The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (106 page)

A handful of vampires stood around the rotary like sentinels, and on seeing them, Nora fought back a chill. They were completely exposed to the elements—bare, pale skin covered by no coat or clothes—and yet showed no discomfort, the black rain striking their bare heads and shoulders, streaming down their pellucid flesh. Arms hanging limply, the
strigoi
watched the humans come and go with grave indifference. They were policemen, guard dogs, and security cameras all in one.

“Security enforces routine so that everything runs in a very orderly manner,” said Sally, picking up on Nora’s fright and distress. “In fact, there are very few incidents.”

“Of people resisting?”

“Of any disruptions,” said Sally, surprised at Nora’s assumption.

Being this close to them without any sharpened silver to protect herself made Nora’s skin crawl. And they smelled it. Their stingers clicked softly against their palates as they sniffed the air, alerted by the scent of her adrenaline.

Sally nudged Nora’s arm in order to get her moving. “We cannot linger here. It is not allowed.”

Nora felt the sentinels’ black and red eyes tracking them as Sally led her down a long offshoot path leading past the warehouselike buildings. Nora sized up the high fences that formed the camp walls: chain link laced with orange hurricane stripping, obscuring the view outside the camp. The tops of the fences were angled out at forty-five degrees, beyond her view, though at a few points she glimpsed tufts of barb wire sticking up like cowlicks. She would have to find another way out.

Beyond, she saw the bare tops of distant trees. She already knew she was out of the city. There were rumors of a large camp north of Manhattan and two smaller camps in Long Island and northern New Jersey. Nora had been transported there with a hood placed over her head, and she had been too anxious and concerned about her mother to think about estimating travel time.

Sally led Nora to a rolling wire gate standing twelve feet high and at least that length wide. It was locked and manned by two female guards standing inside a gatehouse, who nodded familiarly to Sally and worked together to unlatch it and push the gate open just wide enough to admit them.

Inside stood a large barracks house resembling a homey-looking medical building. Behind it, dozens of small mobile homes were arranged in rows like a neatly maintained trailer park.

They entered the barracks house, stepping inside a wide common area. The space resembled a cross between an upscale waiting room and the lounge of a college dormitory. An old episode of
Frasier
was playing, the laugh track ringing so falsely, like the mocking of carefree humans from the past.

In cushioned, pastel-colored chairs, a dozen women sat around in clean white jumpsuits, as opposed to Nora’s and Sally’s dull gray. Their bellies bulged noticeably, each woman in her second or third trimester of pregnancy. And something else: they were allowed to grow their hair, made thick and lustrous from the pregnancy hormones.

And then Nora saw the fruit. One of the women was snacking on a soft, juicy peach, its inside threaded with red veins. Saliva gushed inside Nora’s mouth. The only fresh, not-canned fruit she had tasted in the past year or so were mushy apples from a dying tree in a Greenwich Village courtyard. She had trimmed out the spoiled spots with a multitool blade until the remaining fruit looked like it had already been eaten.

The expression on her face must have reflected her desire, for the pregnant woman, upon meeting Nora’s eyes, looked away uncomfortably.

“What is this?” said Nora.

“The birthing barracks,” said Sally. “This is where pregnant women convalesce and where their infants are ultimately delivered. The trailers outside are among the best and most private living quarters in the entire compound.”

“Where did she get”—Nora lowered her voice—“the fruit?”

“Pregnant women also receive the best food rations. And they are excused from being bled for the length of their pregnancy and nursing.”

Healthy babies. The vampires needed to replenish the race, and their blood supply.

Sally went on. “You are one of the lucky ones, the twenty percent of the population with B-positive blood type.”

Nora knew her own blood type, of course. B positives were the slaves that were more equal than the others. For that, their reward was camp internment, frequent bloodletting, and forced breeding.

“How could they bring a child into this world as it is now? Into this so-called camp? Into captivity?”

