The Light at the End (38 page)

“Oh, you bastards,” Rudy chortled, his cold breath steaming up the window glass. “Oh, you bastards. You thought you had me. You thought you had ol’ Rudy nailed, didn’t you? You cocksucking bastards… oh, ho… oh, ho…”

The laughter was harsh and dry as dust. It was a nervous reaction, superficial and false; not even he was fooled by it. Underscoring it was a thick dark line of terror:
the proverbial bottom line
, he thought, giggling despite himself, transparent as before.

“But I got away, didn’t I?” Filling the air with noise, with his own mad babble. “Couldn’t get me, couldn’t
catch
me! Too fast, too fast for you, you bastards…” And for the first time, he realized that he could relax now, it was over, his enemies were back there at Grand Street with their thumbs up their asses, Stephen and the others…

Stephen
. The memory slapped him across the face like a cold, sobering hand. Who would have thought that Stephen would turn like that, get crazy, try to kill him? Who would have believed it possible?
Not me
, Rudy thought.
Never in a million years
.

And Josalyn. That bitch. Josalyn almost
did
kill him with that fucking cross. He would never have believed that, either.
It’s all going wrong
, he mused bitterly.
It’s all screwed up, and I don’t know why…

There was laughter, suddenly, behind his ears. Ancient laughter. Terrible, gleeful, mocking laughter that came to him from across an enormous distance, like a transatlantic phone call locking in with startling clarity. And a voice… ageless, timeless, infinitely evil… said
I tried to warn you. I told you that they’d come, you were careless and arrogant, and now it’s all over. Too bad for you.

“No,” Rudy moaned out loud, his hands coming up over his ears to muffle the sound.

Yes
, the voice said, behind his ears.
Look at what they’ve done to you, Rudy. Look at where you are. It’s over. All over.

“YOU DID THIS!” Rudy shrieked, his fingers digging in and yanking on what was left of his hair. “YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

The ancient vampire just laughed, not dignifying the accusation with an answer. The laughter faded, grew faint and ghostly with distance.
All over
, the voice whispered, and was gone.

Leaving Rudy alone to stare at the window, vainly searching for a reflection that wasn’t there. It made him crazy. He put his fists through the glass, watching it disperse into a billion glittering shards that were caught up by the wind and sent tinkling against the wall of the tunnel.

All over
, the voice echoed in his ears as he staggered back to the middle of the aisle and looked out the front window into the forever darkness of the tunnel…

*

They loaded Allan gently onto the stretcher and carried him out to the ambulance. The educated guess was that he had a concussion and multiple contusions. Jerome went along, his arm nicely bandaged. The ambulance sat on the street, its lights strobing and pulsing off the rain-slick streets. Josalyn sat with Detective Brenner and two uniformed cops who took turns looking at the shattered window and the vampire-hunting paraphernalia on the counter. A paramedic busied himself with the wound at her neck.

“That was really stupid, you know,” Brenner said, putting a match to his unfiltered Camel and then wearily shaking his head. “You should have called us when you first suspected.”

“You wouldn’t have believed us,” Josalyn maintained, blowing out smoke on an intercept course with the cloud that Brenner was forming in the air. “Ouch!” She winced and cast an irritated, weary glance at the medico. She fished a vial of holy water from her pocket.

“Here, use this… it’s great stuff.” The paramedic looked at Brenner. He nodded.

“We would have checked out this Rudy Pasko a long time ago,” he countered. “At the very least, we would have connected him with the disappearance of the two little girls and nailed him
yesterday
.” He slammed his fist down on the table and she jumped, caught herself, glued herself back down in her seat with her eyes boring sullenly into the carpet. “We would have had him before all…
this
… went down.” He gestured toward the broken window.

“What you don’t understand,” she said, her voice tight and controlled, her eyes still on the floor, “is that Rudy isn’t an ordinary human.”

“Don’t give me that…” he started to say.

“Rudy is a
vampire
,” she cut in, clipping each syllable off between clenched teeth. “What were you going to do: arrest him? If you know all about this case, you know what a monster he is! You…”

“Young lady, I have been scraping Rudy’s victims off the pavement for over a
week
now! And tonight was the worst, believe you me. Do you know how many dead people I had to look at tonight, Miss Horne? Do you know how many people would still be alive if you hadn’t tried this dumb stunt?”

“Do you know how many policemen would be dead if we hadn’t? And he’d
still
be out there!”

Brenner stopped cold on that one for a moment, sucked smoke, blew it out in a slow-motion cumulus cloud. His eyes tracked it as it wafted across the room toward the broken window.

“Do you have anyone else out there?” he said finally.

She glanced quickly at the switchboard, then away.

“Don’t play games, Miss Horne. I saw that one coming.” He leveled a paternal, almost kindly gaze at her and then continued. “Bring them in, please. Call them. Beep them. Whatever you do, do it. This has gone on long enough.”

