The Lesser Dead
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Synopsis
“As much F. Scott Fitzgerald as Dean Koontz” (#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs), Christopher Buehlman excels in twisting the familiar into newfound dread in his genre-bending novels. Now the acclaimed author of Those across the River delivers his most disquieting tale yet.
The secret is, vampires are real and I am one.
The secret is, I’m stealing from you what is most truly yours and I’m not sorry…
New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live—and die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody—he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city’s sidewalks.
The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It’s almost too easy.
Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him … or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were.
And neither are the rest of us.
Release date: October 7, 2014
Publisher: Berkley
Print pages: 368
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The Lesser Dead
Christopher Buehlman
For Terry White
(That’s my aunt. She was a stewardess and model in the seventies. There’s a reasonable chance she did cocaine at Studio 54.)
(Don’t put that part in the dedication.)
FOR STARTERS
I’m going to tell you about a year. This year. 1978. A lot of shit is happening and I think somebody had better write it down before we all forget.
New York City is the place.
If you’re looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn’t for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn.
Still with me?
Too bad for you.
I can’t wait to break your heart.
I’m going to take you someplace dark and damp where good people don’t go. I’m going to introduce you to monsters. Real ones. I’m going to tell you stories about hurting people, and if you like those stories, it means you’re bad.
Shall we go on?
Good. I hate people who pretend they’re something they’re not.
We’re going into the tunnels.
We’ll start up here in Chelsea; there’s a bricked-up ground-level window with half the bricks out, not a big space but big enough, then we’ll go deeper, down where I stay.
Where we stay.
I hope bad smells don’t bother you.
I hope you brought your own light; I don’t need one.
I hope you’re not fat.
Here’s a little taste of what you’re in for, out of sequence, but I told you how unreliable I am. It’s not all this nasty, but this is probably rough if you’re not used to it. If you can get through this, we can hang out.
* * *
We heard them before we saw them. Hunchers. That’s what we called people who hunched in the tunnels. We stayed in the tunnels too of course, the deeper tunnels where no sunlight came at all, but we weren’t Hunchers.
We weren’t even people anymore.
When Margaret saw that her home had been broken into, she didn’t hesitate. She tossed off her flip-flops and marched right for the open trapdoor with me behind her, not caring whether I followed, not caring how many of them there were, and there had to be at least two to pull the chain and get that trapdoor up—it was a big heavy bastard of a door made from part of an old subway car and broken-up seats. She walked with one hand balled on her hip, her stained bathrobe open enough to see her tit if you cared to. She was pissed. It was her place, after all. She was our duly elected mayor.
“Goddamn it,” she whispered, kicking a peeping shower of rats out of her way. She picked up and threw down a shred of a hamburger wrapper in disgust. Whoever they were, they had brought food. You don’t bring food into the loops.
They had tied belts together to lower themselves into the hole. A weak light danced down there, a flashlight, and I heard the sound of a lighter. Somebody sneezed a wet one. Somebody else laughed.
She didn’t bother with the belts. Just dropped down. I stayed up and watched. This was really a job for one vampire. Normally Old Boy or Ruth would have handled this. Old Boy was like her part-time bodyguard, lived in an abandoned train car just down the tracks past Purgatory, but he was a secretive fucker and you never knew where he was. Ruth was out hunting. She was always hungry.
Turns out there were four of them, the intruders, I mean; black guy and three whites, but with Hunchers the race thing gets less important because they’re always dirty and dirt has one color. These guys looked hard, prison tattoos, prison muscles, probably came from the tracks under the Bowery. Guys under the Bowery are mostly wanted men and ex-cons, hunching down there in the piss-smelling dark rather than going back to Attica, which doesn’t say much for Attica. They weren’t from the tracks above our tunnels. We had a few Hunchers above us, but not many and they knew better; our guys would sooner take a whiz on the third rail than walk into our loops.
“Whoa!” the black guy said when the fast-moving woman-thing in the bathrobe landed near where he lay back on the couch, Margaret’s prized antique couch, and he jumped and dropped his flashlight.
One of the white guys said, “Shit!”
