The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (43 page)

Setrakian said, never taking his eyes off it, “This is the man from the airplane?”

Eph stared. This thing was like a demon that had devoured the man named Ansel Barbour and half-assumed his form.

“It
was
him.”

“Somebody caught it,” said Nora. “Chained it here. Locked it away.”

“No,” said Setrakian. “He chained himself.”

Eph then understood. How the wife had been spared, and the children.

“Stay back,” warned Setrakian. And just then the vampire opened its mouth and struck, the stinger lashing out at Setrakian. The old man did not flinch, as the vampire did not have the reach, despite his stinger being many feet long. It retracted in failure, the disgusting outgrowth drooping just past the vampire’s chin, flicking around its open mouth like the blind pink feeler of some deep-sea creature.

Eph said, “Jesus God …”

The vampire Barbour turned feral. It backed up on its haunches, hissing at them. The unbelievable sight shocked Eph into remembering Zack’s camera in his pocket, and he handed Nora his lamp, taking out the recorder.

“What are you doing?” asked Nora.

He fumbled on the power, capturing this thing in the viewfinder. Then, with his other hand, he switched off the safety on his nail gun and aimed it at the beast.

Snap-
c
hunk. Snap-chunk. Snap-chunk.

Eph fired three silver needles from his nail gun, the long-barreled tool bucking with recoil. The projectiles ripped into the vampire, burning into his diseased muscle, bringing forth a hoarse howl of pain that tipped him forward.

Eph kept recording.

“Enough,” said Setrakian. “Let us remain merciful.”

The beast’s neck extended as he strained from the pain. Setrakian repeated his refrain about his singing sword—and then swung right through the vampire’s neck. The body collapsed, arms and legs shivering. The head rolled to a stop, eyes blinking a few times, the stinger flailing like a cut snake, then going still. Hot white effluent bled out of the trunk of the neck, steaming faintly into the cool night air. The capillary worms slithered into the dirt, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, looking for a new vessel.

Nora caught whatever sort of cry was rising in her throat with a hand clamped fast over her open mouth.

Eph stared, revolted, forgetting to look through the viewfinder.

Setrakian stepped back, sword pointed down, white spatter steaming off the silver blade, dripping to the grass. “In the back there. Under the wall.”

Eph saw a hole dug beneath the rear of the shed.

“Something else was in here with him,” said the old man. “Something crawled out, escaped.”

Houses lined the street on either side. It could be in any one of them. “But no sign of the Master.”

Setrakian shook his head. “Not here. Maybe the next.”

Eph looked deep into the shed, trying to make out the blood worms in the light of Nora’s lamps. “Should I go in and irradiate them?”

“There is a safer way. That red can on the back shelf?”

Eph looked. “The gasoline can?”

Setrakian nodded, and at once Eph understood. He cleared his throat and brought the nail gun up again, aiming it, squeezing the trigger twice.

The weaponized tool was accurate from that distance. Fuel glugged out of the punctured canister, spilling down off the wooden shelf to the dirt below.

Setrakian swept open his light topcoat and fished a small box of matches from a pocket in the lining. With a very crooked finger he picked out one wooden match and struck it against the strip on the box, bringing it flaring orange into the night.

“Mr. Barbour is released,” he said.

Then he threw in the lit match and the woodshed roared.

Rego Park Center, Queens

M
ATT GOT THROUGH
an entire rack of juniors’ separates, and then holstered his bar code collection unit—the inventory gun—and set off
downstairs for a snack. After-hours inventory actually wasn’t all that bad. As the Sears store manager, he was comped the overtime, applicable toward his regular weekday hours. And the rest of the mall was closed and locked, the security grates down, meaning no customers, no crowds. And he didn’t have to wear a necktie.

He took the escalator to the merchandise pickup bay, where the best vending machines were. He was coming back through the first-floor jewelry counters eating jelly Chuckles (in ascending order of preference: licorice, lemon, lime, orange, cherry) when he heard something out in the mall proper. He went to the wide steel gate and saw one of the security guards crawling on the floor, three stores down.

The guard was holding his hand to his throat, as though choking, or badly hurt.

