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

Fallenleaves

When Vasiliy regained consciousness, he found himself half-submerged in dirty water. All around him, ruptured pipes vomited gallons upon gallons of sewage water into the growing pool beneath him. Fet tried to get up, but leaned on his bad arm and groaned. He remembered what had happened: the explosion, the strigoi. The air was thick with the disturbing aroma of cooked flesh, mixed with toxic fumes. Somewhere in the distance — above him? beneath him? — he heard sirens and the squelch of police radios. Ahead, the faint glow of fire outlined a distant duct mouth.

His injured leg was submerged, still bleeding, adding to the murkiness of the water. His ears were still ringing, or, rather, just one. Fet raised his hand to it, and crusted blood flaked off into his fingers. He feared he had a blown eardrum.

He had no idea of where he was, or how he could get out, but the blast must have propelled him quite a way, and now, all around him, he found a little bit of free space.

He turned and located a loose grate near his flank. Rusty steel, rotten screws, rattling to his touch. He pried it loose a bit — and already he could feel a rush of fresh air. He was close to freedom, but his fingers were not enough to pry open the grate.

He felt around for something to use as a lever. He located a twisted length of steel — and then, lying facedown, the charred body of the strigoi.

As he looked at the burned remains, a moment of panic struck Fet. The blood worms. Had they seeped out of their host and blindly sought another body in this dank hole? If so, then… were they already in him? The wound in his leg? Would he feel any different if he was infected?

Then, the body moved.

It twitched.

Ever so slightly.

It was still functioning. Still alive — as alive as a vampire can be.

That was the reason the worms had not seeped out.

It stirred and sat up out of the water. Its back was charred, but not its front. Something was wrong with its eyes, and Fet knew in a moment that it no longer could see. It moved with sloppy determination, many of its bones fully dislocated yet its musculature still intact. Its jaw was no longer in place, ripped away by the blast, such that its stinger waved loosely in the air, like a tentacle.

The being splayed itself aggressively, a blind predator ready to charge. But Fet was transfixed by the sight of the exposed stinger. This was the first time he could see it completely. It was attached at two points, both at the base of the throat and at the back portion of the palate. The root was engorged and had a rippling, muscular structure. At the back of the throat, a sphincter-like hole gaped open in demand for food. Vasiliy thought he had seen a similar structure before — but where?

In the gloomy half-light, Fet felt around, looking for his nail gun. The creature’s head turned to the water sounds, trying to orient itself. Fet was about to give up when he stumbled upon the nail gun — completely submerged in the water. Damn, he thought, trying to control his anger.

But the thing had locked on him, somehow — and charged. Fet moved as fast as he could, but now the creature, blindly adapted to the shape of the duct around it and its damaged limbs, instinctively found its footing, moving with uncanny coordination.

Fet raised the gun and hoped for luck. He pulled back on the trigger — twice — and found he was out of ammo. He had emptied the entire payload before being knocked out, and now was left with an empty industrial tool in his hand.

The thing was on top of him in a matter of seconds, tackling Fet, pushing him down.

Fet had its entire weight on top of him. What was left of its mouth trembled as the stinger recoiled, ready to shoot.

Reflexively, Vasiliy grabbed the stinger as he would a rabid rat. He pulled on it, bending it free of the structure of the thing’s open throat. The thing squirmed and yelped, its dislocated arms unable to fight Fet’s grip. The stinger was like a heavily muscled snake, slimy and squirming, bucking, trying to get loose. But now Vasiliy was angry. The harder the thing pulled back, the stronger Fet pulled forward. He would not give up his tight grip, his good arm pulling with all his might.

And Fet’s might was immense.

In one final yank, Vasiliy overpowered the strigoi and ripped the stinger and part of the glandular structure and trachea from the thing’s neck.

The entity squirmed in his hand, moving like an independent animal, even as the host body twitched spasmodically, falling back.

One thick blood worm emerged from the writhing mess, crawling quickly over Fet’s fist. It slithered past his wrist and, all at once, began boring into his arm. It was drilling straight for the forearm veins, and Fet tossed away the stinger structure, watching this parasite invade his arm. It was halfway in when Vasiliy grabbed it by its visible, wriggling end, and yanked. He tore it back out, howling in pain and disgust. Again, reflex took over and he snapped the revolting parasite in two.

In his hands, before his eyes, the two halves regenerated themselves — as if by magic — into complete parasites again.

Fet tossed them away. He saw, exiting the vampire’s body, dozens of worms oozing out, slithering toward him through the fetid water.

His length of twisted steel gone, Fet said fuck it, ripping at the grate with his bare hands, pumped with adrenaline, tearing it loose and grabbing his empty nail gun as he jumped out of the duct and rushed to freedom.

He lived alone in a tenement building in Jersey City, two blocks from Journal Square. One of the few neighborhoods that had not become gentrified. So many yuppies had taken over the rest — and where do they come from? How come they never end?

He climbed the steps to his fourth-floor apartment, his right knee creaking — literally creaking with every step — a squeak of pain jolting his body again and again.

His name was Angel Guzman Hurtado and he used to be big. He still was big, physically, but at age sixty-five his rebuilt knee hurt all the time and his body fat — what his American doctor called his BMI and what any Mexican would call panza — had overtaken his otherwise powerful figure. He sagged where he used to be taut, and he was taut where he had once been flexible — but big? Angel was always big. Both as a man and as a star — or at least what resembled it in his past life.

Angel had been a wrestler—the Wrestler back in Mexico City. El Angel de Plata. The Silver Angel.

He had begun his career in the 1960s as a rudo wrestler (one of the “bad guys”), but soon found himself embraced, with his trademark silver mask, by the adoring public, and so adjusted his style and altered his persona into a tecnico, one of the “good guys.” Through the years he fashioned himself into an industry: comic books, fotonovelas (corny photo-illustrated magazines narrating his strange and often ridiculous exploits), films, and TV spots. He opened two gyms and bought half a dozen tenements throughout Mexico City, becoming, in his own right, a superhero of sorts. His films spanned all genres: western, horror, sci-fi, secret agent — many times within the same feature. He took on amphibian creatures as well as Soviet spies with equal aplomb in badly choreographed scenes full of library sound effects — always ending with his trademark knockout blow known as the “Angel Kiss.”

But it was with vampires that he discovered his true niche. The silver-masked marvel battled every form of vampire: male, female, thin, fat — and, occasionally, even nude, for alternate versions exhibited only overseas.

But the eventual fall equaled the height of his climb. The more he expanded his brand empire, the more infrequently he trained, and wrestling became a nuisance he needed to put up with. When his movies were box-office hits and his popularity still high, he performed wrestling exhibitions only once or twice a year. His movie Angel vs. The Return of the Vampires (a title that made no syntactic sense, and yet encapsulated his film oeuvre perfectly) found new life in repeated TV airings, and Angel felt compelled by fading fame to produce a cinematic rematch with those caped, fanged creatures that had given him so much.

And so it came to pass that one fine morning he found himself face-to-face with a group of young wrestlers made up as vampires in cheap greasepaint and rubber teeth. Angel himself walked them through a change in fight choreography that would have him wrapped three hours early — his focus less on the film at hand than on enjoying an afternoon martini back at the Intercontinental Hotel.

In the scene, one of the vampires would nearly unmask Angel until he miraculously freed himself with an open-palm blow, his trademark “Angel Kiss.”

But as the scene progressed, filmed amid sweaty technicians at a stifling stage in Churubusco Studios, the younger vampire thespian, perhaps enraptured by the glory of his cinematic debut, applied a bit more force than necessary to their skirmish, and threw the middle-aged wrestler down. As they fell, the vampire adversary landed, both awkwardly and tragically, on his venerable master’s leg.

Angel’s knee snapped with a moist, loud crack, bending into an almost perfect L—the wrestler’s anguished scream muffled by his halfway torn silver mask.

He awoke hours later in a private room at one of Mexico’s best hospitals, surrounded by flowers, serenaded by well-wishers shouting from the street below.

But his leg. It was shattered. Irreparably.

The good doctor explained this to him with genial forthrightness, a man with whom Angel had shared a few afternoons of craps at the country club across from the film studios.

In the months and years that followed, Angel spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his broken limb — in hopes of mending his fractured career and recovering his technique — but his skin hardened from the multiple scars crisscrossing the knee, and his bones refused to heal properly.

In a final humiliation, a newspaper revealed his identity to the public, and, without the ambiguity and the mystery of the silver mask, Angel the common man became too pitied to be adored.

The rest happened quickly. As his investments faltered, he worked as a trainer, then bodyguard, then as a bouncer, but his pride remained, and soon he found himself a burly old guy who scared no one. Fifteen years ago, he followed a woman to New York City and overstayed his visa. Now — like most people who end up in tenements — he had no clear idea how he had gotten here, only that he was indeed here, a resident in a building quite similar to one of six he used to own outright.

But thinking of the past was dangerous and painful.

Evenings, he worked as the dishwasher at the Tandoori Palace downstairs, just next door. He was able to stand for hours on busy nights by wrapping lengths of duct tape around two broad splints on either side of his knee, beneath his trousers. And there were many busy nights. Now and then, he cleaned the toilets and swept the sidewalks, giving the Guptas enough reason to keep him around. He had fallen to the bottom of this caste system — so low that now his most valuable possession was anonymity. No one had to know who he once was. In a way, he was wearing a mask again.

For the past two evenings, the Tandoori Palace had remained closed — as had the grocery store next door, the other half of the neo-Bengali emporium the Guptas owned. No word from them, and no sign of their presence, no answer at their phone. Angel started to worry — no, not about them, truthfully, but about his income. The radio talked of quarantine, which was good for health but very bad for business. Had the Guptas fled the city? Perhaps they had gotten caught in some of the violence that had cropped up? In all this chaos, how would he know if they had been shot?

Three months before, they had sent him out to make duplicates of the keys to both places. He had made triplicates — he didn’t know what had possessed him, certainly no dark impulse on his part but only a lesson learned in life: to be prepared for anything.

Tonight, he decided, he would take a look. He needed to know. Just before dawn, Angel hauled himself down to the Guptas’ store. The street was quiet except for a dog, a black husky he had never seen in the neighborhood, barking at him from across the sidewalk — though something stopped the dog from crossing the street.

The Guptas’ store had once been called The Taj Mahal, but now, after generations of graffiti and pamphlet removal, the painted logo had worn away so that only the rosy illustration of the Indian Wonder of the World remained. Strangely, it exhibited too many minarets.

Now, someone had defaced the logo even further, spray-painting a cryptic design of lines and dots in fluorescent orange. The design, cryptic though it was, was fresh. The paint still glistened, a few threads of it slowly dripping at the corners.

Vandals. Here. Yet the locks were in place, the door undamaged.

Angel turned the key. When both bolts slid free, he limped inside.

Everything was silent. The power had been cut, and so the refrigerator was off, all the meats and fish inside gone to waste. Light from the last of the sunset filtered in through the steel shutters over the windows, like an orange-gold mist. Deeper inside, the store was dark. Angel had brought two busted cell phones with him. The call functions did not work, but the screens and batteries still did, and he found that — thanks to a picture of his white wall he snapped during daylight — the screens made excellent lights for hanging on his belt or even strapped to his head for close work.

The store was in absolute disarray. Rice and lentils covered the floor, spilled from several overturned containers. The Guptas would never have allowed this.

Something, Angel knew, was deeply wrong.

Above all else was the stench of ammonia. Not the eye-watering odor of the off-the-shelf cleaner kind he used to clean the toilets, but something more foul. Not pure like a chemical, but messy and organic. His phone illuminated several streaking trails of orange-tinged fluid along the floor, sticky and still wet. They led to the cellar door.

The basement beneath the store communicated with the restaurant and, ultimately, with the belowground floors of his tenement building.

Angel put a shoulder to the Guptas’ office door. He knew they kept an old handgun inside the desk. He found it, the weapon feeling heavy and oily, not at all like the shiny prop guns he used to wave around. He tucked one of the phones into his tight belt and returned to the cellar door.

With his leg hurting more than ever, the old wrestler started down the slick steps. At the bottom, a door. This one had been broken, Angel saw — but from the inside. Someone had broken in from the cellar up to the store.

Beyond the storeroom, Angel heard a hissing sound, evenly measured and prolonged. He went in with both the gun and his phone out.

Another design defaced the wall. It resembled a bloom of six petals, or perhaps an inkblot: the center done in gold, the petals painted black. The paint still glistened, and he ran his light over all of it — maybe a bug, not a flower — before squeezing through the doorway into the next room.

The ceiling was low, spaced with wooden beams for support. Angel knew the layout well. One passage led to a narrow stairway to the sidewalk, where they received food shipments three times a week. The other burrowed through to his tenement building. He started ahead toward his building when the toe of his shoe hit something.

He aimed his phone light down onto the floor. At first he did not understand it. A person, sleeping. Then another. And two more near the stack of chairs.

They weren’t sleeping, because he didn’t hear any snoring or deep breathing, and yet they weren’t dead, because he didn’t smell death.

