"The Fall. Book II of The Strain Trilogy" - читать интересную книгу автора (del Toro Guillermo, Hogan Chuck)

Gray Skies

Thursday, November 4

Mirrors are the bearers of bad news, thought Abraham Setrakian, standing under the greenish fluorescent wall lamp, staring into his bathroom mirror. An old man looking into older glass. The edges were blackened with age, a corruption creeping ever closer to the center. To his reflection. To him.

You will die soon.

The silver-backed looking glass showed him that much. Many times he had been close to death, or worse; but this was different. In his image he saw this inevitability. And still, somehow, Setrakian found comfort in the truth of the old mirrors. They were honest and pure. This one was a magnificent piece, turn-of-the-century, quite heavy, strung from the wall by corded wire, hanging off the old tile at a downward angle. There were, hung from walls and standing on the floors and leaning against bookshelves, some eighty silver-backed mirrors arranged throughout his living quarters. He collected them compulsively. As people who have walked through a desert know the value of water, so Setrakian found it impossible to pass up the acquisition of a silver looking-glass — especially a smaller, portable one.

But, more than that, he relied upon their most ancient quality.

Contrary to popular myth, vampires certainly do have reflections. In mass-produced, modern mirrors, they appear no different than they do to the eye. But in silver-backed glass, their reflections are distorted. Some physical property of the silver projects these virus-laden atrocities with visual interference — like a warning. Much like the looking glass in the Snow White story, a silver-backed mirror cannot tell a lie.

And so, Setrakian looked at his face in the mirror — between the thick porcelain sink and the counter that held his powders and salves, the rubs for his arthritis, the heated liniment to soothe the pain in his gnarled joints — and studied it.

Here he confronted his fading strength. The acknowledgment that his body was just that: a body. Aged and weakening. Decaying. To the point where he was unsure if he would survive the corporeal trauma of a turning. Not all victims do survive it.

His face. Its deep lines like a fingerprint — the thumb of time stamped firmly onto his visage. He had aged twenty additional years overnight. His eyes appeared small and dry, yellowed like ivory. His pallor was off, and his hair lay against his scalp like fine silver grass matted down by a recent storm.

Pic — pic — pic…

He heard death calling. He heard the cane. His heart.

He looked at his twisted hands, molded by sheer will to fit and hold the handle of that silver cane sword — but able to do little else with any dexterity.

The battle with the Master had weakened him greatly. The Master was stronger even than Setrakian had remembered or presumed. He had yet to process his theories spawned by the Master’s survival in direct sunlight — sunlight that weakened and marked him, but did not obliterate him. The virus-smashing ultraviolet rays should have cut through him like the power of ten thousand silver swords — and yet the terrible creature had withstood it and escaped.

What is life, in the end, but a series of small victories and larger failures? But what else was there to do? Give up?

Setrakian never gave up.

Second-guessing was all he had at the moment. If only he had done this instead of that. If he could have somehow dynamited the building once he knew that the Master was inside. If Eph had allowed him to expire rather than saving him at that last critical moment…

His heart was racing again, just thinking of lost opportunities. Fluttering and skipping beats. Lurching. Like an impatient child inside him, wanting to run and run.

Pic — pic — pic…

A low hum purred above the heartbeat.

Setrakian knew it well: this was the prelude to oblivion, to waking up inside an emergency room, if there were any still operating…

With a stiff finger, he fished a white pill out of his box. Nitroglycerin prevented angina by relaxing the vessels carrying blood to his heart, allowing them to dilate, increasing flow and oxygen supply. A sublingual tablet, he placed it underneath his dry tongue, to dissolve.

There was immediately a sweet, tingling sensation. In a few minutes, the murmur in his heart would subside.

The fast-acting nitro pill reassured him. All this second-guessing, this recrimination and mourning: it was a waste of brain activity.

Here he was now. His adopted Manhattan called to him, crumbling from within.

One week now since the 777 had touched down at JFK. One week since the arrival of the Master and the start of the outbreak. Setrakian had foreseen it from the first news report, as surely as one intuits the death of a loved one when the phone rings at an odd hour. News of the dead plane gripped the city. Just minutes after landing safely, the plane had shut down completely, sitting dark on the taxiway. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention boarded the plane in contact suits and found all passengers and crew dead, but for four “survivors.” These survivors were not well at all, their disease syndrome only augmented by the Master. Hidden inside his coffin within the cargo hold of the airplane, the Master had been delivered across the ocean thanks to the wealth and influence of Eldritch Palmer: a dying man who had chosen not to die but instead to trade human control of the planet for a taste of eternity. After a day’s incubation, the virus activated in the dead passengers and they arose from their morgue tables and carried the vampiric plague into the city streets.

The full extent of the plague was known to Setrakian, but the rest of the world resisted the horrible truth. Since then, another airplane had shut down soon after landing at London’s Heathrow Airport, stopping dead on the taxiway to the gate. At Orly Airport, an Air France jet arrived stillborn. At Narita International Airport in Tokyo. At Franz Joseph Strauss in Munich. At the famously secure Ben Gurion International in Tel Aviv, where counterterrorist commandos stormed the darkened airliner on the tarmac to find all 126 passengers dead or unresponsive. And yet no alerts were issued to search the cargo areas, or to destroy the airplanes outright. It was happening too fast, and disinformation and disbelief ruled the day.

And on it went. In Madrid. Beijing. Warsaw. Moscow. Brasilia. Auckland. Oslo. Sofia. Stockholm. Reykjavik. Jakarta. New Delhi. Certain more militant and paranoid territories had correctly initiated immediate airport quarantines, cordoning off the dead jets with military force, and yet… Setrakian couldn’t help but suspect that these landings were as much a tactical distraction as an attempt at infection. Only time would tell if he was correct — though, in truth, there was precious little time.

By now, the original strigoi — the first generation of vampires, the Regis Air victims, and their Dear Ones — had begun their second wave of maturation. They were becoming more accustomed to their environment and new bodies. Learning to adapt, to survive — to thrive. They attacked at nightfall, the news reported “rioting” in large sectors of the city, and this was partially true — looting and vandalism ran rampant in broad daylight — but no one pointed out that activity spiked at night.

Because of these disruptions occurring nationwide, the country’s infrastructure was beginning to crumble. Food delivery lines were broken, distribution delayed. As absences increased, available man-power suffered and electrical outages and brownouts went unserviced. Police and fire response times were down, and incidences of vigilantism and arson up.

Fires burned. Looters prevailed.

Setrakian stared into his face, wishing he could once again glimpse the younger man within. Perhaps even the boy. He thought of young Zachary Goodweather, just down the hall in the spare bedroom. And, somehow, the old man at the end of his life felt sorry for the boy — eleven years old but already at the end of childhood. Tumbling from grace, stalked by an undead thing occupying the body of his mother…

Setrakian stepped out to the dressing area of his bedroom, finding his way to a chair. He sat with one hand covering his face, waiting for the disorienting sensation to pass.

Great tragedy leads to feelings of isolation, which sought to envelop him now. He mourned his long-lost wife, Miriam. Memories of her face had been crowded out of his mind by the few photographs in his possession, which he referred to often and which had the effect of freezing her image in time without ever truly capturing her being. She had been the love of his life. He was a lucky man; it was a struggle sometimes to remember this. He had courted and married a beautiful woman. He had seen beauty and he had seen evil. He had witnessed the best and the worst of the previous century, and he had survived it all. Now he was witnessing the end.

He thought of Ephraim’s ex-wife, Kelly, whom Setrakian had met once in life and once again in death. He understood the man’s pain. He understood the pain of this world.

Outside, he heard another automobile crash. Gunshots in the distance, alarms ringing insistently — cars, buildings — all going unanswered. The screams that split the night were the last cries of humanity. Looters were taking not only goods and property — they were looting souls. Not taking possessions — but taking possession.

He let his hand fall, landing upon a catalog on the small side table. A Sotheby’s catalog. The auction was to be held in just a few days. This was not a coincidence. None of it was coincidence: not the recent occultation, not the conflict overseas, not the economic recession. Like orderly dominoes we fall.

He lifted the auction catalog and searched for a particular page. In it, without any accompanying illustration, was listed an ancient volume:

This very book — not a facsimile, not a photograph — was crucial to understanding the enemy, the strigoi. And vanquishing it.

The book was based on a collection of ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets first discovered in jars inside a cave in the Zagros Mountains in 1508. Written in Sumerian and extremely fragile, the tablets were traded to a wealthy silk merchant, who traveled with them throughout Europe. The merchant was found strangled in his quarters in Florence and his warehouses set on fire. The tablets, however, survived in the possession of two necromancers, the famous John Dee and a more obscure acolyte known to history as John Silence. Dee was Queen Elizabeth Fs consultant, and, unable to decipher them, kept the tablets as a magical artifact until 1608 when, forced by poverty, he sold them — through his daughter Katherine — to the learned Rabbi Avigdor Levy in the old ghetto of Metz, in Lorraine, France. For decades, the rabbi meticulously deciphered the tablets, utilizing his unique abilities — it would be almost three centuries before others could finally be able to decipher similar tablets — and eventually presented his findings in manuscript form as a gift for King Louis XIV.

Upon receipt of the text, the king ordered the elderly rabbi’s imprisonment and the destruction of the tablets, as well as of the rabbi’s entire library of texts and devotional artifacts. The tablets were pulverized, and the manuscript languished in a vault alongside many forbidden treasures. Secretly, Mme de Montespan, the king’s mistress and an avid dabbler in the occult, orchestrated the retrieval of the manuscript in 1671. It remained in the hands of La Voisin, a midwife who was de Montespan’s sorceress and confidante, until her exile following her implication in the hysteria surrounding the Affaire des Poisons.

The book subsequently resurfaced briefly in 1823, appearing in the possession of the notorious London reprobate and scholar William Beckford. It appeared listed as part of the library in Fonthill Abbey, Beckford’s palace of excess, where he accumulated natural and unnatural curiosities, forbidden books, and shocking objets d’art. The Gothic Revival construction and its contents were sold to an arms dealer in order to satisfy a debt, and the book remained lost for nearly a century. It was listed erroneously, or perhaps surreptitiously, under the title Casus Lumen as part of a 1911 auction in Marseille, but the text was never produced for display and the auction summarily canceled after a mysterious outbreak gripped the city. In the ensuing years, the manuscript was widely believed to have been destroyed. Now it was at hand, right here, in New York.

But $15 million? $25 million? Impossible to get. There had to be some other way…

His greatest fear, which he dared share with no one, was that the battle, begun so long ago, was already lost. That this was all an endgame, that humanity’s king was already in check, yet stubbornly playing out its few remaining moves upon the global chessboard.

