Guillermo del Toro - The Fall. Book II of The Strain Trilogy

The first bang against the door shook the guard, making him jump back.

The second blow produced a serving bowl-size dent.

The guard reached out his hand to feel the convexity. He began to say, “What the—”

The door slid open, and pale hands reached inside, pulling him out.

Fet barreled out after him with the book clutched under his arm, lowering his shoulder and driving forward like a running back taking the pigskin through an entire defensive line. He plowed the vampires straight back against the wall, Setrakian exiting behind him, his silver sword flashing, killing a path toward the main floor.

Fet slashed and chopped, fighting at close quarters with the creatures, feeling their inhuman warmth, their acidic white blood spurting onto his coat. He reached for the security guard with the fingers of his sword hand, but found he could do nothing for him, the guard disappearing to the floor beneath a huddle of hungry vampires.

With wide, sweeping slices, Setrakian cleared the way to the front railing overlooking the interior four-story drop. Outside, he saw bodies burning in the street, trees on fire, a melee at the building entrance. Inside, looking straight down, he saw the gangbanger Gus alongside his older Mexican friend. It was the limping ex-wrestler who looked up, pointing out Setrakian.

“Here!” Setrakian called back to Fet. Fet extricated himself from the pile-up, checking his clothes for blood worms as he came running. Setrakian pointed out the wrestler.

“You sure?” said Fet.

Setrakian nodded, and Fet, with a great scowl, held the Occido Lumen out over the railing, giving the wrestler a moment to limp over beneath him. Gus slashed a demon in the wrestler’s way, and Setrakian saw someone else — yes, it was Ephraim — warding others away with a lamp of ultraviolet light.

Fet released the precious book, watching it slowly turn as it fell.

Four stories below them, Angel caught it in his arms like a baby thrown from a burning building.

Fet turned, now able to fight two-handedly, sliding a dagger from the bottom of his pack and leading Setrakian to the escalators. The motorized staircases ran crisscross, side-by-side. Vampires on their way up — summoned to battle by the will of the Master — jumped tracks where the stairways crossed. Fet dispatched them with the tread of his boot and the tip of his sword, sending them sprawling down the moving stairs.

On the bottom flight, Setrakian looked back up through the gap. He saw Eichhorst high above on one of the upper floors, looking down.

The others had done most of the work for them in the lobby. Released vampire corpses lay twisted on the floor, faces and clawed hands frozen in a tableau of white-splattered agony. More vampire drones were pounding on the glass entrance, with still others on the way.

Gus led them back out through the smashed doors onto the sidewalk. Vampires came swarming from 71st and 72nd to the west, and York Avenue north and south. They came up out of the streets, rising through displaced manholes in the intersections. Fighting them off was like trying to bail out of a sinking ship, two vampires arriving for every one destroyed.

A pair of black Hummers rounded the corner hard, headlights angry, front grilles bumping down vampires, rugged tires squashing their bodies. A team of hunters stepped out, hooded and armed with crossbows, and immediately made their presence known. Vampire killing vampire, the drones getting mowed down by the elite guard.

Setrakian knew they had arrived either to escort him and the book directly to the Ancients, or to take possession of the Silver Codex outright. Neither option suited him. He remained close to the wrestler, who carried the book under his arm; his lumbering pace suited Setrakian’s slow legs. Upon learning the wrestler’s moniker, “The Silver Angel,” Setrakian had to smile.

Fet led the way to the corner of 72nd and York. The manhole he wanted had already been popped open, and he grabbed Creem and sent him down first, to clear the hole of vampires. He let Angel and Setrakian down next, the wrestler barely fitting inside the hole. Then Eph, without any questions, climbing right down the iron ladder rungs. Gus and the rest of the Sapphires hung back in order to allow the vampires to close in on them, then went down themselves, Fet disappearing below just as the ring of mayhem collapsed on him.

“Other way!” he yelled down to them. “Other way!”

They had started west along the sewer tunnel, toward the heart of the island underground, but Fet dropped down and led them east, underneath one long block that dead-ended over FDR Drive. The trough of the tunnel carried a measly trickle of water; lack of human activity in surface Manhattan meant fewer showers, fewer flushes.

“All the way to the end!” said Fet, his voice booming inside the stone tube.

Eph came up alongside Setrakian. The old man was slowing, the nub of his walking stick splashing in the water stream. “Can you make it?” said Eph.

“Have to,” said Setrakian.

“I saw Palmer. Today is the day. The last day.”

Setrakian said, “I know it.”

Eph patted Angel’s arm, the one that held the bubble-wrapped book. “Here.” Eph took the bundle from him, and the hobbling Mexican giant took Setrakian’s arm, helping the old man along.

Eph looked at the wrestler as they rushed, filled with questions he knew not how to ask.

“Here they come!” said Fet.

Eph looked back. Mere shapes in the dark tunnel, to his eyes, coming at them like a dark rush of drowning water.

Two of the Sapphires turned back to fight. “No!” cried Fet. “Don’t bother! Just get through here!”

Fet slowed between two long wooden cases strapped to pipes along the tunnel walls. They looked like speaker bars, set vertically, angled in toward the tunnel. To each, he had rigged a simple switch wire, both of which he gathered in his hands now.

“Down the side!” he yelled to the others behind him. “Through the panel.”

But none of them turned the corner. The sight of the onrushing vampires and Fet standing alone in the tunnel holding the triggers to Setrakian’s contraption was too compelling.

Out of the darkness came the first faces, red-eyed, mouths open. Tumbling over one another in an all-out race to be the first to attack the humans, strigoi surged toward them without any regard for their fellow vampires or themselves. A stampede of sickness and depravity, the fury of the overturned hive.

Fet waited, and waited, and waited, until they were nearly upon him. His voice rose in a yell that started in his throat, but by the end seemed to come straight from his mind, a howl of human perseverance into the gale force of a hurricane.

Their hands reached out, the tide of vampires about to overwhelm him — as he flicked both switches.

The effect was something like the ignition of a giant camera flashbulb. The twin devices went off simultaneously in a single explosion of silver. An expulsion of chemical matter that eviscerated the vampires in a wave of devastation. Those in the rear went as quickly as those at the vanguard, because there was no shadow to hide in, the silver particulate burning through them like radiation, smashing their viral DNA.

The silver tinge lingered in the moments after the great purge, like a shiny snowfall, Fet’s howl fading into the emptied tunnel as the shredded matter that was the once-human vampires settled to the tunnel floor.

Gone. As though he had teleported them somewhere else. Like taking a picture, only once the flash faded, no one was there.

No one complete, at least.

Fet released the triggers and turned back at Setrakian.

Setrakian said, “Indeed.”

They followed another ladder, leading down to a walkway with a railing. At the end was a door that opened onto an under-sidewalk grate, the surface visible above them. Fet climbed up the boxes he had set as steps, and popped the loosened grate free with his shoulder.