“But they might get him…” she said, and her eyes went vague, and she saw Joseph and Stephen in matching pools of gore, splayed out like Allan and Armond and Claire and all the others… like Ian…

“Let’s not hold our breath on that, shall we?” he said, seeing through her, knowing that he’d won.

Josalyn nodded almost imperceptibly at him, acquiescing. Then she sighed and turned wearily to the switchboard, where she proceeded to punch in first Stephen’s number, then Joseph’s. She was tired. Very tired.

Get him, Joseph
, whispered a voice inside her mind.
Don’t let them stop you. Nail him down.

There was something wrong with the tunnel.

Rudy’s face was pressed to the glass of the front window, panting shallowly. The fear was building up inside him, inexorably squeezing and fusing his innards like a vise in the hands of an infinitely patient executioner. It had seemed that the train was rolling a long time without stopping; and when he first saw the light up ahead, he had assumed that they were finally coming to a station.

But he was wrong.

He was wrong, and the ancient vampire was right, and he knew it now. He knew it with one last glimpse of the dim light ahead: a light so faint as to be merely suggested, already too bright for him to bear.

I’ve gone all the way in, Stephen
, he heard himself saying in a long-ago, faraway voice.
I’ve gone all the way into the darkness, Stephen
…

A scream, boiling up from the depths of his soul as he turned to run at last.

And you know what I found in there?

Running. Running madly. Toward the back of the train.

Know what I found in there? in there? in
… the voice echoed madly.

Whimpering now, throwing open the door, running through it, running faster, toward the back of the train.

Found the other side.

Throwing open the door.

Found the other side, Stephen.

Running.

The other side, Stephen.

Throwing open the door.

Found the light.

And running.

Found the light at the end.

And running, and sobbing, and throwing open the door. Too slow.

The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, old buddy, old chum.

Too slow.

My friend.

Too slow, hating himself for being too fucking slow as he ran, madly, toward the back of the train.

And away from the light.

At the end.

Traffic was light on the Manhattan Bridge at six o’clock on a Wednesday morning. A few trucks and delivery vans, a few lonely motorists beating the rush: a mere foreshadowing of the traffic to come. It was a beautiful morning to be making the drive; the clouds were dispersing; the rain had left the air smelling crisp, clean, crackling with life.

And the sunrise this morning was absolutely breath-taking.

The center of the bridge began to tremble, and a low I raucous thundering sound came up from out of nowhere to bury the noise of the six o’clock traffic. Only a few of the morning’s motorists were disoriented by the mounting rumble and shudder: all tourists and out-of-towners, at that. The rest of them naturally took it for granted.

Trains went over this bridge all the time.

The downtown D express to Coney Island poked its nose out of the tunnel and into the light just as Rudy boarded the third car from the rear of the train. By the time he reached the second-to-the-last car, one-third of the train was exposed to the sun. It was roundly bisected into light and dark halves before Rudy made it to the end of the car.

When the last door flew open, Joseph was waiting for him.

“NOOOO!” Rudy screamed. Joseph grinned wickedly at him, showing teeth. The messenger bag dangled from one massive hand. Joseph let it drop to the floor and kicked it.

“No weapons, bucko. With my bare hands. Right now.” Joseph dropped back against the rear door, bracing himself with spraddled legs, coyly motioning Rudy forward. “Come and get it, Rudy!
I’m waiting for you!
”

Nobody could have foreseen the speed with which Rudy raced forward at that moment: not Joseph, not Rudy, not even the ancient vampire whose whimsical joyride set the whole grim tableau into motion. Maybe it was a sudden burst of last-ditch survival adrenaline; maybe it was the fact that the train lurched to a sudden, grinding halt. Whatever the case, Rudy Pasko flew the length of the car as if he’d been fired out of a cannon, slamming into Joseph Hunter so hard and so fast that the glass starred and sagged behind the hunter’s back, threatening to give way altogether.

Joseph didn’t even appear to feel it. His grin was undiminished. His hands clamped down on Rudy’s shoulders, hoisting the vampire up to dangle at arm’s length and two feet in the air.

“C’mon, you little supernatural sonofabitch,” Joseph said. “Let’s take a walk.”

He took a step forward, Rudy still in tow. The train lurched suddenly, sickly, back into motion. Joseph staggered forward in a series of awkward little dance steps, slamming Rudy’s back into a pole.

Rudy went apeshit.

And Joseph’s beeper went off.

Beepbeepbeepbeep
. Rudy clawed at Joseph’s arms like a wildcat, raking out great bleeding divots of fabric and flesh. Joseph winced back pain and leaned forward, pressing Rudy’s spine into the pole, trying to fuse them.
Beepbeepbeepbeep
. Rudy flailed out with his feet, catching Joseph in the thighs with a volley of vicious kicks that sent cramps screaming through the muscles of his legs.
Beepbeepbeepbeep
. Joseph folded up slightly. Rudy’s hand snaked out, grabbed a handful of Joseph’s hair, and pulled with brutal, incredible strength.

