"Is that why the dogs and cats are turning on their owners? What. Did. You. Do?"
"Let him up, Frank. See if he's got something to say."
Voices had become so distant. His dear friend smiled and held out a hand. He had made it to more than threescore and ten years of age. They laughed together. His face suddenly felt clean and fresh. His chest no longer felt like it was about to explode. The taste of vomit was gone from his throat. He watched dispassionately as frustrated men yanked back his hood to stare into his glassy eyes. He walked away with Patrick, who slung an arm over his shoulder.
"Goddamn!" the lead interrogator yelled, and flung down the hood. "You held him under for too long. That was our closest Middle Eastern lead!"
"His body was still moving," another man nervously argued.
"He was f**king convulsing, you moron. Look at him. He suffocated under the hood in his own vomit!"
"Quickly, quickly," Rabbi Zeitloff urged, holding Mrs. Weinstein's hand.
"But my Daniel, he couldn't have done those things they claimed." Stella Weinstein's tear-glazed eyes sought the rabbi's and then her husband's. "He is honorable, has a good job working to help the president--so does his superior officer . . . that General Rivera. His wife is a good girl. They have a baby on the way. Tell me my world is not coming to an end!"
"Stella, we must go. Now. There is no time," her husband said, shaking her. "We must trust the rabbi and the monk. Do you see they are rounding people up? Have we not seen this in history before? Open your eyes!"
"Please, I beg you," Rabbi Zeitloff said in a rush. "Follow us out through the safe tunnels that were built under this place when we bought it, then we'll go up to the streets. We'll get you onto a ferry, from there--"
"Where is my son'?" Stella cried out as they hurried her down the long corridor into the basement.
No one answered her as the rabbi opened a door with shaking hands and then gave Monk Lin the key. "Lock us in and may Yahveh be with you."
Running, running, his breath came out in waves of pain as he fled the building and headed uptown. Monk Lin's frantic gaze took in the chaos around him. Dogs snarled in the street, fighting over the dead bodies of the homeless--the first to fall. Those with weak immune systems. Those without shelter and with a limited stash of food or water. They now lay dead in alleyways, food for the rats that battled the dogs, a job too voluminous for a public health system in shambles. Alleys were disease pits. Garbage cans a death sentence. Men and women had rightfully abandoned their jobs hauling refuse. It meant certain death now that the Black Death had settled like a toxic cloud over the eastern seaboard.
Knowing wounded his soul. He'd felt his dear friend Imam leave this plane not a half hour ago. He would not weep; he and Father Patrick, even the young Padre Lopez and the others, were fortunate. This was no way to live. The Buddha was weeping.
Monk Lin jumped back as pigeons began dropping from the sky like small gray bombs of jellied feathered flesh. Dead squirrels littered the streets, even the cockroaches ran about as though disoriented. Sewer openings belched rats. Screams of humanity chilled his bones as he ran through the sweltering streets, dodging the occasional wildly veering car.
Only those who were sick, or without resources, or hiding from the law were still trapped within the city. Basic services had finally shut down, collapsing under the weight of human panic. There were no more civilian trains. No buses. No trucks renewing supplies. Monk Lin looked around. Just military checkpoints. Just military occupation of all civilian carrier systems-- trains, ferries, buses, trucks--everything had been commandeered to transport the sick and dying, or to remove bodies. Stores had been looted for food and water and were now just shells. Money was worthless . . . was outlawed as a cause of passing the contagion.
How would Rabbi Zeitloff ever hope to get the Weinsteins off the island and past checkpoints at the harbor?
Tunnels unused since the fifties shimmered with moisture as the rabbi led Dan's parents to what they all prayed would be salvation. They were healthy--had no signs of the contagion. Phony ID had been drawn up. Hair colors had been changed, size augmented by theatrical prosthetics. Makeup added, enough to get them past harried checkpoint guards. At least they'd be out of hell's kitchen. The safe house network stretched to the harbor. Monk Lin would hold the line and continue to signal for the Neteru team and local Guardians, continue to try to interpret word from the spiritual realm, while he couriered the innocent to a haven beyond the walls of insanity.
Disease was imploding in the major cities, but where the population densities were lower, there was still some fragment of civilization left that had not begun to unravel. Getting to the mountains was the only hope.
Rabbi Zeitloff kept that goal in front of him as he hustled down the dark corridor with a lantern flashlight, blotting out Stella Weinstein's whimpers. His heart ached with hers, but he couldn't focus on that now. He had to deliver her and her husband to higher ground. That's where he needed to get these good people.
They could be safe on hallowed ground of a mission in New England until he could break through to Carlos or Damali to whoosh them into an energy fold and make them vanish without a trace. Worse case, they could trek to Hartford, then head west from there and go toward the Appalachian Mountains. Higher ground. Once in the mountains they could maneuver.
He would focus on that and couldn't think about how his bones ached, his age and weight made his breathing labored, or how his heart now beat in arrhythmia from the heat, exertion, and fright. If it was the last thing he did, he had to keep pushing the Weinsteins forward to reunite them with the core of safety--the Neteru team.
The narrow passage only allowed one body to get through at a time. The air was stifling, the lantern becoming so heavy . . . the gap widening between him and the Weinsteins ahead. Just as well. Tears filled his eyes as the sound that he heard in his head and in his soul slowly filled his ears. The door behind him was a mile away and locked. He leaned his forehead against the wall, his black clerical hat toppling off his head.
"Rabbi!" Dan's father turned around.
Rabbi Zeitloff waved him off. "Push forward and live to see your grandchildren."
A woman's bloodcurdling scream drowned out the high-pitched squeals that echoed in the narrow tunnel behind him.
The rabbi braced himself against both walls, using his body as a shield. They would run for him, the closer meal. . . would scramble over his blood and flesh first, and once sated would continue forward. The rats would eat well on his leathery, fat meat. He laughed, insanity and fear colliding with courage. They had killed his friend Patrick. He could feel Imam was no more. "Run!" He would be a human body plug, a flesh and blood dam to keep the disease-carrying rodents from tearing into Dan's heart by tearing into his parents.
And they came as a biting, clawing, searing wave of filth and pain with red glowing eyes and razor-sharp fangs. They covered his legs and back, a writhing swarm of gnashing teeth, tearing at the soft flesh of his neck and eating away his ears, until the tide of them swept him off his feet.
But one seize of his elderly heart brought two familiar faces toward him. A large dark hand with the strength of a giant clasped his within a familiar palm. Asula brushed off his suit and Patrick lifted him under his arms, a sad smile gracing his face.
"Dead but not broken, the Covenant is still empowered and could be more dangerous to us than alive, Elizabeth. I applaud your work but remain skeptical about its effectiveness." Lilith hissed as she looked into the depths of the illusion beneath her fanged crest. She circled the black pentagram-shaped table in her chambers and glanced up at the Vampire Council. "Once the pale horse rides, never forget that the fifth biblical seal can be broken. That will allow the Light to bring back martyred souls to aid in their cause from the spiritual realm . . . hence why our Dark Lord was so furious that the Neterus' actions prematurely forced his hand." She waved toward the huge chamber doors. "The next time he comes back, unless we have phenomenal progress to report, I guarantee he will not be in such a good mood. Instead of bargains, there will be bodies--do I make myself clear?"