The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (119 page)

Inside, machinery hummed. A heavy odor permeated the air inside, difficult to place at first.

The metallic smell of old coins warmed in a sweaty fist. Human blood.

Nora shut down a little then. She knew what she was going to see even before she reached the first pens.

Inside rooms no larger than a handicapped restroom stall, high-backed wheelchairs were reclined beneath coiled plastic tubes dangling from longer feeder tubes overhead. Flushed clean, the tubes were meant to carry human blood into larger vessels suspended from tracks. The pens were empty now.

Farther ahead, they passed a refrigeration room where the product collected from this terrible blood drive was packed and stored. Forty-two days was the natural limit for viability, but as vampire sustenance—as pure food—maybe the window of time was shorter.

Nora imagined seniors being brought here, sitting slumped in the wheelchairs, tubes taking blood from their necks. She saw them with their eyes rolling back in their sockets, perhaps guided here by the Master’s control of their older, fragile minds.

She grew more frantic and kept moving, knowing the truth but unable to accept it. She tried calling her mother’s name, and the silence that answered was awful, leaving her own voice echoing in her ears, ringing with desperation.

They came to a wide room with walls tiled three-quarters of the way to the ceiling and multiple drains in the red-stained floor. An abattoir. Wrinkled bodies sagged on hooks, flayed skin lying like pelts piled upon the floor.

Nora gagged, but there was nothing in her stomach to come up. She gripped Fet’s arm, and he helped her stay on her feet.

Barnes,
she thought. That uniform-wearing butcher and liar. “I am going to kill him,” she said.

Eph appeared at Fet’s side. “We have to go.”

Nora, her head buried in his chest, felt Fet nod.

Eph said, “They’ll send helicopters. Police, with regular guns.”

Fet wrapped Nora in his arm and walked her to the nearest door. Nora didn’t want to see any more. She wanted to leave this camp for good.

Outside, the dying sky glowed a jaundiced yellow. Gus climbed into the cab of a backhoe parked across the dirt roadway, near the fence. He fooled with the controls, and the engine started.

Nora felt Fet stiffen, and she looked up. A dozen or so ghostlike humans in jumpsuits stood near, having wandered over from the barracks in violation of curfew. Drawn by the machine gun fire, no doubt, and curiosity over the cause of the alarms. Or perhaps these dozen had drawn the short straws.

Gus came down from the backhoe to yell at them, berating them for being so passive and cowardly. But Nora called on him to stop.

“They’re not cowards,” she said. “They’re malnourished, they have low blood pressure, hypotension . . . We have to help them help themselves.”

Fet left Nora to climb into the cab of the backhoe, trying out the controls.

“Gus,” said Bruno. “I’m staying here.”

“What?” said Gus.

“I’m staying here to fuck up this sick shit. Time for a little revenge. Show them they bit the wrong motherfucker.”

Gus got it. Immediately, he understood. “You’re one fucking badass hero,
hombre.
”

“The baddest. Badder than you.”

Gus smiled, the pride he felt for his friend choking him up. They gripped hands, pulling each other in for a tight bro-hug. Joaquin did the same.

“We’ll never forget you, man,” said Joaquin.

Bruno’s face was set angry to hide his softer emotions. He looked back at the bloodletting building. “Neither will these fuckers. I guarantee it.”

Fet had turned the backhoe around and now drove it forward, ramming straight into the high perimeter fence, the tractor’s wide treads riding up and over it.

Police sirens were audible now. Many of them, growing closer.

Bruno went to Nora. “Lady?” he said. “I’m going to burn down this place. For you and for me. Know that.”

Nora nodded, still inconsolable.

“Now go,” said Bruno, turning and starting back into the slaughterhouse with his sword in hand. “All of you!” he yelled at the humans wearing camp jumpsuits, scaring them away. “I need every minute I got.”

Eph offered Nora his hand, but Fet had returned for her, and she left under Fet’s arm, moving past Eph—who, after a moment, followed them over the downed razor wire.

