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  He climbed the steps up, standing on the last crate. Still, the top of his head only reached the level of her stomach. She saw an older African-American man, with unkempt dreads and the tracks of hard-lived years written on his face. He wore a heavy grey overcoat, even though it was the middle of summer.

  He examined her predicament with the straps and let out a low whistle, rubbing his bristly chin hairs.

  “Name?” he asked, out of nowhere.

  “Oh God. Does it matter? Just please get me down.”

  “Oh, I'm getting to that. But first I gotta have a name. Not going to even try anything until I get that.”

  “Why?” her voice was edged, the pain and discomfort evident.

  “Well, see here, this is how it go. If you don't make it, I want to know what to call the redheaded baby doll that fell through my roof and died on my floor. I've cleaned up too many dead folk already with no names. Or no names that I knew, anyhow.”

  “Oh,” she bit her lip. “Dangerella.”

  He laughed.

  “That's no proper name. Is that the name your parents gave you? I don't think so. Say your real name, or I don't get you down.”

  “GET ME DOWN!” she hollered.

  “You in no position to bargain, child. I can just walk away, or call you a museum piece of hanging art, or throw darts at you. But whether I get you down is up to me. This here's my castle, and I'm the king of it. Your name.”

  She dropped her head down and sighed.

  “Angelica.”

  His face broke into a broad grin, his teeth amazingly clean and intact.

  “Okay then, Ms. Dangerella, let's get you down.”

  He stretched up suddenly and deftly grabbed the knife she'd hidden in her belt. The one she was sure no one could detect.

  “Hey!” she cried.

  “What? Didn't think I knowed you had that?” He winked. “Old Earl is nobody's fool.”

  For a scary moment, she wondered if this was how it would end, with her trapped and hanging like a side of beef, stabbed to death by a stranger using her own knife. Didn't seem fair, after surviving the outbreak.

  He flipped her knife from hand to hand in a way of someone well-versed in bladed weapons.

  “Now, I can't unbuckle both your straps, with all your weight on 'em, that'd be impossible. The only way I can see it is to unbuckle one, get that arm free, then hold you up and cut the other one. It'll ruin your backpack, but I can scrounge you another, maybe a pretty kitty cat backpack, all pink and stuff.” He laughed at the horrified look on her face. “Maybe not, then.”

  He grunted with the effort of trying to unlatch a backpack strap that was cinched as tight as it could be. Soon, he gave up and sawed back and forth on it instead.

  “Change of plans, little girl. Get ready. I think gravity's going to be a beeyatch.”

  The knife cut through enough of the strap that the remaining fibers suddenly frayed and broke. They awkwardly tumbled to the ground in a heap, plunging their way through the blocks.

  Dangerella shrieked when her injured leg hit the hard floor. The pain made her see red winking lights around her field of vision.

  She heard the man yelp in the darkness.

  “Jesus, girl, how sharp did you go and make this knife?”

  * * *

  Dangerella watched as Earl pulled the needle and thread through her leg again. She was biting down on a rolled up piece of cloth, her saliva running down her chin. She was grateful that the worst of it was over. She had almost popped her jaw out of joint when he poured the alcohol directly into her wound.

  “This is the germ kind of alcohol, not the kind you drink,” he'd said, right before a hot river of pain lanced through her leg. He told her he didn't have anything for her pain, besides aspirin. And the other kind of alcohol. He had lots of that. He'd been pouring whiskey down her throat to try to keep her mind off the pain, but at first that just made her throat burn.

  Working on her wound was aggravating his own. When they fell, he fell on her knife and sliced up his palm. Earl winced as he pulled the thread. His right hand was wrapped in gauze, and blood was beginning to stain the dressing.

  As she lay there, being stitched like a quilt, and more than a little drunk from the whiskey, her mind bounced all over the place. She started crying. She spit out the cloth.

  “I'm not going to catch up with Bull3tBoy now.” Her lower lip made a quivering furrow. Tears dripped off her chin. “And I don't know how to message him.”

