The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (100 page)

Twenty-eighth Street Subway

N
ORA
STOOD
AT
the corner of Park and Twenty-eighth, rain rapping on the hood of her slicker. She knew she needed to keep moving, but she also needed to know she was not being followed. Otherwise, escaping into the subway system would instead be like walking into a trap.

Vampires had eyes all over the city. She had to appear like any other human on her way to work or home. The problem with that was her mother.

“I told you to call the landlord!” said her mother, pulling back her hood to feel the rain on her face.

“Mama,” said Nora, pushing the hood back over her head.

“Fix this broken shower!”

“Shhh! Quiet!”

Nora had to keep moving. Hard as it was for her mother, walking kept her quiet. Nora gripped her around her lower back, holding her close as she stepped to the curb, just as an army truck approached the intersection. Nora stepped back again, head lowered, watching the vehicle pass. The truck was driven by a
strigoi
. Nora held her mother tightly, stopping her from wandering into the street.

“When I see that landlord, he’s going to be sorry he crossed us.”

Thank goodness for the rain. Because rain meant raincoats, and raincoats meant hoods. The old and infirm had been rounded up long ago. The unproductive had no place in the new society. Nora would never take a risk such as this—venturing out in public with her mother—were there any other choice.

“Mama, can we play the quiet game again?”

“I’m tired of all that. This goddamn leaky ceiling.”

“Who can be quietest the longest? Me or you?”

Nora started her across the street. Ahead, hanging from the pole that supported the street sign and the traffic signal, hung a dead body. Exhibition corpses were commonplace, especially along Park Avenue. A squirrel on the dead man’s slumped shoulder was battling two pigeons for rights to the corpse’s cheeks.

Nora would have steered her mother away from the sight, but her mother didn’t even look up. They turned and started down the slick stairs into the subway station, the steps oily from the filthy rain. Once underground, Nora’s mother again tried to remove her hood, which Nora quickly replaced, scolding her.

The turnstiles were gone. One old MetroCard machine remained for no reason. But the
IF
YOU
SEE
SOMETHING
,
SAY
SOMETHING
signs remained. Nora caught a break: the only two vampires were at the other end of the entrance, not even looking her way. She walked her mother down to the uptown platform, hoping a 4 5 6 train would arrive quickly. She was holding down her mother’s arms and trying to make the embrace appear natural.

Commuters stood around them as they had in the old days. Some read books. A few listened to music on portable music players. All that was missing were the phones and the newspapers.

On one of the poles people leaned against was an old police flier featuring Eph’s face: a copy of his old work ID photograph. Nora closed her eyes, cursing him silently. It was he whom they had been waiting for at the morgue. Nora didn’t like it there, not because she was squeamish—she was anything but—but because it was too open. Gus—the former gangbanger who, following a life-changing encounter with Setrakian, had become a trusted comrade in arms—had carved out space for himself underground. Fet had Roosevelt Island—where she was headed now.

Typical Eph. A genius, and a good man, but always a few minutes behind. Always rushing to catch up at the end.

Because of him she had stayed there that extra day. Out of misplaced loyalty—and, yes, maybe guilt—she wanted to connect with him, to check up on him, to make sure he was okay. The
strigoi
had entered the morgue at street level; Nora had been typing into one of the computers when she heard the glass break. She had just enough time to find her mother, asleep in her wheelchair. Nora could have killed the vampires, but doing so would have given away her position, and the location of Eph’s hideout, to the Master. And unlike Eph, she was too considerate to risk betraying their alliance.

Betraying it to the Master, that is. She had already betrayed Eph with Fet. Betrayed him within their alliance. Which she felt particularly guilty about, but again, Eph was always a few minutes late. This proved it. She had been so patient with him—too patient, especially with his drinking—and now she was living fully for herself.

And her mother. She felt the old woman pulling at her grip and opened her eyes.

“There’s a hair in my face,” said her mother, trying to swipe it away.

Nora examined her quickly. Nothing. But she pretended to see a single strand and released her mother’s arm momentarily to pluck it away. “Got it,” she said. “All set now.”

