Seize the Night

they were made to be, what they were born to be. They can still become if they're vulnerable to the mutated virus, but maybe they aren't susceptible. After this is all over, once people are vaccinated and this outbreak self-limits, we'll track them down and wipe them out.”
    “Not much luck at that so far,” I reminded him.
    “We've been distracted by the bigger problem.”
    “Yeah,” Bobby said. “Destroying the world is ass-busting work.”
    Ignoring him, Manuel said, “Once we get the rest of this cleaned up, then the troop … their days are numbered.”
    Lights flared in the adjacent dining room, where Feeney had proceeded from the living room, and I moved away from the brightness that fell through the connecting doorway.
    The second deputy appeared at the hallway door, and he was not anyone I had seen before. I thought I knew all the police in town, but perhaps the financiers behind the Wyvern wizards had recently provided the funding for a larger force.
    “Found some boxes of ammo,” the new guy said. “No weapons.” Manuel called to Frank, who appeared in the dining-room doorway and said, “Chief?”
    “We're done here,” Manuel said.
    Feeney looked disappointed, but the new man turned away from the kitchen and immediately headed along the hall toward the front of the house.
    With startling speed, Manuel lunged toward Bobby, swinging the baton at his head. Equally quick, Bobby ducked. The club carved the air where Bobby had been, and cracked loudly against the side of the refrigerator.
    Bobby came up under the baton, right in Manuel's face, and I thought he was embracing him, which was weird, but then I saw the gleam of the butcher knife, the point against Manuel's throat.
    The new deputy had raced back to the kitchen, and both he and Frank Feeney had drawn their revolvers, holding the weapons in two-hand grips.
    “Back off,” Manuel told his deputies.
    He backed off, too, easing away from the point of the knife.
    For a crazy moment I thought Bobby was going to shove the huge blade into him, though I know Bobby better than that.
    Remaining wary, the deputies retreated a step or two, and they relaxed their arms from a ready-fire position, although neither man holstered his weapon.
    The spill of light through the dining-room door revealed more of Manuel's face than I cared to see. It had been torn by anger and then knitted together by more anger, so the stitches were too tight, pulling his features into strange arrangements, both eyes bulging, but the left eye more than the right, nostrils flaring, his mouth a straight slash on the left but curving into a sneer on the right, like a portrait by Picasso in a crappy mood, all chopped into cubes, geometric slabs that didn't quite fit together. And his skin was no longer a warm brown but the color of a ham that had been left far too long in the smokehouse, muddy red with settled blood and too much hickory smoke, dark and marbled.
    Manuel seethed with a hatred so intense that it couldn't have been engendered solely by Bobby's smartass remarks. This hatred was aimed at me, too, but Manuel couldn't bring himself to strike me, not after so many years of friendship, so he wanted to hurt Bobby because that would hurt me. Maybe some of his wrath was directed at himself, because he had flushed away his principles, and maybe we were seeing sixteen years of pent-up anger at God for Carmelita's dying in childbirth and for Toby's being born with Down's syndrome, and I think-feel- know that some of this was fury he could not—would not, dared not—admit feeling toward Toby, dear Toby, whom he loved desperately but who had so severely limited his life. After all, there's a reason they say that love is a two-edged sword, rather than a two-edged Wiffle bat or a two-edged Fudgsicle, because love is sharp, it pierces, and love is a needle that sews shut the holes in our hearts, that mends our souls, but it can also cut, cut deep, wound, kill.
    Manuel was struggling to regain control of himself, aware that we were all watching him, that he was a spectacle, but he was losing the struggle. The side of the refrigerator was scarred where he had hammered the billy club into it, but an assault on an appliance, even a major appliance, didn't provide the satisfaction he needed, didn't relieve the pressure still building in him. A couple minutes earlier, I had thought of Bobby as a dry-ice bomb at the critical-evaporation point, but now it was Manuel who exploded, not at