Read Online Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston - Free Book Online

in Queens.
—Is that what the drums tell you, Pitt?
—No, that's what being exiled up here for a year tells me.
He studies a spray-painted tag on the back of a cement urn decorating the edge of the roof. —A year.
He looks at me. —A year in the Bronx.
He looks me up and down. —And, until the last few hours, very little worse for wear.
He resumes his walk, skirting a sag in the tar paper where rainwater has pooled in the shade of one of the trees, greened with scum. —But you have always shown the resilience I was speaking of. I doubted it for some time, thought your sentimentality would get the best of you. Labeled you overly reckless. But I was wrong. Your natural ruthlessness serves you well. A particularly useful adaptation for this neighborhood, I imagine.
I think about what I learned growing up in the Bronx, who taught me the
nature of ruthlessness. I wonder if Predo knows this is home turf for me. Wonder if it matters what he knows.
He looks back at me. —No comment?
He's right, no comment.
He shrugs, stops at the southwest corner of the building where the tops of the trees part, the sky opens up and the view carries straight to the lights and towers across the river. —Perhaps you have some comment regarding that.
I look at the City, but I still have nothing to say.
He lays a hand on the snapped base of another of those urns. —We do not want her killed, Pitt.
He looks at me.
—The wreckage that now floats around her would become un-moored, drift into the open. She has established herself, in her hubris, in the midst of our turf. An entire apartment building in the near center of Coalition territory. She's housing them, providing for their needs. A welfare state. Were she to die, that flotsam would bob into our streets. We could not contain them all. A strike of any scale on the building would draw far too much attention. Our influence spreads to
certain circles in the uninfected community, but not so broadly that we can conceal a paramilitary raid in the heart of the Upper East Side. No.
His hand wraps the jagged stump of cement.
—As appealing as assassination may be, it is out of the question. We must rather proceed with greatest discretion. We know her ultimate goal.
He looks upward. —A cure.
Shaking his head.
—But we need to know by what organizing principles she will proceed. If she is pledged to secrecy, working on her own under the auspices of her fathers biotech labs and with no outside research partners, we have some amount of time and leeway in our plans. If she intends to make this a public effort, marshaling evidence that the Vyrus is some form of illness, and then launching a public-health campaign via a grandstanding news conference or similar stunt, we shall have to act posthaste.
I grunt.
He looks at me. —Yes?
I'm still looking at the City, the Empire State Buildings spire lit up in red,
white and blue.
—Nothing. I just like to make a mental note when people use words I've only
read in books before. Posthaste.
—Well, in an effort to broaden your vocabulary, allow me to use another word:
genocide.
—Yeah, I heard that one before.
—Good. Then I do not need to define it for you. You can picture it on your
own. How it will proceed if she tries to launch an effort to cure the Vyrus as if it
were African famine relief or a similar faddish cause for dissipated fashion
models and rock stars to champion.
I step closer to the balustrade, eyes on the lights. —Maybe wed get our own concert.
—The best we might hope for,  Pitt,  would be an orchestra of our own imprisoned kind to serenade us as we filed into the showers. —Yeah, well I'm not arguing the point.
—No. Nor would I expect you to. Occasional lapses into romanticism aside, you have always been clear on what fate waits us if we are revealed.
I give him a look.
—Wonder.
—Yes?
—What's Bird think of all this? The Society? Rest of the Clans?
He folds his arms.
—Tensions, unsurprisingly, are high. Your former employer,