The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro

  It was risky going home, but he hadn’t seen many cops all day, and anyway he was worried about his madre. He slipped inside the building, trying to keep his shirt-balled hands casual, making for the stairs. Sixteen flights up. Once there, he walked down the hallway and saw no one. He listened at the door. The TV was playing, as usual.

  He knew the bell didn’t work, so he knocked. He waited and knocked again. He kicked at the foot plate, rattling the door and the cheap walls.

  “Crispin,” he hissed at his dirtbag brother. “Crispin, you shit. Open the fucking door.”

  Gus heard the chain lock being undone and the bolt turning inside. He waited, but the door never opened. So Gus unwound the shirt covering his cuffed hands and turned the knob.

  Crispin was standing back in the corner, to the left of the couch, which was his bed, when he came around. The shades were all drawn and the refrigerator door was open in the kitchen.

  “Where’s Mama?” said Gus.

  Crispin said nothing.

  “Fucking pipehead,” said Gus. He closed the fridge. Some stuff had melted and there was water on the floor. “She asleep?”

  Crispin said nothing. He stared at Gus.

  Gus started to get it. He took a better look at Crispin, who barely rated a glance from him anymore, and saw his black eyes and drawn face.

  Gus went to the window and whipped apart the shades. It was night. There was smoke in the air from a fire below.

  Gus turned to face Crispin, across the apartment, and Crispin was already charging him, howling. Gus got his arms up and got the handcuff chain across his brother’s neck, under his jaw. High enough so that he couldn’t get his stinger out.

  Gus grasped the back of his head with his hands and pushed Crispin down to the floor. His vampire brother’s black eyes bugged and his jaw bucked as his mouth tried to open, which Gus’s strangling grip would not allow. Gus was intent on suffocating him, but as time went by and Crispin kept kicking, and there was no blacking out—Gus remembered that vampires didn’t need to breathe and could not be killed that way.

  So he pulled him up by his neck, Crispin’s hands clawing at Gus’s arms and hands. For the past few years, Crispin had been nothing but a drag on their mother and a big pain in the ass for Gus. Now he was a vampire and the brother part of him was gone but the asshole part remained. And so it was retribution that moved Gus to wheel him headfirst into the decorative mirror on the wall, an old oval of heavy glass that didn’t crack until it slid down to the floor. Gus kneed Crispin, throwing him down onto the floor, and then grabbed the largest shard of glass. Crispin wasn’t quite to his knees when Gus rammed the point through the back of his neck. It severed the spine and poked the skin out of the front of his neck without quite ripping it. Gus worked the glass piece sideways, slicing Crispin’s head nearly off—but forgetting its sharpness against his own hands, cutting his palms. The pain stabbed at him, but he did not let go of the broken glass until his brother’s head was removed from its body.

  Gus staggered back, looking at the bloody slash across each of his palms. He wanted to make certain none of those worms wriggling out with Crispin’s white blood got into him. They were on the carpet and hard to see, so Gus stayed away. He looked at his brother, in pieces on the floor, and felt sickened by the vampire part of him, but as to the loss, Gus was numb. Crispin had been dead to him for years.

  Gus washed his hands at the sink. The cuts were long but not deep. He used a gummy dish towel to stop the bleeding and went to his mother’s bedroom.

  “Mama?”

  His only hope was that she not be there. Her bed was made and empty. He turned to leave, then thought twice and got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed. Just her sweater boxes and the arm weights she’d bought ten years ago. He was on his way back to the kitchen when he heard a rustling in the closet. He stopped, listening again. He went to the door and opened it. All of his mother’s clothes were pulled down off the hanging rack, lumped in a big pile on the floor.

  The pile was moving. Gus tugged back an old yellow dress with shoulder pads and his madre’s face leered out at him, black eyed and sallow skinned.

