Dust billowed out, the surviving vamps starting to rise all around them. Only those few who had been beaned by flying bricks stayed dead. The others recovered quickly from the blast, and once again turned their hungry gaze on the Sapphires.
From the corner of his eye, Gus saw Quinlan running away to the opposite side of the street, leaping down a short stairwell leading to a basement apartment. Gus didn’t understand his retreat until he looked back to the destruction he had caused.
The explosive punch to the immediate atmosphere had rolled up to the smoke cover, the burst of moving air creating a rupture. A breach parted the blackness, allowing bright, cleansing sunlight to come pouring down.
The smoke opened, the sun line riding out from the impact site, spreading in a bright yellow cone of irradiating power — the dumb vamps sensing the impending rays only too late.
Gus watched them dissipate around him with ghostly screams. Their bodies fell, reduced instantaneously to steam and cinder. Those few who were at a safe distance from the sun turned and ran into neighboring buildings for cover.
Only the feelers reacted intelligently, anticipating the spreading sun and grabbing Bolivar. The little ones fought him, working together to drag him back from the approaching line of killing sun — just in time, yanking up a sidewalk vent grate and pulling him, clawing, down into the underground.
Suddenly the Sapphires and Angel and Gus were alone on a sunny street. They still had their weapons in hand, but no enemy stood before them.
Just another sunny day in East Harlem.
Gus went to the disaster area, the pawnshop blown off its foundation. The basement was now exposed, full of smoking bricks and settling dust. He called over Angel, who hobbled in to help Gus shift some of the heavier chunks of mortar, clearing a path. Gus climbed down into the wreckage, and Angel followed. He heard a sizzling sound, but it was just severed electrical connections still live with juice. He tossed aside a few chunks of brick, searching the floor for bodies, still concerned that the old man might have been hiding there the whole time.
No corpses. He didn’t discover much of anything, really, just a lot of empty shelves. Almost as though the old man had recently cleared out. The door to the basement had been framed by the ultraviolet lamps now spitting orange sparks. Perhaps this had been a bunker of some sort, like a fallout shelter for a vampire attack — or else a kind of vault built to keep their kind out.
Gus lingered there longer than he should have — with the smoke seam already repairing itself, closing up on the sun once again — digging through the rubble for something, anything that might help him in his cause.
Concealed beneath a fallen wooden beam, Angel discovered, on its side, a small, sealed keepsake box made entirely of silver. A beautiful find. He lifted it up, showing it to the gang, and Gus in particular.
Gus took the box from him. “The old man,” he said. And smiled.
When the old Pennsylvania Station opened in 1910, it had been considered a monument to excess. An opulent temple of mass transportation, and the largest interior space in all of New York, a city inclined toward excess even a century ago.
The demolition of the original station, which began in 1963, and its replacement by the current warren of tunnels and corridors, is viewed historically as a catalyst for the modern historical preservation movement, in that it was perhaps the first — and some say still the greatest — failure of “urban renewal.”
Penn Station remained the busiest transportation hub in the United States, serving 600,000 passengers per day, four times as many as Grand Central Station. It served Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and New Jersey Transit — with a Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) station just one block away, accessible back then by an underground passageway that had been now closed for many years for security reasons.
The modern Penn Station used the same underground platforms as the original Penn Station. Eph had booked Zack, Nora, and Nora’s mother on the Keystone Service, straight through Philadelphia to its terminus, the state capital, Harrisburg. It was normally a four-hour trip, though significant delays were expected. Once there, Nora would survey the situation and arrange transportation to the girls’ camp.
Eph left the van at an empty cab stand a block away and walked them through the quiet streets to the station. A dark cloud hung over the city, both literally and figuratively, smoke hovering ominously as they passed empty storefronts. Display windows were broken, and yet even the looters were gone — most of them turned into looters of human blood.
How far and how fast the city had fallen.
Only once they reached the Seventh Avenue entrance at Joe Louis Plaza, underneath the Madison Square Garden sign, did Eph recognize a hint of the New York of two weeks ago, of last month. Cops and Port Authority workers in orange vests directed the downtrodden crowd, maintaining order as they moved them inside.
The stopped escalators allowed people down onto the concourse. The unceasing foot traffic had allowed the station to remain one of the last bastions of humanity in a city of vampires — resisting colonization despite its proximity to the underground. Eph was certain that most, if not all, trains were delayed, but it was enough that they were still running. The rush of panicked people reassured him. If the trains were stopped, this would have turned into a riot.
Few of the overhead lights were working. None of the stores were open, their shelves all empty, handwritten CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE signs taped to the windows.
The groan of a train arriving on a lower platform reassured Eph as he shouldered Nora and Mrs. Martinez’s bag, Nora seeing to it that her mother did not fall. The concourse was jammed, and yet he welcomed the press of the crowd; he had missed the feeling of being an organism surrounded by a throng of humanity.
National Guard soldiers waited up ahead, looking drawn and exhausted. Still, they were scanning faces as they went past, and Eph remained a wanted man.
Add to that the fact that he had Setrakian’s silver-loaded pistol stuffed into the back of his waistband, and Eph accompanied them only as far as the great blue pillars, pointing out the Amtrak lounge gate around the bend.
Mariela Martinez looked scared and even somewhat angry. The crowd annoyed her. Nora’s mother, a former home healthcare worker, had been diagnosed two years ago with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Sometimes she thought Nora was sixteen years old, which occasionally led to trouble over who was in charge of whom. Today, however, she was quiet, overwhelmed and operating deep within herself, out of her element here and anxious about being away from home. No cross words for her departed husband; no insisting on getting dressed for a party. She wore a long raincoat over a saffron-colored housecoat, her hair hanging heavily behind her in a thick, gray braid. She had taken to Zack already, holding his hand on the ride in, which pleased Eph even as it tugged at his heart.
Eph knelt down in front of his son. The boy looked away, like he didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to say good-bye. “You help Nora with Mrs. Martinez, okay?”
Zack nodded. “Why does it have to be a girls’ camp?”
“Because Nora is a girl and she went there. It’s only going to be you three.”
“And you,” Zack said quickly. “When are you coming?”
“Very soon, I hope.”
Eph had his hands on Zack’s shoulders. Zack brought his hands up to grip Eph’s forearms. “You promise?”
“Soon as I can.”
“That’s not a promise.”
Eph squeezed his boy’s shoulders, selling the lie. “I promise.”
Zack wasn’t buying it, Eph could tell. He could feel Nora looking down at them.
Eph said, “Gimme a hug.”
“Why?” said Zack, pulling back a bit. “I’ll hug you when I see you in Pennsylvania.”
Eph flashed a smile. “One to tide me over then.”
“I don’t see why—”
Eph pulled him close, gripping him tightly while the crowd swirled past them. The boy struggled, but not really, and then Eph kissed his cheek and released him.
Eph stood and Nora pushed in front of him, gently backing Eph up two steps. Her brown eyes were fierce,
