The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (11 page)

A virus? A terror attack? A mass suicide?

And now this.

She wanted Zack and Matt home. She wanted them here with her right now. She wanted this solar occultation thing to be over with, and to know that she would never have to experience this feeling again. She looked up through the filtered lenses at the murdering moon in all its dark triumph, worried that she might never see the sun again.

Yankee Stadium, the Bronx

Z
ACK STOOD ON HIS SEAT
next to Matt, who stared at the eclipse with his nose scrunched up and his mouth hanging open like a driver squinting into oncoming traffic. Fifty-thousand-plus Yankees fans wearing special collector’s pin-striped eclipse glasses, on their feet now, faces upturned, looking at the moon that darkened the sky on a perfect afternoon for baseball. All except Zack Goodweather. The eclipse was cool and all, but now he had seen it, and so Zack turned his attention to the dugout. He was trying to see Yankees players. There was Jeter, wearing the same exact specs as Zack, perched on the top step on one knee as though waiting to be announced to hit. Pitchers and catchers were all outside the bullpen, gathered on the right-field grass like anyone else, taking it all in.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Bob Sheppard, the public address announcer, “boys and girls, you may now remove your safety glasses.”

And so they did. Fifty thousand people, nearly in unison. An appreciative gasp went up, then some ballpark applause, then full-out cheering, as though the crowd were trying to lure the unfailingly modest Matsui out of the dugout for a cap tip after slugging one into Monument Park.

In school, Zack had learned that the sun was a 6,000-degree Kelvin thermonuclear furnace, but that its corona, the outer edge, consisting of superheated hydrogen gas—visible from earth only during totality—was unexplainably hotter, its temperature reaching as high as
2,000,000
degrees Kelvin.

What he saw when he removed his glasses was a perfect black disk edged by a thin blaze of crimson, surrounded by an aura of wispy white light. Like an eye: the moon a wide, black pupil; the corona the white of the eye; and the vivid reds bursting from the rim of the pupil—loops of superheated gas erupting from the edge of the sun—the bloodshot veins. Kind of like the eye of a zombie.

Cool.

Zombie Sky.
No:
Zombies of the Eclipse. Zombies of the Occultation. Occult Zombies from the Planet Moon!
Wait—the moon isn’t a planet.
Zombie Moon.
This could be the concept for the movie he and his friends were going to make this winter. Moon rays during a total
earth eclipse transform members of the New York Yankees into brain-slurping zombies—yes! And his buddy Ron looked almost just like a young Jorge Posada. “Hey, Jorge Posada, can I have your autograph … wait, what are you … hey, that’s my … what’s wrong with … your eyes … gah … no … NOOO!!!”

The organ was playing now, and a few of the drunks turned into conductors, waving their arms and exhorting their section to sing along with some corny “I’m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow” song. Baseball crowds rarely need an excuse to make noise. These people would have cheered even if this occultation were an asteroid hurtling toward them.

Wow. Zack realized, with a start, that this was exactly the sort of thing his dad would have said if he were here.

Matt, now admiring his free specs next to him, nudged Zack. “Pretty sweet keepsake, huh? I bet eBay’ll be flooded with these suckers by this time tomorrow.”

Then a drunk guy jostled Matt’s shoulder, sloshing beer onto his shoes. Matt froze a moment, then rolled his eyes at Zack, kind of a
What-are-you-going-to-do?
face. But he didn’t say or do anything. He didn’t even turn around to look. It occurred to Zack now that he’d never seen Matt drink a beer before, only white or red wine on nights at home with Mom. Zack got the sense then that Matt, for all his enthusiasm about the game, was essentially afraid of the fans sitting around them.

Now Zack really wished his dad were there. He dug Matt’s phone out of his jeans pocket and checked again for a text reply.

Searching for signal,
it read. Still no service. Solar flares and radiation distortion messing with radio waves and orbiting satellites; they said that would happen. Zack put the phone away and craned his head toward the field, looking for Jeter again.