Margaret snatched up the flashlight. Shone it at them each in turn. Not that she needed it, just wanted to make sure they were good and night-blind.
Two of them spoke at once.
“Get that out of my face!”
“Bitch, you’d best get out of here if you know what’s good for you.”
“Don’t talk like that to my mom,” I said in my high, little-boy voice. I have a great little-boy voice, but I had barely gotten mom out before she started. She started by breaking the flashlight on the black guy’s head—Margaret’s a little racist, but it’s not her fault, she’s Irish. Or maybe he got it first because he was on her couch. Either way, you know how these things go, everything happens in a hurry. The hurt guy yelled, everybody stood up or tried to, there was a sick thump as somebody’s head got stove in, then another one, but I admit the gunshots surprised me. I saw it all from the trapdoor, but what did it look like for the poor bastard with the gun?
His muzzle flashes, and there were two, lit up a dead woman with shining eyes and big dirty canines that belonged on a panther. He yelled before she even touched him. One bullet hit her, the second ricocheted madly in the vaulted brick room. And then she touched him plenty.
The last guy tripped over the coffee table trying to find the belt to climb up. She was on top of him then, putting her knee in his back and pulling his head by the hair at his temples while he went, “Gah! Gah!” until she rocked back like she meant it, his spine popped, and he yelled. She pulled his snotrag from where it tongued out of his back pocket and stuffed it into his mouth, this to shut him up, but he lost consciousness anyway.
She stood up then, a little wobbly, and said something garbled. She spat out a rope of blood.
I leapt down, landed on one of the dead guys, pocketed the dropped Zippo, and sat on the wooden chair. Not the couch.
“What was that?” I said.
She spat again, bloody with a tooth in it.
She put up one wait-a-minute finger and I realized what had happened. She was in pain. He had shot her in the mouth and her busted mouth was forming up again. That didn’t take long. Eyes take longer. You don’t want to get your eye hurt in a fight.
“I said,” she said, slurring just a little on top of her thick-as-bread Conny-whatsis accent, “never call me your mother again.”
A DOOR INTO NIGHT
I like the taste of sweat.
How it runs from the head, through the hair, like water filtering down through earth and tree roots into a spring; only instead of getting purer, sweat gets filthier, picks up grit, maybe tobacco, a hint of shampoo, but under and through all of that is salt. Almost too much salt, like honey was almost too sweet, what I remember of honey. They say the tongue’s cut up into little provinces, salty, sour, bitter, sweet. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that salt is about the only taste I enjoy now. Salt in blood is the best, of course, and blood is a feast: iron-coppery and personal and as good in the stomach as ever was a steak. Sweat can’t satisfy, not by itself, but it does hint at what’s next. Sweat is to blood as dirty talk is to sex. It’s an offer. It’s a tease.
If I can, if I’m not too hungry, if I have time, I lick before I bite, with the flat of the tongue like a dog. Maybe your eyes are half-closed because this is sexual for you, or maybe you’re good and scared and making that ripe, rotten fear sweat I shouldn’t love but do. Maybe my hands are tangled in your hair so you can’t run, or maybe you’re so charmed you’re smiling like an idiot and leaning down to me so if anyone sees, they think I’m telling you a secret. In a way, I am.
The secret is vampires are real and I am one and no cop is coming and no doctor can help you and your own mother won’t believe you if you tell her. The secret is I look like a high school freshman but I’m pushing sixty. And the secret is I’m stealing from you what is most truly yours and I’m not sorry.
* * *
My name is Joey Peacock. I live in the tunnels under the subways. And don’t go thinking the underground is so bad for us. It would be for you, if you’re still warm, but things change when you’re turned. Darkness isn’t so dark anymore. Everything seems candlelit, even the blackest black, so that what looks to you like black dirt and a wall covered with black mold takes on a kind of warm glow for us, full of layer and detail like modern art, not that Guggenheim shit, but the pretty stonework-type stuff. Or like Rothko. You know Rothko? He’s at the Guggenheim, but he’s different. First time I saw one, I thought, What’s the big deal, squares of color, so what? But there was something about it. A foxy European chick with a scarf and high boots was staring at it and I said, “What do you see?” and she said, “Just keep looking,” so I did. I think she was French. But she was right. The edges of the square of color started waving and then the painting glowed, like it was full of radiation. She said, “Did a door open for you?” and I said, “Yeah.”
