The Fall (40 page)

All at once, the Master bucked, as though choking. His head jerked back and his nictitating eyelids fluttered. Still, the seal remained tight, the drinking continued stubbornly until the end. The Master disengaged finally—the entire process having taken less than half a minute—its flushed red stinger retracting. The Master stared at Setrakian, reading the interest in his eyes, then stumbled backward a step. Its face contracted, the blood worms slowing, its thick neck gagging.

It dropped Setrakian to the floor and staggered away, sickened by the old man’s blood meal. A flame-like sensation in the pit of his gut.

Setrakian lay on the floor of the control room in a dim haze bleeding through the puncture wound. He finally relaxed his tongue, feeling that the last of the pills in the basket of his jaw were gone. He had ingested the blood vessel-relaxing nitroglycerin and the blood-thinning Coumadin derivative of Fet’s rat poison in massive overdose levels, and passed them along to the Master.

Fet was, indeed, correct: the creatures had no purging mechanism. Once a substance was ingested, they could not vomit it.

Burning inside, the Master moved through the doors at a blur, racing off into the screaming alarms.

The Johnson Space Center went silent halfway through the station’s dark orbit, as they passed the dark side of the Earth. She’d lost Houston.

Thalia felt the first few bumps shortly after that. It was debris, space junk plunking the station. Nothing very unusual about that—only the frequency of the impacts.

Too many. Too close together.

She floated as still as possible, trying to calm herself, trying to think. Something wasn’t right.

She made her way to the porthole and gazed out upon the Earth. Two very hot points of light were visible here on the night side of the planet. One was on the very edge, right on the ridge of dusk. Another one was nearer to the eastern side.

She had never witnessed anything like it, and nothing in her training or the many manuals she had read prepared her for this sight. The intensity of the light, its evident heat—mere pinpoints on the globe itself, and yet her trained eye knew that these were explosions of enormous magnitude.

The station was rocked by another firm impact. This was not the usual small metal hail of space debris. An emergency indicator went off, yellow lights flashing near the door. Something had perforated the solar panels. It was as though the space station were under fire. Now she would need to suit up and—

BAMMM!
Something had struck the hull. She swam over to a computer and saw immediately the warning of an oxygen leak. A rapid one. The tanks had been perforated. She called out to her shipmates, heading for the airlock.

A bigger impact shook the hull. Thalia suited up as fast as she could, but the station itself had been breached. She struggled to fasten her suit helmet, racing the deadly vacuum. With her last ounce of strength, she opened the oxygen valve.

Thalia drifted into darkness, losing consciousness. Her final thought before blackout was not of her husband but of her dog. In the silence of space, she somehow heard him barking.

Soon the International Space Station joined the rest of the flotsam hurtling through space, gradually slipping from its orbit, floating inexorably toward Earth.

Setrakian’s head swam as he lay on the floor of the rumbling Locust Valley Nuclear Power Plant.

He was turning. He could feel it.

A constricting pain in his throat that was only the beginning. His chest a hive of activity. The blood worms had settled and released their payload: the virus breeding quickly inside him, overwhelming his cells. Changing him. Trying to remake him.

His body could not withstand the turning. Even without his now-weakened veins, he was too old, too weak. He was like a thin-stemmed sunflower bending under the weight of its growing head. Or a fetus growing from bad chromosomes.

The voices. He heard them. The buzz of a greater consciousness. A coordination of being. A concert of cacophony.

He felt heat. From his rising body temperature, but also from the trembling floor. The cooling system meant to prevent hot nuclear fuel from melting had failed—failed on purpose. The fuel had melted through the bottom of the reactor core. Once it reached the water table, the ground beneath the plant would erupt in a lethal release of steam.

Setrakian.

The Master’s voice in his head. Phasing in and out with his own. Setrakian had a vision then, of what looked like the rear of a truck—the National Guard trucks he had seen outside the plant’s entrance. The view from the floor, vague and monochromatic, seen through the eyes of a being with night vision enhanced beyond human ability.

