The Fall

  This city needed an Insomni-Zack now. Sleep was a luxury. A luxury no one could afford—if everyone knew what he knew.

  If everyone had seen what he had seen.

  Zack was supposed to be sacked out in a goose-down sleeping bag inside a spare bedroom on the third floor. The room smelled like a closet, like an old cedar room in his grandparents’ house—one that no one opened anymore except for kids who liked to snoop. The small, oddly angled room had been used by Mr. Setrakian (or Professor Setrakian—Zack still wasn’t clear on that part, seeing how the old man ran the first-floor pawnshop) for storage. Tilting stacks of books, many old mirrors, a wardrobe of old clothes, and some locked trunks—really locked, not the fake kind of lock that can be picked with a paper clip and a ballpoint pen (Zack had already tried).

  The exterminator, Fet—or V, as he had told Zack to call him—had hooked up an ancient, cartridge-fed, 8-bit Nintendo system to a pawned Sanyo television set with big knobs and dials on the front instead of buttons, all brought up from the showroom downstairs. They expected him to stay put and play The Legend of Zelda. But the bedroom door had no lock. His dad and Fet had mounted iron bars onto the wall over the window—mounted them on the inside, rather than the outside, bolted to the wall beams—a cage that Mr. Setrakian said was left over from the 1970s.

  They weren’t trying to lock him in, Zack knew. They were trying to lock her out.

  He searched for his dad’s professional page at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and got a “Page Not Found.” So they had already scrubbed him from the government Web site. News hits for “Dr. Ephraim Goodweather” claimed he was a discredited CDC official who fabricated a video purporting to show a human-turned-vampire being destroyed. It said that he had uploaded it (actually, Zack uploaded the video for him, one that his dad wouldn’t let him view) onto the Internet in an attempt to exploit the eclipse hysteria for his own purposes. Obviously, that last part was BS. What “purposes” did his dad have other than trying to save lives? One news site described Goodweather as “an admitted alcoholic involved in a contentious custody battle, who is now believed to be on the run with his kidnapped son.” That left Zack with a lump of ice in his chest. The same article went on to say that both Goodweather’s ex-wife and her boyfriend were currently missing and presumed dead.

  Everything made Zack feel nauseous these days, but the dishonesty of this article was especially toxic to him. All wrong, every last word. Did they really not know the truth? Or… did they not care? Maybe they were trying to exploit his parents’ trouble for their own purposes?

  And the talkback? The comments were even worse. He could not deal with the things they were saying about his dad, the righteous arrogance of all these anonymous posters. He had to deal right now with the awful truth about his mom—and the banality of the venom spewed in blogs and forums missed the point completely.

  How do you mourn someone who isn’t really gone? How do you fear someone whose desire for you is eternal?

  If the world knew the truth the way Zack knew the truth, then his dad’s reputation would be restored, and his voice heard—but still nothing else would change. His mom, his life, would never be the same.

  So, mostly, Zack wanted it all to pass. He wanted something fantastic to happen to make everything right and normal again. As when he was a child—like five or something, he broke a mirror and just covered it with a sheet, then prayed with all his might for its restoration before his parents found out. Or the way he used to wish his parents would fall back in love again. That they would wake up one day and realize what a mistake they had made.

  Now he secretly hoped that his dad could do something incredible. Despite everything, Zack still assumed that there was some happy ending awaiting them. Awaiting all of them. Maybe even something to bring Mom back to the way she was.

  He felt tears coming, and this time he didn’t fight them. He was up on the roof; he was alone. He wanted so badly to see his mother again. The thought terrified him—and yet he yearned for her to come. To look into her eyes. To hear her voice. He wished for her to explain this to him the way she did every troubling thing. Everything is going to be just fine…

  A scream somewhere deep in the night brought him back to the present. He peered uptown, seeing flames on the west side, a column of dark smoke. He looked up. No stars tonight. And only a few airplanes. He had heard fighter jets zooming overhead that afternoon.

