The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (88 page)

The Master’s hand pressed onto Palmer’s bony shoulder like a
vulture’s talons onto a twig. Its other hand gripped the crown of Palmer’s head, turning it to one side, fully extending the old man’s neck and throat.

Palmer looked at the ceiling, his eyes losing focus. He heard choir voices in his head. He had never been held by anyone—anything—in their arms like this in his life. He allowed himself to go limp.

He was ready. His breath came in short, excited bursts as the hardened nail of the Master’s long, thick middle finger pricked at the flesh sagging over his stretched neck.

The Master saw the sick man’s pulse beating through his neck, the man’s heart throbbing in anticipation, and the Master felt the call deep within its stinger. He wanted blood.

But it ignored its nature and, with one firm crack, it ripped Eldritch Palmer’s head from his torso. It released the head and gripped the spurting body and tore Palmer in half, the body splitting apart easily where the bones of the hips narrowed to the waist. It tossed the bloody pieces of meat to the far wall, where they struck the framed masterworks of human abstract art and fell to the floor.

The Master turned fast, sensing another blood source ticking on the premises. Palmer’s manservant, Mr. Fitzwilliam, stood in the doorway. A broad-shouldered human wearing a suit tailored to accommodate weapons of self-defense.

Palmer had wanted this man’s body for his turning. He coveted his bodyguard’s strength, his physical stature, desiring the man’s form for all eternity.

Mr. Fitzwilliam was one of a package with Palmer.

The Master looked into his mind, and showed him this, before flying at him in a blur. Mr. Fitzwilliam first saw the Master all the way across the room, red blood dripping from his enormous hands—and then the Master was bent over him, a stinging, draining sensation like a rod of fire in his throat.

The pain faded after a time. So did Mr. Fitzwilliam’s view of the ceiling.

The Master let the man fall where he had drunk him.

Animals.

Eichhorst remained across the wide room, patient as a lawyer.

The Master said:

Let us commence the Night Eternal.

T
he tugboat drifted down the East River without lights, toward the United Nations. Fet guided the boat along the besieged island, staying only a few hundred yards off the coast. He was no boat captain, but the throttle was easy enough to operate, and, as he had learned in docking the tug at 72nd Street, the thick tire fenders were quite forgiving.

Behind him, at the navigation table, Setrakian sat before the
Occido Lumen.
A single strong lamp made the silver-leaf illustrations glow off the page. Setrakian was absorbed in the work, studying it in a near-trance. He kept a small notebook next to him. A ruled composition school notebook almost half-full with the old man’s notes.

The writing in the
Lumen
was densely yet beautifully hand-scribed, as many as one hundred lines to a page. His old, long-ago-broken fingers turned each corner with delicacy and speed.

He analyzed every page, backlighting them, scanning for watermarks and quickly sketching them as they were discovered. He annotated their exact position and disposition on the page, as these were vital elements in decoding the text laid on them.

Eph stood at his shoulder, alternately looking at the phantasmagoric illustrations and checking the burning island out the wheelhouse window. He noticed a radio near Fet and switched it on, keeping it low so as not to distract Setrakian. It was satellite radio, and Eph searched the news channels until he came across a voice.

A tired female voice, a broadcaster holed up in the Sirius XM headquarters, was operating off some sort of failsafe backup generator. She was working off multiple, fractured sources—Internet, phone, and e-mail—collating reports from around the country and the world, while repeatedly clarifying that she had no way of verifying this information was accurate.

She spoke candidly about vampirism as a virus spreading person-to-person. She detailed a crumbling domestic infrastructure:
accidents, some catastrophic, disabling, or otherwise cutting off traffic along key bridges in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Washington state, and California. Power outages further isolated certain regions, most prevalent along the coasts. Gas lines in the Midwest. The National Guard and various Army regiments had been ordered into peacekeeping duty in many major metropolitan centers, with reports of military activity in New York and Washington, DC. Fighting had broken out along the border between North and South Korea. Burning mosques in Iraq had triggered rioting, compounded by U.S. peacekeeping efforts there. A series of unexplained explosions in the catacombs beneath Paris had crippled the city. And an eerie series of reports detailed suicide clusters occurring at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina, and Niagara Falls in New York.

