The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (82 page)

Eph said, “You brought the Master here. You arranged for him to be on that airplane.”

“Indeed. But, doctor, I have been so consumed with the orchestration of this endeavor for lo these past ten years that to recount it all for you now would truly be a waste of my last hours. If you don’t mind.”

“You are selling out the human race so you can live forever—as a vampire?”

Palmer put his hands together in a gesture of prayer, but only to rub his palms and generate some warmth. “Are you aware that this very island was once home to as many different species as Yellowstone National Park?”

“No, I wasn’t. So we humans had it coming, is that your point?”

Palmer laughed softly. “No, no. No, that is not it. Far too moralistic. Any dominant species would have ravaged the land with equal or grander enthusiasm. My point is that the land doesn’t care. The sky doesn’t care. The planet doesn’t care. The entire system is structured around a long-winded decay and an eventual rebirth. Why are you so precious about humanity? You can already feel it slipping away from you now. You’re falling apart. Is the sensation really all that bad?”

Eph remembered—with a spike of shame now—his apathy in the FBI debriefing room after his arrest. He looked with disgust at the cocktail Palmer expected him to drink.

Palmer continued, “The smart move would have been to cut a deal.”

Eph said, “I had nothing to offer.”

Palmer considered this. “Is that why you still resist?”

“Partly. Why should people like you have all the fun?”

Palmer’s hands returned to his armrests with the certainty of revelation. “It’s the myths, isn’t it? Movies and books and fables. It has become ingrained. The entertainment we sold, that was meant to placate you. To keep you down but still dreaming. Keep you wanting. Hoping. Coveting. Anything to direct your attention away from your sense of the animal, toward the fiction of a greater existence—a higher purpose.” He smiled again. “Something beyond the cycle of birth, reproduction, death.”

Eph pointed at Palmer with his fork. “But isn’t that what you’re doing now? You think you are about to go beyond death. You believe in the same fictions.”

“Me? A victim of the same great myth?” Palmer considered this angle, then discounted it. “I have made a new fate. I am forsaking death for deliverance. My point is—this humanity your heart
bleeds for is already subservient, and fully programmed for subjugation.”

Eph looked up. “Subjugation? What do you mean by that?”

Palmer shook his head. “I am not about to detail everything for you. Not because you might do something heroic with this information—you cannot. It is too late. The die is already cast.”

Eph’s mind reeled. He remembered Palmer’s speech from earlier in the day, his testimony. “Why do you want a quarantine now? Sealing off cities? What is the point? Unless … are you trying to herd us together?”

Palmer did not answer.

Eph went on, “They can’t turn everybody, because then there would be no blood meals. You need a reliable food source.” It hit him then, what Palmer had said. “Food delivery. The meatpacking plants. Are you …? No …”

Palmer folded his old hands in his lap.

Eph pressed him. “And then—what about the nuclear power plants? Why do you need them to come on line?”

Palmer answered by saying again, “The die is already cast.”

Eph set down his fork, wiping the knife blade with his napkin before setting it down as well. These revelations had killed his body’s junkie-like urge for protein.

“You’re not insane,” said Eph, actively trying to read him now. “You’re not even evil. You are desperate, and certainly megalomaniacal. Absolutely perverse. Is all this spun out of a rich man’s fear of death? You trying to buy your way out of it? Actually choosing the alternative? But—for what? What have you
not
already done that you lust after? What will be left for you to lust for?”

For the briefest moment, Palmer’s eyes showed a hint of fragility, perhaps even fear. In that instant he was revealed to be just what he was: a fragile, sick old man.

“You don’t understand, Dr. Goodweather. I have been sick all my life.
All my life.
I had no childhood. No adolescence. I have been fighting against my own rot for as long as I can remember. Fear death? I walk with it every day. What I want now is to transcend it. To silence it. For what has being human ever done for me? Every
pleasure I have ever experienced has been tainted by the whisper of decay and disease.”

“But—to be a vampire? A … a creature? A bloodsucking thing?”

“Well … arrangements have been made. I will be exalted somewhat. Even at the next stage, there has to be a class system, you know. And I have been promised a seat at the very top.”

