Gus’s reverie was interrupted by footfalls in the tunnels. He went to the door and saw artificial light coming around the corner.
Fet came first, Goodweather behind him. Gus had seen Fet a month or two before, but the doctor he had not seen in quite some time. Goodweather looked the worst he’d ever seen him.
They had never seen Gus’s mother before, never even knew he had her here. Fet saw her first, moving to the bars. Gus’s mother’s helmet tracked him. Gus explained the situation to them—how he had it all under control, how she was not a threat to him, his homies, or the mission.
“Holy Christ,” said the big exterminator. “Since when?”
“Long time now,” answered Gus. “I just don’t like to talk about it.”
Fet moved laterally, watching her helmet follow him. “She can’t see though?”
“No.”
“The helmet works? Blocking out the Master?”
Gus nodded. “I think so. Plus, she doesn’t even know where she is . . . it’s a triangulation thing. They need sight and sound and something inside the brain to home in on you. I keep one fully blocked all the time—her ears. Faceplate blocks her sight. It’s her vampire brain and her sense of smell spotting you now.”
“What are you feeding her?” asked Fet.
Gus shrugged. The answer was obvious.
Goodweather spoke up then. “Why? Why do you keep her?”
Gus looked at him. “I guess that’s still none of your fucking business, doctor . . .”
“She’s gone. That thing in there—that’s not your mother.”
“You really think I don’t know that?”
Goodweather said, “There’s no reason to keep her otherwise. You need to release her. Now.”
“I don’t need to do anything. This is my decision. My madre.”
“Not anymore she isn’t. My son, if I find that he has been turned, I will release him. I will cut him down myself, without a moment’s hesitation.”
“Well, this ain’t your son. Or any of your business.”
Gus couldn’t see Goodweather’s eyes clearly in the dim room. Last time they had met, Gus could tell that he had been hyped on speed. The good doctor was self-medicating then, and he thought now, too.
Gus turned away from him, back to Fet, cutting Goodweather out of the conversation. “How was your vacation, hombre?”
“Ah. Funny. Very relaxing. No, it was a wild goose chase, but with an interesting ending. How’s the street battle?”
“I’m taking it to them as best I can. Keeping the pressure up. Program Anarchy, you know? Agent Sabotage, reporting for duty, every damn night. Burned down four vamp lairs last week. Blew up a building the week before. Never knew what hit ’em. Guerilla warfare and dirty fucking tricks. Fight the power, manito.”
“We need it. Any time something explodes in the city, or a thick plume of smoke or dust rises up into the rain, it has to register with people that there are still some in the city who are fighting back. And it’s another thing for the vampires to have to explain away.” Fet motioned to Goodweather. “Eph brought down an entire hospital building a day ago. Detonated oxygen tanks.”
Gus turned to him. “What were you looking for in the hospital?” he asked, letting the doc know that he knew his dirty little secret. Fet was a fighter, a killer like Gus. Goodweather was something more complicated, and simplicity was what they needed now. Gus didn’t trust him. Turning back to Fet, he said, “You remember El Angel de Plata?”
“Of course,” said Fet. “The old wrestler.”
“The Silver Angel.” Gus kissed his thumb and saluted the wrestler’s memory with a fist. “So—call me the Silver Ninja. Got moves that would make your head spin so hard, all your hair would fall out. Two other homeboys with me, we’re on a tear like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Silver Ninja. I like it.”
“Vampire assassin. I’m legendary. And I ain’t gonna rest until I got all their heads on spikes running the length of Broadway.”
“They’re still hanging corpses from street signs. They would love to have yours.”
“And yours. They think they’re badass, but I’m ten times as dangerous as any bloodsucker. Viva las ratas! Long live the rats!”
Fet smiled and shook Gus’s hand. “I wish we had a dozen more like you.”
Gus waved that off. “You get a dozen of me, we’d end up killing off each other.”
