City Under the Moon (28 page)

Even the skies were hazardous. At the intersection of 43
rd
and 11
th
, just north of the Lincoln Tunnel, an NYPD SWAT helicopter attempted an emergency landing to pick up a woman and her child. As they descended, a werewolf leapt from a balcony of the Riverbank West tower and entered the cockpit, causing it to crash into the lower floors of the apartment complex.

***

The Coast Guard and Marines along the island’s perimeter had a particularly rough night.

US Coast Guard Petty Officer Third Class Richard Hatem was gunner’s mate aboard the 87-foot USCG Cutter
Finback
. He’d been stationed with a Weapons Augmentation Team in Cape May before being called to duty just that afternoon, and now he was on the Hudson River, monitoring the northern section of Riverside Park.

Hatem was manning a 25mm machine gun at the stern of the boat, a second line of defense in case anything got past the soldiers on the shore. Its eight-inch-long bullets weren’t silver, but they could liquefy bone. And he was hoping to get plenty of opportunities to do just that.

They expected ground skirmishes, but the assault came by air. Werewolves bounded through the park’s trees, catapulting over the sharpshooters and skyrocketing into Hatem’s sights. He already had three kills and a great story to tell his kid.

And then a crushing weight fell from the sky. The last thing he felt was his bones snapping flat on the deck.

Two crew members were killed on the
Finback
, and four more were injured before the coxswain shot the werewolf with his silver-loaded sidearm. One of the infected soldiers took his own life two hours later.

Veterans of these battles said the worst part was consoling infected friends. Dozens of suicides were reported; hundreds more weren’t.

***

In Madison Square Garden, racial tensions, exhaustion, and fear led to escalating brawls, leaving the guards distracted when a few members of the crowd began to transform. The creatures evaded police and sniper fire, spreading the infection, even as more slipped in through the sewer system. The throng stampeded, broke through the barricaded doors and spilled into the streets. Easy pickings for the predators.

***

The most insulated location on the island was United Nations Headquarters. All resident diplomats and dignitaries had been evacuated by air shortly after the New Year’s Eve outbreak, but a formidable UN peacekeeper force was left to defend the plaza. Relentless waves of werewolves assaulted the General Assembly Building, sometimes in packs of twenty or more. By three in the morning, federal coordinators lost touch with the heads of UN security.

Anyone—
everyone
—foolish enough to roam the streets on foot met with a quick end. But meals were sparse until the wolves strayed far from the center of the island. When they reached the bottlenecks at the exits, bloodbaths ensued.

The most crowded portal was the Lincoln Tunnel, where a mob of forty thousand had been testing the military blockade. When the transformations began, Tenth Avenue from 38
th
to 42
nd
became a hunter’s buffet. Helicopters saw streams of werewolves running toward the tunnel from all directions except the south, where they were feasting on the crowd at the Holland Tunnel.

***

In the basement of the Jacob K. Javits Building at 26 Federal Plaza, Conor Burns and the other guards played cards while they listened to the werewolf prisoners’ howls. Cable TV had gone out with the power, but they still had lights thanks to the back-up generators maintaining the government’s virtual private network.

Conor was used to tension-filled nights, having done two tours in the first Iraq, but the federal guards and CDC EIS officers were pissing stiff. As the night went on, he took all of their money in Hold ‘Em before moving on to IOUs in Gin Rummy.

Around 3 a.m., a fart-ripping crash shook the building.

The guys raced to check the security feeds. Conor’s knees weren’t all that great anymore, so he trailed the pack. More ruckus came from upstairs, poppin’ and clangin’ and every kind of alarm. The whooping siren meant the hidden gunports had activated. When he reached the monitor room, Conor had to push through a lot of whinin’ and cryin’ to get a look.

That’s when he realized someone had driven a damned semi into the lobby.

They had a dozen angles on the ground floor and not a one had any good news. Werewolves comin’ from every direction, runnin’ on four legs or two.

The building shook again. That time it was an explosion. Just about all of the cameras right up and melted.

