Patrick’s temper flared. The former Marine contemplated wheeling about with a vicious backhand of his damaged prosthetic, using the makeshift blade to slice open the gunman’s throat.
As if reading his mind, Virgil maneuvered Shep in front, separating him from his intended target.
The passage continued east another hundred yards, releasing them on the banks of the Hudson River. The sleet had let up, the stars made visible in the night sky by the strange absence of city lights.
Patrick looked to the shoreline where a crowd of people were huddling in small groups. Moving closer, he could distinguish two clearly different sects. The elite were dressed in expensive parkas, their faces concealed behind high-tech gas masks and rebreathers, sized even for the few children among them. Their servants, the majority being foreign, were wearing secondhand outer garments, filtering the night air through cloth painting masks and scarves while they kept vigil over children’s backpacks and overstuffed suitcases. A few were walking dogs on leashes.
A dozen masked gunmen herded the procession to a small pier. All eyes were on the river, where a massive garbage scow was slowly making its way south down the Hudson.
The barge docked. Patrick recognized its corporate logo, the vessel owned by the Lucchese family, a crime syndicate operating out of Brooklyn. A skeleton crew tied off the three-thousand-ton flattop. An African-American woman in her early forties climbed down from the pilothouse, dressed in a long black leather coat, matching boots, and dark camouflage pants. A gas mask was strapped to her face. A holstered.44 Magnum at her slender waist.
She approached Greg “Wonderboy” Mastroianni, a capo in the Lucchese crime family. “I’m Charon. The senator’s aide arranged for us to off-load the suits at Governor’s Island. We need to move. We’ve only got a twenty-minute window before the Coast Guard cutter returns.”
“Load ’em… after they pony up the admission fee.”
“You heard the man! Cash, jewels, gold — no one gets on board without paying up front.”
A well-dressed man in his forties cut in front of an older couple, opening his attaché case. “Here’s $26 million in bearer bonds. That should be more than enough to cover the eleven of us and our two au pairs.”
Charon used her flashlight to exam the bonds. “Oil companies, huh? Works for me. Okay, old man, you’re next. How many you bringing on board?”
The frail man with the silver hair and fur-lined aviator hat was in his late seventies. His wife balanced on a walker, assisted by two large bodyguards. “There are eighty or ninety of us. Half the money’s already been transferred, you’ll receive the other half when we arrive safely. My wife just had a hip replacement, make sure you find her someplace comfortable on board.”
“This look like the Queen Mary to you? She can sit in garbage like everyone else.”
The frail man’s voice rasped venom. “How dare you! Do you have any idea who I am?”
Virgil pulled Shep aside. “We need to leave… now.”
“What about the children? I still have ten vials of vaccine. If I save two for my family, that leaves me with—”
“Hide the box and say nothing. We’ll cross paths with other souls more worthy of being saved.”
“What if I give them a few vials to take to the health authorities in New Jersey. Dr. Nelson said—”
“Open your eyes, Patrick. These are society’s gluttons, they have no desire to save anyone but themselves. Rich and powerful, they’ve lived their entire lives believing the world was left to them alone to control. Corruption veils them from the Light, greed binds them to Satan. Behind those masks are the faces of men who raped the retirement funds of hardworking families even as they pocketed tens of millions of dollars in bonuses. Even now, they attempt to use their ill-gotten fortunes to buy a passage to freedom, oblivious to the reality that their escape from Manhattan could potentially spread the plague to the rest of the world. Take a good look at them, son. See these gluttons for what they really are.”
Patrick stared at the silver-haired old man, who had foolishly removed his gas mask to argue with the black woman. “Now you listen here. My ancestors were running this country back when yours were still running buck naked in the jungle. And you, my Sicilian friend, who do you think arranged this little excursion out of Manhattan? Your boss works for me, and so does the senator! Without me, you assholes wouldn’t make it a hundred feet past this pier.”
The Mafia capo shined his flashlight on the old man’s identification, then unfolded a slip of paper and verified the name. “Ah, damn. Let him on.”
“Get some of your thugs to assist my wife, then get us to Governor’s Island, pronto. My private jet is waiting for us at LaGuardia. I need to be in London in eight hours.”
The silver-haired man paused, as if sensing a presence. Slowly, he turned to face Patrick—
— his eyes nocturnal and glowing, like a cat’s. His ears — pointed and bat-like. Thin lips retract to reveal rotting, pointy yellow teeth. The fingers narrow into talons. Though his posture remains decrepit, the frail old man seems wired with an inner strength. A living corpse, more reptilian than human. A creature of the night.
The servants cleave to him, their bodies encircled by swarms of wasps and hornets. The domestics’ faces are swollen and bleeding from the stings, their mouths sealed permanently with a sewn-on hundred-dollar bill.
The silver-haired Nosferatu rasps at Shep, each word hissing like a snake. “Yessss? You wisssh sssomething?”
The black woman, Charon, hovers behind the vampire’s right shoulder. She smiles seductively at Shep, her leather coat having morphed into a pair of giant wings. The gunmen surrounding her have devolved into Neanderthals, their bulging eyes behind the gas masks jaundice yellow.
Virgil dragged Shep back through the crowd, away from the hungry eyes burning with malice, out of earshot of the whispers cursing him in the darkness. They managed to clear the area without incident, moving south along a deserted shoreline dusted white with sleet and snow.
Patrick faced into the wind, the frigid air helping to clear the hellish vision from his brain. “The vaccine… the hallucinations seem so real.”
“What did you see?”
“Demons and the damned. Bags of flesh without souls.”
“What I see are people who have no love of God nor respect for other human beings. They may succeed in crossing this river, but the baggage they carry with them is chaos and darkness. They’ll die unrepentant and pay for their sins with a currency measured by the suffering they’ve inflicted upon their fellowman.”
Virgil and Patrick huddled by the river’s edge, watching as the last group climbed aboard the barge, the rich using their luggage as chairs on the acre of garbage. After a few moments the twin engines throttled to life, the churning propellers gradually moving the flattop away from the pier, pushing the scow on its southerly course toward Governor’s Island.
The sensation was one of weight, as if the Earth’s gravitational pull had suddenly doubled around him, turning Patrick Shepherd’s blood into liquid lead. In a dream state he turned to his left, his movements slow and surreal, the terror causing his lower intestines to clench.
The Angel of Death stood by the Hudson’s lapping waves, its black wing-like garment tattered and heavy, the creature exuding an aged musk that permeates Patrick’s lungs. The hood had reduced the profile to a long, thin nose and pointed chin, the flesh spackled over bone. The knobby right hand clutched the scythe by its wooden handle, the blade held upright, the metal tinged a bizarre asparagus green.