The Fall (21 page)

“My time is due
now
,” said Palmer. “You know the condition of my health. You know that I have fulfilled every promise, that I have met every deadline, that I have served your Master faithfully and completely. Now the hour grows late. I am due some consideration.”

The Dark Lord sees everything and forgets nothing.

“I will remind you of his—and your—unfinished business with Setrakian, your former pet prisoner.”

His resistance is doomed.

“Agreed, of course. And yet his operations and his diligence do pose a threat to some individuals. Including yourself. And me.”

Eichhorst was silent a moment, as though conceding his agreement.

The Master will settle his affairs with the Juden in a matter of hours. Now—I have not fed for some time, and I was promised afresh meal.

Palmer hid a frown of disgust. How quickly his human revulsion would turn to hunger, to need. How soon he would look back upon his naivete here the way an adult looks back upon the needs of a child. “Everything has been arranged.”

Eichhorst motioned to one of his handlers who stepped away into one of the larger pens. Palmer heard whimpering and checked his watch, wanting to be done with this.

Eichhorst’s handler returned holding, by the back of his neck, much as a farmer might lift up a piglet, a boy of no more than eleven years of age. Blindfolded and shivering, the boy pawed at the air before him, kicking, trying to see beneath the cloth covering his eyes.

Eichhorst turned his head at the smell of his victim, his chin tipped in a gesture of appreciation.

Palmer observed the Nazi and wondered for a moment what it would feel like, after the pain of the turning. What will it mean to exist as a creature who feeds on man?

Palmer turned and signaled to Mr. Fitzwilliam to start the car. “I will leave you to eat in peace,” he said, and left the vampire to its meal.

TWO
HUNDRED
AND
twenty miles above Earth, the concepts of day and night had little meaning. Orbiting the planet once every hour and a half provided all the dawns and sunsets a person could handle.

Astronaut Thalia Charles gently snored inside a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. The American flight engineer was entering her 466th day in Low Earth orbit, with only 6 more to go before the space shuttle docking that was to be her ride back home.

Mission Control set their sleep schedules, and today was to be an “early” day, readying the
ISS
to receive
Endeavor
and the next research facility module it carried. She heard the voice summoning her, and spent a pleasant few seconds transforming from sleep to wakefulness. The floating sensation of dreaming is a constant in zero gravity. She wondered how her head would react to a pillow upon her return. What it would be like to come under the benevolent dictatorship of Earth’s gravity once again.

She removed her eye mask and neck pad, tucking each inside the sleeping bag before loosening the straps and wriggling out. She undid her elastic and shook out her long, black hair, combing it apart with her fingers, then turning a half-somersault to regather it and wind the elastic back around in a double loop.

The voice of Mission Control from Houston’s Johnson Space Center called her to the laptop in the Unity module for a teleconference uplink. This was unusual but not, in itself, a cause for alarm. Bandwidth in space is in high demand, and very carefully allocated. She wondered if there hadn’t been another orbital collision of space junk, its debris rocketed through orbit with the force of a shotgun blast. She disdained having to take shelter inside the attached
Soyuz-TMA
spacecraft, as a precaution. The
Soyuz
was their emergency escape from the
ISS
. A similar threat had occurred two months ago, necessitating an eight-day stay inside its bell-shaped crew module. Space-junk hazards posed the greatest threat to the viability of the
ISS
, and to the psychological well-being of its crew.

The news, as she found out, was even worse.

“We’re scrapping the
Endeavor
launch for now,” said Mission Control head Nicole Fairley.

“Scrapping? You mean postponing?” said Thalia, trying not to betray too much disappointment.

“Postponing indefinitely. There’s a lot going on down here. Some troubling developments. We need to wait this out.”

“What? The thrusters again?”

“No, nothing mechanical.
Endeavor
is sound. This is not a technical problem.”

“Okay…”

“To be honest, I don’t know what this is. You may have noticed you haven’t received any news updates these past few days.”

