The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (78 page)

For the first time in days, she thought of nothing. No vampires, no fears, no plans. She relaxed her focus, and her mind dipped into sleep mode while her eyes remained open.

When she blinked back to awareness, it was like waking up from a dream about falling. A shudder, a startle. A small gasp.

She turned and saw Zack next to her, listening to his iPod.

But her mother was gone.

Nora looked around, didn’t see her. She tugged down Zack’s earbuds, asking him, and he joined her in looking.

“Wait here,” said Nora, pointing to their bags. “Do not move!”

She pushed her way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd waiting before the departures board. She looked for a seam in the crowd, some path her slow-moving mother might have left, but saw nothing.

“Mama!”

Raised voices made Nora turn. She pushed toward them, coming out of the dense crowd near the side of the concourse, by the gate of a closed deli.

There was her mother, haranguing a bewildered-looking family of South Asians.

“Esme!” yelled Nora’s mother, invoking the name of her late sister, Nora’s late aunt. “Take care of the kettle, Esme! It’s boiling, I can hear it!”

Nora reached her finally, taking her arm, stammering an apology to the non-English-speaking parents and their two young daughters. “Mama, come.”

“There you are, Esme,” she said. “What’s that burning?”

“Come, Mama.” Tears wet Nora’s eyes.

“You’re burning down my house!”

Nora clasped her mother’s arm and pulled her back through the crowd, ignoring the grunts and insults. Zack was on tiptoes, looking for them. Nora said nothing to him, not wanting to break down in front of the boy. But this was too much. Everybody has a breaking point. Nora was fast approaching hers.

How proud her mother had been of her daughter, first a chemistry major at Fordham, then medical school with a specialty in biochem at Johns Hopkins. Nora saw now that her mother must have assumed she had it made. A rich doctor for a daughter. But Nora’s interest had been public health, not internal medicine or pediatrics. Looking back now, she thought that growing up in the shadow of Three Mile Island had shaped her life more than she had realized. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paid government grade, a far cry from the healthy income potential of many of her peers. But she was young—there was time to serve now and earn later.

Then her mother got lost one day on the way to the grocery store. Having trouble tying her shoes, turning on the oven and
walking away. Now conversing with the dead. The Alzheimer’s diagnosis prompted Nora to give up her own apartment, in order to care for her declining mother. She had been putting off finding a suitable long-term care facility for her, mainly because she still did not know how she could afford it.

Zack noticed Nora’s distress but left her alone, sensing that she did not want to discuss it. He disappeared back beneath his earbuds.

Then suddenly, hours after it was scheduled, the track number for their train finally flipped over on the big board, announcing the train’s approach. A mad rush ensued. Shoving and yelling, stiff-arming, name-calling. Nora gathered up their bags and hooked her mother’s arm and hollered at Zack to move.

It got uglier still when the Amtrak official at the top of the narrow escalator leading down to the track said the train wasn’t ready yet. Nora found herself near the rear of the angry crowd—so far back, she wasn’t sure they would make it onto the train, even with paid tickets.

And so, Nora did something she had promised herself she would never do: she used her CDC badge to push her way through to the front of the line. She did so knowing that it was not for her own selfish benefit but for her mother and Zack. Still, she heard the name-calling and felt the daggers in every passenger’s eyes as the crowd slowly parted, begrudgingly allowing them through.

And then it seemed it was all for nothing. Once they finally opened the escalator and allowed passengers down to the underground track, Nora found herself facing empty rails. The train was again delayed, and no one would tell them why, or give an estimate as to how long.

Nora arranged for her mother to sit on their bags at their prime position at the yellow line. She and Zack split the last of a bag of Hostess doughnuts, Nora allowing each of them only sips of water from the half-full gym bottle she had packed.

The afternoon had slipped away from them. They would be departing—fingers crossed—after sunset, and that made Nora nervous. She had planned and expected to be well out of the city and on their way west by nightfall. She kept leaning out over the edge of the platform, eyeing the tunnels, her weapon bag tight against her side.

