The Fall

Zack rubbed his face in the crook of his elbow sleeve and turned back to the computer. With some quick desktop searching, Zack discovered the folder containing the video file he was not supposed to view. He opened it and heard Dad’s voice, and realized Dad was operating the camera. Zack’s camera, the one his dad had borrowed.

The subject was hard to see at first, something in the dark inside a shed. A thing leaning forward on its haunches. A guttural growl and a back-of-the-throat hiss. The slinking noise of a chain. The camera zoomed in closer, the dark pixilation improving, and Zack saw its open mouth. A mouth that opened wider than it should, with something resembling a thin silver fish flopping inside.

The shed-thing’s eyes were wide and glaring. He mistook their expression for one of sadness at first, and hurt. A collar—apparently, a dog collar—restrained it at the neck, chained to the dirt floor behind it. The creature looked pale inside the dark shed, so bloodless it was nearly glowing. Then came a strange pumping sound—snap-chunk, snap-chunk, snap-chunk—and three silver nails, propelled from behind the camera (from Dad?) struck the shed-thing like needle-bullets. The camera view jerked up as the thing roared hoarsely, a sick animal consumed with pain.

“Enough,” said a voice on the clip. The voice belonged to Mr. Setrakian, but it was not a tone like anything Zack had ever heard out of the kindly, old pawnbroker’s mouth. “Let us remain merciful.”

Then the old man stepped into view, intoning some words in a foreign, ancient-sounding language—almost like summoning a power or declaring a curse. He raised a silver sword—long and bright with moonlight—and the shed-thing howled as Mr. Setrakian swung the sword with great force …

Voices pulled Zack out of the video. Voices from the street below. He shut the laptop and stood, staying back, peering over the raised edge of the roof down to 118th Street.

A group of five men walked up the block toward the pawnshop, trailed by a slow-moving SUV. They carried weapons—guns—and were pounding on every door. The SUV stopped before the intersection, right outside the front of the pawnshop. The men on foot approached the building, rattling the security gates. Calling, “Open up!”

Zack backed away. He turned to go to the roof door, figuring he’d better get back to his room in case anyone came looking.

Then he saw her. A girl, a teenager, high school probably. Standing on the next roof over, across an empty lot around the corner from the shop entrance. The breeze lifted her long nightshirt, ruffling it around her knees, but did not move her hair, which hung straight and heavy.

She stood on the raised edge of the roof. The very edge, balanced perfectly, no wavering in her posture. Poised at the brink, as though wanting to try to make the jump. The impossible leap. Wanting to and knowing she would fail.

Zack stared. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. But he suspected.

He raised a hand anyway. He waved to her.

She stared back at him.

Dr. Nora Martinez, late of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unlocked the front door. Five men in combat gear with armored vests and assault weapons stared her down through the security grate. Two of them wore kerchiefs, covering their lower faces.

“Everything all right in there, ma’am?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” said Nora, looking for badges or any kind of insignia and seeing none. “So long as this grate holds up, everything is fine.”

“We’re going door-to-door,” said another. “Clearing blocks. Some trouble down that way”—he pointed toward 117th Street—“but we think the worst of it is moving downtown from this direction.” Meaning Harlem.

“And you are …?”

“Concerned citizens, ma’am. You don’t want to be in here all alone.”

“She’s not,” said Vasiliy Fet, the New York City Bureau of Pest Control Services worker and independent exterminator, appearing behind her.

The men sized up the big man. “You the pawnbroker?”

“My father,” said Fet. “What sort of trouble are you seeing?”

“Trying to get a handle on these freaks rioting in the city. Agitators and opportunists. Taking advantage of a bad situation, making it worse.”

“You sound like cops,” said Fet.

“If you’re thinking about leaving town,” said another one, avoiding the topic, “you should go now. Bridges are stacked up, tunnels jammed. Place is going to shit.”

Another said, “You should think about getting out here and helping us. Do something about this.”

Fet said, “I’ll think about it.”

“Let’s go!” called the driver of the SUV idling in the street.

“Good luck,” said one of the men, with a scowl. “You’ll need it.”

Nora watched them go, then locked the door. She stepped back into the shadows. “They’re gone,” she said.

Ephraim Goodweather, who had been watching from the side, emerged. “Fools,” he said.

“Cops,” said Fet, watching them round the street corner.

“How do you know?” asked Nora.

“You can always tell.”

“Good thing you stayed out of sight,” Nora said to Eph.

Eph nodded. “Why no badges?”

