The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (142 page)

“Eph,” said Nora. “Don’t forget—the Master is still out here somewhere.”

A
t the far corner of the dock, some thirty yards from shore, Ann and William waited inside two ten-foot aluminum rowboats with outboard motors. Eph ran Zack to the first boat. When the boy would not board willingly, Eph lifted him up bodily and placed him in there. He looked at his son. “We’re going to get through this, okay, Z?”

Zack had no response. He watched the Born loading the bomb onto the other boat, between the rear and middle bench seats, and gently but firmly lift William out, depositing him back on the dock.

Eph remembered the Master was in Zack’s head, seeing this too. Seeing Eph right now.

“It’s just about over,” Eph said.

T
he violet smoke cover billowed up off the beach, blowing across to the trees, revealing more advancing vampires. “The Master needs a human to take him across water,” said Fet, stepping up with Nora and Gus. “I don’t think there’s anybody left here but us three. We just have to make sure nobody else gets to the skiffs.”

The violet smoke parted strangely, as though folding in on itself. As though something had passed through it at incredible speed.

“Wait—did you see that?” yelled Fet.

Nora heard the thrumming presence of the Master. Impossibly, the wall of smoke changed course completely, curling back from the trees and rolling against the river breeze toward the shore—consuming them. Nora and Fet were immediately separated, vampires rushing at them silently out of the smoke, their bare feet soft on the damp sand.

Helicopter rotors chopped at the air overhead. Cracks and thumps made the sand jump at their shoes, rifle fire from above. Snipers shooting blindly into the smoke cover. A vampire took one to the top of its head just as Nora was about to cut it down. The rotors whipped smoke back at her, and she did a full three-sixty with her sword straight out, blindly coughing, choking. Suddenly she was unsure which side was shore and which was water. She saw a swirling in the smoke, like a dust devil, and heard the thrumming loudly again.

The Master. She kept swinging, fighting the smoke and everything in it.

G
us, keeping his bad arm behind him, rushed blindly sideways through the choking violet cloud, keeping to the shore. The sailboats were tied to a dock unconnected to land, anchored some forty or fifty feet out in the water.

Gus’s left side was throbbing, his arm swollen. He felt feverish as he broke from the edge of the violet cloud, before the river-facing windows of the restaurant, expecting a column of hungry vampires. But he was alone on the beach.

Not so in the air. He saw the black helicopters, six of them directly overhead, with another six or so coming up behind. They hovered low, swarming like giant mechanized bees, whipping sand into Gus’s face. One of them moved out over the river, scattering the surface water, whipping moisture with the force of shards of glass.

Gus heard the rifle cracks and knew they were shooting at the skiffs. Trying to scuttle them. Thumps at his feet told him they were shooting at him too, but he was more concerned about the choppers starting off over the lake—searching for Goodweather, for the nuke.

“
Que chingados esperas?
” he cursed in Spanish. “What are you waiting for?”

Gus fired at those choppers, trying to bring them down. A scorching stab in his calf dropped him to one knee, and he knew he had been shot. He kept firing at the helicopters heading out over the river, seeing sparks fly off the tail.

Another rifle round pierced his side with the force of an arrow. “Do it, Eph! Do it!” he yelled, falling to his elbow and still firing.

One helicopter wobbled, and a human figure fell from it into the water. The chopper failed to right itself, its rear tail spinning frontward until it collided with another chopper, and both aircraft rolled and crashed down into the river.

Gus was out of ammo. He lay back on the beach, just a few yards from the water, watching the death birds hover over him. In an instant, his body was covered with laser sights projecting out of the colored fog.

“Goodweather gets fucking angels,” said Gus, laughing, sucking air. “I get laser sights.” He saw the snipers leaning out of their open cabin doors, sighting him. “Light me up, motherfuckers!”

The sand danced all around him as he was shot through many times. Dozens of bullets rattled his body, severing it, grinding it . . . and Gus’s last thought was,
You better not mess up this one too, doc.

“Where are you taking me?”

