The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Rats, maybe. There was nothing they could do to keep the vermin out of the building—and they had tried everything. In the walls. Or beneath the floor drains. He listened for a moment longer, then returned to the jar.

  He poured the liquid from jar to jar again, this time stopping halfway. The amounts in each jar were roughly even. He set them underneath the overhead lamp and watched the milky surface for a sign of life.

  There it was. In the first jar. A plip this time, almost like that of a small fish nibbling at the surface of a cloudy pond.

  Bennett watched the other jar until he was satisfied, and then poured its contents down the drain. He then started over, again dividing the contents between the two glass vessels.

  A siren in the street outside made him sit up. It passed, and in what should have been the ensuing silence, he heard sounds again. Movement-type sounds, behind him. Again he turned, feeling equal parts paranoid and foolish now. The room was empty, the morgue sterilized and still.

  Yet… something was making that noise. He stood from his stool, silently, turning his head this way and that in order to get a fix on its source.

  His divining directed his attention to the steel door of the walk-in refrigerator. He took a few steps toward it, all his senses attuned.

  A rustling. A stirring. As though from inside. He had spent more than enough time down here not to be spooked by the mere proximity to the dead… but then he remembered the antemortem growth these corpses had exhibited. Clearly, these anxieties had prompted him to revert to the usual human taboos regarding the dead. Everything about his job flew in the face of normal human instinct. Cutting open corpses. Defiling cadavers, peeling faces back from skulls. Excising organs and flaying genitals. He smiled at himself in the empty room. So he was basically normal after all.

  His mind playing tricks on him. Probably a glitch in the cooling fans or something. There was a safety switch inside the cooler, a big red button, in the event anyone ever got himself stuck in there accidentally.

  He turned back to the jars. Watching them, waiting for more movement. He was wishing he had brought his laptop down in order to record his thoughts and impressions.

  Plip.

  He had been ready for it this time, his heart leaping but his body staying put. Still in the first jar. He poured out the other one and split the fluid a third time, approximately one ounce in each.

  As he did this, he thought he saw something ride the spill from the first jar to the second. Something very thin, no more than an inch and a half in length—if indeed he saw what he thought he saw…

  A worm. A fluke. Was this a parasitic disease? There were various examples of parasites reshaping hosts in order to serve their own reproductive aspects. Was this the explanation for the bizarre after-death changes he had seen on the autopsy table?

  He held up the jar in question, swishing around the thinning white fluid underneath the lamplight. He eyed the contents carefully, closely… and yes… not once but twice, something slithered inside. Wriggled. Wire thin and as white as its surroundings, moving very fast.

  Bennett had to isolate it. Dip it in formalin, and then study it, and identify it. If he had this one, he had dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe… who knows how many, circulating inside the other bodies in the—

  A sharp bang from the cooler shocked him, made him jerk up, jostling the jar from his hand. It fell to the counter, but did not shatter—bouncing instead, clattering into the sink, spilling and splattering its contents. Bennett let loose a string of obscenities, searching the stainless-steel basin for the worm. Then he felt warmth on the back of his left hand. Some of the white blood had spattered on him, and was now stinging his flesh. Not burning, but mildly caustic, enough to hurt. He quickly ran cold water over it and wiped it off on his lab coat before it could damage his skin.

  He whirled around then, facing the cooler. The bang he had heard was certainly no electrical malfunction, but more like a wheeled stretcher banging into another wheeled stretcher. Impossible… and his ire rose again. His worm had just gone down the drain. He would get another blood sample, and isolate this parasite. This discovery was his.

  Still wiping his hand on the flap of his jacket, he went to the door and pulled on the handle, releasing the chamber’s seal. A hiss of stale, refrigerated air breathed over him as the door opened wide.

