The Night Eternal (12 page)

Nora stared in disbelief. Such a bald, stunned stare that it immediately drew his attention, too late for her to turn away.

She saw the look of recognition on his face, and a sick feeling spread throughout her body like a sudden fever.

He stopped, his eyes widening in similar disbelief, then turned on his heel, walking toward her. The tattooed vampires trailed him, the old man approaching her with his hands clasped behind his back—his disbelief spreading into a sly smile.

He was Dr. Everett Barnes, the onetime director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nora’s former boss, who, now nearly two years after the fall of the government, still insisted on wearing the uniform symbolic of the Centers’ origin as a branch of the U.S. Navy.

“Dr. Martinez,” he said in his soft Southern drawl. “Nora … Why, this is a most welcome surprise.”

The Master

Z
ACK COUGHED AND
gagged as the camphor scent burned the back of his throat and overwhelmed his palate. His breathing returned, his heartbeat slowed down, and he looked up at the Master—standing before him in the form of the rock star Gabriel Bolivar—and smiled.

At night, the beasts of the zoo became very active, their instincts kicking in for a hunt that would never come behind those bars. In consequence, the night was full of noise. Monkeys howled and big cats roared. Humans now tended the cages and cleaned the streets as a reward for Zack’s hunting skills.

The boy had become quite deft at shooting and the Master rewarded each kill with a new privilege. Zack was curious about girls. Women, really. The Master saw to it that he was brought some. Not to talk. Zack wanted to watch them. Mostly from a place where they couldn’t see him looking. He wasn’t inordinately shy or scared. If anything, he was crafty and he didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to touch them. Not yet. But he looked at them—much as he had watched the leopard in the cage.

In all his years on this earth, the Master had rarely experienced something like this: the chance to groom the body he was to occupy with such care, such attention. For hundreds of years, even under the patronage of the powerful, the Master had been in hiding, feeding and living in the shadows, avoiding its enemies and held back by the truce with the Ancients. But now the world was new, and the Master had a human pet.

The boy was bright and his soul was entirely permeable. The Master was an expert at manipulation. It knew how to push the buttons of greed, desire, vengeance—and at present, its body was quite regal. Bolivar was indeed a rock star and so, by extension, was the Master now.

If the Master suggested Zack was smart, the boy would instantly turn smarter: he would be stimulated into giving the Master his very best. Consequently, if the Master suggested the boy was cruel and cunning, the boy adopted these characteristics to please it. So, through the months and the many nights of conversation and interaction, the Master was training the boy, grooming the darkness that was already in his heart. And the Master felt something it hadn’t felt in centuries: it felt admired.

Was this what it felt like—being a human father—and was being a father always such a monstrous endeavor? Molding the soul of your beloved ones in your image, in your shadow?

The end was near. The decisive times. The Master felt it in the rhythm of the universe, in the small signs and portents, in the cadence of the voice of God. The Master was to inhabit one more body for all time and its reign on Earth would endure. After all, who could stop the Master with the thousand eyes and the thousand mouths? The Master who now governed the armies and the slaves and who held the world in fear?

It could manifest its will instantly in the body of a lieutenant in Dubai or in France simply by thought. It could order the extermination of thousands and no one would know because the media existed no more. Who would try that? Who would succeed?

And then, the Master would look into the boy’s eyes and at the boy’s face and in them see traces of his enemy. The one enemy who, no matter how insignificant he was, would never give up.

Goodweather.

The attacks Goodweather and his group perpetrated on the Master’s installation amounted to very little—vandalism at most. But their actions were murmured about—spoken of in the farms and the factories and aggrandized with every repetition. They were becoming some sort of symbol. And the Master knew the importance of symbols. On Night Zero, it had made a point to have many buildings burn in every city that he overtook. It wanted the ashes and molten metal to remain on the ground, checkering the city maps with symbols of its power. Reminders of its will.

