Kitabı oku: «The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal», sayfa 7

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

THE OLD MAN SAT BEFORE the three adjacent windows at the western end of his dimmed apartment, gazing up at the occluded sun.

Five minutes of night in the middle of the day. The greatest naturally occurring celestial event in four centuries.

The timing could not be ignored.

But to what purpose?

Urgency seized him like a fevered hand. He had not opened the shop that day, instead spending the hours since daybreak hauling things up from his basement workshop. Items and curiosities he had acquired over the years …

Tools of forgotten function. Rare implements of obscure origin. Weapons of lost provenance.

Why he sat here tired now, his gnarled hands aching. No one else but he could foresee what was coming. What was—by every indication—already here.

No one else who would believe him.

Goodfellow. Or Goodwilling. Whatever was the last name of that man who had spoken at the otherwise ridiculous news conference on the television, standing next to the doctor in the navy uniform. How cautiously optimistic all the others had seemed. Exulting over the four survivors, while claiming not to know the final tally of all the dead. We want to assure the public that this threat is contained. Only an elected official would dare to declare a thing safe and finished when he or she didn’t even know yet what it was.

This man was the only one behind the microphones who seemed to think there might be more to this than a malfunctioning aircraft full of dead passengers.

Goodwater?

From the disease control center, the one in Atlanta. Setrakian didn’t know, but he thought his best chance might be with this man. Maybe his only chance.

Four survivors. If they only knew …

He looked out again at the glowing black disk in the sky. Like staring at an eye blinded by a cataract.

Like staring into the future.

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

THE HELICOPTER touched down on the helipad of the Stoneheart Group’s Manhattan headquarters, a building of black steel and glass in the heart of Wall Street. Its top three floors were occupied by Eldritch Palmer’s private New York residence, a regal penthouse constructed with onyx floors, its tables laden with Brancusis, its walls papered with Bacons.

Palmer sat alone in the media room with the shades all drawn, the glowing black eyeball rimmed in fierce crimson and ringed with flaming white staring out at him from a seventy-two-inch viewing screen. This room, like his home in Dark Harbor and the cabin of his medical helicopter, was kept regulated at exactly sixty-two degrees.

He could have gone outside. It was, after all, cold enough for him; he could have been taken up to the roof to witness the occultation. But technology brought him closer to the event itself—not the resulting shadow, but the image of the sun subordinated to the moon—that was the prelude to the devastation. His Manhattan sojourn would be brief. New York City would not be a very pleasant place to visit, not for much longer.

He placed a few phone calls, a few discreet consultations over his secure line. His cargo had indeed arrived as expected.

Smiling, he rose from his chair, walking slowly but straight at the giant viewing screen, as though it were not a screen at all but a portal he was about to step through. He reached out and touched the LCD screen over the image of the angry black disk, liquid pixels squirming bacteria-like beneath the wrinkled pads of his fingers. As though he were reaching through it to touch the eye of death itself.

This occultation was a celestial perversion, a violation of the natural order. A cold, dead stone deposing a burning, living star. For Eldritch Palmer, it was proof that anything—anything, even the grossest betrayal of natural law—was indeed possible.

Of all the human beings watching the occultation that day, in person or via broadcast around the globe, he was perhaps the only one rooting for the moon.

JFK International Control Tower

THOSE IN THE VIEWING CAB of the air-traffic-control tower 321 feet above the ground glimpsed the eerie sunsetlike twilight way off to the west, out beyond the reach of the great moon shadow, past the edge of the umbra. The brighter penumbra, illuminated by the sun’s blazing photosphere, had turned the distant sky yellow and orange, not unlike the healing edge of a wound.

This wall of light was advancing on New York City, which had now been dark for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds.

“Glasses on!” came the order, and Jim Kent put his on, anxious for sunlight’s return. He glanced around, looking for Eph—everyone from the press conference, including the governor and the mayor, had been invited up into the tower cab for the viewing—and, not seeing him, assumed that Eph had slipped back to the maintenance hangar.

In fact, Eph had used this enforced time-out in the best way he knew: by grabbing a chair as soon as the sun had disappeared and going through a packet of construction diagrams showing cutaway views and schematics of the Boeing 777, ignoring the occultation altogether.