Setrakian closed his eyes against a humming in his ears. But the humming persisted — in fact, grew stronger.

The pill had never had this effect on him before.

Once he realized this, Setrakian stiffened and rose to his feet.

It was not the pill at all. The hum was all around him. Low-grade, but there.

They were not alone.

The boy, thought Setrakian. With great effort, he pushed himself up and out of the chair, starting for Zack’s room.

Pic — pic — pic…

The mother was coming for her boy.

Zack Goodweather sat cross-legged in the corner of the roof of the pawnshop building. His dad’s computer was open in his lap. This was the only spot in the entire building where he could get connected to the Internet, trespassing on the unsecured home network of a neighbor somewhere on the block. The wireless signal was weak, varying between one and two bars, slowing his Internet search to a crawl.

Zack had been forbidden to use his dad’s computer. In fact, he was supposed to be asleep right now. The eleven-year-old had enough difficulty sleeping on normal nights, a decent case of insomnia he’d been hiding from his parents for some time.

Insomni-Zack! The first superhero he ever created. An eight-page color comic written, illustrated, lettered, and inked by Zachary Goodweather. About a teen who patrolled the streets of New York by night, foiling terrorists and polluters. And terrorist polluters. He never could get the blanket cape folds to come out right, but he was passable with faces, and okay with musculature.

This city needed an Insomni-Zack now. Sleep was a luxury. A luxury no one could afford — if everyone knew what he knew.

If everyone had seen what he had seen.

Zack was supposed to be sacked out in a goose-down sleeping bag inside a spare bedroom on the third floor. The room smelled like a closet, like an old cedar room in his grandparents’ house — one that no one opened anymore except for kids who liked to snoop. The small, oddly angled room had been used by Mr. Setrakian (or Professor Setrakian — Zack still wasn’t clear on that part, seeing how the old man ran the first-floor pawnshop) for storage. Tilting stacks of books, many old mirrors, a wardrobe of old clothes, and some locked trunks — really locked, not the fake kind of lock that can be picked with a paper clip and a ballpoint pen (Zack had already tried).

The exterminator, Fet — or V, as he had told Zack to call him — had hooked up an ancient, cartridge-fed, 8-bit Nintendo system to a pawned Sanyo television set with big knobs and dials on the front instead of buttons, all brought up from the showroom downstairs. They expected him to stay put and play The Legend of Zelda. But the bedroom door had no lock. His dad and Fet had mounted iron bars onto the wall over the window — mounted them on the inside, rather than the outside, bolted to the wall beams — a cage that Mr. Setrakian said was left over from the 1970s.

They weren’t trying to lock him in, Zack knew. They were trying to lock her out.

He searched for his dad’s professional page at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and got a “Page Not Found.” So they had already scrubbed him from the government Web site. News hits for “Dr. Ephraim Goodweather” claimed he was a discredited CDC official who fabricated a video purporting to show a human-turned-vampire being destroyed. It said that he had uploaded it (actually, Zack uploaded the video for him, one that his dad wouldn’t let him view) onto the Internet in an attempt to exploit the eclipse hysteria for his own purposes. Obviously, that last part was BS. What “purposes” did his dad have other than trying to save lives? One news site described Goodweather as “an admitted alcoholic involved in a contentious custody battle, who is now believed to be on the run with his kidnapped son.” That left Zack with a lump of ice in his chest. The same article went on to say that both Goodweather’s ex-wife and her boyfriend were currently missing and presumed dead.

Everything made Zack feel nauseous these days, but the dishonesty of this article was especially toxic to him. All wrong, every last word. Did they really not know the truth? Or… did they not care? Maybe they were trying to exploit his parents’ trouble for their own purposes?

And the talkback? The comments were even worse. He could not deal with the things they were saying about his dad, the righteous arrogance of all these anonymous posters. He had to deal right now with the awful truth about his mom — and the banality of the venom spewed in blogs and forums missed the point completely.

How do you mourn someone who isn’t really gone? How do you fear someone whose desire for you is eternal?

If the world knew the truth the way Zack knew the truth, then his dad’s reputation would be restored, and his voice heard — but still nothing else would change. His mom, his life, would never be the same.

So, mostly, Zack wanted it all to pass. He wanted something fantastic to happen to make everything right and normal again. As when he was a child — like five or something, he broke a mirror and just covered it with a sheet, then prayed with all his might for its restoration before his parents found out. Or the way he used to wish his parents would fall back in love again. That they would wake up one day and realize what a mistake they had made.

Now he secretly hoped that his dad could do something incredible. Despite everything, Zack still assumed that there was some happy ending awaiting them. Awaiting all of them. Maybe even something to bring Mom back to the way she was.

He felt tears coming, and this time he didn’t fight them. He was up on the roof; he was alone. He wanted so badly to see his mother again. The thought terrified him — and yet he yearned for her to come. To look into her eyes. To hear her voice. He wished for her to explain this to him the way she did every troubling thing. Everything is going to be just fine…

A scream somewhere deep in the night brought him back to the present. He peered uptown, seeing flames on the west side, a column of dark smoke. He looked up. No stars tonight. And only a few airplanes. He had heard fighter jets zooming overhead that afternoon.

Zack rubbed his face in the crook of his elbow sleeve and turned back to the computer. With some quick desktop searching, Zack discovered the folder containing the video file he was not supposed to view. He opened it and heard Dad’s voice, and realized Dad was operating the camera. Zack’s camera, the one his dad had borrowed.

The subject was hard to see at first, something in the dark inside a shed. A thing leaning forward on its haunches. A guttural growl and a back-of-the-throat hiss. The slinking noise of a chain. The camera zoomed in closer, the dark pixilation improving, and Zack saw its open mouth. A mouth that opened wider than it should, with something resembling a thin silver fish flopping inside.

The shed-thing’s eyes were wide and glaring. He mistook their expression for one of sadness at first, and hurt. A collar — apparently, a dog collar — restrained it at the neck, chained to the dirt floor behind it. The creature looked pale inside the dark shed, so bloodless it was nearly glowing. Then came a strange pumping sound—snap-chunk, snap-chunk, snap-chunk — and three silver nails, propelled from behind the camera (from Dad?) struck the shed-thing like needle-bullets. The camera view jerked up as the thing roared hoarsely, a sick animal consumed with pain.

“Enough,” said a voice on the clip. The voice belonged to Mr. Setrakian, but it was not a tone like anything Zack had ever heard out of the kindly, old pawnbroker’s mouth. “Let us remain merciful.”

Then the old man stepped into view, intoning some words in a foreign, ancient-sounding language — almost like summoning a power or declaring a curse. He raised a silver sword — long and bright with moonlight — and the shed-thing howled as Mr. Setrakian swung the sword with great force…

Voices pulled Zack out of the video. Voices from the street below. He shut the laptop and stood, staying back, peering over the raised edge of the roof down to 118th Street.

A group of five men walked up the block toward the pawnshop, trailed by a slow-moving SUV. They carried weapons — guns — and were pounding on every door. The SUV stopped before the intersection, right outside the front of the pawnshop. The men on foot approached the building, rattling the security gates. Calling, “Open up!”

Zack backed away. He turned to go to the roof door, figuring he’d better get back to his room in case anyone came looking.

Then he saw her. A girl, a teenager, high school probably. Standing on the next roof over, across an empty lot around the corner from the shop entrance. The breeze lifted her long nightshirt, ruffling it around her knees, but did not move her hair, which hung straight and heavy.

She stood on the raised edge of the roof. The very edge, balanced perfectly, no wavering in her posture. Poised at the brink, as though wanting to try to make the jump. The impossible leap. Wanting to and knowing she would fail.

Zack stared. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. But he suspected.

He raised a hand anyway. He waved to her.

She stared back at him.

Dr. Nora Martinez, late of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unlocked the front door. Five men in combat gear with armored vests and assault weapons stared her down through the security grate. Two of them wore kerchiefs, covering their lower faces.

“Everything all right in there, ma’am?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” said Nora, looking for badges or any kind of insignia and seeing none. “So long as this grate holds up, everything is fine.”

“We’re going door-to-door,” said another. “Clearing blocks. Some trouble down that way”—he pointed toward 117th Street—“but we think the worst of it is moving downtown from this direction.” Meaning Harlem.

“And you are…?”

“Concerned citizens, ma’am. You don’t want to be in here all alone.”

“She’s not,” said Vasiliy Fet, the New York City Bureau of Pest Control Services worker and independent exterminator, appearing behind her.

The men sized up the big man. “You the pawnbroker?”

“My father,” said Fet. “What sort of trouble are you seeing?”

“Trying to get a handle on these freaks rioting in the city. Agitators and opportunists. Taking advantage of a bad situation, making it worse.”

“You sound like cops,” said Fet.

“If you’re thinking about leaving town,” said another one, avoiding the topic, “you should go now. Bridges are stacked up, tunnels jammed. Place is going to shit.”

Another said, “You should think about getting out here and helping us. Do something about this.”

Fet said, “I’ll think about it.”

“Let’s go!” called the driver of the SUV idling in the street.

“Good luck,” said one of the men, with a scowl. “You’ll need it.”

Nora watched them go, then locked the door. She stepped back into the shadows. “They’re gone,” she said.

Ephraim Goodweather, who had been watching from the side, emerged. “Fools,” he said.

“Cops,” said Fet, watching them round the street corner.

“How do you know?” asked Nora.

“You can always tell.”

“Good thing you stayed out of sight,” Nora said to Eph.

Eph nodded. “Why no badges?”

Fet said, “Probably got off shift and huddled up at happy hour, decided this wasn’t how they were going to let their city go out. Wives all packed up for Jersey, they’ve got nothing to do now but bang some heads. Cops feel they run the place. And they’re not half wrong. Street-gang mentality. It’s their turf and they’ll fight for it.”

“When you think about it,” said Eph, “they’re really not that much different than us right now.”

Nora said, “Except that they’re carrying lead when they should be wielding silver.” She slipped her hand into Eph’s. “I wish we could have warned them.”

“Trying to warn people is how I got to be a fugitive in the first place,” said Eph.

Eph and Nora were the first to board the dead plane after SWAT team members discovered the apparently dead passengers. The realization that the bodies weren’t decomposing naturally, coupled with the disappearance of the coffin-like cabinet during the solar occultation, had helped convince Eph that they were facing an epidemiological crisis which could not be explained by normal medical and scientific means. The grudging realization opened him up to the revelations of the pawnbroker, Setrakian, and the terrible truth behind the plague. His desperation to warn the world of the true nature of the disease — the vampiric virus moving insidiously through the city and out into the boroughs — led to a break with the CDC, which then tried to silence him with a trumped-up charge of murder. He had been a fugitive ever since.

