Kitabı oku: «The Fall», sayfa 2
He looked to Fet. “Car packed?”
“Ready to go.”
Eph squeezed Nora’s hand. She did not want to let him go.
Setrakian’s voice came down the spiral stairs in back of the showroom. “Vasiliy? Ephraim! Nora!”
“Down here, professor,” replied Nora.
“Someone approaches,” he said.
“No, we just got rid of them. Vigilantes. Well-armed ones.”
“I don’t mean someone human,” said Setrakian. “And I cannot find young Zack.”
Zack’s bedroom door banged open, and he turned. His dad blew in, looking like he expected a fight. “Jeez, Dad,” said Zack, sitting up in his sleeping bag.
Eph looked all around the room. “Setrakian said he just looked in here for you.”
“Uhh …” Zack made a show of rubbing his eye. “Must not have seen me on the floor.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Eph looked at Zack a bit longer, not believing him, but clearly with something more pressing on his mind than catching his son in a lie. He walked around the room, checking the barred window. Zack noticed that he held one hand behind his back, and moved in such a way that Zack could not see what he held there.
Nora rushed in behind him, then stopped when she saw Zack.
“What is it?” asked Zack, getting to his feet.
His dad shook his head reassuringly, but the smile came too quickly—just a smile, no levity in his eyes, none at all. “Just looking around. You wait here, ’kay? I’ll be back.”
He exited, turning in such a way that the thing behind his back remained obscured. Zack wondered: was it the snap-chunk thing, or some silver sword?
“Stay put,” said Nora, and closed the door.
Zack wondered what it was they were looking for. Zack had heard his mother mention Nora’s name once in a fight with his dad—well, not a fight really, since they were already split up, but more of a venting. And Zack had seen his dad kiss her that one time—right before he left them and went off with Mr. Setrakian and Fet. Then she had been so tense and preoccupied the whole time they were gone. And once they returned—everything had changed. Zack’s dad had looked so down—Zack never wanted to see him look that way again. And Mr. Setrakian came back sick. Zack, in his subsequent snooping, had caught some of the talk, but not enough.
Something about a “master.”
Something about sunlight and failing to “destroy it.”
Something about “the end of the world.”
As Zack stood alone in the spare room now, puzzling out all these mysteries swirling around him, he noticed a blur in a few of the mirrors hanging on the wall. A distortion, akin to a visual vibration—something that should have been in focus but instead appeared hazy and indistinct in the glass.
Something at his window.
Zack turned, slowly at first—then all at once.
She was clinging to the exterior of the building somehow. Her body was disjointed and distorted, her eyes red and wide and burning. Her hair was falling out, thin and pale now, her schoolteacher dress torn away at one shoulder, her exposed flesh smeared with dirt. The muscles of her neck were swollen and deformed, and blood worms slithered beneath her cheeks, across her forehead.
Mom.
She had come. As he knew she would.
Instinctively, he took a step toward her. Then he read her expression, which all at once transformed from pain into a darkness that could only be described as demonic.
She had noticed the bars.
In an instant, her jaw dropped open—way open, just like in the video—a stinger shooting out from deep beneath where her tongue was. It pierced the window glass with a crack and a tinkle, and kept coming through the hole it punched. Six feet in length, the stinger tapering to a point and snapping at full extension mere inches from his throat.
Zack froze, his asthmatic lungs locked, unable to draw any breath.
At the end of the fleshy shoot, a complicated, double-pronged tip quivered, rooting in the air. Zack remained riveted to the spot. The stinger relaxed and, with a casual, upward nod of her head, she retracted it quickly back into her mouth. Kelly Goodweather thrust her head through the window, crashing out the rest of the glass. She squeezed up inside the open window frame, needing only a few more inches to reach Zack’s throat and claim her Dear One for the Master.
Zack was transfixed by her eyes. Red with black points in the center. He searched, vertiginously, for some semblance of Mom.
Was she dead, as Dad said? Or alive?
Was she gone forever? Or was she here—right here in the room with him?
Was she still his? Or was she now someone else’s?
She jammed her head between the iron bars, grinding flesh and cracking bone, like a snake forcing itself into a rabbit’s hole, trying desperately to bridge the extra distance between her stinger and the boy’s flesh. Her jaw fell again, her glowing eyes settling on the boy’s throat, just above his Adam’s apple.