Conor sent the other guys to the armory. Not that the werewolves could get in, but
just in case
never hurt no one. He watched on the feeds as the guys passed through the door at the top of the stairs.

One camera in the lobby was still working, the one set behind bulletproof glass at the access control door. It’d gone whiteout from the explosion, but the balance was trying to compensate.

When the image clarified, Conor blinked to make sure he wasn’t seeing a leprechaun.

There was a guy at the access door. He looked homeless, with scraggly growth and greasy hair, and he was wearin’ a tee shirt stretched over a button down. His crazy bright eyes stared right back through the camera, like he could see Conor through the wires.

Freaky motherfucker. And out there with all the werewolves. A fuckin’ nut, was what he was.

The guys had reached the armory and they were loading up. Conor reminded himself that it didn’t matter, but—

What the fuck!

The creep in the lobby—
there were werewolves with him
. All over the place. But they weren’t attacking him.

Why the fuck weren’t they attacking him?

Now what was he doing? Fishing something out of his pockets?

An ID card. He had a fucking—

Conor lunged for the override but it was too late. The access light on the console went from red to green and the door was open.

The creep just stood there as the werewolves rushed in.

***

By morning, all of the federal employees at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building were dead or missing. The government’s virtual private network back-up servers had been destroyed, causing interrupts to federal database and email access throughout the tri-state area. And all of the werewolf prisoners escaped, including “patient zero” Holly Cooke.

During the evening of January 1, there were over five thousand deaths in Manhattan and ten times as many injuries. NYPD, Coast Guard, Port Authority, and military stationed at the three tunnels had no choice but to abandon civilian assistance and defend the portals to the mainland at any cost.

Remarkably, almost unbelievably, the quarantine held.

For now.

Nine

Castle Valenkov

Transylvania

1:40 a.m. Eastern European Time

They followed Ilecko through the dead husk of Castle Valenkov.

Back through the ruined foyer, up the grand staircase, and on to the expansive dining room above the common quarters. Various golden utensils were strewn beneath a splintered refectory table.

Gold utensils! Lon hadn’t even considered such a thing… a werewolf would have to avoid any kind of silver.

And then they entered the true spectacle: the ballroom.

He could almost see the ghosts of noble society, all gussied up and flirting and dancing as the orchestra’s melodies warmed the hardwood. Or maybe it was a masquerade ball, with those fancy Venetian masks, where privileged men and women gathered for a decadent orgy to celebrate the beginning of spring.

Now the rodents were throwing a party for the rotting corpses.

The destruction rippled outward from the center, where the massive chandelier had fallen with the impact of a meteor, launching crystal shards that shattered wood and punctured artwork, hobbled the grand piano, and sliced the giant harp’s strings. Lon could still hear the crash. And the screams of the celebrants, now corpses, trapped beneath it.

The ballroom’s service door took them back to the ground floor, where they covered their mouths to stave off a stench that emanated from the servants’ quarters. Finally, they reached the very back of the castle, where Jaguar torched a bolt to grant them access to the rear courtyard.

Lon took it all in, committing not only the details to his memory, but also his better analogies and metaphors...

A dense wall of pines sealed the grove’s perimeter, slicing out a rectangle of bright, starlit sky. Before the trees, strata of diminishing shrubs gave way to an overgrown lawn. A stone path ran from the castle to the back wall, wandering between a series of shoulder-high marble monuments. The landscape was constructed in reverence, as if it were genuflecting toward something at the very back, something shrouded by the shadows of the trees.

Ilecko scooped up a handful of loose soil and considered it thoughtfully before putting it in his pocket. Before Tildascow could ask why, he set off down the path.

“What was that about?” Tildascow whispered.

Lon had no idea. The soil of a man’s home plays an important role in many occult tales, including the classic vampire myth. But not werewolves.

The Shadow Stalkers motioned to indicate movement in the trees. Without night-vision goggles, Lon could only sense (or imagine) the branches rustling. They were out there.
They
.

