“I am merely reminding you that this is apparently not your first time around this particular block.” He sat back, crossing his legs and arms, in the manner of a debater with supreme confidence in his side of the argument. “This is not an unusual situation for you to find yourself in.”
“Wow,” said Nora. “You really are the imbecilic bigot I always thought you would be . . .”
Barnes smiled, unfazed. “I think your choice is an easy one. Life in the camp or—potentially, if you play your cards right—life here. It is a choice no sane person would deliberate over very long.”
Nora felt herself smiling in disbelief, her face twisted uncomfortably. “You dirty fuck,” she said. “You are worse than a vampire, you know that? It’s not need for you, just opportunity. A power trip. Real rape would be too messy for you. You’d rather tie me up with ‘luxuries.’ You want me grateful and compliant. Appreciative for your exploitation of me. You’re a monster. I can see why you fit so well into their plans. But there are not enough plums in this house, or on this ruined planet, that would make me—”
“Perhaps a few days in a harsher environment will change your mind.” Barnes’s eyes had hardened while she was dressing him down. Now suddenly he appeared even more interested in her, as though feeding off this power disparity. “And if you do indeed choose to remain there, isolated and in the dark—which is of course your right—let me remind you of what you have to look forward to. Your blood type happens to be B positive, which, for whatever reason—taste? some vitamin-like benefit?—is most desirable to the vampire class. This means that you will be bred. Since you have entered the camp without a mate, one will be selected for you. He will also be B positive, in order to increase the chances for birthing more B-positive offspring. Someone such as myself. That can easily be arranged. Then, for the rest of your fertility life cycle, you will be either pregnant or nursing. Which has its advantages, as you may have seen. Better housing, better rations, two fruit and vegetable servings per day. Of course, if you should have any trouble conceiving, then after a reasonable amount of time, allowing for numerous attempts using a variety of fertility drugs, you will be relegated to camp labor and five-day bloodletting. After a while, if I may be completely candid, you will die.” Barnes wore a tight smile on his face. “In addition, having taken the liberty of reviewing your intake forms, ‘Ms. Rodriguez,’ I believe you were admitted to the camp with your mother.”
Nora felt the skin on the back of her neck—where she once had hair—tingling.
“You were apprehended on the subway while trying to hide her. I wonder where you two were going.”
“Where is she?” said Nora.
“Still alive, in fact. But, as you might know, due to her age and obvious infirmity, she is scheduled to be bled and then permanently retired.”
These words clouded Nora’s vision.
“Now,” said Barnes, unfolding his arms in order to select a white-chocolate truffle, “it is entirely possible she could be spared. Perhaps . . . this is just coming to me now, but perhaps even brought here, in a sort of semi-retirement. Given her own room, possibly a nurse. She could be well cared for.”
Nora’s hands trembled.
“So . . . you wanna fuck me and you wanna play house?”
Barnes bit into his treat, delighted to find sweet cream inside. “You know, this could have gone much more congenially. I tried the soft sell. I am a gentleman, Nora.”
“You are a son of a bitch. That’s what you are.”
“Ha.” He nodded in enjoyment. “Your Spanish temper, right? Feisty. Good.”
“You goddamn monster.”
“You said that, yes. Now, there is one more thing that I want you to consider. You should know that what I should have done the instant I saw you there in the detention house was identify you and turn you over to the Master. The Master would be only too pleased to learn more about Dr. Goodweather and the rest of your band of rebels. Such as their current whereabouts and the extent of their resources. Even simply where you and your mother were headed on that Manhattan subway car—or where you were coming from.” Barnes smiled and nodded. “The Master would be extremely motivated to learn such information. I can say in total confidence that I believe the Master would enjoy your company even more than I would. And it would use your mother to get to you. No question about that. If you go back to the camp without me you will eventually be discovered. I can assure you of that, too.” Barnes stood, smoothing out the creases in his admiral’s uniform, brushing away the crumbs. “So—now you understand that you have a third option as well. A date with the Master, with eternity as a vampire.”
