Manitou Blood (30 page)

Gil had brought all the practical equipment, most of it hung around his waist. Two flashlights, a large screwdriver, a hunting knife and a baseball bat.

The streets were uncannily silent, like an abandoned movie set, but there were bodies everywhere, and in the heat and humidity they were beginning to stink. Every block was cluttered with wrecked and burned-out cars and trucks, and almost every vehicle contained a corpse, either incinerated into a black matchstick person, or hugely bloated with gas, like a blown-up doll. At one intersection there was a whole bus full of blown-up dolls, all of different ethnic origins.

I saw three small children lying on the sidewalk next to a dumpster, hand-in-hand, and their bodies were glittering with blowflies. I saw a middle-aged woman in a red-and-yellow dress, curled up next to a fire hydrant. I thought she was winking at me, until I realized that maggots were dropping from her forehead into her empty eye socket.

“What did I tell you?” said Gil. “This is like the end of the frigging world.”

We kept on walking, although my stomach made a horrible gurgling noise, and I would have given anything to go back to Jenica's apartment and slam the door behind me and lock it, and wait for somebody to tell me that it was safe to come out.

Almost all of the victims had their throats cut—some so severely that their spines were practically severed—although there was very little blood on the pavement. “
Strigoi
did this,” said Jenica. “They cut, they drink their fill. And you see how many bodies? They must be multiplying very, very fast.”

The stores were deserted, even though many of them had their windows smashed and their doors had been left wide open. Some of their stock had been strewn around across the sidewalks, but it didn't look as if anything much had been stolen. The
strigoi
had been looking for fresh human blood, not microwave ovens.

We looked into a Greek delicatessen. A young woman lay dead on the black-and-white tiled floor, her face covered by her upraised dress, her legs wide apart. “Hold up a minute,” said Gil. I waited on the sidewalk while he went inside. He bent over the young woman's body and tugged down her dress to make her decent. Then he covered her face with a red-checkered napkin, and crossed himself.

He came out again, saying nothing, but I understood then why he was helping us to find the vampires. He believed in human dignity, and he understood the true value of human life. He had seen for himself what happens when men become devils.

We walked six blocks and we saw no signs of life, except for a curtain listlessly waving in a fifth-story window. No traffic, no sirens, no helicopters, no ships whooping in the harbor. No
dogs
, even. Only bodies, some of which were so repulsively mutilated that they didn't looked human. A
man was wearing his own fleshless ribcage like a massive helmet. A young boy of maybe three or four had been run over by a truck, and his head was completely flat, and nearly two feet wide.

At last we reached Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers had collapsed, and where the Freedom Tower was already starting to rise. Again, there was nobody here—nobody alive, anyway. The construction huts were all deserted, and the heavy machinery stood silent, backhoe diggers and bulldozers and concrete mixers. I saw a man's body suspended from a crane, twenty or thirty feet in the air, like a lynching, with two or three seagulls picking at it.

This site had stirred up enough emotions when I had come downtown to view it after September eleventh. But that had been right in the middle of the cleanup, and it had been noisy and busy and bustling with purpose. This morning it was just plain eerie, a deserted construction site in a city populated by rotting corpses, and undead people who could only come out when it was dark. The crane clanked, and clanked, and one of the seagulls screamed in frustration.

“Where's the frigging federal government?” Gil demanded in a sudden burst of frustration. “Where's the rescue teams? Where's the frigging marines? Don't tell me they've just abandoned us. You can't just abandon a whole frigging city!”

Frank leaned against a barrier and coughed. “You can if it's contagious.”

“You mean they've put up the shutters and left us here to die?”

“What would
you
do? Like Harry says, this thing could spread across the eastern seaboard like wildfire.”

“But there's no helicopters even!”

Frank coughed again. “They probably don't want to give us any false hopes,” he said, wryly.

At that moment Jenica called out, “It's here! St. Stephen's Church!” Her voice sounded flat, like someone shouting in a dream.