Eph came racing back into the bedroom. He found Zack standing there, staring dumbly at Kelly, the vampire squeezing its head between the iron bars, about to strike. Eph pulled a silver-bladed sword from behind his back, yelling, “NO!” and jumping in front of Zack.
Nora burst into the room behind Eph, turning on a Luma lamp, its harsh UVC light humming. The sight of Kelly Goodweather—this corrupted human being, this monster-mother—repulsed Nora, but she advanced, the virus-killing light in her outstretched hand.
Eph, too, moved toward Kelly and her hideous stinger. The vampire went deep-eyed with animal rage.
“OUT! GO BACK!” Eph bellowed at Kelly the way he might at some wild animal trying to enter his house, scavenging for food. He leveled the sword at her and made a run for the window.
With one last, painfully ravenous look at her son, Kelly pulled back from the window cage, just out of Eph’s blade’s reach—and darted away along the side of the exterior wall.
Nora placed the lamp inside the cage, resting it upon two intersecting bars so that its killing light filled the space of the smashed window, to keep Kelly from returning.
Eph ran back to his son. Zack’s gaze had fallen, his hands at his throat, chest bucking. Eph thought at first it was despair, then realized it was more than that.
A panic attack. The boy was all locked up inside. He was unable to breathe.
Eph looked around frantically, discovering Zack’s inhaler on top of the old television. He pressed the device into Zack’s hands and guided it to his mouth.
Eph squeezed, and Zack huffed, and the aerosol opened up his lungs. Zack’s pallor improved immediately, his airway expanding like a balloon—and Zack slumped, weakened.
Eph set down his sword, steadying the boy—but the revived Zack shoved him away, rushing toward the empty window. “Mom!” he croaked.
Kelly retreated up the brick face of the building, the talons developing out of her middle fingers aiding her ascent as she climbed flat against the building side, like a spider. Fury at the interloper carried her along. She felt—with the intensity of a mother dreaming of a distressed child calling out her name—the exquisite nearness of her Dear One. The psychic beacon that was his human grief. The force of his need for his mother redoubled her unconditional vampiric need for him.
What she saw when she had laid eyes upon Zachary Goodweather again was not a boy. Was not her son, her love. She saw instead a piece of her that stubbornly remained human. She saw something that remained hers by biology, a part of her being forever. Her own blood, only still human-red, not vampire-white. Still carrying oxygen, not food. She saw an incomplete part of her, held back by force.
And she wanted it. She wanted it like crazy.
This was not human love, but vampire need. Vampire longing. Human reproduction spreads outward, creating and growing, while vampiric reproduction operates in the reverse, turning back upon the bloodline, inhabiting living cells and converting them to its own ends.
The positive attractor, love, becomes its opposite, which is not, in fact, hate—nor death. The negative attractor is infection. Instead of sharing love and the joining of seed and egg and the commingling gene pools in the creation of a new and unique being, it is a corruption of the reproductive process. An inert substance invading a viable cell and producing hundreds of millions of identical copies. It is not shared and creative, but violent, destructive. It is a defilement and a perversion. It is biological rape and supplantation.
She needed Zack. As long as he remained unfinished, she remained incomplete.
The Kelly-thing stood poised on the edge of the roof, indifferent to the suffering city all around her. She knew only thirst. A craving, for blood and for her blood kind. This was the frenzy that compelled her; a virus knows only one thing: that it must infect.
She had begun to search for some other way inside this brick box when, from behind the doorway bulkhead, she heard a pair of old shoes crunching gravel.
In the darkness, she saw him well. The old hunter Setrakian appeared with a silver sword, advancing. He meant to pin her against the edge of the roof and the night.
His heat signature was narrow and dull; an aged human, his blood moved slowly. He appeared small, though all humans appeared small to her now. Small and unformed, creatures grasping at the edge of existence, tripping over their paltry intellect. The butterfly with a death’s head on its winged back looks at a furry chrysalis with absolute disdain. An earlier stage of evolution, an outmoded model incapable of hearing the soothing exultation of the Master.