Sally looked either embarrassed for Nora or ashamed of her. “You may come to find that childbirth is one of the few things that makes life worth living here, Ms. Rodriguez. A few weeks of camp life and you might feel different. Who knows? You may even look forward to this.” Sally pushed her gray sleeve back, revealing bull’s-eye bruises that looked like terrible bee stings, purpling and browning her skin. “One pint every five days.”

“Look, I don’t mean to offend you personally, it’s just that—”

“You know, I’m trying to help you here,” she said. “You’re young enough still. You have opportunities. You could conceive, deliver a baby. Make a life for yourself in this camp. Some of the rest of us . . . are not so fortunate.”

Nora saw this from Sally’s perspective for a moment. She understood that blood loss and malnutrition had weakened Sally and everyone else, sapping the fight from them. She understood the pull of despair, the cycle of hopelessness, that sense of circling the drain—and how the prospect of childbirth could be their only source of hope and pride.

Sally went on. “And someone like yourself who finds this so distasteful, you might appreciate being segregated from the other kind for months at a time.”

Nora made sure she’d heard that correctly. “Segregated? There are no vampires in the birthing area?” She looked around and realized it was true. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. It is a strict rule. They are not allowed.”

“A rule?” Nora struggled to make sense of this. “Is it pregnant women who have to be segregated from vampires, or vampires who have to be segregated from pregnant women?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

A tone rang, akin to a doorbell, and the women set aside their fruit or their reading material and pushed themselves up from their chairs.

“What’s this?” asked Nora.

Sally had straightened up a bit as well. “The camp director. I strongly suggest you be on your best behavior.”

On the contrary, she looked for a place to run to, a door, an escape. But it was too late. A contingent of camp officials arrived, humans, bureaucrats, dressed in casual business wear, not jumpsuits. They entered the central walkway, eyeing the inmates with barely concealed distaste. Their visit seemed to Nora to be an inspection, and a spot one at that.

Trailing them were two huge vampires, arms and necks still bearing tattoos from their human days. Once convicts, Nora surmised, now upper-level guards in this blood factory. Both carried dripping black umbrellas, which Nora thought strange—vampires caring about the rain—until the last man entered behind them, evidently the camp director. He wore a resplendent, mudless, blindingly white suit. Freshly laundered, as clean an article of clothing as Nora had seen in months. The tattooed vampires were this camp commandant’s personal security detail.

He was old, sporting a trim, white mustache and a pointed beard, which gave him the mien of a grandfatherly Satan—the sight of which nearly choked her. She saw medals on the breast of the white suit, fit for a navy admiral.

Nora stared in disbelief. Such a bald, stunned stare that it immediately drew his attention, too late for her to turn away.

She saw the look of recognition on his face, and a sick feeling spread throughout her body like a sudden fever.

He stopped, his eyes widening in similar disbelief, then turned on his heel, walking toward her. The tattooed vampires trailed him, the old man approaching her with his hands clasped behind his back—his disbelief spreading into a sly smile.

He was Dr. Everett Barnes, the onetime director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nora’s former boss, who, now nearly two years after the fall of the government, still insisted on wearing the uniform symbolic of the Centers’ origin as a branch of the U.S. Navy.

“Dr. Martinez,” he said in his soft Southern drawl. “Nora . . . Why, this is a most welcome surprise.”

The Master

Z
ACK
COUGHED
AND
gagged as the camphor scent burned the back of his throat and overwhelmed his palate. His breathing returned, his heartbeat slowed down, and he looked up at the Master—standing before him in the form of the rock star Gabriel Bolivar—and smiled.

At night, the beasts of the zoo became very active, their instincts kicking in for a hunt that would never come behind those bars. In consequence, the night was full of noise. Monkeys howled and big cats roared. Humans now tended the cages and cleaned the streets as a reward for Zack’s hunting skills.

The boy had become quite deft at shooting and the Master rewarded each kill with a new privilege. Zack was curious about girls. Women, really. The Master saw to it that he was brought some. Not to talk. Zack wanted to watch them. Mostly from a place where they couldn’t see him looking. He wasn’t inordinately shy or scared. If anything, he was crafty and he didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to touch them. Not yet. But he looked at them—much as he had watched the leopard in the cage.