  Zack rubbed his face in the crook of his elbow sleeve and turned back to the computer. With some quick desktop searching, Zack discovered the folder containing the video file he was not supposed to view. He opened it and heard Dad’s voice, and realized Dad was operating the camera. Zack’s camera, the one his dad had borrowed.

  The subject was hard to see at first, something in the dark inside a shed. A thing leaning forward on its haunches. A guttural growl and a back-of-the-throat hiss. The slinking noise of a chain. The camera zoomed in closer, the dark pixilation improving, and Zack saw its open mouth. A mouth that opened wider than it should, with something resembling a thin silver fish flopping inside.

  The shed-thing’s eyes were wide and glaring. He mistook their expression for one of sadness at first, and hurt. A collar—apparently, a dog collar—restrained it at the neck, chained to the dirt floor behind it. The creature looked pale inside the dark shed, so bloodless it was nearly glowing. Then came a strange pumping sound—snap-chunk, snap-chunk, snap-chunk —and three silver nails, propelled from behind the camera (from Dad?) struck the shed-thing like needle-bullets. The camera view jerked up as the thing roared hoarsely, a sick animal consumed with pain.

  “Enough,” said a voice on the clip. The voice belonged to Mr. Setrakian, but it was not a tone like anything Zack had ever heard out of the kindly, old pawnbroker’s mouth. “Let us remain merciful.”

  Then the old man stepped into view, intoning some words in a foreign, ancient-sounding language—almost like summoning a power or declaring a curse. He raised a silver sword—long and bright with moonlight—and the shed-thing howled as Mr. Setrakian swung the sword with great force…

  Voices pulled Zack out of the video. Voices from the street below. He shut the laptop and stood, staying back, peering over the raised edge of the roof down to 118th Street.

  A group of five men walked up the block toward the pawnshop, trailed by a slow-moving SUV. They carried weapons—guns—and were pounding on every door. The SUV stopped before the intersection, right outside the front of the pawnshop. The men on foot approached the building, rattling the security gates. Calling, “Open up!”

  Zack backed away. He turned to go to the roof door, figuring he’d better get back to his room in case anyone came looking.

  Then he saw her. A girl, a teenager, high school probably. Standing on the next roof over, across an empty lot around the corner from the shop entrance. The breeze lifted her long nightshirt, ruffling it around her knees, but did not move her hair, which hung straight and heavy.

  She stood on the raised edge of the roof. The very edge, balanced perfectly, no wavering in her posture. Poised at the brink, as though wanting to try to make the jump. The impossible leap. Wanting to and knowing she would fail.

  Zack stared. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. But he suspected.

  He raised a hand anyway. He waved to her.

  She stared back at him.

  Dr. Nora Martinez, late of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unlocked the front door. Five men in combat gear with armored vests and assault weapons stared her down through the security grate. Two of them wore kerchiefs, covering their lower faces.

  “Everything all right in there, ma’am?” one of them asked.

  “Yes,” said Nora, looking for badges or any kind of insignia and seeing none. “So long as this grate holds up, everything is fine.”

  “We’re going door-to-door,” said another. “Clearing blocks. Some trouble down that way”—he pointed toward 117th Street—“but we think the worst of i
t is moving downtown from this direction.” Meaning Harlem.

  “And you are…?”

  “Concerned citizens, ma’am. You don’t want to be in here all alone.”

  “She’s not,” said Vasiliy Fet, the New York City Bureau of Pest Control Services worker and independent exterminator, appearing behind her.

  The men sized up the big man. “You the pawnbroker?”

  “My father,” said Fet. “What sort of trouble are you seeing?”

  “Trying to get a handle on these freaks rioting in the city. Agitators and opportunists. Taking advantage of a bad situation, making it worse.”

  “You sound like cops,” said Fet.

  “If you’re thinking about leaving town,” said another one, avoiding the topic, “you should go now. Bridges are stacked up, tunnels jammed. Place is going to shit.”

  Another said, “You should think about getting out here and helping us. Do something about this.”

