The Fall

Angel put a shoulder to the Guptas’ office door. He knew they kept an old handgun inside the desk. He found it, the weapon feeling heavy and oily, not at all like the shiny prop guns he used to wave around. He tucked one of the phones into his tight belt and returned to the cellar door.

With his leg hurting more than ever, the old wrestler started down the slick steps. At the bottom, a door. This one had been broken, Angel saw-but from the inside. Someone had broken in from the cellar up to the store.

Beyond the storeroom, Angel heard a hissing sound, evenly measured and prolonged. He went in with both the gun and his phone out.

Another design defaced the wall. It resembled a bloom of six petals, or perhaps an inkblot: the center done in gold, the petals painted black. The paint still glistened, and he ran his light over all of it-maybe a bug, not a flower-before squeezing through the doorway into the next room.

The ceiling was low, spaced with wooden beams for support. Angel knew the layout well. One passage led to a narrow stairway to the sidewalk, where they received food shipments three times a week. The other burrowed through to his tenement building. He started ahead toward his building when the toe of his shoe hit something.

He aimed his phone light down onto the floor. At first he did not understand it. A person, sleeping. Then another. And two more near the stack of chairs.

They weren’t sleeping, because he didn’t hear any snoring or deep breathing, and yet they weren’t dead, because he didn’t smell death.

At that very moment, outside, the last of the sun’s direct rays disappeared from the East Coast sky. Night was upon the city, and newly turned vampires, those in their first days, responded very literally to the cosmic edict of sundown and sunup.

The slumbering vampires began to stir. Angel had stumbled unwittingly into a vast nest of undead. He did not need to wait to see their faces to know that this-people rising en masse from the floor of a darkened cellar-was not anything he wanted to be part of, nor indeed present for.

He moved to the narrow space in the wall toward the burrow to his building-one he had seen both ends of but never had the occasion to cross-only to see more figures beginning to rise, blocking his way.

He did not yell or give any warning. He fired the weapon, but was not prepared for the intensity of light and sound inside that constricted space.

Nor were his targets, who appeared more affected by the reports and the bright flash of flame than they were by the lead rounds that pierced their bodies. He fired three more times, achieving the same effect, and then twice behind him, sensing the others’ approach.

The gun clicked empty.

He threw it down. Only one option remained. An old door he had never opened-because he had never been able to, a door with no knob or handle, stuck within a compressed wooden frame surrounded by rock wall.

Angel pretended it was a prop door. Told himself it was a breakaway piece of balsa wood. He had to. He gripped the phone in his fist and lowered his shoulder and ran at it full-force.

The old wood scraped away from its frame, dislodging dust and dirt as the lock cracked and it burst open. Angel and his balky leg stumbled through-nearly falling into a gang of punks on the other side.

The bangers raised guns and silver swords at him, staggered by his bulk, about to slay him.

“Madre Santisima!” exclaimed Angel. Holy Mother of God!

Gus, at the head of the pack, was about to run this vampire motherfucker through when he heard him speak-and speak Spanish. The words stopped Gus-and the vampire-hunting Sapphires behind him-just in time.

“Me lleva la chingada-que haces tu aca, muchachon?” said Gus. What the fuck are you doing here, big boy?

Angel said nothing, letting his facial expression do all the talking as he turned and pointed behind him.

“More bloodsuckers,” said Gus, understanding. “That’s what we’re here for.” He stared at the big man. There was something noble and familiar about him.

“Te conozco?” said Gus. Do I know you? To which the wrestler answered with a quick shrug, but no more words.

Alfonso Creem charged through the doorway, armed with a thick silver rapier with a bell-cup hilt to protect his hand from the blood worms. That protection was negated by the use of his other hand, bare except for a silver-knuckled multi-finger ring inscribed with fake diamonds spelling C-R-E-E-M.

He went after the vampires with furious chops and brutal blows. Gus was right behind him, a UV lamp in one hand, a silver sword in the other. More Sapphires followed close behind.

Never fight in a basement was a tenet of both street fighting and warfare, but it couldn’t be avoided in a vamp hunt. Gus would have preferred to firebomb the place, if he could be guaranteed full mortality. But these vamps always seemed to have another way out.