The Night Eternal (Strain Trilogy 3)

by Chuck Hogan

  Eph eased open the door, his scope seeing into the total darkness beyond. He climbed two long flights of stairs, then went through another unlocked door into a long corridor. Thick steam pipes ran the length of it, still functioning, groaning with heat. By the time he reached the next door, he was dripping with sweat.

  He slid a small silver knife from his backpack, needing to be careful here. The cement-walled emergency exit was no place to get cornered. Black-tinged groundwater had seeped into the floor, pollution from the sky having become a permanent part of the ecosystem. This section of the underground was once regularly patrolled by maintenance workers, rooting out the homeless, the curious, the vandals. Then the strigoi briefly assumed control of the underworld of the city, hiding, feeding, spreading. Now that the Master had reconfigured the planet’s atmosphere in order to free vampires from the threat of the sun’s virus-killing ultraviolet rays, they had risen from this labyrinthine netherworld and claimed the surface for themselves.

  The last door was plastered with a white-and-red sign: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. Eph returned his blade and his night-vision scope to his backpack, then pushed the pressure bar, the alarm wires having been snipped long ago.

  A foul breeze from the stringy black rain exhaled into his face. He pulled up his damp hood and started walking east on Forty-fifth Street. He watched his feet splashing on the sidewalk, walking as he was with his head down. Many of the wrecked or abandoned cars from the initial days remained shoved to the curbs, making most of the streets one-way paths for work vans or supply trucks operated by the vampires and the Stoneheart humans. Eph’s eyes remained low but vigilantly searched either side of the street. He had learned never to look around conspicuously; the city had too many windows, too many pairs of vampire eyes. If you looked suspicious, you were suspicious. Eph went out of his way to avoid any interaction with strigoi. On the streets, as everywhere, humans were second-class citizens, subject to search or any kind of abuse. A sort of creature apartheid existed. Eph could not risk exposure.

  He hurried over to First Avenue, to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, quickly ducking down the ramp reserved for ambulances and hearses. He squeezed behind stretchers and a rolling wardrobe they had set there in order to obscure the basement entrance, and entered the unlocked door to the city morgue.

  Inside, he stood a few moments in the dim silence, listening. This room, with its stainless steel autopsy tables and numerous sinks, was where the first group of passengers from doomed Regis Air Flight 753 had been brought two years before. Where Eph had first examined the needle-like breach in the necks of the seemingly dead passengers, exposing a puncture wound that extended to the common carotid artery—which they would soon discover had been caused by the vampires’ stingers. Where he had also first been shown the strange antemortem augmentation of the vestibular folds around the vocal cords, later determined to be the preliminary stage of the development of the creatures’ fleshy stingers. And where he had first witnessed the transformation of the victims’ blood from healthy red to oily white.

  Also, just outside on the sidewalk was where Eph and Nora first encountered the elderly pawnbroker Abraham Setrakian. Everything Eph knew about the vampire breed—from the killing properties of silver and ultraviolet light, to the existence of the Ancients and their role in the shaping of human civilization since the earliest times, to the rogue Ancient known as the Master whose journey to the New World aboard Flight 753 marked the beginning of the end—he had learned from this tenacious old man.

  The building had remained uninhabited since the takeover. The morgue was not part of the infrastructure of a city administered by vampires, because death was no longer the necessary end point of human existence. As such, the end-of-life rituals of mourning and corpse preparation and burial were no longer needed and rarely observed.

  For Eph, this building was his unofficial base of operations. He started up the stairs to the upper floors, ready to hear it from Nora: how his despair over Zack’s absence was interfering with their resistance work. Dr. Nora Martinez had been Eph’s number two in the Canary Project at the CDC. In the midst of all the stress and chaos of the rise of the vampires, their long-simmering relationship had gone from professional to personal. Eph had attempted to deliver Nora and Zack to safety, out of the city, back when the trains were still running beneath Penn Station. But Eph’s worst fears were realized when Kelly, drawn to her Dear One, led a swarm of strigoi into the tunnels beneath the Hudson River, derailing the train and laying waste to the rest of the passengers—and Kelly attacked Nora and spirited his son away.

