The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Bolivar frowned. “It’s an act, dude. A fucking show, a spectacle. Goth greasepaint and hard-core lyrics. Google me up—my father was a Methodist preacher and the only thing I collect is pussy. Speaking of which, when the hell am I getting out of here?”

  Eph said, “We have a few more tests to run. We want to give you a clean bill of health before we let you go.”

  “When do I get my phone back?”

  “Soon,” said Eph, making his way out.

  The administrator was having trouble with three men outside the entrance to the isolation ward. Two of the men towered over Eph, and had to be Bolivar’s bodyguards. The third was smaller and carried a briefcase, and smelled distinctly of lawyer.

  Eph said, “Gentlemen, this is a restricted area.”

  The lawyer said, “I’m here to discharge my client Gabriel Bolivar.”

  “Mr. Bolivar is undergoing tests and will be released at the earliest possible convenience.”

  “And when will that be?”

  Eph shrugged. “Two, maybe three days, if all goes well.”

  “Mr. Bolivar has petitioned for his release into the care of his personal physician. I have not only power of attorney, but I can function as his health care proxy if he is in any way disabled.”

  “No one gets in to see him but me,” said Eph. To the administrator, he said, “Let’s post a guard here immediately.”

  The attorney stepped up. “Listen, Doctor. I don’t know much about quarantine law, but I’m pretty sure it takes an executive order from the president to hold someone in medical isolation. May I, in fact, see said order?”

  Eph smiled. “Mr. Bolivar is now a patient of mine, as well as the survivor of a mass casualty. If you leave your number at the nurses’ desk, I will do my best to keep you abreast of his recovery—with Mr. Bolivar’s consent, of course.”

  “Look, Doc.” The attorney put his hand on Eph’s shoulder in a manner Eph did not like. “I can get quicker results than a court injunction simply by mobilizing my client’s rabid fan base.” He included the administrator in this threat. “You want a mob of Goth chicks and assorted freaks protesting outside this hospital, running wild through these halls, trying to get in to see him?”

  Eph looked at the attorney’s hand until the attorney removed it from his shoulder. He had two more survivors to see. “Look, I really don’t have time for this. So let me just ask you some questions straight out. Does your client have any sexually transmitted diseases I should know about? Does he have any history of narcotics use? I’m only asking because, if I have to go look up his entire medical record, well, those things have a way of getting into the wrong hands. You wouldn’t want his full medical history leaked out to the press—right?”

  The attorney stared at him. “That is privileged information. Releasing it would be a felony violation.”

  “And a real potential embarrassment,” said Eph, holding the attorney’s eye another second for maximum impact. “I mean, imagine if somebody put your complete medical history out there on the Internet for everyone to see.”

  The attorney was speechless as Eph started away past the two bodyguards.

  Joan Luss, law-firm partner, mother of two, Swarthmore grad, Bronxville resident, Junior League member, was sitting on a foam mattress in her isolation-ward hospital bed, still tied up in that ridiculous johnny, scribbling notes on the back of a mattress-pad wrapper. Scribbling and waiting and wiggling her bare toes. They wouldn’t give her back her phone; she’d had to cajole and threaten just to get a lead pencil.

  She was about to buzz again when finally her nurse walked in the door. Joan turned on her get-me-results smile. “Hi, yes, there you are. I was wondering. What was the doctor’s name who was in here?”

  “He’s not a doctor from the hospital.”

  “I realize that. I was asking his name.”

  “His name is Dr. Goodweather.”

  “Goodweather.” She scribbled that down. “First name?”

  “Doctor.” Her flat smile. “They all have the same first name to me—Doctor.”

  Joan squinted as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard that right, and shifted a bit on the stiff sheets. “And he was dispatched here from the Centers for Disease Control?”

  “I guess so, yes. He left orders for a number of tests—”

  “How many others survived the crash?”

  “Well, there was no crash.”

