RAIN OF ASHES
Extract from the Diary of Ephraim Goodweather
On the second day of darkness they rounded them up. The best and the brightest: all those in power, the wealthy, the influential.
Lawmakers and CEOs, tycoons and intellectuals, rebels and figures of great popular esteem. None were turned; all were slain, destroyed. Their execution was swift, public, and brutal.
Save for a few experts from each discipline, all leaders were eliminated. Out they marched, the damned, from the River House, the Dakota, the Beresford, and their ilk. They were all apprehended and herded into major metropolitan gathering places worldwide, such as the National Mall in Washington, DC, Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Moscow’s Red Square, Cape Town Stadium, and Central Park in New York City. There, in a horrific pageant of carnage, they were disposed of.
It was said that over one thousand strigoi rampaged down Lexington and raided every building surrounding Gramercy Park. Offerings of money or favor fell on deaf ears. Soft, manicured hands implored and begged. Their bodies twitched—hanging from lampposts all along Madison Avenue. In Times Square, twenty-foot-high funeral pyres burned tanned, pampered flesh. Smelling much like barbecue, the elite of Manhattan illuminated the empty streets, closed shops—EVERYTHING MUST GO—and silent LED megascreens.
The Master had apparently calculated the right number, the exact balance, of vampires needed to establish dominance without overburdening the blood supply; its approach was methodological and indeed mathematical. The elderly and infirm were also collected and eliminated. It was a purge and a putsch. Roughly one-third of the human population was exterminated over that seventy-two-hour period, which had since become known as, collectively, “Night Zero.”
The hordes took control of the streets. Riot police, SWAT, the U.S. Army—the tide of monsters overtook them all. Those who submitted, those who surrendered themselves, remained as guards and keepers.
The Master’s plan was a resounding success. In brutally Darwinian fashion, the Master had selected the survivors for compliance and malleability. Its growing strength was nothing short of terrifying. With the Ancients destroyed, its control over the horde—and through them, the world—had broadened and become ever more sophisticated. The strigoi no longer roamed the streets like raving zombies, raiding and feeding at will. Their movements were coordinated. Like bees in a hive or ants in a hill, they apparently each had clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They were the Master’s eyes on the street.
In the beginning daylight was entirely gone. A few seconds of faint sunlight could be glimpsed when the sun was at its zenith, but other than that, the darkness was unremitting. Now, two years later, the sun filtered through the poisoned atmosphere for only two hours each day, but the pale light it gave was nothing like the sunlight that had once warmed Earth.
The strigoi were everywhere, like spiders or ants, making sure that those left alive were truly fitting back into a routine…
And yet the most shocking thing of all was… how little life had truly changed. The Master capitalized on the societal chaos of the first few months. Deprivation—of food, clean water, sanitation, law enforcement—terrorized the populace, so much so that, once basic infrastructure was restored, once a program of food rations was implemented and the rebuilt electrical grid chased off the darkness of the long nights, they responded with gratitude and obedience. Cattle need the recompense of order and routine—the unambiguous structure of power—to surrender.
In fewer than two weeks, most systems were restored. Water, power… cable television was reintroduced, broadcasting all reruns now, without commercials. Sports, news, everything a repeat. Nothing new was produced. And… people liked it.
Rapid transit was a priority in the new world, because personal automobiles were extremely rare. Cars were potential bombs and as such had no place in the new police state. Cars were impounded and crushed. All vehicles on the street belonged to public services: police, fire department, sanitation—they were all operational, manned by complying humans.
Airplanes had suffered the same fate. The only active fleet was controlled by Stoneheart, the multinational corporation whose grip on food distribution, power, and military industries the Master had exploited in its takeover of the planet, and it consisted of roughly 7 percent of the planes that once crossed the world’s skies.
Silver was outlawed and became trade currency, highly desirable and exchangeable for coupons or food points. The right amount of it could even buy you, or a loved one, a way out of the farms.
The farms were the only entirely different thing in this new world. That and the fact that there was no more educational system. No more schooling, no more reading, no more thinking.
The pens and slaughterhouses were manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Trained wardens and cattle drivers supplied the strigoi with the nutrients needed. The new class system was quickly established. A system of biological castes: the strigoi favored B positive. Any blood type would do, but B positive either provided extra benefits—like different grades of milk—or held its taste and quality better outside the body and was better for packaging and storing. Non-B’s were the workers, the farmers, the true grunts. B positives were the Kobe—the prime cut of beef. They were pampered, given benefits and nutrients. They even got double the exposure at the UV camps, to make sure their vitamin D took root. Their daily routine, their hormonal balance, and ultimately their reproduction were systematically regulated to keep up with the demand.
And so it was. People went to work, watched TV, ate their meals, and went to bed. But in the dark and in the silence they wept and stirred, knowing all too well that those they knew, those next to them—even the ones sharing the very bed they were lying on—could suddenly be gone, devoured by the concrete structure of the closest farm. And they bit their lips and cried, for there was no choice but to submit. There was always someone else (parents, siblings, children) who depended on them. Always someone else who gave them the license to be afraid, the blessing of cowardice.
Who would have dreamed that we would be looking back with great nostalgia at the tumultuous nineties and early noughts. The times of turmoil and political pettiness and financial fraud that preceded the collapse of the world order… it was a golden era by comparison. All that we were became lost—all social form and order in the way our fathers and forefathers understood it. We became a flock. We became cattle.
Those of us who are still alive but have not joined the system… we have become the anomaly… We are the vermin. Scavengers. Hunted.
With no way to fight back…
On the second day of darkness they rounded them up. The best and the brightest: all those in power, the wealthy, the influential.
Lawmakers and CEOs, tycoons and intellectuals, rebels and figures of great popular esteem. None were turned; all were slain, destroyed. Their execution was swift, public, and brutal.
Save for a few experts from each discipline, all leaders were eliminated. Out they marched, the damned, from the River House, the Dakota, the Beresford, and their ilk. They were all apprehended and herded into major metropolitan gathering places worldwide, such as the National Mall in Washington, DC, Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Moscow’s Red Square, Cape Town Stadium, and Central Park in New York City. There, in a horrific pageant of carnage, they were disposed of.
It was said that over one thousand strigoi rampaged down Lexington and raided every building surrounding Gramercy Park. Offerings of money or favor fell on deaf ears. Soft, manicured hands implored and begged. Their bodies twitched—hanging from lampposts all along Madison Avenue. In Times Square, twenty-foot-high funeral pyres burned tanned, pampered flesh. Smelling much like barbecue, the elite of Manhattan illuminated the empty streets, closed shops—EVERYTHING MUST GO—and silent LED megascreens.
The Master had apparently calculated the right number, the exact balance, of vampires needed to establish dominance without overburdening the blood supply; its approach was methodological and indeed mathematical. The elderly and infirm were also collected and eliminated. It was a purge and a putsch. Roughly one-third of the human population was exterminated over that seventy-two-hour period, which had since become known as, collectively, “Night Zero.”
The hordes took control of the streets. Riot police, SWAT, the U.S. Army—the tide of monsters overtook them all. Those who submitted, those who surrendered themselves, remained as guards and keepers.
The Master’s plan was a resounding success. In brutally Darwinian fashion, the Master had selected the survivors for compliance and malleability. Its growing strength was nothing short of terrifying. With the Ancients destroyed, its control over the horde—and through them, the world—had broadened and become ever more sophisticated. The strigoi no longer roamed the streets like raving zombies, raiding and feeding at will. Their movements were coordinated. Like bees in a hive or ants in a hill, they apparently each had clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They were the Master’s eyes on the street.
In the beginning daylight was entirely gone. A few seconds of faint sunlight could be glimpsed when the sun was at its zenith, but other than that, the darkness was unremitting. Now, two years later, the sun filtered through the poisoned atmosphere for only two hours each day, but the pale light it gave was nothing like the sunlight that had once warmed Earth.
The strigoi were everywhere, like spiders or ants, making sure that those left alive were truly fitting back into a routine…
And yet the most shocking thing of all was… how little life had truly changed. The Master capitalized on the societal chaos of the first few months. Deprivation—of food, clean water, sanitation, law enforcement—terrorized the populace, so much so that, once basic infrastructure was restored, once a program of food rations was implemented and the rebuilt electrical grid chased off the darkness of the long nights, they responded with gratitude and obedience. Cattle need the recompense of order and routine—the unambiguous structure of power—to surrender.
In fewer than two weeks, most systems were restored. Water, power… cable television was reintroduced, broadcasting all reruns now, without commercials. Sports, news, everything a repeat. Nothing new was produced. And… people liked it.
Rapid transit was a priority in the new world, because personal automobiles were extremely rare. Cars were potential bombs and as such had no place in the new police state. Cars were impounded and crushed. All vehicles on the street belonged to public services: police, fire department, sanitation—they were all operational, manned by complying humans.
Airplanes had suffered the same fate. The only active fleet was controlled by Stoneheart, the multinational corporation whose grip on food distribution, power, and military industries the Master had exploited in its takeover of the planet, and it consisted of roughly 7 percent of the planes that once crossed the world’s skies.
Silver was outlawed and became trade currency, highly desirable and exchangeable for coupons or food points. The right amount of it could even buy you, or a loved one, a way out of the farms.
The farms were the only entirely different thing in this new world. That and the fact that there was no more educational system. No more schooling, no more reading, no more thinking.
The pens and slaughterhouses were manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Trained wardens and cattle drivers supplied the strigoi with the nutrients needed. The new class system was quickly established. A system of biological castes: the strigoi favored B positive. Any blood type would do, but B positive either provided extra benefits—like different grades of milk—or held its taste and quality better outside the body and was better for packaging and storing. Non-B’s were the workers, the farmers, the true grunts. B positives were the Kobe—the prime cut of beef. They were pampered, given benefits and nutrients. They even got double the exposure at the UV camps, to make sure their vitamin D took root. Their daily routine, their hormonal balance, and ultimately their reproduction were systematically regulated to keep up with the demand.
And so it was. People went to work, watched TV, ate their meals, and went to bed. But in the dark and in the silence they wept and stirred, knowing all too well that those they knew, those next to them—even the ones sharing the very bed they were lying on—could suddenly be gone, devoured by the concrete structure of the closest farm. And they bit their lips and cried, for there was no choice but to submit. There was always someone else (parents, siblings, children) who depended on them. Always someone else who gave them the license to be afraid, the blessing of cowardice.
Who would have dreamed that we would be looking back with great nostalgia at the tumultuous nineties and early noughts. The times of turmoil and political pettiness and financial fraud that preceded the collapse of the world order… it was a golden era by comparison. All that we were became lost—all social form and order in the way our fathers and forefathers understood it. We became a flock. We became cattle.
Those of us who are still alive but have not joined the system… we have become the anomaly… We are the vermin. Scavengers. Hunted.
With no way to fight back…
Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens
A SCREAM PEALED in the distance, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather startled awake. He thrashed on the sofa, flipping onto his back and sitting up, and—in one fluid, violent motion—gripped the worn leather sword handle jutting out of the pack on the floor at his side and slashed the air with a blade of singing silver.
His battle cry, hoarse and garbled, a fugitive from his nightmares, stopped short. His blade quivered, unmet.
He was alone.
Kelly’s house. Her sofa. Familiar things.
His ex-wife’s living room. The scream was a far-off siren, converted into a human shriek by his sleeping mind.
He had been dreaming again. Of fire and shapes—indefinable but vaguely humanoid—made of blinding light. A flashpoint. He was in the dream and these shapes wrestled with him right before the light consumed it all. He always awoke agitated and exhausted, as if he had physically grappled with an opponent. The dream came out of nowhere. He could be having the most domestic kind of reverie—a picnic, a traffic jam, a day at the office—and then the light would grow and consume it all, and the silvery figures emerged.
He blindly groped for his weapon bag—a modified baseball gear bag, looted many months before off the high rack of a ransacked Modell’s on Flatbush Avenue.
He was in Queens. Okay. Okay. Everything coming back to him now—accompanied by the first pangs of a jaw-clenching hangover. He had blacked out again. Another dangerous binge. He returned the sword to his weapons bag, then rolled back, holding his head in his hands like a cracked crystal sphere he had delicately picked up off the floor. His hair felt wiry and strange, his head throbbing.
Hell on earth. Right. Land of the damned.
Reality was an ornery bitch. He had awoken to a nightmare. He was still alive—and still human—which wasn’t much, but it was the best he could expect.
Just another day in hell.
The last thing he remembered from sleep, the fragment of the dream that clung to his consciousness like sticky afterbirth, was an image of Zack bathed in searing silver light. It was out of his shape that the flashpoint had occurred this time.
“Dad—” Zack said, and his eyes locked with Eph’s—and then the light consumed it all.
The remembrance of it raised chills. Why couldn’t he find some respite from this hell in his dreams? Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? To balance out a horrible existence with dreams of flight and escape? What he wouldn’t have given for a reverie of pure sentimentality, a spoonful of sugar for his mind.
Eph and Kelly fresh out of college, ambling hand-in-hand through a flea market, looking for cheap furniture and knickknacks for their first apartment…
Zack as a toddler, stomping fat-footed around the house, a little boss in diapers…
Eph and Kelly and Zack at the dinner table, sitting with hands folded before full plates, waiting for Z to plow through his obsessively thorough saying of grace…
Instead, Eph’s dreams were like badly recorded snuff films. Familiar faces from his past—enemies, acquaintances, and friends alike—being stalked and taken while he watched, unable to reach them, to help them, or even to turn away.
He sat up, steadying himself and rising, one hand on the back of the sofa. He left the living area and walked to the window overlooking the backyard. LaGuardia Airport was not far away. The sight of an airplane, the distant sound of a jet engine, was cause for wonder now. No lights circled the sky. He remembered September 11, 2001, and how the emptiness of the sky had seemed so surreal back then, and what a strange relief it was when the planes returned a week later. Now there was no relief. No getting back to normal.
Eph wondered what time it was. Sometime o’clock in the morning, he figured, judging by his own failing circadian rhythm. It was summer—at least according to the old calendar—and so the sun should have been high and hot in the sky.
Instead, darkness prevailed. The natural order of night and day had been shattered, presumably forever. The sun was obliterated by a murky veil of ash floating in the sky. The new atmosphere was comprised of the detritus of nuclear explosions and volcanic eruptions distributed around the globe, a ball of blue-green candy wrapped inside a crust of poisonous chocolate. It had cured into a thick, insulating cowl, sealing in darkness and cold and sealing out the sun.
Perennial nightfall. The planet turned into a pale, rotting netherworld of rime and torment.
The perfect ecology for vampires.
According to the last live news reports, long since censored but traded like porn on Internet boards, these post-cataclysm conditions were much the same around the world. Eyewitness accounts of the darkening sky, of black rain, of ominous clouds knitting together and never breaking apart. Given the planet’s rotation and wind patterns, the poles—the frozen north and south—were theoretically the only locations on Earth still receiving regular seasonal sunlight… though nobody knew this for certain.
The residual radiation hazard from the nuclear explosions and the plant meltdowns had been intense at first, catastrophically so at the various ground zeros. Eph and the others had spent nearly two months belowground, in a train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, and so were spared the short-term fallout. Extreme meteorological conditions and atmospheric winds spread the damage over large areas, which may have aided in dispersing the radioactivity; the fallout was expelled by the hard rainstorms created by the violent changes to the ecosystem, further diffusing the radiation. Fallout decays exponentially, and in the short term, areas without direct-impact exposure became safe for travel and decontamination within approximately six weeks.
The long-term effects were yet to come. Questions as to human fertility, genetic mutations, and increased carcinogenesis would not be answered for some time. But these very real concerns were overshadowed by the current situation: two years following the nuclear disasters and the vampiric takeover of the world, all fears were immediate.
The pealing siren went quiet. These warning systems, meant to repel human intruders and attract assistance, still went off from time to time—though much less frequently than in the early months, when the alarms wailed constantly, persistently, like the agonal screams of a dying race. Another vestige of civilization fading away.
In the absence of the alarm, Eph listened for intruders. Through windows, rising from dank cellars, descending from dusty attics—vampires entered through any opening, and nowhere was safe. Even the few hours of sunlight each day—a dim, dusky light, haven taken on a sickly amber hue—still offered many hazards. Daylight was human curfew time. The best time for Eph and the others to move—safe from direct confrontation by strigoi—was also one of the most dangerous, due to surveillance and the prying eyes of human sympathizers looking to improve their lot.
Eph leaned his forehead against the window. The coolness of the glass was a pleasant sensation against his warm skin and the throbbing inside his skull.
Knowing was the worst part. Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person—it only adds the burden of panic. Fear of the future, and the memory of a better, brighter past, were as much a source of Eph’s suffering as the vampire plague itself.
He needed food, he needed protein. Nothing in this house; he had cleaned it out of food—and alcohol—many months ago. Even found a secret stash of Butterfingers in Matt’s closet.
He backed off from the window, turning to face the room and the kitchen area beyond. He tried to remember how he got here and why. He saw slash marks in the wall where, using a kitchen knife, he had released his ex-wife’s boyfriend, decapitating the recently turned creature. That was back in the early days of slaying, when killing vampires was nearly as frightening as the notion of being turned by one. Even when the vampire in question had been his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a man poised to assume Eph’s place as the most important male figure in Zack’s life.
But that gag reflex of human morality was long gone now. This was a changed world, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, once a prominent epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a changed man. The virus of vampirism had colonized the human race. The plague had routed civilization in a coup d’état of astonishing virulence and violence. Insurgents—the willful, the powerful, and the strong—had all largely been destroyed or turned, leaving the meek, the defeated, and the fearful to do the Master’s bidding.
Eph returned to his weapon bag. From a narrow, zippered pocket meant for batting gloves or sweatbands, he pulled out his creased Moleskine notebook. These days he remembered nothing without writing it down in his tattered diary. Everything went in there, from the transcendental to the banal. Everything must be recorded. This was his compulsion. His diary was essentially a long letter to his son, Zack. Leaving a record of his search for his only boy. Noting his observations and theories involving the vampire menace. And, as a scientist, simply recording data and phenomena.
At the same time, it was also a helpful exercise for retaining some semblance of sanity.
His handwriting had grown so cramped over the past two years, he could barely read his own entries. He recorded the date each day, because it was the only reliable method of tracking time without a proper calendar. Not that it mattered much—except for today.
He scribbled down the date, and then his heart pushed a double beat. Of course. That was it. Why he was back here yet again.
Today was Zack’s thirteenth birthday.
YOU MAY NOT LIVE BEYOND THIS POINT warned the sign affixed to the upstairs door, written in Magic Marker, illustrated with gravestones and skeletons and crosses. It was drawn in a younger hand, done when Zack was seven or eight. Zack’s bedroom had been left essentially unchanged since the last time he’d occupied it, the same as the bedrooms of missing kids everywhere, a symbol of the stopping of time in the hearts of their parents.
Eph kept returning to the bedroom like a diver returning again and again to a sunken shipwreck. A secret museum; a world preserved exactly as it had once been. A window directly into the past.
Eph sat on the bed, feeling the mattress’s familiar give, hearing its reassuring creak. He had been through everything in this room, everything his boy used to touch in the life he used to lead. He curated this room now; he knew every toy, every figurine, every coin and shoestring, every T-shirt and book. He rejected the notion that he was wallowing. People don’t attend church or synagogue or mosque to wallow; they attend regularly as a gesture of faith. Zack’s bedroom was a temple now. Here, and here alone, Eph felt a sense of peace and an affirmation of inner resolve.
Zack was still alive.
This was not speculation. This was not blind hope.
Eph knew that Zack was still alive and that his boy had not yet been turned.
In past times—the way the world used to work—the parent of a missing child had resources to turn to. They had the comfort of the police investigative process, and the knowledge that hundreds, if not thousands, of people identified and sympathized with their plight and were actively assisting in the search.
This abduction had occurred in a world without police, without human law. And Eph knew the identity of the being that had abducted Zack. The creature that was once his mother—yes. She committed the abduction. But her action was compelled by a larger entity.
The king vampire, the Master.
But Eph did not know why Zack had been taken. To hurt Eph, of course. And to satisfy his undead mother’s drive to revisit her “Dear Ones,” the beings she had loved in life. The insidious epidemiology of the virus spread in a vampiric perversion of human love. Turning them into fellow strigoi locked them to you forever, to an existence beyond the trials and tribulations of being human, devolving into only primal needs such as feeding, spreading, survival.
That was why Kelly (the thing that was once Kelly) had become so psychically fixated on their boy, and how, despite Eph’s best efforts, she had been able to spirit him away.
And it was precisely this same syndrome, this same obsessive passion for turning those closest to them, that confirmed to Eph that Zack had not been turned. For if the Master or Kelly had drunk the boy, then Zack would surely have returned for Eph as a vampire. Eph’s dread of this very occurrence—of having to face his undead son—had haunted him for two years now, at times sending him into a downward spiral of despair.
But why? Why hadn’t the Master turned Zack? What was it holding him for? As a potential marker to be played against Eph and the resistance effort he was part of? Or for some other more sinister reason that Eph could not—dared not—fathom?
Eph shuddered at the dilemma this would present to him. Where his son was concerned, he was vulnerable. Eph’s weakness was equal to his strength: he could not let go of his boy.
Where was Zack at that very moment? Was he being held somewhere? Being tormented as his father’s proxy? Thoughts like these clawed at Eph’s mind.
It was not knowing that unsettled him the most. The others—Fet, Nora, Gus—were able to commit fully to the resistance, all their energy and their focus, precisely because they had no hostages in this war.
Visiting this room usually helped Eph feel less alone in this accursed world. But today it had the opposite effect. He had never felt so acutely alone as he felt right here, at this very moment.
Eph thought again about Matt, his ex-wife’s boyfriend—the one he had slain downstairs—and how he used to obsess over that man’s growing influence on Zack’s upbringing. Now he had to think—daily, hourly—about what sort of hell his boy must be living in, under the rule of this actual monster…
Overcome, feeling nauseous and sweaty, Eph dug out his diary and scratched down the same question that appeared throughout the notebook, like a koan:
Where is Zack?
As was his habit, he flipped back through the most recent entries. He spied a note about Nora and tried to make out his penmanship.
“Morgue.”
“Rendezvous.”
“Move at sunlight.”
Eph squinted, trying to remember—as a sense of anxiety spread through him.
He was supposed to meet Nora and Mrs. Martinez at the old Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In Manhattan. Today.
Shit.
Eph grabbed his bag with a clank of the silver blades, throwing the straps over his back, sword handles behind his shoulders like leather-wrapped antennae. He looked around quickly on his way out, spying an old Transformers toy next to the CD player on Zack’s bureau. Sideswipe, if Eph remembered correctly from reading Zack’s books outlining the Autobots’ specs. A birthday present from Eph to Zack, just a few years before. One of Sideswipe’s legs dangled, snapped from overuse. Eph manipulated the arms, remembering the way Zack used to effortlessly “transform” the toy from car to robot and back again like a Rubik’s Cube grand master.
“Happy birthday, Z,” whispered Eph before stuffing the busted toy into his weapons bag and heading for the door.
Woodside
THE FORMER KELLY Goodweather arrived outside her former residence on Kelton Street just minutes after Eph’s departure. She had been tracking the human—her Dear One—since picking up his bloodbeat some fifteen hours before. But when the sky had brightened for the meridiem—the two to three hours of dull yet hazardous sunlight that filtered through the thick cloud cover each planetary rotation—she’d had to retire underground, losing time. Now she was close.
Two black-eyed feelers accompanied her—children blinded by the solar occlusion that coincided with the Master’s arrival in New York City, who were subsequently turned by the Master itself and now gifted with the enhanced perception of second sight—small and fast, skittering along the sidewalk and over abandoned cars like hungry spiders, seeing nothing and sensing everything.
Normally, Kelly’s innate attraction to her Dear One would have been sufficient for her to track and locate her ex-husband. But Eph’s signal was weakened and distorted by the effects of ethanol, stimulants, and sedatives on his nervous and circulatory systems. Intoxication confused the synapses in a human brain, slowing its transfer rate and serving to cloak its signal, like interference over a radio channel.
The Master had taken a peculiar interest in Ephraim Goodweather, specifically in monitoring his movement throughout the city. That was why the feelers—formerly a brother and sister, now nearly identical, having shed their hair, genitals, and other human gender markers—had been sent by the Master to assist Kelly in her pursuit. Here, they began racing back and forth along the short fence in front of the house, waiting for Kelly to catch up to them.
She opened the gate and entered the property, walking once around the house, wary of traps. Once satisfied, she rammed the heel of her hand through a double windowpane, shattering glass as she reached up and unfastened the lock, raising the sash.
The feelers leaped inside, Kelly following, lifting one bare, dirty leg through, then bending and easily contorting her body to enter the three-foot-square opening. The feelers climbed all over the sofa, indicating it like trained police canines. Kelly stood very still for a long moment, opening her senses to the interior of the dwelling. She confirmed that they were alone and thus too late. But she sensed Eph’s recent presence. Maybe there was more to be learned.
The feelers scooted across the floor to a north-facing window, touching the glass as though absorbing a recent, lingering sensation—then at once scrambled up the stairs. Kelly followed them, allowing them to scent and indicate. When she came upon them they were leaping around a bedroom, their psychic senses agitated by the urgency of Eph’s recent occupation, like animals driven wild by some overwhelming but little-understood impulse.
Kelly stood in the center of the room, arms at her sides. The heat of her vampiric body, her blazing metabolism, instantly raised the temperature of the cool room a few degrees. Unlike Eph, Kelly suffered no form of human nostalgia. She felt no affinity for her former domicile, no pangs of regret or loss as she stood in her son’s room. She no longer felt any connection to this place, just as she no longer felt any connection to her pitiable human past. The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.
A hum entered her being, a presence inside her head and a quickening throughout her body. The Master, looking through her. Seeing with her eyes. Observing their near miss.
A moment of great honor and privilege…
Then, just as suddenly, the humming presence was gone. Kelly felt no reproach from the Master for having fallen short of capturing Eph. She felt only useful. Of all the others that served it, throughout this world, Kelly had two things the Master greatly valued. The first was a direct link to Ephraim Goodweather.
The second was Zachary.
Still, Kelly felt the ache of wanting—of needing—to turn her dear son. The urge had subsided but never vanished. She felt it all the time, an incomplete part of herself, an emptiness. It went against her vampire nature. But she bore this agony for one reason only: because the Master demanded it. Its immaculate will alone held Kelly’s longing at bay. And so the boy remained human. Remained undelivered, unfinished. There was indeed a purpose to the Master’s demand. In that, she trusted without any uncertainty. For the motive had not been revealed to her, because it was not for her to know yet.
For now it was quite enough to see the boy sitting at the Master’s side.
The feelers leaped around her as Kelly descended the staircase. She crossed to the raised window and exited through it as she had entered, almost without breaking stride. The rains had started again, fat, black drops pelting her hot scalp and shoulders, disappearing in wisps of steam. Standing out on the center yellow line of the street, she sensed Eph’s trail anew, his bloodbeat growing stronger as he became more sober.
With the feelers racing back and forth, she strode through the falling rain, leaving a faint trail of steam in her wake. She neared a rapid-transit station and felt her psychic link to him beginning to fade. This was due to the growing distance between them. He had boarded a subway train.
No disappointment clouded her thoughts. Kelly would continue to pursue Eph until they were reunited once and for all. She communicated her report back to the Master before following the feelers into the station.
Eph was returning to Manhattan.
The Farrell
THE HORSE CHARGED. In its wake was a plume of thick black smoke and orange flame.
The horse was on fire.
Fully consumed, the proud beast galloped with an urgency born not of pain but of desire. At night, visible from a mile away, the horse without rider or saddle raced through the flat, barren countryside, toward the village. Toward the watcher.
Fet stood transfixed by the sight. Knowing it was coming for him. He anticipated it. Expected it.
Entering the outskirts of the village, bearing down on him with the velocity of a flaming arrow, the galloping horse spoke—naturally, in a dream, it spoke—saying, I live.
Fet howled as the flaming horse overtook him—and he awoke.
He was on his side, lying on a fold-down bed in the crew bunk beneath the foredeck of a rocking ship. The vessel pitched and swayed, and he pitched and swayed with it, the possessions around him netted and tied down tight. The other beds were folded up to the wall. He was the only one currently bunking.
The dream—always essentially the same—had haunted him since his youth. The flaming horse with burning hooves racing at him out of the dark night, awakening him just before impact. The fear he felt upon waking was deep and rich, a child’s fear.
He reached for his pack beneath the bunk. The bag was damp—everything on the ship was damp—but its top knot was tight, its contents secure.
The ship was the Farrell, a large fishing boat used for smuggling marijuana, which, yes, was still a profitable black-market business. This was the final leg of a return trip from Iceland. Fet had hired the boat for the price of a dozen small arms and plenty of ammunition to keep them running pot for years to come. The sea was one of the few areas left on the planet that was essentially beyond the vampires’ reach. Illicit drugs had become incredibly scarce under the new prohibition, the trade confined to homegrown and home-brewed narcotics such as marijuana and pockets of methamphetamine. They operated a smaller sideline business smuggling moonshine—and, on this trip, a few cases of fine Icelandic and Russian vodka.
Fet’s mission to Iceland was twofold. His first order of business was to travel to the University of Reykjavik. In the weeks and months following the vampire cataclysm, while still holed up inside the train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, waiting for the surface air to become habitable once again, Fet constantly paged through the book Professor Abraham Setrakian had died for, the book the Holocaust survivor–turned–vampire hunter had entrusted explicitly and exclusively to Fet’s possession.
It was the Occido Lumen, loosely translated as “The Fallen Light.” Four hundred eighty-nine folios, handwritten on parchment, with twenty illuminated pages, bound in leather and faced with plates of pure vampire-repelling silver. The Lumen was an account of the rise of the strigoi, based upon a collection of ancient clay tablets dating back to Mesopotamian times, discovered inside a cave in the Zagros Mountains in 1508. Written in Sumerian and extremely fragile, the tablets survived over a century until they fell into the hands of a French rabbi who was committed to deciphering them—more than two centuries before Sumerian was widely translated—in secret. The rabbi eventually presented his illuminated manuscript to King Louis XIV as a gift—and was immediately imprisoned for his effort.
The original tablets were pulverized upon royal order and the manuscript believed destroyed or lost. The king’s mistress, a dabbler in the occult, retrieved the Lumen from a palace vault in 1671, and from there it changed hands many times in obscurity, acquiring its reputation as a cursed text. The Lumen resurfaced briefly in 1823 and again in 1911, each time coinciding with mysterious outbreaks of disease, before disappearing again. The text was offered for auction at Sotheby’s in Manhattan no fewer than ten days following the Master’s arrival and the start of the vampire plague—and was won, after great effort, by Setrakian with the backing of the Ancients and their accumulated wealth.
Setrakian, the university professor who shunned normal society following the turning of his beloved wife, becoming obsessed with hunting and destroying the virus-bred strigoi, had considered the Lumen the authoritative text on the conspiracy of vampires that had plagued the earth for most of the history of mankind. Publicly, his station in life had fallen to that of a lowly pawnbroker in an economically depressed section of Manhattan; yet in the bowels of his shop he had maintained an armory of vampire-fighting weapons and a library of ancient accounts and manuals regarding the dread race, accumulated from all corners of the globe throughout decades of pursuit. But such was his desire to reveal the secrets contained within the Occido Lumen that he ultimately gave his life so that it would fall into Fet’s hands.
It had occurred to Fet, during those long, dark nights in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River, that the Lumen had to have been offered up for auction by someone. Someone had possessed the cursed book—but who? Fet thought that perhaps the seller had some further knowledge of its power and its contents. In the time since they surfaced, Fet had been diligently going through the tome with a Latin dictionary, doing the tedious work of translating the lexicon as best he could. On an excursion inside the vacated Sotheby’s building on the Upper East Side, Fet discovered that the University of Reykjavik was to be the anonymous beneficiary of the proceeds from the sale of the extraordinarily rare book. With Nora he weighed the pros and cons of undertaking this journey, and together they decided that this lengthy voyage to Iceland was their only chance of uncovering who had actually put the book up for auction.
However, the university, as he discovered upon arrival, was a warren of vampires. Fet had hoped that Iceland might have gone the way of the United Kingdom, which had reacted swiftly to the plague, blowing up the Chunnel and hunting down strigoi after the initial outbreak. The islands remained nearly vampire-free, and their people, though completely isolated from the rest of the infected globe, remained human.
Fet had waited until daylight to search the ransacked administrative offices in hopes of tracing the book’s provenance. He learned that the university trust itself had offered the book for auction, not a scholar employed there or a specific benefactor, as Fet had hoped. As the campus itself was deserted, this was a long way to travel to find a dead end. But it was not a total waste. For on a shelf in the Egyptology department, Fet had found a most curious text: an old, leather-bound book, printed in French in 1920. On its cover were the words Sadum et Amurah. The very last words that Setrakian had asked Fet to remember.
He took the text with him. Even though he spoke not a single word of French.
The second part of his mission proved to be much more productive. At some point early on in his association with these pot smugglers, after learning how wide their reach was, Fet challenged them to connect him with a nuclear weapon. This request was not as far-fetched as one might think. In the Soviet Union especially, where the strigoi enjoyed total control, many so-called suitcase nukes had been purloined by ex-KGB officers and were rumored to be available—in less-than-mint condition—on the black markets of Eastern Europe. The Master’s drive to purge the world of these weapons—in order that they could not be used to destroy its site of origin, as the Master had itself destroyed the six Ancients—proved to Fet and the others that the Master was indeed vulnerable. Much like the Ancients, the Master’s site of origin, the very key to its destruction, was encrypted within the pages of the Lumen. Fet offered the right price and had the silver to back it up.
This crew of smugglers put out feelers among their maritime compatriots, with the promise of a silver bounty. Fet was skeptical when the smugglers told him they had a surprise for him, but the desperate will believe in almost anything. They rendezvoused on a small volcanic island south of Iceland with a Ukrainian crew of seven aboard a junked-out yacht with six different outboard engines off the stern. The captain of the crew was young, in his midtwenties, and essentially one-handed, his left arm withered and ending in an unsightly claw.
The device was not a suitcase at all. It resembled a small keg or trash can wrapped in a black tarpaulin and netting, with buckled green straps around its sides and over its lid. Roughly three feet tall by two feet wide. Fet tried lifting it gently. It weighed over one hundred pounds.
“You sure this works?” he asked.
The captain scratched his copper beard with his good hand. He spoke broken English with a Russian accent. “I am told it does. Only one way to find out. It misses one part.”
“One part is missing?” said Fet. “Let me guess. Plutonium. U-233.”
“No. Fuel is in the core. One-kiloton capability. It misses the detonator.” He pointed to a thatch of wires on the top and shrugged. “Everything else good.”
The explosive force of a one-kiloton nuke equaled one thousand tons of TNT. A half-mile shockwave of steel-bending destruction. “I’d love to know how you came across this,” said Fet.
“I’d like to know what you want it for,” said the captain. “Best if we all keep our secrets.”
“Fair enough.”
The captain had another crewman help Fet load the bomb onto the smugglers’ boat. Fet opened the hold beneath the steel floor where the cache of silver lay. The strigoi were bent on collecting every piece of silver in the same manner as they were collecting and disarming nukes. As such, the value of this vampire-killing substance rose exponentially.
Once the deal was consummated, including a side transaction between crews of bottles of vodka for pouches of rolling tobacco, drinks were poured into shot glasses.
“You Ukraine?” the captain asked Fet after downing the firewater.
Fet nodded. “You can tell?”
“Look like people from my village, before it disappear.”
“Disappear?” said Fet.
The young captain nodded. “Chernobyl,” he explained, raising his shriveled arm.
Fet now looked at the nuke, bungee-corded to the wall. No glow, no tick-tick-tick. A drone weapon awaiting activation. Had he bartered for a barrel full of junk? Fet did not think so. He trusted the Ukrainian smuggler to vet his own suppliers, and also the fact that he had to continue doing business with the pot smugglers.
Fet was excited, even confident. This was like holding a loaded gun, only without a trigger. All he needed was a detonator.
Fet had seen, with his own eyes, a crew of vampires excavating sites around a geologically active area of hot springs outside Reykjavik, known as Black Pool. This proved that the Master did not know the exact location of its own site of origin—not the Master’s birthplace, but the earthen site where it had first arisen in vampiric form.
The secret to its location was contained in the Occido Lumen. All Fet had to do was what he as of yet had failed to accomplish: decode the work and discover the location of the site of origin himself. Were the Lumen more like a straightforward manual for exterminating vampires, Fet would have been able to follow its instructions—but instead, the Lumen was full of wild imagery, strange allegories, and dubious pronouncements. It charted a backward path throughout the course of human history, steered not by the hand of fate but by the supernatural grip of the Ancients. The text confounded him, as it did the others. Fet lacked faith in his own scholarship. Here, he missed most the old professor’s reassuring wealth of knowledge. Without him, the Lumen was as useful to them as the nuclear device was without a detonator.
Still, this was progress. Fet’s restless enthusiasm brought him topside. He gripped the rail and looked out over the turbulent ocean. A harsh, briny mist but no heavy rain tonight. The changed atmosphere made boating more dangerous, the marine weather more unpredictable. Their boat was moving through a swarm of jellyfish, a species that had taken over much of the open seas, feeding on fish eggs and blocking what little daily sun reached the ocean—at times in floating patches several miles wide, coating the surface of the water like pudding skin.
