The Fall

data link. “Do we have another virus?” All the laptops on the ISS operated on a wireless intranet, segregated from the mainframe.

“Not a computer virus, no.”

Thalia gripped the handlebar to hold herself still in front of the screen. “Okay. I’m going to stop asking questions now and just listen.”

“We are in the midst of a rather mystifying global pandemic. It apparently started in Manhattan and has been popping up in various cities and spreading ever since. Concurrently, and apparently in direct relation, there have been a large number of disappearances reported. At first, these vanishings were attributed to sick people staying home from work, people seeking medical attention. Now there are riots. I’m talking entire blocks of New York City. The violence has spread across state lines. The first report of attacks in London came four days ago, then at Narita Airport in Japan. Each country has been guarding its flank and its international profile, trying to avoid a meltdown of travel and commerce, which—as I understand it—is, in fact, exactly what each country should be seeking. The World Health Organization held a press conference yesterday in Berlin. Half of its members were absent. They officially moved the pandemic from a phase five to a phase-six alert.”

Thalia couldn’t believe it. “Is it the eclipse?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“The occultation. When I watched it from up here… the great black blot that was the shadow of the moon, spreading over the northeastern U.S. like a dead spot… I guess I had this… I had a premonition of sorts.”

“Well—it does seem to have started around then.”

“It was just the way it looked. So ominous.”

“We have had a few major incidents here in Houston, and more in Austin and Dallas. Mission Control is operating at about seventy percent manpower now, our numbers shrinking every day. With operation personnel levels unreliable, we have no choice but to push back the launch at this time.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“The Russian transport that went up two months ago left you plenty of food and batteries, enough to last up to a year if rationing becomes necessary.”

“A year?” said Thalia, more forcefully than she would have liked.

“Just thinking worst-case. Hopefully things get back under control here and we can get you back maybe two or three weeks out.”

“Great. So until then, more freeze-dried borscht.”

“This same message is being relayed to Commander Demidov and Engineer Maigny by their respective agencies. We are aware of your disappointment, Thalia.”

“I haven’t received any e-mail from my husband in a few days. Have you been holding those back as well?”

“No, we haven’t. A few days, you say?”

Thalia nodded. She pictured Billy as she always did, working inside the kitchen of their home in West Hartford, dishrag over his shoulder, cooking up some ambitious feast over the stove. “Contact him for me, will you? He’ll want to know about the postponement.”

“We did attempt to contact him. No answer. Either at your house, or his restaurant.”

Thalia swallowed hard. She worked quickly to regain her composure.

He’s fine, she thought. I’m the one orbiting the planet in a spaceship. He’s down there, both feet on the ground. He’s fine.

She showed Mission Control only confidence and fortitude, but she had never felt so far away from her husband as at that moment.

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

THE BLOCK WAS already burning when Gus arrived with the Sapphires and Angel.

They saw smoke from the bridge on the way over: thick and black, rising in various spots uptown and down, Harlem and the Lower East Side and points between. As though the city had seen a coordinated military attack.

The morning sun was overhead, the city quiet. They shot up Riverside Drive, weaving around abandoned vehicles. Seeing smoke rising from city blocks was like watching a person bleed. Gus felt alternately helpless and anxious—the city was falling to shit all around him, and time was of the essence.

Creem and the other Jersey punks looked upon Manhattan burning with a kind of satisfaction. To them it was like watching a disaster movie. But to Gus, this was like watching his turf going up in flames.

The block they were headed to was the epicenter of the biggest uptown blaze: all the streets surrounding the pawnshop were blacked out by the thick veil of smoke, turning day into a strange, storm-like night.

“Those motherfuckers,” said Gus. “They blocked out the sun.”

The entire side of the street raged in flames—except the pawnshop on the corner. Its large front windows were shattered, security grates pulled off the building overhang and lying twisted on the sidewalk.

The rest of the city was quieter than a cold Christmas morning, but this block—the 118th Street intersection—was, at that dark daylight hour, teeming with vamps laying siege to the pawnshop.

They were after the old man.

Inside the apartment above the shop, Gabriel Bolivar moved from room to room. Silver-backed mirrors covered the walls instead of pictures, as though some strange spell had converted artwork into glass. The former rock star’s blurry reflection moved with him from room to room in his search for the old man Setrakian and his accomplices.

Bolivar stopped in the room the mother of the boy had tried to enter—the wall boarded behind an iron cage.

No one.

It looked as though they had cleared out. Bolivar wished the mother had accompanied them here. Her blood link to the boy would have proved valuable. But the Master had tasked Bolivar, and its will would be done.

The job of bloodhound instead fell to the feelers, the newly turned blind children. Bolivar came out to the kitchen to see one there, a boy with fully black eyes, crouching down on all fours. He was “looking” out the window toward the street, using his extrasensory perception.

The basement? said Bolivar.

No one, said the boy.

But Bolivar needed to see it for himself, needed to be sure, moving past him to the stairs. Bolivar rode the spiral railing down on his hands and bare feet, down one floor to the street level, where the other feelers had retreated to the shop—then continuing his descent to the basement and a locked door.

Bolivar’s soldiers were already there, in answer to his telepathic command. They tore at the locked door with powerful, oversize hands, digging into the iron-bolted frame with the hardened nails of their talon-like middle fingers until they gained purchase, then joined forces to rip the door back from its frame.

The first few to enter tripped the ultraviolet lamps surrounding the interior of the doorway, the electric indigo rays cooking their virus-rich bodies, the vampires dissipating with screams and clouds of dust. The rest were repulsed by the light, pushed backward against the spiral staircase, shading their eyes. They were unable to see through the doorway.

Bolivar was the first to haul himself hand over hand up the staircase, ahead of the crush. The old man still could be inside there.

Bolivar had to find another way in.

He noticed then the feelers tensed on the floor, facing the smashed windows and the street beyond, like pointer dogs responding to a scent. The first among them—a girl in soiled briefs and an undershirt—snarled and then leaped through the jagged shards of glass to the street.