  Zack’s capture—for which Eph in no way held Nora accountable—had nonetheless driven a wedge between them, just as it had driven a wedge between Eph and everything. Eph felt disconnected from himself. He felt fractured and fragmented and knew that this was all he had to offer Nora now.

  Nora had her own concerns: chiefly her mother, Mariela Martinez, her mind crippled by Alzheimer’s disease. The OCME building was large enough that Nora’s mother could roam the upper floors, strapped into her wheelchair, creeping down the hallway by the grip socks on her feet, conversing with people no longer present or alive. A wretched existence, but, in reality, not so far removed from that of the rest of the surviving human race. Perhaps better: Mrs. Martinez’s mind had taken refuge in the past and thus could avoid the horror of the present.

  The first sign Eph found that something was amiss was the overturned wheelchair, lying on its side near the door off the fourth-floor stairway, strap belts lying on the floor. Then the ammonia scent hit him, the telltale odor of vampire presence. Eph drew his sword, his pace quickening down the corridor, a sick feeling rising from his gut. The medical examiner’s building had limited electricity, but Eph could not use lamps or light fixtures that would be visible from the street, so he proceeded down the dim corridor in a defensive crouch, mindful of doors and corners and other potential hiding places.

  He passed a fallen partition. A ransacked cubicle. An overturned chair. “Nora!” he called. An incautious act, but if there were still any strigoi present, he wanted to draw them out now.

  On the floor in a corner office, he discovered Nora’s travel backpack. It had been ripped open, her clothes and personal items flung around the room. Her Luma lamp sat in the corner, plugged into its charger. Her clothes were one thing, but Eph knew that Nora would never go anywhere without her UV lamp, unless she had no choice. He did not see her weapon pack anywhere.

  He picked up the handheld lamp, switching on the black light. It revealed swirling bursts of bright color on the carpet and against the side of the desk: vampire excrement stains.

  Strigoi had marauded here; that was obvious. Eph tried to remain focused and calm. He thought he was alone, at least on this floor: no vampires, which was good, but no Nora, or her mother, which was devastating.

  Had there been a fight? He tried to read the room, its swirling stains and overturned chair. He didn’t think so. He roamed the hall looking for more evidence of violence beyond property damage but found none. Combat would have been her last resort, and had she made a stand here, the building would certainly be under the control of vampires now. This, to Eph’s eye, looked more akin to a house raid.

  While examining the desk, he found Nora’s weapon bag stowed beneath it, her sword still inside. So evidently she had been surprised. If there was no battle—no silver-to-vampire contact—then her chances of meeting a violent end decreased exponentially. The strigoi weren’t interested in victims. They were intent on filling their camps.

  Had she been captured? It was a possibility, but Eph knew Nora, and she would never go without a battle—and he just didn’t see any evidence of that. Unless they had captured her mother first. Nora might have acquiesced then out of fear for Mrs. Martinez’s safety.

  If so, it was unlikely that Nora would have been turned. The strigoi, under the Master’s command, were reluctant to add to their ranks: drinking a human’s blood and infe
cting them with the vampiric viral strain only created another vampire to feed. No, it was more likely that Nora would have been transported to a detention camp outside the city. From there, she could be assigned work or further disciplined. Not much was known about the camps; some of those who went in never reemerged. Mrs. Martinez, having lived well beyond her productivity years, would meet a more certain end.

  Eph looked around, becoming frantic, trying to figure out what to do. This appeared to be a random incident—but was it? At times, Eph had to keep his distance from the others and carefully monitor his comings and goings from the OCME, because of Kelly’s tireless pursuit of him. His discovery could lead the Master right to the heart of their resistance. Had something gone wrong? Was Fet compromised as well? Had the Master somehow gotten onto their entire cell?

