The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (32 page)

Eph said, “No, I mean—this is trespassing. We should call the police first.”

Setrakian took Eph’s lamp from him with a scolding look. “What we have to do here … they would not understand.”

He switched on the lamp, two purple bulbs emitting black light. It was similar to the medical-grade wands Eph used, but brighter and hotter, and fitted with bigger batteries.

“Black light?” said Eph.

“Black light is merely long-wave ultraviolet, or UVA. Revealing, but harmless. UVB is medium wave, can cause sunburn or skin cancer. This”—he took care to aim the beam away from them, as well as himself—“is short-wave UVC. Germicidal, used for sterilization. Excites
and smashes DNA bonds. Direct exposure is very harmful to human skin. But to a vampire—this is weapons grade.”

The old man started down the steps with the lamp, his walking stick in his other hand. The ultraviolet spectrum provides little real illumination, the UVC light adding to the gloom of the situation rather than alleviating it. Over the stone walls on the sides of the stairs, as they passed from the chill of the night into the cool of a cement-foundation cellar, moss glowed a spectral white.

Inside, Eph made out the dark outline of stairs going up to the first floor. A laundry area and an old-fashioned pinball machine.

And a body lying on the floor.

A man laid out in plaid pajamas. Eph started toward him with the impulse of a trained physician—then stopped himself. Nora groped the wall opposite the inside door, flipping the switch there, but no light came on.

Setrakian moved toward the man, thrusting the lamp close to his neck. The weird indigo glow revealed a small, perfectly straight fissure in glowing blue, just left of the center of his throat.

“He is turned,” said Setrakian.

The old man pushed the Luma lamp back into Eph’s hands. Nora turned on hers and shone it over the man’s face, revealing a mad subcutaneous being, a scowling, deathlike mask shifting and writhing, looking indefinably, yet undoubtedly, evil.

Setrakian went and found, leaning against a corner workbench, a new ax with a glossy wooden handle and a shiny red-and-silver steel blade. He returned with it in his gnarled hands.

“Wait,” said Eph.

Setrakian said, “Please stand back, Doctor.”

“He’s just lying here,” said Eph.

“He will soon arise.” The old man gestured to the stone steps leading up to the open bulkhead doors, his eyes never leaving the man on the floor. “The girl is out there now. Feeding on others.” Setrakian readied the ax. “I don’t ask that you condone this, Doctor. All I ask right now is that you step aside.”

Eph saw the determination in Setrakian’s face and knew the old man would swing whether or not he was in his way. Eph stepped back. The blade was heavy for Setrakian’s size and age, the old man bringing
both arms up over his head, the flat of the blade almost at the back of his waist.

Then his arms relaxed. His elbows lowered.

His head turned toward the open bulkhead doors, listening.

Eph heard it then too. The crunching of dry grass being flattened.

He imagined it was an animal, at first. But no. The crunching had the simple cadence of a biped.

Footsteps. Human—or once-human. Approaching.

Setrakian lowered the ax. “Stand by the door.
Silently.
Close it behind her once she enters.” He took the lamp back from Eph, pressing the ax into his hands in trade. “She must not escape.”

He withdrew to where his walking stick stood against the wall, on the opposite side of the door—then switched off the hot lamp, disappearing into total darkness.

Eph stood beside the open cellar door, his back to the wall, flat up against it. Nora was next to him, both of them shivering in the basement of a stranger’s house. The footsteps were closer, light and soft on the ground.

They stopped at the top of the steps. A faint shadow fell over the moonlight on the cellar floor: a head and shoulders.

The footsteps started coming down.

At the bottom, just before the door, they stopped. Eph—not three yards away, the ax hugged to his chest—was transfixed by the girl’s profile. Small and short, blonde hair falling over the shoulders of a modest, shin-length nightgown. Barefoot, arms hanging straight and loose, standing with a peculiar stillness. Her chest rose and fell, but no steam came out of her mouth into the moonlight.

Later, he would learn much more. That her senses of hearing and smell had become greatly enhanced. That she could hear blood pulsing through his and Nora’s and the professor’s bodies, and could smell the carbon dioxide emitted by their breath. He would learn that sight was the least acute of her senses. She was now at the stage where she was losing her color vision, and yet her thermal imaging—the ability to “read” heat signatures as monochromatic halos—had not yet fully matured.

