Bushwick, Brooklyn
THE MAN WHO MET THEM at the empty house filled most of the door frame. The shadow of a skipped shave blackened his jutting jaw like a dusting of soot. He carried a large white sack at his hip, one hand choking its neck, an oversize pillowcase with something heavy inside.
After the introductions, the big man went into his shirt pocket and unfolded a worn copy of a cover letter bearing the CDC seal. He showed the letter to Eph.
“You said you had something to show us?” said Eph.
“Two things. First, this.”
Fet loosened the drawstring on his sack and overturned the contents onto the floor. Four furry rodents landed in a heap, all dead.
Eph jumped back and Nora gasped.
“I always say, you want to get people’s attention, bring ’em a bag of rats.” Fet picked one up by its long tail, its body twirling slowly back and forth under his hand. “They’re coming up out of their burrows all across the city. Even in daytime. Something’s driving them out. Meaning, something’s not right. I know that during the black death, rats came out and dropped dead in the streets. These rats here aren’t coming up to die. They’re coming up plenty alive and plenty desperate and hungry. Take my word for it, when you see a big change in rat ecology, it means bad news is on the way. When the rats start to panic, it’s time to sell GE. Time to get out. Know what I mean?”
Setrakian said, “I do indeed.”
Eph said, “I’m missing something here. What do rats have to do with…?”
“They are a sign,” said Setrakian, “as Mr. Fet rightly states. An ecological symptom. Stoker popularized the myth that a vampire can change its form, transforming into a nocturnal creature such as a bat or a wolf. This false notion arises out of a truth. Before dwellings had basements or cellars, vampires nested in caves and dens on the edges of villages. Their corruptive presence displaced the other creatures, bats and wolves, driving them out so that they overran the villages—their appearance always coinciding with the spreading sickness and the corruption of souls.”
Fet was paying close attention to the old man. “You know what?” he said. “Twice when you were just talking, I heard you say the word ‘vampire.’”
Setrakian looked at him evenly. “That you did.”
After a contemplative pause, and a long look at the others, Fet said, “Okay.” As though he was starting to get it. “Now let me show you the other thing.”
He led them down into the basement. The smell was one of foul incense, of something diseased that had been burned. He showed them the atomized flesh and bone, now cold cinder lying on the floor of the basement. The rectangle of window sunlight had elongated and moved, shining against the wall now. “But it was beaming down here, and they went into it, and it cooked them in an instant. But, before that, they came at me with this…thing shooting out from underneath their tongues.”
Setrakian told him the short version. The rogue Master stowing away on Flight 753. The disappearing coffin. The morgue dead rising and returning to their Dear Ones. The household nests. The Stoneheart Group. Silver and sunlight. The stinger.
Fet said, “Their heads tipped back and their mouths opened up…and it was like that candy, that kids’ candy—the one that used to come with Star Wars character heads.”
Nora said, after a moment, “A Pez dispenser.”
“That’s it. You tip up the chin, candy pops out of the neck.”
Eph nodded. “Except for the candy part, an apt description.”
Fet looked at Eph. “So why are you public enemy number one?”
“Because silence is their weapon.”
“Hell, then. Somebody has to make some noise.”
“Exactly,” said Eph.
Setrakian eyed the light clipped on the side of Fet’s belt. “Let me ask you this. Your profession uses black light, if I am not mistaken.”
“Sure. To pick up rodent urine traces.”
Setrakian glanced over at Eph and Nora.
Fet took another look at the old man in the vest and suit. “You know about exterminating?”
Setrakian said, “I have had some experience.” He stepped over to the turned property manager, who had crawled or dragged himself away from the sunlight, and was now curled up in the far corner. Setrakian examined him with a silver-backed mirror, and showed Fet the result. The exterminator looked back and forth between the property manager as he appeared to his eyes and the vibrating blur reflected in the glass. “But you strike me as an expert on things that burrow and hide. Creatures who nest. Who feed off the human population. Your job is to drive out these vermin?”
Fet looked at Setrakian and the others like a man standing on an express train, gathering speed out of the station, suddenly realizing he had boarded on the wrong track. “What are you getting me into here?”
“Tell us, then, please. If vampires are vermin—an infestation spreading quickly throughout the city—how would you stop them?”
“I can tell you that, from a pest control point of view, poisoning and trapping are short-term solutions that won’t work in the long run. Picking these babies off one by one gets you nowhere. The only rats you ever see are the weakest ones. The hungry ones. Smart ones know how to survive. Control is what works. Managing their habitat, disrupting their ecosystem. Removing the food supply and starving them out. Then you get to the root of the infestation, and wipe it clean.”
Setrakian nodded slowly, then looked back at Eph. “The Master. The root of this evil. Somewhere in Manhattan right now.” The old man looked again at the unfortunate curled up on the floor, who would animate after nightfall, became a vampire, vermin. “You will step back please,” he said, unsheathing his sword. With his pronouncement and a two-handed stroke, he decapitated the man where he lay. As pale pink blood eked out—the host was not yet fully turned—Setrakian wiped his blade on the man’s shirt and returned it to the walking stick. “If only we had some indication of where the Master might be nesting. The site would have been preapproved and perhaps even selected by him. A lair worthy of his stature. A place of darkness, offering shelter from, yet access to, the human world on the surface.” He turned back to Fet. “Do you have any notion where these rats might be rising from? The epicenter of their displacement?”
