Bite Me

Chapter One: Night Freight

The blood in my footwell was moving.

I noticed it at the stoplight on Ferry and Dock, the long one that stays red for ninety seconds even at two in the morning when there is nobody in Harrow Bay to stop for but me. The van smelled wrong — sweet, scorched, like somebody had burned sugar in a pan and then poured cough syrup over it. I looked down and there was a slick of dark spreading out from under the cooler on the passenger side, running along the rubber mat, pooling in the low spot where the floor pan had rusted through and been patched by a man named Hutchins who charged me two hundred dollars and a case of beer.

Blood leaks. That's the job. A cooler gets stacked badly, a bag seam gives, and you spend your dawn with a bucket of bleach solution and a shop vac feeling sorry for yourself. In six years of running Bauer Cold Chain I had cleaned up worse.

But this was too dark. Human blood in a transport bag is a specific color, a red so plain you stop seeing it. This looked like the inside of a plum. And when I leaned over with my phone light, the bag itself — the intact one, the one still sitting in the cooler with its lid half-canted — shifted. Not sloshed. Shifted. A slow deliberate pressure against the plastic, the way a cat moves under a blanket.

The light turned green. I sat there anyway.

"Nikki." Jodie's voice came out of the dash speaker, thin and bored. "You're stopped."

"I'm stopped."

"You're stopped at Ferry and Dock for four minutes, which is either a police stop, a medical event, or you're eating that gas station burrito I told you not to buy."

"I've got a leaker."

A pause. Keys clicking. Jodie Franklin had been dispatching for me since the second van, which meant she had been dispatching for me since I could barely make payroll, which meant she talked to me like a sister and I let her. "Rivergate load?"

"Rivergate load."

"Then it's Rivergate's problem. Drop it, log it, photograph it, and let Mr. Cold Hands write you a check."

Mr. Cold Hands. That was Silvan Radovic, who owned Rivergate Plasma Services, who wore gray suits the exact color of the fog off the lake, who paid in cash in unmarked bank envelopes every second Friday and never once got the amount wrong. He'd shaken my hand at our first meeting and I'd nearly flinched. His fingers were the temperature of a doorknob in January.

He was also, at that point, sixty percent of my revenue.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm turning around."

"Nikki."

"I'm turning around because I want it off my floor before it eats through the patch, Jodie. Not because I'm curious."

"You are the most curious woman I have ever met and you nearly died of it twice."

"Once," I said, and hung up on her.

Harrow Bay is a port town that stopped being a port. Two miles of shuttered steel sheds along the water, an ore dock that hasn't loaded since I was in middle school, a grain elevator standing up out of the fog like a set of gray teeth. In February the fog comes in wet and salted from the lake even though the lake isn't salt, and it freezes on the chain-link, and you drive by feel. I knew that waterfront the way you know the inside of your own mouth. Three vans, one dispatcher, a route map I'd stopped looking at in year two. I navigated by potholes. There was a bad one on Cargill Street — a crater outside the old net-house that could take a tie rod off — and I steered around it in the dark without thinking.

I worked nights because nights paid double for medical cargo, and because ever since my mother died in a rented room on Slocum Avenue with a bag of saline in her arm and the TV on mute, I hadn't been able to sleep in the dark anyway. Better to be moving. Better to have a schedule and a temperature log and a checklist. Grief hates a checklist.

Rivergate sat at the foot of the old grain slip: a low white building with a clean lobby nobody used and, around the back, an intake dock with a roll-up door and a scale. My key fob got me in. It had gotten me in a hundred times, at two and three and four in the morning, dropping product into the walk-in and scanning the manifest sheet on the wall.

The roll-up was already up.

That was the first thing. Nobody leaves an intake dock open in February; the walk-in fights it and the compressor screams. I backed in anyway, killed the engine, pulled on nitrile gloves, and hauled the bad cooler out with both hands held level like a man carrying soup.

The dock lights were off. Emergency strips only, that sick green. And beyond the walk-in, at the back wall where I had always assumed there was more wall, there was a door standing open on a stairwell going down.

I want to be honest about this part, because later everyone had a theory about why I went down those stairs, and most of the theories made me stupid or reckless or brave, and none of them were right.

I went down because I smelled it.

The scorched-sugar smell was coming up out of that stairwell in a warm column, and under it — under it was the ward smell. Iodine and old sheets and unwashed bodies and the particular sourness of people who are not being turned often enough. I had spent four months in a rented room breathing that smell. My whole body knew it before my brain caught up. My feet were already going.

The sub-basement ran the length of the building. Concrete, low pipes, a strip of fluorescent tubes half of which had died. Gurneys in two rows, maybe eighteen of them, each with a person on it.

They were alive. That was the thing. Every one of them was alive, and cannulated, sixteen-gauge in the antecubital, lines running to collection ports set into a rail along the wall like the world's worst blood drive. Some had two lines. There was a woman near the stairs with a face I half recognized from the shelter on Belter Street, and she rolled her eyes toward me — just her eyes, because she could not lift her head — and her lips moved and nothing came out.

