"Shit yeah!" said Gus, overjoyed by the sight of these guys. "Where do I sign up!"
But his savior had slowed, something catching his eye. Gus looked more closely into the shadowy recesses of his sweatshirt hood, and the face there was eggshell white. Its eyes were black and red, and its mouth was dry and nearly lipless.
The hunter was staring at the bloody lines across Gus's palms.
Gus knew that look. He had just seen it in his brother's and his mother's eyes.
He tried to pull back, but the grip on his arm was lock solid. The thing opened its mouth and the tip of its stinger appeared.
Then another hunter came up, holding its crossbow to this hunter's neck. The new hunter pulled back Gus's hunter's hood, and Gus saw the bald, earless head, the aged eyes of a mature vampire. The vampire snarled at his brethren's weapon, then surrendered Gus to the new hunter, whose pale vampire face Gus glimpsed as he was lifted aloft, carried to the black SUV, and thrown into the third-row seat.
The rest of the hooded vampires climbed back inside the vehicle and it took off, wheeling a hard U-turn in the middle of the avenue. Gus was the only human inside the SUV.
A smack to the temple knocked him out cold. The SUV raced back toward the burning building, bursting through the street smoke like an airplane punching through a cloud, then screaming past the rioting, rounding the next corner and heading farther uptown.
The Bathtub
THE SO-CALLED BATHTUB of the fallen World Trade Center, the seven-stories-deep foundation, was lit up as bright as day for overnight work even in the minutes before dawn. Yet the construction site was still, the great machines quiet. The work that had continued around the clock almost since the towers' collapse had, for the time being, all but ceased.
"Why this?" asked Eph. "Why here?"
"It drew him," said Setrakian. "A mole hollows out a home in the dead trunk of a felled tree. Gangrene forms in a wound. He is rooted in tragedy and pain."
Eph, Setrakian, and Fet sat in the back of Fet's van, parked at Church and Cortlandt. Setrakian sat by the rear-door windows with a nightscope. Very little traffic rolled past, only the occasional predawn taxi or delivery truck. No pedestrians or any other signs of life. They were looking for vampires and not finding any.
Setrakian, his eye still to the scope, said, "It's too bright here. They don't want to be seen."
Eph said, "We can't keep looping around the site again and again."
"If there are as many as we suspect," said Setrakian, "then they must be nearby. To return to the lair before sunrise." He looked at Fet. "Think like vermin."
Fet said, "I will tell you this. I've never seen a rat go in anywhere through the front door." He thought about it some more, then pushed past Eph toward the front seats. "I have an idea."
He rolled north on Church to City Hall, one block northeast of the WTC site. A large park surrounded it, and Fet pulled into a bus space on Park Row, killing the engine.
"This park is one of the biggest rat nests in the city. We tried pulling out the ivy, 'cause it was such good ground cover. Changed the garbage containers, but it was no use. They play here like squirrels, especially at noon when the lunch crowd comes. Food makes them happy, but they can get food just about anywhere. It's infrastructure that rats really crave." He pointed to the ground. "Underneath, in there, is an abandoned subway station. The old City Hall stop."
Setrakian said, "It still connects?"
"Everything connects underground, one way or another."
Chapter 20
They watched, and did not wait for long.
"There," said Setrakian.
Eph saw a bedraggled-looking woman by a streetlight, some thirty yards away. "A homeless woman," he said.
"No," said Setrakian, handing his heat scope to Eph.
Eph saw, through the scope, the woman as a fierce blur of red against a cool, dim background.
"Their metabolism," said Setrakian. "There is another."
A heavy woman waddling, still getting her sea legs, staying in the shadows along the low iron fence ringing the park.
Then another: a man wearing a newspaper hawker's change apron, carrying a body on his shoulder. Dropping it over the fence, then clumsily scaling it himself. He fell going over, ripping one leg of his pants, standing back up without any reaction and picking up his victim and continuing into the tree cover.
"Yes," said Setrakian. "This is it."
Eph shivered. The presence of these walking pathogens, these humanoid diseases, repulsed him. He felt sick watching them stagger into the park, lower animals obeying some unconscious impulse, withdrawing from the light. He sensed their hurry, like commuters trying to catch that last train home.
They quietly stepped out of the van. Fet wore a protective Tyvek jumpsuit and rubber wading boots. He offered spare sets to the others, Eph and Setrakian choosing only the boots. Setrakian sprayed, without asking, each of them from a bottle of scent-eliminating spray with a picture of a deer in red crosshairs on the label. The spray of course could do nothing about the carbon dioxide emitted by their breath, nor the sound of their pumping hearts and coursing blood.
Fet carried the most. The nail gun was in a bag hung across his chest, complete with three extra loaders of silver brads. He carried various tools on his belt, including his night-vision monocular and his black-light wand, along with one of Setrakian's silver daggers in a leather sheath. He held a high-powered Luma light in his hand, and bore the UVC mine in a mesh bag over his shoulder.
Setrakian carried his walking stick and a Luma light, the heat scope in his coat pocket. He double-checked the pillbox in his vest, then left his hat behind in the van.
Eph also carried a Luma, as well as, in a sheath strapped across his chest, a silver sword, the twenty-five-inch blade and grip against his back.
Fet said, "I'm not sure this makes sense. Going down to fight a beast on its own turf."
Setrakian said, "We have no alternative. This is the only time we know where he is." He looked up at the sky, bluing with the first faint glimmer of day. "The night is ending. Let us go."
They made their way to the low fence gate, which was kept locked overnight. Eph and Fet scaled it, then reached back to help Setrakian.
The sound of more footsteps on the sidewalk-moving quickly, one heel dragging-made them hustle deep into the park.
The interior was unlit at night, and thick with trees. They heard the park fountain running and automobiles passing outside.
"Where are they?" whispered Eph.