Gus led them back out of the tunnels to the basement of Buell Hall, where Fet and Goodweather had left the Coleman cooler. He then led them back underground to Low Memorial Library, then up through its administrative offices to the roof. A cool, dark afternoon-night with no rain, only an ominously black cloud of fog rolling in off the Hudson.
Fet popped open the top of the cooler, revealing two magnificent headless tunas sloshing around in what was left of the ice from the ship’s hold.
“Hungry?” asked Fet.
Eating it raw was the obvious thing to do, but Goodweather laid down some medical science on them, insisting that they cook the fish because of the climate changes altering the ocean’s ecosystem; no one knew what kind of lethal bacteria were lurking in raw fish.
Gus knew where to get a decent-sized camping grill from the catering department and Fet helped him carry it up to the roof. Goodweather was sent to break off old car antennas for skewers. They built their fire on the Hudson side between two large roof fans, blocking the flame light from the street and obscuring it from most rooftops.
The fish blackened up nice. Crisp-skinned and warm pink on the inside. A few bites in, Gus immediately felt better. He was so hungry all the time, he was unable to see how malnutrition ran him down both mentally and physically. The protein feast recharged him. Already he was looking forward to heading out on another daylight raid.
“So,” said Gus, with the pleasure of warm food on his tongue, “what is the occasion of this feast?”
“We need your help,” said Fet. He told Gus what they knew about Nora, Fet’s manner turning grave, intense. “She’s got to be in the nearest blood camp, the one north of the city. We want to get her out.”
Gus checked Goodweather, who was supposed to be her boyfriend. Goodweather looked back at him, but strangely without the same fire that Fet had. “Tall order.”
“The tallest. We have to move as soon as possible. If they find out who she is, that she knows us . . . it will be bad for her and worse for us.”
“I’m all for combat, don’t get me wrong. But I try to be strategic, too, these days. My job is not only staying alive but dying human. We all know the risks. Is it worth going in to get her? And I’m just asking, homes.”
Fet nodded, looking at the flames licking at the skewered fish. “I get your point. At this stage, it’s like, what are we doing this for? Are we trying to save the world? World’s already gone. If the vampires disappeared tomorrow, what would we do? Rebuild? How? For whom?” He shrugged, looking to Goodweather for support. “Maybe someday. Until this sky clears, it’d be a fight for survival no matter who runs this planet.” Fet paused to wipe some tuna off the whiskers around his lips. “I could give you a lot of reasons. But, bottom line, I’m just tired of losing people. We’re gonna do this with or without you.”
Gus waved his hand. “Never said anything about doing it without me. Just wanted to get your thinking on it. I like the doc. My boys are due back soon; we can arm up then.” Gus picked off another hot chunk of tuna. “Always wanted to fuck up a farm. All I needed was a good reason.”
Fet was flush with gratitude. “You save some of this food for your guys, energize them.”
“Beats squirrel meat. Let’s put this fire out. I have something to show you.”
Gus wrapped the rest of the fish in paper to save for his hombres, then doused the flames with the melted ice. He led them down through the building and across the vacant campus to Buell Hall, into the basement. In a small side room, Gus had wired a stationary bicycle to a handful of battery chargers. A d
esk held a variety of devices scavenged from the university audiovisual department, including late-model digital cameras with long lenses, a media drive, and some small, portable high-def monitors—all the stuff they just didn’t make anymore.
“Some of my boys been recording our raids and recon. Good propaganda value, if we can get it out there some way. Also been doing some recon work. You know about the castle in Central Park?”
“Of course,” said Fet. “The Master’s nest. Surrounded by an army of vamps.”
Goodweather was intrigued now, moving to the seven-inch monitor as Gus fed it a waiting battery pack and wired in a camera.
The screen came to life, soupy green and black.
“Night-vision lens. Found a couple dozen in collector’s boxes of a shooter video game. They fit on the end of a telephoto. Not a perfect match—and the quality is basically shit, I know. But keep watching.”