At that very moment, outside, the last of the sun’s direct rays disappeared from the East Coast sky. Night was upon the city, and newly turned vampires, those in their first days, responded very literally to the cosmic edict of sundown and sunup.

The slumbering vampires began to stir. Angel had stumbled unwittingly into a vast nest of undead. He did not need to wait to see their faces to know that this — people rising en masse from the floor of a darkened cellar — was not anything he wanted to be part of, nor indeed present for.

He moved to the narrow space in the wall toward the burrow to his building — one he had seen both ends of but never had the occasion to cross — only to see more figures beginning to rise, blocking his way.

He did not yell or give any warning. He fired the weapon, but was not prepared for the intensity of light and sound inside that constricted space.

Nor were his targets, who appeared more affected by the reports and the bright flash of flame than they were by the lead rounds that pierced their bodies. He fired three more times, achieving the same effect, and then twice behind him, sensing the others’ approach.

The gun clicked empty.

He threw it down. Only one option remained. An old door he had never opened — because he had never been able to, a door with no knob or handle, stuck within a compressed wooden frame surrounded by rock wall.

Angel pretended it was a prop door. Told himself it was a breakaway piece of balsa wood. He had to. He gripped the phone in his fist and lowered his shoulder and ran at it full-force.

The old wood scraped away from its frame, dislodging dust and dirt as the lock cracked and it burst open. Angel and his balky leg stumbled through — nearly falling into a gang of punks on the other side.

The bangers raised guns and silver swords at him, staggered by his bulk, about to slay him.

“Madre Santisima!” exclaimed Angel. Holy Mother of God!

Gus, at the head of the pack, was about to run this vampire motherfucker through when he heard him speak — and speak Spanish. The words stopped Gus — and the vampire-hunting Sapphires behind him — just in time.

“Me lleva la chingada — que haces tu aca, muchachon?” said Gus. What the fuck are you doing here, big boy?

Angel said nothing, letting his facial expression do all the talking as he turned and pointed behind him.

“More bloodsuckers,” said Gus, understanding. “That’s what we’re here for.” He stared at the big man. There was something noble and familiar about him.

“Te conozco?” said Gus. Do I know you? To which the wrestler answered with a quick shrug, but no more words.

Alfonso Creem charged through the doorway, armed with a thick silver rapier with a bell-cup hilt to protect his hand from the blood worms. That protection was negated by the use of his other hand, bare except for a silver-knuckled multi-finger ring inscribed with fake diamonds spelling C-R-E-E-M.

He went after the vampires with furious chops and brutal blows. Gus was right behind him, a UV lamp in one hand, a silver sword in the other. More Sapphires followed close behind.

Never fight in a basement was a tenet of both street fighting and warfare, but it couldn’t be avoided in a vamp hunt. Gus would have preferred to firebomb the place, if he could be guaranteed full mortality. But these vamps always seemed to have another way out.

There were more nesting vamps than they had bargained for, and the white blood spilled like sludgy, sour milk. Still, they cut and chopped their way through, and, when they were done, they returned to Angel, who remained standing on the other side of the broken door.

Angel was in a state of shock. He had recognized the Guptas among Creem’s victims, and he couldn’t get over their undead faces, and the creature howls they emitted when the Colombian hacked at their white-blooded throats.

These were the types of punks he used to slap around in his movies. “Que chingados pasa?” What is all this?

“The end of the world,” said Gus. “Who are you?”

“I’m… I am nobody,” Angel said, recovering. “I worked here.” He pointed up at an angle. “Live there.”

“Your entire building is infested, man.”

“Infested? Are they really…?”

“Vampires? You bet your ass.”

Angel felt dizzy — disoriented — this couldn’t be happening. Not to him. A whirl of emotions overtook him and amid them he was able to recognize one that had long ago deserted him.

It was excitement.

Creem was flexing his silver fist. “Leave him. These freaks are waking up all over the place, and I still got some more killing in me.”

“What do you say?” asked Gus, turning back to his fellow countryman. “Nothing for you here.”

“Look at that knee,” said Creem. “No one’s going to slow me up, get me turned into one of them stingers.”

Gus pulled a small sword from the Sapphires’ equipment bag and handed it to Angel. “This is his building. Let’s see if he can earn his keep.”

As though some sort of psychic alarm had been sounded, the vampire residents of Angel’s building were ready for battle. The undead emerged from every doorway, climbing effortlessly through obstacles and staircases.

During a stairway battle, Angel saw a neighbor of his, a seventy-three-year-old woman with a walker, use the banister as a jumping point to traverse the stairwell between floors. She and others moved with the stupefying grace of primates.

In his movies, the enemy announced itself with a glower, and accommodated the hero by moving slowly for the kill. Angel didn’t exactly “earn his keep,” though his brute strength did give him certain advantages. His wrestling knowledge came back to him in close combat situations, despite his limited mobility. And he felt like an action hero once again.

Like evil spirits, the undead kept coming. As though summoned from the surrounding buildings, wave after wave of pale, slithery-tongued creatures swarmed up from the lower floors, and the tenement walls ran white. They fought them the way firemen fight fires, pushing back, tamping out flare-ups, and attacking hot spots. They functioned as a stone-cold execution squad, and Angel would later be amazed to learn that this was their inaugural nighttime assault. Two of the Colombians were stung, lost to the scourge — and yet when they were done, the punks only seemed to want more.

Compared to this, they said, daylight hunting was a breeze.

Once they had stemmed the tide, one of the Colombians found a carton of smokes and they all lit up. Angel hadn’t smoked in years, but the taste and the smell blocked out the stench of the dead things. Gus watched the smoke dissipate and offered up a silent prayer for the departed.

“There is a man,” said Gus. “An old pawnbroker over in Manhattan. He was the first to clue me to these vamps. Saved my soul.”

“No chance,” said Creem. “Why go all the way across the river when there is killing galore here?”

“You meet this guy, you’ll understand why.”

“How do you know he’s still kickin’ it?”

“I sure hope he is. We’re going over the bridge at first light.”

Angel took a minute then to return to his apartment for the last time. His knee ached as he looked around: unwashed clothes heaped in the corner, dirty dishes in his sink, the general squalor of the place. He had never taken any pride in his living condition — and it shamed him now. Perhaps, he sensed, he knew all the time that he was destined for something better — something he could never have foreseen — and he was just waiting for the call.

He threw some extra clothes into a grocery bag, including his knee brace, and then lastly — almost ashamedly, because taking it was like admitting it was his most cherished possession, all he had left of who he once was — he grabbed the silver mask.

He folded the mask into his jacket pocket and, with it next to his heart, he realized that, for the first time in decades, he felt good about himself.

Eph finished tending to Vasiliy’s injuries, giving particular attention to cleaning out the worm hole in his forearm. The ratcatcher had sustained a great deal of damage, but none of it permanent, except maybe the hearing loss and ringing in his right ear. The metal shard came out of his leg and he hobbled on it but did not complain. He was still standing. Eph admired that, and felt a bit like an Ivy League momma’s boy by his side. For all his education and scholarly achievements, Eph felt infinitely less useful to the cause than Fet.

But that would soon change.

The exterminator opened his poison closet, showing Setrakian his bait packs and traps, his halothane bottles and toxic blue kibble. Rats, he explained, lacked the biological mechanism for vomiting. The main function of emesis is to purge a body of toxic substances, which was why rats were particularly susceptible to poisoning. Why they had evolved and developed other traits to compensate for this. One was that they could ingest just about anything, including nonfood materials such as clay or concrete, which helped to dilute a toxin’s effect on the rat’s body until they could get rid of the poison as waste. The other was the rats’ intelligence, their complex food-avoidance strategies that aided in their survival.

“Funny thing,” said Fet, “is that when I ripped out that thing’s throat, and got a good look in there?”

“Yes?” said Setrakian.

“The way it looked to me, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they can’t puke either.”

Setrakian nodded, thinking on that. “I believe you are correct,” he said. “May I ask, what is the chemical makeup of these rodenticides?”

“Depends,” said Fet. “These use thallium sulfate, a heavy metal salt that attacks the liver, brain, and muscle. Odorless, colorless, and highly toxic. These over here use a common mammalian blood-thinner.”

“Mammalian? What, something like Coumadin?”

“No, not something like. Exactly like.”

Setrakian looked at the bottle. “So I myself have been taking rat poison for some years now.”

“Yep. You and millions of other people.”

“And this does what?”

“Same thing it would do to you if you took too much of it. The anticoagulant leads to internal hemorrhaging. Rats bleed out. It’s not pretty.”

In picking up the bottle to examine its label, Setrakian noticed something on the shelf behind it. “I do not wish to alarm you, Vasiliy. But aren’t these mouse droppings?”

Fet pushed his way in for a closer look. “Motherfucker!” he said. “How can this be?”

“A minor infestation, I’m sure,” said Setrakian.

“Minor, major, what does it matter? This is supposed to be Fort Knox!” Fet knocked over a few bottles, trying to see better. “This is like vampires breaking into a silver mine.”

While Fet was obsessively searching the back of the closet for more evidence, Eph watched Setrakian slip one of the bottles inside his coat pocket.

Eph followed Setrakian away from the closet, catching him alone. “What are you going to do with that?” he said.

Setrakian showed no guilt at having been discovered. The old man’s cheeks were sunken, his flesh a pale shade of gray. “He said it is essentially blood thinner. With all the pharmacies being raided, I would not like to run out.”

Eph studied the old man, trying to see the truth behind his lie.

Setrakian said, “Nora and Zack are ready for their journey to Vermont?”

“Just about. But not Vermont. Nora had a good point — it’s Kelly’s parents’ place, she might be drawn to it. There’s a girls’ camp Nora knows, from growing up in Philadelphia. It’s off-season now. Three cabins on a small island in the middle of a lake.”

“Good,” said Setrakian. “The water will keep them safe. How soon do you leave for the train station?”

“Soon,” said Eph, checking his wristwatch. “We still have a little time.”

“They could take a car. You do realize that we are out of the epicenter now. This neighborhood, with its lack of direct subway service and comparatively few apartment buildings conducive to rapid infestation, has yet to be totally colonized. We are not in a bad spot here.”

Eph shook his head. “The train is the fastest and surest way out of this plague.”

Setrakian said, “Fet told me about the off-duty policemen who came to the pawnshop. Who resorted to vigilantism once their families were safely away from the city. You have something similar in mind, I think.”

Eph was stunned. Had the old man intuited his plan somehow? He was about to tell him when Nora entered carrying an open carton. “What is this stuff for?” she asked, setting it down near the raccoon cages. Inside were chemicals and trays. “You setting up a dark room?”

Setrakian turned from Eph. “There are certain silver emulsions that I want to test on blood worms. I am optimistic that a fine mist of silver, if possible to derive, synthesize, and direct, will be an effective weapon for mass killing of the creatures.”

Nora said, “But how are you going to test it? Where are you going to get a blood worm?”

Setrakian lifted the lid off a Styrofoam cooler, revealing the jar containing his slowly pulsing vampire heart. “I will segment the worm powering this organ.”

Eph said, “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Only if I make a mistake. I have segmented the parasites in the past. Each section regenerates a fully functioning worm.”

“Yeah,” said Fet, returning from the poison closet. “I’ve seen it.”

Nora lifted out the jar, looking at the heart the old man had fed for more than thirty years, keeping it alive with his own blood. “Wow,” she said. “It’s like a symbol, isn’t it?”

Setrakian looked at her with keen interest. “How do you mean?”

“This diseased heart kept in a jar. I don’t know. I think it exemplifies that which will be our ultimate downfall.”

Eph said, “Being what?”

Nora looked at him with an expression of both sadness and sympathy. “Love,” she said.

“Ah,” said Setrakian, his acknowledgment confirming her insight.

“The undead returning for their Dear Ones,” Nora said. “Human love corrupted into vampiric need.”

Setrakian said, “That may indeed be the most insidious evil of this plague. That is why you have to destroy Kelly.”

Nora quickly agreed. “You must release her from the Master’s grip. Release Zack. And, by extension, all of us.”

Eph was shocked but knew all too well that she was right. “I know,” he said.

“But it is not enough to know what is the correct course of action,” said Setrakian. “You are being called upon to perform a deed that goes against every human instinct. And, in the act of releasing a loved one… you taste what it is to be turned. To go against everything you are. That act changes one forever.”

Setrakian’s words had power, and the others were silent. Then Zack — evidently tired of playing the handheld video game Eph had found for him, or perhaps the battery had finally given out — returned from the van, finding them gathered in conversation. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, young man — talking strategy,” said Setrakian, taking a seat on one of the cartons, resting his legs. “Vasiliy and I have an appointment in Manhattan, so, with your father’s permission, we will catch a ride with you back over the bridge.”

Eph said, “What kind of appointment?”

“At Sotheby’s, a preview of their next auction.”

“I thought they weren’t offering that item for preview.”

“They are not,” said Setrakian. “But we have to try. This is my absolute last chance. At the very least, it will give Vasiliy the opportunity to observe their security.”