Eph shook his head at all of this—bewildering, a nightmare,
War of the Worlds
come true—until he heard the report of an Amtrak derailment inside the North River Tunnel, further cutting off the island of Manhattan. The broadcaster moved on to a report of rioting in Mexico City, leaving Eph staring at the radio.

“Derailment,” he said.

The radio couldn’t answer him.

Fet said, “She didn’t say when. Maybe they got through.”

Fear spiked in Eph’s chest. He felt sick. “They didn’t,” he said. He knew it. No ESP, no psychic knowledge: he simply knew it. Their escape now struck him as being too good to be true. All his relief, his clear-headedness—gone. A dark pall fell over his mind.

“I have to go there.” He turned toward Fet, unable to see anything but the mental image of a derailment and vampire attack. “Bring us in. You have to let me off. I’m going after Zack and Nora.”

Fet did not argue, fooling with the steering controls. “Let me find someplace to crash-land.”

Eph looked for weapons. Former gang rivals Gus and Creem were eating junk food out of a convenience-store bag. Gus used his boot to slide their weapon bag toward Eph.

A change in the broadcaster’s tone returned their attention to the radio. A nuclear plant accident had been reported on the eastern coast of China. Nothing out of Chinese news agencies, but
there were eyewitness accounts of a mushroom cloud visible from Taiwan, as well as seismometer readings near Guangdong indicating an Earth tremor in the neighborhood of a quake registering 6.6 on the Richter scale. The lack of reporting from Hong Kong was said to indicate the possibility of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse, which would turn electrical cables into lightning rods or antennas and have the effect of frying any connected solid-state devices.

Gus said, “Vampires nuking us now? Fuck us.” Then he translated for Angel, who was repairing a homemade splint around his knee.

“Madre de Dios,”
said Angel, crossing himself.

Fet said, “Wait a minute. A nuclear plant accident? That’s a meltdown, not a bomb. Maybe a steam explosion on the site—like Chernobyl—but not a detonation. They’re designed so that those aren’t possible.”

“Designed by whom?” Setrakian said this, never looking up from the book.

Fet sputtered. “I don’t know—what do you mean?”

“Constructed by whom?”

“Stoneheart,” said Eph. “Eldritch Palmer.”

“What?” said Fet. “But—nuclear explosions? Why do that when he’s so close to winning the world?”

“There will be more,” said Setrakian. His voice came without breath, disembodied, intoned.

Fet said, “What do you mean, more?”

Setrakian said, “Four more. The Ancients were born from the light. The Fallen Light,
Occido Lumen
—and they can only be consumed by it …”

Gus got up and went to stand over the old man. The book was open to a two-page spread. A complex mandala in silver, black, and red. On top of it, on tracing paper, Setrakian had laid out the outline of the six-winged angel. Gus said, “It says that?”

Setrakian closed the silver book and got to his feet. “We must return to the Ancients. At once.”

Gus said, “Okay,” though he was befuddled by this sudden change in course. “To give them the book?”

“No,” said Setrakian, finding his pillbox inside his vest pocket,
pulling it open with trembling fingers. “The book arrives too late for them.”

Gus squinted. “Too late?”

Setrakian struggled to pluck a nitroglycerin pill out of the box. Fet steadied the old man’s shaking hand, pinching a nitroglycerin pill and laying it into his wrinkled palm. “You do realize, professor,” said Fet, “that Palmer just opened a new nuclear plant on Long Island.”

The old man’s eyes grew distant and unfocused, as though still dazed by the concentric geometry of the mandala. Then Setrakian placed the pill beneath his tongue and closed his eyes, waiting for its effects to steady his heart.

Z
ack, after Nora had gone off with her mother, lay in filth beneath the short ledge running the length of the southern tube of the North River Tunnels, hugging the silver blade to his chest. She was coming right back, and he had to listen for her. Not easy over the sound of his wheezing. He realized this only now, and felt around in his pockets, finding his inhaler.

