Playing Games

I’m pushed through the doorway and walking down a dark corridor that opens up into the rest of the warehouse. The walls are sparse and the area is intentionally being kept poorly lit. There could three Templars hiding around there, it could be three hundred. In a touch I would’ve thought a coincidence under better circumstances, a lone chair with a light beaming down from high is over in one section. Predictably, that’s our destination. I sit without being forced and light a cigarette. Malvolio wisps back and all I can see is Dingo looking at me. “So…explain yourself man. What happened? How did you…shit, are you really human again?” he asks. As much as I’d like for this reunion to be emotional, my ambivalence about dying is suddenly becoming much harder to control. I’m really not used to mortality. There are two ways to get a person to believe what you’re telling them. They want it to be true or they’re afraid it is. The trick is knowing which one to use. I lean forward and whisper as lowly as I can knowing full well every Templar around can hear me, “Dingo, listen. If these guys decide to bite me, don’t get involved. They pumped me full of a vaccine, everyone who bites is going to become human. It’s a trap.” His eyes bulge and he hastily backs up a bit. That should buy me some safety and it was certainly better than saying some magic book had cast some spell. “What are you doing with a bunch of Nod freaks anyways?” I say much louder. Malvolio wisps back into view and slaps me across the face. “Your heretic views are now even more disgusting coming from the mouth of a traitor mortal. We will be asking the questions here, not you,” he says. Dingo looks embarrassed and down at the floor. He’d been a reliable guy, a bit thrifty and blood crazed, but an alright guy. After I decided to bail on the Enlightenment, he’d been one of the first to agree to come with me. “Since you seem to have lost a bit of your memory regarding our extra-sensory capacities, I’m going to ask another question. How much do they know and perhaps more importantly, how much do you know?”