Zack looked at his dad and said, “Can’t we do the James Bond security stuff instead of getting on a train?”

Eph said, “ ’Fraid not, little ninja. You gotta go.”

Nora said, “But how will you all keep in touch and connect afterward?” She pulled out her phone. “This thing is just a camera now. They’re toppling cell towers in every borough.”

Setrakian said, “If worst comes to worse, we can always meet back here. Perhaps you should use the ground line to contact your mother, tell her we are on the way.”

Nora left to do just that, and Fet went out to start the van. Then it was just Eph and Zack, the father with his arm around his son, facing the old man.

“You know, Zachary,” said Setrakian, “in the camp I was telling you about, the conditions were so brutal that many times I wanted to grab a rock, a hammer, a shovel, and take down one, maybe two guards. I would have died with them, for certain — and yet, in the searing heat of the moment of choice, at least I would have accomplished something. At least my life — my death — would have meaning.

Setrakian never looked at Eph, only the boy, though Eph knew this speech was meant for him.

“That was how I thought. And every day I despised myself for not going through with it. Every moment of inaction feels like cowardice in the face of such inhuman oppression. Survival often feels like an indignity. But — and this is the lesson as I see it now, as an old man — sometimes the most difficult decision is to not martyr yourself for someone, but instead to choose to live for them. Because of them.”

Only then did he look at Eph.

“I do hope you will take that to heart.”

The custom van in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade pulled to a stop right outside the canopied entrance of the Black Forest Solutions meatpacking facility in Upstate New York.

Handlers from both the lead and trailing SUVs opened large black umbrellas as the rear van doors opened and an automatic ramp was lowered to the driveway.

A wheelchair was rolled out backward, its occupant immediately surrounded by the umbrellas and quickly shuttled inside.

The umbrellas did not come down until the chair reached a windowless expanse among the animal pens. The occupant of the wheelchair was a sun-shy figure wearing a burka-like habit.

Eldritch Palmer, watching the entrance from the side, made no attempt to greet the occupant, but instead awaited its unveiling. Palmer was supposed to be meeting with the Master, not one of its wretched Third Reich flunkies. But the Dark One was nowhere to be seen. Palmer realized then that he had not had an audience with the Master since its run-in with Setrakian.

A small, impolite smile curled the edges of Palmer’s lips. Was he pleased that the disgraced professor had shown the Master some disgrace? No, not exactly. Palmer had zero affection for lost causes such as Abraham Setrakian. Still, as a man used to being president and CEO, Palmer didn’t mind that the Master had been shown something in the way of humility.

He chastised himself then, admonishing himself to never let these thoughts enter his mind in the presence of the Dark One.

The Nazi removed his coverings layer by layer. Thomas Eichhorst, the Nazi who had once headed the Treblinka extermination camp, arose from the wheelchair, the black sun-coverings piled at his feet like so many sloughed layers of flesh. His face retained the arrogance of a camp commandant, though the decades had worn away the edges like a fine acid. His flesh was smooth as a mask of ivory. Unlike any other Eternal Palmer had ever met, Eichhorst insisted on wearing a suit and tie, maintaining the bearing of an undead gentleman.

Palmer’s dislike for the Nazi had nothing whatsoever to do with his crimes against humanity. Palmer was in the midst of overseeing a genocide himself. Rather, his distaste for Eichhorst was borne out of envy. He resented Eichhorst’s blessing of Eternity — the great gift of the Master — because he coveted it so.

Palmer then recalled his first introduction to the Master, a meeting facilitated by Eichhorst. This had followed three full decades of searching and researching, of exploring that seam where myth and legend met historical reality. Palmer finally tracked down the Ancients themselves, and finagled an introduction. They turned down his request to join their Eternal clan, refusing him flatly, even though Palmer knew they had accepted into their rare breed men whose net worth was significantly lower than his. Their unqualified scorn, after so many years of hope, was a humiliation that Eldritch Palmer simply could not bear. It meant his mortality and the surrender of all that he had accomplished in this pre-life. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: that was fine for the masses, but for Palmer, only immortality would do. The corruption of his body — which had never been a friend to him — was but a small price to pay.

And so commenced another decade of searching — but this time, in pursuit of the legend of the rogue Ancient, the seventh immortal, whose power was said to rival any of the others. This journey brought Palmer to the craven Eichhorst, who arranged the summit.

It occurred inside the Zone of Alienation surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, a little more than a decade after the 1986 reactor disaster. Palmer had to enter the Zone without his usual motorcade support (his unmarked ambulance and security detail), the reason being that moving vehicles kick up radioactive dust, laced with cesium-137, so you don’t want to follow any other moving vehicles. So Mr. Fitzwilliam — Palmer’s bodyguard and medic — drove him alone, and drove fast.

Their meeting took place after nightfall, of course, in one of the so-called black villages surrounding the plant: evacuated settlements that dotted the most blighted ten-square-kilometer area of the planet.

Pripyat, the largest of these settlements, had been founded in 1970 to house plant workers, its population having grown to fifty thousand at the time of the accident and radiation exposure. The city was fully evacuated three days later. A carnival had been built in a large downtown lot, set to open on May 1, 1986: five days after the disaster, two days after the city was emptied forever.

Palmer met the Master at the foot of the never-operated Ferris wheel, sitting as still as a giant stopped clock. It was there that a deal was struck, and the Ten-year Plan set into motion — with the Earth’s occultation designated as the time of the crossing.

In return, Palmer was promised his Eternity, and a seat at the right hand of the Master. Not as one of his errand-boy acolytes but as a partner in apocalypse, pending his delivery of the human race as promised.

Before the meeting ended, the Master grasped Palmer by the arm and ran up the side of the giant Ferris wheel. At the top, the terrified Palmer was shown Chernobyl, the red beacon of the #4 reactor in the distance, pulsing steadily atop the sarcophagus of lead and steel, sealing in one hundred tons of labile uranium.

And now here he was, ten years on, Palmer at the verge of delivering everything he had pledged to the Master on that dark night in a diseased land. The plague was spreading faster every hour now, throughout the country and across the globe — and still he was being made to bear the indignity of this vampire bureaucrat.

Eichhorst’s expertise was in the construction of animal pens and the coordination of maximally efficient abattoirs. Palmer had financed the “refurbishing” of dozens of meat plants nationwide, all of them redesigned according to Eichhorst’s exact specifications.

I trust everything is in order, said Eichhorst.

“Naturally,” said Palmer, barely able to mask his distaste for the creature. “What I want to know is, when will the Master uphold his end of the bargain?”

In due time. All in due time.

“My time is due now,” said Palmer. “You know the condition of my health. You know that I have fulfilled every promise, that I have met every deadline, that I have served your Master faithfully and completely. Now the hour grows late. I am due some consideration.”

The Dark Lord sees everything and forgets nothing.

“I will remind you of his — and your — unfinished business with Setrakian, your former pet prisoner.”

His resistance is doomed.

“Agreed, of course. And yet his operations and his diligence do pose a threat to some individuals. Including yourself. And me.”

Eichhorst was silent a moment, as though conceding his agreement.

The Master will settle his affairs with the Juden in a matter of hours. Now — I have not fed for some time, and I was promised afresh meal.

Palmer hid a frown of disgust. How quickly his human revulsion would turn to hunger, to need. How soon he would look back upon his naivete here the way an adult looks back upon the needs of a child. “Everything has been arranged.”

Eichhorst motioned to one of his handlers who stepped away into one of the larger pens. Palmer heard whimpering and checked his watch, wanting to be done with this.

Eichhorst’s handler returned holding, by the back of his neck, much as a farmer might lift up a piglet, a boy of no more than eleven years of age. Blindfolded and shivering, the boy pawed at the air before him, kicking, trying to see beneath the cloth covering his eyes.

Eichhorst turned his head at the smell of his victim, his chin tipped in a gesture of appreciation.

Palmer observed the Nazi and wondered for a moment what it would feel like, after the pain of the turning. What will it mean to exist as a creature who feeds on man?

Palmer turned and signaled to Mr. Fitzwilliam to start the car. “I will leave you to eat in peace,” he said, and left the vampire to its meal.

Two hundred and twenty miles above Earth, the concepts of day and night had little meaning. Orbiting the planet once every hour and a half provided all the dawns and sunsets a person could handle.

Astronaut Thalia Charles gently snored inside a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. The American flight engineer was entering her 466th day in Low Earth orbit, with only 6 more to go before the space shuttle docking that was to be her ride back home.

Mission Control set their sleep schedules, and today was to be an “early” day, readying the ISS to receive Endeavor and the next research facility module it carried. She heard the voice summoning her, and spent a pleasant few seconds transforming from sleep to wakefulness. The floating sensation of dreaming is a constant in zero gravity. She wondered how her head would react to a pillow upon her return. What it would be like to come under the benevolent dictatorship of Earth’s gravity once again.

She removed her eye mask and neck pad, tucking each inside the sleeping bag before loosening the straps and wriggling out. She undid her elastic and shook out her long, black hair, combing it apart with her fingers, then turning a half-somersault to regather it and wind the elastic back around in a double loop.

The voice of Mission Control from Houston’s Johnson Space Center called her to the laptop in the Unity module for a teleconference uplink. This was unusual but not, in itself, a cause for alarm. Bandwidth in space is in high demand, and very carefully allocated. She wondered if there hadn’t been another orbital collision of space junk, its debris rocketed through orbit with the force of a shotgun blast. She disdained having to take shelter inside the attached Soyuz-TMA spacecraft, as a precaution. The Soyuz was their emergency escape from the ISS. A similar threat had occurred two months ago, necessitating an eight-day stay inside its bell-shaped crew module. Space-junk hazards posed the greatest threat to the viability of the ISS, and to the psychological well-being of its crew.

The news, as she found out, was even worse.

“We’re scrapping the Endeavor launch for now,” said Mission Control head Nicole Fairley.

“Scrapping? You mean postponing?” said Thalia, trying not to betray too much disappointment.

“Postponing indefinitely. There’s a lot going on down here. Some troubling developments. We need to wait this out.”

“What? The thrusters again?”

“No, nothing mechanical. Endeavor is sound. This is not a technical problem.”

“Okay…”

“To be honest, I don’t know what this is. You may have noticed you haven’t received any news updates these past few days.”

There was no direct Internet access in space. Astronauts received data, video, and e-mail through a Ky-band data link. “Do we have another virus?” All the laptops on the ISS operated on a wireless intranet, segregated from the mainframe.

“Not a computer virus, no.”

Thalia gripped the handlebar to hold herself still in front of the screen. “Okay. I’m going to stop asking questions now and just listen.”

“We are in the midst of a rather mystifying global pandemic. It apparently started in Manhattan and has been popping up in various cities and spreading ever since. Concurrently, and apparently in direct relation, there have been a large number of disappearances reported. At first, these vanishings were attributed to sick people staying home from work, people seeking medical attention. Now there are riots. I’m talking entire blocks of New York City. The violence has spread across state lines. The first report of attacks in London came four days ago, then at Narita Airport in Japan. Each country has been guarding its flank and its international profile, trying to avoid a meltdown of travel and commerce, which — as I understand it — is, in fact, exactly what each country should be seeking. The World Health Organization held a press conference yesterday in Berlin. Half of its members were absent. They officially moved the pandemic from a phase five to a phase-six alert.”

Thalia couldn’t believe it. “Is it the eclipse?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“The occultation. When I watched it from up here… the great black blot that was the shadow of the moon, spreading over the northeastern U.S. like a dead spot… I guess I had this… I had a premonition of sorts.”

“Well — it does seem to have started around then.”

“It was just the way it looked. So ominous.”

“We have had a few major incidents here in Houston, and more in Austin and Dallas. Mission Control is operating at about seventy percent manpower now, our numbers shrinking every day. With operation personnel levels unreliable, we have no choice but to push back the launch at this time.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“The Russian transport that went up two months ago left you plenty of food and batteries, enough to last up to a year if rationing becomes necessary.”

“A year?” said Thalia, more forcefully than she would have liked.

“Just thinking worst-case. Hopefully things get back under control here and we can get you back maybe two or three weeks out.”

“Great. So until then, more freeze-dried borscht.”

“This same message is being relayed to Commander Demidov and Engineer Maigny by their respective agencies. We are aware of your disappointment, Thalia.”

“I haven’t received any e-mail from my husband in a few days. Have you been holding those back as well?”

“No, we haven’t. A few days, you say?”

Thalia nodded. She pictured Billy as she always did, working inside the kitchen of their home in West Hartford, dishrag over his shoulder, cooking up some ambitious feast over the stove. “Contact him for me, will you? He’ll want to know about the postponement.”

“We did attempt to contact him. No answer. Either at your house, or his restaurant.”

Thalia swallowed hard. She worked quickly to regain her composure.

He’s fine, she thought. I’m the one orbiting the planet in a spaceship. He’s down there, both feet on the ground. He’s fine.