Night’s like that now. It’s always been there, full of radiation or whatever, and maybe that’s what cats stare at when they look off into nothing but now I see it, too. When I first changed, I used to spend hours under bridges and down under manholes just trying to count the different kinds of black. Only none of it was exactly black anymore. I know I can’t make you see it, but it’s like The Wizard of Oz, only flipped. Above the tunnels in the neon and lightbulbs, that’s like black-and-white, boring-old-uncles Kansas. Down in the tunnels isn’t exactly exploding with Munchkinland colors, but it is . . . incandescent. That’s a pretty word. That’s a five-dollar word, but it works. The tunnels are gently, subtly incandescent. They breathe. They are most certainly not ugly.
Know what’s ugly? Sunlight. Even looking at it indirectly is like staring into the jet of a welder’s torch, all that light bouncing off the sidewalk and off the chrome of cars. Even peeking at it from the shadow of a manhole cover hurts. Overcast days make us queasy, unless we wear sunglasses. We all have sunglasses.
And don’t go thinking that because I live underground I let myself go. I’m a good-looking kid, kind of young Frank Sinatra–ish, and I’m not going to spoil all that by letting myself get ratty-looking. The Hunchers, they don’t care, they’re here because they’re running away or sinking or already sunk. They live on flattened-out pieces of cardboard because they’re too lazy to steal rugs and they camp out in Grand Central or Penn Station where people can see how dirty and sad they are and they beg. They let their hair knot up and their fingernails have quarter moons of muck under them; they run around covered in grease and filth and they crawl under their sleeping bags with rats peeping at them and drink brake fluid or sniff glue or cut themselves with broken glass or whatever, but the point is they’re nasty. They eat rats, call them track-rabbits. Not all of them are so bad, but most of them. There’s one black woman living up above us, mostly on the streets, sometimes at Union Square station, I don’t know how she keeps the weight on, but she’s like an island. Won’t look at any of us directly, I think she knows what we are, everyone calls her Mama. Mama has two shopping carts full of stuff, all organized though, like neat. Shoes in one bag, shirts in another. But filthy.
I don’t have anything to do with Hunchers, except to feed on them sometimes. Just sometimes. They’re mostly full of booze, and booze hurts on the way out, or drugs, which give me a headache. We’re much cleaner. Like cats. That’s it, they’re rats and we’re cats. None of them have nice clothes, but that’s maybe not their fault. They’re poor.
Me, I got money. I charm people out of it all the time, and I use most of it to keep myself looking sharp. I have three mirrors, and don’t go believing that baloney about us not reflecting. We reflect. We just don’t show up so good in photographs. We blur. You know that guy who never takes a good picture? Ask yourself if you only see that guy at night. If the answer is yes, maybe don’t spend any time alone with him, you know what I’m saying? Maybe only hang out in big groups.
Nice clothes are important to me, even if they’re hard to keep clean down here. There’s a big trough or basin not far from my room; everybody uses that to wash clothes and bathe. Fill it up and you could only just keep your chin above water sitting down, not that we fill it all the way because the spigot’s not hooked up and it takes so long to get water from the busted pipe we use. Somebody sunk a big hook in the roof above the basin, a long time ago; it’s rusty now, and there used to be a pulley and a rotten old rope hanging from it, but it was in the way so Margaret got rid of it. There’s like twenty bars of soap around the tub we use and share, plus a couple of boxes of detergent and an oldey-timey washboard. Me, I hate doing laundry by hand. I keep a jar of quarters for the Laundromat and I use a dry cleaner on 3rd Avenue who doesn’t ask questions. I like the mod look: tight coats, paisley, zipper boots. I know I look a little dated when I walk into the disco, and like a throwback when I hit the punk club. Sometimes I wear a fedora, which looks funny on a young guy, but I remember when you’d sooner leave your house without your nuts than without a good hat. I remember when you used to have to take your hat off in elevators and houses and when you spoke to a woman; some people still do that. I don’t bother.