Nora’s gaze blurred into the middle distance. She felt lethargic, almost dizzy. She believed that this was something like what it must feel like to be bled.
“But you have a decision to mull over,” said Barnes. “I won’t keep you any longer. I know you want to get right back to the camp—to your mother, while she is still alive.” He went to the double doors, pushing them open out into the grand hallway. “Do think it over, and let me know what you decide. Time is running out . . .”
Unseen by him, Nora pocketed one of the butter knives at the table.
Beneath Columbia University
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HAD been, Gus knew, a big-shot school. Lots of old buildings, crazy expensive tuition, mucho security and cameras. He used to see some of the students out trying to mix with the neighborhood, some for community-minded reasons, which he never understood, and others for more illicit reasons, which he understood very well. But as for the university itself, the derelict Morningside Heights campus and all of its facilities, there was nothing much worth his time.
Now it was Gus’s base, his headquarters and his home. The Mexican gangbanger would never be made to leave his turf; indeed, he would blow it all up before allowing that to happen. As his sabotage and hunting activities dwindled in number and became more regimented, Gus started to look for a permanent base. He really needed it. It was hard to be efficient in this mad new world. Sticking it to the man became a 24/7 occupation, and one that was less and less rewarding every time. Police and fire departments, medical services, traffic surveillance—everything had been co-opted. When searching his old Harlem haunts for a place to coop, he’d connected with two of his La Mugre gangbangers and fellow saboteurs, Bruno Ramos and Joaquin Soto.
Bruno was fat—no other way to say it—fed mostly with Cheetos and beer. Joaquin was tight and lean. Groomed, tattooed, and full of ’tude. They were both brothers to Gus and they would die for him. Born ready.
Joaquin had done jail time with Gus. They’d done cell time together. Sixteen months for Gus. They’d watched each other’s back and Joaquin had done solitary for a good stretch after elbowing the teeth out of a guard, a big black guy named Raoul—what a fucked-up name for someone with no teeth: Raoul. After the vampires’ arrival—what some called the Fall—Gus had reconnected with Joaquin during the looting of an electronics store. Joaquin and Bruno helped him carry a big plasma TV and a box of video games.
Together they had taken the university and found it to be only slightly infested. Windows and doors were boarded and sealed with steel plates, the interiors razed and desecrated with ammonia waste. The students had all fled early, trying to evacuate the city and get back home. Joaquin guessed they never got very far.
What they found, in prowling around the deserted buildings, was a system of tunnels below the foundation. A book in the display case at the admissions office tipped Joaquin off to the fact that the campus had originally been erected on the grounds of a nineteenth-century insane asylum. The university architects had leveled all the existing hospital buildings except one and then built upon the existing foundations. Many of the linking tunnels were used for utilities, steam pipes generating scalding condensation, miles of electric wiring. Over time, a number of these passages had been boarded up or otherwise sealed in order to prevent injury to thrill-seeking students and urban spelunkers.
/> Together they had explored and claimed for themselves much of this underground network linking almost all of Columbia’s seventy-one campus buildings located between Broadway and Amsterdam on New York’s Upper West Side. Some more remote sections remained unexplored, simply because there wasn’t enough time in the day or night for hunting vampires, sowing chaos throughout Manhattan, and clearing musty tunnels.
Gus had carved out his own digs, concentrated in one quadrant of the campus’s main plaza. His domain started beneath the only remaining building original to the asylum, Buell Hall; ran beneath the Low Memorial Library and Kent Hall; and terminated at Philosophy Hall, the building outside of which was a bronze statue of a naked dude just sitting there, thinking.
The tunnels made for a cool crib, a real villain’s lair. The failure of the steam system meant he could access areas rarely visited in at least a century—the coarse black fibers sticking out of cracks in the underground walls were actual horsehairs used to strengthen the plaster mix—which had led him into a dank subbasement of iron-barred cells.
