The Farrell
THE HORSE CHARGED. In its wake was a plume of thick black smoke and orange flame.
The horse was on fire.
Fully consumed, the proud beast galloped with an urgency born not of pain but of desire. At night, visible from a mile away, the horse without rider or saddle raced through the flat, barren countryside, toward the village. Toward the watcher.
Fet stood transfixed by the sight. Knowing it was coming for him. He anticipated it. Expected it.
Entering the outskirts of the village, bearing down on him with the velocity of a flaming arrow, the galloping horse spoke—naturally, in a dream, it spoke—saying, I live.
Fet howled as the flaming horse overtook him—and he awoke.
He was on his side, lying on a fold-down bed in the crew bunk beneath the foredeck of a rocking ship. The vessel pitched and swayed, and he pitched and swayed with it, the possessions around him netted and tied down tight. The other beds were folded up to the wall. He was the only one currently bunking.
The dream—always essentially the same—had haunted him since his youth. The flaming horse with burning hooves racing at him out of the dark night, awakening him just before impact. The fear he felt upon waking was deep and rich, a child’s fear.
He reached for his pack beneath the bunk. The bag was damp—everything on the ship was damp—but its top knot was tight, its contents secure.
The ship was the Farrell, a large fishing boat used for smuggling marijuana, which, yes, was still a profitable black-market business. This was the final leg of a return trip from Iceland. Fet had hired the boat for the price of a dozen small arms and plenty of ammunition to keep them running pot for years to come. The sea was one of the few areas left on the planet that was essentially beyond the vampires’ reach. Illicit drugs had become incredibly scarce under the new prohibition, the trade confined to homegrown and home-brewed narcotics such as marijuana and pockets of methamphetamine. They operated a smaller sideline business smuggling moonshine—and, on this trip, a few cases of fine Icelandic and Russian vodka.
Fet’s mission to Iceland was twofold. His first order of business was to travel to the University of Reykjavik. In the weeks and months following the vampire cataclysm, while still holed up inside the train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, waiting for the surface air to become habitable once again, Fet constantly paged through the book Professor Abraham Setrakian had died for, the book the Holocaust survivor–turned–vampire hunter had entrusted explicitly and exclusively to Fet’s possession.
It was the Occido Lumen, loosely translated as “The Fallen Light.” Four hundred eighty-nine folios, handwritten on parchment, with twenty illuminated pages, bound in leather and faced with plates of pure vampire-repelling silver. The Lumen was an account of the rise of the strigoi, based upon a collection of ancient clay tablets dating back to Mesopotamian times, discovered inside a cave in the Zagros Mountains in 1508. Written in Sumerian and extremely fragile, the tablets survived over a century until they fell into the hands of a French rabbi who was committed to deciphering them—more than two centuries before Sumerian was widely translated—in secret. The rabbi eventually presented his illuminated manuscript to King Louis XIV as a gift—and was immediately imprisoned for his effort.
The original tablets were pulverized upon royal order and the manuscript believed destroyed or lost. The king’s mistress, a dabbler in the occult, retrieved the Lumen from a palace vault in 1671, and from there it changed hands many times in obscurity, acquiring its reputation as a cursed text. The Lumen resurfaced briefly in 1823 and again in 1911, each time coinciding with mysterious outbreaks of disease, before disappearing again. The text was offered for auction at Sotheby’s in Manhattan no fewer than ten days following the Master’s arrival and the start of the vampire plague—and was won, after great effort, by Setrakian with the backing of the Ancients and their accumulated wealth.
Setrakian, the university professor who shunned normal society following the turning of his beloved wife, becoming obsessed with hunting and destroying the virus-bred strigoi, had considered the Lumen the authoritative text on the conspiracy of vampires that had plagued the earth for most of the history of mankind. Publicly, his station in life had fallen to that of a lowly pawnbroker in an economically depressed section of Manhattan; yet in the bowels of his shop he had maintained an armory of vampire-fighting weapons and a library of ancient accounts and manuals regarding the dread race, accumulated from all corners of the globe throughout decades of pursuit. But such was his desire to reveal the secrets contained within the Occido Lumen that he ultimately gave his life so that it would fall i
nto Fet’s hands.
