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

The creature bucked wildly, Nora hacking at it with her knife, screaming all the while.

The child vampire fell, and Nora pulled out the flare, still lit. She whipped around, anticipating Kelly’s rear attack.

But Kelly was gone. Nowhere to be found.

Nora brandished the flare, the two remaining vampire children crouching near their fallen playmate. She made sure that Kelly wasn’t on the ceiling or underneath the ledge.

Uncertainty was worse. The children split up, circling around her on either side, and Nora backed up to the wall beneath the giant mural, ready to do battle, determined not to be ambushed.

Eldritch Palmer watched the illumination flares streaking over rooftops uptown. Puny fireworks. Match-strikes in a world of darkness. The helicopter approached him from the north, slowing above. He awaited his visitors on the seventy-eighth floor of the Stoneheart Building.

Eichhorst was first. A vampire wearing a tweed suit was like a pit bull wearing a knit sweater. He held the door open, the Master ducking as it entered, striding, cloaked, across the floor.

Palmer watched all this through the reflection in the windows.

Explain.

The voice sepulchral, edged with fury.

Palmer, having summoned the strength to stand, turned on his weak legs. “I cut off your funding. I closed the line of credit. Simple.”

Eichhorst stood to the side, watching with his gloved hands crossed. The Master looked down at Palmer, its raw-red skin inflamed, its eyes crimson and penetrating.

Palmer went on, “It was a demonstration. Of how critical my participation is to your success. It became evident to me that you needed to be reminded of my worth.”

They won the book.

This from Eichhorst, whose contempt for Palmer had always been certain, and returned in kind. But Palmer addressed the Master.

“What does it matter at this late moment? Turn me and I will be only too happy to finish off Professor Setrakian myself.”

You understand so little. But then, you have never viewed me as anything other than a means to an end. Your end.

“And shouldn’t I say the same of you! You, who has withheld your gift from me for so many years. I have given you everything and withheld nothing. Until this moment!”

This book is no mere trophy. It is a chalice of information. It is the last, lingering hope of the pig humans. The final gasp of your race. This, you cannot conceive. Your human perspective is so small.

“Then allow me to see.” Palmer stepped toward him, standing only halfway up the Master’s cloaked chest. “It is time. Deliver to me what is rightfully mine, and everything you need shall be yours.”

The Master said nothing into Palmer’s head. He did not move.

But Palmer was fearless. “We have a deal.”

Did you stop anything else? Have you disrupted any of the other plans we set in motion?

“None. Everything stands. Now — do we have a deal?”

We do.

The suddenness with which the Master leaned down to him shocked Palmer, made his fragile heart jump. Its face, up close, the blood worms coasting the veins and capillaries just beneath the florid beetroot that was its skin. Palmer’s brain released long-forgotten hormones, the moment of conversion upon him. Mentally, he had long ago packed his bags, and yet there was still a burst of trepidation at the first step of the ultimate one-way voyage. He had no quarrel with the improvements the turning would have upon his body; he wondered only what it would do to his long-held consolation and fiercest weapon, his mind.

The Master’s hand pressed onto Palmer’s bony shoulder like a vulture’s talons onto a twig. Its other hand gripped the crown of Palmer’s head, turning it to one side, fully extending the old man’s neck and throat.

Palmer looked at the ceiling, his eyes losing focus. He heard choir voices in his head. He had never been held by anyone — anything — in their arms like this in his life. He allowed himself to go limp.

He was ready. His breath came in short, excited bursts as the hardened nail of the Master’s long, thick middle finger pricked at the flesh sagging over his stretched neck.

The Master saw the sick man’s pulse beating through his neck, the man’s heart throbbing in anticipation, and the Master felt the call deep within its stinger. He wanted blood.

But it ignored its nature and, with one firm crack, it ripped Eldritch Palmer’s head from his torso. It released the head and gripped the spurting body and tore Palmer in half, the body splitting apart easily where the bones of the hips narrowed to the waist. It tossed the bloody pieces of meat to the far wall, where they struck the framed masterworks of human abstract art and fell to the floor.

The Master turned fast, sensing another blood source ticking on the premises. Palmer’s manservant, Mr. Fitzwilliam, stood in the doorway. A broad-shouldered human wearing a suit tailored to accommodate weapons of self-defense.

Palmer had wanted this man’s body for his turning. He coveted his bodyguard’s strength, his physical stature, desiring the man’s form for all eternity.

Mr. Fitzwilliam was one of a package with Palmer.

The Master looked into his mind, and showed him this, before flying at him in a blur. Mr. Fitzwilliam first saw the Master all the way across the room, red blood dripping from his enormous hands — and then the Master was bent over him, a stinging, draining sensation like a rod of fire in his throat.

The pain faded after a time. So did Mr. Fitzwilliam’s view of the ceiling.

The Master let the man fall where he had drunk him.

Animals.

Eichhorst remained across the wide room, patient as a lawyer.

The Master said:

Let us commence the Night Eternal.

The tugboat drifted down the East River without lights, toward the United Nations. Fet guided the boat along the besieged island, staying only a few hundred yards off the coast. He was no boat captain, but the throttle was easy enough to operate, and, as he had learned in docking the tug at 72nd Street, the thick tire fenders were quite forgiving.

Behind him, at the navigation table, Setrakian sat before the Occido Lumen. A single strong lamp made the silver-leaf illustrations glow off the page. Setrakian was absorbed in the work, studying it in a near-trance. He kept a small notebook next to him. A ruled composition school notebook almost half-full with the old man’s notes.

The writing in the Lumen was densely yet beautifully hand-scribed, as many as one hundred lines to a page. His old, long-ago-broken fingers turned each corner with delicacy and speed.

He analyzed every page, backlighting them, scanning for watermarks and quickly sketching them as they were discovered. He annotated their exact position and disposition on the page, as these were vital elements in decoding the text laid on them.

Eph stood at his shoulder, alternately looking at the phantasmagoric illustrations and checking the burning island out the wheelhouse window. He noticed a radio near Fet and switched it on, keeping it low so as not to distract Setrakian. It was satellite radio, and Eph searched the news channels until he came across a voice.

A tired female voice, a broadcaster holed up in the Sirius XM headquarters, was operating off some sort of failsafe backup generator. She was working off multiple, fractured sources — Internet, phone, and e-mail — collating reports from around the country and the world, while repeatedly clarifying that she had no way of verifying this information was accurate.

She spoke candidly about vampirism as a virus spreading person-to-person. She detailed a crumbling domestic infrastructure: accidents, some catastrophic, disabling, or otherwise cutting off traffic along key bridges in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Washington state, and California. Power outages further isolated certain regions, most prevalent along the coasts. Gas lines in the Midwest. The National Guard and various Army regiments had been ordered into peacekeeping duty in many major metropolitan centers, with reports of military activity in New York and Washington, DC. Fighting had broken out along the border between North and South Korea. Burning mosques in Iraq had triggered rioting, compounded by U.S. peacekeeping efforts there. A series of unexplained explosions in the catacombs beneath Paris had crippled the city. And an eerie series of reports detailed suicide clusters occurring at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina, and Niagara Falls in New York.