  Joan Luss, after having released herself and the others from the isolation ward, hired a car to take her straight to the weekend home in New Canaan, Connecticut, of one of the founding partners of her law firm. She’d had the driver pull over twice so she could retch out the window. A combination of flu and nerves. But no matter. She was victim class and advocate now. Aggrieved party and crusading counselor. Fighting for restitution for the families of the dead and for the four fortunate survivors. The white-shoe firm of Camins, Peters, and Lilly could be looking at 40 percent of the largest corporate-claim payout ever, bigger than Vioxx, bigger even than WorldCom.

  Joan Luss, partner.

  You think you’re doing all right in Bronxville until you drive out into New Canaan. Bronxville, Joan’s home, is a leafy village in Westchester County, fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan, twenty-eight minutes by Metro-North train. Roger Luss worked in international finance for Clume and Fairstein, and traveled out of the country most weeks. Joan had traveled quite a bit, but had to pull back after the children were born, because it didn’t look good. But she missed it, and had thoroughly enjoyed her previous week in Berlin, at the Ritz-Carlton on the Potsdamer Platz. She and Roger, having grown so accustomed to hotel living, had emulated that very lifestyle in their home, with heated bathroom floors, a downstairs steam room, twice-weekly fresh flower deliveries, seven-day-a-week landscaping, and of course their housekeeper and laundress. Everything but turn-down service and a sweet on their pillows at night.

  Buying into Bronxville several years before, with its lack of new construction and forbiddingly high tax rate, had been a big step up for them. But now, having had a taste of New Canaan—where lead partner Dory Camins lived like a feudal lord on a three-house estate complete with a fishing pond, horse stables, and an equestrian track—Bronxville, on her way back, had struck her as quaint, provincial, even a little… tired.

  Now home, she had just awakened after suffering through a tremulous late-afternoon nap. Roger was still in Singapore, and she kept hearing noises in the house, noises that finally scared her awake. Restless anxiety. She attributed it to the meeting, perhaps the biggest meeting of her life.

  Joan emerged from her study, holding the wall on her way downstairs, coming into the kitchen as Neeva, the children’s wonderful nanny, was clearing away the dinner mess, running a damp cloth over the table crumbs. “Oh, Neeva, I could have done that,” said Joan, not meaning a word of it, walking right to the tall glass cabinet where she kept their medicine. Neeva was a Haitian grandmother who lived in Yonkers, one town over. She was sixty-something, but looked basically ageless, always wearing a long ankle-length floral dress and comfortable Converse sneakers. Neeva was a much-needed calming influence in the Luss home. They were a busy bunch, what with Roger’s traveling and Joan’s long hours in the city and the children’s school and programs in between, everyone going in sixteen different directions. Neeva was the family rudder, and Joan’s secret weapon in keeping the household running right.

  “Joan, you don’t look so good.”

  “Joan” and “don’t” came out sounding like “Jon” and “don” in Neeva’s island lilt.

  “Oh, I’m just a little run-down.” She popped some Motrin and two Flexerils and sat down at the kitchen island, opening House Beautiful.

  “You should eat,” said Neeva.

  “Hurts to swallow,” said Joan.

  “Soup, then,” decreed Neeva, and set about getting it for her.

  Neeva was a mother figure for all of them, not just the children. And why shouldn’t Joan have some mothering too? God knows, her real mother—twice divorced, living in an apartme
nt in Hialeah, Florida—wasn’t up to the task. And the best part? When Neeva’s doting ways became too annoying, Joan could simply send her away on an errand with the kiddies. Best. Arrangement. Ever.

  “I hear about that air-o-plane.” Neeva looked back at Joan from the can opener. “No good. An evil thing.”

  Joan smiled at Neeva and her adorable little tropical superstitions—the smile cut abruptly short by a sharp pain in her jaw.

  While the soup bowl rotated in the whirring microwave, Neeva came back to look at Joan, laying her roughened brown hand against Joan’s forehead, exploring the glandular region of Joan’s neck with gray-nailed fingers. Joan pulled back in pain.

  “Swollen bad,” Neeva said.

  Joan closed the magazine. “Maybe I should go back to bed.”