I have taken care of people. Before the vans, I was a paramedic for five years, and before that I was a kid holding a bucket for a mother who could not keep down her pills. I know what a person looks like at a hemoglobin of four. Every single one of them was there.

I got to the woman from Belter Street and put two fingers on her carotid and felt a pulse like a moth hitting a window.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. I'm going to get you out of here."

That was when I heard the wet, thoughtful sound of somebody breathing through a mouth that didn't close right.

There were three of them coming down the row. Gray men, and I mean gray — skin like the underside of a mushroom, hair in patches, gums receded so far back that the teeth stood out of their faces like fence pickets. They moved wrong. Too fast in the joints and too slow in between, as if their bodies were being remembered rather than used. One of them was wearing Rivergate coveralls with a name patch. The patch said DALE, and I remember thinking, with a hysterical clarity, that somebody named Dale had a mother somewhere.

I didn't scream. I ran the checklist, because that's what's in me instead of a scream.

Airway. Eyes. Knees.

The first one came in reaching and I put the heel of my hand up under his jaw and drove his teeth together on his own tongue, and the sound was awful and he didn't care. The second one I got in the eyes with two fingers — a real strike, the kind they teach you and then hope you never use — and he shrieked and it was a wet, whistling noise like a kettle. The third one took my hair.

I went sideways into a gurney rail and my temple opened up. Warmth in my ear. The concrete came up and hit me in the shoulder and then the one named Dale was on my back with his knee in my spine and his hands around my head, turning it, patient as a farmer, exposing the side of my throat.

I got a thumb into the web of his hand and bent. He didn't care about that either. Pain wasn't a language they spoke anymore.

So I did the last thing on the list, which is not a technique, which is just what you do. I bit him. I got the meat of his forearm in my teeth and I bit down until I felt it give, and he made a sound of pure irritation, and hauled my head back.

And then the room changed.

Something came down the stairwell without using most of the stairs. I felt it in the floor — a whump, like a dropped safe. Dale's weight came off my back so fast that my own body flopped. There was a bang against the rail, a spray of something over my hands, and then a series of noises I have never been able to describe to anybody without lying a little: a crack, and a tearing, and a long grinding shove, and then quiet.

I rolled onto my side. I got my elbow under me.

The man standing in the middle of Silvan Radovic's sub-basement was enormous. Six foot five, easily, in a black canvas coat that came to his knees and smelled — even from ten feet away, even over the blood — of gun oil and cold rain. His hair was dark and pushed back off his face by wet. He had a mouth that had been cut open at some point in his life and healed badly, a white seam running up through his lower lip, and it made his face look permanently mid-sentence.

One of the gray men was in two pieces. I want to say that clinically because I cannot say it any other way. The second was folded around a pipe. The third was still moving, sort of, on the floor by the wall, and the big man walked over and put a boot on his head and pressed until he wasn't.

Then he turned and looked at me, and his face went from cold to furious in the space of one breath.

"You," he said. His voice was low and had an accent worn almost off, the way a coin wears smooth. "You were not supposed to be down here."

"There are eighteen people—"

"I can count."

"—they need fluids, they need transport, some of them are hours from—"

"I know what they need." He crossed the room. I got my feet under me because I was not going to be on the floor for whatever came next, and my knees held, barely, and the blood from my temple ran down into my collar. Up close he was worse. Up close his eyes had a shine on them like a dog's in headlights, and his teeth, when he spoke, were wrong in a very specific way.

I have thought about that moment a lot. I've had people ask me whether I understood right away. I did. I want credit for that. My brain didn't waste ten minutes on burglars or drugs or a cult. It took one look at those teeth and at what he had just done to three men with his hands, and it said, in a very small clear voice, *oh, so that's real*, and then it moved on to the more pressing question, which was whether I was going to be alive in five minutes.

"Are you going to kill me?" I asked.

He stopped. Something flickered behind the anger. "That's the first thing you say?"

"It's the load-bearing question."

He looked at me a long moment. Water dripped off the hem of his coat.

"No," he said. "I am going to do something worse. I am going to explain."

Behind us, on her gurney, the woman from Belter Street made a small sound, and the big man's head turned, and I watched his whole face change again — anger to something raw and old and tired — and he said, not to me, "Get the lines. I'll carry them up two at a time."

So I got the lines.

We worked for forty minutes. He carried, I capped and clamped and elevated legs and stole every bag of saline in that basement, which was four, which was not enough. He made a phone call in a language I didn't know. A box truck came, driven by a woman with a shaved head and a mouth like a paper cut, and men I never got names for loaded eighteen people into it with more gentleness than I expected from anybody who moved like that.

When it pulled out, he stood in the roll-up door with the fog coming in around him and said, "Your van is a crime scene now. Leave it. Come with me."

"That van is a third of my business."

"Then you have two-thirds left." He looked back over his shoulder at me and the green emergency light made him look like something dredged up. "My name is Damon Grozav. In about ninety seconds you are going to know things you cannot unknow, and I am going to be very angry about it for a long time. I want you to understand that none of the anger is at you."

"That's a hell of a pitch."

"It's not a pitch," said Damon Grozav. "It's an apology in advance."