  Earl stopped, and looked at her.

  “Who's bullethead?”

  “Just some guy I'm in love…met online.”

  “Ah. 'Love.' Good for you this is just an online deal. There's no such thing as love.”

  “What?” Dangerella tried to sit up.

  The room spun around her.

  She laid back down in a hurry.

  “People always think they're in love. Really they're in love with the idea of love. Anyhow,” he said as he used his teeth to end the knot of the sutures on her leg. “Young love is the worst kind. He's probably dead by now with the bleeding thing. Most people are.”

  His words hit her like punches. “What the hell do you know? You're just a bum living under the street.”

  Earl pulled back then. His face was unreadable. He got up and walked away to sit on a milk crate. His eyes looked far off, unfocused.

  “I'm sorry. I didn't…I mean you just fixed up my leg and all and here I dump on you. I didn't mean it.”

  “Oh hell, don't do that. Don't act like you didn't tell the truth. I guess I am a bum. I gave up on the world long before the latest trouble, but you have no call to know about that.”

  “I should have said thanks for—she started softly.

  “But let me give you some free advice,” he interrupted. “Speaking the truth will only get you in big trouble someday. I know it did me.”

  He bowed down and shook his head. “I know it did me.”

  They didn't talk for a while, both of them feeling their own flavor of prickly and neither sure how to shift into something else.

  After a time, Earl came over and quietly finished up dressing her leg. He elevated it on a rolled up quilt and threw a thin blanket on top of her. She stuck out her good leg and both arms to try to keep cool. The whiskey didn't help. It made her warm from the inside out. Still, when he offered her another drink of it, she didn't turn it down.

  She spent a fitful night trying like hell to go to sleep. As far as she could tell, Earl sat in the same place on the crate all night. She watched him in the dark. He was a big man, or was once. His dreads came down to the middle of his back.

  He muttered things under his breath.

  She wondered where Bull3tBoy was, and if he was okay. She thought about his online picture, the one that wasn't an avatar and showed what he really looked like. He said he was clumsy and tall, that's as far as he went describing himself. She wanted him to be a hero and come tearing into the city to find her. But she knew that would be nearly impossible without her tablet's GPS.

  It hurt her to think she would rather have him safe and at the compound than wasting his time looking for her. It made the inside of her chest tingle. Because she also wanted to be with him more than anything else she could think of.

  * * *

  Dangerella's leg swelled, sporting angry red skin around the wound. She tentatively tried to get up and put some weight on it, but ended up falling back down.

  She tried to talk to Earl, but he was still angry, or absent. He frequently seemed to get lost in his own mind. Her voice turned small.

  He continued to take care of her. He didn't have anything to drink that wasn't liquor, so she only took enough to wet the insides of her mouth, and stretched out the time between sips. She felt light-headed and feverish enough from infection; she didn't want to be drunk all the time too.

  Finally he came over to check on her leg, lifting up the bandages. His eyes grew wide and he cursed under his breath.

&
nbsp; “Did you bring any meds in your backpack? Penicillin? Antibiotics?”

  “No. I only brought stuff, well, you know, for girls.”

  He ran a hand over his face.

  “Well, here's the thing. The pharmacies were looted and picked over right off. Necessary drugs and things that got you high disappeared first. Antibiotics are necessary drugs. I need to go topside and see if I can find you something.”

  “Okay,” she answered weakly.

  “I don't like leaving you here like this, but I can't take you with me either.”

  She shrugged, not knowing how to answer that.

  “But I got no choice. You sure messed up my life, you know that?”

  “I didn't…”

  Earl's face screwed up in rage, and he shouted, “I didn't ask to be born on your planet!” He picked up random things and started smashing them against the walls.

  She felt around, looking for something. Something that should have been there. In spite of the sickness and the haze in her mind, she snapped awake.

  “My knives! Where are my knives?”

  “See, now, I can't trust you to have weapons in my own house, little girl. Your knife about split my hand in half.” He waved his arms, describing an invisible box, like a mime.