He looked to Fet. “Car packed?”

“Ready to go.”

Eph squeezed Nora’s hand. She did not want to let him go.

Setrakian’s voice came down the spiral stairs in back of the showroom. “Vasiliy? Ephraim! Nora!”

“Down here, professor,” replied Nora.

“Someone approaches,” he said.

“No, we just got rid of them. Vigilantes. Well-armed ones.”

“I don’t mean someone human,” said Setrakian. “And I cannot find young Zack.”

Zack’s bedroom door banged open, and he turned. His dad blew in, looking like he expected a fight. “Jeez, Dad,” said Zack, sitting up in his sleeping bag.

Eph looked all around the room. “Setrakian said he just looked in here for you.”

“Uhh…” Zack made a show of rubbing his eye. “Must not have seen me on the floor.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Eph looked at Zack a bit longer, not believing him, but clearly with something more pressing on his mind than catching his son in a lie. He walked around the room, checking the barred window. Zack noticed that he held one hand behind his back, and moved in such a way that Zack could not see what he held there.

Nora rushed in behind him, then stopped when she saw Zack.

“What is it?” asked Zack, getting to his feet.

His dad shook his head reassuringly, but the smile came too quickly — just a smile, no levity in his eyes, none at all. “Just looking around. You wait here, ’kay? I’ll be back.”

He exited, turning in such a way that the thing behind his back remained obscured. Zack wondered: was it the snap-chunk thing, or some silver sword?

“Stay put,” said Nora, and closed the door.

Zack wondered what it was they were looking for. Zack had heard his mother mention Nora’s name once in a fight with his dad — well, not a fight really, since they were already split up, but more of a venting. And Zack had seen his dad kiss her that one time — right before he left them and went off with Mr. Setrakian and Fet. Then she had been so tense and preoccupied the whole time they were gone. And once they returned — everything had changed. Zack’s dad had looked so down — Zack never wanted to see him look that way again. And Mr. Setrakian came back sick. Zack, in his subsequent snooping, had caught some of the talk, but not enough.

Something about a “master.”

Something about sunlight and failing to “destroy it.”

Something about “the end of the world.”

As Zack stood alone in the spare room now, puzzling out all these mysteries swirling around him, he noticed a blur in a few of the mirrors hanging on the wall. A distortion, akin to a visual vibration — something that should have been in focus but instead appeared hazy and indistinct in the glass.

Something at his window.

Zack turned, slowly at first — then all at once.

She was clinging to the exterior of the building somehow. Her body was disjointed and distorted, her eyes red and wide and burning. Her hair was falling out, thin and pale now, her schoolteacher dress torn away at one shoulder, her exposed flesh smeared with dirt. The muscles of her neck were swollen and deformed, and blood worms slithered beneath her cheeks, across her forehead.

Mom.

She had come. As he knew she would.

Instinctively, he took a step toward her. Then he read her expression, which all at once transformed from pain into a darkness that could only be described as demonic.

She had noticed the bars.

In an instant, her jaw dropped open — way open, just like in the video — a stinger shooting out from deep beneath where her tongue was. It pierced the window glass with a crack and a tinkle, and kept coming through the hole it punched. Six feet in length, the stinger tapering to a point and snapping at full extension mere inches from his throat.

Zack froze, his asthmatic lungs locked, unable to draw any breath.

At the end of the fleshy shoot, a complicated, double-pronged tip quivered, rooting in the air. Zack remained riveted to the spot. The stinger relaxed and, with a casual, upward nod of her head, she retracted it quickly back into her mouth. Kelly Goodweather thrust her head through the window, crashing out the rest of the glass. She squeezed up inside the open window frame, needing only a few more inches to reach Zack’s throat and claim her Dear One for the Master.

Zack was transfixed by her eyes. Red with black points in the center. He searched, vertiginously, for some semblance of Mom.

Was she dead, as Dad said? Or alive?

Was she gone forever? Or was she here — right here in the room with him?

Was she still his? Or was she now someone else’s?

She jammed her head between the iron bars, grinding flesh and cracking bone, like a snake forcing itself into a rabbit’s hole, trying desperately to bridge the extra distance between her stinger and the boy’s flesh. Her jaw fell again, her glowing eyes settling on the boy’s throat, just above his Adam’s apple.

Eph came racing back into the bedroom. He found Zack standing there, staring dumbly at Kelly, the vampire squeezing its head between the iron bars, about to strike. Eph pulled a silver-bladed sword from behind his back, yelling, “NO!” and jumping in front of Zack.

Nora burst into the room behind Eph, turning on a Luma lamp, its harsh UVC light humming. The sight of Kelly Goodweather — this corrupted human being, this monster-mother — repulsed Nora, but she advanced, the virus-killing light in her outstretched hand.

Eph, too, moved toward Kelly and her hideous stinger. The vampire went deep-eyed with animal rage.

“OUT! GO BACK!” Eph bellowed at Kelly the way he might at some wild animal trying to enter his house, scavenging for food. He leveled the sword at her and made a run for the window.

With one last, painfully ravenous look at her son, Kelly pulled back from the window cage, just out of Eph’s blade’s reach — and darted away along the side of the exterior wall.

Nora placed the lamp inside the cage, resting it upon two intersecting bars so that its killing light filled the space of the smashed window, to keep Kelly from returning.

Eph ran back to his son. Zack’s gaze had fallen, his hands at his throat, chest bucking. Eph thought at first it was despair, then realized it was more than that.

A panic attack. The boy was all locked up inside. He was unable to breathe.

Eph looked around frantically, discovering Zack’s inhaler on top of the old television. He pressed the device into Zack’s hands and guided it to his mouth.

Eph squeezed, and Zack huffed, and the aerosol opened up his lungs. Zack’s pallor improved immediately, his airway expanding like a balloon — and Zack slumped, weakened.

Eph set down his sword, steadying the boy — but the revived Zack shoved him away, rushing toward the empty window. “Mom!” he croaked.

Kelly retreated up the brick face of the building, the talons developing out of her middle fingers aiding her ascent as she climbed flat against the building side, like a spider. Fury at the interloper carried her along. She felt — with the intensity of a mother dreaming of a distressed child calling out her name — the exquisite nearness of her Dear One. The psychic beacon that was his human grief. The force of his need for his mother redoubled her unconditional vampiric need for him.

What she saw when she had laid eyes upon Zachary Good-weather again was not a boy. Was not her son, her love. She saw instead a piece of her that stubbornly remained human. She saw something that remained hers by biology, a part of her being forever. Her own blood, only still human-red, not vampire-white. Still carrying oxygen, not food. She saw an incomplete part of her, held back by force.

And she wanted it. She wanted it like crazy.

This was not human love, but vampire need. Vampire longing. Human reproduction spreads outward, creating and growing, while vampiric reproduction operates in the reverse, turning back upon the bloodline, inhabiting living cells and converting them to its own ends.

The positive attractor, love, becomes its opposite, which is not, in fact, hate — nor death. The negative attractor is infection. Instead of sharing love and the joining of seed and egg and the commingling gene pools in the creation of a new and unique being, it is a corruption of the reproductive process. An inert substance invading a viable cell and producing hundreds of millions of identical copies. It is not shared and creative, but violent, destructive. It is a defilement and a perversion. It is biological rape and supplantation.

She needed Zack. As long as he remained unfinished, she remained incomplete.

The Kelly-thing stood poised on the edge of the roof, indifferent to the suffering city all around her. She knew only thirst. A craving, for blood and for her blood kind. This was the frenzy that compelled her; a virus knows only one thing: that it must infect.

She had begun to search for some other way inside this brick box when, from behind the doorway bulkhead, she heard a pair of old shoes crunching gravel.

In the darkness, she saw him well. The old hunter Setrakian appeared with a silver sword, advancing. He meant to pin her against the edge of the roof and the night.

His heat signature was narrow and dull; an aged human, his blood moved slowly. He appeared small, though all humans appeared small to her now. Small and unformed, creatures grasping at the edge of existence, tripping over their paltry intellect. The butterfly with a death’s head on its winged back looks at a furry chrysalis with absolute disdain. An earlier stage of evolution, an outmoded model incapable of hearing the soothing exultation of the Master.

Something in her always went back to Him. Some primitive and yet coordinated form of animal communication. The psyche of the hive.

As the old human advanced toward her with his slaying silver blade glowing brightly in her vision, a response came forth, directly from the Master, relayed through her into the mind of the old avenger.

Abraham.

From the Master, and yet — not of his great voice, as Kelly understood it.

Abraham. Don’t.

It came as a woman’s intonation. Not Kelly’s. No voice she had ever heard.

But Setrakian had. She saw it in his heat signature, the way his heart rate quickened.

I live in her too… I live in her…

The avenger stopped, a hint of weakness coming into his eyes. The Kelly vampire seized on the moment, her chin falling, her mouth jerking open, feeling the impending thrust of her activated stinger.

But then the hunter raised his weapon and came at her with a cry. She had no choice. The silver blade burned in the night of her eyes.

She turned and ran along the edge, turning down and scuttling low along the wall of the building. From the vacant lot below, she looked back once at the old human, his shrinking heat signature, standing alone, watching her go.

Eph went to Zack, pulling on his arm, keeping him back from the scalding UV light of the lamp inside the window cage.

“Get away!” yelled Zack.

“Buddy,” said Eph, trying to calm him down, calm them both down. “Guy. Z. Hey.”

“You tried to kill her!”

Eph didn’t know what to say, because indeed he had. “She’s… she’s dead already.”

“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.

They 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 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 allowed — 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.

THE 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 nonissue, 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?”

Eph found it difficult to process theory down in the underbelly of the besieged city. “You’re saying that he’s saying that maybe we’ve always known…?”

“Yes — always feared. That this threat — this clan of vampires who subsist on human blood, and whose disease possesses human bodies — existed and was known. But as they went underground, or what-have-you, retreating into the shadows, the truth got massaged into myth. Fact became folklore. But this well of fear runs so deeply, throughout all peoples and all cultures, that it never went away.”

Eph nodded, interested but also distracted. Fet could stand back and consider the big picture, while Eph’s situation was the opposite of Fet’s. His wife — his ex-wife — had been taken, turned. And now she was hell-bent on turning her blood, her Dear One, their son. This plague of demons had affected him on a personal level, and he was finding it difficult to focus on anything else, never mind theorizing on the grand scale of things — though that was, in fact, his training as an epidemiologist. But when something this insidious enters your personal life, all superior thinking goes out the window.