  Joan smiled. Sometimes you had to pretend that English was their second language in order to make yourself understood. “What I am asking you is, how many others did not perish on Flight 753 from Berlin to New York?”

  “There are three others in this wing with you. Now, Dr. Goodweather wants to take blood and…”

  Joan tuned her out right there. The only reason she was still sitting in this sickroom was because she knew she could find out more by playing along. But that ploy was nearing its end. Joan Luss was a tort attorney, “tort” being a legal term meaning “a civil wrong,” recognized as grounds for a lawsuit. A plane full of passengers all die, except for four survivors—one of whom is a tort attorney.

  Poor Regis Air. As far as they would be concerned, the wrong passenger had lived.

  Joan said, talking right over the nurse’s instructions, “I would like a copy of my medical report to date, along with a complete list of lab tests already performed, and their results…”

  “Mrs. Luss? Are you certain you feel all right?”

  Joan had swooned for a moment, but it was just a remnant of whatever had overcome them at the end of that horrible flight. She smiled and shook her head fiercely, asserting herself anew. This anger she was feeling would power her through the next one thousand or so billable hours spent sorting through this catastrophe and bringing this dangerously negligent airline to trial.

  She said, “Soon I will feel very well indeed.”

  Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

  “NO FLIES,” SAID EPH.

  Nora said, “What?”

  They were standing before rows of crash bags laid out before the airplane. The four refrigerated trucks had pulled inside the hangar, sides respectfully canvassed in black to obscure the fish market signage. Each body had already been identified and assigned a bar-coded toe tag by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York. This tragedy was a “closed universe” mass disaster, in their parlance, with a fixed and knowable number of casualties—the opposite of the collapse of the Twin Towers. Thanks to passport scans, passenger manifests, and the intact condition of the remains, identification of the decedents was a simple, straightforward task. Determining the cause of their deaths was to be the real challenge.

  The tarp crinkled under the HAZMAT team’s boots as the blue vinyl bags were hoisted by straps at either end and loaded aboard their appointed truck with all solemnity.

  Eph said, “There should be flies.” The work lights set up around the hangar showed that the air above the corpses was clear but for a lazy moth or two. “Why aren’t there any flies?”

  After death, the bacteria along the digestive tract that, in life, cohabitated symbiotically with the healthy human host, begins to fend for itself. It starts feeding on the intestines, eventually eating its way through the abdominal cavity and consuming the organs. Flies can detect the putrid off-gassing from a decomposing carcass as far as one mile away.

  Two hundred and six meals were set out here. The hangar should have been buzzing with pests.

  Eph started across the tarp toward where a pair of HAZMAT officers was sealing another crash bag. “Hold on,” he said to them. They straightened and stepped back as Eph knelt and unzipped the seam, exposing the corpse inside.

  It was the young girl who had died holding her mother’s hand. Eph had memorized her body’s location on the floor without realizing it. You always remember the children.

  Her blond hair lay flat, a smiling sun pendant hanging from a black cord rested against the pit of her throat. Her white dress made her look almost bridelike.
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  The officers moved on to seal and take the next bag. Nora came up behind Eph, watching him. With his gloved hands, he grasped the girl gently by the sides of her head, rotating it on her neck.

  Rigor mortis fully sets in about twelve hours after death, holding for twelve to twenty-four more hours—they were in that middle range now—until the fixed calcium bonds inside the muscles break down again and the body returns to flexibility.

  “Still flexible,” said Eph. “No rigor.”

  He grasped her shoulder and hip and rolled the girl over onto her front. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, revealing the flesh of her lower back, the small bulbous nodes of her spine. Her skin was pallid and lightly freckled.

  After the heart stops, blood pools inside the circulatory system. The capillary walls, being just one cell thick, soon succumb to the pressure, bursting and spilling blood into the surrounding tissues. This blood settles in the lowest, “dependent” side of the body, and coagulates quickly. Lividity is said to become fixed after about sixteen hours.

