The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (129 page)

“Good. So you’re not in any rush. Maybe I should step back, then. Wait for a better offer from you.”

And maybe I should draw and quarter your son.

Eph wanted to run his sword through this undead child’s throat. Leave the Master wanting for a while longer. But at the same time he did not want to push the creature too far. Not with Zack’s life on the line. “You’re the one bluffing now. You are worried and are pretending not to be. You want this book and you want it very badly. Why so soon?”

It did not answer.

“There is no other traitor. You are all lies.”

The feeler remained crouched, its back against the wall.

“Fine,” said Eph. “Play it that way.”

My father is dead.

Eph’s heart skipped a beat, stopping dead in his chest for a long moment. Such was the shock of hearing, as clear as though he were there in the room with him, his son Zack’s voice.

He was shaking. He fought hard to keep a furious scream from rising in his throat.

“You goddamned . . .”

The Master returned to Kelly’s voice.
You will bring the book as soon as you can.

Eph’s first fear was that Zack had been turned. But no; the Master was just throwing Zack’s voice, pushing it to Eph through this feeler.

Eph said, “Goddamn you.”

God tried to. And where is He now?

“Not here,” said Eph, his blade lowering a bit. “Not here.”

No. Not in a department store men’s room in a deserted Macy’s. Why don’t you release this poor child, Ephraim? Look into its blind eyes. Wouldn’t striking it down give you great satisfaction?

He did look into its eyes. Glassy and unblinking. Eph saw the vampire . . . but also the boy he once was.

I have thousands of sons. All of them absolutely loyal.

“You have only one true offspring. The Born. And all he wants is to destroy you.”

The feeler dropped to its knees, raising its chin, baring its neck to Eph, its arms hanging limp at its sides.

Take him, Ephraim, and be done with it.

The feeler’s blind eyes stared into nothingness, in the manner of a supplicant awaiting orders from its lord. The Master wanted him to execute the child. Why?

Eph pointed the tip of his sword at the boy’s exposed neck. “Here,” he said. “Run him into my sword if you wish him released.”

You have no desire to slay him?

“I have every desire to slay him. But no good reason to.”

When the boy did not move, Eph stepped back, pulling away his sword. Something wasn’t right here.

You cannot slay the boy. You hide behind weakness by calling it strength.

Eph said, “Weakness is giving in to temptation. Strength is resisting it.” He looked at the feeler, Kelly’s voice still hanging in his head. The feeler had no link to Eph, not without Kelly. And her voice was being projected by the Master, in an attempt to distract and weaken him, but the vampire Kelly could be anywhere at that moment. Anywhere.

Eph backed out of the stall and started running, rushing up the escalator to where he had left Nora.

K
elly stayed close to the wall, padding barefoot past the racks of clothes. The woman’s scent lingered in the back room behind the shoe display . . . but her bloodbeat thrummed across the display floor. Kelly approached the changing-room doorway. Nora Martinez waited there with a silver sword.

“Hey, bitch,” Nora greeted her.

Kelly seethed, her mind going out to the feelers, calling them close. She had no clear angle of attack. The silver weapon glowed hot in her view as the bald female human started toward her.

“You really let yourself go,” said Nora, circling around a register. “Cosmetics is on the first floor, by the way. And maybe a turtleneck to cover up that nasty turkey neck.”

The girl feeler came bounding from the stairs, stopping near Kelly.

“Mother-daughter shopping day,” said Nora. “How sweet. I’ve got some silver jewelry I’d love to see you two try on.”

Nora feigned a jab; Kelly and the girl feeler just stared at her.

“I used to be afraid,” said Nora. “In the train tunnel, I was afraid of you. I’m not afraid now.”

Nora unclipped the Luma lamp hanging from her pack, switching on the battery-powered black light. The ultraviolet rays repelled the vampires, the feeler snarling and backing away on all fours. Kelly remained still, only turning as Nora circled away from them, backing away to the stairs. She was using the mirrors to check behind her, which was how she saw the blurred figure darting up from the handrail.

Nora spun and drove her blade deep into the mouth of the boy feeler, the searing silver releasing him almost immediately. She jerked the blade out and spun back, ready for the attack.

Kelly and the girl feeler were gone. Vanished—as though they had never been there in the first place.

“Nora!”

