The Fall (7 page)

They heard a multitude of footsteps and voices in the bar above them as they pressed on into the next room.

One came at Eph from the side—still wearing a bartending apron—its eyes wide and hungry. Eph slashed at it backhandedly, driving the creature back with the lamp light. Eph was learning to ignore his physician’s inclination toward mercy. The vampire gnashed pitifully in a corner as Eph closed in, finishing it off.

Two others, maybe three, had taken off through the next door as soon as they saw the indigo light coming. A handful remained, crouched beneath broken shelves, ready to attack.

Fet came alongside Eph, lamp in hand. Eph started toward the vampires, but Fet caught his arm. Whereas Eph was breathing hard, the exterminator proceeded in a businesslike manner, focused without distress.

“Wait,” said Fet. “Leave them for Barnes’s
FBI
buddies.”

Eph, seeing the advantage of Fet’s idea, backed off, still with his lamp trained on them. “Now what?”

“Those others ran. There’s a way out.”

Eph looked at the next door. “You better be right,” he said.

Fet took the lead belowground, following the trail of dried urine fluorescing underneath the Luma lamps. The rooms gave way to a series of cellars, connected by old, hand-dug tunnels. The ammonia markings went in many different directions, Fet selecting one, turning off at a junction.

“I like this,” he said, stamping muck off his boots. “Just like rat hunting, following the trail. The UV light makes it easy.”

“But how do they know these routes?”

“They’ve been busy. Exploring, foraging. You never heard of the Volstead Grid?”

“Volstead? Like the Volstead Act? Prohibition?”

“Restaurants, bars, speakeasies, they had to open up their cellars, go underground. This is a city that just keeps building over itself. Combine the old cellars and houses under there with the tunnels, aqueducts, and old utility pipes—and some say you can move block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, solely underground, between any two points in the city.”

“Bolivar’s place,” said Eph, remembering the rock star who had been one of the four survivors of Flight 753. His building was an old bootlegger’s house, with a secret gin cellar that linked to the subway tunnels below. Eph checked behind them as they passed a side tunnel. “How do you know where you’re going?”

Fet pointed to another hobo signal scratched into the stone, probably with one of the creature’s hardened talon nails. “We’re on to something here,” he said. “That’s all I know for sure. But I bet the Ferry Loop Station isn’t more than a block or two away.”

AUGUSTIN
...

Augustin Elizalde got to his feet. He stood in a stew of absolute darkness. A palpable inky blackness without a hint of light. Like space with no stars. He blinked his eyes to make certain that they were open—and they were. No change.

Was this death? No place could be darker.

Must be. He was fucking dead.

Or—maybe they had turned him. Was he a vampire now, his body taken over, but this old part of him shut away in the darkness of his mind, like a prisoner in an attic? Maybe the coolness he felt and the hardness of the floor beneath his feet were just compensatory tricks of his brain. He was walled up forever inside his own head.

He crouched a bit, trying to establish his existence through movement and sensory impression. He grew dizzy due to the lack of a visual focal point, and set his feet wider apart. He reached up, jumping, but could feel no ceiling above him.

An occasional faint breeze rippled his shirt. It smelled like soil. Like earth.

He was underground. Buried alive.

Augustin…

Again. His mother’s voice calling to him as in a dream.

“Mama?”

His voice doubled back on him in a startling echo. He remembered her as he had left her: sitting in the bottom of her bedroom closet, under a great pile of clothes. Staring up at him with the leering hunger of a newly turned
them.

Vampires, the old man said.

Gus turned, trying to guess in which direction the voice might have originated. He had nothing else to do but follow this voice.

He walked to a stone wall, feeling his way along its smooth and slowly curving face. His palms remained sore where the glass had cut him—the shard he had wielded in the murder (no—the
destruction
) of his brother-turned-vampire. He stopped to feel his wrists, and realized the handcuffs he had been wearing at the time of his escape from police custody—the ones whose chain the hunters had split—were now gone.

