Fet had come to them as a city employee, an exterminator who wanted to know what was driving the rats out from underground. He had already run into a few vampires in his subterranean adventures, and his skill set—a dedicated killer of vermin, and an expert in the workings of the city beneath the city—lent itself perfectly to vampire hunting. He was the one who had first led Eph and Setrakian down here in search of the Master’s nest.
The smell of slaughter remained trapped in the underground chamber. The charred stench of roasted vampire—and the lingering ammonia odor of the creatures’ excrement.
Eph found himself lagging behind, and picked up his pace, sweeping the tunnel with his flashlight, catching up to Fet.
The exterminator chewed an unlit Toro cigar, which he was used to talking around. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m great,” said Eph. “Couldn’t be better.”
“He’s confused. Man, I was confused at that age, and my mother wasn’t… you know.”
“I know. He needs time. And that’s just one of many things I can’t give him right now.”
“He’s a good kid. I don’t usually like kids, but I like yours.”
Eph nodded, appreciative of the effort Fet was putting forth. “I like him too.”
“I worry about the old man.”
Eph stepped carefully over the loose stones. “It took a lot out of him.”
“Physically, sure. But there’s more.”
“Failure.”
“That, yes. Getting so near, after so many years of chasing these things, only to see the Master withstand and survive the old man’s best shot. But something else too. There are things he’s not telling us. Or hasn’t told us yet. I am sure of it.”
Eph remembered the king vampire throwing back its cloak in a gesture of triumph, its lily-white flesh cooking in the daylight as it howled at the sun in defiance—then
disappearing over the edge of the rooftop. “He thought sunlight would kill the Master.”
Fet chewed his cigar. “The sun did hurt it, at least. Who knows how long that thing would have been able to take the exposure. And you—you cut him. With the silver.” Eph had gotten in a half-lucky slash across the Master’s back, which the sun’s subsequent exposure fused into an instant black scar. “If it can be hurt, I guess it can be destroyed. Right?”
“But—isn’t a wounded animal more dangerous?”
“Animals, like people, are motivated by pain and fear. But this thing? Pain and fear are where it lives. It doesn’t need any additional motivation.”
“To wipe us all out.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Would he want to wipe out all of mankind? I mean—we’re his food. We’re his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He turns everyone into vamps, there goes his entire food supply. Once you kill all the chickens, no more eggs.”
Eph was impressed by Fet’s reasoning, the logic of an exterminator. “He’s got to maintain a balance, right? Turn too many people into vampires, you create too great a demand for human meals. Blood economics.”
“Unless there’s some other fate in store for us. I only hope the old man has the answers. If he doesn’t…”
“Then nobody does.”
They came up to the dingy tunnel junction. Eph held up his Luma lamp, the UVC rays bringing out the wild stains of vampire waste: their urine and excrement, whose biological matter fluoresced under the low light range. The stains were no longer the garish colors Eph remembered. These stains were fading. This meant that no vampires had revisited the spot recently. Perhaps, through their apparent telepathy, they had been warned away by the deaths of the hundreds of fellow creatures that Eph, Fet, and Setrakian had slain.
Fet used his steel rod to poke at the mound of discarded mobile phones, piled up like a cairn. A desultory monument to human futility—as though vampires had sucked the life out of people, and all that was left were their gadgets.
Fet said, quietly, “I’ve been thinking about something he said. He was talking about myths from different cultures and ages revealing similar basic human fears. Universal symbols.”
“Archetypes.”
“That was the word. Terrors common to all tribes and countries, deep in all humans across the board—diseases and plagues, warfare, greed. His point was, what if these things aren’t just superstitions? What if they are directly related? Not separate fears linked by our subconscious—but what if they have actual roots in our past? In other words, what if these aren’t common myths? What if they are common truths?”
Eph found it difficult to process theory down in the underbelly of the besieged city. “You’re saying that he’s saying that maybe we’ve always known…?”