The Night Eternal

Others were lit by artificial light, city zones rebuilt by humans overseen by the Stoneheart Foundation, at the direction of the Master: light was critical for work in a world that was dark for as many as twenty-two hours each calendar day. Power grids all across the globe had collapsed following initial electromagnetic pulses that were the result of multiple nuclear detonations. Voltage overruns had burned out electrical conductors, plunging much of the world into vampire-friendly darkness. People very quickly came to the realization—terrifying and brutal in its impact—that a creature race of superior strength had seized control of the planet and that man had been supplanted at the top of the food chain by beings whose own biological needs demanded a diet of human blood. Panic and despair swept the continents. Infected armies fell silent. In the time of consolidation following Night Zero, as the new, poisonous atmosphere continued to roil and cure overhead, so did the vampires establish a new order.

The subway train slowed as it approached Queensboro Plaza. Eph lifted his foot from the rear step, hanging from the blind side of the car so as not to be seen from the platform. The heavy, constant rain was good for one thing only: obscuring him from the vampires’ watchful, blood-red eyes.

He heard the doors slide open, people shuffling in and out. The automated track announcements droned from overhead speakers. The doors closed and the train began moving again. Eph regripped the window frame with his sore fingers and watched the dim platform recede from his vision, sliding away down the line like the world of the past, shrinking, fading, swallowed up by the polluted rain and the night.

The subway train soon dipped underground, out of the driving rain. After two more stops, it entered the Steinway Tunnel, beneath the East River. It was modern conveniences such as this—the amazing ability to travel beneath a swift river—that contributed to the human race’s undoing. Vampires, forbidden by nature from crossing a body of moving water under their own power, were able to circumvent such obstacles by the use of tunnels, long-distance aircraft, and other rapid-transit alternatives.

The train slowed, approaching Grand Central Station—and just in time. Eph readjusted his grip on the subway car’s exterior, fighting fatigue, tenaciously holding on to his homemade hooks. He was malnourished, as thin now as he had been as a freshman in high school. He had grown accustomed to the persistent, gnawing emptiness in the pit of his belly; he knew that protein and vitamin deficiencies affected not only his bones and muscles but also his mind.

Eph hopped off before it came to a full stop, stumbling to the rock bed between the tracks. He rolled on his left shoulder, landing like an expert. He flexed his fingers, unlocking the arthritis-like paralysis of his knuckles, putting away the hooks. The train’s rear light shrank up ahead, and he heard the grating of steel wheels braking against steel rails, a metallic shriek his ears never got used to.

He turned and hobbled off the other way, deeper into the tunnel. He had traveled this route enough times that he did not need his night scope to reach the next platform. The third rail was not a concern, covered with wood casing, in fact making for a convenient step up onto the abandoned platform.

Construction materials remained on the tile floor, a renovation interrupted at its earliest stage: scaffolding, a stack of pipe sections, bales of tubing wrapped in plastic. Eph pushed back his wet hood and reached into his pack for his night-vision scope, strapping it over his head, the lens fitting in front of his right eye. Satisfied that nothing had been disturbed since his last visit, he moved toward the unmarked door.

At its pre-vampire peak, half a million people daily crossed the polished Tennessee marble of the Grand Concourse floor somewhere above him. Eph could not risk entering the main terminal—the half-acre concourse afforded few places to hide—but he had been up on the catwalks on the roof. There, he had looked at the monuments to a lost age: landmark skyscrapers such as the MetLife Building and the Chrysler Building, dark and silent against the night. He had climbed above the two-story-high air-conditioning units on the terminal roof, standing on the pediment facing Forty-second Street and Park Avenue, among colossal statues of the Roman gods Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury above the great clock of Tiffany glass. On the central section of the roof, he had looked down more than a hundred feet to the cathedral-like Grand Concourse. That was as close as he had gotten.

Eph eased open the door, his scope seeing into the total darkness beyond. He climbed two long flights of stairs, then went through another unlocked door into a long corridor. Thick steam pipes ran the length of it, still functioning, groaning with heat. By the time he reached the next door, he was dripping with sweat.