The Fall

  Gus smiled at the mad Mexican’s bravery. And he recognized Angel for the very first time. He understood everything—the strength, the courage of this old man. As a child, he had seen all of the wrestler’s films on TV. On weekends, they played on an endless loop. And now he was standing next to his hero. “This world is a motherfucker, isn’t it?”

  Angel nodded and said, “But it’s the only one we have.”

  Gus felt a surge of love for this fucked-up fellow countryman. For his matinee idol. His eyes welled up as he clapped his hands against the big man’s shoulders. He said, “Que viva el Angel de Plata, culeros!”

  Angel nodded. “Que viva!”

  And with that, the Silver Angel turned back, limping, toward the doomed power plant.

  Emergency lights flashed, the exterior alarm muted inside the control room. The wall panel instruments blinked, imploring human hands to take action.

  Setrakian knelt on the floor across from Eichhorst’s still body. Eichhorst’s head had rolled almost to the corner. One of Setrakian’s pocket mirrors had cracked, and he was using the silver back to crush the blood worms seeking him out. With his other hand, he was trying to pick up his heart pills, but his gnarled fingers and arthritic knuckles had trouble with the pincer grip.

  And then he was aware of a presence, whose sudden arrival changed the atmosphere of the already charged room. No puff of smoke, no crack of thunder. A psychic blow more breathtaking than mere stagecraft. Setrakian didn’t have to look up to know it was the Master—and yet he did look up, from the hem of its dark cloak to its imperious face.

  Its flesh had peeled back to the sub-dermis, save for a few patches of sun-cooked skin. A fiery red beast with splotches of black. Its eyes roared with intensity, a bloodier hue of red. The circulating worms rippled beneath the surface like twitching nerves alive with madness.

  It is done.

  The Master seized the wolf’s-head handle of Setrakian’s sword before the old man could react. The creature held the silver blade for inspection the way a man might handle a glowing-hot poker.

  The world is mine.

  The Master, his movement no more than a blur, retrieved the wooden sheath from the floor on the other side of Setrakian. He fit the two pieces together, burying the blade inside the cavity of the original walking stick and fixing the joined staff with a sudden wrenching twist of his hands.

  Then he returned the foot of the stick to the floor. The overlong walking stick was a perfect fit, of course: it had belonged to the human giant Sardu, in whose body the Master currently resided.

  The nuclear fuel inside the reactor core is beginning to overheat and melt. This facility was constructed using modern safeguards, but the automatic containment procedures only delay the inevitable. The meltdown will occur, fouling and destroying this origin site of the sixth and only remaining member of my clan. The buildup of steam will result in a catastrophic reactor explosion that will release a plume of radioactive fallout.

  The Master jabbed Setrakian in the ribs with the end of the walking stick, the old man hearing and feeling a crack, curling into a ball on the floor.

  As my shadow falls over you, Setrakian, so does it fall over this planet. First I infected your people, now I have infected the globe. Your half dark world was not enough. How long I have looked forward to this permanent, lasting dusk. This warm, blue-green rock shivers at my touch, becoming a cold black stone of rime and rot. The sunset of humankind is the dawn of the blood harvest.

  The Master’s head then turned a few degrees, toward the door. He was not alarmed, nor even annoyed, more like curious. Setrakian turned also, a sizzle of hope rising along his back. The door opened and Angel entered limping, wearing a mask of shiny silver nylon with black stitching.

  “No,” gasped Setrakian.

  Angel carried an automatic weapon, and, seeing the eight-foot-tall cloaked creature towering over Setrakian, opened up on the king vampire.

  The creature stood there for a moment, gazing at its patently ridiculous opponent. But as the bullets flew, the Master became, instinctively, a blur—the rounds carrying across the room into the sensitive equipment lining the walls. The Master paused on one side of the room, visible for just the briefest moment, though by the time Angel turned and fired, the vampire was moving again. The rounds ripped into a control panel, sparks shooting out of the wall.

