by Chuck Hogan
Human blood is more than 95 percent water. The rest is proteins, sugars, and minerals, but no fat. Tiny bloodsuckers such as mosquitoes, ticks, and other arthropods could survive on blood meals just fine. As efficient as the vampires’ transmuted bodies were, as large sanguivores they had to consume a steady blood diet in order to avoid starvation. And because human blood was mostly water, they expressed waste frequently, including while feeding.
Eph left the flayed stinger upon the counter, returning to the creature. The acidic white vampire blood had eaten through the tubing across its neck, but the vampire’s thrashing had subsided. Eph opened up the creature’s chest, cutting down from sternum to waist in a classic Y. Through the calcified bone of the rib cage, he saw that the interior of the chest had mutated into quadrants, or chambers. He had long ago surmised that the entire digestive tract was transformed by the vampiric disease syndrome, but never, until now, had he viewed the chest cavity in its mature form.
The scientist in him found it truly extraordinary.
The human survivor in him found it absolutely repellent.
He stopped cutting when he heard footsteps on the floor above him. Hard steps—shoes—but some creatures occasionally still wore them, as quality footwear lasted longer than most other articles of clothing. He looked at the vampire’s smashed face and dented head and hoped he hadn’t underestimated the power of the Master’s reach, unwittingly inviting a fight.
Eph took up his long sword and lamp. He stepped back into a recess near the door to the walk-in cooler, giving him a good view of the stairs. No point in hiding; vamps could hear the beating of a human heart, circulating the red blood they craved.
The footsteps descended slowly—until the last few steps, which they ran down and kicked open the door. Eph saw a flash of silver, a long blade like his own, and knew immediately who it was—and relaxed.
Fet saw Eph standing against the wall and narrowed his eyes in that way he did. The exterminator wore wool trousers and a deep-blue anorak, the buckled leather strap of his bag slung across his chest. He pulled his hood back, further revealing his grizzled face, and sheathed his blade.
“Vasiliy?” said Eph. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Fet saw Eph’s pathology smock and gloved hands, then turned toward the still-animate strigoi eviscerated upon the table.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Fet asked, lowering his sword. “I just arrived today . . .”
Eph stepped away from the wall and returned his own sword to the pack on the floor. “I am examining this vampire.”
Fet came forward to the table, looking at the creature’s crushed face. “Did you do that?”
“No. Not directly. He was struck by a chunk of falling concrete, caused by a hospital I blew up.”
Fet looked at Eph. “I heard it. That was you?”
“They had me cornered. Almost.”
Eph felt relief as soon as he saw Vasiliy—but he also felt a bolt of anger tensing his body. He stood there, frozen. Not knowing what to do. Should he embrace the ratcatcher? Or beat the shit out of him?
Fet turned back to the strigoi on the table, wincing at the sight. “And so you decided to bring him down here. To play with him.”
“I saw an opportunity to answer some outstanding questions about our tormentors’ biological system.”
Fet said, “Looks more like torture to me.”
“Well, that is the difference between an exterminator and a scientist.”
“Maybe,” said Fet, circling the table so that he faced Eph across it. “Or maybe you can’t tell the difference. Maybe, since you can’t hurt the Master, you grabbed this thing in its place. You do realize this creature won’t tell you where your boy is.”
Eph didn’t like it when they threw Zack back at him like that. Eph had a stake in this battle that none of the others understood. “In studying its biology, I am looking for weaknesses in the design. Something we can exploit.”
Fet said, standing across the vampire’s opened body from Eph, “We know what they are. Forces of nature who invade us and exploit our bodies. Who feed off us. They are no mystery to us anymore.”
The creature moaned softly and stirred on the table. Its hips thrust forward and its chest heaved as though humping an invisible partner.
“Jesus, Eph. Destroy this fucking thing.” Fet backed away from the table. “Where’s Nora?”
He had tried to make it sound casual and failed.
Eph took a deep breath. “I think something’s happened to her.”
“What do you mean ‘something’? Talk.”
“When I got back here, she was gone. Her mother, too.”
“Gone where?”
“I think they got rousted from here and left. I haven’t heard from her since. If you haven’t either, then something’s happened.”
Fet stared, stunned. “And you figured the best thing to do was stay here and dissect a fucking vamp?”
“To stay here and wait for one of you two to get in touch with me, yes.”
Fet scowled at Eph’s attitude. He felt like slapping the guy—slapping him and telling him what a waste of time he was. Eph had it all and Fet had nothing, and yet Eph repeatedly squandered or overlooked his good fortune. He would have liked to slap the guy a couple of times alright. But instead he sighed heavily and said, “Take me through this.”
Eph walked him upstairs, showed him the overturned chair and Nora’s abandoned lamp, clothes, and weapons bag. He watched Fet’s eyes, saw them burning. Given Fet’s and Nora’s deception, Eph had thought it might feel good to see Fet suffer—but it didn’t. Nothing about this felt good. “It’s bad,” said Eph.
“Bad,” said Fet, turning toward the windows looking out at the city. “That’s all you got?”
“What do you want to do?”