  Fet said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “Let’s go!” called the driver of the SUV idling in the street.

  “Good luck,” said one of the men, with a scowl. “You’ll need it.”

  Nora watched them go, then locked the door. She stepped back into the shadows. “They’re gone,” she said.

  Ephraim Goodweather, who had been watching from the side, emerged. “Fools,” he said.

  “Cops,” said Fet, watching them round the street corner.

  “How do you know?” asked Nora.

  “You can always tell.”

  “Good thing you stayed out of sight,” Nora said to Eph.

  Eph nodded. “Why no badges?”

  Fet said, “Probably got off shift and huddled up at happy hour, decided this wasn’t how they were going to let their city go out. Wives all packed up for Jersey, they’ve got nothing to do now but bang some heads. Cops feel they run the place. And they’re not half wrong. Street-gang mentality. It’s their turf and they’ll fight for it.”

  “When you think about it,” said Eph, “they’re really not that much different than us right now.”

  Nora said, “Except that they’re carrying lead when they should be wielding silver.” She slipped her hand into Eph’s. “I wish we could have warned them.”

  “Trying to warn people is how I got to be a fugitive in the first place,” said Eph.

  Eph and Nora were the first to board the dead plane after SWAT team members discovered the apparently dead passengers. The realization that the bodies weren’t decomposing naturally, coupled with the disappearance of the coffin-like cabinet during the solar occultation, had helped convince Eph that they were facing an epidemiological crisis which could not be explained by normal medical and scientific means. The grudging realization opened him up to the revelations of the pawnbroker, Setrakian, and the terrible truth behind the plague. His desperation to warn the world of the true nature of the disease—the vampiric virus moving insidiously through the city and out into the boroughs—led to a break with the CDC, which then tried to silence him with a trumped-up charge of murder. He had been a fugitive ever since.

  He looked to Fet. “Car packed?”

  “Ready to go.”

  Eph squeezed Nora’s hand. She did not want to let him go.

  Setrakian’s voice came down the spiral stairs in back of the showroom. “Vasiliy? Ephraim! Nora!”

  “Down here, professor,” replied Nora.

  “Someone approaches,” he said.

  “No, we just got rid of them. Vigilantes. Well-armed ones.”

  “I don’t mean someone human,” said Setrakian. “And I cannot find young Zack.”

  Zack’s bedroom door banged open, and he turned. His dad blew in, looking like he expected a fight. “Jeez, Dad,” said Zack, sitting up in his sleeping bag.

  Eph looked all around the room. “Setrakian said he just looked in here for you.”

  “Uhh…” Zack made a show of rubbing his eye. “Must not have seen me on the floor.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Eph looked at Zack a bit longer, not believing him, but clearly with something more pressing on his mind than catching his son in a lie. He walked around the room, checking the barred window. Zack noticed that he held one hand behind his back, and moved in such a way that Zack could not see what he held there.

  Nora rushed in behind him, then stopped when she saw Zack.

  “What is it?” asked Zack, getting to his feet.

  His dad shook his head reassuringly, but the smile came too quickly—just a smile, no levity in his eyes, none at all. “Just looking around. You wait here, ’kay? I’ll be back.”

  He exited, turning in such a way that the thing behind his back remained obscured. Zack wondered: was it the snap-chunk thing, or some silver sword?

  “Stay put,” said Nora, and closed the door.

  Zack wondered what it was they were looking for. Zack had heard his mother mention Nora’s name once in a fight with his dad—well, not a fight really, since they were already split up, but more of a venting. And Zack had seen his dad kiss her that one time—right before he left them and went off with Mr. Setrakian and Fet. Then she had been so tense and preoccupied the whole time they were gone. And once they returned—everything had changed. Zack’s dad had looked so down—Zack never wanted to see him look that way again. And Mr. Setrakian came back sick. Zack, in his subsequent snooping, had caught some of the talk, but not enough.

  Something about a “master.”

  Something about sunlight and failing to “destroy it.”

