The Night Eternal (41 page)

The other he hurled toward some abandoned cars in an old rental car parking lot. That flare bounced off a vampire’s chest before hitting the asphalt. The vampire never flinched.

“Shit,” said Gus. He pointed at Mr. Quinlan. “Why didn’t he say anything?”

They have been here the entire time.

“Jesus,” said Gus. He went running toward the rental car company and opened up on the vampire there. The machine gun reports echoed long after he was done, and the vampire lay on the ground, not dead but down for good and full of bleeding white holes.

Nora said, “We should get out of here.”

“Won’t get far without gas,” said Eph. “Fet?”

Fet was pumping, the fuel flowing more freely now. Getting there.

Gus fired his Steyr across at the other flare, trying to scatter the vampires in the Wendy’s lot, but they didn’t scare. Eph drew his sword, seeing movement behind the cars in the parking lot on the other side. Figures running.

Gus yelled out, “Cars!”

Eph heard the engines approaching. No headlights, but vehicles coming out of the darkness, underneath the highway overpass, slowing to a stop.

“Fet, you want me to—?”

“Just keep them back!” Fet pumped and pumped, trying not to breathe the toxic fumes.

Nora reached inside both cars, turning on each set of headlights, illuminating the immediate area east and west.

To the east, opposite the highway, vampires crowded the edge of the light, their red eyes reflecting like glass baubles.

To the west, coming from the highway, two vans, figures emptying out of them. Local vampires called into duty.

“Fet?” said Eph.

“Here, switch tanks,” said Fet, pumping hard, not stopping. Eph pulled the tubing from the Jeep’s almost-full tank and quickly transferred it to the Explorer, gasoline spraying out onto the hardtop.

Footsteps now, and it took Eph a moment to locate them. Overhead, on top of the canopy roof, right above them. The vampires were encircling them and closing in.

Gus opened up his gun on the trucks, winging a vampire or two but not doing any real damage.

“Move away from the tank!” yelled Fet. “I don’t want any sparks nearby!”

Mr. Quinlan returned from the roadside, near Eph at the vehicles. The Born felt it was his responsibility to protect him.

“Here they come!” said Nora.

The vampires began to swarm. A coordinated effort, first focusing on Gus. Four vampires, two running at him from either side. Gus fired on one pair, shredding them, then wheeled and put down the other two, but only just in time.

While he was occupied, a handful of dark figures seized the opportunity to break from the adjoining lots, running toward the Mobil.

Gus turned and sprayed them, hobbling a few, but had to turn back around as more advanced on him.

Mr. Quinlan darted forward with amazing agility, meeting three advancing fellow
strigoi
and forcefully driving his open hands into their throats, snapping their necks.

Bang!
A small vampire, a child, dropped down onto the roof of the Jeep from the carport roof. Nora swiped at it, and the little vampire hissed and darted backward, the Jeep rocking gently. Eph rushed around past the headlights to the other side of the Jeep, looking to slay the nasty little thing. It wasn’t there.

“Not here!” said Eph.

“Not here either!” called Nora.

Eph said, “Underneath!”

Nora got down and swung her sword underneath the vehicle’s carriage, the blade’s reach long enough to drive the child back out toward Eph’s side. He cut at its lower right leg, severing the Achilles tendon. But instead of retreating again, the maimed vampire came right out from beneath the Jeep and sprang up at him, Eph’s sword meeting it halfway, cutting down the blood-rabid
strigoi
in midair. He felt the effort more than ever. He felt his muscles twitch and spasm. A flash of pain ran from his elbow to his lower back. His arm curled in a brutal cramp. He knew what it was: he was malnourished, perhaps even to the point of starvation. He ate very little and very badly—no minerals, no electrolytes, his nerve endings terminally raw. He was coming to an end as a fighter. He fell down, releasing his sword, feeling a million years old.

A wet crunching sound startled Eph from behind. Mr. Quinlan was behind him, bright in the headlights, the head of another child vampire in one hand, the body in his other. The vampire had gotten the drop on Eph, but Mr. Quinlan saved him. The Born threw the dripping body parts to the blacktop as he turned, anticipating the next attack.