  They were beyond that time limit now.

  From expiring in a seated position, and then being laid out flat, the pooled, thickened blood should have rendered the skin along her lower back a deep, dark purple.

  Eph looked out over the rows of bags. “Why aren’t these bodies decomposing as they should?”

  Eph eased the girl back flat again, then thumbed open her right eye with a practiced hand. Her cornea was clouded, as it should have been, and the sclera, the opaque white protective layer, was suitably dry. He examined the fingertips of her right hand—the one that had been tucked into her mother’s—and found them slightly wrinkled, due to evaporation, as they should have been.

  He sat back, annoyed by the mixed signals he was receiving, then inserted his two gloved thumbs between her dry lips. The gasplike noise that escaped from her parted jaw was the simple venting of gas. The immediate interior of the mouth was unremarkable, but he wriggled one gloved finger inside to depress her tongue, checking for more dryness.

  The soft palate and tongue were completely white, as though carved in ivory. Like anatomical netsuke. The tongue was rigid and oddly erect. Eph manipulated it to the side and revealed the rest of the mouth, equally drained.

  Drained? What’s next? he thought. “The bodies have been drained—there’s not a drop of blood left.” If not that line, then one from a Dan Curtis 1970s TV horror show: “ Lieutenant—the corpses—they’re… drained of blood!” Cue organ music.

  Fatigue was starting to set in. Eph held the firm tongue between his thumb and index finger, using a small flashlight to peer down her white throat. It looked vaguely gynecological to him. Porn netsuke?

  Then the tongue moved. He jerked back, pulling out his finger. “Jesus Christ!” The girl’s face remained a placid mask of death, lips still slightly parted.

  Nora, next to him, stared. “What was it?”

  Eph was wiping his gloved finger on his trousers. “Simple reflex action,” he said, standing. He looked down at the girl’s face until he couldn’t look anymore, then drew the zipper up along the bag, sealing her inside.

  Nora said, “What could it be? Something that slows tissue decay somehow? These people are dead…”

  “In every way except decomposition.” Eph shook his head uneasily. “We can’t hold up the transport. Bottom line is, we need these bodies at the morgue. Cut them open. Figure out this thing from the inside.”

  Nora, he noticed, was gazing off in the direction of the ornate cabinet, laid out on the hangar floor away from the rest of the unloaded luggage. “Nothing’s right about this,” she said.

  Eph was looking the other way, at the great aircraft overhead. He wanted to get back aboard. They must have missed something. The answer had to be in there.

  But before he could do this, he saw Jim Kent escorting the director of the CDC inside the hangar. Dr. Everett Barnes was sixty-one years old, and still very much the southern country doctor he had started out as. The Public Health Service that the CDC was a part of had been born of the navy, and though the PHS had long since branched off on its own, many top CDC officials still favored military-style uniforms, including Director Barnes. So you had the contradiction of a folksy, down-home, white-goateed gentleman dressing like a retired admiral in a trim khaki field uniform complete with chest candy. Looking very much like a combat-decorated Colonel Sanders.

  After the preliminaries, and a cursory examination of one of the airplane dead, Director Barnes asked about the survivors.

  Eph told him, “None of them has any memory of what happened. They are no help at all.”

  “Symptoms?”

  “Headaches, some severe. Muscle pain, ringing in the ears. Disorientation. Dry mouth. Problems with balance.”

  Director Barnes said, “Generally, not much worse than anyone else getting off a transatlantic flight.”

  “It’s uncanny, Everett,” said Eph. “Nora and I were the first ones on the plane. These passengers—all of them—were flat-lined. Not breathing. Four minutes without oxygen is the threshold for permanent brain damage. These people, they might have been out for more than an hour.”

  “Evidently not,” said the director. “And they couldn’t tell you anything?”

  “They had more questions for me than I had for them.”

  “Any commonality among the four?”

  “I’m pursuing that now. I was going to ask for your help in confining them until our work is done.”

