They sat in silence with that floating in the air between them.
Swann knew that everyone was probably thinking the same thoughts, and they were bad thoughts. Dangerous thoughts.
It was Schmidt who put them out there.
“If Fayne is patient zero,” he asked, “does that mean that there will be more like him?”
Feldman opened her mouth to answer, but the door to her office suddenly banged open. Riddle stood there, one hand on the doorknob, one hand clutched to his own throat.
To what was left of his throat.
Riddle’s mouth worked as he tried to speak a word. A name.
But that throat was no longer constructed for speech.
Blood spurted from between his fingers.
Feldman screamed. Swann screamed, too.
Schmidt yelled with sudden fear and anger as he yanked up his cuff and tore the thirty-two caliber throwaway pistol from the nylon holster. He racked the slide and brought it up just as Riddle’s legs buckled.
“Fayne!” yelled Swann.
And then they rushed into the hall, and into hell.
— 26 —
October 12, 10:45 p.m.
Bellevue Hospital
Zero Days until the V-Event
“Stay back,” ordered Schmidt, but Swann was right at his heels. Swann didn’t want to be there, he wanted to flee, to find some place to hide, but his body would not listen to the cringing pleas of his mind. He pelted down the hallway after the detective.
Alarms began blaring overhead. People ran, people screamed.
In the private rooms the patients howled like dogs.
There was a long, crooked trail of blood leading all the way back to Fayne’s room. Doctors and nurses crouched against the walls, many of them spattered with red.
As they wheeled around the corner, Schmidt tripped and fell over a body that lay sprawled on the floor. A nurse. Her head was canted obscenely to one side and there was a red ruin where her trachea should have been. Her eyes stared at the ceiling and even as Swann dropped to his knees beside her, he knew that there was nothing he could do.
Schmidt was on his knees, his pistol in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He shouted into the phone, calling for backup. Calling for SWAT.
God almighty, thought Swann as he reached out to close the nurse’s eyes. They always did that in the movies. His fingers brushed the lids, but even though they rolled down, the lids popped open again as soon as he let go. He withdrew his hand like he’d been stung.
Down the hall, all of the doors were open. Some of the patients peered out. Most looked absolutely terrified. A few were laughing.
One pointed to a set of double doors that led to another wing.
“It went in there,” said the patient in a voice that was small and fractured.
It, thought Swann. Not “he.”
The patient said, “It had a girl. It dragged her in there.”
God.
Schmidt shoved his phone back into his pocket, clambered to his feet and hurried to the double doors. They were closed, but there was a small Plexiglas window. Schmidt did a quick-look through the window and ducked back as if expecting to be shot at.
“Can you see him?” whispered Swann.
“No.” Schmidt was sweating and he held his little automatic with two powerful hands. Those hands trembled.
“How long until your backup arrives?”
There was a single piercing scream from beyond the doors. A woman’s scream. High and shrill and filled with more terror than Swann had ever heard in a human voice.
“Too fucking long,” growled Schmidt, and he wheeled around, kicked open the doors and ran into the hall. Swann bounded up and got to the door just as he heard the first shot.
The sound was followed almost instantly by another scream. A man’s this time.
It was not Fayne’s voice.
It was Schmidt’s.
There was no second shot.
In the distance, even with the blaring alarms, Luther Swann could hear the sound of sirens approaching and, even louder, the thunder of his own beating heart.
— 27 —
October 12, 10:51 p.m.
Bellevue Hospital
Zero Days until the V-Event
It took all of Swann’s courage to approach those double doors and peer through the window.
He saw three things. Three figures.
He saw a woman. Asian, pretty, terrified beyond the capacity to move. She cowered on the floor. Her clothes were covered with blood, but Swann could not tell if any of it was her own.
He saw Jerry Schmidt, lying sprawled, bent backward over a gurney, his automatic hooked uselessly on one twitching finger of his outstretched right hand. His body trembled and his legs jerked with involuntary spasms as his body tumbled through pain and into a terminal shock.
And he saw Michael Fayne. Or, the thing that had been Michael Fayne, bent over and tearing at the detective’s throat with savage teeth.
There was blood everywhere.
It was the defining characteristic of the tableau.
Blood.
Blood and death.
Fayne suddenly raised his head and stared down the hallway, through the little window, right into Swann’s eyes. He raised his dripping mouth from the dying detective.
And he smiled.