He brought it to his mouth and took two puffs, and felt immediate relief. He thought of the breath in his lungs like a guy trapped inside a net. When Zack got anxious, it was like the guy was fighting the net, pulling at it, winding himself up worse and making everything tight. The puff from Zack’s inhaler was like a blast of knockout gas, the guy weakening, going limp, the net relaxing over him.

He put away the inhaler and reaffirmed his grip on the knife.
Give it a name and it’s yours forever.
That is what the professor had told him. Zack feverishly raced through his thoughts in search of a name. Trying to focus on anything but the tunnel.

Cars get girl names. Guns get guy names. What do knives get?

He thought of the professor, the man’s old, broken fingers, presenting him with the weapon.

Abraham.

That was his first name.

That was the name of the knife.

“Help!”

A man’s voice. Someone running through the tunnel—coming nearer. His voice echoing.

“Help me! Anybody there?”

Zack did not move. He didn’t even turn his head, only his eyes. He heard the man stumble and fall, and that was when Zack heard the other footsteps. Someone pursuing him. The man got up again, then fell. Or else was thrown down. Zack hadn’t realized how close the man was to him. The man kicked and howled out some gibberish like a madman, crawling along one of the rails. Zack saw him then, a form in the darkness, clawing forward while kicking back at his pursuers. He was so near that Zack could feel the man’s terror. So near that Zack readied Abraham in his hand, blade pointing out.

One of them landed on the man’s back. His yowling was cut short, one of their hands reaching around and entering his open mouth, pulling at his cheek. More hands set upon him—overlarge fingers grabbing at his flesh and his clothes, and dragging him away.

Zack felt the man’s madness spread into him. He lay there shivering so hard he thought he was going to give himself away. The man got off another anguished groan, and it was enough to know that they—the children’s hands—were pulling him back the other way.

Zack had to run. He had to run off after Nora. He remembered one time playing hide-and-seek in his old neighborhood, and he had burrowed in behind some bushes, listening to the seeker’s slow count. He was found last, or almost last, once he realized that one kid was still missing, a younger boy who had joined the game late. And they looked for him a little bit, calling his name, and then lost interest, figuring he had gone back home. But Zack didn’t think so. He had seen the glimmer in the young boy’s eye when they ran off to hide, the almost-evil anticipation of the hunted wanting to outwit the hunter. Beyond the thrill of the chase: the knowledge of a really clever hiding place.

Clever to a five-year-old’s mind. And then Zack knew. He went all the way down the street to the house owned by the old man who yelled at them when kids cut through his backyard. Zack went to the refrigerator lying on its side, still at the bottom of their driveway on the day after trash day. The door had been removed, but now it lay on top of the squash-yellow appliance. Zack pulled it open, breaking the seal, and there was the boy, starting to turn blue. Somehow, with
near Hulk-like hide-and-seek strength, the five-year-old had pulled the door of the fridge over him. The boy was fine, except for puking onto the lawn after Zack helped him out, and the old man coming to his door and yelling at them to beat it.

Beat it.

Zack slid out on his back, half-coated in tunnel soot, and started running. He turned on his busted iPod, the cracked screen lighting the floor in front of him in a four-foot nimbus of soft, blue light. He couldn’t hear anything, even his own footfalls, so loud was the panic in his head. He assumed he was being chased—could feel hands reaching for the back of his neck—and whether true or not, he ran as though it were.

He wanted to call out Nora’s name, but did not, knowing it would give away his position. Abraham’s blade scraped the wall of the tunnel, telling him he was veering too far to the right.

Zack saw a burning red flame up ahead. Not a torch, but an angry light, like a flare. It scared him. He was supposed to be running away from trouble, not toward it. He slowed, not wanting to go forward, unable to go back.

He thought about the boy hiding inside the refrigerator. No light, no sound, no air.

The door, dark against the dividing wall, had a sign on it Zack did not bother to read. The handle turned and he went through it, back into the original northbound tunnel. He could smell the smoke the friction of the derailed train caused, along with the noxious stench of ammonia. This was a mistake—he should wait for Nora, she would be looking for him—but on he ran.

Ahead, a figure. At first, he believed that it was Nora. This person also wore a backpack, and Nora had been carrying a bag.