Something in her always went back to Him. Some primitive and yet coordinated form of animal communication. The psyche of the hive.
As the old human advanced toward her with his slaying silver blade glowing brightly in her vision, a response came forth, directly from the Master, relayed through her into the mind of the old avenger.
Abraham.
From the Master, and yet—not of his great voice, as Kelly understood it.
Abraham. Don’t.
It came as a woman’s intonation. Not Kelly’s. No voice she had ever heard.
But Setrakian had. She saw it in his heat signature, the way his heart rate quickened.
I live in her too … I live in her …
The avenger stopped, a hint of weakness coming into his eyes. The Kelly vampire seized on the moment, her chin falling, her mouth jerking open, feeling the impending thrust of her activated stinger.
But then the hunter raised his weapon and came at her with a cry. She had no choice. The silver blade burned in the night of her eyes.
She turned and ran along the edge, turning down and scuttling low along the wall of the building. From the vacant lot below, she looked back once at the old human, his shrinking heat signature, standing alone, watching her go.
Eph went to Zack, pulling on his arm, keeping him back from the scalding UV light of the lamp inside the window cage.
“Get away!” yelled Zack.
“Buddy,” said Eph, trying to calm him down, calm them both down. “Guy. Z. Hey.”
“You tried to kill her!”
Eph didn’t know what to say, because indeed he had. “She’s … she’s dead already.”
“Not to me!”
“You saw her, Z.” Eph didn’t want to have to talk about the stinger. “You saw it. She’s not your mom anymore. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to kill her!” Zack said, his voice still raw from choking.
“I do,” said Eph. “I do.”
He went to Zack, trying again for some contact, but the boy pulled away. He went instead to Nora, who was handy as a female substitute, and cried into her shoulder.
Nora looked back at Eph with consolation in her eyes, but Eph wouldn’t have it. Fet was at the door behind him.
“Let’s go,” said Eph, rushing from the room.
The Night Squad
THEY CONTINUED UP the street toward Marcus Garvey Park, the five off-duty cops on foot, and the sergeant in his personal vehicle.
No badges. No cruiser cameras. No after-action reports. No inquiries, no community boards, and no Internal Affairs.
This was about force. About setting things right.
“Communicable mania,” the feds termed it. “Plague-related dementia.”
What happened to good, old-fashioned “bad guys”? That term gone out of style?
The government was talking about deploying the Staties? The National Guard? The Army?
At least give us blue boys a shot first.
“Hey—what the …!”
One of them was holding his arm. A deep cut, right through the sleeve.
Another projectile landed at their feet.
“Fucking throwing rocks now?”
They scanned the rooftops.
“There!”
A huge chunk of decorative stone, a fleur-de-lis, came sailing down at their heads, scattering them. The piece shattered onto the curb, rock smacking their shins.
“In here!”
They ran for the door, busted inside. The first man in charged up the stairs to the second-floor landing. There, a teenage girl in a long nightshirt stood in the middle of the hallway.
“Get outta here, honey!” he yelled, pushing right past her, heading for the next flight of stairs. Someone was on the move up there. The cop didn’t have to wait for rules of engagement, or justifiable force. He yelled at him to stop, then opened up on the guy, plugging him four times, putting him down.
He advanced on the rioter, all charged up. A black guy with four good hits in his chest. The cop smiled down the gap in the stairs.
“I got one!”
The black guy sat up. The cop backed away, getting off one more round before the guy sprang on him, clutching him, doing something to his neck.
The cop spun, his assault rifle pressed flat between them, feeling the railing give against his hip.
They fell together, landing hard. Another cop turned and saw the suspect on top of the first cop, biting him on the neck or something. Before firing, he looked up to see where they had fallen from—and saw the nightshirt-wearing teen.
She leaped down at him, knocking him flat, straddling him, and clawing at his face and neck.
A third cop came back down the stairs and saw her—then saw the guy behind her with a stinger coming out of his mouth, throbbing as it drained the first cop.
The third cop fired on the teen, knocking her back. He started to go after the other freak when a hand swept down from behind him, a long, talon-like nail slicing open his neck, spinning him into the creature’s arms.