She showed Mission Control only confidence and fortitude, but she had never felt so far away from her husband as at that moment.

The block was already burning when Gus arrived with the Sapphires and Angel.

They saw smoke from the bridge on the way over: thick and black, rising in various spots uptown and down, Harlem and the Lower East Side and points between. As though the city had seen a coordinated military attack.

The morning sun was overhead, the city quiet. They shot up Riverside Drive, weaving around abandoned vehicles. Seeing smoke rising from city blocks was like watching a person bleed. Gus felt alternately helpless and anxious — the city was falling to shit all around him, and time was of the essence.

Creem and the other Jersey punks looked upon Manhattan burning with a kind of satisfaction. To them it was like watching a disaster movie. But to Gus, this was like watching his turf going up in flames.

The block they were headed to was the epicenter of the biggest uptown blaze: all the streets surrounding the pawnshop were blacked out by the thick veil of smoke, turning day into a strange, storm-like night.

“Those motherfuckers,” said Gus. “They blocked out the sun.”

The entire side of the street raged in flames — except the pawnshop on the corner. Its large front windows were shattered, security grates pulled off the building overhang and lying twisted on the sidewalk.

The rest of the city was quieter than a cold Christmas morning, but this block — the 118th Street intersection — was, at that dark daylight hour, teeming with vamps laying siege to the pawnshop.

They were after the old man.

Inside the apartment above the shop, Gabriel Bolivar moved from room to room. Silver-backed mirrors covered the walls instead of pictures, as though some strange spell had converted artwork into glass. The former rock star’s blurry reflection moved with him from room to room in his search for the old man Setrakian and his accomplices.

Bolivar stopped in the room the mother of the boy had tried to enter — the wall boarded behind an iron cage.

No one.

It looked as though they had cleared out. Bolivar wished the mother had accompanied them here. Her blood link to the boy would have proved valuable. But the Master had tasked Bolivar, and its will would be done.

The job of bloodhound instead fell to the feelers, the newly turned blind children. Bolivar came out to the kitchen to see one there, a boy with fully black eyes, crouching down on all fours. He was “looking” out the window toward the street, using his extrasensory perception.

The basement? said Bolivar.

No one, said the boy.

But Bolivar needed to see it for himself, needed to be sure, moving past him to the stairs. Bolivar rode the spiral railing down on his hands and bare feet, down one floor to the street level, where the other feelers had retreated to the shop — then continuing his descent to the basement and a locked door.

Bolivar’s soldiers were already there, in answer to his telepathic command. They tore at the locked door with powerful, oversize hands, digging into the iron-bolted frame with the hardened nails of their talon-like middle fingers until they gained purchase, then joined forces to rip the door back from its frame.

The first few to enter tripped the ultraviolet lamps surrounding the interior of the doorway, the electric indigo rays cooking their virus-rich bodies, the vampires dissipating with screams and clouds of dust. The rest were repulsed by the light, pushed backward against the spiral staircase, shading their eyes. They were unable to see through the doorway.

Bolivar was the first to haul himself hand over hand up the staircase, ahead of the crush. The old man still could be inside there.

Bolivar had to find another way in.

He noticed then the feelers tensed on the floor, facing the smashed windows and the street beyond, like pointer dogs responding to a scent. The first among them — a girl in soiled briefs and an undershirt — snarled and then leaped through the jagged shards of glass to the street.

The little girl came right at Angel, loping on all fours with fawn-like grace. The old wrestler backed up into the street, wanting no part of her, but she had locked in on the biggest target and was set on taking him down. She sprang up from the road, black-eyed, open-mouthed — and Angel reverted into wrestler mode, handling her as though she were a challenger throwing herself at him from the top turnbuckle. He applied the Angel Kiss, his open-palm blow smacking the girl out of the air in mid-leap, sending her lithe little body flying a good dozen yards away, tumbling to the road.

Angel recoiled immediately. One of the great disappointments of his life was not knowing any of the children he had sired. She was a vampire, but she looked so human — a child, still — and he started toward her with his bare hand outstretched. She turned and hissed, her blind eyes like two black bird’s eggs, her stinger darting out at him, maybe three feet in length, considerably shorter than an adult vampire’s. The tip flailed before his eyes like a devil’s tail, and Angel was transfixed.

Gus intervened quickly, finishing her with a hard swipe of his sword that scored the surface of the road, scraping up sparks.

This slaying sent the other vamps into an attack frenzy. A brutal battle, Gus and the Sapphires outnumbered at first three to one, then four to one as vamps fled from the pawnshop and emerged from the basements of the adjacent buildings burning along the street. Either they had been psychically summoned into battle, or simply heard the ringing dinner bell. Destroy one, and two more came at you.

Then a shotgun blast exploded near Gus and a marauding vamp was cut in two. He turned to see Mr. Quinlan, the Ancients’ chief hunter, picking off rioting white-bloods with military precision. He must have come up from underneath like these others. Unless he had been shadowing Gus and the Sapphires the entire time, from the darkness of the underground.

Gus noticed, in that moment — his senses heightened by the adrenaline of battle — that no blood worms coursed beneath the surface of Quinlan’s translucent skin. All the old ones, including the other hunters, crawled with worms, and yet his nearly iridescent flesh was as still and smooth as skin on a pudding.

But the fight was on, and the revelation passed in an instant. Mr. Quinlan’s killing cleared some much-needed space, and the Sapphires, no longer in danger of being surrounded, moved the fight from the middle of the street toward the pawnshop. The children waited, on all fours, on the periphery of the battle, like wolf cubs awaiting a weakened deer to kill. Quinlan sent one blast in their direction, the blind creatures scattering with a high-pitched squeal as he reloaded.

Angel snapped a vampire’s neck with a sharp twist of his hands, and then, in a single, swift move, rare for a man his age — and girth — he turned and used his massive elbow to crack the skull of another one against the wall.

Gus saw his chance, and broke away from the melee, running inside with his sword in search of the old man. The shop was empty, so he ran up the stairs, into an old, prewar apartment.

The many mirrors told him he was in the right place — but no old man.

He met two female vamps on the way back down, introducing them to the heel of his boot before running them through with silver. Their shrieks adrenalized him as he jumped over their bodies, avoiding the white blood oozing down the steps.

The stairs continued belowground, but he had to return to his compadres fighting for their lives and their souls beneath the smoke-blotted sky.

Before exiting, he noticed a section of busted wall near the stairs, exposing old copper water pipes running vertically. He set his sword down on a display case of brooches and cameos, finding a Chuck Knoblauch-autographed Louisville Slugger baseball bat with a $39.99 price tag. He hacked away at the old wallboard, smashing it open until he located the gas line. An old cast-iron pipe. Three good hacks with the bat, and it separated at a coupling — fortunately, without producing any sparks.

The smell of natural gas filled the room, escaping from the ruptured pipe not with a cool hiss but with a hoarse roar.

The feelers swarmed around Bolivar, who felt their distress. This fighter with the shotgun. He was not human. He was vampire.

But he was different.

The feelers could not read him. Even if he were of a different clan — and, clearly, he was — they should have been able to impart some knowledge of him to Bolivar, so long as he was of the worm.

Bolivar was mystified by this strange presence, and made to attack. But the feelers, reading his intent, leaped into his path. He tried to pull them off, but their dogged insistence was strange enough to merit his attention.

Something was about to happen, and he needed to take heed.

Gus reclaimed his sword and slashed his way out through another vamp — this one dressed in doctor’s scrubs — on his way outside and into the next building. There, he ripped away a burning section of windowsill, running with the flaming plank back into battle. He drove it, sharp point-down, into the back of a slain vamp, so that the wood stood like a torch.

“Creem!” he called, needing the silver-blinged killer to cover him as he went into the gear bag for the crossbow. He rummaged for a silver bolt, finding one. Gus tore off a piece of the downed vamp’s shirt, wrapping it around the bolt head and tying it tight, then loading the bolt into the cross, dipping the wrapping into the flames, and raising the crossbow toward the store.

A vamp wearing bloody gym clothes came wilding at Gus, and Quinlan stopped the creature with a crushing punch to the throat. Gus advanced to the curb, hollering, “Get back, cabrones!” then aiming and letting the flaming bolt go, watching it drive through the smashed window frame and across the shop, landing in the rear wall.

Gus was racing away when the building shattered in a single blast. The brick face collapsed, spilling into the street, the roof and its wooden underpinnings bursting apart like the top paper of a firecracker.

The shockwave knocked the unaware vampires to the street. The suck of oxygen brought an odd, post-detonation silence to the block, which was compounded by the ringing in their ears.

Gus got to his knees, then his feet. The corner building was no more, flattened as though by a giant foot. Dust billowed out, the surviving vamps starting to rise all around them. Only those few who had been beaned by flying bricks stayed dead. The others recovered quickly from the blast, and once again turned their hungry gaze on the Sapphires.

From the corner of his eye, Gus saw Quinlan running away to the opposite side of the street, leaping down a short stairwell leading to a basement apartment. Gus didn’t understand his retreat until he looked back to the destruction he had caused.

The explosive punch to the immediate atmosphere had rolled up to the smoke cover, the burst of moving air creating a rupture. A breach parted the blackness, allowing bright, cleansing sunlight to come pouring down.

The smoke opened, the sun line riding out from the impact site, spreading in a bright yellow cone of irradiating power — the dumb vamps sensing the impending rays only too late.

Gus watched them dissipate around him with ghostly screams. Their bodies fell, reduced instantaneously to steam and cinder. Those few who were at a safe distance from the sun turned and ran into neighboring buildings for cover.

Only the feelers reacted intelligently, anticipating the spreading sun and grabbing Bolivar. The little ones fought him, working together to drag him back from the approaching line of killing sun — just in time, yanking up a sidewalk vent grate and pulling him, clawing, down into the underground.

Suddenly the Sapphires and Angel and Gus were alone on a sunny street. They still had their weapons in hand, but no enemy stood before them.

Just another sunny day in East Harlem.

Gus went to the disaster area, the pawnshop blown off its foundation. The basement was now exposed, full of smoking bricks and settling dust. He called over Angel, who hobbled in to help Gus shift some of the heavier chunks of mortar, clearing a path. Gus climbed down into the wreckage, and Angel followed. He heard a sizzling sound, but it was just severed electrical connections still live with juice. He tossed aside a few chunks of brick, searching the floor for bodies, still concerned that the old man might have been hiding there the whole time.

No corpses. He didn’t discover much of anything, really, just a lot of empty shelves. Almost as though the old man had recently cleared out. The door to the basement had been framed by the ultraviolet lamps now spitting orange sparks. Perhaps this had been a bunker of some sort, like a fallout shelter for a vampire attack — or else a kind of vault built to keep their kind out.

Gus lingered there longer than he should have — with the smoke seam already repairing itself, closing up on the sun once again — digging through the rubble for something, anything that might help him in his cause.

Concealed beneath a fallen wooden beam, Angel discovered, on its side, a small, sealed keepsake box made entirely of silver. A beautiful find. He lifted it up, showing it to the gang, and Gus in particular.

Gus took the box from him. “The old man,” he said. And smiled.

When the old Pennsylvania Station opened in 1910, it had been considered a monument to excess. An opulent temple of mass transportation, and the largest interior space in all of New York, a city inclined toward excess even a century ago.

The demolition of the original station, which began in 1963, and its replacement by the current warren of tunnels and corridors, is viewed historically as a catalyst for the modern historical preservation movement, in that it was perhaps the first — and some say still the greatest — failure of “urban renewal.”

Penn Station remained the busiest transportation hub in the United States, serving 600,000 passengers per day, four times as many as Grand Central Station. It served Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and New Jersey Transit — with a Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) station just one block away, accessible back then by an underground passageway that had been now closed for many years for security reasons.

The modern Penn Station used the same underground platforms as the original Penn Station. Eph had booked Zack, Nora, and Nora’s mother on the Keystone Service, straight through Philadelphia to its terminus, the state capital, Harrisburg. It was normally a four-hour trip, though significant delays were expected. Once there, Nora would survey the situation and arrange transportation to the girls’ camp.

Eph left the van at an empty cab stand a block away and walked them through the quiet streets to the station. A dark cloud hung over the city, both literally and figuratively, smoke hovering ominously as they passed empty storefronts. Display windows were broken, and yet even the looters were gone — most of them turned into looters of human blood.

How far and how fast the city had fallen.

Only once they reached the Seventh Avenue entrance at Joe Louis Plaza, underneath the Madison Square Garden sign, did Eph recognize a hint of the New York of two weeks ago, of last month. Cops and Port Authority workers in orange vests directed the downtrodden crowd, maintaining order as they moved them inside.

The stopped escalators allowed people down onto the concourse. The unceasing foot traffic had allowed the station to remain one of the last bastions of humanity in a city of vampires — resisting colonization despite its proximity to the underground. Eph was certain that most, if not all, trains were delayed, but it was enough that they were still running. The rush of panicked people reassured him. If the trains were stopped, this would have turned into a riot.

Few of the overhead lights were working. None of the stores were open, their shelves all empty, handwritten CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE signs taped to the windows.