B
runo, raging with pain, felt the worms move inside of him. The enemy was inside his circulatory system, spreading throughout his organs and wriggling inside his brain. He worked quickly to transport the stand-alone UV lamps from the farmstead garden to the bloodletting factory, setting them inside the doors to delay the incursion of the vampires. Then he set about severing the tubes and dismantling the blood-collecting apparatus as though he were tearing apart his own infected arteries. He stabbed and sliced the refrigerated packs of blood, leaving the floor and his clothes awash in scarlet. It splattered everywhere, drenching him, but not before he made sure he wasted every last unit. Then he went about destroying the equipment itself, the vacuums and pumps.

The vampires trying to enter were getting fried by the UV light. Bruno tore down the carcasses and human pelts but did not know what else to do with them. He wished for gasoline and a source of flame. He started up the machinery and then hacked at the wiring, hoping to short-circuit the electrical system.

When the first policeman broke through, he found a wild-eyed, bloody-red Bruno trashing the place. Without any warning he fired upon Bruno. Two rounds broke his collarbone and snapped his left shoulder, shattering it to pieces.

He heard more entering and climbed up a ladder alongside storage shelves, ascending to the highest point in the building. He hung one-handed over the approaching cops and vampires driven wild both by the destruction he had wrought and by the blood soaking his body, dripping to the floor. As vampires ran up the ladder, bounding toward him, Bruno arched his neck over the hungry creatures below, pressing his sword to his throat, and—
Fuck you!—
wasted the very last vessel of human blood remaining in the building.

New Jersey

T
HE
M
ASTER
LAY
still within the loam-filled coffin—long ago handcrafted by the infidel Abraham Setrakian—loaded into the cargo hold of a blacked-out van. The van was part of a four-vehicle convoy crossing from New Jersey back into Manhattan.

The many eyes of the Master had seen the bright trace of the burning spaceship blazing across the dark sky, ripping open the night like God’s own fingernail. And then the column of light and the unfortunate but not surprising return of the Born . . .

The timing of the brilliant streak in the sky coincided exactly with Ephraim Goodweather’s moment of crisis. The fiery bolt had spared his life. The Master knew: there were no coincidences, only omens.

Which meant what? What did this incident portend? What was it about Goodweather that had provoked the agencies of nature to come to his rescue?

A challenge. A true and direct challenge—one that the Master welcomed. For victory is only as great as one’s enemy.

That the unnatural comet burned the skies over New York confirmed the Master’s intuition that the site of its origin, still unknown, was somewhere within that geographic region.

This knowledge engaged the Master. In a way, it echoed the comet that had announced the birthing site of another god walking the earth two thousand years ago.

Night was about to fall, the vampires about to rise. Their king reached out, readying them for battle, mobilizing them with its mind.

Every last one of them.

JACOB
AND
THE ANGEL

Saint Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University

A
CID
RAIN
HAD
continued to fall abundantly and steadily, staining everything, soiling the city.

Atop the exterior domed structure on Saint Paul’s Chapel, Mr. Quinlan observed as the column of daylight started to close and lightning detonated within the dark clouds. Sirens were audible now. Police cars were visible heading toward the camp. Human police would soon be there. He hoped Fet and the others could evacuate soon.

He found the small maintenance niche at the base of the dome. There he retrieved the book: the
Lumen.
He crawled deeper into the niche and found refuge in a structural alcove—away from the rain and the incipient daylight. It was a cramped place beneath the granite roof structure and Mr. Quinlan fit snugly. In a notebook he had jotted some observations, annotated some clues. Safe and dry, he carefully laid down the book.

And he began to read again.

INTERLUDE
III
OCCIDO LUMEN:
SADUM
AND
AMURAH

T
HE
A
NGEL
OF
D
EATH
SANG
WITH
THE
VOICE
OF
G
OD
AS
THE
cities were destroyed in a rain of sulfur and fire. God’s face was revealed and His light burned it all in a flash.