Kelly Goodweather, her rage of hunger and blood-need triggered by the yearning for her son, dragged the cop one-handedly into the nearest apartment, slamming the door so that she could feed deeply and without interruption.
The Master—Part I
THE MAN’S LIMBS twitched for the last time, the faint perfume of his final breath escaping his mouth, the death rattle signaling the end of the repast for the Master. The man’s inert, nude body, released by the towering shadow, collapsed next to the other four victims similarly at the feet of Sardu.
All of them exhibited the same concussive stinger mark in the soft flesh of the inside thigh, right on the femoral artery. The popular image of a vampire drinking from the neck was not incorrect, but powerful vampires favored the femoral artery of the right leg. The pressure and oxygenation were perfect, and the flavor was fuller, almost blunt. The jugular, on the other hand, carried impure, tangy blood. Regardless, the act of feeding had long ago lost its thrill for the Master. Many a time the ancient vampire fed without even looking into its victim’s eyes—although the adrenaline surge of fear in the victim added an exotic tingle to the metallic flavor of blood.
For centuries, human pain remained fresh and even invigorating: its various manifestations amused the Master, the cattle’s delicate symphony of gasps and screams and exhalations still arousing the creature’s interest.
But now, especially when it fed like this, en masse, it sought absolute silence. From within, the Master called upon its primal voice—its original voice—the voice of its true self, shedding all other guests within its body and its will. It emitted its murmur: a pulse, a psycho-sedative rumble from within, mental whiplash, paralyzing nearby prey for the longest time in order that the Master could feed at peace.
But in the end, The Murmur was to be used cautiously, for it exposed the Master’s true voice. Its true self.
It took a bit of time and effort to quiet all the inhabiting voices and discover its own again. This was dangerous, as these voices served as the Master’s cloaking device. The voices—including that of Sardu, the boy hunter whose body the Master inhabited—camouflaged the Master’s presence, position, and thoughts before the other Ancient Ones. They cloaked him.
It had used The Murmur inside the 777 at arrival, and it wielded the pulse-sound now to gain absolute silence and collect its thoughts. The Master could do it here—hundreds of feet below ground level, in a concrete vault at the center of the semi-abandoned charnel house complex. The Master’s chamber resided at the center of a labyrinth of curving corralled areas and service tunnels beneath the steer abattoir above them. Blood and residue had once been collected there, but now, after a thorough cleaning in advance of the Master’s residency, the structure resembled most closely a small industrial chapel.
The pulsating slash on the Master’s back had started healing almost instantly. He never feared any permanent damage from the wound—he never feared anything—and yet the slash would form into a scar, defacing his body like an affront. The old fool and the humans by his side would regret the day they crossed the Master.
The faintest echo of rage—of deep indignation—rippled through its many voices and its single will. The Master felt vexed, a refreshing and energizing sensation. Indignation was not a feeling it experienced often, and thus the Master lowed—even welcomed—this novel reaction.
Quiet laughter rattled through its injured body. The Master was way ahead of the game, and all of its various pawns were behaving as expected. Bolivar, the energetic lieutenant in his ranks, was proving quite apt at spreading the thirst, and had even collected a few serfs that could do sun chores for them. Palmer’s arrogance grew with each tactical advance, yet he remained fully under the Master’s control. The Occultation had marked the time for the plan to be set forth. It had defined the delicate, sacred geometry needed, and now—very soon—the earth would burn …
On the floor, one of the morsels groaned, unexpectedly clinging to life. Refreshed and delighted, the Master gazed down upon it. In its mind, the chorus of voices restarted. The Master looked upon the man at his feet, and some pain and fear remained in his gaze—an unanticipated treat.
This time, the Master indulged itself, savoring the tangy dessert. Under the vaulted roof of the Charnel House, the Master lifted the body up, carefully laying its hand over the chest, above the heart of the man, and greedily extinguished the rhythm within.
Ground Zero
THE PLATFORM WAS empty when Eph jumped down onto the tracks, following Fet into the subway tunnel leading alongside the construction bathtub of the Ground Zero project.
He never imagined he would return here, to this place. After everything they had witnessed and encountered before, he could not imagine a force strong enough to compel him to return to the subterranean labyrinth that was the Master’s nest.
