And then he’d woken up on that concrete floor in a daze, hours lost to God only knows what.

Walking across to his space, he had to duck down as the wedge of ground rose up to meet the underside of the highway.

The junkie in Mr. F’s spot stirred and blinked a lot. “That you, Greg? I was just looking after your shit, you know.”

“I’m going to need it back sometime. But you can stay put now.”

“Okay. I’ll keep it safe.”

“Yeah.” Mr. F looked around. “So you see Chops tonight?”

“He was here a hour ago. You looking to buy? I got some I can sell you. It’s good shit.”

Mr. F put his hand into the pocket of the coat he did not own. “I got fifty.”

“I can only give you half of what I got ’cuz I’ma need some soon.”

“It’s cool.”

As the man sat up, a whiff of body odor rose up to join the smell of urine and feces and earth. Dirty fingers rummaged through the pocket of Mr. F’s own coat, and then a single Baggie the size of a sugar packet was produced.

Mr. F leaned down, aware of a curling anticipation in his gut and a buzzing in his head.

The man recoiled. “Dude. You stink.”

Fuck you, Mr. F thought.

Their hands were quick, the transfer of cash and H fast as a blink, and with that, there was nothing else to be said. No thank-yous or goodbyes or see-you-laters. The junkie lay back down to enjoy what was left of his float on a sleeping bag that was not his own, and Mr. F walked off.

He’d gone about a hundred yards before he realized that he didn’t have his gear. He needed a spoon, a lighter, and a couple of drops of liquid. Rage rose up at the impediment to his high, but he calmed himself down quick. With his new, super-sharp eyes, he located a used syringe and a bent-up spoon by a turned-over drum that functioned as a communal table. Then he found a discarded Bic by someone’s grocery cart of clothes and personal effects. The last piece came together as he walked up on a bottle of Poland Spring that had an inch of mud-colored liquid in it.

The don’t-give-a-shit about sanitation or sterilization was as familiar as the landscape of homelessness. He should have cared about the needle being dirty and what the hell was in the bottom of the plastic bottle. He should have cared about the purity of the drug. He should have cared about himself.

But he didn’t. He was only focused on what was coming, the promise of sweet relief from the screaming fear and paranoia in his head all that mattered. Everything else that wasn’t as-good-as, as-safe-as, as-smart-as, was collateral damage. Background noise. Negotiable to the point of being unimportant.

Even if those compromises were the shit that would bite him in the ass later.

As with all junkies, however, he borrowed against the future, going into an existential debt that didn’t have a monthly payment obligation, but rather a balloon at the end of an unknown term that very few could meet. Which was why the repo’s happened with such frequency, all those corpses piling up, the OD count growing ever higher as people entered the funnel with that first, tantalizing taste, and then got stuck in the trap, only realizing they couldn’t get out when it was too late.

The doorstep Mr. F chose was a familiar one and it felt right to sit his ass down on its hard transom and stretch his legs out. He took a minute to enjoy the view—and by that, he wasn’t even seeing the sleeping bags and the clusters of mumblers that were now a ways off. No, he was focused on the promise of no longer feeling anything bad.

His hands shook with excitement as he put the brown nub in the belly of the dirty spoon, poured a little soup on it, and flicked the Bic under the basin. The resulting swill was quick to its birth, but the syringe’s draw wasn’t smooth, the dried, caked-on grit inside its belly making the plunger fight its retraction. He nearly spilled everything.

But he prevailed over the obstacles.

When the needle was all set, he turned to the crook of his arm, and realized, as he saw that he hadn’t taken his coat off first, that he was out of practice even though he’d done this just over twenty-four hours ago. Even though he’d done this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times in the last three years. Even though this wasn’t rocket science.

The first rule of injection efficiency was that you got your sleeve rolled. You didn’t load the needle and then have this kind of delay. But it was an easy fix. Ha-ha. He put the syringe between his teeth and shoved his sleeve up—except that didn’t work. He had been scrawny before, his body mass eaten away by priorities that didn’t include food. Now, though, he had muscles that he hadn’t noticed and that meant shoving what covered his arm up wasn’t as easy a move as it used to be.

Mr. F ripped the jacket off, popped a vein by pumping his fist a couple of times, and pushed the needle in.

The plunger went down fine, not that it would have mattered if he’d had to put all his newfound strength into it.

