The Fall (34 page)

“Sir, our information is that it has just been rescinded. I am very sorry. You will have to take up the matter with your bank—”

“My bank! On the contrary, we will complete the bidding here and now, and then I will straighten out this irregularity!”

“I am sorry, sir. The house rules are the same as they have been for decades, and cannot be altered, not for anyone.” The auctioneer looked out over the audience, resuming the bidding. “I have $32 million.”

Eichhorst raised his paddle. “$35 million!”

“Sir, I am sorry. The bid is $32 million. Do I hear $32.5?”

Setrakian sat with his paddle on his leg, ready.

“$32.5?”

Nothing.

“$32 million, going once.”

“$40 million!” said Eichhorst, standing in the aisle now.

“$32 million, going twice.”

“I object! This auction must be canceled. I must be allowed more time—”

“$32 million. Lot 1007 is sold to bidder #23. Congratulations.”

The gavel came down to ratify the sale; the room burst into applause. Hands reached toward Setrakian in congratulations, but the old man got to his feet as quickly as possible and walked to the front of the room, where he was met by another steward.

“I would like to take possession of the book immediately,” he informed her.

“But, sir, we have some paperwork—”

“You may clear the payment, including the house’s commission, but I am taking possession of the book, and I am doing so now.”

Gus’s battered Hummer wove and bashed its way back across the Queensboro Bridge. As they returned to Manhattan, Eph spotted dozens of military vehicles staged at 59th Street and Second Avenue, in front of the entrance to the Roosevelt Island Tramway. The larger, canopied trucks read
FORT
DRUM
in black stencil, and two white buses, as well as some Jeeps, read
USMA
WEST
POINT
.

“Shutting down the bridge?” said Gus, his gloved hands tight upon the steering wheel.

“Maybe enforcing the quarantine,” said Eph.

“You think they are with us or against us?”

Eph saw personnel in combat fatigues pulling a tarp down off a large, truck-mounted machine gun—and he felt his heart lift a little. “I’m going to say with us.”

“I hope so,” said Gus, swinging hard toward uptown. “Because if not, this is gonna get even more fucking interesting.”

They arrived at 72nd and York just as the street battle was getting underway. Vamps came streaming out of the brick-tower nursing home across the street from Sotheby’s—the aged residents imbued with new motility and
strigoi
strength.

Gus killed the engine and popped the trunk. Eph, Angel, and the two Sapphires jumped out and started grabbing silver.

“I guess he won it after all,” said Gus, ripping open a carton, handing Eph two vases of painted glass with narrow necks, gasoline sloshing inside.

“Won what?” said Eph.

Gus wicked a rag into each and then flicked open a silver-plated Zippo, igniting them. He took one vase from Eph and walked out into the street away from the Hummer. “Put your shoulder into it, homes,” said Gus. “On three. One. Two.
Yahh
!”

They catapulted the economy-sized Molotov cocktails over the heads of the marauding vampires. The vases shattered, igniting immediately, liquid flame opening up and spreading instantly like twin pools of hell. Two Carmelite sisters went up first, their brown-and-white habits taking to the flame like sheets of newspaper. Then went the multitude of vampires in bathrobes and housecoats, squealing. The Sapphires came on next, skewering the engulfed creatures, finishing them off—only to see more come charging down 71st Street, like maniac firefighters answering a psychic five-alarm call.

A couple of burning vampires charged on, flames trailing, and only stopped a foot or so away from Gus after being riddled with silver bullets.

“Where the hell are they already?” yelled Gus, looking to Sotheby’s entrance. The tall, thin sidewalk trees out front burned like hellish sentries outside the auction house.

Eph saw building guards rushing to lock the revolving doors inside the glass lobby. “Come on!” he yelled, and they fought their way past the burning trees. Gus wasted some silver bolts on the doors, puncturing and weakening the glass before Angel charged through.

Setrakian leaned heavily on his oversize walking stick in the elevator going down. The auction had drained him, and yet there was so much more to do. Fet stood at his side, his weapon pack on his back, the $32 million book in bubble wrap under his arm.

To Setrakian’s right, one of the auction house’s security guards waited with hands clasped over his belt buckle.