Fet and Goodweather bent forward to better view the small screen. After a few moments of deep concentration, the ghostly dark figures in the image started to come together for them.
“The castle, right?” said Gus, outlining it with his finger. “Stone foundation, the lake. Over here, your army of vamps.”
Fet asked, “Where’d you take this from?”
“Roof of the Museum of Natural History. Close as I could get. Had it on a tripod like a sniper.”
The image of the castle parapet trembled mightily, the zoom setting maxed out.
“There we go,” said Gus. “See it?”
As the image stabilized again, a figure emerged onto the high ledge of the parapet. The army below turned their heads toward it in a mass gesture of complete allegiance.
“Holy shit,” said Fet. “Is that the Master?”
“It’s smaller,” said Goodweather. “Or is the perspective out of whack?”
“It’s the Master,” said Fet. “Look at the drones below, how they turn their heads toward him at once. Like flowers bending toward the sun.”
Eph said, “It changed. Jumped bodies.”
“It must have,” said Fet, bursting pride evident in his voice. “The professor did hurt it after all. He had to have. I knew it. Wounded it so that it had to take on a new form.” Fet straightened. “I wonder how he did it.”
Gus watched Goodweather concentrating hard on the muddy, trembling image of the new Master moving. “It’s Bolivar,” said Goodweather.
“What’s that?” asked Gus.
“Not what. Who. Gabriel Bolivar.”
“Bolivar?” said Gus, searching his memory. “The singer?”
“That’s him,” said Goodweather.
“Are you sure?” said Fet, knowing exactly who Goodweather was referring to. “It’s so dark, how can you tell?”
“The way he moves. Something about him. I’m telling you—he is the Master.”
Fet looked closely. “You’re right. Why him? Maybe the Master had no time to choose. Maybe the old man hit it so hard, it had to change immediately.”
As Goodweather stared at the image, another vague form joined the Master out on the high parapet. Goodweather seemed to freeze, then tremble as though suffering a chill.
“It’s Kelly,” he said.
Goodweather said this with authority, without any trace of doubt.
Fet pulled back a bit, having more trouble with the image than Goodweather. But Gus could tell that he too was convinced. “Jesus.”
Goodweather steadied himself with a hand on the table. His vampire wife was serving at the side of the Master.
And then a third figure emerged. Smaller, skinnier than the other two. Reading darker on the night-vision scale.
“See that there?” said Gus. “We got a human being living among the vampires. Not just the vampires—the Master. Want to guess?”
Fet stiffened. That was Gus’s first sign that something was wrong. Then Fet turned to look at Goodweather.
Goodweather let go of the table. His legs gave out and he slumped back into a sitting position on the floor. His eyes were still locked on the soupy image, his stomach burning, suddenly flushed with acid. His lower lip trembled, and tears welled up in his eyes.
“That’s my son.”
International Space Station
TAKE IT DOWN.
Astronaut Thalia Charles didn’t even turn her head anymore. When the voice came now, she just accepted it. She almost—yes, she could admit this—welcomed it. As alone as she was—indeed, she was one of the most alone human beings in the history of human beings—she was not alone with her thoughts.
She was isolated aboard the International Space Station, the massive research facility disabled and tumbling through Earth’s orbit. Its solar-powered thrusters firing sporadically, the man-made satellite continued to drift in an elliptical trajectory some two hundred miles above its home planet, passing from day into night roughly every three hours.
For nearly two calendar years now—racking up eight orbital days for every one calendar day—she had existed in this state of quarantined suspension. Zero gravity and zero exercise had taken a great toll on her wasting body. Most of her muscle was gone, her tendons atrophied. Her spine, arms, and legs had bent in odd, disturbing angles and most of her fingers were useless hooks, curled upon themselves. Her food rations—mainly freeze-dried borscht brought up on the last Russian transport before the cataclysm—had dwindled to almost nothing, but on the other hand her body required little nutrition. Her skin was brittle, and flakes of it floated about the cabin like dandelion snow. Much of her hair was gone, which was also for the best, as it only got in the way in zero gravity.