Those hunters. They had turned out to be vampires themselves, appearing on that street in Morningside Heights and battling the other vampires like two sides in a gang war. But the hunters were well equipped. They had weapons, and they were coordinated. They drove cars. They weren’t just the bloodthirsty attack drones like the ones Gus had faced and destroyed.

The last thing he remembered was them throwing Gus into the back of an
SUV
. But—why him?

Another puff of wind, like Mother Nature’s last breath, brushed against his face, and he followed it—hoping he was moving in the right direction. The wall ended at a sharp corner. He felt for the opposite side, his left, and found it the same: ending at a corner, with a gap in between. Just like a doorway.

Gus stepped through, and the new echo of his footsteps told him that this room was wider and higher-ceilinged than the rest. A faint smell here, familiar to him somehow. Trying to place it.

He got it. The cleaning solution he’d had to use in lockup, on maintenance detail. It was ammonia. Not enough to singe the inside of his nose.

Then something started to happen. He thought his mind was playing tricks, but then realized that, yes, light was coming to the room. The slowness of the illumination, and the general uncertainty of the situation, terrified him. Two tripod lamps set wide apart, near the far walls, were coming up gradually, diluting the thick blackness.

Gus drew his arms in tight, in the manner of the mixed-martial-arts fighters he watched on the Internet. The lights kept brightening, though so gradually that the wattage barely registered. But his pupils were so widely dilated by the darkness, his retina so exposed, that any light source would have caused a reaction.

He didn’t see it at first. The being was right in front of him, no more than ten or fifteen feet away, but its head and limbs were so pale and still and smooth that his eyes read them as part of the walls of rock.

The only thing that stood out was a pair of symmetrical dark holes. Not black holes, but almost black.

The deepest red. Blood red.

If they were eyes, they did not blink. Nor did they stare. They looked upon Gus with a remarkable lack of passion. These were eyes as indifferent as red stones. Blood-sodden eyes that had seen it all.

Gus glimpsed the outline of a robe on the being’s body, blending into the darkness like a cavity within the cavity. The being stood tall, if he was making it out correctly. But the stillness of this thing was deathlike. Gus did not move.

“What is this?” he said, his voice coming out a little funny, betraying his fear. “You think you’re eating Mexican tonight? You wanna think twice about that. How ’bout you come and choke on it, bitch.”

It radiated such silence and stillness that Gus might have been looking at some clothed statue. Its skull was hairless and smooth all over, lacking the cartilage of ears. Now Gus was aware of something, hearing—or, rather, feeling—a vibration like humming.

“Well?” he said, addressing the expressionless eyes. “What you waiting for? You like to play with your food before you eat it?” He pulled his fists in closer to his face. “Not this fucking
chalupa,
you undead piece of shit.”

Something other than movement drew his attention to the right—and he saw that there was another one. Standing there like part of the stone wall, a shade shorter than the first one, eyes shaped differently but similarly emotionless.

And then, to the left—gradually, to Gus’s eyes—a third.

Gus, who was not unfamiliar with courtrooms, felt like he was appearing before three alien judges inside a stone chamber. He was going out of his mind, but his reaction was to keep shooting off his mouth. To keep putting up the gangbanger front. The judges he had faced called it “contempt.” Gus called it “coping.” What he did when he felt looked down upon. When he felt he was being treated not as a unique human being but as an inconvenience, an obstacle dropped in someone’s way.

We
will be brief.

Gus’s hands shot up to his temples. Not his ears: the voice was somehow
inside
his head. Coming from that same part of his brain where his own interior monologue originated—as though some pirate radio station had started broadcasting on his signal.

You are Augustin Elizalde.

He gripped his head but the voice was tight in there. No off switch.

“Yeah, I know who the fuck I am. Who the fuck are you?
What
the fuck are you? And how did you get inside my—”

You are not here as sustenance. We have plenty of livestock on hand for the snow season.

Livestock? “Oh, you mean people?” Gus had heard occasional yells, anguished voices echoing through the caves, but imagined they were cries in his dreams.