We get water from a pipe that’s probably been busted fifty years. Just enough water gets out of it to run down the wall and somebody chiseled out a kind of groove near the bottom, like a niche just big enough to fit a bucket into. It takes about a minute and a half to fill a bucket. We have a cheap fold-up table for folding laundry and whatnot, we keep it near that big concrete trough; I think this place, our common place, used to be some kind of a cleaning station. Anyway, there’s mold and dirt all caked on the wall except where the water runs out of its rusty pipe, but the wall is clean where the water washes down in a footlong track. The pipe is really rusty, that’s how you can tell it’s old. Some joker even wrote RUST where the water runs, chiseled it into the wall and there’s still flecks of white paint in the letters, but the water washed most of it away. People must have been using this for a long time. It’s kind of beautiful there, the way we see, though you would probably think it was just a wet wall with crap all around it and a busted pipe. You’d probably rather have a milk shake than a quart of blood, too, so we’ll have to agree to disagree. Anyway, I’m glad I have a way to wash my hair. Having clean hair is maybe the most important part of looking attractive.
I love long hair, if it’s clean. I don’t have long hair myself because it makes it too hard to pass as a kid, and little-lost-soccer-boy is my favorite disguise. Just after sunset I dress out down in the subway, slip my little plastic shin guards under my knee socks, carry cleats in my free hand, and then it’s I got separated from my mom and dad, help me find their hotel across the park. Works like a charm. I could pass as a little girl, but damned if I’m wearing a dress.
I’m open-minded, but not gay.
ROBERT PLANT AND THE MEXICAN CHICK
Except I am a little gay for Robert Plant.
I saw Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden a year or so ago, maybe four or five years, it goes so quick now. Anyway, I was really close to the stage, and there he was. Robert Plant. Long and lean, golden-curled like a woman but wolfy, his hairy belly snug in his jeans, the bacony smell of marijuana warm and close around me (when I remembered to breathe—I forgot for a good half an hour; I know I didn’t breathe at all during “No Quarter,” and that song went on so long three pearl divers in a row would have died. Plant was right at the peak, as good as he was ever going to get, nowhere to go but gray and fat, and that happens fast. I thought about turning him just to preserve that, the that that was Robert fucking Plant in 1970-whatever, but of course vampirism would kill his career, turn him into a talented bum like Billy Bang. More about him later. The undead don’t care about careers. Vampires are all retirees, happy enough to bend your ear about what they used to do, but their only passion is for a dark, warm liquid, and the only thing that satisfies them to the bones is getting more. It’s worse than heroin, believe me, and I’ve seen plenty of junkies.
But just thinking about sticking my nose in that big, honey-colored shag of hair on Robert Plant made me pop a boner. A really hard, uncomfortable one, and in my tight jeans, too. I tried to pretend it was for the foxy, spaced-out Mexican girl hip-grinding near me in her midriff shirt and turquoise rings, slinky and stinking of patchouli, but no dice. My dead pecker was hard for Robert Plant. I thought about leaving because I don’t think of myself that way, nothing against the gays, but Joseph Hiram Peacock is all about the trim. No way could I leave that concert. It was too good. I love the shit out of Robert Plant.
I wanted to try to get backstage, but even if I did, what was I going to do? Bite him? Wave my boner at him? Get him to sign it? When the music was finally done and everyone heaved for the exits, I saw the Mexican girl shouldering her way through the crowd with her friend, a helplessly ordinary brown-haired waitress type with glow-in-the-dark blue eye shadow. That was where my night was going. I followed them out.
Down into the subway, which I think of as my front porch (yes, the whole thing) and all the way to the East Village via Union Square. Blue eye shadow lived there, above a rock-and-roll bar, and I was afraid my new girlfriend would go up with her, but she didn’t. She kept going, past Tompkins Park, all the way to grimey, crimey Alphabet City, and I followed her, thinking, Don’t take a cab don’t take a cab don’t take a cab, I’ll protect you.
