The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (74 page)

Bolivar was the first to haul himself hand over hand up the staircase, ahead of the crush. The old man still could be inside there.

Bolivar had to find another way in.

He noticed then the feelers tensed on the floor, facing the smashed windows and the street beyond, like pointer dogs responding to a scent. The first among them—a girl in soiled briefs and an undershirt—snarled and then leaped through the jagged shards of glass to the street.

T
he little girl came right at Angel, loping on all fours with fawn-like grace. The old wrestler backed up into the street, wanting no part of her, but she had locked in on the biggest target and was set on taking him down. She sprang up from the road, black-eyed, open-mouthed—and Angel reverted into wrestler mode, handling her as though she were a challenger throwing herself at him from the top turnbuckle. He applied the Angel Kiss, his open-palm blow smacking the girl out of the air in mid-leap, sending her lithe little body flying a good dozen yards away, tumbling to the road.

Angel recoiled immediately. One of the great disappointments of his life was not knowing any of the children he had sired. She was a vampire, but she looked so human—a child, still—and he started toward her with his bare hand outstretched. She turned and hissed, her blind eyes like two black bird’s eggs, her stinger darting out at him, maybe three feet in length, considerably shorter than an adult vampire’s. The tip flailed before his eyes like a devil’s tail, and Angel was transfixed.

Gus intervened quickly, finishing her with a hard swipe of his sword that scored the surface of the road, scraping up sparks.

This slaying sent the other vamps into an attack frenzy. A brutal battle, Gus and the Sapphires outnumbered at first three to one, then four to one as vamps fled from the pawnshop and emerged from the basements of the adjacent buildings burning along the street. Either they had been psychically summoned into battle, or simply heard the ringing dinner bell. Destroy one, and two more came at you.

Then a shotgun blast exploded near Gus and a marauding vamp was cut in two. He turned to see Mr. Quinlan, the Ancients’ chief hunter, picking off rioting white-bloods with military precision. He must have come up from underneath like these others. Unless he had been shadowing Gus and the Sapphires the entire time, from the darkness of the underground.

Gus noticed, in that moment—his senses heightened by the adrenaline of battle—that no blood worms coursed beneath the surface of Quinlan’s translucent skin. All the old ones, including the other hunters, crawled with worms, and yet his nearly iridescent flesh was as still and smooth as skin on a pudding.

But the fight was on, and the revelation passed in an instant. Mr. Quinlan’s killing cleared some much-needed space, and the Sapphires, no longer in danger of being surrounded, moved the fight from the middle of the street toward the pawnshop. The children waited, on all fours, on the periphery of the battle, like wolf cubs awaiting a weakened deer to kill. Quinlan sent one blast in their direction, the blind creatures scattering with a high-pitched squeal as he reloaded.

Angel snapped a vampire’s neck with a sharp twist of his hands, and then, in a single, swift move, rare for a man his age—and girth—he turned and used his massive elbow to crack the skull of another one against the wall.

Gus saw his chance, and broke away from the melee, running inside with his sword in search of the old man. The shop was empty, so he ran up the stairs, into an old, prewar apartment.

The many mirrors told him he was in the right place—but no old man.

He met two female vamps on the way back down, introducing them to the heel of his boot before running them through with silver. Their shrieks adrenalized him as he jumped over their bodies, avoiding the white blood oozing down the steps.

The stairs continued belowground, but he had to return to his
compadres
fighting for their lives and their souls beneath the smoke-blotted sky.

Before exiting, he noticed a section of busted wall near the stairs, exposing old copper water pipes running vertically. He set his sword down on a display case of brooches and cameos, finding a Chuck Knoblauch – autographed Louisville Slugger baseball bat with a $39.99 price tag. He hacked away at the old wallboard, smashing it open until he located the gas line. An old cast-iron pipe. Three good hacks with the bat, and it separated at a coupling—fortunately, without producing any sparks.

The smell of natural gas filled the room, escaping from the ruptured pipe not with a cool hiss but with a hoarse roar.

