Tap as many veins as you like. Draw off just enough and leave behind a confused mugging victim or a zonked-out junkie. Hustle the blood banks, buy some green scrubs and lurk around the hospitals. Find a sweet Lucy who’ll open a vein for you as often as she can just because she loves to be used that way. Try lapping at your own slit wrists or sucking on a decapitated rat and get sick as a man guzzling seawater. Try it all to put off the one thing you don’t want to do, but sooner or later you’ll do it.

And once you do, once you pop a blade through warm, healthy skin and feel the hot gush of living blood hit the back of your tongue, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

And then you’ll curse at how long you’re gonna have to wait till the next time. As few of us as there are running around, it’s still too many. We all start picking off civilians whenever we feel hard up, this island’s gonna be an abattoir. That happens, the lid blows off.

We let them know we’re here, we let the real people know what’s lurking just underneath their lives, and we won’t last another night.

We’ll all be in the sun.

And what the Vyrus does to its host when it gets hit by the sun, it makes what my girl’s going through look easy.

And it ain’t. That shit ain’t easy at all.

I smoke and look at Christian and remember how he handled it when he was back on his feet. Way he handled it is, he found what was left of his gang, the Dusters. He managed to infect a couple. And they infected a couple more. After some months, when they had their shit together, they got on their hogs and hit the Wall. Massacre ain’t the word. I don’t know the word for what they did down in Chinatown. But the Dusters own Pike Street now.

They haven’t been acknowledged as a Clan, but they could give fuckall as long as no one messes in their shit. And no one does.

I flick a butt into traffic.

– Yeah, sure, we go back.