The first monument was engraved with a black bird perched on a miniature tree, stretching upward with an Orthodox Cross in its beak. Lon couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before. The monument’s counterpart on the other side of the path bore another, similar—

Lon whipped back so fast that he had to right his glasses. Now he remembered!

It was the coat of arms of Wallachia.

From the 1400s to the mid-1800s, this region of Romania was called Wallachia, a kingdom known for grueling power struggles and bloody wars. Could Valenkov’s family lineage stretch back to that era?

Lon returned to the other monument. It was also a coat of arms: a simple shield divided in half, the left side cut by horizontal—

Beethoven pushed him to move along.

The next set of monuments displayed carved busts of a man and a woman. Probably Valenkov’s antecedents.

More shaking in the trees. The soldiers silently tracked the movement as they crept ever closer toward the back of the courtyard. From here, Lon could see their destination: a mausoleum, carved in purple-veined Phrygian marble. Its black iron gate was set behind an arched portico resembling teeth.

Geez, man, these people knew how to set a mood.

Even Ilecko was looking toward the trees now. He held his sword tight against the back of his right arm, its crooked tip just reaching his elbow. They were only twenty feet away when they crossed between the final set of monuments. Both of them bore the same shield—

Ohmyfuckingpeterjackson.

Lon’s gasp caused everyone to spin.

It was a dragon, curved so that his tail wrapped around his throat, like the
Ouroboros
, the snake eating his own tail. The cross of Saint George was stretched across his back, resting between wings folded across his body.

The seal of the Order of the Dragon!

Lon had never seen this particular version before, but he had drawn his own from a 1408 description by Sigismund, the King of Hungary and later Holy Roman Emperor.

And the mausoleum! Its carvings were clearer now. The features had been softened by time, but those columns
were
teeth, and the façade was—

Breathe, Lon, breathe.

—the façade was sculpted to look like the face of a dragon. It was unmistakable!

But—but—

The Order of the Dragon—
in Romania!
—could only mean one—

Something landed on top of the mausoleum, coming down hard like the crack of a whip. Lon fell over backwards and the Shadow Stalkers converged above him with their rifles trained. All he could see were asses and elbows.

“Twelve o’clock!” someone spat.

“Do not attack!” Ilecko whisper-yelled.

Lon leaned left and right, trying to see between the bodies. Ilecko was the biggest obstacle, until he stepped forward, closer to it.

It was perched on top of the portico, a mass of grey fur soaking up all of the dim light. A growl emanated from somewhere inside its cloaked body, the threatening hum of an idling chainsaw.

“Steady,” Tildascow said. “Steady.”

As Ilecko approached, the beast’s features unfurled from the darkness: bulging shoulders, and then swollen arms quivering with rage as they spread to take ownership of the mausoleum… legs uncoiling from beneath, knees skinning the marble… a tail slinking upward, swaying back and forth. The creature tilted forward, leaning to meet Ilecko, finally revealing a lupine face that could barely disguise the scowl of a man.

A man. A poor, cursed man, whose soul is trapped inside a wolf,
Lon thought. And that was the last thing he expected to think, amid the fear and the excitement and the fear and the vindication and the fear. And the fear.

The man was there, you could see him, but he was not present. His body was merely a vessel, which had suffered a mutiny so absolute that you’d think the creature began as a wolf and its form had been twisted to resemble a man.

In that moment, Lon realized that becoming a werewolf was a worse fate than being attacked by one.

Ilecko was unfazed. He kept his left hand up, belaying the soldiers, and he stepped forward to meet the wolf’s gaze. It leaned closer in return, dripping saliva in front of the mausoleum’s entrance.

More wolves dropped from the sky, landing behind them with soft splats. As they slinked between the monuments, Lon realized these were more lupine than the humanoid werewolf he’d seen in the CDC’s video. Ilecko was right; they really did grow stronger in brighter moonlight.

And they had them surrounded.

But Ilecko pressed forward, stepping beneath the guardian werewolf and between the marble columns carved to look like dragon’s teeth. He wrenched open the black gate and turned back to them.