He slowed long enough to pull a Luma lamp from the pack on his back. The ultraviolet light picked up an explosion of color, the biological matter expelled by vampires. The staining was recent, the ammonia odor eye-watering. This much waste indicated a massive feeding.
Eph ran until he saw the rear car of the derailed train. No noise; all was still. Eph started around the right, seeing ahead where the engine or the first passenger car had jumped the track, angled up against the tunnel wall. He entered an open door, boarding the dark train. Through his green vision, he viewed the carnage. Bodies slumped over chairs, over other bodies, on the floor. All budding vampires, due to begin rising as soon as the next sunset. No time to release them all now. Or to go through them, face-by-face.
No. He knew Nora was smarter than that.
He jumped back out, turning the corner around the train, and saw the lurkers. Four of them, two to a side, their eyes reflecting like glass in his monocular. His Luma lamp froze them, hungry faces leering as they backed away, allowing him passage.
Eph knew better. He went between the two pairs, counting to three before reaching back and drawing his sword from his pack, and wheeling around.
He caught them coming, slashing the first two aggressors, then going after the backpedalers and cutting them down without hesitation.
Before their bodies settled on the tracks, Eph returned to the wet trail of vampire waste. It led to a passage through the left wall, into the facing, Manhattan-bound track. Eph followed the swirling colors, ignoring his disgust, rushing through the dark tunnel. He passed two hacked corpses—the bright register of their spilled blood under the black light showing them to be strigoi—then heard a ruckus ahead.
He came upon some nine or ten creatures bunched up at a door. They fanned out upon sensing him, Eph sweeping his Luma lamp in order to prevent any from slipping behind him.
The door. Zack was inside, Eph told himself.
He went homicidal, attacking before the vampires could coordinate an assault. Slashing and burning. His animal brutality surpassed theirs. His paternal need overmatched their blood hunger. This was a fight for his son’s life, and for a father pushed to the brink, killing came quick. Killing was easy.
He went to the door, clanging his white-slickened sword blade against it. “Zack! It’s me! Open up!”
The hand holding the door fast from the inside released the knob, Eph ripping open the door. There stood Nora, her wide eyes as bright as the flare burning in her hand. She stared at him a long moment, as though making sure it was him—a human him—then rushed into his arms. Behind her, sitting on a box in her housecoat with her gaze cast sadly into the corner, was Nora’s mother.
Eph closed his arms around Nora as best he could without letting the wet blade touch her. Then, realizing the rest of the storage closet was empty, he pushed back.
“Where’s Zack?” he said.
Gus blew through the open perimeter gate, the dark silhouettes of the cooling towers looming in the distance. Motion-sensitive surveillance cameras sat on high white poles like heads upon pikes, failing to track their Hummer as it passed. The road in was long and winding, and they were unmet.
Setrakian rode in the passenger seat with his hand over his heart. High fences topped with barbwire; towers spewing smokelike steam. A camp flashback rippled through him like nausea.
“Federates,” said Angel, from the backseat.
National Guard trucks were set up at the entrance to the interior security zone. Gus slowed, awaiting some signal or order that he would then have to figure out a way to disobey.
When no such order came, he rolled right up to the gate and stopped. He exited the Hummer with the engine running, checking the first truck. Empty. The second as well. Empty but for splashes of red blood on the windshield and dashboard, and a dry puddle on the front seat.
Gus went into the back of the truck, lifting the canvas. He waved over Angel, who came limping. Together they looked at the rack of small arms. Angel strung one submachine gun over each of his considerable shoulders, cradling an assault rifle in his arms. Extra ammunition went into his pockets and shirt. Gus carried two Colt submachine guns back to the Hummer.
They pushed around the trucks through to the first buildings. Getting out, Setrakian heard loud engines running and realized the plant was operating on diesel-fueled backup generators. The redundant safety systems were operating automatically, keeping the abandoned reactor from shutting down.