But calluses form in as little as one day. Scotch had helped. Scotch helped quite a bit.
He walked over black rocks along the same out-of-service track as before. The rats had not returned. He passed the sump hose abandoned by the sandhogs who had also disappeared.
Fet carried his usual steel rod of rebar. Despite the more appropriate and impactful weapons they carried—ultraviolet lamps, silver swords, a nail gun loaded with brads of pure silver—Fet continued to carry his rat stick, though they both knew there were no longer any rats here. Vampires had infested the rats’ subterranean domain.
Fet also liked the nail gun. Pneumatic air-powered nail guns required tubing and water. Electric nail guns lacked punch and trajectory. Neither was truly portable. Fet’s powder-actuated gun—a weapon from the old man’s arsenal of oddities ancient and modern—operated on a shotgun load of gunpowder. Fifty silver nails per load, fed through the bottom like the magazine of an UZI. Lead bullets put holes in vamps, same as humans—but when your nervous system is gone, physical pain is a non-issue, copper-plated projectiles reduced to blunt instruments. A shotgun had stopping power, but unless you severed the head at the neck, pellet blasts didn’t kill either. Silver, introduced in the form of an inch-and-a-half brad, killed viruses. Lead bullets made them angry, but silver nails hurt them at something like a genetic level. And, almost as important, at least to Eph: silver scared them. As did ultraviolet light in the pure, shortwave UVC range. Silver and sunlight were the vampire equivalent of the exterminator’s rat stick.
Fet had come to them as a city employee, an exterminator who wanted to know what was driving the rats out from underground. He had already run into a few vampires in his subterranean adventures, and his skill set—a dedicated killer of vermin, and an expert in the workings of the city beneath the city—lent itself perfectly to vampire hunting. He was the one who had first led Eph and Setrakian down here in search of the Master’s nest.
The smell of slaughter remained trapped in the underground chamber. The charred stench of roasted vampire—and the lingering ammonia odor of the creatures’ excrement.
Eph found himself lagging behind, and picked up his pace, sweeping the tunnel with his flashlight, catching up to Fet.
The exterminator chewed an unlit Toro cigar, which he was used to talking around. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m great,” said Eph. “Couldn’t be better.”
“He’s confused. Man, I was confused at that age, and my mother wasn’t … you know.”
“I know. He needs time. And that’s just one of many things I can’t give him right now.”
“He’s a good kid. I don’t usually like kids, but I like yours.”
Eph nodded, appreciative of the effort Fet was putting forth. “I like him too.”
“I worry about the old man.”
Eph stepped carefully over the loose stones. “It took a lot out of him.”
“Physically, sure. But there’s more.”
“Failure.”
“That, yes. Getting so near, after so many years of chasing these things, only to see the Master withstand and survive the old man’s best shot. But something else too. There are things he’s not telling us. Or hasn’t told us yet. I am sure of it.”
Eph remembered the king vampire throwing back its cloak in a gesture of triumph, its lily-white flesh cooking in the daylight as it howled at the sun in defiance—then disappearing over the edge of the rooftop. “He thought sunlight would kill the Master.”
Fet chewed his cigar. “The sun did hurt it, at least. Who knows how long that thing would have been able to take the exposure. And you—you cut him. With the silver.” Eph had gotten in a half-lucky slash across the Master’s back, which the sun’s subsequent exposure fused into an instant black scar. “If it can be hurt, I guess it can be destroyed. Right?”
“But—isn’t a wounded animal more dangerous?”
“Animals, like people, are motivated by pain and fear. But this thing? Pain and fear are where it lives. It doesn’t need any additional motivation.”
“To wipe us all out.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Would he want to wipe out all of mankind? I mean—we’re his food. We’re his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He turns everyone into vamps, there goes his entire food supply. Once you kill all the chickens, no more eggs.”
Eph was impressed by Fet’s reasoning, the logic of an exterminator. “He’s got to maintain a balance, right? Turn too many people into vampires, you create too great a demand for human meals. Blood economics.”
“Unless there’s some other fate in store for us. I only hope the old man has the answers. If he doesn’t …”
“Then nobody does.”
