Eph gripped his sword, searching faces as he passed them. Dead faces with bloodred eyes.
“Stay together,” whispered Setrakian, lifting the UVC mine thing carefully out of the mesh bag on Fet’s back as they walked. With crooked fingers, he peeled back a strip of safety tape, then rotated the top of the globe to ready the battery. “I do hope this works.”
“Hope?” said Fet.
One came at him then—an old man, maybe not as sated as the others—and Fet showed him his silver dagger and the vampire hissed. Fet put a boot on the man’s thigh and kicked him back, showing the others his silver.
“We’re digging ourselves into a deep hole here.”
Faces came out of the walls, flushed and leering. Older vampires, first or second generation, marked by their whitening hair. There were animal-like groans and glottal clicks from some, like attempts at speech blocked by the vile appendages grown beneath their tongues. Their swollen throats twitched perversely.
Setrakian said, walking between Fet and Eph, “When this spike makes contact with the ground, the battery should connect.”
“Should!” said Fet.
“You must take cover before it ignites. Behind these supports.” Rusted, rivet-studded beams stood at regular intervals. “You won’t have more than a few seconds. When you do, shut your eyes. Do not look. The burst will blind you.”
“Just do it!” said Fet, crowded by the vampires.
“Not yet…” The old man opened his walking stick just enough to bare the silver blade, and with the quick motion of flint striking stone he ran the tips of two crooked fingers against the sharp edge. Blood dripped to the stone floor. The scent went through the vampires with a visible ripple. They were coming from all over, crowding in from unseen corners, ever curious and ever hungry.
Fet swiped the dusty air with his dagger in order to maintain the few meters of open space around them as they moved. “What are you waiting for?” he said.
Eph searched faces, scanning the dead-eyed women for Kelly. One made a move toward him and he laid the tip of his sword against her breastbone and she shrank back as though burned.
More noise now, the front crowd being pressed closer from behind, hunger overriding hesitance, want trumping wait. Setrakian’s blood dribbled to the floor, its scent—and the casual waste—driving them into a frenzy.
“Do it!” said Fet.
Setrakian said, “A few more seconds…”
The vampires pushed in, Eph prodding them back with the tip of his sword. He only then thought to turn his Luma light back on, but they leaned into its repulsing rays like zombies staring at the sun. The ones in front were at the mercy of those in the rear. The bubble was collapsing…Eph felt one hand grab at his sleeve…
“Now!” said Setrakian.
He tossed the spiked globe into the air, like a referee serving up a jump ball. The heavy thing righted itself at its apex, weighted spikes pointing straight down as it drove toward the floor.
The four-edged steel spike sank into the stone, and a whir started, like that of an old flashbulb rack recharging.
“Go, go!” said Setrakian.
Eph waved his light and swung his sword like a machete, making for one of the stanchions. He felt them grabbing at him, pulling, and felt the squishy thump of his sword cutting, and heard their groans and garbled howls. And still—he checked faces, looking for Kelly, and striking down all those who were not her.
The mine’s whir became a growing whine, and Eph stabbed and kicked and swiped his way to the steel support beam, stepping into its shadow just as the underground chamber began to fill with a blazing blue light. He clamped his eyes shut and buried them in the crook of his elbow.
He heard the bestial agony of the shattered vampires. The melting, blistering, peeling sound of their bodies being desiccated at the chemical level, the collapsing of their innards like the charcoaling of their very souls. Their dumb cries strangled in scalded throats.
Mass immolation.
The high-pitched whine lasted no longer than ten seconds, the brilliant plane of cleansing blue light riding from floor to ceiling before the battery burned out. The chamber went mostly dark again—and when the only sound left was a residual sizzling, Eph lowered his arm, opening his eyes.
The nauseating stench of roasted disease rose in smoky steam from the charred creatures laid out over the floor. It was impossible to move without disturbing these rotted demons, their bodies crumbling like artificial logs hollowed out by fire. Only those vampires lucky enough to have been partially behind a beam remained animate, Eph and Fet moving quickly to release these crippled, half-destroyed creatures.