Eph called to her from the floor below. “Coming down!” she yelled back, descending the wooden steps.

He met her there, anxious, having feared the worst. He saw the slick white blood on her blade.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded, grabbing a scarf off a nearby rack to clean off her sword. “Ran into Kelly upstairs. She says hi.”

Eph stared at the sword. “Did you . . . ?”

“No, unfortunately. Just one of her little foster monsters.”

Eph said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, she half-expected a swarm of vampires to greet them. But no. Regular humans moving between work and home, shoulders hunched against the rain.

“How did it go?” asked Nora.

“It’s a bastard,” said Eph. “A true bastard.”

“But do you think it bought it?”

Eph could not look her in the eye. “Yes,” he said. “It bought it.”

Eph was vigilant for vampires, scanning the sidewalks as they went.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Keep moving,” he said. Across Thirty-sixth Street, he pulled over, ducking under the canopy of a closed market. He looked up through the rain, eyeing the rooftops.

There, high across the street, a feeler leaped from the edge of one building to the next. Tracking them.

“They’re following us,” said Eph. “Come on.” They walked on, trying to lose themselves in the masses. “We have to wait them out until the meridiem.”

Columbia University

E
PH
AND
N
ORA
returned to the empty university campus soon after first light, confident they were not followed. Eph figured that Mr. Quinlan had to be underground, probably going over the
Lumen.
He was headed that way when Gus intercepted them—or, more accurately, intercepted Nora while Eph was still with her.

“You have the medicine?” he asked.

Nora showed him a bag full of their loot.

“It’s Joaquin,” said Gus.

Nora stopped short, thinking vampire involvement. “What happened?”

“I need you to see him. It’s bad.”

They followed him to a classroom where Joaquin was propped up on top of a desk, his pant leg rolled up. His knee was bulbous in two places, considerably swollen. The gangbanger was in great pain. Gus stood on the other side of the desk, waiting for answers.

“How long has it been like this?” Nora asked Joaquin.

Through a sweaty grimace, Joaquin said, “I dunno. A while.”

“I’m going to touch it here.”

Joaquin braced himself. Nora explored the swollen areas around the knee. She saw a small wound below the patella, less than an inch in length and crooked, its edges yellowed and crusty. “When did you get this cut?”

“Dunno,” said Joaquin. “Think I bumped it at the blood camp. Didn’t notice it until long after.”

Eph jumped in. “You’ve been going out on your own sometimes. You hit any hospitals or nursing home facilities?”

“Uh . . . probably. Saint Luke’s, sure.”

Eph looked at Nora, their silence conveying the seriousness of the infection. “Penicillin?” said Nora.

“Maybe,” said Eph. “Let’s go think this through.” To Joaquin, he said, “Lie back. We’ll be right back in.”

“Hold up, doc. That don’t sound good.”

Eph said, “It’s an infection, obviously. It would be fairly routine to treat this in a hospital. Problem is, there are no more hospitals. A sick human is simply disposed of. So we need to discuss how to care for it.”

Joaquin nodded, unconvinced, and lay back on the desk. Gus, without a word, followed Eph and Nora out into the hallway.

Gus said, looking mostly at Nora, “No bullshit.”

Nora shook her head. “Bacterium, multiresistant. He might have cut himself at the camp, but this is something he picked up at a medical facility. The bug can live on instruments, on surfaces, for a long time. Nasty, and trenchant.”

Gus said, “Okay. What do you need?”

“What we need is something we can’t get anymore. We just went out looking for it—vancomycin.”

There had been a run on vancomycin during the last days of the scourge. Befuddled medical experts, professionals who should have known better than to feed a panic, went on television suggesting this “drug of last resort” as a possible treatment for the still-unidentified strain that was spreading through the country with incredible speed.

“And even if we could find some vancomycin,” said Nora, “it would take a severe course of antibiotics and other remedies to rid him of this infection. It’s not a vampire sting, but, in terms of life expectancy, it might as well be.”

Eph said, “Even if we could get some fluids into him intravenously, it just won’t do him any good, except prolonging the inevitable.”

Gus looked at Eph as though he were going to hit him. “There’s gotta be some other way. You guys are fucking doctors . . .”

Nora said, “Medically, we’re halfway back to the Dark Ages now. With no new drugs being manufactured, all the diseases we thought we had beat are back, and taking us early. We can maybe scrounge around, find something to make him more comfortable . . .”