In all his years on this earth, the Master had rarely experienced something like this: the chance to groom the body he was to occupy with such care, such attention. For hundreds of years, even under the patronage of the powerful, the Master had been in hiding, feeding and living in the shadows, avoiding its enemies and held back by the truce with the Ancients. But now the world was new, and the Master had a human pet.

The boy was bright and his soul was entirely permeable. The Master was an expert at manipulation. It knew how to push the buttons of greed, desire, vengeance—and at present, its body was quite regal. Bolivar was indeed a rock star and so, by extension, was the Master now.

If the Master suggested Zack was smart, the boy would instantly turn smarter: he would be stimulated into giving the Master his very best. Consequently, if the Master suggested the boy was cruel and cunning, the boy adopted these characteristics to please it. So, through the months and the many nights of conversation and interaction, the Master was training the boy, grooming the darkness that was already in his heart. And the Master felt something it hadn’t felt in centuries: it felt admired.

Was this what it felt like—being a human father—and was being a father always such a monstrous endeavor? Molding the soul of your beloved ones in your image, in your shadow?

The end was near. The decisive times. The Master felt it in the rhythm of the universe, in the small signs and portents, in the cadence of the voice of God. The Master was to inhabit one more body for all time and its reign on Earth would endure. After all, who could stop the Master with the thousand eyes and the thousand mouths? The Master who now governed the armies and the slaves and who held the world in fear?

It could manifest its will instantly in the body of a lieutenant in Dubai or in France simply by thought. It could order the extermination of thousands and no one would know because the media existed no more. Who would try that? Who would succeed?

And then, the Master would look into the boy’s eyes and at the boy’s face and in them see traces of his enemy. The one enemy who, no matter how insignificant he was, would never give up.

Goodweather.

The attacks Goodweather and his group perpetrated on the Master’s installation amounted to very little—vandalism at most. But their actions were murmured about—spoken of in the farms and the factories and aggrandized with every repetition. They were becoming some sort of symbol. And the Master knew the importance of symbols. On Night Zero, it had made a point to have many buildings burn in every city that he overtook. It wanted the ashes and molten metal to remain on the ground, checkering the city maps with symbols of its power. Reminders of its will.

There were other dissidents—drug dealers, smugglers, looters—but they were anarchic vectors that never intersected with the Master’s plan, and so the Master cared little for their transgressions. But Goodweather was different. He and his group were remnants of Setrakian’s presence on Earth, and as such their very existence was an affront to the Master’s power.

But the Master held hostage the very thing that would lure Goodweather to him.

The Master smiled at the boy. And the boy smiled back.

Office of the Chief Medical
Examiner, Manhattan

A
FTER
THE
B
ELLEVUE
Hospital explosion, Eph had worked his way north up along East River Drive, using the abandoned cars and trucks for cover. He jogged as fast as he could with his sore hip and wounded leg, moving the wrong way down an entrance ramp, back toward Thirtieth Street. He knew he had pursuers, probably including some of the juvenile feelers, the freakish, blind psychic trackers who moved on all fours. He dug out his night-vision scope and hurried back to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, thinking that the last place the vampires would look would be a building they had recently infiltrated and cleared.

His ears continued to ring from the concussive blast. A few car alarms honked and blared, and freshly broken glass lay in the street, high windows shattered by the force of the explosion. As he came to the corner of Thirtieth and First, he noticed chunks of bricks and mortar in the road, part of a building façade had failed, raining debris into the street. As he got closer, through the green light of his scope, he noticed a pair of legs sticking out from behind two old traffic safety barrels.

Bare legs, bare feet. A vampire lying facedown off the sidewalk.

Eph slowed, circling the barrels. He saw the vampire laid out among chunks of brick and concrete. White, worm-infested blood lay in a small pool beneath its downturned face. It wasn’t released: subcutaneous worms continued to ripple beneath its flesh, meaning its blood was still circulating. Evidently, this wounded creature was unconscious, or its undead equivalent.