The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (56 page)

“Not to me!”

“You saw her, Z.” Eph didn’t want to have to talk about the stinger. “You saw it. She’s not your mom anymore. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to kill her!” Zack said, his voice still raw from choking.

“I do,” said Eph. “I do.”

He went to Zack, trying again for some contact, but the boy pulled away. He went instead to Nora, who was handy as a female substitute, and cried into her shoulder.

Nora looked back at Eph with consolation in her eyes, but Eph wouldn’t have it. Fet was at the door behind him.

“Let’s go,” said Eph, rushing from the room.

The Night Squad

T
HEY CONTINUED UP
the street toward Marcus Garvey Park, the five off-duty cops on foot, and the sergeant in his personal vehicle.

No badges. No cruiser cameras. No after-action reports. No inquiries, no community boards, and no Internal Affairs.

This was about force. About setting things right.

“Communicable mania,” the feds termed it. “Plague-related dementia.”

What happened to good, old-fashioned “bad guys”? That term gone out of style?

The government was talking about deploying the Staties? The National Guard? The Army?

At least give us blue boys a shot first.

“Hey—what the …!”

One of them was holding his arm. A deep cut, right through the sleeve.

Another projectile landed at their feet.

“Fucking throwing rocks now?”

They scanned the rooftops.

“There!”

A huge chunk of decorative stone, a fleur-de-lis, came sailing down at their heads, scattering them. The piece shattered onto the curb, rock smacking their shins.

“In here!”

They ran for the door, busted inside. The first man in charged up the stairs to the second-floor landing. There, a teenage girl in a long nightshirt stood in the middle of the hallway.

“Get outta here, honey!” he yelled, pushing right past her, heading for the next flight of stairs. Someone was on the move up there. The cop didn’t have to wait for rules of engagement, or justifiable force. He yelled at him to stop, then opened up on the guy, plugging him four times, putting him down.

He advanced on the rioter, all charged up. A black guy with four good hits in his chest. The cop smiled down the gap in the stairs.

“I got one!”

The black guy sat up. The cop backed away, getting off one
more round before the guy sprang on him, clutching him, doing something to his neck.

The cop spun, his assault rifle pressed flat between them, feeling the railing give against his hip.

They fell together, landing hard. Another cop turned and saw the suspect on top of the first cop, biting him on the neck or something. Before firing, he looked up to see where they had fallen from—and saw the nightshirt-wearing teen.

She leaped down at him, knocking him flat, straddling him, and clawing at his face and neck.

A third cop came back down the stairs and saw her—then saw the guy behind her with a stinger coming out of his mouth, throbbing as it drained the first cop.

The third cop fired on the teen, knocking her back. He started to go after the other freak when a hand swept down from behind him, a long, talon-like nail slicing open his neck, spinning him into the creature’s arms.

Kelly Goodweather, her rage of hunger and blood-need triggered by the yearning for her son, dragged the cop one-handedly into the nearest apartment, slamming the door so that she could feed deeply and without interruption.

The Master—Part I

T
HE MAN’S LIMBS
twitched for the last time, the faint perfume of his final breath escaping his mouth, the death rattle signaling the end of the repast for the Master. The man’s inert, nude body, released by the towering shadow, collapsed next to the other four victims similarly at the feet of Sardu.

All of them exhibited the same concussive stinger mark in the soft flesh of the inside thigh, right on the femoral artery. The popular image of a vampire drinking from the neck was not incorrect, but powerful vampires favored the femoral artery of the right leg. The pressure and oxygenation were perfect, and the flavor was fuller, almost blunt. The jugular, on the other hand, carried impure, tangy blood. Regardless, the act of feeding had long ago lost its thrill for
the Master. Many a time the ancient vampire fed without even looking into its victim’s eyes—although the adrenaline surge of fear in the victim added an exotic tingle to the metallic flavor of blood.

For centuries, human pain remained fresh and even invigorating: its various manifestations amused the Master, the cattle’s delicate symphony of gasps and screams and exhalations still arousing the creature’s interest.

