The Fall (18 page)

Not until the box sank to the ocean floor did Dreverhaven’s taunting voice finally leave Setrakian’s mind, like a madness finding its cure. Setrakian looked at his crooked fingers, bruised and bleeding, stinging with the salt water—and clenched them into tangled fists.

He was indeed going the way of madness. It was time to go underground, he realized, just as the
strigoi
had. To continue his work in private, and to await his chance.

His chance at the book. At the Master.

It was time to repair to America.

THE
MASTER
WAS
, above all things, compulsive in both action and thought. The Master had considered every potential permutation of the plan. It felt vaguely anxious for this all to come to fruition, but one thing the Master did not lack was conviction.

The Ancients would be exterminated all at once, and in a matter of hours.

They would not even see it coming. How could they? After all, hadn’t the Master orchestrated the demise of one of them, along with six serfs, some years ago in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria? The Master itself had shared in the pain of the anguish of death at the very moment it occurred, feeling the maelstrom pull of the darkness—the implacable nothing—and savoring it.

On the 26th of April, 1986, several hundred meters below at the center of the Bulgarian city, a solar flash—a fission approximating the power of the sun—occurred inside a vaulted cellar within fifteen-foot-thick concrete walls. The city above was shaken by a deep rumble and a seismic movement, its epicenter tracked to Pirotska Street—but there were no injuries, and very little damage to property.

The event had been a mere bleep in the news, barely worth mentioning. It was to become completely overshadowed by the meltdown of the reactor at Chernobyl, and yet, in a manner unknown to most, intimately related to it.

Of the original seven, the Master had remained the most ambitious, the hungriest—and, in a sense, the youngest. This was only natural. The Master was the last one to arise, and from whence it was created was the mouth, the throat,
the thirst.

Divided by this thirst, the others were scattered and hidden. Concealed, yet connected.

These notions buzzed inside the great consciousness of the Master. Its thoughts wandered to the time the Master first visited Armageddon on this Earth—to cities long forgotten, with pillars of alabaster and floors of polished onyx.

To the first time it had tasted blood.

Quickly, the Master reasserted control over its thoughts. Memories were a dangerous thing. They individuated the Master’s mind, and when that happened, even in this protected environment, the other Ancients could hear too. For in those moments of clarity, their minds became one. As they once had been, and were meant to be forever.

They were all created as one, and, thus, the Master had no name of its own. They all shared the one—Sariel—just as they shared one nature and one purpose. Their emotions and thought were naturally connected, in exactly the way the Master connected with the brood it was fostering, and all that would spring forth after that. The bond between the Ancients could be blocked but could never be broken. Their instincts and thoughts naturally yearned for connection.

In order to succeed, the Master had to subvert such an occurrence.

WHEN
VASILIY
REGAINED
consciousness, he found himself half-submerged in dirty water. All around him, ruptured pipes vomited gallons upon gallons of sewage water into the growing pool beneath him. Fet tried to get up, but leaned on his bad arm and groaned. He remembered what had happened: the explosion, the
strigoi.
The air was thick with the disturbing aroma of cooked flesh, mixed with toxic fumes. Somewhere in the distance—above him? beneath him?—he heard sirens and the squelch of police radios. Ahead, the faint glow of fire outlined a distant duct mouth.

His injured leg was submerged, still bleeding, adding to the murkiness of the water. His ears were still ringing, or, rather, just one. Fet raised his hand to it, and crusted blood flaked off into his fingers. He feared he had a blown eardrum.

He had no idea of where he was, or how he could get out, but the blast must have propelled him quite a way, and now, all around him, he found a little bit of free space.

He turned and located a loose grate near his flank. Rusty steel, rotten screws, rattling to his touch. He pried it loose a bit—and already he could feel a rush of fresh air. He was close to freedom, but his fingers were not enough to pry open the grate.

He felt around for something to use as a lever. He located a twisted length of steel—and then, lying facedown, the charred body of the
strigoi.