International Space Station

T
WO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES
above earth, astronaut Thalia Charles—the American flight engineer on Expedition 18, along with a Russian commander and a French engineer—floated in zero gravity through the vestibule joining the
Unity
module to the aft hatch of lab mod
Destiny.
The ISS research facility orbited earth sixteen times each day, or about once every hour and a half, at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Occultations were no great feat in low earth orbit: blocking the sun with any round object in a window revealed the spectacular corona. Thalia’s interest therefore was not in the alignment of the moon and the sun—from her fast-moving perspective, there was indeed no occultation—but rather the result of this phenomenon upon the slow-rotating earth.

Destiny,
the primary research lab on the ISS, measures twenty-eight by fourteen feet—although the interior working space of this cylindrical module, due to the amount of equipment tied down to the squared-off sides, is tighter than that, measuring roughly five humans long by one human across. Every duct, pipe, and wire connection was directly accessible and therefore visible, such that each of
Destiny
’s four walls looked like the back of a panel-size motherboard. At times Thalia felt like little more than a tiny microprocessor dutifully carrying out computations inside a great space computer.

Thalia walked her hands along the nadir, the “floor” of
Destiny
—in space there is no up or down—to a broad, lenslike ring studded with bolts. The portal shutter was designed to protect the integrity of the module from micrometeoroids or collisions with orbital debris. She maneuvered her sock-covered feet against a wall grip and manually opened it, revealing the two-foot-diameter optical-quality window.

The blue-white ball of earth came into view.

Thalia’s duty assignment was to point and shoot some earth photos with a hard-mounted Hasselblad camera via remote trigger. But when she first looked out on the planet from her unusual vantage point, what she saw made her shudder. The great black blot that was the shadow of the moon looked like a dead spot on the earth. A dark and threatening flaw in the otherwise healthy blue orb that was home. Most unnerving was that she could see nothing at all within the umbra, the central, darkest part of the moon’s shadow, that entire region disappearing into a black void. It was something like viewing a postdisaster satellite map showing devastation caused by a mighty fire that had consumed New York City, and was now spreading out over a broad patch of the eastern seaboard.

Manhattan

N
EW
Y
ORKERS CONGREGATED
in Central Park, the fifty-five-acre Great Lawn filling up as though for a summertime concert. Those who had set out blankets and lawn chairs earlier in the morning now stood on their feet with the rest, children perched on their fathers’ shoulders, babies cradled in their mother’s arms. Belvedere Castle loomed purple-gray over the park, an eerie touch of the gothic in this pastoral open space dwarfed by the East and West Side high-rises.

The great island metropolis ground to a halt, the stillness of the city at that hour felt by all. It was a blackout vibe, anxious yet communal. The occultation imposed a sort of equality upon the city and its denizens, a five-minute suspension of social stratification. Everyone the same under the sun—or the lack thereof.

Radios played up and down the lawn, people singing along with Z100’s spinning of the seven-minute Bonnie Tyler karaoke favorite “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Along the East Side bridges connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world, people stood next to their stopped vehicles, or sat on the hoods, a few photographers with specially filtered cameras clicking from the walkways.

Many rooftops hosted early cocktail hours, a New Year’s Eve-type celebration dampened, for the moment, by the fearsome spectacle in the sky.

The giant Panasonic Astrovision screen, in night-dim Times Square, simulcast the occultation to the terrestrial masses, the sun’s ghostly corona shimmering over “the crossroads of the world” like a warning from a distant sector of the galaxy, the broadcast interrupted by flickers of distortion.

Emergency 911 and nonemergency 311 systems took a torrent of calls, including a handful from preterm pregnant women reporting early “eclipse-induced” labor. EMTs were dutifully dispatched, even though traffic all over the island was at a virtual standstill.

The twin psychiatric centers on Randall’s Island in the northern East River confined violent patients to their rooms and ordered all blinds drawn. Nonviolent patients were invited to assemble in the blacked-out cafeterias, where they were being shown movies—broad comedies—although, during minutes of the totality, a noticeable few
grew restless, anxious to leave the room but unable to articulate why. At Bellevue, the psych ward had already seen an uptick in admittances that morning, in advance of the occultation.