But now, especially when it fed like this, en masse, it sought absolute silence. From within, the Master called upon its primal voice—its original voice—the voice of its true self, shedding all other guests within its body and its will. It emitted its murmur: a pulse, a psycho-sedative rumble from within, mental whiplash, paralyzing nearby prey for the longest time in order that the Master could feed at peace.

But in the end,
The Murmur
was to be used cautiously, for it exposed the Master’s true voice. Its true self.

It took a bit of time and effort to quiet all the inhabiting voices and discover its own again. This was dangerous, as these voices served as the Master’s cloaking device. The voices—including that of Sardu, the boy hunter whose body the Master inhabited—camouflaged the Master’s presence, position, and thoughts before the other Ancient Ones. They cloaked him.

It had used
The Murmur
inside the 777 at arrival, and it wielded the pulse-sound now to gain absolute silence and collect its thoughts. The Master could do it here—hundreds of feet below ground level, in a concrete vault at the center of the semi-abandoned charnel house complex. The Master’s chamber resided at the center of a labyrinth of curving corralled areas and service tunnels beneath the steer abattoir above them. Blood and residue had once been collected there, but now, after a thorough cleaning in advance of the Master’s residency, the structure resembled most closely a small industrial chapel.

The pulsating slash on the Master’s back had started healing almost instantly. He never feared any permanent damage from the wound—he never feared anything—and yet the slash would form into a scar, defacing his body like an affront. The old fool and the humans by his side would regret the day they crossed the Master.

The faintest echo of rage—of deep indignation—rippled through its many voices and its single will. The Master felt vexed, a refreshing and energizing sensation. Indignation was not a feeling it experienced often, and thus the Master lowed—even welcomed—this novel reaction.

Quiet laughter rattled through its injured body. The Master was way ahead of the game, and all of its various pawns were behaving as expected. Bolivar, the energetic lieutenant in his ranks, was proving quite apt at spreading the thirst, and had even collected a few serfs that could do sun chores for them. Palmer’s arrogance grew with each tactical advance, yet he remained fully under the Master’s control. The Occultation had marked the time for the plan to be set forth. It had defined the delicate, sacred geometry needed, and now—very soon—the earth would burn …

On the floor, one of the morsels groaned, unexpectedly clinging to life. Refreshed and delighted, the Master gazed down upon it. In its mind, the chorus of voices restarted. The Master looked upon the man at his feet, and some pain and fear remained in his gaze—an unanticipated treat.

This time, the Master indulged itself, savoring the tangy dessert. Under the vaulted roof of the Charnel House, the Master lifted the body up, carefully laying its hand over the chest, above the heart of the man, and greedily extinguished the rhythm within.

Ground Zero

T
HE PLATFORM WAS
empty when Eph jumped down onto the tracks, following Fet into the subway tunnel leading alongside the construction bathtub of the Ground Zero project.

He never imagined he would return here, to this place. After everything they had witnessed and encountered before, he could not imagine a force strong enough to compel him to return to the subterranean labyrinth that was the Master’s nest.

But calluses form in as little as one day. Scotch had helped. Scotch helped quite a bit.

He walked over black rocks along the same out-of-service track
as before. The rats had not returned. He passed the sump hose abandoned by the sandhogs who had also disappeared.

Fet carried his usual steel rod of rebar. Despite the more appropriate and impactful weapons they carried—ultraviolet lamps, silver swords, a nail gun loaded with brads of pure silver—Fet continued to carry his rat stick, though they both knew there were no longer any rats here. Vampires had infested the rats’ subterranean domain.

Fet also liked the nail gun. Pneumatic air-powered nail guns required tubing and water. Electric nail guns lacked punch and trajectory. Neither was truly portable. Fet’s powder-actuated gun—a weapon from the old man’s arsenal of oddities ancient and modern—operated on a shotgun load of gunpowder. Fifty silver nails per load, fed through the bottom like the magazine of an UZI. Lead bullets put holes in vamps, same as humans—but when your nervous system is gone, physical pain is a non-issue, copper-plated projectiles reduced to blunt instruments. A shotgun had stopping power, but unless you severed the head at the neck, pellet blasts didn’t kill either. Silver, introduced in the form of an inch-and-a-half brad, killed viruses. Lead bullets made them angry, but silver nails hurt them at something like a genetic level. And, almost as important, at least to Eph: silver scared them. As did ultraviolet light in the pure, shortwave UVC range. Silver and sunlight were the vampire equivalent of the exterminator’s rat stick.