  Setrakian returned his attention to the floor, frantically picking at the tiny pills.

  The Master slowed again, with the effect of materializing before Angel. The masked wrestler dropped the big gun with a clatter and lunged at the creature.

  The Master noted the big human’s weak knee, but those things could be fixed. The body was aged, yet size-appropriate. Suitable, perhaps, for temporary housing.

  The Master eluded Angel. The wrestler swung around, but the Master was already behind him again. While assessing Angel, the Master slapped him on the back of his neck, where the stitched hem of his mask met skin. The wrestler jerked around wildly again.

  Angel was being toyed with, and he didn’t like it. He turned fast and came around with his free hand, catching the Master on the chin with an open-palm blow. The “Angel Kiss.”

  The creature’s head snapped back. Angel shocked himself with his success in landing the blow. The Master lowered his eyes at the masked avenger, the speed of the worms rippling under his flesh a sign of his rage.

  Inside the mask, Angel smiled excitedly.

  “You would like me to reveal myself, wouldn’t you?” he said. “The mystery dies with me. My face must remain hidden.”

  These words were the catchphrase from every one of the Silver Angel’s movies, dubbed into many languages all over the world—words the wrestler had been waiting for decades to say for real. But the Master was through playing.

  It struck Angel full-force with the back of its enormous hand. The jaw and left cheekbone exploded inside the mask and the wrestler’s left eye went with them.

  But Angel didn’t give up. Through enormous effort, he stood on his own two feet. Trembling, his knee hurting like a motherfucker, choking on his own blood… yet in his mind he raced back in time, to a younger, happier place.

  He felt dizzy and warm and full of juice and remembered he was in a film stage. Of course—he was shooting a movie. The monster in front of him was nothing but some clever special effect—a day player in a suit. Then why did it hurt so much? And his mask: it smelled funny to him. Like unwashed hair and sweat. It smelled like a thing removed to the oblivion of storage. It smelled of him.

  An empty bubble of blood rose in his throat and burst there in a liquid whimper. His jaw and left side pulverized, the smelly mask was now the only thing holding the old wrestler’s face together.

  Angel grunted and lunged at his opponent. The Master released the stick in order to grip the big human with both hands, and, in an instant, tore him to shreds.

  Setrakian stifled a cry. He was stuffing pills in under his tongue—stopping just as the Master returned his attention to him.

  The Master grasped Setrakian’s shoulder and lifted the slight old man off the floor. Setrakian dangled in the air before the Master, squeezed by the vampire’s bloody hands. The Master pulled him close, Setrakian staring into its horrible face, the leech’s face swarming with ancient evil.

  I believe, in a way, you always wanted this, Professor. I think you have always been curious to know the other side.

  Setrakian could not respond with the pills dissolving beneath his tongue. But he did not have to answer the Master verbally. My sword sings of silver, he thought.

  He felt woozy, the medicine kicking in, clouding his thoughts—shielding his true intent from the Master’s perception. We learned much from the book. We know Chernobyl was a decoy… He saw the Master’s face. How he longed to see fear in it. Your name. I know your true name. Would you like to hear it… Ozryel?

  And then the Master’s mouth fell open and his stinger shot out furiously, snapping and piercing S
etrakian’s neck, rupturing his vocal cords and jamming into his carotid artery. As he lost his voice, Setrakian felt no stinging pain, only the body-wide ache of the drinking. The collapse of his circulatory system and the organs it served, leading to shock.

  The Master’s eyes were royal-red, staring at its prey’s face as it drank with immense satisfaction. Setrakian held the creature’s gaze, not out of defiance but watching and waiting for some indication of discomfort. He felt the vibration of the blood worms wriggling throughout his body, greedily inspecting and invading his self.

  All at once, the Master bucked, as though choking. His head jerked back and his nictitating eyelids fluttered. Still, the seal remained tight, the drinking continued stubbornly until the end. The Master disengaged finally—the entire process having taken less than half a minute—its flushed red stinger retracting. The Master stared at Setrakian, reading the interest in his eyes, then stumbled backward a step. Its face contracted, the blood worms slowing, its thick neck gagging.