Fet said, “Probably got off shift and huddled up at happy hour, decided this wasn’t how they were going to let their city go out. Wives all packed up for Jersey, they’ve got nothing to do now but bang some heads. Cops feel they run the place. And they’re not half wrong. Street-gang mentality. It’s their turf and they’ll fight for it.”

“When you think about it,” said Eph, “they’re really not that much different than us right now.”

Nora said, “Except that they’re carrying lead when they should be wielding silver.” She slipped her hand into Eph’s. “I wish we could have warned them.”

“Trying to warn people is how I got to be a fugitive in the first place,” said Eph.

Eph and Nora were the first to board the dead plane after SWAT team members discovered the apparently dead passengers. The realization that the bodies weren’t decomposing naturally, coupled with the disappearance of the coffin-like cabinet during the solar occultation, had helped convince Eph that they were facing an epidemiological crisis which could not be explained by normal medical and scientific means. The grudging realization opened him up to the revelations of the pawnbroker, Setrakian, and the terrible truth behind the plague. His desperation to warn the world of the true nature of the disease—the vampiric virus moving insidiously through the city and out into the boroughs—led to a break with the CDC, which then tried to silence him with a trumped-up charge of murder. He had been a fugitive ever since.

He looked to Fet. “Car packed?”

“Ready to go.”

Eph squeezed Nora’s hand. She did not want to let him go.

Setrakian’s voice came down the spiral stairs in back of the showroom. “Vasiliy? Ephraim! Nora!”

“Down here, professor,” replied Nora.

“Someone approaches,” he said.

“No, we just got rid of them. Vigilantes. Well-armed ones.”

“I don’t mean someone human,” said Setrakian. “And I cannot find young Zack.”

Zack’s bedroom door banged open, and he turned. His dad blew in, looking like he expected a fight. “Jeez, Dad,” said Zack, sitting up in his sleeping bag.

Eph looked all around the room. “Setrakian said he just looked in here for you.”

“Uhh …” Zack made a show of rubbing his eye. “Must not have seen me on the floor.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Eph looked at Zack a bit longer, not believing him, but clearly with something more pressing on his mind than catching his son in a lie. He walked around the room, checking the barred window. Zack noticed that he held one hand behind his back, and moved in such a way that Zack could not see what he held there.

Nora rushed in behind him, then stopped when she saw Zack.

“What is it?” asked Zack, getting to his feet.

His dad shook his head reassuringly, but the smile came too quickly—just a smile, no levity in his eyes, none at all. “Just looking around. You wait here, ’kay? I’ll be back.”

He exited, turning in such a way that the thing behind his back remained obscured. Zack wondered: was it the snap-chunk thing, or some silver sword?

“Stay put,” said Nora, and closed the door.

Zack wondered what it was they were looking for. Zack had heard his mother mention Nora’s name once in a fight with his dad—well, not a fight really, since they were already split up, but more of a venting. And Zack had seen his dad kiss her that one time—right before he left them and went off with Mr. Setrakian and Fet. Then she had been so tense and preoccupied the whole time they were gone. And once they returned—everything had changed. Zack’s dad had looked so down—Zack never wanted to see him look that way again. And Mr. Setrakian came back sick. Zack, in his subsequent snooping, had caught some of the talk, but not enough.

Something about a “master.”

Something about sunlight and failing to “destroy it.”

Something about “the end of the world.”

As Zack stood alone in the spare room now, puzzling out all these mysteries swirling around him, he noticed a blur in a few of the mirrors hanging on the wall. A distortion, akin to a visual vibration—something that should have been in focus but instead appeared hazy and indistinct in the glass.

Something at his window.

Zack turned, slowly at first—then all at once.

She was clinging to the exterior of the building somehow. Her body was disjointed and distorted, her eyes red and wide and burning. Her hair was falling out, thin and pale now, her schoolteacher dress torn away at one shoulder, her exposed flesh smeared with dirt. The muscles of her neck were swollen and deformed, and blood worms slithered beneath her cheeks, across her forehead.

Mom.

She had come. As he knew she would.

Instinctively, he took a step toward her. Then he read her expression, which all at once transformed from pain into a darkness that could only be described as demonic.

She had noticed the bars.

In an instant, her jaw dropped open—way open, just like in the video—a stinger shooting out from deep beneath where her tongue was. It pierced the window glass with a crack and a tinkle, and kept coming through the hole it punched. Six feet in length, the stinger tapering to a point and snapping at full extension mere inches from his throat.

Zack froze, his asthmatic lungs locked, unable to draw any breath.