  Eph went to the laptop computer on the desk, opening it. It was still powered on, and he struck the space bar to wake up the screen. Workstation computers in the ME’s building were hardwired to a still-functioning network server. The Internet was heavily damaged in spots and generally unreliable. One was more likely to receive an error message than a page load. Unrecognized and unauthorized Internet protocol addresses were particularly susceptible to worms and viruses, and many computers in the building had become either locked up due to hard-drive-damaging malware or slowed to an unusable crawl by corrupted operating systems. Mobile phone technology was no longer in existence, either for telecommunication or for Internet access. Why allow the human underclass access to a communications network capable of spanning the globe—something the vampires possessed telepathically?

  Eph and the others operated under the assumption that all Internet activity was vampire-monitored. The page he was now looking at—that Nora had apparently abandoned suddenly, without time to shut down the hard drive—was some sort of personal message exchange, a two-party chat conducted in shorthand.

  “NMart” was obviously Nora Martinez. Her partner in conversation, “VFet,” was Vasiliy Fet, the former New York City exterminator. Fet had joined their fight early, by way of an invasion of rats prompted by the arrival of the strigoi. He had proven himself invaluable to the cause, for both his vermin-killing techniques and his knowledge of the city, in particular the boroughs’ subterranean passageways. He had become as much of a disciple of the late Setrakian as Eph was, coming into his own as a New World vampire hunter. Currently, he was on a freighter somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, returning from Iceland on a very important errand.

  This thread, full of Fet’s grammatical idiosyncrasies, had started the day before, and it was mainly about Eph. He read words he was never meant to see:

  NMart: E not here—missed rendezvous. You were right. I shouldn’t have relied on him. Now all I can do is wait . . .

  VFet: Don’t wait there. Keep moving. Return to Roosvlt.

  NMart: Can’t—my mother is worse. Will try to stay another day at most. TRULY cannot take this anymore. He’s dangerous. He’s becoming a risk to us all. Just a matter of time before bitch-vamp Kelly catches up with him or he leads her back here.

  VFet: I hear you. But w need him. Most keep hm close.

  NMart: He goes out on his own. Doesn’t care about anything else.

  VFet: He’s 2 important. 2 them. 2 the M. 2 us.

  NMart: I know it . . . it’s just that I can’t trust him anymore. I don’t even know who he is . . .

  VFet: We all just have to keep him from sinking all to the deep end. You especially. Keep him afloat. He dsn’t know where the book is. That’s our double blind. He can’t hurt us that way.

  NMart: He’s at K’s house again. I know it. Raiding it for memories of Z. Like stealing from a dream.

  And then:

  NMart: You know I miss you. How much longer?

  VFet: Returning now. Missing you too.

  Eph shrugged off his weapon pack, resheathing his sword, and dropped down into the office chair.

  He stared at the most recent exchange, reading it again and again, hearing Nora’s voice, then Fet’s Brooklyn accent.

  Missing you too.

  He felt weightless, reading it—as though the force of gravity had been removed from his body. And yet, here he sat, still.

  He should have felt more anger. More righteous fury. Betrayal. A jealous frenzy.

  And he did feel all these things. But not deeply. Not acutely. They were there, and he acknowledged them, but it amounted to . . . more of the same. His malaise was so overwhelming that no other flavor, no matter how sour, could change his emotional palate.

  How had this happened? At times, over these past two years, Eph had consciously kept his distance from Nora. He had done so to protect her, to protect them all . . . or so he said to himself, justifying plain abandonment.

  Still—he couldn’t understand it. He reread the other part. So he was a “risk.” He was “dangerous.” Unreliable. They seemed to think that they were carrying him. Part of him felt relief. Relief for Nora—Good for her—but most of him just throbbed with mounting rage. What was this? Was he jealous just because he couldn’t hold her anymore? God knew he was not exactly minding the store; was he angry because someone else had found his forgotten toy and now he wanted it back? He knew himself so little . . . Kelly’s mother used to tell him he was always ten minutes too late to all the major milestones of his life. Late for Zack’s birth, late for the wedding, late to save his marriage from falling apart. God knew he was late to save Zack or save the world, and now—now this . . .

