Page 50
For the past two evenings, the Tandoori Palace had remained closed—as had the grocery store next door, the other half of the neo-Bengali emporium the Guptas owned. No word from them, and no sign of their presence, no answer at their phone. Angel started to worry—no, not about them, truthfully, but about his income. The radio talked of quarantine, which was good for health but very bad for business. Had the Guptas fled the city? Perhaps they had gotten caught in some of the violence that had cropped up? In all this chaos, how would he know if they had been shot?
Three months before, they had sent him out to make duplicates of the keys to both places. He had made triplicates—he didn’t know what had possessed him, certainly no dark impulse on his part but only a lesson learned in life: to be prepared for anything.
Tonight, he decided, he would take a look. He needed to know. Just before dawn, Angel hauled himself down to the Guptas’ store. The street was quiet except for a dog, a black husky he had never seen in the neighborhood, barking at him from across the sidewalk—though something stopped the dog from crossing the street.
The Guptas’ store had once been called The Taj Mahal, but now, after generations of graffiti and pamphlet removal, the painted logo had worn away so that only the rosy illustration of the Indian Wonder of the World remained. Strangely, it exhibited too many minarets.
Now, someone had defaced the logo even further, spray-painting a cryptic design of lines and dots in fluorescent orange. The design, cryptic though it was, was fresh. The paint still glistened, a few threads of it slowly dripping at the corners.
Vandals. Here. Yet the locks were in place, the door undamaged.
Angel turned the key. When both bolts slid free, he limped inside.
Everything was silent. The power had been cut, and so the refrigerator was off, all the meats and fish inside gone to waste. Light from the last of the sunset filtered in through the steel shutters over the windows, like an orange-gold mist. Deeper inside, the store was dark. Angel had brought two busted cell phones with him. The call functions did not work, but the screens and batteries still did, and he found that—thanks to a picture of his white wall he snapped during daylight—the screens made excellent lights for hanging on his belt or even strapped to his head for close work.
The store was in absolute disarray. Rice and lentils covered the floor, spilled from several overturned containers. The Guptas would never have allowed this.
Something, Angel knew, was deeply wrong.
Above all else was the stench of ammonia. Not the eye-watering odor of the off-the-shelf cleaner kind he used to clean the toilets, but something more foul. Not pure like a chemical, but messy and organic. His phone illuminated several streaking trails of orange-tinged fluid along the floor, sticky and still wet. They led to the cellar door.
The basement beneath the store communicated with the restaurant and, ultimately, with the belowground floors of his tenement building.
Angel put a shoulder to the Guptas’ office door. He knew they kept an old handgun inside the desk. He found it, the weapon feeling heavy and oily, not at all like the shiny prop guns he used to wave around. He tucked one of the phones into his tight belt and returned to the cellar door.
With his leg hurting more than ever, the old wrestler started down the slick steps. At the bottom, a door. This one had been broken, Angel saw—but from the inside. Someone had broken in from the cellar up to the store.
Beyond the storeroom, Angel heard a hissing sound, evenly measured and prolonged. He went in with both the gun and his phone out.
Another design defaced the wall. It resembled a bloom of six petals, or perhaps an inkblot: the center done in gold, the petals painted black. The paint still glistened, and he ran his light over all of it—maybe a bug, not a flower—before squeezing through the doorway into the next room.
The ceiling was low, spaced with wooden beams for support. Angel knew the layout well. One passage led to a narrow stairway to the sidewalk, where they received food shipments three times a week. The other burrowed through to his tenement building. He started ahead toward his building when the toe of his shoe hit something.
He aimed his phone light down onto the floor. At first he did not understand it. A person, sleeping. Then another. And two more near the stack of chairs.
They weren’t sleeping, because he didn’t hear any snoring or deep breathing, and yet they weren’t dead, because he didn’t smell death.
At that very moment, outside, the last of the sun’s direct rays disappeared from the East Coast sky. Night was upon the city, and newly turned vampires, those in their first days, responded very literally to the cosmic edict of sundown and sunup.
The slumbering vampires began to stir. Angel had stumbled unwittingly into a vast nest of undead. He did not need to wait to see their faces to know that this—people rising en masse from the floor of a darkened cellar—was not anything he wanted to be part of, nor indeed present for.
He moved to the narrow space in the wall toward the burrow to his building—one he had seen both ends of but never had the occasion to cross—only to see more figures beginning to rise, blocking his way.
He did not yell or give any warning. He fired the weapon, but was not prepared for the intensity of light and sound inside that constricted space.
Nor were his targets, who appeared more affected by the reports and the bright flash of flame than they were by the lead rounds that pierced their bodies. He fired three more times, achieving the same effect, and then twice behind him, sensing the others’ approach.
The gun clicked empty.
He threw it down. Only one option remained. An old door he had never opened—because he had never been able to, a door with no knob or handle, stuck within a compressed wooden frame surrounded by rock wall.
Angel pretended it was a prop door. Told himself it was a breakaway piece of balsa wood. He had to. He gripped the phone in his fist and lowered his shoulder and ran at it full-force.
The old wood scraped away from its frame, dislodging dust and dirt as the lock cracked and it burst open. Angel and his balky leg stumbled thr
ough—nearly falling into a gang of punks on the other side.
The bangers raised guns and silver swords at him, staggered by his bulk, about to slay him.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50 (Reading here)
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114