As he looked at the burned remains, a moment of panic struck Fet. The blood worms. Had they seeped out of their host and blindly sought another body in this dank hole? If so, then… were they already in him? The wound in his leg? Would he feel any different if he was infected?

Then, the body moved.

It twitched.

Ever so slightly.

It was still functioning. Still alive—as alive as a vampire can be.

That was the reason the worms had not seeped out.

It stirred and sat up out of the water. Its back was charred, but not its front. Something was wrong with its eyes, and Fet knew in a moment that it no longer could see. It moved with sloppy determination, many of its bones fully dislocated yet its musculature still intact. Its jaw was no longer in place, ripped away by the blast, such that its stinger waved loosely in the air, like a tentacle.

The being splayed itself aggressively, a blind predator ready to charge. But Fet was transfixed by the sight of the exposed stinger. This was the first time he could see it completely. It was attached at two points, both at the base of the throat and at the back portion of the palate. The root was engorged and had a rippling, muscular structure. At the back of the throat, a sphincter-like hole gaped open in demand for food. Vasiliy thought he had seen a similar structure before—but where?

In the gloomy half-light, Fet felt around, looking for his nail gun. The creature’s head turned to the water sounds, trying to orient itself. Fet was about to give up when he stumbled upon the nail gun—completely submerged in the water.
Damn,
he thought, trying to control his anger.

But the thing had locked on him, somehow—and charged. Fet moved as fast as he could, but now the creature, blindly adapted to the shape of the duct around it and its damaged limbs, instinctively found its footing, moving with uncanny coordination.

Fet raised the gun and hoped for luck. He pulled back on the trigger—twice—and found he was out of ammo. He had emptied the entire payload before being knocked out, and now was left with an empty industrial tool in his hand.

The thing was on top of him in a matter of seconds, tackling Fet, pushing him down.

Fet had its entire weight on top of him. What was left of its mouth trembled as the stinger recoiled, ready to shoot.

Reflexively, Vasiliy grabbed the stinger as he would a rabid rat. He pulled on it, bending it free of the structure of the thing’s open throat. The thing squirmed and yelped, its dislocated arms unable to fight Fet’s grip. The stinger was like a heavily muscled snake, slimy and squirming, bucking, trying to get loose. But now Vasiliy was angry. The harder the thing pulled back, the stronger Fet pulled forward. He would not give up his tight grip, his good arm pulling with all his might.

And Fet’s might was immense.

In one final yank, Vasiliy overpowered the
strigoi
and ripped the stinger and part of the glandular structure and trachea from the thing’s neck.

The entity squirmed in his hand, moving like an independent animal, even as the host body twitched spasmodically, falling back.

One thick blood worm emerged from the writhing mess, crawling quickly over Fet’s fist. It slithered past his wrist and, all at once, began boring into his arm. It was drilling straight for the forearm veins, and Fet tossed away the stinger structure, watching this parasite invade his arm. It was halfway in when Vasiliy grabbed it by its visible, wriggling end, and yanked. He tore it back out, howling in pain and disgust. Again, reflex took over and he snapped the revolting parasite in two.

In his hands, before his eyes, the two halves regenerated themselves—as if by magic—into complete parasites again.

Fet tossed them away. He saw, exiting the vampire’s body, dozens of worms oozing out, slithering toward him through the fetid water.

His length of twisted steel gone, Fet said fuck it, ripping at the grate with his bare hands, pumped with adrenaline, tearing it loose and grabbing his empty nail gun as he jumped out of the duct and rushed to freedom.

HE
LIVED
ALONE
in a tenement building in Jersey City, two blocks from Journal Square. One of the few neighborhoods that had not become gentrified. So many yuppies had taken over the rest—and where do they come from? How come they never end?

He climbed the steps to his fourth-floor apartment, his right knee creaking—literally creaking with every step—a squeak of pain jolting his body again and again.