At the end of the fleshy shoot, a complicated, double-pronged tip quivered, rooting in the air. Zack remained riveted to the spot. The stinger relaxed and, with a casual, upward nod of her head, she retracted it quickly back into her mouth. Kelly Goodweather thrust her head through the window, crashing out the rest of the glass. She squeezed up inside the open window frame, needing only a few more inches to reach Zack’s throat and claim her Dear One for the Master.

Zack was transfixed by her eyes. Red with black points in the center. He searched, vertiginously, for some semblance of Mom.

Was she dead, as Dad said? Or alive?

Was she gone forever? Or was she here—right here in the room with him?

Was she still his? Or was she now someone else’s?

She jammed her head between the iron bars, grinding flesh and cracking bone, like a snake forcing itself into a rabbit’s hole, trying desperately to bridge the extra distance between her stinger and the boy’s flesh. Her jaw fell again, her glowing eyes settling on the boy’s throat, just above his Adam’s apple.

Eph came racing back into the bedroom. He found Zack standing there, staring dumbly at Kelly, the vampire squeezing its head between the iron bars, about to strike. Eph pulled a silver-bladed sword from behind his back, yelling, “NO!” and jumping in front of Zack.

Nora burst into the room behind Eph, turning on a Luma lamp, its harsh UVC light humming. The sight of Kelly Goodweather—this corrupted human being, this monster-mother—repulsed Nora, but she advanced, the virus-killing light in her outstretched hand.

Eph, too, moved toward Kelly and her hideous stinger. The vampire went deep-eyed with animal rage.

“OUT! GO BACK!” Eph bellowed at Kelly the way he might at some wild animal trying to enter his house, scavenging for food. He leveled the sword at her and made a run for the window.

With one last, painfully ravenous look at her son, Kelly pulled back from the window cage, just out of Eph’s blade’s reach—and darted away along the side of the exterior wall.

Nora placed the lamp inside the cage, resting it upon two intersecting bars so that its killing light filled the space of the smashed window, to keep Kelly from returning.

Eph ran back to his son. Zack’s gaze had fallen, his hands at his throat, chest bucking. Eph thought at first it was despair, then realized it was more than that.

A panic attack. The boy was all locked up inside. He was unable to breathe.

Eph looked around frantically, discovering Zack’s inhaler on top of the old television. He pressed the device into Zack’s hands and guided it to his mouth.

Eph squeezed, and Zack huffed, and the aerosol opened up his lungs. Zack’s pallor improved immediately, his airway expanding like a balloon—and Zack slumped, weakened.

Eph set down his sword, steadying the boy—but the revived Zack shoved him away, rushing toward the empty window. “Mom!” he croaked.

Kelly retreated up the brick face of the building, the talons developing out of her middle fingers aiding her ascent as she climbed flat against the building side, like a spider. Fury at the interloper carried her along. She felt—with the intensity of a mother dreaming of a distressed child calling out her name—the exquisite nearness of her Dear One. The psychic beacon that was his human grief. The force of his need for his mother redoubled her unconditional vampiric need for him.

What she saw when she had laid eyes upon Zachary Goodweather again was not a boy. Was not her son, her love. She saw instead a piece of her that stubbornly remained human. She saw something that remained hers by biology, a part of her being forever. Her own blood, only still human-red, not vampire-white. Still carrying oxygen, not food. She saw an incomplete part of her, held back by force.

And she wanted it. She wanted it like crazy.

This was not human love, but vampire need. Vampire longing. Human reproduction spreads outward, creating and growing, while vampiric reproduction operates in the reverse, turning back upon the bloodline, inhabiting living cells and converting them to its own ends.

The positive attractor, love, becomes its opposite, which is not, in fact, hate—nor death. The negative attractor is infection. Instead of sharing love and the joining of seed and egg and the commingling gene pools in the creation of a new and unique being, it is a corruption of the reproductive process. An inert substance invading a viable cell and producing hundreds of millions of identical copies. It is not shared and creative, but violent, destructive. It is a defilement and a perversion. It is biological rape and supplantation.

She needed Zack. As long as he remained unfinished, she remained incomplete.

The Kelly-thing stood poised on the edge of the roof, indifferent to the suffering city all around her. She knew only thirst. A craving, for blood and for her blood kind. This was the frenzy that compelled her; a virus knows only one thing: that it must infect.

She had begun to search for some other way inside this brick box when, from behind the doorway bulkhead, she heard a pair of old shoes crunching gravel.

In the darkness, she saw him well. The old hunter Setrakian appeared with a silver sword, advancing. He meant to pin her against the edge of the roof and the night.

