The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro

  A pale, opalescent liquid sprayed at first, some of it spurting out onto his gloves and his hip on the initial cut, then sluicing steadily out of the arm, singing into the bottom of the jar. Flowing fast, but then, lacking any circulatory pressure from its stilled heart, losing force after about three ounces or so. Bennett lowered the arm to draw out more.

  Eph’s shock at the callousness of the cut was quickly overcome by his amazement at the sight of the flow. This couldn’t be blood. Blood settles and congeals after death. It doesn’t drain out like engine oil.

  Nor does it turn white. Bennett returned the arm to the corpse’s side and held up the jar for Eph to see.

  Lieutenant—the corpses—they’re…

  “At first I thought maybe the proteins were separating, the way oil sits on top of water,” Bennett said. “But it’s not quite that either.”

  The issue was pasty white, almost as though sour milk had been introduced into the bloodstream.

  Lieutenant…oh, Jesus—

  Eph could not believe what he was seeing.

  Nora said, “They’re all like this?”

  Bennett nodded. “Exsanguinated. They have no blood.”

  Eph eyed the white matter in the jar, and his taste for whole milk turned his stomach.

  Bennett said, “I’ve got some other things. Core temperature is elevated. Somehow these bodies are still generating heat. Additionally, we’ve found dark spots on some organs. Not necrosis, but almost more like…like bruising.”

  Bennett set the jar of opalescent fluid back down on the counter and called over a pathology assistant. She brought with her an opaque plastic tub of the same sort that take-out soup comes in. She peeled off the top and Bennett reached inside, removing an organ, setting it on a cutting board like a small, fresh-from-the-butcher roast. It was an undissected human heart. He pointed a gloved finger at where it would have joined the arteries. “See the valves? Almost as if they have grown open. Now, they couldn’t have operated like this in life. Not closing and opening and pumping blood. So this can’t have been congenital.”

  Eph was aghast. This abnormality was a fatal defect. As every anatomist knows, people look just as different on the inside as they do on the outside. But no human being could conceivably have survived to adulthood with this heart.

  Nora asked, “Do you have medical records for the patient? Anything we can check this against?”

  “Nothing yet. Probably not until morning. But it’s made me slow this process down. Way down. I’m stopping in a little while, shutting down for the night so I can get some more support in here tomorrow. I want to check every little thing. Such as—this.”

  Bennett walked them down to a fully anatomized body, that of a midweight adult male. His neck had been dissected back to the throat, exposing the larynx and trachea, so that the vocal folds, or vocal cords, were visible just above the larynx.

  Bennett said, “See the vestibular folds?”

  They were also known as “false vocal cords”: thick mucous membranes whose only function is to sit above and protect the true vocal folds. They are a true anatomical oddity in that they can regenerate themselves completely, even after surgical removal.

  Eph and Nora leaned in closer. Both saw the outgrowth from the vestibular folds, a pinkish, fleshy protuberance—not disruptive or malformed like a tumorous mass, but branching from and within the inner throat, below the tongue. A novel, seemingly spontaneous augmentation of the soft lower mandible.

  They scrubbed up outside, more diligently than usual. Both were deeply shaken by what they had seen inside the morgue.

  Eph spoke first. “I’m wondering when things are going to start making sense again.” He dried his hands completely, feeling the open air against his gloveless hands. Then he felt his own neck, over the throat, approximately where the incisions were all located. “A straight, deep puncture wound in the neck. And a virus that slows antemortem decomposition on the one hand, yet apparently causes spontaneous antemortem tissue growth on the other?”

  Nora said, “This is something new.”

  “Or—something very, very old.”

  They started out the delivery door, to Eph’s illegally parked Explorer, his EMERGENCY BLOOD DELIVERY pass on the dash. The last streaks of daytime warmth were leaving the sky. Nora said, “We need to check out the other morgues, see if they are finding the same deviations.”