There were other dissidents—drug dealers, smugglers, looters—but they were anarchic vectors that never intersected with the Master’s plan, and so the Master cared little for their transgressions. But Goodweather was different. He and his group were remnants of Setrakian’s presence on Earth, and as such their very existence was an affront to the Master’s power.

But the Master held hostage the very thing that would lure Goodweather to him.

The Master smiled at the boy. And the boy smiled back.

Office of the Chief Medical
Examiner, Manhattan

A
FTER THE
B
ELLEVUE
Hospital explosion, Eph had worked his way north up along East River Drive, using the abandoned cars and trucks for cover. He jogged as fast as he could with his sore hip and wounded leg, moving the wrong way down an entrance ramp, back toward Thirtieth Street. He knew he had pursuers, probably including some of the juvenile feelers, the freakish, blind psychic trackers who moved on all fours. He dug out his night-vision scope and hurried back to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, thinking that the last place the vampires would look would be a building they had recently infiltrated and cleared.

His ears continued to ring from the concussive blast. A few car alarms honked and blared, and freshly broken glass lay in the street, high windows shattered by the force of the explosion. As he came to the corner of Thirtieth and First, he noticed chunks of bricks and mortar in the road, part of a building façade had failed, raining debris into the street. As he got closer, through the green light of his scope, he noticed a pair of legs sticking out from behind two old traffic safety barrels.

Bare legs, bare feet. A vampire lying facedown off the sidewalk.

Eph slowed, circling the barrels. He saw the vampire laid out among chunks of brick and concrete. White, worm-infested blood lay in a small pool beneath its downturned face. It wasn’t released: subcutaneous worms continued to ripple beneath its flesh, meaning its blood was still circulating. Evidently, this wounded creature was unconscious, or its undead equivalent.

Eph looked for the largest chunk of brick and concrete. He lifted it over his head to finish the job … until a sense of gruesome curiosity came over him. He used his boot to roll the
strigoi
onto its back, the creature lying flat and still. It must have heard the rumbling of the loose bricks and looked skyward, because its face was bashed in.

The chunk of bricks grew heavy in his hands, and he lowered it, tossing it aside, letting it crash against the sidewalk just a foot away from the creature’s head. No reaction.

The medical examiner’s building was right across the street. A great risk—but if the creature was indeed blind, as it appeared, then it could not feed the Master its vision. And if it was also brain-damaged … then it could not communicate with the Master at all, and its current location could not be traced.

Eph moved quickly, before he could talk himself out of it. He got his hands beneath the creature’s armpits, careful of the sticky mass of blood, and rescue-dragged him off the curb, across the street, and around to the ramp leading to the basement morgue.

Inside, he nudged over a step stool to help him load the vampire onto an autopsy table. He worked quickly, binding the creature’s wrists beneath the table with rubber tubing, then similarly affixing its ankles to the table legs.

Eph looked at the
strigoi
laid out upon the examining table. Yes, he was indeed about to do this. He pulled a pathologist’s full-length smock from the closet, pulling on twin pairs of latex gloves. He taped the wrists to his sleeves and his leg cuffs to the tops of his boots, creating a seal. In a cabinet over one of the sinks, he found a clear plastic splash guard and fit it over his face. Then he wheeled over a tray and arranged upon it a dozen different stainless steel implements, all of them cutting tools.

As he was looking at the vampire, it roused into consciousness, stirring at first, rolling its head this way and that. It sensed the bindings and began to struggle against them, bucking its waist up and down off the table. Eph used another length of tubing around its waist and beneath the table, and then another across its neck, knotting it tightly underneath.

From behind the creature’s head, Eph used a probe to tempt its stinger, allowing for the possibility that it still might be functioning even within its smashed face. He saw the vampire’s throat buck and heard a clicking in its jaw as it tried to activate its stinging mechanism. But the mandible had been damaged internally. His only concern therefore was the blood worms, for which he kept his Luma lamp close at hand.

