Chapter 49 The Whole Putrid Mess #2
“I will give this statement to your friend,” she said. “For you and for the others those men might hurt. And maybe it will help. But there is no cure, you know. For the world.”
“Not a cure,” Evan said.
He felt those blue eyes searching the side of his face. “What then?”
He thought.
He thought of missions past.
Lidia and Santiago Martinez, the framed school portrait of eight-year-old Gabriel on the wall, and the wrapped presents waiting beneath the Christmas tree.
Jayla Hill, orphaned as surely as he was, magically speaking again through crushed vocal cords.
The Seabrooks, Ruby and her parents, Mason and Deborah, and that jigsaw puzzle of a family photo on their kitchen table, their once-intact family put back together again.
He thought about when he’d finally delivered Anjelina home, how she’d moved through the white gate to the house, Aragón and Belicia waiting behind the screen door with unspeakable relief.
He thought about how nervous his half brother Andre Duran had been to see his daughter again, how Sofia had run over to him when he’d walked in and wrapped herself around his waist.
He thought about the way Max Merriweather had smiled shyly when Evan told him to write his own story so no one else would write it for him.
He thought about sitting in Trevon Gaines’s bedroom until Trevon fell asleep, how he’d clutched his stuffed frog and murmured to himself, We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself.
And Joey. Swinging at him with a tire iron when he let her out of the trunk.
Her first time in the penthouse, ogling the poured-concrete countertops, the soaring ceiling, the walls of glass—This place.
It’s like something made up. His hands on her thigh, stanching the bleeding from her femoral artery.
How she’d blown out the candle he’d set atop an MRE on her seventeenth birthday, trying not to cry.
Alison Siegler walking from the shipping container to the waiting ambulance, standing tall, unbroken, after her sixteen-day ordeal.
He thought about Isa Vasquez’s proud smile and stubby thumbs-up, how her Down syndrome–slanted eyes had lit up when he’d told her she was a very brave young woman.
He merged onto the Southern State Parkway east and rode it all the way to Bay Parkway, scooping down through Canarsie and toward the neck of Barren Island. The slate-gray sky gave way to rain, big, sporadic drops plopping onto the windshield.
Not a cure.
What then?
“Balance,” he answered.
Anca offered her hand palm-up across the console. The gesture was tentative. Sisterly.
He took it.
She squeezed it once.
He squeezed back.
Cutting across Flatbush Avenue, he nosed off asphalt onto the rutted dirt road Templeton had specified.
Head-tall elephant grass battered the side panels and then fell away to reveal flat salt marshes.
Aside from a few washed-out hiking trails, there were no signs of life.
The windshield wipers worked hard. Weeds and bramble twisted up from the fecund earth, clashing with mini-forests of reeds, straight and dense as cornfields.
As he curved along the inlet of Dead Horse Bay, the smell hit, an abattoir reek.
Honoring the Third Commandment, he’d pored over records of the area, memorizing the topography down to each bend and turn.
In the 1850s, horse-rendering plants had dumped their residual here, enough chopped-up carcasses to clog the surrounding waters.
Vat-boiled fat, fertilizer and glue, millstone-ground bone.
Oil had been extruded from the forage fish in the bay, too, offal dumped along the coastline where feral dogs and pigs roamed, picking at fragrant refuse heaps.
Contaminants, too, chemical and radiological, explosive nitroglycerin derived from garbage trucked in from the city to be incinerated.
The whole putrid mess had been layered over with mounds of landfill waste and buried ineptly beneath sixteen feet of sandy topsoil.
High-tide floods had eroded and excavated this rancid history, every wash of filthy water from the bay revealing more decay and ruin, the rot of ages compounding in the primordial soup where marsh met water.
Each ebb and flow vomited up horse bones, rusted shanks of killing machinery, Medusa-hair tangles of seaweed peppered with bits of trash.
It was impossible to sense how far the cesspool stretched its stink into the Atlantic, the earth, rain clouds, and sink faucets.
Anca’s nose wrinkled against the stench.
Evan felt it pressing into his pores, assaultive osmosis, filth entering his lungs, his bloodstream. His OCD ticked up but he breathed it away, mission-focused.
The unofficial road dipped low along Glass Bottle Beach, named with utilitarian grimness like everything else in the vicinity.
For some reason, bottles disgorged from the landfill had aggregated here, shattered and intact, brown and blue and green and clear, marked with the jaunty antique lettering of their past lives, soda and shoe polish, bleach and digestive tonics.
Stranded boats proliferated, hurricane casualties—rotting junk boats christened with graffiti tags, a half-buried motorboat rearing up from the sand like a breaching whale.
The Mercedes crept along through rain and muck, wipers beating away for clarity.
They’d loop down, cut back across Flatbush, and forge surreptitiously toward Floyd Bennett Field from the south.
He had to slow to pass an upended tree, squat and gnarled, octopoid roots twisting out like the ruffled hem of a living dress.
Even with the windows up, the reek off the water choked him. His eyes watered.
Anca’s hand reached for his, tightening. Another squeeze?
No, panic.
He looked over. Her mouth pulsed, lips sealed.
Moving robotically, she reached in her purse, flipped her cell phone onto the dash, digging for something. She came up with her seizure plan, hands fumbling automatically to get it around her neck.
“No,” he said, slowing the car. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here and will not leave.”
Her hands released. Her tongue squirmed in her closed mouth. “Emerald,” she said faintly. “Jade and fir.”
On the dashboard, her phone showed no signal. The fallen tree partially hemmed them in from behind, a choke point. To their right, the refuse-strewn coastline gave onto choppy water. To the left a wall of reeds, vertically barred with shadow and impenetrable to the eye. Perfect ambush point.
Her eyes fluttered. “Bright. It’s so bright.”
But there was barely any light. The wipers thrashed against the rain, the air heavied with gray, the sun a mere thumb smudge within the leaden overcast.
He nudged the Mercedes away from the reeds to the far side of the narrow dirt road, clear for rapid acceleration.
Anca covered her eyes, a low mewling noise escaping her throat.
He reached across her to the controls, lowering her seat back.
A fork of lightning touched down to the water, close enough to make him blink.
He couldn’t face her and the curtain of reeds at the same time.
Thunder rumbled through the chassis, his bones. Rain sheeted down. He shot a glance over his shoulder. Even at a few feet, the reeds were barely visible. He unholstered his ARES, set it beneath his thigh, then turned back to Anca.
She seized.