Eph found himself increasingly obsessed with Eldritch Palmer, the head of the Stoneheart Group and one of the three richest men in the world — and the man they had identified as the Master’s co-conspirator. As the domestic attacks had scaled up, doubling each passing night, the strain spreading exponentially, the news insisted on reducing them to mere “riots.” This was akin to calling a revolution an isolated protest. They had to know better, and yet someone — it had to be Palmer, a man with a vested interest in misleading the American public and the world at large — was influencing the media and controlling the CDC. Only his Stoneheart Group could finance and enforce such a massive campaign of public misinformation about the occultation. Eph had determined, privately, that if they could not readily destroy the Master, well, they could certainly destroy Palmer, who was not only elderly but notoriously infirm. Any other man would have passed on ten years ago, but Palmer’s vast fortune and unlimited resources kept him alive, like an antique vehicle requiring round-the-clock maintenance just to keep it running. Life, the doctor in Eph imagined, had become for Palmer something akin to a fetish: How long could he keep going?

Eph’s fury at the Master — for turning Kelly, for upending everything Eph believed about science and medicine — was justified but impotent, like shaking his fists at death itself. But condemning Palmer, the Master’s human collaborator and enabler, gave Eph’s torment a direction and a purpose. Even better, it legitimized a desire for personal revenge.

This old man had shattered Eph’s son’s life and broken the boy’s heart.

They reached the long chamber that was their destination. Fet readied his nail gun and Eph brandished his sword before turning the corner.

At the far end of the low chamber stood the mound of dirt and refuse. The filthy altar upon which the coffin — the intricately carved cabinet had traversed the Atlantic inside the cold underbelly of Regis Air Flight 753, inside which the Master lay buried in cold, soft loam — had lain.

The coffin was gone. Disappeared again, as it had from the secure hangar at LaGuardia Airport. The flattened top of the dirt altar still bore its impression.

Someone — or, more likely, some thing — had returned to claim it before Eph and Fet could destroy the Master’s resting place.

“He’s been back here,” said Fet, looking all around.

Eph was bitterly disappointed. He had longed to demolish the heavy cabinet — to turn his wrath on some physical form of destruction, and to disrupt the monster’s habitat in some certain way. To let it know that they had not given up, and would never back down.

“Over here,” said Fet. “Look at this.”

A splashed-out swirl of colors at the base of the side wall, given life by the rays of Fet’s lamp wand, indicated a fresh spray of vampire urine. Then Fet illuminated the entire wall with a normal flashlight.

A graffiti mural of wild designs, random in arrangement, covered the stone expanse. Closer, Eph discerned that the vast majority of the figures were variations on a six-pointed motif, ranging from rudimentary to abstract to simply bewildering. Here was something starlike in appearance; there a more amoeba-like pattern. The graffiti spread out across the wide wall in the manner of a thing replicating itself, filling the stone face from bottom to top. Up close, the paint smelled fresh.

“This,” said Fet, stepping back to take it all in, “is new.”

Eph moved in to examine a glyph at the center of one of the more elaborate stars. It appeared to be a hook, or a claw, or…

“A crescent moon.” Eph moved his black-light lamp across the complex motif. Invisible to the naked eye, two identical shapes were hidden in the vectors of the tracery. And an arrow, pointing to the tunnels beyond.

“They may be migrating,” said Fet. “Pointing the way…”

Eph nodded, and followed Fet’s gaze. The direction it indicated was southeast.

“My father used to tell me about these markings,” said Fet. “Hobo speak — from when he first came to this country after the war. Chalk drawings indicating friendly and unfriendly houses — where you might get fed, find a bed, or even to warn others about a hostile homeowner. Throughout the years, I’ve seen similar signs in warehouses, in tunnels, cellars…”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know the language.” He looked around. “But it seems to be pointing that way. See if one of those phones has any battery left. One with a camera.”

Eph rooted through the top of the pile, trying phones and discarding the dark ones. A pink Nokia with a glow-in-the-dark Hello Kitty charm winked to life in his hand. He tossed it to Fet.

Fet looked it over. “I never understood this fucking cat. The head is too big. How is it even a cat? Look at it. Is it sick with… with water inside it?”

“Hydrocephalic, you mean?” said Eph, wondering where this was coming from.

Fet ripped off the charm and tossed it away. “It’s a jinx. Fucking cat. I hate that fucking cat.”

He snapped a picture of the crescent glyph illuminated by indigo light, then videoed the entirety of the manic fresco, overwhelmed by the sight of it inside this gloomy chamber, haunted by the nature of its trespass — and mystified as to its meaning.

It was daylight when they emerged. Eph carried his sword and other equipment inside a baseball bag over his shoulder; Fet ported his weapons in a small rolling case that used to contain his exterminating tools and poisons. They were dressed for labor, and dirty from the tunnels beneath Ground Zero.

Wall Street was eerily quiet, the sidewalks nearly empty. Distant sirens wailed, begging a response that would not come. Black smoke was becoming a permanent fixture in the city sky.

The few pedestrians who did pass scurried by them quickly, with barely a nod. Some wore face masks, others shielded their noses and mouths with scarves — operating on misinformation about this mysterious “virus.” Most shops and stores were closed — looted and empty or without power. They passed a market that was lit but un-staffed. People inside were taking what was left of the spoiled fruit in the stalls in front, or canned goods from the emptying shelves in back. Anything consumable. The drink cooler had already been raided, as had the refrigerated foods section. The cash register was cleaned out as well, because old habits die hard. But currency was hardly as valuable as water and food would be soon.

“Crazy,” muttered Eph.

“At least some people still have power,” said Fet. “Wait until their phones and laptops run dry, and they find they can’t recharge. That’s when the screaming starts.”

Crosswalk signs changed symbols, going from the red hand to the white figure walking, but without crowds to cross. Manhattan without pedestrians was not Manhattan. Eph heard automobile horns out on the main avenues, but only an occasional taxi traversed the side streets — drivers hunched over steering wheels, fares sitting anxiously in the back.

They both paused at the next curb, out of habit, the crossing sign turning red. “Why now, do you think?” said Eph. “If they have been here so long, for centuries — what provoked this?”

Fet said, “His time horizon and ours, they are not the same. We measure our lives in days and years, by a calendar. He is a night creature. He has only the sky to concern him.”

“The eclipse,” said Eph suddenly. “He was waiting for that.”

“Maybe it means something,” said Fet. “Signifies something to him…”

Coming out of a station, a Transit Authority cop glanced at them, eyeing Eph.

“Shit.” Eph looked away, but neither quickly nor casually enough. Even with the police forces breaking down, his face was on television a lot, and everybody was still watching, waiting to be told what to do.

As they moved on, the cop turned away. It’s just my paranoia, Eph thought.

Around the corner, following precise instructions, the cop made a phone call.

Hello there, world.

Or what’s left of it.

I used to think that there was nothing more useless than writing a blog.

I was unable to imagine any greater waste of time.

I mean, who cares what you have to say?

So I don’t really know what this is.

But I need to do it.

I guess I have two reasons.

One is to set down my thoughts. To get them out onto this computer screen where I can see them and maybe make some sense out of all that is happening. Because what I have experienced in the past few days has changed me — literally — and I need to try and figure out who I am now.

The second reason?

Simple. Get out the truth. The truth of what is happening.

Who am I? I’m an exterminator by trade. So if you happen to live in one of the five boroughs of NYC, and you see a rat in your bathtub and you call pest control…

Yep. I’m the guy who shows up two weeks later.

You used to be able to leave that dirty job to me. Ridding pests. Eradicating vermin.

But not anymore.

A new infestation is spreading throughout the city, and into the world. A new breed of intruder. A pox upon the human race.

These creatures are nesting in your basement.

In your attic.

Your walls.

Now, here’s the kicker.

With rats, mice, roaches — the best way to eliminate an infestation is to remove the food source.

Okay.

Only problem with that is that this new breed’s food source?

That’s right.

It’s us.

You and me.

See, in case you haven’t figured it out yet — we’re in a shitload of trouble here.

The low-slung building was one of a dozen at the end of the crumbling road, an office park that had been foundering even before the recession hit. It retained the sign of the previous tenant, R. L. Industries, a former armored car dispatcher and garage, and accordingly remained surrounded by a sturdy twelve-foot chain-link fence. Access was by key card through an electronic gate.

The garage half of the interior held the doctor’s cream-colored Jaguar and a fleet of black vehicles befitting a dignitary’s motorcade. The office half had been refitted into a small, private surgery dedicated to servicing one patient.

Eldritch Palmer lay in the recovery room, waking to the usual postoperative discomfort. He roused himself slowly but surely, having made this dark passage to returning consciousness many times before. His surgical team knew well the appropriate mix of sedatives and anesthesia. They never put him under deeply anymore. At his advanced age, it was too risky. And for Palmer, the less anesthesia used the faster he recovered.

He remained connected to machines testing the efficiency of his new liver. The donor had been a teenage Salvadorian runaway, tested to be disease-, drug-, and alcohol-free. A healthy, young, pinkish-brown organ, roughly triangular in shape, similar to an American football in size. Fresh off a jet plane, fewer than fourteen hours since harvesting, this allograft was, by Palmer’s own count, his seventh liver. His body went through them the way coffee machines go through filters.

The liver, both the largest internal organ and the largest single gland in the human body, has many vital functions, including metabolism, glycogen storage, plasma synthesis, hormone production, and detoxification. Currently, there was no medical way to compensate for its absence in the body — which was most unfortunate for the reluctant Salvadorian donor.

Mr. Fitzwilliam, Palmer’s nurse, bodyguard, and constant companion, stood in the corner, ever-vigilant in the manner of most ex-Marines. The surgeon entered, still wearing his mask, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves. The doctor was fastidious, ambitious, and, even by most surgeons’ standards, incredibly wealthy.

He drew back the sheet. The newly stitched incision was a reopening of an older transplantation scar. Outwardly, Palmer’s chest was a lumpy tableau of disfiguring scars. His interior torso was a hardened basket of failing organs. That was what the surgeon told him: “I am afraid your body cannot sustain any more tissue or organ allografts, Mr. Palmer. This is the end.”

Palmer smiled. His body was a hive of other people’s organs, and in that way he was not dissimilar from the Master, who was the embodiment of a hive of undead souls.

“Thank you, doctor. I understand.” Palmer’s voice was still raw from the breathing tube. “In fact, I suggest that you strike this surgery altogether. I know you are concerned about the AMA finding out about our techniques of organ harvesting, and I hereby release you from obligation. The fee you collect for this procedure will be your last. I will require no further medical intervention — not ever.”

The surgeon’s eyes remained uncertain. Eldritch Palmer, a sick man for nearly all his life, possessed an uncanny will to live: a fierce and unnatural survival instinct the likes of which the surgeon had never before encountered. Was he finally succumbing to his ultimate fate?

