“They could take a car. You do realize that we are out of the epicenter now. This neighborhood, with its lack of direct subway service and comparatively few apartment buildings conducive to rapid infestation, has yet to be totally colonized. We are not in a bad spot here.”
Eph shook his head. “The train is the fastest and surest way out of this plague.”
Setrakian said, “Fet told me about the off-duty policemen who came to the pawnshop. Who resorted to vigilantism once their families were safely away from the city. You have something similar in mind, I think.”
Eph was stunned. Had the old man intuited his plan somehow? He was about to tell him when Nora entered carrying an open carton. “What is this stuff for?” she asked, setting it down near the raccoon cages. Inside were chemicals and trays. “You setting up a dark room?”
Setrakian turned from Eph. “There are certain silver emulsions that I want to test on blood worms. I am optimistic that a fine mist of silver, if possible to derive, synthesize, and direct, will be an effective weapon for mass killing of the creatures.”
Nora said, “But how are you going to test it? Where are you going to get a blood worm?”
Setrakian lifted the lid off a Styrofoam cooler, revealing the jar containing his slowly pulsing vampire heart. “I will segment the worm powering this organ.”
Eph said, “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Only if I make a mistake. I have segmented the parasites in the past. Each section regenerates a fully functioning worm.”
“Yeah,” said Fet, returning from the poison closet. “I’ve seen it.”
Nora lifted out the jar, looking at the heart the old man had fed for more than thirty years, keeping it alive with his own blood. “Wow,” she said. “It’s like a symbol, isn’t it?”
Setrakian looked at her with keen interest. “How do you mean?”
“This diseased heart kept in a jar. I don’t know. I think it exemplifies that which will be our ultimate downfall.”
Eph said, “Being what?”
Nora looked at him with an expression of both sadness and sympathy. “Love,” she said.
“Ah,” said Setrakian, his acknowledgment confirming her insight.
“The undead returning for their Dear Ones,” Nora said. “Human love corrupted into vampiric need.”
Setrakian said, “That may indeed be the most insidious evil of this plague. That is why you have to destroy Kelly.”
Nora quickly agreed. “You must release her from the Master’s grip. Release Zack. And, by extension, all of us.”
Eph was shocked but knew all too well that she was right. “I know,” he said.
“But it is not enough to know what is the correct course of action,” said Setrakian. “You are being called upon to perform a deed that goes against every human instinct. And, in the act of releasing a loved one … you taste what it is to be turned. To go against everything you are. That act changes one forever.”
Setrakian’s words had power, and the others were silent. Then Zack—evidently tired of playing the handheld video game Eph had found for him, or perhaps the battery had finally given out—returned from the van, finding them gathered in conversation. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, young man—talking strategy,” said Setrakian, taking a seat on one of the cartons, resting his legs. “Vasiliy and I have an appointment in Manhattan, so, with your father’s permission, we will catch a ride with you back over the bridge.”
Eph said, “What kind of appointment?”
“At Sotheby’s, a preview of their next auction.”
“I thought they weren’t offering that item for preview.”
“They are not,” said Setrakian. “But we have to try. This is my absolute last chance. At the very least, it will give Vasiliy the opportunity to observe their security.”
Zack looked at his dad and said, “Can’t we do the James Bond security stuff instead of getting on a train?”
Eph said, “’Fraid not, little ninja. You gotta go.”
Nora said, “But how will you all keep in touch and connect afterward?” She pulled out her phone. “This thing is just a camera now. They’re toppling cell towers in every borough.”
Setrakian said, “If worst comes to worse, we can always meet back here. Perhaps you should use the ground line to contact your mother, tell her we are on the way.”
Nora left to do just that, and Fet went out to start the van. Then it was just Eph and Zack, the father with his arm around his son, facing the old man.
“You know, Zachary,” said Setrakian, “in the camp I was telling you about, the conditions were so brutal that many times I wanted to grab a rock, a hammer, a shovel, and take down one, maybe two guards. I would have died with them, for certain—and yet, in the searing heat of the moment of choice, at least I would have accomplished something. At least my life—my death—would have meaning.
Setrakian never looked at Eph, only the boy, though Eph knew this speech was meant for him.
“That was how I thought. And every day I despised myself for not going through with it. Every moment of inaction feels like cowardice in the face of such inhuman oppression. Survival often feels like an indignity. But—and this is the lesson as I see it now, as an old man—sometimes the most difficult decision is to not martyr yourself for someone, but instead to choose to live for them. Because of them.”
Only then did he look at Eph.
“I do hope you will take that to heart.”
The Black Forest Solutions Facility
THE CUSTOM VAN in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade pulled to a stop right outside the canopied entrance of the Black Forest Solutions meatpacking facility in Upstate New York.
Handlers from both the lead and trailing SUVs opened large black umbrellas as the rear van doors opened and an automatic ramp was lowered to the driveway.
A wheelchair was rolled out backward, its occupant immediately surrounded by the umbrellas and quickly shuttled inside.