Inside the first buildings, they were met by turned soldiers—vampires in fatigues. With Gus in front and Angel limping behind, they moved through the revenants, shredding bodies without any finesse. The rounds staggered the vampires, but they wouldn’t stay down unless the spinal column was obliterated at the neck.
“Know where you’re going?” said Gus over his shoulder.
“I do not,” said Setrakian.
He followed the security checkpoints, pushing through doors with the most warning signs. Here there were no more soldier vampires, only plant workers turned into guards and sentinels. The more resistance Setrakian met, the closer he knew they were to the control room.
Setrakian.
The old man grabbed the wall.
The Master. Here …
How much more powerful the Master’s “voice” was inside his head than that of the Ancients. Like a hand grasping his brain stem and snapping his spine like a whip.
Angel straightened Setrakian with a meaty hand and called to Gus.
“What is it?” said Gus, fearing a heart attack.
They hadn’t heard it. The Master spoke only to Setrakian.
“He is here now,” said Setrakian. “The Master.”
Gus looked this way and that, hyperalert. “He’s here? Great. Let’s get him.”
“No. You don’t understand. You haven’t faced him yet. He is not like the Ancients. These guns are nothing to him. He will dance around bullets.”
Gus reloaded his smoking weapon and said, “I come too far with this. Nothing scares me now.”
“I know, but you can’t beat him this way. Not here, and not with weapons made for killing men.” Setrakian fixed his vest, straightening. “I know what he wants.”
“Okay. What’s that?”
“Something only I can give him.”
“That damn book?”
“No. Listen to me, Gus. Return to Manhattan. If you leave now, there is hope that you might make it in time. Join Eph and Fet if you can. You will need to be deep underground regardless.”
“This place is going to blow?” Gus looked at Angel, who was breathing hard and gripping his bad leg. “Then come back with us. Let’s go. If you can’t beat him here.”
“I can’t stop this nuclear chain reaction. But—I might be able to affect the chain reaction of vampiric infection.”
An alarm went off—piercing honks spaced about one second apart—startling Angel, who checked both ends of the hallway.
“My guess is the backup generators are failing,” said Setrakian. He grasped Gus’s shirt, talking over the horn blasts. “Do you want to be cooked alive here? Both of you—go!”
Gus remained with Angel as the old man walked on, unsheathing the sword from his walking stick. Gus looked to the other old man in his charge, the broken-down wrestler drenched in sweat, his big eyes uncertain. Waiting to be told what to do.
“We go,” said Gus. “You heard the man.”
Angel’s big arm stopped him. “Just leave him here?”
Gus shook his head hard, knowing there was no good solution. “I’m only alive still because of him. For me, whatever the pawnbroker says, goes. Now let’s get as far away from here as we can, unless you want to see your own skeleton.”
Angel was still looking after Setrakian, and had to be pulled away by Gus.
Setrakian entered the control room and saw a lone creature in an old suit standing before a series of panels, watching gauge dials roll back as systems failed. Red emergency lights flashed from every corne
r of the room, though the alarm was muted.
Eichhorst turned just its head, red eyes settling on its former camp prisoner. No concern in his face—it wasn’t capable of the subtleties of emotion, and barely registered the larger reactions, such as surprise.
You are just in time, it said, returning to the monitors.
Setrakian, sword at his side, circled behind the creature.
I don’t believe I extended you my congratulations on winning the book. That was a clever bit of work, going around Palmer like that.
“I expected to meet him here.”
You won’t be seeing him again. He never realized his great dream, precisely because he failed to understand that it was not his aspirations that mattered but the Master’s. You creatures and your pathetic hopes.
Setrakian said, “Why you? Why did he keep you?”
The Master learns from humans. That is a key element of his greatness. He watches and he sees. Your kind has shown him the way to your own final solution. I see only packs of animals, but he sees patterns of behavior. He listens to what you are saying when, as I suspect, you have no idea you are saying anything at all.
