The custom van in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade pulled to a stop right outside the canopied entrance of the Black Forest Solutions meatpacking facility in Upstate New York.
Handlers from both the lead and trailing SUVs opened large black umbrellas as the rear van doors opened and an automatic ramp was lowered to the driveway.
A wheelchair was rolled out backward, its occupant immediately surrounded by the umbrellas and quickly shuttled inside.
The umbrellas did not come down until the chair reached a windowless expanse among the animal pens. The occupant of the wheelchair was a sun-shy figure wearing a burka-like habit.
Eldritch Palmer, watching the entrance from the side, made no attempt to greet the occupant, but instead awaited its unveiling. Palmer was supposed to be meeting with the Master, not one of its wretched Third Reich flunkies. But the Dark One was nowhere to be seen. Palmer realized then that he had not had an audience with the Master since its run-in with Setrakian.
A small, impolite smile curled the edges of Palmer’s lips. Was he pleased that the disgraced professor had shown the Master some disgrace? No, not exactly. Palmer had zero affection for lost causes such as Abraham Setrakian. Still, as a man used to being president and CEO, Palmer didn’t mind that the Master had been shown something in the way of humility.
He chastised himself then, admonishing himself to never let these thoughts enter his mind in the presence of the Dark One.
The Nazi removed his coverings layer by layer. Thomas Eichhorst, the Nazi who had once headed the Treblinka extermination camp, arose from the wheelchair, the black sun-coverings piled at his feet like so many sloughed layers of flesh. His face retained the arrogance of a camp commandant, though the decades had worn away the edges like a fine acid. His flesh was smooth as a mask of ivory. Unlike any other Eternal Palmer had ever met, Eichhorst insisted on wearing a suit and tie, maintaining the bearing of an undead gentleman.
Palmer’s dislike for the Nazi had nothing whatsoever to do with his crimes against humanity. Palmer was in the midst of overseeing a genocide himself. Rather, his distaste for Eichhorst was borne out of envy. He resented Eichhorst’s blessing of Eternity — the great gift of the Master — because he coveted it so.
Palmer then recalled his first introduction to the Master, a meeting facilitated by Eichhorst. This had followed three full decades of searching and researching, of exploring that seam where myth and legend met historical reality. Palmer finally tracked down the Ancients themselves, and finagled an introduction. They turned down his request to join their Eternal clan, refusing him flatly, even though Palmer knew they had accepted into their rare 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.
“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?”
“My time is due
“I will remind you of his — and your — unfinished business with Setrakian, your former pet prisoner.”
“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.
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.
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