She had all but disintegrated, both in body and in mind.
The Russian commander had died just three weeks after the ISS began to malfunction. Massive nuclear explosions on Earth excited the atmosphere, leading to multiple impacts with orbiting space junk. They had taken shelter inside their emergency escape capsule, the Soyuz spacecraft, following procedure in the absence of any communiqué from Houston. Commander Demidov volunteered to don a space suit and venture bravely out into the main facility in an attempt to repair the oxygen tank leaks—and succeeded in restoring and rerouting one of them into the Soyuz, before apparently suffering a massive heart attack. His success allowed Thalia and the French engineer to survive much longer than anticipated, as well as redistribute one-third of their rations of food and water.
But the result had been as much a curse as a blessing.
Then, within a few months, Maigny, the engineer, began showing signs of dementia. As they watched the planet disappear behind a black, octopus-ink-like cloud of polluted atmosphere, he rapidly lost faith and began speaking in strange voices. Thalia fought to maintain her own sanity in part by attempting to restore his and believed she was making real progress, until she caught a reflection of him making bizarre faces when he thought she could not see him. That night, as she pretended to sleep, spinning slowly inside the tight cabin space with her eyes half-closed, she watched in gravity-free horror as Maigny quietly unpacked the survival kit located between two of the three seats. He removed the three-barreled pistol from inside, more like a shotgun than a simple handgun. Some years ago, a Russian space capsule had, upon reentry and descent, crash-landed in the Siberian wilderness. It was hours before they were located, during which time the cosmonauts had to fight off wolves with little more than stones and tree branches. Since that episode, the specially made oversized gun—complete with a machete inside its detachable buttstock—had been included as standard mission equipment inside the “Soyuz Portable Survival Kit.”
She watched him feel up the barrel of the weapon, exploring the trigger with his finger. He removed the machete and spun it in the air, watching the blade go around and around and catching a glint of the distant sun. She felt the blade pass near her and saw, like the glint of the sun, a hint of pleasure in his eyes.
She knew then what she would have to do in order to save herself. She continued to pursue her amateur therapy so as not to aler
t Maigny to her concern, all the while preparing for the inevitable. She did not like to think of it, even now.
Occasionally, depending on the rotation of the ISS, his corpse floated into view through the door to the station, like a macabre Jehovah’s Witness making a house call.
Again—one fewer person to consume food rations. One fewer set of lungs.
And more time endured trapped alone inside this incapacitated space can.
Take it down.
“Don’t tempt me,” she muttered. The voice was male, indistinct. Familiar, but she could not place it.
Not her husband. Not her late father. But somebody she knew . . .
She did feel something, a presence with her inside the Soyuz. Didn’t she? Or was it only a desire for companionship? A want, a need? What person’s voice was she using to fill up this blank space in her life?
She looked out through the windows as the ISS again crossed into sunlight.
As she stared out the window at the dawning sun, she saw colors come into the sky. She called it “the sky,” but it was not the sky up there; nor was it “night.” It was the universe and it wasn’t “black” either; it was absent of light. It was void. The purest nothingness. Except . . .
There it was again: colors. A spray of red and a burst of orange, just outside her peripheral vision. Something like the bright explosions one sees in one’s tightly shut eyes.
She tried this, shutting her eyes, pressing her lids with her dry, cracked thumbs. Again, an absence of light. The void of the inside of her head. A fountain of undulating colors and stars came into the nothingness—and then she opened her eyes again.
Blue brightened and disappeared in the distance. Then, in another area, a spray of green. And violet!
Signs. Even if they were purely fictions created in her mind, they were signs. Of something.
Take it down, dearie.
“Dearie?” Nobody ever called her “dearie.” Never her husband, not any of her teachers, nor the astronaut program administrators, nor her parents or grandparents.
Still, she didn’t question the voice’s identity too strongly. She was happy for the company. She was happy for the counsel.