It had occurred to Fet, during those long, dark nights in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River, that the Lumen had to have been offered up for auction by someone. Someone had possessed the cursed book—but who? Fet thought that perhaps the seller had some further knowledge of its power and its contents. In the time since they surfaced, Fet had been diligently going through the tome with a Latin dictionary, doing the tedious work of translating the lexicon as best he could. On an excursion inside the vacated Sotheby’s building on the Upper East Side, Fet discovered that the University of Reykjavik was to be the anonymous beneficiary of the proceeds from the sale of the extraordinarily rare book. With Nora he weighed the pros and cons of undertaking this journey, and together they decided that this lengthy voyage to Iceland was their only chance of uncovering who had actually put the book up for auction.
However, the university, as he discovered upon arrival, was a warren of vampires. Fet had hoped that Iceland might have gone the way of the United Kingdom, which had reacted swiftly to the plague, blowing up the Chunnel and hunting down strigoi after the initial outbreak. The islands remained nearly vampire-free, and their people, though completely isolated from the rest of the infected globe, remained human.
Fet had waited until daylight to search the ransacked administrative offices in hopes of tracing the book’s provenance. He learned that the university trust itself had offered the book for auction, not a scholar employed there or a specific benefactor, as Fet had hoped. As the campus itself was deserted, this was a long way to travel to find a dead end. But it was not a total waste. For on a shelf in the Egyptology department, Fet had found a most curious text: an old, leather-bound book, printed in French in 1920. On its cover were the words Sadum et Amurah. The very last words that Setrakian had asked Fet to remember.
He took the text with him. Even though he spoke not a single word of French.
The second part of his mission proved to be much more productive. At some point early on in his association with these pot smugglers, after learning how wide their reach was, Fet challenged them to connect him with a nuclear weapon. This request was not as far-fetched as one might think. In the Soviet Union especially, where the strigoi enjoyed total control, many so-called suitcase nukes had been purloined by ex-KGB officers and were rumored to be available—in less-than-mint condition—on the black markets of Eastern Europe. The Master’s drive to purge the world of these weapons—in order that they could not be used to destroy its site of origin, as the Master had itself destroyed the six Ancients—proved to Fet and the others that the Master was indeed vulnerable. Much like the Ancients, the Master’s site of origin, the very key to its destruction, was encrypted within the pages of the Lumen. Fet offered the right price and had the silver to back it up.
This crew of smugglers put out feelers among their maritime compatriots, with the promise of a silver bounty. Fet was skeptical when the smugglers told him they had a surprise for him, but the desperate will believe in almost anything. They rendezvoused on a small volcanic island south of Iceland with a Ukrainian crew of seven aboard a junked-out yacht with six different outboard engines off the stern. The captain of the crew was young, in his midtwenties, and essentially one-handed, his left arm withered and ending in an unsightly claw.
The device was not a suitcase at all. It resembled a small keg or trash can wrapped in a black tarpaulin and netting, with buckled green straps around its sides and over its lid. Roughly three feet tall by two feet wide. Fet tried lifting it gently. It weighed over one hundred pounds.
“You sure this works?” he asked.
The captain scratched his copper beard with his good hand. He spoke broken English with a Russian accent. “I am told it does. Only one way to find out. It misses one part.”
“One part is missing?” said Fet. “Let me guess. Plutonium. U-233.”
“No. Fuel is in the core. One-kiloton capability. It misses the detonator.” He pointed to a thatch of wires on the top and shrugged. “Everything else good.”
The explosive force of a one-kiloton nuke equaled one thousand tons of TNT. A half-mile shockwave of steel-bending destruction. “I’d love to know how you came across this,” said Fet.
“I’d like to know what you want it for,” said the captain. “Best if we all keep our secrets.”
“Fair enough.”