The Fall (31 page)

Somehow, she got her mother down the long step without dropping her. Nora looked forward to where the front car had left the track, angled tight against the tunnel wall, and realized she had to go the other way.

She had departed the claustrophobia of the stuck train for the claustrophobia of an under-river tunnel.

Nora unzipped the side compartment on her travel duffel and pulled out her Luma lamp. She powered it on, the battery humming to life, the
UVC
bulb crackling indigo, burning hot.

The tracks lit up before her. Vampire discharge was everywhere, fluorescent guano, covering the floor and sprayed on the walls. Evidently, they had been crossing this way to the mainland for days, and by the thousands. It was the perfect environment for them: dark, dirty, and concealed from surface eyes.

Others disembarked behind them, a few using mobile phone screens to light their way. “Oh, my God!” one shrieked.

Nora turned and saw, by the light of the passengers’ phones, the train wheels goopy with white vampire blood. Gobs of pale skin and the black gristle of crushed bones hung from the undercarriage. Nora wondered if they were run down accidentally—or had they thrown themselves in the path of the charging train?

Thrown themselves seemed most likely. And if so—then what for?

Nora thought she knew. With the image of Kelly still bright in her mind, Nora threw one arm around Zack, taking her mother by the hand and running for the rear of the train.

New Jersey was a long walk away, and they were not alone here.

They heard screaming aboard the train now. Passengers being mauled by pale creatures marauding through the cars. Nora tried to keep Zack from looking up and seeing the faces pressed against the windows, regurgitating saliva and blood.

Nora got to the end of the train, rounding it—stepping over crushed vampire corpses on the tracks, using her UV light to kill any lurking blood worms—and starting up the other side, where there was a clear path toward the front car.

Tunnels carry and distort noises. Nora wasn’t sure what she was hearing, but its presence put an extra scare into her. She exhorted the people following them to stop a moment and be quiet and still.

She heard a noise like scuttling, only many times repeated and magnified through the tunnel. Coming behind them, in the same direction the train had been traveling. A horde of footsteps.

The light from the cell phone screens and Nora’s UV lamp had very little range. Something was coming at them out of the dark void, and Nora corralled Zack and her mother and started running the other way.

The hunter pulled back from Fet’s side, his spike still poised at Fet’s neck. Setrakian had started to tell the Ancients about Eldritch Palmer’s association with the Master.

We know already. He came to us some time ago, petitioning us for immortality.

“And you refused him. So he went across the street.”

He did not meet our criteria. Eternity is a beautiful gift, entrance into an immortal aristocracy. We are rigorously selective.

The voice reverberating inside Fet’s head sounded like a scolding parent’s multiplied a thousandfold. He looked at the hunter next to him and wondered: some long-dead European king? Alexander the Great? Howard Hughes?

No—not these hunters. Fet guessed he was an elite soldier in his former life. Plucked off a battlefield, perhaps during a special-ops mission. Drafted by the ultimate selective service. But who knew which army? What era? Vietnam? Normandy? Thermopylae?

Setrakian said—confirming for himself lifelong theories as he stated these facts—”The Ancients are connected to the human world at its uppermost levels. They assume the initiate’s wealth, which helps them insulate themselves and assert their influence across the globe.”

Were it a simple business transaction, his wealth is substantial enough. But we require more than riches. What we seek is power, access, and obedience. He lacked the last.

“Palmer grew angry when the gift was refused him. So he sought out the rogue Master, the young one—”

You seek to know all, Setrakian. Greedy until the end. Let us agree that you are half correct in everything. Palmer may have sought out the Seventh, yes. But be assured—it was the Seventh who found him.

“Do you know what it is he wants?”

We do know.

“You must know then that you are in trouble. The Master is creating minions by the thousands, too many for your hunters to cut down. His strain is spreading. These are beings you cannot control, not through power or influence.”

You spoke of the Silver Codex.

The power of their voices made Fet squint.