Setrakian saw his walking stick—Sardu’s walking stick—rattling around just a few feet away, as though he could reach out and touch it one last time.

Pic—pic—pic…

He was seeing what the Master saw.

Setrakian, you fool.

The floor of the truck rumbled, speeding away. The view rocked back and forth as though seen by a thing writhing in pain.

You thought poisoning your blood could kill me?

Setrakian pulled himself up onto all fours, relying on the temporary strength the turning imbued him with.

Pic—pic…

I have sickened you,
strigoi, Setrakian thought.
Again I have weakened you.

And he knew the Master could hear him now.

You are turned.

I have finally released Sardu. And soon I will be released myself.

And he said nothing more, the nascent vampire Setrakian dragging himself closer to the endangered core.

Pressure continued to build inside the containment structure. A bubble of toxic hydrogen expanding out of control. The steel-reinforced concrete shield would only make the ultimate explosion worse.

Setrakian pulled himself arm by arm, leg by leg. His body turning inside, his mind aflutter with the sight of a thousand eyes, his head singing with the chorus of a thousand voices.

Zero hour was at hand. They were all heading underground.

Pic…

“Silence,
strigoi.
”

Then the nuclear fuel reached the groundwater. The earth beneath the plant erupted, and the origin place of the final Ancient was obliterated—as was Setrakian, in the same instant.

No more.

The pressure vessel cracked open and released a radioactive cloud over Long Island Sound.

Gabriel Bolivar, the former rock star and the only remaining member of the original four Regis Air survivors, waited deep beneath the meatpacking plant. It had been called upon especially by the Master, called to be ready.

Gabriel, my child.

The voices hummed, droning as one in perfect fidelity. The old man, Setrakian—his voice had been silenced forever.

Gabriel. The name of an archangel… So appropriate
...

Bolivar awaited the dark father, feeling him near. Knowing of his victory on the surface. All that was left now was to wait for the new world to set and cure.

The Master entered the black dirt chamber. The Master stood before Bolivar, its head crooked at the chamber ceiling. Bolivar could feel the Master’s body distress, but its mind—its word—sang as true as ever.

In me, you will live. In my hunger and my voice and my breath—and we will live in you. Our minds will reside in yours and our blood will race together.

The Master threw off its cloak, reaching its long arm into its coffin, scooping out a handful of rich soil. He fed it into Bolivar’s unswallowing mouth.

And you will be my son and I your father and we will rule as I and us, forever.

The Master clutched Bolivar in a great embrace. Bolivar was alarmingly thin, appearing fragile and small against the Master’s colossal frame. Bolivar felt swallowed, possessed. He felt received. For the first time in life or death, Gabriel Bolivar felt at home.

The worms came spilling out of the Master, hundreds and hundreds of them, seeping out of its reddened flesh. The frenzied worms wove all around them, in and out of their flesh, fusing the two beings in a crimson embroidery.

Then, finally, the Master released the old husk of the long-ago giant, which crumbled and broke away as it hit the floor. And, as he did so, the soul of the boy-hunter also found release. It disappeared from the chorus of voices, the hymn that animated the Master.

Sardu was no more. Gabriel Bolivar was something new.

Bolivar/the Master spit the soil out. It opened its mouth and tested its stinger. The fleshy protuberance rode out with a firm snap, and recoiled.

The Master was reborn.

The body was unfamiliar somehow, the Master having been accustomed to Sardu for so long, but this transitional body was flexible and fresh. The Master would soon put it to the test.

At any rate, this human physicality was of little concern to the Master now. The giant’s body had suited the creature when it lived among the shadows. But size and durability of the host body mattered little now. Not in this new world that it had created in its own image.

The Master sensed human intrusion. A strong heart, a swift pulse. A boy.