Free-range husbandry has suited our needs for thousands of years. Dumb animals make for plentiful food. On occasion, one shows unusual resourcefulness.

Gus barely followed that, wanting them to get to the point. “So—what, you’re saying you’re not going to try to turn me into… one of you?”

Our bloodline is pristine and privileged. To enter into our heritage is a gift. Entirely unique and very, very expensive.

They weren’t making any sense to Gus. “If you’re not going to drink my blood—then what the hell do you want?”

We have a proposal.

“A proposal?” Gus banged on the side of his head as though it were a malfunctioning appliance. “I guess I’m fucking listening—unless I have a choice.”

We need a daylight serf. A hunter. We are a nocturnal race of beings, you are diurnal.

“Diurnal?”

Your endogenous circadian rhythm corresponds directly to the light-dark cycle of what you call a twenty-four-hour day. Your kind’s inbred chronobiology is acclimated to this planet’s celestial timetable, in reverse of ours. You are a sun creature.

“Fucking what?”

We need someone who can move about freely during daylight hours. One who can withstand sun exposure, and, in fact, use its power, as well as any other weapons at his disposal, to massacre the unclean.

“Massacre the unclean? You are vampires, right? Are you saying you want me killing your own kind?”

Not our kind. This unclean strain spreading so promiscuously through your people—it is a scourge. It is out of control.

“What did you expect?”

We had no part in this. Before you, stand beings of great honor and discretion. This contagion represents the violation of a truce—an equilibrium—that has lasted for centuries. This is a direct affront.

Gus stepped back a few inches. He actually thought he was starting to understand now. “Somebody’s trying to move in on your block.”

We do not breed in the same random, chaotic manner as your kind. Ours is a process of careful consideration.

“You’re picky eaters.”

We eat what we want. Food is food. We dispose of it when we are satiated.

A laugh rose inside Gus’s chest, nearly choking him. Talking about people like they were three for a dollar at the corner market.

You find that humorous?

“No. The opposite. That’s why I’m laughing.”

When you consume an apple, do you throw away the core? Or do you conserve the seeds for planting more trees?

“I guess I throw it away.”

And a plastic receptacle? When you’ve emptied its contents?

“Fine, I get it. You throw back your pints of blood and then toss away the human bottle. Here’s what I want to know. Why me?”

Because you appear capable.

“How you figure that?”

Your criminal record, for one. You came to our attention through your arrest for murder in Manhattan.

The fat, naked guy rampaging through Times Square. The guy had attacked a family there, and at the time Gus was like, “Not in my city, freak.” Now, of course, he wished he had stayed back like all the rest.

Then you escaped police custody, slaying more uncleans in the process.

Gus frowned. “That ‘unclean’ was my compadre. How you know all this, living down here in this shithole?”

Be assured that we are connected with the human world at its uppermost levels. But, if balance is to be maintained, we cannot afford exposure—precisely what this unclean strain threatens us with now. That is where you come in.

“A gang war. That, I understand. But you left out something super-fucking important. Like—why the fuck should I help you?”

Three reasons.

“I’m counting. They better be good ones.”

The first is, you will leave this room alive.

“I’ll give you that one.”

The second is, your success in this endeavor will enrich you beyond that which you ever thought possible.

“Hmm. I don’t know. I can count pretty high.”

The third… is right behind you.

Gus turned. He saw a hunter first, one of the badass vamps who had grabbed him off the street. Its head was cowled inside a black hoodie, its red eyes glowing.

Next to the hunter was a vampire with that look of distant hunger now familiar to Gus. She was short and heavy, with tangled black hair, wearing a torn housedress, the upper front of her throat bulging with the interior architecture of the vampire stinger.

At the base of the stitched V of her dress collar was a highly stylized, black-and-red crucifix, a tattoo she said she regretted getting in her youth but which must have looked pretty fucking boss at the time, and which, since his youngest days, had always impressed Gusto, no matter what she said.