The loony bin. Where they caged up the maddest of the mad. No skeletons in chains or anything like that, though they had found scratches in the stonemasonry, like the jagged clawing of fingernails, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear ghostly echoes of the hideous, soul-baring screams from centuries past.
This was where he kept her. His madre. In an eight-by-six cage made of iron bars running ceiling to floor, forming a semicircle creating a corner cell. Gus’s mother’s hands were manacled behind her back with a pair of thick wrist cuffs he had found under a table in a nearby chamber, for which there was no key. A full-face black motorcycle helmet covered her head, much of the finish chipped away from her repeated headlong ramming against the bars during the first few months of her captivity. Gus had superglued the neck curtain of the helmet to her flesh. This was the only way he could fully contain her vampire stinger, for his own safety. It also covered the growing turkey wattle, the sight of which sickened him. He had removed the clear plastic face plate and replaced it with a padlocked iron flat, sprayed black and hinged at the sides. He had baffled the ear molds inside the helmet with thick cotton wadding.
She could therefore neither see nor hear anything, and yet, whenever Gus entered the chamber, the helmet turned and tracked him. Her head turned, eerily attuned to his walk, following him across the room. She gurgled and squealed as she stood in the center of the rounded corner cell, unclothed, her worn vampire body grimy from the asylum’s century-old dust. Gus had once attempted to clothe her through the bars, using cloaks, coats, then blankets, but they all fell away. She had no need for clothes and no concept of modesty. The soles of her feet had developed a pad of calluses, as thick as the treads on a pair of tennis sneakers. Insects and lice wandered freely over her body and her legs were stained, tanned by repeated defecation. Chaps of brown skin were delineated around her veiny, pale thighs and calves.
Months ago, after the fight inside the Hudson River train tunnel, once the air had cleared, Gus had separated from the others. Part of it was his nature, but part of it was his mother. He knew that she would soon find him—her Dear One—and he prepared for her arrival. When she did, Gus got the drop on her, bagging her head and hog-tying her. She fought him with ridiculous vampire strength, but Gus managed to jam the helmet on her, caging her head and trapping her stinger. Then he manacled her wrists and dragged her by the neck of the helmet to this dungeon. Her new home.
Gus reached in through the bars, sliding up her faceplate. Her dead black pupils, rimmed with scarlet, stared out at him, mad, soulless, but full of hunger. Every time he raised the iron shield, he could feel her desire to unleash her stinger, and sometimes, if she tried repeatedly, thick curtains of lubricant oozed out of any fissure in the seal.
In the course of their domestic life, Bruno, Joaquin, and Gus had formed a great, imperfect family together. Bruno was always ebullient and for some reason, he had the gift of cracking up both Gus and Joaquin. They shared every duty in the household but only Gus was allowed direct contact with his mother. He washed her, head to toe, every week and kept her cell as clean and dry as he humanly could.
The dented helmet gave her a machinelike appearance, like a banged-up robot or android. Bruno remembered a bad old movie he saw on TV late one night called Robot Monster. In the film, the titular creature had a steel helmet screwed atop a brutish apelike body. This is how he saw the Elizaldes: Gustavo vs. the Robot Monster.
Gus pulled a small pocketknife from his jacket and unfolded the silver blade. His mother’s eyes watched him carefully—like a caged animal’s. He pushed back his left sleeve, then extended both arms through the iron bars, holding them above her helmeted head as her dead eyes tracked the silver blade. Gus pressed the sharpened point against his left forearm, cutting, leaving a thin incision of less than half an inch in length. Rich, red blood spilled from the wound. Gus angled his arm so that the blood ran down to his wrist, dripping into the open helmet.
He watched his mother’s eyes as her mouth and stinger worked unseen inside the helmet, ingesting the blood meal.
She got maybe a shot glass’s worth of him before he pulled his arms back outside the cage. Gus retreated to a small table he kept across the room, ripping a square of paper towel from a thick brown roll and applying direct pressure to the wound, then sealing the cut with liquid bandage squeezed from an almost-empty tube. He pulled a baby wipe from a pop-up box and cleaned off the bloodstain on his arm. The length of his left forearm was scored with similar knife scratches, adding to his already impressive display of body art. In feeding her, he kept tracing and retracing the same pattern, opening and reopening the same old wounds, carving the word “MADRE” into his flesh.