Fet then walked over to the mine, which had caught fire. He surveyed the damage.
“Well,” he said, “that fucking worked.”
“Look,” said Setrakian.
At the far end of the steaming chamber, set on top of a yard-high mound of dirt and refuse, was a long, black box.
As Eph and the others approached it—with the dread of bomb-squad agents approaching a suspicious device without wearing blast suits—the situation felt terribly familiar, and it was only a moment before he placed it: he had felt exactly the same walking toward the darkened airplane on the taxiway, at the start of this whole thing.
This sense of approaching something dead and not dead. Some delivery from another world.
He got close enough to confirm that it was indeed the long, black cabinet from the cargo hold of Flight 753. Its top doors exquisitely carved with human figures swirling as though burning in flames, and elongated faces screaming in agony.
The Master’s oversize coffin, set here on an altar of rubble and rubbish beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center.
“This is it,” Eph said.
Setrakian reached out to the side of the box, almost touching the carvings, then pulling back his twisted fingers. “A long time I have searched for this,” he said.
Eph shuddered, not wanting to meet this thing again, with its devouring size and ruthless strength. He remained on the near side, expecting the top doors to burst open at any moment. Fet went around to the facing side. There were no handles on the top doors. One had to slip one’s fingers in beneath the lip of the middle seam and pull up. It would be awkward, and difficult to do quickly.
Setrakian stood at the presumed head of the cabinet, his long sword ready in his hand. But his expression was grim. Eph saw the reason for this in the old man’s eyes, and it deflated him.
Too easy.
Eph and Fet wriggled their fingers in beneath the double doors, and on a nod of three, pulled them back. Setrakian leaned forward with his lamp and his sword…and discovered a box full of soil. He probed it with his blade, the silver tip scraping the bottom of the great box. Nothing.
Fet stepped back, wild-eyed, full of adrenaline he could not stifle. “He’s gone?”
Setrakian withdrew his blade, tapping off the soil on the edge of the box.
Eph’s disappointment was overwhelming. “He escaped.” Eph stepped back from the coffin, turning to the wasteland of slain vampires inside the stultifying chamber. “He knew we were here. He fled into the subway system fifteen minutes ago. He can’t surface because of the sun…so he’ll stay underground until night.”
Fet said, “Inside the longest transit system in the entire world. Eight hundred miles of tracks.”
Eph’s voice was raw with despair. “We never even had a chance.”
Setrakian looked exhausted but undaunted. If anything, his old eyes showed a bit of fresh light. “Is this not how you exterminate vermin, Mr. Fet? By rousting them from their nest? Flushing them out?”
Fet said, “Only if you know where they’re going to end up.”
Setrakian said, “Don’t all burrowing creatures, from rats to rabbits, construct a kind of back door…?”
“A bolt-hole,” said Fet. He was getting it now. “An emergency exit. Predator comes in one way, you run out the other.”
Setrakian
said, “I believe we have the Master on the run.”
Vestry Street, Tribeca
THEY HADN’T TIME to properly destroy the coffin, and so settled for shoving it off its altar of rubble, overturning it and spilling the soil to the floor. They had resolved to return later to finish the job.
Getting back through the tunnels and out to Fet’s van took some time, and more of Setrakian’s energy.
Fet parked around the corner from the Bolivar town house. They ran the sunny half block to his front door with no effort to conceal their Luma lamps or silver swords. They saw no one outside the residence at that early hour, and Eph started up the crossbars of the scaffolding in front. Over the boarded door was a transom window decorated with the address number. Eph smashed it in with his sword, kicking free the larger shards and then clearing out the frame with his blade. He took a lamp and went inside, lowering himself into the foyer.
His purple light illuminated twin marble panthers on either side of the door. A winged angel statue at the bottom of the curling stairs looked down at him balefully.
He heard it, and felt it: the hum of the Master’s presence. Kelly, he thought, misery aching in his chest. She had to be here.