Zack stood in the middle of the boat, rocking in the wake. Their puttering motor had faded into the darkness and the purple fog, leaving only the usual humming sensation in Zack’s head. It mixed with the low throb of the helicopters approaching.

The woman named Ann pushed off from the dock cleat, while William pulled and pulled the rip cord of the coughing outboard motor, streams of violet smoke trailing past them. “To our island downriver.” She looked to William. “Hurry.”

Zack said, “What do you have there?”

“We have shelter. Warm beds.”

“And?”

“We have chickens. A garden. Chores. It’s an old fort from the American Revolution. There are children your age. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe there.”

The Master’s voice said,
You were safe here.

Zack nodded, blinking. He lived like a prince, in a real castle in the center of a giant city. He owned a zoo. Everything he wanted.

Until your father tried to take you away.

Something told Zack to stay focused on the dock. The motor turned over, sputtering to life, and William turned in the rear seat and worked the tiller, steering them into the current. The helicopters were visible now, their lights and laser sights brightening the purple smoke on the beach. Zack counted off seven sets of seven blinks as the dock began to recede from view.

A blur of purple smoke burst from the long edge of the dock, flying through the air toward them. Out of it appeared the Master, its cloak flying behind it like wings, arms outstretched, the wolf-headed walking stick in one hand.

Its two bare feet landed in the aluminum boat with a bang. Ann, kneeling at the front point, barely had time to turn. “Fuck me . . .” She saw the Master before her—recognizing the pallid flesh of Gabriel Bolivar. This was the guy her niece was always yapping about. She wore him on T-shirts, hung his posters on her walls. And now, all that Ann could think of was,
I never liked his fucking music . . .

The Master set down his staff, then reached for her and, in a ripping motion, tore her in half at the waist the way strongmen do very thick phone books—then hurled both halves into the river.

William was transfixed by the sight of the Master, who lifted him by his armpit and flat-handed his face with such tremendous force that William’s neck snapped and his head flopped back off his shoulders like a removed coat hood. It dumped him into the river water as well, then retrieved its walking stick and looked down at the boy.

Take me there, my son.

Zack moved to the tiller and changed course, the Master standing astride the middle bench, its cloak swirling in the wind, as they followed the first boat’s disappearing wake.

T
he smoke began to thin out, and Nora’s calls to Fet were answered. They found each other and then found their way back to the restaurant, outrunning the rounds from the helicopter snipers overhead.

Inside, they found the rest of Gus’s weapons. Fet grabbed Nora’s hand and they ran to the riverside windows, opening one onto the deck. Nora had picked up the
Lumen
and had it with her.

They saw the boats bobbing offshore. “Where’s Gus?” asked Nora.

“We’ll have to swim for it,” said Fet. His injured arm was now covered in blood, the wound reopened. “But first—”

Fet fired at the chopper spotlights, shattering the first one he aimed at.

“They can’t shoot what they can’t see!” he yelled.

Nora did the same, the weapon chugging in her grip. She got one too. The remaining lights swept the shoreline for the source of the automatic gunfire.

That was when Nora saw Gus’s body laid out in the sand, river water lapping at his side.

Her shock and sorrow only paralyzed her a moment. Immediately, Gus’s fighting spirit came over her, as well as Fet.
Don’t mourn—fight.
They moved out aggressively onto the beach, firing away at the Master’s helicopters.

T
he farther they got away from shore, the harder the boat rocked. The Born held tight to the nuke’s belt straps while Eph steered, trying to keep them from pitching over into the river. Thick, green-black water sloshed over the sides, spraying the bomb’s casing and the oak urns, a thin puddle forming underneath. It was spraying rain again, and they were sailing into the wind.

Mr. Quinlan lifted the urns off the wet floor of the boat, moved them away from the water. Eph did not know what it meant, but the act of bringing the remains of the Ancients to the origin site of the last of their number reminded Eph that it was all about to end. The shock of seeing Zack that way had thrown him off.

He motored past the second island, a long, rocky beach backed by bare, dying trees. Eph checked the map, the paper in his hand growing damp, the ink starting to run and spread.

