The Fall (The Strain Trilogy 2)

“We cannot remain here any longer.”

Eph sat down on the flat exercise mat inside the odd-angled storage room on the top floor of Setrakian’s home. Zack sat there with one leg bent, his knee as high as his cheek, arms hugging his thigh. Zack looked ragged, like a boy sent off to sleepaway camp who came back changed, and not for the better. Silver-backed mirrors surrounded them, giving Eph the feeling of being watched by many old eyes. The window frame within the iron bars had been hastily boarded over, a bandage uglier than the wound it covered.

Eph studied his son’s face, trying to read it. He was worried about the boy’s sanity, as he was worried about his own. He rubbed his mouth in preparation for talking, and felt roughness around the edges of his lips and chin, realizing he hadn’t shaved in days.

“I checked the parenting handbook earlier,” he began. “Unfortunately there was no chapter about vampires.”

He tried to smile, but wasn’t sure it worked. He wasn’t sure his smile was persuasive anymore. He wasn’t sure anyone should be smiling now.

“Okay, so, this is going to sound twisted—and it is twisted. But let me get it out. You know your mom loved you, Z. More even than you know, as much as a mother can love a son. That’s why she and I went through all we did, what felt to you at times like a tug-of-war—because neither one of us could bear being apart from you. Because you’re it. I know that children sometimes blame themselves for their parents’ breakup. But you were the one thing holding us together. And driving us crazy fighting over you.”

“Dad, you don’t have to—”

“I know, I know. Cut to it, right? But no. This stuff you need to hear, and right now. Maybe I need to hear it too, okay? We need to set each other straight. Put it right out in front of us. A mother’s love is… it’s like a force. It’s beyond simple human affection. It’s soul-deep. A father’s love—my love for you, Z—it’s the strongest thing in my life, absolutely it is. But this thing has made me realize that there’s something about maternal love—it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.”

He checked to see how this was going with Zack. Couldn’t tell.

“And now this thing, this plague, this awful… it’s taken who she was and burned off all that was good in her. All that was right and true. All that was, as we understand it, human. Your mom… she was beautiful, she was caring, she was… she was also crazy, in the way all devoted mothers are. But you were her great gift to the world. That’s how she saw you. That’s what you are still. That part of her lives on. But now—she is not herself anymore. She is not Kelly Goodweather, not Mom—and this is hard for both of us to accept. All that remains of what she was, as far as I can tell, is her bond with you. Because that bond is sacred, and it never dies. What we call love, in our sappy greeting-card way, is evidently something much deeper than we humans imagined. Her human love for you has… it seems to have shifted, has morphed, into this kind of want, this need. Where she is now, this bad place? She wants you there with her. It’s not bad to her, or evil, or dangerous. She just wants you with her. And what you need to know is that this is all because your mother loved you so completely.”

Zack nodded. He couldn’t or wouldn’t speak.

“Now, that said, we have to keep you safe from her. She looks different now, right? That’s because she is different—fundamentally different—and it’s not easy to face that. I can’t make this right for you except to protect you from her. From what she has become. That’s my new job now, as your parent, as your father. If you think of your mom, as she originally was, and what she would do to save you from any threat to your health, to your safety… well, you tell me. What would she do?”

Zack nodded, answering immediately. “She would hide me.”

“She would take you away. Remove you from the threat, get you to a safe place.” Eph listened to what he was saying. “Just pick you up and… run. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You’re right,” said Zack.

“Okay, so—being the overprotective mom? That’s my job now.”

Brooklyn

ERIC JACKSON PHOTOGRAPHED the window burn from three different angles. He always carried a small Canon digital camera when he was on duty, along with his gun and his badge.

Acid etching was the thing now. Craft-store etching product usually mixed with shoe polish, marking on glass or Plexiglas. It didn’t show up immediately, burning into the glass in the space of hours. The longer the acid-etched tag remained, the more permanent it became.

He stood back to size up the shape. Six black appendages radiating from a red center mass. He clicked back through his camera memory. Another one, taken yesterday in Bay Ridge, only not as well-defined. And another, in Canarsie, looking more like an oversized asterisk but evincing the same tight lines.

Jackson knew Phade’s work anywhere. True, this wasn’t like his usual throw-ups—this was amateur work compared to that—but the fine arcs and perfect free-hand proportion were unmistakable.

Dude was going all-city, sometimes in one night. How was that possible?

Eric Jackson was a member of the New York Police Department’s Citywide Vandals Taskforce, his job to track and prevent vandalism. He believed in the gospel of the NYPD as it pertained to graffiti. Even the most beautifully colored and detailed graffiti throw-up represented an affront to public order. An invitation to others to consider the urban environment theirs to do wit

h as they pleased. Freedom of expression was always the miscreant’s way out, but littering was an act of expression also, and you still got nicked for it. Order was a fragile thing, with chaos always just a few steps away.

The city was seeing that now, firsthand.

Riots had claimed whole blocks in the South Bronx. Nighttime was the worst. Jackson kept waiting for a call from a captain that would put him back in the old uniform and out on the street. But no word yet. Not a lot of radio chatter at all, whenever he switched it on inside his car. So he kept on doing what he was paid to do.

The governor had resisted calls for the National Guard, but he was just a guy in Albany, weighing his political future. Supposedly, with so many units still in Iraq and Afghanistan, the guard was undermanned and underequipped—but, looking at the black smoke in the distant sky, Jackson would have welcomed any help.

Jackson dealt with vandals in all five boroughs, but nobody bombed as much of the city’s fa$clade as Phade. Dude was everywhere. Must have slept all day, tagged all night. He was fifteen or sixteen now, had been getting up since he was twelve. That was the age most taggers start, toying up at schools, on newspaper boxes, etc. In surveillance photos, Phade’s face was always obscured, usually by a Yankees cap tucked underneath a sweatshirt hood, sometimes even an aerosol mask. He wore typical tagger get-up: cargo pants with many pockets, a backpack for his Krylons, hi-top kicks.

Most vandals work in tagging crews, but not Phade. He was a young legend, moving with apparent impunity throughout diverse neighborhoods. He was said to carry a stolen set of transit keys, including a skeleton that unlocked subway cars. His tags earned respect. The typical profile of a young tagger is low self-esteem, a desire for peer recognition, a distorted view of fame. Phade fit none of these traits. His signature wasn’t a tag—usually a nickname or a repetitive motif—but his style itself. His pieces jumped off walls. Jackson’s own suspicion—long since moved from a hunch to a foregone certainty—was that Phade was likely obsessive-compulsive, perhaps showing symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome or even full-spectrum autism.

Jackson understood this, in part, because he was an obsessive himself. He carried a full book on Phade, quite similar in appearance to the “piece books” taggers carried, featuring their graffiti outlines in a black-cover Cachet sketchbook. As one of five officers assigned to the GHOST unit within the Vandals Taskforce—the Graffiti Habitual Offender Suppression Team—he was responsible for maintaining a graffiti offender databank cross-referencing tags and throw-ups with addresses. People who consider graffiti a kind of “street art” think of brightly colored, Wild Style bubble bombs on building murals and subway cars. They don’t think of tagging crews etching storefronts, competing for high-profile—and often dangerous—“gets.” Or, more often, marking gang territory, establishing name recognition and intimidation.