  It dropped Setrakian to the floor and staggered away, sickened by the old man’s blood meal. A flame-like sensation in the pit of his gut.

  Setrakian lay on the floor of the control room in a dim haze bleeding through the puncture wound. He finally relaxed his tongue, feeling that the last of the pills in the basket of his jaw were gone. He had ingested the blood vessel-relaxing nitroglycerin and the blood-thinning Coumadin derivative of Fet’s rat poison in massive overdose levels, and passed them along to the Master.

  Fet was, indeed, correct: the creatures had no purging mechanism. Once a substance was ingested, they could not vomit it.

  Burning inside, the Master moved through the doors at a blur, racing off into the screaming alarms.

  The Johnson Space Center went silent halfway through the station’s dark orbit, as they passed the dark side of the Earth. She’d lost Houston.

  Thalia felt the first few bumps shortly after that. It was debris, space junk plunking the station. Nothing very unusual about that—only the frequency of the impacts.

  Too many. Too close together.

  She floated as still as possible, trying to calm herself, trying to think. Something wasn’t right.

  She made her way to the porthole and gazed out upon the Earth. Two very hot points of light were visible here on the night side of the planet. One was on the very edge, right on the ridge of dusk. Another one was nearer to the eastern side.

  She had never witnessed anything like it, and nothing in her training or the many manuals she had read prepared her for this sight. The intensity of the light, its evident heat—mere pinpoints on the globe itself, and yet her trained eye knew that these were explosions of enormous magnitude.

  The station was rocked by another firm impact. This was not the usual small metal hail of space debris. An emergency indicator went off, yellow lights flashing near the door. Something had perforated the solar panels. It was as though the space station were under fire. Now she would need to suit up and—

  BAMMM! Something had struck the hull. She swam over to a computer and saw immediately the warning of an oxygen leak. A rapid one. The tanks had been perforated. She called out to her shipmates, heading for the airlock.

  A bigger impact shook the hull. Thalia suited up as fast as she could, but the station itself had been breached. She struggled to fasten her suit helmet, racing the deadly vacuum. With her last ounce of strength, she opened the oxygen valve.

  Thalia drifted into darkness, losing consciousness. Her final thought before blackout was not of her husband but of her dog. In the silence of space, she somehow heard him barking.

  Soon the International Space Station joined the rest of the flotsam hurtling through space, gradually slipping from its orbit, floating inexorably toward Earth.

  Setrakian’s head swam as he lay on the floor of the rumbling Locust Valley Nuclear Power Plant.

  He was turning. He could feel it.

  A constricting pain in his throat that was only the beginning. His chest a hive of activity. The blood worms had settled and released their payload: the virus breeding quickly inside him, overwhelming his cells. Changing him. Trying to remake him.

  His body could not withstand the turning. Even without his now-weakened veins, he was too old, too weak. He was like a thin-stemmed sunflower bending under the weight of its growing head. Or a fetus growing from bad chromosomes.

  The voices. He heard them. The buzz of a greater consciousness. A coordination of being. A concert of cacophony.

  He felt heat. From his rising body temperature, but also from the trembling floor. The cooling system meant to prevent hot nuclear fuel from melting had failed—failed on purpose. The fuel had melted through the bottom of the reactor core. Once it reached the water table, the ground beneath the plant would erupt in a lethal release of steam.

  Setrakian.

  The Master’s voice in his head. Phasing in and out with his own. Setrakian had a vision then, of what looked like the rear of a truck—the National Guard trucks he had seen outside the plant’s entrance. The view from the floor, vague and monochromatic, seen through the eyes of a being with night vision enhanced beyond human ability.

  Setrakian saw his walking stick—Sardu’s walking stick—rattling around just a few feet away, as though he could reach out and touch it one last time.

  Pic—pic—pic…

  He was seeing what the Master saw.