Setrakian came down next, held from the outside by Fet, helped to the floor by Eph. Setrakian landed and drew his sword. He too felt the Master’s presence, and with it, relief. They were not too late.
“He is here,” said Eph.
Setrakian said, “Then he already knows we are.”
Fet lowered two larger UVC lamps to Eph, then clambered over the transom himself, his boots striking the floor.
“Quickly,” said Setrakian, leading them under the winding stairs, the bottom floor in the midst of renovation. They moved through a long kitchen of still-boxed appliances, looking for a closet. They found it, empty inside, and unfinished.
They pushed open the false door in the back wall, as it had been pictured in Nora’s People magazine printouts.
Stairs led down. A sheet of plastic behind them flapped, and they turned around fast, but it was only riding the draft rising up the stairs. The wind carried the scent of the subway, and of dirt and spoilage.
This was the way to the tunnels. Eph and Fet began arranging two large UVC lamps so they could fill the closet passageway with hot, killing light, and thereby seal off the underground. And block any other vampires from rising up, and, more imperative, ensure that the only way out of the town house was into direct sunlight.
Eph looked back to see Setrakian leaning against one wall, his fingertips pressing against the vest, over his heart. Eph didn’t like the looks of that, and had started toward him when Fet’s voice turned him back around. “Damnit!” One of the hot lamps tumbled over, clunking to the floor. Eph checked to make sure that the bulbs still worked, then righted the lamp, wary of the radiative light.
Fet quieted him. He heard noises below. Footsteps. The odor in the air changed—became ranker, more rotten. Vampires were assembling.
Eph and Fet backed away from the blue-lit closet, their safety valve. When Eph turned back to the old man, he was gone.
Setrakian had moved back into the foyer. His heart felt tight in his chest, overtaxed by stress and anticipation. So long he had waited. So long…
His gnarled hands began to ache. He flexed them, gripping the sword handle beneath the silver wolf’s head. Then he felt something, the faintest breeze in advance of movement…
Moving his drawn sword at the last possible moment saved him from a direct and fatal blow. The impact knocked him back, sending his crumpled body sliding headfirst over the marble floor to slam into the base of the wall. But he kept his grip on his sword. He got back to his feet quickly, swinging his blade back and forth, seeing nothing in the dim foyer.
So fast the Master moved.
He was right here. Somewhere.
Now you are an old man.
The voice crackled inside Setrakian’s head like an electric shock. Setrakian swung his silver sword out wide in front of him. A black form blurred past the statue of the weeping angel at the foot of the curling marble stairs.
The Master would try to distract him. This was his way. Never to challenge directly, face-to-face, but to deceive. To surprise from behind.
Setrakian backed up against the wall beside the front door. Behind him, a narrow, door-framing window of Tiffany glass had been blacked over. Setrakian struck at the lead panes, smashing out the precious glass with his sword.
Daylight knifed into the foyer.
At that moment of breaking glass, Eph and Fet returned to find Setrakian standing with his sword raised, his body bathed in sunlight.
The old man saw the dark blur rising up the stairs. “There he is!” he yelled, starting after him. “Now!”
Eph and Fet charged up the steps after the old man. Two other vampires met them at the top of the stairs. Bolivar’s former security detail, his Big-and-Tall-Store bodyguards now hungry-faced hulks in dirty suits. One swatted at Eph, who stumbled backward and almost lost his balance, grabbing the wall to keep himself from tumbling down the marble stairs. He stuck out his Luma light and the big dummy recoiled and Eph chopped at his thigh with the sword. The vampire let out a gasp and swung at him again. Eph gutted him, running his sword most of the way through his belly before pulling it back, the vampire sinking to the landing like a stuck balloon.
Fet held his at bay with his lamp light, sticking and cutting at the bodyguard’s grabbing hands with his short-bladed dagger. He brought the light up, right into its face, and the vampire flailed and looked around wildly, temporarily blinded. Fet ducked him and got behind his back, stabbing the bodyguard in the back of its thick neck before shoving him hard down the stairs.