They were passing within ten miles of the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which put Fet in mind of one of the more interesting accounts contained in Setrakian’s work papers, the pages he had compiled to leave behind alongside the Lumen. In them, the old professor related an account of the Winthrop Fleet of 1630, which made the Atlantic voyage ten years after the Mayflower, transporting a second wave of Pilgrims to the New World. One of the fleet’s ships, the Hopewell, had transported three pieces of unidentified cargo contained in crates of handsome and ornately carved wood. Upon landing in Salem, Massachusetts, and resettling in Boston (due to its abundance of freshwater) thereafter, conditions among the Pilgrims turned brutal. Two hundred settlers were lost in the first year, their deaths attributed to illness rather than the true cause: they had been prey for the Ancients, after having unwittingly conveyed the strigoi to the New World.
Setrakian’s death had left a great void in Fet. He dearly missed the wise man’s counsel as well as his company, but most acutely he missed his intellect. The old man’s demise wasn’t merely a death but—and this was not an overstatement—a critical blow to the future of humankind. At great risk to himself, he had delivered into their hands this sacred book, the Occido Lumen—though not the means to decipher it. Fet had also made himself a student of the pages and leather-bound notebooks containing the deep, hermetic ruminations of the old man, but sometimes filed away side by side with small domestic observations, grocery lists, financial calculations.
He cracked open the French book and, not surprisingly, couldn’t make heads or tails of it either. However, some beautiful engravings proved quite illuminating: in a full-page illustration, Fet saw the image of an old man and his wife, fleeing a city, burning in a holy flash of fire—the wife turning to dust. Even he knew that tale… “Lot… ,” he said. A few pages before he saw another illustration: the old man shielding two painfully beautiful winged creatures—archangels sent by the Lord. Quickly Fet slammed the book shut and looked at the cover. Sadum et Amurah.
“Sodom and Gomorrah… ,” he said. “Sadum and Amurah are Sodom and Gomorrah…” And suddenly he felt fluent in French. He remembered an illustration in the Lumen, almost identical to the one in the French book. Not in style or sophistication but in content. Lot shielding the archangels from the men seeking congress with them.
The clues were there, but Fet was mostly unable to put any of this to good use. Even his hands, coarse and big as baseball mitts, seemed entirely unsuited for handling the Lumen. Why had Setrakian chosen him over Eph to guard the book? Eph was smarter, no doubt, much better-read. Hell, he probably spoke fucking French. But Setrakian knew that Fet would die before allowing the book to fall into the Master’s hands. Setrakian knew Fet well. And loved him well—with the patience and the care of an old father. Firm but compassionate, Setrakian never made Fet feel too slow or uninformed; quite to the contrary, he explained every matter with great care and patience and made Fet feel included. He made him belong.
The emotional void in Fet’s life had been filled by a most unsuspected source. When Eph grew increasingly erratic and obsessive, beginning in the earliest days inside the train tunnel but magnifying once they surfaced, Nora had come to lean more on Fet, to confide in him and to give and to seek comfort. Over time, Fet had learned how to respond. He had come to admire Nora’s tenacity in the face of such overwhelming despair; so many others had succumbed to either hopelessness or insanity, or else, like Eph, had allowed their despair to change them. Nora Martinez evidently saw something in Fet—maybe the same thing the old professor had seen in him—a primal nobility, more akin to a beast of burden than a man, and something Fet himself had been unaware of until recently. And if this quality that he possessed—steadfastness, determination, ruthlessness, whatever it was—made him somehow more attractive to her under these extreme circumstances, then he was the better for it.
Out of respect for Eph, he had resisted this entanglement, denying his own feelings as well as Nora’s. But their mutual attraction was more evident now. On the last day before his departure, Fet had rested his leg against Nora’s. A casual gesture by any measure, except for someone like Fet. He was a large man but incredibly conscious of his personal space, neither seeking nor allowing any violation of it. He kept his distance, ultimately uncomfortable with most human contact—but Nora’s knee was pressed against his, and his heart was racing. Racing with hope as the notion dawned on him: She’s holding. She is not moving away…
She had asked him to be careful, to take care of himself, and in her eyes were tears. Genuine tears as she saw him leave.
No one had ever cried for Fet before.
Manhattan
EPH RODE THE 7 express inbound, clinging fast to the exterior of the subway train. He gripped the rear left corner of the last car, his right boot perched on the rear step, fingertips dug into the window frames, rocking with the motion of the train over the elevated track. The wind and the black rain whipped at the tails of his charcoal-gray raincoat, his hooded face turned in toward the shoulder straps of his weapon pack.
It used to be that the vampires had to ride on the outside of the trains, shuttling around the underground of Manhattan in order to avoid discovery. Through the window, whose dented frame he had pried his fingers under, he saw humans sitting and rocking with the motion of the train. The distant stares, the expressionless faces: a perfectly orderly scene. He did not look for long, for if there were any strigoi riding, their heat-registering night vision would have spotted him, resulting in a very unpleasant welcoming party at the next stop. Eph was still a fugitive, his likeness hanging in post offices and police stations throughout the city, the news stories concerning his successful assassination of Eldritch Palmer—cleverly edited from his unsuccessful attempt—still replayed on television every week or so, keeping his name and face foremost in the minds of the watchful citizenry.
Riding the trains required skills that Eph had developed through time and necessity. The tunnels were invariably wet—smelling of burned ozone and old grease—and Eph’s ragged, smeared clothes acted as perfect camouflage, both visual and olfactory. Hooking up to the rear of the train—that required timing and precision. But Eph had it down. As a kid in San Francisco, he had routinely used the back of streetcars to hitch a ride to school. And you had to board them just in time. Too early and you would be discovered. Too late and you would be dragged and take a bad tumble.
And in the subway, he had taken some tumbles—usually due to drink. Once, as the train took a curve under Tremont Avenue, he had lost his footing as he calculated his landing jump and trailed on the back of the train, legs hopping frantically, bouncing against the tracks until he rolled on his side, cracking two ribs and dislocating his right shoulder—the bone popping softly as it hit the steel rails on the other side of the line. He barely avoided being hit by an oncoming train. Seeking refuge in a maintenance alcove saturated in human urine and old newspapers, he had popped the shoulder back in—but it bothered him every other night. If he rolled on it in his sleep he would wake up in agony.
But now, through practice, he had learned to seek the footholds and the crevices in the rear structure of the train cars. He knew every train, every car—and he had even fashioned two short grappling hooks to grab on to the loose steel panels in a matter of seconds. They were hammered out of the good silver set at the Goodweather household and, now and then, served as a short-range weapon with the strigoi.
The hooks were attached to wooden handles, made from the legs of a mahogany table Kelly’s mother had given them as a wedding present. If she only knew… She had never liked Eph—not good enough for her Kelly—and now she would like him even less.
Eph turned his head, shaking off some of the wetness in order to look out through the black rain to the city blocks on either side of the concrete viaduct high above Queens Boulevard. Some blocks remained ravaged, razed by fires during the takeover, or else looted and long since emptied. Patches of the city appeared as though they had been destroyed in a war—and, indeed, they had.
Others were lit by artificial light, city zones rebuilt by humans overseen by the Stoneheart Foundation, at the direction of the Master: light was critical for work in a world that was dark for as many as twenty-two hours each calendar day. Power grids all across the globe had collapsed following initial electromagnetic pulses that were the result of multiple nuclear detonations. Voltage overruns had burned out electrical conductors, plunging much of the world into vampire-friendly darkness. People very quickly came to the realization—terrifying and brutal in its impact—that a creature race of superior strength had seized control of the planet and that man had been supplanted at the top of the food chain by beings whose own biological needs demanded a diet of human blood. Panic and despair swept the continents. Infected armies fell silent. In the time of consolidation following Night Zero, as the new, poisonous atmosphere continued to roil and cure overhead, so did the vampires establish a new order.
The subway train slowed as it approached Queensboro Plaza. Eph lifted his foot from the rear step, hanging from the blind side of the car so as not to be seen from the platform. The heavy, constant rain was good for one thing only: obscuring him from the vampires’ watchful, blood-red eyes.
He heard the doors slide open, people shuffling in and out. The automated track announcements droned from overhead speakers. The doors closed and the train began moving again. Eph regripped the window frame with his sore fingers and watched the dim platform recede from his vision, sliding away down the line like the world of the past, shrinking, fading, swallowed up by the polluted rain and the night.
The subway train soon dipped underground, out of the driving rain. After two more stops, it entered the Steinway Tunnel, beneath the East River. It was modern conveniences such as this—the amazing ability to travel beneath a swift river—that contributed to the human race’s undoing. Vampires, forbidden by nature from crossing a body of moving water under their own power, were able to circumvent such obstacles by the use of tunnels, long-distance aircraft, and other rapid-transit alternatives.
The train slowed, approaching Grand Central Station—and just in time. Eph readjusted his grip on the subway car’s exterior, fighting fatigue, tenaciously holding on to his homemade hooks. He was malnourished, as thin now as he had been as a freshman in high school. He had grown accustomed to the persistent, gnawing emptiness in the pit of his belly; he knew that protein and vitamin deficiencies affected not only his bones and muscles but also his mind.
Eph hopped off before it came to a full stop, stumbling to the rock bed between the tracks. He rolled on his left shoulder, landing like an expert. He flexed his fingers, unlocking the arthritis-like paralysis of his knuckles, putting away the hooks. The train’s rear light shrank up ahead, and he heard the grating of steel wheels braking against steel rails, a metallic shriek his ears never got used to.
He turned and hobbled off the other way, deeper into the tunnel. He had traveled this route enough times that he did not need his night scope to reach the next platform. The third rail was not a concern, covered with wood casing, in fact making for a convenient step up onto the abandoned platform.
Construction materials remained on the tile floor, a renovation interrupted at its earliest stage: scaffolding, a stack of pipe sections, bales of tubing wrapped in plastic. Eph pushed back his wet hood and reached into his pack for his night-vision scope, strapping it over his head, the lens fitting in front of his right eye. Satisfied that nothing had been disturbed since his last visit, he moved toward the unmarked door.
At its pre-vampire peak, half a million people daily crossed the polished Tennessee marble of the Grand Concourse floor somewhere above him. Eph could not risk entering the main terminal—the half-acre concourse afforded few places to hide—but he had been up on the catwalks on the roof. There, he had looked at the monuments to a lost age: landmark skyscrapers such as the MetLife Building and the Chrysler Building, dark and silent against the night. He had climbed above the two-story-high air-conditioning units on the terminal roof, standing on the pediment facing Forty-second Street and Park Avenue, among colossal statues of the Roman gods Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury above the great clock of Tiffany glass. On the central section of the roof, he had looked down more than a hundred feet to the cathedral-like Grand Concourse. That was as close as he had gotten.
Eph eased open the door, his scope seeing into the total darkness beyond. He climbed two long flights of stairs, then went through another unlocked door into a long corridor. Thick steam pipes ran the length of it, still functioning, groaning with heat. By the time he reached the next door, he was dripping with sweat.
He slid a small silver knife from his backpack, needing to be careful here. The cement-walled emergency exit was no place to get cornered. Black-tinged groundwater had seeped into the floor, pollution from the sky having become a permanent part of the ecosystem. This section of the underground was once regularly patrolled by maintenance workers, rooting out the homeless, the curious, the vandals. Then the strigoi briefly assumed control of the underworld of the city, hiding, feeding, spreading. Now that the Master had reconfigured the planet’s atmosphere in order to free vampires from the threat of the sun’s virus-killing ultraviolet rays, they had risen from this labyrinthine netherworld and claimed the surface for themselves.
The last door was plastered with a white-and-red sign: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. Eph returned his blade and his night-vision scope to his backpack, then pushed the pressure bar, the alarm wires having been snipped long ago.
A foul breeze from the stringy black rain exhaled into his face. He pulled up his damp hood and started walking east on Forty-fifth Street. He watched his feet splashing on the sidewalk, walking as he was with his head down. Many of the wrecked or abandoned cars from the initial days remained shoved to the curbs, making most of the streets one-way paths for work vans or supply trucks operated by the vampires and the Stoneheart humans. Eph’s eyes remained low but vigilantly searched either side of the street. He had learned never to look around conspicuously; the city had too many windows, too many pairs of vampire eyes. If you looked suspicious, you were suspicious. Eph went out of his way to avoid any interaction with strigoi. On the streets, as everywhere, humans were second-class citizens, subject to search or any kind of abuse. A sort of creature apartheid existed. Eph could not risk exposure.
He hurried over to First Avenue, to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, quickly ducking down the ramp reserved for ambulances and hearses. He squeezed behind stretchers and a rolling wardrobe they had set there in order to obscure the basement entrance, and entered the unlocked door to the city morgue.
Inside, he stood a few moments in the dim silence, listening. This room, with its stainless steel autopsy tables and numerous sinks, was where the first group of passengers from doomed Regis Air Flight 753 had been brought two years before. Where Eph had first examined the needle-like breach in the necks of the seemingly dead passengers, exposing a puncture wound that extended to the common carotid artery—which they would soon discover had been caused by the vampires’ stingers. Where he had also first been shown the strange antemortem augmentation of the vestibular folds around the vocal cords, later determined to be the preliminary stage of the development of the creatures’ fleshy stingers. And where he had first witnessed the transformation of the victims’ blood from healthy red to oily white.
Also, just outside on the sidewalk was where Eph and Nora first encountered the elderly pawnbroker Abraham Setrakian. Everything Eph knew about the vampire breed—from the killing properties of silver and ultraviolet light, to the existence of the Ancients and their role in the shaping of human civilization since the earliest times, to the rogue Ancient known as the Master whose journey to the New World aboard Flight 753 marked the beginning of the end—he had learned from this tenacious old man.
The building had remained uninhabited since the takeover. The morgue was not part of the infrastructure of a city administered by vampires, because death was no longer the necessary end point of human existence. As such, the end-of-life rituals of mourning and corpse preparation and burial were no longer needed and rarely observed.
For Eph, this building was his unofficial base of operations. He started up the stairs to the upper floors, ready to hear it from Nora: how his despair over Zack’s absence was interfering with their resistance work. Dr. Nora Martinez had been Eph’s number two in the Canary Project at the CDC. In the midst of all the stress and chaos of the rise of the vampires, their long-simmering relationship had gone from professional to personal. Eph had attempted to deliver Nora and Zack to safety, out of the city, back when the trains were still running beneath Penn Station. But Eph’s worst fears were realized when Kelly, drawn to her Dear One, led a swarm of strigoi into the tunnels beneath the Hudson River, derailing the train and laying waste to the rest of the passengers—and Kelly attacked Nora and spirited his son away.
Zack’s capture—for which Eph in no way held Nora accountable—had nonetheless driven a wedge between them, just as it had driven a wedge between Eph and everything. Eph felt disconnected from himself. He felt fractured and fragmented and knew that this was all he had to offer Nora now.
Nora had her own concerns: chiefly her mother, Mariela Martinez, her mind crippled by Alzheimer’s disease. The OCME building was large enough that Nora’s mother could roam the upper floors, strapped into her wheelchair, creeping down the hallway by the grip socks on her feet, conversing with people no longer present or alive. A wretched existence, but, in reality, not so far removed from that of the rest of the surviving human race. Perhaps better: Mrs. Martinez’s mind had taken refuge in the past and thus could avoid the horror of the present.
The first sign Eph found that something was amiss was the overturned wheelchair, lying on its side near the door off the fourth-floor stairway, strap belts lying on the floor. Then the ammonia scent hit him, the telltale odor of vampire presence. Eph drew his sword, his pace quickening down the corridor, a sick feeling rising from his gut. The medical examiner’s building had limited electricity, but Eph could not use lamps or light fixtures that would be visible from the street, so he proceeded down the dim corridor in a defensive crouch, mindful of doors and corners and other potential hiding places.
He passed a fallen partition. A ransacked cubicle. An overturned chair. “Nora!” he called. An incautious act, but if there were still any strigoi present, he wanted to draw them out now.
On the floor in a corner office, he discovered Nora’s travel backpack. It had been ripped open, her clothes and personal items flung around the room. Her Luma lamp sat in the corner, plugged into its charger. Her clothes were one thing, but Eph knew that Nora would never go anywhere without her UV lamp, unless she had no choice. He did not see her weapon pack anywhere.
He picked up the handheld lamp, switching on the black light. It revealed swirling bursts of bright color on the carpet and against the side of the desk: vampire excrement stains.
Strigoi had marauded here; that was obvious. Eph tried to remain focused and calm. He thought he was alone, at least on this floor: no vampires, which was good, but no Nora, or her mother, which was devastating.
Had there been a fight? He tried to read the room, its swirling stains and overturned chair. He didn’t think so. He roamed the hall looking for more evidence of violence beyond property damage but found none. Combat would have been her last resort, and had she made a stand here, the building would certainly be under the control of vampires now. This, to Eph’s eye, looked more akin to a house raid.
While examining the desk, he found Nora’s weapon bag stowed beneath it, her sword still inside. So evidently she had been surprised. If there was no battle—no silver-to-vampire contact—then her chances of meeting a violent end decreased exponentially. The strigoi weren’t interested in victims. They were intent on filling their camps.
Had she been captured? It was a possibility, but Eph knew Nora, and she would never go without a battle—and he just didn’t see any evidence of that. Unless they had captured her mother first. Nora might have acquiesced then out of fear for Mrs. Martinez’s safety.
If so, it was unlikely that Nora would have been turned. The strigoi, under the Master’s command, were reluctant to add to their ranks: drinking a human’s blood and infecting them with the vampiric viral strain only created another vampire to feed. No, it was more likely that Nora would have been transported to a detention camp outside the city. From there, she could be assigned work or further disciplined. Not much was known about the camps; some of those who went in never reemerged. Mrs. Martinez, having lived well beyond her productivity years, would meet a more certain end.
Eph looked around, becoming frantic, trying to figure out what to do. This appeared to be a random incident—but was it? At times, Eph had to keep his distance from the others and carefully monitor his comings and goings from the OCME, because of Kelly’s tireless pursuit of him. His discovery could lead the Master right to the heart of their resistance. Had something gone wrong? Was Fet compromised as well? Had the Master somehow gotten onto their entire cell?
Eph went to the laptop computer on the desk, opening it. It was still powered on, and he struck the space bar to wake up the screen. Workstation computers in the ME’s building were hardwired to a still-functioning network server. The Internet was heavily damaged in spots and generally unreliable. One was more likely to receive an error message than a page load. Unrecognized and unauthorized Internet protocol addresses were particularly susceptible to worms and viruses, and many computers in the building had become either locked up due to hard-drive-damaging malware or slowed to an unusable crawl by corrupted operating systems. Mobile phone technology was no longer in existence, either for telecommunication or for Internet access. Why allow the human underclass access to a communications network capable of spanning the globe—something the vampires possessed telepathically?
Eph and the others operated under the assumption that all Internet activity was vampire-monitored. The page he was now looking at—that Nora had apparently abandoned suddenly, without time to shut down the hard drive—was some sort of personal message exchange, a two-party chat conducted in shorthand.
“NMart” was obviously Nora Martinez. Her partner in conversation, “VFet,” was Vasiliy Fet, the former New York City exterminator. Fet had joined their fight early, by way of an invasion of rats prompted by the arrival of the strigoi. He had proven himself invaluable to the cause, for both his vermin-killing techniques and his knowledge of the city, in particular the boroughs’ subterranean passageways. He had become as much of a disciple of the late Setrakian as Eph was, coming into his own as a New World vampire hunter. Currently, he was on a freighter somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, returning from Iceland on a very important errand.
This thread, full of Fet’s grammatical idiosyncrasies, had started the day before, and it was mainly about Eph. He read words he was never meant to see:
NMart: E not here—missed rendezvous. You were right. I shouldn’t have relied on him. Now all I can do is wait…
VFet: Don’t wait there. Keep moving. Return to Roosvlt.
NMart: Can’t—my mother is worse. Will try to stay another day at most. TRULY cannot take this anymore. He’s dangerous. He’s becoming a risk to us all. Just a matter of time before bitch-vamp Kelly catches up with him or he leads her back here.
VFet: I hear you. But w need him. Most keep hm close.
NMart: He goes out on his own. Doesn’t care about anything else.
VFet: He’s 2 important. 2 them. 2 the M. 2 us.
NMart: I know it… it’s just that I can’t trust him anymore. I don’t even know who he is…
VFet: We all just have to keep him from sinking all to the deep end. You especially. Keep him afloat. He dsn’t know where the book is. That’s our double blind. He can’t hurt us that way.
NMart: He’s at K’s house again. I know it. Raiding it for memories of Z. Like stealing from a dream.
And then:
NMart: You know I miss you. How much longer?
VFet: Returning now. Missing you too.
Eph shrugged off his weapon pack, resheathing his sword, and dropped down into the office chair.
He stared at the most recent exchange, reading it again and again, hearing Nora’s voice, then Fet’s Brooklyn accent.
Missing you too.
He felt weightless, reading it—as though the force of gravity had been removed from his body. And yet, here he sat, still.
He should have felt more anger. More righteous fury. Betrayal. A jealous frenzy.
And he did feel all these things. But not deeply. Not acutely. They were there, and he acknowledged them, but it amounted to… more of the same. His malaise was so overwhelming that no other flavor, no matter how sour, could change his emotional palate.
How had this happened? At times, over these past two years, Eph had consciously kept his distance from Nora. He had done so to protect her, to protect them all… or so he said to himself, justifying plain abandonment.
Still—he couldn’t understand it. He reread the other part. So he was a “risk.” He was “dangerous.” Unreliable. They seemed to think that they were carrying him. Part of him felt relief. Relief for Nora—Good for her—but most of him just throbbed with mounting rage. What was this? Was he jealous just because he couldn’t hold her anymore? God knew he was not exactly minding the store; was he angry because someone else had found his forgotten toy and now he wanted it back? He knew himself so little… Kelly’s mother used to tell him he was always ten minutes too late to all the major milestones of his life. Late for Zack’s birth, late for the wedding, late to save his marriage from falling apart. God knew he was late to save Zack or save the world, and now—now this…
Nora? With Fet?
She was gone. Why didn’t he do something before? Strangely, amid the pain and the sense of loss he also felt relief. He didn’t need to worry anymore—he didn’t need to compensate for his shortcomings, explain his absence, mollify Nora. But as that tenuous wave of relief was about to kick in, he turned around and caught himself in a mirror.
He looked older. Much older than he should have. And dirty, almost like a hobo. His hair was plastered against his sweaty forehead and his clothes were layered with months of grime. His eyes were sunk and his cheeks jutted out, pulling the taut, thin skin surrounding them. No wonder, he thought. No wonder.
He pulled himself back out of the chair in a daze. He walked down four flights of stairs and out of the medical examiner’s building through the pissing black rain to nearby Bellevue Hospital. He climbed in through a broken window and walked the dark and deserted halls, following signs for the emergency room. Bellevue’s ER was once a Level 1 trauma center, meaning it had housed a full range of specialists providing access to the best facilities.
As well as the best drugs.
He arrived at the nurses’ station and found the drug cabinet door torn off. The locked refrigerator had also been pried open and ransacked. No Percs, no Vikes, no Demerol. He pocketed some oxycodone and antianxiety meds in blister packs—self-diagnosing and self-medicating—tossing empty cartons over his shoulder. He popped two white oxys and dry-swallowed them—then froze.
He had been moving so quickly and making so much noise that he had not heard the bare feet approaching. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement from across the nurses’ station and stood.
Two strigoi, staring at him. Fully formed vampires, hairless and pale, unclothed. He saw the thickened arteries bulging through their necks, running down over their clavicles into their chests like throbbing tree roots. One had once been a male human (larger body) and the other had been a female (breasts shriveled and pale).
The other distinguishing trait of these matured vampires was their loose, floppy wattle. Disgusting, stretched-out flesh that hung like a turkey neck, pale red when in need of nourishment, flushing crimson after feeding. The wattles of these strigoi hung pale and scrotumlike, swaying with a turn of their heads. A sign of rank, and the mark of an experienced hunter.
Were these the same two that had accosted Nora and her mother or otherwise rousted them from the OCME? There was no way to confirm it, but something told Eph this was the case—which, if true, meant that Nora might have gotten away clean after all.
He saw what he thought was a glimmer of recognition in their otherwise blank, red eyes. Normally there was no spark or hint of a brain at work behind a vampire’s gaze—but Eph had seen this look before and knew that he had been recognized and identified. Their surrogate eyes had communicated their find to the Master, whose presence came flooding into their brains with the force of possession. The horde would be there in a matter of minutes.
“Doctor Goodweather…,” both the creatures said at the same time, their voices chirping in eerie synchrony. Their bodies rose like twin marionettes controlled by the same invisible string. The Master.
Eph observed, both fascinated and repulsed, how their blank stare gave way to the intelligence, the poise of the superior creature—undulating, snapping to attention, like a leather glove snapping into shape as the hand fills it with form and intention.
The pale, elongated faces of the creatures morphed as the will of the Master overtook the flaccid mouths and the vacant eyes…
“You look… quite tired…,” the twin marionettes said, their bodies moving in unison. “I think you should rest… don’t you think? Join us. Give in. I will procure for you. Anything you want…”
The monster was right: he was tired—oh, so very, very tired—and yes, he would’ve liked to give in. Can I? he thought. Please? Give in?
His eyes brimmed with tears and he felt his knees give—just a little—like a man about to sit down. “The people you love—the ones you miss—they live in my embrace…,” the twin messengers said, their message worded so carefully. So inviting, so ambiguous…
Eph’s hands trembled as he reached back over each shoulder, gripping the worn leather handles of his two long swords. He drew them out straight so as not to slice his weapon pack. Maybe it was the opioid kicking in, but something clicked deep inside his brain, something that made him associate these two monstrosities, female and male, with Nora and Fet. His lover and his trusted friend, now conspiring against him. It was as though they themselves had come upon Eph here, rummaging through the drug cabinet like a junkie, witnessing him at his lowest moment—for which they were directly responsible.
“No,” he said, renouncing the Master with a broken whimper, his voice breaking even in that single syllable. And rather than push his emotions aside, Eph brought them to the fore, molded them into rage.
“As you wish,” the Master said. “I will see you again… soon…”
And then, the will gave way to the hunters. Snorting, huffing, the beasts came back, leaving behind the poised, erect stance and landing on all fours, ready to circle their prey. Eph did not give the vampires a chance to flank him. He rushed straight at the male first, both swords at the ready. The vamp leaped away from him at the last moment—they were agile and fast—but not before Eph’s sword tip caught it across the side of its torso. The slash was deep enough to make the vampire land off-balance, the wound leaking white blood. Strigoi rarely felt any bodily pain, but they felt it when the weapon was silver. The creature twisted and gripped its side.
In that moment of hesitation and inattention, Eph spun and brought his other sword across at shoulder height. One slice removed the head from the neck and shoulders, severing it just beneath the jaw. The vampire’s arms went up in a reflex of self-protection before its trunk and limbs collapsed.
Eph turned again just as the female was in the air. It had vaulted the counter, springing at him with its twin taloned middle fingers poised to cut at his face—but Eph was just able to deflect its arms with his own as the vampire flew past, landing hard against the wall, slumping to the floor. Eph lost both his swords in the process. His hands were so weak. Oh, yes, yes, please—I want to give up.
The strigoi quickly sprang onto all fours, facing Eph from a crouch. Its eyes bore into him, surrogates of the Master, the evil presence that had taken everything from him. Eph’s rage flared anew. He swiftly produced his grappling hooks and braced for impact. The vampire charged and Eph went for it—the vampire wattle dangling beneath its chin made for a perfect target. He had done this move hundreds of times—like a worker in a fish plant scaling a big tuna. One hook connected with the throat behind the wattle, sinking quickly and jamming behind the cartilaginous tube that housed the larynx and launched the stinger. Pulling down on it—hard—he blocked the stinger and forced the creature to genuflect with a piglike squeal. The other hook connected to the eye socket, and Eph’s thumb jammed under the jaw, locking the mouth shut. One summer, a long, long time ago, his father had shown him that move when catching snakes on a small river up north. “Clamp the jaw,” he had said, “lock the mouth—so they can’t bite.” Not many snakes were poisonous but a lot of them had a nasty bite and enough bacteria in their mouth to cause a lot of pain. Turned out that Eph—city boy Eph—was good at catching snakes. A natural. He had even been able to show off one good day, catching a snake in the driveway at home when Zack was still a child. He felt superior—a hero. But that was a long time ago. A zillion years BC.
Now Eph, weak and infirm, was hooking up a powerful, undead creature so hot to the touch, all angry energy and thirst. He was not knee-deep in a cool California stream or climbing out of his minivan to catch a city snake. He was in real danger. He could feel his muscles give. His strength was fading. Yes… yes—I would like to give in…
And his weakness made him angry. And he thought of everything he had lost—Kelly, Nora, Zack, the world—and he yanked hard, with a primal scream, ripping the trachial tube and snapping the tense cartilage. The jaw snapped and dislocated under his grimy thumb at the very same time. A surge of blood and worms sprang forth and Eph danced backward, avoiding them studiously, weaving like a boxer out of the reach of his opponent.
The vampire sprang to its feet, sliding along the wall, howling, wattle and neck torn and flapping, gushing. Eph feigned a strike, the vamp retreating a few steps, wheezing and wailing, an awkward, wet little sound—almost like a duck call. He feinted again, and the vamp didn’t buy it at all this time. Eph had it lulled into a rhythm when the vamp stiffened, then ran off.
If Eph could ever put together a list of rules of engagement, near the top would have been Never follow a fleeing vampire. Nothing good could come from it. There was no strategic advantage to running down a strigoi. Its clairvoyant alert had already gone out. The vampires had developed coordinated attack strategies over the past two years. Running was either a stalling tactic or an outright ruse.
And yet, Eph, in his anger, did what he knew not to do. He picked up his swords and pursued it, down the hallway to a door marked STAIRS. Anger and a weird desire for proxy revenge made him hit the door and run up two flights. The female then left the stairwell, and Eph followed it out, the vampire loping down the corridor, Eph chasing after it with a long sword in each hand. The vamp turned right and then left, entering another stairwell, racing up one flight.
As Eph tired, common sense returned. He saw the female at the far end of the corridor and sensed that it had slowed, that it was waiting for him, making sure that Eph could see it rounding the corner.
He stopped. It couldn’t be a trap. He had just shown up in the hospital; there was no time. So the only other reason for the vampire to lead him on what amounted to a wild goose chase was…
Eph walked into the nearest patient room, crossing to the windows. The glass was streaked with oily black rain, the city below obscured by ripples of dirty water washing down the glass. Eph strained to see the streets, his forehead against the glass.
He saw dark forms, identifiable as bodies, racing out onto the sidewalks from facing buildings, flooding the street below. More and more, from around corners and out of doors, like firemen answering a six-alarm call, moving to the hospital entrance.
Eph backed away. The psychic call had indeed gone out. One of the architects of the human resistance, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, was trapped inside Bellevue Hospital.
Twenty-eighth Street Subway
NORA STOOD AT the corner of Park and Twenty-eighth, rain rapping on the hood of her slicker. She knew she needed to keep moving, but she also needed to know she was not being followed. Otherwise, escaping into the subway system would instead be like walking into a trap.
Vampires had eyes all over the city. She had to appear like any other human on her way to work or home. The problem with that was her mother.
“I told you to call the landlord!” said her mother, pulling back her hood to feel the rain on her face.
“Mama,” said Nora, pushing the hood back over her head.
“Fix this broken shower!”
“Shhh! Quiet!”
Nora had to keep moving. Hard as it was for her mother, walking kept her quiet. Nora gripped her around her lower back, holding her close as she stepped to the curb, just as an army truck approached the intersection. Nora stepped back again, head lowered, watching the vehicle pass. The truck was driven by a strigoi. Nora held her mother tightly, stopping her from wandering into the street.
“When I see that landlord, he’s going to be sorry he crossed us.”
Thank goodness for the rain. Because rain meant raincoats, and raincoats meant hoods. The old and infirm had been rounded up long ago. The unproductive had no place in the new society. Nora would never take a risk such as this—venturing out in public with her mother—were there any other choice.
“Mama, can we play the quiet game again?”
“I’m tired of all that. This goddamn leaky ceiling.”
“Who can be quietest the longest? Me or you?”
Nora started her across the street. Ahead, hanging from the pole that supported the street sign and the traffic signal, hung a dead body. Exhibition corpses were commonplace, especially along Park Avenue. A squirrel on the dead man’s slumped shoulder was battling two pigeons for rights to the corpse’s cheeks.
Nora would have steered her mother away from the sight, but her mother didn’t even look up. They turned and started down the slick stairs into the subway station, the steps oily from the filthy rain. Once underground, Nora’s mother again tried to remove her hood, which Nora quickly replaced, scolding her.
The turnstiles were gone. One old MetroCard machine remained for no reason. But the IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING signs remained. Nora caught a break: the only two vampires were at the other end of the entrance, not even looking her way. She walked her mother down to the uptown platform, hoping a 4 5 6 train would arrive quickly. She was holding down her mother’s arms and trying to make the embrace appear natural.
Commuters stood around them as they had in the old days. Some read books. A few listened to music on portable music players. All that was missing were the phones and the newspapers.
On one of the poles people leaned against was an old police flier featuring Eph’s face: a copy of his old work ID photograph. Nora closed her eyes, cursing him silently. It was he whom they had been waiting for at the morgue. Nora didn’t like it there, not because she was squeamish—she was anything but—but because it was too open. Gus—the former gangbanger who, following a life-changing encounter with Setrakian, had become a trusted comrade in arms—had carved out space for himself underground. Fet had Roosevelt Island—where she was headed now.
Typical Eph. A genius, and a good man, but always a few minutes behind. Always rushing to catch up at the end.
Because of him she had stayed there that extra day. Out of misplaced loyalty—and, yes, maybe guilt—she wanted to connect with him, to check up on him, to make sure he was okay. The strigoi had entered the morgue at street level; Nora had been typing into one of the computers when she heard the glass break. She had just enough time to find her mother, asleep in her wheelchair. Nora could have killed the vampires, but doing so would have given away her position, and the location of Eph’s hideout, to the Master. And unlike Eph, she was too considerate to risk betraying their alliance.
Betraying it to the Master, that is. She had already betrayed Eph with Fet. Betrayed him within their alliance. Which she felt particularly guilty about, but again, Eph was always a few minutes late. This proved it. She had been so patient with him—too patient, especially with his drinking—and now she was living fully for herself.
And her mother. She felt the old woman pulling at her grip and opened her eyes.
“There’s a hair in my face,” said her mother, trying to swipe it away.
Nora examined her quickly. Nothing. But she pretended to see a single strand and released her mother’s arm momentarily to pluck it away. “Got it,” she said. “All set now.”
But she could tell from her mother’s fidgeting that her ploy had not worked. Her mother tried blowing at it. “Tickles. Let me go!”
Nora felt a head or two turn. She released her mother’s arm. The old woman brushed at her face, then tried to remove her hood.
Nora forced it back on over her head, but not before a shock of unkempt silver-gray was briefly visible.
She heard someone gasp near her. Nora fought the urge to look, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. She heard whispering, or else imagined she did.
She leaned toward the yellow line, hoping to see train headlights.
“There he is!” shouted her mother. “Rodrigo! I see you. Don’t pretend!”
She was yelling the name of their landlord from when Nora was a child. A rail-thin man, Nora recalled, with a great mop of black hair and hips so narrow he carried his tool belt rather than wore it. The man she was calling to now—dark-haired, but no double for the Rodrigo of thirty years ago—looked over attentively.
Nora turned her mother away, trying to shush her. But her mother twisted back around, her hood slipping back from her face as she tried to call to the phantom landlord.
“Mama,” implored Nora. “Please. Look at me. Silence.”
“He’s always there to flirt with me, but when there is work to be done…”
Nora wanted to clamp her hand over her mother’s mouth. She fixed the hood and walked her away down the platform, only drawing more attention in the process. “Mama, please. We will be discovered.”
“Lazy bastard, he is!”
Even if her mother was mistaken for a drunk, there would be trouble. Alcohol was prohibited, both because it affected the blood and because it promoted antisocial behavior.
Nora turned, thinking about fleeing the station—and saw headlights brightening the tunnel. “Mama, our train. Shhhh. Here we go.”
It pulled in. Nora waited at the first car. A few passengers disembarked before Nora rushed her mother inside, finding a pair of seats together. The 6 train would get them to Fifty-ninth Street in a matter of minutes. She fixed her mother’s hood back on her head and waited for the doors to close.
Nora noticed that no one else sat near them. She looked down the length of the car in time to see the other entering passengers look quickly away. Then she looked out onto the platform and saw a young couple out standing with two Transit Authority cops—humans—pointing at the first subway car. Pointing at Nora.
Close the doors, she pled silently.
And they did. With the same random efficiency the New York transit system had always exhibited, the doors slid shut. Nora waited for the familiar lurch, looking forward to getting back over to vampire-free Roosevelt Island and waiting there for Fet’s return.
But the car did not start forward. She waited for it, one eye on her fellow passengers at the other end of the car, the other on the transit cops walking toward the car. Behind them now were the two vampires, red eyes fixed on Nora. Behind them stood the concerned couple who had pointed out Nora and her mother.
The couple had thought they were doing the right thing, following the new laws. Or perhaps they were spiteful; everyone else had to abandon their elders to the master race.
The doors opened and the human transit cops boarded first. Even if she could murder two of her own kind and release the two strigoi and escape from the underground station, she would have to do so alone. There was no way she could do so without sacrificing her mother, either to capture or to death.
