The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (24 page)

The Thing looked deep into Setrakian’s eyes then, and saw his soul.

“Abraham Setrakian,” it purred. “A name so soft, so sweet, for a boy so full of spirit …” It moved close to his face. “But why destroy me, boy? Why am I so deserving of your wrath, when around you you find even more death in my absence. I am not the monster here. It is God. Your God and mine, the absent Father who left us all so long ago … In your eyes I see what you fear most, young Abraham, and it is not me … It is the pit. So now you shall see what happens when I feed you to it and God does nothing to stop it.”

And then, with a brutal cracking noise, the Thing shattered the bones in the hands of young Abraham.

The boy fell to the floor, curled in a ball of pain, his crushed fingers near his chest. He had landed in a faint pool of sunlight.

Dawn.

The Thing hissed, attempting to move close to him one more time.

But the prisoners in the barracks began to stir, and as young Abraham lost consciousness, the Thing vanished.

Abraham was discovered bleeding and injured before roll call. He was dispatched to the infirmary from which wounded prisoners never returned. A carpenter with broken hands served no purpose in the camp, and the head overseer immediately approved his disposal. He was dragged out to the burning hole with the rest of the roll-call failures, made to kneel in a line. Thick, greasy, black smoke occluded the sun above, searing hot and merciless. Setrakian was stripped and dragged to the very edge, cradling his destroyed hands, shivering in fear as he gazed into the pit.

The searing pit. The hungry flames twisting, the greasy smoke lifting away in a kind of hypnotic ballet. And the rhythm of the execution line—gunshot, gun carriage clicking, the soft bouncing tinkle of the bullet casing against the dirt ground—lulled him into a death trance. Staring down into the flames stripping away flesh and bone, unveiling man for what he is: mere matter. Disposable, crushable, flammable sacks of meat—easily revertible to carbon.

The Thing was an expert in horror, but this human horror indeed exceeded any other possible fate. Not only because it was without mercy, but because it was acted upon rationally and without compulsion. It was a choice. The killing was unrelated to the larger war, and served no purpose other than evil. Men chose to do this to other men and invented reasons and places and myths in order to satisfy their desire in a logical and methodical way.

As the Nazi officer mechanically shot each man in the back of the head and kicked them forward into the consuming pit, Abraham’s will eroded. He felt nausea, not at the smells or the sights but at the knowledge—the certainty—that God was no longer in his heart. Only this pit.

The young man wept at his failure and the failure of his faith as he felt the muzzle of the Luger press against the bare skin—

Another mouth at his neck—

And then he heard the shots. From across the yard, a work crew of prisoners had taken the observation towers and were now overriding the camp, shooting every uniformed officer in sight.

The man at his back went away. Leaving Setrakian poised at the edge of that pit.

A Pole next to him in line stood and started to run—and the will seeped back into young Setrakian’s body. Hands clutched to his chest, he found himself up and running, naked, toward the camouflaged barbed-wire fence.

Gunfire all around him. Guards and prisoners bursting with blood and falling. Smoke now, and not just from the pit: fires starting all across the camp. He made it to the fence, near some others and somehow, with anonymous hands lifting him to the top, doing what his broken hands could not, he fell to the other side.

He lay on the ground, rifle rounds and machine-gun fire ripping into the dirt around him—and again, helping hands and arms raised him up, lifting him to his feet. And as his unseen helpers were torn apart by bullets, Setrakian ran and ran and found himself crying … for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.

A matter of choice.

For miles he ran, even as Austrian reinforcements closed in. His feet were sliced open, his toes shattered by rocks, but nothing could stop him now that he was beyond the fence. His mind was of a single purpose as he finally reached the woods and collapsed in the darkness, hiding in the night.

DAWN

17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan

S
etrakian shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable on the bench against the wall inside the precinct house holding tank. He had waited in a glass-walled prebooking area all night, stuck with many of the same thieves, drunks, and perverts he was caged in with now. During the long wait, he had had sufficient time to consider the scene he had made outside the coroner’s office, and realized he had spoiled his best chance at reaching the federal disease control agency in the person of Dr. Goodweather.

