“Undead end,” Eph muttered. “You bastard.”
Bruno glanced over at him. “Bastard? You the one who ran us into this trap!”
Once I catch you and turn you, I will know all your secrets.
That turned Eph cold. “Here they come,” he said to Bruno—and got ready for them.
Nora had arrived at Barnes’s office inside the administrative building ready to agree to anything, including giving herself to Barnes, in order to save her mother and get close to him. She despised her former boss even more than the vampire oppressors. His immorality sickened her—but the fact that he believed she was weak enough to simply bend to his will made her nauseous.
Killing him would show him that. If his fantasy was her submission, her plan was to drive the shank into his heart. Death by butter knife: how fitting!
She would do it as he lay in bed or in the middle of his dinner patter, so hideously civilized. He was more evil than the strigoi: his corruption was not a disease, was not something inflicted upon him. His corruption was opportunistic. A choice.
Worst of all was his perception of her as a potential victim. He had fatally misread Nora, and all that was left was for her to show him the error of his ways. In steel.
He made her wait out in the hallway, where there was no chair or bathroom, for three hours. Twice he left his office, resplendent in his crisp, white admiral’s uniform, strolling past Nora carrying some papers but never acknowledging her, passing without a word, disappearing behind another door. And so she waited, stewing, even when the single camp whistle signaled the rations call, one hand across her grumbling stomach—her mind squarely focused on her mother and murder.
Finally, Barnes’s assistant—a young female with clean, shoulder-length auburn hair, wearing a laundered gray jumpsuit—opened the door, admitting Nora without a word. The assistant remained in the doorway as Nora passed through. Perfumed skin and minty breath. Nora returned the assistant’s look of disapproval, imagining just how the woman had secured such a plum position in Barnes’s world.
The assistant sat behind her desk, leaving Nora to try the next door, which was locked. Nora turned and retreated to one of the two hard folding chairs against the wall facing the assistant. The assistant made busy noises in an effort to ignore Nora while simultaneously asserting her superiority. Her telephone buzzed and she lifted the receiver, answering it quietly. The room, save for the unfinished wooden walls and the laptop computer, resembled a low-tech 1940s-era office: corded telephone, a pen and paper set, blotter. On the near corner of the desk, just off the blotter, sat a thick chocolate brownie on a small paper plate. The assistant hung up after a few whispered words and noticed Nora staring at the treat. She reached for the plate, taking just a nibble of the dessert cake, a few stray crumbs sprinkling down into her lap.
Nora heard a click in the doorknob, followed by Barnes’s voice.
“Come in!”
The assistant moved her treat to the other side of her desk, out of Nora’s reach, before waving her through. Nora again walked to the door and turned the knob, which, this time, gave way.
Barnes was standing behind his desk, stuffing files into an open attaché case, preparing to leave for the day. “Good morning, Carly. Is the car ready?”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Barnes,” sang the assistant. “They just called up from the gate.”
“Call down and make sure the heat is on in the back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nora?” said Barnes, still stuffing, not looking up. His demeanor was much changed from their previous encounter at his palatial home. “You have something you wish to discuss with me?”
“You win.”
“I win? Wonderful. Now tell me, what is it I have won?”
“Your way. With me.”
He hesitated just a moment before closing the case, snapping the clasps. He looked at her and nodded slightly to himself, as though having trouble remembering his original offer. “Very good,” he said, then went rooting in a drawer for some other nearly forgotten thing.
Nora waited. “So?” she said.
“So,” he said.
“Now what?”
“Now I am in a very great rush. But I will let you know.”
“I thought . . . I’m not going back to your house now?”
“Soon. Another time. Busy day and all.”
“But—I’m ready now.”
“Yes. I thought you would grow a bit more eager. Camp life doesn’t agree with you? No, I didn’t think so.” He took up the handle of his case. “I’ll soon call for you.”
Nora understood: he was making her wait on purpose. Prolonging her agony as payback for not immediately falling into bed with him that day at his house. A dirty old man on a power trip.