There was no direct Internet access in space. Astronauts received data, video, and e-mail through a Ky-band data link. “Do we have another virus?” All the laptops on the
ISS
operated on a wireless intranet, segregated from the mainframe.

“Not a computer virus, no.”

Thalia gripped the handlebar to hold herself still in front of the screen. “Okay. I’m going to stop asking questions now and just listen.”

“We are in the midst of a rather mystifying global pandemic. It apparently started in Manhattan and has been popping up in various cities and spreading ever since. Concurrently, and apparently in direct relation, there have been a large number of disappearances reported. At first, these vanishings were attributed to sick people staying home from work, people seeking medical attention. Now there are riots. I’m talking entire blocks of New York City. The violence has spread across state lines. The first report of attacks in London came four days ago, then at Narita Airport in Japan. Each country has been guarding its flank and its international profile, trying to avoid a meltdown of travel and commerce, which—as I understand it—is, in fact, exactly what each country
should
be seeking. The World Health Organization held a press conference yesterday in Berlin. Half of its members were absent. They officially moved the pandemic from a phase five to a phase-six alert.”

Thalia couldn’t believe it. “Is it the eclipse?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“The occultation. When I watched it from up here… the great black blot that was the shadow of the moon, spreading over the northeastern U.S. like a dead spot… I guess I had this… I had a premonition of sorts.”

“Well—it does seem to have started around then.”

“It was just the way it looked. So ominous.”

“We have had a few major incidents here in Houston, and more in Austin and Dallas. Mission Control is operating at about seventy percent manpower now, our numbers shrinking every day. With operation personnel levels unreliable, we have no choice but to push back the launch at this time.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“The Russian transport that went up two months ago left you plenty of food and batteries, enough to last up to a year if rationing becomes necessary.”

“A
year
?” said Thalia, more forcefully than she would have liked.

“Just thinking worst-case. Hopefully things get back under control here and we can get you back maybe two or three weeks out.”

“Great. So until then, more freeze-dried borscht.”

“This same message is being relayed to Commander Demidov and Engineer Maigny by their respective agencies. We are aware of your disappointment, Thalia.”

“I haven’t received any e-mail from my husband in a few days. Have you been holding those back as well?”

“No, we haven’t. A few days, you say?”

Thalia nodded. She pictured Billy as she always did, working inside the kitchen of their home in West Hartford, dishrag over his shoulder, cooking up some ambitious feast over the stove. “Contact him for me, will you? He’ll want to know about the postponement.”

“We did attempt to contact him. No answer. Either at your house, or his restaurant.”

Thalia swallowed hard. She worked quickly to regain her composure.

He’s fine,
she thought.
I’m the one orbiting the planet in a spaceship. He’s down there, both feet on the ground. He’s fine.

She showed Mission Control only confidence and fortitude, but she had never felt so far away from her husband as at that moment.

THE
BLOCK
WAS
already burning when Gus arrived with the Sapphires and Angel.

They saw smoke from the bridge on the way over: thick and black, rising in various spots uptown and down, Harlem and the Lower East Side and points between. As though the city had seen a coordinated military attack.

The morning sun was overhead, the city quiet. They shot up Riverside Drive, weaving around abandoned vehicles. Seeing smoke rising from city blocks was like watching a person bleed. Gus felt alternately helpless and anxious—the city was falling to shit all around him, and time was of the essence.

Creem and the other Jersey punks looked upon Manhattan burning with a kind of satisfaction. To them it was like watching a disaster movie. But to Gus, this was like watching his turf going up in flames.

The block they were headed to was the epicenter of the biggest uptown blaze: all the streets surrounding the pawnshop were blacked out by the thick veil of smoke, turning day into a strange, storm-like night.

“Those motherfuckers,” said Gus. “They blocked out the sun.”

The entire side of the street raged in flames—except the pawnshop on the corner. Its large front windows were shattered, security grates pulled off the building overhang and lying twisted on the sidewalk.