  “This is a weapon-free zone, is Earl's house.”

  “I'm going to need those when I leave, Earl.”

  He jumped as if bitten by a snake.

  “You can't leave right now. Not with your leg infected. You ain't leaving.” His eyes were burning brightly.

  Dangerella's face became grim, but she remained silent.

  Earl grabbed a wireframe grocery cart with damaged wheels. “I got maybe another place I can look for meds. I'll be back.”

  “Wait,” Dangerella requested. Earl looked at her impatiently.

  “If you can find a laptop or a tablet, could you grab that for me?”

  Earl frowned, his dreads swaying. “What do you need that for?”

  “I can use it,” she assured him. Then, her stomach cramped up and she curled into herself on the makeshift cot.

  Angrily, Earl looked at her. “So you can leave.”

  She pretended to not hear him, and groaned. Eventually, he left, dragging the cart behind him, making as much noise as he possibly could.

  * * *

  Earl stood in front of the Grand Arthurian Plaza: home of luxury condos with excellent security. However, he knew where the extra emergency key was kept. He removed the third brick down on the right side of the door.

  He entered the marble-clad lobby and carefully looked around. Every little noise contrasted with the complete silence.

  The first floor condos had doors flung open. Earl saw signs of a struggle or hurried exit, belongings strewn everywhere. There were stiff brown stains on the expensive carpeting. No one had gotten around to cleaning up the blood.

  The first floor didn't matter. Earl's objective was the elevator. He stepped into the open car and double-pressed the basement and lobby keys simultaneously. He was heading toward the basement. In the Super's office was the skeleton key. At least it always had been. He smiled when he was rewarded by finding the dull brass key and ring hanging off the metal key box.

  He pressed the lobby and penthouse keys together to go up.

  The penthouse was where Mr. Diamond lived. That's what his entourage and the staff called him. He had the whole floor to himself. Earl felt himself half-bowing as he entered, though he doubted anyone was there to bow back or dismiss him. Old habits die hard.

  He ignored the immaculate living area with the huge picture windows. There was another more important room here. When he reached it, he slowly opened the door and felt a puff of trapped air escape. Air rich in oxygen. It really perked Earl up and brightened his eyes. For a moment, he thought the hermetically sealed room might have miraculously saved Mr. Diamond throughout the blood virus trouble. But he saw in the expensive hospital bed a different story.

  The bed was covered in dark spent blood, and after observing his dying position, Earl felt a little sorry for Mr. Diamond, unable to move, and already old and unhealthy. He must have let in someone he completely trusted. Someone who entered and carried the virus within them.

  The bed was curtained with plastic barriers, and as he walked through them, he saw the culprit, already punished, dead on the floor. Mr. Diamond's nephew, in front of the opened wall safe. He died hugging bricks of cash and platinum bars to his chest as he bled out of his orifices. Earl didn't like Mr. Diamond's nephew, but nobody deserved to die like that.

  He stepped over the body, and opened a large standing cabinet that filled one wall.

  Pay dirt.

  He stepped into a massive medicine cabinet, larger than a walk-in pantry. Mr. Diamond had his physicians stock every medicine one could think of, in the mad struggle to keep him mostly alive. Some bottles had names on them Earl had never heard of, but there were several antibiotic prescriptions, different versions of penicillin, ciprofloxacin, and broad spectrum infection eradicators. There was also a refrigerated section with bags of drawn blood, probably Mr. Diamond's own. Earl quickly shut that. He held his jute bag under the shelves and shoveled all the meds in.

  He stopped at the foot of Mr. Diamond's bed.

  “What good did it do you, huh? Now you're dead, and I'm still walking around. Where are your boys now? Carmine probably took the coward's way out and kissed his own gun barrel goodbye. What it's worth to own everything, when everything goes to crap? Nothing. That's what.”

  As he was leaving the place he found something lying on a glass table. He started to pick it up, and then set it back down gently. He stared at it for a long time. He lifted it again in his rough hands. Things warred in his head that paralyzed him. He wondered whether it was the proper thing to take it with him.