She took a few steps forward, moving out of the rectangle of faint moonlight and into the full darkness of the cellar. A ghost had entered
the room. Eph should have shut the door, but the girl’s very presence here froze him.

She turned toward where Setrakian stood, fixing on his position. The old man switched on his lamp. The girl looked at it with no expression. Then he started toward her with it. She felt its heat, and turned toward the cellar door to escape.

Eph swung it shut. The heavy door slammed hard, reverberating throughout the entire foundation. Eph imagined that the house was going to fall in on them.

The young girl, Emma Gilbarton, saw them now. She was lit purple from the side, and Eph saw glowing traces of indigo along her lips and on her small, pretty chin. Odd, like a ravegoer wearing fluorescent paint.

He remembered: blood glows indigo under ultraviolet light.

Setrakian held the bright lamp in front of him, using it to drive her back. Her reaction was animalistic and confused, recoiling as though confronted with a flaming torch. Setrakian pursued her cruelly, backing her up against a wall. From deep in her throat came a low, guttural noise, a groan of distress.

“Doctor.” Setrakian was calling to Eph. “Doctor, come. Now!”

Eph went closer to the girl, taking the Luma lamp from Setrakian and handing him the ax—all the while keeping the light trained on the girl.

Setrakian stepped back. He tossed the ax away, sending it clanking along the hard floor. He held his tall walking stick in his gloved hands, gripping it beneath the wolf’s-head handle. With one firm twist of his wrist, he separated the top handle from the rest.

From its wooden sheath, Setrakian withdrew a sword blade fashioned of silver.

“Hurry,” said Eph, watching the girl writhe against the wall, trapped there by the lamp’s killing rays.

The girl saw the old man’s blade, glowing nearly white, and something like fear came into her face. Then the fear went fierce.

“Hurry!” said Eph, wanting it to be over. The girl hissed and he saw the dark shade inside her, beneath her skin, a demon snarling to be let out.

Nora was watching the father, lying on the floor. His body began to stir, his eyes opening. “Professor?” said Nora.

But the old man was locked in on the girl.

Nora watched Gary Gilbarton sit up, then rise to his bare feet, a dead man standing in his pajamas, eyes open.

“Professor?” said Nora again, switching on her lamp.

The lamp crackled. She shook it, smacking the bottom, where the battery went. The purple light fizzled on, then off—then on again.

“Professor!” she yelled.

The fluttering lamplight had gotten Setrakian’s attention. He turned on the revenant man, who looked confused and unsteady on his feet. With skill rather than agility, Setrakian doubled Gilbarton up with jabbing thrusts to the gut and chest, opening white-bleeding wounds in his pajama top.

Eph, alone with the girl now, watching this demon assert itself inside her, and not knowing what was happening behind him, said, “Professor Setrakian!”

Setrakian directed thrusts at the father’s armpits in order to bring his hands down by his sides, then slashed at the tendons behind his knees, collapsing the revenant onto all fours. With Gilbarton’s head up and his neck extended, Setrakian raised his sword and uttered some words in a foreign language—like a solemn pronouncement—and then his blade sang through the man’s neck, separating his head from his trunk, the revenant’s lower quarters collapsing to the floor.

“Professor!” said Eph, pressing the lamplight on the girl, torturing her—a girl about Zack’s age, her wild eyes filling with indigo coloring—bloody tears—while the being inside her raged.

Her mouth opened as though to speak. Almost as though to sing. Her mouth kept opening and the thing emerged, the stinger from the soft palate beneath her tongue. The appendage swelled as the girl’s eyes changed from sad to hungry, almost glowing in anticipation.

The old man returned to her, sword first. “Back,
strigoi
!” he said.

The girl turned to the old man, her eyes still flaring. Setrakian’s silver blade was now slick with white blood. He intoned the same words as before, his sword poised two-handedly over one shoulder. Eph backed out of the way just as the blade swept through.

She had raised her hand in protest at the last moment, and the blade lifted it from her wrist before separating her head from her neck. The cut was clean and perfectly flat. White blood splattered against the wall—not in an arterial spray, but with more of a sickening
splatch
—
and her body collapsed to the floor, head and hand dropping against it, the head tumbling away.