Gus’s gun rattled out in the street as more vampires converged on them from the edges of darkness. Eph cut down two more adult
strigoi
running up from behind the gas station store. He was worried about Nora being on her own, on the other side of the cars.

“Fet! Come on!” he yelled.

“Almost!” Fet yelled back.

Mr. Quinlan lashed out, dropping more sacrificial
strigoi,
his hands dripping white. They just kept coming.

“They’re trying to hold us here,” said Eph. “Slow us down!”

The Master is en route. And others. I can sense it.

Eph stabbed the closest
strigoi
by the throat, then kicked it in the chest, retrieved his blade, and ran around to the other side of the Jeep. “Gus!” he called.

Gus was already retreating, his smoking gun silent. “I’m out.”

Eph chopped at a pair of vampires coming up on Nora, then whipped the fuel line out of the Explorer’s tank. Fet saw this and finally gave up pumping. He grabbed Eph’s spare sword out of his pack and took care of another animal-like vampire coming over the Explorer’s hood.

Gus jumped into the front seat of the Explorer, grabbing another weapon. “Go! Get out of here!”

There was no time to throw the gas-soaked pump into the truck. They abandoned it there, gas still drooling out of the tube, slicking the hardtop.

“Don’t shoot this close!” said Fet. “You’ll blow us up!”

Eph went for the Jeep’s door. He watched through the windows as Mr. Quinlan grabbed a female vampire by her legs and whipped her head against a steel column. Fet was in the backseat behind Eph, fighting off vamps trying to get in the door. Eph jumped into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut and turning the key.

The engine started up. Eph saw that Nora was inside the Explorer. Mr. Quinlan was the last, climbing into the backseat of the Jeep with
strigoi
running up to his window. Eph threw the truck into drive and curled out into the street, mowing down two vampires with the Jeep’s silver grille. He saw Nora zoom the Explorer out to the edge of the road, then stop short. Gus jumped out with his machine gun and bent low, firing laterally across the hardtop at the leading edge of the fuel spill. It ignited and he jumped into the Explorer, and both trucks sped away as the flame slid toward the uncapped ground tank, igniting the fumes above for one brief, beautiful moment of winged flame—then the ground tank erupted, an angry orange-black blast, making the ground shudder, splitting the canopy, and frying the
strigoi
still there.

“Jesus,” said Fet, watching out the back window, past the tarp-covered nuclear bomb. “And that’s nothing compared to what we’ve got here.”

Eph gunned it past the vehicles in the road, some of the vampires rushing to get behind the wheel. He wasn’t worried about outrunning them. Only the Master.

Late-arriving vampires darted out into the street, practically throwing themselves into the path of the Jeep in an attempt to slow them down. Eph tore through them, seeing hideous faces for an instant in the headlights just at impact. The caustic white blood ate at the Jeep’s rubber wiper blades after a few back-and-forth swipes. A gang had gathered on the entrance ramp leading back onto Interstate 81, but Eph went right by that ramp, heading down the dark town road.

He followed the main road, handing the map back to Fet, watching for the Explorer’s headlights in his rearview mirror. He didn’t see them. He felt for the walkie-talkie, finding it on the seat near his hip. “Nora? You get out? You two okay?”

Her voice came back a moment later, adrenalized. “We’re good! We’re out!”

“I don’t see you.”

“We’re … I don’t know. Probably behind you.”

“Just keep heading north. If we get separated, meet up at Fishers Landing as soon as you can get there. You got that? Fishers Landing.”

“Fishers Landing,” she said. “Okay.” Her voice crackled.

“Run with your headlights off when you can—but only when you can. Nora?”

“We’re going to … up … onward.”

“Nora, I’m losing you.”

“… Eph …”

Eph felt Fet leaning up behind him. “Radio range is only about one mile.”

Eph checked his mirrors. “They must have headed down another road. So long as they stay off the highway …”

Fet took the radio, trying to raise her, but got nothing. “Shit,” he said.

“She got the rendezvous point,” said Eph. “She’s with Gus. She’ll be all right.”