  “Help?”

  “We need these four patients to cooperate.”

  “We have their cooperation.”

  “For now. I just… we can’t take any chances.”

  The director smoothed down his trim white beard as he spoke. “I’m sure that, with a little tactical use of bedside manner, we can leverage their appreciation for having been spared this tragic fate, and keep them compliant.” His smile revealed an upper row of heavily enameled dentures.

  “What about enforcing the Health Powers Act—”

  “Ephraim, you know there is a world of difference between isolating a few passengers for voluntary preventive treatment, and confining them in quarantine. There are larger issues—media issues, to be frank—to consider.”

  “Everett, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree—”

  The director’s small hand came down gently on Eph’s shoulder. He exaggerated his drawl a bit, maybe in order to soften the blow. “Let me save us both some time here, Ephraim. Looking at this objectively now, this tragic incident is, thankfully—one might say, blessedly—contained. We’ve had no other deaths or illnesses on any other airplanes or in any other airports around the globe, in what is approaching eighteen hours since that plane landed. These are positives, and we must stress them. Send a message to the public at large, reinforcing their confidence in our system of air travel. I am certain, Ephraim, that engaging these fortunate survivors, appealing to their sense of honor and duty, will be enough to compel them to cooperate.” The director removed his hand, smiling at Eph like a military man humoring his pacifist son. “Besides,” continued Barnes, “this has all the hallmarks of a goddamn gas leak, doesn’t it? So many victims so suddenly incapacitated? The closed environment? And the survivors rallying after being removed from the plane?”

  Nora said, “Except that the air circulation quit when the electrical did, right after landing.”

  Director Barnes nodded, folding his hands in consideration of this. “Well, it’s a lot to process, no question. But, look here—this was a very good drill for your team. You’ve handled it well. And now that things appear to be settling down, let’s see you get right to the bottom of it. Just as soon as this damn press briefing is done with.”

  Eph said, “Hang on. What?”

  “The mayor and the governor are holding a press conference, along with airline representatives, Port Authority officials, and so on. You and I will represent the federal health response.”

  “Oh—no. Sir, I
don’t have the time. Jim can do that—”

  “Jim can do it, but today it will be you, Ephraim. As I said, it is time for you to be the point man on this. You are the head of the Canary project, and I want someone up there who has been dealing with victims firsthand. We need to put a face on our efforts.”

  That was why all this bluster about no detention or quarantine. Barnes was laying down the party line. “But I really don’t know anything yet,” said Eph. “Why so soon?”

  Director Barnes smiled, showing his enamel again. “The doctor’s code is, ‘First—do no harm.’ The politician’s code is, ‘First—go on television.’ Plus, I understand that there is a time element involved. Something about wanting to get the broadcast out before this damn solar event. Sunspots affecting radio waves, or something.”

  “Solar…” Eph had forgotten all about it. The rare total solar eclipse that was to occur around three thirty that very afternoon. The first such solar event in the New York City region in more than four hundred years, since the advent of America. “Christ, I forgot.”

  “Our message to the people of this country will be simple. A profound loss of life has occurred here, and is being investigated fully by the CDC. It is a human catastrophe, but the incident has been contained, and is apparently unique, and there is absolutely no further cause for alarm.”

  Eph hid his scowl from the director. He was being made to stand up in front of cameras and say that everything was just dandy. He walked out of the containment area and through the narrow space between the great doors of the hangar, into the doomed light of the day. He was still trying to figure a way out of this when the mobile inside his pants pocket buzzed against the top of his thigh. He pulled it out, an envelope icon slowly revolving on the LCD screen. A text message from Matt’s mobile. Eph opened it:

  Yanks 4 Sux 2. gr8t seats, wish u wre here, Z.

  Eph stood staring at this electronic dispatch from his son until his eyes lost focus. He was left staring at his own shadow on the airport tarmac, which, unless he was imagining things, had already begun to vanish.