One of the cops reached over and pulled back Nora’s mother’s hood, revealing her head. “Ladies,” he said, “you have to come with us.” When Nora did not stand right away, he placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed tightly. “Now.”
Bellevue Hospital
EPH BACKED AWAY from the window and the vampires converging on Bellevue Hospital on the streets below. He had screwed up… Dread burned at the pit of his stomach. It was all lost.
His first instinct was to keep rising, to buy time by heading to the roof—but that was an obvious dead end. The only advantage to being on the roof was that he could throw himself off of it, were the choice death or vampire afterlife.
Going straight down meant fighting his way through them. That would be like running into a swarm of killer bees: he was almost certain to get stung at least once, and once was all it took.
So, running was not an option. Nor was making a suicidal final stand. But he had spent enough time in hospitals to consider this his home turf. The advantage was his; he just had to find it.
He hurried past the patient elevators, then stopped, doubling back, stopping before the gas control panel. An emergency shutoff for the entire floor. He cracked open the plastic shield and made sure the cutoff was open, then stabbed at the fixture until he heard a pronounced hiss.
He ran to the stairwell, charging up one flight, racing to that floor’s gas control panel, and repeating the same damage. Then right back into the stairs—and this time he could hear the bloodsuckers charging up the lower flights. No outcry, because they had no voice. Only the slapping of dead, bare feet as they climbed.
He risked one more floor, making quick work of the access panel there. He pressed the nearby elevator button but did not wait for the car, instead running off in search of the service elevators, the ones the orderlies used to transport supply carts and bedridden patients. He located the bank of elevators and pressed the button, waiting for one to board.
The adrenaline of survival and the chase put a charge into his blood that was as sweet as any artificial stimulant he could find. This, he realized, was the high he sought from pharmaceuticals. Over the course of so many life-or-death battles, he had messed up his pleasure receptors. Too many highs and too many lows.
The elevator door opened and he pressed “B” for basement. Signs admonished him on the importance of patient confidentiality and clean hands. A child smiled at him from a grimy poster. Sucking on a lollipop and giving him a wink and a thumbs-up. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE A-OKAY said the printed moron. On the poster were timetables and dates for a pediatrics fair taking place a million years ago. Eph returned one sword to the bag on his back, watching the floor numbers go down. The elevator jerked once, and the car darkened and stopped between floors—stuck. A nightmare scenario, but then moments later it lurched and continued downward. Like everything else that depended on regular upkeep, these mechanical conveyances were not to be trusted—that is, if you had a choice.
The door dinged and opened finally, Eph exiting into the service wing of the hospital basement. Stretchers with bare mattresses were bunched up against the wall like supermarket carts awaiting customers. A giant canvas laundry cart sat beneath the open end of a wall chute.
In the corner, on a handful of long-handled dollies, stood a dozen or so green-painted oxygen tanks. Eph worked as fast as his fatigued body allowed, hustling the tanks into each of the three elevators, four tanks to a car. He pulled off their metal nose caps and used them to hammer at the feed nozzles until he heard the reassuring hiss of escaping gas. He pressed the buttons for the top floor, and all three doors closed.
He pulled a half-full can of charcoal lighter fluid from inside his pack. His box of all-weather matches was somewhere inside his coat pocket. With trembling hands, he tipped over the canvas laundry cart, emptying the crusty linen in front of the three elevators, then squeezed the lighter fluid can with wicked glee, pissing flammable liquid all over the heap of cotton. He struck a pair of matches and dropped them onto the pile, which ignited with a hot whumph. Eph pressed the call button for all three elevator cars—operated individually from the service basement—and then ran like hell, trying to find a way out.
Near a barred exit door, he saw a large control panel of colored pipes. He freed a fire axe from its glass cabinet—it felt so heavy, so big. Repeatedly, he chopped at the gaskets of all three feeds, using more the ax’s weight than his own fading strength, until gas came whistling out. He pushed through the door and found himself in the spitting rain, standing in a muddy sitting area of park benches and cracked walkways overlooking Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the rain-swept East River. And for some reason all he could think of was a line from an old movie, Young Frankenstein—“It could be worse. It could be raining.” He chuckled. He had seen that movie with Zack. For weeks they had quoted punch lines from it to each other. “There wolf… there castle.”
He was behind the hospital. No time to run for the street. He instead rushed across the small park, needing to put as much space between him and the building as possible.
As he reached the far edge, he saw more vamps coming up the high wall from Roosevelt Drive. More assassins dispatched by the Master, their high-metabolism bodies steaming in the rain.
Eph ran at them, waiting for the building behind him to explode and collapse at any moment. He kicked back the first few, forcing them off the wall down to the parkway below—where they landed on their hands and feet, righting themselves immediately, like unkillables in a video game. Eph ran along the top edge of the wall, toward the NYU Medical Center buildings, trying to get away from Bellevue. Before him, a long-taloned vamp hand gripped the top of the wall, a bald, red-eyed face appearing. Eph dropped to his knee, jabbing the end of his sword blade into the vamp’s open mouth, the point reaching the back of its hot throat. But he did not run it through, did not destroy it. The silver blade burned it, keeping its jaw from unhinging and unleashing its stinger.
The vampire could not move. Its red-rimmed eyes glared at Eph in confusion and pain.
Eph said, “Do you see me?”
The vamp’s eyes showed no reaction. Eph was addressing not it but the Master, watching through this creature.
“Do you see this?”
He turned the sword, forcing the vamp’s perspective toward Bellevue. Other creatures were scaling the wall, and some were already running out of the hospital, alerted to Eph’s escape. He had only moments. He feared that his sabotage had failed, that the leaking gas had instead found a safe way out of the hospital building.
Eph got back in the vamp’s face as though it were the Master’s itself.
“Give me back my son!”
He had just finished the last word as the building erupted behind him, throwing Eph forward, his sword piercing the back of the vampire’s throat and exiting its neck. Eph tumbled off the wall, gripping the handle of his sword, the blade sliding out of the vampire’s face as together they twisted and fell.
Eph landed on the roof of an abandoned car, one of many lining the inside lane of the roadway. The vampire slammed into the road next to him.
Eph’s hip took the brunt of the impact. Over the ringing in his ears, Eph heard a high whistling scream and looked up into the black rain. He watched something like a missile shoot out from high above, arc overhead, and splash down into the river. One of the oxygen tanks.
Mortar-heavy bricks thumped down onto the road. Shards of glass fell like jewels in the rain, shattering on the road. Eph covered his head with his coat as he slid down off the dented roof, ignoring the pain in his side.
Only as he stood up did he notice two shards of glass, lodged firmly in his calf. He yanked them out. Blood poured from the wounds. He heard a wet, excited squeal…
A few yards away, the vamp lay on its back, dazed, white blood gurgling from the perforation in the back of its neck—but still excited and hungry. Eph’s blood was its call for dinner.
Eph got in its face, gripping its broken, dislodged chin, and saw its red eyes focus on him, then on the silver point of his blade.
“I want my son, you motherfucker!” yelled Eph.
He then released the strigoi with a vicious chop to the throat, severing its head and its communication with the Master.
Limping, bleeding, he got up again. “Zack…,” he murmured. “Where are you…?”
Then he started his long journey back home.
Central Park
BELVEDERE CASTLE, SET on the northern end of the Lake in Central Park along the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse Road, was a high Victorian Gothic and Romanesque “folly” constructed in 1869 by Jacob Wray Mould and Calvert Vaux, the original designers of the park. All Zachary Goodweather knew was that it looked spooky and cool, and that was what had always drawn him to it: this medieval (to his mind) castle in the center of the park in the center of the city. As a child, he used to make up tales about the castle, how it was in fact a giant fortress constructed by tiny trolls for the original architect of the city, a dark lord named Belvedere who dwelled in catacombs deep beneath the castle rock, haunting the dark citadel by night as he tended to his creatures throughout the park.
This was back when Zack still had to resort to fantasy for tales of the supernatural and the grotesque. When he needed to daydream in order to escape from the boredom of the modern world.
Now his daydreams were real. His fantasies were attainable. His wishes were requests, his desires realized.
He stood inside the open doorway to the castle, a young man now, watching black rain pummel the park. It slapped the overflowing Turtle Pond, once an algae-rich pool of shimmering green, now a muddy black hole. The sky above was ominously overcast, which was to say, normal. No blue in the sky meant no blue in the water. For two hours a day, some ambient light seeped through the tumultuous cloud cover, enough so that visibility improved to a point where he could see the rooftops of the city around him and the Dagobah-like swamp that the park had become. The solar-powered park lamps could not soak up enough juice in that time to illuminate the twenty-two hours of darkness, their light fading soon after the vampires returned from their retreat beneath ground and into the shadows.
Zack had grown—and grown strong—in this past year; his voice had started changing a few months ago, his jawline becoming defined and his torso elongating seemingly overnight. His strong legs carried him up, climbing the near staircase, a skinny iron spiral leading to the Henry Luce Nature Observatory on the second floor. Along the walls and beneath glass tables remained displays of animal skeletons, bird feathers, and papier-mâché birds set in plywood trees. Central Park had once been one of the richest bird-watching areas in the United States, but the climate change had ended that, probably forever. In the first weeks following the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions triggered by nuclear plant meltdowns and warhead detonations, the dark sky had hung thick with birds. Shrieks and calls all night. Mass bird deaths, winged corpses falling from the sky along with heavy black hail. As chaotic and desperate in the air as it was for humans on the ground. Now there were no longer any warmer southern skies to migrate to. For days, the ground had been literally covered with flapping, blackened wings. Rats feasted on the fallen voraciously. Agonized chirping and hooting punctuated the rhythm of the falling hail.
But now, the park was still and quiet when there was no rain, its lakes empty of waterfowl. A few grimy bones and feather strands melded in the mulch and the mud covering the soil and pavement. Ragged, mangy squirrels occasionally darted up trees, but their population in the park was way down. Zack looked out through one of the telescopes—he had jammed a quarter-sized stone into the pay slot so that the telescope operated without money—and his field of vision disappeared in the fog and the murky rain.
The castle had been home to a functioning meteorological station before the vampires came. Most of the equipment remained on the peaked tower roof, as well as inside the fenced compound south of the castle. New York City radio stations used to give the weather with, “The temperature in Central Park is… ,” and the number they called was a reading taken from the turret observatory. It was July now, maybe August, what used to be known as the “dog days” of summer, and the highest temperature reading Zack had witnessed during one particularly balmy night was sixty-one degrees Fahrenheit, sixteen degrees Celsius.
August was Zack’s birth month. There was a two-year-old calendar in the back office, and he wished that he had thought to keep track of the passing days more carefully. Was he thirteen years old yet? He felt that he was. He decided that yes, he was. Officially a teenager.
Zack could still—barely—remember the time his father had taken him to the Central Park Zoo one sunny afternoon. They had visited this very nature exhibit inside the castle, then ate Italian ices out on the stone wall overlooking the meteorological equipment. Zack remembered confiding in his father about how kids in school sometimes made wisecracks about his last name, Goodweather, saying that Zack was going to be a weatherman when he grew up.
“What are you going to be?” asked his dad.
“A zookeeper,” Zack had answered. “And probably a motocross racer.”
“Sounds good,” said his dad, and they threw their empty paper cups into the recycling bin before moving on to an afternoon matinee. And, at the end of that day, after a perfect afternoon, father and son had vowed to repeat the excursion. But they never did. Like so many promises in the Zack-Eph story, this one went unfulfilled.
Remembering that was like recalling a dream now—if it had ever existed at all. His dad was long gone, dead along with Professor Setrakian and the rest. Once in a great while, he would hear an explosion somewhere in the city or see a thick plume of smoke or dust rising into the rain and wonder. There had to be some humans still resisting the inevitable. It made Zack think of the raccoons that pestered his family one Christmas vacation, raiding their garbage no matter what Dad did to secure it. This was like that, he supposed. A nuisance, but little more.
Zack left the musty exhibit and went back down the stairs. The Master had created a room for him that Zack had modeled on his old bedroom at home. Except that his old bedroom did not have a wall-sized video display screen taken from the Times Square ESPN Zone. Or a Pepsi machine, or entire store racks of comic books. Zack kicked a game controller he had left on the floor, dropping down into one of the luxe leather chairs from Yankee Stadium, the thousand-dollar seats behind home plate. Occasionally, kids were brought in for matches, or he played them online on a dedicated server, but Zack almost always won. Everybody else was out of practice. Domination could get boring, especially when there were no new games being produced.
At first, being at the castle was terrifying. He had heard all the stories about the Master. He kept waiting to be turned into a vampire, like his mom, but it never happened. Why? He had never been given a reason, nor had he asked for one. He was a guest there and, as the only human, almost like a celebrity. In the two years since Zack had become the Master’s guest, no other nonvampire had been admitted to Belvedere Castle or anywhere near the premises. What had at first seemed like a kidnapping instead came to seem, gradually, over time, like selection. Like a calling. As though a special place had been reserved for him in this new world.
Over all others, Zack had been chosen. For what, he did not know. All he knew was that the being that had delivered him to this point of privilege was the absolute ruler of the new dominion. And, for some reason, he wanted Zack at his side.
The stories Zack had been told—of a fearsome giant, a ruthless killer, and evil incarnate—were obvious exaggerations. First of all, the Master was of average height for an adult. For an ancient being, it appeared almost youthful. Its black eyes were piercing, such that Zack could certainly see the potential for horror if someone fell into disfavor with it. But behind them—for one so fortunate to view them directly, as Zack had been—was a depth and a darkness that transcended humanity, a wisdom that reached back through time, an intelligence connected to a higher realm. The Master was a leader, commanding a vast clan of vampires throughout the city and the world, an army of beings answering its telepathic call from this castle throne in the swampy center of New York City.
The Master was a being possessed of actual magic. Diabolical magic, yes, but the only true magic Zack had ever witnessed. Good and evil were malleable terms now. The world had changed. Night was day. Down was the new up. Here, in the Master, was proof of a higher being. A superhuman. A divinity. His power was extraordinary.
Take Zack’s asthma. The air quality in the new climate was extremely poor, due to stagnancy, elevated ozone readings, and the recirculation of particulate matter. With the thick cloud cover pressing down over everything like an unwashed blanket, weather patterns suffered, and ocean breezes did little to refresh the city’s airflow. Mold grew and spores flew.
Yet, Zack was fine. Better than fine: his lungs were clear, and he breathed without wheezing or gasping. In fact, he hadn’t had anything resembling an asthma attack in all the time he had been with the Master. It had been two years since he had used an inhaler, because he did not need one anymore.
His respiratory system was fully dependent upon one substance even more magically effective than albuterol or prednisone. A fine, white droplet of the Master’s blood—administered orally, once weekly, from the Master’s pricked finger onto Zack’s waiting tongue—cleared Zack’s lungs, allowing him to breathe free.
What had seemed weird and disgusting at first now came as a gift: the milky-white blood with its faint electrical charge and a taste of copper and hot camphor. Bitter medicine, but the effect was nothing short of miraculous. Any asthma sufferer would give just about anything never to feel the smothering panic of an asthma attack again.
This blood absorption did not make Zack a vampire. The Master prevented any of the blood worms from reaching Zack’s tongue. The Master’s only desire was to see Zack healthy and comfortable. And yet the true source of Zack’s affinity and awe for the Master was not the power the Master exercised, but rather the power the Master conferred. Zack was evidently special in some way. He was different, exalted among humans. The Master had singled him out for attention. The Master had, for lack of a better term, befriended him.
Like the zoo. When Zack heard that the Master was going to close it down forever, he protested. The Master offered to spare it, to turn the entire zoo over to Zack, but on one condition: that Zack had to take care of it. Had to feed the animals and clean the cages, all by himself. Zack had jumped at the chance, and the Central Park Zoo became his. Just like that. (He was offered the carousel too, but carousels were for babies; he had helped them tear it down.) The Master could grant wishes like a genie.
Of course, Zack didn’t realize how much work it was going to be, but he kept at it as best he could. The changed atmosphere claimed some of the animals quickly, including the red panda and most of the birds, making his job easier. Still, with no one to prod him along, he allowed the intervals between feeding times to grow and grow. It fascinated him how some of the animals turned on one another, both the mammals and the reptiles. The great snow leopard was Zack’s favorite and the animal he feared most. So the leopard was fed most regularly: at first, thick slabs of fresh meat arriving by truck every other day. Then one day, a live goat. Zack led it into the cage and watched from behind a tree as the leopard stalked its prey. Then a sheep. Then a baby deer. But over time, the zoo fell deep into disrepair, the cages fouled with animal waste that Zack grew tired of cleaning. After many months he came to dread the zoo, and more and more he ignored his responsibilities. At night sometimes he heard the other animals cry out, but never the snow leopard.
After the better part of a year, Zack went to the Master and complained that the work was too much for him.
It will be abandoned, then. And the animals destroyed.
“I don’t want them destroyed. I just… don’t want to take care of them anymore. You could have any of your kind do it, and they would never complain.”
You want me to keep it open just for your enjoyment only.
“Yes.” Zack had asked for more extravagant things and always received them. “Why not?”
On one condition.
“Okay.”
I have watched you with the leopard.
“You have?”
Watched you feed it animals to stalk and devour. Its agility and beauty attracts you. But its power frightens you.
“I guess.”
I have also watched you allow other animals to starve.
Zack began to protest. “There are too many to take care of—”
I have watched you pit them against one another. It is natural enough, your curiosity. Watching how lesser species react under stress. Fascinating, isn’t it? Watching them fight for survival…
Zack did not know if he should admit to this.
The animals are yours to do with what you wish. That includes the leopard. You control its habitat and its feeding schedule. You should not fear it.
“Well… I don’t. Not really.”
Then… why don’t you kill it?
“What?”
Have you never thought about what it would be like, to kill such an animal?
“Kill it? Kill the leopard?”
You’ve grown bored with zoo-keeping because it is artificial, unnatural. Your instincts are correct, but your method is wrong. You want to own these primitive creatures. But they are not meant to be kept. Too much power. Too much pride. There is only one way to truly possess a wild animal. To make it your own.
“To kill it.”
Prove yourself equal to this task, and I will reward you by seeing to it that your zoo remains open and the animals fed and cared for, while relieving you of your duties there.
“I… I can’t.”
Because it is beautiful or because you fear it?
“Just… because.”
What is the one thing I have refused you? The one thing you asked for that I declined to allow?
“A loaded gun.”
I will see to it that a rifle is maintained for your use within the confines of the zoo. The decision is yours… I want you to take a side…
So Zack went to the zoo the next day, just to hold the loaded weapon. He found it on an umbrella table inside the entrance, brand-new, small sized, with a satin walnut stock and a recoil pad, and a scope on top. It only weighed about seven pounds. He carefully carried the weapon around his zoo, sighting various targets. He wanted to shoot but wasn’t sure how many rounds it held. It was a bolt-action rifle, but he wasn’t 100 percent certain he could reload it, even if he could get more ammunition. He aimed for a sign that said RESTROOMS and fingered the trigger, not really squeezing, and the weapon jumped in his hands. The rifle butt slammed into his shoulder, the recoil shoving him backward. The report was a loud crack. He gasped and saw a wisp of smoke coming out of the muzzle. He looked at the sign and saw a hole punched through one of the O’s.
Zack practiced his aim for the next several days, utilizing the exquisite, whimsical bronze animals in the Delacorte clock. The clock still played music every half hour. As the figures moved along their circular track, Zack aimed at a hippopotamus playing the violin. He missed his first two shots entirely, and the third one grazed the goat playing the pipes. Frustrated, Zack reloaded and waited for the next go-around, sitting on a nearby bench as the distant sirens lulled him into a nap. The bells woke him thirty minutes later. This time he aimed ahead of his target rather than trying to track with it as it moved. Three shots at the hippo, and he distinctly heard one sharp ricochet off the bronze figure. Two days later, the goat had lost the tip of one of its two pipes, and the penguin had lost part of a drumstick. Zack was able to hit the figures now with speed and accuracy. He felt ready.
The leopard habitat consisted of a waterfall and a birch and bamboo forest, all contained within a high tent of stainless steel woven mesh. The terrain inside was steep, with tunnel-like tubes carved into the slope, leading to the windowed viewing area.
The snow leopard stood on a rock and looked at Zack, associating the boy’s appearance with feeding time. The black rain had soiled her coat, but the animal still possessed a regal air. At four feet in length, she could leap forty or fifty feet if motivated, as when going after prey.
She stepped off the rock, prowling in a circle. The rifle report had antagonized her. Why did the Master want Zack to kill it? What purpose would it serve? It seemed like a sacrifice, as though Zack were being asked to execute the bravest animal in order that the others might survive.
He was shocked when the leopard came bounding toward the steel mesh separating them, baring her teeth. She was hungry and disappointed that she did not smell any food, as well as alarmed by the rifle shot—though that was not at all what it seemed like to Zack. He jumped back before reasserting himself, pointing the rifle at the snow leopard, answering her low, intimidating growl. She walked in a tight circle, never taking her eyes off him. She was voracious, and Zack realized that she would go through meal after meal and that, if the food ever ran out, she would feast on the hand that fed her without a moment’s justification. She would take if she needed to take. She would attack.
The Master was right. He was afraid of the leopard, and rightly so. But which one was the keeper and which one the kept? Didn’t she have Zack working for her, feeding her regularly over these many months? He was her pet as much as she was his. And suddenly, with the rifle in his hand, that arrangement didn’t feel right.
He hated her arrogance, her will. He walked around the enclosure, the snow leopard following him on the other side of the mesh. Zack entered the ZOO EMPLOYEES ONLY feeding area, looking out through the small window over the door through which he dropped the leopard’s meat or released livestock. Zack’s deep breathing seemed to fill the entire room. He ducked through the top-hinged door, which slammed shut behind him.
He had never been inside the leopard’s pen before. He looked up at the high tent overhead. A number of different-sized bones were scattered over the ground before him, remnants of past meals.
He had a grand fantasy of striding out into the small wood and tracking the cat, looking her in her eyes before deciding whether or not to pull the trigger. But the noise of the closing door was the equivalent of ringing the dinner bell, and at once the snow leopard came slinking around a boulder strategically set to shield the leopard’s feeding from zoo visitors.
The leopard stopped short, surprised to see Zack inside there. For once there was no steel mesh between them. She lowered her head as though trying to understand this strange turn of events, and Zack saw that he had made a terrible mistake. He brought the rifle to his shoulder without aiming it and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled it again. Nothing.
He reached for the bolt handle and yanked it back and slid it forward. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped in his hands. He worked the bolt again, frantically, and squeezed the trigger, and the report was the only thing that reached his ringing ears. He worked the bolt again, and squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped. Another time, and the rifle clicked empty. Again, and still empty.
He realized only then that the snow leopard was lying on its side before him. He went to the animal, seeing the red bloodstains spreading over its coat. The animal’s eyes were closed, its powerful limbs still.
Zack climbed up on the boulder and sat there with the empty rifle on his lap. Overcome with emotions, he shuddered and cried. He felt at once triumphant and lost. He looked out at the zoo from inside the pen. It had begun to rain.
Things began to change for Zack after that. His rifle only held four rounds, and for a while he returned to his zoo each day for target practice: more signs, benches, branches. He began to take more risks. He rode a dirt bike along the old jogging routes in the park, around and around the Great Lawn, riding the bike through the empty streets of Central Park, past the shriveled remains of hanging corpses or the ashes of funerary pyres. When he rode at night, he liked to turn the bike’s headlight off. It was exciting, magical—an adventure. Protected by the Master, he felt no fear.
But what he did feel, still, was the presence of his mother. Their bond, which had felt strong even after her turning, had faded over time. The creature that had once been Kelly Goodweather now barely resembled the human woman who had been his mother. Her scalp was dirty, hairless, her lips thin and lacking even a hint of pink. The soft cartilage of her nose and ears had collapsed into mere vestigial lumps. Loose, ragged flesh hung from her neck, and an incipient, crimson wattle, undulating when she turned her head. Her chest was flat, her breasts shriveled, her arms and legs caked with a grime so thick the driving rain could not wash it away. Her eyes were orbs of black floating on beds of dark red, essentially lifeless… except for sometimes, rarely, perhaps only in Zack’s imagination now, when he saw what he thought might be a glimmer of recognition reflective of the mother she once was. It wasn’t so much an emotion or expression, but rather the way a certain shadow fell across her face, in a manner more obscuring of her vampire nature than revealing of her former human self. Fleeting moments, growing more rare with time—but they were enough. More psychologically than physically, his mother remained on the periphery of his new life.
Bored, Zack pulled the plunger on his vending machine, and a Milky Way bar dropped to the bottom drawer. He ate it as he went back up to the first floor, then outside, looking for some trouble to get into. As though on cue, Zack’s mother came scrabbling up the craggy rock face that was the castle’s foundation. She did so with feline agility, scaling the wet schist seemingly without exertion, her bare feet and talon-aided hands moving from purchase to purchase as though she had ascended that very path one thousand times before. At the top, she vaulted easily onto the walkway, two spiderlike feelers following behind her, loping back and forth on all fours.
As she neared Zack, standing in the doorway just out of the rain, he saw that her neck wattle was flush, engorged and red even through the accumulated dirt and filth. It meant that she had recently fed.
“Had a nice dinner out, Mom?” he asked, revolted. The scarecrow that had once been his mother stared at him with empty eyes. Every time he saw her, he felt the exact same contradictory impulses: repulsion and love. She followed him around for hours at a time, occasionally keeping her distance like a watchful wolf. He had, once, been moved to caress her hair and afterward had cried silently.
She entered the castle without a glance at Zack’s face. Her wet footprints and the muck tracked in by the feelers’ hands and feet added to the grunge coating the stone floor. Zack looked at her and, for a fleeting moment—though distorted by vampiric mutation—saw his mother’s face emerge. But, just as immediately, the illusion was broken, the memory soiled by this ever-present monster that he could not help but love. Everybody else he ever had in his life was gone. This was all Zack had left: a broken doll to keep him company.
Zack felt a warmth fill the breezy castle, as though left by a being in swift motion. The Master had returned, a slight murmur entering Zack’s head. He watched his mother ascend the stairs to the upper floors and followed her, wanting to see what the commotion was about.
The Master
THE MASTER HAD once understood the voice of God. It once held it within itself, and in a way, it retained a pale imitation of that state of grace. It was, after all, a being of one mind and many eyes, seeing all at once, processing it all, experiencing the many voices of its subjects. And like God’s, the Master’s voice was a concert of flow and contradiction—it carried the breeze and the hurricane, the lull and the thunder, rising and fading with dusk and dawn…
But the scale of God’s voice encompassed it all—not earth, not the continents, but the whole world. And the Master could only witness it but no longer could make sense of it as it was able to once upon a time in the origin of it all.
This is, it thought, for the millionth time, what it is to fall from grace…
And yet, there the Master stood: monitoring the planet through the observations of its brood. Multiple sources of input, one central intelligence. The Master’s mind casting a net of surveillance over the globe. Squeezing planet Earth in a fist of a thousand fingers.
Goodweather had just released seventeen serfs in the explosion of the hospital building. Seventeen lost, their number soon to be replaced; the arithmetic of infection was of paramount importance to the Master.
The feelers remained out searching the surrounding blocks for the fugitive doctor, seeking his psychic scent. Thus far, nothing. The Master’s ultimate victory was assured, the great chess match all but over, except that its opponent obstinately refused to concede defeat—leaving to the Master the drudgery of chasing the last remaining piece around the board.
That final piece was not, in fact, Goodweather, but instead the Occido Lumen, the lone extant edition of the cursed text. In detailing the mysterious origin of the Master and the Ancients, the book also contained an indication for bringing about the Master’s demise—the location of its site of origin—if one knew where to look.
Fortunately, the current possessors of the book were illiterate cattle. The tome had been stolen at auction by the old professor Abraham Setrakian, at that time the lone human on earth with the knowledge necessary to decrypt the tome and its arcane secrets. However, the old professor had little time to review the Lumen before his death. And in the brief time the Master and Setrakian were linked through possession—in those precious moments between the old professor’s turning and his destruction—the Master learned, through their shared intelligence, every bit of knowledge the professor had gleaned from the silver-bound volume.
Everything—and yet it was not enough. The location of the Master’s origin—the fabled “Black Site”—was still unknown to Setrakian at the time of his turning. This was frustrating, but it also proved that his loyal band of sympathizers did not know the location either. Setrakian’s knowledge of folklore and the history of the dark clans was unsurpassed among humans and, like a snuffed flame, had died with him.
The Master was confident that even with the cursed book in hand, Setrakian’s followers could not decode the book’s mystery. But the Master needed the coordinates itself, in order to guarantee its safety for eternity. Only a fool leaves anything of importance to chance.
In that moment of possession, of unique psychological intimacy with Setrakian, the Master had also learned the identities of Setrakian’s co-conspirators. The Ukrainian, Vasiliy Fet. Nora Martinez and Augustin Elizalde.
But none was more compelling to the Master than the one whose identity the Master had already known: Dr. Ephraim Goodweather. What the Master had not known, and what came as a surprise, was that Setrakian considered Goodweather the strongest link among them. Even given Goodweather’s obvious vulnerabilities—his temperament, and the loss of his former wife and his son—Setrakian believed him to be absolutely incorruptible.
The Master was not a being prone to surprise. Existing for centuries tended to dull revelations, but this one nagged at the Master. How could it be? Reluctantly, the Master admitted to having a high opinion of Setrakian’s judgment—for a human. As with the Lumen, the Master’s interest in Goodweather had begun as a mere distraction.
The distraction had become a pursuit.
The pursuit was now an obsession. All humans broke at the end. Sometimes it took mere minutes, sometimes days, sometimes decades, but the Master always won at the end. This was endurance chess. His time frame was much broader than theirs, his mind far more trained—and void of delusions or hopes.
This was what had led the Master to Goodweather’s progeny. This was the original reason the Master had not turned the boy. The reason the Master assuaged the discomfort in the boy’s lungs with a drop or so of its precious blood every week—which also had the effect of enabling the Master to peer into the boy’s warm and pliable mind.
The boy had responded to the Master’s power. And the Master used this, engaging the boy mentally. Subverting his naïve ideas about divinity. After a period of fear and disgust, the boy, with assistance from the Master, had come to feel admiration and respect. His cloying emotions for his father had shrunk like an irradiated tumor. The boy’s young mind was an agreeable lump of dough, one the Master continued to knead.
Preparing it. To rise.
The Master normally met such subjects at the end of the corruption process. Here, the Master had the unusual opportunity to participate in the corruption of the son and surrogate of the allegedly incorruptible. The Master was able to experience this downfall directly through the boy, thanks to the bond of the blood feeding. The Master had felt the boy’s conflict when facing the snow leopard, felt his fear, felt his joy. Never had the Master wanted to keep anyone alive before; never had he wanted them to remain human. The Master had already decided: this was the next body to inhabit. With that in mind, the Master was essentially preparing young Zachary. It had learned never to take a body younger than age thirteen. Physically, the advantages included boundless energy, fresh joints, and supple muscles, requiring little maintenance. But the disadvantages were still those of taking a weaker body, structurally fragile and with limited strength. So, even though the Master no longer required extraordinary size and strength—as it did with Sardu, the giant body inside which it had traveled to New York, the host the Master had to shed after it was poisoned by Setrakian—it also did not require extraordinary physical appeal and seductiveness, as with Bolivar. It would wait… What the Master sought for the future was convenience.
The Master had been able to view itself through Zachary’s own eyes, which had been most illuminating. Bolivar’s body had served the Master ably, and it was interesting to note the boy’s response to his arresting appearance. He was, after all, a magnetic presence. A performer. A star. That, combined with the Master’s dark talents, proved irresistible to the young man.
And the same could be said in reverse. The Master found itself telling Zachary things, not out of rank affection but in the manner of an older self to a younger self. A dialogue like that was a rarity in its prolonged existence. After all, it had consorted for centuries with some of the most hardened and ruthless souls. Sided with them, molded them to its will. In a contest of brutality, he knew no equal.
But Zack’s energy was pure, his essence quite similar to his father’s. A perfect pool to study and taint. All this contributed to the Master’s curiosity about young Goodweather. The Master had, over the centuries, perfected the technique of reading humans, not only in nonverbal communication—known as a “tell”—but even in their omissions. A behaviorist can anticipate or detect a lie by the concert of micro-gestures that telegraphs it. The Master could anticipate a lie two beats before it even happened. Not that it cared, morally, one way or another. But to detect the truth or lie in a covenant was vital for it. It meant access or lack of it—cooperation or danger. Humans were insects to the Master and it an entomologist living among them. This discipline had lost all fascination for the Master thousands of years ago—until now. The more Zachary Goodweather tried to hide things, the more the Master was able to draw out of him—without the young man even knowing he was telling the Master everything it needed to know. And through the young Goodweather, the Master was amassing information about Ephraim. A curious name. Second son of Joseph and a woman once visited by an angel: Asenath. Ephraim, known only for his progeny—lost in the Bible, without identity or purpose. The Master smiled.
So the search continued on two fronts: for the Lumen, containing the secret of the Black Site in its silver-bound pages, and for Ephraim Goodweather.
It occurred to the Master, many times, that he might claim both prizes at the same time.
The Master was convinced the Black Site was near at hand. All the clues indicated this was so—the very clues that had led it here. The prophecy that had forced it to cross the ocean. And yet, in an abundance of caution, its slaves continued their excavations in far-flung parts of the world to see if they could find it elsewhere.
The Black Cliffs of Negril. The Black Hills mountain range in South Dakota. The oil fields at Pointe-Noire, on the western coast of the Republic of the Congo.
In the meantime, the Master had nearly achieved complete worldwide nuclear disarmament. Having taken immediate control of the military forces of the world through the directed spread of vampirism among infantry and command officers, it now had access to much of the world’s stockpiles. Rounding up and dismantling rogue nations’ weaponry, as well as so-called loose nukes, would take some more time, but the end was close.
The Master looked at every corner of its Earth farm and was pleased.
The Master reached for Setrakian’s wolf-headed staff, the one the vampire hunter had carried. The walking stick had once belonged to Sardu and had been refitted to include a silver blade when twisted open. It was nothing more than a trophy now, a symbol of the Master’s victory. The token amount of silver in its silver handle did not bother the Master, though it took great care not to touch the ornamental wolf’s head.
The Master carried it into the castle turret, the highest point in the park, and stepped outside into the oily rain. Beyond the spindly upper branches of the denuded treetops, through the thick haze of fog and pollution-heavy air, stood the dirty gray buildings, the East Side and the West Side. In the glowing register of his heat-sensitive vision, thousands upon thousands of empty windows stared down like the cold, dead eyes of fallen witnesses. The dark sky roiled above, voiding filth on the defeated city.
Below the Master, forming an arc around the base of the raised rock foundation, stood the guardians of the castle, twenty deep. Beyond them, in answer to the Master’s psychic call, a sea of vampires had assembled on the fifty-five-acre Great Lawn, each staring up with black-moon eyes.
No cheer. No salute. No exultation. A still and quiet congregation; a silent army, awaiting its orders.
Kelly Goodweather appeared at the Master’s side, and, next to her, the Goodweather boy. Kelly Goodweather had been summoned; the boy had wandered over out of pure curiosity.
The Master’s command went out to every vampire’s mind.
Goodweather.
There was no answer to the Master’s call. The only response would be action. In due time, he would kill Goodweather—first his soul, and then his body. Unbearable suffering would be endured.
He would make sure of that.
Roosevelt Island
PRIOR TO ITS late-twentieth-century reinvention as a planned community, Roosevelt Island was home to the city’s penitentiary, its lunatic asylum, and its smallpox hospital, and was previously known as Welfare Island.
Roosevelt Island had always been a home for New York City’s castaways. Fet was that now.
He had decided that he would rather live in isolation on this narrow, two-mile-long island in the middle of the East River than reside in the vampire-ruin city or its infested boroughs. He could not bear to live inside an occupied New York. Apparently, the river-phobic strigoi could find no use for this small satellite island of Manhattan, and so, soon after the takeover, they cleared the island of all residents and set it afire. The cables to the tram at Fifty-ninth Street had been cut and the Roosevelt Island Bridge destroyed at its terminus in Queens. The F line subway still ran through the island beneath the river, but the Roosevelt Island Station stop had been permanently walled up.
But Fet knew a different way in from the underwater tunnel up to the geographic center of the island. An access tunnel built to service the island community’s unusual pneumatic tube system of refuse collection and disposal. The vast majority of the island, including its once-towering apartment buildings offering magnificent Manhattan views, was in ruins. But Fet had found a few mostly undamaged belowground units in the luxury apartment complex constructed around the Octagon, formerly the main building of the old lunatic asylum. There, well concealed among the destruction, he had sealed off the burned top floors and joined four bottom-floor units. The water and electricity pipes under the river had not been disturbed, so once the borough grids were repaired Fet had power and potable water.
Under cover of daylight, the smugglers dropped off Fet and the Russian nuke at the northern end of the island. He retrieved a wheeled hardware-store pallet cart he kept stashed in a hospital utility shed near the rocky shoreline and towed the weapon and his rucksack and a small Styrofoam cooler through the rain to his hideout.
He was excited to see Nora and even feeling a bit giddy. Return journeys will do that. Also, she was the only one who knew he was meeting with the Russians, and so he arrived with his great prize in tow like a boy with a school trophy. His sense of accomplishment was amplified by the excitement and enthusiasm he knew she would show him.
