The Fall

Fet chewed his cigar. “The sun did hurt it, at least. Who knows how long that thing would have been able to take the exposure. And you-you cut him. With the silver.” Eph had gotten in a half-lucky slash across the Master’s back, which the sun’s subsequent exposure fused into an instant black scar. “If it can be hurt, I guess it can be destroyed. Right?”

“But-isn’t a wounded animal more dangerous?”

“Animals, like people, are motivated by pain and fear. But this thing? Pain and fear are where it lives. It doesn’t need any additional motivation.”

“To wipe us all out.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Would he want to wipe out all of mankind? I mean-we’re his food. We’re his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He turns everyone into vamps, there goes his entire food supply. Once you kill all the chickens, no more eggs.”

Eph was impressed by Fet’s reasoning, the logic of an exterminator. “He’s got to maintain a balance, right? Turn too many people into vampires, you create too great a demand for human meals. Blood economics.”

“Unless there’s some other fate in store for us. I only hope the old man has the answers. If he doesn’t…”

“Then nobody does.”

They came up to the dingy tunnel junction. Eph held up his Luma lamp, the UVC rays bringing out the wild stains of vampire waste: their urine and excrement, whose biological matter fluoresced under the low light range. The stains were no longer the garish colors Eph remembered. These stains were fading. This meant that no vampires had revisited the spot recently. Perhaps, through their apparent telepathy, they had been warned away by the deaths of the hundreds of fellow creatures that Eph, Fet, and Setrakian had slain.

Fet used his steel rod to poke at the mound of discarded mobile phones, piled up like a cairn. A desultory monument to human futility-as though vampires had sucked the life out of people, and all that was left were their gadgets.

Fet said, quietly, “I’ve been thinking about something he said. He was talking about myths from different cultures and ages revealing similar basic human fears. Universal symbols.”

“Archetypes.”

“That was the word. Terrors common to all tribes and countries, deep in all humans across the board-diseases and plagues, warfare, greed. His point was, what if these things aren’t just superstitions? What if they are directly related? Not separate fears linked by our subconscious-but what if they have actual roots in our past? In other words, what if these aren’t common myths? What if they are common truths?”

Eph found it difficult to process theory down in the underbelly of the besieged city. “You’re saying that he’s saying that maybe we’ve always known…?”

“Yes-always feared. That this threat-this clan of vampires who subsist on human blood, and whose disease possesses human bodies-existed and was known. But as they went underground, or what-have-you, retreating into the shadows, the truth got massaged into myth. Fact became folklore. But this well of fear runs so deeply, throughout all peoples and all cultures, that it never went away.”

Eph nodded, interested but also distracted. Fet could stand back and consider the big picture, while Eph’s situation was the opposite of Fet’s. His wife-his ex-wife-had been taken, turned. And now she was hell-bent on turning her blood, her Dear One, their son. This plague of demons had affected him on a personal level, and he was finding it difficult to focus on anything else, never mind theorizing on the grand scale of things-though that was, in fact, his training as an epidemiologist. But when something this insidious enters your personal life, all superior thinking goes out the window.

Eph found himself increasingly obsessed with Eldritch Palmer, the head of the Stoneheart Group and one of the three richest men in the world-and the man they had identified as the Master’s co-conspirator. As the domestic attacks had scaled up, doubling each passing night, the strain spreading exponentially, the news insisted on reducing them to mere “riots.” This was akin to calling a revolution an isolated protest. They had to know better, and yet someone-it had to be Palmer, a man with a vested interest in misleading the American public and the world at large-was influencing the media and controlling the CDC. Only his Stoneheart Group could finance and enforce such a massive campaign of public misinformation about the occultation. Eph had determined, privately, that if they could not readily destroy the Master, well, they could certainly destroy Palmer, who was not only elderly but notoriously infirm. Any other man would have passed on ten years ago, but Palmer’s vast fortune and unlimited resources kept him alive, like an antique vehicle requiring round-the-clock maintenance just to keep it running. Life, the doctor in Eph imagined, had become for Palmer something akin to a fetish: How long could he keep going?