Mr. F exhaled in relief. Leaning his head back, he closed his eyes and opened his senses to what was going to come. He took a deep breath. And . . . another one.

Repositioning himself, shuffling back further against the door, he crossed his ankles. Uncrossed them. Recrossed them.

Anticipation curled in his chest and flushed his face. He couldn’t wait for the rush and the float, the buzz . . .

When he opened his lids back up and righted his head, he looked around, his eyes bouncing over the bundles of human flesh that were off in the distance as well as the zombies that shuffled toward the bridge and away from it.

The fury that jumped him up to his feet was so explosive, he turned and punched the door he’d been leaning against, his fist penetrating the panel, breaking through as if the dirty stainless steel was skin. When he yanked his hand out of the hole he made, the ragged metal ripped open his own flesh.

The blood that welled and fell was black like oil and it glistened in the low light. As it dropped off his hand and landed on the dirt at his feet, it was not absorbed into the earth.

It sat there and seemed to stare back at him.

Jo walked fast and kept her head down. She might have been raised in a WASPy household in Philly, but she was more than good with the New York self-protection code where you didn’t meet people you didn’t know in the eye, and thus made it clear that you were not interested in any trouble.

As she went along the street, she held her purse in front of herself and kept one hand in her windbreaker’s pocket with her nine against her palm. She was very aware of how many blocks were between her and her car. Not a smart move, but then the last thing she’d thought was going to happen was her doing an after-dark 5k that took her so far away from the damn thing.

The sound of high-heeled shoes coming at her was a surprise, and it was for that reason only that she flipped her eyes forward for a split second.

Well. Her chance of survival just went way up. If anyone saw that package, and had to choose between hitting it over the head and Jo? Easy choice. The gorgeous brunette was wearing some kind of fancy outfit with a brilliant pink ruffle around her tiny waist and ropes of necklaces bouncing on her perfect breasts. Her legs were as long as a city street and shapely as sculpture, and there was nothing apologetic or deflecting about her stride. She strutted like the model she had to be, and to hell with the risks associated with being a 120-pound female out alone after dark.

Then again, maybe she was hiding a whole lot of metal under that skirt—and not of the chastity belt variety, but the point-and-shoot kind.

As they closed in on each other, Jo risked a second glance, and decided that the strut was less model-like and more like ready-to-cut-a-bitch pissed.

Jo dropped her stare as they passed, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder.

Yup, the back was as good as the front, that long, mahogany-colored hair so thick, so bouncy, so healthy, it had to be a raft of extensions. Surely no one could have all those physical attributes going for them.

Shaking her head, Jo checked the street sign as she crossed another intersection and then cut over toward where she’d left her VW Golf. The wind came at her now, and it was hard to say exactly when the scent registered. But even with the goal of getting safely to her junker, her feet slowed . . . and stopped.

Copper. She was tasting copper in the back of her throat.

There was only one thing that did that, and there had to be a lot of it for the smell to be concentrated in this kind of stiff breeze.

Narrowing her eyes, she tried to see what was up ahead while she went for her cell phone. Looking behind herself, she couldn’t see the woman anymore, and there was no one else around.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was . . .

Even though her instincts were screaming at her to come back when the sun was up, she walked forward, the smell of blood getting thicker until she felt like she wasn’t so much breathing it in as drinking it. And then she caught sight of her car, about a hundred yards away—

The dripping stopped her.

Between each of her footfalls, she became aware of a soft plunk, plunk, plunk.

Don’t look, a small voice inside her said. Don’t . . . look—

Up on the first landing of a fire escape, there was a tangled knot the size of an armchair, and her first thought was Why the hell would someone put a piece of furniture up there?

And then she saw the origin of the dripping sound.

There was a steady stream of something dropping from the knot, and as she went over to the fire escape, light from an exterior fixture some distance away lined up with what was falling to the asphalt.

The stuff was red and translucent.

Stumbling back, Jo covered her mouth with her palm, but then she needed to throw out her arms for balance as her foot knocked into a soccer ball—

Not a soccer ball.

What rolled off to the side was a human head.

As it came to rest, the facial features were angled toward her. The eyes were open and staring sightlessly upward, the mouth lax as if the man had been screaming as he had been decapitated.

Jo’s vision went checkerboard and her legs went loose, but she had the presence of mind to dial 911. When the operator answered, the words did not come. She was breathing hard, yet there was no air in her lungs, nothing to send the syllables up her throat and out her mouth.