The End of Totality

THE END WAS MARKED by an extraordinary phenomenon. Dazzling prominences of light appeared along the western edge of the moon, combining to form a single bead of dazzling sunlight, like a rip in the darkness, giving the effect of a blindingly radiant diamond set upon the moon’s silver ring. But the price for such beauty, despite a vigorous public service campaign dedicated to eye safety during the occultation, was that more than 270 people across the city, 93 of them children, suffered permanent blindness by watching the sun’s dramatic reappearance without wearing proper eye protection. There are no pain sensors in the retina, and the afflicted did not realize they were damaging their eyes until it was too late.

The diamond ring expanded slowly, becoming a band of jewels known as “Baily’s beads,” which merged into the reborn crescent of the sun, essentially pushing the interloping moon away.

On earth, the shadow bands returned, shimmering over the ground like inaugural spirits heralding the passing from one form of existence to another.

As natural light began filling back in, the human relief on the ground was epic. Cheers and hugs and spontaneous applause. Automobile horns sounded all across the city, and Kate Smith’s recorded voice sang over the loudspeakers at Yankee Stadium.

Ninety minutes later, the moon had completely departed from the path of the sun, and the occultation was over. In one very real sense, nothing at all had happened: nothing in the sky had been altered or otherwise affected, nothing had changed on earth except for the few minutes of late-afternoon shade across the northeastern United States. Even in New York itself, people packed up afterward as though the fireworks show was over, and those who had traveled away from home transferred the focus of their dread from the occluded afternoon sun to the traffic awaiting them. A compelling astronomic phenomenon had cast a shadow of awe and anxiety across all five boroughs. But this was New York, and when it was over—it was over.

AWAKENING

Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

Eph returned to the hangar by electric cart, leaving Jim behind with Director Barnes, giving Eph and Nora some breathing room.

The hospital screens had all been wheeled away from beneath the 777’s wing, the tarp pulled up. Ladders were now hung from the fore and aft exit doors, and a gang of NTSB officials was working near the aft cargo hatch. The aircraft was being regarded as a crime scene now. Eph found Nora wearing a Tyvek jumper and latex gloves, her hair pulled up under a paper cap. She was dressed not for biological containment but for simple evidence preservation.

“That was pretty amazing, huh?” she said, greeting him.

“Yeah,” said Eph, his sheaf of airplane schematics under his arm. “Once in a lifetime.”

There was coffee set out on a table, but Eph instead plucked a chilling milk carton from its bowl of ice, tore it open, and emptied it down his throat. Ever since giving up liquor, Eph, like a calcium-hungry toddler, craved whole milk.

Nora said, “Still nothing here. The NTSB is pulling out the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. I’m not sure why they think the black boxes will work when everything else on the airplane failed catastrophically, but I guess I admire their optimism. So far, technology has gotten us exactly nowhere. We’re twenty hours in now, and this thing is still wide open.”

Nora was perhaps the only person he had ever known who worked better and smarter through emotion rather than the other way around. “Anyone been through the inside of the plane since the bodies came out?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet.”

Eph carried his schematics up the wheeled stairs and into the aircraft. The seats were all empty now, and the lighting inside was normal. The only other difference from Eph’s and Nora’s perspective was that they were no longer sealed inside contact suits. All five senses were available to them now.

Eph said, “You smell that?”

Nora did. “What is it?”

“Ammonia. That’s part of it.”

“And … phosphorous?” The odor made her wince. “Is this what knocked them out?”

“No. The plane is clean for gas. But …” He was looking around—looking around for something they could not see. “Nora, go get the Luma wands, would you?”

While she went back out for them, Eph went throughout the cabin closing the window shades, as they had been the night before, darkening the cabin.

Nora returned with two Luma light wands that emitted a black light, similar to the one used on amusement park rides, that made laundered white cotton glow spectrally. Eph remembered Zack’s ninth birthday party at a “cosmic” bowling alley, and how every time Zack smiled, the boy’s teeth shone bright white.

They switched on the lights, and immediately the dark cabin was transformed into a crazy swirl of colors, a massive staining all throughout the floor and over the seats, leaving dark outlines of where the passengers had been.

Nora said, “Oh my God …”

Some of the glowing substance even coated the ceiling in a splashed-out pattern.