  Nora? With Fet?

  She was gone. Why didn’t he do something before? Strangely, amid the pain and the sense of loss he also felt relief. He didn’t need to worry anymore—he didn’t need to compensate for his shortcomings, explain his absence, mollify Nora. But as that tenuous wave of relief was about to kick in, he turned around and caught himself in a mirror.

  He looked older. Much older than he should have. And dirty, almost like a hobo. His hair was plastered against his sweaty forehead and his clothes were layered with months of grime. His eyes were sunk and his cheeks jutted out, pulling the taut, thin skin surrounding them. No wonder, he thought. No wonder.

  He pulled himself back out of the chair in a daze. He walked down four flights of stairs and out of the medical examiner’s building through the pissing black rain to nearby Bellevue Hospital. He climbed in through a broken window and walked the dark and deserted halls, following signs for the emergency room. Bellevue’s ER was once a Level 1 trauma center, meaning it had housed a full range of specialists providing access to the best facilities.

  As well as the best drugs.

  He arrived at the nurses’ station and found the drug cabinet door torn off. The locked refrigerator had also been pried open and ransacked. No Percs, no Vikes, no Demerol. He pocketed some oxycodone and antianxiety meds in blister packs—self-diagnosing and self-medicating—tossing empty cartons over his shoulder. He popped two white oxys and dry-swallowed them—then froze.

  He had been moving so quickly and making so much noise that he had not heard the bare feet approaching. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement from across the nurses’ station and stood.

  Two strigoi, staring at him. Fully formed vampires, hairless and pale, unclothed. He saw the thickened arteries bulging through their necks, running down over their clavicles into their chests like throbbing tree roots. One had once been a male human (larger body) and the other had been a female (breasts shriveled and pale).

  The other distinguishing trait of these matured vampires was their loose, floppy wattle. Disgusting, stretched-out flesh that hung like a turkey neck, pale red when in need of nourishment, flushing crimson after feeding. The wattles of these strigoi hung pale and scrotumlike, swaying with a turn of their heads. A sign of rank, and the mark of an experienced hunter.

  Were these the same two that had accosted Nora and her mother or otherwise rousted them from the OCME? There was no way to confirm it, but something told Eph this was the case—which, if true, meant th
at Nora might have gotten away clean after all.

  He saw what he thought was a glimmer of recognition in their otherwise blank, red eyes. Normally there was no spark or hint of a brain at work behind a vampire’s gaze—but Eph had seen this look before and knew that he had been recognized and identified. Their surrogate eyes had communicated their find to the Master, whose presence came flooding into their brains with the force of possession. The horde would be there in a matter of minutes.

  “Doctor Goodweather . . . ,” both the creatures said at the same time, their voices chirping in eerie synchrony. Their bodies rose like twin marionettes controlled by the same invisible string. The Master.

  Eph observed, both fascinated and repulsed, how their blank stare gave way to the intelligence, the poise of the superior creature—undulating, snapping to attention, like a leather glove snapping into shape as the hand fills it with form and intention.

  The pale, elongated faces of the creatures morphed as the will of the Master overtook the flaccid mouths and the vacant eyes . . .

  “You look . . . quite tired . . . ,” the twin marionettes said, their bodies moving in unison. “I think you should rest . . . don’t you think? Join us. Give in. I will procure for you. Anything you want . . .”

  The monster was right: he was tired—oh, so very, very tired—and yes, he would’ve liked to give in. Can I? he thought. Please? Give in?

  His eyes brimmed with tears and he felt his knees give—just a little—like a man about to sit down. “The people you love—the ones you miss—they live in my embrace . . . ,” the twin messengers said, their message worded so carefully. So inviting, so ambiguous . . .