The groan of a train arriving on a lower platform reassured Eph as he shouldered Nora and Mrs. Martinez’s bag, Nora seeing to it that her mother did not fall. The concourse was jammed, and yet he welcomed the press of the crowd; he had missed the feeling of being an organism surrounded by a throng of humanity.

National Guard soldiers waited up ahead, looking drawn and exhausted. Still, they were scanning faces as they went past, and Eph remained a wanted man.

Add to that the fact that he had Setrakian’s silver-loaded pistol stuffed into the back of his waistband, and Eph accompanied them only as far as the great blue pillars, pointing out the Amtrak lounge gate around the bend.

Mariela Martinez looked scared and even somewhat angry. The crowd annoyed her. Nora’s mother, a former home healthcare worker, had been diagnosed two years ago with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Sometimes she thought Nora was sixteen years old, which occasionally led to trouble over who was in charge of whom. Today, however, she was quiet, overwhelmed and operating deep within herself, out of her element here and anxious about being away from home. No cross words for her departed husband; no insisting on getting dressed for a party. She wore a long raincoat over a saffron-colored housecoat, her hair hanging heavily behind her in a thick, gray braid. She had taken to Zack already, holding his hand on the ride in, which pleased Eph even as it tugged at his heart.

Eph knelt down in front of his son. The boy looked away, like he didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to say good-bye. “You help Nora with Mrs. Martinez, okay?”

Zack nodded. “Why does it have to be a girls’ camp?”

“Because Nora is a girl and she went there. It’s only going to be you three.”

“And you,” Zack said quickly. “When are you coming?”

“Very soon, I hope.”

Eph had his hands on Zack’s shoulders. Zack brought his hands up to grip Eph’s forearms. “You promise?”

“Soon as I can.”

“That’s not a promise.”

Eph squeezed his boy’s shoulders, selling the lie. “I promise.”

Zack wasn’t buying it, Eph could tell. He could feel Nora looking down at them.

Eph said, “Gimme a hug.”

“Why?” said Zack, pulling back a bit. “I’ll hug you when I see you in Pennsylvania.”

Eph flashed a smile. “One to tide me over then.”

“I don’t see why—”

Eph pulled him close, gripping him tightly while the crowd swirled past them. The boy struggled, but not really, and then Eph kissed his cheek and released him.

Eph stood and Nora pushed in front of him, gently backing Eph up two steps. Her brown eyes were fierce, right up in his. “Tell me now. What is this you are planning?”

“I’m going to say good-bye to you.”

She stood close, like a lover saying farewell, only she had her knuckle pressed right into the lowest part of his sternum and was twisting it there like a screw. “After we’re gone — what are you going to do? I want to know.”

Eph looked past her at Zack, standing with Nora’s mother, dutifully holding her hand. Eph said, “I’m going to try to stop this thing. What do you think?”

“I think it’s too late for that, and you know it. Come with us. If you’re doing this for the old man — I feel the same way about him you do. But it’s over, we both know that. Come with us. We’ll regroup there. We’ll figure out our next move. Setrakian will understand.”

Eph felt her pull on him more than the pain of her knuckle in his breastbone. “We still have a chance here,” he said. “I believe that.”

“We”—she made sure he saw that she was referring to the two of them—“still have a chance also, if we both get out of here now.”

Eph pulled the last bag off his shoulder and hung it on hers. “Weapon bag,” he said. “In case you run into any trouble.”

Angry tears wet her eyes. “You should know that, if you end up doing something stupid here, I am determined to hate you forever.”

He nodded once.

She kissed his lips, wrapping him in an embrace. Her hand found the butt of the pistol in the small of Eph’s back, and her eyes darkened, her head moving back to study his face. For a moment Eph thought she was going to yank it out and take it from him, but instead she came close again, right up to his ear, her cheek wet with tears.

She whispered, “I hate you already.”

She pulled away, not looking back at him as she gathered up Zack and her mother and ushered them toward the departures board.

Eph waited and watched Zack go, the boy looking back as they reached the corner, searching for him. Eph waved, his hand high — but the boy didn’t see him. The Glock tucked inside Eph’s belt suddenly felt heavier.

Inside the former headquarters of the Canary Project at Eleventh and 27th, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Everett Barnes, was napping in an office chair inside Ephraim Goodweather’s old office. The ringing telephone penetrated his consciousness, but not enough to rouse him. It took the hand of an FBI special agent on his shoulder to do that.

Barnes sat up, shaking off sleep, feeling refreshed. “Washington?” he guessed.

The agent shook his head. “Goodweather.”

Barnes pressed the flashing button on the desk phone and picked up the receiver. “Ephraim? Where are you?”

“Penn Station. Phone booth.”

“Are you all right?”

“I just put my son on a train out of the city.”

“Yes?”

“I’m ready to come in.”

Barnes looked at the agent and nodded. “I am very relieved to hear that.”

“I’d like to see you personally.”

“Stay where you are, I am on my way.”

He hung up and the agent handed him his coat. Barnes was attired in full Navy regalia. They went out the main office and down the steps to the curb, where Dr. Barnes’s black SUV was parked. Barnes climbed into the passenger side and the agent started the ignition.

The blow came so suddenly, Barnes didn’t know what was happening. Not to him — to the FBI agent. The man slumped forward, honking the horn with his chin. He tried to raise his hands and a second blow came — from the backseat. A hand wielding a pistol. It took one more blow to knock out the agent, leaving him slumped against the door.

The assailant was out of the backseat and opening the driver’s door, pulling out the unconscious man and dumping him onto the sidewalk like a big bag of laundry.

Ephraim Goodweather leaped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Barnes opened his door, but Eph pulled him back inside, jamming the gun against the inside of Barnes’s thigh rather than his head. Only a doctor or perhaps a soldier knew that you might survive a head or neck wound, but one shot to the femoral artery meant certain death.

“Close it,” said Eph.

Barnes did. Eph already had the SUV in drive, and was racing out onto 27th Street.

Barnes tried to squirm away from the pistol in his lap. “Please, Ephraim. Please let’s talk—”

“Good! You start.”

“May I at least put on my seat belt?”

Eph took the corner hard and said, “No.”

Barnes saw that Ephraim had dumped something into the cup holders between them: the FBI agent’s shield. The muzzle was tight against his leg, Eph’s left hand heavy upon the steering wheel. “Please, Ephraim, be very, very careful—”

“Start talking, Everett.” Eph pressed the gun hard into Barnes’s leg. “Why the hell are you still here? Still in the city? You wanted a front-row seat, huh?”

“I don’t know what you are referring to, Ephraim. This is where the sick are.”

“The sick,” said Eph disparagingly.

“The infected.”

“Everett — you keep talking like that and this gun is going to go off.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“And you’ve been lying. I want to know why there is no goddamned quarantined Eph’s rage filled the interior of the car. He veered hard right to avoid a broken-down and looted delivery van. “No competent attempt at containment,” he continued. “Why has this been allowed to keep burning? Answer me!”

Barnes was up against the door, whimpering like a boy. “It is completely out of my hands now!” he said.

“Let me guess. You are just following orders.”

“I… I accept my role, Ephraim. The time came where a choice had to be made, and I made it. This world, the one we thought we knew, Ephraim — it is at the brink.”

“You don’t say.”

Barnes’s voice grew colder. “The smart bet is with them. Never wager with your heart, Ephraim. Every major institution has been compromised, either directly or indirectly. By that, I mean either corrupted or subverted. This is occurring at the highest levels.”

Eph nodded hard. “Eldritch Palmer.”

“Does it really matter at this point?”

“To me it does.”

“When a patient is dying, Ephraim — when all hope for recovery is gone — what does a good physician do?”

“He keeps fighting.”

“You prolong it? Really? When the end is certain and near? When they are already beyond saving — do you offer palliative care and draw out the inevitable? Or do you let nature run its course?”

“Nature! Jesus, Everett.”

“I don’t know what else to call it.”

“I call it euthanasia. Of the entire human race. You standing back in your Navy uniform and watching it die on the table.”

“You apparently want to make this personal, Ephraim, when I have caused none of this. Blame the disease, not the doctor. To a certain extent, I am as appalled as you are. But I am a realist, and some things simply cannot be wished away. I did what I did because there was no other choice.”

“There is always a choice, Everett. Always. Fuck — I know that. But you… you are a coward, a traitor, and — worse — a fucking fool.”

“You will lose this fight, Ephraim. In fact, if I’m not mistaken — you already have.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Eph, already halfway across town. “You and I. We’ll see it together.”

Sotheby’s, the auction house founded in 1744, brokered art, diamond, and international realty sales in forty countries, with principal salesrooms in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Moscow, and New York. Sotheby’s New York occupied the length of York Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets, one block in from FDR Drive and the East River. It was a glass-front, ten-story building, housing specialist departments, galleries, and auction spaces — some of which was normally open to the public.

Not this day, however. A private security detail wearing breathing masks were posted outside on the sidewalk and inside behind the revolving doors. The Upper East Side was attempting to maintain some semblance of civility, even as pockets of the city fell to chaos around them.

Setrakian expressed his desire to register as an approved bidder for the impending auction, and he and Fet were issued masks and allowed inside.

The building’s front foyer was open, rising all the way to the top, ten levels of railed balconies going up. Setrakian and Fet were assigned an escort, and taken up escalators to a representative’s office on the fifth floor.

The representative pulled on her paper mask as they entered, making no move to come out from behind her desk. Shaking hands was unsanitary. Setrakian reiterated his intention, and she nodded and produced a packet of forms.

“I need the name and number of your broker, and please list your securities accounts. Proof of intent to bid, in the form of an authorization for one million dollars, is the standard deposit for this level of auction.”

Setrakian glanced at Fet, twiddling the pen in his crooked fingers. “I am afraid I am between brokers at present. I do, however, possess some interesting antiquities myself. I would be happy to put them up as collateral.”

“I am very sorry.” She was already retrieving the forms from him, refiling them in her desk drawers.

“If I might,” said Setrakian, returning her pen, which she made no move to touch. “What I would really like to do is to view the catalog items before making a decision.”

“I am afraid that is a privilege for bidders only. Security is very, very tight, as you probably know, due to some of the items being offered—”

“The Occido Lumen.”

She swallowed. “Precisely, yes. There is much… much mystique surrounding the item, as you may be familiar with, and naturally, given the current state of affairs here in Manhattan… and the fact that no auction house has successfully offered the Lumen for sale in the past two centuries… well, one doesn’t have to be especially superstitious to link the two.”

“I am sure there is also a strong financial component. Why else go on with the auction at all? Evidently Sotheby’s believes that its sale commission outweighs the risks associated with bringing the Lumen to auction.”

“Well, I couldn’t possibly comment on business affairs.”

“Please.” Setrakian laid a hand on the top edge of her desk, gently, as though it were her arm. “Is it at all possible? For an old man just to look?”

Her eyes were unmoved over her mask. “I cannot.”

Setrakian looked to Fet. The city exterminator stood up and pulled down his mask. He produced his city badge. “Hate to do this, but — I need to see the building supervisor immediately. The person in charge of this property itself.”

The director of Sotheby’s North America rose from behind his desk when the building supervisor entered with Setrakian and Fet. “What is the meaning of this?”

The building supervisor said, his face mask puffing, “This gentleman says we have to evacuate the building.”

“Evacuate the… what?”

“He has the authority to shutter the building for seventy-two hours while the city inspects it.”

“Seventy-two… but what about the auction?”

“Canceled,” said Fet. He punctuated that with a shrug. “Unless.”

The director’s expression flattened behind his mask, as though he suddenly understood. “This city is crumbling around us, and you choose now, today, to come looking for a bribe?”

“It’s not a bribe I’m after,” said Fet. “The truth is, and you can probably tell just by looking at me, I’m something of an art fanatic.”

They were allowed restricted access to the Occido Lumen, their viewing occurring inside a private, glass-walled chamber within a larger viewing vault located behind two locked doors on the ninth floor. The bulletproof case was unlocked and removed, and Fet watched Setrakian prepare himself to inspect the long-sought tome, white cotton gloves covering his crooked hands.

The old book rested on an ornate viewing stand of white oak. It was 12 × 8 × 1.8 inches, 489 folios, handwritten in parchment, with twenty illuminated pages, bound in leather and faced with pure-silver plates on the front and rear covers and the spine. The pages themselves were also edged in silver.

Now it made sense to Fet. Why the book had never fallen into the possession of the Ancients. Why the Master didn’t just come and take it from them right here, right now.

The silver casing. The book was literally beyond their grasp.

Twin cameras on arched stems rising out of the table captured images of the open pages, which were shown on oversized vertical plasma screens on the wall before them. The first illuminated page in the front matter featured a detailed drawing of a figure of six appendages done in fine, glowing silver leaf. The style and the minute calligraphy surrounding it spoke of another time, another world. Fet was drawn in by the reverence Setrakian showed this book. The quality of the craftsmanship impressed him, but, when it came to the artwork itself, Fet had no clue what he was looking at. He waited for insights from the old man. All he knew was that there were clear similarities between this work and the markings he and Eph had discovered in the subway. Even the three crescent moons were represented here.