I saw her go into a moldy-looking brownstone with a big bloodshot eye spray-painted on the side along with a jungle of names and letters in all colors. Bottles in paper sacks in the alley, an egg carton, a warped shopping cart turned over and shot through with weeds. Third-floor light came on, backlighting a balconeta with a little garden of potted plants. I skinnied up the brick wall and tapped on the glass. She let me in. They always let me in. It helps that I was turned when I was fourteen, baby face, big blue eyes, thank God I was mostly through puberty. My voice can go either way, which is useful, I’ve trained it. Before all this started, I had only ever met one little-boy vampire with a permanently high voice, and he made me uncomfortable. I have always felt that whoever turns anyone less than thirteen needs to be taken sunbathing.
So there I was on her third-floor iron balcony, the smell of the iron making me horny for blood, smiling at her where she peeped around the curtain and saying, “You need to water your coriander,” through a cracked pane. She understood the third time and smiled back and absolutely should not have opened the French door but did. I mean, there wasn’t a fire escape on that side, how did I get up there?
People don’t think when they see something they like.
And we’re all hypnotists anyway, vampires I mean. We get what we want.
So she cracked the door of her own free will and that was all the invitation I needed. In came my little white hand, pushing the curtain aside, pushing her back, but playfully. Not really, but it seemed like it to her because I was smiling. Her cat was the smartest thing in the room. He didn’t like me. He didn’t scream and shit himself like they do sometimes, but he decided now was a great time to go in the closet, up on the towels. Fine by me, kitty. Stay out of my way.
“Do you want tea?” she said. Did I want tea! “It’s chamomile. I just put the water on.” Trace of an accent, like she came to America when she was eleven or twelve. “Or I’ve got beer.” The thought of beer in my empty, black stomach made my empty, black stomach turn. I hadn’t fed in days and it was getting urgent. So I charmed her hard.
“My earlobe tastes like cinnamon.”
“Mentiroso,” she said, glass-eyed, her lips staying open after the final o. I always remembered that word. I asked Cvetko about it years later and he said, “That means ‘liar,’” which is about what I guessed. Cvetko was Slovenian, spoke like eight languages and read even more, but I’ll get to him in a minute.
“You don’t have to take my word for it,” I said, so she leaned in, openmouthed, and I saw her teeth. Dark fillings in the back ones. And she never had braces; her bottom teeth formed a kind of slack W and she had tiny crooked canines sharper than normal. Not sharp like mine, and certainly not as long, but she couldn’t see mine because I was charming her not to. You can’t see a vampire’s fangs unless he wants you to, or unless something startles him good, but it’s got to be something big. Terrifying. Then all those unconscious charms go right out the window and you see him just as he is, which isn’t so pretty, especially as we get older. But you know what we don’t do unconsciously? Blink. When we’re around you guys, we have to remember to blink, another reason we like sunglasses.
The Mexican fox leaned close, first sucking then sharply nibbling my earlobe. She giggled and said, “Canela,” licking her lips, and now it was my turn. I tasted her earlobes and she shivered. Then she wrinkled her nose. Goddamn it, I had forgotten to breathe on the way here so now my breath smelled like a dead dog in a Dumpster. I poured on the charm.
“My breath smells like cinnamon, too.”
She unwrinkled her nose and smiled, nodding in agreement, a little bit of drool falling from the corner of her mouth. I was drooling, too, but not because I’d been charmed slack-jawed. I was getting ravenous. I licked her neck. Just once. It was rank with psilocybin, bitter with patchouli, but the salt shone through it all like a nickel in a mud puddle. I got hard again, glad Robert Plant had nothing to do with it. Her jugular vein pulsed delicately, but I was feeling naughtier than that.
“Take your jeans down,” I said.
She raised one eyebrow. I like people who can do that; I taught myself how when I was a kid, before all this.
“Take your jeans and panties down,” I commanded. She drooled and complied.
She was hairy, but had shaved her thighs at least. Not that I minded hair. Cvetko hated hair. I’ll get to Cvetko.