“It’s not blood,” said Eph, overwhelmed by the sight. Looking through to the aft cabin was like staring into a Jackson Pollock painting. “It’s some sort of biological matter.”

“Whatever it is, it’s sprayed all over the place. Like something exploded. But from where?”

“From here. From right where we are standing.” He knelt down, examining the carpet, the smell more pungent there. “We need to sample this and test it.”

“You think?” said Nora.

He stood again, still amazed. “Look at this.” He showed her a page of the airplane schematics. It diagrammed emergency rescue access for the Boeing 777 series. “See this shaded module at the front of the plane?”

She did. “It looks like a flight of stairs.”

“Right in back of the cockpit.”

“What’s ‘OFCRA’ stand for?”

Eph walked down to the galley before the cockpit door. Those very initials were printed on a wall panel there.

“Overhead flight crew rest area,” said Eph. “Standard on these long-distance big birds.”

Nora looked at him. “Did anybody check up here?”

Eph said, “I know we didn’t.”

He reached down and turned a handle recessed in the wall, pulling open the panel. A trifolding door revealed narrow, curving steps leading up into the dark.

“Oh, shit,” said Nora.

Eph played his Luma lamp up the stairs. “I take it that means you want me to go first.”

“Wait. Let’s get somebody else.”

“No. They won’t know what to look for.”

“Do we?”

Eph ignored that, and climbed the tight, curling stairs.

The upper compartment was tight, low-ceilinged. There were no windows. The Luma lights were better suited for forensic examination than indoor illumination.

Inside the first module, they made out two side-by-side business-class-size seats folded down. Behind these were two inclined bunks, also side by side, not much larger than a crawl space. The dark light showed both modules to be empty.

It also, however, showed more of the same multicolored mess they had discovered below. On the floor and tracked over the seats and one of the bunks. But here it was smudged, almost as though tracked in while still wet.

Nora said, “What the hell?”

The ammonia smell was here as well—and something else. A pungent odor.

Nora noticed it too, bringing the back of her hand beneath her nostrils. “What is it?”

Eph stood almost doubled over under the low ceiling between the two chairs. He was trying to put a word to it. “Like earthworms,” he said. “Used to dig them up as kids. Cut them in half in order to watch each section wriggle away. Their smell was earth, the cold soil they crawled through.”

Eph ran his black light over the walls and floors, scouring the chamber. He was about to give up when he noticed something behind Nora’s paper booties.

“Nora, don’t move,” said Eph.

He leaned to one side for a better angle on the carpeted floor behind her, Nora frozen as though she were about to trip a land mine.

A small clump of soil lay on the patterned carpet. No more than a few grams of dirt, a trace amount, richly black.

Nora said, “Is that what I think it is?”

Eph said, “The cabinet.”

They climbed back down the outside stairs to the area of the hangar reserved for cargo, where food-service carts were now being opened and inspected. Eph and Nora scanned the piles of luggage, the golf bags, the kayak.

The black wooden cabinet was gone. The space it had previously occupied, on the edge of the tarpaulin, was bare.

“Someone must have moved it,” said Eph, still looking. He walked away a few steps, scanning the rest of the hangar. “Couldn’t have gotten far.”

Nora’s eyes were blazing. “They are just starting to go through all this stuff. Nothing’s been taken out yet.”

Eph said, “This one thing was.”

“This is a secure site, Eph. That thing was what, about eight by four by three? It weighed a few hundred pounds. Would have taken four men to carry it.”

“Exactly. So somebody knows where it is.”

They went to the duty officer manning the hangar door, the keeper of the site log. The young man consulted his master list, a time log of everyone’s and everything’s entrances and exits. “Nothing here,” he said.

Eph sensed Nora’s objection rising and spoke before she could. “How long have you been here—standing right here?”

“Since about twelve, sir.”

“No break?” said Eph. “What about during the eclipse?”

“I stood right out here.” He pointed to a spot a few yards away from the door. “No one went by me.”

Eph looked back at Nora.

Nora said, “What in the hell is going on?” She looked at the duty officer. “Who else might have seen a great big coffin?”

Eph frowned at the word “coffin.” He looked back into the hangar, and then up at the security cameras in the rafters.

He pointed. “They did.”

