The Fall. Book II of The Strain Trilogy

“I like this,” he said, stamping muck off his boots. “Just like rat hunting, following the trail. The UV light makes it easy.”

“But how do they know these routes?”

“They’ve been busy. Exploring, foraging. You never heard of the Volstead Grid?”

“Volstead? Like the Volstead Act? Prohibition?”

“Restaurants, bars, speakeasies, they had to open up their cellars, go underground. This is a city that just keeps building over itself. Combine the old cellars and houses under there with the tunnels, aqueducts, and old utility pipes — and some say you can move block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, solely underground, between any two points in the city.”

“Bolivar’s place,” said Eph, remembering the rock star who had been one of the four survivors of Flight 753. His building was an old bootlegger’s house, with a secret gin cellar that linked to the subway tunnels below. Eph checked behind them as they passed a side tunnel. “How do you know where you’re going?”

Fet pointed to another hobo signal scratched into the stone, probably with one of the creature’s hardened talon nails. “We’re on to something here,” he said. “That’s all I know for sure. But I bet the Ferry Loop Station isn’t more than a block or two away.”

Nazareth, Pennsylvania

Augustin…

Augustin Elizalde got to his feet. He stood in a stew of absolute darkness. A palpable inky blackness without a hint of light. Like space with no stars. He blinked his eyes to make certain that they were open — and they were. No change.

Was this death? No place could be darker.

Must be. He was fucking dead.

Or — maybe they had turned him. Was he a vampire now, his body taken over, but this old part of him shut away in the darkness of his mind, like a prisoner in an attic? Maybe the coolness he felt and the hardness of the floor beneath his feet were just compensatory tricks of his brain. He was walled up forever inside his own head.

He crouched a bit, trying to establish his existence through movement and sensory impression. He grew dizzy due to the lack of a visual focal point, and set his feet wider apart. He reached up, jumping, but could feel no ceiling above him.

An occasional faint breeze rippled his shirt. It smelled like soil. Like earth.

He was underground. Buried alive.

Augustin…

Again. His mother’s voice calling to him as in a dream.

“Mama?”

His voice doubled back on him in a startling echo. He remembered her as he had left her: sitting in the bottom of her bedroom closet, under a great pile of clothes. Staring up at him with the leering hunger of a newly turned them.

Vampires, the old man said.

Gus turned, trying to guess in which direction the voice might have originated. He had nothing else to do but follow this voice.

He walked to a stone wall, feeling his way along its smooth and slowly curving face. His palms remained sore where the glass had cut him — the shard he had wielded in the murder (no — the destruction) of his brother-turned-vampire. He stopped to feel his wrists, and realized the handcuffs he had been wearing at the time of his escape from police custody — the ones whose chain the hunters had split — were now gone.

Those hunters. They had turned out to be vampires themselves, appearing on that street in Morningside Heights and battling the other vampires like two sides in a gang war. But the hunters were well equipped. They had weapons, and they were coordinated. They drove cars. They weren’t just the bloodthirsty attack drones like the ones Gus had faced and destroyed.

The last thing he remembered was them throwing Gus into the back of an SUV. But — why him?

Another puff of wind, like Mother Nature’s last breath, brushed against his face, and he followed it — hoping he was moving in the right direction. The wall ended at a sharp corner. He felt for the opposite side, his left, and found it the same: ending at a corner, with a gap in between. Just like a doorway.

Gus stepped through, and the new echo of his footsteps told him that this room was wider and higher- ceilinged than the rest. A faint smell here, familiar to him somehow. Trying to place it.

He got it. The cleaning solution he’d had to use in lockup, on maintenance detail. It was ammonia. Not enough to singe the inside of his nose.

Then something started to happen. He thought his mind was playing tricks, but then realized that, yes, light was coming to the room. The slowness of the illumination, and the general uncertainty of the situation, terrified him. Two tripod lamps set wide apart, near the far walls, were coming up gradually, diluting the thick blackness.

Gus drew his arms in tight, in the manner of the mixed-martial-arts fighters he watched on the Internet. The lights kept brightening, though so gradually that the wattage barely registered. But his pupils were so widely dilated by the darkness, his retina so exposed, that any light source would have caused a reaction.

He didn’t see it at first. The being was right in front of him, no more than ten or fifteen feet away, but its head and limbs were so pale and still and smooth that his eyes read them as part of the walls of rock.

The only thing that stood out was a pair of symmetrical dark holes. Not black holes, but almost black.

The deepest red. Blood red.

If they were eyes, they did not blink. Nor did they stare. They looked upon Gus with a remarkable lack of passion. These were eyes as indifferent as red stones. Blood-sodden eyes that had seen it all.

Gus glimpsed the outline of a robe on the being’s body, blending into the darkness like a cavity within the cavity. The being stood tall, if he was making it out correctly. But the stillness of this thing was deathlike. Gus did not move.

“What is this?” he said, his voice coming out a little funny, betraying his fear. “You think you’re eating Mexican tonight? You wanna think twice about that. How ’bout you come and choke on it, bitch.”

It radiated such silence and stillness that Gus might have been looking at some clothed statue. Its skull was hairless and smooth all over, lacking the cartilage of ears. Now Gus was aware of something, hearing — or, rather, feeling — a vibration like humming.

“Well?” he said, addressing the expressionless eyes. “What you waiting for? You like to play with your food before you eat it?” He pulled his fists in closer to his face. “Not this fucking chalupa, you undead piece of shit.”

Something other than movement drew his attention to the right — and he saw that there was another one. Standing there like part of the stone wall, a shade shorter than the first one, eyes shaped differently but similarly emotionless.

And then, to the left — gradually, to Gus’s eyes — a third.

Gus, who was not unfamiliar with courtrooms, felt like he was appearing before three alien judges inside a stone chamber. He was going out of his mind, but his reaction was to keep shooting off his mouth. To keep putting up the gangbanger front. The judges he had faced called it “contempt.” Gus called it “coping.” What he did when he felt looked down upon. When he felt he was being treated not as a unique human being but as an inconvenience, an obstacle dropped in someone’s way.

We will be brief.

Gus’s hands shot up to his temples. Not his ears: the voice was somehow inside his head. Coming from that same part of his brain where his own interior monologue originated — as though some pirate radio station had started broadcasting on his signal.

You are Augustin Elizalde.

He gripped his head but the voice was tight in there. No off switch.

“Yeah, I know who the fuck I am. Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you? And how did you get inside my—”