The Fall

Fet came alongside Eph, lamp in hand. Eph started toward the vampires, but Fet caught his arm. Whereas Eph was breathing hard, the exterminator proceeded in a businesslike manner, focused without distress.

“Wait,” said Fet. “Leave them for Barnes’s FBI buddies.”

Eph, seeing the advantage of Fet’s idea, backed off, still with his lamp trained on them. “Now what?”

“Those others ran. There’s a way out.”

Eph looked at the next door. “You better be right,” he said.

Fet took the lead belowground, following the trail of dried urine fluorescing underneath the Luma lamps. The rooms gave way to a series of cellars, connected by old, hand-dug tunnels. The ammonia markings went in many different directions, Fet selecting one, turning off at a junction.

“I like this,” he said, stamping muck off his boots. “Just like rat hunting, following the trail. The UV light makes it easy.”

“But how do they know these routes?”

“They’ve been busy. Exploring, foraging. You never heard of the Volstead Grid?”

“Volstead? Like the Volstead Act? Prohibition?”

“Restaurants, bars, speakeasies, they had to open up their cellars, go underground. This is a city that just keeps building over itself. Combine the old cellars and houses under there with the tunnels, aqueducts, and old utility pipes-and some say you can move block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, solely underground, between any two points in the city.”

“Bolivar’s place,” said Eph, remembering the rock star who had been one of the four survivors of Flight 753. His building was an old bootlegger’s house, with a secret gin cellar that linked to the subway tunnels below. Eph checked behind them as they passed a side tunnel. “How do you know where you’re going?”

Fet pointed to another hobo signal scratched into the stone, probably with one of the creature’s hardened talon nails. “We’re on to something here,” he said. “That’s all I know for sure. But I bet the Ferry Loop Station isn’t more than a block or two away.”

Nazareth, Pennsylvania

AUGUSTIN…

Augustin Elizalde got to his feet. He stood in a stew of absolute darkness. A palpable inky blackness without a hint of light. Like space with no stars. He blinked his eyes to make certain that they were open-and they were. No change.

Was this death? No place could be darker.

Must be. He was fucking dead.

Or-maybe they had turned him. Was he a vampire now, his body taken over, but this old part of him shut away in the darkness of his mind, like a prisoner in an attic? Maybe the coolness he felt and the hardness of the floor beneath his feet were just compensatory tricks of his brain. He was walled up forever inside his own head.

He crouched a bit, trying to establish his existence through movement and sensory impression. He grew dizzy due to the lack of a visual focal point, and set his feet wider apart. He reached up, jumping, but could feel no ceiling above him.

An occasional faint breeze rippled his shirt. It smelled like soil. Like earth.

He was underground. Buried alive.

Augustin…

Again. His mother’s voice calling to him as in a dream.

“Mama?”

His voice doubled back on him in a startling echo. He remembered her as he had left her: sitting in the bottom of her bedroom closet, under a great pile of clothes. Staring up at him with the leering hunger of a newly turned them.

Vampires, the old man said.

Gus turned, trying to guess in which direction the voice might have originated. He had nothing else to do but follow this voice.

He walked to a stone wall, feeling his way along its smooth and slowly curving face. His palms remained sore where the glass had cut him-the shard he had wielded in the murder (no-the destruction) of his brother-turned-vampire. He stopped to feel his wrists, and realized the handcuffs he had been wearing at the time of his escape from police custody-the ones whose chain the hunters had split-were now gone.

Those hunters. They had turned out to be vampires themselves, appearing on that street in Morningside Heights and battling the other vampires like two sides in a gang war. But the hunters were well equipped. They had weapons, and they were coordinated. They drove cars. They weren’t just the bloodthirsty attack drones like the ones Gus had faced and destroyed.

The last thing he remembered was them throwing Gus into the back of an SUV. But-why him?

Another puff of wind, like Mother Nature’s last breath, brushed against his face, and he followed it-hoping he was moving in the right direction. The wall ended at a sharp corner. He felt for the opposite side, his left, and found it the same: ending at a corner, with a gap in between. Just like a doorway.

Gus stepped through, and the new echo of his footsteps told him that this room was wider and higher-ceilinged than the rest. A faint smell here, familiar to him somehow. Trying to place it.

He got it. The cleaning solution he’d had to use in lockup, on maintenance detail. It was ammonia. Not enough to singe the inside of his nose.