The Night Eternal

Nora feigned a jab; Kelly and the girl feeler just stared at her.

“I used to be afraid,” said Nora. “In the train tunnel, I was afraid of you. I’m not afraid now.”

Nora unclipped the Luma lamp hanging from her pack, switching on the battery-powered black light. The ultraviolet rays repelled the vampires, the feeler snarling and backing away on all fours. Kelly remained still, only turning as Nora circled away from them, backing away to the stairs. She was using the mirrors to check behind her, which was how she saw the blurred figure darting up from the handrail.

Nora spun and drove her blade deep into the mouth of the boy feeler, the searing silver releasing him almost immediately. She jerked the blade out and spun back, ready for the attack.

Kelly and the girl feeler were gone. Vanished—as though they had never been there in the first place.

“Nora!”

Eph called to her from the floor below. “Coming down!” she yelled back, descending the wooden steps.

He met her there, anxious, having feared the worst. He saw the slick white blood on her blade.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded, grabbing a scarf off a nearby rack to clean off her sword. “Ran into Kelly upstairs. She says hi.”

Eph stared at the sword. “Did you… ?”

“No, unfortunately. Just one of her little foster monsters.”

Eph said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, she half-expected a swarm of vampires to greet them. But no. Regular humans moving between work and home, shoulders hunched against the rain.

“How did it go?” asked Nora.

“It’s a bastard,” said Eph. “A true bastard.”

“But do you think it bought it?”

Eph could not look her in the eye. “Yes,” he said. “It bought it.”

Eph was vigilant for vampires, scanning the sidewalks as they went.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Keep moving,” he said. Across Thirty-sixth Street, he pulled over, ducking under the canopy of a closed market. He looked up through the rain, eyeing the rooftops.

There, high across the street, a feeler leaped from the edge of one building to the next. Tracking them.

“They’re following us,” said Eph. “Come on.” They walked on, trying to lose themselves in the masses. “We have to wait them out until the meridiem.”

Columbia University

EPH AND NORA returned to the empty university campus soon after first light, confident they were not followed. Eph figured that Mr. Quinlan had to be underground, probably going over the Lumen. He was headed that way when Gus intercepted them—or, more accurately, intercepted Nora while Eph was still with her.

“You have the medicine?” he asked.

Nora showed him a bag full of their loot.

“It’s Joaquin,” said Gus.

Nora stopped short, thinking vampire involvement. “What happened?”

“I need you to see him. It’s bad.”

They followed him to a classroom where Joaquin was propped up on top of a desk, his pant leg rolled up. His knee was bulbous in two places, considerably swollen. The gangbanger was in great pain. Gus stood on the other side of the desk, waiting for answers.

“How long has it been like this?” Nora asked Joaquin.

Through a sweaty grimace, Joaquin said, “I dunno. A while.”

“I’m going to touch it here.”

Joaquin braced himself. Nora explored the swollen areas around the knee. She saw a small wound below the patella, less than an inch in length and crooked, its edges yellowed and crusty. “When did you get this cut?”

“Dunno,” said Joaquin. “Think I bumped it at the blood camp. Didn’t notice it until long after.”

Eph jumped in. “You’ve been going out on your own sometimes. You hit any hospitals or nursing home facilities?”

“Uh… probably. Saint Luke’s, sure.”

Eph looked at Nora, their silence conveying the seriousness of the infection. “Penicillin?” said Nora.

“Maybe,” said Eph. “Let’s go think this through.” To Joaquin, he said, “Lie back. We’ll be right back in.”

“Hold up, doc. That don’t sound good.”

Eph said, “It’s an infection, obviously. It would be fairly routine to treat this in a hospital. Problem is, there are no more hospitals. A sick human is simply disposed of. So we need to discuss how to care for it.”

Joaquin nodded, unconvinced, and lay back on the desk. Gus, without a word, followed Eph and Nora out into the hallway.

Gus said, looking mostly at Nora, “No bullshit.”

Nora shook her head. “Bacterium, multiresistant. He might have cut himself at the camp, but this is something he picked up at a medical facility. The bug can live on instruments, on surfaces, for a long time. Nasty, and trenchant.”

Gus said, “Okay. What do you need?”

“What we need is something we can’t get anymore. We just went out looking for it—vancomycin.”

There had been a run on vancomycin during the last days of the scourge. Befuddled medical experts, professionals who should have known better than to feed a panic, went on television suggesting this “drug of last resort” as a possible treatment for the still-unidentified strain that was spreading through the country with incredible speed.

“And even if we could find some vancomycin,” said Nora, “it would take a severe course of antibiotics and other remedies to rid him of this infection. It’s not a vampire sting, but, in terms of life expectancy, it might as well be.”

Eph said, “Even if we could get some fluids into him intravenously, it just won’t do him any good, except prolonging the inevitable.”

Gus looked at Eph as though he were going to hit him. “There’s gotta be some other way. You guys are fucking doctors…”

Nora said, “Medically, we’re halfway back to the Dark Ages now. With no new drugs being manufactured, all the diseases we thought we had beat are back, and taking us early. We can maybe scrounge around, find something to make him more comfortable…”

She looked at Eph. Gus did too. Eph didn’t care anymore; he pulled off his pack—where he had smuggled the Vicodin—and opened the zippered pouch and pulled out a baggie full of tablets. Dozens of tablets and pills in different shapes, colors, and sizes. He selected a pair of low-dosage Lorcets, some Percodans, and four two- milligram Dilaudid tabs.

“Start him with these,” he said, pointing to the Lorcets. “Save the Dilaudids for last.” The rest of the bag he turned over to Nora. “Take it all. I’m through with them.”

Gus looked at the pills in his hands. “These won’t cure him?”

“No,” said Nora. “Just manage his pain.”

“What about, you know, amputation? Cutting off his leg. I could do it myself.”

“It’s not just the knee, Gus.” Nora touched his arm. “I’m sorry. The way things are now, there’s just not much we can do.”

Gus stared at the drugs in his hand, dazed, as though he held there the broken pieces of Joaquin.

Fet entered, the shoulders of his duster wet from outside. He slowed a moment, struck by the strange scene of Eph, Gus, and Nora standing together in an emotional moment.

“He’s here,” said Fet. “Creem’s back. At the garage.”