Between Bellevue and the New York University Medical Center, two of the largest hospitals in the world, stood perhaps the ugliest building in all of Manhattan. The headquarters of the chief medical examiner of New York was a misshapen rectangle of sickly turquoise. As the fish truck off-loaded bagged corpses, wheeled on stretchers into the autopsy rooms and walk-in refrigerators in the basement, Gossett Bennett, one of the office’s fourteen medical examiners, stepped outside for a quick break. He could not see the moon-sun from the small park behind the hospital—the building itself was in his way—so he instead watched the watchers. All along FDR Drive, which the park overlooked, people stood between parked cars on the never-idle throughway. The East River beyond was dark, a river of tar reflecting the dead sky. Across the river, a gloom overhung all of Queens, broken only by the glow of the sun’s corona reflected in a few of the highest, west-facing windows, like the white-hot flame of some spectacular chemical-plant blaze.

This is what the beginning of the end of the world will look like,
he thought to himself before returning to the M.E.’s office to assist in the cataloging of the dead.

JFK International Airport

T
HE FAMILIES OF
the deceased passengers and crew of Regis Air Flight 753 were encouraged to take a break from paperwork and Red Cross coffee (decaf only for the aggrieved), and walk outside onto the tarmac in the restricted area behind terminal 3. There, with nothing in common but their grief, the hollow-eyed mourners huddled together and faced the eclipse arm in arm—some leaning on others in solidarity, others in need of actual physical support—their faces turned to the dark western sky. They did not know yet that they would be split up soon into four groups and shuttled in school buses to their respective medical examiner’s offices where, one family at a time, they would be invited into a viewing room and shown a postmortem photograph and asked to formally identify their loved one. Only families who
demanded to view the actual physical remains would be allowed to do so. They then would be issued hotel room vouchers to the airport Sheraton, where a complimentary dinner buffet would be offered and grief counselors placed at their disposal all night and into the next day.

For now, they stared up at the black disk glowing like a spotlight in reverse, sucking light away from this world and back up to the heavens. This obliterating phenomenon was to them a perfect symbol of their loss at that very moment. To them, the eclipse was the opposite of remarkable. It seemed merely appropriate that the sky and their God would see fit to mark their despair.

O
utside the Regis Air maintenance hangar, Nora stood apart from the other investigators, waiting for Eph and Jim to return from the press conference. Her eyes were turned toward the ominous black hole in the sky, but her vision was unfocused. She felt caught up in something she did not understand. As though a strange new foe had arisen. The dead moon eclipsing the living sun. Night occulting day.

A shadow flowed past her then. She detected it as a shimmer from out of the corner of her eye, something like the slithering worm shadows that had undulated over the tarmac just before totality. Something just outside her field of vision, at the very edge of perception. Fleeing the maintenance hangar like a dark spirit. A shadow she
felt
.

In the split second it took her pupil to move to it, the shadow was gone.

L
orenza Ruiz, the airport baggage-conveyer operator who had been the first to drive out to the dead airplane, found herself haunted by the experience. Standing in the aircraft’s shadow that previous night, Lo couldn’t get it out of her mind. She hadn’t slept at all, tossing and turning, finally rising to pace. A late-night glass of white wine failed to do the trick. It weighed on her like something she could not let go of. When sunrise finally came, she found herself eyeing the clock—in anticipation, she realized, of returning to work. She found she couldn’t wait to get back to JFK. Not out of morbid curiosity. It was the image of that dormant plane, impressed upon her mind like a bright light
flashed into her eye. All she knew was that she had to get back to see it again.

Now this eclipse, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the airport was shut down. This stoppage had been in the planning for months—the FAA had cleared a fifteen-minute window of downtime for airports within the range of the occultation, out of concern for the vision of the pilots, who couldn’t very well wear filtered glasses during takeoff or landing—but still, the math struck her as pretty damning and pretty simple: