dark eyes, were hollow too. Vampires, blocking his exit.
They started coming down the hall at him, and the next thing he knew, he was hammering away at them with his cuffed hands, throwing them against walls, smashing their faces into the floor. He kicked them when they were down, but they didn’t stay down for long. He gave none of them the chance to get their stingers out, crushing a few skulls with the heel of his heavy boots as he ran to the elevator, the doors closing as they reached it.
Gus stood alone in the elevator car, catching his breath, counting down the floors. His bag was gone — it had ripped open, leaving his clothes strewn about the hallway.
The numbers got to L and the doors dinged open on Gus standing in a crouch, ready for a fight.
The lobby was empty. But outside the door, a faint orange glow flickered, and there were screams and howls. He went out into the street, seeing the blaze on the next block, the flames jumping to neighboring buildings. He saw people in the streets with wooden planks and other makeshift weapons, running toward the blaze.
From the other direction, he saw another loose gang of six people, no weapons, walking, not running. A lone man came running past Gus the other way, saying, “Fuckers everywhere, man!” and then he was pounced upon by the group of six. To an untrained eye, it would have looked like a good old-fashioned street mugging, but Gus saw a mouth stinger by the orange light of the flames. Vampires turning people in the street.
While he was watching, an all-black SUV with bright halogen lamps rolled up fast out of the smoke. Cops. Gus turned and chased his headlamp shadow down the street — running right into the gang of six. They came at him, their pale faces and black eyes lit up by the headlights. Gus heard car doors open and boots hit the pavement, and he was caught between these two fates. He raced at the snarling vampires, swinging his bound fists and butting them in the chest with his head. He didn’t want to give them a chance to open their mouths on him. But then one of them hooked its arm inside Gus’s cuffs and twisted him around, dragging him to the ground. In a second, the herd was on top of him, fighting over who would be the one to drink from his neck.
There was a
The one on top of him was hit from the side and suddenly knocked away. Gus rolled over and got to his knees in the middle of this street fight.
These weren’t cops at all. They were men in black hoodies, their faces obscured, black combat pants and black jump boots. They were firing pistol crossbows and larger crossbows with wooden rifle stocks. Gus saw one guy sight a vampire and put a bolt in his neck. Before the vampire even had time to raise his hands to his throat, the bolt exploded with enough force to disintegrate his neck, removing the head.
Dead vampire.
The bolts were silver tipped and top loaded with an impact charge.
Vampire hunters. Gus stared in amazement at these guys. Other vampires were coming out of the doorways, and these shooters were throat accurate at twenty-five, even thirty yards.
One of them came up fast on Gus, as though mistaking him for a vamp, and before Gus could even speak, the hunter put a boot on his arms, pinning them against the road. He reloaded his crossbow and aimed it at the links joining Gus’s cuffs. A silver bolt split the steel, embedding itself in the asphalt. Gus winced, but there was no explosive charge. His hands were apart, though still in cop bracelets, and the hunter hauled him up onto his feet with startling strength.
“Shit yeah!” said Gus, overjoyed by the sight of these guys. “Where do I sign up!”
But his savior had slowed, something catching his eye. Gus looked more closely into the shadowy recesses of his sweatshirt hood, and the face there was eggshell white. Its eyes were black and red, and its mouth was dry and nearly lipless.
The hunter was staring at the bloody lines across Gus’s palms.
Gus knew that look. He had just seen it in his brother’s and his mother’s eyes.
He tried to pull back, but the grip on his arm was lock solid. The thing opened its mouth and the tip of its stinger appeared.
Then another hunter came up, holding its crossbow to this hunter’s neck. The new hunter pulled back Gus’s hunter’s hood, and Gus saw the bald, earless head, the aged eyes of a mature vampire. The vampire snarled at his brethren’s weapon, then surrendered Gus to the new hunter, whose pale vampire face Gus glimpsed as he was lifted aloft, carried to the black SUV, and thrown into the third-row seat.
The rest of the hooded vampires climbed back inside the vehicle and it took off, wheeling a hard U-turn in the middle of the avenue. Gus was the only human inside the SUV.
A smack to the temple knocked him out cold. The SUV raced back toward the burning building, bursting through the street smoke like an airplane punching through a cloud, then screaming past the rioting, rounding the next corner and heading farther uptown.
The so-called bathtub of the fallen World Trade Center, the seven-stories-deep foundation, was lit up as bright as day for overnight work even in the minutes before dawn. Yet the construction site was still, the great machines quiet. The work that had continued around the clock almost since the towers’ collapse had, for the time being, all but ceased.
“Why this?” asked Eph. “Why here?”
“It drew him,” said Setrakian. “A mole hollows out a home in the dead trunk of a felled tree. Gangrene forms in a wound. He is rooted in tragedy and pain.”
Eph, Setrakian, and Fet sat in the back of Fet’s van, parked at Church and Cortlandt. Setrakian sat by the rear-door windows with a nightscope. Very little traffic rolled past, only the occasional predawn taxi or delivery truck. No pedestrians or any other signs of life. They were looking for vampires and not finding any.
Setrakian, his eye still to the scope, said, “It’s too bright here. They don’t want to be seen.”
Eph said, “We can’t keep looping around the site again and again.”
“If there are as many as we suspect,” said Setrakian, “then they must be nearby. To return to the lair before sunrise.” He looked at Fet. “Think like vermin.”
Fet said, “I will tell you this. I’ve never seen a rat go in anywhere through the front door.” He thought about it some more, then pushed past Eph toward the front seats. “I have an idea.”
He rolled north on Church to City Hall, one block northeast of the WTC site. A large park surrounded it, and Fet pulled into a bus space on Park Row, killing the engine.
“This park is one of the biggest rat nests in the city. We tried pulling out the ivy, ’cause it was such good ground cover. Changed the garbage containers, but it was no use. They play here like squirrels, especially at noon when the lunch crowd comes. Food makes them happy, but they can get food just about anywhere. It’s infrastructure that rats really crave.” He pointed to the ground. “Underneath, in there, is an abandoned subway station. The old City Hall stop.”
Setrakian said, “It still connects?”
“Everything connects underground, one way or another.”
They watched, and did not wait for long.
“There,” said Setrakian.
Eph saw a bedraggled-looking woman by a streetlight, some thirty yards away. “A homeless woman,” he said.
“No,” said Setrakian, handing his heat scope to Eph.
Eph saw, through the scope, the woman as a fierce blur of red against a cool, dim background.
“Their metabolism,” said Setrakian. “There is another.”
A heavy woman waddling, still getting her sea legs, staying in the shadows along the low iron fence ringing the park.
Then another: a man wearing a newspaper hawker’s change apron, carrying a body on his shoulder. Dropping it over the fence, then clumsily scaling it himself. He fell going over, ripping one leg of his pants, standing back up without any reaction and picking up his victim and continuing into the tree cover.
“Yes,” said Setrakian. “This is it.”
Eph shivered. The presence of these walking pathogens, these humanoid diseases, repulsed him. He felt sick watching them stagger into the park, lower animals obeying some unconscious impulse, withdrawing from the light. He sensed their hurry, like commuters trying to catch that last train home.
