The Complete Strain Trilogy

  “An island? Where?”

  “Nearby . . . but I need the book to confirm. I can read it now, I’m positive. I can decipher it.”

  “Right!” said Gus. “Just bring him the book! The same one he wanted to turn over to the Master! Just hand it over to him. Maybe Quinlan’s in on it too.”

  Mr. Quinlan ignored Gus’s accusation.

  Nora waved at Gus to be quiet. “How do you know you can read it?”

  Eph had no way to explain it. “I just know.”

  “It is an island. You said that.” Nora stepped toward him. “But why? Why were you shown this?”

  Eph said, “Our destinies—even those of the angels—are given to us in fragments. The Occido Lumen had revelations that most of us ignored—given to a prophet, in a vision, and then consigned to a handful of lost clay tablets. It has always been like this: the clues, the pieces, that form God’s wisdom come to us through improbable means: visions, dreams, and omens. Seems to me that God sends the message, but leaves it up to us to decipher it.”

  “You realize that you are asking us to trust a vision you had,” said Nora to Eph. “After just admitting to us that you were going to mislead us.”

  “I can show you,” said Eph. “I know you don’t think you can trust me, but you can. You must. I don’t know why . . . but I think I can save us. I can save us all. Including Zack. By destroying the Master once and for all.”

  “You’re fucking insane,” said Gus. “You were just a stupid asshole but now you are also fucking insane! I bet he knocked back some of the pills he gave Joaquin. He’s telling us about a fucking Ambien dream! The doc is a drug addict, and he’s tripping out. Or else he has the shakes. And we’re supposed to do what he says? After a dream about some angels?” Gus threw up his hands. “You believe that, then you people are as fucking crazy as he is.”

  He is telling the truth. Or what he knows to be the truth.

  Gus stared at Mr. Quinlan. “Is that the same as being right?”

  Fet said, “I think I believe him.” Eph was moved by the nobility of Vasiliy. “I say, back at the blood camp, that sign in the sky was meant for him. There is a reason he had this vision.”

  Now Nora looked at Eph as though she barely knew him. Any lingering familiarity she felt she had with him was gone now; he saw that. He was an object now, like the Lumen. “I think we have to listen to him.”

  Belvedere Castle

  ZACK SAT UPON the big rock inside the snow leopard’s habitat, underneath the branches of a dead tree. He sensed that something was up. Something weird. The castle always seemed to reflect the mood of the Master, in the same way that the weather instruments responded to changes in temperature and air pressure. Something was coming. Zack didn’t know how, but he felt it.

  The rifle lay across his lap. He wondered if he would need to use it. He thought of the snow leopard that had once stalked these grounds. He missed his pet, his friend, and yet, in a sense, the leopard was still there with Zack. Inside him.

  He saw movement outside the mesh wall. This zoo hadn’t seen another visitor in two years. He used the rifle sight to locate the intruder.

  It was Zack’s mother, running his way. Zack had watched her enough to know agitation when he saw it. She slowed as she approached the habitat, seeing Zack inside. A trio of feelers came bounding after her on all fours, like puppies trailing their owner at dinnertime.

  These blind vampires were her children now. Not Zack. Now, instead of her having been the one who changed—having turned into a vampire and departed the league of the living—Zack felt that it was he who had passed out of normal existence. That he was the one who had died, in relation to his mother, and lived before her now as a memory she could no longer remember, a ghost in her house. Zack was the strange one. The other.

  For a moment, while he had her in his sights, he placed his index finger on the trigger, ready to squeeze. But then he relinquished his grip on the rifle.

  He went out through the feeding door, exiting the rear of the habitat, going to her. It was subtle, her agitation. The way her arms hung, her fingers splayed. Zack wondered where she was coming from. And where did she go when the Master sent her out? Zack was her only living Dear One—so whom did she seek? And what now was the sudden emergency?

  Her eyes were red and glowing. She turned and started away, commanding the feelers with her eyes, and Zack followed, his rifle at his side. They exited the zoo in time for Zack to see a large group of vampires—a regiment of the legion that ringed the castle of the Master—running through the trees toward the edge of the park.