However, when he arrived at the charred door that led inside to his concealed subterranean chamber, he found it open a few inches. This was not a mistake Dr. Nora Martinez would ever make. Fet quickly removed his sword from his bag. He had to tow the cart inside in order to get it out of the rain. He left it in the fire-damaged hallway and walked down the partially melted flight of stairs.
He entered his unlocked door. His hideaway did not require much security, because it was so well hidden and because, other than the rare maritime smuggler risking a journey along the Manhattan interior, almost no one else ever set foot on the island anymore.
The spare kitchen was unoccupied. Fet lived largely on snack food pilfered and stockpiled after the first few months of the siege, crackers and granola bars and Little Debbie cakes and Twinkies that were now reaching or, in some cases, already surpassing their “sell by” dates. Contrary to popular belief, they did become inedible. He had tried his hand at fishing, but the sooty river water was so rife with blight he was worried that no flame could get hot enough to safely cook out the pollution.
He moved through the bedroom after a quick check of the closets. The mattress on the floor had been just fine with him until the prospect of Nora perhaps staying overnight made him hunt for a proper bed frame. The spare bathroom, where Fet kept the rat-hunting equipment he had salvaged from his old storefront shop in the Flatlands, a few instruments from his former vocation that he had been unable to part with, was otherwise empty.
Fet ducked through the hole he had sledgehammered open, into the next unit, which he used as a study. The room was stocked with bookshelves and stacked cartons of Setrakian’s library and writings, centered around a leather sofa under a low-hanging reading lamp.
At about two o’clock in the circularly arranged room stood a hooded figure, well over six feet tall, strongly built. His face receded into the black cotton hood, but the eyes were apparent, piercing and red. In his pale hands was a notebook filled with Setrakian’s fine handwriting.
He was a strigoi. But he was clothed. He wore pants and boots in addition to the hooded sweatshirt.
He eyed the rest of the room, thinking ambush.
I am alone.
The strigoi put his voice directly into Fet’s head. Fet looked again at the notebook in his hands. This was a sanctuary to Fet. This vampire had invaded it. He could easily have destroyed it. The loss would have been catastrophic.
“Where is Nora?” Fet asked, and then moved on the strigoi, unsheathing his sword as fast as a man of Fet’s size can move. But the vampire at once eluded him and pushed him down to the ground. Fet roared in anger and tried to wrestle his opponent, but no matter what he did, the strigoi would retaliate with a block and a crippling move, immobilizing Fet—hurting him just enough.
I have been here alone. Do you, by chance, remember who I am, Mr. Fet?
Fet did, vaguely. He remembered that this one had once held an iron spike at his neck, inside an old apartment high above Central Park.
“You were one of those hunters. The Ancients’ personal bodyguards.”
Correct.
“But you didn’t vaporize with the rest.”
Obviously not.
“Q something.”
Quinlan.
Fet freed his right arm and tried to connect with the creature’s cheek but the wrist was clamped and twisted in the blink of an eye. This time it hurt. A lot.
Now, I can dislocate this arm or I can break it. Your choice. But think about it. If I wanted you dead, you would be by now. Over the centuries I have served many masters, fought many wars. I have served emperors and queens and mercenaries. I have killed thousands of your kind and hundreds of rogue vampires. All I need from you is a moment. I need you to listen. If you attack me again, I will kill you instantly. Do we understand each other?
Fet nodded. Mr. Quinlan released him.
“You didn’t die with the Ancients. Then you must be one of the Master’s breed…”
Yes. And no.
“Uh-huh. That’s convenient. Mind me asking how you got here?”
Your friend Gus. The Ancients had me recruit him for sun hunting.
“I remember. Too little, too late, as it turned out.”
Fet remained guarded. This didn’t add up. The Master’s wily ways made him paranoid, but it was precisely this paranoia that had kept Fet alive and unturned over the past two years.
I am interested in viewing the Occido Lumen. Gus told me that you might be able to point me in the right direction.
“Fuck you,” said Fet. “You’ll have to go through me to get it.”
Mr. Quinlan appeared to smile.
We seek the same goal. And I have a little more of an edge when it comes to deciphering the book and Setrakian’s notes.
The strigoi had closed Setrakian’s notebook—one that Fet had reread many times. “Good reading?”
Indeed. And impressively accurate. Professor Setrakian was as learned as he was cunning.
“He was the real deal, all right.”
He and I almost met once before. About twenty miles north of Kotka, in Finland. He had somehow tracked me there. At the time I was wary of his intentions, as you might imagine. In retrospect, he would have made for an interesting dinner companion.
“As opposed to a meal himself,” said Fet. He thought that perhaps a quick test was in order. He pointed at the text in Q’s hands. “Ozryel, right? Is that the name of the Master?” he said. Fet had brought along with him on his voyage some copied pages of the Lumen to study whenever possible—including an image Setrakian had first focused on upon opening the Lumen. The archangel whom Setrakian referred to as Ozryel. The old professor had lined up this illuminated page with the alchemical symbol of three crescent moons combined to form a rudimentary biohazard sign, in such a way that the twinned images achieved a kind of geometric symmetry. “The old man called Ozy ‘the angel of death.’ ”
It’s “Ozy” now, is it?
“Sorry, yeah. Nickname. So—it was Ozy who became the Master?”
Partially correct.
“Partially?”
Fet had lowered his sword by now and leaned on it like a cane, the silver point making another notch in the floor.
“See, Setrakian would have had one thousand questions for you. Me, I don’t even know where to start.”
You already started.
“I guess I did. Shit, where were you two years ago?”
I’ve had work to do. Preparations.
“Preparations for what?”
Ashes.
“Right,” Fet said. “Something about the Ancients, collecting their remains. There were three Old World Ancients.”
You know more than you think you do.
“But still not enough. See, I just returned from a journey myself. Trying to track down the provenance of the Lumen. A dead end… but something else broke my way. Something that could be big.”
Fet thought of the nuke, which made him remember his excitement at returning home, which made him remember Nora. He moved to a laptop computer, waking it from a weeklong sleep. He checked the encrypted message board. No postings from Nora since two days ago.
“I have to go,” he told Mr. Quinlan. “I have many questions, but there might be something wrong, and I have to go meet someone. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ll wait here for me?”
None. I must have access to the Lumen. Like the sky, it is written in a language beyond your comprehension. If you produce it for me… next time we meet I can promise you a plan of action…
Fet felt an overwhelming urge to hurry, a sudden sense of dread. “I’ll have to talk to the others first. This is not a decision I can make alone.”
Mr. Quinlan remained still in the half-light.
You may find me through Gus. Just know there is precious little time. If ever a situation called for decisive action, this is it.
INTERLUDE I MR. QUINLAN’S STORY
THE YEAR 40 AD, THE LAST FULL YEAR OF THE REIGN OF Gaius Caligula, emperor of Rome, was marked by extraordinary displays of hubris, cruelty, and insanity. The emperor began appearing in public dressed as a god, and various public documents of the time refer to him as “Jupiter.” He had the heads removed from statues of gods and replaced with images of his own head. He forced senators to worship him as a physical living god. One of these Roman senators was his horse, Incitatus.
The imperial palace on the Palatine was extended to annex a temple erected for Caligula’s worship. Among the emperor’s court was a former slave, a pale, dark-haired boy of fifteen years, summoned by the new sun god at the behest of a soothsayer who was never again seen. The slave was renamed Thrax by the emperor.
Legend held that Thrax had been discovered in an abandoned village in the savage hinterlands of the far East: the frozen regions, inhabited only by the most Barbaric tribes. His reputation was that of a being of great brutality and cunning despite his innocent, fragile appearance. Some claimed he was gifted with the power of prophecy, and Caligula was instantly enthralled by him. Thrax was only seen at night, usually seated at Caligula’s side, where he exerted great influence for one so young—or else alone in the temple under the light of the moon, his pale skin glowing like alabaster. Thrax spoke several Barbaric tongues, and quickly learned Latin and science—his voracious desire for knowledge surpassed only by his appetite for cruelty. He quickly earned a sinister reputation in Rome, at a time when it was considered an achievement to distinguish oneself by cruelty alone. He advised Caligula politically and dispensed or withdrew imperial favor with complete ease. Regardless, he encouraged the emperor’s rise to divinity. They could be seen sitting side by side at the Circus Maximus, fervently supporting the Roman Green stables in the horse races. It was rumored, in fact, that it was Thrax who suggested they poison the rival stables after a loss of their team.
Caligula could not swim, and neither could Thrax, who inspired the emperor to erect his greatest folly: a temporary floating bridge, more than two miles long, using ships as pontoons, connecting the port city of Baiae to the port city of Puteoli. Thrax was not present when Caligula triumphantly rode Incitatus across the Bay of Baiae, attired in Alexander the Great’s original breastplate—but it was said that the former slave later made many night crossings, always in a litter carried by four Nubian slaves, dressed in the finest garments, an unholy sedia gestatoria flanked by a dozen guards.
Habitually, once a week, seven handpicked female slaves were brought to Thrax in his gold and alabaster chamber beneath the temple. He demanded they be virgins, in perfect health, and no older than nineteen. Tiny swabs of their sweat would be used to select them during the course of the week. At nightfall on the seventh day, the ironwood door would be barred from within.
The first killing took place on a green marble pedestal at the center of the chamber, with sculptural relief depicting a mass of writhing, pleading bodies, raising their supplicant eyes and arms toward the heavens. Twin canals at the base redirected the flowing slave blood into gold cups encrusted with rubies and garnets.
Thrax emerged out of a passage, wearing only his subligar, and quietly ordered the slave to climb upon the pedestal. There he drank her in full view of the seven bronze mirrors hanging from the chamber walls, biting her fiercely as he punctured her throat with his stinger. The suction was so sudden, so swift, that one could actually see the veins collapsing beneath the slave’s skin as the color drained from her flesh within seconds. Thrax’s wiry arms restrained the slave’s torso with great strength and expert control.
When the entertainment of the ensuing panic faded, a second slave was swiftly attacked, feasted on, and brutally killed. There followed a third and a fourth and so on, until one terrorized slave remained. Thrax savored the final kill the most. Satiating.
But one night late in winter, Thrax slowed before finishing the final slave, having detected an extra pulse in the slave’s blood. He felt her belly through her tunic and found it firm and swollen. Confirming her pregnancy, Thrax brutally slapped her down, her blood trailing from his mouth. He went for a gold dagger, kept next to a cornucopia of fresh fruit. He sliced at her, going for the neck—only to have his expert blow deflected by her bare forearm, severing her outer muscles and missing the tendons by mere millimeters. Thrax lunged again but was stopped by the girl. Despite his speed and skill, he remained at a disadvantage due to his underdeveloped, adolescent body. So weak in spite of his time-honed technique.
The Master thereby resolved never again to occupy any vehicle younger than thirteen years of age. The slave girl wept and begged the Master to spare her life and that of her unborn child—all the while bleeding deliciously. She invoked the names of her gods. But her pleas meant nothing to the Master—except as part of the feeding process: the sizzling sound of bacon in the frying pan.
At that moment, palace guards came pounding at his door. Their orders were to never interrupt his weekly ceremony, but, because they knew his penchant for cruelty, the Master knew that their reason for disturbing him must be one of importance. Accordingly, the Master unbarred the door and admitted them to the gory scene. Months of palace duty had inured the guards to the sight of such desecration and perversion. They informed Thrax that Caligula had survived an assassination attempt and summoned him to the emperor’s side.
The slave needed to be dispatched and her pregnancy terminated. The rules dictated as much. But the Master did not want to be cheated of his weekly sport, and so Thrax ordered that the doors be guarded until his return.
It turned out that the supposed assassination plot was simply a bout of imperial hysteria, resulting in the slaying of seven innocent orgy guests. Thrax returned to his chamber not much later to discover that while he was away assuaging the sun god, the centurions had cleared the palace grounds, including the temple, in order to quell the phantom coup. The pregnant slave—infected, wounded—was gone.
As dawn approached, Thrax persuaded Caligula to dispatch soldiers into all the surrounding cities to find the slave and return her to the temple. Despite a near-sacking of their own land, the soldiers failed to find her. When nightfall finally returned, Thrax went out in search of the slave, but his imprint upon her mind was weak due to her pregnancy. The Master was only a few hundred years old at the time and still apt to make mistakes.
This particular omission would dog the Master for centuries to come. For within the first month of the new year, Caligula was indeed assassinated, and his successor, Claudius, after a brief period of exile, came into power by procuring the support of the Praetorian guard—and the evil slave Thrax found himself purged and on the run.
The pregnant slave girl kept moving south, back to the land of her Dear Ones. She gave birth to a pale, nearly translucent baby boy, its skin the color of marble in moonlight. He was born in a cave amid an olive field near Sicily and in that dry land they hunted for years. The slave and the baby shared a weak psychic bond, and although they both survived on the blood of humans, the boy lacked the infecting pathogen necessary to turn his victims.
Rumors of a demon spread throughout the Mediterranean as the Born grew—and grew quickly. The half boy could sustain limited exposure to the sun without perishing. But otherwise, tainted by the curse of the Master, he possessed all of the vampiric attributes, with the exception of the enslaving link to his creator.
But if the Master was ever destroyed, so he would be too.
A decade later, as the Born was returning to his cave just before dawn, he sensed a presence. He saw, within the shadows of the cave, a deeper shadow still, stirring, watching him. Then he felt the voice of his mother waning within him—her signal extinguished. He knew instantly what had happened: whatever was in there had done away with his mother… and now awaited him. Without even seeing his enemy, the Born knew the intensity of its cruelty. The thing in the shadows knew no mercy. With absolutely no hesitation, the Born turned away and escaped toward his only refuge: the light of the morning sun.
The Born survived as best he could. He scavenged and hunted and occasionally robbed travelers in the Sicilian crossroads. Soon he was captured and brought to justice. He was indentured and trained as a gladiator. In exhibitions, the Born defeated every challenger, human or beast, and his unnatural talents and peculiar appearance drew the attention of the senate and the Roman military. On the eve of their ceremonial branding, an ambush by multiple rivals jealous of his success and attention resulted in multiple sword wounds, fatal blows that, miraculously, did not kill him. He healed quickly and was immediately withdrawn from the gladiator school, taken in by a senator, Faustus Sertorius, who had a passing familiarity with the dark arts and held a considerable collection of primitive artifacts. The senator recognized the gladiator as the fifth immortal to be birthed by human flesh and vampiric blood, and thus named him Quintus Sertorius.
The strange peregrinus was inducted into the army’s auxilia at first but quickly rose through the ranks and joined the third legion. Under the banner of Pegasus, Quintus crossed the ocean to wage war in Africa against the fierce Berbers. He became proficient in handling the pilum, the Roman elongated lance, and it is said that he could throw it with such force as to take down a horse in full gallop. He wielded a double-edged steel sword, a gladius hispaniensis, forged specially for him—void of any silver ornaments and with a bone grip made from a human femur.
Through the decades, Quintus took the victorious march from the temple of Bellona to the Porta Triumphalis many times and served through generations and various reigns, at the pleasure of every emperor. Rumors about his longevity added to his legend and he grew to be both feared and admired. In Brittania, he struck terror into the hearts and minds of the Pict army. Among the German Gamabrivii, he was known as the Shadow of Steele, and his mere presence kept the peace along the banks of the Euphrates.
Quintus was an imposing figure. His chiseled physique and preternaturally pale skin gave him the appearance of a living, breathing statue carved of the purest marble. Everything about him was martial and combative, and he carried himself with the greatest assurance. He put himself at the head of every charge, and he was the last to leave the battleground. For the first few years he kept trophies, but, as the slaughter became repetitive, and as these keepsakes began to clutter his domicile, he lost interest. He broke down the rules of combat to exactly fifty-two moves: techniques of balletic precision that brought down his adversaries in fewer than twenty seconds.
At every step of his career, Quintus felt the persecution of the Master, who had long since abandoned the fifteen-year-old slave Thrax’s body as its host. There were thwarted ambushes, slave vampire attacks, and, only rarely, direct assaults by the Master in various guises. At first Quintus was confused by the nature of these attacks, but over time, he became curious about his progenitor. His Roman military training taught him to go on the offensive when threatened, and so he began tracking the Master, in a search for answers.
At the same time, the Born’s exploits and his growing legend brought him to the attention of the Ancients, who approached him one night in the middle of battle. Through his contact with them, the Born learned the truth about his lineage and the background of the wayward Ancient they referred to as “the Young One.” They showed him many things under the assumption that, once their secrets were revealed to him, the Born would naturally join them.
But Quintus refused. He turned his back on the dark order of vampire lords born of the same cataclysmic force as the Master. Quintus had spent all his life among humans, and he wanted to try to adapt to their kind. He wanted to explore that half of him. And, despite the threat the Master posed to him, he wished to live as an immortal among mortals, rather than—as he thought of himself then—a half-breed among purebreds.
Having been born out of omission rather than action, Quintus was unable to procreate in any way. He was unable to reproduce and could never truly claim a woman as his very own. Quintus lacked the pathogen that would have allowed him to spread the infection or subjugate any humans to his will.
At the end of his campaign days, Quintus found himself a legate and was given a fertile plot of land and even a family: a young Berber widow with olive skin, dark eyes, and a daughter of her own. In her, he found affection and intimacy and eventually love. The dark woman sang for him sweet songs in her native tongue and lulled him to sleep in the deep cellars of his home. During a time of relative peace, they kept house on the shore of southern Italy. Until one night when he was away, and the Master visited her.
Quintus came back to find his family turned and lying in wait, attacking him along with the Master. Quintus had to fight them all at once, releasing his savage wife and then her child. He barely survived the Master’s onslaught. At the time, the vehicle chosen by the Master was the body of a fellow legionnaire, an ambitious, ruthless tribune named Tacitus. The short but sturdy and muscular body gave the Master ample margin in the fight. There were almost no legionnaires under five foot ten, but Tacitus had been admitted because he was strong as an ox. His arms and neck were thick and short and made of bulging strands of muscle. His mountainous shoulders and back gave him a slightly hunched aspect but now, as he towered over a beaten Quintus, Tacitus was as straight as a marble column. Quintus had, however, prepared for this occasion—both fearing it and hoping it would one day come. In a hidden fold of his belt, he hid a narrow silver blade—sheathed away from his skin but with a carved sandalwood handle that allowed him to retrieve it fast. He pulled it out and slashed Tacitus across the face, bisecting his eye and snapping his right cheekbone in two. The Master howled and covered its injured eye, out of which blood and vitreous humor poured forth. In a single bound, it jumped out of the house and into the darkened garden beyond.
When he recovered, Quintus felt a loneliness that would never leave him again. He swore revenge upon the creature that created him—even though such an act would mean his own demise as well.
Many years later, upon the advent of the Christian faith, Quintus returned to the Ancients, acknowledging who and what he was. He offered them his wealth, his influence, and his strength, and they welcomed him as one of their own. Quintus warned them of the Master’s perfidy, and they acknowledged the threat but never lost confidence in their numerical advantage and the wisdom of their years.
Through the ensuing centuries Quintus continued his quest for vengeance.
But for the next seven centuries, Quintus—later Quinlan—never got closer to the Master than he did one night in Tortosa, in what is now known as Syria, when the Master called him “son.”
My son, wars this long can only be won by yielding. Lead me to the Ancients. Help me destroy them and you may take your rightful place at my side. Be the prince that you truly are…
The Master and Quintus were standing at the edge of a rocky cliff overlooking a vast Roman necropolis. Quinlan knew that the Master had no escape. The nascent rays of daylight were already causing him to smoke and burn. The Master’s words were unexpected and his voice, in Quinlan’s head, an intrusion. Quinlan felt an intimacy that scared him. And for a moment—which he would live to regret for the rest of his life—he felt true belonging. This thing—having taken refuge in the tall, pale body of an ironworker—was his father. His true father. Quinlan lowered his weapon for an instant, and the Master rapidly crawled down the rocky cliff face, disappearing into a system of crypts and tunnels below.
Centuries later, a ship sailed from Plymouth, England, to Cape Cod in the newly discovered territory of America. The ship was carrying 130 passengers according to the official manifest, but within the cargo compartments several boxes containing earth could be found. The items listed within were earth and tulip bulbs; presumably their owner wanted to take advantage of the coastal climate. The reality was far darker. Three of the Ancients and their loyal ally Quinlan established themselves rather rapidly in the New World, under the auspices of a rich merchant: Kiliaen Van Zanden. The settlements in the New World were in fact little more than a collective banana republic whose mercantile ways were grown into the preeminent economic and military power on the planet in fewer than two centuries’ time—all of which was essentially a front for the real business being conducted belowground and behind closed doors. All efforts were focused on the acquisition of the Occido Lumen, in hopes of answering what, at that time, was the only question remaining for Quinlan and the Ancients:
How could they destroy the Master?
Camp Liberty
DR. NORA MARTINEZ awoke to the shrill camp whistle. She lay in a canvas stretcher hanging from the ceiling, enveloping her like a sling. The only way out was to shimmy under her blanket, escaping through the end, feet first.
Standing, she sensed immediately that something wasn’t right. She turned her head this way and that. It felt too light. Her free hand went immediately to her scalp.
Bare. Completely bald. This shocked her. Nora didn’t have many vanities, but she’d been blessed with gorgeous hair, keeping it long even though—as an epidemiologist—it was an impractical choice for a professional. She gripped her scalp now as though fighting a searing migraine, feeling bare flesh where she never had before. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she suddenly felt smaller and—somehow, but truly—weakened. In shaving off her hair, they had also cut away a bit of her strength.
But her unsteadiness wasn’t just the result of her bare scalp. She felt groggy, swaying for balance. After the confusing admittance process, and her attendant anxiety, Nora was amazed she had been able to sleep at all. In fact, she now remembered that she had been determined to remain awake, in order to learn as much as she could about the quarantine area before proceeding into the general population of the absurdly named Camp Liberty.
But this taste in her mouth now—as though she had been gagged with a fresh cotton sock—told Nora that she had been drugged. That bottle of drinking water she had been issued—they had doped it.
Anger rose inside her, some of it aimed at Eph. Unproductive. Instead, she focused on Fet, yearning for him. She was almost certain never to see either of those two men again. Not unless she could find some way out of this place.
The vampires who ran the camp—or perhaps their human co-conspirators, contract members of the Stoneheart Group—wisely enforced a quarantine for new entries. This type of encampment was tinder for an infectious disease event, one that had the potential to wipe out the camp population, their precious blood providers.
A woman entered the room through the canvas flaps that hung over the doorway. She wore a slate-gray jumpsuit, the same color and bland style as Nora’s. Nora recognized her face, remembering her from yesterday. Terrifically thin, her skin a pale parchment wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and her mouth. Her dark hair was close-cropped, her scalp due for a shave. Yet the woman appeared upbeat, for some reason Nora could not fathom. Her function here was apparently that of a camp mother of sorts. Her name was Sally.
Nora asked her, as she had the day before, “Where is my mother?”
Sally’s smile was all customer service, tolerant and disarming. “How did you sleep, Ms. Rodriguez?”
Nora had given a false name upon admission, as her association with Eph had certainly landed her name on every watch list. “I slept just fine,” she said. “Thanks to the sedative mixed into my water. I asked you where my mother is.”
“My assumption is that she has been transferred to Sunset, which is a sort of active retirement community associated with the camp. That is normal procedure.”
“Where is it? I want to see her.”
“It’s a separate part of the camp. I suppose a visit is possible at some point, but not now.”
“Show me. Where it is.”
“I could show you the gate, but… I’ve never been inside myself.”
“You’re lying. Or else you really believe it. Which means you’re lying to yourself.”
Sally was just a functionary, a messenger. Nora understood that Sally was not intentionally trying to mislead her but simply repeating what she had been told. Perhaps she had no idea, nor capacity to suspect, that this “Sunset” might not exist exactly as advertised.
“Please listen to me,” said Nora, growing frantic. “My mother is not well. She is sick, she is confused. She has Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I am sure she’ll be well looked after—”
“She will be put down. Without a moment’s hesitation. She’s outlived her usefulness to these things. But she is sick, she is panicked, she needs to see a familiar face. Do you understand? I just want to see her. One last time.”
This was a lie, of course. Nora wanted to bust the both of them out of there. But she had to find her mother first.
“You’re human. How can you do this—how?”
Sally reached out to squeeze Nora’s left arm reassuringly but mechanically. “She truly is in a better place, Ms. Rodriguez. The elderly have rations sufficient to support their health and aren’t required to produce anything in return. I envy them, frankly.”
“Do you really believe that?” said Nora, amazed.
“My father is there,” said Sally.
Nora gripped her arm. “Don’t you want to see him? Show me where.”
Sally was entirely sympathetic—to the point where Nora wanted to slap her. “I know it is difficult, the separation. What you have to focus on now is taking good care of yourself.”
“Was it you who drugged me?”
Sally’s smile drained of conviviality, replaced by concern—perhaps concern for Nora’s sanity, for her future potential as a productive camp member. “I have no access to medication.”
“Do they drug you?”
Sally offered no opinion on Nora’s response. “Quarantine is over,” she said. “You’re to be part of the general camp community now, and I’m to show you around, to help you get acclimated.”
Sally led her out through a small, open-air buffer zone, along a walkway beneath a tarpaulin keeping them from being soaked by rainfall. Nora looked out at the sky: another starless night. Sally had papers for the human at the checkpoint, a man in his fifties wearing a white doctor’s coat over his slate-gray jumpsuit. He looked over the forms, glanced at Nora with the eyes of a customs agent, then let them through.
Rain found them despite the overhead canopy, splashing at their legs and feet. Nora wore hospital-style foam sandals with spongy soles. Sally wore a comfortable, if damp, pair of Saucony sneakers.
The path of crushed stone fed into a wide circular walkway surrounding a high lookout post similar to a lifeguard’s station. The rotary formed a hub of sorts, with four other paths extending from it. Warehouse-style buildings stood nearby, long and low, with what appeared to be factory-style buildings farther away. No signs marked the way, only arrows fashioned out of white stone embedded in the muddy ground. Low-wattage lights marked the paths, necessary for human navigation.
A handful of vampires stood around the rotary like sentinels, and on seeing them, Nora fought back a chill. They were completely exposed to the elements—bare, pale skin covered by no coat or clothes—and yet showed no discomfort, the black rain striking their bare heads and shoulders, streaming down their pellucid flesh. Arms hanging limply, the strigoi watched the humans come and go with grave indifference. They were policemen, guard dogs, and security cameras all in one.
“Security enforces routine so that everything runs in a very orderly manner,” said Sally, picking up on Nora’s fright and distress. “In fact, there are very few incidents.”
“Of people resisting?”
“Of any disruptions,” said Sally, surprised at Nora’s assumption.
Being this close to them without any sharpened silver to protect herself made Nora’s skin crawl. And they smelled it. Their stingers clicked softly against their palates as they sniffed the air, alerted by the scent of her adrenaline.
Sally nudged Nora’s arm in order to get her moving. “We cannot linger here. It is not allowed.”
Nora felt the sentinels’ black and red eyes tracking them as Sally led her down a long offshoot path leading past the warehouselike buildings. Nora sized up the high fences that formed the camp walls: chain link laced with orange hurricane stripping, obscuring the view outside the camp. The tops of the fences were angled out at forty-five degrees, beyond her view, though at a few points she glimpsed tufts of barb wire sticking up like cowlicks. She would have to find another way out.
Beyond, she saw the bare tops of distant trees. She already knew she was out of the city. There were rumors of a large camp north of Manhattan and two smaller camps in Long Island and northern New Jersey. Nora had been transported there with a hood placed over her head, and she had been too anxious and concerned about her mother to think about estimating travel time.
Sally led Nora to a rolling wire gate standing twelve feet high and at least that length wide. It was locked and manned by two female guards standing inside a gatehouse, who nodded familiarly to Sally and worked together to unlatch it and push the gate open just wide enough to admit them.
Inside stood a large barracks house resembling a homey-looking medical building. Behind it, dozens of small mobile homes were arranged in rows like a neatly maintained trailer park.
They entered the barracks house, stepping inside a wide common area. The space resembled a cross between an upscale waiting room and the lounge of a college dormitory. An old episode of Frasier was playing, the laugh track ringing so falsely, like the mocking of carefree humans from the past.
In cushioned, pastel-colored chairs, a dozen women sat around in clean white jumpsuits, as opposed to Nora’s and Sally’s dull gray. Their bellies bulged noticeably, each woman in her second or third trimester of pregnancy. And something else: they were allowed to grow their hair, made thick and lustrous from the pregnancy hormones.
And then Nora saw the fruit. One of the women was snacking on a soft, juicy peach, its inside threaded with red veins. Saliva gushed inside Nora’s mouth. The only fresh, not-canned fruit she had tasted in the past year or so were mushy apples from a dying tree in a Greenwich Village courtyard. She had trimmed out the spoiled spots with a multitool blade until the remaining fruit looked like it had already been eaten.
The expression on her face must have reflected her desire, for the pregnant woman, upon meeting Nora’s eyes, looked away uncomfortably.
“What is this?” said Nora.
“The birthing barracks,” said Sally. “This is where pregnant women convalesce and where their infants are ultimately delivered. The trailers outside are among the best and most private living quarters in the entire compound.”
“Where did she get”—Nora lowered her voice—“the fruit?”
“Pregnant women also receive the best food rations. And they are excused from being bled for the length of their pregnancy and nursing.”
Healthy babies. The vampires needed to replenish the race, and their blood supply.
Sally went on. “You are one of the lucky ones, the twenty percent of the population with B-positive blood type.”
Nora knew her own blood type, of course. B positives were the slaves that were more equal than the others. For that, their reward was camp internment, frequent bloodletting, and forced breeding.
“How could they bring a child into this world as it is now? Into this so-called camp? Into captivity?”
Sally looked either embarrassed for Nora or ashamed of her. “You may come to find that childbirth is one of the few things that makes life worth living here, Ms. Rodriguez. A few weeks of camp life and you might feel different. Who knows? You may even look forward to this.” Sally pushed her gray sleeve back, revealing bull’s-eye bruises that looked like terrible bee stings, purpling and browning her skin. “One pint every five days.”
“Look, I don’t mean to offend you personally, it’s just that—”
“You know, I’m trying to help you here,” she said. “You’re young enough still. You have opportunities. You could conceive, deliver a baby. Make a life for yourself in this camp. Some of the rest of us… are not so fortunate.”
Nora saw this from Sally’s perspective for a moment. She understood that blood loss and malnutrition had weakened Sally and everyone else, sapping the fight from them. She understood the pull of despair, the cycle of hopelessness, that sense of circling the drain—and how the prospect of childbirth could be their only source of hope and pride.
Sally went on. “And someone like yourself who finds this so distasteful, you might appreciate being segregated from the other kind for months at a time.”
Nora made sure she’d heard that correctly. “Segregated? There are no vampires in the birthing area?” She looked around and realized it was true. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. It is a strict rule. They are not allowed.”
“A rule?” Nora struggled to make sense of this. “Is it pregnant women who have to be segregated from vampires, or vampires who have to be segregated from pregnant women?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
A tone rang, akin to a doorbell, and the women set aside their fruit or their reading material and pushed themselves up from their chairs.
“What’s this?” asked Nora.
Sally had straightened up a bit as well. “The camp director. I strongly suggest you be on your best behavior.”
On the contrary, she looked for a place to run to, a door, an escape. But it was too late. A contingent of camp officials arrived, humans, bureaucrats, dressed in casual business wear, not jumpsuits. They entered the central walkway, eyeing the inmates with barely concealed distaste. Their visit seemed to Nora to be an inspection, and a spot one at that.
Trailing them were two huge vampires, arms and necks still bearing tattoos from their human days. Once convicts, Nora surmised, now upper-level guards in this blood factory. Both carried dripping black umbrellas, which Nora thought strange—vampires caring about the rain—until the last man entered behind them, evidently the camp director. He wore a resplendent, mudless, blindingly white suit. Freshly laundered, as clean an article of clothing as Nora had seen in months. The tattooed vampires were this camp commandant’s personal security detail.
He was old, sporting a trim, white mustache and a pointed beard, which gave him the mien of a grandfatherly Satan—the sight of which nearly choked her. She saw medals on the breast of the white suit, fit for a navy admiral.
Nora stared in disbelief. Such a bald, stunned stare that it immediately drew his attention, too late for her to turn away.
She saw the look of recognition on his face, and a sick feeling spread throughout her body like a sudden fever.
He stopped, his eyes widening in similar disbelief, then turned on his heel, walking toward her. The tattooed vampires trailed him, the old man approaching her with his hands clasped behind his back—his disbelief spreading into a sly smile.
He was Dr. Everett Barnes, the onetime director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nora’s former boss, who, now nearly two years after the fall of the government, still insisted on wearing the uniform symbolic of the Centers’ origin as a branch of the U.S. Navy.
“Dr. Martinez,” he said in his soft Southern drawl. “Nora… Why, this is a most welcome surprise.”
The Master
ZACK COUGHED AND gagged as the camphor scent burned the back of his throat and overwhelmed his palate. His breathing returned, his heartbeat slowed down, and he looked up at the Master—standing before him in the form of the rock star Gabriel Bolivar—and smiled.
At night, the beasts of the zoo became very active, their instincts kicking in for a hunt that would never come behind those bars. In consequence, the night was full of noise. Monkeys howled and big cats roared. Humans now tended the cages and cleaned the streets as a reward for Zack’s hunting skills.
The boy had become quite deft at shooting and the Master rewarded each kill with a new privilege. Zack was curious about girls. Women, really. The Master saw to it that he was brought some. Not to talk. Zack wanted to watch them. Mostly from a place where they couldn’t see him looking. He wasn’t inordinately shy or scared. If anything, he was crafty and he didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to touch them. Not yet. But he looked at them—much as he had watched the leopard in the cage.
In all his years on this earth, the Master had rarely experienced something like this: the chance to groom the body he was to occupy with such care, such attention. For hundreds of years, even under the patronage of the powerful, the Master had been in hiding, feeding and living in the shadows, avoiding its enemies and held back by the truce with the Ancients. But now the world was new, and the Master had a human pet.
The boy was bright and his soul was entirely permeable. The Master was an expert at manipulation. It knew how to push the buttons of greed, desire, vengeance—and at present, its body was quite regal. Bolivar was indeed a rock star and so, by extension, was the Master now.
If the Master suggested Zack was smart, the boy would instantly turn smarter: he would be stimulated into giving the Master his very best. Consequently, if the Master suggested the boy was cruel and cunning, the boy adopted these characteristics to please it. So, through the months and the many nights of conversation and interaction, the Master was training the boy, grooming the darkness that was already in his heart. And the Master felt something it hadn’t felt in centuries: it felt admired.
Was this what it felt like—being a human father—and was being a father always such a monstrous endeavor? Molding the soul of your beloved ones in your image, in your shadow?
The end was near. The decisive times. The Master felt it in the rhythm of the universe, in the small signs and portents, in the cadence of the voice of God. The Master was to inhabit one more body for all time and its reign on Earth would endure. After all, who could stop the Master with the thousand eyes and the thousand mouths? The Master who now governed the armies and the slaves and who held the world in fear?
It could manifest its will instantly in the body of a lieutenant in Dubai or in France simply by thought. It could order the extermination of thousands and no one would know because the media existed no more. Who would try that? Who would succeed?
And then, the Master would look into the boy’s eyes and at the boy’s face and in them see traces of his enemy. The one enemy who, no matter how insignificant he was, would never give up.
Goodweather.
The attacks Goodweather and his group perpetrated on the Master’s installation amounted to very little—vandalism at most. But their actions were murmured about—spoken of in the farms and the factories and aggrandized with every repetition. They were becoming some sort of symbol. And the Master knew the importance of symbols. On Night Zero, it had made a point to have many buildings burn in every city that he overtook. It wanted the ashes and molten metal to remain on the ground, checkering the city maps with symbols of its power. Reminders of its will.
There were other dissidents—drug dealers, smugglers, looters—but they were anarchic vectors that never intersected with the Master’s plan, and so the Master cared little for their transgressions. But Goodweather was different. He and his group were remnants of Setrakian’s presence on Earth, and as such their very existence was an affront to the Master’s power.
But the Master held hostage the very thing that would lure Goodweather to him.
The Master smiled at the boy. And the boy smiled back.
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan
AFTER THE BELLEVUE Hospital explosion, Eph had worked his way north up along East River Drive, using the abandoned cars and trucks for cover. He jogged as fast as he could with his sore hip and wounded leg, moving the wrong way down an entrance ramp, back toward Thirtieth Street. He knew he had pursuers, probably including some of the juvenile feelers, the freakish, blind psychic trackers who moved on all fours. He dug out his night-vision scope and hurried back to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, thinking that the last place the vampires would look would be a building they had recently infiltrated and cleared.
His ears continued to ring from the concussive blast. A few car alarms honked and blared, and freshly broken glass lay in the street, high windows shattered by the force of the explosion. As he came to the corner of Thirtieth and First, he noticed chunks of bricks and mortar in the road, part of a building façade had failed, raining debris into the street. As he got closer, through the green light of his scope, he noticed a pair of legs sticking out from behind two old traffic safety barrels.
Bare legs, bare feet. A vampire lying facedown off the sidewalk.
Eph slowed, circling the barrels. He saw the vampire laid out among chunks of brick and concrete. White, worm-infested blood lay in a small pool beneath its downturned face. It wasn’t released: subcutaneous worms continued to ripple beneath its flesh, meaning its blood was still circulating. Evidently, this wounded creature was unconscious, or its undead equivalent.
