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

Beat it.

Zack slid out on his back, half-coated in tunnel soot, and started running. He turned on his busted iPod, the cracked screen lighting the floor in front of him in a four-foot nimbus of soft, blue light. He couldn’t hear anything, even his own footfalls, so loud was the panic in his head. He assumed he was being chased — could feel hands reaching for the back of his neck — and whether true or not, he ran as though it were.

He wanted to call out Nora’s name, but did not, knowing it would give away his position. Abraham’s blade scraped the wall of the tunnel, telling him he was veering too far to the right.

Zack saw a burning red flame up ahead. Not a torch, but an angry light, like a flare. It scared him. He was supposed to be running away from trouble, not toward it. He slowed, not wanting to go forward, unable to go back.

He thought about the boy hiding inside the refrigerator. No light, no sound, no air.

The door, dark against the dividing wall, had a sign on it Zack did not bother to read. The handle turned and he went through it, back into the original northbound tunnel. He could smell the smoke the friction of the derailed train caused, along with the noxious stench of ammonia. This was a mistake — he should wait for Nora, she would be looking for him — but on he ran.

Ahead, a figure. At first, he believed that it was Nora. This person also wore a backpack, and Nora had been carrying a bag.

But such optimism was just a trick of his preteen mind.

The hissing sound scared him initially. But Zack saw enough in the faint outer reaches of his light source to tell that this person was involved in an endeavor that did not involve violence. He watched the graceful movements of the person’s arm and realized he was spraying paint onto the tunnel wall.

Zack went another step forward. The person was not much taller than he, a sweatshirt hood over his head. There was paint spatter on his elbows and the hem of his black hoodie, his camouflage pants and Converse hi-tops. He was doing up the wall, though Zack could see only a small corner of the mural, which was silver and ruffled in appearance. Under it, the vandal was finishing his tag. PHADE, it read.

All this happened in moments — which was why it did not seem unusual to Zack that someone should have been painting in absolute darkness.

Phade lowered his arm, having finished his signature, then turned toward Zack.

Zack said, “Hey, I don’t know what you know, but you gotta get out of this…”

Phade slid back the hood covering his face — and it was not a he. Phade was a girl, or had once been a girl, no older than her teens. Phade’s face was now inert, unnaturally immobile, like a mask of dead flesh wrapping the malignant biology festering within. Its skin, by Zack’s iPod light, had the pallor of pickled flesh, like the color of a fetal pig inside a specimen jar. Zack saw a spill of red down the front of its chin, neck, and sweatshirt. The red stain was not paint.

Zack heard squealing behind him. He turned for a moment — and then whipped around, realizing he had just turned his back on a vampire. As he turned back to Phade, he put out his hand with the knife in it, not knowing that Phade had darted straight at him.

Abraham’s blade ran right into Phade’s throat. Zack pulled back his hand fast, as though having committed a tragic accident, and white fluid came burbling out of Phade’s neck. Phade’s eyes rolled wide with a surge of menace, and before Zack knew what he was doing, he had stabbed the vampire four more times in the throat. The can of spray paint sssssed against Phade’s leg before falling to the ground.

The vampire collapsed.

Zack stood there with the murder weapon in his hand, holding Abraham like something he had broken and didn’t know how to set down.

The patter of advancing vampires woke him up, unseen but bearing down on him out of the darkness. Zack dropped his iPod light, reaching down for the can of silver paint. He got it into his hand and the spray trigger under his finger just as two spiderlike vampire children came screaming out of the dark, stingers flicking in and out of their mouths. The way in which they moved was indescribably wrong, so swift, exploiting the flexibility of youth into dislocated arms and knees, moving impossibly low and tight along the floor.

Zack took aim at the stingers. He sprayed both creatures full in the face — mouth and nose and eyes — before they could get to him. They had a sort of film over their eyes already, and the paint adhered to it, shutting down their vision. They reeled back, trying to clear their eyes with their oversized — for their bodies — hands and having no luck.

This was Zack’s chance to pounce and kill — but, knowing more vampires were on the way, he instead picked up his iPod light and ran before the painted vampires perceived him through other senses.

He saw steps and a door stamped with caution signs. It was locked but not bolted, no one expecting burglars this far beneath sea level, and Zack slipped the point of Abraham’s blade inside the door crack, working it behind the latch. Inside, the thrum of transformers startled him. He saw no other door, and panicked, thinking he was stuck. But a service duct ran a foot off the floor, out of the wall to the left, before turning and angling into the machinery. Zack chanced a look beneath it and did not see a facing wall. He deliberated a moment, then set his iPod down on the floor, lit-screen up, its light reflecting off the metal bottom of the duct. He then slid it down along beneath the duct like a thin puck gliding over an air hockey table. The up-shining light slid down the floor, turning slightly, but going a long way before stopping, hitting something hard. Zack saw that the light was no longer shining off the reflecting duct.

Zack did not hesitate. He got down on his belly and started beneath the duct before crawling back out again, starting over, realizing he could go faster on his already filthy back. Out he went, headfirst along the narrow crawl space. He slid some fifty feet, the floor at times grabbing his shirt, cutting into his back. At the end, his head popped out into a void, the duct turning and rising high up alongside an embedded ladder.

Zack reclaimed his iPod, shining it up. He could see nothing. But he could hear bumps echoing along the duct: vampire children following his route, moving with preternatural ease.

Zack started up the ladder, his paint can in his hand, Abraham stuck in his belt. He went hand-over-hand up the iron rungs, the echoing duct thumps rising with him. He stopped a moment, hooking his elbow on a rung, pulling the iPod from his pocket to check behind him.

The iPod tumbled from his grip. He grabbed after it, nearly slipping from the ladder, then watched it fall.

As the glowing screen dropped, twisting, it flashed past a form rising up the ladder, illuminating another of his evil playmates.

Zack went back to climbing, faster than he thought he could. But never fast enough. He felt the ladder shaking, and stopped and turned just in time. The child vampire was at his heels when Zack hit it with the paint-can spray, stunning it, blinding it — and then kicking at it with his heel until it fell squealing from the ladder.

He kept climbing, wishing he didn’t have to keep looking back. The iPod light was tiny, the floor below a long way away. The ladder shook — harder now. More bodies climbing up the rungs. Zack heard a dog barking — muffled, an exterior noise — and knew he was near some kind of exit. This gave him a boost of energy and he hurried upward, coming to a flat, round roof.

A manhole. The smooth bottom of it, cold from touching the outside. The surface world was right above. Zack pushed with the heel of his hand. He gave it all he had.