T
he feelers swarmed around Bolivar, who felt their distress.

This fighter with the shotgun. He was not human. He was vampire.

But he was different.

The feelers could not read him. Even if he were of a different clan—and, clearly, he was—they should have been able to impart some knowledge of him to Bolivar, so long as he was of the worm.

Bolivar was mystified by this strange presence, and made to attack. But the feelers, reading his intent, leaped into his path. He tried to pull them off, but their dogged insistence was strange enough to merit his attention.

Something was about to happen, and he needed to take heed.

G
us reclaimed his sword and slashed his way out through another vamp—this one dressed in doctor’s scrubs—on his way outside and into the next building. There, he ripped away a burning section of windowsill, running with the flaming plank back into
battle. He drove it, sharp point – down, into the back of a slain vamp, so that the wood stood like a torch.

“Creem!” he called, needing the silver-blinged killer to cover him as he went into the gear bag for the crossbow. He rummaged for a silver bolt, finding one. Gus tore off a piece of the downed vamp’s shirt, wrapping it around the bolt head and tying it tight, then loading the bolt into the cross, dipping the wrapping into the flames, and raising the crossbow toward the store.

A vamp wearing bloody gym clothes came wilding at Gus, and Quinlan stopped the creature with a crushing punch to the throat. Gus advanced to the curb, hollering, “Get back,
cabrones
!” then aiming and letting the flaming bolt go, watching it drive through the smashed window frame and across the shop, landing in the rear wall.

Gus was racing away when the building shattered in a single blast. The brick face collapsed, spilling into the street, the roof and its wooden underpinnings bursting apart like the top paper of a firecracker.

The shockwave knocked the unaware vampires to the street. The suck of oxygen brought an odd, post-detonation silence to the block, which was compounded by the ringing in their ears.

Gus got to his knees, then his feet. The corner building was no more, flattened as though by a giant foot. Dust billowed out, the surviving vamps starting to rise all around them. Only those few who had been beaned by flying bricks stayed dead. The others recovered quickly from the blast, and once again turned their hungry gaze on the Sapphires.

From the corner of his eye, Gus saw Quinlan running away to the opposite side of the street, leaping down a short stairwell leading to a basement apartment. Gus didn’t understand his retreat until he looked back to the destruction he had caused.

The explosive punch to the immediate atmosphere had rolled up to the smoke cover, the burst of moving air creating a rupture. A breach parted the blackness, allowing bright, cleansing sunlight to come pouring down.

The smoke opened, the sun line riding out from the impact site, spreading in a bright yellow cone of irradiating power—the dumb vamps sensing the impending rays only too late.

Gus watched them dissipate around him with ghostly screams. Their bodies fell, reduced instantaneously to steam and cinder. Those few who were at a safe distance from the sun turned and ran into neighboring buildings for cover.

Only the feelers reacted intelligently, anticipating the spreading sun and grabbing Bolivar. The little ones fought him, working together to drag him back from the approaching line of killing sun—just in time, yanking up a sidewalk vent grate and pulling him, clawing, down into the underground.

Suddenly the Sapphires and Angel and Gus were alone on a sunny street. They still had their weapons in hand, but no enemy stood before them.

Just another sunny day in East Harlem.

Gus went to the disaster area, the pawnshop blown off its foundation. The basement was now exposed, full of smoking bricks and settling dust. He called over Angel, who hobbled in to help Gus shift some of the heavier chunks of mortar, clearing a path. Gus climbed down into the wreckage, and Angel followed. He heard a sizzling sound, but it was just severed electrical connections still live with juice. He tossed aside a few chunks of brick, searching the floor for bodies, still concerned that the old man might have been hiding there the whole time.

No corpses. He didn’t discover much of anything, really, just a lot of empty shelves. Almost as though the old man had recently cleared out. The door to the basement had been framed by the ultraviolet lamps now spitting orange sparks. Perhaps this had been a bunker of some sort, like a fallout shelter for a vampire attack—or else a kind of vault built to keep their kind out.