Eph looked for the largest chunk of brick and concrete. He lifted it over his head to finish the job… until a sense of gruesome curiosity came over him. He used his boot to roll the strigoi onto its back, the creature lying flat and still. It must have heard the rumbling of the loose bricks and looked skyward, because its face was bashed in.
The chunk of bricks grew heavy in his hands, and he lowered it, tossing it aside, letting it crash against the sidewalk just a foot away from the creature’s head. No reaction.
The medical examiner’s building was right across the street. A great risk—but if the creature was indeed blind, as it appeared, then it could not feed the Master its vision. And if it was also brain-damaged… then it could not communicate with the Master at all, and its current location could not be traced.
Eph moved quickly, before he could talk himself out of it. He got his hands beneath the creature’s armpits, careful of the sticky mass of blood, and rescue-dragged him off the curb, across the street, and around to the ramp leading to the basement morgue.
Inside, he nudged over a step stool to help him load the vampire onto an autopsy table. He worked quickly, binding the creature’s wrists beneath the table with rubber tubing, then similarly affixing its ankles to the table legs.
Eph looked at the strigoi laid out upon the examining table. Yes, he was indeed about to do this. He pulled a pathologist’s full-length smock from the closet, pulling on twin pairs of latex gloves. He taped the wrists to his sleeves and his leg cuffs to the tops of his boots, creating a seal. In a cabinet over one of the sinks, he found a clear plastic splash guard and fit it over his face. Then he wheeled over a tray and arranged upon it a dozen different stainless steel implements, all of them cutting tools.
As he was looking at the vampire, it roused into consciousness, stirring at first, rolling its head this way and that. It sensed the bindings and began to struggle against them, bucking its waist up and down off the table. Eph used another length of tubing around its waist and beneath the table, and then another across its neck, knotting it tightly underneath.
From behind the creature’s head, Eph used a probe to tempt its stinger, allowing for the possibility that it still might be functioning even within its smashed face. He saw the vampire’s throat buck and heard a clicking in its jaw as it tried to activate its stinging mechanism. But the mandible had been damaged internally. His only concern therefore was the blood worms, for which he kept his Luma lamp close at hand.
He drew the scalpel across the being’s throat, opening it around the tube ligature, peeling back the folds. Eph was most careful here, watching the throat column jerk, the jaw attempt to de-hinge. The fleshy protuberance that was the stinger remained retracted and limp. Eph seized its narrow tip with a clamp and pulled, the stinger extending generously. The creature tried to retake control of it, the muscle at the base twitching.
For his own safety, Eph reached for his small silver blade and amputated the appendage.
The being tensed as though shot through with pain and defecated a small amount of discharge, the smell of ripe ammonia stinging Eph’s nose. White blood spilled out around the throat incision, the caustic fluid seeping onto the stretched rubber tube.
Eph carried the writhing organ to the counter, where he lay it next to a digital scale. He examined it under the light of a magnifying lens, and as it twitched like a severed lizard’s tail, he noted the tiny double tip at the end. Eph bisected the organ lengthwise, then peeled back the pink flesh, exposing dilated bifurcated canals. He already knew that one canal introduced, along with the virus-infected parasitic worm, a narcotizing agent and a salivary blend of anticoagulants when a vampire stung its victim. The other canal siphoned the blood meal. The vampire did not suck the blood out of its human victim but instead relied on physics to do the extraction, the second stinger canal forming a vacuum-like connection through which arterial blood was drawn up as easily as water crawls up the stem of a plant. The vampire could speed the capillary action if necessary by working the base of its stinger like a piston. Amazing that this complex biological system arose out of radical endogenous growth.
Human blood is more than 95 percent water. The rest is proteins, sugars, and minerals, but no fat. Tiny bloodsuckers such as mosquitoes, ticks, and other arthropods could survive on blood meals just fine. As efficient as the vampires’ transmuted bodies were, as large sanguivores they had to consume a steady blood diet in order to avoid starvation. And because human blood was mostly water, they expressed waste frequently, including while feeding.
Eph left the flayed stinger upon the counter, returning to the creature. The acidic white vampire blood had eaten through the tubing across its neck, but the vampire’s thrashing had subsided. Eph opened up the creature’s chest, cutting down from sternum to waist in a classic Y. Through the calcified bone of the rib cage, he saw that the interior of the chest had mutated into quadrants, or chambers. He had long ago surmised that the entire digestive tract was transformed by the vampiric disease syndrome, but never, until now, had he viewed the chest cavity in its mature form.
The scientist in him found it truly extraordinary.
The human survivor in him found it absolutely repellent.
He stopped cutting when he heard footsteps on the floor above him. Hard steps—shoes—but some creatures occasionally still wore them, as quality footwear lasted longer than most other articles of clothing. He looked at the vampire’s smashed face and dented head and hoped he hadn’t underestimated the power of the Master’s reach, unwittingly inviting a fight.
Eph took up his long sword and lamp. He stepped back into a recess near the door to the walk-in cooler, giving him a good view of the stairs. No point in hiding; vamps could hear the beating of a human heart, circulating the red blood they craved.
The footsteps descended slowly—until the last few steps, which they ran down and kicked open the door. Eph saw a flash of silver, a long blade like his own, and knew immediately who it was—and relaxed.
Fet saw Eph standing against the wall and narrowed his eyes in that way he did. The exterminator wore wool trousers and a deep-blue anorak, the buckled leather strap of his bag slung across his chest. He pulled his hood back, further revealing his grizzled face, and sheathed his blade.
“Vasiliy?” said Eph. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Fet saw Eph’s pathology smock and gloved hands, then turned toward the still-animate strigoi eviscerated upon the table.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Fet asked, lowering his sword. “I just arrived today…”
Eph stepped away from the wall and returned his own sword to the pack on the floor. “I am examining this vampire.”
Fet came forward to the table, looking at the creature’s crushed face. “Did you do that?”
“No. Not directly. He was struck by a chunk of falling concrete, caused by a hospital I blew up.”
Fet looked at Eph. “I heard it. That was you?”
“They had me cornered. Almost.”
Eph felt relief as soon as he saw Vasiliy—but he also felt a bolt of anger tensing his body. He stood there, frozen. Not knowing what to do. Should he embrace the ratcatcher? Or beat the shit out of him?
Fet turned back to the strigoi on the table, wincing at the sight. “And so you decided to bring him down here. To play with him.”
“I saw an opportunity to answer some outstanding questions about our tormentors’ biological system.”
Fet said, “Looks more like torture to me.”
“Well, that is the difference between an exterminator and a scientist.”
“Maybe,” said Fet, circling the table so that he faced Eph across it. “Or maybe you can’t tell the difference. Maybe, since you can’t hurt the Master, you grabbed this thing in its place. You do realize this creature won’t tell you where your boy is.”
Eph didn’t like it when they threw Zack back at him like that. Eph had a stake in this battle that none of the others understood. “In studying its biology, I am looking for weaknesses in the design. Something we can exploit.”
Fet said, standing across the vampire’s opened body from Eph, “We know what they are. Forces of nature who invade us and exploit our bodies. Who feed off us. They are no mystery to us anymore.”
The creature moaned softly and stirred on the table. Its hips thrust forward and its chest heaved as though humping an invisible partner.
“Jesus, Eph. Destroy this fucking thing.” Fet backed away from the table. “Where’s Nora?”
He had tried to make it sound casual and failed.
Eph took a deep breath. “I think something’s happened to her.”
“What do you mean ‘something’? Talk.”
“When I got back here, she was gone. Her mother, too.”
“Gone where?”
“I think they got rousted from here and left. I haven’t heard from her since. If you haven’t either, then something’s happened.”
Fet stared, stunned. “And you figured the best thing to do was stay here and dissect a fucking vamp?”
“To stay here and wait for one of you two to get in touch with me, yes.”
Fet scowled at Eph’s attitude. He felt like slapping the guy—slapping him and telling him what a waste of time he was. Eph had it all and Fet had nothing, and yet Eph repeatedly squandered or overlooked his good fortune. He would have liked to slap the guy a couple of times alright. But instead he sighed heavily and said, “Take me through this.”
Eph walked him upstairs, showed him the overturned chair and Nora’s abandoned lamp, clothes, and weapons bag. He watched Fet’s eyes, saw them burning. Given Fet’s and Nora’s deception, Eph had thought it might feel good to see Fet suffer—but it didn’t. Nothing about this felt good. “It’s bad,” said Eph.
“Bad,” said Fet, turning toward the windows looking out at the city. “That’s all you got?”
“What do you want to do?”
“You say that as though we even have a choice. We have to go get her.”
“Ah. Simple.”
“Yes! Simple! You wouldn’t want us to go after you?”
“I wouldn’t expect it.”
“Really?” said Fet, turning to him. “I guess we have fundamentally different ideas about loyalty.”
“Yes, I guess we do,” said Eph with enough edge on his words to make them stick.
Fet didn’t respond, but he didn’t back down either. “So you think she was grabbed. But not turned.”
“Not here. But how can we know for sure? Unlike Zack, she has no Dear One to go after. Right?”
Another jab. Eph couldn’t help himself. The computer containing their intimate correspondence was right there on the desk.
Fet understood now that Eph at least suspected something. Maybe he was daring Eph to come right out and make an open accusation, but Eph would not give him the satisfaction. So, instead of answering Eph’s insinuations, Fet countered as usual, attacking Eph’s vulnerable spot. “I assume you were at Kelly’s house again instead of here to meet Nora at the appointed time? This obsession with your son has warped you, Eph. Yes, he needs you. But we need you too. She needs you. This isn’t just about you and your son. Others are relying on you.”
“And what about you?” said Eph. “Your obsession with Setrakian. That’s what your trip to Iceland was. Doing what you think he would have done. Did you figure out all the secrets in the Lumen? No? I thought not. You could have been here as well, but you chose to follow in the old man’s shoes, his self-appointed disciple.”
“I took a chance. We have to get lucky sometime.” Fet stopped himself, throwing up his hands. “But—forget all that. Focus on Nora. She’s our only problem right now.”
Eph said, “Best-case scenario, she’s in a heavily guarded blood camp. If we guess right on which one, then all we have to do is get ourselves inside, find her, and get back out again. I can think of easier ways to commit suicide.”
Fet began packing up Nora’s things. “We need her. Pure and simple. We can’t afford to lose anyone. We need all hands on deck if we’re gonna have any chance of digging ourselves out of this mess.”
“Fet. We’ve seen two years of this. The Master’s system has taken root. We are lost.”
“Wrong—just because I might have struck out on the Lumen doesn’t mean I came back empty-handed.”
Eph tried to figure out that one. “Food?”
“That too,” said Fet.
Eph was not in the mood for a guessing game. Besides, at the mention of real food, his mouth had begun to water, his belly twisting into a fist. “Where?”
“In a cooler, stashed nearby. You can help me carry it.”
“Carry it where?”
“Uptown,” said Fet. “We need to go get Gus.”
Staatsburg, New York
NORA RODE IN the backseat of a town car, speeding through rainy rural New York. The upholstery was dark and clean, but the floor mats were filthy from foot mud. Nora sat all the way over on the right, curled up in the corner, not knowing what was to come next.
She did not know where she was being taken. After her shocking encounter with her former boss Everett Barnes, Nora was led by two hulking vampires to a building with a room full of curtainless showers. The vampires remained near the only door, standing together. She could have made a stand there and refused but felt it was best to go along and see what was to come, perhaps a better chance to escape.
So she disrobed and showered. Self-consciously at first, but when she looked back at the big vampires, their eyes were focused on the far wall with their trademark distant stare, lacking any interest in the human form.
The cool spray—she could not get it hot—felt alien against her bare scalp. Her skin was prickled by needles of cold water, and the runoff spilled unimpeded down the back of her neck and naked back. The water felt good. Nora grabbed a half bar of soap sitting in a recessed tile niche. She lathered her hands and head and bare stomach and found relief in the ritual. She washed her shoulders and neck, pausing to smell the soap right against her nose—rose and lilac—a relic from the past. Someone, somewhere had made this bar of soap. Along with thousands of others, and packaged and shipped it in a normal day with traffic jams and school drops and hurried lunches. Someone had thought the bar of soap with rose and lilac scent would sell well and designed it—its shape and scent and color—to attract the attention of housewives and mothers on the crowded shelves of a Kmart or a Walmart. And now that bar of soap was here—in a processing plant. An archaeological artifact that smelled of roses and lilacs and of times gone by.
A new gray jumper was folded on a bench in the middle of the room, with a pair of white cotton panties set on top. She dressed and was led back through the quarantine station to the front gates. Above her, on an arch of rusting iron, dripped the word LIBERTY. The town car arrived, as did another one behind it. Nora got in the back of the first car; no one entered the second car.
A glasslike partition of hard plastic separated the driver from her passenger. She was a human in her early twenties, dressed in a man’s chauffeur suit and cap. Her hair was shaved tight below the back of her cap brim, leading Nora to assume that she was bald, and therefore perhaps a camp resident herself. And yet the pinkness of her flesh on the back of her neck and the healthy color of her hands made Nora doubt that she was a regular bleeder.
Nora turned again, obsessing over the tail car as she had done since pulling away from the camp. She couldn’t be sure, through the glare of its headlights in the dark rain, but something about the driver’s posture made her think it was a vamp. A backup car, maybe, in case she tried to escape. Her own doors were completely stripped of their inside panels and armrests, with the lock and window controls removed.
She expected a long ride, but little more than two or three miles away from the camp the town car pulled off the road through an open driveway gate. Rising out of the foggy gloom at the end of a long, curling driveway was a house larger and grander than most any she had ever seen. It appeared out of the New York countryside like a European manor, with nearly every window lit warmly yellow, as though for a party.
The car stopped. The driver remained behind the wheel as a butler exited the door, holding two umbrellas, one open over his head. He pulled Nora’s door open and shielded her from the dirty rain as she exited the vehicle and walked with him up slick marble steps. Inside, he disposed of the umbrellas and snapped a white towel off a nearby rack, dropping to one knee to attend to her muddied feet.
“This way, Dr. Martinez,” he said. Nora followed him, her bare soles silent upon the cool floor down a wide hallway. Brightly lit rooms, floor vents pushing warm air, the pleasing odor of cleaning solution. It was all so civilized, so human. Which is to say, so dreamlike. The difference between the blood camp and this mansion was the difference between ash and satin.
The butler pulled open twin doors, revealing an opulent dining room featuring a long table with only two settings laid out, adjoining one corner. The dishes were gold-rimmed with fluted edges, a small coat of arms in the center. The glassware was crystal, but the silverware was stainless steel—not silver. It was apparently the only concession in the entire mansion to the reality of the vampire-run world.
Arranged on a brass platter kitty-corner between the twin settings were a bowl of gorgeous plums, a porcelain basket of assorted pastries, and two dishes of chocolate truffles and other confectionery treats. The plums called to her. She reached for the bowl before stopping herself, remembering the drugged water they had given her in the camp. She needed to resist temptation and, despite her hunger, make smart choices.
She did not sit, remaining standing on bare feet. Music played faintly elsewhere inside the house. There was a second door across the room, and she considered trying the knob. But she felt watched. She looked for cameras and saw none.
The second door opened. Barnes entered, again wearing his formal, all-white admiral’s uniform. His skin beamed healthy and pink around his trim white Vandyke beard. Nora had almost forgotten how healthy a well-nourished human being could look.
“Well,” he said, striding down the length of the table toward her. He kept one hand tucked in his pocket, aping a gentleman of the manor. “This is a much more amenable setting to reacquaint ourselves, isn’t it? Camp life is so dreary. This place is my great escape.” He swirled his hand at the room and the house beyond. “Too big for only me, of course. But with eminent domain, everything on the menu is priced the same, so why settle for less than the very best? It was once owned by a pornographer, I understand. Smut bought all this. So I don’t feel all that bad.” He smiled, the corners of his mouth pulling up the trimmed edges of his pointy beard, as he reached her end of the table. “You haven’t eaten?” he said, looking at the food tray. He reached for a pastry drizzled with a sugary glaze. “I imagined you’d be famished.” He looked at the pastry with pride. “I have these made for me. Every day in a bakery in Queens, just for me. I used to long for them as a kid—but I couldn’t afford them… But now…”
Barnes took a bite of the pastry. He sat down at the head of the table and unfolded his napkin, smoothing it out on his knee.
Nora, once she knew the food was untainted, grabbed a plum and made quick work of it, devouring the fruit. She grabbed her own napkin to swipe at her juice-slicked chin, then reached for another.
“You bastard,” she said with her mouth full.
Barnes smiled flatly, expecting better from her. “Wow, Nora—straight to the point… ‘Realist’ is more like it. You want ‘opportunist’? That I might accept. Maybe. But this is a new world now. Those who accept this fact and acclimate themselves to it are much better off.”
“How noble. A sympathizer with these… these monsters.”
“On the contrary, I would say that sympathy is one trait that I lack.”
“A profiteer, then.”
He considered that, playing at polite conversation, finishing off his pastry and licking each of his fingertips. “Maybe.”
“How about ‘traitor’? Or—‘motherfucker’?”
Barnes slammed his hand against the table. “Enough,” he said, waving off the word as one would a pesky fly. “You’re clinging to self-righteousness because that is all you have left! But look at me! Look at all that I have got…”
Nora didn’t take her eyes from him. “They killed all the real leaders in the first weeks. The opinion makers, the powerful. Leaving room for someone like you to float to the top. That can’t feel so good either. Being the floater in the flush.”
Barnes smiled, pretending her opinion of him did not matter. “I am trying to be civilized. I am trying to help you. So sit… Eat… Converse…”
Nora pulled the other chair back from the table, in order to give herself some distance from him.
“Allow me,” he said. Dull knife in hand, Barnes began preparing a croissant for her, swiping in butter and raspberry preserves. “You are using wartime terms such as ‘traitor’ and ‘profiteer.’ The war, if there ever was one, is over. A few humans such as yourself haven’t accepted this new reality yet, but that is your delusion. Now—does this mean we all have to be slaves? Is that the only choice? I don’t think so. There is room in the middle, even room near the top. For those few with exceptional skills and the perspicacity to apply them.” He set the croissant on her plate.
“I had forgotten how slippery you were,” she said. “And how ambitious.”
He smiled as though she had offered him a compliment. “Well—camp living can be a fulfilled existence. Not only living for oneself but for others. This basic human biological function—the creation of blood—is an enormous resource to their kind. Do you think that leaves us with no leverage? If one plays things right, that is. If one can demonstrate to them that one has real value.”
“As a jailer.”
“Again—so reductive. Yours is the language of losers, Nora. I believe that the camp exists neither to punish nor oppress. It is simply a facility, constructed for mass production and maximum efficiency. My opinion—though I consider it a simple fact—is that people quickly come to appreciate living a life with clearly defined expectations. With simple, understandable rules for survival. If you provide, you will be provided for. There is real comfort in that. The human population has decreased by almost a third worldwide. A lot is the doing of the Master, but people kill each other pursuing simple things… like the food you have before you. So I assure you, camp life, once you give yourself over to it fully, is remarkably stress-free.”
Nora ignored the croissant prepared by his hands, pouring some lemon water from a pitcher into her glass instead. “I think the scariest thing is that you actually do believe this.”
“The notion that we humans were somehow more than mere animals, mere creatures set upon this earth—that we were instead chosen to be here—is what got us into trouble. Made us settled, made us complacent. Privileged. When I think about the fairy tales we used to tell ourselves and each other about God…”
A servant opened the double doors, entering with a gold-foil-topped bottle balanced upon a brass tray.
“Ah,” said Barnes, sliding his empty glass toward the servant. “The wine.”
Nora watched the servant pour a bit into Barnes’s glass. “What is all this about?” she asked.
“Priorat. Spanish. Palacios, L’Ermita, ’04. You’ll like it. Along with this fine house, I inherited a quite wonderful wine cellar.”
“I mean all this. Me being brought here. Why? What do you want?”
“To offer you something. A great opportunity. One that could improve your lot in this new life considerably, and perhaps forever.”
Nora watched him sample and okay the wine, allowing the servant to fill his glass. She said, “You need another driver? A dishwasher? A wine steward?”
Barnes smiled, with something shy behind the smile. He was looking at Nora’s hands as though he wanted to take them in his own. “You know, Nora, I have always admired your beauty. And… to be quite candid, I always thought Ephraim didn’t deserve a woman such as you…”
Nora opened her mouth to speak. No sound came out, only breath, emptying her lungs with a silent exhalation.
“Of course, back then, in an office environment, a government setting, it would have been… unprofessional to make any sort of advance on a subordinate. Termed harassment or some such. Remember those ridiculous and unnatural rules? How fussy civilization got toward the end? Now we have a much more natural order of things. He who wants and can… conquers and takes.”
Nora swallowed finally and found her voice. “Are you saying what I think you are saying, Everett?”
He blushed a little, as though lacking the conviction of his boorishness. “There aren’t many people left from my previous life. Or yours. Mightn’t it be nice every once in a while to reminisce? That could be very pleasant, I think—to share experiences we had together. Work anecdotes… dates and places. Remembering the way things used to be? We have so much in common—our professional backgrounds, our work experience. You could even practice medicine at the camp, if you wish. I seem to recall you have a background in social work. You could tend to the ill, ready them to return to productivity. Or even pursue more serious work, if you desire. You know, I have much influence.”
Nora kept her voice at an even pitch. “And in return?”
“In return? Luxury. Comfort. You would reside here, with me—on a trial basis, at first. Neither of us would want to commit to a bad situation. Over time, I think the arrangement would come together nicely. I am sorry that I didn’t find you before they shaved your lovely hair. But we have wigs—”
He reached for her bare scalp, but Nora straightened fast, pulling back.
“Is this how your driver got her job?” she said.
Barnes slowly drew back his hand; his face showed regret. Not for himself, but for Nora, as though she had rudely crossed a line that could not be uncrossed.
“Well,” he said, “you seemed to fall in with Goodweather, who was your boss at the time, quite easily.”
She was less offended than incredulous. “So that’s it,” she said. “You didn’t like that. You were my boss’s boss. You thought you were the one who should… First-night rights, is that it?”
“I am merely reminding you that this is apparently not your first time around this particular block.” He sat back, crossing his legs and arms, in the manner of a debater with supreme confidence in his side of the argument. “This is not an unusual situation for you to find yourself in.”
“Wow,” said Nora. “You really are the imbecilic bigot I always thought you would be…”
Barnes smiled, unfazed. “I think your choice is an easy one. Life in the camp or—potentially, if you play your cards right—life here. It is a choice no sane person would deliberate over very long.”
Nora felt herself smiling in disbelief, her face twisted uncomfortably. “You dirty fuck,” she said. “You are worse than a vampire, you know that? It’s not need for you, just opportunity. A power trip. Real rape would be too messy for you. You’d rather tie me up with ‘luxuries.’ You want me grateful and compliant. Appreciative for your exploitation of me. You’re a monster. I can see why you fit so well into their plans. But there are not enough plums in this house, or on this ruined planet, that would make me—”
“Perhaps a few days in a harsher environment will change your mind.” Barnes’s eyes had hardened while she was dressing him down. Now suddenly he appeared even more interested in her, as though feeding off this power disparity. “And if you do indeed choose to remain there, isolated and in the dark—which is of course your right—let me remind you of what you have to look forward to. Your blood type happens to be B positive, which, for whatever reason—taste? some vitamin-like benefit?—is most desirable to the vampire class. This means that you will be bred. Since you have entered the camp without a mate, one will be selected for you. He will also be B positive, in order to increase the chances for birthing more B-positive offspring. Someone such as myself. That can easily be arranged. Then, for the rest of your fertility life cycle, you will be either pregnant or nursing. Which has its advantages, as you may have seen. Better housing, better rations, two fruit and vegetable servings per day. Of course, if you should have any trouble conceiving, then after a reasonable amount of time, allowing for numerous attempts using a variety of fertility drugs, you will be relegated to camp labor and five-day bloodletting. After a while, if I may be completely candid, you will die.” Barnes wore a tight smile on his face. “In addition, having taken the liberty of reviewing your intake forms, ‘Ms. Rodriguez,’ I believe you were admitted to the camp with your mother.”
Nora felt the skin on the back of her neck—where she once had hair—tingling.
“You were apprehended on the subway while trying to hide her. I wonder where you two were going.”
“Where is she?” said Nora.
“Still alive, in fact. But, as you might know, due to her age and obvious infirmity, she is scheduled to be bled and then permanently retired.”
These words clouded Nora’s vision.
“Now,” said Barnes, unfolding his arms in order to select a white-chocolate truffle, “it is entirely possible she could be spared. Perhaps… this is just coming to me now, but perhaps even brought here, in a sort of semi-retirement. Given her own room, possibly a nurse. She could be well cared for.”
Nora’s hands trembled.
“So… you wanna fuck me and you wanna play house?”
Barnes bit into his treat, delighted to find sweet cream inside. “You know, this could have gone much more congenially. I tried the soft sell. I am a gentleman, Nora.”
“You are a son of a bitch. That’s what you are.”
“Ha.” He nodded in enjoyment. “Your Spanish temper, right? Feisty. Good.”
“You goddamn monster.”
“You said that, yes. Now, there is one more thing that I want you to consider. You should know that what I should have done the instant I saw you there in the detention house was identify you and turn you over to the Master. The Master would be only too pleased to learn more about Dr. Goodweather and the rest of your band of rebels. Such as their current whereabouts and the extent of their resources. Even simply where you and your mother were headed on that Manhattan subway car—or where you were coming from.” Barnes smiled and nodded. “The Master would be extremely motivated to learn such information. I can say in total confidence that I believe the Master would enjoy your company even more than I would. And it would use your mother to get to you. No question about that. If you go back to the camp without me you will eventually be discovered. I can assure you of that, too.” Barnes stood, smoothing out the creases in his admiral’s uniform, brushing away the crumbs. “So—now you understand that you have a third option as well. A date with the Master, with eternity as a vampire.”
Nora’s gaze blurred into the middle distance. She felt lethargic, almost dizzy. She believed that this was something like what it must feel like to be bled.
“But you have a decision to mull over,” said Barnes. “I won’t keep you any longer. I know you want to get right back to the camp—to your mother, while she is still alive.” He went to the double doors, pushing them open out into the grand hallway. “Do think it over, and let me know what you decide. Time is running out…”
Unseen by him, Nora pocketed one of the butter knives at the table.
Beneath Columbia University
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HAD been, Gus knew, a big-shot school. Lots of old buildings, crazy expensive tuition, mucho security and cameras. He used to see some of the students out trying to mix with the neighborhood, some for community-minded reasons, which he never understood, and others for more illicit reasons, which he understood very well. But as for the university itself, the derelict Morningside Heights campus and all of its facilities, there was nothing much worth his time.
Now it was Gus’s base, his headquarters and his home. The Mexican gangbanger would never be made to leave his turf; indeed, he would blow it all up before allowing that to happen. As his sabotage and hunting activities dwindled in number and became more regimented, Gus started to look for a permanent base. He really needed it. It was hard to be efficient in this mad new world. Sticking it to the man became a 24/7 occupation, and one that was less and less rewarding every time. Police and fire departments, medical services, traffic surveillance—everything had been co-opted. When searching his old Harlem haunts for a place to coop, he’d connected with two of his La Mugre gangbangers and fellow saboteurs, Bruno Ramos and Joaquin Soto.
Bruno was fat—no other way to say it—fed mostly with Cheetos and beer. Joaquin was tight and lean. Groomed, tattooed, and full of ’tude. They were both brothers to Gus and they would die for him. Born ready.
Joaquin had done jail time with Gus. They’d done cell time together. Sixteen months for Gus. They’d watched each other’s back and Joaquin had done solitary for a good stretch after elbowing the teeth out of a guard, a big black guy named Raoul—what a fucked-up name for someone with no teeth: Raoul. After the vampires’ arrival—what some called the Fall—Gus had reconnected with Joaquin during the looting of an electronics store. Joaquin and Bruno helped him carry a big plasma TV and a box of video games.
Together they had taken the university and found it to be only slightly infested. Windows and doors were boarded and sealed with steel plates, the interiors razed and desecrated with ammonia waste. The students had all fled early, trying to evacuate the city and get back home. Joaquin guessed they never got very far.
What they found, in prowling around the deserted buildings, was a system of tunnels below the foundation. A book in the display case at the admissions office tipped Joaquin off to the fact that the campus had originally been erected on the grounds of a nineteenth-century insane asylum. The university architects had leveled all the existing hospital buildings except one and then built upon the existing foundations. Many of the linking tunnels were used for utilities, steam pipes generating scalding condensation, miles of electric wiring. Over time, a number of these passages had been boarded up or otherwise sealed in order to prevent injury to thrill-seeking students and urban spelunkers.
Together they had explored and claimed for themselves much of this underground network linking almost all of Columbia’s seventy-one campus buildings located between Broadway and Amsterdam on New York’s Upper West Side. Some more remote sections remained unexplored, simply because there wasn’t enough time in the day or night for hunting vampires, sowing chaos throughout Manhattan, and clearing musty tunnels.
Gus had carved out his own digs, concentrated in one quadrant of the campus’s main plaza. His domain started beneath the only remaining building original to the asylum, Buell Hall; ran beneath the Low Memorial Library and Kent Hall; and terminated at Philosophy Hall, the building outside of which was a bronze statue of a naked dude just sitting there, thinking.
The tunnels made for a cool crib, a real villain’s lair. The failure of the steam system meant he could access areas rarely visited in at least a century—the coarse black fibers sticking out of cracks in the underground walls were actual horsehairs used to strengthen the plaster mix—which had led him into a dank subbasement of iron-barred cells.
The loony bin. Where they caged up the maddest of the mad. No skeletons in chains or anything like that, though they had found scratches in the stonemasonry, like the jagged clawing of fingernails, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear ghostly echoes of the hideous, soul-baring screams from centuries past.
This was where he kept her. His madre. In an eight-by-six cage made of iron bars running ceiling to floor, forming a semicircle creating a corner cell. Gus’s mother’s hands were manacled behind her back with a pair of thick wrist cuffs he had found under a table in a nearby chamber, for which there was no key. A full-face black motorcycle helmet covered her head, much of the finish chipped away from her repeated headlong ramming against the bars during the first few months of her captivity. Gus had superglued the neck curtain of the helmet to her flesh. This was the only way he could fully contain her vampire stinger, for his own safety. It also covered the growing turkey wattle, the sight of which sickened him. He had removed the clear plastic face plate and replaced it with a padlocked iron flat, sprayed black and hinged at the sides. He had baffled the ear molds inside the helmet with thick cotton wadding.
She could therefore neither see nor hear anything, and yet, whenever Gus entered the chamber, the helmet turned and tracked him. Her head turned, eerily attuned to his walk, following him across the room. She gurgled and squealed as she stood in the center of the rounded corner cell, unclothed, her worn vampire body grimy from the asylum’s century-old dust. Gus had once attempted to clothe her through the bars, using cloaks, coats, then blankets, but they all fell away. She had no need for clothes and no concept of modesty. The soles of her feet had developed a pad of calluses, as thick as the treads on a pair of tennis sneakers. Insects and lice wandered freely over her body and her legs were stained, tanned by repeated defecation. Chaps of brown skin were delineated around her veiny, pale thighs and calves.
Months ago, after the fight inside the Hudson River train tunnel, once the air had cleared, Gus had separated from the others. Part of it was his nature, but part of it was his mother. He knew that she would soon find him—her Dear One—and he prepared for her arrival. When she did, Gus got the drop on her, bagging her head and hog-tying her. She fought him with ridiculous vampire strength, but Gus managed to jam the helmet on her, caging her head and trapping her stinger. Then he manacled her wrists and dragged her by the neck of the helmet to this dungeon. Her new home.
Gus reached in through the bars, sliding up her faceplate. Her dead black pupils, rimmed with scarlet, stared out at him, mad, soulless, but full of hunger. Every time he raised the iron shield, he could feel her desire to unleash her stinger, and sometimes, if she tried repeatedly, thick curtains of lubricant oozed out of any fissure in the seal.
In the course of their domestic life, Bruno, Joaquin, and Gus had formed a great, imperfect family together. Bruno was always ebullient and for some reason, he had the gift of cracking up both Gus and Joaquin. They shared every duty in the household but only Gus was allowed direct contact with his mother. He washed her, head to toe, every week and kept her cell as clean and dry as he humanly could.
The dented helmet gave her a machinelike appearance, like a banged-up robot or android. Bruno remembered a bad old movie he saw on TV late one night called Robot Monster. In the film, the titular creature had a steel helmet screwed atop a brutish apelike body. This is how he saw the Elizaldes: Gustavo vs. the Robot Monster.
Gus pulled a small pocketknife from his jacket and unfolded the silver blade. His mother’s eyes watched him carefully—like a caged animal’s. He pushed back his left sleeve, then extended both arms through the iron bars, holding them above her helmeted head as her dead eyes tracked the silver blade. Gus pressed the sharpened point against his left forearm, cutting, leaving a thin incision of less than half an inch in length. Rich, red blood spilled from the wound. Gus angled his arm so that the blood ran down to his wrist, dripping into the open helmet.
He watched his mother’s eyes as her mouth and stinger worked unseen inside the helmet, ingesting the blood meal.
She got maybe a shot glass’s worth of him before he pulled his arms back outside the cage. Gus retreated to a small table he kept across the room, ripping a square of paper towel from a thick brown roll and applying direct pressure to the wound, then sealing the cut with liquid bandage squeezed from an almost-empty tube. He pulled a baby wipe from a pop-up box and cleaned off the bloodstain on his arm. The length of his left forearm was scored with similar knife scratches, adding to his already impressive display of body art. In feeding her, he kept tracing and retracing the same pattern, opening and reopening the same old wounds, carving the word “MADRE” into his flesh.
“I found you some music, Mama,” he said, producing a handful of battered and burned CDs. “Some of your favorites: Los Panchos, Los Tres Ases, Javier Solis…”
Gus looked at her standing inside the cage, feasting on her son’s blood, and tried to remember the woman who raised him. The single mother with a sometime husband and occasional boyfriends. She did her best for him, which was different from always doing the right thing. But it was the best she knew how to do. She had lost the custody battle, her versus the street. The barrio had raised him. It was the street behavior he emulated, rather than that of his madre. So many things he regretted now but could not change. He chose to remember their younger days. Her caressing him—treating his wounds after a neighborhood fight. And, even in her angriest moments, the kindness and love in her eyes.
All gone now. All disappeared.
Gus had disrespected her in life. So why did he now revere her in undeath? He did not know the answer. He did not understand the forces that drove him. All he knew was that visiting with her in this state—feeding her—charged him up like a battery. Made him crazy for revenge.
He placed one of the CDs in a luxurious stereo system he had pillaged from a car full of corpses. He had jimmied a few speakers of different brands and managed to get a good sound out of it. Javier Solis started singing “No te doy la libertad” (I will not give you freedom), an angry and melancholic bolero that proved eerily appropriate for the occasion.
“Do you like it, Madre?” he said, knowing all too well that this was just another monologue between them. “You remember it?”
Gus returned to the cage wall. He reached inside to close the faceplate, sealing her back in the darkness, when he saw something change in her eyes. Something came into them.
He had seen this before. He knew what it meant.
The voice, not his mother’s, boomed deep inside his head.
I can taste you, boy, said the Master. I taste your blood and your yearning. I taste your weakness. I know who you are in league with. My bastard son. The eyes remained focused on him, with a hint of a spark behind them, like that tiny red light on a camera that tells you it is passively recording.
Gus tried to clear his mind. He tried to think nothing. Yelling at the creature through his mother brought him nothing. That much he had learned. Resist. The way old man Setrakian would have advised him. Gus was training himself to withstand the dark intelligence of the Master.
Yes, the old professor. He had plans for you. If only he could see you here. Feeding your madre in the same manner he used to feed the infested heart of his long-lost wife. He failed, Gus. As you will fail.
Gus focused the pain in his head on the image of his mother as she once was. His mind’s eye stared at this image in an attempt to block out everything else.
Bring me the others, Augustin Elizalde. Your reward will be great. Your survival will be assured. Live like a king, not as a rat. Or else… no mercy. However much you beg for a second chance, I will no longer hear you. Your time is growing short…
“This is my house,” said Gus, aloud but quietly. “My mind, demon. You are not welcome here.”
What if I gave her back? Her will is stored in me along with the millions of voices. But I can find it for you, invoke it for you. I can give you your mother back…
And then, Gus’s mother’s eyes became almost human. They softened and became wet and full of pain.
“Hijito,” she said. “My son. Why am I here? Why am I like this… ? What are you doing to me?”
It hit him all at once, her nakedness, the madness, the guilt, the horror.
“No!!” he screamed, and reached in through the bars with a trembling hand, sliding the faceplate shut at once. Immediately, once it was closed, Gus felt released, as though by an invisible hand. And in the helmet, the laughter of the Master exploded. Gus covered his ears but the voice continued resounding in his head until, like an echo, it faded away.
The Master had attempted to engage him long enough to get a fix on Gus’s location, so it could send in his army of vampires to wipe him out.
It was just a trick. Not my mother. Just a trick. Never deal with the devil—that much he knew. Live like a king. Right. The king of a ruined world. The king of nothing. But down here, he was alive. An agent of chaos. Caca grande. The shit in the Master’s soup.
Gus’s reverie was interrupted by footfalls in the tunnels. He went to the door and saw artificial light coming around the corner.
