Voices pulled Zack out of the video. Voices from the street below. He shut the laptop and stood, staying back, peering over the raised edge of the roof down to 118th Street.
A group of five men walked up the block toward the pawnshop, trailed by a slow-moving SUV. They carried weapons — guns — and were pounding on every door. The SUV stopped before the intersection, right outside the front of the pawnshop. The men on foot approached the building, rattling the security gates. Calling, “Open up!”
Zack backed away. He turned to go to the roof door, figuring he’d better get back to his room in case anyone came looking.
Then he saw her. A girl, a teenager, high school probably. Standing on the next roof over, across an empty lot around the corner from the shop entrance. The breeze lifted her long nightshirt, ruffling it around her knees, but did not move her hair, which hung straight and heavy.
She stood on the raised edge of the roof. The very edge, balanced perfectly, no wavering in her posture. Poised at the brink, as though wanting to try to make the jump. The impossible leap. Wanting to and knowing she would fail.
Zack stared. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. But he suspected.
He raised a hand anyway. He waved to her.
She stared back at him.
Dr. Nora Martinez, late of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unlocked the front door. Five men in combat gear with armored vests and assault weapons stared her down through the security grate. Two of them wore kerchiefs, covering their lower faces.
“Everything all right in there, ma’am?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” said Nora, looking for badges or any kind of insignia and seeing none. “So long as this grate holds up, everything is fine.”
“We’re going door-to-door,” said another. “Clearing blocks. Some trouble down that way”—he pointed toward 117th Street—“but we think the worst of it is moving downtown from this direction.” Meaning Harlem.
“And you are…?”
“Concerned citizens, ma’am. You don’t want to be in here all alone.”
“She’s not,” said Vasiliy Fet, the New York City Bureau of Pest Control Services worker and independent exterminator, appearing behind her.
The men sized up the big man. “You the pawnbroker?”
“My father,” said Fet. “What sort of trouble are you seeing?”
“Trying to get a handle on these freaks rioting in the city. Agitators and opportunists. Taking advantage of a bad situation, making it worse.”
“You sound like cops,” said Fet.
“If you’re thinking about leaving town,” said another one, avoiding the topic, “you should go now. Bridges are stacked up, tunnels jammed. Place is going to shit.”
Another said, “You should think about getting out here and helping us. Do something about this.”
Fet said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Let’s go!” called the driver of the SUV idling in the street.
“Good luck,” said one of the men, with a scowl. “You’ll need it.”
Nora watched them go, then locked the door. She stepped back into the shadows. “They’re gone,” she said.
Ephraim Goodweather, who had been watching from the side, emerged. “Fools,” he said.
“Cops,” said Fet, watching them round the street corner.
“How do you know?” asked Nora.
“You can always tell.”
“Good thing you stayed out of sight,” Nora said to Eph.
Eph nodded. “Why no badges?”
Fet said, “Probably got off shift and huddled up at happy hour, decided this wasn’t how they were going to let their city go out. Wives all packed up for Jersey, they’ve got nothing to do now but bang some heads. Cops feel they run the place. And they’re not half wrong. Street-gang mentality. It’s their turf and they’ll fight for it.”
“When you think about it,” said Eph, “they’re really not that much different than us right now.”
Nora said, “Except that they’re carrying lead when they should be wielding silver.” She slipped her hand into Eph’s. “I wish we could have warned them.”
“Trying to warn people is how I got to be a fugitive in the first place,” said Eph.
Eph and Nora were the first to board the dead plane after SWAT team members discovered the apparently dead passengers. The realization that the bodies weren’t decomposing naturally, coupled with the disappearance of the coffin-like cabinet during the solar occultation, had helped convince Eph that they were facing an epidemiological crisis which could not be explained by normal medical and scientific means. The grudging realization opened him up to the revelations of the pawnbroker, Setrakian, and the terrible truth behind the plague. His desperation to warn the world of the true nature of the disease — the vampiric virus moving insidiously through the city and out into the boroughs — led to a break with the CDC, which then tried to silence him with a trumped-up charge of murder. He had been a fugitive ever since.
He looked to Fet. “Car packed?”
“Ready to go.”
Eph squeezed Nora’s hand. She did not want to let him go.
Setrakian’s voice came down the spiral stairs in back of the showroom. “Vasiliy? Ephraim! Nora!”
“Down here, professor,” replied Nora.
“Someone approaches,” he said.
“No, we just got rid of them. Vigilantes. Well-armed ones.”
“I don’t mean someone human,” said Setrakian. “And I cannot find young Zack.”
Zack’s bedroom door banged open, and he turned. His dad blew in, looking like he expected a fight. “Jeez, Dad,” said Zack, sitting up in his sleeping bag.
Eph looked all around the room. “Setrakian said he just looked in here for you.”
“Uhh…” Zack made a show of rubbing his eye. “Must not have seen me on the floor.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Eph looked at Zack a bit longer, not believing him, but clearly with something more pressing on his mind than catching his son in a lie. He walked around the room, checking the barred window. Zack noticed that he held one hand behind his back, and moved in such a way that Zack could not see what he held there.
Nora rushed in behind him, then stopped when she saw Zack.
“What is it?” asked Zack, getting to his feet.
His dad shook his head reassuringly, but the smile came too quickly — just a smile, no levity in his eyes, none at all. “Just looking around. You wait here, ’kay? I’ll be back.”
He exited, turning in such a way that the thing behind his back remained obscured. Zack wondered: was it the
“Stay put,” said Nora, and closed the door.
Zack wondered what it was they were looking for. Zack had heard his mother mention Nora’s name once in a fight with his dad — well, not a fight really, since they were already split up, but more of a venting. And Zack had seen his dad kiss her that one time — right before he left them and went off with Mr. Setrakian and Fet. Then she had been so tense and preoccupied the whole time they were gone. And once they returned — everything had changed. Zack’s dad had looked so down — Zack never wanted to see him look that way again. And Mr. Setrakian came back sick. Zack, in his subsequent snooping, had caught some of the talk, but not enough.
Something about a “master.”
Something about sunlight and failing to “destroy it.”
Something about “the end of the world.”
As Zack stood alone in the spare room now, puzzling out all these mysteries swirling around him, he noticed a blur in a few of the mirrors hanging on the wall. A distortion, akin to a visual vibration — something that should have been in focus but instead appeared hazy and indistinct in the glass.
