The hordes took control of the streets. Riot police, SWAT, the U.S. Army—the tide of monsters overtook them all. Those who submitted, those who surrendered themselves, remained as guards and keepers.
The Master’s plan was a resounding success. In brutally Darwinian fashion, the Master had selected the survivors for compliance and malleability. Its growing strength was nothing short of terrifying. With the Ancients destroyed, its control over the horde—and through them, the world—had broadened and become ever more sophisticated. The strigoi no longer roamed the streets like raving zombies, raiding and feeding at will. Their movements were coordinated. Like bees in a hive or ants in a hill, they apparently each had clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They were the Master’s eyes on the street.
In the beginning daylight was entirely gone. A few seconds of faint sunlight could be glimpsed when the sun was at its zenith, but other than that, the darkness was unremitting. Now, two years later, the sun filtered through the poisoned atmosphere for only two hours each day, but the pale light it gave was nothing like the sunlight that had once warmed Earth.
The strigoi were everywhere, like spiders or ants, making sure that those left alive were truly fitting back into a routine . . .
And yet the most shocking thing of all was . . . how little life had truly changed. The Master capitalized on the societal chaos of the first few months. Deprivation—of food, clean water, sanitation, law enforcement—terrorized the populace, so much so that, once basic infrastructure was restored, once a program of food rations was implemented and the rebuilt electrical grid chased off the darkness of the long nights, they responded with gratitude and obedience. Cattle need the recompense of order and routine—the unambiguous structure of power—to surrender.
In fewer than two weeks, most systems were restored. Water, power . . . cable television was reintroduced, broadcasting all reruns now, without commercials. Sports, news, everything a repeat. Nothing new was produced. And . . . people liked it.
Rapid transit was a priority in the new world, because personal automobiles were extremely rare. Cars were potential bombs and as such had no place in the new police state. Cars were impounded and crushed. All vehicles on the street belonged to public services: police, fire department, sanitation—they were all operational, manned by complying humans.
Airplanes had suffered the same fate. The only active fleet was controlled by Stoneheart, the multinational corporation whose grip on food distribution, power, and military industries the Master had exploited in its takeover of the planet, and it consisted of roughly 7 percent of the planes that once crossed the world’s skies.
Silver was outlawed and became trade currency, highly desirable and exchangeable for coupons or food points. The right amount of it could even buy you, or a loved one, a way out of the farms.
The farms were the only entirely different thing in this new world. That and the fact that there was no more educational system. No more schooling, no more reading, no more thinking.
The pens and slaughterhouses were manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Trained wardens and cattle drivers supplied the strigoi with the nutrients needed. The new class system was quickly established. A system of biological castes: the strigoi favored B positive. Any blood type would do, but B positive either provided extra benefits—like different grades of milk—or held its taste and quality better outside the body and was better for packaging and storing. Non-B’s were the workers, the farmers, the true grunts. B positives were the Kobe—the prime cut of beef. They were pampered, given benefits and nutrients. They even got double the exposure at the UV camps, to make sure their vitamin D took root. Their daily routine, their hormonal balance, and ultimately their reproduction were systematically regulated to keep up with the demand.
And so it was. People went to work, watched TV, ate their meals, and went to bed. But in the dark and in the silence they wept and stirred, knowing all too well that those they knew, those next to them—even the ones sharing the very bed they were lying on—could suddenly be gone, devoured by the concrete structure of the closest farm. And they bit their lips and cried, for there was no choice but to submit. There was always someone else (parents, siblings, children) who depended on them. Always someone else who gave them the license to be afraid, the blessing of cowardice.
Who would have dreamed that we would be looking back with great nostalgia at the tumultuous nineties and early noughts. The times of turmoil and political pettiness and financial fraud that preceded the collapse of the world order . . . it was a golden era by comparison. All that we were became lost—all social form and order in the way our fathers and forefathers understood it. We became a flock. We became cattle.
Those of us who are still alive but have not joined the system . . . we have become the anomaly . . . We are the vermin. Scavengers. Hunted.
With no way to fight back . . .
Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens
A SCREAM PEALED in the distance, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather startled awake. He thrashed on the sofa, flipping onto his back and sitting up, and—in one fluid, violent motion—gripped the worn leather sword handle jutting out of the pack on the floor at his side and slashed the air with a blade of singing silver.
His battle cry, hoarse and garbled, a fugitive from his nightmares, stopped short. His blade quivered, unmet.
He was alone.
Kelly’s house. Her sofa. Familiar things.
His ex-wife’s living room. The scream was a far-off siren, converted into a human shriek by his sleeping mind.
He had been dreaming again. Of fire and shapes—indefinable but vaguely humanoid—made of blinding light. A flashpoint. He was in the dream and these shapes wrestled with him right before the light consumed it all. He always awoke agitated and exhausted, as if he had physically grappled with an opponent. The dream came out of nowhere. He could be having the most domestic kind of reverie—a picnic, a traffic jam, a day at the office—and then the light would grow and consume it all, and the silvery figures emerged.
