He looks at the floor. Crosses his legs and shifts in his seat like it’s suddenly uncomfortable.
“I’m not sure,” he says. “But as I said, I haven’t left the apartment in a long time.”
“Maybe it’s time to take a break,” says Tracy.
“Just one more thing. If a regular person like Tracy here got bitten by someone like you, or maybe a zed, is there some way to fix her?”
“You mean so she doesn’t die and return?”
“Yes.”
“No. There’s nothing for that.”
Tracy comes over and stands between Johnny and us.
“That’s it for now. Let’s let Johnny have his snack, and if he feels like it, he can answer a few more questions.”
As Tracy talks, Johnny takes off the top of the cooler and looks inside. He goes to a dresser and takes a plastic sheet from the top and spreads it on the floor like a picnic blanket. He rips off the top of one of the bags of jelly beans and pours the candy into the pig guts and blood, stirring it with his fingers. He looks at us and grins.
“I have a bit of a sweet tooth.”
“Let’s go have some coffee and let Johnny eat,” says Tracy, shooing us out of the room and closing the door.
“He likes to eat by himself. He knows his food bothers living people. It’s his way of being polite.”
“He’s not what I expected. He’s like a kid.”
Fiona started the coffeemaker while we were in with Johnny. It smells good. She pours cups for all of us.
“He isn’t always like this. None of the undead sleep, but they still have bodies and bodies need rest. Every few weeks, Johnny goes into a kind of fugue state. Sleepy. Vague. Uncommunicative. Like he’s suddenly autistic. After a couple of days, he starts coming out of it. That’s what he’s doing now, so he’s a little slower than usual.”
“How’s his memory?”
“Look, if you still think someone’s been sneaking him out, you can forget it. Johnny’s tagged with one of those house-arrest ankle bracelets. If he tried to leave here or if someone tried to take him, alarms would go off all over the place.”
“Someone could disable it with tools or magic.”
“Yeah, but they’d have to know about it. The bracelet isn’t on his ankle. It’s inside him. Sewed inside his stomach cavity.”
Dammit. Cabal using Johnny as a blunt instrument was a nice neat package, but Johnny seems to be off the hook. Cabal, on the other hand, is still homecoming king to me. I just need to connect a few more dots.
Allegra pours cream and sugar into her coffee.
“How’d he get the name Johnny Thunders?”
Fiona smiles like a mother remembering her kid’s first step.
“Johnny was in one of his fugues when they brought him here. I think moving when he was zoned out was hard on him. He ignored us and didn’t talk for days. He just stared at the wall. We used to leave the TV or music on when we weren’t in the room so he’d have company. Usually one of us was in the apartment, but this one night Tracy’s car broke down and I had to go and pick her up. When we got back, Johnny was bouncing up and down singing along with the stereo. It was the Murder City Devils song ‘Johnny Thunders.’”
I drink the coffee straight. It feels good to have coffee for its own sake and not to cure the night before.
“Why was he staring at his hands with a magnifier when we went in?”
Tracy says, “He wasn’t staring. He was working. I said it before, Savants are obsessives. They do something really well and they do it over and over again. They’ll do it forever, I guess.”
She pours herself more coffee.
“Johnny likes words and he likes geology. He’s transcribing the entire Oxford English Dictionary onto grains of sand. The last time I asked, he was up to ‘farraginous.’”