The Last Days of Max Payne

Part One: The Shadow Before

Prologue

New York, the last days of the summer. Through the open window a hot breeze gently rustles the blinds, the smoke-choked breath of the city pressing in on my apartment. Already the symphony of the night is starting up, and the sun has yet to vanish over the horizon – the car alarms, the smashing bottles, the laughter. Tonight, however, beneath that blood red twilight, the city is quiet. Tonight the city is mourning. I light up a smoke and take my mind back three months, back to the night it all began – back to when New York became a nightmare.

It started on a pleasant June night, the height of summer. Her name was Maria Escobar, a young, pretty girl with ash-brown hair. A normal young woman with a part time job in Spanish Harlem. She'd told her parents that she was going out drinking with friends, and maybe that's where she began – but that's not where her night ended up. By the time the last rays of sunlight had become milky silhouettes on the horizon, and the lights of the city had flickered into brilliant glitter, she was in a small third-storey apartment. With another woman. According to the other girl, a bank assistant called Carrie Neville, Maria had wandered into the bathroom for a quick smoke. She'd had a few drinks, had started complaining of a headache. Through the blinds night-time was crawling in, laden with foreboding. From the moment Neville told me that story I could picture her – a pretty girl, slumped over a dirty porcelain sink, her hair hanging limp over her pale face, cold sweat rolling down her gaunt cheeks. Coughing her life away. She'd think it was the smokes at first. Then she'd realise that the coughing wasn't stopping, and then she'd look down in the sink – and she'd see the clots of blood, a dirty forewarning of what was to come.

Carrie found her lying on the tiles. She'd thrown up and looked skinny and pale. The sink and the dirty floor tiles were splattered with blood. Carrie called 911. The ambulance came quickly, a luxury that has long since vanished in this city – but it was still too late. She was DOA when they got her in to the hospital. When they got her on the slab, I got the call. I was out cruising, a homicide detective, back on the streets after all the inquests and the internal affairs grilling. An average cop with a clean slate, my past history all but forgotten – buried beneath an avalanche of paperwork and bureaucracy. Nothing left but the memories, and even they were fading away, lurking only in the darkest hours of the night – only resurfacing at three in the morning, when I'd wake up on the couch soaked in cold, shaky sweat. The mortician thought there was foul play going on. She was right.

She escorted me to Escobar's body, and gently pulled back the white cloth. I should have seen it then. The death of a woman. The start of all the problems in my life. I should have seen the city's fate in her pale cheeks and her frightened, staring eyes. Instead I played it as business as usual. I dragged in suspects. I questioned her parents, her girlfriend. I looked over Neville's shabby Mid-town apartment, the blood dried to maroon streaks on the floor. I delved into her shady past. Little did I know that already the bodies were starting to pile up.

Just two days later a young gay man was found dead in the toilets of a nightclub, soaked in his own blood. Same symptoms. He'd gone pale, he'd caught a fever, and then the coughing started. The death rattle. By the time they got his corpse into the hospital he'd gone pale and stiff. Later that night his partner was taken in with the same symptoms. By the time they got him up to surgery he was dead.

Within a week forty were dead, all with the same symptoms. It had began somewhere in the gay community, but by the end of the week it had spread beyond that, and cases were cropping up all over the city. It didn't discriminate. Anyone could fall victim to it. It took women, children, the elderly, all without mercy. Bodies were found in alleyways and clubs, in the crumbling slums of the city. Only when a promising young legal executive was found dead in his office did the tabloid press grab the reigns of the story, and they milked it for all it was worth. The headlines screamed 'PLAGUE' and talks of the second coming of AIDS were rampant. Some hack named it Miasma – the mysterious, fatal gas – and the name stuck.

The shadow of Miasma had fallen on New York City.

By August the death toll was well into the three-hundreds, and then the panic began. The hospitals were swamped. Doctors were helpless to stop it. Everyone the disease touched died. There were no survivors. Once you got that headache, you were marked for death. By the time the coughing began, you knew it was over. Cases were reported in Chicago and LA. Politicians made speeches promising to fight it, to little avail.

By the end of the month the death toll in New York alone was pushing up to the edge of triple figures. The hospitals were full of the sick, the dead lying with the dying. Bodies began to show up everywhere, always with that splatter of blood around the top of the chest like a guilty child smothered in jam. I was dropped from the case. This was no longer a matter for the police, the higher-ups had decided. This was a major medical crisis.

I took a long drag of my smoke. Somewhere down below a car alarm burst into life, a banshee wail on the hazy summer air. Now they reckoned Miasma had claimed as many as a thousand lives, and the death toll was rising. No-one knew where it came from. No-one knew how you contracted it. It just struck suddenly and killed even quicker. And outside the streets had never been quieter. There was noise, but it was empty. Miasma was a fog that had descended silently over the city, without a warning.

Behind me a door creaked open.

"Max," said a voice from behind me. A voice laced with crushed glass, a voice worn down by years of tragedy and torment. But it still stirred emotions within me that I thought had died with my wife.

I hadn't seen a lot of Mona Sax since the inquest. She spent some time getting patched up in the hospital after the Manor incident of two years ago. We were separated for most of the inquest that followed – the questioning, the internal affairs interrogations. All the official crap. I'd played the right cards. The Inner Circle, a Masonic cult at the heart of the government, had imploded and collapsed. The government knew I'd been at the heart of the whole affair. If the questioning got too intense they knew I'd let slip some very incriminating information. The higher-ups in government had decided that the Inner Circle was a mess they wanted cleaned up quickly and forgotten about. If that meant clearing all the charges against me, then so be it. I was released on lack of evidence and put back on the force. It didn't make me feel any better. But I ignored it, let it become another chapter in my life.

Mona had played the same cards, but she didn't have my connections. She was still facing imprisonment for killing Senator Sebastian Gate, an Inner Circle member. She slipped away from the hospital one night, and after that I don't know what happened to her. Only that one day she found me in this run-down apartment block, and since then she had drifted in occasionally. We didn't speak much. She just appeared, we made love, and then she vanished like a ghost of a past I'd tried to forget.

But tonight was different. I could sense it in the determined tone of her voice. I didn't have to turn around to see her worried face.

"We have to leave this city, Max," she said. "There's nothing left for us here. Either of us."

"You're a fugitive, Mona," I replied, not turning around.

"And you think you're hands are clean?"

She was right. I was as guilty as she was, no matter what the law said. "So what are you suggesting we do? I blow town with you, a fugitive, just as I'm starting to piece my life back together?"

She moved up behind me and gently rested a hand on my shoulder. Ice cold. It sent shivers down through my body that settled into a warm glow down in my chest. When Mona touched meit felt like an electric current, fusing my empty dead cell with new life. "Don't tell me this city isn't killing you, Max. The memories. The enemies. Let's leave. Let's make a new start."

I crushed the cigarette out on the wooden window-ledge. She was right. Whatever I had ever had in this city had died with Michelle. Now there was nothing but pain and suffering out there in the night. Whatever life I had left lay with Mona.

I stood up and reached for my jacket. Then I grabbed my Berreta, enjoying its comforting warmth. It was like embracing an old friend.

Then, time for one last journey through the night. To finish it all off.

We left the building.