“I found you some music, Mama,” he said, producing a handful of battered and burned CDs. “Some of your favorites: Los Panchos, Los Tres Ases, Javier Solis . . .”
Gus looked at her standing inside the cage, feasting on her son’s blood, and tried to remember the woman who raised him. The single mother with a sometime husband and occasional boyfriends. She did her best for him, which was different from always doing the right thing. But it was the best she knew how to do. She had lost the custody battle, her versus the street. The barrio had raised him. It was the street behavior he emulated, rather than that of his madre. So many things he regretted now but could not change. He chose to remember their younger days. Her caressing him—treating his wounds after a neighborhood fight. And, even in her angriest moments, the kindness and love in her eyes.
All gone now. All disappeared.
Gus had disrespected her in life. So why did he now revere her in undeath? He did not know the answer. He did not understand the forces that drove him. All he knew was that visiting with her in this state—feeding her—charged him up like a battery. Made him crazy for revenge.
He placed one of the CDs in a luxurious stereo system he had pillaged from a car full of corpses. He had jimmied a few speakers of different brands and managed to get a good sound out of it. Javier Solis started singing “No te doy la libertad” (I will not give you freedom), an angry and melancholic bolero that proved eerily appropriate for the occasion.
“Do you like it, Madre?” he said, knowing all too well that this was just another monologue between them. “You remember it?”
Gus returned to the cage wall. He reached inside to close the faceplate, sealing her back in the darkness, when he saw something change in her eyes. Something came into them.
He had seen this before. He knew what it meant.
The voice, not his mother’s, boomed deep inside his head.
I can taste you, boy, said the Master. I taste your blood and your yearning. I taste your weakness. I know who you are in league with. My bastard son. The eyes remained focused on him, with a hint of a spark behind them, like that tiny red light on a camera that tells you it is passively recording.
Gus tried to clear his mind. He tried to think nothing. Yelling at t
he creature through his mother brought him nothing. That much he had learned. Resist. The way old man Setrakian would have advised him. Gus was training himself to withstand the dark intelligence of the Master.
Yes, the old professor. He had plans for you. If only he could see you here. Feeding your madre in the same manner he used to feed the infested heart of his long-lost wife. He failed, Gus. As you will fail.
Gus focused the pain in his head on the image of his mother as she once was. His mind’s eye stared at this image in an attempt to block out everything else.
Bring me the others, Augustin Elizalde. Your reward will be great. Your survival will be assured. Live like a king, not as a rat. Or else . . . no mercy. However much you beg for a second chance, I will no longer hear you. Your time is growing short . . .
“This is my house,” said Gus, aloud but quietly. “My mind, demon. You are not welcome here.”
What if I gave her back? Her will is stored in me along with the millions of voices. But I can find it for you, invoke it for you. I can give you your mother back . . .
And then, Gus’s mother’s eyes became almost human. They softened and became wet and full of pain.
“Hijito,” she said. “My son. Why am I here? Why am I like this . . . ? What are you doing to me?”
It hit him all at once, her nakedness, the madness, the guilt, the horror.
“No!!” he screamed, and reached in through the bars with a trembling hand, sliding the faceplate shut at once. Immediately, once it was closed, Gus felt released, as though by an invisible hand. And in the helmet, the laughter of the Master exploded. Gus covered his ears but the voice continued resounding in his head until, like an echo, it faded away.
The Master had attempted to engage him long enough to get a fix on Gus’s location, so it could send in his army of vampires to wipe him out.
It was just a trick. Not my mother. Just a trick. Never deal with the devil—that much he knew. Live like a king. Right. The king of a ruined world. The king of nothing. But down here, he was alive. An agent of chaos. Caca grande. The shit in the Master’s soup.
The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal Page 84