“And please note for future reference that I am not a man to be kept waiting. I trust that is clear to you now. Carly?”
The assistant appeared in the open doorway. “Yes, Dr. Barnes?”
“Carly, I can’t find the ledger. Maybe you can search around and bring it by the house later.”
“Yes, Dr. Barnes.”
“Say, around nine thirty?”
Nora saw in assistant Carly’s face not the satisfied swagger she was anticipating but instead a hint of distaste.
They stepped out into the anteroom, whispering. Ridiculous, as if Nora were Barnes’s wife.
Nora took the opportunity to rush to Barnes’s desk, searching it for anything that might help her cause, any bit of information she was not supposed to see. But he had taken most everything with him. Sliding out the center drawer, she saw a computer-generated map of the camp with each zone color-coded. Beyond the birthing area she had already visited, and in the same general direction as where she understood the “retirement” section of camp was established, was a zone named “Letting.” This zone contained a shaded area labeled “Sunshine.” Nora tried to rip up the map in order to take it with her, but it was glued to the bottom of the drawer. She scanned it again, quickly memorizing it, then shut the drawer just as Barnes returned.
Nora worked hard to mask the fury in her face, to regard him with a smile. “What about my mother? You promised me—”
“And if indeed you hold up your end of the bargain, I shall of course hold up mine. Scout’s honor.”
It was clear he wanted her to beg, which was something she simply could not bring herself to do.
“I want to know that she is safe.”
Barnes nodded, grinning a little. “You want to make demands, is what you want. I alone dictate the timing of this and everything else that occurs inside the walls of this camp.”
Nora nodded, but her mind was elsewhere now, her wrist already wriggling behind her back, pushing the shank forward.
“If your mother is to be processed, she will be. You have no say in the matter. They probably picked her up already and she is on her way to be cleaned up. Your life, however, is still a bargaining chip. Hope you cash it in.”
Now she had the shank in her hand. She gripped it.
“Is that understood?” he said.
“Understood,” she said through gritted teeth.
“You will need to come with a much more agreeable attitude when I do call for you, so please be ready. And smile.”
She wanted to fucking kill him where he stood.
From the outer office, his assistant’s panicked voice broke the mood. “Sir?”
Barnes stepped away before Nora could act, returning to the anteroom alone.
Nora heard the footsteps charging up the stairs. Slapping at the floor: bare feet.
Vampire feet.
A team of four large-framed, once-male vampires burst into the office. These undead goons wore tribal prison-style tattoos on their sagging flesh. The assistant gasped and backed away into her corner as the four went right after Barnes.
“What is it?” he said.
They told him, telepathically—and fast. Barnes barely had time to react before they grabbed his arms and
practically picked him up, running him out the door and away down the hall. Then the camp whistle started shrieking.
Shouting outside. Something was happening. Nora heard and felt the vibration of doors slamming downstairs.
The assistant remained in the corner, behind her desk, the phone to her ear. Nora heard hard footsteps charging up the stairs. Boots equaled humans. The assistant cowered while Nora moved to the door—just in time to see Fet rushing inside.
Nora was struck speechless. He carried his sword but no other weapons. His face was wild with the look of the hunt. A grateful, openmouthed smile appeared on her face.
Fet glanced at Nora and then at the assistant in the corner, then turned to leave. He was back out the door and almost out of sight around the corner before he stopped, straightened, and looked back.
“Nora?” he said.
Her baldness. Her jumpsuit. He hadn’t recognized her at first.
“V,” she said.
He gripped her, and she clawed at his back, burying her face in his smelly, unwashed shoulder. He pulled her off him for a second look, at once exulting in his great luck in finding her and trying to make sense of her shaved head.
“It’s you,” he said, touching her scalp. Then he looked over the rest of her. “You . . .”
“And you,” she said, tears springing from the corners of her eyes. Not Eph, again. Not Eph. You.
