The Night Eternal

Near a barred exit door, he saw a large control panel of colored pipes. He freed a fire axe from its glass cabinet—it felt so heavy, so big. Repeatedly, he chopped at the gaskets of all three feeds, using more the ax’s weight than his own fading strength, until gas came whistling out. He pushed through the door and found himself in the spitting rain, standing in a muddy sitting area of park benches and cracked walkways overlooking Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the rain-swept East River. And for some reason all he could think of was a line from an old movie, Young Frankenstein—“It could be worse. It could be raining.” He chuckled. He had seen that movie with Zack. For weeks they had quoted punch lines from it to each other. “There wolf… there castle.”

He was behind the hospital. No time to run for the street. He instead rushed across the small park, needing to put as much space between him and the building as possible.

As he reached the far edge, he saw more vamps coming up the high wall from Roosevelt Drive. More assassins dispatched by the Master, their high-metabolism bodies steaming in the rain.

Eph ran at them, waiting for the building behind him to explode and collapse at any moment. He kicked back the first few, forcing them off the wall down to the parkway below—where they landed on their hands and feet, righting themselves immediately, like unkillables in a video game. Eph ran along the top edge of the wall, toward the NYU Medical Center buildings, trying to get away from Bellevue. Before him, a long-taloned vamp hand gripped the top of the wall, a bald, red-eyed face appearing. Eph dropped to his knee, jabbing the end of his sword blade into the vamp’s open mouth, the point reaching the back of its hot throat. But he did not run it through, did not destroy it. The silver blade burned it, keeping its jaw from unhinging and unleashing its stinger.

The vampire could not move. Its red-rimmed eyes glared at Eph in confusion and pain.

Eph said, “Do you see me?”

The vamp’s eyes showed no reaction. Eph was addressing not it but the Master, watching through this creature.

“Do you see this?”

He turned the sword, forcing the vamp’s perspective toward Bellevue. Other creatures were scaling the wall, and some were already running out of the hospital, alerted to Eph’s escape. He had only moments. He feared that his sabotage had failed, that the leaking gas had instead found a safe way out of the hospital building.

Eph got back in the vamp’s face as though it were the Master’s itself.

“Give me back my son!”

He had just finished the last word as the building erupted behind him, throwing Eph forward, his sword piercing the back of the vampire’s throat and exiting its neck. Eph tumbled off the wall, gripping the handle of his sword, the blade sliding out of the vampire’s face as together they twisted and fell.

Eph landed on the roof of an abandoned car, one of many lining the inside lane of the roadway. The vampire slammed into the road next to him.

Eph’s hip took the brunt of the impact. Over the ringing in his ears, Eph heard a high whistling scream and looked up into the black rain. He watched something like a missile shoot out from high above, arc overhead, and splash down into the river. One of the oxygen tanks.

Mortar-heavy bricks thumped down onto the road. Shards of glass fell like jewels in the rain, shattering on the road. Eph covered his head with his coat as he slid down off the dented roof, ignoring the pain in his side.

Only as he stood up did he notice two shards of glass, lodged firmly in his calf. He yanked them out. Blood poured from the wounds. He heard a wet, excited squeal…

A few yards away, the vamp lay on its back, dazed, white blood gurgling from the perforation in the back of its neck—but still excited and hungry. Eph’s blood was its call for dinner.

Eph got in its face, gripping its broken, dislodged chin, and saw its red eyes focus on him, then on the silver point of his blade.

“I want my son, you motherfucker!” yelled Eph.

He then released the strigoi with a vicious chop to the throat, severing its head and its communication with the Master.

Limping, bleeding, he got up again. “Zack…,” he murmured. “Where are you…?”

Then he started his long journey back home.

Central Park