He blindly groped for his weapon bag—a modified baseball gear bag, looted many months before off the high rack of a ransacked Modell’s on Flatbush Avenue.
He was in Queens. Okay. Okay. Everything coming back to him now—accompanied by the first pangs of a jaw-clenching hangover. He had blacked out again. Another dangerous binge. He returned the sword to his weapons bag, then rolled back, holding his head in his hands like a cracked crystal sphere he had delicately picked up off the floor. His hair felt wiry and strange, his head throbbing.
Hell on earth. Right. Land of the damned.
Reality was an ornery bitch. He had awoken to a nightmare. He was still alive—and still human—which wasn’t much, but it was the best he could expect.
Just another day in hell.
The last thing he remembered from sleep, the fragment of the dream that clung to his consciousness like sticky afterbirth, was an image of Zack bathed in searing silver light. It was out of his shape that the flashpoint had occurred this time.
“Dad—” Zack said, and his eyes locked with Eph’s—and then the light consumed it all.
The remembrance of it raised chills. Why couldn’t he find some respite from this hell in his dreams? Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? To balance out a horrible existence with dreams of flight and escape? What he wouldn’t have given for a reverie of pure sentimentality, a spoonful of sugar for his mind.
Eph and Kelly fresh out of college, ambling hand-in-hand through a flea market, looking for cheap furniture and knickknacks for their first apartment . . .
Zack as a toddler, stomping fat-footed around the house, a little boss in diapers . . .
Eph and Kelly and Zack at the dinner table, sitting with hands folded before full plates, waiting for Z to plow through his obsessively thorough saying of grace . . .
Instead, Eph’s dreams were like badly recorded snuff films. Familiar faces from his past—enemies, acquaintances, and
friends alike—being stalked and taken while he watched, unable to reach them, to help them, or even to turn away.
He sat up, steadying himself and rising, one hand on the back of the sofa. He left the living area and walked to the window overlooking the backyard. LaGuardia Airport was not far away. The sight of an airplane, the distant sound of a jet engine, was cause for wonder now. No lights circled the sky. He remembered September 11, 2001, and how the emptiness of the sky had seemed so surreal back then, and what a strange relief it was when the planes returned a week later. Now there was no relief. No getting back to normal.
Eph wondered what time it was. Sometime o’clock in the morning, he figured, judging by his own failing circadian rhythm. It was summer—at least according to the old calendar—and so the sun should have been high and hot in the sky.
Instead, darkness prevailed. The natural order of night and day had been shattered, presumably forever. The sun was obliterated by a murky veil of ash floating in the sky. The new atmosphere was comprised of the detritus of nuclear explosions and volcanic eruptions distributed around the globe, a ball of blue-green candy wrapped inside a crust of poisonous chocolate. It had cured into a thick, insulating cowl, sealing in darkness and cold and sealing out the sun.
Perennial nightfall. The planet turned into a pale, rotting netherworld of rime and torment.
The perfect ecology for vampires.
According to the last live news reports, long since censored but traded like porn on Internet boards, these post-cataclysm conditions were much the same around the world. Eyewitness accounts of the darkening sky, of black rain, of ominous clouds knitting together and never breaking apart. Given the planet’s rotation and wind patterns, the poles—the frozen north and south—were theoretically the only locations on Earth still receiving regular seasonal sunlight . . . though nobody knew this for certain.
The residual radiation hazard from the nuclear explosions and the plant meltdowns had been intense at first, catastrophically so at the various ground zeros. Eph and the others had spent nearly two months belowground, in a train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, and so were spared the short-term fallout. Extreme meteorological conditions and atmospheric winds spread the damage over large areas, which may have aided in dispersing the radioactivity; the fallout was expelled by the hard rainstorms created by the violent changes to the ecosystem, further diffusing the radiation. Fallout decays exponentially, and in the short term, areas without direct-impact exposure became safe for travel and decontamination within approximately six weeks.
The long-term effects were yet to come. Questions as to human fertility, genetic mutations, and increased carcinogenesis would not be answered for some time. But these very real concerns were overshadowed by the current situation: two years following the nuclear disasters and the vampiric takeover of the world, all fears were immediate.
The pealing siren went quiet. These warning systems, meant to repel human intruders and attract assistance, still went off from time to time—though much less frequently than in the early months, when the alarms wailed constantly, persistently, like the agonal screams of a dying race. Another vestige of civilization fading away.
In the absence of the alarm, Eph listened for intruders. Through windows, rising from dank cellars, descending from dusty attics—vampires entered through any opening, and nowhere was safe. Even the few hours of sunlight each day—a dim, dusky light, haven taken on a sickly amber hue—still offered many hazards. Daylight was human curfew time. The best time for Eph and the others to move—safe from direct confrontation by strigoi—was also one of the most dangerous, due to surveillance and the prying eyes of human sympathizers looking to improve their lot.
Eph leaned his forehead against the window. The coolness of the glass was a pleasant sensation against his warm skin and the throbbing inside his skull.