But she could tell from her mother’s fidgeting that her ploy had not worked. Her mother tried blowing at it. “Tickles. Let me go!”

Nora felt a head or two turn. She released her mother’s arm. The old woman brushed at her face, then tried to remove her hood.

Nora forced it back on over her head, but not before a shock of unkempt silver-gray was briefly visible.

She heard someone gasp near her. Nora fought the urge to look, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. She heard whispering, or else imagined she did.

She leaned toward the yellow line, hoping to see train headlights.

“There he is!” shouted her mother. “Rodrigo! I see you. Don’t pretend!”

She was yelling the name of their landlord from when Nora was a child. A rail-thin man, Nora recalled, with a great mop of black hair and hips so narrow he carried his tool belt rather than wore it. The man she was calling to now—dark-haired, but no double for the Rodrigo of thirty years ago—looked over attentively.

Nora turned her mother away, trying to shush her. But her mother twisted back around, her hood slipping back from her face as she tried to call to the phantom landlord.

“Mama,” implored Nora. “Please. Look at me. Silence.”

“He’s always there to flirt with me, but when there is work to be done . . .”

Nora wanted to clamp her hand over her mother’s mouth. She fixed the hood and walked her away down the platform, only drawing more attention in the process. “Mama,
please
. We will be discovered.”

“Lazy bastard, he is!”

Even if her mother was mistaken for a drunk, there would be trouble. Alcohol was prohibited, both because it affected the blood and because it promoted antisocial behavior.

Nora turned, thinking about fleeing the station—and saw headlights brightening the tunnel. “Mama, our train. Shhhh. Here we go.”

It pulled in. Nora waited at the first car. A few passengers disembarked before Nora rushed her mother inside, finding a pair of seats together. The 6 train would get them to Fifty-ninth Street in a matter of minutes. She fixed her mother’s hood back on her head and waited for the doors to close.

Nora noticed that no one else sat near them. She looked down the length of the car in time to see the other entering passengers look quickly away. Then she looked out onto the platform and saw a young couple out standing with two Transit Authority cops—humans—pointing at the first subway car. Pointing at Nora.

Close the doors,
she pled silently.

And they did. With the same random efficiency the New York transit system had always exhibited, the doors slid shut. Nora waited for the familiar lurch, looking forward to getting back over to vampire-free Roosevelt Island and waiting there for Fet’s return.

But the car did not start forward. She waited for it, one eye on her fellow passengers at the other end of the car, the other on the transit cops walking toward the car. Behind them now were the two vampires, red eyes fixed on Nora. Behind them stood the concerned couple who had pointed out Nora and her mother.

The couple had thought they were doing the right thing, following the new laws. Or perhaps they were spiteful; everyone else had to abandon their elders to the master race.

The doors opened and the human transit cops boarded first. Even if she could murder two of her own kind and release the two
strigoi
and escape from the underground station, she would have to do so alone. There was no way she could do so without sacrificing her mother, either to capture or to death.

One of the cops reached over and pulled back Nora’s mother’s hood, revealing her head. “Ladies,” he said, “you have to come with us.” When Nora did not stand right away, he placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed tightly. “Now.”

Bellevue Hospital

E
PH
BACKED
AWAY
from the window and the vampires converging on Bellevue Hospital on the streets below. He had screwed up . . . Dread burned at the pit of his stomach. It was all lost.

His first instinct was to keep rising, to buy time by heading to the roof—but that was an obvious dead end. The only advantage to being on the roof was that he could throw himself off of it, were the choice death or vampire afterlife.

Going straight down meant fighting his way through them. That would be like running into a swarm of killer bees: he was almost certain to get stung at least once, and once was all it took.

So, running was not an option. Nor was making a suicidal final stand. But he had spent enough time in hospitals to consider this his home turf. The advantage was his; he just had to find it.

He hurried past the patient elevators, then stopped, doubling back, stopping before the gas control panel. An emergency shutoff for the entire floor. He cracked open the plastic shield and made sure the cutoff was open, then stabbed at the fixture until he heard a pronounced hiss.