  The alarm went off on Eph’s cell phone. A text message from Zack:

  whre R U ???? Z

  “Shit,” said Eph. “I forgot…the custody hearing…”

  “Now?” Nora said, before catching herself. “Okay. You go. I’ll meet you after—”

  “No, I’ll call them—it will be fine.” He looked around, feeling himself splitting in two. “We need to take another look at the pilot. Why did his puncture close up, but not the others’? We need to get on top of the physiopathology of this thing.”

  “And the other survivors.”

  Eph frowned, reminded that they were gone. “It’s not like Jim to screw up like that.”

  Nora wanted to defend Jim. “If they’re getting sick, they’ll come back.”

  “Only—it might be too late. For them, and for us.”

  “What do you mean, for us?”

  “To get to the bottom of this thing. There’s got to be an answer somewhere, an explanation. A rationale. Something impossible is happening, and we need to find out why and stop it.”

  Up on the sidewalk at the main entrance on First Street, news crews were set up for live remotes from the medical examiner’s office. That attracted a sizable crowd of onlookers, whose nervousness was palpable from around the corner. Lots of uncertainty in the air.

  But one man broke from the crowd, a man Eph had noticed on the way in. An old man with birch white hair, holding a walking stick that was too tall for him, gripping it, like a staff, below its high silver handle. Like a dinner-theater Moses, except that he was impeccably dressed, formal and old-fashioned, in a light black overcoat over a gabardine suit, with a gold watch chain looped on his vest. And—oddly for the otherwise distinguished wardrobe—gray wool gloves with the fingertips cut off.

  “Dr. Goodweather?”

  The old man knew his name. Eph gave him another look, and said, “Do I know you?”

  The man spoke with an accent, maybe Slavic. “I saw you on the box. The TV. I knew you would have to come here.”

  “You’ve been waiting here for me?”

  “What I have to say, Doctor, it is very important. Critical.”

  Eph was distracted by the handle on top of the old man’s tall walking stick: a silver wolf’s head. “Well, not now…call my office, make an appointment…” He moved away, dialing rapidly on his cell phone.

  The old man appeared anxious, an agitated man striving to speak calmly. He put on his best gentlemanly smile, including Nora in his introduction. “Abraham Setrakian is my name. Which should mean nothing to you.” He gestured, with his walking stick, at the morgue. “You saw them in there. The passengers from the airplane.”

  Nora said, “You know something about that?”

  “Indeed,” he said, sending a grateful smile her way. Setrakian glanced at the morgue again, like a man who, having waited so long to speak, was uncertain where to start. “You found them not much changed in there, no?”

  Eph turned off his cell phone before it rang through. The old man’s words echoed his own irrational fears. “Not changed how?” he said.

  “The dead. Bodies not breaking down.”

  Eph said, more out of concern than intrigue, “So that is what people are hearing out here?”

  “No one had to tell me anything, Doctor. I know.”

  “You ‘know,’” said Eph.

  “Tell us,” said Nora. “What else do you know?”

  The old man cleared his throat. “Have you found a…coffin?”

  Eph felt Nora rise up almost three inches off the sidewalk. Eph said, “What did you say?”

&nb
sp; “A coffin. If you have it, then you still have him.”

  Nora said, “Him who?”

  “Destroy it. Right away. Do not keep it for study. You must destroy the coffin, without delay.”

  Nora shook her head. “It’s gone,” she said. “We don’t know where it is.”

  Setrakian swallowed with bitter disappointment. “It is as I feared.”

  “Why destroy it?” asked Nora.

  Eph cut in then, saying to Nora, “If this kind of talk is getting around, people will panic.” He looked at the old man. “Who are you? How did you hear these things?”

  “I am a pawnbroker. I heard nothing. These things I know.”

  “You know?” said Nora. “How do you know?”

  “Please.” He focused on Nora now, the more receptive one. “What I am about to say, I do not say lightly. I say it desperately and with utter honesty. Those bodies in there?” He pointed at the morgue. “I tell you, before this night falls, they must be destroyed.”