No matter. The surgeon was relieved, and grateful. His retirement had been planned for some time now, and everything was arranged. It was a blessing to be free of all obligations at such a tumultuous time as this. He only hoped the flights to Honduras were still in operation. And burning down this building would draw no inquiries in the wake of so much civil unrest.

All this the doctor swallowed with a polite smile. He withdrew under Mr. Fitzwilliam’s steely gaze.

Palmer rested his eyes. He let his mind go back to the Master’s solar exposure, perpetrated by that old fool, Setrakian. Palmer assessed this development in the only terms he understood: What did it mean for him?

It only sped up the timeline, which, in turn, expedited his imminent deliverance.

At long last, his day was nearly at hand.

Setrakian. Did defeat indeed taste bitter? Or was it more akin to ashes on the tongue?

Palmer had never known defeat—would never know defeat. And how many can say that?

Like a stone in the middle of a swift river, stood Setrakian. Foolishly and proudly believing he was disrupting the flow — when, in fact, the river was predictably running full-speed right around him.

The futility of humans. It all starts out with such promise, doesn’t it? And yet all ends so predictably.

His thoughts turned to The Palmer Foundation. It was indeed expected among the super-rich that each of the world’s wealthiest endow a charitable organization in his own name. This, his one and only philanthropic foundation, had used its ample resources to transport and treat two full busloads of children afflicted by the recent occultation of the Earth. Children struck blind during that rare celestial event — either as a result of peeking at the eclipsed sun without proper optical protection, or else due to an unfortunate defect in the lenses of a batch of child-size safety glasses. The faulty glasses had been traced back to a plant in China, the trail running cold at an empty lot in Taipei…

No expense was to be spared in the rehabilitation and reeducation of these poor souls, his foundation pledged. And indeed, Palmer meant it.

The Master had demanded it so.

Eph felt that they were being followed as they crossed the street. Fet, on the other hand, was focused on the rats. The displaced rodents scurried from door to door and along the sunny gutter, evidently in a state of panic and chaos.

“Look up there,” said Fet.

What Eph thought were pigeons perched on the ledges were, in fact, rats. Looking down, watching Eph and Fet as though waiting to see what they would do. Their presence was instructive as a barometer of the vampire infestation spreading underground, driving rats from their nests. Something about the animal vibrations the strigoi gave off, or else their manifestly evil presence, repelled other forms of life.

“There must be a nest nearby,” said Fet.

They neared a bar, and Eph felt a thirsty tug at the back of his throat. He doubled back and tried the door, finding it unlocked. An ancient bar, established more than 150 years ago — the oldest continually operating ale house in New York City, bragged the sign — but no patrons, and no bartender. The only disruption to the silence was the low chatter of a television in a high corner, playing the news.

They walked to the back bar, which was darker, and just as empty. Half-consumed mugs of beer sat on the tables, and a few chairs still had coats hanging off them. When the party ended here, it had ended abruptly and all at once.

Eph checked the bathrooms — the men’s room containing great and ancient urinals ending in a trough beneath the floor — and found them predictably empty.

He came back out, his boots scuffing the sawdust on the floor. Fet had set down his case and pulled out a chair, resting his legs.

Eph stepped behind the back bar. No liquor bottles or blenders or buckets of ice — just beer taps, with shelves of ten-ounce glass mugs waiting below. The place served only beer. No liquor, which was what Eph wanted. Only its own branded brew, available in either light or dark ale. The old taps were for show, but the newer ones flowed smoothly. Eph poured two dark draughts. “Here’s to…?”

Fet got to his feet and walked to the bar, taking up one of the mugs. “Killing bloodsuckers.”

Eph drained half his mug. “Looks like people cleared out of here in a hurry.”

“Last call,” said Fet, swiping the foam off his thick upper lip. “Last call all over town.”

A voice from the television got their attention, and they walked into the front room. A reporter was doing a live shot from a town near Bronxville, the hometown of one of the four survivors of Flight 753. Smoke darkened the sky behind him, the news crawl reading, BRONXVILLE RIOTS CONTINUE.

Fet reached up to change the channel. Wall Street was reeling from consumer fear, the threat of an outbreak greater than the H1N1 flu, and a rash of disappearances among their own brokers. Traders were shown sitting immobilized while the market averages plummeted.

On NY1, traffic was the focus, every exit out of Manhattan congested with people fleeing the island ahead of a rumored quarantine. Air and rail travel were overbooked, the airports and train station scenes of sheer chaos.

Eph heard a helicopter overhead. A chopper was probably the only easy way in or out of Manhattan now. If you had your own helipad. Like Eldritch Palmer.

Eph found an old-school, hard-wired telephone behind the bar. He got a scratchy dial tone and patiently used the rotary face to dial Setrakian’s.

It rang through, and Nora answered. “How’s Zack?” Eph asked, before she could speak.

“Better. He was really flipped out for a while.”

“She never came back?”

“No. Setrakian ran her off the roof.”

“Off the roof? Good Christ.” Eph felt sick. He grabbed a clean mug and couldn’t pour another beer fast enough. “Where’s Z now?”

“Upstairs. You want me to get him?”

“No. Better if I talk to him face-to-face when I get back.”

“I think you’re right. Did you destroy the coffin?”

“No,” said Eph. “It was gone.”

“Gone?” she said.

“Apparently he’s not badly injured. Not slowed down much at all. And — this is weird, but there were some strange drawings on the wall down there, spray paint—”

“What do you mean, someone putting up graffiti?”

Eph patted the phone in his pocket, reassuring himself that the pink phone was still there. “I got some video. I really don’t know what to make of it.” He pulled the phone away for a moment to swallow more beer. “I’ll tell you, though. The city — it’s eerie. Quiet.”

“Not here,” said Nora. “There’s a little bit of a lull now that it’s dawn — but it won’t last. The sun doesn’t seem to scare them as much now. Like they’re becoming bolder.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” said Eph. “They’re learning, becoming smarter. We have to get out of there. Today.”

“Setrakian was just saying that. Because of Kelly.”

“Because she knows where we are now?”

“Because she knows — that means the Master knows.”

Eph pressed his hand against his closed eyes, pushing back on his headache. “Okay.”

“Where are you now?”

“Financial District, near the Ferry Loop station.” He didn’t mention that he was in a bar. “Fet has a line on a bigger car. We’re going to get that and head back soon.”

“Just — please get back here in one human piece.”

“That’s our plan.”

He hung up, and went rooting underneath the bar. He was looking for a container to hold more beer, which he needed for the descent back underground. Something other than a glass mug. He found an old, leather-jacketed flask, and, in brushing the dust off the brass cap, discovered a bottle of good vintage brandy behind it. No dust on the brandy: probably there for a quick nip for the barkeep to break the monotony of the ale. He rinsed out the flask and was filling it carefully over a small sink when he heard a knock at the door.

He came around the bar fast, heading for his weapon bag before realizing: vampires don’t knock. He continued past Fet to the door, cautiously, looking through the window and seeing Dr. Everett Barnes, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The old country doctor was not wearing his admiral’s uniform — the CDC was originally born of the U.S. Navy — but rather an ivory-on-white suit, the jacket unbuttoned. He looked as though he had rushed away from a late breakfast.

Eph could view the immediate street area behind him, and Barnes was apparently alone, at least for the moment. Eph unlocked the door and pulled it open.

“Ephraim,” said Barnes.

Eph grabbed him by his lapel and hauled him inside fast, locking up again. “You,” he said, checking the street again. “Where are the rest?”

Director Barnes pulled away from Eph, readjusting his jacket. “They are on orders to keep well back. But they will be here soon, make no mistake about that. I insisted that I needed a few minutes alone with you.”

“Jesus,” said Eph, checking the rooftops across the street before backing away from the front windows. “How did they get you here so fast?”

“It is a priority that I speak to you. No one wants to harm you, Ephraim. This was all done at my behest.”

Eph turned away from him, heading back to the bar. “Maybe you only think so.”

“We need you to come in,” said Barnes, following him. “I need you, Ephraim. I know this now.”

“Look,” said Eph, reaching the bar and turning. “Maybe you understand what’s going on, and maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re part of it, I don’t know. You might not even know. But there is someone behind this, someone very powerful, and if I go anywhere with you now, it will certainly result in my incapacitation or death. Or worse.”

“I am eager to listen to you, Ephraim. Whatever you have to say. I stand before you as a man admitting his mistake. I know now that we are in the grip of something altogether devastating and otherworldly.”

“Not otherworldly. This-worldly.” Eph capped his brandy flask.

Fet was behind Barnes. “How long until they come in?” he asked.

“Not long,” said Barnes, unsure of the big exterminator in the dirty jumpsuit. Barnes returned his attention to Eph, and the flask. “Should you be drinking now?”

“Now more than ever,” said Eph. “Help yourself if you want. I recommend the dark ale.”

“Look, I know you’ve been put through a lot—”

“What happens to me doesn’t really matter, Everett. This isn’t about me, so any appeals to my ego won’t get you anywhere. What I am concerned about are these half-truths — or, should I say, outright lies — being issued under the auspices of the CDC. Are you no longer serving the public now, Everett? Just your government?”

Director Barnes winced. “Necessarily both.”

“Weak,” said Eph. “Inept. Even criminal.”

“This is why I need you to come in, Ephraim. I need your eyewitness experience, your expertise—”

“It’s too late! Can’t you at least see that?”

Barnes backed off a bit, keeping an eye on Fet because Fet made him nervous. “You were right about Bronxville. We’ve closed it off.”

“Closed it off?” said Fet. “How?”

“A wire fence.”

Eph laughed bitterly. “A wire fence? Jesus, Everett. This is exactly what I mean. You’re reacting to the public perception of the virus, rather than the threat itself. Reassuring them with fences? With a symbol? They will tear those fences apart—”

“Then tell me. Tell me what I need. What you need.”

“Start with destroying the corpses. That is step number one.”

“Destroy the…? You know I can’t do that.”

“Then nothing else you do matters. You have to send in a military team and sweep through that place and eliminate every single carrier. Then expand that operation south, into the city here, and all across Brooklyn and the Bronx…”

“You’re talking mass killing. Think about the visuals—”

“Think about the reality, Everett. I am a doctor, same as you. But this is a new world now.”

Fet drifted away, back toward the front, keeping an eye on the street. Eph said, “They don’t want you to bring me in to help. They want you to bring me in so they can neutralize me and the people I know. This”—he crossed to his weapons bag, drawing a silver sword—“is my scalpel now. The only way to heal these creatures is to release them — and yes, that means wholesale slaughter. Not doctoring. You want to help — to really help? Then get on TV and tell them that. Tell them the truth.”