His name was Angel Guzman Hurtado and he used to be big. He still was big, physically, but at age sixty-five his rebuilt knee hurt all the time and his body fat—what his American doctor called his
BMI
and what any Mexican would call
panza
—had overtaken his otherwise powerful figure. He sagged where he used to be taut, and he was taut where he had once been flexible—but big? Angel was always big. Both as a man and as a star—or at least what resembled it in his past life.

Angel had been a wrestler—
the
Wrestler back in Mexico City. El Angel de Plata. The Silver Angel.

He had begun his career in the 1960s as a
rudo
wrestler (one of the “bad guys”), but soon found himself embraced, with his trademark silver mask, by the adoring public, and so adjusted his style and altered his persona into a
tecnico,
one of the “good guys.” Through the years he fashioned himself into an industry: comic books,
fotonovelas
(corny photo-illustrated magazines narrating his strange and often ridiculous exploits), films, and TV spots. He opened two gyms and bought half a dozen tenements throughout Mexico City, becoming, in his own right, a superhero of sorts. His films spanned all genres: western, horror, sci-fi, secret agent—many times within the same feature. He took on amphibian creatures as well as Soviet spies with equal aplomb in badly choreographed scenes full of library sound effects—always ending with his trademark knockout blow known as the “Angel Kiss.”

But it was with vampires that he discovered his true niche. The silver-masked marvel battled every form of vampire: male, female, thin, fat—and, occasionally, even nude, for alternate versions exhibited only overseas.

But the eventual fall equaled the height of his climb. The more he expanded his brand empire, the more infrequently he trained, and wrestling became a nuisance he needed to put up with. When his movies were box-office hits and his popularity still high, he performed wrestling exhibitions only once or twice a year. His movie
Angel vs. The Return of the Vampires
(a title that made no syntactic sense, and yet encapsulated his film oeuvre perfectly) found new life in repeated TV airings, and Angel felt compelled by fading fame to produce a cinematic rematch with those caped, fanged creatures that had given him so much.

And so it came to pass that one fine morning he found himself face-to-face with a group of young wrestlers made up as vampires in cheap greasepaint and rubber teeth. Angel himself walked them through a change in fight choreography that would have him wrapped three hours early—his focus less on the film at hand than on enjoying an afternoon martini back at the Intercontinental Hotel.

In the scene, one of the vampires would nearly unmask Angel until he miraculously freed himself with an open-palm blow, his trademark “Angel Kiss.”

But as the scene progressed, filmed amid sweaty technicians at a stifling stage in Churubusco Studios, the younger vampire thespian, perhaps enraptured by the glory of his cinematic debut, applied a bit more force than necessary to their skirmish, and threw the middle-aged wrestler down. As they fell, the vampire adversary landed, both awkwardly and tragically, on his venerable master’s leg.

Angel’s knee snapped with a moist, loud crack, bending into an almost perfect
L
—the wrestler’s anguished scream muffled by his halfway torn silver mask.

He awoke hours later in a private room at one of Mexico’s best hospitals, surrounded by flowers, serenaded by well-wishers shouting from the street below.

But his leg. It was shattered. Irreparably.

The good doctor explained this to him with genial forthrightness, a man with whom Angel had shared a few afternoons of craps at the country club across from the film studios.

In the months and years that followed, Angel spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his broken limb—in hopes of mending his fractured career and recovering his technique—but his skin hardened from the multiple scars crisscrossing the knee, and his bones refused to heal properly.

In a final humiliation, a newspaper revealed his identity to the public, and, without the ambiguity and the mystery of the silver mask, Angel the common man became too pitied to be adored.

The rest happened quickly. As his investments faltered, he worked as a trainer, then bodyguard, then as a bouncer, but his pride remained, and soon he found himself a burly old guy who scared no one. Fifteen years ago, he followed a woman to New York City and overstayed his visa. Now—like most people who end up in tenements—he had no clear idea how he had gotten here, only that he was indeed here, a resident in a building quite similar to one of six he used to own outright.