Of course he had come off like a crazy old man. Maybe he was slipping. Going wobbly like a gyroscope at the end of its revolutions. Maybe the years of waiting for this moment, lived on that line between dread and hope, had taken their toll.

Part of getting old is checking oneself constantly. Keeping a good firm grip on the handrail. Making sure you’re still you.

No. He knew what he knew. The only thing wrong with him now was that he was being driven mad by desperation. Here he was, being held captive in a police station in Midtown Manhattan, while all around him …

Be smart, you old fool. Find a way out of here. You’ve worked your way out of far worse places than this.

He replayed the scene from the booking area in his mind. In the
middle of his giving his name and address and having the charges of disturbing the peace and criminal trespass explained to him, and signing a property form for his walking stick (“It is of immense personal significance,” he had told the sergeant) and his heart pills, a Mexican youth of eighteen or nineteen was brought in, wrists handcuffed behind him. The youth had been roughed up, his face scratched, his shirt torn.

What caught Setrakian’s eye were the burn holes in his black pants and across his shirt.

“This is
bullshit
, man!” said the youth, arms pulled tight behind him, leaning back as he was pushed ahead by detectives. “That
puto
was crazy. Dude was
loco
, he was naked, running in the streets. Attacking people. He came at
us
!” The detectives dropped him, hard, into a chair. “You didn’t see him, man. That fucker bled
white
. He had this fucking … this
thing
in his mouth! It wasn’t fucking
human
!”

One of the detectives came over to Setrakian’s booking sergeant’s cubicle, wiping sweat off his face with a paper towel. “Crazy-ass Mex. Two-time juvie loser, just turned eighteen. Killed a man this time, in a fight. Him and a buddy, must have jumped the guy, stripped off his clothes. Tried to roll him right in the middle of Times Square.”

The booking sergeant rolled his eyes and continued pecking at his keyboard. He asked Setrakian another question, but Setrakian didn’t hear him. He barely felt the seat beneath him, or the warped fists his old, broken hands made. Panic nearly overtook him at the thought of facing the unfaceable again. He saw the future. He saw families torn apart, annihilation, an apocalypse of agonies. Darkness reigning over light. Hell on earth.

At that moment Setrakian felt like the oldest man on the planet.

Suddenly, his dark panic was supplanted by an equally dark impulse: revenge. A second chance. The resistance, the fight—the coming war—it had to begin with him.

Strigoi.

The plague had started.

Isolation Ward,
Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

J
IM
K
ENT
, still in his street clothes, lying in the hospital bed, sputtered, “This is ridiculous. I feel fine.”

Eph and Nora stood on either side of the bed. “Let’s just call it a precaution, then,” said Eph.

“Nothing happened. He must have knocked me down as I went through the door. I think I blacked out for a minute. Maybe a low-grade concussion.”

Nora nodded. “It’s just that … you’re one of us, Jim. We want to make sure everything checks out.”

“But—why in isolation?”

“Why not?” Eph forced a smile. “We’re here already. And look—you’ve got an entire wing of the hospital to yourself. Best bargain in New York City.”

Jim’s smile showed that he wasn’t convinced. “All right,” he said finally. “But can I at least have my phone so I can feel like I’m contributing?”

Eph said, “I think we can arrange that. After a few tests.”

“And—please tell Sylvia I’m all right. She’s going to be panicked.”

“Right,” said Eph. “We’ll call her as soon as we get out of here.”

They left shaken, pausing before exiting the isolation unit. Nora said, “We have to tell him.”

“Tell him what?” said Eph, a little too sharply. “We have to find out what we’re dealing with first.”

Outside the unit, a woman with wiry hair pulled back under a wide headband stood up from the plastic chair she had pulled in from the lobby. Jim shared an apartment in the East Eighties with his girlfriend, Sylvia, a horoscope writer for the
New York Post
. She brought five cats to the relationship, and he brought one finch, making for a very tense household. “Can I go in?” said Sylvia.