Setrakian stepped forward. “What I want from you is unlimited financial support. I require it immediately.”

The auction. Don’t you think we have considered this before?

“But bidding on it yourselves, employing a human representative, risked exposure. Impossible to guarantee the motives. Better to scuttle each potential sale throughout the years. But that will not be possible this time. I am certain that the timing of this widespread attack, the occultation of the Earth, and the reappearance of the book are no coincidence. It is all aligned. Do you deny this cosmic symmetry?”

We do not. But then again, the outcome will follow the design no matter what we do.

“Doing nothing seems to me like a flawed plan.”

And what would you want in return?

“A brief glimpse at its contents. Handcrafted in silver, this book is the one human creation you cannot possess. I have seen the Silver Codex, as you refer to it. It holds many revelations, I can guarantee you that. You would be wise to see what mankind knows of your origin.”

Half-truths and speculation.

“Is it? Can you take that chance? Mal’akh Elohim?”

A pause. Fet felt his head relax a moment. He could have sworn he saw the Ancient purse its lips in disgust.

Unlikely alliances are often the most productive.

“Let me be quite clear here. I offer you no alliance. This is nothing more than a wartime truce. The enemy of my enemy is in this instance neither my friend nor yours. I promise nothing other than a viewing of the book, and through it, a chance to defeat the rogue Master before he destroys you. But once this agreement is consummated, I promise you only that the fight will continue. I will come after you again. And you after me…”

Once you view the book, Setrakian, we cannot allow you to live. You must know that. This holds for any human.

Fet swallowed and said, “I’m not much of a reader anyway…”

Setrakian said, “I accept. And now that we understand each other, there is one other thing I need. Not from you, but from your man here. From Gus.”

Gus stepped in front of the old man and Fet. “Just so long as it involves killing.”

There was no ribbon-cutting ceremony. No giant pair of prop scissors, no dignitaries or politicians. No fanfare at all.

The Locust Valley Nuclear Power Plant went online at 5:23 A.M. Resident Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors oversaw the procedures from the control room of the $17 billion facility.

Locust Valley was a nuclear fission facility, operating twin thermal, light-water-moderated Generation
III
reactors. All site and safety reviews had been completed before the Uranium-235 bundles and the control rods were introduced into the water inside the pressurized core.

The principle of controlled fission is likened to a nuclear bomb exploding at a slow, steady rate, rather than a millisecond. The heat produced generates electricity, which is then harnessed and delivered in a manner similar to that of conventional coal-burning power plants.

Palmer understood the concept of fission only in the sense that it was similar to cell division in biology. The energy was produced in the splitting: that was the value and the magic of nuclear fuel.

Outside, the twin cooling towers gave off steam like giant beakers of concrete.

Palmer marveled. Here was the final piece of the puzzle. The last tumbler falling into place.

This was the moment of the bolt sliding free, just before the great vault door is opened.

As he watched steam clouds drift off into the ominous sky like ghosts rising from great boiling cauldrons, he remembered Chernobyl. The black village of Pripyat, where he had first encountered the Master. The reactor accident was, like the concentration camps in World War II, a lesson for the Master. The human race had shown the Master the way. They had provided the very tools for their own demise.

All of it underwritten by Eldritch Palmer.

He’s been out there turning folks for free.

Ah, Dr. Goodweather. But the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. That was how it was supposed to work, according to the Bible.

But this wasn’t the Bible. This was America.

The first should be first.

At once, Palmer knew how his business partners felt after dealing with him. Like they’d been punched in the gut with the same hand they just shook.

You think you’re working with somebody, until you realize: you’re working
for
them.

Why make you wait in line?

Indeed.

Zack pulled away from Nora’s hand when his iPod fell to the tunnel floor. It was stupid, it was a reflex, but his mom had bought it for him, even paying for tunes she didn’t care for very much, and sometimes hated. When he held the magical little device in his hand and lost himself in the music, he was losing himself in her as well.

“Zachary!”

