Horror exists. You can read about it every day, or you can see it up close. A shaking Colonia woman you pick up on the corner of 65th and Second, with her worldly possessions in her husband’s duffel bag, can tell you about horror in the front seat of the car, sobbing while you say “there, there,” and biting back rage so you can rush her to someone who can actually help her.
Horror is a story you tell yourself when you feel safe. You pretend you’ve experienced it, and maybe you have—in some form—but the potential for worse is always fulfilled.
Even the horror-stricken can experience horror. It’s always new. Always fresh. It can find an unwounded place on the soul—a place where only a story might have existed—and pierce it with experience.
Horror starts out looking like a normal street on a normal day. It looks like going around the block a few times, looking for a parking spot when you’re actually double-checking for spies and traps.
“And the sheriff’s department left just like that.” Connor’s question is a statement wrapped up in suspicion. He drives.
I crane my neck to see around every corner. “NYPD says they’re gone. Colonia too. Can’t guarantee there aren’t stragglers or booby traps. But the street looks clear. Agreed?”
“Aye.”
“Pull into the parking lot.” I look out the rear window and wave to the car behind me.
“The cops do their job and check for said booby traps?”
“I talked them out of it.” I turn back to the front. “Whatever the Colonia left behind is my problem.”
The site being abandoned is an invitation to return, and we’ve RSVP’d yes. There’s a trap here, or a message, or just four floors trashed for a week and a half.
“Us first,” I say to Connor when he parks. “I want to make sure we’re clear.”
Four cars have pulled in behind us. My guys get out after Connor and I do. Each one’s been touched by Colonia violence. All of them want to be here and are fiercely loyal to the cause against that organization. That’s the benefit of operating with a motive greater than profit.
“The blokes will follow on our signal.” The elevator doors slide open. Conner checks it and holds open the door so I can join him. When the doors close, he says, “The other day, in your fucking suburban garage…”
“Forget about it.”
“I wasn’t trying to have a go at you.”
He’s not going to just accept forgiveness for definitely and unequivocally having a fucking go at me. Damn tenacious, this guy.
With an eyebrow raised in disbelief, I throw his lingo back at him with the full weight of my New York accent. “You were mad as a cut snake.”
“That I was, mate. That I was.”
“Feeling better?”
“Sure am.”
“Keep it that way.”
There’s no need to speak of the time he tried to strangle me ever again.
“It’s going to be a disaster area,” I say when the elevator slows.
“I expect arse piss on the walls.”
“What is that?” I turn to him.
“What comes out when you eat a dodgy fish.”
“Right.” I face front as the doors open. “You have higher expectations than I do.”
I’m joking because they’re as low as possible.
But that’s a failure of imagination. There’s always a new nightmare waiting.
We clear the three floors of apartments first, and the guys start coming up.
The rooms look better than we anticipated. We track a stink of dead things to a ninth-floor apartment and find an open fridge too warm for the ground beef left inside.
“They got hungry.” Connor shuts the door.
“Must have been some good leftovers.”
“You want to bring a couple of guys with us up to the penthouse?”
My floor won’t be this clean. I know it from the fact that they found Nico’s spare ID packet.
And there’s the greenhouse.
“Pick two with strong stomachs.”
Conner doesn’t go right away. All he does is raise an eyebrow.
“For the ass piss, or whatever. Guarantee you at least one of them shit on my pillow.”
He leaves, and I go right up the stairs without them. Whatever’s up there, I’ll handle. Tripwires. Ambushes. Booby traps. Maybe I’ll clear the greenhouse too, before they head up.
The hallway is empty. The double doors to my office are open.
So much has happened in this hallway. I begged Sarah to open a blocked door. Kissed her. Invited her into my apartment.
The office has been ransacked. Papers everywhere. Cords ripped out of the walls. Phones thrown.
At my feet, a lone postcard from St. Easy. I pick it up and flip it over.
Dearest Dario—
You should see the beautiful girls here… and they’d love to see you. All my love
—Willa.
Stupid. All of us. Willa was stupid to send this thing. I was stupid to not burn it as soon as it came. The fucking Colonia are stupid for not seeing it’s the key to my entire operation. I tear it up and put the pieces in my pocket.
The entry to my apartment is open. There, too, I find no traps, but the furniture’s been shifted. Cabinets opened. A few dishes broken. Someone made a sandwich and left half of it behind.