“Hey!” called Matt.

The guard saw him and reached out, not a wave but a plea for help. Matt dug out his key ring and turned the longest one in the wall slot, raising the gate just four feet, high enough to duck under, and ran down to the man.

The security guard gripped his arm and Matt got him up onto a nearby bench next to the wishing fountain. The man was gasping. Matt saw blood on his neck between his fingers, but not enough to indicate a stabbing. There were bloodstains on his uniform shirt also, and the guy’s lap was damp where he had peed himself.

Matt knew the guy by sight only, recognizing him as kind of a douche. A big-armed guy who patrolled the mall with his thumbs in his belt like some southern sheriff. With his hat off now, Matt saw the guy’s receding hairline, black strands straggly and greasy, over his pate like oil. The guy was rubber limbed and clinging to Matt’s arm, painfully and not very manfully.

Matt kept asking what had happened, but the guard was hyperventilating and looking all around. Matt heard a voice and realized it was the guard’s hip radio. Matt lifted the receiver off his belt. “Hello? This is Matt Sayles, manager of Sears. Hey, one of your guys here, on the first level—he’s hurt. He’s bleeding from the neck, and he’s all gray.”

The voice on the other end said, “This is his supervisor. What’s happening there?”

The guard was fighting to spit something out but only air wheezed from his ravaged throat.

Matt relayed, “He was attacked. He’s got bruises on the sides of
his neck, and wounds … he’s pretty scared. But I don’t see anybody else …”

“I’m coming down the utility stairs now,” said the supervisor. Matt could hear his footfalls over the radio broadcast. “Where did you say you—”

He cut out there. Matt waited for him to come back on, then pressed the call button. “Where did we say we what?”

Finger off, he listened. Nothing again.

“Hello?”

A burst of transmission came through, less than one second long. A voice yelling, muffled:
“GARGAHRAH—”

The guard pitched forward off the bench, crawling away on all fours, dragging himself toward Sears. Matt got to his feet, radio in hand, turning toward the restrooms sign next to which was the door to the utility stairs.

He heard thumping, like kicking coming down.

Then a familiar whirring. He turned back toward his store and saw the steel security gate lowering to the floor. He had left his keys hanging in the control.

The terrified guard was locking himself in.

“Hey—
hey!
” yelled Matt.

But before he could run there, Matt felt a presence behind him. He saw the guard back off, big-eyed, knocking over a rack of dresses and crawling away. Matt turned and saw two kids in baggy jeans and oversize cashmere hoodies coming out of the corridor to the restrooms. They looked drugged out, their brown skin yellowed, their hands empty.

Junkies. Matt’s fear spiked, thinking they might have hit the guard with a dirty syringe. He pulled out his wallet, tossing it to one of them. The kid didn’t move to catch it, the wallet smacking him in the gut and falling to the floor.

Matt backed up against the store grate as the two guys closed in.

Vestry Street, Tribeca

E
PH PULLED UP
across the street from Bolivar’s residence, a pair of conjoined town houses fronted by three stories of scaffolding. They crossed to the door and found it boarded up. Not haphazardly or
temporarily, but covered with thick planking bolted over the door frame. Sealed.

Eph looked up the front face of the building to the night sky beyond. “What’s this hiding?” he said. He put a foot up on the scaffolding, starting to climb. Setrakian’s hand stopped him.

There were witnesses. On the sidewalk of the neighboring buildings. Standing and watching in the darkness.

Eph went to them. He found the silver-backed mirror in his jacket pocket and grabbed one of them to check his reflection. No shaking. The kid—no older than fifteen, done up in sad-eyed Goth paint and black lipstick—shook away from Eph’s grip.

Setrakian checked the others with his glass. None of them was turned.

“Fans,” said Nora. “A vigil.”

“Get out of here,” snarled Eph. But they were New York kids, they knew they didn’t have to move.

Setrakian looked up at Bolivar’s building. The front windows were darkened but he could not tell, at night, if they were blacked out or just in the process of renovation.

“Let’s climb up that scaffolding,” said Eph. “Break in a window.”

