The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (84 page)

Nora had stopped, staring in horror at something behind him.

Out of the tunnel darkness came small figures moving at great speed. With inhuman agility, these recent human children, none of them older than their early teens, sprang toward them along the tracks.

They were led by a phalanx of blind vampire children, eyes black and burned out. The blind ones moved more strangely, the sighted children overtaking them once they reached the train, emitting horrible little squeals of inhuman joy.

They immediately set upon the passengers fleeing the carnage
on the train. Others raced up the tunnel walls and swarmed over the roof of the train like baby spiders crawling out of an egg sac.

And among them—one adult figure moved with evil purpose. A feminine form, shadowed by the dim tunnel light, seemingly directing the onslaught. A possessed mother leading an army of demon children.

A hand gripped the hood of his jacket—it was Nora—yanking Zack away. He stumbled, turning to run with her, taking Nora’s mother’s arm under his shoulder and half-dragging the old woman from the train wreck flooding over with mad vampire children.

Nora’s indigo light barely illuminated their path along the tracks, brightening the kaleidoscope of colorful and sickly psychedelic vampire excrement. No other passengers followed them.

“Look!” Zack said.

His young eyes spotted a pair of steps leading to a door in the left-hand wall. Nora steered them that way, running up to try the handle. It was stuck, or locked, so she stepped back and kicked at it with the heel of her shoe again and again until the handle came down and the door popped open.

Through the other side was an identical platform and two steps leading down into another tunnel. More train tracks, this the southern tube of the tunnel, heading eastbound from New Jersey to Manhattan.

Nora slammed the door, shutting it as hard as she could, then hustled them down onto the tracks.

“Hurry,” she said. “Keep moving. We can’t fight them all.”

They pushed farther into the dark tunnel. Zack helped Nora, supporting her mother, but it was clear they could not walk like this forever.

They never heard anything behind them—never heard the door bang open—and still they moved as though the vampires were right on their heels. Every second felt like borrowed time.

Nora’s mother had lost both her shoes, her nylons torn, her feet cut and bleeding. She said over and over, her voice rising, “I need to rest. I want to go home.”

Finally, it was too much. Nora slowed, Zack slowing with her. Nora clamped her hand over her mother’s mouth, needing to silence her.

Zack saw Nora’s face by the purple light of her lamp. He read the stricken expression on her face as she struggled to carry and silence her mother at the same time.

He realized then that she had to make a terrible decision.

Her mother was trying to peel Nora’s hand off her mouth. Nora shrugged down her duffel bag. “Open this,” she told him. “I want you to take a knife.”

“I already have one.” Zack dug into his pocket, pulling out the brown bone handle, unfolding the four-inch silver blade.

“Where did you get that?”

“Professor Setrakian gave it to me.”

“Good. Zack. Please listen. Do you trust me?”

Such a strange question. “Yes,” he said.

“Listen to me. I need you to hide. To get down and crawl underneath this overhang.” The track sides were buttressed about two feet from the ground, the angle beneath them cloaked in shadow. “Lie down under there and hold that knife close to your chest. Stay in the shadow. I know it’s dangerous. I won’t be … I won’t be long, I promise. Anyone comes by and stops near you, anyone who isn’t me—
anyone
—you cut them with that. Do you understand?”

“I …” He had seen the faces of the passengers on the train, pressed against the windows. “I understand.”

“The throat, the neck—anywhere you can. Keep cutting and stabbing until they fall. Then run ahead and hide again. Understand?”

He nodded, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Promise me.”

Zack nodded again.

“I will be right back. If I am gone too long, you will know it. And then I want you to start running.” She pointed toward New Jersey. “That way. All the way. Stopping for nothing. Not even me. All right?”

“What are you going to do?”

But Zack knew. He was certain he knew. And so was Nora.

Nora’s mother was biting her hand, forcing Nora to remove it from her mouth. She gripped him in a half-hug, mashing his face
into her side. He felt her kiss the crown of his head. Then her mother resumed yelling, and Nora had to cover her mouth again. “Be brave,” she told him. “Go.”

Zack got down onto his back and wriggled in underneath the overhang, not even thinking about the usual things like rats or mice. He gripped the bone handle tightly, holding the knife to his chest like a crucifix, and listened as Nora struggled to lead her mother away.