  Gus closed the door again. Didn’t slam it and run off, he just closed it and stood there. He wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come, only a sigh, a soft, deep whimper, and then he turned and looked around his mother’s bedroom for a weapon to cut her head off with…

  …and then he realized what the world had come to. Instead, he turned back to the closed door, leaning his forehead against it.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered. “Lo siento. I should have been here. I should have been here…”

  He walked, dazed, into his own room. He couldn’t even change his shirt, thanks to the handcuffs. He stuffed some clothes into a paper bag for when he could change, and crumpled it up under his arm.

  Then he remembered the old man. The pawnshop on 118th Street. He would help him. And help him fight this thing.

  He left his apartment, exiting into the hall. People stood down at the elevator end, and Gus lowered his head and started toward them. He didn’t want to be recognized, didn’t want to have to deal with any of his mother’s neighbors.

  He was about halfway to the elevators when he realized they weren’t talking or moving. Gus looked up and saw that the three people there were standing and facing him. He stopped when he realized that their eyes, their dark eyes, were hollow too. Vampires, blocking his exit.

  They started coming down the hall at him, and the next thing he knew, he was hammering away at them with his cuffed hands, throwing them against walls, smashing their faces into the floor. He kicked them when they were down, but they didn’t stay down for long. He gave none of them the chance to get their stingers out, crushing a few skulls with the heel of his heavy boots as he ran to the elevator, the doors closing as they reached it.

  Gus stood alone in the elevator car, catching his breath, counting down the floors. His bag was gone—it had ripped open, leaving his clothes strewn about the hallway.

  The numbers got to L and the doors dinged open on Gus standing in a crouch, ready for a fight.

  The lobby was empty. But outside the door, a faint orange glow flickered, and there were screams and howls. He went out into the street, seeing the blaze on the next block, the flames jumping to neighboring buildings. He saw people in the streets with wooden planks and other makeshift weapons, running toward the blaze.

  From the other direction, he saw another loose gang of six people, no weapons, walking, not running. A lone man came running past Gus the other way, saying, “Fuckers everywhere, man!” and then he was pounced upon by the group of six. To an untrained eye, it would have looked like a good old-fashioned street mugging, but Gus saw a mouth stinger by the orange light of the flames. Vampires turning people in the street.

  While he was watching, an all-black SUV with bright halogen lamps rolled up fast out of the smoke. Cops. Gus turned and chased his headlamp shadow down the street—running right into the gang of six. They came at him, their pale faces and black eyes lit up by the headlights. Gus heard car doors open and boots hit the pavement, and he was caught between these two fates. He raced at the snarling vampires, swinging his bound fists and butting them in the chest with his head. He didn’t want to give them a chance to open their mouths on him. But then one of them hooked its arm inside Gus’s cuffs and twisted him around, dragging him to the ground. In a second, the herd was on top of him, fighting over who would be the one to drink from his neck.

  There was a thwok sound, and a vampire squeal. Then a splat, and one of the vampires’ heads was gone.

  The one on top of him was hit from the side and suddenly knocked away. Gus rolled over and got to his knees in the middle of this street fight.

  These weren’t cops at all. They were men in black hoodies, their faces obscured, black combat pants and black jump boots. They were firing pistol crossbows and larger crossbows with wooden rifle stocks. Gus saw one guy sight a vam
pire and put a bolt in his neck. Before the vampire even had time to raise his hands to his throat, the bolt exploded with enough force to disintegrate his neck, removing the head.

  Dead vampire.

  The bolts were silver tipped and top loaded with an impact charge.

  Vampire hunters. Gus stared in amazement at these guys. Other vampires were coming out of the doorways, and these shooters were throat accurate at twenty-five, even thirty yards.

  One of them came up fast on Gus, as though mistaking him for a vamp, and before Gus could even speak, the hunter put a boot on his arms, pinning them against the road. He reloaded his crossbow and aimed it at the links joining Gus’s cuffs. A silver bolt split the steel, embedding itself in the asphalt. Gus winced, but there was no explosive charge. His hands were apart, though still in cop bracelets, and the hunter hauled him up onto his feet with startling strength.

  “Shit yeah!” said Gus, overjoyed by the sight of these guys. “Where do I sign up!”