Eph’s vampire tried to rise, but Fet dropped him again with a kick to the ribs. The bodyguard’s head lay off the top step, and with a cry of anguish, Eph brought his sword down.
The head bumped down the stairs, gaining speed and rotation at the bottom, hopping the other vampire’s body and rolling all the way to the wall.
White blood oozed out of its opened neck, onto the carmine runner. The blood worms emerged, Fet frying them with his lamp.
The bodyguard at the bottom of the steps was no more than a skin sack of broken bones, but he was still animate. The fall had not severed his neck, and so had not released him. His eyes were open and he stared dumbly up the long staircase, trying to move.
Eph and Fet found Setrakian near the closed elevator grate with his sword out, taking a swipe at a dark, fast-moving blur. “Watch out—!” called Setrakian, but before the words were out of his mouth, the Master struck Fet from behind. He went down hard, nearly smashing his lamp. Eph barely had time to react before the form flew past him—slowing down just long enough for Eph to see the Master’s face again, his wormy flesh and sneering mouth—and he was thrown back against the wall.
Setrakian lunged forward, sweeping his sword two-handedly, driving the fast-moving form into a wide, high-ceilinged, floor-through room. Eph got himself up and followed, as did Fet, a lick of blood dribbling down his temple.
The Master stopped, appearing to them before the massive stone fireplace at the midpoint of the room. The town house had windows only at either long end—leaving no sunlight in the middle to assist them. The Master’s cloak rippled and settled and his horrible eyes looked down on them all, but mainly Fet, no small man himself. The blood trickling down his face. With something like a howling grin, the long-armed Master grabbed up lumber and bales of electrical wire and any other debris within reach and hurled them at the three assassins.
Setrakian flattened against the wall, Eph taking cover around the corner, Fet using a chunk of wallboard as a shield.
When the assault ended and they looked up, the Master was gone again.
“Christ!” hissed Fet. He swiped the blood off his face with his hand, then tossed aside the wallboard. He threw his silver dagger into the cold fireplace with a clank and a thud—useless against this giant—
and took Eph’s lamp from him, giving Fet two, freeing Eph up to wield his longer blade with both hands.
“Stay after him,” said Setrakian, pushing ahead. “Like smoke rising up a chimney, we must force him to the roof.”
As they rounded the corner, four more hissing vampires came at them. They looked like former fans of Bolivar’s with their razored hair and piercings.
Fet went after them with the twin lamps, pushing them back. One got through, and Eph played backup, showing her his silver sword. This one looked like a chubby Vampira in a denim skirt and torn fishnet stockings. She had that curious rapacity of the newly turned vampire that Eph had come to recognize. Eph aimed his sword at her from a crouch, the vampire feinting right, then left, hissing at him through white lips.
Eph heard Setrakian yell, “Strigoi!” in that commanding voice of his. The chopping sound of the old man cutting down vampires emboldened Eph. The chubby Vampira feinted too aggressively and Eph jabbed her, his sword tip slicing into the front shoulder of her torn black cotton top, burning the beast within. Her mouth opened and her tongue curled up, and Eph darted back barely in time, her stinger just missing his neck. She continued at him, mouth agape, and with a howl of anger, Eph ran his sword at her face. Straight at her stinger, the blade slicing right through the back of her head, the tip burying a few inches in the unfinished wall.
The vampire’s eyes bugged. Her stinger was cut and leaking white blood, filling her mouth and spilling down her chin, which she could not move. She was pinned to the wall. She bucked and attempted to cough her wormy blood onto Eph. A virus will propagate itself any way it can.
Setrakian had slain the other three vampires, leaving the newly polished maple flooring at the end of the hall slathered in white. He returned to Eph, yelling, “Back!”
Eph released his sword, the grip quivering out of the wall. Setrakian swung at the vampire’s neck, and gravity pulled the headless body to the floor.
The Strain Page 39