Setrakian focused his interest on two pages, one pure text, the other a rich illumination. Beyond the obvious artistry of the page, Fet could not understand what it was about the image that captivated the old man so — that wrung tears from Setrakian’s eyes.

They stayed beyond their allotted fifteen minutes, Setrakian rushing to copy out some twenty-eight symbols. Only Fet could not find the symbols in the images on the page. But he said nothing, waiting while Setrakian — obviously frustrated by the stiffness of his crooked fingers — filled two sheets of paper with these symbols.

The old man was silent as they rode the elevator back down to the foyer. He said nothing until they had exited the building and were far enough away from the armed security guards.

Setrakian said, “The pages are watermarked. Only a trained eye can see it. Mine can.”

“Watermarked? You mean, like currency?”

Setrakian nodded. “All the pages in the book. It was a common practice in some grimoires and alchemical treatises. Even in early tarot card sets. You see? There is text printed on the pages, but a second layer underneath. Watermarked directly into the paper at the time of its pressing. That is the real knowledge. The Sigil. The hidden symbol — the key…”

“Those symbols you copied…”

Setrakian patted his pocket, reassuring himself that he had taken the sketches with him.

He paused then, something catching his eye. Fet followed him across the street to the large building facing the glass front of Sotheby’s. The Mary Manning Walsh Home was a nursing home run by the Carmelite Sisters for the Archdiocese of New York.

Setrakian was drawn to the brick front to the left of the entrance awning. A graffiti design spray-painted there, in orange and black. It took Fet a moment to realize that it was yet another highly stylized, if cruder, variation on the illuminated figure in the front matter of the book locked away on the top floor of the facing building — a book no one had seen for decades.

“What the hell?” said Fet.

“It is him — his name,” said Setrakian. “His true name. He is branding the city with it. Calling it his own.”

Setrakian turned away, looking up at the black smoke blowing over the sky, obscuring the sun.

Setrakian said, “Now to find a way to get that book.”

Dearest Zack,

What you must know is that I needed to do this — not out of arrogance (I am no hero, son), but out of conviction. Leaving you in that train station — the pain I feel now is the worst I have ever experienced. Know that I never chose the human race instead of you. What I am to do now is for your future — yours alone. That the rest of mankind may benefit is but a side issue. This is so that you will never, ever have to do what I just did: choose between your child and your duty.

From the moment I first held you in my arms, I knew that you were going to be the only genuine love story in my life. The one human being to whom I could give my all and expect nothing in return. Please understand that I cannot trust anyone else to attempt what I am about to do. Much of the history of the previous century was written with a gun. Written by men driven to murder by their conviction, and their demons. I have both. Insanity is real, son — it is existence now. No longer a disorder of the mind, but an external reality. Maybe I can change this.

I will be branded a criminal, I may be called mad — but my hope is that, in time, the truth will vindicate my name, and that you, Zachary, will once again hold me in your heart.

No amount of words will ever do justice to what I feel for you and the relief that you are now safe with Nora. Please think of your father not as a man who deserted you, who broke a promise to you, but as a man who wanted to ensure that you survived this assault on our species. As a man with difficult choices to make, just like the man you will one day grow to be.

Please think also of your mother — as she was. Our love for you will never die so long as you live. In you, we have given this world a great gift — and of that, I have no doubt.

Your old man,

Dad

The office of Emergency Management building operated on a darkened block in Brooklyn. The four-year-old, $50 million OEM facility served as the central point of coordination for major emergencies in New York. It housed New York’s 130-agency Emergency Operations Center, containing state-of-the-art audiovisual and information technology systems and full backup generators. The headquarters had been built to replace the agency’s former facility at 7 World Trade Center, destroyed on 9/11. It was constructed to foster resource coordination between public agencies in the event of a large-scale disaster. To that end, redundant electromechanical systems ensured continuous operation during a power outage.

The twenty-four-hours-a-day building was operating exactly as it should. The problem was that many of the agencies it was meant to coordinate with — local, state, federal, and nonprofit — were either offline, understaffed, or else apparently abandoned.

The heart of the city’s emergency disaster network was still beating strong, but precious little of its informational blood was reaching the extremities — as if the city had suffered a massive stroke.

Eph feared he would miss his narrow window of opportunity. Getting back across the bridge took him much longer than he had expected: most people who were able and willing to leave Manhattan had already done so, and the road debris and abandoned cars made the crossing difficult. Someone had tied two corners of an immense yellow tarpaulin to one of the bridge’s support wires, rippling in the wind like an old maritime flag of quarantine flying off the mast of a doomed ship.

Director Barnes sat quietly, gripping the handle over the window, finally realizing that Eph was not going to tell him where they were headed.

The Long Island Expressway was substantially faster, Eph eyeing the towns as he passed them, seeing empty streets from the overpasses, quiet gas stations, empty mall parking lots.

His plan was dangerous, he knew. More desperate than organized. A psychopath’s plan, perhaps. But he was okay with this: insanity was all around him. And sometimes luck trumped preparation.

He arrived just in time to catch the beginning of Palmer’s address on the car radio. He parked near a train station, turning off the engine, turning to Barnes.

“Get out your ID now. We’re going inside the OEM together. I will have the gun under my jacket. You say anything to anybody or try to alert security, I will shoot whoever you talk to and then I will shoot you. Do you believe me?”

Barnes looked into Eph’s eyes. He nodded.

“Now we walk, and fast.”

They came up on the OEM building along 15th Street, the road lined with official vehicles on both sides. The tan-brick building exterior resembled that of a new grade school, nearly a block long but only two stories tall. A broadcast tower rose behind it, surrounded by a wire-topped fence. National Guard members stood at ten-yard intervals along the short lawn, securing the building.

Eph saw the gated parking lot entrance, and, inside, what had to be Palmer’s idling motorcade. The middle limousine appeared almost presidential, and certainly bulletproof.

He knew he must get Palmer before he got into that car.

“Walk tall,” said Eph, his hand around Barnes’s elbow, steering him along the sidewalk past the soldiers toward the entrance.

A group of protesters heckled them from across the street, holding signs about God’s wrath, proclaiming that because America had lost faith in Him, He was now abandoning it. A preacher in a shabby suit stood atop a short stepladder, reading verses out of Revelation. Those surrounding him stood with their open palms facing the OEM in a gesture of blessing, praying over the city agency. One placard featured a hand-drawn icon of a downcast Jesus Christ bleeding from a crown of thorns, sporting vampire fangs and glaring red eyes.

“Who will deliver us now?” the shabby monk cried.

Sweat ran down Eph’s chest, past the silver-loaded pistol stuck in his belt.

Eldritch Palmer sat in the Emergency Operations Center before a microphone set upon a table and a pitcher of water. He faced a video wall upon which was displayed the seal of the United States Congress.

Alone, except for his trusted aide, Mr. Fitzwilliam, Palmer wore his usual dark suit, looking a shade paler than usual, a bit more shrunken in the chair. His wrinkled hands rested on the top of the table, still, waiting.

Via satellite link, he was about to address an emergency joint session of the United States Congress. This unprecedented address, with questions to follow, was also being broadcast via live Internet feed over all television and radio networks and their affiliates still in operation, and internationally across the globe.

Mr. Fitzwilliam stood just out of camera view, his hands clasped at belt level, looking outside the secure room into the larger facility. Most of the 130 workstations were occupied, and yet no work was being done. All eyes were turned to the hanging monitors.

After brief opening remarks, facing the half-full Capitol chamber, Palmer read from a prepared statement scrolling in large print on a teleprompter behind the camera.

“I want to address this public health emergency in terms of where myself and my Stoneheart Foundation are well-positioned to intervene, to respond, to reassure. What I can present to you today is a three-fold action plan for the United States of America, and the world beyond.

“First, I am pledging an immediate loan of three billion dollars to the city of New York, in order to keep city services functioning and to fund a citywide quarantine.

“Second, as the president and CEO of Stoneheart Industries, I want to extend my personal guarantee as to the capacity and security of this nation’s food delivery system, both through our essential transportation holdings and our various meatpacking facilities.

“Third, I would respectively recommend that the remaining Nuclear Regulatory Commission procedures be suspended in order that the completed Locust Valley Nuclear Power Plant be allowed to come online immediately, as a direct solution to New York’s current catastrophic power-grid problems.”

As head of the Canary Project in New York, Eph had been inside the OEM a few times before. He was familiar with the entrance procedures, which were secure and yet manned by armed professionals used to dealing with other armed professionals. So while Barnes’s identification was inspected rather closely, Eph simply dropped his shield and pistol into a basket and walked briskly through the metal detector.

“Would you like an escort, Director Barnes?” asked the security guard.

Eph grabbed his things and Barnes’s arm. “We know the way.”

Palmer’s questioning fell to a panel of three Democrats and two Republicans. He faced the most scrutiny from the ranking member of the Department of Homeland Security, Representative Nicholas Frone of the Third Congressional District of New York, also a member of the House Financial Committee. Voters were said not to trust baldness or beards, and yet, on both counts, Frone had bucked the trend now for three successive terms of office.

“As to this quarantine, Mr. Palmer — I have to say, hasn’t that horse already left the barn?”

Palmer sat with his hands set upon a single piece of paper in front of him. “I enjoy your folksy sayings, Representative Frone. But as someone who grew up in the seat of privilege, you might not realize that it is indeed possible for an industrious farmer to saddle and mount another horse in order to safely rein in the one that got away. America’s working farmers would never give up on a good horse. I think neither should we.”

“Also I find it interesting that you should tie your pet project, this nuclear reactor, that you have been trying to ram through regulatory procedures, into your proposal. I’m not at all convinced this is a good time to be rushing such a plant into production. And I would like to know how exactly it will help, when the problem, as I understand it, is not energy deficiency but interruptions in delivery.”

Palmer responded, “Representative Frone, two critical power plants servicing New York State are currently offline, due to voltage overload and power-line failure caused by widespread surges in the system. This starts a chain reaction of adverse effects. It decreases the water supply, due to a lack of pressure in the lines, which will lead to contamination if it is not immediately addressed. It has impacted rail transportation up and down the northeast corridor, the safe screening of passengers for air transportation, and even road travel, with the unavailability of electric gasoline pumps. It has disrupted mobile telephone communication, which impacts statewide emergency services, such as 911 response, placing citizens directly at risk.”

Palmer continued, “Now, as to nuclear power, this plant, located in your district, is ready to come online. It has passed every preliminary regulation without flaw, and yet bureaucratic procedures demand more waiting. You have a fully capable power plant — one that you yourself campaigned against and resisted every step of the way — that could power much of the city if activated. A hundred and four such plants supply twenty percent of this country’s electricity, and yet this is the first nuclear power plant to have been commissioned in the United States since the Three Mile Island incident in 1978. The word ‘nuclear’ dredges up negative connotations, but, in fact, it is a sustainable energy source that reduces carbon emissions. It is our only honest large-scale alternative to fossil fuels.”

Representative Frone said, “Let me interrupt your commercial message here, Mr. Palmer. With all due respect, isn’t this crisis nothing more than a fire sale for the superrich such as yourself? Pure ‘Shock Doctrine,’ is it not? I, for one, am very curious to know what you plan to do with New York City once you own it.”

“As I made clear previously, this would be an interest-free, twenty-year revolving line of credit…”

Eph dumped the FBI credentials in a wastebasket and continued with Barnes through the Emergency Operations Center that was the heart of the facility. The attention of everyone present was focused on Palmer, pictured on the many monitors overhead.

Eph saw dark-suited Stoneheart men clustered around a side hall leading to a pair of glass doors. The sign with the arrow read: SECURE CONFERENCE ROOM.

A chill washed over Eph, as he realized he was almost certain to die here. Certainly if he succeeded. Indeed, his worst fear was that he might be cut down without successfully assassinating Eldritch Palmer.

Eph guessed the direction of the parking lot exit. He turned to Barnes and whispered, “Act sick.”

“What?”

“Act sick. Shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you.”

Eph continued with him past the conference-room hall toward the rear. Another Stoneheart man stood near a pair of doors. Before him hung a glowing sign for the men’s restroom.

“Here it is, sir,” said Eph, opening the door for Barnes. Barnes entered holding his belly, clearing his throat into his wrist. Eph rolled his eyes at the Stoneheart, whose facial expression did not change at all.

Inside the restroom, they were alone. Palmer’s words carried over speakers. Eph pulled out the gun. He walked Barnes into the farthest stall and sat him on the covered toilet.

“Get comfortable,” he said.

“Ephraim,” said Barnes. “They are certain to kill you.”

“I know,” Eph said, pistol-whipping Barnes before closing the door. “That’s what I came here for.”