“Promised by a vampire. A virus. What about
his
will? He is going to invade yours as he has all the others—possess it, make yours an extension of his own. What good is that? Merely trading one whisper for another …”

“I have dealt with worse, believe me. But it is kind of you to show such concern for my well-being.” Palmer looked to the great windows, beyond their reflection to the dying city below. “People will prefer any fate to this. They will welcome our alternative. You’ll see. They will accept any system, any order, that promises them the illusion of security.” He looked back. “But you haven’t touched your drink.”

Eph said, “Maybe I’m not so preprogrammed. Maybe people are more unpredictable than you think.”

“I don’t think so. Every model has its individual anomalies. A renowned doctor and scientist becomes an assassin. Amusing. What most people lack is vision—a vision of the truth. The ability to act with deadly certainty. No, as a group—a
herd,
that is your word—they are easily led, and wonderfully predictable. Capable of selling, turning, killing those that they profess to love in exchange for peace of mind or a scrap of food.” Palmer shrugged, disappointed that Eph was evidently through eating and the meal was over. “You will be going back to the FBI now.”

“Those agents are in on it? How big is this conspiracy?”

“‘Those agents’?” Palmer shook his head. “As with any bureaucratic institution—say, for instance, the CDC—once you seize control of the top, the rest of the organization simply follows orders. The Ancients have operated that way for years. The Master is no exception. Don’t you see that this is why governments were established in the first place? So, no, there is no conspiracy, Dr. Goodweather. This is the very same structure that has existed since the beginning of recorded time.”

Mr. Fitzwilliam unplugged Palmer from his feeding machine. Eph saw that Palmer was already half a vampire; that the jump from intravenous nourishment to a blood meal was not a great one. “Why did you have me here?”

“Not to gloat. I believe that has been made clear. Nor to unburden my soul.” Palmer chuckled before returning to seriousness. “This is my last night as a man. Dinner with my would-be assassin struck me as a meaningful part of the program. Tomorrow, Dr. Goodweather, I will exist in a place beyond death’s reach. And your kind will exist—”

“My kind?” said Eph, interrupting.

“Your kind will exist in a manner beyond all hope. I have delivered to you a new Messiah, and the reckoning is at hand. The mythmakers were right, save for their characterization of the second coming of a Messiah. He will indeed raise the dead. He will preside over the final judgment. God promises eternal life. The Master delivers it. And he will establish his kingdom on earth.”

“And what does that make
you
? The kingmaker? It sounds to me like you are one more drone doing his bidding.”

Palmer pursed his dry lips in a condescending manner. “I see. Another clumsy attempt to instill doubt in me. Dr. Barnes warned me against your stubbornness. But I suppose you have to try again and again—”

“I’m not trying anything. If you can’t see that he’s been stringing you along, then you deserve to get it in the neck.”

Palmer held his expression steady. What worked behind it—that was another matter. “Tomorrow,” he said, “is the day.”

“And why would he deign to share power with another?” said Eph. He sat up, his hands dropping below the table. He was winging it here, but it felt right. “Think about it. What sort of contract is holding him to this arrangement? What’d you two do, shake hands? You’re not blood brothers—not yet. Best-case scenario, by this time tomorrow you’ll be just another bloodsucker in the hive. Take it from an epidemiologist. Viruses don’t make deals.”

“He would be nowhere without me.”

“Without your money. Without your mundane influence, yes.
All of which”—Eph nodded at the anarchy below them—“exist no more.”

Mr. Fitzwilliam stepped forward then, moving to Eph’s side. “The helicopter has returned.”

“And so it is good evening, Dr. Goodweather,” said Palmer, wheeling back from the table. “And good-bye.”

“He’s been out there turning folks for free, left and right. So ask yourself this. If you’re so damn important, Palmer—why make you wait in line?”

Palmer was rolling slowly away. Mr. Fitzwilliam hoisted Eph roughly to his feet. Eph was lucky: the silver knife he had hidden, tucked inside his waistband, only grazed his upper thigh.