Fet handed back the radio. “They have enough fuel, anyway. Now all we have to do is stay alive until sunrise.”

At the roadside, beneath a blank marquee sign for an old abandoned drive-in movie theater, an expressionless
strigoi
followed the Jeep with his eyes as it passed him by.

T
he Master reached out with its mind. Although it seemed counterintuitive, engaging many different perspectives at once served to focus the Master’s thoughts and soothe its temper.

Through the eyes of one of its minions, the Master watched the green vehicle driven by Dr. Ephraim Goodweather barrel through an unlit intersection in rural upstate New York, the oversized Jeep following the central yellow line. Moving ever north.

It viewed the Explorer driven by Dr. Nora Martinez driving past a church in a small town square. The criminal Augustin Elizalde leaned out the front window, and there was a muzzle flash and the Master’s view disappeared. They were also moving north, along the other side of the highway they had started out on—the interstate on which the Master was now traveling at a high rate of speed.

It saw the boy, Zachary Goodweather, seated in the helicopter crossing the state through the air, traveling northwest on a sharp diagonal. The boy looked out the window of the flying machine, ignoring the airsick Dr. Everett Barnes seated next to him, the older man’s face a bluish shade of gray. The boy, and perhaps Barnes, would be instrumental to the Master in distracting or otherwise persuading Goodweather.

The Master also saw through Kelly Goodweather’s perception. Traveling inside a moving vehicle dulled her homing impulse somewhat, but still the Master felt her closeness to Dr. Goodweather, her former human mate. Her sensitivity gave the Master another perspective with which to triangulate his focus on Dr. Goodweather.

Turn off here.

The town car swerved and zoomed down the exit ramp, the gang leader Creem driving with a heavy foot.

“Shit,” said Creem upon seeing the still-burning service station just up the road. The smell of burned fuel entered the automobile’s ventilation system.

Left.

Creem followed directions, turning away from the blast site, wasting no time. They passed the drive-in theater marquee and the vampire standing watch there. The Master dipped again into its vision and saw itself inside the black town car, hurtling down the roadway.

They were gaining on Goodweather.

E
ph roared along country roads, winding their way north. He kept changing routes to keep his pursuers guessing. Vampire sentinels stood watch at every turn. Eph could tell if he had been on the same road for too long when they put obstacles in his way, trying to slow him down or make him crash: other cars, a wheelbarrow, planters from a garden store. Driving upwards of fifty miles per hour on a pitch-black road, these things came up fast in his headlights and were dangerous to maneuver around.

A few times the vampires tried to ram them with a car or follow them. That was Fet’s cue to rise up out of the sunroof with the machine gun in hand.

Eph avoided the city of Syracuse altogether, traveling east around the outskirts. The Master knew where they were—but it still did not know where they were going. That was the only thing saving them right now. Otherwise it would mass its slaves at the shore of the Saint Lawrence River, keeping Eph and the others from getting through.

If possible, Eph would have just kept driving until daylight. But gasoline was an issue, and stopping to refuel was simply too dangerous. They were going to have to risk waiting for daylight at the river, potentially as sitting ducks.

On the plus side, the farther north they drove, the fewer roadside
strigoi
they saw. The lower rural population was in their favor.

N
ora was at the wheel. Reading maps was not one of Gus’s strengths. Nora was confident they were moving north in general but knew that they had occasionally gotten sidetracked a little too far east or west. They were past Syracuse, but suddenly Watertown—the last city of any size before the Canadian border—seemed so far away.

The radio at her hip had crackled a few times, but every time she tried to raise Eph, she received only silence in return. After a while she stopped trying. She did not want to chance running down the batteries.

Fishers Landing. That was what Eph had said, where they were to meet. Nora had lost track of how many hours it had been since sundown, how many more it would be until sunrise—all she knew was that it was too many. She wanted daylight far too badly to dare to trust her own gut estimation.

Just get there,
she thought.
Get there and figure it out.

“Here they come, doc,” said Gus.

Nora looked all around the street in front of her. She saw nothing, driving so intently through the darkness. Then she saw it: a hint of light through the treetops.