He ran to the stairwell, charging up one flight, racing to that floor’s gas control panel, and repeating the same damage. Then right back into the stairs—and this time he could hear the bloodsuckers charging up the lower flights. No outcry, because they had no voice. Only the slapping of dead, bare feet as they climbed.

He risked one more floor, making quick work of the access panel there. He pressed the nearby elevator button but did not wait for the car, instead running off in search of the service elevators, the ones the orderlies used to transport supply carts and bedridden patients. He located the bank of elevators and pressed the button, waiting for one to board.

The adrenaline of survival and the chase put a charge into his blood that was as sweet as any artificial stimulant he could find. This, he realized, was the high he sought from pharmaceuticals. Over the course of so many life-or-death battles, he had messed up his pleasure receptors. Too many highs and too many lows.

The elevator door opened and he pressed “B” for basement. Signs admonished him on the importance of patient confidentiality and clean hands. A child smiled at him from a grimy poster. Sucking on a lollipop and giving him a wink and a thumbs-up.
EVERYTHING
IS
GOING
TO
BE
A
-
OKAY
said the printed moron. On the poster were timetables and dates for a pediatrics fair taking place a million years ago. Eph returned one sword to the bag on his back, watching the floor numbers go down. The elevator jerked once, and the car darkened and stopped between floors—stuck. A nightmare scenario, but then moments later it lurched and continued downward. Like everything else that depended on regular upkeep, these mechanical conveyances were not to be trusted—that is, if you had a choice.

The door dinged and opened finally, Eph exiting into the service wing of the hospital basement. Stretchers with bare mattresses were bunched up against the wall like supermarket carts awaiting customers. A giant canvas laundry cart sat beneath the open end of a wall chute.

In the corner, on a handful of long-handled dollies, stood a dozen or so green-painted oxygen tanks. Eph worked as fast as his fatigued body allowed, hustling the tanks into each of the three elevators, four tanks to a car. He pulled off their metal nose caps and used them to hammer at the feed nozzles until he heard the reassuring hiss of escaping gas. He pressed the buttons for the top floor, and all three doors closed.

He pulled a half-full can of charcoal lighter fluid from inside his pack. His box of all-weather matches was somewhere inside his coat pocket. With trembling hands, he tipped over the canvas laundry cart, emptying the crusty linen in front of the three elevators, then squeezed the lighter fluid can with wicked glee, pissing flammable liquid all over the heap of cotton. He struck a pair of matches and dropped them onto the pile, which ignited with a hot
whumph
. Eph pressed the call button for all three elevator cars—operated individually from the service basement—and then ran like hell, trying to find a way out.

Near a barred exit door, he saw a large control panel of colored pipes. He freed a fire axe from its glass cabinet—it felt so heavy, so big. Repeatedly, he chopped at the gaskets of all three feeds, using more the ax’s weight than his own fading strength, until gas came whistling out. He pushed through the door and found himself in the spitting rain, standing in a muddy sitting area of park benches and cracked walkways overlooking Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the rain-swept East River. And for some reason all he could think of was a line from an old movie,
Young Frankenstein
—“
It could be worse. It could be raining.
” He chuckled. He had seen that movie with Zack. For weeks they had quoted punch lines from it to each other. “
There wolf . . . there castle.
”

He was behind the hospital. No time to run for the street. He instead rushed across the small park, needing to put as much space between him and the building as possible.

As he reached the far edge, he saw more vamps coming up the high wall from Roosevelt Drive. More assassins dispatched by the Master, their high-metabolism bodies steaming in the rain.

Eph ran at them, waiting for the building behind him to explode and collapse at any moment. He kicked back the first few, forcing them off the wall down to the parkway below—where they landed on their hands and feet, righting themselves immediately, like unkillables in a video game. Eph ran along the top edge of the wall, toward the NYU Medical Center buildings, trying to get away from Bellevue. Before him, a long-taloned vamp hand gripped the top of the wall, a bald, red-eyed face appearing. Eph dropped to his knee, jabbing the end of his sword blade into the vamp’s open mouth, the point reaching the back of its hot throat. But he did not run it through, did not destroy it. The silver blade burned it, keeping its jaw from unhinging and unleashing its stinger.