He drew the scalpel across the being’s throat, opening it around the tube ligature, peeling back the folds. Eph was most careful here, watching the throat column jerk, the jaw attempt to de-hinge. The fleshy protuberance that was the stinger remained retracted and limp. Eph seized its narrow tip with a clamp and pulled, the stinger extending generously. The creature tried to retake control of it, the muscle at the base twitching.

For his own safety, Eph reached for his small silver blade and amputated the appendage.

The being tensed as though shot through with pain and defecated a small amount of discharge, the smell of ripe ammonia stinging Eph’s nose. White blood spilled out around the throat incision, the caustic fluid seeping onto the stretched rubber tube.

Eph carried the writhing organ to the counter, where he lay it next to a digital scale. He examined it under the light of a magnifying lens, and as it twitched like a severed lizard’s tail, he noted the tiny double tip at the end. Eph bisected the organ lengthwise, then peeled back the pink flesh, exposing dilated bifurcated canals. He already knew that one canal introduced, along with the virus-infected parasitic worm, a narcotizing agent and a salivary blend of anticoagulants when a vampire stung its victim. The other canal siphoned the blood meal. The vampire did not suck the blood out of its human victim but instead relied on physics to do the extraction, the second stinger canal forming a vacuum-like connection through which arterial blood was drawn up as easily as water crawls up the stem of a plant. The vampire could speed the capillary action if necessary by working the base of its stinger like a piston. Amazing that this complex biological system arose out of radical endogenous growth.

Human blood is more than 95 percent water. The rest is proteins, sugars, and minerals, but no fat. Tiny bloodsuckers such as mosquitoes, ticks, and other arthropods could survive on blood meals just fine. As efficient as the vampires’ transmuted bodies were, as large sanguivores they had to consume a steady blood diet in order to avoid starvation. And because human blood was mostly water, they expressed waste frequently, including while feeding.

Eph left the flayed stinger upon the counter, returning to the creature. The acidic white vampire blood had eaten through the tubing across its neck, but the vampire’s thrashing had subsided. Eph opened up the creature’s chest, cutting down from sternum to waist in a classic Y. Through the calcified bone of the rib cage, he saw that the interior of the chest had mutated into quadrants, or chambers. He had long ago surmised that the entire digestive tract was transformed by the vampiric disease syndrome, but never, until now, had he viewed the chest cavity in its mature form.

The scientist in him found it truly extraordinary.

The human survivor in him found it absolutely repellent.

He stopped cutting when he heard footsteps on the floor above him. Hard steps—shoes—but some creatures occasionally still wore them, as quality footwear lasted longer than most other articles of clothing. He looked at the vampire’s smashed face and dented head and hoped he hadn’t underestimated the power of the Master’s reach, unwittingly inviting a fight.

Eph took up his long sword and lamp. He stepped back into a recess near the door to the walk-in cooler, giving him a good view of the stairs. No point in hiding; vamps could hear the beating of a human heart, circulating the red blood they craved.

The footsteps descended slowly—until the last few steps, which they ran down and kicked open the door. Eph saw a flash of silver, a long blade like his own, and knew immediately who it was—and relaxed.

Fet saw Eph standing against the wall and narrowed his eyes in that way he did. The exterminator wore wool trousers and a deep-blue anorak, the buckled leather strap of his bag slung across his chest. He pulled his hood back, further revealing his grizzled face, and sheathed his blade.

“Vasiliy?” said Eph. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Fet saw Eph’s pathology smock and gloved hands, then turned toward the still-animate
strigoi
eviscerated upon the table.

“What the hell are
you
doing here?” Fet asked, lowering his sword. “I just arrived today …”

Eph stepped away from the wall and returned his own sword to the pack on the floor. “I am examining this vampire.”

Fet came forward to the table, looking at the creature’s crushed face. “Did you do that?”

“No. Not directly. He was struck by a chunk of falling concrete, caused by a hospital I blew up.”

Fet looked at Eph. “I heard it. That was you?”

“They had me cornered. Almost.”