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep
as Joseph howled, the world fading out in a brilliant white flash, white flash turning red, red flood turning back into Rudy’s snarling face, cold, spittle lips… red, rolling eyes.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep
in his ears, driving him crazy, filling his mind with hate that boiled up and out of him like a geyser of cold, oily blackness. Hate the job. Hate the city. Hate the sound of the beeper. Hate the lousy motherfucker in my hands. Hate this pain…

And Rudy kicked and thrashed and wailed and ripped out the handful of Joseph’s hair, then dug his nails into the raw meat of the scalp. And the beeper went on and on and on. And the pain and the sound and the sheer effort of holding Rudy up weighed down on Joseph, making his knees start to buckle, making him choke down the terrible fear that he wouldn’t be able to keep it up, he was going to lose it, he was going to die and it would all have been for nothing…

“
NO!
” he screamed, throwing all of his strength into one last desperate surge forward…

…and sunlight streamed in through the windows, a solid wall of light that rolled down the length of the car like a bulldozer’s blade. It swept over them just as Joseph pinned Rudy back against the pole. It drowned them in its radiance.

Rudy began to decompose.

It began with the x-shaped brand at the base of his skull, the blistering bald spot at the crown: a mottled, red-black scum oozed up to the surface as if squeezed from a tube. It slopped over his shoulders and down the sides of his head as he jerked and stiffened like a man being pulled apart by horses. His head lolled back, face contorted with agony. Sunlight hit the crosshatched tattoo across the broken nose, the sore on the lip, the dangling earlobe. A pale slime, like blood and blobs of curdled milk, spilled down into his open mouth.

…
and he was plummeting face-first into a vast, oily blackness, his disembodied awareness shrieking in terror as the hot, fetid wind choked him and roared like a million roasting souls, drowning out all thought as he fought to lose consciousness, to abandon all awareness of the horror yawning before him…

Rudy screamed: burbled at first, then pushing through, a deafening air-raid siren of anguish that warbled and screeched and raked at Joseph’s eardrums like needles, while a geyser of pale, rank fluid arced outward from the mouth and splattered all over their shoes. When Peggy Lewin died, it was like a single soul being doused with gasoline and lit; Rudy’s was more like the scream of legions, of the hundreds of thousands who died at Treblinka all screaming in unison. It was a sound that no single dying human could make.

…
and the roar of the wind was laughter, hideous and all-consuming laughter that laid his soul bare, peeled away to reveal the sour core of his arrogance and his ignorance, and the void parted its thick, acrid clouds to reveal a huge demonic maw, opening wide to receive him as he fell, buffeting against the finely veined membrane, screaming as he plunged down and down and…

Rudy kicked and clawed like a wind-up puppy, blindly thrashing at the air in mechanical frenzy. His face swelled up, turned gray-green and murky, like a layer of scum on a stagnant pool. The red light faded from his eyes, leaving behind a pair of yellowish hard-boiled eggs that had no pupils, no irises, no veins.

Still he screamed, the sound spiraling up into ultrasonic frequencies, cutting through the rumble of the train like a dentist’s drill. The flesh around the mouth sputtered and frayed, stretching across his jawbones like molten rubber bands. Something started to bubble up behind the eyes.

…
and he was blind, he was blind, the hot howling wind robbing him, deafening him, sealing him in with its molten kiss, deaf to his own choking screams, screams that pulsed with the madly staccato
beepbeepbeepbeep
that seemed so very far away
…

Rudy’s wind-up motion was grinding down to the last few turns of the key. His scream broke up into a grotesque parody of the beepers shrill, steady pulse, out of phase and painfully distorting. The meat of his shoulders went soft and spongy under Joseph’s hands. Joseph gripped them harder, pushing Rudy against the pole. Something snapped, and Joseph’s fingers tore through the fabric of Rudy’s shirt, sinking to the hilt in writhing, rotting meat and muscle. Thick clouds of sickly green vapor spewed hissing from the punctured flesh. Rudy’s eyes exploded suddenly like tiny pus-filled water balloons.

Joseph screamed, finally able to stand it no more, slipping helplessly over the edge into madness. He jerked his hands away frantically. Rudy stuck to them. A thin animal squeal ripped itself from Joseph’s throat; Rudy flapped and flopped at the ends of his arms as Joseph tried desperately to shake the body loose.

…
and all was fire, all was pain, raw fear and madness spiraling upward and echoing back as his soul crisped and rolled and fell, like a shooting star, across endless plains of molten fire where the countless writhing hordes of the damned paused in their suffering to applaud the spectacle blazing through the vaulted heavens above them; fatting, falling, the tormentors jeering and pointing with long, crooked fingers as the dying soul of Rudy Pasko arced headfirst into oblivion
…

Rudy finally came loose with a sputtering sound, slapping back against the pole and then slithering down its length like a warm stick of butter. Death rattled in his throat, a stopwatch ticking off the final seconds with pitiless precision. His moldering hands clenched and unclenched in a farewell spasm as he folded up on the floor, settling into himself like freshly mixed batter.