We gathered around 155 Cedar Street, where St. Stephen's Church had stood. The layout of the street was being changed, and there were metal fences everywhere, and rubble, and long coiling hoses, and portable generators. A narrow trench had been excavated along the side of the street, where new utility pipes were being laid, and this was heaped with bodies, too, although I couldn't count how many, and I didn't want to look them too close. One man's face was already looking runny.

Frank straightened up, and sniffed the air, as if
strigoi
gave off a detectable smell.

“Well?” I asked him.

“I can feel something, but I'm not sure what. A kind of emptiness.”

“
Emptiness?
What do you mean?”

“It's like when you're moving out of a house—and you take a last look around—just to make sure you haven't left anything behind—but really you're trying to remember everything you did there—but you can't—”

“What about
strigoi?
” said Gil.

“I don't know. But there's
something
here. My skin's burning. And my teeth are aching. Believe me—they really, really hurt, right down to the roots.”

Even through the folds of the net curtain I could see that he was suffering. “Do you want to go back?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, emphatically. “This is where the nest is, I'm sure of it. Let's go find these bastards and finish them off.”

I squeezed around a metal fence and walked across the construction site. St. Stephen's had been only a tiny building, with a street frontage of only fifty feet and a depth of no more than seventy-five feet. The site had been completely scraped down to floor level, and the mosaic flooring had now been cleaned and swept and covered in heavy-duty plastic sheeting, to protect it. I looked down and there was St. Stephen staring up at me through the vinyl, dark-skinned and sad-eyed, with a tarnished gold halo.

The buildings on either side had been less seriously damaged, so the site was like a gap where a molar had been extracted, and we stood deep in shadow.

Gil and Jenica followed me as I picked my way to the very back of the building. Here, there were two raised platforms, where the altar had once stood, and off to the left I could see a three-foot space in the mosaic where the door to the vaults must have been. The stairs leading downward were covered over by rusty metal sheeting, but it looked as
if somebody had shifted it, just enough to allow somebody very thin to creep in. Or maybe creep
out.

Frank came to join us. “I can feel that emptiness even more strongly. It's almost—I don't know—
sad
.”

“Okay, let's go down and see what St. Stephen has been hiding from us all these years.”

Between us, Gil and I managed to manhandle the metal sheeting away from the staircase, even though it felt like it weighed half a ton, and after we had moved it I had to walk around in a circle like Groucho Marx, until I straightened myself up. The staircase was wooden, and very dusty. After six or seven steps it took a sharp turn off to the right, toward the back of the construction site, and was swallowed by darkness.

Gil switched on the larger of his two flashlights. “I'll go first. Jenica—I think you should maybe come next. You have all the vampire-hunting gear. Harry—you should take up the rear.”

“Don't trust me?” asked Frank.

“I'm a grunt,” said Gil. “Grunts don't trust nobody, never.”

Jenica said, “We should be safe, if the
strigoi
are sleeping. But like I told you before, we know about them only through myths and legends, and we cannot be absolutely sure that they will not attack us.”

“That's a risk we'll have to take,” I told her. “Come on—we're dealing with the supernatural here, and when you're dealing with the supernatural, you don't get a manufacturer's warranty.”

She looked at me, and there was something in her eyes that made me feel as if the ground was sliding sideways, underneath my feet. “Of course,” she said. “Life is full of unexpected terrors.”

Gil tested his weight on the top step of the staircase. “Seems okay,” he commented. Then he went down the next step, and the next. “It's a little creaky, but otherwise I think it's sound.”

He disappeared around the bend in the stairs, although we could still hear his voice. “It's pretty dusty down here, but it's dry. There's another bend in the stairs, and then there's an archway. Are you coming on down?”

Jenica took her eyes away from me and followed Gil down the stairs, her boot heels going
clomp, clomp, clomp
on every tread.

