The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro

  The program then went to a commercial for an “age-defying” cream designed to “help you live longer and better.”

  The congenitally ill tycoon then switched off the audio, so that the only sound, other than the dialysis machine, was the humming behind his avaricious smile.

  On another screen was a graphic showing the financial markets declining while the dollar continued its fall. Palmer himself was moving the markets, steadily divesting himself of equities and buying into metals: gold, silver, palladium, and platinum bullion.

  The commentator went on to suggest that the recent recession represented opportunities in futures trading. Palmer strongly disagreed. He was shorting futures. Everybody’s except his own.

  A telephone call was forwarded to his chair through Mr. Fitzwilliam. A sympathetic member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, calling to inform him that the epidemiologist with the Canary project, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, had escaped.

  “Escaped?” said Palmer. “How is that possible?”

  “He had an elderly man with him who apparently was more wily than he’d seemed. He carried a long silver sword.”

  Palmer was silent for one full respiration. Then, slowly, he smiled.

  Forces were aligning against him. All well and good. Let them come together. It would be easier to clear them all away.

  “Sir?” said the caller.

  “Oh—nothing,” said Palmer. “I was just thinking of an old friend.”

  Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

  EPH AND NORA stood with Setrakian behind the locked doors of his pawnshop, the two epidemiologists still shaken up.

  “I gave them your name,” said Eph, looking outside the window.

  “The building is in my late wife’s name. We should be safe here for the moment.”

  Setrakian was anxious to get downstairs to his basement armory, but the two doctors were still rattled. “They are coming after us,” said Eph.

  “Clearing the way for infection,” said Setrakian. “The strain will move faster through an orderly society than one on high alert.”

  “They who?” said Nora.

  “Whoever had the influence to get that coffin loaded onto a transatlantic flight in this age of terrorism,” said Setrakian.

  Eph said, pacing, “They’re framing us. Sending someone in there to steal Redfern’s remains…who looked like us?”

  “As you said, you are the lead authority to sound the general alarm for disease control. Be thankful they only tried to discredit you.”

  Nora said, “Without the CDC behind us, we have no authority.”

  Setrakian said, “We must continue on our own now. This is disease control at its most elemental.”

  Nora looked over at him. “You mean—murder.”

  “What would you want? To become like that…or to have someone release you?”

  Eph said, “It’s still a polite euphemism for murder. And easier said than done. How many heads do we have to cut off? There are three of us here.”

  Setrakian said, “There are ways other than severing the spinal column. Sunlight, for example. Our most powerful ally.”

  Eph’s phone trembled inside his pocket. He pulled it out, wary, checking the display.

  An Atlanta exchange. CDC headquarters. “Pete O’Connell,” he said to Nora, and took the call.

  Nora turned to Setrakian. “So where are they all right now, during the day?”

  “Underground. Cellars and sewers. The dark bowels of buildings, such as maintenance rooms, in the heating and cooling systems. In the walls sometimes. But usually in dirt. That is where they prefer to make their nests.”

  “So—they sleep during the day, right?”

  “That would be most convenient, wouldn’t it? A handful of coffins in a basement, full of dozing vampires. But no, they don’t sleep at all. Not as we understand it. They will shut down for a while if they are sated. Too much blood digestion fatigues them. But never for long. They go underground during daylight hours solely to escape the killing rays of the sun.”

  Nora appeared quite pale and overwhelmed, like a little girl who’d been told that dead people do not in fact grow wings and fly straight up to heaven to be angels, but instead stay on earth and grow stingers under their tongues and turn into vampires.

  “That thing you said,” she said. “Before you cut them down. Something in another language. Like a pronouncement, or a kind of curse.”

  The old man winced. “Something I say only to calm myself. To steady my hand for the final blow.”

  Nora waited to hear what it was. Setrakian saw that, for whatever reason, she needed to know.

  “I say, ‘Strigoi, my sword sings of silver.’” Setrakian winced again, uncomfortable saying this now. “Sounds better in the old language.”

  Nora saw that this old vampire killer was essentially a modest man. “Silver,” she said.

  “Only silver,” he said. “Renowned throughout the ages for its antiseptic and germicidal properties. You can cut them with steel or shoot them with lead, but only silver really hurts them.”

  Eph had his free hand over his other ear, trying to hear Pete, who was driving in a car just outside Atlanta. Pete said, “What’s going on up there?”

  “Well…what have you heard?”

  “That I’m not supposed to be talking to you. That you’re in trouble. That you’ve gone off the reservation or some such.”

  “It’s a mess here, Pete. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Well, I had to call anyway. I’ve been putting in time on the samples you sent me.”

  Eph felt another stone fall into his gut. Dr. Peter O’Connell was one of the heads of the Unexplained Deaths Project at the CDC’s National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases. UNEX was an interdisciplinary group made up of virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and clinicians from inside and outside the CDC. A great many naturally occurring deaths go unexplained in the United States each year, and a fraction of these—about seven hundred per annum—are referred to UNEX for further investigation. Of those seven hundred, merely 15 percent are satisfactorily resolved, with samples from the rest being banked for possible future reexamination.

