a golden era by comparison. All that we were became lost—all social form and order in the way our fathers and forefathers understood it. We became a flock. We became cattle.
Those of us who are still alive but have not joined the system … we have become the anomaly … We are the vermin. Scavengers. Hunted.
With no way to fight back …
Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens
A SCREAM PEALED in the distance, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather startled awake. He thrashed on the sofa, flipping onto his back and sitting up, and—in one fluid, violent motion—gripped the worn leather sword handle jutting out of the pack on the floor at his side and slashed the air with a blade of singing silver.
His battle cry, hoarse and garbled, a fugitive from his nightmares, stopped short. His blade quivered, unmet.
He was alone.
Kelly’s house. Her sofa. Familiar things.
His ex-wife’s living room. The scream was a far-off siren, converted into a human shriek by his sleeping mind.
He had been dreaming again. Of fire and shapes—indefinable but vaguely humanoid—made of blinding light. A flashpoint. He was in the dream and these shapes wrestled with him right before the light consumed it all. He always awoke agitated and exhausted, as if he had physically grappled with an opponent. The dream came out of nowhere. He could be having the most domestic kind of reverie—a picnic, a traffic jam, a day at the office—and then the light would grow and consume it all, and the silvery figures emerged.
He blindly groped for his weapon bag—a modified baseball gear bag, looted many months before off the high rack of a ransacked Modell’s on Flatbush Avenue.
He was in Queens. Okay. Okay. Everything coming back to him now—accompanied by the first pangs of a jaw-clenching hangover. He had blacked out again. Another dangerous binge. He returned the sword to his weapons bag, then rolled back, holding his head in his hands like a cracked crystal sphere he had delicately picked up off the floor. His hair felt wiry and strange, his head throbbing.
Hell on earth. Right. Land of the damned.
Reality was an ornery bitch. He had awoken to a nightmare. He was still alive—and still human—which wasn’t much, but it was the best he could expect.
Just another day in hell.
The last thing he remembered from sleep, the fragment of the dream that clung to his consciousness like sticky afterbirth, was an image of Zack bathed in searing silver light. It was out of his shape that the flashpoint had occurred this time.
“Dad—” Zack said, and his eyes locked with Eph’s—and then the light consumed it all.
The remembrance of it raised chills. Why couldn’t he find some respite from this hell in his dreams? Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? To balance out a horrible existence with dreams of flight and escape? What he wouldn’t have given for a reverie of pure sentimentality, a spoonful of sugar for his mind.
Eph and Kelly fresh out of college, ambling hand-in-hand through a flea market, looking for cheap furniture and knickknacks for their first apartment …
Zack as a toddler, stomping fat-footed around the house, a little boss in diapers …
Eph and Kelly and Zack at the dinner table, sitting with hands folded before full plates, waiting for Z to plow through his obsessively thorough saying of grace …
Instead, Eph’s dreams were like badly recorded snuff films. Familiar faces from his past—enemies, acquaintances, and friends alike—being stalked and taken while he watched, unable to reach them, to help them, or even to turn away.
He sat up, steadying himself and rising, one hand on the back of the sofa. He left the living area and walked to the window overlooking the backyard. LaGuardia Airport was not far away. The sight of an airplane, the distant sound of a jet engine, was cause for wonder now. No lights circled the sky. He remembered September 11, 2001, and how the emptiness of the sky had seemed so surreal back then, and what a strange relief it was when the planes returned a week later. Now there was no relief. No getting back to normal.
Eph wondered what time it was. Sometime o’clock in the morning, he figured, judging by his own failing circadian rhythm. It was summer—at least according to the old calendar—and so the sun should have been high and hot in the sky.
Instead, darkness prevailed. The natural order of night and day had been shattered, presumably forever. The sun was obliterated by a murky veil of ash floating in the sky. The new atmosphere was comprised of the detritus of nuclear explosions and volcanic eruptions distributed around the globe, a ball of blue-green candy wrapped inside a crust of poisonous chocolate. It had cured into a thick, insulating cowl, sealing in darkness and cold and sealing out the sun.
Perennial nightfall. The planet turned into a pale, rotting netherworld of rime and torment.
The perfect ecology for vampires.
According to the last live news reports, long since censored but traded like porn on Internet boards, these post-cataclysm conditions were much the same around the world. Eyewitness accounts of the darkening sky, of black rain, of ominous clouds knitting together and never breaking apart. Given the planet’s rotation and wind patterns, the poles—the frozen north and south—were theoretically the only locations on Earth still receiving regular seasonal sunlight … though nobody knew this for certain.
The residual radiation hazard from the nuclear explosions and the plant meltdowns had been intense at first, catastrophically so at the various ground zeros. Eph and the others had spent nearly two months belowground, in a train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, and so were spared the short-term fallout. Extreme meteorological conditions and atmospheric winds spread the damage over large areas, which may have aided in dispersing the radioactivity; the fallout was expelled by the hard rainstorms created by the violent changes to the ecosystem, further diffusing the radiation. Fallout decays exponentially, and in the short term, areas without direct-impact exposure became safe for travel and decontamination within approximately six weeks.
The long-term effects were yet to come. Questions as to human fertility, genetic mutations, and increased carcinogenesis would not be answered for some time. But these very real concerns were overshadowed by the current situation: two years following the nuclear disasters and the vampiric takeover of the world, all fears were immediate.