As he stood there watching, rats started appearing out of the cobblestones. Literally, clawing up from between the worn-down stones, surfacing from the underground. Rats' skeletons are collapsible, allowing them to squeeze through holes no larger than the size of their skulls, about three-quarters of an inch in width. They were coming up through the gaps in twos and threes, and quickly scattering. Using the twelve-by-three stones as a ruler, Vasiliy estimated that these rats ranged from eight to ten inches in body length, doubled by their tail. In other words, fully grown adults.
Two garbage bags near him were twitching and bulging, rats eating their way through their insides. A small rat tried to dart past him to a trash barrel, and Vasiliy kicked out with his work boot, punting the muncher back fifteen feet. It landed in the middle of the alley, not moving. Within seconds, the other rats were greedily upon it, long, yellow incisors biting through fur. The most effective and efficient way to exterminate rats is to remove the food source from their environment and then let them eat one another.
These rats were hungry, and they were on the run. Such daytime surface activity was practically unheard of. This kind of mass displacement only happened in the wake of an event such as an earthquake or a building collapse.
Or, occasionally, a large construction project.
Vasiliy continued another block south, crossing Barclay Street to where the city opened up to the sky above, a sixteen-acre job site.
He stepped up to one of the viewing platforms overlooking the location of the former World Trade Center. They were nearing completion of the deep underground basin meant to support the new construction, the cement and steel columns now starting to rise out of the ground. The site existed like a gouge in the city-like the gnaw in the little girl's face.
Vasiliy remembered that apocalyptic September of 2001. A few days after the Twin Towers' collapse, he had gone in with the health department, starting with the shuttered restaurants around the perimeter of the site, clearing away abandoned food. Then down into the basements and underground rooms, never once seeing a live rat, but plenty of evidence of their presence, including miles of rat tracks enshrined in the settled dust. He remembered most vividly a Mrs. Fields cookie shop, almost entirely eaten through. The rat population was exploding at the site, the concern being that the rats would spill out of the ruins in search of new food sources, swarming into the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. So a massive, federally funded containment program was undertaken. Thousands of bait stations and steel-wire traps were set down in and around Ground Zero, and, thanks to Vasiliy's vigilance and that of others like him, the feared invasion never did materialize.
Vasiliy remained on a government contract to this day, his department overseeing a rat-control study in and around Battery Park. So he was pretty well caught up on local infestations, and had been throughout the beginnings of the construction project. And until now everything had been business as usual.
He looked down at the trucks pouring cement and the cranes moving rubble. He waited three minutes for a young boy to finish with one of the mounted viewfinders-the same kind they have on the top of the Empire State Building-then dropped in his two quarters and scanned the work site.
In a moment, he saw them, their little brown bodies scuttling out from corners, racing around stone piles, a few scampering hell bent for leather up the access road toward Liberty Street. Racing around rebar spikes marking the foundation of the Freedom Tower as though running a goddamned obstacle course. He looked for the breaks where the new construction would connect underground with the PATH subway. Then he turned the viewfinder higher and followed a line of them scrambling up the underpinnings of a steel platform along the east corner, clambering out onto strung wires. They were racing out of the basin, a mass exodus, following any escape route they could find.
Isolation Ward, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center
BEHIND THE SECOND DOOR of the isolation ward, Eph pulled on latex gloves. He would have insisted that Setrakian do the same, but another look at his crooked fingers made Eph wonder if it would even be possible.
They walked inside Jim Kent's bay, the only occupied station in the otherwise empty ward. Jim lay sleeping now, still in his street clothes, wires from his chest and hand leading to machines whose readings were quiet. The attending nurse had said his levels were dipping so low that all the automatic alarms-low heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, oxygen levels-had to be muted, because they kept going off.
Eph pushed past the hanging curtains of clear plastic, feeling Setrakian grow tense beside him. As they got close, Kent's vitals rose on all the readout screens-which was highly irregular.
"Like the worm in the jar," said Setrakian. "He senses us. He senses that blood is near."
"Can't be," said Eph.
He advanced farther. Jim's vitals and brainwave activity increased.
"Jim," said Eph.
His face was slack in sleep, his dark skin turning a putty gray color. Eph could see his pupils moving fast beneath his eyelids in a kind of manic REM sleep.
Setrakian drew back the last intervening layer of clear curtain with the silver wolf's head of his tall walking staff. "Not too close," he warned. "He is turning." Setrakian reached into his coat pocket. "Your mirror. Take it out."
The inside-front pocket of Eph's jacket was weighed down by a four-inch-by-three-inch silver-framed mirror, one of the many items the old man had collected from his basement vampire armory.
"You see yourself in there?"
Eph saw his reflection in the old glass. "Sure."
"Please use it to look at me."
Eph turned it at an angle, so as to view the old man's face. "Okay."
Nora said, "Vampires have no reflection."
Setrakian said, "Not quite. Please now-with caution-use it to look at his face."
Because the mirror was so small, Eph needed to step closer to the bed, his arm outstretched, holding the glass at an angle over Jim's head.
He couldn't pick up Jim's reflection at first. The image looked as though Eph's hand were violently shaking. But the background, the pillow and bed frame, were still.
Jim's face was a blur. It looked as though his head was shaking with tremendous speed, or vibrating with such force that his features were imperceptible.
He pulled his arm back fast.
"Silver backing," said Setrakian, tapping his own mirror. "That is the key. Today's mass-produced mirrors, with their chrome-sprayed backing, they won't reveal anything. But silver-backed glass always tells the truth."
Eph looked at himself in the mirror again. Normal. Except for the slight trembling of his own hand.