The Strain (Page 23)

The cats turned and ran. They fled the clearing, claws grabbing willy-nilly at the high fence or scrambling through predug holes beneath it.

Lo could not turn. She felt a rush of heat from behind her, as from an oven door when you open it. A presence. As she tried to move, the sounds in her head coalesced into one single horrible voice.

"HERE."

And then she was lifted off the ground.

When the legion of cats returned, they discovered her body with its head crushed, cast deep into their side of the hurricane fence like so much litter. The gulls had found her first-but the cats quickly scared them off and got right to work, hungrily shredding her clothes to get to the feast within.

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

THE OLD MAN SAT BEFORE the three adjacent windows at the western end of his dimmed apartment, gazing up at the occluded sun.

Five minutes of night in the middle of the day. The greatest naturally occurring celestial event in four centuries.

The timing could not be ignored.

But to what purpose?

Urgency seized him like a fevered hand. He had not opened the shop that day, instead spending the hours since daybreak hauling things up from his basement workshop. Items and curiosities he had acquired over the years…

Tools of forgotten function. Rare implements of obscure origin. Weapons of lost provenance.

Why he sat here tired now, his gnarled hands aching. No one else but he could foresee what was coming. What was-by every indication-already here.

No one else who would believe him.

Goodfellow. Or Goodwilling. Whatever was the last name of that man who had spoken at the otherwise ridiculous news conference on the television, standing next to the doctor in the navy uniform. How cautiously optimistic all the others had seemed. Exulting over the four survivors, while claiming not to know the final tally of all the dead. We want to assure the public that this threat is contained. Only an elected official would dare to declare a thing safe and finished when he or she didn’t even know yet what it was.

This man was the only one behind the microphones who seemed to think there might be more to this than a malfunctioning aircraft full of dead passengers.

Goodwater?

From the disease control center, the one in Atlanta. Setrakian didn’t know, but he thought his best chance might be with this man. Maybe his only chance.

Four survivors. If they only knew…

He looked out again at the glowing black disk in the sky. Like staring at an eye blinded by a cataract.

Like staring into the future.

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

THE HELICOPTER touched down on the helipad of the Stoneheart Group’s Manhattan headquarters, a building of black steel and glass in the heart of Wall Street. Its top three floors were occupied by Eldritch Palmer’s private New York residence, a regal penthouse constructed with onyx floors, its tables laden with Brancusis, its walls papered with Bacons.

Palmer sat alone in the media room with the shades all drawn, the glowing black eyeball rimmed in fierce crimson and ringed with flaming white staring out at him from a seventy-two-inch viewing screen. This room, like his home in Dark Harbor and the cabin of his medical helicopter, was kept regulated at exactly sixty-two degrees.

He could have gone outside. It was, after all, cold enough for him; he could have been taken up to the roof to witness the occultation. But technology brought him closer to the event itself-not the resulting shadow, but the image of the sun subordinated to the moon-that was the prelude to the devastation. His Manhattan sojourn would be brief. New York City would not be a very pleasant place to visit, not for much longer.

He placed a few phone calls, a few discreet consultations over his secure line. His cargo had indeed arrived as expected.

Smiling, he rose from his chair, walking slowly but straight at the giant viewing screen, as though it were not a screen at all but a portal he was about to step through. He reached out and touched the LCD screen over the image of the angry black disk, liquid pixels squirming bacteria-like beneath the wrinkled pads of his fingers. As though he were reaching through it to touch the eye of death itself.

This occultation was a celestial perversion, a violation of the natural order. A cold, dead stone deposing a burning, living star. For Eldritch Palmer, it was proof that anything-anything, even the grossest betrayal of natural law-was indeed possible.

Of all the human beings watching the occultation that day, in person or via broadcast around the globe, he was perhaps the only one rooting for the moon.

JFK International Control Tower

THOSE IN THE VIEWING CAB of the air-traffic-control tower 321 feet above the ground glimpsed the eerie sunsetlike twilight way off to the west, out beyond the reach of the great moon shadow, past the edge of the umbra. The brighter penumbra, illuminated by the sun’s blazing photosphere, had turned the distant sky yellow and orange, not unlike the healing edge of a wound.

This wall of light was advancing on New York City, which had now been dark for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds.

"Glasses on!" came the order, and Jim Kent put his on, anxious for sunlight’s return. He glanced around, looking for Eph-everyone from the press conference, including the governor and the mayor, had been invited up into the tower cab for the viewing-and, not seeing him, assumed that Eph had slipped back to the maintenance hangar.

In fact, Eph had used this enforced time-out in the best way he knew: by grabbing a chair as soon as the sun had disappeared and going through a packet of construction diagrams showing cutaway views and schematics of the Boeing 777, ignoring the occultation altogether.

The End of Totality

THE END WAS MARKED BY an extraordinary phenomenon. Dazzling prominences of light appeared along the western edge of the moon, combining to form a single bead of dazzling sunlight, like a rip in the darkness, giving the effect of a blindingly radiant diamond set upon the moon’s silver ring. But the price for such beauty, despite a vigorous public service campaign dedicated to eye safety during the occultation, was that more than 270 people across the city, 93 of them children, suffered permanent blindness by watching the sun’s dramatic reappearance without wearing proper eye protection. There are no pain sensors in the retina, and the afflicted did not realize they were damaging their eyes until it was too late.

The diamond ring expanded slowly, becoming a band of jewels known as "Baily’s beads," which merged into the reborn crescent of the sun, essentially pushing the interloping moon away.

On earth, the shadow bands returned, shimmering over the ground like inaugural spirits heralding the passing from one form of existence to another.

As natural light began filling back in, the human relief on the ground was epic. Cheers and hugs and spontaneous applause. Automobile horns sounded all across the city, and Kate Smith’s recorded voice sang over the loudspeakers at Yankee Stadium.