Fet came first, Goodweather behind him. Gus had seen Fet a month or two before, but the doctor he had not seen in quite some time. Goodweather looked the worst he’d ever seen him.
They had never seen Gus’s mother before, never even knew he had her here. Fet saw her first, moving to the bars. Gus’s mother’s helmet tracked him. Gus explained the situation to them—how he had it all under control, how she was not a threat to him, his homies, or the mission.
“Holy Christ,” said the big exterminator. “Since when?”
“Long time now,” answered Gus. “I just don’t like to talk about it.”
Fet moved laterally, watching her helmet follow him. “She can’t see though?”
“No.”
“The helmet works? Blocking out the Master?”
Gus nodded. “I think so. Plus, she doesn’t even know where she is… it’s a triangulation thing. They need sight and sound and something inside the brain to home in on you. I keep one fully blocked all the time—her ears. Faceplate blocks her sight. It’s her vampire brain and her sense of smell spotting you now.”
“What are you feeding her?” asked Fet.
Gus shrugged. The answer was obvious.
Goodweather spoke up then. “Why? Why do you keep her?”
Gus looked at him. “I guess that’s still none of your fucking business, doctor…”
“She’s gone. That thing in there—that’s not your mother.”
“You really think I don’t know that?”
Goodweather said, “There’s no reason to keep her otherwise. You need to release her. Now.”
“I don’t need to do anything. This is my decision. My madre.”
“Not anymore she isn’t. My son, if I find that he has been turned, I will release him. I will cut him down myself, without a moment’s hesitation.”
“Well, this ain’t your son. Or any of your business.”
Gus couldn’t see Goodweather’s eyes clearly in the dim room. Last time they had met, Gus could tell that he had been hyped on speed. The good doctor was self-medicating then, and he thought now, too.
Gus turned away from him, back to Fet, cutting Goodweather out of the conversation. “How was your vacation, hombre?”
“Ah. Funny. Very relaxing. No, it was a wild goose chase, but with an interesting ending. How’s the street battle?”
“I’m taking it to them as best I can. Keeping the pressure up. Program Anarchy, you know? Agent Sabotage, reporting for duty, every damn night. Burned down four vamp lairs last week. Blew up a building the week before. Never knew what hit ’em. Guerilla warfare and dirty fucking tricks. Fight the power, manito.”
“We need it. Any time something explodes in the city, or a thick plume of smoke or dust rises up into the rain, it has to register with people that there are still some in the city who are fighting back. And it’s another thing for the vampires to have to explain away.” Fet motioned to Goodweather. “Eph brought down an entire hospital building a day ago. Detonated oxygen tanks.”
Gus turned to him. “What were you looking for in the hospital?” he asked, letting the doc know that he knew his dirty little secret. Fet was a fighter, a killer like Gus. Goodweather was something more complicated, and simplicity was what they needed now. Gus didn’t trust him. Turning back to Fet, he said, “You remember El Angel de Plata?”
“Of course,” said Fet. “The old wrestler.”
“The Silver Angel.” Gus kissed his thumb and saluted the wrestler’s memory with a fist. “So—call me the Silver Ninja. Got moves that would make your head spin so hard, all your hair would fall out. Two other homeboys with me, we’re on a tear like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Silver Ninja. I like it.”
“Vampire assassin. I’m legendary. And I ain’t gonna rest until I got all their heads on spikes running the length of Broadway.”
“They’re still hanging corpses from street signs. They would love to have yours.”
“And yours. They think they’re badass, but I’m ten times as dangerous as any bloodsucker. Viva las ratas! Long live the rats!”
Fet smiled and shook Gus’s hand. “I wish we had a dozen more like you.”
Gus waved that off. “You get a dozen of me, we’d end up killing off each other.”
Gus led them back out of the tunnels to the basement of Buell Hall, where Fet and Goodweather had left the Coleman cooler. He then led them back underground to Low Memorial Library, then up through its administrative offices to the roof. A cool, dark afternoon-night with no rain, only an ominously black cloud of fog rolling in off the Hudson.
Fet popped open the top of the cooler, revealing two magnificent headless tunas sloshing around in what was left of the ice from the ship’s hold.
“Hungry?” asked Fet.
Eating it raw was the obvious thing to do, but Goodweather laid down some medical science on them, insisting that they cook the fish because of the climate changes altering the ocean’s ecosystem; no one knew what kind of lethal bacteria were lurking in raw fish.
Gus knew where to get a decent-sized camping grill from the catering department and Fet helped him carry it up to the roof. Goodweather was sent to break off old car antennas for skewers. They built their fire on the Hudson side between two large roof fans, blocking the flame light from the street and obscuring it from most rooftops.
The fish blackened up nice. Crisp-skinned and warm pink on the inside. A few bites in, Gus immediately felt better. He was so hungry all the time, he was unable to see how malnutrition ran him down both mentally and physically. The protein feast recharged him. Already he was looking forward to heading out on another daylight raid.
“So,” said Gus, with the pleasure of warm food on his tongue, “what is the occasion of this feast?”
“We need your help,” said Fet. He told Gus what they knew about Nora, Fet’s manner turning grave, intense. “She’s got to be in the nearest blood camp, the one north of the city. We want to get her out.”
Gus checked Goodweather, who was supposed to be her boyfriend. Goodweather looked back at him, but strangely without the same fire that Fet had. “Tall order.”
“The tallest. We have to move as soon as possible. If they find out who she is, that she knows us… it will be bad for her and worse for us.”
“I’m all for combat, don’t get me wrong. But I try to be strategic, too, these days. My job is not only staying alive but dying human. We all know the risks. Is it worth going in to get her? And I’m just asking, homes.”
Fet nodded, looking at the flames licking at the skewered fish. “I get your point. At this stage, it’s like, what are we doing this for? Are we trying to save the world? World’s already gone. If the vampires disappeared tomorrow, what would we do? Rebuild? How? For whom?” He shrugged, looking to Goodweather for support. “Maybe someday. Until this sky clears, it’d be a fight for survival no matter who runs this planet.” Fet paused to wipe some tuna off the whiskers around his lips. “I could give you a lot of reasons. But, bottom line, I’m just tired of losing people. We’re gonna do this with or without you.”
Gus waved his hand. “Never said anything about doing it without me. Just wanted to get your thinking on it. I like the doc. My boys are due back soon; we can arm up then.” Gus picked off another hot chunk of tuna. “Always wanted to fuck up a farm. All I needed was a good reason.”
Fet was flush with gratitude. “You save some of this food for your guys, energize them.”
“Beats squirrel meat. Let’s put this fire out. I have something to show you.”
Gus wrapped the rest of the fish in paper to save for his hombres, then doused the flames with the melted ice. He led them down through the building and across the vacant campus to Buell Hall, into the basement. In a small side room, Gus had wired a stationary bicycle to a handful of battery chargers. A desk held a variety of devices scavenged from the university audiovisual department, including late-model digital cameras with long lenses, a media drive, and some small, portable high-def monitors—all the stuff they just didn’t make anymore.
“Some of my boys been recording our raids and recon. Good propaganda value, if we can get it out there some way. Also been doing some recon work. You know about the castle in Central Park?”
“Of course,” said Fet. “The Master’s nest. Surrounded by an army of vamps.”
Goodweather was intrigued now, moving to the seven-inch monitor as Gus fed it a waiting battery pack and wired in a camera.
The screen came to life, soupy green and black.
“Night-vision lens. Found a couple dozen in collector’s boxes of a shooter video game. They fit on the end of a telephoto. Not a perfect match—and the quality is basically shit, I know. But keep watching.”
Fet and Goodweather bent forward to better view the small screen. After a few moments of deep concentration, the ghostly dark figures in the image started to come together for them.
“The castle, right?” said Gus, outlining it with his finger. “Stone foundation, the lake. Over here, your army of vamps.”
Fet asked, “Where’d you take this from?”
“Roof of the Museum of Natural History. Close as I could get. Had it on a tripod like a sniper.”
The image of the castle parapet trembled mightily, the zoom setting maxed out.
“There we go,” said Gus. “See it?”
As the image stabilized again, a figure emerged onto the high ledge of the parapet. The army below turned their heads toward it in a mass gesture of complete allegiance.
“Holy shit,” said Fet. “Is that the Master?”
“It’s smaller,” said Goodweather. “Or is the perspective out of whack?”
“It’s the Master,” said Fet. “Look at the drones below, how they turn their heads toward him at once. Like flowers bending toward the sun.”
Eph said, “It changed. Jumped bodies.”
“It must have,” said Fet, bursting pride evident in his voice. “The professor did hurt it after all. He had to have. I knew it. Wounded it so that it had to take on a new form.” Fet straightened. “I wonder how he did it.”
Gus watched Goodweather concentrating hard on the muddy, trembling image of the new Master moving. “It’s Bolivar,” said Goodweather.
“What’s that?” asked Gus.
“Not what. Who. Gabriel Bolivar.”
“Bolivar?” said Gus, searching his memory. “The singer?”
“That’s him,” said Goodweather.
“Are you sure?” said Fet, knowing exactly who Goodweather was referring to. “It’s so dark, how can you tell?”
“The way he moves. Something about him. I’m telling you—he is the Master.”
Fet looked closely. “You’re right. Why him? Maybe the Master had no time to choose. Maybe the old man hit it so hard, it had to change immediately.”
As Goodweather stared at the image, another vague form joined the Master out on the high parapet. Goodweather seemed to freeze, then tremble as though suffering a chill.
“It’s Kelly,” he said.
Goodweather said this with authority, without any trace of doubt.
Fet pulled back a bit, having more trouble with the image than Goodweather. But Gus could tell that he too was convinced. “Jesus.”
Goodweather steadied himself with a hand on the table. His vampire wife was serving at the side of the Master.
And then a third figure emerged. Smaller, skinnier than the other two. Reading darker on the night-vision scale.
“See that there?” said Gus. “We got a human being living among the vampires. Not just the vampires—the Master. Want to guess?”
Fet stiffened. That was Gus’s first sign that something was wrong. Then Fet turned to look at Goodweather.
Goodweather let go of the table. His legs gave out and he slumped back into a sitting position on the floor. His eyes were still locked on the soupy image, his stomach burning, suddenly flushed with acid. His lower lip trembled, and tears welled up in his eyes.
“That’s my son.”
International Space Station
TAKE IT DOWN.
Astronaut Thalia Charles didn’t even turn her head anymore. When the voice came now, she just accepted it. She almost—yes, she could admit this—welcomed it. As alone as she was—indeed, she was one of the most alone human beings in the history of human beings—she was not alone with her thoughts.
She was isolated aboard the International Space Station, the massive research facility disabled and tumbling through Earth’s orbit. Its solar-powered thrusters firing sporadically, the man-made satellite continued to drift in an elliptical trajectory some two hundred miles above its home planet, passing from day into night roughly every three hours.
For nearly two calendar years now—racking up eight orbital days for every one calendar day—she had existed in this state of quarantined suspension. Zero gravity and zero exercise had taken a great toll on her wasting body. Most of her muscle was gone, her tendons atrophied. Her spine, arms, and legs had bent in odd, disturbing angles and most of her fingers were useless hooks, curled upon themselves. Her food rations—mainly freeze-dried borscht brought up on the last Russian transport before the cataclysm—had dwindled to almost nothing, but on the other hand her body required little nutrition. Her skin was brittle, and flakes of it floated about the cabin like dandelion snow. Much of her hair was gone, which was also for the best, as it only got in the way in zero gravity.
She had all but disintegrated, both in body and in mind.
The Russian commander had died just three weeks after the ISS began to malfunction. Massive nuclear explosions on Earth excited the atmosphere, leading to multiple impacts with orbiting space junk. They had taken shelter inside their emergency escape capsule, the Soyuz spacecraft, following procedure in the absence of any communiqué from Houston. Commander Demidov volunteered to don a space suit and venture bravely out into the main facility in an attempt to repair the oxygen tank leaks—and succeeded in restoring and rerouting one of them into the Soyuz, before apparently suffering a massive heart attack. His success allowed Thalia and the French engineer to survive much longer than anticipated, as well as redistribute one-third of their rations of food and water.
But the result had been as much a curse as a blessing.
Then, within a few months, Maigny, the engineer, began showing signs of dementia. As they watched the planet disappear behind a black, octopus-ink-like cloud of polluted atmosphere, he rapidly lost faith and began speaking in strange voices. Thalia fought to maintain her own sanity in part by attempting to restore his and believed she was making real progress, until she caught a reflection of him making bizarre faces when he thought she could not see him. That night, as she pretended to sleep, spinning slowly inside the tight cabin space with her eyes half-closed, she watched in gravity-free horror as Maigny quietly unpacked the survival kit located between two of the three seats. He removed the three-barreled pistol from inside, more like a shotgun than a simple handgun. Some years ago, a Russian space capsule had, upon reentry and descent, crash-landed in the Siberian wilderness. It was hours before they were located, during which time the cosmonauts had to fight off wolves with little more than stones and tree branches. Since that episode, the specially made oversized gun—complete with a machete inside its detachable buttstock—had been included as standard mission equipment inside the “Soyuz Portable Survival Kit.”
She watched him feel up the barrel of the weapon, exploring the trigger with his finger. He removed the machete and spun it in the air, watching the blade go around and around and catching a glint of the distant sun. She felt the blade pass near her and saw, like the glint of the sun, a hint of pleasure in his eyes.
She knew then what she would have to do in order to save herself. She continued to pursue her amateur therapy so as not to alert Maigny to her concern, all the while preparing for the inevitable. She did not like to think of it, even now.
Occasionally, depending on the rotation of the ISS, his corpse floated into view through the door to the station, like a macabre Jehovah’s Witness making a house call.
Again—one fewer person to consume food rations. One fewer set of lungs.
And more time endured trapped alone inside this incapacitated space can.
Take it down.
“Don’t tempt me,” she muttered. The voice was male, indistinct. Familiar, but she could not place it.
Not her husband. Not her late father. But somebody she knew…
She did feel something, a presence with her inside the Soyuz. Didn’t she? Or was it only a desire for companionship? A want, a need? What person’s voice was she using to fill up this blank space in her life?
She looked out through the windows as the ISS again crossed into sunlight.
As she stared out the window at the dawning sun, she saw colors come into the sky. She called it “the sky,” but it was not the sky up there; nor was it “night.” It was the universe and it wasn’t “black” either; it was absent of light. It was void. The purest nothingness. Except…
There it was again: colors. A spray of red and a burst of orange, just outside her peripheral vision. Something like the bright explosions one sees in one’s tightly shut eyes.
She tried this, shutting her eyes, pressing her lids with her dry, cracked thumbs. Again, an absence of light. The void of the inside of her head. A fountain of undulating colors and stars came into the nothingness—and then she opened her eyes again.
Blue brightened and disappeared in the distance. Then, in another area, a spray of green. And violet!
Signs. Even if they were purely fictions created in her mind, they were signs. Of something.
Take it down, dearie.
“Dearie?” Nobody ever called her “dearie.” Never her husband, not any of her teachers, nor the astronaut program administrators, nor her parents or grandparents.
Still, she didn’t question the voice’s identity too strongly. She was happy for the company. She was happy for the counsel.
“Why?” she asked.
No answer. The voice never answered on request. And yet she kept expecting that someday it would.
“How?” she asked.
No answer again, but as she drifted through the bell-shaped cabin, her boot caught on the survival kit between the seats.
“Really?” she said, addressing the kit itself as though it were the source of the voice.
She hadn’t touched the thing since she had last used it. She pulled it out now, opening the kit, the combination lock unclasped. (Had she left it that way?) She lifted out the TP-82, the long-barreled handgun. The machete was gone; she had tossed it out with Maigny. She raised the weapon to eye level, as though aiming it at the window… and then released it, watching it twist and float before her like a word or an idea hanging in the air.
She inventoried the rest of the kit. Twenty rifle rounds. Twenty flares. Ten shotgun shells.
“Tell me why,” she said, wiping away a rogue teardrop, watching the speck of moisture sail away. “After all this time—why now?”
She held still, her body barely rotating. She was certain an answer was going to come. A reason. An explanation.
Because it’s time…
The flaming light burst past her window with such silent alacrity that she choked on her own breath. She began to hyperventilate, grabbing the seat back and propelling herself to the window to watch the tail of the comet burn away into Earth’s atmosphere, snuffing itself out before reaching the tumorous lower atmosphere.
She whipped around, again feeling a presence. Something not human.
“Was that… ?” she started to ask, but could not complete the question.
Because obviously, it was.
A sign.
When she was a girl, a falling star streaking across the sky made her want to become an astronaut. That was the story she told whenever called upon to visit schools or do interviews in the months leading up to launch, and yet it was entirely true: her fate had been written across the sky in her youth.
Take it down.
Again, her breath got caught in her throat. The voice—at once she recognized it. Her dog at home in Connecticut, a Newfoundland named Ralphie. This was the voice she heard in her head whenever she would talk to him, when she would rough up his coat and engage him and he would nuzzle against her leg.
Want to go out?
Yes indeed I do I do.
Want a treat?
Do I! Do I!
Who’s a good boy?
I am I am I am.
I’ll miss you lots while I’m in space.
I’ll miss you back, dearie.
This was the voice with her now. The same one she had projected onto her Ralphie. Her and not her, the voice of companionship and trust and affection.
“Really?” she asked again.
Thalia thought about what it would be like, moving through the cabins, blowing out the thrusters until she breached the hull. This great scientific facility of conjoined capsules listing and plummeting from its orbit, catching fire as it entered the upper atmosphere, streaking downward like a flaming burr and penetrating the poisonous crust of the troposphere.
And then certainty filled her like an emotion. And even if she were merely insane, at least she could move without doubt now, without question. And—at the very, very least—she would not be going out like Maigny, hallucinating and foaming at the mouth.
The shotgun shells loaded in manually from the breach side.
She would scuttle the hull to let the airlessness in and then go down with the ship. In a way she had always suspected this was to be her destiny. This was a decision formed of beauty. Born of a falling star, Thalia Charles was about to become a falling star herself.
Camp Liberty
NORA LOOKED AT the shank.
She had been working on it all night long. She was exhausted but proud. The irony of a butter-knife shank was not lost on her. Such a dainty piece of cutlery, now sharpened into a jagged point and edge. Still a few more hours to go—she could sharpen it to perfection.
She had muffled the sound of the grinding—against a corner piece in the concrete—by covering it with her lumpy bed pillow. Her mother was asleep a few feet away. She didn’t wake up. Their reunion would be brief. The afternoon before, perhaps an hour after she had returned from seeing Barnes, they had been handed a processing order. In it was a request for Nora’s mother to leave the recreation courtyard at dawn.
Feeding time.
How would they “process” her? She didn’t know. But she would not allow it. She would call for Barnes, give in, get close to him, and then kill him. She would either save her mother or get him. If her hands were going to be empty they would be stained with his blood.
Her mother murmured something in her sleep and then lapsed back into the deep but gentle snoring that Nora knew so well. As a child Nora had been lulled to sleep by that sound and the rhythmic up-and-down of her chest. Her mother was, back then, a formidable woman. A force of nature. She worked, indefatigable, and raised Nora properly—always vigilant of her, always able to provide an education and a degree and the clothes and luxuries that go with them. Nora got a graduation dress and the expensive textbooks and not once had her mother complained.
But there was that one night right before Christmas, when Nora had been awakened by a soft sobbing. She was fourteen and had been particularly nasty about getting a quinceañera dress on her upcoming birthday…
She quietly climbed down the steps and stood at the kitchen door. Her mother was sitting alone, a half glass of milk by her side—reading glasses and bills all over the table.
Nora was paralyzed by this sight. Sort of like sneaking up on God crying. She was about to step in and ask her what was wrong when her mother’s sobbing became louder—a roar. She suffocated the noise by grotesquely covering her mouth with both hands, while her eyes exploded in tears. This terrified Nora. Made the blood freeze in her veins. They never spoke about the incident, but Nora had been imprinted with that image of pain. She changed. Perhaps forever. She took better care of her mother and of herself and always worked harder than anyone else.
As dementia settled in, Nora’s mother started to complain. About everything and all the time. Her resentments and anger, accumulated through the years and quieted by civility, came forth in torrents of incoherent nagging. And Nora took it all. She would never abandon her mother.
Three hours before dawn, Nora’s mother opened her eyes. And for a fleeting moment she was lucid. It happened now and then but less often than before. In a way, Nora thought, her mother, like the strigoi, was supplanted by another will and it was quite eerie whenever she snapped out of the trancelike disease and looked at Nora. At Nora as she was, right here, right now.
“Nora? Where are we?” she said.
“Shh, Mama. We are okay. Go back to sleep.”
“Are we in a hospital? Am I sick?” she asked, agitated.
“No, Mama. It’s all right. Everything is fine.” Nora’s mother held her daughter’s hand firmly and lay back down in her cot. She caressed her shaved head.
“What happened? Who did this to you?” she asked, mortified.
Nora kissed her mother’s hand. “Nobody, Mom. It will grow back. You’ll see.”
Nora’s mother looked at her with great lucidity, and after a long pause she asked, “Are we going to die?”
And Nora didn’t know what to say. She began to sob, and her mother hushed her now and hugged her and kissed her softly on the head. “Don’t cry, my dear. Don’t cry.”
She then held her head and looked her daughter straight in the eye and said, “Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything. I love you, Nora. I always will. And that we will have forever.”
They fell asleep together and Nora lost track of the time. She woke up and saw that the sky was clearing.
What now? They were trapped. Away from Fet, away from Eph. With no way out. Except the butter knife.
She took a final look at the shank. She would go to Barnes and use it and then… then maybe she would turn it on herself.
Suddenly it didn’t look sharp enough. She worked on the edge and the tip until dawn.
Sewage Processing Plant
THE STANFORD SEWAGE Processing Plant lay beneath a hexagonal red brick building on La Salle Street between Amsterdam and Broadway. Built in 1906, the plant was meant to keep up with the area’s demands and growth for at least a century. During its first decade, the plant processed thirty million gallons of raw sewage a day. But the influx of people delivered by two consecutive world wars soon made that rate insufficient. The neighbors also complained about shortness of breath, eye infections, and a general sulfurous smell emanating from the building 24/7. The plant shut down partially in 1947 and completely five years after that.
The inside of it was immense, even majestic. There was a nobility to industrial turn-of-the-century architecture that has since been lost. Twin wrought-iron staircases led to the catwalks above, and the cast-iron structures that filtered and processed the raw sewage had barely been vandalized over the years. Faded graffiti and a three-feet-deep deposit of silt, dry leaves, dog poop, and dead pigeons were the only signs of abandonment. A year before, Gus Elizalde had stumbled onto it and had cleaned one of the reservoirs by hand, turning it into his own personal armory.
The only access was through a tunnel, and only by using a massive iron valve locked with a heavy stainless steel chain.
Gus wanted to show off his weapons cache, so they could load up for the raid on the blood camp. Eph had stayed behind—needing some alone time after finally seeing his son, via video, after two long years, standing alongside the Master and his vampire mother. Fet had renewed understanding for Eph’s unique plight, the toll the vampire strain had taken on his life, and Fet sympathized completely. But still, on their way to the improvised armory, Fet discreetly complained about Eph, about how his focus was slipping. He complained in only practical terms, without malice, without rancor. Maybe with just a touch of jealousy, since Goodweather’s presence still could get in the way of him and Nora.
“I don’t like him,” said Gus. “Never did. Guy bitches about what he doesn’t have, loses sight of what he does have, and is never happy. He’s what you call a—what’s that word?”
“Pessimist?” said Fet.
“Asshole,” said Gus.
“He’s gone through a lot,” said Fet.
“Oh, really. Oh, I’m so fucking sorry. I always wanted my mother to stand naked in a cell with a fucking helmet glued to her fucking cabeza.”
Fet almost smiled. Gus was ultimately right. No man should ever have to go through what Eph was going through. But still, Fet needed him functional and battle-ready. Their corps was shrinking, and getting everyone’s best effort was critical.
“He’s never fucking happy. His wife nags him too much? Bam!! She is gone!! Now, boo-hoo-boo, if only I could get her back… Bam!! She’s undead, boo-hoo-boo, poor me, my wife is a fucking vampire… Bam!! They take his son. Boo-hoo-fucking-boo, if only I could have him back… It never fucking ends with him. Who you love or who you protect is all there is, man. Fucked-up as it may be. If my mother looks like the ugliest porno Power Ranger, I don’t care, man. That’s what I have. I have my mama. See? I don’t give up,” said Gus. “And I don’t give a fuck. When I go, I wanna go fighting those fuckers. Maybe because I’m a fire sign.”
“You’re a what?” said Fet.
“Gemini,” said Gus. “In the zodiac. A fire sign.”
“Gemini is an air sign, Gus,” said Fet.
“Whatever. I still don’t give a fuck,” said Gus. Then after a long pause, he added, “If we still had the old man here, we’d be on top by now.”
“I believe that,” said Fet.
Gus slowed in the darkened underground tunnel and started to unlock the padlock.
“So, about Nora,” he said. “Have you… ?”
“No—no,” said Fet, blushing. “I… no.”
Gus smiled in the dark. “She doesn’t even know, huh?”
“She knows,” said Fet. “At least—I think she does. But we haven’t done much about it.”
“You will, big boy,” said Gus as he opened the access valve to the armory. “Bienvenido a Casa Elizalde!” he said, extending his arms and showing a wide array of automatic weapons and swords and ammo of all calibers.
Fet patted him on the back while nodding. He eyed a box of hand grenades. “Where the fuck did you get these?”
“Pfft. A boy needs his toys, man. And the bigger, the better.”
Fet said, “Any specific uses in mind?”
“Too many. I’m saving ’em for something special. Why, you got any ideas?”
Fet said, “How about detonating a nuclear bomb?”
Gus laughed harshly. “That actually sounds like fun.”
“I’m glad you think so. Because I didn’t come back from Iceland completely empty-handed.”
Fet told Gus about the Russian bomb he had bought with silver.
“No mames?” Gus said. “You have a nuclear bomb?”
“But no detonator. That’s where I was hoping you could help me out.”
“You’re serious?” Gus asked. He hadn’t moved past the previous exchange. “A nuclear bomb?”
Fet nodded modestly.
“Much respect, Fet,” said Gus. “Much respect. Let’s take out the island. Like—right fucking now!”
“Whatever we do with it… we get one shot. We need to be sure.”
“I know who can get us the detonator, man. The only asshole that is still capable of getting anything dirty, anything crooked on the whole East Coast. Alfonso Creem.”
“How would you go about contacting him? Crossing to Jersey is like going into East Germany.”
“I have my ways,” said Gus. “You just leave it to Gusto. How you think I got the fucking grenades?”
Fet went silent, pensive, and then looked back at Gus.
“Would you trust Quinlan? With the book?”
“The old man’s book? The Silver whatever?”
Fet nodded. “Would you share it with him?”
“I don’t know, man,” said Gus. “I mean, sure—it’s just a book.”
“The Master wants the book for a reason. Setrakian sacrificed his life for it. Whatever is inside must be real. Your friend Quinlan thinks as much…”
“What about you?” asked Gus.
“Me?” Fet said. “I have the book—but I can’t do much with it myself. You know that saying ‘He’s so dumb, he couldn’t find a prayer in the Bible’? Well, I can’t find much. There’s some trick to it, maybe. We should be so close.”
“I’ve seen him, man—Quinlan. Shit, I’ve recorded that motherfucker cleaning a nest in a New York minute. Two, three dozen vampires.”
Gus smiled, cherishing his memories. Fet liked Gus even more when he smiled.
“In jail you learn that there are two kinds of guys in this world—and I don’t care if they’re human or bloodsuckers—there’s the ones that take it and the ones that hand it out. And this guy, man—this guy gives it out like fucking candy… He wants the hunt, man. He wants the hunt. And he’s maybe the one other orphan out here who hates the Master as much as we do.”
Fet nodded. In his heart the matter was resolved.
Quinlan would get the book. And Fet would get some answers.
Extract from the Diary of Ephraim Goodweather
Most midlife crises are not this bad. In the past, it used to be that people would watch their youth fade, their marriage break, or their careers grow stagnant. Those were the breaks, usually eased by a new car, a dab of Just for Men, or a big Mont Blanc pen, depending on your budget. But what I have lost cannot be compensated for. My heart races every time I think of it, every time I sense it. It is over. Or it will be over soon enough. Whatever I had, I have squandered—and what I hoped for will never be. Things around me have taken their permanent, horrible final form. All the promise in my life—youngest graduate in my class, the big move east, meeting the perfect girl—all that is gone. The evenings of cold pizza and a movie. Of feeling like a giant in my son’s eyes…
When I was a kid, there was this guy on TV called Mr. Rogers, and he used to sing: “You can never go down / can never go down / can never go down the drain.” What a fucking lie.
Once, I might have gathered my past in order to present it as a CV or a list of accomplishments, but now… now it seems like an inventory of trivialities, of things that could have been but are not. As a young man I felt the world and my place in it was all part of a plan. That success, whatever that is, was something to be gained simply by focusing on my work—on being good at “What I did.” As a workaholic father, I felt that the day-to-day grind was a way to provide, to see us through while life took its final shape. And now… now that the world around me has become an unbearable place, and all I have is the nausea of wrong turns taken and things lost. Now I know this is the real me. The permanent me. The solidified disappointment of that young man’s life—the subtraction of all those achievements of youth—the minus of a plus that was never tallied. This is me: weak, infirm, fading. Not giving up, because I never do… but living without faith in myself or my circumstance.
My heart flutters at the notion of never finding Zack—at the idea that he is gone forever. This I cannot accept. I will not accept.
Not thinking straight. But I will find him, I know I will. I have seen him in my dreams. His eyes looking at me, making of me that giant once again, calling me by the truest name a man can ever aspire to: “Dad.”
I have seen a light surrounding us. Purging us. Absolving me—of the booze and the pills and the blind spots of my heart. I have seen this light. I long for it again in a world this dark.
Most midlife crises are not this bad. In the past, it used to be that people would watch their youth fade, their marriage break, or their careers grow stagnant. Those were the breaks, usually eased by a new car, a dab of Just for Men, or a big Mont Blanc pen, depending on your budget. But what I have lost cannot be compensated for. My heart races every time I think of it, every time I sense it. It is over. Or it will be over soon enough. Whatever I had, I have squandered—and what I hoped for will never be. Things around me have taken their permanent, horrible final form. All the promise in my life—youngest graduate in my class, the big move east, meeting the perfect girl—all that is gone. The evenings of cold pizza and a movie. Of feeling like a giant in my son’s eyes…
When I was a kid, there was this guy on TV called Mr. Rogers, and he used to sing: “You can never go down / can never go down / can never go down the drain.” What a fucking lie.
Once, I might have gathered my past in order to present it as a CV or a list of accomplishments, but now… now it seems like an inventory of trivialities, of things that could have been but are not. As a young man I felt the world and my place in it was all part of a plan. That success, whatever that is, was something to be gained simply by focusing on my work—on being good at “What I did.” As a workaholic father, I felt that the day-to-day grind was a way to provide, to see us through while life took its final shape. And now… now that the world around me has become an unbearable place, and all I have is the nausea of wrong turns taken and things lost. Now I know this is the real me. The permanent me. The solidified disappointment of that young man’s life—the subtraction of all those achievements of youth—the minus of a plus that was never tallied. This is me: weak, infirm, fading. Not giving up, because I never do… but living without faith in myself or my circumstance.
My heart flutters at the notion of never finding Zack—at the idea that he is gone forever. This I cannot accept. I will not accept.
Not thinking straight. But I will find him, I know I will. I have seen him in my dreams. His eyes looking at me, making of me that giant once again, calling me by the truest name a man can ever aspire to: “Dad.”
I have seen a light surrounding us. Purging us. Absolving me—of the booze and the pills and the blind spots of my heart. I have seen this light. I long for it again in a world this dark.
Beneath Columbia University
EPH WANDERED AWAY through the subterranean tunnels of the former insane asylum beneath the former Columbia University. All he wanted to do was walk. Seeing Zack atop Belvedere Castle with Kelly and the Master had shaken Eph to the core. Of all the fates he had dreaded for his son—Zack murdered or starving in a locked cage somewhere—standing at the Master’s side had never occurred to him.
Was it the demon Kelly who had drawn their son into the fold? Or was it the Master who wanted Zack with him, and if so, why?
Perhaps the Master had threatened Kelly, and Zack had no choice but to play along. Eph wanted to cling to this hypothesis. Because the idea that the boy would freely align himself with the Master was unimaginable. The corruption of one’s child is a parent’s worst fear. Eph needed to believe in Zack as a little lost boy, not a wayward son.
But his fear wouldn’t let him slip into this fantasy. Eph had walked away from the video screen feeling like a ghost.
He dug into his coat pocket, finding two white Vicodin tablets. They glowed in his palm, made brilliant by the light of his battery-powered headlamp. He thrust them into his mouth, dry-swallowing them. One of them lodged at the base of his esophagus, and he had to jump up and down a few times in order to force it down.
He is mine.
Eph looked up fast. Kelly’s voice—muffled and distant, but distinctly hers. He turned around twice but found himself quite alone in the underground passage.
He has always been mine.
Eph drew his sword a few inches out of its sheath. He started forward, toward a short flight of stairs heading down. The voice was in his head, but some sixth sense was showing him the way.
He sits at the right hand of the Father.
Eph running now, furious, the light from his headlamp shaking, turning down another dim corridor, turning into…
The dungeon room. Gus’s caged mother.
Eph swept the room. It was otherwise empty. Slowly he turned to the helmeted vampire standing still in the center of its cage. Gus’s vampire mother stood very still, Eph’s light casting a grid shadow onto her body.
Kelly’s voice said, Zack believes you are dead.
Eph drew his sword fully from its sheath. “Shut up,” he said.
He is starting to forget. The old world and all its ways. It’s gone now, a dream of youth.
“Quiet!” Eph said.
He is attentive to the Master. He is respectful. He is learning.
Eph thrust his sword in between two bars. Gus’s mother flinched, repelled by the presence of silver, her pendulous breasts swinging in the half light. “Learning what?” said Eph. “Answer me!”
Kelly’s voice did not.
“You’re brainwashing him,” said Eph. The boy was in isolation, mentally vulnerable. “Are you brainwashing him?”
We are parenting him.
Eph winced as though cut by her words. “No. No… what can you know about that? What can you know about love—about being a father or being a son… ?”
We are the fertile blood. We have birthed many sons… Join us.
“No.”
It is the only way you will be reunited with him.
Eph’s arm lowered a bit. “Fuck you. I will kill you—”
Join us and be with him forever.
Eph froze there a moment, paralyzed by despair. She wanted something from him. The Master wanted something. He made himself pull back. Deny them. Stop talking. Walk away.
Shut the fuck up—! he thought, his rage louder than his voice. He held tightly to his silver blade at his side. He ran back out of the room and into the passageways, Kelly’s voice staying in his head.
Come to us.
He turned a corner, thrusting open a rusty door.
Come to Zack.
He kept running. With each step, he grew angrier, becoming enraged.
You know you want to.
And then her laughter. Not her human laugh, high and light and infectious, but a taunting laugh, meant to provoke him. Meant to turn him back.
But on he ran. And the laughter melted away, fading with distance.
Eph went on blindly, his sword blade clanging into the legs of discarded chairs and scraping against the floor. The Vikes had kicked in, and he was swimming a bit, his body numb but not his head. In walking away, he had turned a corner in his own mind. Now more than ever he wanted to free Nora from the blood camp. To deliver her from the clutches of the vampires. He wanted to show the Master—show it that even in a fucked-up time such as this, it could be done: a human could be saved. That Zack was not lost to Eph, and that the Master’s hold on him was not as secure as it might think.
Eph stopped to catch his breath. His headlamp was dimming, and he tapped it, the light flickering. He needed to figure out where he was and surface, or else be lost in this dark labyrinth. He was anxious to let the others know that he was ready to go to the camp and fight.
He turned the next corner, and at the end of the long, dark corridor, Eph saw a figure. Something about its stance—low-armed, knees lightly flexed—said “vampire.”
Eph’s sword came up. He went a few steps forward, hoping to light the creature better.
It remained still. The narrow corridor walls drifted a bit in Eph’s vision, wobbling thanks to the Vikes. Maybe he was seeing things—seeing what he wanted to see. He had wanted a fight.
Convinced now that it was a figment of his imagination, Eph grew more emboldened, approaching the ghost.
“Come here,” he said, his rage at Kelly and the Master still brimming. “Come and get it.”
The creature stood its ground, allowing Eph a better look. A sweatshirt hood formed a triangular cotton point over its head, shadowing its face and obscuring its eyes. Boots and jeans. One arm hung low at its side, the other hand just hidden behind its back.
Eph strode toward the figure with angry determination, like that of a man crossing a room to slam a door shut. The figure never moved. Eph planted his back leg and delivered a two-handed baseball swing aimed at the neck.
To Eph’s surprise, his sword clanged and his arms kicked back, the handle almost springing loose from his grip. A burst of sparks briefly lit the corridor.
It took Eph a moment to realize that the vampire had parried his blow with a length of steel.
Eph regripped his sword with his stinging palms and rattled knuckles and reared back to swing again. The vampire wielded his steel bar one-handedly, easily deflecting the attack. A sudden boot thrust into Eph’s chest sent him sprawling, tripping over his own feet as he collapsed to the floor.
Eph stared up at the shadowy figure. Entirely real, but… also different. Not one of the semi-intelligent drones he was used to facing. This vamp had a stillness, a self-composure, that set him apart from the seething masses.