Barnes looked at Fet in the front. “And who is this one with you now? I expected to see you with Dr. Martinez.”

Something about the way Barnes said Nora’s name struck Eph as odd. But he could not pursue it. Fet came back quickly from the front windows.

“Here they come,” said Fet.

Eph ventured near enough to see vans pulling up, closing off the street in either direction. Fet passed him, grabbing Barnes by the shoulder and walking him to a table in back, sitting him in the corner. Eph slung his baseball bag over his shoulder and ported Fet’s case to him.

“Please,” said Barnes. “I implore you. Both of you. I can protect you.

“Listen,” said Fet. “You just officially became a hostage, so shut the fuck up.” To Eph, he said: “Now what? How do we hold them off? UVC light doesn’t work on the FBI.”

Eph looked around the old ale house for answers. The pictures and ephemera of a century and a half, hanging on the walls and cluttering the shelves behind the bar. Portraits of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and a bust of JFK — all assassinated presidents. Nearby, among such curios as a musket, a shaving-cream mug, and framed obituaries, hung a small silver dagger.

Near it, a sign: WE WERE HERE BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.

Eph rushed behind the bar. He kicked aside the sawdust over the bull-nose ring latch embedded in the worn wooden floor.

Fet, appearing at his side, helped him raise the trapdoor.

The odor told them everything they needed to know. Ammonia. Pungent and recent.

Director Barnes, still in his seat in the corner, said, “They’ll only come in after you.”

“Judging by the smell — I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Fet, starting down first.

“Everett,” said Eph, switching on his Luma lamp before going down. “In case there is any lingering ambiguity, let me be perfectly clear now. I quit.”

Eph followed Fet to the bottom, his lamp illuminating the supply area beneath the bar in ethereal indigo. Fet reached up to close the door overhead.

“Leave it,” muttered Eph. “If he’s as dirty as I think he is, he’s running for the door already.”

Fet did, the hatch remaining open.

The ceiling was low, and the detritus of many decades — old kegs and barrels, a few broken chairs, stacks of empty glass racks, and an old industrial dishwasher — narrowed the passageway. Fet adjusted thick rubber bands around his ankles and jacket cuffs — a trick from his days baiting roach-infested apartments, learned the hard way. He handed some to Eph. “For worms,” he said, zipping his jacket tight.

Eph crossed the stone floor, pushing open a side door leading to an old, warm ice room. It was empty.

Next came a wooden door with an old, oval knob. The floor dust before it was disturbed in the shape of a fan. Fet nodded to him, and Eph yanked it open.

You don’t hesitate. You don’t think. Eph had learned that. You never give them time to group up and anticipate, because it is in their makeup that one of them will sacrifice itself in order that the others might have a chance at you. Facing stingers that can reach five or six feet, and their extraordinary night vision, you never, ever stop moving until every last monster is destroyed.

The neck was their vulnerable point — same as their prey’s throat was to them. Sever the spinal column and you destroy the body and the being that inhabits it. A significant amount of white-blood loss achieves the same end, though bloodletting is much more dangerous, as the capillary worms that escape live on outside the body, seeking new human bodies to invade. Why Fet liked to band up his cuffs.

Eph destroyed the first two in the manner that had proved most effective: using the UVC lamp like a torch to repel the beast, isolating and trapping them against a wall, then closing in with the sword for the coup de gr$aCce. Weapons made of silver do wound them, and cause whatever constitutes the vampire equivalent of human pain — and ultraviolet light burns through their DNA like flame.

Fet used the nail gun, pumping silver brads into their faces to blind or otherwise disorient them, then running through their distended throats. Loosened worms slithered across the wet floor. Eph killed some of the worms with his UVC light, while others met their fate beneath the hard treads of Fet’s boots. Fet, after stomping a few of them, scooped them into a small jar from his case. “For the old man,” he said, before continuing on with his slaying.

They heard a multitude of footsteps and voices in the bar above them as they pressed on into the next room.

One came at Eph from the side — still wearing a bartending apron — its eyes wide and hungry. Eph slashed at it backhandedly, driving the creature back with the lamp light. Eph was learning to ignore his physician’s inclination toward mercy. The vampire gnashed pitifully in a corner as Eph closed in, finishing it off.

Two others, maybe three, had taken off through the next door as soon as they saw the indigo light coming. A handful remained, crouched beneath broken shelves, ready to attack.

Fet came alongside Eph, lamp in hand. Eph started toward the vampires, but Fet caught his arm. Whereas Eph was breathing hard, the exterminator proceeded in a businesslike manner, focused without distress.

“Wait,” said Fet. “Leave them for Barnes’s FBI buddies.”

Eph, seeing the advantage of Fet’s idea, backed off, still with his lamp trained on them. “Now what?”

“Those others ran. There’s a way out.”

Eph looked at the next door. “You better be right,” he said.

Fet took the lead belowground, following the trail of dried urine fluorescing underneath the Luma lamps. The rooms gave way to a series of cellars, connected by old, hand-dug tunnels. The ammonia markings went in many different directions, Fet selecting one, turning off at a junction.

“I like this,” he said, stamping muck off his boots. “Just like rat hunting, following the trail. The UV light makes it easy.”

“But how do they know these routes?”

“They’ve been busy. Exploring, foraging. You never heard of the Volstead Grid?”

“Volstead? Like the Volstead Act? Prohibition?”

“Restaurants, bars, speakeasies, they had to open up their cellars, go underground. This is a city that just keeps building over itself. Combine the old cellars and houses under there with the tunnels, aqueducts, and old utility pipes — and some say you can move block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, solely underground, between any two points in the city.”

“Bolivar’s place,” said Eph, remembering the rock star who had been one of the four survivors of Flight 753. His building was an old bootlegger’s house, with a secret gin cellar that linked to the subway tunnels below. Eph checked behind them as they passed a side tunnel. “How do you know where you’re going?”

Fet pointed to another hobo signal scratched into the stone, probably with one of the creature’s hardened talon nails. “We’re on to something here,” he said. “That’s all I know for sure. But I bet the Ferry Loop Station isn’t more than a block or two away.”

Augustin…

Augustin Elizalde got to his feet. He stood in a stew of absolute darkness. A palpable inky blackness without a hint of light. Like space with no stars. He blinked his eyes to make certain that they were open — and they were. No change.

Was this death? No place could be darker.

Must be. He was fucking dead.

Or — maybe they had turned him. Was he a vampire now, his body taken over, but this old part of him shut away in the darkness of his mind, like a prisoner in an attic? Maybe the coolness he felt and the hardness of the floor beneath his feet were just compensatory tricks of his brain. He was walled up forever inside his own head.

He crouched a bit, trying to establish his existence through movement and sensory impression. He grew dizzy due to the lack of a visual focal point, and set his feet wider apart. He reached up, jumping, but could feel no ceiling above him.

An occasional faint breeze rippled his shirt. It smelled like soil. Like earth.

He was underground. Buried alive.

Augustin…

Again. His mother’s voice calling to him as in a dream.

“Mama?”

His voice doubled back on him in a startling echo. He remembered her as he had left her: sitting in the bottom of her bedroom closet, under a great pile of clothes. Staring up at him with the leering hunger of a newly turned them.

Vampires, the old man said.

Gus turned, trying to guess in which direction the voice might have originated. He had nothing else to do but follow this voice.

He walked to a stone wall, feeling his way along its smooth and slowly curving face. His palms remained sore where the glass had cut him — the shard he had wielded in the murder (no — the destruction) of his brother-turned-vampire. He stopped to feel his wrists, and realized the handcuffs he had been wearing at the time of his escape from police custody — the ones whose chain the hunters had split — were now gone.

Those hunters. They had turned out to be vampires themselves, appearing on that street in Morningside Heights and battling the other vampires like two sides in a gang war. But the hunters were well equipped. They had weapons, and they were coordinated. They drove cars. They weren’t just the bloodthirsty attack drones like the ones Gus had faced and destroyed.

The last thing he remembered was them throwing Gus into the back of an SUV. But — why him?

Another puff of wind, like Mother Nature’s last breath, brushed against his face, and he followed it — hoping he was moving in the right direction. The wall ended at a sharp corner. He felt for the opposite side, his left, and found it the same: ending at a corner, with a gap in between. Just like a doorway.

Gus stepped through, and the new echo of his footsteps told him that this room was wider and higher-ceilinged than the rest. A faint smell here, familiar to him somehow. Trying to place it.

He got it. The cleaning solution he’d had to use in lockup, on maintenance detail. It was ammonia. Not enough to singe the inside of his nose.

Then something started to happen. He thought his mind was playing tricks, but then realized that, yes, light was coming to the room. The slowness of the illumination, and the general uncertainty of the situation, terrified him. Two tripod lamps set wide apart, near the far walls, were coming up gradually, diluting the thick blackness.

Gus drew his arms in tight, in the manner of the mixed-martial-arts fighters he watched on the Internet. The lights kept brightening, though so gradually that the wattage barely registered. But his pupils were so widely dilated by the darkness, his retina so exposed, that any light source would have caused a reaction.

He didn’t see it at first. The being was right in front of him, no more than ten or fifteen feet away, but its head and limbs were so pale and still and smooth that his eyes read them as part of the walls of rock.

The only thing that stood out was a pair of symmetrical dark holes. Not black holes, but almost black.

The deepest red. Blood red.

If they were eyes, they did not blink. Nor did they stare. They looked upon Gus with a remarkable lack of passion. These were eyes as indifferent as red stones. Blood-sodden eyes that had seen it all.

Gus glimpsed the outline of a robe on the being’s body, blending into the darkness like a cavity within the cavity. The being stood tall, if he was making it out correctly. But the stillness of this thing was deathlike. Gus did not move.

“What is this?” he said, his voice coming out a little funny, betraying his fear. “You think you’re eating Mexican tonight? You wanna think twice about that. How ’bout you come and choke on it, bitch.”

It radiated such silence and stillness that Gus might have been looking at some clothed statue. Its skull was hairless and smooth all over, lacking the cartilage of ears. Now Gus was aware of something, hearing — or, rather, feeling — a vibration like humming.

“Well?” he said, addressing the expressionless eyes. “What you waiting for? You like to play with your food before you eat it?” He pulled his fists in closer to his face. “Not this fucking chalupa, you undead piece of shit.”

Something other than movement drew his attention to the right — and he saw that there was another one. Standing there like part of the stone wall, a shade shorter than the first one, eyes shaped differently but similarly emotionless.

And then, to the left — gradually, to Gus’s eyes — a third.