Fet nodded immediately, his eyes staring into the distance. “I think I know.”
Church Street and Fulton
IN THE DECLINING light of day, the two epidemiologists, the pawnbroker, and the exterminator all stood on the viewing platform on the upper edge of the World Trade Center construction site, the excavation dug one block wide and seventy feet deep.
Fet’s city credentials and one small lie—Setrakian was not a world-famous rodentologist in from Omaha—got them into the subway tunnel without an escort. Fet led them down to the same out-of-service track he had followed before, playing his flashlight upon the ratless tracks. The old man stepped carefully over the ties, picking his way along the bed stones with his oversize walking stick. Eph and Nora carried Luma lights.
“You are not from Russia,” Setrakian said to Fet.
“Just my parents and my name.”
“In Russia, they are called vourdalak. The prevailing myth is that one gains immunity from them by mixing the blood of a vourdalak with flour and making bread from the paste, which must then be eaten.”
“Does that work?”
“As well as any folk remedy. Which is to say, not very well at all.” Setrakian remained far to the right of the electrified third rail. “That steel rod looks handy.”
Fet looked at his length of rebar. “It’s crude. Like me, I suppose. But it gets the job done. Also like me.”
Setrakian lowered his voice to cut down on the tunnel echo. “I have some other instruments you might find at least as effective.”
Fet saw the sump hose the sandhogs had been working on. Farther ahead, the tunnel turned and widened, and Fet recognized the dingy junction at once. “In here,” he said, shining a flashli
ght beam around, keeping it low.
They stopped and listened to the dripping of water. Fet scoured the ground with his light. “I put down tracking powder last time. See?”
There were human footprints in the powder. Shoes, sneakers, and bare feet.
Fet said, “Who goes barefoot in a subway tunnel?”
Setrakian held up a wool-gloved hand. The tubelike tunnel acoustics brought them distant groans.
Nora said, “Jesus Christ…”
Setrakian whispered, “Your lamps, please. Turn them on.”
Eph and Nora did, their powerful UVC rays illuminating the dark underground, exposing a mad swirl of colors. Innumerable stains splashed wildly against the floor, the walls, the iron stanchions…everywhere.
Fet recoiled in disgust. “This is all…?”
“It is excrement,” said Setrakian. “The creatures will shit while they eat.”
Fet looked around in amazement. “I guess a vampire doesn’t have much need for good hygiene.”
Setrakian was backing away. He had a different grip on his walking stick now, the top half pulled several inches out of the bottom half, baring the bright, sharp blade. “We must leave here. Right now.”
Fet was listening to the noises in the tunnels. “No argument from me.”
Eph’s foot kicked something, and he jumped back, expecting rats. He shone his UVC lamp down and discovered a low mound of objects in the corner.
They were mobile phones. One hundred or more, piled up as though they had been thrown into the corner.
“Huh,” said Fet. “Somebody dumped a load of mobile phones down here.”
Eph reached for some on the top of the pile. The first two he tried were dead. The third had just one blinking bar of battery life. An X icon along the top of the screen indicated that there was no reception.
“That’s why the police can’t find all the missing people by their cell phones,” said Nora. “They’re all underground.”
“Judging by the looks of this,” said Eph, tossing the phones back onto the pile, “most of them are here.”
Eph and Nora stared at the phones, quickening their steps.
“Quickly,” said Setrakian, “before we are detected.” He led the retreat out of the tunnel. “We must prepare.”
LAIR
Worth Street, Chinatown
It was early on the fourth night as Ephraim cruised past his building on the way to Setrakian’s to properly arm themselves. He saw no police posted outside his place, so he pulled over. He was taking a chance, but it had been days since he’d changed his clothes, and all he needed was five minutes. He pointed out his third-floor window to them, and said he would lower the blinds once he was inside if there was no trouble.
He made it into the building lobby with no problem, then climbed the stairs. He found his apartment door open a crack, and paused to listen. An open door didn’t seem very coplike.
He pushed inside, calling, “Kelly?” No answer. “Zack?” They were the only ones who had keys.
The smell alarmed him at first, until he realized it was the Chinese food left in the trash, from when Zack was over—which seemed like years ago. He entered the kitchen to see if the milk in the refrigerator was still good…and then stopped.
He stared. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.
Two uniformed cops lay on his kitchen floor, against the wall.
A droning started inside the apartment. Quickly rising to something like a scream, like a chorus of agony.
His apartment door slammed shut. Eph whipped around to the closed door.
Two men stood there. Two beings. Two vampires.
Eph saw this at once. Their posture, their pallor.
One of them he did not know. The other one he recognized as the survivor Bolivar. Looking very dead, and very dangerous, and very hungry.
Then Eph sensed an even greater danger in the room. For these two revenants were not the source of the drone. Turning his head back toward the main room took an eternity and it took only one second.