“Sorry, Sylvia. Rules of the isolation wing—only medical personnel. But Jim said to tell you that he’s feeling fine.”

Sylvia gripped Eph’s arm. “What do
you
say?”

Eph said, tactfully, “He looks very healthy. We want to run some tests, just in case.”

“They said he passed out, he was a bit woozy. Why the isolation ward?”

“You know how we work, Sylvia. Rule out all the bad stuff. Go step by step.”

Sylvia looked to Nora for female reassurance.

Nora nodded and said, “We’ll get him back to you as soon as we can.”

D
ownstairs, in the hospital basement, Eph and Nora found an administrator waiting for them at the door to the morgue. “Dr. Goodweather, this is completely irregular. This door is never to be locked, and the hospital insists on being informed of what is going on—”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Graham,” said Eph, reading her name off her hospital ID, “but this is official CDC business.” He hated pulling rank like a bureaucrat, but occasionally being a government employee had its advantages. He took out the key he had appropriated and unlocked the door, entering with Nora. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, locking it again behind him.

The lights came on automatically. Redfern’s body lay underneath a sheet on a steel table. Eph selected a pair of gloves from the box near the light switch and opened up a cart of autopsy instruments.

“Eph,” said Nora, pulling on gloves herself. “We don’t even have a death certificate yet. You can’t just cut him open.”

“We don’t have time for formalities. Not with Jim up there. And besides—I don’t even know how we’re going to explain his death in the first place. Any way you look at it, I murdered this man. My own patient.”

“In self-defense.”

“I know that. You know that. But I certainly don’t have the time to waste explaining that to the police.”

He took the large scalpel and drew it down Redfern’s chest, making the Y incision from the left and right collarbones down on two diagonals to the top of the sternum, then straight down the center line of the trunk, over the abdomen to the pubis bone. He then peeled back the skin and underlying muscles, exposing the rib cage and the abdominal apron. He didn’t have time to perform a full medical autopsy. But he did need to confirm some things that had shown up on Redfern’s incomplete MRI.

He used a soft rubber hose to wash away the white, blood-like leakage and viewed the major organs beneath the rib cage. The chest cavity was a mess, cluttered with gross black masses fed by spindly feeders, veinlike offshoots attached to the pilot’s shriveled organs.

“Good God,” said Nora.

Eph studied the growths through the ribs. “It’s taken him over. Look at the heart.”

It was misshapen, shrunken. The arterial structure had been altered also, the circulatory system grown more simplified, the arteries themselves covered over with a dark, cancerous blight.

Nora said, “Impossible. We’re only thirty-six hours out from the plane landing.”

Eph flayed Redfern’s neck then, exposing his throat. The new construct was rooted in the midneck, grown out of the vestibular folds. The protuberance that apparently acted as a stinger lay in its retracted state. It connected straight into the trachea, in fact fusing with it, much like a cancerous growth. Eph elected not to anatomize further just yet, hoping instead to remove the muscle or organ or whatever it was in its entirety at a later time, to study it whole and determine its function.

Eph’s phone rang then. He turned so that Nora could pull it from his pocket with her clean gloves. “It’s the chief medical examiner’s office,” she said, reading the display. She answered it for him, and after listening for a few moments, told the caller, “We’ll be right there.”

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan

D
IRECTOR
B
ARNES ARRIVED
at the OCME at Thirtieth and First at the same time as Eph and Nora. He stepped from his car, unmistakable in his goatee and navy-style uniform. The intersection was jammed with police cars and TV news crews set up outside the turquoise front of the morgue building.

Their credentials got them inside, all the way to Dr. Julius Mirnstein, the chief medical examiner for New York. Mirnstein was bald but for tufts of brown hair on the sides and back of his head, long faced, dour by nature, wearing the requisite white doctor’s coat over gray slacks.

“We think we were broken into overnight—we don’t know.” Dr. Mirnstein looked at an overturned computer monitor and pencils spilled from a cup. “We can’t get any of the overnight staff on the
phone.” He double-checked that with an assistant who had a telephone to her ear, and who shook her head in confirmation. “Follow me.”