Knowing was the worst part. Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person—it only adds the burden of panic. Fear of the future, and the memory of a better, brighter past, were as much a source of Eph’s suffering as the vampire plague itself.
He needed food, he needed protein. Nothing in this house; he had cleaned it out of food—and alcohol—many months ago. Even found a secret stash of Butterfingers in Matt’s closet.
He backed off from the window, turning to face the room and the kitchen area beyond. He tried to remember how he got here and why. He saw slash marks in the wall where, using a kitchen knife, he had released his ex-wife’s boyfriend, decapitating the recently turned creature. That was back in the early days of slaying, when killing vampires was nearly as frightening as the notion of being turned by one. Even when the vampire in question had been his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a man poised to assume Eph’s place as the most important male figure in Zack’s life.
But that gag reflex of human morality was long gone now. This was a changed world, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, once a prominent epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a changed man. The virus of vampirism had colonized the human race. The plague had routed civilization in a coup d’état of astonishing virulence and violence. Insurgents—the willful, the powerful, and the strong—had all largely been destroyed or turned, leaving the meek, the defeated, and the fearful to do the Master’s bidding.
Eph returned to his weapon bag. From a narrow, zippered pocket meant for batting gloves or sweatbands, he pulled out his creased Moleskine notebook. These days he remembered nothing without writing it down in his tattered diary. Everything went in there, from the transcendental to the banal. Everything must be recorded. This was his compulsion. His diary was essentially a long letter to his son, Zack. Leaving a record of his search for his only boy. Noting his observations and theories involving the vampire menace. And, as a scientist, simply recording data and phenomena.
At the same time, it was also a helpful exercise for retaining some semblance of sanity.
His handwriting had grown so cramped over the past two years, he could barely read his own entries. He recorded the date each day, because it was the only reliable method of tracking time without a proper calendar. Not that it mattered much—except for today.
He scribbled down the date, and then his heart pushed a double beat. Of course. That was it. Why he was back here yet again.
Today was Zack’s thirteenth birthday.
YOU MAY NOT LIVE BEYOND THIS POINT warned the sign affixed to the upstairs door, written in Magic Marker, illustrated with gravestones and skeletons and crosses. It was drawn in a younger hand, done when Zack was seven or eight. Zack’s bedroom had been left essentially unchanged since the last time he’d occupied it, the same as the bedrooms of missing kids everywhere, a symbol of the stopping of time in the hearts of their parents.
Eph kept returning to the bedroom like a diver returning again and again to a sunken shipwreck. A secret museum; a world preserved exactly as it had once been. A window directly into the past.
Eph sat on the bed, feeling the mattress’s familiar give, hearing its reassuring creak. He had been through everything in this room, everything his boy used to touch in the life he used to lead. He curated this room now; he knew every toy, every figurine, every coin and shoestring, every T-shirt and book. He rejected the notion that he was wallowing. People don’t attend church or synagogue or mosque to wallow; they attend regularly as a gesture of faith. Zack’s bedroom was a temple now. Here, and here alone, Eph felt a sense of peace and an affirmation of inner resolve.
Zack was still alive.
This was not speculation. This was not blind hope.
Eph knew that Zack was still alive and that his boy had not yet been turned.
In past times—the way the world used to work—the parent of a missing child had resources to turn to. They had the comfort of the police investigative process, and the knowledge that hundreds, if not thousands, of people identified and sympathized with their plight and were actively
assisting in the search.
This abduction had occurred in a world without police, without human law. And Eph knew the identity of the being that had abducted Zack. The creature that was once his mother—yes. She committed the abduction. But her action was compelled by a larger entity.
The king vampire, the Master.
But Eph did not know why Zack had been taken. To hurt Eph, of course. And to satisfy his undead mother’s drive to revisit her “Dear Ones,” the beings she had loved in life. The insidious epidemiology of the virus spread in a vampiric perversion of human love. Turning them into fellow strigoi locked them to you forever, to an existence beyond the trials and tribulations of being human, devolving into only primal needs such as feeding, spreading, survival.
That was why Kelly (the thing that was once Kelly) had become so psychically fixated on their boy, and how, despite Eph’s best efforts, she had been able to spirit him away.
And it was precisely this same syndrome, this same obsessive passion for turning those closest to them, that confirmed to Eph that Zack had not been turned. For if the Master or Kelly had drunk the boy, then Zack would surely have returned for Eph as a vampire. Eph’s dread of this very occurrence—of having to face his undead son—had haunted him for two years now, at times sending him into a downward spiral of despair.
But why? Why hadn’t the Master turned Zack? What was it holding him for? As a potential marker to be played against Eph and the resistance effort he was part of? Or for some other more sinister reason that Eph could not—dared not—fathom?
Eph shuddered at the dilemma this would present to him. Where his son was concerned, he was vulnerable. Eph’s weakness was equal to his strength: he could not let go of his boy.
Where was Zack at that very moment? Was he being held somewhere? Being tormented as his father’s proxy? Thoughts like these clawed at Eph’s mind.
The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal Page 73