The umbrellas did not come down until the chair reached a windowless expanse among the animal pens. The occupant of the wheelchair was a sun-shy figure wearing a burka-like habit.
Eldritch Palmer, watching the entrance from the side, made no attempt to greet the occupant, but instead awaited its unveiling. Palmer was supposed to be meeting with the Master, not one of its wretched Third Reich flunkies. But the Dark One was nowhere to be seen. Palmer realized then that he had not had an audience with the Master since its run-in with Setrakian.
A small, impolite smile curled the edges of Palmer’s lips. Was he pleased that the disgraced professor had shown the Master some disgrace? No, not exactly. Palmer had zero affection for lost causes such as Abraham Setrakian. Still, as a man used to being president and CEO, Palmer didn’t mind that the Master had been shown something in the way of humility.
He chastised himself then, admonishing himself to never let these thoughts enter his mind in the presence of the Dark One.
The Nazi removed his coverings layer by layer. Thomas Eichhorst, the Nazi who had once headed the Treblinka extermination camp, arose from the wheelchair, the black sun-coverings piled at his feet like so many sloughed layers of flesh. His face retained the arrogance of a camp commandant, though the decades had worn away the edges like a fine acid. His flesh was smooth as a mask of ivory. Unlike any other Eternal Palmer had ever met, Eichhorst insisted on wearing a suit and tie, maintaining the bearing of an undead gentleman.
Palmer’s dislike for the Nazi had nothing whatsoever to do with his crimes against humanity. Palmer was in the midst of overseeing a genocide himself. Rather, his distaste for Eichhorst was borne out of envy. He resented Eichhorst’s blessing of Eternity—the great gift of the Master—because he coveted it so.
Palmer then recalled his first introduction to the Master, a meeting facilitated by Eichhorst. This had followed three full decades of searching and researching, of exploring that seam where myth and legend met historical reality. Palmer fin
ally tracked down the Ancients themselves, and finagled an introduction. They turned down his request to join their Eternal clan, refusing him flatly, even though Palmer knew they had accepted into their rare breed men whose net worth was significantly lower than his. Their unqualified scorn, after so many years of hope, was a humiliation that Eldritch Palmer simply could not bear. It meant his mortality and the surrender of all that he had accomplished in this pre-life. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: that was fine for the masses, but for Palmer, only immortality would do. The corruption of his body—which had never been a friend to him—was but a small price to pay.
And so commenced another decade of searching—but this time, in pursuit of the legend of the rogue Ancient, the seventh immortal, whose power was said to rival any of the others. This journey brought Palmer to the craven Eichhorst, who arranged the summit.
It occurred inside the Zone of Alienation surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, a little more than a decade after the 1986 reactor disaster. Palmer had to enter the Zone without his usual motorcade support (his unmarked ambulance and security detail), the reason being that moving vehicles kick up radioactive dust, laced with cesium-137, so you don’t want to follow any other moving vehicles. So Mr. Fitzwilliam—Palmer’s bodyguard and medic—drove him alone, and drove fast.
Their meeting took place after nightfall, of course, in one of the so-called black villages surrounding the plant: evacuated settlements that dotted the most blighted ten-square-kilometer area of the planet.
Pripyat, the largest of these settlements, had been founded in 1970 to house plant workers, its population having grown to fifty thousand at the time of the accident and radiation exposure. The city was fully evacuated three days later. A carnival had been built in a large downtown lot, set to open on May 1, 1986: five days after the disaster, two days after the city was emptied forever.
Palmer met the Master at the foot of the never-operated Ferris wheel, sitting as still as a giant stopped clock. It was there that a deal was struck, and the Ten-year Plan set into motion—with the Earth’s occultation designated as the time of the crossing.
In return, Palmer was promised his Eternity, and a seat at the right hand of the Master. Not as one of his errand-boy acolytes but as a partner in apocalypse, pending his delivery of the human race as promised.
Before the meeting ended, the Master grasped Palmer by the arm and ran up the side of the giant Ferris wheel. At the top, the terrified Palmer was shown Chernobyl, the red beacon of the #4 reactor in the distance, pulsing steadily atop the sarcophagus of lead and steel, sealing in one hundred tons of labile uranium.
And now here he was, ten years on, Palmer at the verge of delivering everything he had pledged to the Master on that dark night in a diseased land. The plague was spreading faster every hour now, throughout the country and across the globe—and still he was being made to bear the indignity of this vampire bureaucrat.
Eichhorst’s expertise was in the construction of animal pens and the coordination of maximally efficient abattoirs. Palmer had financed the “refurbishing” of dozens of meat plants nationwide, all of them redesigned according to Eichhorst’s exact specifications.
I trust everything is in order, said Eichhorst.
“Naturally,” said Palmer, barely able to mask his distaste for the creature. “What I want to know is, when will the Master uphold his end of the bargain?”
In due time. All in due time.
“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 a fresh 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 naiveté 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.
International Space Station
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.”
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There was no direct Internet access in space. Astronauts received data, video, and e-mail through a KU-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.”