  Something was happening. And the Master had summoned him.

  Roosevelt Island

  EPH AND NORA waited on the boat, docked on the Queens side of Roosevelt Island, around the northern point of Lighthouse Park. Creem sat watching them from the rear, watching their guns. Across the other side of the East River, Eph saw the lights of a helicopter between buildings, hovering in the vicinity of Central Park.

  “What’s going to happen?” Nora asked him, the hood of her jacket keeping out the rain. “Do you know?”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “We’re going to make it, right?”

  Eph said, “I don’t know that.”

  Nora said, “You were supposed to say yes. Fill me with confidence. Make me believe that we can do this.”

  “I think we can.”

  Nora was soothed by the calm in his voice. “And what do we do about him?” she asked, referring to Creem.

  “Creem will cooperate. He will take us to the arsenal.”

  Creem huffed at that.

  “Because what else does he have?” said Eph.

  “What else do we have?” echoed Nora. “Gus’s hideout is blown. So is your place at the ME’s office. Now Fet’s hideaway here, Creem knows about it.”

  “We’re out of options,” said Eph. “Though really we’ve only had two options all along.”

  “Which were?” said Nora.

  “Quit or destroy.”

  “Or die trying,” she added.

  Eph watched the helicopter take off again, zooming north over Manhattan. The darkness wouldn’t shield them from vampire eyes. The crossing back would be dangerous.

  Voices. Gus and Fet. Eph made out Mr. Quinlan with them, cradling something in his arms, like a beer keg wrapped in a tarpaulin.

  Gus climbed in first. “They try anything?” he asked Nora.

  Nora shook her head. Eph realized then that she had been left there to keep an eye on both of them, as though he and Creem might try to sail away and strand the others on the island. Nora appeared embarrassed that Gus had let Eph learn this.

  Mr. Quinlan boarded, the boat dipping down under his weight and the weight of the device. Yet he set it down easily on the deck, a testament to his great strength.

  Gus said, “So let’s see this bad boy.”

  “When we get there,” said Fet, hurrying to the controls. “I don’t want to open up that thing in this rain. Besides, if we’re going to get inside this army arsenal, we have to make it there by sunup.”

  Gus sat on the floor against the side of the boat. The wetness didn’t seem to bother him. He positioned himself and his gun so that he could keep an eye on both Creem and Eph.

  They made it back across to the pier, Mr. Quinlan carrying the device to Creem’s yellow Hummer. The oak urns had been loaded previously.

  Fet took the wheel, driving north across the city, heading for the George Washington Bridge. Eph wondered if they would hit any roadblocks but then realized that the Master still did not know their direction or destination. Unless . . .

  Eph turned to Creem, wedged tight in the backseat. “Did you tell the Master about the bomb?”

  Creem stared at him, weighing the pros and cons of answering truthfully.

  He did not.

  Creem looked at Mr. Quinlan with great annoyance, confirming Mr. Quinlan’s read of him.

  No roadblock. They drove off the bridge
into New Jersey, following signs for Interstate 80 West. Eph had dented up Creem’s silver grille nudging a few cars out of the way, in order to clear their path, but they encountered no major obstructions. While they were stopped at an intersection, trying to figure out which way to turn, Creem tried to grab Nora’s weapon and make a break for it. But his bulk prevented him from making any quick movement, and he ate Mr. Quinlan’s elbow, denting his silver grille, just like that of his Hummer.

  If their vehicle had been made along the way, the Master would have immediately known their location. But the river, and the proscription against crossing moving bodies of water of their own volition, should have slowed the slaves of the Master who pursued them, if not the Master himself. So it was just the Jersey vampires they had to worry about at the moment.

  The Hummer was a fuel guzzler, and the gas-gauge needle leaned close to “E.” They were also racing time, needing to reach the armory at sunup while the vampires slept. Mr. Quinlan made Creem talk, giving them directions.

  They pulled off the highway and zoomed toward Picatinny. All sixty-five hundred acres of the vast army installation were fenced. Creem’s way inside involved parking in the woods and trekking a half mile through a swamp.

  “No time for that,” said Fet, the Hummer running on fumes. “Where’s the main entrance?”