Fet had come to them as a city employee, an exterminator who wanted to know what was driving the rats out from underground. He had already run into a few vampires in his subterranean adventures, and his skill set—a dedicated killer of vermin, and an expert in the workings of the city beneath the city—lent itself perfectly to vampire hunting. He was the one who had first led Eph and Setrakian down here in search of the Master’s nest.

The smell of slaughter remained trapped in the underground chamber. The charred stench of roasted vampire—and the lingering ammonia odor of the creatures’ excrement.

Eph found himself lagging behind, and picked up his pace, sweeping the tunnel with his flashlight, catching up to Fet.

The exterminator chewed an unlit Toro cigar, which he was used to talking around. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m great,” said Eph. “Couldn’t be better.”

“He’s confused. Man, I was confused at that age, and my mother wasn’t … you know.”

“I know. He needs time. And that’s just one of many things I can’t give him right now.”

“He’s a good kid. I don’t usually like kids, but I like yours.”

Eph nodded, appreciative of the effort Fet was putting forth. “I like him too.”

“I worry about the old man.”

Eph stepped carefully over the loose stones. “It took a lot out of him.”

“Physically, sure. But there’s more.”

“Failure.”

“That, yes. Getting so near, after so many years of chasing these things, only to see the Master withstand and survive the old man’s best shot. But something else too. There are things he’s not telling us. Or hasn’t told us yet. I am sure of it.”

Eph remembered the king vampire throwing back its cloak in a gesture of triumph, its lily-white flesh cooking in the daylight as it howled at the sun in defiance—then disappearing over the edge of the rooftop. “He thought sunlight would kill the Master.”

Fet chewed his cigar. “The sun did hurt it, at least. Who knows how long that thing would have been able to take the exposure. And you—you cut him. With the silver.” Eph had gotten in a half-lucky slash across the Master’s back, which the sun’s subsequent exposure fused into an instant black scar. “If it can be hurt, I guess it can be destroyed. Right?”

“But—isn’t a wounded animal more dangerous?”

“Animals, like people, are motivated by pain and fear. But this thing? Pain and fear are where it lives. It doesn’t need any additional motivation.”

“To wipe us all out.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Would he want to wipe out all of mankind? I mean—we’re his food. We’re his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He turns everyone into vamps, there goes his entire food supply. Once you kill all the chickens, no more eggs.”

Eph was impressed by Fet’s reasoning, the logic of an exterminator.
“He’s got to maintain a balance, right? Turn too many people into vampires, you create too great a demand for human meals. Blood economics.”

“Unless there’s some other fate in store for us. I only hope the old man has the answers. If he doesn’t …”

“Then nobody does.”

They came up to the dingy tunnel junction. Eph held up his Luma lamp, the UVC rays bringing out the wild stains of vampire waste: their urine and excrement, whose biological matter fluoresced under the low light range. The stains were no longer the garish colors Eph remembered. These stains were fading. This meant that no vampires had revisited the spot recently. Perhaps, through their apparent telepathy, they had been warned away by the deaths of the hundreds of fellow creatures that Eph, Fet, and Setrakian had slain.

Fet used his steel rod to poke at the mound of discarded mobile phones, piled up like a cairn. A desultory monument to human futility—as though vampires had sucked the life out of people, and all that was left were their gadgets.

Fet said, quietly, “I’ve been thinking about something he said. He was talking about myths from different cultures and ages revealing similar basic human fears. Universal symbols.”

“Archetypes.”

“That was the word. Terrors common to all tribes and countries, deep in all humans across the board—diseases and plagues, warfare, greed. His point was, what if these things aren’t just superstitions? What if they are directly related? Not separate fears linked by our subconscious—but what if they have actual roots in our past? In other words, what if these aren’t common myths? What if they are common truths?”