The rush of tunnel air came like a sigh of relief. The light announced the train’s approach, and everyone stood. Nora’s mother was nearly elbowed over the edge by some guy wearing an enormously bulky backpack. The train glided in, everyone jockeying for position—as a pair of doors miraculously stopped right in front of Nora. Finally something was going their way.

The doors parted and the rush of the crowd carried them inside. She claimed twin seats for her mother and Zack, shoving their possessions into the overhead rack, save for Zack’s backpack—he held it on his lap—and Nora’s weapon bag. Nora stood before them, their knees touching hers, hands gripping the railing overhead.

The rest piled inside. Once aboard, and knowing now that the final stage of their exodus was about to begin, the relieved passengers exhibited a bit more civility. Nora watched a man give up his seat to a woman with a child. Strangers helped others hauling bags. There was an immediate sense of community among the fortunate.

Nora herself felt a sudden sense of well-being. She was at least on the verge of breathing easy. “You good?” she asked Zack.

“Never better,” he said, with a slight roll of his eyes, untangling his iPod wires and fitting the buds into his ears.

As she had feared, many passengers—some of them ticketed, some unticketed—did not make the train. After some trouble closing all the doors, those left behind began banging on the windows, while others went pleading to attendants who looked like they would rather be on the train themselves. Those that had been turned away looked like war-torn refugees, and Nora closed her eyes and said a brief prayer for them—and then another one for herself, for forgiveness, for putting her loved ones ahead of these strangers.

The silver train started to move west, toward the tunnels under the Hudson River, and the packed car broke out into applause. Nora watched the lights of the station slide away and disappear, and then they were rising through the underworld, toward the surface—like swimmers surfacing for much-needed breath.

She felt good inside the train, cutting through the darkness like a sword through a vampire. She looked down at her mother’s lined face, watching the woman’s eyes dip and flutter. Two minutes of rocking put her immediately to sleep.

They emerged from the station into the fallen night, running briefly aboveground before the tunnels underneath the Hudson River. As rain spit at the train’s windows, Nora gasped at what she saw. Glimpses of anarchy: cars in flames, distant blazes, people fighting under strings of black rain. People running through the streets—were they being chased? Hunted? Were they even people at all? Maybe they were the ones doing the hunting.

She checked Zack, finding him focused on his iPod display. Nora saw, in his concentration, the father in the son. Nora loved Eph, and believed she could love Zack—even though she still knew so little about him. Eph and his boy were similar in so many ways, beyond appearance. She and Zack would have plenty of time to get to know each other once they reached the isolated camp.

She looked back out at the night, the darkness, and the power outages broken here and there by headlights, occasional bursts of generator-powered illumination. Light equaled hope. The land on either side began to give way, the city starting to retreat. Nora pressed against the window to chart their progress, to gauge how long it would be until they were through the next tunnel and clear of New York.

That was when she saw, standing on the top corner of a low wall, a figure outlined against a spray of upturned light. Something about this apparition made Nora quiver, a premonition of evil. She could not take her eyes off the figure as the train approached … and the figure began to raise its arm.

It was pointing at the train. Not just at the train, it seemed—but directly at Nora.

The train slowed as it passed, or maybe that was only how it seemed to Nora, her sense of time and motion bent by terror.

Smiling, backlit in the rain, hair sleek and dirty, mouth horribly distended and red eyes ablaze—Kelly Goodweather stared at Nora Martinez.

Their eyes locked as the train rolled past. Kelly’s finger followed Nora.

Nora pressed her forehead against the glass, sickened by the sight of the vampire, and yet knowing what Kelly was about to do.

Kelly jumped at the last moment, leaping with preternatural
animal grace, disappearing from Nora’s sight as she latched on to the train.