  “Destroyed?” said Nora, reacting negatively to him for the first time. “Why?”

  “I recommend incineration. Cremation. It is simple and sure.”

  “That’s him,” came a voice from the side doors, a morgue official leading a uniformed New York City patrolman toward them. Toward Setrakian.

  The old man ignored them, speaking faster now. “Please. It is almost too late.”

  “Right there,” said the morgue official, marching over, pointing out Setrakian to the cop. “That’s the guy.”

  The cop, amiable and bored, said to Setrakian, “Sir?”

  Setrakian ignored him, pleading his case directly to Nora and Eph. “A truce has been broken. An ancient, sacred pact. By a man who is no longer a man, but an abomination. A walking, devouring abomination.”

  “Sir,” said the cop. “May I have a word with you, sir?”

  Setrakian reached out and grasped Eph’s wrist, to command his attention. “He is here now, here in the New World, this city, this very day. This night. Do you understand? He must be stopped.”

  The wool-covered fingers of the old man’s hand were gnarled, claw-like. Eph pulled away from him, not roughly but enough to jostle the old man backward. His walking stick whacked the cop on the shoulder, almost in the face—and suddenly the cop’s disinterest turned to anger.

  “Okay, that’s it,” said the cop, twisting the walking stick out of his hands and bracing the old man’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  “You must stop him here,” Setrakian continued, being led away.

  Nora turned to the morgue official. “What’s this about? What are you doing?”

  The official glanced at the laminated identification cards hanging from their necks—the red letters reading CDC—before answering. “He tried to get inside earlier, claiming to be a family member. Insisting on viewing the dead bodies.” The official looked at him being taken away. “Some kind of ghoul.”

  The old man continued to plead his case. “Ultraviolet light,” he called over his shoulder. “Go over the bodies with ultraviolet light…”

  Eph froze. Had he just heard that?

  “Then you will see I am right,” yelled the old man, being folded into the backseat of a cruiser. “Destroy them. Now. Before it is too late…”

  Eph watched them slam the door on the old man, the cop climbing behind the wheel and pulling away.

  Excess Baggage

  EPH’S CALL RANG through forty minutes late to his, Kelly’s, and Zack’s fifty-minute session with Dr. Inga Kempner, their court-appointed family therapist. He was relieved not to be sitting inside her first-floor office in a prewar brownstone in Astoria, the place where the final custody issues were to be decided.

  Eph pled his case through the doctor’s speakerphone. “Let me explain—I’ve been dealing all weekend with the most extreme of circumstances. This dead-airplane situation out at Kennedy. It couldn’t be helped.”

  Dr. Kempner said, “This isn’t the first time you’ve failed to present yourself at an appointment.”

  “Where’s Zack?” he said.

  “Out in the waiting area,” said Dr. Kempner.

  She and Kelly had been talking without him. Things had already been decided. It was all over before it had even begun.

  “Look, Dr. Kempner—all I ask is that you reschedule our appointment…”

  “Dr. Goodweather, I am afraid that—”

  “No—wait—please, hold on.” He cut right to it. “Look, am I the perfect father? No, I’m not. I admit that. Points for honesty, right? In fact, I’m not even sure I’d want to be the ‘perfect’ father, and raise some plain vanilla kid who’s not going to make a difference in this world. But I do know that I want to be the best father I can be. Because that is what Zack deserves. And that is my only goal right now.”

  “All appearances to the contrary,” said Dr. Kempner.

  Eph gave his phone the finger. Nora stood just a few feet away. He felt angry, yet strangely exposed and vulnerable.

  “Listen to me,” said Eph, fighting hard to keep his cool. “I know that you know I have rearranged my life around this situation, around Zack. I established this office in New York City specifically so that I could be here, near his mother, so that he would have the benefit of us both. I—usually—have very regular hours during the week, a dependable schedule, with established off-call times. I’m working doubles on weekends in order to have two off for every one I’m on.”