“You’re saying he learned from you? Learned what?” Setrakian’s grip tightened on the handle of his sword as Eichhorst turned. He looked at the former camp commandant—and suddenly he knew.
It is not easy to establish and operate a well-functioning camp. It took a special kind of human intellect to oversee the systematic destruction of a people at maximum efficiency. He drew upon my singular knowledge.
Setrakian went dry. He felt as though his flesh were crumbling off his bones.
Camps. Human stockyards. Blood farms spread out across the country, the world.
In a sense, Setrakian had always known. Always known but never wanted to believe. He had seen it in the Master’s eyes upon their first meeting in the barracks at Treblinka. Man’s own inhumanity to man had whet the monster’s appetite for havoc. We had, through our atrocities, demonstrated our own doom to the ultimate nemesis, welcoming him as though by prophesy.
The building shuddered as a bank of monitors went dark.
Setrakian cleared his throat to find his voice. “Where is your Master now?”
He is everywhere, don’t you know? Here, now. Watching you. Through me.
Setrakian readied himself, taking a step forward. His course was clear. “He must be pleased with your handiwork. But he has little use for you now. No more than I do.”
You underestimate me, Jew.
Eichhorst vaulted up onto the nearby console with little apparent effort, moving out of Setrakian’s kill range. Setrakian raised his silver blade, its tip pointing at the Nazi’s throat. Eichhorst’s arms were at his sides, elongated fingers rubbing against his palms. It feigned an attack; Setrakian countering but not giving any quarter. The old vampire leaped to another console, shoes trampling on the tender controls of this highly sensitive room. Setrakian swung around, tracking it—until he faltered.
With the hand holding the wooden sheath of his walking stick, Setrakian pressed his crooked knuckles to his chest, over his heart.
Your pulse is most irregular.
Setrakian winced and staggered. He exaggerated his distress, but not for Eichhorst’s sake. His sword arm bent, but he kept the blade high.
Eichhorst hopped down to the floor, watching Setrakian with something like nostalgia.
I no longer know the tether of the heartbeat. The lung breath. The cheap gear-work and slow tick of the human clock.
Setrakian leaned against the console. Waiting for strength to return.
And you would rather perish than continue on in a greater form?
Setrakian said, “Better to die a man than live as a monster.”
Can you fail to see that, to all the lesser beings, you are the monster? It is you who took this planet for your own. And now the worm turns.
Eichhorst’s eyes flickered a moment, their nictitating lids narrowing.
He commands me to turn you. I do not look forward to your blood. Hebraic inbreeding has fortified the bloodline into a vintage as salty and mineral-muddied as the River Jordan.
“You won’t turn me. The Master himself couldn’t turn me.”
Eichhorst moved laterally, not yet attempting to close the distance between them.
Your wife struggled but she never cried out. I thought that strange. Not even a whimper. Only a single word. “Abraham.”
Setrakian allowed himself to be goaded, wanting the vampire closer. “She saw the end. She found solace in the moment, knowing that I would someday avenge her.”
She called your name and you were not there. I wonder if you will sing out at the end.
Setrakian sank almost to one knee before lowering his blade, using the point against the floor as a kind of crutch, to keep himself from falling.
Put aside your weapon, Jew.
Setrakian lifted his sword, switching to an overhand grip of the handle in order to examine the line of the old silver blade. He looked at the wolf’s head pommel, feeling its counterbalancing weight.
Accept your fate.
“Ah,” said Setrakian, looking at Eichhorst standing just a few feet away. “But I already have.”
Setrakian put everything he had into the throw. The sword crossed the space between them and penetrated Eichhorst just below the breastplate, dead-center in his torso, between the buttons of his vest. The vampire fell back against the console with his bent arms back as though in a gesture of balance. The killing silver was in his body and he could not touch it to pull out the blade. He began to twitch as the silver’s toxic virucidal properties spread outward like a burning cancer. White blood appeared around the blade with the first of the escaping worms.
