, praying that his voice didn't waver suspiciously.

"Damn, fiend. Ain't you been listening? The package was bad. And it did something to anyone who rode it. Have you seen any of your fellow fiends?"

Tavon never expected to see any of them upright again. Once he thought about it, Dollar never held. His boys might've, though. "Told you, I ain't been around."

"They dead."

The statement snapped Tavon out of his hunger lust, if only temporarily. "Dead? But I ain't seen no ambos."

"Ain't gonna be none. Even death can't keep a good fiend down."

"What you mean?"

"They tearing up shit. Attacking folks. Breaking into houses. What you think all that ammo's been about? Niggas got guns. They ain't putting up with the foolishness of some fiend that don't know when to quit."

"D?" one of his men said, street-sharpened instinct on high alert. He gestured for silence.

Everyone made their way to his end of the porch. They heard it, too. Something stirred, like the rustling of dead leaves across a floorboard. Both the guards drew their guns. The boards of the house next door shattered, baseheads poured out of the window frames or ran out the front door. Dollar and Tavon ducked behind the guards, landing hard on the concrete. That white burnout leapt onto the porch, a feral gleam in his eyes, slashing at the throat of one of the guards. He took three bullets to his chest before another shot sprayed the back of his head along the porch stones. The fiends fell on the guard, tearing at his clothes, shredding his pockets. Not satisfied, one held him by the back of his head, his fingers digging into the sockets of his eyes, then bit into his skull. His body danced, as if caught on a live wire, then slumped. The other guard never even got off a shot. Overwhelmed by the scene, he just stood rooted with both guns drawn. The fiends dragged him down, without a cry, knocked a gun from his hands, tore out his pockets, then took turns scooping out bits of gray matter with their fingers.

Dollar scrambled for the loose gun.

"Come on," he said, waving him inside. Tavon spied a couple more fiends coming from the other end of the porch. Whatever fiends that remained converged on the house.

Dollar and Tavon rushed into the house and lifted the plank into place. The plank normally served to stop any impromptu police raids. The scale of the problem dawned on Tavon. The house had over twenty windows, plus four doors, not including the basement entrance. He heard a crash from the back of the house – the kitchen – then a thudding from behind him. Fists pounded against the basement door as if the house itself had found its heartbeat. They pushed against the door. A creaking shudder came from the great room. Tavon chanced a peek around the corner. The already-weakened floor gave way. Miss Jane pulled herself from the hole, paying no mind to the jagged floorboards tearing a bloodless track through her thigh. A bone protruded through her flesh, yet she tried to walk like she still had wares to sell. There was no residual spark, no light of recognition in her eyes.

"Shit, they ain't even bleedin'. Don't look like they even feel pain," Tavon squealed.

"We gonna have to go upstairs. Get them when they come up one at a time."

As soon as their weight left the door, hands – craggy masses of picked flesh – wrangled through, desperately grasping after them. Tavon scrambled up the stairs first, followed by Dollar who took each step one at a time, aiming his gun at any movement. When the crush of bodies started shambling up the stairs, he let them step near enough to pop them in the center of their foreheads. Couldn't have been more than a few dozen fiends taken out by the package, Tavon hoped. Judging from the daylong gunfire, there were maybe a dozen of them laying siege to the house.

Tavon heard a scrabbling along the roof.

He stared along the vaulted ceilings, then opted to check the three bedrooms. The first bedroom had once been its own apartment. Someone had torn the kitchenette from the wall and pulled a door from its hinges. Inside what Tavon originally thought was a closet was a bathroom that had been nailed closed, its cracked ceramic bowl bled thick urine. A pile of crap sat in the corner. All the boards remained intact on the windows, so Tavon shut the door.

Dollar let the bodies pile on the stairwell, the obstacles proving difficult for the walking decay to navigate. Even as one climbed over the half-dozen bodies' sprawled limbs, he'd shoot them, adding to the stack. Tavon closed off the second room before slipping into the third. Piles of split boards and plaster were scattered in the room. Three windows on one wall, still boarded, but cracks of light revealed an odd shape to the middle window. Tavon stepped nearer. It wasn't a window.

It was a balcony door.

The door splintered open. Loose Tooth hung from the gutters, having swung down from the roof through the door. Tavon hit the floor, shielding his face from the flying glass shards and bits of boarding. Loose Tooth was slow to get to his feet after a landing that left his legs bent at odd angles and him laying on his back. Still, he pulled himself together, heedless of the glass teeth of the broken window that ripped into him. With the shamble of a hit-and-run victim, he shuffled toward Tavon. Stinking of fetid mud, his vacuous face eyed Tavon hungrily. His mouth moved in an approximation of speaking. If Tavon didn't know better, he would've sworn Loose Tooth tonelessly voiced the word "Blast".

Tavon grabbed a board and swung it, breaking it over Loose Tooth's shoulder. He barely flinched. His mouth opened and closed, long ropes of saliva streaming in thick gooey bands. If you couldn't bring the mouth to the curb, bring the curb to the mouth, Tavon thought. A jousting knight, he charged with the board. The board plunged into his friend's mouth, then he used Loose Tooth's neck as a fulcrum and snapped the top of his jaw. He still twitched, his arms pining toward him in loose spasms.

"This way," Dollar yelled, only glancing at the pursuing fiend. "There's too many of them and I'm almost out of bullets."

They ran into the back bathroom. A cast-iron tub took up most of the space. The white-tiled walls looked relatively pristine, though the stench of the long-unflushed toilet gagged them. Stool steeped into a muddy tea. They shut the door and sat against it.

"I think they after you," Tavon said.

"Why me?" Dollar asked.

"They need a fix. A fiend is a fiend." Tavon glanced at the gun. "How many shots you got left?"

Dollar pulled out his clip. "One, with one in the chamber, left."

Tavon thought about his last blast. A taste would sure go down good about now. If he didn't have much world to begin with, handling the end of it wasn't a stretch. The door lurched, the fiends pushing forward. Hands pressed in from all sides, searching for purchase. Dollar held the edge of the door. Another burnout squeezed his head between the opening, the skin of his face pulled taut. He craned his neck and bit into Dollar. Dollar pulled back and fired into his skull. His body fell into the other fiends, giving Tavon the moment he needed to get the door closed again.

"I'm done, Tae." Dollar clutched his arm. Tavon moved his hand to see the wound.

"It's only a scratch. Ain't nothin' but a thing."

"He took a bite of me. They're like rabid dogs, Tae. I can feel their poison working its way through me. It's warm, almost tingly." Tavon knew the feeling, but said nothing. Dollar continued. "It's only a matter of time. And I don't want to go out like them."

Before Tavon could stop him, Dollar put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger. A crimson trail filigreed the tiles. Tavon opened the door to an explosion of skeletal hands. They pulled Dollar's body through. Tavon listened to the terrible wet chomping sounds. He couldn't believe that it would end this way. He did the deeds, a soldier in the game. They all were. He expected to die on the front lines, but with some sense of dignity. Not to face sickness in that place where beetles crawled and centipedes squirmed. He prayed that Dollar, or whatever they found on him, might sate them, at least for a little while. But he knew better. The friends he knew were gone.

Only the desire remained.