Eph scrambled back up onto his feet. The challenge stoked the fire burning inside him. He didn’t know what this vampire was, and he didn’t care. “Come on!” he shouted, beckoning the vamp. Again, the creature did not move. Eph evened out his blade, showing the vamp the sharp silver point. He feigned a stab, spinning quickly, one of his best moves, slashing with enough force to cut the creature in two. But the vamp foresaw the move, raising his steel to parry, and Eph countered again, dodging, coming back around the other way and going straight for its neck.
The vamp was ready for him. Its hand grabbed Eph’s forearm, closing on it like a hot clamp. It twisted Eph’s arm with such force that Eph had to arch backward to keep his elbow and shoulder from snapping under pressure. Eph howled in pain, unable to keep his grip on the sword. It popped from his hand and clattered to the floor. With his free hand, Eph went to his belt for his hip dagger, slashing at the vampire’s face.
Surprised, the thing shoved Eph to the floor, reeling back.
Eph crawled away, his elbow burning with pain. Two more figures came running from his end of the hallway, two humans. Fet and Gus.
Just in time. Eph turned toward the outnumbered vamp, expecting it to hiss and charge.
Instead, the creature reached down to the floor, lifting Eph’s sword by its leather-wrapped handle. It turned the silver-bladed weapon this way and that, as though judging its weight and construction.
Eph had never seen a vampire willingly get that close to silver before—much less take a weapon into its hands.
Fet had drawn his sword, but Gus stopped him with a hand, walking past Eph without offering to help him up. The vampire tossed Eph’s sword to Gus, casually, grip first. Gus caught it easily and lowered the blade.
“Of all the things you taught me,” said Gus, “you left out the part about making these great fucking entrances.”
The vampire’s response was telepathic and exclusive to Gus. It pushed back its black hood, revealing a perfectly bald and earless head, preternaturally smooth, almost in the way that thieves appear with nylons stretched over their faces.
Except for its eyes. They glowed fiercely red, like those of a rat.
Eph stood up, rubbing his elbow. This thing was obviously strigoi, and yet Gus stood near it. Stood with it.
Fet, his hand still on his own sword grip, said, “You again.”
“What the hell is this?” said Eph, apparently the last one to this party.
Gus tossed Eph’s sword back at him, harder than was necessary. “You should remember Mr. Quinlan,” said Gus. “The Ancients’ top hunter. And currently the baddest man in the whole damn town.” Gus then turned back to Mr. Quinlan. “A friend of ours got herself thrown into a blood camp. We want her back.”
Mr. Quinlan regarded Eph with eyes informed by centuries of existence. His voice, when it entered Eph’s mind, was a smooth, measured baritone.
Dr. Goodweather, I presume.
Eph locked eyes with him. Barely nodded. Mr. Quinlan looked at Fet:
I’m here in the hopes that we can reach an arrangement.
Low Memorial Library, Columbia University
INSIDE THE COLUMBIA University library, in a research room off the cavernous rotunda—once, and still, the largest all-granite dome in the country—Mr. Quinlan sat at a reading table across from Fet.
“You help us break into the camp—you get to read the book,” said Fet. “There is no further negotiation…”
I will do that. But you know that you will be vastly outnumbered by both strigoi and human guards?
“We know,” said Fet. “Will you help us in? That’s the price.”
I will.
The burly exterminator unzipped a hidden pocket in his backpack and pulled out a large bundle of rags.
You had it on you? asked the Born, incredulous.
“Can’t think of a safer place,” said Fet, smiling. “Hidden in plain sight. You want the book, you go through me.”
A daunting task, to be sure.
Fet shrugged. “Daunting enough.” He unwrapped a volume lying within the rags. “The Lumen,” said Fet.
Quinlan felt a wave of cold travel up his neck. A rare sensation in one so old. He studied the book as Fet turned to face him. The cover was ragged leather and fabric.
“I pulled off the silver cover. Ruined the spine a little bit, but too bad. It looks humble and unimportant, doesn’t it?”
Where’s the silver cover?
“I have it socked away. Easy to retrieve.”
Quinlan looked at him. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, exterminator?
Felt shrugged off the compliment.
The old man chose well, Mr. Fet. Your heart is uncomplicated. It knows what it knows and acts accordingly. Greater wisdom is hard to find.
The Born sat with his black cotton hood sloughed off his immaculately smooth, white head. Before him, open to one of the illuminated pages, lay the Occido Lumen. Because its silver edging was repellent to his vampiric nature, he carefully turned the pages using the eraser top of a pencil. Now, at once, he touched the interior of the page with his fingertip, almost in the way a blind man would search a loved one’s face.
This document was holy. It contained the creation and history of the world’s vampire race, and as such included several references to Borns. Imagine a human allowed access to a book outlining human creation and answers to most if not all of life’s mysteries. Mr. Quinlan’s deeply red eyes scanned the pages with intense interest.
The reading is slow. The language is dense.
Fet said, “You’re telling me.”
Also, there is much that is hidden. In images and in the watermarks. They appear much clearer to my eyes than yours—but this is going to require some time.
“Which is exactly what we do not have. How much time will it take?”
The Born’s eyes continued scanning back and forth.
Impossible to say.
Fet was aware that his anxiety was a distraction to Mr. Quinlan.
“We are loading the weapons. You have an hour or so—then you’ll come with us. We are getting Nora back…”
Fet turned around and walked away. Three steps later, the Lumen, the Master, and the apocalypse evaporated. There was only Nora in his mind.
Mr. Quinlan returned his attention to the pages of the Lumen and started to read.
INTERLUDE II OCCIDO LUMEN: THE MASTER’S TALE
THERE WAS A THIRD.
Each of the holy books, the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran, tells the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So, in a way, does the Lumen.
In Genesis 18, three archangels appear before Abraham in human form. Two are said to proceed from there to the doomed cities of the plain, where they reside with Lot, enjoy a feast, and are later surrounded by the men of Sodom, whom they blind before destroying their city.
The third archangel is deliberately omitted. Hidden. Lost.
This is his story.
Five cities shared the vast, lush plain of the Yarden River, near what is today the Dead Sea. And out of all of these Sodom was the proudest, the most beautiful. It rose from its fertile surroundings as a landmark, a monument to wealth and prosperity.
Irrigated by a complex canal system, it had grown randomly through the centuries, radiating outward from the waterways and ending up in a shape that vaguely resembled a dove in flight. Its ten-acre contours crystallized in that form when the surrounding walls were erected around 2024 BC. The walls were over forty feet tall and six feet thick, constructed of baked mud brick and plastered in gypsum to make them shine brightly in the sun. Within them, mud-brick buildings were built so close together as to be almost on top of one another, the tallest of which was a temple erected to honor the Canaanite god Moloch. The population of Sodom fluctuated around two thousand. Fruits, spices, and grains were abundant, driving the city’s prosperity. The glass and gilded bronze tiles of a dozen palaces were visible at once, glinting in the dying sunlight.
Such wealth was guarded by the enormous gates that gave entrance into the city. Six irregular stones of enormous size and heft created a monumental archway with gates fashioned from iron and hardwoods impervious to fire or battering rams.
It was at these gates that Lot, son of Haran, nephew of Abram, was when the three creatures of light arrived.
Pale they were, and radiant and remote. Part of the essence of God and, as such, void of any blemish. From each of their backs, four long appendages emerged, suffused with feathery light, easily confused with luminous wings. The four jutting limbs fused in the back of the creatures and flapped softly with their every step, as naturally as one would compensate for forward movement by swaying one’s arms. With each step they acquired form and mass, until they stood there, naked and somewhat lost. Their skin was radiant like the purest alabaster and their beauty was a painful reminder of Lot’s mortal imperfection.
They were sent there to punish the pride, decadence, and brutality that had bred within the prosperous walls of the city. Gabriel, Michael, and Ozryel were God’s emissaries—His most trusted, most cherished creations and His most ruthless soldiers.
And among them it was Ozryel who held His greatest favor. He was intent upon visiting the town square that night, where they had been instructed to go—but Lot beseeched them to stay with him at his residence instead. Gabriel and Michael agreed, and so Ozryel, the third, who was most interested in the wicked ways of these cities, was made to acquiesce to his brothers’ wishes. Of the three, it was Ozryel who held the voice of God within himself, the power of destruction that would erase the two sinful cities from the earth. He was, as it is told in every tale, God’s favorite: His most protected, His most beautiful creation.
Lot had been blessed aplenty, with land and cattle and a pious wife. So the feast at his home was abundant and varied. And the three archangels feasted as men, and Lot’s two virginal daughters washed their feet. These physical sensations were new to all three of the angels, but for Ozryel the sensations were overwhelming, achieving a profundity that escaped the other two. This represented Ozryel’s first experience of individuality, of apartness from the energy of the deity. God is an energy, rather than an anthropomorphic being, and God’s language is biology. Red blood cells, the principle of magnetic attraction, neurological synapse: each is a miracle, and in each is the presence and flow of God. When Lot’s wife cut herself while preparing the herbs and oil for the bath, Ozryel beheld her blood with great curiosity; the smell of it excited him. Tempted him. And its color was precious, lush… like liquid rubies glinting in the candlelight. The woman—who had protested the men’s presence from the start—recoiled when she discovered the archangel staring at her wound, enraptured.
Ozryel had come to earth many times. He had been there when Adam died at the age of nine hundred thirty and he had been there when the men who laughed at Noah drowned in the raging dark waters of the Flood. But he had always traversed this plane in spirit form, his essence still connected to the Lord, never having been made flesh.
So Ozryel had never before experienced hunger. Never before experienced pain. And now a flood of sensations besieged him. Having now felt the crust of the earth beneath his feet… felt the cold night air caress his arms… tasted food grown of the land and carved from its lower mammals, what he thought he would be able to appreciate at a remove, with the detachment of a tourist, he instead found drawing him closer to humankind, closer to the land itself. Closer to this breed of animal. Cool water cascading over his feet. Digested food breaking down inside his mouth, his throat. The physical experiences became addictive, and Ozryel’s curiosity got the best of him.
When the men of the city converged upon Lot’s house, having heard that he was harboring mysterious strangers, Ozryel was enthralled by their shouts. The men, brandishing torches and weapons, demanded to be shown the visitors, so that they might know them. So aroused were they by the rumored beauty of these travelers, they desired to possess them sexually. The brute carnality of the mob fascinated Ozryel, reminded him of his own hunger, and when Lot went to bargain with them—offering his virginal daughters instead, only to be refused—Ozryel used his power to slip outside of the house, unseen.
He shadowed the crowd, briefly. He kept a few feet away, hidden in an alley, feeling the delirious energy of the mass movement—an energy so unlike God’s. Yet they were filled with the same beauty and glory that were gifts of the divine. These undulating sacs of flesh—their faces never at rest—raved as one, seeking communion with the unknown in the most animalistic manner possible. Their lust was so pure—and so intoxicating.
Much has been made of the vices in Sodom and Gomorrah but little could be seen as Ozryel walked the streets of that city, lit by a complex system of bronze oil lamps and paved in raw alabaster. Gold and silver door frames adorned the porticos of every door within its three concentric plazas.
A gold portico announced wares of the flesh and a silver one announced darker pleasures. Those who crossed the silver doorways would seek cruel or violent sensations. It was this very cruelty that God could not forgive. Not the abundance and not the abandon but the rank sadism the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah would show to travelers and slaves. Inhospitable cities they were, and uncaring. Slaves and captured enemies were bought from caravans to please the patrons of the silver porticos.
And, whether by design or by accident, it was a silver threshold Ozryel crossed. His hostess was a stocky woman of light olive skin. Unrefined, ungroomed—the wife of a slave driver and interested only in commerce. But that night, when the hostess looked up from her post at the vestibule of the pleasure house, she saw the most beautiful, benevolent human-appearing creature standing before her by the golden light of the burning oil. The archangels were perfect, sexless vessels. No hair on their bodies or faces and immaculate, opalescent skin and pearlescent eyes. Their gums were as pale as the ivory of their teeth and the grace of their elongated limbs came from perfect proportions. They had no trace of genitalia: a biological detail that would be echoed obliquely in the horror that would spawn.
Such was the beauty—the benign magnificence—of Ozryel that the woman felt like weeping and asking for forgiveness. But years at the trade gave her the fortitude to peddle her services. As Ozryel witnessed the refined violence within the walls of the establishment, the archangel sensed his primal grace wane—abandoning him as desire arose—and even though he did not know exactly what he was looking for, he found it.
On impulse, Ozryel gripped the hostess’s neck, walking her back against a low stone wall, watching the woman’s expression change into fear. Ozryel felt the strong yet delicate tendons around the woman’s throat, then kissed them, licked them, tasting her salty rancid sweat. And then, on an impulse, he bit, deep and hard, and tore open her flesh, plucking her arteries like harp strings with his teeth—ping-ping—and savagely drinking of the blood essence that poured forth. Ozryel slayed this woman, not as an offering to his almighty Lord but simply in order to know Him. To know. To possess. To dominate and conquer.
And the taste of the blood, and the death of the burly woman, and the fluidity of the exchange of power, was sheer ecstasy. To consume the blood, made of the essence and glory of the divine—and, in doing so, disrupting the flow that was the presence of God—put Ozryel into a frenzy. He wanted more. Why had God denied him, His favorite, this? The ambrosia hidden in these imperfect creatures.
It was said that wine fermented from the worst berries tasted sweetest.
But now Ozryel wondered: what about wine from the richest berries of all?
Left with the limp body at his feet, the spilled blood shining silvery in the high light of the moon, Ozryel was left with one thought only:
Do angels have blood?
Low Memorial Library, Columbia University
MR. QUINLAN CLOSED the pages of the Lumen and looked up to meet Fet and Gus, fully armed and ready to go. Much was left to learn about the Master’s origins, but already his head was swimming with the information that the book held. He jotted down a few notes, circled a few transcriptions, and rose. Fet took the book and wrapped it up again, put it in his backpack, and then handed it to Mr. Quinlan.
“I will not take it with us,” he said to Mr. Quinlan. “And if we don’t make it, you should be the one to know where the book is hidden. If they catch us and they try to get it out of us… well, even if you bleed, you cannot talk about what you don’t know… right?”
Mr. Quinlan nodded gently, accepting the honor.
“Glad to get rid of it, actually…”
If you say so.
“I say so. Now—if we don’t make it…,” Fet said. “You have the most necessary tool. Finish the fight. Kill the Master.”
New Jersey
ALFONSO CREEM SAT in a plush, eggshell-white La-Z-Boy recliner, his untied Pumas up on the leg rest, a hard rubber chew toy in his hand. Ambassador and Skill, his two wolf-dog hybrids, lay on the dining room floor, leashed to the broad wooden legs of the heavy table, their silvery eyes watching the red-and-white-striped ball.
Creem squeezed the toy and the dogs growled. For some reason, this amused him and thus he repeated the process over and over again.
Royal, Creem’s first lieutenant—of the battle-worn Jersey Sapphires—sat on the bottom step of the staircase, spitting coffee into a mug. Nicotine, ganja, and the like were getting harder and harder to find, so Royal had jerry-rigged a delivery system for the only reliably available new-world vice: caffeine. He would tear off a small section of coffee filter, form a pouch for sprinkling ground coffee inside, then tuck it up against his gum like chaw. It was bitter, but it kept him fired up.
Malvo sat by the front window, keeping an eye on the street, watching for truck convoys. The Sapphires had resorted to hijacking in order to keep themselves alive. The bloodsuckers varied their routes, but Creem himself had witnessed a food shipment go by a few days ago and figured they were due.
Feeding himself and his crew was Creem’s first priority. It was no surprise that starvation was bad for morale. Feeding Ambassador and Skill was Creem’s second priority. The wolf-hounds’ keen noses and innate survival skills had more than once alerted the Sapphires to an impending night attack from the bloodsuckers. Feeding their women came third. The women were nothing very special, a few desperate strays they had picked up along the way—but they were women and they were warm and alive. “Alive” was very sexy these days. Food kept them quiet, grateful, and close, and that was good for his crew. Besides, Creem didn’t go for sickly-looking, skinny women. He liked his plump.
For months now, he had been mixing it up with bloodsuckers on his old turf, just fighting to stay alive and free. It was impossible for a human to gain a foothold in this new blood economy. Cash and property meant nothing; even gold was worthless. Silver was the only black-market item worth trafficking in, besides food. The Stoneheart humans had been confiscating all the silver they could get their dirty hands on, sealing it up inside unused bank vaults. Silver was a threat to the bloodsuckers, though first you had to fashion it into a weapon, and there weren’t many silversmiths around these days.
So food was the new currency. (Water was still plentiful, so long as you boiled it and filtered it.) Stoneheart Industries, after transforming their meatpacking slaughterhouses into blood camps, had left in place their basic food-transportation apparatus. The bloodsuckers, by seizing the entire organization, now controlled the spigot. Food was farmed by the humans who slaved in the camps. They supplemented the brief, two-to-three-hour window of pale sunlight each day with massive indoor ultraviolet lamp farms: glowing greenhouses for fruits and vegetables; vast warehouses for chicken, pigs, and cattle. The UV lamps were fatal for bloodsuckers, and so they were the sole human-only areas of the camps.
All this Creem had learned from hijacked Stoneheart truck drivers.
Outside the camp, food could be obtained with ration cards earned through work. You had to be a documented worker to get a ration card: you had to do the bloodsuckers’ bidding in order to eat. You had to obey.
The bloodsuckers were essentially psychic cops. Jersey was a police state, with every stinger watching everything, reporting automatically, so that you never knew you had been fingered until it was too late. The suckers just worked, fed, and, for those few sunny hours each day, lay in their dirt. In general, these drones were disciplined, and—like the slave humans—ate what and when they were told: usually these packs of blood that came from the camps. Though Creem had seen a few go off the reservation. You could walk the streets at night among the bloodsuckers if you looked like you were working, but humans were expected to defer to them like the second-class citizens they were. But that just wasn’t Creem’s style. Not in Jersey, no sir.
He heard a little bell and collapsed the recliner, pushing himself to his feet. The bell meant a message had arrived from New York. From Gus.
Atop Gus’s hideaway, the Mexican had fashioned a small coop for pigeons and some chickens. From the chickens, every once in a while he got a fresh egg packed with protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals—as valuable as a pearl from an oyster. From the pigeons, he got a way to connect to the world outside Manhattan. Safe, uncompromised, and undetected by the bloodsuckers. Some days Gus used the pigeons to set a delivery from Creem: weapons, ammo, a little porn. Creem could get almost anything for the right price.
Today was one such day. The pigeon—Harry, “the New Jersey Express,” as Gus called him—had landed in a little perch by the window and was pecking at the bell, knowing that Creem would give him some food.
Creem unfastened the elastic band from its leg and removed the small plastic capsule and took out the thin roll of paper. Harry cooed softly.
“Cool it, you little shit,” said Creem as he unsealed a small Tupperware container of precious corn feed and spilled some into a cup for the pigeon’s reward, popping some into his own mouth before recapping it.
Creem read Gus’s request. “A detonator?” He snickered. “You gotta be fucking shitting me…”
Malvo made a snick-snick noise with his tongue against his teeth. “Scout car coming,” he said.
The wolf-hounds sprang up, but Creem waved at them to keep quiet. He undid their leashes from the table leg, pulling back sharply on the chain chokers to keep them silent and at his heels. “Signal the others.”
Royal led the way to the attached garage. Creem was still a huge presence, despite having lost sixty pounds. His short, powerful arms were still too broad to cross over his nearly square midsection. While at home, he sported all his silver, his knuckle bling and his tooth-capping grille. Creem was into silver back when it was just shiny shit, before it became the mark of a warrior and an outlaw.
Creem watched the others slide into the Tahoe with their weapons. The transports usually traveled in a three-vehicle military convoy, bloodsuckers in the lead and the rear, with the bread truck driven by humans in the middle. Creem wanted to see some grains this time: cereal, rolls, butter loaves. Carbohydrates filled them up and lasted for days, sometimes weeks. Protein was a rare gift, and meat even rarer, but difficult to keep fresh. Peanut butter was the organic kind with oil on top—because no foods were processed anymore, ever—which Creem couldn’t stand, but both Royal and the wolf-hounds loved it.
The vamps showed no fear of the wolf-hounds, but the human drivers sure did. They saw the silver glint in their lupine-canine eyes and routinely shit themselves. Creem had trained the animals only as well as he cared to train them, meaning that they always heeded him, the one who fed them. But they were not creatures meant to be domesticated or tamed, which was why Creem identified with them and kept them close at his side.
Ambassador strained at his choker; Skill’s paw nails scratched at the garage floor. They knew what was coming. They were about to earn their meal. In that, they were even more motivated than the rest of the Sapphires, because for a wolf-hound, the economy had never changed. Food, food, food.
The garage door went up. Creem heard the trucks rumbling around the corner, nice and loud because there was no other traffic noise to compete with. This would be a typical jam-up. They had, idling between two houses across the street, a tow truck ready to smash the lead vehicle. Backup cars would cut off the bloodsuckers in the rear, bottlenecking the convoy in this residential street.
Keeping their cars running was another of Creem’s priorities. He had guys good at that. Gasoline was at a premium, as were car batteries. The Sapphires used two garages in Jersey for chopping up food trucks for parts and fuel.
The lead truck rounded the corner fast. Creem picked up on an extra vehicle in the convoy, a fourth, but this didn’t trouble him too much. Right on time, the tow truck came screeching out from across the street, tearing across the muddy front yard and bumping off the curb—ramming the rear quarter of the lead truck, putting it into a backspin hard enough that it was facing the wrong way when it came to rest. Support cars closed in fast, bumper-locking the rear truck. The middle vehicles in the convoy braked hard, veering off to the curb. Two soft-sided transports—maybe a double haul.
Royal drove the Tahoe straight at the food truck, stopping just inches from its grille. Creem released Ambassador and Skill, who went racing over the muddy yard toward the scene. Royal and Malvo jumped out, each bearing a long silver sword and a silver knife. They went right at the bloodsuckers emptying out of the lead vehicle. Royal was especially vicious. He had bolted silver spikes to the toes of his boots. The hijacking looked to be over in less than one minute.
The first thing Creem noticed that was wrong was the food truck. The human operators remained inside the cab, rather than jumping out and running. Ambassador leaped up at the driver’s-side door, his choppers snapping at the closed window, the man inside looking down into the wolf-hound’s angry mouth and bared teeth.
Then the soft canvas sides of the twin army trucks were pulled up like curtains. Instead of food, some twenty or thirty bloodsucker vampires came tearing out, their fury, speed, and intensity matching the wolf-hounds’. Malvo slashed off three of them hard before one got up in his face, knocking him back. Malvo twisted and fell—and they were on him.
Royal backed off, retreating like a kid with a sand pail in his hand facing an incoming tidal wave. He bumped up against his own vehicle, delaying his escape.
Creem could not see what was happening in the rear… but he heard the screams. And if there was one thing he had learned, it was that…
Vampires don’t scream.
Creem ran—as much as a man of his size can run—toward his boy Royal, who was backed up against the front of the Tahoe by a gang of six bloodsuckers. Royal was all but done for, but Creem could not let him go out like that. Creem carried a .44 Magnum on his hip, and the rounds weren’t made of silver, but he liked the weapon anyway. He drew it and capped off two vampires’ heads, blam, blam, the white, acid-like vamp blood spraying into Royal’s face, blinding him.
Creem saw, beyond Royal, Skill with its fangs clamped on the elbow of one of the marauding bloodsuckers. The sucker, oblivious to pain, slashed at Skill’s furry throat with the hardened nail of its talonlike middle finger, opening up the wolf-hound’s neck in a mess of silver-gray fur and rich, red blood.
Creem blasted the bloodsucker, opening up two holes in its throat. The sucker went down right next to the whimpering Skill in a mess of carnage.
Another pair of bloodsuckers had fallen upon Ambassador, their vampire strength overpowering the fierce animal. Creem fired away, taking chunks of head and shoulder and arm, but the silverless bullets failed to stop the suckers from ripping apart the wolf-hound.
What the gunfire did achieve was that it attracted attention to Creem. Royal was gone already, two suckers with their stingers in his neck, feeding on him right there in the middle of the street. The humans remained locked inside the cab of the decoy truck, watching, their eyes wide, with not horror but excitement. Creem got off two rounds in their direction and heard glass breaking but could not slow to see if he had hit them.
He squeezed himself through the open driver’s door of the Tahoe, his bulk pushed up against the steering wheel. He threw the vehicle in reverse, the engine still running, and chewed up some yard mud as he backed away. He slammed on the brakes, tearing up more yard, then twisted the wheel to the left. Two bloodsuckers leaped into his way, and Creem hit the gas hard, the Tahoe bursting forward and running them down, its tires grinding them into the sidewalk. Creem fishtailed into the road, gunning the engine but forgetting that it had been a while since he’d operated an automobile.
He skidded sideways, grinding up against the opposite curb, blowing one of the tires off its rim. He swung the other way, overcorrecting. Creem stomped the pedal flat to the floor, got a burst of speed out of the Tahoe—and then the engine sputtered and quit.
Creem checked the dashboard panel. The gas gauge glowed “E.” His crew had poured in just enough fuel for the job. The getaway van, the one with the half-full tank, was in the rear.
Creem threw open his door. He grabbed the frame and pulled himself from the vehicle, seeing the bloodsuckers running toward him. Dirty-pale, barefoot, naked, bloodthirsty. Creem reloaded his .44 from the only other clip on his belt, blasting holes in the bastards, who, as in nightmares, kept coming. When the gun clicked empty, Creem threw it aside and went at the suckers with his silver-covered fists, his bling punches packing extra force and pain. He yanked off one of his chains and started strangling a bloodsucker with it, swinging the creature’s body around to block the other ghouls’ clutching, battering hands.
But he was weak from malnutrition, and, big as he was, he tired easily. They overtook him, but rather than go right at his throat, they locked his big arms in their own and with preternatural strength dragged the sweat-drenched gang leader off the street. They hauled him up two steps into a looted convenience store, bracing him there in a seated position on the floor. Gassed, Creem unleashed a string of curses until heavy breathing dizzied him, and he started to black out. As the store spun in his vision, he wondered what the hell they were waiting for. He wanted them to choke on his blood. He had no worries about being turned into a vampire; that was one of the distinct advantages to having a mouth full of repellent silver.
Two humans stepped inside, Stoneheart employees in neat black suits like the undertakers they were. Creem thought they had arrived to strip him of his silver, and he rallied, fighting with all he had left. The bloodsuckers kneeled into his arms, twisting them in pain. But the Stonehearts merely watched over him as he slumped on the floor, gasping for air.
Then the atmosphere inside the store changed. The only way to describe it is the way things get so still outside right before a storm. Creem’s hair stood up on the back of his neck. Something was about to happen. This was like the moment when two hands go rushing toward each other, the instant before the clap.
A humming entered Creem’s brain like the rumble of a dentist’s drill, only without the vibration. Like the roar of an approaching helicopter without the wind. Like the droning chant of a thousand monks—only without the song.
The bloodsuckers stiffened up like soldiers awaiting inspection. The two Stonehearts stepped to the side, against an empty aisle rack. The suckers on either side of Creem relinquished their grip on him, pulling away, leaving him sitting alone in the middle of the dirty linoleum…
… as a dark figure entered the store.
Camp Liberty
THE TRANSPORT JEEP was a repurposed military vehicle with an expanded cargo bed and no roof. Mr. Quinlan drove at breakneck speed through the lashing rain and inky darkness; his vampire vision required no headlights. Eph and the others bumped along in the back, getting soaked as they hurtled blindly through the night. Eph closed his eyes against the rain and the rocking, feeling like a small boat caught in a typhoon, battered but determined to ride it out.
They stopped finally, and Eph lifted his head and looked up at the immense gate, dark against the dark sky. No light was necessary. Mr. Quinlan cut the Jeep’s engine, and there were no sounds or voices, other than the rain and the mechanical rumble of a distant generator somewhere inside.
The camp was enormous and all around it a featureless concrete wall was being erected. At least twenty feet high, it had crews working on it day and night, raising rebar, pouring concrete by stadium quartz lights. It would be ready very soon, but for the time being, a gate constructed of chain link backed by wooden planks gave access to the camp.
For some reason, Eph had imagined he would hear children crying, adults screaming, or some other form of audible anguish, being near so much human suffering. The darkly quiet exterior of the camp spoke to an oppressive efficiency that was almost as shocking.
No doubt they were being watched by unseen strigoi. Mr. Quinlan’s body registered bright and hot in the vampires’ heat-sensitive vision, with the five other beings in the back of the Jeep reading as cooler humans.
Mr. Quinlan lifted a baseball equipment bag from the passenger seat and lay it across his shoulder as he exited the Jeep. Eph stood dutifully, his wrists, waist, and ankles bound by nylon rope. The five of them were knotted together with only a few feet of slack between them, like members of a chain gang. Eph was in the middle, Gus in front of him, Fet in back. First and last were Bruno and Joaquin. One by one they hopped down from the back of the vehicle, landing in the mud.
Eph could smell the strigoi, their feverlike earthiness and their ammoniac waste. Mr. Quinlan walked alongside Eph, accompanying his prisoners into the camp.
Eph felt as though he were walking into the mouth of the whale and feared being swallowed. He knew going in that the odds were no better than even that he would ever emerge from this slaughterhouse again.
Communication was handled wordlessly. Mr. Quinlan was not exactly on the other vampires’ wavelength, telepathically, but the existence of his psychic signal was enough to pass first inspection. Physically, he appeared less gaunt than the rank-and-file vampires, his pale flesh more lily-petal smooth than dead and plastic, his eyes a brighter red with an independent spark. They shuffled down a narrow canvas tunnel beneath a roof constructed of chicken fencing. Eph looked up through the wire into the falling rain and the sheer blackness of the starless sky.
They arrived at a quarantine station. A few battery-powered work lamps illuminated the room, as this area was manned by humans. With the low-wattage light casting shadows against the walls, and the relentless rain outside, and the palpable sense of being surrounded by hundreds of malevolent beings, the quarantine station resembled a scared little tent in the middle of a vast jungle.
The staff’s heads were all shaved. Their eyes were dry and tired-looking, and they wore slate-gray prison-grade jumpsuits and perforated rubber clogs.
The five were asked to provide their names, and each man lied. Eph signed a scribble next to his pseudonym with a dull pencil. Mr. Quinlan stood in the background, before a canvas wall thumping with rain, while four strigoi stood golemlike, one pair of sentries at either flap door.
Mr. Quinlan’s story was that he had captured five outliers squatting in a cellar beneath a Korean market on 129th Street. A blow to the head, suffered in the act of subduing his cargo, explained his glitchy telepathy—whereas, in fact, Quinlan was actively blocking the vampires from accessing his true thoughts. He had shed his oversized pack, laying it down on the damp canvas floor near his boots.
The humans first tried to untie the binding knots, in hopes of preserving the rope for reuse. But the wet nylon would not budge and had to be cut. Under the watchful eyes of the vampire guards, Eph remained standing with his eyes down, rubbing his raw wrists. It was impossible for him to look a vampire in the eye without showing hatred. Also, he was concerned about being recognized by the strigoi hive mind.
He was aware of a disturbance brewing inside the tent. The quiet was awkward, the sentries directing their attention at Mr. Quinlan. The strigoi had picked up on something different about him.
Fet noticed this too, because he suddenly started talking, trying to direct attention away from Quinlan. “When do we eat?” he asked.
The human with the clipboard looked up from his note-taking. “Whenever they feed you.”
“Hope it’s not too rich,” he said. “I don’t do well with rich foods.”
They stopped what they were doing, staring at Fet as though he were insane. The lead man said, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Good,” said Fet.
One of the strigoi noticed that Mr. Quinlan’s pack remained on the floor in the corner of the room. The vampire reached for the long, heavy bag.
Fet stiffened near Eph. One of the human personnel grasped Eph’s chin, using a penlight to examine the interior of his mouth. The man had bags beneath his eyes the color of black tea. Eph said, “Were you a doctor?”
“Sort of,” said the man, looking at Eph’s teeth.
“How ‘sort of’?”
“Well, I was a veterinarian,” he said.
Eph closed his mouth. The man flicked the light beam in and out of Eph’s eyes, intrigued by what he saw.
“You’ve been taking some medication?” asked the vet.
Eph didn’t like the vet’s tone. “Sort of,” he answered.
“You’re in pretty bad shape. Kinda tainted,” said the vet. Eph saw the vampire drawing the zipper back on the pack. The nylon shell was lined with lead from the X-ray aprons of a midtown dentist’s office. Once the strigoi felt the disruptive properties of the silver blades, he dropped the pack as though scalded.
Mr. Quinlan rushed for the pack. Eph pushed the veterinarian, knocking the man all the way across the tent. Mr. Quinlan shoved past the strigoi and pulled a sword quickly from the pack, turning, holding it out. The vampires were at first too stunned to move as the surprise presence of silver, in the form of a weapon, held them back. Mr. Quinlan advanced slowly in order to give Fet, Gus, and the others time to grab their weapons. Eph felt a hell of a lot better once he got a sword into his hands. The weapon Mr. Quinlan brandished was actually Eph’s blade, but there was no time to quibble.
The vampires did not react as humans would. None of them ran out the door to escape or warn others. The alarm went out psychically. Their attack, after the initial shock, came swiftly.
Mr. Quinlan cut one down with a blow to the neck. Gus rushed forward, meeting a charging vampire and running his blade straight through its throat. Decapitation was difficult in close quarters because the broad slashing required to sever the neck risked wounding others, and the blood spray was caustic, laden with infectious worm parasites. Close-quarters combat with strigoi was always a last resort, and so the five of them fought their way out of the quarantine intake room as quickly as possible.
Eph, the last to arm himself, was set upon not by vampires but by humans. The veterinarian and one other. He was so startled, he reacted to the attack as though they were strigoi and stabbed the vet through the base of his neck. Red arterial spray spritzed the wooden supporting pole in the center of the room as both Eph and the veterinarian stared at one another with wide eyes. “What the hell are you doing!” yelled Eph. The veterinarian sank to his knees, and the second man turned his attention to his wounded friend.
Eph backed away slowly from the dying man, pulled on his shoulder by one of the others. He was shaken; he had killed a man.
They stepped out of the tent, emerging into the open air inside the camp. The rain had slowed to a misty drizzle. A canvas-roofed path lay before them, but the night prevented Eph from taking in the camp as a whole. No strigoi yet, but they knew that the alarm had gone out. It took their eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness—out of which the vampires came running.
The five of them fanned out in an arc, taking on all comers. Here there was room to swing the blade freely, to plant one’s rear foot and drive the sword with enough force to lift the head from the shoulders. Eph hacked hard, moving and slashing and checking constantly behind him.
In this way, they repelled the initial wave. They continued ahead, though without any intelligence as to the organization of the camp. They looked for some indication of where the general population was located. Another pair of vampires came at them from the left, and Mr. Quinlan, protecting his flank, cut them down, then led the others in that general direction.
Ahead, silhouetted against the darkness, was a tall, narrow structure: a lookout post in the center of a stone circle. More vampires came running at top speed and the five men tightened up, moving as a unit, five silver blades cutting together almost as one wide one.
They needed to kill fast. The strigoi had been known to sacrifice one or more of their number in an attempt at improving their chances of capturing and turning a human aggressor. Their strategy was such that one or three or even ten vampires were worth sacrificing for the elimination of one human slayer.
Eph curled back behind the others, taking the rear, walking backward as they formed a moving oval, a ring of silver to hold the swarming vampires at bay. His eyes becoming more acclimated to the dark, Eph perceived other strigoi slowing in the distance, congregating, holding back. Tracking without attacking. Planning some more coordinated assault.
“They’re massing,” he told the others. “I think we’re being pushed this way.”
He heard the wet cut of a sword, then Fet’s voice. “A building up ahead. Our only hope is to go zone by zone.”
We broke out into the camp too early, said Mr. Quinlan.
The sky as yet was showing no sign of brightening. Everything hinged upon that unreliable window of sunlight. The trick now was to last inside enemy territory until the uncertain dawn.
Gus swore and cut down another creature. “Stay tight,” said Fet.
Eph continued his slow walk backward. He could just make out the faces of the first line of vampires pursuing them, staring intently. Staring—it seemed—at him.
Was it just his imagination? Eph slowed, then stopped altogether, allowing the others to progress a few yards without him.
The pursuing vampires stopped as well.
“Ah, shit,” said Eph.
They had recognized him. The equivalent of an all-points bulletin on the vampire psychic network was a hit. The hive was alerted to his presence, which meant only one thing.
The Master knew that Eph was there. Watching this through its drones.
“Hey!” said Fet, doubling back to Eph. “What the hell are you doing stopping… ?” He saw the strigoi, maybe two dozen of them, staring. “Jesus. What are they, starstruck?”
Awaiting orders.
“Christ, let’s just—”
The camp whistle went off—jolting them—a shrill steam scream followed by four more in quick succession. Then silence again.
Eph understood the alarm’s purpose: to alert not just the vampires but also the humans. A call to take shelter, perhaps.
Fet looked to the nearest building. He again checked the sky for light. “If you can lead them away from here, from us—we can get in and out of this place that much more quickly.”
Eph had no desire to be a bouncing red chew toy for this pack of bloodsuckers, but he saw the logic in Fet’s plan. “Just do me a favor,” he said. “Make it fast.”
Fet called back, “Gus! Stay with Eph.”
“No way,” said Gus. “I’m going in. Bruno, get with him.”