  “What about daylight?” said Nora.

  “It’s coming. We can’t wait.” He rolled down Eph’s window and pointed to the machine gun. “Get ready.”

  He pulled in, heading straight for the gate, whose sign read, PICATINNY ARSENAL THE JOINT CENTER OF EXCELLENCE FOR ARMAMENTS AND MUNITIONS, and passed a building labeled VISITOR CONTROL. Vamps came out of the guard shack, Fet blinding them with his high beams and roof-rack lights before ramming them with the silver grille. They went down like milk-filled scarecrows. Those who avoided the Hummer’s swath of destruction danced at the end of Eph’s machine gun, which he fired out from a sitting position, balanced out of the passenger window.

  They would communicate Eph’s location to the Master, but the coming dawn—just starting to lighten the swirling black clouds overhead—gave the rest of them a couple of hours’ head start.

  That did not account for the human guards, a few of which came out of the visitors center after the Hummer had passed. They were rushing toward their security vehicles as Fet took a corner, wheeling through what looked like a small town. Creem pointed the way toward the research area, where he believed there to be detonators and fuses. “Here,” he said as they approached a block of low-lying, unlabeled buildings. The Hummer coughed and lurched, and Fet turned into a side lot, rolling to a stop. They hopped out, Mr. Quinlan hauling huge Creem from the car like a load of laundry, then pushing the Hummer into a carport space half-hidden from the road. He opened the back and lifted out the nuclear device like luggage, while everyone else, except Creem, grabbed guns.

  Inside the unlocked door was a research and development warehouse that had evidently not seen any activity in some time. The lights worked, and the place looked picked over, like a store selling off all its wares at a discount, and the display shelves too. All lethal weapons had been taken, but nonlethal devices and parts remained, on draftsman’s tables and work desks.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Eph.

  Mr. Quinlan set down the package. Fet pulled off the tarp. The device looked like a small barrel: a black cylinder with buckled straps around its sides and over its lid. The straps bore Russian lettering. A tuft of wires sprouted out of the top.

  Gus said, “That’s it?”

  Eph examined the tangle of thick, braided wires that ran from beneath the lid. “You’re sure about this thing?” he asked Fet.

  “No one’s going to be absolutely sure until this thing mushrooms up to the sky,” said Fet. “It’s a one-kiloton yield, small by nuclear-weapons standards but plenty big for our needs. It’s a fission bomb, low efficiency. Plutonium pieces are the trigger. This thing will take out anything within a half-mile radius.”

  “If you can detonate it,” said Gus. “How can we match up Russian and American parts?”

  “It works by implosion. The plutonium is projected toward the core like bullets. It’s all laid in there. What we need is something to start the shock wave.”

  Nora said, “Something with a delay.”

  “Exactly,” said Fet.

  “And you’ll have to do it on the fly. We don’t have much time.” She looked at Gus. “Can you get another vehicle together for us? Maybe two?”

  Gus nodded. “You people hot-wire this nuclear bomb, I’ll go hot-wire some cars.”

  Nora said, “That leaves only one more thing.”

  She walked over to Eph and pulled off her pack.

  She handed it to him. The Lumen was inside.

  “Right,” said Eph, intimidated now that the time was here. Fet was already digging through discarded devices. Mr. Quinlan stood near Creem. Eph found a door that led to a hallway of offices and picked one that was void of any personal effects. A desk, a chair, a file cabinet, and a blank, wall-sized whiteboard.

  He pulled the Lumen from Nora’s bag and set it upon the nicked desk. Eph took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind, then opened the first pages. The book felt very ordinary in his hands, nothing like the magical object from his dream. He turned the pages slowly, remaining calm when nothing happened at first, no lightning bolts of inspiration or revelation. The silver threading in the illuminated pages looked dull to his eye underneath the fluorescent ceiling fixtures, the text flat and lifeless. He tried the symbols, touching the page with his fingertips.