  But his savior had slowed, something catching his eye. Gus looked more closely into the shadowy recesses of his sweatshirt hood, and the face there was eggshell white. Its eyes were black and red, and its mouth was dry and nearly lipless.

  The hunter was staring at the bloody lines across Gus’s palms.

  Gus knew that look. He had just seen it in his brother’s and his mother’s eyes.

  He tried to pull back, but the grip on his arm was lock solid. The thing opened its mouth and the tip of its stinger appeared.

  Then another hunter came up, holding its crossbow to this hunter’s neck. The new hunter pulled back Gus’s hunter’s hood, and Gus saw the bald, earless head, the aged eyes of a mature vampire. The vampire snarled at his brethren’s weapon, then surrendered Gus to the new hunter, whose pale vampire face Gus glimpsed as he was lifted aloft, carried to the black SUV, and thrown into the third-row seat.

  The rest of the hooded vampires climbed back inside the vehicle and it took off, wheeling a hard U-turn in the middle of the avenue. Gus was the only human inside the SUV.

  A smack to the temple knocked him out cold. The SUV raced back toward the burning building, bursting through the street smoke like an airplane punching through a cloud, then screaming past the rioting, rounding the next corner and heading farther uptown.

  The Bathtub

  THE SO-CALLED BATHTUB of the fallen World Trade Center, the seven-stories-deep foundation, was lit up as bright as day for overnight work even in the minutes before dawn. Yet the construction site was still, the great machines quiet. The work that had continued around the clock almost since the towers’ collapse had, for the time being, all but ceased.

  “Why this?” asked Eph. “Why here?”

  “It drew him,” said Setrakian. “A mole hollows out a home in the dead trunk of a felled tree. Gangrene forms in a wound. He is rooted in tragedy and pain.”

  Eph, Setrakian, and Fet sat in the back of Fet’s van, parked at Church and Cortlandt. Setrakian sat by the rear-door windows with a nightscope. Very little traffic rolled past, only the occasional predawn taxi or delivery truck. No pedestrians or any other signs of life. They were looking for vampires and not finding any.

  Setrakian, his eye still to the scope, said, “It’s too bright here. They don’t want to be seen.”

  Eph said, “We can’t keep looping around the site again and again.”

  “If there are as many as we suspect,” said Setrakian, “then they must be nearby. To return to the lair before sunrise.” He looked at Fet. “Think like vermin.”

  Fet said, “I will tell you this. I’ve never seen a rat go in anywhere through the front door.” He thought about it some more, then pushed past Eph toward the front seats. “I have an idea.”

  He rolled north on Church to City Hall, one block northeast of the WTC site. A large park surrounded it, and Fet pulled into a bus space on Park Row, killing the engine.

  “This park is one of the biggest rat nests in the city. We tried pulling out the ivy, ’cause it was such good ground cover. Changed the garbage containers, but it was no use. They play here like squirrels, especially at noon when the lunch crowd comes. Food makes them happy, but they can get food just about anywhere. It’s infrastructure that rats really crave.” He pointed to the ground. “Underneath, in there, is an abandoned subway station. The old City Hall stop.”

  Setrakian said, “It still connects?”

  “Everything connects underground, one way or another.”

  They watched, and did not wait for long.

  “There,” said Setrakian.

  Eph saw a bedraggled-looking woman by a streetlight, some thirty yards away. “A homeless woman,” he said.

  “No,” said Setrakian, handing his heat scope to Eph.

  Eph saw, through the scope, the woman as a fierce blur of red against a cool, dim background.

  “Their metabolism,” said Setrakian. “There is another.”

  A heavy woman waddling, still getting her sea legs, staying in the shadows along the low iron fence ringing the park.

  Then another: a man wearing a newspaper hawker’s change apron, carrying a body on his shoulder. Dropping it over the fence, then clumsily scaling it himself. He fell going over, ripping one leg of his pants, standing back up without any reaction and picking up his victim and continuing into the tree cover.

  “Yes,” said Setrakian. “This is it.”