He embraced her again. More bodies followed behind him. Gus and another Mexican. Gus slowed when he saw Fet hugging a bald camp member. It was a long moment before he said, “Dr. Martinez?”
“It’s me, Gus. Is it really you?”
“A guevo! You better believe it,” he said.
“What is this building?” asked Fet. “Administration or something? What are you doing here?”
For a moment, she couldn’t remember. “Barnes!” she said. “From the CDC. He runs the camp—runs all the camps!”
“Where the hell is he?”
“Four big vampires just came and got him. His own security force. He went that way.”
Fet stepped out into the empty hall. “This way?”
“He has a car out by the gate.” Nora stepped into the hallway. “Is Eph with you?”
A pang of jealousy. “He’s outside holding them off. I’d go after this guy Barnes for you, but we have to get back to Eph.”
“And my mother.” Nora gripped Fet’s shirt. “My mother. I’m not leaving without her.”
“Your mother?” said Fet. “She’s still here?”
“I think so.” She held Fet’s face. “I can’t believe you’re here. For me.”
He could’ve kissed her. He could have. Amid the chaos and the turmoil and the danger—he could’ve. The world had vanished around them. It was her—only her in front of him.
“For you?” said Gus. “Hell, we like this killing shit. Right, Fet?” His grin undercut his words. “We gotta get back to my homeboy Bruno.”
Nora followed them out the door, then abruptly stopped. She turned back to Carly, the assistant, still standing behind her desk in the far corner of the anteroom, the telephone in her hand hanging low at her side. Nora rushed back toward her, Carly’s eyes widening with fright. Nora reached across her desk, grabbing the rest of the brownie off its paper plate. She took a big bite and threw the rest at the wall next to the assistant’s head.
But in her moment of triumph, Nora felt only pity for the young woman. And the brownie didn’t taste anywhere near as good as Nora thought it would.
Out in the open yard, Eph hacked and swung, clearing as much space around himself as possible. Six feet was the outside limit for vampire stingers; the combined length of his arm and his sword gave him about that distance. So he kept slashing, carving out a six-foot-wide radius of silver.
But Bruno did not share Eph’s strategy. He instead took on each individual threat as it appeared, and, because he was a brutally efficient killer, he had gotten away with it thus far. But he was also tiring. He went after a pair of vampires threatening from his blind side, but it was a ruse. When he took the bait, the strigoi separated him from Eph, filling in the gap between them. Eph tried to slice his way back over to Bruno, but the vampires stuck to their strategy: separate and destroy.
Eph felt the building at his back. His circle of silver became a semicircle, his sword like a burning torch keeping the darkness of vampirism at bay. A few of them dropped to all fours, trying to dart underneath his reach and pull him down by the legs, but he managed to strike at them, and strike hard, the mud at his feet turning white. But as the bodies piled up, Eph’s radius of safety continued to contract.
He heard Bruno grunt, then howl. Bruno was backed up against the high perimeter fence. Eph watched him slice off a stinger with his sword, but too late. Bruno had been stung. Just a moment of contact, of penetration, but the damage had been done: the worm implanted, the vampire pathogen entering his bloodstream. But Bruno had not been drained of blood, and he continued to battle, in fact with renewed vigor. He fought on, knowing that, even if he were to survive this onslaught, he was doomed. Dozens of worms wriggled under the skin of his face and neck.
The other strigoi around Eph, psychically apprised of this success, sensed victory and surged toward Eph with abandon. A few came off Bruno to shove the encroaching vampires from behind, further shrinking Eph’s zone of safety. Elbows tucked at his sides, he swung and cut at their wild faces, their swaying crimson wattles and open mouths. A stinger shot out at him, striking the wall near his ear with an arrow-like thump. He sliced it down, but there were more. Eph tried to keep up a wall of silver, his arms and shoulders screaming in pain. All it took was for one stinger to get through. He felt the force of the vampire mob closing in on him. Mr. Quinlan landed in the middle of the fight and joined instantly. He made a difference but they all knew they were just holding back the tide. Eph was about to be overrun.