  * * *

  Pills were placed in her mouth, and washed down with whiskey. She wasn't aware of it. Her mind was filled with nightmares, intricate maps and unbelievable birds. Dangerella dreamed of losing her leg and walking with a prosthetic limb, the interior of which cached several knives. She was a killer robot and Bull3tBoy rode alongside her on his mechanized horse.

  * * *

  Earl sat patiently next to Dangerella on his milk crate. He was drinking very expensive 25 year old scotch taken from Mr. Diamond's penthouse.

  “Beats the hell out of cheap wine,” he told himself.

  He sipped slowly, savoring each blended flavor.

  The last time he'd had liquor this good was in Da Nang, Vietnam. He'd been assisting an interrogation.

  “Don't let him die,” they told him. They wanted Earl to patch the prisoner up so they could start again. Sometimes there was nothing he could do, the body was a machine and sometimes it could be damaged beyond repair. But the eyes of the prisoners would plead with him.

  That duty whittled away little bits of his soul, leaving gaping holes that he now filled with alcohol. The Vietnamese general had very nice liquor, and primo cigars. Not as good as Mr. Diamond's, but still good.

  He dozed a few minutes at a time. His head would start to drop, and he'd jerk himself back awake. The girl slept on, the antibiotics working their way through her system. He'd popped a few himself, as a precaution for his own knife wound.

  * * *

  When Dangerella's fever broke, Earl stood over her, staring.

  “Where you going to go after you leave?” he asked her, devoid of emotion.

  “Just nowhere, anywhere.”

  “Staten Island, right? You're going there.” Less of a question, more of a declaration.

  “Yes.” She tried to pull herself up. “It's safe.”

  He laughed bitterly.

  “Safe? Who told you it was safe?” He crossed his arms, looking very intimidating.

  “They did. On the site.” She stuck her chin up defiantly.

  “And 'they' are?”

  “Well…”

  “You don't even know, do you? All you know is they ar
e asking people to come. Now why would they do that?” He shook his dreads at her. “Why wouldn't they just keep their own selves safe?”

  “Because they're trying to save mankind. We're all that's left.”

  Earl grunted to himself, and then said, “Okay, let me tell you something, baby doll. Mankind has always been crazy selfish as hell. Just because there's less of them don't make them less crazy.” His eyes connected with hers and she felt them bore through her.

  “Good advice, and you best take it. Don't go. Stay here. You don't know if you can trust them.”

  “And I should trust you? The guy who stole my knives?”

  “Safe keeping, is all.” He said, though he did look around the space to see if anything had been disturbed.

  She sat up all the way, and glared up at him.

  “I am going to leave. You can't stop me. I appreciate the help, but I can't stay in a hovel under a sidewalk. Besides, Bull3tBoy…”

  “Bullethead.”

  “Bull3tBoy is waiting for me. If I don't show up, he could do something stupid, like come looking for me.”

  Earl was rigid. He continued to stare for a minute. He reached for a bundle behind a shelf and almost threw it at her. Then he stalked away and left.

  Dangerella unwrapped the cloth and found her knives in the first layer. But there was something hard underneath them, wrapped in more cloth. She set it in her lap and pulled the material away. She gasped.

  It was a tablet. Much better than the one she broke.

  “Thank…” she started to say, and realized he wasn't there anymore to hear it.

  Before she turned it on, she looked at the back and saw the engraving.

  'G. Bandorelli' it said.

  “The gangster?” she whispered to herself.

  “Huh.” She shook her head, amazed.

  Dangerella: Hey! Are you there?

  Bull3tBoy: OMG. Where have you been?

  Dangerella: Guess what? I am on Gianni Bandorelli's tablet!

  Bull3tBoy: The mobster?

  Dangerella: Alleged.

  Bull3tBoy: yeah, ok, whatevs, like the rule of law still applies. So how did that happen?

  Dangerella: Long story. I'll tell you when I see you. Right now I'm a little slowed up.