Setrakian shook his head. “No way we can get inside now without the police being called and you being taken away. You’re a wanted man, remember?” Setrakian leaned on his walking stick, looking up at the dark building before starting away. “No—we have no choice but to wait. Let’s find out some more about this building, and its owner. It might help to know first what we are getting into.”

DAYLIGHT

Bushwick, Brooklyn

V
asiliy Fet’s first stop the next morning was a house in Bushwick, not far from where he had grown up. Inspection calls were coming in from all over, the normal two- to three-week wait time easily doubling. Vasiliy was still working off his backlog from last month, and he had promised this guy he’d come through for him today.

He pulled up behind a silver Sable and got his gear out of the back of his truck, his length of rebar and magician’s cart of traps and poisons. First thing he noticed was a rivulet of water running along the gangway between the two row houses, a clear, slow trickle, as from a broken pipe. Not as appetizing as creamy brown sewage, but more than enough to hydrate an entire rat colony.

One basement window was broken, plugged up with rags and old towels. It could have been simple urban blight, or it could have been the handiwork of “midnight plumbers,” a new breed of copper thieves ripping out pipe to sell at salvage yards.

The bank owned both houses now, neighboring investment properties that, thanks to the subprime mortgage meltdown, flipped back on their owners, who lost them to foreclosure. Vasiliy was meeting a property manager there. The door to the first house was unlocked, and Vasiliy knocked and called out a hello. He poked his head into the first
room before the staircase, checking baseboards for runs and droppings. A broken, half-fallen shade hung from one window, casting a slanting shadow onto the gouged wood floor. But no manager in sight.

Vasiliy was in too much of a rush to be kept waiting here. On top of his backlog, he hadn’t been able to sleep right last night, and wanted to get back to the World Trade Center site that morning to talk to somebody in charge. He found a metal clipboard case stuck between balusters on the third step of the stairs. The company name on the business cards in the clip matched the one on Vasiliy’s work order.

“Hello!” he called again, then gave up. He found the door to the basement stairs, deciding to get started anyway. The basement was dark below—the stuffed window frame he had glimpsed from the outside—and the electricity had long ago been turned off. It was doubtful there was even a bulb in the ceiling fixture. Vasiliy left his handcart behind to prop open the door, and walked down carrying his poker.

The staircase hooked left. He saw loafers first, then khaki-clad legs: the property manager sitting against the side stone wall in a crack-house slump, his head to one side, his eyes open but staring, dazed.

Vasiliy had been in enough abandoned houses in enough rough neighborhoods to know better than to rush right over to the guy. He looked around from the bottom step, eyes slow to adjust to the darkness. The basement was unremarkable except for two lengths of cut copper piping lying on the floor.

To the right of the stairs was the base of the chimney, adjacent to the furnace that vented into it. Vasiliy saw, curled low around the far corner of the chimney mortar, four dirty fingers.

Somebody was crouched there, hiding, waiting for him.

He had turned to go back up the stairs to call the police when he saw the light around the bend in the steps disappear. The door had been closed. By someone else at the top of the stairs.

Vasiliy’s first impulse was to run, and run he did, racing off the stairs and right at the chimney where the owner of the dirty hand crouched. With a cry of attack, he swung his length of rebar at the knuckles, crushing bone against mortar.

The attacker came up at him fast, without regard to pain.
Crack has a way of doing that,
he thought. It was a girl, no older than her teens, and she was filthy all over, with blood down her chest and around her mouth. All of this he saw in a dim flash as she threw herself at him with
weird speed, and even weirder strength, propelling him back, hard, against the far wall despite being half his size. She made an airless raging noise, and when she opened her mouth a freakishly long tongue slithered out. Vasiliy’s boot came up instantly, striking her in the chest and putting her down on the floor.

He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and knew he could not win a fight in the dark. He reached up to the blocked window with his rebar and snagged the dirty rags jammed in there, twisting and pulling them down, falling like a plug out of a dyke with light instead of water flooding through.

He turned back just in time to see her eyes go to horror. She lay fully within the frame of sunlight, her body emitting a kind of anguished howl and breaking down all at once, smashed and steaming. It was as he imagined nuclear radiation might work on a person, cooking and dissolving them at the same time.