Gus, who was not unfamiliar with courtrooms, felt like he was appearing before three alien judges inside a stone chamber. He was going out of his mind, but his reaction was to keep shooting off his mouth. To keep putting up the gangbanger front. The judges he had faced called it “contempt.” Gus called it “coping.” What he did when he felt looked down upon. When he felt he was being treated not as a unique human being but as an inconvenience, an obstacle dropped in someone’s way.

We will be brief.

Gus’s hands shot up to his temples. Not his ears: the voice was somehow inside his head. Coming from that same part of his brain where his own interior monologue originated — as though some pirate radio station had started broadcasting on his signal.

You are Augustin Elizalde.

He gripped his head but the voice was tight in there. No off switch.

“Yeah, I know who the fuck I am. Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you? And how did you get inside my—”

You are not here as sustenance. We have plenty of livestock on hand for the snow season.

Livestock? “Oh, you mean people?” Gus had heard occasional yells, anguished voices echoing through the caves, but imagined they were cries in his dreams.

Free-range husbandry has suited our needs for thousands of years. Dumb animals make for plentiful food. On occasion, one shows unusual resourcefulness.

Gus barely followed that, wanting them to get to the point. “So — what, you’re saying you’re not going to try to turn me into… one of you?”

Our bloodline is pristine and privileged. To enter into our heritage is a gift. Entirely unique and very, very expensive.

They weren’t making any sense to Gus. “If you’re not going to drink my blood — then what the hell do you want?”

We have a proposal.

“A proposal?” Gus banged on the side of his head as though it were a malfunctioning appliance. “I guess I’m fucking listening — unless I have a choice.”

We need a daylight serf. A hunter. We are a nocturnal race of beings, you are diurnal.

“Diurnal?”

Your endogenous circadian rhythm corresponds directly to the light-dark cycle of what you call a twenty-four-hour day. Your kind’s inbred chronobiology is acclimated to this planet’s celestial timetable, in reverse of ours. You are a sun creature.

“Fucking what?”

We need someone who can move about freely during daylight hours. One who can withstand sun exposure, and, in fact, use its power, as well as any other weapons at his disposal, to massacre the unclean.

“Massacre the unclean? You are vampires, right? Are you saying you want me killing your own kind?”

Not our kind. This unclean strain spreading so promiscuously through your people — it is a scourge. It is out of control.

“What did you expect?”

We had no part in this. Before you, stand beings of great honor and discretion. This contagion represents the violation of a truce — an equilibrium — that has lasted for centuries. This is a direct affront.

Gus stepped back a few inches. He actually thought he was starting to understand now. “Somebody’s trying to move in on your block.”

We do not breed in the same random, chaotic manner as your kind. Ours is a process of careful consideration.

“You’re picky eaters.”

We eat what we want. Food is food. We dispose of it when we are satiated.

A laugh rose inside Gus’s chest, nearly choking him. Talking about people like they were three for a dollar at the corner market.

You find that humorous?

“No. The opposite. That’s why I’m laughing.”

When you consume an apple, do you throw away the core? Or do you conserve the seeds for planting more trees?

“I guess I throw it away.”

And a plastic receptacle? When you’ve emptied its contents?

“Fine, I get it. You throw back your pints of blood and then toss away the human bottle. Here’s what I want to know. Why me?”

Because you appear capable.

“How you figure that?”

Your criminal record, for one. You came to our attention through your arrest for murder in Manhattan.

The fat, naked guy rampaging through Times Square. The guy had attacked a family there, and at the time Gus was like, “Not in my city, freak.” Now, of course, he wished he had stayed back like all the rest.

Then you escaped police custody, slaying more uncleans in the process.

Gus frowned. “That ‘unclean’ was my compadre. How you know all this, living down here in this shithole?”

Be assured that we are connected with the human world at its uppermost levels. But, if balance is to be maintained, we cannot afford exposure — precisely what this unclean strain threatens us with now. That is where you come in.

“A gang war. That, I understand. But you left out something super-fucking important. Like — why the fuck should I help you?”

Three reasons.

“I’m counting. They better be good ones.”

The first is, you will leave this room alive.

“I’ll give you that one.”

The second is, your success in this endeavor will enrich you beyond that which you ever thought possible.

“Hmm. I don’t know. I can count pretty high.”

The third… is right behind you.

Gus turned. He saw a hunter first, one of the badass vamps who had grabbed him off the street. Its head was cowled inside a black hoodie, its red eyes glowing.

Next to the hunter was a vampire with that look of distant hunger now familiar to Gus. She was short and heavy, with tangled black hair, wearing a torn housedress, the upper front of her throat bulging with the interior architecture of the vampire stinger.

At the base of the stitched V of her dress collar was a highly stylized, black-and-red crucifix, a tattoo she said she regretted getting in her youth but which must have looked pretty fucking boss at the time, and which, since his youngest days, had always impressed Gusto, no matter what she said.

The vampire was his mother. Her eyes were blindfolded with a dark rag. Gus could see the throbbing of her throat, the want of her stinger.

She senses you. But her eyes must remain covered. Within her resides the will of our enemy. He sees through her. Hears through her. We cannot keep her in this chamber for long.

Gus’s eyes filled with angry tears. The sorrow ached in him, manifested in rage. Since about age eleven, he had done nothing but dishonor her. And now here she was before him: a beast, an undead monster.

Gus turned back to face the others. This fury surged within him, but here he was powerless, and he knew it.

The third is, you get to release her.

Dry sobs came up like sorrowful belches. He was sickened by this situation, appalled by it, and yet…

He turned back around. She was as good as kidnapped. Taken hostage by this “unclean” strain of vampire they kept talking about.

“Mama,” he said. Although she listened, she showed no change of expression.

Slaying his brother, Crispin, had been easy, because of the longstanding bad feelings between them. Because Crispin was an addict and even more of a failure than Gus. Doing Crispin through the neck with that shard of broken glass had been efficiency in action: family therapy and garbage disposal rolled into one. The rage he accumulated through decades had evaporated with every slash.

But delivering his madre from this curse, that would be an act of love.

Gus’s mother was removed from the chamber, but the hunter stayed behind. Gus looked back at the three, seeing them better now. Awful in their stillness. They never moved.

We will provide you with anything you need to achieve this task. Capital support is not an issue, as we have amassed vast fortunes of human treasure through time.

Those who received the gift of eternity had paid fortunes over the centuries. Within their vaults, the Ancient Ones held Mesopotamian coils of silver, Byzantine coins, sovereigns, Deutsche marks. The currency mattered nothing to them. Shells to trade with the natives. “So — you want me to fetch for you — is that it?”

Mr. Quinlan will provide you with anything you need. Anything. He is our best hunter. Efficient and loyal. In many respects, unique. Your only restriction is secrecy. Concealment of our existence is paramount. We leave it to you to recruit other hunters such as yourself. Invisible and unknown, yet skilled at killing.

Gus bridled, feeling the pull of his mother behind him. An outlet for his wrath: maybe this was just what he needed.

His lips pursed into an angry smile. He needed manpower. He needed killers.

He knew exactly where to go next.

Fet, with only one false turn, led them to a tunnel that connected to the abandoned South Ferry Loop Station. Dozens of phantom subway stations dot the IRT, the IND, and the BMT systems. You don’t see them on the maps anymore, though they can be glimpsed through in-service subway car windows on active rails — if you know when and where to look.

The underground climate was more humid here, a dampness in the ground soil, the walls slick and weeping.

The glowing trail of strigoi waste became more scarce here. Fet looked around, puzzled. He knew that the route down Broadway was part of the city’s original subway project, South Ferry having opened for commuters in 1905. The underwater tunnel to Brooklyn opened three years later.

The original mosaic tiling featuring the station initials, SF, still stood, high on the wall, near an incongruously modern sign—

— as if anyone would make that mistake. Eph moved into a small maintenance bay, scanning with his Luma.

Out of the darkness, a voice cackled, “Are you IRT?”

Eph smelled the man before he saw him. The figure emerged from a nearby alcove stuffed with ripped and soiled mattresses — a toothless scarecrow of a man dressed in multiple layers of shirts, coats, and pants. His body scent patiently distilled and aged through all of them.

“No,” said Fet, taking over. “We’re not here rousting anybody.”

The man looked them over, rendering a snap judgment as to their trustworthiness. “Name’s Cray-Z,” he said. “You from up top?”

“Sure,” said Eph.

“What’s it like? I’m one of the last ones here.”

“Last ones?” said Eph. He noticed, for the first time, the shabby outline of a few tents and cardboard housings. After a moment, a few more spectral figures emerged. The “Mole People,” denizens of the urban abyss, the fallen, the disgraced, the disenfranchised, the “broken windows” of the Giuliani era. This was where they eventually found their way to, the city below, where it remained warm 24/7, even in the dead of winter. With luck and experience, one could camp at a site for as many as six months at a time, even more. Away from the busier stations, some resided for years without ever seeing a maintenance crew.

Cray-Z looked at Eph with his head turned to favor his one good eye. The other one was covered in granulated cataracts. “That’s right. Most all the colony is gone — just like the rats. Yeah, man. Vanished, leaving them fine valuables behind.”

He gestured at discarded piles of junk: ragged sleeping bags, muddy shoes, some coats. Fet felt a pang, knowing that these articles represented the sum total of the worldly possessions of the recently departed.

Cray-Z smiled a vacant smile. “Unusual, man. Downright spooky.”

Fet remembered something he had read in National Geographic, or maybe watched one night on the History channel: the story of a colony of settlers in the pre-America era — in Roanoke, maybe — who vanished one day. Over a hundred people, gone, leaving behind all of their belongings but no clues to their sudden and mysterious departure, nothing except two cryptic carvings: the word CROATOAN written into a post on their fort, and the letters CRO whittled into the bark of a nearby tree.

Fet looked again at the mosaic SF tiled onto the high wall.

“I know you,” said Eph, keeping a polite distance from the reeking Cray-Z. “I’ve seen you around — I mean, up there.” He pointed toward the surface. “You carry one of those signs, GOD IS WATCHING YOU, or something like that.”

Cray-Z smiled a mostly toothless smile and went and pulled out his hand-drawn placard, proud of his celebrity status. GOD is WATCHING YOU!!! in bright red, with three exclamation points for emphasis.

Cray-Z was indeed a semi-delusional zealot. Down here, he was an outcast among outcasts. He had lived underground as long as anyone — maybe longer. He claimed that he could get anywhere in the city without surfacing — and yet he apparently lacked the ability to urinate without splashing the toes of his shoes.

Cray-Z moved alongside the tracks, motioning for Eph and Fet to follow. He ducked inside a tarp-and-pallet shack, where old, nibbled extension cords wound away up into the roof, wired into some hidden source of electricity on the great city grid.