Setrakian pulled himself to his feet and stood, wavering, before Eichhorst. He did so with no sense of triumph, and little satisfaction. He made certain that the vampire’s eyes were focused on him—and, by extension, the Master’s eyes—and said, “Through him you took love away from me. Now you will have to turn me yourself.” Then he grasped the sword handle and slowly pulled it from Eichhorst’s chest.
The vampire settled back against the console, its hands still grasping at nothing. It began to slide to the right, falling stiffly, and Setrakian, in his weakened state, anticipated Eichhorst’s trajectory and set the point of his sword against the floor. The blade rested at about a forty-degree angle, the angle of the guillotine blade.
Eichhorst’s falling body pulled its neck across the edge of the blade, and the Nazi was destroyed.
Setrakian swiped both sides of his silver blade over the vampire’s coat sleeve, cleaning them, then backed away from the blood worms fleeing Eichhorst’s open neck. His chest seized up like a knot. He reached for his pillbox and, in trying to open it with his twisted hands, spilled the contents onto the control-room floor.
Gus emerged from the nuke plant ahead of Angel, into the dim, overcast last day. Between the persistent alarm blasts, he heard a deathly silence, the generators no longer working. He sensed a low-voltage snap in the air, like static electricity, but it might just have been him knowing what was to come.
Then, a familiar noise cutting into the air. A helicopter. Gus found the lights, seeing the chopper circle behind the steaming towers. He knew it wasn’t help on the way. He realized that this had to be the Master’s ride out of here, so it didn’t cook with the rest of Long Island.
Gus went into the back of the National Guard truck. He had seen the Stinger missile the first time, but stuck with the small arms. All he needed was a reason.
He brought it out and double-checked to make sure he had it facing the right way. It balanced nicely on his shoulder and was surprisingly light for an anti-aircraft weapon, maybe thirty-five pounds. He ran past the limping Angel to the side of the building. The chopper was coming in lower, making to land in a wide clearing.
The trigger was easy to find, as was the scope. He looked through it, and once the missile detected the heat
of the helicopter’s exhaust, it emitted a high, whistle-like tone. Gus squeezed the trigger and the launch rocket shot the missile out of the tube. The launch engine fell away and the main solid rocket engine lit up and the Stinger flew off like a plume of smoke traveling along a string.
The helicopter never saw it coming. The missile struck it a few hundred yards above the ground and the flying machine burst upon impact, the explosion upending it and sending it pinwheeling into nearby trees.
Gus threw off the empty launcher. The fire was good. It would light his way to the water. Long Island Sound was the fastest and safest way back home.
He said as much to Angel, but he could tell, as the distant light of the flames played across the old brawler’s face, that something had changed.
“I’m staying,” said Angel.
Gus tried to explain that which he only vaguely understood himself. “This whole place is going to go up. This is nukes.”
“I can’t walk away from a fight.” Angel patted his leg to show that he meant it literally as well as figuratively. “Besides, I’ve been here before.”
“Here?”
“In my movies. I know how it ends. The evil one faces the good one, and all seems lost.”
“Angel,” said Gus, needing to go.
“The day is saved always—in the end.”
Gus had noticed the ex-wrestler acting more and more scattered. The vampire siege was wearing on his mind, his perspective. “Not here. Not against this.”
Angel pulled, from deep in his front pocket, a piece of cloth. He pulled it on over his head, rolling the silver mask down so that only his eyes and his mouth showed. “You go,” he said. “Back to the island, with the doctor. Do as the old man tell you. Me? He have no plan for me. So I stay. I fight.”
Gus smiled at the mad Mexican’s bravery. And he recognized Angel for the very first time. He understood everything—the strength, the courage of this old man. As a child, he had seen all of the wrestler’s films on TV. On weekends, they played on an endless loop. And now he was standing next to his hero. “This world is a motherfucker, isn’t it?”
The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal Page 70