  Every UNEX researcher holds another position within the CDC, and Pete was the chief of Infectious Disease Pathology, an expert on how and why a virus affects its host. Eph had forgotten sending him early biopsies and blood samples from Captain Redfern’s preliminary examination.

  “It’s a viral strain, Eph. No doubt about that. A remarkable bit of genetic acid.”

  “Pete, wait, listen to me—”

  “The glycoprotein has amazing binding characteristics. I’m talking skeleton key. Astonishing. This little bugger doesn’t merely hijack the host cell, tricking it into reproducing more copies of itself. No—it fuses to the RNA. Melds with it. Consumes it…yet somehow doesn’t use it up. What it’s doing is, it’s making a copy of itself mated with the host cell. And taking only the parts it needs. I don’t know what you’re seeing with your patient, but theoretically, this thing could replicate and replicate and replicate, and many millions of generations later—and this thing is fast—it could reproduce its own organ structure. Systemically. It could change its host. Into what, I don’t know—but I sure would like to find out.”

  “Pete.” Eph’s head was swimming. It made too much sense. The virus overwhelmed and transformed the cell—just as the vampire overwhelmed and transformed the victim.

  These vampires were viruses incarnate.

  Pete said, “I’d like to do the genetics on this one myself, really see what makes it tick—”

  “Pete, listen to me. I want you to destroy it.”

  Eph heard Pete’s windshield wipers working in the silence. “What?”

  “Save your findings, hang on to those, but destroy that sample right away.”

  More windshield wipers, metronomes of Pete’s uncertainty. “Destroy the one I wa
s working on, you mean? Because you know that we always bank some, just in case—”

  “Pete, I need you to drive straight to the lab and destroy that sample.”

  “Eph.” Eph heard Pete’s blinker, Pete pulling off the road to finish the conversation. “You know how careful we are with any potential pathogens. We’re clean and we’re safe. And we have a very strict laboratory protocol that I can’t just break for your—”

  “I made a terrible mistake letting it out of New York City. I didn’t know then what I know now.”

  “Exactly what kind of trouble are you in, Eph?”

  “Bleach it. If that doesn’t work, use acid. Set it on fire if you have to, I don’t care. I’ll take full responsibility—”

  “It’s not about responsibility, Eph. It’s about good science. You need to be straight with me now. Someone said they saw something about you on the news.”

  Eph had to end this. “Pete, do as I ask—and I promise I will explain everything to you when I can.”

  He hung up. Setrakian and Nora had listened to the end of his conversation.

  Setrakian said, “You sent the virus somewhere else?”

  “He’s going to destroy it. Pete will err on the side of caution—I know him too well.” Eph looked at the televisions for sale along the wall. Something about you on the news… “Any of these work?”

  They found one that did. It wasn’t long before the story rolled around.

  They showed Eph’s photograph from his CDC identification card. Then a blurry snippet of his encounter with Redfern, and one of the two look-alikes carrying a body bag from the hospital room. It said that Dr. Ephraim Goodweather was being sought as “a person of interest” in the disappearance of the corpses of the Flight 753 airline passengers.

  Eph stood motionless. He thought of Kelly watching this. Of Zack.

  “Those bastards,” he hissed.

  Setrakian switched off the television. “The only good news about this is that they still consider you a threat. That means there is still time. Still hope. A chance.”

  Nora said, “You sound like you have a plan.”

  “Not a plan. A strategy.”

  Eph said, “Tell us.”

  “Vampires have their own laws, both savage and ancient. One such commandment that endures is that a vampire cannot cross moving water. Not without human assistance.”

  Nora shook her head. “Why not?”

  “The reason perhaps lies in their very creation, so long ago. The lore has existed in every known culture on the planet, for all time. Mesopotamians, Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, Hebrews, the Romans. Old as I am, I am not old enough to know. But the prohibition holds even today. Giving us something of an advantage here. Do you know, what is New York City?”

  Nora got it right away. “An island.”

  “An archipelago. We are surrounded on all sides by water right now. The airline passengers, they went to morgues in all five boroughs?”

  “No,” said Nora. “Only four. Not Staten Island.”

  “Four, then. Queens and Brooklyn are both separated from the mainland, by the East River and the Long Island Sound respectively. The Bronx is the only borough connected to the United States.”

  Eph said, “If only we could seal off the bridges. Set up fire lines north of the Bronx, east of Queens at Nassau…”

  “Wishful thinking at this point,” said Setrakian. “But, can you see, we do not have to destroy every one of them individually. They are all of one mind, operating in a hive mentality. Controlled by a single intelligence. Who is very likely landlocked somewhere here in Manhattan.”

  “The Master,” said Eph.

  “The one who came over in the belly of the airplane. The owner of the missing coffin.”

  Nora said, “How do you know he’s not back near the airport? If he can’t cross the East River on his own.”

  Setrakian smiled flatly. “I feel very confident that he did not journey all the way to America to hide out in Queens.” He opened the rear door, the steps leading to his basement armory. “What we have to do now is hunt him down.”