It had begun to drizzle lightly within the tunnel, weeping ceiling pipes wetting the dirt, their water splattering onto Cray-Z’s tarp and running down into a waiting Gatorade bottle.

Cray-Z emerged carrying an old promotional cutout of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, flashing his trademark “How’m I Doing?” smile. “Here,” he said, handing the life-sized photo to Eph. “Hold this.”

Cray-Z then walked them to the far tunnel, pointing down its tracks.

“Right into there,” he said. “That’s where they all went.”

“Who? The people?” said Eph, setting Mayor Koch down next to him. “They went into the tunnel?”

Cray-Z laughed. “No. Not just the tunnel, shithead. Down there. Where the pipes at the curve go under the East River, across to Governor’s Island, then over to mainland Brooklyn at Red Hook. That’s where they took them.”

“Took them?” said Eph, a chill trickling down his spine. “Who — who took them?”

Just then, a track signal lit up nearby. Eph jumped back. “This track still active?”

Fet said, “The 5 train still turns around on the inner loop.”

Cray-Z spat onto the tracks. “Man knows his trains.”

Light grew inside the space as the train approached, brightening the old station, bringing it briefly to life. Mayor Koch shook under Eph’s hand.

“You watch real close, now,” said Cray-Z. “No blinking!” He covered his blind eye and smiled his mostly toothless smile.

The train thundered past them, taking the turn a little faster than usual. The cars were nearly vacant inside, maybe one or two people visible through the windows, here and there a solitary straphanger. Abovegrounders just passing through.

Cray-Z gripped Eph’s forearm as the end of the train approached. “There—right there —”

In the flickering light of the passing train, Fet and Eph saw something on the rear exterior of the final car. A cluster of figures — of bodies, people — flat against the outside of the train. Clinging to it like remoras riding a steel shark.

“You see that?” exulted Cray-Z. “You see ’em all? The Other People.”

Eph shook loose of Cray-Z’s grip, taking a few steps forward away from him and Mayor Koch, the train finishing its loop and dwindling into darkness, the light leaving the tunnel like water down a drain.

Cray-Z started hustling back to his shack. “Somebody has to do something, right? You guys just decided it for me. These are the dark angels at the end of time. They’ll snatch us all if we let ’em.”

Fet took a few lumbering steps after the receding train, before stopping and looking back at Eph. “The tunnels. It’s how they get across. They can’t go over moving water, right? Not unassisted.”

Eph was right there with him. “But under the water. Nothing stops them from that.”

“Progress,” said Fet. “This is the trouble progress gets us in. What do you call it — when you figure out you can get away with shit that nobody made up a specific rule for?”

“A loophole,” said Eph.

“Exactly. This, right here?” Fet opened his arms, gesturing at their surroundings. “We just discovered one giant gaping loophole.”

The luxury coach bus departed New Jersey’s St. Lucia’s Home for the Blind in the early afternoon, headed for an exclusive academy in Upstate New York.

The driver, with his corny stories and an entire catalog of knock-knock jokes, made the journey fun for his passengers, some sixty nervous children between the ages of seven and twelve. Their cases had been culled from emergency-room reports throughout the tristate area. These children were recently visually impaired — all had been accidentally blinded by the recent lunar occultation — and, for many, this was their first trip without a parent present.

Their scholarships, all offered and provided by the Palmer Foundation, included this orientation-like camp outing, an immersive retreat in adaptive techniques for the newly blind. Their chaperones — nine young adult graduates of St. Lucia’s — were each legally blind, meaning their central visual acuity rated 20/200 or less, though they had some residual light perception. The children in their care were all clinically NLP, or “no light perception,” meaning totally blind. The driver was the only sighted person on board.

The traffic was slow in many spots, due to the jam-ups surrounding Greater New York, but the driver kept the children entertained with riddles and banter. At other times, he narrated the ride, or described the interesting things he could see out the window, or invented details in order to make the mundane interesting. He was a longtime employee of St. Lucia’s, who didn’t mind playing the clown. He knew that one secret to unlocking the potential of these traumatized children, and opening their hearts to the challenges ahead, was to feed their imagination and involve and engage them.

“Knock-knock.”

Who’s there?

“Disguise.”

Disguise who?

“Disguise jokes are killing me.”

The stop at McDonald’s went well, all things considered, except that the Happy Meal toy was a hologram card. The driver sat apart from the group, watching the youngsters finding their French fries with tentative hands, having not yet learned to “clock” their meal for ease of consumption. At the same time, unlike the majority of blind children who were born sight-impaired, McDonald’s had visual meaning for them, and they seemed to find comfort in the smooth plastic swivel chairs and oversize drinking straws.

Back on the road, the three-hour ride stretched into double that amount of time. The chaperones led the children singing in rounds, then broadcast some audiobooks on the overhead video screens. A number of the younger children, their biological clocks thrown off by blindness, dozed on and off.

The chaperones perceived the change in light quality through the coach windows, aware of darkness falling outside. The coach moved more swiftly as they got into New York State — until all at once they felt it decelerate suddenly, enough so that stuffed animals and drink cups fell to the floor.

The coach pulled to the side and stopped.

“What is it?” asked the lead chaperone, a twenty-four-year-old assistant teacher named Joni, sitting closest to the front of the bus.

“Don’t know… something strange. Just sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Then the driver was gone, but the chaperones were too busy to worry — anytime the coach stopped, hands went up for assistance to the restroom in back.

Some ten minutes later, the driver returned. He started up the bus without a word, despite the fact that the chaperones were still supervising bathroom trips. Joni’s request to him to wait was ignored, but the kids were eventually helped back to their seats, and everyone was okay.

The coach rolled on quietly from there. The audio program was not continued. The driver’s banter ceased, and, in fact, he refused to respond to any questions Joni asked, seated right behind him in the first row. She grew alarmed, but decided she must not let the others sense her concern. She told herself that the coach was still moving properly, they were traveling at an appropriate rate of speed, and anyway they had to be close to their destination by now.

Some time later, the coach turned onto a dirt road, waking everyone up. Then it rolled onto even rougher ground, everyone holding on, drinks spilling into laps as the bus bumped along. They endured this shaking for one full minute — until the bus abruptly stopped.

The driver turned off the engine and they heard the door fold open with a pneumatic hiss. He departed without a word, his keys jingling faintly into the distance.

Joni instructed the chaperones to wait. If they had indeed arrived at the academy, as Joni hoped, they would be greeted by the staff at any moment. The problem of the silent bus driver could be addressed at the appropriate time.

Increasingly, however, it seemed that this was not the case, and that no one was coming to greet them.

Joni gripped the back of her seat and stood, feeling her way to the open door. She called into the darkness:

“Hello?”

She heard nothing other than the popping and pinging of the coach’s cooling engine, and the flutter of a passing bird’s wings.

She turned to the young passengers in her care. She sensed their exhaustion and their anxiety. A long trip, now with an uncertain end. Some of the children in back were crying.

Joni called a chaperone meeting at the front. Amid frantic whispering, no one knew what to do.

“Out of range,” explained Joni’s cell phone, in an annoyingly patient voice.

One of them felt along the large dashboard for the operator’s radio but could not locate the handset. He did notice that the driver’s seat of cushioned plastic was still exceedingly warm.

Another chaperone, a brash nineteen-year-old named Joel, finally unfolded his cane and picked his way down the bus steps to the ground.

“It’s a grassy field,” he reported back. Then he yelled, to the driver or to anyone else who might be within earshot: “Hello! Is anybody there?”

“This is so wrong,” said Joni, who, as the lead chaperone, felt as helpless as the little ones in her care. “I just can’t understand it.”

“Wait,” said Joel, talking over her. “Do you hear that?”

They were all quiet, listening.

“Yes,” said another.

Joni heard nothing aside from an owl hooting in the distance. “What?”

“I don’t know. A… a humming.”

“What? Mechanical?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s more like… almost like a mantra from yoga class. You know, one of those sacred syllables?”

She listened longer. “I don’t hear a thing, but… okay. Look, we have two choices. Close the door and stay here, and be helpless — or get everybody outside and mobilize them to find help.”

No one wanted to stay. They had been on the bus too long.

“What if this is some test?” speculated Joel. “You know, part of the weekend.”

Another murmured her agreement.

That sparked something in Joni. “Fine,” she said. “If this is a test, then we’re going to ace it.”

They unloaded the children by rows, and shepherded them into tight columns where they could walk with one hand resting on the shoulder of the child in front of them. Some of the children acknowledged the “hum,” responding to it, trying to replicate the noise for the others. Its presence seemed to calm them. Its source gave them all a destination.

Three chaperones led the way, sweeping their sticks over the surface of the field. The ground was rugged but largely clear of rocks or other treacherous obstacles.

Soon, they heard animal noises in the distance. Someone guessed donkeys, but most agreed no. It sounded like pigs.

A farm? Maybe the humming was a large generator? Some sort of feed machine grinding at night?

Their pace quickened until they reached an impediment: a low wooden rail fence. Two of the three leaders split up left and right, searching for an opening. One was located, and the group was herded to it, moving inside. The grass turned to dirt beneath their shoes, and the pig noises grew louder, nearer. They were on some sort of broad path, and the chaperones drew the children into tighter columns, striding forward until they reached a building of some sort. The path led directly to a large, open doorway, and they entered, calling out but receiving no answer.

They were inside a vast room of various contrapuntal noises. The hogs reacted to their presence with squeals of curiosity that frightened the children. They butted their tight pens and scraped their hooves against the straw-laden floor. Joni felt for the stalls lining either side of the group. The smell was of animal excrement, but also… something more foul. Something like charnel.

They had found the inside of the swine wing of a slaughterhouse, though none of them would have called it by that name.

The hum had become a voice for some of them. Those children felt compelled to break ranks, apparently responding to something familiar in the voice — and the chaperones had to round them up again, some by force. They initiated a new head count to make sure they were all still together.

While she was participating in the count, Joni finally heard the voice. She recognized it as her own, the strangest sensation — the voice seeming to originate inside her own head, hailing her, as in a dream.

They followed the call of the voice, walking forward down a wide ramp to a common area thick with the smell of charnel.

“Hello?” said Joni, her voice trembling — still hoping that the corny bus driver would answer them. “Can you help us?”

A being awaited them. A shadow akin to an eclipse. They felt its heat and sensed its immensity. The droning noise swelled, filled their heads beyond distraction, blanketing their most profound remaining sense — aural recognition — and leaving them in a state of near-suspended animation.

None of them heard the tender crinkling of the Master’s burned flesh as he moved.