The Flatlands

S
ETRAKIAN WORKED QUICKLY,
hearing Fet’s van arrive at the back of the shop. He flipped madly through the pages of the old volume on the table, this one the third volume of the French edition of
Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs,
published by Berthelot and Ruelle in Paris in 1888, his eyes going back and forth between its engraved pages and the sheets of symbols he had copied from the
Lumen.
He studied one symbol in particular. He finally located the engraving, his hands and eyes stopping for a moment.

A six-winged angel, wearing a crown of thorns, with a face both blind and mouth-less—but with multiple mouths festooning each of its wings. At its feet was a familiar symbol—a crescent moon—and a single word.

“Argentum,”
read Setrakian. He gripped the yellowing page reverently—and then tore the engraving from its old binding, jamming it inside the pages of his notebook, just as Fet opened the door.

F
et was back before sundown. He was certain he had not been found or traced by the vampire brood, which would lead the Master straight back to Setrakian.

The old man was working over a table near the radio, closing up one of his old books. He had tuned in a talk show, playing low, one of the few voices still on the airwaves. Fet felt a true affinity for Setrakian. Part of it was the bond that grows between soldiers in times of battle, the brotherhood of the trench—in this case, the trench being New York City. Then there was the great respect Fet felt for this weakened old man who simply would not stop fighting. Fet liked to think there were similarities between himself and the professor, in their dedication to a vocation, and mastery of knowledge about their foes—the obvious difference being one of scope, in that Fet fought pests and nuisance animals, while Setrakian had
committed himself, at a young age, to eradicating an inhuman race of parasitic beings.

In one sense, Fet thought of himself and Eph as the professor’s surrogate sons. Brothers in arms, yet as opposite as could be. One was a healer, the other an exterminator. One a university-trained family man of high status, the other a blue-collar, self-educated loner. One lived in Manhattan, the other Brooklyn.

And yet the one who had originally been at the forefront of the outbreak, the medical scientist, had seen his influence fall away in the dark days since the source of the virus had become known. While his opposite number, the city employee with a little sideline shop in Flatlands—and the killer instinct—now served at the old man’s side.

There was one other reason Fet felt close to Setrakian. Something Fet could not bring up to him, nor something he was entirely clear on himself. Fet’s parents had immigrated to this country from the Ukraine (not Russia, as they told people, and as Fet still claimed), not only in search of the opportunities all immigrants seek but also to escape their past. Fet’s father’s father—and this was nothing he had ever been told, because no one in his family spoke of it directly, especially his sour father—had been a Soviet prisoner of war, who was conscripted into service at one of the extermination camps during World War II. Whether it was Treblinka or Sobibor or elsewhere, Fet did not know. It was nothing he ever desired to explore. His grandfather’s role in the Shoah was revealed two decades after the war ended, and he was jailed. In his defense, he claimed that he had been victimized at the hands of the Nazis, forced into the lowly role of camp guard. Ukrainians of German extraction had been installed in positions of authority, while the rest toiled at the whim of the sadistic camp commanders. Yet prosecutors submitted evidence of personal enrichment in the postwar years, such as the source of Fet’s grandfather’s wealth in starting his dressmaking company, which he was unable to explain. But it was a blurred photograph of him wearing a black uniform, standing against a fence of barbed wire with a carbine in his gloved hands—lips curled in an expression claimed by some to be a nasty smirk, by others a grimace—that ultimately did him in. Fet’s father
never spoke of it while he was alive. What little Fet knew, he had learned from his mother.

Shame can indeed be visited upon future generations, and Fet carried this with him now like a terrible burden, a hot dose of shame always in the pit of his stomach. Realistically, a man can bear no responsibility for the actions of his grandfather, and yet …

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

Fet had never suffered from this affiliation as he did now—except perhaps in dreams. One sequence recurred, disrupting his sleep again and again. In it, Fet has returned to his family’s home village, a place he had never visited in real life. Every door and window is shut to him, and he walks the streets alone, yet watched. And then suddenly, from one end of the street, a roaring burst of angry orange light flies toward him on the cadence of galloping hooves.