She looked at Eph. Gus did too. Eph didn’t care anymore; he pulled off his pack—where he had smuggled the Vicodin—and opened the zippered pouch and pulled out a baggie full of tablets. Dozens of tablets and pills in different shapes, colors, and sizes. He selected a pair of low-dosage Lorcets, some Percodans, and four two-milligram Dilaudid tabs.

“Start him with these,” he said, pointing to the Lorcets. “Save the Dilaudids for last.” The rest of the bag he turned over to Nora. “Take it all. I’m through with them.”

Gus looked at the pills in his hands. “These won’t cure him?”

“No,” said Nora. “Just manage his pain.”

“What about, you know, amputation? Cutting off his leg. I could do it myself.”

“It’s not just the knee, Gus.” Nora touched his arm. “I’m sorry. The way things are now, there’s just not much we can do.”

Gus stared at the drugs in his hand, dazed, as though he held there the broken pieces of Joaquin.

Fet entered, the shoulders of his duster wet from outside. He slowed a moment, struck by the strange scene of Eph, Gus, and Nora standing together in an emotional moment.

“He’s here,” said Fet. “Creem’s back. At the garage.”

Gus closed the pills in his fist. “You go. Deal with that piece of shit. I’ll be along.”

He went back inside to Joaquin, caressed his sweaty forehead, and helped him swallow the pills. Gus knew that he was saying good-bye to the last person in the world he cared for. The last person he really loved. His brother, his mother, his closest
compas:
all gone now. He had nothing left now.

B
ack outside, Fet looked at Nora. “Everything all right? You took a long time.”

“We were being followed,” she said.

Eph watched them embrace. He had to pretend as though he didn’t care.

“Mr. Quinlan get anywhere with the
Lumen
?” asked Eph once they parted.

“No,” said Fet. “It’s not looking good.”

The three of them headed across the Greek-amphitheater-like Low Plaza, past the library, and on to the edge of the campus, where the maintenance building stood. Creem’s yellow Hummer was parked inside the garage. The blinged-out leader of the Jersey Sapphires had his fat hand on a shopping cart full of semiautomatic weapons that Gus had promised him. The gang leader grinned wide, his silver-plated teeth glowing Cheshire Cat–like inside his considerable mouth.

“I could do some damage with these pop guns,” he said, sighting one out the open garage door. He looked at Fet, Eph, and Nora. “Where’s the Mex?”

“He’ll be along,” said Fet.

Creem, professionally suspicious, mulled this over before deciding it was okay. “You authorized to speak for him? I made that bean eater a fair offer.”

Fet said, “We are all well aware.”

“And?”

“Whatever it takes,” said Fet. “We have to see the detonator first.”

“Yeah, sure, of course. We can arrange that.”

“Arrange it?” said Nora. She looked at his ugly yellow truck. “I thought you were bringing it.”

“Bringing it? I don’t even know what the fuck it looks like. What am I, MacGyver? I show you where to go. Military arsenal. If this place don’t have it, I don’t know that anyplace does.”

Nora looked at Fet. It was clear she didn’t trust this Creem. “So, what, you’re offering us a ride to the store? That’s your great contribution?”

Creem smiled at her. “Intelligence and access. That’s what I bring to the table.”

“If you don’t have this thing yet . . . then why are you here now?”

Creem brandished the unloaded weapon. “I came for my guns, and for the Mex’s answer. And a little matter of ammunition to load up these babies.” He opened his driver’s-side door, reaching for something between the front seats: a map of Jersey, with a hand-drawn map paper-clipped to it.

Nora showed the maps to Fet and then Eph. “This is what you’re giving us. For the island of Manhattan.” She looked at Fet. “The Native Americans got a better deal than we are.”

Creem was amused. “That’s a map of the Picatinny Arsenal. You see there, it’s in the northern New Jersey skylands, so only about thirty, forty miles west of here. A giant military reserve that the bloodsuckers now control. But I got a way in. Been raiding munitions for months now. Drawn down on most of their ammo—why I need this here.” He patted the weapons as he loaded them into the back of his Hummer. “Started out in the Civil War as a place for the army to store gunpowder. It was military research and manufacturing before the vamp takeover.”