Chamber music played over the panel speaker. A string quartet, Dvor$aAk.

“Congratulations, sir,” said the security guard, to break the silence.

“Yes,” said Setrakian. He noticed the white wire in the man’s brown ear. “Does your radio work in this elevator, by any chance?”

“No, sir, it does not.”

The elevator stopped abruptly, all three men grabbing for the wall to steady themselves. The car started down again at once, then again stopped. The number on the overhead display read 4.

The guard pressed the
DOWN
button, then the 4 button, thumbing each one numerous times.

While the guard was so engaged, Fet drew a sword from his pack and faced the elevator door. Setrakian twisted the grip of his walking stick, exposing the silver shaft of his hidden blade.

The first bang against the door shook the guard, making him jump back.

The second blow produced a serving bowl-size dent.

The guard reached out his hand to feel the convexity. He began to say, “What the—”

The door slid open, and pale hands reached inside, pulling him out.

Fet barreled out after him with the book clutched under his arm, lowering his shoulder and driving forward like a running back taking the pigskin through an entire defensive line. He plowed the vampires straight back against the wall, Setrakian exiting behind him, his silver sword flashing, killing a path toward the main floor.

Fet slashed and chopped, fighting at close quarters with the creatures, feeling their inhuman warmth, their acidic white blood spurting onto his coat. He reached for the security guard with the fingers of his sword hand, but found he could do nothing for him, the guard disappearing to the floor beneath a huddle of hungry vampires.

With wide, sweeping slices, Setrakian cleared the way to the front railing overlooking the interior four-story drop. Outside, he saw bodies burning in the street, trees on fire, a melee at the building entrance. Inside, looking straight down, he saw the gangbanger Gus alongside his older Mexican friend. It was the limping ex-wrestler who looked up, pointing out Setrakian.

“Here!” Setrakian called back to Fet. Fet extricated himself from the pile-up, checking his clothes for blood worms as he came running. Setrakian pointed out the wrestler.

“You sure?” said Fet.

Setrakian nodded, and Fet, with a great scowl, held the
Occido Lumen
out over the railing, giving the wrestler a moment to limp over beneath him. Gus slashed a demon in the wrestler’s way, and Setrakian saw someone else—yes, it was Ephraim—warding others away with a lamp of ultraviolet light.

Fet released the precious book, watching it slowly turn as it fell.

Four stories below them, Angel caught it in his arms like a baby thrown from a burning building.

Fet turned, now able to fight two-handedly, sliding a dagger from the bottom of his pack and leading Setrakian to the escalators. The motorized staircases ran crisscross, side-by-side. Vampires on their way up—summoned to battle by the will of the Master—jumped tracks where the stairways crossed. Fet dispatched them with the tread of his boot and the tip of his sword, sending them sprawling down the moving stairs.

On the bottom flight, Setrakian looked back up through the gap. He saw Eichhorst high above on one of the upper floors, looking down.

The others had done most of the work for them in the lobby. Released vampire corpses lay twisted on the floor, faces and clawed hands frozen in a tableau of white-splattered agony. More vampire drones were pounding on the glass entrance, with still others on the way.

Gus led them back out through the smashed doors onto the sidewalk. Vampires came swarming from 71st and 72nd to the west, and York Avenue north and south. They came up out of the streets, rising through displaced manholes in the intersections. Fighting them off was like trying to bail out of a sinking ship, two vampires arriving for every one destroyed.

A pair of black Hummers rounded the corner hard, headlights angry, front grilles bumping down vampires, rugged tires squashing their bodies. A team of hunters stepped out, hooded and armed with crossbows, and immediately made their presence known. Vampire killing vampire, the drones getting mowed down by the elite guard.

Setrakian knew they had arrived either to escort him and the book directly to the Ancients, or to take possession of the Silver Codex outright. Neither option suited him. He remained close to the wrestler, who carried the book under his arm; his lumbering pace suited Setrakian’s slow legs. Upon learning the wrestler’s moniker, “The Silver Angel,” Setrakian had to smile.