The rest of the city was quieter than a cold Christmas morning, but this block—the 118th Street intersection—was, at that dark daylight hour, teeming with vamps laying siege to the pawnshop.

They were after the old man.

Inside the apartment above the shop, Gabriel Bolivar moved from room to room. Silver-backed mirrors covered the walls instead of pictures, as though some strange spell had converted artwork into glass. The former rock star’s blurry reflection moved with him from room to room in his search for the old man Setrakian and his accomplices.

Bolivar stopped in the room the mother of the boy had tried to enter—the wall boarded behind an iron cage.

No one.

It looked as though they had cleared out. Bolivar wished the mother had accompanied them here. Her blood link to the boy would have proved valuable. But the Master had tasked Bolivar, and its will would be done.

The job of bloodhound instead fell to the feelers, the newly turned blind children. Bolivar came out to the kitchen to see one there, a boy with fully black eyes, crouching down on all fours. He was “looking” out the window toward the street, using his extrasensory perception.

The basement?
said Bolivar.

No one,
said the boy.

But Bolivar needed to see it for himself, needed to be sure, moving past him to the stairs. Bolivar rode the spiral railing down on his hands and bare feet, down one floor to the street level, where the other feelers had retreated to the shop—then continuing his descent to the basement and a locked door.

Bolivar’s soldiers were already there, in answer to his telepathic command. They tore at the locked door with powerful, oversize hands, digging into the iron-bolted frame with the hardened nails of their talon-like middle fingers until they gained purchase, then joined forces to rip the door back from its frame.

The first few to enter tripped the ultraviolet lamps surrounding the interior of the doorway, the electric indigo rays cooking their virus-rich bodies, the vampires dissipating with screams and clouds of dust. The rest were repulsed by the light, pushed backward against the spiral staircase, shading their eyes. They were unable to see through the doorway.

Bolivar was the first to haul himself hand over hand up the staircase, ahead of the crush. The old man still could be inside there.

Bolivar had to find another way in.

He noticed then the feelers tensed on the floor, facing the smashed windows and the street beyond, like pointer dogs responding to a scent. The first among them—a girl in soiled briefs and an undershirt—snarled and then leaped through the jagged shards of glass to the street.

The little girl came right at Angel, loping on all fours with fawn-like grace. The old wrestler backed up into the street, wanting no part of her, but she had locked in on the biggest target and was set on taking him down. She sprang up from the road, black-eyed, open-mouthed—and Angel reverted into wrestler mode, handling her as though she were a challenger throwing herself at him from the top turnbuckle. He applied the Angel Kiss, his open-palm blow smacking the girl out of the air in mid-leap, sending her lithe little body flying a good dozen yards away, tumbling to the road.

Angel recoiled immediately. One of the great disappointments of his life was not knowing any of the children he had sired. She was a vampire, but she looked so human—a child, still—and he started toward her with his bare hand outstretched. She turned and hissed, her blind eyes like two black bird’s eggs, her stinger darting out at him, maybe three feet in length, considerably shorter than an adult vampire’s. The tip flailed before his eyes like a devil’s tail, and Angel was transfixed.

Gus intervened quickly, finishing her with a hard swipe of his sword that scored the surface of the road, scraping up sparks.

This slaying sent the other vamps into an attack frenzy. A brutal battle, Gus and the Sapphires outnumbered at first three to one, then four to one as vamps fled from the pawnshop and emerged from the basements of the adjacent buildings burning along the street. Either they had been psychically summoned into battle, or simply heard the ringing dinner bell. Destroy one, and two more came at you.

Then a shotgun blast exploded near Gus and a marauding vamp was cut in two. He turned to see Mr. Quinlan, the Ancients’ chief hunter, picking off rioting white-bloods with military precision. He must have come up from underneath like these others. Unless he had been shadowing Gus and the Sapphires the entire time, from the darkness of the underground.