“You say that as though we even have a choice. We have to go get her.”
“Ah. Simple.”
“Yes! Simple! You wouldn’t want us to go after you?”
“I wouldn’t expect it.”
“Really?” said Fet, turning to him. “I guess we have fundamentally different ideas about loyalty.”
“Yes, I guess we do,” said Eph with enough edge on his words to make them stick.
Fet didn’t respond, but he didn’t back down either. “So you think she was grabbed. But not turned.”
“Not here. But how can we know for sure? Unlike Zack, she has no Dear One to go after. Right?”
Another jab. Eph couldn’t help himself. The computer containing their intimate correspondence was right there on the desk.
Fet understood now that Eph at least suspected something. Maybe he was daring Eph to come right out and make an open accusation, but Eph would not give him the satisfaction. So, instead of answering Eph’s insinuations, Fet countered as usual, attacking Eph’s vulnerable spot. “I assume you were at Kelly’s house again instead of here to meet Nora at the appointed time? This obsession with your son has warped you, Eph. Yes, he needs you. But we need you too. She needs you. This isn’t just about you and your son. Others are relying on you.”
“And what about you?” said Eph. “Your obsession with Setrakian. That’s what your trip to Iceland was. Doing what you think he would have done. Did you figure out all the secrets in the Lumen? No? I thought not. You could have been here as well, but you chose to follow in the old man’s shoes, his self-appointed disciple.”
“I took a chance. We have to get lucky sometime.” Fet stopped himself, throwing up his hands. “But—forget all that. Focus on Nora. She’s our only problem right now.”
Eph said, “Best-case scenario, she’s in a heavily guarded blood camp. If we guess right on which one, then all we have to do is get ourselves inside, find her, and get back out again. I can think of easier ways to commit suicide.”
Fet began packing up Nora’s things. “We need her. Pure and simple. We can’t afford to lose anyone. We need all hands on deck if we’re gonna have any chance of di
gging ourselves out of this mess.”
“Fet. We’ve seen two years of this. The Master’s system has taken root. We are lost.”
“Wrong—just because I might have struck out on the Lumen doesn’t mean I came back empty-handed.”
Eph tried to figure out that one. “Food?”
“That too,” said Fet.
Eph was not in the mood for a guessing game. Besides, at the mention of real food, his mouth had begun to water, his belly twisting into a fist. “Where?”
“In a cooler, stashed nearby. You can help me carry it.”
“Carry it where?”
“Uptown,” said Fet. “We need to go get Gus.”
Staatsburg, New York
NORA RODE IN the backseat of a town car, speeding through rainy rural New York. The upholstery was dark and clean, but the floor mats were filthy from foot mud. Nora sat all the way over on the right, curled up in the corner, not knowing what was to come next.
She did not know where she was being taken. After her shocking encounter with her former boss Everett Barnes, Nora was led by two hulking vampires to a building with a room full of curtainless showers. The vampires remained near the only door, standing together. She could have made a stand there and refused but felt it was best to go along and see what was to come, perhaps a better chance to escape.
So she disrobed and showered. Self-consciously at first, but when she looked back at the big vampires, their eyes were focused on the far wall with their trademark distant stare, lacking any interest in the human form.
The cool spray—she could not get it hot—felt alien against her bare scalp. Her skin was prickled by needles of cold water, and the runoff spilled unimpeded down the back of her neck and naked back. The water felt good. Nora grabbed a half bar of soap sitting in a recessed tile niche. She lathered her hands and head and bare stomach and found relief in the ritual. She washed her shoulders and neck, pausing to smell the soap right against her nose—rose and lilac—a relic from the past. Someone, somewhere had made this bar of soap. Along with thousands of others, and packaged and shipped it in a normal day with traffic jams and school drops and hurried lunches. Someone had thought the bar of soap with rose and lilac scent would sell well and designed it—its shape and scent and color—to attract the attention of housewives and mothers on the crowded shelves of a Kmart or a Walmart. And now that bar of soap was here—in a processing plant. An archaeological artifact that smelled of roses and lilacs and of times gone by.
A new gray jumper was folded on a bench in the middle of the room, with a pair of white cotton panties set on top. She dressed and was led back through the quarantine station to the front gates. Above her, on an arch of rusting iron, dripped the word LIBERTY. The town car arrived, as did another one behind it. Nora got in the back of the first car; no one entered the second car.
A glasslike partition of hard plastic separated the driver from her passenger. She was a human in her early twenties, dressed in a man’s chauffeur suit and cap. Her hair was shaved tight below the back of her cap brim, leading Nora to assume that she was bald, and therefore perhaps a camp resident herself. And yet the pinkness of her flesh on the back of her neck and the healthy color of her hands made Nora doubt that she was a regular bleeder.
Nora turned again, obsessing over the tail car as she had done since pulling away from the camp. She couldn’t be sure, through the glare of its headlights in the dark rain, but something about the driver’s posture made her think it was a vamp. A backup car, maybe, in case she tried to escape. Her own doors were completely stripped of their inside panels and armrests, with the lock and window controls removed.
