Free Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older Page B

something I haven’t done since my resurrection: I turn around and run for mylife.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    L ate at night, after all the wildness of the street had finally simmered to a scattered call-and-response, and the hustlers, families, gossiphounds, stoopgoons, hopscotchers, beatboxers, and little old people had wandered off to their respective houses or hovels, all that was left was the city and the swelling tide of life returning to my broken body. You could hear Brooklyn breathing through Mama Esther’s windows in that quiet four-a.m. ecstasy. The rush of an occasional passing car, a gust of wind, the leaves outside brushing against one another, a delivery truck backing up a few blocks away. Somewhere, even farther, an ocean liner’s mournful call would sound as it pulled into the harbor. Construction on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. An ambulance howl in the night, and then another, their calls sounding out across the city.
    I took it all in. Let it sink into my pores as I lay there feeling each cell of my body blink back awake, one by one, night after night.
    *   *   *
    There is no such peacefulness to be found at the Burgundy Bar tonight. The soulcatchers have congregatedhere to seek shelter from the relentless memories. All that heavy spirit crap has scared off the regular customers, so it’s just my half-dead ass, Quiñones—he doesn’t seem to be fazed by anything—and a bunch of shook-up ghosts. When we arrived, I bought some rounds and left them at the empty tables around the bar for the soulcatchers to devour at will.
    “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Dro says. He’s more together than I was expecting, given how shook he’d gotten over the first ngk run-in, but he’s also talking too much. “You ever known the COD to retreat like that, Riley?”
    Riley grunts a no and slurps down a shot. I follow suit.
    “I mean, what happens now? We’re not just gonna let that freak get away with taking one of our own.”
    “We regroup. There’s a squad watching the house, but ’long as the ngk is in there, we can only go in for a few minutes at a time. We lick our wounds and bury our dead, so to speak, and figure out what to do next.”
    “Oh.” You can see Dro’s not so satisfied with that answer. He wants a grisly revenge to level out the playing field, overwhelming force and a brutal showdown and all that. Fortunately, he’s smart enough not to go on about it just now.
    “I think he’s . . . like me,” I say.
    Both Riley and Dro look at me. I suppose they’re startled because I don’t usually talk about what I am, and it obviously bugs me that something so hideous could share a title with me. But fuck it. It’s going to be said; I might as well say it. Plus I’m five shots deep and well past giving a damn what anyone thinks. Put it on the table. “Put it on the table!” I say, slamming a hand on the bar. Quiñones takes it for a sign that I want another round, and I decide not to disabuse him of the notion.
    “What do you make of it?” Riley asks. He’s humbled, our glorious leader. He’s asking me as an equal. The tragedy seems to have leveled us all out some.
    I shake my head and then stop. A few seconds later the room stops too. “I don’t . . . know. I hate it. Two months ago I met the first person who was like me and I killed him. Now perhaps I’ve met another, and he’s a sick fuck who murdered a soulcatcher and a nice Jewish man in front of my eyes.” And that’s not even to mention the one I can’t stop thinking about. “I’m not very happy right now.”
    “Understandable,” Riley says. I clink my glass against theirs and drink.
    “Hey,” a voice behind me says. It’s a soulcatcher, unbelievably smashed and wobbling a few inches from the back of my head.
    “Can I help you?”
    “One’a yer fuckin’ people took out one’a our fucking people tonight. You know that, right?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I said . . .”
    “Angus,”