Eph smiled at Gus’s obvious distaste for him. He caught Mr. Quinlan’s arm and pulled him back, trading the sword he carried for his own.
I will take care of the human guards, Mr. Quinlan said, and disappeared in a flash.
Eph regripped the familiar leather handle, then waited for Bruno to come up at his side. “You okay with this?”
“Better than okay,” said Bruno, out of breath but smiling wide, like a kid. His super-white teeth looked great against his light-brown skin.
Eph lowered his sword, jogging off to the left and away from the structure. The vamps hesitated a moment before following. Eph and Bruno rounded the corner of a long, shedlike outbuilding, all dark. Beyond it, light shone from inside a window.
Lights meant humans.
“This way!” said Eph, breaking into a run. Bruno kept pace, panting. Eph looked back and, sure enough, the vampires were charging around the corner after them. Eph ran toward the light, seeing a vampire standing near the door to the building.
He was a big male, backlit by the faint window light. On his large chest and the sides of his trunklike neck, Eph saw fading tattoo ink, turned green by the white blood and multiple stretch marks.
At once, like a traumatic memory forcing its way back into his consciousness, the Master’s voice was inside Eph’s head.
What are you here for, Goodweather?
Eph stopped and pointed his sword at the big vamp. Bruno spun around next to him, keeping an eye on the drones behind them.
What is it you came here to get?
Bruno roared next to Eph, hacking down two charging vampires. Eph turned, momentarily distracted, seeing the others bunched up just a few yards away—respecting the silver—and then, realizing he had allowed himself to become distracted, turned back fast with his sword up.
The tip of his sword caught the charging vampire in the right breast, entering skin and muscle but not running him through. Eph withdrew quickly and stabbed at the vampire’s throat, just as the thing’s jaw was beginning to drop, baring its stinger. The tattooed vampire shivered and dropped to the ground.
“Fuckers!” yelled Bruno.
They were all coming now. Eph wheeled and readied his sword. But there were just too many, and all moving at once. He started backpedaling—
You are here searching for someone, Goodweather.
—and felt stones beneath his feet as he neared the building. Bruno kept hacking and slaying as Eph backed up three steps, feeling for the door handle, opening the latch, the door giving way.
You are mine now, Goodweather.
The voice boomed, disorienting him. Eph pulled on Bruno’s shoulder, motioning to the gangbanger to follow him inside. They ran past makeshift cages on either side of the narrow walkway, containing humans in various stages of distress. A madhouse of sorts. The people howled at Eph and Bruno as they hurried through.
Dead end, Goodweather.
Eph shook his head hard, trying to chase the Master’s voice from his mind. Its presence was addling, like the voice of madness itself. Add to that the people clawing at the cages as he passed, and Eph was caught in a cyclone of confusion and terror.
The first of the pursuing vampires entered the other end. Eph tried one door, leading to an office of sorts, with a dentist-style chair whose headrest, and the floor beneath it, was crusted with dry, red human blood. Another door led outside, Eph jumping down three steps. More vampires awaited him, having gone around the building rather than through it, and Eph swung and chopped, turning just in time to catch one female leaping at him from the roof.
Why did you come here, Goodweather?
Eph leaped back from the slain female. He and Bruno backed away, side by side, heading toward an unlit, windowless structure set against the high perimeter fence. Perhaps the vampires’ quarters? The camp strigoi’s nest?
Eph and Bruno angled themselves, only to find that the fence turned sharply and ended at another unlit structure.
Dead end. I told you.
Eph stood up to the vampires coming toward them in the dark.
“Undead end,” Eph muttered. “You bastard.”
Bruno glanced over at him. “Bastard? You the one who ran us into this trap!”
Once I catch you and turn you, I will know all your secrets.
That turned Eph cold. “Here they come,” he said to Bruno—and got ready for them.
Nora had arrived at Barnes’s office inside the administrative building ready to agree to anything, including giving herself to Barnes, in order to save her mother and get close to him. She despised her former boss even more than the vampire oppressors. His immorality sickened her—but the fact that he believed she was weak enough to simply bend to his will made her nauseous.
Killing him would show him that. If his fantasy was her submission, her plan was to drive the shank into his heart. Death by butter knife: how fitting!
She would do it as he lay in bed or in the middle of his dinner patter, so hideously civilized. He was more evil than the strigoi: his corruption was not a disease, was not something inflicted upon him. His corruption was opportunistic. A choice.
Worst of all was his perception of her as a potential victim. He had fatally misread Nora, and all that was left was for her to show him the error of his ways. In steel.
He made her wait out in the hallway, where there was no chair or bathroom, for three hours. Twice he left his office, resplendent in his crisp, white admiral’s uniform, strolling past Nora carrying some papers but never acknowledging her, passing without a word, disappearing behind another door. And so she waited, stewing, even when the single camp whistle signaled the rations call, one hand across her grumbling stomach—her mind squarely focused on her mother and murder.
Finally, Barnes’s assistant—a young female with clean, shoulder-length auburn hair, wearing a laundered gray jumpsuit—opened the door, admitting Nora without a word. The assistant remained in the doorway as Nora passed through. Perfumed skin and minty breath. Nora returned the assistant’s look of disapproval, imagining just how the woman had secured such a plum position in Barnes’s world.
The assistant sat behind her desk, leaving Nora to try the next door, which was locked. Nora turned and retreated to one of the two hard folding chairs against the wall facing the assistant. The assistant made busy noises in an effort to ignore Nora while simultaneously asserting her superiority. Her telephone buzzed and she lifted the receiver, answering it quietly. The room, save for the unfinished wooden walls and the laptop computer, resembled a low-tech 1940s-era office: corded telephone, a pen and paper set, blotter. On the near corner of the desk, just off the blotter, sat a thick chocolate brownie on a small paper plate. The assistant hung up after a few whispered words and noticed Nora staring at the treat. She reached for the plate, taking just a nibble of the dessert cake, a few stray crumbs sprinkling down into her lap.
Nora heard a click in the doorknob, followed by Barnes’s voice.
“Come in!”
The assistant moved her treat to the other side of her desk, out of Nora’s reach, before waving her through. Nora again walked to the door and turned the knob, which, this time, gave way.
Barnes was standing behind his desk, stuffing files into an open attaché case, preparing to leave for the day. “Good morning, Carly. Is the car ready?”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Barnes,” sang the assistant. “They just called up from the gate.”
“Call down and make sure the heat is on in the back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nora?” said Barnes, still stuffing, not looking up. His demeanor was much changed from their previous encounter at his palatial home. “You have something you wish to discuss with me?”
“You win.”
“I win? Wonderful. Now tell me, what is it I have won?”
“Your way. With me.”
He hesitated just a moment before closing the case, snapping the clasps. He looked at her and nodded slightly to himself, as though having trouble remembering his original offer. “Very good,” he said, then went rooting in a drawer for some other nearly forgotten thing.
Nora waited. “So?” she said.
“So,” he said.
“Now what?”
“Now I am in a very great rush. But I will let you know.”
“I thought… I’m not going back to your house now?”
“Soon. Another time. Busy day and all.”
“But—I’m ready now.”
“Yes. I thought you would grow a bit more eager. Camp life doesn’t agree with you? No, I didn’t think so.” He took up the handle of his case. “I’ll soon call for you.”
Nora understood: he was making her wait on purpose. Prolonging her agony as payback for not immediately falling into bed with him that day at his house. A dirty old man on a power trip.
“And please note for future reference that I am not a man to be kept waiting. I trust that is clear to you now. Carly?”
The assistant appeared in the open doorway. “Yes, Dr. Barnes?”
“Carly, I can’t find the ledger. Maybe you can search around and bring it by the house later.”
“Yes, Dr. Barnes.”
“Say, around nine thirty?”
Nora saw in assistant Carly’s face not the satisfied swagger she was anticipating but instead a hint of distaste.
They stepped out into the anteroom, whispering. Ridiculous, as if Nora were Barnes’s wife.
Nora took the opportunity to rush to Barnes’s desk, searching it for anything that might help her cause, any bit of information she was not supposed to see. But he had taken most everything with him. Sliding out the center drawer, she saw a computer-generated map of the camp with each zone color-coded. Beyond the birthing area she had already visited, and in the same general direction as where she understood the “retirement” section of camp was established, was a zone named “Letting.” This zone contained a shaded area labeled “Sunshine.” Nora tried to rip up the map in order to take it with her, but it was glued to the bottom of the drawer. She scanned it again, quickly memorizing it, then shut the drawer just as Barnes returned.
Nora worked hard to mask the fury in her face, to regard him with a smile. “What about my mother? You promised me—”
“And if indeed you hold up your end of the bargain, I shall of course hold up mine. Scout’s honor.”
It was clear he wanted her to beg, which was something she simply could not bring herself to do.
“I want to know that she is safe.”
Barnes nodded, grinning a little. “You want to make demands, is what you want. I alone dictate the timing of this and everything else that occurs inside the walls of this camp.”
Nora nodded, but her mind was elsewhere now, her wrist already wriggling behind her back, pushing the shank forward.
“If your mother is to be processed, she will be. You have no say in the matter. They probably picked her up already and she is on her way to be cleaned up. Your life, however, is still a bargaining chip. Hope you cash it in.”
Now she had the shank in her hand. She gripped it.
“Is that understood?” he said.
“Understood,” she said through gritted teeth.
“You will need to come with a much more agreeable attitude when I do call for you, so please be ready. And smile.”
She wanted to fucking kill him where he stood.
From the outer office, his assistant’s panicked voice broke the mood. “Sir?”
Barnes stepped away before Nora could act, returning to the anteroom alone.
Nora heard the footsteps charging up the stairs. Slapping at the floor: bare feet.
Vampire feet.
A team of four large-framed, once-male vampires burst into the office. These undead goons wore tribal prison-style tattoos on their sagging flesh. The assistant gasped and backed away into her corner as the four went right after Barnes.
“What is it?” he said.
They told him, telepathically—and fast. Barnes barely had time to react before they grabbed his arms and practically picked him up, running him out the door and away down the hall. Then the camp whistle started shrieking.
Shouting outside. Something was happening. Nora heard and felt the vibration of doors slamming downstairs.
The assistant remained in the corner, behind her desk, the phone to her ear. Nora heard hard footsteps charging up the stairs. Boots equaled humans. The assistant cowered while Nora moved to the door—just in time to see Fet rushing inside.
Nora was struck speechless. He carried his sword but no other weapons. His face was wild with the look of the hunt. A grateful, openmouthed smile appeared on her face.
Fet glanced at Nora and then at the assistant in the corner, then turned to leave. He was back out the door and almost out of sight around the corner before he stopped, straightened, and looked back.
“Nora?” he said.
Her baldness. Her jumpsuit. He hadn’t recognized her at first.
“V,” she said.
He gripped her, and she clawed at his back, burying her face in his smelly, unwashed shoulder. He pulled her off him for a second look, at once exulting in his great luck in finding her and trying to make sense of her shaved head.
“It’s you,” he said, touching her scalp. Then he looked over the rest of her. “You…”
“And you,” she said, tears springing from the corners of her eyes. Not Eph, again. Not Eph. You.
He embraced her again. More bodies followed behind him. Gus and another Mexican. Gus slowed when he saw Fet hugging a bald camp member. It was a long moment before he said, “Dr. Martinez?”
“It’s me, Gus. Is it really you?”
“A guevo! You better believe it,” he said.
“What is this building?” asked Fet. “Administration or something? What are you doing here?”
For a moment, she couldn’t remember. “Barnes!” she said. “From the CDC. He runs the camp—runs all the camps!”
“Where the hell is he?”
“Four big vampires just came and got him. His own security force. He went that way.”
Fet stepped out into the empty hall. “This way?”
“He has a car out by the gate.” Nora stepped into the hallway. “Is Eph with you?”
A pang of jealousy. “He’s outside holding them off. I’d go after this guy Barnes for you, but we have to get back to Eph.”
“And my mother.” Nora gripped Fet’s shirt. “My mother. I’m not leaving without her.”
“Your mother?” said Fet. “She’s still here?”
“I think so.” She held Fet’s face. “I can’t believe you’re here. For me.”
He could’ve kissed her. He could have. Amid the chaos and the turmoil and the danger—he could’ve. The world had vanished around them. It was her—only her in front of him.
“For you?” said Gus. “Hell, we like this killing shit. Right, Fet?” His grin undercut his words. “We gotta get back to my homeboy Bruno.”
Nora followed them out the door, then abruptly stopped. She turned back to Carly, the assistant, still standing behind her desk in the far corner of the anteroom, the telephone in her hand hanging low at her side. Nora rushed back toward her, Carly’s eyes widening with fright. Nora reached across her desk, grabbing the rest of the brownie off its paper plate. She took a big bite and threw the rest at the wall next to the assistant’s head.
But in her moment of triumph, Nora felt only pity for the young woman. And the brownie didn’t taste anywhere near as good as Nora thought it would.
Out in the open yard, Eph hacked and swung, clearing as much space around himself as possible. Six feet was the outside limit for vampire stingers; the combined length of his arm and his sword gave him about that distance. So he kept slashing, carving out a six-foot-wide radius of silver.
But Bruno did not share Eph’s strategy. He instead took on each individual threat as it appeared, and, because he was a brutally efficient killer, he had gotten away with it thus far. But he was also tiring. He went after a pair of vampires threatening from his blind side, but it was a ruse. When he took the bait, the strigoi separated him from Eph, filling in the gap between them. Eph tried to slice his way back over to Bruno, but the vampires stuck to their strategy: separate and destroy.
Eph felt the building at his back. His circle of silver became a semicircle, his sword like a burning torch keeping the darkness of vampirism at bay. A few of them dropped to all fours, trying to dart underneath his reach and pull him down by the legs, but he managed to strike at them, and strike hard, the mud at his feet turning white. But as the bodies piled up, Eph’s radius of safety continued to contract.
He heard Bruno grunt, then howl. Bruno was backed up against the high perimeter fence. Eph watched him slice off a stinger with his sword, but too late. Bruno had been stung. Just a moment of contact, of penetration, but the damage had been done: the worm implanted, the vampire pathogen entering his bloodstream. But Bruno had not been drained of blood, and he continued to battle, in fact with renewed vigor. He fought on, knowing that, even if he were to survive this onslaught, he was doomed. Dozens of worms wriggled under the skin of his face and neck.
The other strigoi around Eph, psychically apprised of this success, sensed victory and surged toward Eph with abandon. A few came off Bruno to shove the encroaching vampires from behind, further shrinking Eph’s zone of safety. Elbows tucked at his sides, he swung and cut at their wild faces, their swaying crimson wattles and open mouths. A stinger shot out at him, striking the wall near his ear with an arrow-like thump. He sliced it down, but there were more. Eph tried to keep up a wall of silver, his arms and shoulders screaming in pain. All it took was for one stinger to get through. He felt the force of the vampire mob closing in on him. Mr. Quinlan landed in the middle of the fight and joined instantly. He made a difference but they all knew they were just holding back the tide. Eph was about to be overrun.
It would be over soon.
A flare of light opened in the sky above them. Eph believed it was in fact a flare or some other pyrotechnic device sent up by the vampires as an alert signal or even a deliberate distraction. One moment of inattention and Eph was done for.
But the flare light kept shining, intensifying, expanding overhead. It was moving, higher than he realized.
Most important, the vampire attack slowed. Their bodies stiffened as their openmouthed heads turned toward the dark sky.
Eph could not believe his good fortune. He readied his sword to cut a swath through the strigoi in a last-gasp gambit to kill his way to safety…
But even he couldn’t resist. The sky-fire was too seductive. He too had to risk a peek at the polluted sky.
Across the black sackcloth of planet-smothering ash, a fierce flame was falling, cutting like the blaze from an acetylene torch. It burned through the darkness like a comet, a head of pure flame leading a narrowing tail. A searing teardrop of red-orange fire unzipping the false night.
It could only have been a satellite—or something even bigger—plummeting from the outer orbit, reentering Earth’s atmosphere like a fiery cannonball launched from the defeated sun.
The vampires backed away. With their red eyes locked on the streak of flame, they stumbled over one another with a rare lack of coordination. This was fear, thought Eph—or something like it. The sign in the sky reached their elemental selves, and they possessed no mechanism to express this terror other than a squealing noise and a clumsy retreat.
Even Mr. Quinlan retreated a bit. Overwhelmed by the light and the spectacle.
As the falling satellite burned bright in the sky, it parted the dense ash cloud and a brutal shaft of daylight penetrated the air like the finger of God, burning it all, falling over a three-mile radius that included the outer edges of the farm.
As the vampires burned and squealed, Fet and Gus and Joaquin met them coming the other way. The three of them ran into the panicked mob, cutting down the outliers before their attack triggered a full-blown riot, the vampires running off in every direction.
For a moment, the majestic column of light revealed the camp around them. The high wall, the dour buildings, the mucky ground. Plain verging on ugly, but only menacing in its ordinariness. This was like the back lot behind the showroom or the dirty restaurant kitchen: the place without artifice, where the real work gets done.
Eph watched the streak burn across the sky with increasing intensity, its head flaming thicker and brighter until it finally consumed itself and the angry trail of fire thinned to a wisp of flame—and then nothing.
Behind it, the much anticipated daylight had finally begun brightening the sky, as though heralded by that timely streak of flame. The pale outline of the sun was barely visible behind the ash cloud, a few of its rays filtering down through seams and weaknesses in the pollution cocoon. It was barely enough light for early dawn in the former world—but it was enough. Enough to drive the fleeing creatures underground for an hour or two.
Eph saw a camp prisoner following Fet and Gus, and despite her bald head and shapeless jumpsuit, he instantly recognized her as Nora. A jarring mix of emotions struck him. It seemed as though years instead of weeks had passed since they’d last met. But right now there were more pressing issues.
Mr. Quinlan retreated into the shadows. His tolerance to UV had been tested to its limit.
I will meet you… back at Columbia… I wish you all good luck.
With that, he bolted up the walls and out of the camp, effortlessly. In the blink of an eye, he was gone.
Gus noticed Bruno gripping his neck and went to him. “Qué pasó, vato?”
“Fucker’s in me,” said Bruno. The gangbanger grimaced, wetting his dry lips, then spitting onto the ground. His posture was open and strange, as though he could feel the worms already crawling inside him. “I’m damned, homes.”
The others all went silent. Gus, in his shock, reached for Bruno’s face, examining his throat. Then he pulled him into a hard hug. “Bruno,” he said.
“Fucking savages,” said Bruno. “Lucky fucking shot.”
“Goddamn it!” yelled Gus, pulling away from him. He didn’t know what to do. No one did. Gus stepped away and launched a ferocious howl.
Joaquin went toward Bruno with tears in his eyes. “This place,” he said, jabbing the point of his sword into the ground. “This is fucking hell on earth.” Then he raised his sword toward the sky, bellowing, “I am gonna slay every last one of these bloodsuckers in your name!”
Gus came back fast. He pointed at Eph. “You made it okay, though. Huh? How’s that? You were supposed to stay together. What happened to my boy?”
Fet stepped between them. “It’s not his fault.”
“How you know that?” said Gus, hurt burning in his eyes. “You was with me!” Gus spun around, went back to Bruno. “Tell me it was this motherfucker’s fault, Bruno, I’ll kill him right here, right now. Tell me!”
But Bruno, if he even heard Gus, didn’t answer. He was examining his hands and arms, as though looking for the worms infesting him.
Fet said, “It’s the vampires who are to blame, Gus. Stay focused.”
“Oh, I’m focused,” said Gus. He moved toward Fet threateningly, but Fet let him come up on him, knowing he had to vent his despair. “Like a laser fucking beam. I’m the Silver Ninja.” Gus pointed at Eph. “I’m focused.”
Eph started to defend himself but held his tongue, realizing that Gus wasn’t interested in what really happened. Anger was the only way the young gangbanger could express his pain.
Fet turned to Eph. “What was that thing in the sky?”
Eph shrugged. “I don’t know. I was done for, like Bruno. They were on me—it was over. And then that thing streaked across the sky. Something falling to earth. Spooked the strigoi. Extraordinary dumb luck.”
“That wasn’t luck,” said Nora. “That was something else.”
Eph stared, thrown off by Nora’s bald appearance. “Something else like what?”
“You can deny it,” said Nora, “or maybe you don’t want to know. Maybe you don’t even care. But that didn’t just happen, Ephraim. That happened to you. To us.” She eyed Fet and clarified. “To all of us…”
Eph was confused. A thing burning up in the atmosphere happened because of them?
“Let’s get you out of here,” he said. “And Bruno. Before anyone else gets hurt.”
“No way,” said Gus. “I’m tearing this place down. I want to find the fucker who did my boy.”
“No,” said Nora, stepping forward, the smallest among them. “We’re going to get my mother first.”
Eph was stunned. “But, Nora… you don’t really think she’s still here, do you?”
“She is still alive. And you of all people are not going to believe who told me this.”
Nora told Eph about Everett Barnes. Eph was mystified at first, wondering why she would joke about something like that. Then he was flat-out flabbergasted. “Everett Barnes, in charge of a blood camp?”
“In charge of all the blood camps,” said Nora.
Eph resisted it a moment more, only to see how right it was. The worst thing about this news was how much sense it made. “That son of a bitch.”
“She’s here,” said Nora. “He said she was. And I think I know where.”
“Okay,” said Eph, exhausted and wondering how far he could push this delicate matter. “But you remember what Barnes tried to do to us before.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Nora.” Eph did not want to spend any more time than was necessary inside this death trap. “Don’t you think Barnes would have told you anything—”
“We need to go get her,” Nora said, half turning away from him.
Fet came to her defense. “We have sun-time,” he said. “Before the cloud of ashes closes again. We’re going to look.”
Eph looked at the big exterminator, then back at Nora. They were making decisions together. Eph was outvoted.
“Fine,” said Eph. “Let’s make it quick.”
With the sky glow allowing a bit of light into the world—like a dimmer slowly rotated from the lowest to the second-to-lowest setting—the camp appeared as a dingy, military-style outpost and prison. The high fence ringing the perimeter was topped with tangles of concertina wire. Most of the buildings were cheaply constructed and caked with grime from the polluted rain—with the notable exception of the administration building, on the side of which was displayed the old Stoneheart corporate symbol: a black orb bisected laterally by a steel-blue ray, like an eye blinking shut.
Nora quickly led them under the canvas-covered path running deeper into the camp, passing other interior gates and buildings.
“The birthing area,” she told them, pointing out the high gate. “They isolate pregnant women. Wall them off from the vampires.”
“Maybe superstition?”
Nora said, “It looked more like quarantine to me. I don’t know. What would happen to an unborn fetus if the mother were turned?”
Fet said, “I don’t know. Never thought about that.”
“They have,” said Nora. “Seems like they’ve taken careful precautions against it ever happening.”
They continued past the front gate, along the interior wall. Eph kept checking behind them. “Where are all the humans?” he asked.
“The pregnant women live in trailers back there. The bleeders live in barracks to the west. It’s like a concentration camp. I think they will process my mother in that area farther ahead.”
She pointed at two dark buildings beyond the birthing zone, neither of which looked promising. They hurried farther along to the entrance to a large warehouse. Guard stations set up outside were empty at the moment.
“Is this it?” asked Fet.
Nora looked around, trying to get her bearings. “I saw a map… I don’t know. This isn’t what I envisioned.”
Fet checked the guard stations first. Inside was a bank of small-screen monitors, all dark. No on/off switches, no chairs.
“Vamps guard this place,” said Fet. “To keep humans out— or in?”
The entrance was not locked. The first room inside, which would have been the office or reception area, was stocked with rakes, shovels, hoes, hose trolleys, tillers, and wheelbarrows. The floor was dirt.
They heard grunts and squeals coming from inside. A nauseating shudder rippled through Eph, as he at first thought they were human noises. But no.
“Animals,” said Nora, moving to the door.
The vast warehouse was a humming brightness. Three stories tall, and twice the size of a football field or a soccer pitch, it was essentially an indoor farmstead and impossible to take in all at once. Suspended from the rafters high above were great lamps, with more lighting rigs erected over large garden plots and an orchard. The heat inside the warehouse was extreme but mitigated by a manufactured breeze that circulated via large vent fans.
Pigs congregated in a muddy enclosure outside an unroofed sty. A high-screened henhouse sat opposite, near what sounded like a cowshed and a sheep shelter. The smell of manure carried on the ventilating breeze.
Eph had to shield his eyes at first, with the lights pouring down from above, all but eliminating any surface shadows. They started down along one of the lanes, following a perforated irrigation pipe set on two-foot-high legs.
“Food factory,” said Fet. He pointed out cameras on the buildings. “People work it. Vamps keep an eye on them.” He squinted up into the lights. “Maybe there’s UV lights mixed in with the regular lamps up there, mimicking the range of light offered by the sun.”
Nora said, “Humans need light too.”
“Vamps can’t come inside. So people are left alone in here to tend the flock and harvest produce.”
Eph said, “I doubt they are left alone.”
Gus made a hissing noise to get their attention. “Rafters,” he said.
Eph looked up. He turned around, taking in a three-hundred-sixty-degree view until he saw the figure moving along a catwalk maybe two-thirds of the way up the long wall.
It was a man, wearing a long, drab, duster-style coat and a wide-brimmed rain hat. He was moving as fast as he could along the narrow, railed walkway.
“Stoneheart,” said Fet. Eldritch Palmer’s league of fellow travelers, who since his demise had transferred their allegiance to the Master when the Master assumed control of Palmer’s corporation’s vast industrial infrastructure. Strigoi sympathizers and—in terms of the new food-and-shelter-based economy—profiteers.
“Hey!” yelled Fet. The man did not respond but only lowered his head and moved more quickly.
Eph ran his eyes along the walkway to the corner. Mounted on a wide, triangular platform—both an observation post and a sniper’s perch—was the long barrel of a machine gun, tipped toward the ceiling, awaiting an operator.
“Get low!” said Fet, and they scattered, Gus and Bruno running back toward the entrance, Fet grabbing Nora and running her to the corner of the henhouse, Eph hustling toward the sheep shelter, Joaquin heading for the gardens.
Eph ducked and ran along the fence, this bottleneck being the very thing he had feared. He wasn’t going to perish by human hands, though. That much he had decided long ago. They were open targets down here in the serene, brightly lit interior farmstead—but Eph could do something about that.
The sheep were agitated, bleating too loudly for Eph to hear anything else. He glanced back at the corner and saw Gus and Bruno racing toward a ladder to the side. The Stoneheart reached the perch and was fooling with the mounted repeater, turning the muzzle end down toward the ground. He lashed out first at Gus, strafing the ground behind him until he lost the angle. Gus and Bruno started up the left-side wall, but the ladder did not run directly beneath; the Stoneheart might have another chance at them before they reached the catwalk.
Eph threw off the wire loops holding the sheep inside their shelter. The gate door banged open and they went bleating into the enclosure. Eph found the hinged section of fence and vaulted over it, working the outside catch. He grabbed the fence and raised his feet just in time, riding it open in order to avoid being trampled by the escaping sheep.
He heard gunfire but didn’t look back, running to the cowshed and doing the same, throwing up the rolling door and turning the herd loose. These were not fat Holsteins but rather cows in the dictionary definition of the term only: thin, loose-hided, walleyed, and fast. They went every which way, a number of them galumphing into the orchard and knocking into the weak-trunked apple trees.
Eph went around the dairy, looking for the others. He saw Joaquin far right, behind one of the garden lamps with a tool in his hand, using it to aim the hot lamp up at the corner shooter. A genius idea, it worked perfectly, distracting the Stoneheart so that Gus and Bruno could charge up the exposed section of ladder. Joaquin dove for cover as the Stoneheart ripped at the lamp, exploding the bulb in a shower of sparks.
Fet was up and running, using one wayward heifer as a partial shield as he broke for a ladder on the near wall, to the right of the shooter’s perch. Eph edged around the corner of the dairy, thinking about making a run for the wall himself, when the dirt started popping before his feet. He bolted backward just as the rounds chewed the wooden corner where his head had been.
The ladder shivered under his weight as Fet climbed hand-over-hand toward the catwalk. The Stoneheart was swung all the way around, trying to angle his fire at Gus and Bruno, but they were low on the walkway, his rounds clanking off the intervening iron slats. Someone below turned another lamp on the Stoneheart, and Fet could see the man’s face locked in a grimace, as though he knew he was going to lose. Who were these people who would willingly do the vampires’ bidding?
Inhuman, he thought.
And that thought powered Fet up the last few rungs. The Stoneheart was still unaware of his blind-side approach but could turn at any time. Imagining the long barrel of the gun swinging his way made him run faster, drawing his sword from his pack.
Inhuman motherfuckers.
The Stoneheart heard or felt Fet’s pounding boots. He swung around, wide-eyed, firing the gun before he had completed the sweep, but too late. Fet was too close. He ran his sword through the Stoneheart’s belly, then pulled it back.
Bewildered, the man slumped to his knees, appearing as shocked by Fet’s betrayal of the new vampiric order as Fet was by the Stoneheart’s betrayal of his own kind. Out of this offended expression vomited bile and blood, bursting onto the barrel of the smoking weapon.
The man’s agonal suffering was wholly unlike any vampire’s. Fet was not used to killing fellow humans. The silver sword was well suited for vampire killing but completely inefficient for dispatching humans.
Bruno came charging from the other catwalk, seizing the man before Fet could react, grabbing him up and dumping him over the low edge of the perch. The Stoneheart twisted in the air, trailing gore, landing headfirst.
Gus grabbed the trigger end of the hot weapon. He swung it around, surveilling the artificial farmstead below them. He tipped it up, aiming it at the multitude of lights beaming down on the farm like cooking lamps.
Fet heard yelling and recognized Nora’s voice, finding her below, waving her arms and pointing at the gun as sheep trotted past.
Fet grabbed the tops of Gus’s arms, just below his shoulders. Not restraining him, just getting his attention. “Don’t,” he said, referring to the lamps. “This food is for humans.”
Gus winced. He wanted to light up the place. Instead, he pulled away from the bright lamps and fired straight out across the cavernous building, rounds punching holes in the far wall, ejected cartridges raining onto the perch.
Nora was the first one out of the indoor farm. She could feel the others pulling on her to leave; the pale light would fade from the sky soon. She grew more frantic with each step, until she was running.
The next building was surrounded by a fence covered with opaque black netting. She could see the building inside, an older structure, original to the former food-processing plant, not vast like the farmstead. A faceless, industrial-appearing building that fairly screamed “slaughterhouse.”
“Is this it?” asked Fet.
Beyond it, Nora could see a turn in the perimeter fence. “Unless… unless they changed it from the map.”
She clung to hope. This was obviously not the entrance to a retirement community or any sort of hospitable environment.
Fet stopped her. “Let me go in first,” he said. “You wait here.”
She watched him start away, the others closing around her like doubts in her mind. “No,” she said at once, and caught up with him. Her breath was short, her words coming quietly. “I’m going too.”
Fet rolled back the gate just wide enough for them to enter. The others followed to a side doorway apart from the main entrance, where the door was unlocked.
Inside, machinery hummed. A heavy odor permeated the air inside, difficult to place at first.
The metallic smell of old coins warmed in a sweaty fist. Human blood.
Nora shut down a little then. She knew what she was going to see even before she reached the first pens.
Inside rooms no larger than a handicapped restroom stall, high-backed wheelchairs were reclined beneath coiled plastic tubes dangling from longer feeder tubes overhead. Flushed clean, the tubes were meant to carry human blood into larger vessels suspended from tracks. The pens were empty now.
Farther ahead, they passed a refrigeration room where the product collected from this terrible blood drive was packed and stored. Forty-two days was the natural limit for viability, but as vampire sustenance—as pure food—maybe the window of time was shorter.
Nora imagined seniors being brought here, sitting slumped in the wheelchairs, tubes taking blood from their necks. She saw them with their eyes rolling back in their sockets, perhaps guided here by the Master’s control of their older, fragile minds.
She grew more frantic and kept moving, knowing the truth but unable to accept it. She tried calling her mother’s name, and the silence that answered was awful, leaving her own voice echoing in her ears, ringing with desperation.
They came to a wide room with walls tiled three-quarters of the way to the ceiling and multiple drains in the red-stained floor. An abattoir. Wrinkled bodies sagged on hooks, flayed skin lying like pelts piled upon the floor.
Nora gagged, but there was nothing in her stomach to come up. She gripped Fet’s arm, and he helped her stay on her feet.
Barnes, she thought. That uniform-wearing butcher and liar. “I am going to kill him,” she said.
Eph appeared at Fet’s side. “We have to go.”
Nora, her head buried in his chest, felt Fet nod.
Eph said, “They’ll send helicopters. Police, with regular guns.”
Fet wrapped Nora in his arm and walked her to the nearest door. Nora didn’t want to see any more. She wanted to leave this camp for good.
Outside, the dying sky glowed a jaundiced yellow. Gus climbed into the cab of a backhoe parked across the dirt roadway, near the fence. He fooled with the controls, and the engine started.
Nora felt Fet stiffen, and she looked up. A dozen or so ghostlike humans in jumpsuits stood near, having wandered over from the barracks in violation of curfew. Drawn by the machine gun fire, no doubt, and curiosity over the cause of the alarms. Or perhaps these dozen had drawn the short straws.
Gus came down from the backhoe to yell at them, berating them for being so passive and cowardly. But Nora called on him to stop.
“They’re not cowards,” she said. “They’re malnourished, they have low blood pressure, hypotension… We have to help them help themselves.”
Fet left Nora to climb into the cab of the backhoe, trying out the controls.
“Gus,” said Bruno. “I’m staying here.”
“What?” said Gus.
“I’m staying here to fuck up this sick shit. Time for a little revenge. Show them they bit the wrong motherfucker.”
Gus got it. Immediately, he understood. “You’re one fucking badass hero, hombre.”
“The baddest. Badder than you.”
Gus smiled, the pride he felt for his friend choking him up. They gripped hands, pulling each other in for a tight bro-hug. Joaquin did the same.
“We’ll never forget you, man,” said Joaquin.
Bruno’s face was set angry to hide his softer emotions. He looked back at the bloodletting building. “Neither will these fuckers. I guarantee it.”
Fet had turned the backhoe around and now drove it forward, ramming straight into the high perimeter fence, the tractor’s wide treads riding up and over it.
Police sirens were audible now. Many of them, growing closer.
Bruno went to Nora. “Lady?” he said. “I’m going to burn down this place. For you and for me. Know that.”
Nora nodded, still inconsolable.
“Now go,” said Bruno, turning and starting back into the slaughterhouse with his sword in hand. “All of you!” he yelled at the humans wearing camp jumpsuits, scaring them away. “I need every minute I got.”
Eph offered Nora his hand, but Fet had returned for her, and she left under Fet’s arm, moving past Eph—who, after a moment, followed them over the downed razor wire.
Bruno, raging with pain, felt the worms move inside of him. The enemy was inside his circulatory system, spreading throughout his organs and wriggling inside his brain. He worked quickly to transport the stand-alone UV lamps from the farmstead garden to the bloodletting factory, setting them inside the doors to delay the incursion of the vampires. Then he set about severing the tubes and dismantling the blood-collecting apparatus as though he were tearing apart his own infected arteries. He stabbed and sliced the refrigerated packs of blood, leaving the floor and his clothes awash in scarlet. It splattered everywhere, drenching him, but not before he made sure he wasted every last unit. Then he went about destroying the equipment itself, the vacuums and pumps.
The vampires trying to enter were getting fried by the UV light. Bruno tore down the carcasses and human pelts but did not know what else to do with them. He wished for gasoline and a source of flame. He started up the machinery and then hacked at the wiring, hoping to short-circuit the electrical system.
When the first policeman broke through, he found a wild-eyed, bloody-red Bruno trashing the place. Without any warning he fired upon Bruno. Two rounds broke his collarbone and snapped his left shoulder, shattering it to pieces.
He heard more entering and climbed up a ladder alongside storage shelves, ascending to the highest point in the building. He hung one-handed over the approaching cops and vampires driven wild both by the destruction he had wrought and by the blood soaking his body, dripping to the floor. As vampires ran up the ladder, bounding toward him, Bruno arched his neck over the hungry creatures below, pressing his sword to his throat, and—Fuck you!—wasted the very last vessel of human blood remaining in the building.
New Jersey
THE MASTER LAY still within the loam-filled coffin—long ago handcrafted by the infidel Abraham Setrakian—loaded into the cargo hold of a blacked-out van. The van was part of a four-vehicle convoy crossing from New Jersey back into Manhattan.
The many eyes of the Master had seen the bright trace of the burning spaceship blazing across the dark sky, ripping open the night like God’s own fingernail. And then the column of light and the unfortunate but not surprising return of the Born…
The timing of the brilliant streak in the sky coincided exactly with Ephraim Goodweather’s moment of crisis. The fiery bolt had spared his life. The Master knew: there were no coincidences, only omens.
Which meant what? What did this incident portend? What was it about Goodweather that had provoked the agencies of nature to come to his rescue?
A challenge. A true and direct challenge—one that the Master welcomed. For victory is only as great as one’s enemy.
That the unnatural comet burned the skies over New York confirmed the Master’s intuition that the site of its origin, still unknown, was somewhere within that geographic region.
This knowledge engaged the Master. In a way, it echoed the comet that had announced the birthing site of another god walking the earth two thousand years ago.
Night was about to fall, the vampires about to rise. Their king reached out, readying them for battle, mobilizing them with its mind.
Every last one of them.
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