COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HAD been, Gus knew, a big-shot school. Lots of old buildings, crazy expensive tuition, mucho security and cameras. He used to see some of the students out trying to mix with the neighborhood, some for community-minded reasons, which he never understood, and others for more illicit reasons, which he understood very well. But as for the university itself, the derelict Morningside Heights campus and all of its facilities, there was nothing much worth his time.
Now it was Gus’s base, his headquarters and his home. The Mexican gangbanger would never be made to leave his turf; indeed, he would blow it all up before allowing that to happen. As his sabotage and hunting activities dwindled in number and became more regimented, Gus started to look for a permanent base. He really needed it. It was hard to be efficient in this mad new world. Sticking it to the man became a 24/7 occupation, and one that was less and less rewarding every time. Police and fire departments, medical services, traffic surveillance—everything had been co-opted. When searching his old Harlem haunts for a place to coop, he’d connected with two of his La Mugre gangbangers and fellow saboteurs, Bruno Ramos and Joaquin Soto.
Bruno was fat—no other way to say it—fed mostly with Cheetos and beer. Joaquin was tight and lean. Groomed, tattooed, and full of ’tude. They were both brothers to Gus and they would die for him. Born ready.
Joaquin had done jail time with Gus. They’d done cell time together. Sixteen months for Gus. They’d watched each other’s back and Joaquin had done solitary for a good stretch after elbowing the teeth out of a guard, a big black guy named Raoul—what a fucked-up name for someone with no teeth: Raoul. After the vampires’ arrival—what some called the Fall—Gus had reconnected with Joaquin during the looting of an electronics store. Joaquin and Bruno helped him carry a big plasma TV and a box of video games.
Together they had taken the university and found it to be only slightly infested. Windows and doors were boarded and sealed with steel plates, the interiors razed and desecrated with ammonia waste. The students had all fled early, trying to evacuate the city and get back home. Joaquin guessed they never got very far.
What they found, in prowling around the deserted buildings, was a system of tunnels below the foundation. A book in the display case at the admissions office tipped Joaquin off to the fact that the campus had originally been erected on the grounds of a nineteenth-century insane asylum. The university architects had leveled all the existing hospital buildings except one and then built upon the existing foundations. Many of the linking tunnels were used for utilities, steam pipes generating scalding condensation, miles of electric wiring. Over time, a number of these passages had been boarded up or otherwise sealed in order to prevent injury to thrill-seeking students and urban spelunkers.
Together they had explored and claimed for themselves much of this underground network linking almost all of Columbia’s seventy-one campus buildings located between Broadway and Amsterdam on New York’s Upper West Side. Some more remote sections remained unexplored, simply because there wasn’t enough time in the day or night for hunting vampires, sowing chaos throughout Manhattan, and clearing musty tunnels.
Gus had carved out his own digs, concentrated in one quadrant of the campus’s main plaza. His domain started beneath the only remaining building original to the asylum, Buell Hall; ran beneath the Low Memorial Library and Kent Hall; and terminated at Philosophy Hall, the building outside of which was a bronze statue of a naked dude just sitting there, thinking.
The tunnels made for a cool crib, a real villain’s lair. The failure of the steam system meant he could access areas rarely visited in at least a century—the coarse black fibers sticking out of cracks in the underground walls were actual horsehairs used to strengthen the plaster mix—which had led him into a dank subbasement of iron-barred cells.
The loony bin. Where they caged up the maddest of the mad. No skeletons in chains or anything like that, though they had found scratches in the stonemasonry, like the jagged clawing of fingernails, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear ghostly echoes of the hideous, soul-baring screams from centuries past.