  Eph shivered. The presence of these walking pathogens, these humanoid diseases, repulsed him. He felt sick watching them stagger into the park, lower animals obeying some unconscious impulse, withdrawing from the light. He sensed their hurry, like commuters trying to catch that last train home.

  They quietly stepped out of the van. Fet wore a protective Tyvek jumpsuit and rubber wading boots. He offered spare sets to the others, Eph and Setrakian choosing only the boots. Setrakian sprayed, without asking, each of them from a bottle of scent-eliminating spray with a picture of a deer in red crosshairs on the label. The spray of course could do nothing about the carbon dioxide emitted by their breath, nor the sound of their pumping hearts and coursing blood.

  Fet carried the most. The nail gun was in a bag hung across his chest, complete with three extra loaders of silver brads. He carried various tools on his belt, including his night-vision monocular and his black-light wand, along with one of Setrakian’s silver daggers in a leather sheath. He held a high-powered Luma light in his hand, and bore the UVC mine in a mesh bag over his shoulder.

  Setrakian carried his walking stick and a Luma light, the heat scope in his coat pocket. He double-checked the pillbox in his vest, then left his hat behind in the van.

  Eph also carried a Luma, as well as, in a sheath strapped across his chest, a silver sword, the twenty-five-inch blade and grip against his back.

  Fet said, “I’m not sure this makes sense. Going down to fight a beast on its own turf.”

  Setrakian said, “We have no alternative. This is the only time we know where he is.” He looked up at the sky, bluing with the first faint glimmer of day. “The night is ending. Let us go.”

  They made their way to the low fence gate, which was kept locked overnight. Eph and Fet scaled it, then reached back to help Setrakian.

  The sound of more footsteps on the sidewalk—moving quickly, one heel dragging—made them hustle deep into the park.

  The interior was unlit at night, and thick with trees. They heard the park fountain running and automobiles passing outside.

  “Where are they?” whispered Eph.

  Setrakian brought out his heat scope. He scanned the area, then handed the scope off to Eph. Eph saw bright red shapes moving stealthily through the otherwise cool landscape.

  The answer to his question was: they were everywhere. And quickly converging on a point to their north.

  Their destination became clear. A kiosk on the Broadway side of the park, a dark structure Eph couldn’t make much more of from that distance. He watched and waited until the numbers of returning vampi
res declined, and Setrakian’s scope picked up no other significant heat sources.

  They ran to the structure. In the burgeoning light, they saw that it was an information kiosk, kept shuttered overnight. They pulled open the door, and found it empty.

  They huddled inside the cramped space, the wooden counter taken up by wire racks full of tourist fliers and tour-bus schedules. Fet turned his little Maglite on twin metal doors in the floor. There were thick eye-holes at either end, the padlocks gone. The lettering across the twin doors read, MTA.

  Fet pulled open both doors, Eph with his lamp at the ready. Stairs led down into darkness. Setrakian aimed his flashlight at a faded sign on the wall as Fet started down.

  “Emergency exit,” Fet reported. “They sealed off the old City Hall station after World War Two. The track turn was too sharp for newer trains, the platform too narrow—though I think the number six local still turns around here.” He looked from side to side. “Must have demolished the old emergency exit, and put this kiosk up on top of it.”

  “Fine,” Setrakian said. “Let us go.”

  Eph followed, bringing up the rear. He did not bother to close the doors behind him, wanting a straight shot to the surface if they needed it. Grime coated the sides of each step, the middles cleaned by regular foot traffic. Darker than night down there.

  Fet said, “Next stop, 1945.”

  The flight of stairs ended at an open door leading to a second flight of wider stairs, leading down to what had to be the old mezzanine. A tiled dome with four arched sides, rising to an ornate skylight of modern glass, was just starting to blue. Some ladders and old scaffolding had been laid against the wooden ticket room along one rounded wall. The arched doorways were without turnstiles, the station predating tokens.

  The far arch led to another flight of stairs no more than five persons wide, emptying into the narrow platform. They listened at the arched doorway, hearing only the distant screech of subway car brakes, then emerged fully onto the abandoned platform.