  “Did you attend an AA meeting this weekend?”

  Eph grew silent. All the air went out of his tires. “Were you even listening?”

  “Have you felt the need to drink?”

  “No,” he grunted, making a supreme effort to keep his cool. “I’ve been sober twenty-three months, you know that.”

  Dr. Kempner said, “Dr. Goodweather, this isn’t a question of who loves your son more. It never is, in these situations. Wonderful, that you both care so much, so deeply. Your dedication to Zack is plainly evident. But, as is so often the case, there seems to be no way to prevent this from turning into a contest. The state of New York issues guidelines I must follow in my recommendation to the judge.”

  Eph swallowed bitterly. He tried to interrupt, but she kept on talking. “You’ve resisted the court’s original custodial inclination, you’ve fought it every step of the way. And I consider that a measure of your affection for Zachary. You have also made great personal strides, and that is both evident and admirable. But now we find that you have reached your court of last resort, if you will. In the formulas we use for arbitrating custody. Visitation rights, of course, have never been in question…”

  “No, no, no,” murmured Eph, like a man about to be rammed by an oncoming car. It was this same sinking feeling he’d had all weekend. He tried reaching back—to he and Zack sitting in his apartment, eating Chinese food and playing video games. The entire weekend stretched out before them. What a glorious feeling that had been.

  “My point, Dr. Goodweather,” said Dr. Kempner, “is that I can’t see much purpose in going any further.”

  Eph turned to Nora, who looked up at him, understanding in an instant what he was going through.

  “You can tell me it’s over,” Eph whispered into the phone. “But it’s not over, Dr. Kempner. It never will be.” And with that, he hung up.

  He turned away, knowing Nora would respect him in this moment and not try to approach. And for that he was grateful, because there were tears in his eyes that he did not want her to see.

  THE FIRST NIGHT

  Just a few hours later, inside the basement morgue of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, Dr. Bennett was finishing up after a very long day. He should have been exhausted, but in fact he was exhilarated. Something extraordinary was happening. It was as though the normally reliable rules of death and decomposition were being rewritten, right in this room. This shit went beyond established medicine, beyond human biology itself…perhaps even into the realm of the miraculous.


  As planned, he had halted all autopsies for the night. Some work continued on other matters, the medico-legal investigators operating out of the cubicles upstairs, but the morgue was Bennett’s. He had noticed something during the CDC doctors’ visit, something about the blood sample he had drawn, the opalescent fluid he had collected in a specimen jar. He had stored it in the back of one of the specimen coolers, stashing it behind some glassware like the last good dessert inside a community refrigerator.

  He unscrewed the cap and looked at it now, seated on a stool at the examination counter near the sink. After a few moments, the surface of the six or so ounces of white blood rippled, and Bennett shivered. He took a deep breath in order to collect himself. He thought about what to do, and then pulled an identical jar down from the shelf above. He filled it with the same amount of water and set the jars down side by side. He needed to make certain that the disturbance was not the result of vibrations from a passing truck or some such.

  He watched and waited.

  There it was again. The viscous white fluid rippled—he saw it—while the considerably less dense water surface did not undulate at all.

  Something was moving inside the blood sample.

  Bennett thought for a moment. He poured the water down the sink drain, and then slowly poured the oily blood from one jar into the other. The fluid was syrupy and poured slowly but neatly. He saw nothing pass through the thin stream. The bottom of the first jar remained lightly coated with the white blood, but he saw nothing there.

  He set the new jar down, and again he watched and waited.

  He did not have to watch very long. The surface undulated and Bennett nearly leaped out of his stool.

  He heard a noise behind him then, a scratching or a rustling sound. He turned, made jumpy by his discovery. Overhead lamps shone down on the empty stainless-steel tables behind him, every surface wiped down, the floor drains mopped clean. The Flight 753 victims locked away inside the walk-in cooler across the morgue.