It would be over soon.
A flare of light opened in the sky above them. Eph believed it was in fact a flare or some other pyrotechnic device sent up by the vampires as an alert signal or even a deliberate distraction. One moment of inattention and Eph was done for.
But the flare light kept shining, intensifying, expanding overhead. It was moving, higher than he realized.
Most important, the vampire attack slowed. Their bodies stiffened as their openmouthed heads turned toward the dark sky.
Eph could not believe his good fortune. He readied his sword to cut a swath through the strigoi in a last-gasp gambit to kill his way to safety . . .
But even he couldn’t resist. The sky-fire was too seductive. He too had to risk a peek at the polluted sky.
Across the black sackcloth of planet-smothering ash, a fierce flame was falling, cutting like the blaze from an acetylene torch. It burned through the darkness like a comet, a head of pure flame leading a narrowing tail. A searing teardrop of red-orange fire unzipping the false night.
It could only have been a satellite—or something even bigger—plummeting from the outer orbit, reentering Earth’s atmosphere like a fiery cannonball launched from the defeated sun.
The vampires backed away. With their red eyes locked on the streak of flame, they stumbled over one another with a rare lack of coordination. This was fear, thought Eph—or something like it. The sign in the sky reached their elemental selves, and they possessed no mechanism to express this terror other than a squealing noise and a clumsy retreat.
Even Mr. Quinlan retreated a bit. Overwhelmed by the light and the spectacle.
As the falling satellite burned bright in the sky, it parted the dense ash cloud and a brutal shaft of daylight penetrated the air like the finger of God, burning it all, falling over a three-mile radius that included the outer edges of the farm.
As the vampires burned and squealed, Fet and Gus and Joaquin met them coming the other way. The three of them ran into the panicked mob, cutting down the outliers before their attack triggered a full-blown riot, the vampires running off in every
direction.
For a moment, the majestic column of light revealed the camp around them. The high wall, the dour buildings, the mucky ground. Plain verging on ugly, but only menacing in its ordinariness. This was like the back lot behind the showroom or the dirty restaurant kitchen: the place without artifice, where the real work gets done.
Eph watched the streak burn across the sky with increasing intensity, its head flaming thicker and brighter until it finally consumed itself and the angry trail of fire thinned to a wisp of flame—and then nothing.
Behind it, the much anticipated daylight had finally begun brightening the sky, as though heralded by that timely streak of flame. The pale outline of the sun was barely visible behind the ash cloud, a few of its rays filtering down through seams and weaknesses in the pollution cocoon. It was barely enough light for early dawn in the former world—but it was enough. Enough to drive the fleeing creatures underground for an hour or two.
Eph saw a camp prisoner following Fet and Gus, and despite her bald head and shapeless jumpsuit, he instantly recognized her as Nora. A jarring mix of emotions struck him. It seemed as though years instead of weeks had passed since they’d last met. But right now there were more pressing issues.
Mr. Quinlan retreated into the shadows. His tolerance to UV had been tested to its limit.
I will meet you . . . back at Columbia . . . I wish you all good luck.
With that, he bolted up the walls and out of the camp, effortlessly. In the blink of an eye, he was gone.
Gus noticed Bruno gripping his neck and went to him. “Qué pasó, vato?”
“Fucker’s in me,” said Bruno. The gangbanger grimaced, wetting his dry lips, then spitting onto the ground. His posture was open and strange, as though he could feel the worms already crawling inside him. “I’m damned, homes.”
The others all went silent. Gus, in his shock, reached for Bruno’s face, examining his throat. Then he pulled him into a hard hug. “Bruno,” he said.
“Fucking savages,” said Bruno. “Lucky fucking shot.”
“Goddamn it!” yelled Gus, pulling away from him. He didn’t know what to do. No one did. Gus stepped away and launched a ferocious howl.