A huge being wearing a long, dark cloak. Its height taking up all of the apartment, to the ceiling and more, its neck bent so that it was looking down at Eph.
Its face…
Eph grew dizzy as the being’s superhuman height made the room seem small, made him feel small. The sight weakened his legs, even as he turned to race toward the door to the hallway.
Now the being was in front of him, between him and the door, blocking the only exit. As though Eph hadn’t actually turned but the floor itself had rotated. The other two normal, man-size vampires flanked him on either side.
The being was closer now. Looming over Eph. Looking down.
Eph dropped to his knees. Simply being in the presence of this giant creature was paralyzing, no different than if Eph had been physically struck down.
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
Eph felt this. The way you feel live music in your chest. A hum rumbling in his brain. He averted his eyes, to the floor. He was crippled by fear. He did not want to see its face again.
Look at me.
At first Eph believed that this thing was strangling him with its mind. But his breathlessness was the result of pure terror, a panic of his very soul.
He raised his eyes just a bit. Trembling, he saw the hem of the Master’s robe, up to the hands at the end of the sleeves. They were revoltingly colorless and nail-less, and inhumanly large. The fingers were of uniform length, all oversize except for the middle finger, which was even longer and thicker than the rest—and hooked at the end like a talon.
The Master. Here for him. To turn him.
Look at me, pig.
Eph did, raising his head as though a hand gripped his chin.
The Master looked down at him from where his head bent beneath the ceiling. It gripped the sides of its hood with its huge hands and pulled it back off its skull. The head was hairless and colorless. Its eyes, lips, and mouth were all without hue, worn and washed out, like threadbare linen. Its nose was worn back like that of a weathered statue, a mere bump made of two black holes. Its throat throbbed in a hungry pantomime of breathing. Its skin was so pale that it was translucent. Visible beneath the flesh, like a blurry map to an ancient, ruined land, were veins that no longer carried blood. Veins that pulsed with red. The circulating blood worms. Capillary parasites coursing beneath the Master’s pellucid flesh.
This is a reckoning.
The voice rode into Eph’s head on a roar of terror. He felt himself going slack. Everything muddled and dimming.
I have your pig wife. Soon your pig son.
Eph’s head was swollen to bursting with disgust and anger. It felt like a balloon forcing itself to pop. He slid one foot flat beneath him. He staggered to his feet before this immense demon.
I will take everything from you and leave nothing. That is my way.
The Master reached forward in a fast, blurry motion. Eph felt, as an anesthetized patient feels the pressure of the dentist’s drill, a gripping sensation on the top of his head, and then his feet were off the floor. He swung his arms and kicked out his legs. The Master palmed his head like a basketball, lifting him one-handedly toward the ceiling. To eye level, near enough to glimpse the blood worms wriggling like plague spermatozoa.
I am the occultation and the eclipse.
Lifting Eph to his mouth like a fat grape. The mouth was dark inside, his throat a barren cavern, a direct route to hell. Eph, his body swinging from his neck, was nearly out of his mind. He could feel the long middle talon against the back of his neck, its pressure at the top of his spine. The Master tipped Eph’s head back as though cracking open the pop top of a beer can.
I am a drinker of men.
A wet, crunching sound, and then the Master’s mouth began to open. His jaw retracted and his tongue curled up and back and his hideous stinger emerged.
Eph roared, defiantly blocking access to his neck with his arms, howling into the Master’s savage face.
And then, something…not Eph’s howl…something made the Master’s great head turn ever so slightly.
The nostrils in his face pulsed, the sniffing of a demon without breath.
His onyx eyes turned back to Eph. Staring at him like two dead spheres. Glaring at Eph—as though Eph had somehow dared to deceive the Master.
Not alone.
At that moment, coming up the stairs of Eph’s apartment building two steps behind Fet, Setrakian gripped the handrail suddenly, his shoulder slumping against the wall. Pain burst in his head like a blinding aneurism, and a voice—vile and gloating and blasphemous—boomed like a bomb exploding inside a crowded symphony hall.
SETRAKIAN.
Fet stopped and looked back, but through wincing eyes Setrakian waved him ahead. A whisper was all he could muster: “He is here.”
Nora’s eyes darkened. Fet’s boots pounded as he ran up to the landing. Nora helped Setrakian, pulling him after Fet, to the door, inside the apartment.
Fet hit the first body he encountered, an open field tackle, going in low and getting grabbed as he did, falling and rolling over. He popped up fast in a fighting stance and faced his opponent, seeing the vampire’s face, not grinning, but with his mouth spread like a grin, ready to feed.
Then Fet saw the giant being across the room. The Master, with Eph in his grip. Monstrous. Mesmerizing.
The nearer vampire came at him and drove Fet back into the kitchen, against the refrigerator door.
Nora rushed inside, managing to switch on her Luma lamp just as the vampire Bolivar lunged for her. He hissed a breathless scream and reeled backward. Then Nora saw the Master, the back of his down-turned head against the ceiling. She saw Eph dangling by his head in the monster’s grip. “Eph!”
Setrakian entered with his long sword bared. He froze for a moment when he saw the Master, the giant, the demon. Here in front of him now after so many years.
The Strain Page 35
