Four stories below them, Angel caught it in his arms like a baby thrown from a burning building.
Fet turned, now able to fight two-handedly, sliding a dagger from the bottom of his pack and leading Setrakian to the escalators. The motorized staircases ran crisscross, side-by-side. Vampires on their way up — summoned to battle by the will of the Master — jumped tracks where the stairways crossed. Fet dispatched them with the tread of his boot and the tip of his sword, sending them sprawling down the moving stairs.
On the bottom flight, Setrakian looked back up through the gap. He saw Eichhorst high above on one of the upper floors, looking down.
The others had done most of the work for them in the lobby. Released vampire corpses lay twisted on the floor, faces and clawed hands frozen in a tableau of white-splattered agony. More vampire drones were pounding on the glass entrance, with still others on the way.
Gus led them back out through the smashed doors onto the sidewalk. Vampires came swarming from 71st and 72nd to the west, and York Avenue north and south. They came up out of the streets, rising through displaced manholes in the intersections. Fighting them off was like trying to bail out of a sinking ship, two vampires arriving for every one destroyed.
A pair of black Hummers rounded the corner hard, headlights angry, front grilles bumping down vampires, rugged tires squashing their bodies. A team of hunters stepped out, hooded and armed with crossbows, and immediately made their presence known. Vampire killing vampire, the drones getting mowed down by the elite guard.
Setrakian knew they had arrived either to escort him and the book directly to the Ancients, or to take possession of the Silver Codex outright. Neither option suited him. He remained close to the wrestler, who carried the book under his arm; his lumbering pace suited Setrakian’s slow legs. Upon learning the wrestler’s moniker, “The Silver Angel,” Setrakian had to smile.
Fet led the way to the corner of 72nd and York. The manhole he wanted had already been popped open, and he grabbed Creem and sent him down first, to clear the hole of vampires. He let Angel and Setrakian down next, the wrestler barely fitting inside the hole. Then Eph, without any questions, climbing right down the iron ladder rungs. Gus and the rest of the Sapphires hung back in order to allow the vampires to close in on them, then went down themselves, Fet disappearing below just as the ring of mayhem collapsed on him.
“Other way!” he yelled down to them. “Other way!”
They had started west along the sewer tunnel, toward the heart of the island underground, but Fet dropped down and led them east, underneath one long block that dead-ended over FDR Drive. The trough of the tunnel carried a measly trickle of water; lack of human activity in surface Manhattan meant fewer showers, fewer flushes.
“All the way to the end!” said Fet, his voice booming inside the stone tube.
Eph came up alongside Setrakian. The old man was slowing, the nub of his walking stick splashing in the water stream. “Can you make it?” said Eph.
“Have to,” said Setrakian.
“I saw Palmer. Today is the day. The last day.”
Setrakian said, “I know it.”
Eph patted Angel’s arm, the one that held the bubble-wrapped book. “Here.” Eph took the bundle from him, and the hobbling Mexican giant took Setrakian’s arm, helping the old man along.
Eph looked at the wrestler as they rushed, filled with questions he knew not how to ask.
“Here they come!” said Fet.
Eph looked back. Mere shapes in the dark tunnel, to his eyes, coming at them like a dark rush of drowning water.
Two of the Sapphires turned back to fight. “No!” cried Fet. “Don’t bother! Just get through here!”
Fet slowed between two long wooden cases strapped to pipes along the tunnel walls. They looked like speaker bars, set vertically, angled in toward the tunnel. To each, he had rigged a simple switch wire, both of which he gathered in his hands now.
“Down the side!” he yelled to the others behind him. “Through the panel.”
But none of them turned the corner. The sight of the onrushing vampires and Fet standing alone in the tunnel holding the triggers to Setrakian’s contraption was too compelling.
Out of the darkness came the first faces, red-eyed, mouths open. Tumbling over one another in an all-out race to be the first to attack the humans,
Fet waited, and waited, and waited, until they were nearly upon him. His voice rose in a yell that started in his throat, but by the end seemed to come straight from his mind, a howl of human perseverance into the gale force of a hurricane.
Their hands reached out, the tide of vampires about to overwhelm him — as he flicked both switches.
The effect was something like the ignition of a giant camera flashbulb. The twin devices went off simultaneously in a single explosion of silver. An expulsion of chemical matter that eviscerated the vampires in a wave of devastation. Those in the rear went as quickly as those at the vanguard, because there was no shadow to hide in, the silver particulate burning through them like radiation, smashing their viral DNA.
The silver tinge lingered in the moments after the great purge, like a shiny snowfall, Fet’s howl fading into the emptied tunnel as the shredded matter that was the once-human vampires settled to the tunnel floor.
Gone. As though he had teleported them somewhere else. Like taking a picture, only once the flash faded, no one was there.
No one complete, at least.
Fet released the triggers and turned back at Setrakian.
Setrakian said, “Indeed.”
They followed another ladder, leading down to a walkway with a railing. At the end was a door that opened onto an under-sidewalk grate, the surface visible above them. Fet climbed up the boxes he had set as steps, and popped the loosened grate free with his shoulder.
They emerged at the 73rd Street ramp entrance onto FDR Drive. A few strays blundered into them as they rushed across the six-lane parkway over the dividing concrete barriers, moving around abandoned cars toward the East River.
Eph looked back, seeing vampires dropping down off the high balcony that was the courtyard at the end of 72nd Street. They came swarming out of 73rd along the parkway. Eph worried that they were backing themselves up against the river, with blood-hungry revenants closing on all sides.
But on the other side of a low iron fence was a landing, a municipal dock of sorts, though it was too dark for Eph to see what it was for. Fet went over first, moving with surly confidence, and so Eph followed with all the others.
Fet ran to the end of the landing, and Eph saw it now: a tugboat, large tires tied all the way around its sides, acting as fenders. They climbed onto the main deck, Fet running up into the wheel-house. The engine started with a cough and a roar, and Eph untied the aft end. The boat lurched at first, Fet pushing it too hard, then launched away from the island.
Out on the West Channel, floating a few dozen yards off the edge of Manhattan, Eph watched the horde of vampires clamor to the edge of FDR Drive. They bunched there, trailing the boat along its slow southern path, unable to venture out over moving water.
The river was a safe zone. A no-vamp’s-land.
Beyond the plunderers, Eph looked up at the looming buildings of the darkened city. Behind him, above Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the East River, were pockets of daylight — not pure sunlight, for it was evidently an overcast day, but clarity — between the smoke-veiled landmasses of Manhattan and Queens.
They approached the Queensboro Bridge, gliding underneath the high cantilever span. A bright flash streaked across the Manhattan skyline, turning Eph’s head. Then another went up, like a modest firework. Then a third.
Illumination flares, in orange and white.
A vehicle came tearing up FDR Drive toward the throng of vampires following the boat. It was a Jeep, soldiers in camouflage standing out of the back, firing automatic weapons into the crowd.
“The Army!” said Eph. He felt something he hadn’t felt in some time: hope. He looked around for Setrakian, and, not seeing him, headed into the main cabin.
