The Night Eternal (The Strain Trilogy 3)

“You’re going to be okay,” she told him.

But the boy’s attention was elsewhere. He was looking skyward, and after a moment Eph heard it too.

Black helicopters. Approaching from the south. Coming in low.

Gus came hobbling down from the beach. Eph saw immediately that his left arm was badly broken—his left hand swelling with blood—though that condition did not in any way cool the gangbanger’s anger toward him. “Choppers!” yelled Gus. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

Eph quickly slipped off his pack. “Take it,” he said to Fet. The Lumen was inside.

“Fuck the manual, man,” Gus said. “This is practice!”

Gus dropped his gun, shaking off his own pack with a painful grunt—first his good arm, and then Nora helped him lift it off his broken one—then rummaged inside for two purple-colored canisters from his pack. He pulled the pins with his teeth, rolling the smoke grenades to the right and to the left.

Violet smoke billowed, lifted by the shore wind, shielding the beach and dock from view and providing some intermediate cover from the approaching helicopters. “Get outta here!” yelled Gus. “You and your boy. Take care of the Master. I’ll cover your ass—but you remember, Goodweather, you and me, we got business to settle after.” Gus gently, though with great pain, pushed the jacket sleeve up from the swollen wrist of his bad arm, showing Eph the scarred word “MADRE,” left there from all of Gus’s bloodletting.

“Eph,” said Nora. “Don’t forget—the Master is still out here somewhere.”

At the far corner of the dock, some thirty yards from shore, Ann and William waited inside two ten-foot aluminum rowboats with outboard motors. Eph ran Zack to the first boat. When the boy would not board willingly, Eph lifted him up bodily and placed him in there. He looked at his son. “We’re going to ge

t through this, okay, Z?”

Zack had no response. He watched the Born loading the bomb onto the other boat, between the rear and middle bench seats, and gently but firmly lift William out, depositing him back on the dock.

Eph remembered the Master was in Zack’s head, seeing this too. Seeing Eph right now.

“It’s just about over,” Eph said.

The violet smoke cover billowed up off the beach, blowing across to the trees, revealing more advancing vampires. “The Master needs a human to take him across water,” said Fet, stepping up with Nora and Gus. “I don’t think there’s anybody left here but us three. We just have to make sure nobody else gets to the skiffs.”

The violet smoke parted strangely, as though folding in on itself. As though something had passed through it at incredible speed.

“Wait—did you see that?” yelled Fet.

Nora heard the thrumming presence of the Master. Impossibly, the wall of smoke changed course completely, curling back from the trees and rolling against the river breeze toward the shore—consuming them. Nora and Fet were immediately separated, vampires rushing at them silently out of the smoke, their bare feet soft on the damp sand.

Helicopter rotors chopped at the air overhead. Cracks and thumps made the sand jump at their shoes, rifle fire from above. Snipers shooting blindly into the smoke cover. A vampire took one to the top of its head just as Nora was about to cut it down. The rotors whipped smoke back at her, and she did a full three-sixty with her sword straight out, blindly coughing, choking. Suddenly she was unsure which side was shore and which was water. She saw a swirling in the smoke, like a dust devil, and heard the thrumming loudly again.

The Master. She kept swinging, fighting the smoke and everything in it.

Gus, keeping his bad arm behind him, rushed blindly sideways through the choking violet cloud, keeping to the shore. The sailboats were tied to a dock unconnected to land, anchored some forty or fifty feet out in the water.

Gus’s left side was throbbing, his arm swollen. He felt feverish as he broke from the edge of the violet cloud, before the river-facing windows of the restaurant, expecting a column of hungry vampires. But he was alone on the beach.

Not so in the air. He saw the black helicopters, six of them directly overhead, with another six or so coming up behind. They hovered low, swarming like giant mechanized bees, whipping sand into Gus’s face. One of them moved out over the river, scattering the surface water, whipping moisture with the force of shards of glass.

Gus heard the rifle cracks and knew they were shooting at the skiffs. Trying to scuttle them. Thumps at his feet told him they were shooting at him too, but he was more concerned about the choppers starting off over the lake—searching for Goodweather, for the nuke.

“Que chingados esperas?” he cursed in Spanish. “What are you waiting for?”

Gus fired at those choppers, trying to bring them down. A scorching stab in his calf dropped him to one knee, and he knew he had been shot. He kept firing at the helicopters heading out over the river, seeing sparks fly off the tail.

Another rifle round pierced his side with the force of an arrow. “Do it, Eph! Do it!” he yelled, falling to his elbow and still firing.

One helicopter wobbled, and a human figure fell from it into the water. The chopper failed to right itself, its rear tail spinning frontward until it collided with another chopper, and both aircraft rolled and crashed down into the river.

Gus was out of ammo. He lay back on the beach, just a few yards from the water, watching the death birds hover over him. In an instant, his body was covered with laser sights projecting out of the colored fog.

“Goodweather gets fucking angels,” said Gus, laughing, sucking air. “I get laser sights.” He saw the snipers leaning out of their open cabin doors, sighting him. “Light me up, motherfuckers!”