Now I put my nose in the corner where her leg met her hip, Christ-awfully aware of the mother lode of dark, soupy blood coursing in her femoral artery. I licked there, just at the juncture. She moaned a little, then tried to maneuver my head so I could lick her slit. Normally I might have, but I was too hungry. I scratched her thigh with the pricks of my fangs, noticed her cat looking at me from its perch on the towels. Keeping eye contact with the cat, I jammed my fangs into the femoral. The blood jetted around my teeth, flooded my mouth, hot and ambrosial, and now I moaned. My hand was spidered flat on her belly, the tip of my ring finger in her navel. She squealed and squirmed while I drank. She came, I think. I made myself stop at what felt like a pint, took care not to backwash in her. Not that I thought she was going to die—death plus backwash equals new vampire. A pint isn’t going to kill anybody, just ask the Red Cross.
I pulled out. Her body jerked. Her teakettle sang. I pulled off my shoe and sock, stuck the sock on her bite wound, put her hand on top of the bite, then closed her legs around that. She was sleeping already, which was normal. Tomorrow there wouldn’t even be any holes, they close up fast if you’re healthy, but there would be bruising.
I went into the kitchen, turned the stove off, and moved the kettle. Damn it, I was still hungry. In a spasm of poor timing, the cat hissed at me. Fine. I grabbed the little beast, flipped it over (ignoring its flurry of claws—the scratches were shallow, healed almost as fast as kitty made them), and sank my teeth into its belly, stabbing for the big vein there. Cat blood isn’t great, but it does the job. I only meant to take a swallow, but I took more and the cat shuddered and became an ex-cat. “Oh, hell,” I said. The girl didn’t deserve to wake up to a sore crotch, a hangover, and a dead cat. I kissed her temple, holding the cat behind my back, and was just about to make my way out the French doors. I remembered my shoe, put that on sockless, and jumped down all three floors to the dirty street. Left the doors open to support the runaway cat theory.
I walked all the way to Murray Hill with the cat under my jacket before I broke the window of a Buick Centurion and flung it in the passenger seat. Funny that I remember the car but not her name. Was it Yasmina? Did I fuck her around the hand holding the sock to her bite wound, leaving her full of my lukewarm, dead seed?
You would have sex with me if I weren’t charming you, right? You saw me and thought I was sexy, I might have said.
I thought you were sexy, she might have slurred back. Or maybe I’m remembering other girls, other nights. I’m not sure. Probably did get with Yasmina, Violeta, Rosa, whatever her name was. Feeding makes you a little drunk and you forget things.
God, she was pretty. I think of her when I hear Led Zeppelin, her face, yes, but mostly the blood in her thigh. And the high-in-the-nose tang of her sweat.
And the teakettle.
CVETKO
Whatever year the Zeppelin concert was, forget that.
This is about what happened in 1978.
It started on Valentine’s Day, a couple of weeks after the blizzard.
It was cold enough to make a polar bear put on wool underwear and Cvetko had red envelopes for his letters. I’ll get to the letters in a minute, but now it’s time for me to try to describe the charmless but endearing calamity that was Cvetko.
Imagine a friend of your parents, someone you knew as a kid, that person from before you were born who came over sometimes and sat around with your dad and mom drinking a little, not too much, talking about the most boring shit in the world and there’s no such thing as a radio or TV yet but you have to sit there and not fidget while he goes on and on laughing at his own lame jokes, pushing his glasses up with the wrong finger, not exactly “old” yet but already has that old-man smell like socks and wood and some shaving cream they don’t make anymore. And everybody listens to him because he’s actually very nice, would loan you money or help you move before you asked him to, one of those guys, but he just doesn’t understand that nobody cares about a picnic he took on a mountain in Yugoslavia in 1925 or whether Father Jumping-Jesus sounded nasal after Mass and we all hope he doesn’t catch a cold.
Cvetko was Yugoslavian, but he would point a finger up at the ceiling and tilt his head and insist that he was Slovenian. Not much of an accent; to give the guy credit, he had a gift for languages. Once, when God still rode a tricycle, he taught linguistics in that Yugoslavian city that sounds like “lube job.”
He came to the loops only two years before, and Margaret didn’t want him at first; Margaret didn’t want anybody at first, she was not the trusting type. But this poor schmuck. He’d seen some nasty stuff in World War II, lost his family, two boys and a girl. Fucking Nazis. He wasn’t a Jew or anything, he was as Catholic as they came, but he didn’t sign on with their program. And he says it wasn’
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