Out of the adjoining tunnel, Kelly Goodweather arrived with her son, Zachary, firmly in her grip. The boy stood trembling, crouched over in a posture of self-protection. He saw nothing in the darkness, only sensing presences, heated bodies in the cool underground. He smelled ammonia and dank soil and something rotting.

Kelly approached with the pride of a cat depositing a mouse at its master’s threshold. The Master’s physical appearance, revealed to her night-seeing eyes in the blackness of the underground chamber, did not confound her in the least. She saw his presence within Bolivar and questioned nothing.

The Master scraped some magnesium from the wall, sprinkling it into the basket of a torch. He then chipped into the stone with his long middle nail, a spray of sparks igniting the small torch, bringing an orange glow to the chamber.

Zack saw before him a bony vampire with glowing red eyes and a slack expression. His mind had mostly shut down in panic, but there was still that small part of him that trusted his mother, that found calm so long as she was near.

Then, near the gaunt vampire, Zack saw the empty corpse lying on the floor, its sun-damaged, vinyl-smooth flesh still glistening. The creature’s pelt.

He saw also a walking stick leaning against the cave wall. The wolf’s head caught the flicker of the flame.

Professor Setrakian.

No.

Yes.

The voice was inside his head. Answering him with the power and authority Zack suspected God might speak to him someday, in answer to his prayers.

But this was not God’s voice. This was the commanding presence of the thin creature before him.

“Dad,” Zack whispered. His father had been with the professor. Tears welled up. “Dad.”

Zack’s mouth moved, but the word had no breath behind it. His lungs were locking up. He felt his pockets for his inhaler. His knees buckling, Zack slumped to the ground.

Kelly watched her suffering son impassively. The Master had been prepared to destroy Kelly. The Master was unaccustomed to defiance, and could think of no reason why Kelly had not turned the boy immediately.

Now the Master saw why. Kelly’s bond with the boy was so strong, the affection so potent, that she had instead brought him to the Master to be turned.

This was an act of devotion. An offering borne out of the human precursor—love—to vampire need, which, in fact, surpassed that need.

And the Master did indeed hunger. And the boy was a fine specimen. He would be honored to receive the Master.

But now… things appeared different in the darkness of a new night.

The Master saw more benefit in waiting.

It sensed the distress in the boy’s chest, his heart first racing, and now starting to slow. The boy lay on the ground, clutching at his throat, the Master standing over him. The Master pricked its thumb with the sharp nail of its prominent middle finger, and, taking care not to let slip any worms, allowed one single white drop to fall into the boy’s open mouth, landing upon his gasping tongue.

The boy groaned suddenly, sucking air. In his mouth, the taste of copper and hot camphor—but in a few moments, he was breathing normally again. Once, on a dare, Zack had licked the ends of a nine-volt battery. That was the jolt he had felt before his lungs opened. He looked up at the Master—this creature, this presence—with the awe of the cured.

Sunday, November 28

With every city and province around the globe—already alarmed by initial reports out of New York City—now afflicted by growing waves of unexplained disappearances…

With rumors and wild tales—of the vanished returning to their homes after dark, possessed of inhuman desires—spreading at speeds more scorching than the pandemic itself…

With terms like “vampirism” and “plague” finally being uttered by those in positions of power and influence…

And with the economy, the media, and transportation systems all failing throughout the globe…

... the world had already teetered over the edge, into fullblown panic.

And then began the nuclear-plant meltdowns. One after the other.

No official sequence of events or proper time line can, nor ever will be, verified, due to the mass destruction and subsequent devastation. What follows is the accepted hypothesis, though admittedly a “best guess” based mainly upon the arrangement of the tiles before the first domino fell.

After China, the reactor failure of a Stoneheart-constructed nuclear plant in Hadera, on the western coast of Israel, led to a second core meltdown. A vapor cloud of radioactivity was released, containing large particles of radioisotopes as well as caesium and tellurium in aerosol form. Warm Mediterranean wind currents scattered the contamination northeast into Syria and Turkey and over the Black Sea into Russia, as well as east over Iraq and northern Iran.