F
et sat in the idling DPW van, waiting. He wore a reflector vest over his usual coveralls, and a hard hat. He was going over the sewer map by the dashboard light.

The old man’s makeshift silver chemical weapons were in back, buffeted with rolled towels to prevent them from sliding around. He was worried about this plan. Too many moving parts. He checked the rear door of his shop, waiting for the old man to appear.

Inside, Setrakian adjusted the collar on his cleanest shirt, his gnarled fingers tightening the loops of his bow tie. He pulled out one of his small, silver-backed mirrors in order to check the fit. He was dressed in his best suit.

He put down the mirror and did one last check. His pills! He found the tin and shook the contents gently for luck, cursing himself for almost forgetting it, sliding it inside his jacket pocket. There. Done.

On his way to the door, he looked one last time at the specimen jar that held the remains of his wife’s vivisected heart. He had irradiated it with black light, finally killing the blood worm once and for all. The organ, so long in the grip of the parasitic virus, was now blackening with decay.

Setrakian looked upon it as one’s gaze falls upon a beloved’s gravestone. He meant it to be the last thing he saw of this place. For he was certain he was never coming back.

E
ph sat alone on a long, wooden bench against the wall of the squad room.

The FBI agent’s name was Lesh, and his chair and desk were set
about three feet beyond Eph’s reach. Eph’s left wrist was manacled to a low steel rail running along the wall just above the bench, like the safety rails in handicapped bathrooms. Eph had to slouch a bit as he sat, keeping his right leg straight out in order to accommodate the knife still hidden in his waistband. No one had frisked him upon his return from Palmer’s.

Agent Lesh had a facial tic, an occasional winking of his left eye that made his cheek dance but did not impair his speech. Pictures of school-age children stood in inexpensive frames upon his cubicle desk.

“So,” said the agent. “This thing. I don’t get it. Is it a virus, or is it a parasite?”

“It’s both,” said Eph, trying to be reasonable, still hoping to somehow talk his way free. “The virus is delivered by a parasite, in the form of a blood worm. This parasite is exchanged upon infection, through the throat stinger.”

Agent Lesh winked involuntarily and scribbled this down on his pad.

So the FBI was starting to figure things out finally—only much too late. Good cops like Agent Lesh operated at the broad bottom end of the pyramid, having no idea that things had long since been decided by those at the very top.

Eph said, “Where are those other two agents?”

“Who’s this?”

“The ones who took me into the city on the helicopter.”

Agent Lesh stood, getting a better view over the squad-room cubicles. A few dedicated agents remained at work. “Hey, anybody here take Dr. Goodweather up on a bird into the city?”

Grunts and denials. Eph realized he hadn’t seen the two men since his return. “I’d say they’re gone for good.”

“Can’t be,” said Agent Lesh. “Our orders are to stand by here until further notice.”

That didn’t sound good at all. Eph looked again at the pictures on Lesh’s desk. “You get your family out of the city?”

“We don’t live in the city. Too expensive. I drive in from Jersey every day. But yeah, they’re out. School got canceled, so my wife took them up to a friend’s on Kinnelon Lake.”

Not far enough,
thought Eph. “Mine are out, too,” he said. He
leaned forward, as far as his handcuffs—and the table knife against his hip—would allow. “Look, Agent Lesh,” said Eph, trying to take him into his confidence. “All this that’s happening … I know it seems like chaos, like absolute disorder? It’s not. Okay? It is not. This is a carefully planned, coordinated attack. And today … today it is all coming to a head. I still don’t know exactly how, or what. But it is today. And we—you and me both—need to get out of here.”

Agent Lesh winked twice. “You’re under arrest, doctor. You shot at a man in broad daylight with dozens of witnesses around you, and you would be on your way to a federal arraignment if things weren’t so crazy right now and most government offices weren’t closed. So you’re not going anywhere, and because of you, neither am I. Now—what can you tell me about these?”

Agent Lesh showed him some printouts. Photographs of markings etched on buildings featuring the six-legged, bug-like graffiti rendering.

“Boston,” Agent Lesh said. He shuffled them from the front of the pile to the back. “This one from Pittsburgh. Outside Cleveland. Atlanta. Portland, Oregon, three thousand miles away.”