  Liberty Street, the World Trade Center Site

  VASILIY FET, the exterminator with the New York City Bureau of Pest Control, stood at the construction fence above the great “bathtub” foundation at the site of the former World Trade Center complex. He had left his handcart in his van, parked over on West Street, in a Port Authority lot with the other construction vehicles. In one hand he carried rodenticide and light tunnel gear in a red-and-black Puma sport bag. In his other he held his trusty length of rebar, found at a job site once, a one-meter-long steel rod perfect for probing rat burrows and pushing bait inside—and occasionally beating back aggressive or panicked vermin.

  He stood between the Jersey barriers and the construction fence at the corner of Church and Liberty, among the orange-and-white caution barrels along the wide pedestrian walkway. People walked past, striding toward the temporary subway entrance at the other end of the block. There was a sense of new hope in the air here, warm, like the abundant sunshine that blessed this destroyed part of the city. The new buildings were starting to go up now, after years of planning and excavation, and it was as though this terrible black bruise was finally starting to heal.

  Only Fet noticed the oily smears discoloring the vertical edges of the curb. The droppings around the parking barriers. The gnaw marks scoring the lid of the corner garbage can. Telltale signs of surface rat presence.

  One of the sandhogs took him down the haul road and into the basin. He pulled up at the foot of the structure that would become the new underground WTC PATH station, with five tracks and three underground platforms. For now, the silver trains entered through daylight and open air as they made their way along the bottom of the bathtub toward the temporary platforms.

  Vasiliy stepped out of the pickup, down among the concrete footings, looking up seven stories to the street above him. He was in the pit where the towers had fallen. It was enough to take his breath away.

  Vasiliy said, “This is a holy place.”

  The sandhog had a bushy, gray-flecked mustache, and wore a loose flannel shirt over a tucked-in flannel shirt—both heavy with soil and sweat—and blue jeans with muddy gloves tucked into the belt. His hard hat was covered with stickers. “I always thought so,” he said. “Recently I’m not so sure.”

  Fet looked at him. “Because of the rats?”

  “There’s that, sure. Gushing out of the tunnels the past few days, like we’ve struck rat oil. But that’s fallen off now.” He shook his head, looking up at the slurry wall erected beneath Vesey Street, seventy sheer feet of concrete studded with tiebacks.

  Fet said, “Then what?”

  The guy shrugged. Sandhogs are a proud lot. They built New York City, its subways and sewers, every tunnel, pier, skyscraper, and bridge foundation. Every glass of clean water comes out of the tap thanks to a sandhog. A family job, different generations working together on the same sites. Dirty work done right. So the guy was reluctant to sound reluctant. “Everyone’s in kind of a funk. We had two guys walk off, disappear. Clocked in for a shift, went down into the tunnels, but never clocked out. We’re twenty-four/seven here, but nobody wants night shifts anymore. Nobody wants to be underground. And these are young guys, my daredevils.”

  Fet looked ahead to the tunnel openings where the subterranean structures would be joined beneath Church Street. “So no new construction these past few days? Breaking new ground?”

  “Not since we got the basin hollowed out.”

  “And all this started with the rats?”

  “Around then. Something’s come over this place, just in the past few days.” The sandhog shrugged, shaking it off. He had a plain white hard hat for Vasiliy. “And I thought I had a dirty job. What makes someone want to become a rat catcher anyway?”

  Vasiliy put on the hat, feeling the wind change near the mouth of the underground passage. “I guess I’m addicted to the glamour.”

&nbs
p; The sandhog looked at Vasiliy’s boots, his Puma bag, the steel rod. “Done this before?”

  “Gotta go where the vermin are. There’s a lot of city under this city.”

  “Tell me about it. You got a flashlight, I hope? Some bread crumbs?”

  “Think I’m good.”

  Vasiliy shook the sandhog’s hand, then started inside.

  The tunnel was clean at first, where it had been shored up. He followed it out of the sunlight, yellow lights strung every ten or so yards, marking his way. He was under where the original concourse had been located. This big burrow would, when all was said and done, connect the new PATH station to the WTC transportation hub located between towers two and three, a half block away. Other feed tunnels connected to city water, power, and sewer.

  Deeper in, he couldn’t help but notice fine, powdery dust still coating the walls of the original tunnel. This was a hallowed place, still very much a graveyard. Where bodies and buildings were pulverized, reduced to atoms.

  He saw burrows, he saw tracks and scat, but no rats. He picked away at the burrows with his rod, and listened. He heard nothing.

  The strung-up work lights ended at a turn, a deep, velvety blackness lying ahead. Vasiliy carried a million-candlepower spot lamp in his bag—a big yellow Garrity with a bullhorn grip—as well as two backup mini Maglites. But artificial light in a dark enclosure wiped out one’s night vision altogether, and for rat hunting he liked to stay dark and quiet. He pulled out a night-vision monocular instead, a handheld unit with a strap that attached nicely to his hard hat, coming down over his left eye. Closing his right eye turned the tunnel green. Rat vision, he called it, their beady eyes glowing in the scope.

  Nothing. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the rats were gone. Driven off.

  That stumped him. It took a lot to displace rats. Even once you removed their food source, it could be weeks before seeing a change. Not days.