If there was anything human left in the man, Swann could not see it. Not in that smile.
All he saw was a monster.
All he saw was a vampire.
The vampire spoke a single word as his fingers caressed the ragged, pumping veins.
“Mine.”
He stood, frozen to the spot, frozen into the moment, trapped by the power of those black-within-black eyes
Swann could not tear his own eyes away. He was helpless, lost in this new reality. He stared at the monster, at the thing he had spent his life studying. The thing he had sometimes secretly wished was real. The thing he had lauded and written about and aggrandized and devoted his life to. No longer a thing of myth and legend. No longer a creature of film or fiction.
Real.
Here.
Now.
“God …”
Schmidt’s words from just a few minutes ago replayed in his head with dreadful clarity.
If Fayne is patient zero, does that mean that there will be more like him?
He was still standing there when big men in black body armor and automatic rifles came barging out of the stairwells. He made no protest as they pulled him aside and shouldered past him. He was dazed, numb, horrified beyond speech or action. One of the officers pushed him to the floor and he went down without resistance and did not argue or speak even a single word when the roar of gunfire filled the air, drowning out all other sounds.
— 28 —
Secaucus, NJ
Now
The V-Event plus Twenty-six Days
Luther Swann picked up the phone on the fifth ring. The phone had been ringing off and on for weeks. He knew that he should probably change his number. Or maybe throw the damn thing away.
But he recognized the screen display.
“Hello,” he said quietly.
“Luther …?”
“Alice? How are you?”
“Oh, god, Luther,” said Dr. Feldman in a tiny voice. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Los Angeles,” he said. “Following up reports. So far … nothing.”
“No,” she said urgently. “Turn on the news. God, Luther … Detroit. Mexico City. Cairo ….”
“What … what do you mean?”
Feldman was sobbing. “It’s everywhere, Luther. Oh my God … it’s everywhere.”
"ROADKILL" PT.2
Nancy Holder
— 8 —
Rampage. Thompson didn’t get his full patch for killing Moncho, because he didn’t tell anyone that Moncho had returned, seemingly from the dead, and that he’d been a vampire. No seemingly about that. He didn’t tell Bobby because Bobby had started seeing vampires everywhere — behind the counter in the liquor store; driving the school bus; sitting in one of the seats on the school bus. Bobby saw them flying across the moon at night. Bobby heard them sucking out the blood of the town’s few remaining cattle and chickens.
It didn’t take special training in nonverbal communication to know that Bobby was losing his shit.
Luther Swann kept insisting that vampires didn’t fly. Bobby said he’d seen a wedge of them flying over his house, like geese flying south for the winter. No one contradicted Bobby.
But they did trade looks.
In the middle of the night, Bobby would burst out of the house in a pair of jeans, brandishing a semi-automatic, and paint the night with starbursts of live ammunition. One night he killed a cat. Another night, he killed an old man.
He insisted the old man had been a vampire. He said the Mendozas came up to the windows at night and taunted him, promising to steal their own children so that they could turn them into vampires and be together again forever. And he went out there to cut them in half and instead, the old man died.
No one else saw the Mendozas. If Little Sister and Manuel overheard Bobby’s raving in the middle of the night, they didn’t show it. Or maybe they had forgotten that the vampires he was talking about had once been their parents. More crosses went up on the turquoise door and the walls of the Morrisey home. But Yuki Nitobe had explained that crosses didn’t serve as deterrents against vampires. Bobby said they did.
As the months went by, Little Sister stuck to Walker, which upset “Manny” no end. Thompson understood why. No one had adopted him with any special affection. Manuel went through weeks where he clung to his sister day and night. Then he’d ignore her completely, making a show of hanging out with the O.M.s. Thompson could see a one-percenter in the making, but he stayed well away. Manuel was not the mission.
Little Sister had a birthday — sweet sixteen — and all her uncles gave her presents, mostly jewelry, and some makeup in the original packaging, which meant that it had probably been stolen because outlaws stole things. Thompson refrained from pointing out that in Latin cultures, fifteen was the big birthday for girls. Their quinceñera. She layered on her treasures and strutted around in a cropped T-shirt and low-slung cutoff jeans, practically in her own original packaging, but no one came near her. Maybe Walker had staked his claim. If that were the case, in the old days, she would have a tattoo somewhere prominent that read “Property of my Old Man Walker” by now. Now it was nearly three day’s ride to get to a decent tattoo parlor.