Gus lingered there longer than he should have—with the smoke seam already repairing itself, closing up on the sun once again—digging through the rubble for something, anything that might help him in his cause.

Concealed beneath a fallen wooden beam, Angel discovered, on its side, a small, sealed keepsake box made entirely of silver. A beautiful find. He lifted it up, showing it to the gang, and Gus in particular.

Gus took the box from him. “The old man,” he said. And smiled.

Pennsylvania Station

W
HEN THE OLD
Pennsylvania Station opened in 1910, it had been considered a monument to excess. An opulent temple of mass transportation, and the largest interior space in all of New York, a city inclined toward excess even a century ago.

The demolition of the original station, which began in 1963, and its replacement by the current warren of tunnels and corridors, is viewed historically as a catalyst for the modern historical preservation movement, in that it was perhaps the first—and some say still the greatest—failure of “urban renewal.”

Penn Station remained the busiest transportation hub in the United States, serving 600,000 passengers per day, four times as many as Grand Central Station. It served Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and New Jersey Transit—with a Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) station just one block away, accessible back then by an underground passageway that had been now closed for many years for security reasons.

The modern Penn Station used the same underground platforms as the original Penn Station. Eph had booked Zack, Nora, and Nora’s mother on the Keystone Service, straight through Philadelphia to its terminus, the state capital, Harrisburg. It was normally a four-hour trip, though significant delays were expected. Once there, Nora would survey the situation and arrange transportation to the girls’ camp.

Eph left the van at an empty cab stand a block away and walked them through the quiet streets to the station. A dark cloud hung over the city, both literally and figuratively, smoke hovering ominously as they passed empty storefronts. Display windows were broken, and yet even the looters were gone—most of them turned into looters of human blood.

How far and how fast the city had fallen.

Only once they reached the Seventh Avenue entrance at Joe Louis Plaza, underneath the Madison Square Garden sign, did Eph recognize a hint of the New York of a few weeks ago, of last month. Cops and Port Authority workers in orange vests directed the downtrodden crowd, maintaining order as they moved them inside.

The stopped escalators allowed people down onto the concourse. The unceasing foot traffic had allowed the station to remain one of the last bastions of humanity in a city of vampires—resisting colonization despite its proximity to the underground. Eph was certain that most, if not all, trains were delayed, but it was enough that they were still running. The rush of panicked people reassured him. If the trains were stopped, this would have turned into a riot.

Few of the overhead lights were working. None of the stores were open, their shelves all empty, handwritten
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
signs taped to the windows.

The groan of a train arriving on a lower platform reassured Eph as he shouldered Nora and Mrs. Martinez’s bag, Nora seeing to it that her mother did not fall. The concourse was jammed, and yet he welcomed the press of the crowd; he had missed the feeling of being an organism surrounded by a throng of humanity.

National Guard soldiers waited up ahead, looking drawn and exhausted. Still, they were scanning faces as they went past, and Eph remained a wanted man.

Add to that the fact that he had Setrakian’s silver-loaded pistol stuffed into the back of his waistband, and Eph accompanied them only as far as the great blue pillars, pointing out the Amtrak lounge gate around the bend.

Mariela Martinez looked scared and even somewhat angry. The crowd annoyed her. Nora’s mother, a former home healthcare worker, had been diagnosed two years ago with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Sometimes she thought Nora was sixteen years old, which occasionally led to trouble over who was in charge of whom. Today, however, she was quiet, overwhelmed and operating deep within herself, out of her element here and anxious about being away from home. No cross words for her departed husband; no insisting on getting dressed for a party. She wore a long raincoat over a saffron-colored housecoat, her hair hanging heavily behind her in a thick, gray braid. She had taken to Zack already, holding his hand on the ride in, which pleased Eph even as it tugged at his heart.

Eph knelt down in front of his son. The boy looked away, like he didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to say good-bye. “You help Nora with Mrs. Martinez, okay?”

Zack nodded. “Why does it have to be a girls’ camp?”