Representative Frone continued, “Now, there were reports in the media, before all this began, that you and your minions had been undertaking a raid on the world silver market, trying to corner it. Frankly, there have been many wild stories regarding this outbreak. Some of them — true or not — have struck a chord. Plenty of people believe it. Are you, in fact, preying on people’s fears and superstitions? Or is this, as I hope, the lesser of two evils — a simple case of greed?”

Palmer picked up the piece of paper before him. He folded it once lengthwise, then once again across, and carefully slid the page into his inside breast pocket. He did so slowly, his eyes never leaving the camera connecting him to Washington, DC.

“Representative Frone, I believe that this is exactly the kind of pettiness and moral gridlock that has led us to this dark time. It is a matter of record that I have donated the maximum amount allowable by law to your opponent in each of your previous campaigns, and this is how you take—”

Frone yelled over him, “That’s an outrageous charge!”

“Gentlemen,” said Palmer, “you see before you an old man. A frail man, with very little time left on this earth. A man who wants to give back to the nation that has given him so very much in his life. Now I find myself in a unique position to do just that. Within the boundaries of the law — never above it. No one is above the law. Which is why I wanted to make a full accounting before you today. Please allow a patriot’s final act to be a noble one. That is all. Thank you.

Mr. Fitzwilliam pulled out his chair, and Palmer got to his feet amid the hubbub and gavel-banging from the chamber on the video wall before him.

Eph stood by the door, listening. Movement outside, but not enough hubbub yet. He was tempted to open the door just a bit, but it opened inward, and he would certainly have been seen.

He tugged on the pistol’s handle, keeping it loose and ready in his waistband.

A man walked past, saying, as though into a radio, “Get the car.”

That was Eph’s cue. He took a deep breath and reached for the door handle, walking out of the restroom and into murder.

Two Stonehearts in dark suits were moving to the far end of the hall, the doors leading outside. Eph turned the other way, seeing two more rounding the corner, advance men, eyeing him immediately.

Eph’s timing had been less than perfect. He stepped to the side, as though deferring to the men, trying to appear uninterested.

Eph saw the small front wheels first. A wheelchair was being rolled around the corner. Two polished shoes were set on the fold-down footrests.

It was Eldritch Palmer, looking exceedingly small and frail. His flour-white hands were folded in his sunken lap, his eyes looking straight ahead, not at Eph.

One of the advance men veered off toward Eph, as though to block his view of the passing billionaire. Palmer was fewer than five yards away. Eph could not wait any longer.

His heart racing, Eph pulled the gun from his waistband. Everything happened in slow motion and all at once.

Eph raised the gun and darted to the left, in order to clear the Stoneheart man in his way. His hand trembled, but his arm was straight, his aim true.

He aimed for the largest target — the chest of the seated man — and squeezed the trigger. But the lead Stoneheart man threw himself at Eph — sacrificing himself more automatically than any Secret Service agent had ever leaped in front of a U.S. president.

The round struck the man in the chest, thudding off the body armor beneath his suit. Eph reacted just in time, shoving the man to the side before he could be tackled.

Eph fired again, but off-balance, the silver bullet ricocheting off Palmer’s wheelchair armrest.

Eph fired again, but the Stonehearts threw themselves in front of Palmer. The third round went into the wall. An especially large man with a military crew cut — the man pushing Palmer’s chair — started to run, wheeling his benefactor forward so that the Stone-heart men were catapulted onto Eph, and he went down.

He twisted as he fell, his gun arm facing the exit doorway. One more shot. He raised it to fire at the back of the chair, around the large bodyguard — but a shoe stomped down on his forearm, the round firing into the carpet, the weapon leaping from Eph’s grip.

Eph was at the bottom of a growing pile, bodies rushing in from the main room now. Shouts, screams. Hands clawing at Eph, pulling at his limbs. He twisted his head just enough to see, through the arms and legs of his attackers, the wheelchair being pushed out through the double doors, into blazing daylight.

Eph howled in agony. His only chance gone forever. The moment slipping away.

The old man had survived unharmed.

Now the world was nearly his.

The master, standing at full height inside the utter blackness of a large chamber deep beneath the meatpacking plant, was electrically alert with meditative focus. It had become more deliberative as its sun-scorched flesh continued to flake off its once-human host body, exposing raw, red dermis beneath.

The Master’s head rotated a few degrees on its great, broad neck, turning slightly toward the entrance, giving Bolivar its attention. No need for Bolivar to report what the Master already knew, what the Master had already — through Bolivar — seen: the arrival of the human hunters at the pawnshop, evidently in hopes of contacting old Setrakian, and the disastrous battle that ensued.

Behind Bolivar, feelers skittered about on all four limbs, like blind crabs. They “saw” something that unsettled them, as Bolivar was learning to infer from their behavior.

Someone was coming. The feelers’ disquiet was offset by the Master’s distinct lack of concern about the interloper.

The Master said: The Ancient Ones have employed mercenaries for day hunting. A further sign of their desperation. And the old professor?

Bolivar said: He slipped away in advance of our attack. Inside his domicile, the feelers sensed that he is still alive.

Hiding. Plotting. Scheming.

With the same desperation as the Ancients.

Humans only become dangerous when they have nothing to lose.

The whir of a motorized wheelchair, and the sound of its nubby tires rolling over the dirt floor, announced that the visitor was Eldritch Palmer. His bodyguard nurse trailed him, holding blue glow sticks to illuminate the passage for their human vision.

Feelers skittered away at the wheelchair’s advance, crawling halfway up the wall, remaining outside the glow radius of the chemical luminescence, hissing.

“More creatures,” said Palmer under his breath, unable to hide his distaste upon seeing the blind vampire children and their black-eyed stares. The billionaire was furious. “Why this hole?”

It pleases me.

Palmer saw, for the first time, by the light of the soft blue glow, the Master’s flesh peeling. Chunks of it littered the ground at his feet like shorn hair beneath a barber’s chair. Palmer was troubled by the sight of the raw flesh revealed beneath the Master’s cracked exterior, and got to talking quickly, in order that the Master not read his mind like a soothsayer divining through a crystal ball.

“Look here. I have waited and I have done everything you’ve asked and I have received nothing in return. Now an attempt has been made on my life! I want my reward now! My patience has reached its end. You will give me what I am promised, or I will bankroll you no longer — do you understand? This is the end of it!”

The Master’s skin crinkled as its ceiling-scraping head leaned forward. The monster was indeed intimidating, but Palmer would not back down.

“My premature death, should it come, would render this entire plan moot. You will have no more leverage upon my will — nor claim upon my resources.”

Eichhorst, the perverse Nazi commandant, summoned to the chamber by the Master, entered behind Palmer into the haze of blue light. You would do well to hold your human tongue in the presence of Der Meister.

The Master, with a wave of his great hand, silenced Eichhorst. His red eyes appeared purple in the blue light, fixing wide on Palmer. So it is done. I will grant your wish for immortality. In one day’s time.

Palmer stammered, taken aback. First, because of his surprise at the Master’s sudden capitulation — after all these years of effort. And then, in recognition of the great leap Palmer was poised to take. To dive into the abyss that is death, and surface on the other side…

The businessman inside of him wanted more of a guarantee. But the schemer inside of him held his tongue.

You do not place provisions on a monster such as the Master. You bid for its favor, and then accept its largesse with gratitude.

One more mortal day. Palmer thought he might even enjoy it.

All plans are fully in motion. My Brood is marching across the mainland. We have exposure in every critical destination, our circle widening in cities and provinces around the globe.

Palmer swallowed his anticipation, saying, “And even as the circle grows, it simultaneously tightens.” His old hands described the scenario, fingers interlocking, palms squeezing together in a pantomime of strangling.

Indeed. One last task that remains before the start of The Devouring.

Eichhorst, looking like half a man beside the giant Master, said: The book.

“Of course,” said Palmer. “It will be yours. But, I must ask you… if you already know the contents…”

It is not critical that I be in possession of the book. It is critical that others are not.

“So — why not just blow up the auction house? Explode the entire block?”

Crude solutions have been attempted in the past, and have failed. This book has had too many lives. I must be absolutely certain of its fate. So that I may watch it burn.

The Master then straightened to its full height, becoming distracted in such a way that only the Master could.

It was seeing something. The Master was physically in the cave with them, but psychically it was seeing through another’s eyes — one of the Brood.

Into Palmer’s head, the Master uttered two words:

The boy.

Palmer waited for an explanation, which never came. The Master had returned to the present, the now. He had returned to them with a new certainty, as if he had glimpsed the future.

Tomorrow the world burns and the boy and the book will be mine.

I have killed.

I have slain.

With the hands typing this now.

I have stabbed, sliced, beat, crushed, dismembered, beheaded.

I have worn their white blood on my clothes and my boots.

I have destroyed. And I have rejoiced at the destruction.

You may say, as an exterminator by trade, I’ve been training for this all my life.

I understand the argument. I just can’t support it.

Because it is one thing to have a rat race up your arm in blind fear.

Yet quite another to face a fellow human form and cut it down.

They look like people. They are very much like you and me.

I am no longer an exterminator. I am a vampire hunter.

And here is the other thing.

Something I will only say here, because I don’t dare tell anyone else.

Because I know what they will think.

I know what they will feel.

I know what they will see when they look into my eyes.

But — all this killing?

I kind of like it.

And I’m good at it.

I might even be great at it.

The city is falling and probably the world. Apocalypse is a big word, a heavy word, when you realize you are actually facing it.

I can’t be the only one. There must be others out there like me. People who have lived their whole lives feeling half-complete. Who never truly fit anywhere in the world. Who never understood why they were here, or what they were meant for. Who never answered the call, because they never heard it. Because nothing ever spoke to them.

Until now.

Nora looked away for what seemed like only a moment. As she stared at the big board, waiting for their track number to be announced, her gaze deepened and, utterly exhausted, she zoned out.

For the first time in days, she thought of nothing. No vampires, no fears, no plans. She relaxed her focus, and her mind dipped into sleep mode while her eyes remained open.

When she blinked back to awareness, it was like waking up from a dream about falling. A shudder, a startle. A small gasp.

She turned and saw Zack next to her, listening to his iPod.

But her mother was gone.

Nora looked around, didn’t see her. She tugged down Zack’s earbuds, asking him, and he joined her in looking.

“Wait here,” said Nora, pointing to their bags. “Do not move!”

She pushed her way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd waiting before the departures board. She looked for a seam in the crowd, some path her slow-moving mother might have left, but saw nothing.

“Mama!”

Raised voices made Nora turn. She pushed toward them, coming out of the dense crowd near the side of the concourse, by the gate of a closed deli.

There was her mother, haranguing a bewildered-looking family of South Asians.

“Esme!” yelled Nora’s mother, invoking the name of her late sister, Nora’s late aunt. “Take care of the kettle, Esme! It’s boiling, I can hear it!”

Nora reached her finally, taking her arm, stammering an apology to the non-English-speaking parents and their two young daughters. “Mama, come.”

“There you are, Esme,” she said. “What’s that burning?”

“Come, Mama.” Tears wet Nora’s eyes.

“You’re burning down my house!”

Nora clasped her mother’s arm and pulled her back through the crowd, ignoring the grunts and insults. Zack was on tiptoes, looking for them. Nora said nothing to him, not wanting to break down in front of the boy. But this was too much. Everybody has a breaking point. Nora was fast approaching hers.

How proud her mother had been of her daughter, first a chemistry major at Fordham, then medical school with a specialty in biochem at Johns Hopkins. Nora saw now that her mother must have assumed she had it made. A rich doctor for a daughter. But Nora’s interest had been public health, not internal medicine or pediatrics. Looking back now, she thought that growing up in the shadow of Three Mile Island had shaped her life more than she had realized. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paid government grade, a far cry from the healthy income potential of many of her peers. But she was young — there was time to serve now and earn later.

Then her mother got lost one day on the way to the grocery store. Having trouble tying her shoes, turning on the oven and walking away. Now conversing with the dead. The Alzheimer’s diagnosis prompted Nora to give up her own apartment, in order to care for her declining mother. She had been putting off finding a suitable long-term care facility for her, mainly because she still did not know how she could afford it.

Zack noticed Nora’s distress but left her alone, sensing that she did not want to discuss it. He disappeared back beneath his earbuds.

Then suddenly, hours after it was scheduled, the track number for their train finally flipped over on the big board, announcing the train’s approach. A mad rush ensued. Shoving and yelling, stiff-arming, name-calling. Nora gathered up their bags and hooked her mother’s arm and hollered at Zack to move.

It got uglier still when the Amtrak official at the top of the narrow escalator leading down to the track said the train wasn’t ready yet. Nora found herself near the rear of the angry crowd — so far back, she wasn’t sure they would make it onto the train, even with paid tickets.

And so, Nora did something she had promised herself she would never do: she used her CDC badge to push her way through to the front of the line. She did so knowing that it was not for her own selfish benefit but for her mother and Zack. Still, she heard the name-calling and felt the daggers in every passenger’s eyes as the crowd slowly parted, begrudgingly allowing them through.

And then it seemed it was all for nothing. Once they finally opened the escalator and allowed passengers down to the underground track, Nora found herself facing empty rails. The train was again delayed, and no one would tell them why, or give an estimate as to how long.

