owner of the dirty hand crouched. With a cry of attack, he swung his length of rebar at the knuckles, crushing bone against mortar.
The attacker came up at him fast, without regard to pain.
He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and knew he could not win a fight in the dark. He reached up to the blocked window with his rebar and snagged the dirty rags jammed in there, twisting and pulling them down, falling like a plug out of a dyke with light instead of water flooding through.
He turned back just in time to see her eyes go to horror. She lay fully within the frame of sunlight, her body emitting a kind of anguished howl and breaking down all at once, smashed and steaming. It was as he imagined nuclear radiation might work on a person, cooking and dissolving them at the same time.
It happened almost all at once. The girl — or whatever she was — lay desiccated on the filthy floor of the basement.
Vasiliy stared. Horrified wasn’t even the word. He completely forgot about the one coming off the stairs until the guy moaned, reacting to the light. The guy backed away, stumbling near the property manager, then regaining his footing and starting for the stairs.
Vasiliy recovered just in time to go underneath the stairs. He jabbed the rod through the step planks, tripping the man, making him fall back down hard to the floor. Vasiliy went around him, his poker raised, as the man got to his feet. His formerly brown skin was a sickly jaundiced yellow. His mouth opened, and Vasiliy saw that it was not a tongue but something much worse.
Vasiliy cracked him across the mouth with the rebar. It sent the man spinning and dropped him to his knees. Vasiliy reached forward and grasped the back of his neck, as he would a hissing snake or a snapping rat, keeping that mouth thing away from him. He looked back to the rectangle of light, swirling with the dust of the annihilated girl. He felt the guy buck and fight to get away. Vasiliy brought the rod down hard against the thing’s knees and forced it toward the light.
Fear-maddened Vasiliy Fet realized he wanted to see it again. This slaying trick of the light. With a boot to the lower back, he sent the guy flailing into the sun — and watched him break and crumble all at once, shredded by the burning rays, sinking into ash and steam.
South Ozone Park, Queens
ELDRITCH P ALMER’S limousine eased into a warehouse in a weedy industrial park less than one mile from the old Aqueduct Racetrack. Palmer traveled in a modest motorcade, his own car followed by a second, empty limousine, in the event that his broke down, followed by a third vehicle, a customized black van that was in fact a private ambulance equipped with his dialysis machine.
A door opened on the side of the warehouse to admit the vehicles, then closed behind them. Waiting to greet him were four members of the Stoneheart Society, a subset of his powerful international investment conglomerate, the Stoneheart Group.
Palmer’s door was opened for him by Mr. Fitzwilliam, and he stepped out to their awe. An audience with the chairman was a rare privilege.
Their dark suits emulated his. Palmer was accustomed to awe in his presence. His group investors regarded him as a messianic figure whose foreknowledge of market turns had enriched them. But his society disciples — they would follow him into hell.
Palmer felt invigorated today, and stood with only the aid of his mahogany cane. The former box-company warehouse was mostly empty. The Stoneheart Group used it occasionally for vehicle storage, but its value today lay in its old-fashioned, precode, underground incinerator, accessed by a large oven-size door in the wall.
Next to the Stoneheart Society members was a Kurt isolation pod on top of a wheeled stretcher. Mr. Fitzwilliam stood at his side.
“Any problems?” said Palmer.
“None, Chairman,” they replied. The two who resembled Doctors Goodweather and Martinez handed over their forged Centers for Disease Control and Prevention credentials to Mr. Fitzwilliam.
Palmer looked in through the transparent isolation pod at the decrepit form of Jim Kent. The blood-starved vampire’s body was shriveled, like the form of a demon whittled out of diseased birch. His muscular and circulatory features showed through his disintegrated flesh except at his swollen, blackened throat. His eyes were open and staring out of the hollows of his drawn face.
Palmer felt for this vampire starved into petrifaction. He knew what it was for a body to crave simple maintenance while the soul suffers and the mind waits.
He knew what it was to be betrayed by one’s maker.
Now Eldritch Palmer found himself on the cusp of deliverance. Unlike this poor wretch, Palmer was on the verge of liberation, and immortality.
“Destroy him,” he said, and stood back as the pod was wheeled to the open door of the incinerator, and the body was fed into the flames.
Their trip to Westchester to find Joan Luss, the third Flight 753 survivor, was cut short by the morning news. The village of Bronxville had been closed off by New York State Police and HAZMAT teams due to a “gas leak.” Aerial news helicopter recordings showed the town nearly still at daybreak, the only cars on the road being state police cruisers. The next story showed the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner building at Thirtieth and First being boarded up, with speculation about more people disappearing from the area, and incidents of panic among local residents.
Penn Station was the only place they could think of guaranteed to have old-fashioned pay telephones. Eph stood at a bank of them with Nora and Setrakian off to the side as morning commuters moved through the station.
Eph thumbed through Jim’s phone, the RECENT CALLS list, looking for Director Barnes’s direct mobile line. Jim rolled close to one hundred calls each day, and Eph kept scrolling through them while, on the landline, Barnes answered his phone.
Eph said, “Are you really going with the ‘gas leak’ gambit, Everett? How long do you think that’s going to hold in this day and age?”
Barnes recognized Eph’s voice. “Ephraim, where are you?”
“Have you been to Bronxville? Have you seen it now?”
“I have been there…we don’t know what we have quite yet…”
“Don’t know! Give me a break, Everett.”
“They found the police station empty this morning. The entire town appears to have been abandoned.”
“Not abandoned. They’re all still there, just hiding. Come sundown, in Westchester County it’s going to be like Transylvania. What you need are strike teams, Everett. Soldiers. Going house to house through that town, as if it’s Baghdad. It’s the only way.”
“What we don’t want is to create a panic—”
“The panic is already starting. Panic is an appropriate response to this thing, more so than denial.”
“The New York DOH Syndromic Surveillance Systems show no indication of any emerging outbreak.”
“They monitor disease patterns by tracking ER visits, ambulance runs, and pharmacy sales. None of which figures into this scenario. This whole city is going to go the way of Bronxville if you don’t get going on it.”
Director Barnes said, “I want to know what you have done with Jim Kent.”
“I went to go see him and he was already gone.”
“I’m told you had something to do with his disappearance.”
“What am I, Everett — the Shadow? I’m everywhere at once. I’m an evil genius. Yes I am.”
“Ephraim, listen—”
“You listen to me. I am a doctor — a doctor you hired to do a job. To identify and contain emerging diseases in the United States. I am calling to tell you that it’s still not too late. This is the fourth day since the arrival of the