She expected a long ride, but little more than two or three miles away from the camp the town car pulled off the road through an open driveway gate. Rising out of the foggy gloom at the end of a long, curling driveway was a house larger and grander than most any she had ever seen. It appeared out of the New York countryside like a European manor, with nearly every window lit warmly yellow, as though for a party.
The car stopped. The driver remained behind the wheel as a butler exited the door, holding two umbrellas, one open over his head. He pulled Nora’s door open and shielded her from the dirty rain as she exited the vehicle and walked with him up slick marble steps. Inside, he disposed of the umbrellas and snapped a white towel off a nearby rack, dropping to one knee to attend to her muddied feet.
“This way, Dr. Martinez,” he said. Nora followed him, her bare soles silent upon the cool floor down a wide hallway. Brightly lit rooms, floor vents pushing warm air, the pleasing odor of cleaning solution. It was all so civilized, so human. Which is to say, so dreamlike. The difference between the blood camp and this mansion was the difference between ash and satin.
The butler pulled open twin doors, revealing an opulent dining room featuring a long table with only two settings laid out, adjoining one corner. The dishes were gold-rimmed with fluted edges, a small coat of arms in the center. The glassware was crystal, but the silverware was stainless steel—not silver. It was apparently the only concession in the entire mansion to the reality of the vampire-run world.
Arranged on a brass platter kitty-corner between the twin settings were a bowl of gorgeous plums, a porcelain basket of assorted pastries, and two dishes of chocolate truffles and other confectionery treats. The plums called to her. She reached for the bowl before stopping herself, remembering the drugged water they had given her in the camp. She needed to resist temptation and, despite her hunger, make smart choices.
She did not sit, remaining standing on bare feet. Music played faintly elsewhere inside the house. There was a second door across the room, and she considered trying the knob. But she felt watched. She looked for cameras and saw none.
The second door opened. Barnes entered, again wearing his formal, all-white admiral’s uniform. His skin beamed healthy and pink around his trim white Vandyke beard. Nora had almost forgotten how healthy a well-nourished human being could look.
“Well,” he said, striding down the length of the table toward her. He kept one hand tucked in his pocket, aping a gentleman of the manor. “This is a much more amenable setting to reacquaint ourselves, isn’t it? Camp life is so dreary. This place is my great escape.” He swirled his hand at the room and the house beyond. “Too big for only me, of course. But with eminent domain, everything on the menu is priced the same, so why settle for less than the very best? It was once owned by a pornographer, I understand. Smut bought all this. So I don’t feel all that bad.” He smiled, the corners of his mouth pulling up the trimmed edges of his pointy beard, as he reached her end of the table. “You haven’t eaten?” he said, looking at the food tray. He reached for a pastry drizzled with a sugary glaze. “I imagined you’d be famished.” He looked at the pastry with pride. “I have these made for me. Every day in a bakery in Queens, just for me. I used to long for them as a kid—but I couldn’t afford them . . . But now . . .”
Barnes took a bite of the pastry. He sat down at the head of the table and unfolded his napkin, smoothing it out on his knee.
Nora, once she knew the food was untainted, grabbed a plum and made quick work of it, devouring the fruit. She grabbed her own napkin to swipe at her juice-slicked chin, then reached for another.
“You bastard,” she said with her mouth full.
Barnes smiled flatly, expecting better from her. “Wow, Nora—straight to the point . . . ‘Realist’ is more like it. You want ‘opportunist’? That I might accept. Maybe. But this is a new world now. Those who accept this fact and acclimate themselves to it are much better off.”
“How noble. A sympathizer with these . . . these monsters.”
“On the contrary, I would say that sympathy is one trait that I lack.”
“A profiteer, then.”
He considered that, playing at polite conversation, finishing off his pastry and licking each of his fingertips. “Maybe.”
“How about ‘traitor’? Or—‘motherfucker’?”
Nora didn’t take her eyes from him. “They killed all the real leaders in the first weeks. The opinion makers, the powerful. Leaving room for someone like you to float to the top. That can’t feel so good either. Being the floater in the flush.”
Barnes smiled, pretending her opinion of him did not matter. “I am trying to be civilized. I am trying to help you. So sit . . . Eat . . . Converse . . .”
Nora pulled the other chair back from the table, in order to give herself some distance from him.
“Allow me,” he said. Dull knife in hand, Barnes began preparing a croissant for her, swiping in butter and raspberry preserves. “You are using wartime terms such as ‘traitor’ and ‘profiteer.’ The war, if there ever was one, is over. A few humans such as yourself haven’t accepted this new reality yet, but that is your delusion. Now—does this mean we all have to be slaves? Is that the only choice? I don’t think so. There is room in the middle, even room near the top. For those few with exceptional skills and the perspicacity to apply them.” He set the croissant on her plate.
“I had forgotten how slippery you were,” she said. “And how ambitious.”
He smiled as though she had offered him a compliment. “Well—camp living can be a fulfilled existence. Not only living for oneself but for others. This basic human biological function—the creation of blood—is an enormous resource to their kind. Do you think that leaves us with no leverage? If one plays things right, that is. If one can demonstrate to them that one has real value.”