They came up to the dingy tunnel junction. Eph held up his Luma lamp, the UVC rays bringing out the wild stains of vampire waste: their urine and excrement, whose biological matter fluoresced under the low light range. The stains were no longer the garish colors Eph remembered. These stains were fading. This meant that no vampires had revisited the spot recently. Perhaps, through their apparent telepathy, they had been warned away by the deaths of the hundreds of fellow creatures that Eph, Fet, and Setrakian had slain.
Fet used his steel rod to poke at the mound of discarded mobile phones, piled up like a cairn. A desultory monument to human futility—as though vampires had sucked the life out of people, and all that was left were their gadgets.
Fet said, quietly, “I’ve been thinking about something he said. He was talking about myths from different cultures and ages revealing similar basic human fears. Universal symbols.”
“Archetypes.”
“That was the word. Terrors common to all tribes and countries, deep in all humans across the board—diseases and plagues, warfare, greed. His point was, what if these things aren’t just superstitions? What if they are directly related? Not separate fears linked by our subconscious—but what if they have actual roots in our past? In other words, what if these aren’t common myths? What if they are common truths?”
Eph found it difficult to process theory down in the underbelly of the besieged city. “You’re saying that he’s saying that maybe we’ve always known …?”
“Yes—always feared. That this threat—this clan of vampires who subsist on human blood, and whose disease possesses human bodies—existed and was known. But as they went underground, or what-have-you, retreating into the shadows, the truth got massaged into myth. Fact became folklore. But this well of fear runs so deeply, throughout all peoples and all cultures, that it never went away.”
Eph nodded, interested but also distracted. Fet could stand back and consider the big picture, while Eph’s situation was the opposite of Fet’s. His wife—his ex-wife—had been taken, turned. And now she was hell-bent on turning her blood, her Dear One, their son. This plague of demons had affected him on a personal level, and he was finding it difficult to focus on anything else, never mind theorizing on the grand scale of things—though that was, in fact, his training as an epidemiologist. But when something this insidious enters your personal life, all superior thinking goes out the window.
Eph found himself increasingly obsessed with Eldritch Palmer, the head of the Stoneheart Group and one of the three richest men in the world—and the man they had identified as the Master’s coconspirator. As the domestic attacks had scaled up, doubling each passing night, the strain spreading exponentially, the news insisted on reducing them to mere “riots.” This was akin to calling a revolution an isolated protest. They had to know better, and yet someone—it had to be Palmer, a man with a vested interest in misleading the American public and the world at large—was influencing the media and controlling the CDC. Only his Stoneheart Group could finance and enforce such a massive campaign of public misinformation about the occultation. Eph had determined, privately, that if they could not readily destroy the Master, well, they could certainly destroy Palmer, who was not only elderly but notoriously infirm. Any other man would have passed on ten years ago, but Palmer’s vast fortune and unlimited resources kept him alive, like an antique vehicle requiring round-the-clock maintenance just to keep it running. Life, the doctor in Eph imagined, had become for Palmer something akin to a fetish: How long could he keep going?
Eph’s fury at the Master—for turning Kelly, for upending everything Eph believed about science and medicine—was justified but impotent, like shaking his fists at death itself. But condemning Palmer, the Master’s human collaborator and enabler, gave Eph’s torment a direction and a purpose. Even better, it legitimized a desire for personal revenge.
This old man had shattered Eph’s son’s life and broken the boy’s heart.
They reached the long chamber that was their destination. Fet readied his nail gun and Eph brandished his sword before turning the corner.
At the far end of the low chamber stood the mound of dirt and refuse. The filthy altar upon which the coffin—the intricately carved cabinet had traversed the Atlantic inside the cold underbelly of Regis Air Flight 753, inside which the Master lay buried in cold, soft loam—had lain.
The coffin was gone. Disappeared again, as it had from the secure hangar at LaGuardia Airport. The flattened top of the dirt altar still bore its impression.
Someone—or, more likely, some thing—had returned to claim it before Eph and Fet could destroy the Master’s resting place.
“He’s been back here,” said Fet, looking all around.
Eph was bitterly disappointed. He had longed to demolish the heavy cabinet—to turn his wrath on some physical form of destruction, and to disrupt the monster’s habitat in some certain way. To let it know that they had not given up, and would never back down.
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