“What’s in it for you?” Eph asked Mr. Fitzwilliam. “You’re too healthy to be dreaming of eternal life as a bloodsucker.”

Mr. Fitzwilliam said nothing. The weapon remained tight against Eph’s hip as he was led away, back up to the roof.

RAINFALL

THUD-BUMP!

Nora shivered at the first impact. Everyone felt it, but few realized what it was. She didn’t know much herself about the North River Tunnels that connected Manhattan and New Jersey. She guessed that, under normal circumstances—which, let’s face it, didn’t exist anymore—it was maybe a two-to-three-minute trip total, traveling deep below the Hudson River. A one-way trip, no stopping. The only way in or out through the surface entrance and exit. They probably hadn’t even hit the halfway point, the deepest part, yet.

Bam-BAMM-bam-bam-bam.

Another hit, and the sound and vibration of grinding beneath the train’s chassis. The noise traveling from the front, bumping beneath her feet all the way to the back of the train, and gone. Her father, driving her uncle’s Cadillac many years ago, once ran over a big badger driving through the Adirondacks; this noise was almost the same, only bigger.

This was no badger.

Nor, she suspected, was it human.

Dread enveloped her. The thumping roused her mother, and Nora instinctively grabbed her frail hand. In response, she got a vague smile and a vacant stare.

Better that way,
thought Nora, with an extra chill. Better not to deal with her questions, her suspicions, her fears. Nora had plenty of her own.

Zack remained under the influence of his earbuds, eyes closed, head bobbing gently over the backpack on his lap—grooving or maybe dozing. Either way, he was unaware of the bumps and the sense of concern growing in their train car. Though not for long …

Bump-CRUNCH.

A gasp went up. Impacts more frequent now, the noises louder. Nora prayed they would get through the tunnel in time. The one thing she had always hated about trains and subways: you can never see out the front windows. You don’t see what the driver sees. All you get is a blur. You never see what’s coming.

More hits. She thought she could distinguish the cracking of bones and—another!—an inhuman squeal, not unlike a pig.

The conductor evidently had had enough. The emergency brakes engaged with a metallic screech, grating like steel fingernails against the chalkboard of Nora’s fear.

Standing passengers grabbed seatbacks and overhead racks. The bumping slowed and became agonizingly more pronounced, the weight of the train crushing bodies beneath them. Zack’s head came up and his eyes opened and he looked at Nora.

The train went into a skid, its wheels screaming—then a great shudder and the interior compartment shook with a violence that threw people to the ground.

The train shrieked to a stop, the car tilted to the right.

They had jumped the track.

Derailed.

Lights inside the train flickered and died. A groan went up, with notes of panic.

Then emergency lights came on, but pale.

Nora pulled Zack to his feet. Time to get moving. She pulled her mother with her, starting toward the front of the car before everyone else on the train had recovered. She wanted to get a look at the tunnel by the train’s headlight. But she saw immediately that way was impassable. Too many people, too much thrown luggage.

Nora tugged on the strap of the weapon bag across her chest
and pushed them the other way, toward the exit between cars. She was playing nice, waiting for fellow passengers to get their bags, when she heard the screaming start in the first car.

Every head turned.

Nora said, “Come on!” She pulled on them both, shoving her way through bodies toward the exits. Let the other people look; she had two lives to protect, never mind her own.

At the end of the car, waiting for some guy to pry open the automatic doors, Nora glanced back behind her.

Over the heads of the confused passengers, she saw frenzied movement in the next car … dark figures moving quickly … and then a burst of arterial blood spraying against the glass door separating compartments.

G
us and his crew had been outfitted by the hunters with armor-plated Hummers, black with chrome accents. Most of the chrome was gone now, due to the fact that, in order to get across bridges and up city streets, you had to do some contact driving.

Gus was heading the wrong way across 59th Street, his headlamps the only lights on the road. Fet sat up front, because of his size. The weapon bag was at his feet. Angel and the others were in another vehicle.

The radio was on, the sports talk host having racked some music in order to give his voice or maybe his bladder a break. Fet realized, as Gus cut hard up onto the sidewalk in order to avoid a knot of abandoned vehicles, that the song was Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.”