“Are you going to be able to manage this?” I asked Frank.

Underneath his net curtain, he nodded. “This is the only way. If I don't do this, I'm going to die. Worse than that, I'm going to die and I won't be dead.”

“Keep fighting it, Frank.”

“I'm trying, Harry, believe me. Do you know something—I've treated patients with stomach cancer, and they've taken hold of my sleeve, and they've begged me to kill them. Begged me, with tears in their eyes.
Kill me, doc! Kill me!

He paused, and then he said, “I never knew what they were suffering, not until now. But you can't get your revenge on cancer, can you? I think those people would have wanted to go on living, if they could, no matter how much pain they were going through.”

“Look, if this gets too much for you—”

“Harry, I'm a doctor. I'll know when it's time to pull the plug. But, thanks.”

“Right, then. Let's go.”

Frank felt his way down the staircase and I followed close behind him, giving a quick glance around the construction site to make sure that nobody was watching us. I'd seen too many of those movies when Dr. Van Helsing goes into Dracula's cellars to put a crucifix and a bunch of garlic in his coffin, only to be caught by the vampire coming back home from a night's blood-sucking.

We had to duck our heads to go around the corner in the staircase. It was narrow, and it was very low. As Gil had warned us, we had to negotiate another bend, and then we
found ourselves in a cellar, with red brick arches, and a red brick floor. It was obvious that it had been completely swept clean, probably by the N.Y. Department of Environmental Protection, after September eleventh. It smelled of nothing but brick dust, and there was nothing stored here—no boxes, no religious paraphernalia, and definitely no coffins.

Gil went over to the far side of the cellar, so that the arches hid his head. He flicked his flashlight left and right, up and down, but then he came back and said, “Looks like we've drawn a blank. I can't see any trapdoors, or secret passages. Maybe the vampires
were
here, they're not here now, and that's for sure.”

“I could
feel
them,” Frank insisted.

“You felt emptiness,” I reminded him. “And whatever you say about it, this is emptiness.”

“Anyway, we will have to think again,” said Jenica. “If they are not here, then where are they? If only I could talk to my father, he would have more ideas where we could look.”

I borrowed Gil's spare flashlight, and took a slow walk around the cellar, peering at every crack between the bricks.

“You're wasting your time, Harry,” said Gil. “If there
is
another vault, underneath this one, my guess is that it was sealed up years ago. Remember this part of downtown gets flooded pretty often. That's why they had to build the World Trade Center in kind of a concrete bathtub.”

I had almost completed a circuit of the cellar when I noticed that the shadow to the left of one of the arches appeared to be slightly wider than any of the others. If you had been giving the cellar nothing more than a quick, superficial search, you never would have seen it. In fact, unless you were specifically looking for a concealed entrance, you never would have seen it at all.

Jenica was already making her way back up the staircase, but I called out, “Hey! Wait up!”

“You got something?” asked Gil.

I had to go up really close to the arch before I realized why the shadow was wider. There was a niche there, but it was only about eighteen inches wide, if that, and it was cleverly concealed by protruding brickwork. But when I shone the flashlight directly into it, I realized that it ran right behind the arch. After about five feet, I could see narrow brick steps. The steps led downward, and then turned sharply and steeply to the right, so that they disappeared below the building next door.

“This is it,” I called out. “Here's the way down.”

Gil came around to look at it. “Jesus, that's skinny. Nobody over a hundred and eighty-five pounds need apply.”

“No claustrophobics, either.”

Jenica and Frank joined us. Because there was no sunlight down here, Frank had pulled off his net curtain, and his hood. Frank said, “I knew it.”

Gil said, “Let's be realistic about this. If we go down there, and we get ambushed, it isn't going to be easy to get out.”

“Do we have a choice?” I asked him.

Frank said, “Why don't I go first? If we don't find these bastards, I'm going to die anyway. And maybe they won't attack me, if they think that I'm one of them. Or
nearly
one of them.”