Eph said, “I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s some sort of code. They don’t communicate through speech. They need a system of language. They’re marking territory, marking progress … something like that.”

“And this bug design?”

“I know. It’s almost like … have you heard of automatic writing? The subconscious mind? See, they are all connected on a psychic level. I don’t understand it—only that it exists. And like any great intelligence, I think there’s a subconscious segment, with this stuff spilling out … almost artistically. Expressing itself. You’re seeing the same basic designs scrawled on buildings all across the country. It’s probably halfway around the world by now.”

Agent Lesh dropped the images back onto his desk. He grabbed the back of his neck, massaging it. “And silver, you say? Ultraviolet light? The sun?”

“Check the gun I had. It’s here somewhere, right? Check the bullets. Pure silver. Not because Palmer is a vampire. He’s not—not yet. But it was given to me …”

“Yeah? Go on? By whom? I’d like to know how it is you know all these things—”

The lights went out. The heat vents went silent, and everyone in the squad room groaned.

“Not again,” said Agent Lesh, getting to his feet.

Emergency lights flickered on, the
EXIT
signs over the doors and every fifth or sixth ceiling panel light all coming on at half- or a quarter-power.

“Beautiful,” said Agent Lesh, pulling a flashlight down off a hook on the top of his cubicle partition.

Then the fire alarm went off, whooping through overhead speakers.

“Ah!” shouted Agent Lesh. “Better and better!”

Eph heard a scream from somewhere in the building.

“Hey,” yelled Eph. He tugged on the handcuff bar. “Uncuff me. They’re coming for us.”

“Huh?” Agent Lesh remained where he was, listening for more screams. “Coming for us?”

A crash, and a noise like a door breaking.

“For me!” said Eph. “My gun. You have to get it!”

Agent Lesh focused on listening. He went ahead and unsnapped his own holster.

“No! That won’t work! The silver in my gun! Don’t you understand? Go get it—!”

Gunshots. Just one floor beneath them.

“Shit!” Agent Lesh started away, drawing his sidearm.

Eph swore and turned his attention to the bar and his handcuffs. He yanked on the rail with both hands—no give whatsoever. He slid the handcuff down first to one end, then the other, hoping to exploit some weak spot, but the bolts were thick, the bar set deeply into the wall. He kicked at it, but couldn’t get through.

Eph heard a scream—closer now—and more gunshots. He tried to stand, only able to get three-quarters of the way erect. He tried to pull the wall down.

Shots in the room now. The cubicle walls blocked his view. All he had to go on was the flashes of flame from the agents’ weapons—and the agents’ screaming.

Eph dug into his pants for the silver table knife. It felt a lot smaller in his hand here than it had inside Palmer’s penthouse. He jammed the dull edge in behind the bench at an angle and pulled back on it, hard and fast. The tip snapped off, producing a short but sharp blade like a jailhouse shiv.

A thing came vaulting onto the top of the cubicle wall. It crouched there, balanced on all four limbs. It appeared small in the dim lighting of the squad room, turning its head in a weird, searching manner, scanning without sight, sniffing without a sense of smell.

Its face turned toward Eph, and he knew it was locked in.

It came off the top of the partition walls with feline agility, and Eph saw that the child vampire’s eyes were blackened like the hot end of a burned-out lightbulb. Its face was turned slightly away from him, its unseeing eyes not trained on his body—and yet somehow it saw him, of that he was certain.

Its physicality was terrifying to Eph, like facing a jaguar in a cage—and being chained to the cage. Eph stood sideways, in the vain hope of protecting his throat, his silver blade out toward the feeler, who sensed the weapon. Eph moved laterally as the handcuff rail would allow, the creature tracking him to the left, and then back toward the right, its head snakelike upon its swollen neck.

Then it struck, its stinger whipping out, shorter than an adult vampire’s, Eph just reacting in time to swipe at it with his blade. Whether he cut it or not, he had made impact, fending off the approach, the feeler skittering backward like a kicked dog.

“GET OUTTA HERE!” yelled Eph, trying to command it as he would an animal, but the feeler only looked at him with its unseeing eyes. When two more vampires—regular monsters, red human blood staining their shirtfronts—turned the corner around the partitions, Eph understood that the feeler had summoned backup.