Eph yelled over the motor and the wind, the pain in his ribs constricting his voice. “How, without turning him, did the Master create this . . . symbiotic relationship with my boy?”

I don’t know. The key is that he is away from the Master now.

“The Master’s influence will disappear once we do away with it, like all of its vampires?”

Everything that the Master was will cease.

Eph was cheered. He felt real hope. He believed that they could be father and son again. “It’ll be a little like cult deprogramming, I suppose. No such thing as therapy anymore. I just want to get him back to his old bedroom. Start there.”

Survival is the only therapy. I did not want to tell you before, for fear of your losing focus. But I believe the Master was grooming your son for its future self.

Eph swallowed. “I feared it myself. I couldn’t think of any other reason to keep him and not turn him. But—why? Why Zack?”

It may have little to do with your son.

“You mean, it’s because of me?”

I can’t know. All I know is that the Master is a perverse being. It loves to take root in pain. To subvert and corrupt. Perhaps in you it saw a challenge. You were the first one to board the aircraft on which it traveled to New York. You aligned yourself with Abraham Setrakian, its sworn enemy. Achieving the subjugation of an entire race of beings is a feat, but an impersonal one. The Master is one that needs to inflict pain personally. It needs to feel another’s suffering. It needs to experience it firsthand. “Sadism” is your closest modern term for it. And here it has been its undoing.

Exhausted, Eph watched the third dark island pass. After the fourth island, he banked the boat. Difficult to tell the shape of the landmass from the river—and in the darkness impossible to see all six outcroppings without circling it first—but somehow Eph knew that the map was true and this was the Black Site. The bare, black trees on this uninhabited island resembled many-fingered giants burned stiff, arms raised to the heavens in mid-cry.

Eph spotted an inlet and turned toward it, cutting the engine, nosing right onto land. The Born grabbed the nuke and stood, stepping onto the rocky shore.

Nora was right. Leave me here to finish it. Go back to your boy.

Eph looked at the hooded vampire, his face slashed, ready to end his existence. Suicide was an unnatural act for mortal humans to commit—but for an immortal? Mr. Quinlan’s martyrdom was a many times more transgressive, unnatural, violent act.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Eph.

The Born nodded.
Then it is time to go.

With that, the Born started up the rocky rise with the keg-sized bomb in his arms and the remains of the Ancients in his pack. Eph’s only hesitation was a memory of his vision and its haunting images. The Born had not been foreseen as the redeemer. But Eph had not had enough time with the
Occido Lumen,
and perhaps the prophetic reading was different.

Eph dipped the propeller back into the water and gripped the zip cord. He was about to pull when he heard a motor, the sound carrying to him on the swirling wind.

Another boat, approaching. But there had been only one other motorized boat.

Zack’s boat.

E
ph looked back for the Born, but he had already disappeared over the rise. Eph’s heart pounded as he stared into the dark mist over the river, straining to see the approaching craft. It sounded like it was coming in fast.

Eph stood and jumped out of the boat onto the rocks, one arm across his broken ribs, the twin handles of his swords wobbling over his shoulders. He charged up the rocky rise as fast as he could, the ground smoking with mist rising into the spitting rain as though the land were heating up in anticipation of the atomic cremation to come.

Eph topped the rise, unable to spot Mr. Quinlan among the trees. He rushed into the dead woods, calling to him, “Quinlan!” as loudly as his chest would allow, then emerged on the other side into a marshy clearing.

The mist was high. The Born had set the weapon down in the approximate center of the trefoil-shaped island, in the middle of a ring of inlaid stones resembling rocky black blisters. He was moving around the device and setting up the white oak receptacles containing the Ancients’ ashes.

Mr. Quinlan heard Eph calling him and turned his way—and just then picked up the Master’s approach.

“It’s here!” yelled Eph. “It’s—”

A blast of wind stirred up the mist. Mr. Quinlan just had time to brace himself before impact, grabbing on to the Master as it streaked in from out of nowhere. The momentum of the body strike carried them many yards away, rolling unseen into the mist. Eph saw something twist and fall through the air—and believed it was Setrakian’s old wolf-handled walking stick.