The exquisite violence of the immolation was, however, nothing to Ozryel—not any longer. He yearned for more personal destruction. He longed to violate the order, and in doing so, achieve mastery over it.

As Lot’s family fled, his wife turned back and gazed into God’s face, ever changing, impossibly radiant. Brighter than the sun, it burned everything around her and turned her into a pillar of white, crystalline ashes.

The explosion transformed the sand within a five-mile radius of the valley into pure glass. And over it the archangels walked on, their mission accomplished, ordered to return to the ether. Their time as men on earth was at an end.

Ozryel felt the warm smooth glass beneath his soles and felt the sun upon his face and felt an evil impulse rising within him. With the flimsiest of excuses, he lured Michael away from Gabriel, leading him up a rocky bluff, where he cajoled Michael into spreading his silver wings and feeling the heat of the sun upon them. Thus aroused, Ozryel could not control his impulses any longer and fell upon his brother with extraordinary strength, tearing open the archangel’s throat and drinking his luminous, silvery blood.

The sensation was beyond belief. Transcendent perversion. Gabriel came upon him in the throes of violent ecstasy, Ozryel’s brilliant wings open to their full expanse, and was appalled. The order was to return immediately, but Ozryel, still in the grip of mad lust, refused and tried to turn Gabriel away from God.

Let us be Him, here on earth. Let us become gods and walk among these men and let them worship us. Have you not tasted the power? Does it not command you?

But Gabriel held fast, summoning Raphael, who arrived in human form on an arrow of light. The beam paralyzed Ozryel, fixing him to the earth he so loved. He was held between two rivers. The very rivers that fed the canals in Sadum. God’s vengeance was swift: the archangels were ordered to rend their brother to pieces and scatter his limbs around the material world.

Ozryel was torn asunder, into seven pieces, his legs, arms, and wings cast to distant corners of the earth, buried deep, until only his head and throat remained. As Ozryel’s mind and mouth were most offensive to God, this seventh piece was flung far into the ocean, submerged many leagues deep. Buried in the darkest silt and blackest sand at the bottom. No one could ever touch the remains. No one could remove them. There they would stay until the day of judgment at the end of days when all life on earth would be called forth before the Creator.

But, through the ages, tendrils of blood seeped out of the interred pieces and gave birth to new entities. The Ancients. Silver, the closest substance to the blood they drank, would forever have an ill effect on them. The sun, the closest thing to God’s face on earth, would always purge them and burn them away, and as in their very origin, they would remain trapped between moving bodies of water and could never cross them unassisted.

They would know no love and could breed only by taking life. Never giving it. And, should the pestilence of their blood ever spread without control, their demise would come from the famine of their kind.

Columbia University

M
R
. 
Q
UINLAN
SAW
the different glyphs and the coordinates that signaled the location of the internments.

All the sites of origin.

Hastily, he wrote them down. They corresponded perfectly to the sites the Born had visited, gathering the dusty remains of the Ancients. Most of them had a nuclear plant built above them and had been sabotaged by the Stoneheart Group. The Master had of course prepared this coup very carefully.

But the seventh site, the most important of them all, appeared as a dark spot on the page. A negative form in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean. With it, two words in Latin:
Oscura. Aeterna.

Another, odd shape was visible in the watermark.

A falling star.

T
he Master had sent helicopters. They had seen them from the windows of their cars on the slow drive south, back to Manhattan. They crossed the Harlem River from Marble Hill, staying off the parkways, abandoning their vehicles near Grant’s Tomb and then making their way through the steady night rain like regular citizens, slipping onto the abandoned campus of Columbia University.

While the others went below to regroup, Gus crossed Low Plaza to Buell Hall and rode the service dumbwaiter to the roof. He had his coop up there, for the messenger pigeons.

His “Jersey Express” was back, squatting underneath the perch gutter Gus had fashioned.