No one shit on my pillow, but the sheets are half off the bed.
When I reach the wall I chainsawed open, I pause. There are tracks in the plaster dust. Some are shoes. Some are bare feet. They’re irregular. All directions. Sliding and half-stepping.
Sarah’s suite is on the opposite side of the open wall.
More tracks. They’re dark in the sprinkling of plaster in front of the wall, and white as they tracked the dust away.
There’s nothing unexpected here, but I have a profound sense of unease.
I observe every cranny and crack without moving. I listen for any sound out of the ordinary. There’s something. Not the traffic outside. Not the heating unit. Not water whistling through the pipes. Not the door to the stairway, way out in the hall, swinging open. Not the footsteps of Connor and two men with strong stomachs.
“Stop!” I bark, palm up to them.
Through the doorway, they’re frozen at the apartment’s entry. I put a finger to my lips, close my eyes, and listen.
Not the traffic outside. Not the heating unit. Not water whistling through the pipes. Not the men breathing. Not my heart beating.
But a scratching.
I know this scuttling scrape-tapping.
From a warehouse in Newark. And the tunnels under the subway. I know it from the storage room where I kept Don DeLillo’s body to prove I was the one who did him—and thus the one who should fill the power vacuum left behind.
Crossing over the broken wall in a heightened state of awareness, I see the winding plaster trails are from bare feet, and I smell the blood. The white powder rat tracks fade and disappear like ghosts.
When I get to the bedroom, the scratch-scrape-tapping is as loud as crumpling paper, and on the bed, a sea of gray fur undulates like shaking sewage.
“Connor!”
When I shout, the rats scurry away toward me, over my shoes, down the hall behind me.
“Fuck, what?” One of the guys, surprised by the flow of rodents.
“Damn.” Connor. Right behind me, looking over my shoulder.
There’s a body on Sarah’s bed, arms and legs tied to all four corners, face eaten away.
Dafne.
Her skirt’s over her waist, and the space between her legs is covered in a blood-soaked bandage. I grab a balled-up pillowcase from the floor and approach her with it. Her mouth is open. Four front teeth missing. Bruises on her neck that are so fresh they’re barely visible. The rats have started shitting on her. I cover her face.
“They did this?” Connor asks.
“It wasn’t Santa Claus.”
One of the guys excuses himself to throw up. So much for strong stomachs.
“They hollowed her.” Conner indicates the bandage between her legs.
It’s funny to me how easy it is to forget that no matter what you’ve seen or experienced, there’s always a new horror.
I’ve spent years hearing about the details of “hollowing.” It’s why so few women run from the oppressive life inside the Colonia. The carrot that keeps them there—besides brainwashing from birth—is a stable life, the promise of a good family, a stipend when it’s needed, free fucking healthcare with their nutbag doctors.
Hollowing is the stick, and it’s a horror reserved for traitors like Dafne.
“Probably did it in their clinic,” Connor says. “Then brought her back here.”
“Why?” Gingerly, I pull the bandage away. “Why do it if they were going to kill her?”
The blood stopped clotting, so the bandage comes away easily, revealing a flat area, shorn of labia and clitoris.
Hollowed.
“And why bring her back here?” I put the bandage back and notice the dress isn’t blood-soaked.
It’s red.
“Because she’s a message,” Connor mutters. “We have to kill them. All of them.”
We will. Every last one of them. But the path between my brain and my mouth is broken as I trace the lines of the gown. Its plunging neckline. The mass of red fabric gathered above the knees.
It’s Sarah’s dress from Armistice Night.
“Those fuckers,” I whisper.
Connor’s right. This is a message, and we have to kill all of them.
“Bury her proper first.” Connor. Sensible. Practical.
What they did to Dafne is reason enough to slaughter them.
The message they’re sending about Sarah…
“Those. Fucking. Mother. Fuckers!”
… is the blinding fire that’s going to burn this city.
“Dario?” Connor. Curious. Scared.
“Get me one of them.”
This is what they do to traitors.
“Who?”
Connor is red. This room is red. This building is red. The earth it’s built on is a smoldering pile of red so black, it’s white.
“Bring me a Colonia. A driver. A soldier. A fucking janitor. Get me a living body with a dick I can rip off. Do it!”
My voice is thunder. I draw it from the depths of the earth, where my need to protect Sarah sits uncomfortably with my horror.