  Setrakian, you fool.

  The floor of the truck rumbled, speeding away. The view rocked back and forth as though seen by a thing writhing in pain.

  You thought poisoning your blood could kill me?

  Setrakian pulled himself up onto all fours, relying on the temporary strength the turning imbued him with.

  Pic—pic…

  I have sickened you, strigoi, Setrakian thought. Again I have weakened you.

  And he knew the Master could hear him now.

  You are turned.

  I have finally released Sardu. And soon I will be released myself.

  And he said nothing more, the nascent vampire Setrakian dragging himself closer to the endangered core.

  Pressure continued to build inside the containment structure. A bubble of toxic hydrogen expanding out of control. The steel-reinforced concrete shield would only make the ultimate explosion worse.

  Setrakian pulled himself arm by arm, leg by leg. His body turning inside, his mind aflutter with the sight of a thousand eyes, his head singing with the chorus of a thousand voices.

  Zero hour was at hand. They were all heading underground.

  Pic…

  “Silence, strigoi.”

  Then the nuclear fuel reached the groundwater. The earth beneath the plant erupted, and the origin place of the final Ancient was obliterated—as was Setrakian, in the same instant.

  No more.

  The pressure vessel cracked open and released a radioactive cloud over Long Island Sound.

  Gabriel Bolivar, the former rock star and the only remaining member of the original four Regis Air survivors, waited deep beneath the meatpacking plant. It had been called upon especially by the Master, called to be ready.

  Gabriel, my child.

  The voices hummed, droning as one in perfect fidelity. The old man, Setrakian—his voice had been silenced forever.

  Gabriel. The name of an archangel… So appropriate…

  Bolivar awaited the dark father, feeling him near. Knowing of his victory on the surface. All that was left now was to wait for the new world to set and cure.

  The Master entered the black dirt chamber. The Master stood before Bolivar, its head crooked at the chamber ceiling. Bolivar could feel the Master’s body distress, but its mind—its word—sang as true as ever.

  In me, you will live. In my hunger and my voice and my breath—and we will live in you. Our minds will reside in yours and our blood will race together.

  The Master threw off its cloak, reaching its long arm into its coffin, scooping out a handful of rich soil. He fed i
t into Bolivar’s unswallowing mouth.

  And you will be my son and I your father and we will rule as I and us, forever.

  The Master clutched Bolivar in a great embrace. Bolivar was alarmingly thin, appearing fragile and small against the Master’s colossal frame. Bolivar felt swallowed, possessed. He felt received. For the first time in life or death, Gabriel Bolivar felt at home.

  The worms came spilling out of the Master, hundreds and hundreds of them, seeping out of its reddened flesh. The frenzied worms wove all around them, in and out of their flesh, fusing the two beings in a crimson embroidery.

  Then, finally, the Master released the old husk of the long-ago giant, which crumbled and broke away as it hit the floor. And, as he did so, the soul of the boy-hunter also found release. It disappeared from the chorus of voices, the hymn that animated the Master.

  Sardu was no more. Gabriel Bolivar was something new.

  Bolivar/the Master spit the soil out. It opened its mouth and tested its stinger. The fleshy protuberance rode out with a firm snap, and recoiled.

  The Master was reborn.

  The body was unfamiliar somehow, the Master having been accustomed to Sardu for so long, but this transitional body was flexible and fresh. The Master would soon put it to the test.

  At any rate, this human physicality was of little concern to the Master now. The giant’s body had suited the creature when it lived among the shadows. But size and durability of the host body mattered little now. Not in this new world that it had created in its own image.

  The Master sensed human intrusion. A strong heart, a swift pulse. A boy.

  Out of the adjoining tunnel, Kelly Goodweather arrived with her son, Zachary, firmly in her grip. The boy stood trembling, crouched over in a posture of self-protection. He saw nothing in the darkness, only sensing presences, heated bodies in the cool underground. He smelled ammonia and dank soil and something rotting.