  Still nothing. How could this be? Perhaps he was just too nervous, too amped up. Nora appeared at his door, Mr. Quinlan behind her. He shaded his eyes with his hands to block them out—trying to block everything out, most important, his own doubts. He closed the book and closed his eyes, trying to force himself to relax. Let the others think what they wanted to think. He went inward. He went to thoughts of Zack. Of freeing his son from the clutches of the Master. To ending this darkness on Earth. To the higher angels flying around inside his head.

  He opened his eyes and sat up. He opened the book with confidence. He took his time looking at the text. Studying the same illustrations he had looked at one hundred times before. It wasn’t just a dream, he told himself. He believed this. But, at the same time, nothing was happening. Something was wrong, something was off. The Lumen was holding on to all of its secrets.

  “Maybe if you try to sleep,” suggested Nora. “Enter it through your subconscious.”

  Eph smiled, appreciating her encouragement, having expected derision. The others wanted him to succeed. They needed him to succeed. He could not let them down.

  Eph looked to Mr. Quinlan, hoping the Born had some suggestion or insight.

  It will come.

  These words made Eph doubt himself more than ever. Mr. Quinlan had no idea, other than faith, faith in Eph, while Eph’s own faith was fading. What have I done? he thought. What will we do now?

  “We’ll leave you alone,” said Nora, backing away, closing the door.

  Eph shook off his despair. He sat back in the chair and rested his hands upon the book and closed his eyes, waiting for something to happen.

  He drifted, at times, but kept waking up, having no luck directing his dreams. Nothing came to him. He tried reading the text two more times before giving up, slamming the book shut, and dreading the walk back out to the others.

  Heads turned, Fet and Nora read his expression and his posture, their expectations dashed. Eph had no words. He knew that they understood his distress and frustration, but that didn’t make failure any more acceptable.

  Gus came in, shaking rain off his jacket. He passed Creem sitting on the floor near Mr. Quinlan and the nuclear device.

  “I got us two rides,” said Gus. “A big army Jeep, enclosed, and an Explorer.” He looked at Mr. Quinlan. “We can get the silver grille onto the Jeep, if you want to help me.
They run, but no guarantees. We’ll have to siphon more fuel along the way, or else find a working gas station.” He looked to Fet.

  Fet held up his device. “All I know is this is a weatherproof fuse that you can set by hand. Either immediate or delay mode. Just turn this switch.”

  “How long is the delay?” asked Gus.

  “Not sure. At this point, we’ll have to take what we can get. The wire connections look like they will match up.” Fet shrugged, indicating that he had done as much as he could do. “All we need now is a destination.”

  Eph said, “I must be doing something wrong. Or something we forgot, or . . . something I just don’t know.”

  Fet said, “We’ve burned up most of the daylight. When night falls they’re going to start coming for us. We have to move on from here, regardless.”

  Eph nodded fast, gripping the book. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Gus said, “We’re done. That’s what you’re telling us.”

  Nora said to Eph, “You didn’t get anything from the book? Not even—”

  Eph shook his head.

  “What about the vision? You said it’s an island.”

  “One of dozens of islands. Over twelve in the Bronx alone, eight or so in Manhattan, half a dozen in Staten Island . . . Like at the mouth of a giant lake.” Eph searched his tired mind. “That’s all I know.”

  Nora said, “We can maybe find some military maps. Somewhere around here.”

  Gus laughed. “I’m crazy for going along with this, for trusting a crazy coward traitor. For not killing you and saving me this misery.”

  Eph noticed Mr. Quinlan doing his usual silent thing. Standing there with arms folded, patiently waiting for something to happen. Eph wanted to go to him, to tell the Born that his faith in Eph was misplaced.

  Fet intervened before Eph could. “Look,” he said. “After all we’ve been through—all that we’re going through—there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t know yourself. I just want you to remember the old man for a second. He died for that thing in your hands, remember. He sacrificed himself so that we would have it. I’m not saying this to put any more pressure on you here. I’m saying it to take the pressure away. The pressure’s gone, as far as I can see. We’re at the end. We’ve got no more. You’re it. We’re with you, thumbs up or thumbs down. I know you’re thinking about your boy; I know it eats at you. But just think about the old man for a moment. Reach down deep. And if there is anything there, you’ll find it—you’ll find it now.”