Nora arranged for her mother to sit on their bags at their prime position at the yellow line. She and Zack split the last of a bag of Hostess doughnuts, Nora allowing each of them only sips of water from the half-full gym bottle she had packed.

The afternoon had slipped away from them. They would be departing — fingers crossed — after sunset, and that made Nora nervous. She had planned and expected to be well out of the city and on their way north by nightfall. She kept leaning out over the edge of the platform, eyeing the tunnels, her weapon bag tight against her side.

The rush of tunnel air came like a sigh of relief. The light announced the train’s approach, and everyone stood. Nora’s mother was nearly elbowed over the edge by some guy wearing an enormously bulky backpack. The train glided in, everyone jockeying for position — as a pair of doors miraculously stopped right in front of Nora. Finally something was going their way.

The doors parted and the rush of the crowd carried them inside. She claimed twin seats for her mother and Zack, shoving their possessions into the overhead rack, save for Zack’s backpack — he held it on his lap — and Nora’s weapon bag. Nora stood before them, their knees touching hers, hands gripping the railing overhead.

The rest piled inside. Once aboard, and knowing now that the final stage of their exodus was about to begin, the relieved passengers exhibited a bit more civility. Nora watched a man give up his seat to a woman with a child. Strangers helped others hauling bags. There was an immediate sense of community among the fortunate.

Nora herself felt a sudden sense of well-being. She was at least on the verge of breathing easy. “You good?” she asked Zack.

“Never better,” he said, with a slight roll of his eyes, untangling his iPod wires and fitting the buds into his ears.

As she had feared, many passengers — some of them ticketed, some unticketed — did not make the train. After some trouble closing all the doors, those left behind began banging on the windows, while others went pleading to attendants who looked like they would rather be on the train themselves. Those that had been turned away looked like war-torn refugees, and Nora closed her eyes and said a brief prayer for them — and then another one for herself, for forgiveness, for putting her loved ones ahead of these strangers.

The silver train started to move west, toward the tunnels under the Hudson River, and the packed car broke out into applause. Nora watched the lights of the station slide away and disappear, and then they were rising through the underworld, toward the surface — like swimmers surfacing for much-needed breath.

She felt good inside the train, cutting through the darkness like a sword through a vampire. She looked down at her mother’s lined face, watching the woman’s eyes dip and flutter. Two minutes of rocking put her immediately to sleep.

They emerged from the station into the fallen night, running briefly aboveground before the tunnels underneath the Hudson River. As rain spit at the train’s windows, Nora gasped at what she saw. Glimpses of anarchy: cars in flames, distant blazes, people fighting under strings of black rain. People running through the streets — were they being chased? Hunted? Were they even people at all? Maybe they were the ones doing the hunting.

She checked Zack, finding him focused on his iPod display. Nora saw, in his concentration, the father in the son. Nora loved Eph, and believed she could love Zack — even though she still knew so little about him. Eph and his boy were similar in so many ways, beyond appearance. She and Zack would have plenty of time to get to know each other once they reached the isolated camp.

She looked back out at the night, the darkness, and the power outages broken here and there by headlights, occasional bursts of generator-powered illumination. Light equaled hope. The land on either side began to give way, the city starting to retreat. Nora pressed against the window to chart their progress, to gauge how long it would be until they were through the next tunnel and clear of New York.

That was when she saw, standing on the top corner of a low wall, a figure outlined against a spray of upturned light. Something about this apparition made Nora quiver, a premonition of evil. She could not take her eyes off the figure as the train approached… and the figure began to raise its arm.

It was pointing at the train. Not just at the train, it seemed — but directly at Nora.

The train slowed as it passed, or maybe that was only how it seemed to Nora, her sense of time and motion bent by terror.

Smiling, backlit in the rain, hair sleek and dirty, mouth horribly distended and red eyes ablaze — Kelly Goodweather stared at Nora Martinez.

Their eyes locked as the train rolled past. Kelly’s finger followed Nora.

Nora pressed her forehead against the glass, sickened by the sight of the vampire, and yet knowing what Kelly was about to do.

Kelly jumped at the last moment, leaping with preternatural animal grace, disappearing from Nora’s sight as she latched on to the train.

Setrakian worked quickly, hearing Fet’s van arrive at the back of the shop. He flipped madly through the pages of the old volume on the table, this one the third volume of the French edition of Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, published by Berthelot and Ruelle in Paris in 1888, his eyes going back and forth between its engraved pages and the sheets of symbols he had copied from the Lumen. He studied one symbol in particular. He finally located the engraving, his hands and eyes stopping for a moment.

A six-winged angel, wearing a crown of thorns, with a face both blind and mouth-less — but with multiple mouths festooning each of its wings. At its feet was a familiar symbol — a crescent moon — and a single word.

“Argentum,” read Setrakian. He gripped the yellowing page reverently — and then tore the engraving from its old binding, jamming it inside the pages of his notebook, just as Fet opened the door.

Fet was back before sundown. He was certain he had not been found or traced by the vampire brood, which would lead the Master straight back to Setrakian.

The old man was working over a table near the radio, closing up one of his old books. He had tuned in a talk show, playing low, one of the few voices still on the airwaves. Fet felt a true affinity for Setrakian. Part of it was the bond that grows between soldiers in times of battle, the brotherhood of the trench — in this case, the trench being New York City. Then there was the great respect Fet felt for this weakened old man who simply would not stop fighting. Fet liked to think there were similarities between himself and the professor, in their dedication to a vocation, and mastery of knowledge about their foes — the obvious difference being one of scope, in that Fet fought pests and nuisance animals, while Setrakian had committed himself, at a young age, to eradicating an inhuman race of parasitic beings.

In one sense, Fet thought of himself and Eph as the professor’s surrogate sons. Brothers in arms, yet as opposite as could be. One was a healer, the other an exterminator. One a university-trained family man of high status, the other a blue-collar, self-educated loner. One lived in Manhattan, the other Brooklyn.

And yet the one who had originally been at the forefront of the outbreak, the medical scientist, had seen his influence fall away in the dark days since the source of the virus had become known. While his opposite number, the city employee with a little sideline shop in Flatlands — and the killer instinct — now served at the old man’s side.

There was one other reason Fet felt close to Setrakian. Something Fet could not bring up to him, nor something he was entirely clear on himself. Fet’s parents had immigrated to this country from the Ukraine (not Russia, as they told people, and as Fet still claimed), not only in search of the opportunities all immigrants seek but also to escape their past. Fet’s father’s father — and this was nothing he had ever been told, because no one in his family spoke of it directly, especially his sour father — had been a Soviet prisoner of war, who was conscripted into service at one of the extermination camps during World War II. Whether it was Treblinka or Sobibor or elsewhere, Fet did not know. It was nothing he ever desired to explore. His grandfather’s role in the Shoah was revealed two decades after the war ended, and he was jailed. In his defense, he claimed that he had been victimized at the hands of the Nazis, forced into the lowly role of camp guard. Ukrainians of German extraction had been installed in positions of authority, while the rest toiled at the whim of the sadistic camp commanders. Yet prosecutors submitted evidence of personal enrichment in the postwar years, such as the source of Fet’s grandfather’s wealth in starting his dressmaking company, which he was unable to explain. But it was a blurred photograph of him wearing a black uniform, standing against a fence of barbed wire with a carbine in his gloved hands — lips curled in an expression claimed by some to be a nasty smirk, by others a grimace — that ultimately did him in. Fet’s father never spoke of it while he was alive. What little Fet knew, he had learned from his mother.

Shame can indeed be visited upon future generations, and Fet carried this with him now like a terrible burden, a hot dose of shame always in the pit of his stomach. Realistically, a man can bear no responsibility for the actions of his grandfather, and yet…

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

Fet had never suffered from this affiliation as he did now — except perhaps in dreams. One sequence recurred, disrupting his sleep again and again. In it, Fet has returned to his family’s home village, a place he had never visited in real life. Every door and window is shut to him, and he walks the streets alone, yet watched. And then suddenly, from one end of the street, a roaring burst of angry orange light flies toward him on the cadence of galloping hooves.

A stallion — its coat, mane, and tail aflame — is charging at him. The horse is fully consumed, and Fet, always at the very last second, dives out of its path, turning and watching the animal tear off across the countryside, trailing dark smoke in its wake.

“How is it out there?”

Fet set down his satchel. “Quiet. Menacing.” He shrugged off his jacket, pulling a jar of peanut butter and some Ritz crackers from the pockets. He had stopped off at his apartment. He offered some to Setrakian. “Any word?”

“Nothing,” said Setrakian, inspecting the cracker box as though he might turn down the snack. “But Ephraim is long overdue.”

“The bridges. Clogged.”

“Mmm.” Setrakian pulled out the wax wrapper, sniffing at the contents before trying a cracker. “Did you get the maps?”

Fet patted his pocket. He had journeyed to a DPW depot in Gravesend in order to procure sewer maps for Manhattan, specifically the Upper East Side. “I got them, all right. Question is — will we get to use them?”

“We will. I am certain.”

Fet smiled. The old man’s faith never failed to warm him. “Can you tell me what you saw in that book?”

Setrakian set down the box of crackers and lit up a pipe. “I saw… everything. I saw hope, yes. But then… I saw the end of us. Of everything.”

He slid out a reproduction of the crescent moon drawing seen both in the subway, via Fet’s pink phone video, and in the pages of the Lumen. The old man had copied it three times.

“You see? This symbol — like the vampire itself, how it was once seen — is an archetype. Common to all mankind, East and West — but within it, a different permutation, see? Latent, but revealed in time, like any prophecy. Observe.”

He took the three pieces of paper and, utilizing a makeshift light table, laid them out, superimposing one atop another.

“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple… when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…”

The three moons rotated in the paper, and joined together.

“These are not three moons. No. They are occultations. Three solar eclipses, each occurring at the exact latitude and longitude, marking an even, enormous span of years — signaling an event, now complete. Revealing the sacred geometry of omen.”

Fet saw with amazement that the three shapes together formed a rudimentary biohazard sign: . “But this symbol… I know it from my work. It was just designed in the sixties, I think…”

“All symbols are eternal. They exist even before we dream of them…”

“So how did…”

“Oh, we know,” said Setrakian. “We always know. We don’t discover, we don’t learn. We just remember things that we have forgotten…” He pointed to the symbol. “A warning. Dormant in our mind, reawakened now — as the end of time approaches.”

Fet regarded the worktable Setrakian had taken over. He was experimenting with photography equipment, explaining something about “testing a metallurgical silver emulsion technique” that Fet did not understand. But the old man seemed to know what he was doing. “Silver,” said Setrakian. “Argentum, to the ancient alchemists and represented by this symbol…” Again, Setrakian presented Fet with the image of the crescent moon.

“And this, in turn…” said Setrakian, producing the engraving of the archangel. “Sariel. In certain Enochian manuscripts he is named Arazyal, Asaradel. Names all too similar to Azrael or Ozryel…”

Placing the engraving side to side with the biohazard sign and the alchemical symbol of the crescent moon gave the images a shocking through-line. A convergence, a direction; a goal.

Setrakian felt a surge of energy and excitement. His mind was hunting.

“Ozryel is the angel of death,” said Setrakian. “Muslims call him ‘he of the four faces, the many eyes, and the many mouths. He of the seventy thousand feet and four thousand wings.’ And he has as many eyes and as many tongues as there are men on earth. But you see, that only speaks of how he can multiply, how he can spread…”

Fet’s thoughts swam. The part that most concerned him was safely extracting the blood worm from Setrakian’s jar-sealed vampire heart. The old man had lined the table with battery-powered UV lamps in order to contain the worm. Everything appeared ready, and the jar was close at hand, the fist-size organ throbbing — and yet, now that the time had come, Setrakian was reluctant to butcher the sinister heart.

Setrakian leaned in close to the specimen jar, and a tentacled outgrowth shot out, the mouth-like sucker at its tip adhering to the glass. These blood worms were nasty suckers. Fet understood that the old man had been feeding it drops of his blood for decades now, nursing this ugly thing, and, in doing so, had formed some eerie attachment to it. That was natural enough. But Setrakian’s hesitation here contained an emotional component beyond pure melancholy.

This was more like true sorrow. More like despair.

Fet realized something then. Now and then, in the middle of the night, he had seen the old man speaking to the jar, feeding the thing inside. Alone by candlelight he stared at it, whispered to it, and caressed the cold glass containing the unholy flesh. Once Fet swore he’d heard the old man singing to it. Softly, in a foreign tongue — not Armenian — a lullaby…

Setrakian had become aware of Fet looking at him. “Forgive me, professor,” said Fet. “But… whose heart is it? The original story you told us…”

Setrakian nodded, having been found out. “Yes… that I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village in northern Albania? You are right, that tale is not entirely true.”

Tears sparkled in the old man’s eyes. One drop fell in silence, and, when he finally spoke, he did so in a whisper — as the tale he told required it.