  Something about “the end of the world.”

  As Zack stood alone in the spare room now, puzzling out all these mysteries swirling around him, he noticed a blur in a few of the mirrors hanging on the wall. A distortion, akin to a visual vibration—something that should have been in focus but instead appeared hazy and indistinct in the glass.

  Something at his window.

  Zack turned, slowly at first—then all at once.

  She was clinging to the exterior of the building somehow. Her body was disjointed and distorted, her eyes red and wide and burning. Her hair was falling out, thin and pale now, her schoolteacher dress torn away at one shoulder, her exposed flesh smeared with dirt. The muscles of her neck were swollen and deformed, and blood worms slithered beneath her cheeks, across her forehead.

  Mom.

  She had come. As he knew she would.

  Instinctively, he took a step toward her. Then he read her expression, which all at once transformed from pain into a darkness that could only be described as demonic.

  She had noticed the bars.

  In an instant, her jaw dropped open—way open, just like in the video—a stinger shooting out from deep beneath where her tongue was. It pierced the window glass with a crack and a tinkle, and kept coming through the hole it punched. Six feet in length, the stinger tapering to a point and snapping at full extension mere inches from his throat.

  Zack froze, his asthmatic lungs locked, unable to draw any breath.

  At the end of the fleshy shoot, a complicated, double-pronged tip quivered, rooting in the air. Zack remained riveted to the spot. The stinger relaxed and, with a casual, upward nod of her head, she retracted it quickly back into her mouth. Kelly Goodweather thrust her head through the window, crashing out the rest of the glass. She squeezed up inside the open window frame, needing only a few more inches to reach Zack’s throat and claim her Dear One for the Master.

  Zack was transfixed by her eyes. Red with black points in the center. He searched, vertiginously, for some semblance of Mom.

  Was she dead, as Dad said? Or alive?

  Was she gone forever? Or was she here—right here in the room with him?

  Was she still his? Or was she now someone else’s?

  She jammed her head between the iron bars, grinding flesh and cracking bone, like a snake forcing itself into a rabbit’s hole, trying desperately to bridge the extra distance between her stinger and the boy’s flesh. Her jaw fell again, her glowing e
yes settling on the boy’s throat, just above his Adam’s apple.

  Eph came racing back into the bedroom. He found Zack standing there, staring dumbly at Kelly, the vampire squeezing its head between the iron bars, about to strike. Eph pulled a silver-bladed sword from behind his back, yelling, “NO!” and jumping in front of Zack.

  Nora burst into the room behind Eph, turning on a Luma lamp, its harsh UVC light humming. The sight of Kelly Goodweather—this corrupted human being, this monster-mother—repulsed Nora, but she advanced, the virus-killing light in her outstretched hand.

  Eph, too, moved toward Kelly and her hideous stinger. The vampire went deep-eyed with animal rage.

  “OUT! GO BACK!” Eph bellowed at Kelly the way he might at some wild animal trying to enter his house, scavenging for food. He leveled the sword at her and made a run for the window.

  With one last, painfully ravenous look at her son, Kelly pulled back from the window cage, just out of Eph’s blade’s reach—and darted away along the side of the exterior wall.

  Nora placed the lamp inside the cage, resting it upon two intersecting bars so that its killing light filled the space of the smashed window, to keep Kelly from returning.

  Eph ran back to his son. Zack’s gaze had fallen, his hands at his throat, chest bucking. Eph thought at first it was despair, then realized it was more than that.

  A panic attack. The boy was all locked up inside. He was unable to breathe.

  Eph looked around frantically, discovering Zack’s inhaler on top of the old television. He pressed the device into Zack’s hands and guided it to his mouth.

  Eph squeezed, and Zack huffed, and the aerosol opened up his lungs. Zack’s pallor improved immediately, his airway expanding like a balloon—and Zack slumped, weakened.

  Eph set down his sword, steadying the boy—but the revived Zack shoved him away, rushing toward the empty window. “Mom!” he croaked.