some more killing in me.”
“What do you say?” asked Gus, turning back to his fellow countryman. “Nothing for you here.”
“Look at that knee,” said Creem. “No one’s going to slow me up, get me turned into one of them stingers.”
Gus pulled a small sword from the Sapphires’ equipment bag and handed it to Angel. “This is his building. Let’s see if he can earn his keep.”
As though some sort of psychic alarm had been sounded, the vampire residents of Angel’s building were ready for battle. The undead emerged from every doorway, climbing effortlessly through obstacles and staircases.
During a stairway battle, Angel saw a neighbor of his, a seventy-three-year-old woman with a walker, use the banister as a jumping point to traverse the stairwell between floors. She and others moved with the stupefying grace of primates.
In his movies, the enemy announced itself with a glower, and accommodated the hero by moving slowly for the kill. Angel didn’t exactly “earn his keep,” though his brute strength did give him certain advantages. His wrestling knowledge came back to him in close combat situations, despite his limited mobility. And he felt like an action hero once again.
Like evil spirits, the undead kept coming. As though summoned from the surrounding buildings, wave after wave of pale, slithery-tongued creatures swarmed up from the lower floors, and the tenement walls ran white. They fought them the way firemen fight fires, pushing back, tamping out flare-ups, and attacking hot spots. They functioned as a stone-cold execution squad, and Angel would later be amazed to learn that this was their inaugural nighttime assault. Two of the Colombians were stung, lost to the scourge—and yet when they were done, the punks only seemed to want more.
Compared to this, they said, daylight hunting was a breeze.
Once they had stemmed the tide, one of the Colombians found a carton of smokes and they all lit up. Angel hadn’t smoked in years, but the taste and the smell blocked out the stench of the dead things. Gus watched the smoke dissipate and offered up a silent prayer for the departed.
“There is a man,” said Gus. “An old pawnbroker over in Manhattan. He was the first to clue me to these vamps. Saved my soul.”
“No chance,” said Creem. “Why go all the way across the river when there is killing galore here?”
“You meet this guy, you’ll understand why.”
“How do you know he’s still kickin’ it?”
“I sure hope he is. We’re going over the bridge at first light.”
Angel took a minute then to return to his apartment for the last time. His knee ached as he looked around: unwashed clothes heaped in the corner, dirty dishes in his sink, the general squalor of the place. He had never taken any pride in his living condition—and it shamed him now. Perhaps, he sensed, he knew all the time that he was destined for something better—something he could never have foreseen—and he was just waiting for the call.
He threw some extra clothes into a grocery bag, including his knee brace, and then lastly—almost ashamedly, because taking it was like admitting it was his most cherished possession, all he had left of who he once was—he grabbed the silver mask.
He folded the mask into his jacket pocket and, with it next to his heart, he realized that, for the first time in decades, he felt good about himself.
The Flatlands
EPH FINISHED TENDING to Vasiliy’s injuries, giving particular attention to cleaning out the worm hole in his forearm. The ratcatcher had sustained a great deal of damage, but none of it permanent, except maybe the hearing loss and ringing in his right ear. The metal shard came out of his leg and he hobbled on it but did not complain. He was still standing. Eph admired that, and felt a bit like an Ivy League momma’s boy by his side. For all his education and scholarly achievements, Eph felt infinitely less useful to the cause than Fet.
But that would soon change.
The exterminator opened his poison closet, showing Setrakian his bait packs and traps, his halothane bottles and toxic blue kibble. Rats, he explained, lacked the biological mechanism for vomiting. The main function of emesis is to purge a body of toxic substances, which was why rats were particularly susceptible to poisoning. Why they had evolved and developed other traits to compensate for this. One was that they could ingest just about anything, including nonfood materials such as clay or concrete, which helped to dilute a toxin’s effect on the rat’s body until they could get rid of the poison as waste. The other was the rats’ intelligence, their complex food-avoidance strategies that aided in their survival.
“Funny thing,” said Fet, “is that when I ripped out that thing’s throat, and got a good look in there?”
“Yes?” said Setrakian.
“The way it looked to me, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they can’t puke either.”
Setrakian nodded, thinking on that. “I believe you are correct,” he said. “May I ask, what is the chemical makeup of these rodenticides?”
“Depends,” said Fet. “These use thallium sulfate, a heavy metal salt that attacks the liver, brain, and muscle. Odorless, colorless, and highly toxic. These over here use a common mammalian blood-thinner.”
“Mammalian? What, something like Coumadin?”
“No, not something like. Exactly like.”
Setrakian looked at the bottle. “So I myself have been taking rat poison for some years now.”
“Yep. You and millions of other people.”
“And this does what?”
“Same thing it would do to you if you took too much of it. The anticoagulant leads to internal hemorrhaging. Rats bleed out. It’s not pretty.”
In picking up the bottle to examine its label, Setrakian noticed something on the shelf behind it. “I do not wish to alarm you, Vasiliy. But aren’t these mouse droppings?”
Fet pushed his way in for a closer look. “Motherfucker!” he said. “How can this be?”
“A minor infestation, I’m sure,” said Setrakian.
“Minor, major, what does it matter? This is supposed to be Fort Knox!” Fet knocked over a few bottles, trying to see better. “This is like vampires breaking into a silver mine.”
While Fet was obsessively searching the back of the closet for more evidence, Eph watched Setrakian slip one of the bottles inside his coat pocket.
Eph followed Setrakian away from the closet, catching him alone. “What are you going to do with that?” he said.
Setrakian showed no guilt at having been discovered. The old man’s cheeks were sunken, his flesh a pale shade of gray. “He said it is essentially blood thinner. With all the pharmacies being raided, I would not like to run out.”
Eph studied the old man, trying to see the truth behind his lie.
Setrakian said, “Nora and Zack are ready for their journey to Vermont?”
“Just about. But not Vermont. Nora had a good point—it’s Kelly’s parents’ place, she might be drawn to it. There’s a girls’ camp Nora knows, from growing up in Philadelphia. It’s off-season now. Three cabins on a small island in the middle of a lake.”
“Good,” said Setrakian. “The water will keep them safe. How soon do you leave for the train station?”
“Soon,” said Eph, checking his wristwatch. “We still have a little time.”
“They could take a car. You do realize that we are out of the epicenter now. This neighborhood, with its lack of direct subway service and comparatively few apartment buildings conducive to rapid infestation, has yet to be totally colonized. We are not in a bad spot here.”
Eph shook his head. “The train is the fastest and surest way out of this plague.”