Eph, Nora, and the Port Authority site log duty officer walked up the long, steel staircase to the control office overlooking the maintenance hangar. Below, mechanics were removing the aircraft’s nose for a look at the internals.

Four drone cameras ran constantly inside the hangar: one at the door leading to the office stairs; one trained on the hangar doors; one up in the rafters—the one Eph had pointed to—and one in the room they were standing in now. All displayed on a four-square screen.

Eph asked the maintenance foreman, “Why the camera in this room?”

The foreman shrugged. “Prolly ’cause this is where the petty cash is.”

He took his seat, a battered office chair whose armrests were striped with duct tape, and worked the keyboard beneath the monitor, expanding the rafter view to full screen. He scanned back through the security recording. The unit was digital, but a few years old, and too distorted to make out anything clearly during the rewind.

He stopped it. On the screen, the cabinet lay exactly where it had, on the edge of the off-loaded cargo.

“There it is,” said Eph.

The duty officer nodded. “Okay. So let’s see where it went.”

The foreman punched it forward. It ran more slowly than the rewind, but was still pretty fast. The light in the hangar darkened with the occultation, and when it brightened again, the cabinet was gone.

“Stop, stop,” said Eph. “Back it up.”

The foreman backed up a little, pressed play again. The time code on the bottom showed the image playing more slowly than before.

The hangar dimmed and at once the cabinet was again gone.

“What the—?” said the foreman, hitting pause.

Eph said, “Go back just a bit.”

The foreman did, then let it play through in real time.

The hangar dimmed, still lit by the interior work lights. The cabinet was there. And then it vanished.

“Wow,” said the duty officer.

The foreman paused the video. He was confounded too.

Eph said, “There is a gap. A cut.”

The foreman said, “No cut. You saw the time code.”

“Go back a bit then. A bit more … right there … now again.”

The foreman played it again.

And again the cabinet disappeared.

“Houdini,” grumbled the foreman.

Eph looked at Nora.

“It didn’t just disappear,” said the duty officer. He pointed out the other luggage nearby. “Everything else stays the same. Not a flicker.”

Eph said, “Back it up again. Please.”

The foreman ran it yet again. The cabinet disappeared yet again.

“Wait,” said Eph. He’d seen something. “Step it back—slowly.”

The foreman did, and ran it again.

“There,” said Eph.

“Christ,” exclaimed the foreman, almost jumping out of his creaky seat. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?” said Nora, together with the duty officer.

The foreman was into it now, rewinding the image just a few steps.

“Coming …,” said Eph, readying him. “Coming …” The foreman held his hand over the keyboard like a game show contestant waiting to press a buzzer. “… there.”

The cabinet was gone again. Nora leaned close. “What?”

Eph pointed to the side of the monitor. “Right there.”

Just evident on the wide right edge of the image was a black blur.

Eph said, “Something bursting past the camera.”

“Up in the rafters?” said Nora. “What, a bird?”

“Too damn big,” Eph said.

The duty officer, leaning close, said, “It’s a glitch. A shadow.”

“Okay,” Eph said, standing back. “A shadow of what?”

The duty officer straightened. “Can you go frame by frame?”

The foreman tried. The cabinet disappeared from the floor … almost simultaneously with the appearance of the blur in the rafters. “Best I can do on this machine.”

The duty officer studied the screen again. “Coincidence,” he declared. “How could anything move at that speed?”

Eph asked, “Can you zoom in?”

The foreman rolled his eyes. “This here ain’t CSI—it’s Radio-fucking-Shack.”

“So, it’s gone,” Nora said, turning to Eph, the other men unable to help. “But why—and how?”

Eph cupped his hand over the back of his neck. “The soil from the cabinet … it must be the same as the soil we just found. Which means …”

Nora said, “Are we formulating a theory that someone got up into the overhead flight crew rest area from the cargo hold?”

Eph recalled the feeling he had gotten, standing in the cockpit with the dead pilots—just before discovering that Redfern was still alive. That of a presence. Something nearby.

He moved Nora away from the other two. “And tracked some of that … whatever swirl of biological matter in the passenger cabin.”

Nora looked back to the image of the black blur in the rafters.

Eph said, “I think someone was hiding up in that compartment when we first entered the plane.”

“Okay …,” she said, grappling with that. “But then—where is it now?”

Eph said, “Wherever that cabinet is.”