Weird for Nora to use his full name, but it worked, straightening him up fast. She looked frantic, holding on to her mother near the front of the train. Zack felt something extra for Nora now, something they had in common, seeing her mother so sick: both of their mothers were lost to them, and yet still partly there.

Zack grabbed the music player and shoved it into his jeans pocket, leaving his tangled earphones behind. The derailed train rocked faintly with howling violence and Nora tried to block it from his view. But he knew. He had seen the windows running red. He had seen the faces. He was half in shock, moving through a terrible dream.

Nora had stopped, staring in horror at something behind him.

Out of the tunnel darkness came small figures moving at great speed. With inhuman agility, these recent human children, none of them older than their early teens, sprang toward them along the tracks.

They were led by a phalanx of blind vampire children, eyes black and burned out. The blind ones moved more strangely, the sighted children overtaking them once they reached the train, emitting horrible little squeals of inhuman joy.

They immediately set upon the passengers fleeing the carnage on the train. Others raced up the tunnel walls and swarmed over the roof of the train like baby spiders crawling out of an egg sac.

And among them—one adult figure moved with evil purpose. A feminine form, shadowed by the dim tunnel light, seemingly directing the onslaught. A possessed mother leading an army of demon children.

A hand gripped the hood of his jacket—it was Nora—yanking Zack away. He stumbled, turning to run with her, taking Nora’s mother’s arm under his shoulder and half-dragging the old woman from the train wreck flooding over with mad vampire children.

Nora’s indigo light barely illuminated their path along the tracks, brightening the kaleidoscope of colorful and sickly psychedelic vampire excrement. No other passengers followed them.

“Look!” Zack said.

His young eyes spotted a pair of steps leading to a door in the left-hand wall. Nora steered them that way, running up to try the handle. It was stuck, or locked, so she stepped back and kicked at it with the heel of her shoe again and again until the handle came down and the door popped open.

Through the other side was an identical platform and two steps leading down into another tunnel. More train tracks, this the southern tube of the tunnel, heading eastbound from New Jersey to Manhattan.

Nora slammed the door, shutting it as hard as she could, then hustled them down onto the tracks.

“Hurry,” she said. “Keep moving. We can’t fight them all.”

They pushed farther into the dark tunnel. Zack helped Nora, supporting her mother, but it was clear they could not walk like this forever.

They never heard anything behind them—never heard the door bang open—and still they moved as though the vampires were right on their heels. Every second felt like borrowed time.

Nora’s mother had lost both her shoes, her nylons torn, her feet cut and bleeding. She said over and over, her voice rising, “I need to rest. I want to go home.”

Finally, it was too much. Nora slowed, Zack slowing with her. Nora clamped her hand over her mother’s mouth, needing to silence her.

Zack saw Nora’s face by the purple light of her lamp. He read the stricken expression on her face as she struggled to carry and silence her mother at the same time.

He realized then that she had to make a terrible decision.

Her mother was trying to peel Nora’s hand off her mouth. Nora shrugged down her duffel bag. “Open this,” she told him. “I want you to take a knife.”

“I already have one.” Zack dug into his pocket, pulling out the brown bone handle, unfolding the four-inch silver blade.

“Where did you get that?”

“Professor Setrakian gave it to me.”

“Good. Zack. Please listen. Do you trust me?”

Such a strange question. “Yes,” he said.

“Listen to me. I need you to hide. To get down and crawl underneath this overhang.” The track sides were buttressed about two feet from the ground, the angle beneath them cloaked in shadow. “Lie down under there and hold that knife close to your chest. Stay in the shadow. I know it’s dangerous. I won’t be… I won’t be long, I promise. Anyone comes by and stops near you, anyone who isn’t me—
anyone
—you cut them with that. Do you understand?”

“I…” He had seen the faces of the passengers on the train, pressed against the windows. “I understand.”

“The throat, the neck—anywhere you can. Keep cutting and stabbing until they fall. Then run ahead and hide again. Understand?”