Setrakian lowered his sword and pulled the lamp from Eph’s hands, holding the fading beam close to the girl’s open neck wound, almost in a gesture of triumph. But triumph it was not: Eph saw things wriggling in the seeping pool of thick white blood.

The parasitic worms. They curled tight and went still when the light hit them. The old man was irradiating the scene.

Eph heard footfalls on the stone steps. Nora, racing out through the bulkhead. He ran after her, nearly tripping over the decapitated body of the girl’s father, surfacing onto the grass and the night air.

Nora was running to the swaying, dark trees. He caught up to her before she reached them, pulling her close, wrapping her up tight. She screamed into his chest, as though afraid to allow her cry to escape into the night, and he held her until Setrakian surfaced onto the yard.

The old man’s breath steamed into the cool night, chest pumping from exertion. He pressed his fingers to his heart. His white hair was mussed and shiny in the moonlight, making him appear—as did everything to Eph, at that moment—quite mad.

He cleaned his blade on the grass before returning it to the sheath end of the walking stick. He fixed the two pieces together with a firm twist, and the overlong walking stick was as it had been before.

“She is released now,” he said. “The girl and her father are at peace.”

He was checking his shoes and pants cuffs for vampire blood in the moonlight. Nora viewed him through wild eyes. “Who are you?” she said.

“Just a pilgrim,” he answered. “Same as you.”

They walked back to Eph’s Explorer. Eph felt all jittery and exposed out in the front yard. Setrakian opened the passenger door and pulled out a spare battery pack. He swapped batteries with the one in Eph’s lamp, then checked the purple light briefly against the side of the truck.

Setrakian said, “You wait here please.”

“For what?” said Eph.

“You saw the blood on her lips, her chin. She was flushed. She had fed. This is not done yet.”

The old man set off toward the next house. Eph watched him, Nora
leaving Eph’s side in order to lean against the truck. She swallowed hard, as though about to be sick. “We just killed two people in the cellar of their own home.”

“This thing is spread by people. By un-people.”

“Vampires, my God …”

Eph said, “Rule number one is always—fight the disease, not its victims.”

“Don’t demonize the sick,” said Nora.

“But now … now the sick
are
demons. Now the infected are active vectors of the disease, and have to be stopped. Killed. Destroyed.”

“What will Director Barnes say about that?”

Eph said, “We can’t wait for him. We’ve already waited too long.”

They fell silent. Soon Setrakian returned carrying his walking stick/vampire sword and the still warm lamp.

“It is done,” he said.

“Done?” Nora said, still appalled by what she had seen. “Now what? You do realize there were some two hundred other passengers aboard that plane.”

“It is much worse than that. The second night is upon us. The second wave of infection is happening now.”

THE SECOND NIGHT

P
atricia ran a hand vigorously back through her hair, as though shaking out the lost hours of another day gone by. She found herself actually looking forward to Mark coming home, and not just for the satisfaction of throwing the kids at him and saying, “Here.” She wanted to fill him in on the only real news of the day, the Lusses’ nanny—who Patricia spied through the sheers of the front-facing dining room windows—racing out of the Lusses’ house not five minutes after arriving, children nowhere in sight, the old black woman running as if she was being chased.

Oooh
, the Lusses. How neighbors can get under your
skin
. Whenever she thought of skin-and-bones Joanie tossing off a description of her “European-style pure-soil wine cellar,” Patricia shot an automatic middle finger in the general direction of the Luss house. She was
dying
to find out what Mark knew about Roger Luss, if he was still overseas. She wanted to compare notes. The only time she and her husband seemed to get on the same page was when they were tearing down friends, family, and neighbors. Maybe because savoring others’ marital problems and family misfortunes somehow made hers and Mark’s seem less troublesome.

Scandal always went better with a glass of pinot, and she finished off her second with a flourish. She checked the kitchen clock, with
sincere thoughts of pacing herself, given Mark’s predictable impatience whenever he arrived home to find her two drinks ahead of him. Screw him, snug in his office in the city all day, doing his lunches, walking about at his leisure, hobnobbing on the late train home. Meanwhile, she was stuck here with the baby and Marcus and the nanny and the gardener …