The Fall

breed men whose net worth was significantly lower than his. Their unqualified scorn, after so many years of hope, was a humiliation that Eldritch Palmer simply could not bear. It meant his mortality and the surrender of all that he had accomplished in this pre-life. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: that was fine for the masses, but for Palmer, only immortality would do. The corruption of his body—which had never been a friend to him—was but a small price to pay.

And so commenced another decade of searching—but this time, in pursuit of the legend of the rogue Ancient, the seventh immortal, whose power was said to rival any of the others. This journey brought Palmer to the craven Eichhorst, who arranged the summit.

It occurred inside the Zone of Alienation surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, a little more than a decade after the 1986 reactor disaster. Palmer had to enter the Zone without his usual motorcade support (his unmarked ambulance and security detail), the reason being that moving vehicles kick up radioactive dust, laced with cesium-137, so you don’t want to follow any other moving vehicles. So Mr. Fitzwilliam—Palmer’s bodyguard and medic—drove him alone, and drove fast.

Their meeting took place after nightfall, of course, in one of the so-called black villages surrounding the plant: evacuated settlements that dotted the most blighted ten-square-kilometer area of the planet.

Pripyat, the largest of these settlements, had been founded in 1970 to house plant workers, its population having grown to fifty thousand at the time of the accident and radiation exposure. The city was fully evacuated three days later. A carnival had been built in a large downtown lot, set to open on May 1, 1986: five days after the disaster, two days after the city was emptied forever.

Palmer met the Master at the foot of the never-operated Ferris wheel, sitting as still as a giant stopped clock. It was there that a deal was struck, and the Ten-year Plan set into motion—with the Earth’s occultation designated as the time of the crossing.

In return, Palmer was promised his Eternity, and a seat at the right hand of the Master. Not as one of his errand-boy acolytes but as a partner in apocalypse, pending his delivery of the human race as promised.

Before the meeting ended, the Master grasped Palmer by the arm and ran up the side of the giant Ferris wheel. At the top, the terrified Palmer was shown Chernobyl, the red beacon of the #4 reactor in the distance, pulsing steadily atop the sarcophagus of lead and steel, sealing in one hundred tons of labile uranium.

And now here he was, ten years on, Palmer at the verge of delivering everything he had pledged to the Master on that dark night in a diseased land. The plague was spreading faster every hour now, throughout the country and across the globe—and still he was being made to bear the indignity of this vampire bureaucrat.

Eichhorst’s expertise was in the construction of animal pens and the coordination of maximally efficient abattoirs. Palmer had financed the “refurbishing” of dozens of meat plants nationwide, all of them redesigned according to Eichhorst’s exact specifications.

I trust everything is in order, said Eichhorst.

“Naturally,” said Palmer, barely able to mask his distaste for the creature. “What I want to know is, when will the Master uphold his end of the bargain?”

In due time. All in due time.

“My time is due now,” said Palmer. “You know the condition of my health. You know that I have fulfilled every promise, that I have met every deadline, that I have served your Master faithfully and completely. Now the hour grows late. I am due some consideration.”

The Dark Lord sees everything and forgets nothing.

“I will remind you of his—and your—unfinished business with Setrakian, your former pet prisoner.”

His resistance is doomed.

“Agreed, of course. And yet his operations and his diligence do pose a threat to some individuals. Including yourself. And me.”

Eichhorst was silent a moment, as though conceding his agreement.

The Master will settle his affairs with the Juden in a matter of hours. Now—I have not fed for some time, and I was promised afresh meal.

Palmer hid a frown of disgust. How quickly his human revulsion would turn to hunger, to need. How soon he would look back upon his naivete here the way an adult looks back upon the needs of a child. “Everything has been arranged.”

Eichhorst motioned to one of his handlers who stepped away into one of the larger pens. Palmer heard whimpering and checked his watch, wanting to be done with this.

Eichhorst’s handler returned holding, by the back of his neck, much as a farmer might lift up a piglet, a boy of no more than eleven years of age. Blindfolded and shivering, the boy pawed at the air before him, kicking, trying to see beneath the cloth covering his eyes.

Eichhorst turned his head at the smell of his victim, his chin tipped in a gesture of appreciation.

Palmer observed the Nazi and wondered for a moment what it would feel like, after the pain of the turning. What will it mean to exist as a creature who feeds on man?

Palmer turned and signaled to Mr. Fitzwilliam to start the car. “I will leave you to eat in peace,” he said, and left the vampire to its meal.

International Space Station

TWO HUNDRED AND twenty miles above Earth, the concepts of day and night had little meaning. Orbiting the planet once every hour and a half provided all the dawns and sunsets a person could handle.

Astronaut Thalia Charles gently snored inside a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. The American flight engineer was entering her 466th day in Low Earth orbit, with only 6 more to go before the space shuttle docking that was to be her ride back home.

Mission Control set their sleep schedules, and today was to be an “early” day, readying the ISS to receive Endeavor and the next research facility module it carried. She heard the voice summoning her, and spent a pleasant few seconds transforming from sleep to wakefulness. The floating sensation of dreaming is a constant in zero gravity. She wondered how her head would react to a pillow upon her return. What it would be like to come under the benevolent dictatorship of Earth’s gravity once again.

She removed her eye mask and neck pad, tucking each inside the sleeping bag before loosening the straps and wriggling out. She undid her elastic and shook out her long, black hair, combing it apart with her fingers, then turning a half-somersault to regather it and wind the elastic back around in a double loop.

The voice of Mission Control from Houston’s Johnson Space Center called her to the laptop in the Unity module for a teleconference uplink. This was unusual but not, in itself, a cause for alarm. Bandwidth in space is in high demand, and very carefully allocated. She wondered if there hadn’t been another orbital collision of space junk, its debris rocketed through orbit with the force of a shotgun blast. She disdained having to take shelter inside the attached Soyuz-TMA spacecraft, as a precaution. The Soyuz was their emergency escape from the ISS. A similar threat had occurred two months ago, necessitating an eight- day stay inside its bell-shaped crew module. Space-junk hazards posed the greatest threat to the viability of the ISS, and to the psychological well-being of its crew.

The news, as she found out, was even worse.

“We’re scrapping the Endeavor launch for now,” said Mission Control head Nicole Fairley.

“Scrapping? You mean postponing?” said Thalia, trying not to betray too much disappointment.

“Postponing indefinitely. There’s a lot going on down here. Some troubling developments. We need to wait this out.”

“What? The thrusters again?”

“No, nothing mechanical. Endeavor is sound. This is not a technical problem.”

“Okay…”

“To be honest, I don’t know what this is. You may have noticed you haven’t received any news updates these past few days.”

There was no direct Internet access in space. Astronauts received data, video, and e-mail through a Ky-band