Fet led the way to the corner of 72nd and York. The manhole he wanted had already been popped open, and he grabbed Creem and sent him down first, to clear the hole of vampires. He let Angel and Setrakian down next, the wrestler barely fitting inside the hole. Then Eph, without any questions, climbing right down the iron ladder rungs. Gus and the rest of the Sapphires hung back in order to allow the vampires to close in on them, then went down themselves, Fet disappearing below just as the ring of mayhem collapsed on him.

“Other way!” he yelled down to them. “Other way!”

They had started west along the sewer tunnel, toward the heart of the island underground, but Fet dropped down and led them east, underneath one long block that dead-ended over
FDR
Drive. The trough of the tunnel carried a measly trickle of water; lack of human activity in surface Manhattan meant fewer showers, fewer flushes.

“All the way to the end!” said Fet, his voice booming inside the stone tube.

Eph came up alongside Setrakian. The old man was slowing, the nub of his walking stick splashing in the water stream. “Can you make it?” said Eph.

“Have to,” said Setrakian.

“I saw Palmer. Today is the day. The last day.”

Setrakian said, “I know it.”

Eph patted Angel’s arm, the one that held the bubble-wrapped book. “Here.” Eph took the bundle from him, and the hobbling Mexican giant took Setrakian’s arm, helping the old man along.

Eph looked at the wrestler as they rushed, filled with questions he knew not how to ask.

“Here they come!” said Fet.

Eph looked back. Mere shapes in the dark tunnel, to his eyes, coming at them like a dark rush of drowning water.

Two of the Sapphires turned back to fight. “No!” cried Fet. “Don’t bother! Just get through here!”

Fet slowed between two long wooden cases strapped to pipes along the tunnel walls. They looked like speaker bars, set vertically, angled in toward the tunnel. To each, he had rigged a simple switch wire, both of which he gathered in his hands now.

“Down the side!” he yelled to the others behind him. “Through the panel.”

But none of them turned the corner. The sight of the onrushing vampires and Fet standing alone in the tunnel holding the triggers to Setrakian’s contraption was too compelling.

Out of the darkness came the first faces, red-eyed, mouths open. Tumbling over one another in an all-out race to be the first to attack the humans,
strigoi
surged toward them without any regard for their fellow vampires or themselves. A stampede of sickness and depravity, the fury of the overturned hive.

Fet waited, and waited, and waited, until they were nearly upon him. His voice rose in a yell that started in his throat, but by the end seemed to come straight from his mind, a howl of human perseverance into the gale force of a hurricane.

Their hands reached out, the tide of vampires about to overwhelm him—as he flicked both switches.

The effect was something like the ignition of a giant camera flashbulb. The twin devices went off simultaneously in a single explosion of silver. An expulsion of chemical matter that eviscerated the vampires in a wave of devastation. Those in the rear went as quickly as those at the vanguard, because there was no shadow to hide in, the silver particulate burning through them like radiation, smashing their viral
DNA
.

The silver tinge lingered in the moments after the great purge, like a shiny snowfall, Fet’s howl fading into the emptied tunnel as the shredded matter that was the once-human vampires settled to the tunnel floor.

Gone. As though he had teleported them somewhere else. Like taking a picture, only once the flash faded, no one was there.

No one complete, at least.

Fet released the triggers and turned back at Setrakian.

Setrakian said, “Indeed.”

They followed another ladder, leading down to a walkway with a railing. At the end was a door that opened onto an under-sidewalk grate, the surface visible above them. Fet climbed up the boxes he had set as steps, and popped the loosened grate free with his shoulder.

They emerged at the 73rd Street ramp entrance onto
FDR
Drive. A few strays blundered into them as they rushed across the six-lane parkway over the dividing concrete barriers, moving around abandoned cars toward the East River.

Eph looked back, seeing vampires dropping down off the high balcony that was the courtyard at the end of 72nd Street. They came swarming out of 73rd along the parkway. Eph worried that they were backing themselves up against the river, with blood-hungry revenants closing on all sides.

But on the other side of a low iron fence was a landing, a municipal dock of sorts, though it was too dark for Eph to see what it was for. Fet went over first, moving with surly confidence, and so Eph followed with all the others.