His heat signature was narrow and dull; an aged human, his blood moved slowly. He appeared small, though all humans appeared small to her now. Small and unformed, creatures grasping at the edge of existence, tripping over their paltry intellect. The butterfly with a death’s head on its winged back looks at a furry chrysalis with absolute disdain. An earlier stage of evolution, an outmoded model incapable of hearing the soothing exultation of the Master.

Something in her always went back to Him. Some primitive and yet coordinated form of animal communication. The psyche of the hive.

As the old human advanced toward her with his slaying silver blade glowing brightly in her vision, a response came forth, directly from the Master, relayed through her into the mind of the old avenger.

Abraham.

From the Master, and yet—not of his great voice, as Kelly understood it.

Abraham. Don’t.

It came as a woman’s intonation. Not Kelly’s. No voice she had ever heard.

But Setrakian had. She saw it in his heat signature, the way his heart rate quickened.

I live in her too … I live in her …

The avenger stopped, a hint of weakness coming into his eyes. The Kelly vampire seized on the moment, her chin falling, her mouth jerking open, feeling the impending thrust of her activated stinger.

But then the hunter raised his weapon and came at her with a cry. She had no choice. The silver blade burned in the night of her eyes.

She turned and ran along the edge, turning down and scuttling low along the wall of the building. From the vacant lot below, she looked back once at the old human, his shrinking heat signature, standing alone, watching her go.

Eph went to Zack, pulling on his arm, keeping him back from the scalding UV light of the lamp inside the window cage.

“Get away!” yelled Zack.

“Buddy,” said Eph, trying to calm him down, calm them both down. “Guy. Z. Hey.”

“You tried to kill her!”

Eph didn’t know what to say, because indeed he had. “She’s … she’s dead already.”

“Not to me!”

“You saw her, Z.” Eph didn’t want to have to talk about the stinger. “You saw it. She’s not your mom anymore. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to kill her!” Zack said, his voice still raw from choking.

“I do,” said Eph. “I do.”

He went to Zack, trying again for some contact, but the boy pulled away. He went instead to Nora, who was handy as a female substitute, and cried into her shoulder.

Nora looked back at Eph with consolation in her eyes, but Eph wouldn’t have it. Fet was at the door behind him.

“Let’s go,” said Eph, rushing from the room.

The Night Squad

THEY CONTINUED UP the street toward Marcus Garvey Park, the five off-duty cops on foot, and the sergeant in his personal vehicle.

No badges. No cruiser cameras. No after-action reports. No inquiries, no community boards, and no Internal Affairs.

This was about force. About setting things right.

“Communicable mania,” the feds termed it. “Plague-related dementia.”

What happened to good, old-fashioned “bad guys”? That term gone out of style?

The government was talking about deploying the Staties? The National Guard? The Army?

At least give us blue boys a shot first.

“Hey—what the …!”

One of them was holding his arm. A deep cut, right through the sleeve.

Another projectile landed at their feet.

“Fucking throwing rocks now?”

They scanned the rooftops.

“There!”

A huge chunk of decorative stone, a fleur-de-lis, came sailing down at their heads, scattering them. The piece shattered onto the curb, rock smacking their shins.

“In here!”

They ran for the door, busted inside. The first man in charged up the stairs to the second-floor landing. There, a teenage girl in a long nightshirt stood in the middle of the hallway.

“Get outta here, honey!” he yelled, pushing right past her, heading for the next flight of stairs. Someone was on the move up there. The cop didn’t have to wait for rules of engagement, or justifiable force. He yelled at him to stop, then opened up on the guy, plugging him four times, putting him down.

He advanced on the rioter, all charged up. A black guy with four good hits in his chest. The cop smiled down the gap in the stairs.

“I got one!”

The black guy sat up. The cop backed away, getting off one more round before the guy sprang on him, clutching him, doing something to his neck.

The cop spun, his assault rifle pressed flat between them, feeling the railing give against his hip.

They fell together, landing hard. Another cop turned and saw the suspect on top of the first cop, biting him on the neck or something. Before firing, he looked up to see where they had fallen from—and saw the nightshirt-wearing teen.

She leaped down at him, knocking him flat, straddling him, and clawing at his face and neck.

A third cop came back down the stairs and saw her—then saw the guy behind her with a stinger coming out of his mouth, throbbing as it drained the first cop.

The third cop fired on the teen, knocking her back. He started to go after the other freak when a hand swept down from behind him, a long, talon-like nail slicing open his neck, spinning him into the creature’s arms.

Kelly Goodweather, her rage of hunger and blood-need triggered by the yearning for her son, dragged the cop one-handedly into the nearest apartment, slamming the door so that she could feed deeply and without interruption.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.