splashing hard. The tunnel hooked right, where a wide pipe ran out of the stone and down the length of the narrowing hole. The steam heat fostered algae and fungal growth that glowed in his lamplight. He made out the dim form of the vampire ahead of him, running with its hands open, fingers clawing at the air.
Then another quick turn, and the vampire was gone. Eph slowed and looked all around, shining his lamp, panicking — until he spotted the thing’s legs wriggling through a flat hole dug under the side wall. The being undulated with wormlike efficiency, slithering out of the passage, and Eph slashed at its filthy feet but they whisked through too fast, his sword stabbing dirt.
Eph got down on his knees, but could not see through to the other side of the shallow hole. He heard footsteps and knew Fet and Setrakian were still well behind him. He decided he could not wait. Eph got down on his back and started through.
He fed himself into the hole with his arms over his head, lamp and sword first.
Panting now, he waved the lamp around like a torch. He was inside another tunnel, but this one was finished off with track rails and stones, and had an eerie, unused stillness about it. To his left, not one hundred yards away, was light.
A platform. He hurried along the track and clambered up. This platform offered none of the splendor of the City Hall station; instead it was all bare steel beams and visible ceiling piping. Eph thought he had visited every station in the downtown area, but he had never stopped at this one.
A length of subway cars rested against the end of the platform, the door sign reading OUT OF SERVICE. The shell of an old control tower stood in the middle, plastered with old-school wild-style graffiti. He tried the door but it was sealed.
He heard scuffling back inside the tunnel. It was Fet and Setrakian coming through the burrow, catching up with him. Probably not smart, his running ahead alone. Eph resolved to wait for them there, in this oasis of light, until he heard a stone being kicked in the near track bed. He turned just in time to see the vampire breaking from the last subway car, running along the far wall, away from the lights of the abandoned station.
Eph raced after him, over the elevated platform to the end, then leaped down onto the tracks, following them back into darkness. The track bed veered right, the rails ending. The tunnel walls shuddered in his vision as he ran. He could hear the vampire’s scuttling footsteps echoing, its bare feet upon the cutting rocks. The creature was stumbling, slowing. Eph drew closer, the heat of his lamp panicking the vampire. It turned back once, its indigo-lit face a mask of horror.
Eph swept his sword arm forward, decapitating the monster in midstep.
The headless body pitched forward, Eph stopping to shine the Luma light on its oozing neck, killing the escaping blood worms. He straightened again and his harsh breathing subsided…and then he held his breath altogether.
He heard things. Or, rather, sensed them. Things all around him. No footsteps or movement, just… stirrings.
He fumbled for his small flashlight and clicked it on. The bodies of New Yorkers were laid out all along the grungy floor of the tunnel. Their clothed bodies lined each side, like victims of a gas attack. Some eyes were still open, gazing with the narcotized stare of the ill.
These were the turned. The recently bitten, the newly infected. Attacked that very night. The stirring Eph had heard was the metamorphosis inside their bodies: no limbs moving, but rather the tumors colonizing their organs, and the mandibles growing into oral stingers.
The bodies numbered in the dozens, and there were many more ahead, vague forms beyond the reach of his beam. Men, women, children — victims from all walks of life. He rushed around, moving his beam from face to face, searching for Kelly — and praying he would not find her here.
He was still searching when Fet and Setrakian caught up. With something like relief, and at the same time despair, Eph told them, “She’s not here.”
Setrakian stood with his hand held against his chest, unable to catch his breath. “How much farther?”
Fet said, “That was another City Hall station, on the BMT line. A lower level that was never put into service, only used for layup and storage. That means we’re underneath the Broadway line. This turn in the track takes us around the foundation of the Woolworth Building. Cortlandt Street is next. Meaning the World Trade Center is…” He looked up, as though able to see ten, fifteen stories through city rock to the surface. “We’re close.”
“Let’s finish this,” said Eph. “Now.”
“Wait,” said Setrakian, still trying to steady his heart rate. His flashlight beam played over the faces of the turned. He got down on one knee to check some of them with a silver-backed mirror from his coat pocket. “We have a responsibility here first.”
Fet and Eph exterminated the nascent vampires by the light of Setrakian’s flashlight. Each beheading was like a hack at Eph’s sanity.
Eph too had been turned. Not from human to vampire, but from healer to slayer.
The groundwater deepened farther into the catacombs, with strange, sun-starved roots and vines and albino growths crawling down from the unfinished ceiling to feed off the water. The occasional yellow tunnel light showed a total lack of graffiti. White dust lay across the untouched sides of the floor, some of it very fine, coating the surface of pockets of stagnant water. It was residue from the World Trade Center. The three of them avoided stepping in it where they could, with the respect afforded a graveyard.
The ceiling got lower, gradually dipping below head level, approaching a dead end. Setrakian’s search beam found an opening in the upper part of the shrinking wall, wide enough to admit them. A rumbling that had been vague and distant began to gather in force. Their flashlight beams showed the water at their boots beginning to tremble. It was the unmistakable roar of a subway train, and each of them actually turned around to look, though the tunnel they were standing in contained no rail beds.
It was in front of them, coming right at them — but on live tracks lifting over their heads, entering the active City Hall BMT platform above. The squealing, roaring, and shuddering became unbearable — reaching earthquakelike force and decibels — and at once they realized that this powerful disruption was their best opportunity.
They pressed through the crack, hurrying into another man-made, trackless passage, this one strung with unlit bulbs, construction lights dancing under the force of the passing subway train. Piles of dirt and debris had long ago been pushed back beyond steel beams rising some thirty feet to the ceiling. Around a long corner up ahead, jaundiced light shone faintly. They switched off their Luma lights and rushed along the dark tunnel, feeling it widen as they rounded the corner into a long, open chamber.
As the floor stopped trembling and the train noise faded like a passing storm, they slowed to keep their boot steps quiet. Eph sensed the others before he saw them, their outlines, sitting on or lying about the floor. The creatures were roused by their presence, sitting up, but not attacking. So he and Setrakian and Fet kept moving, wading forward into the Master’s lair.
The demons had fed that night, and were bloated with blood, like ticks, lying about and digesting. Their languor was deathlike, they were creatures resigned to waiting for sundown and the opportunity to feed again.
They started to rise. They wore construction clothes and business suits and workout clothes and pajamas and evening wear and dirty aprons and nothing at all.
Eph gripped his sword, searching faces as he passed them. Dead faces with bloodred eyes.
“Stay together,” whispered Setrakian, lifting the UVC mine thing carefully out of the mesh bag on Fet’s back as they walked. With crooked fingers, he peeled back a strip of safety tape, then rotated the top of the globe to ready the battery. “I do hope this works.”
“Hope?” said Fet.
One came at him then — an old man, maybe not as sated as the others — and Fet showed him his silver dagger and the vampire hissed. Fet put a boot on the man’s thigh and kicked him back, showing the others his silver.
“We’re digging ourselves into a deep hole here.”
Faces came out of the walls, flushed and leering. Older vampires, first or second generation, marked by their whitening hair. There were animal-like groans and glottal clicks from some, like attempts at speech blocked by the vile appendages grown beneath their tongues. Their swollen throats twitched perversely.