  Neeva stood back, looking at her strangely. “You should go back to hospital.”

  Joan would have laughed if she knew it wouldn’t hurt. Back to Queens? “Trust me, Neeva. I am much better off here in your hands. Besides—take it from one who knows. That whole hospital thing was an insurance ploy on the airline’s behalf. All for their benefit—not mine.”

  As she rubbed her sore, swollen neck, Joan envisioned the impending lawsuit, and once again her spirits soared. She glanced around the kitchen. Funny how a house she had spent so much time and money redecorating and re-renovating could appear so suddenly… shabby.

  Camins, Peters, Lilly… and Luss.

  The children entered the kitchen then, Keene and Audrey, whining about some toy-related incident. Their voices worked their way inside Joan’s head such that she was seized by a commanding urge to backhand them each hard enough to send them flying halfway across the kitchen. But she managed to do what she always did, channeling her aggression toward her children into false enthusiasm, thrown up like a wall around her angry self. She closed the magazine and raised her voice in order to silence theirs.

  “How would you each like a pony, and your very own pond?”

  She believed it was her generous bribe that had silenced the children, but it was in fact her smile, gargoylelike and glaring, baring an expression of utter hatred, that frightened them into stillness.

  For Joan, the momentary silence was bliss.

  The 911 call came in for a naked man at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel exits. The dispatch went out as a 10-50, a low-priority disorderly person call. A unit from the 1-7 arrived within eight minutes, and found a bad jam-up, worse than usual for a Sunday night. A few drivers honked and pointed them uptown. The suspect, they yelled, a fat guy wearing nothing but a red tag on his toe, had already moved on.

  “I got kids here!” howled one guy in a dinged-up Dodge Caravan.

  Officer Karn, the driver, said to his partner, Officer Lupo, “I’m gonna say Park Avenue type. Sex club regular. Took too much X before his weekend kink session.”

  Officer Lupo unbuckled and opened his door. “I’m on traffic duty. Loverboy’s all yours.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Officer Karn to the slamming of the door. He lit up his rack and waited patiently—he wasn’t paid extra to rush—for the traffic snarl to part for him.

  He cruised up past Thirty-eighth, eyeballing cross streets. A fat naked guy on the loose shouldn’t be too hard to find. People on the sidewalks seemed okay, not freaked. One helpful citizen smoking outside a bar saw the slow-rolling cruiser and stepped forward, pointing him up the street.

  A second and third call came in, both for a naked man marauding outside the United Nations headquarters. Officer Karn hit the gas, looking to end this. He cruised past the lit-up flags of all the member nations flying out front, to the visitors’ entrance at the north end. Blue NYPD sawhorses everywhere, as well as car-bomb deterring cement planters.

  Karn rolled up on a detail of bored cops near the sawhorses. “I’m looking for a fat naked man.”

  One cop shrugged. “I could give you a few phone numbers.”

  Gabriel Bolivar returned by limousine to his new home in Manhattan, two town houses undergoing extensive renovations on Vestry Street, in Tribeca. When finished, the home would encompass thirty-one rooms and fourteen thousand total square feet, including a mosaic-lined swimming pool, servants’ quarters for a staff of sixteen, a basement recording studio, and a twenty-six-seat movie theater.

  Only the penthouse was finished and furnished, rushed into completion while Bolivar was away on his European tour. The rest of the rooms in the lower floors were roughed out, some of them plastered, others still dressed in plastic wrap and insulation. Sawdust had worked its way onto every surface and into every crevice. Bolivar’s business manager had briefed him on the developments, but Bolivar wasn’t much interested in the journey, only the destination of his soon-to-be lavish and decadent palace.

  The “Jesus Wept” tour had ended on a down note. The promoters had to work hard to fill the arenas so that Bolivar could truthfully claim to have played to sold-out audiences everywhere—but he had. Then the tour charter crapped out in Germany, and rather than wait behind with the others, Bolivar had consented to hop a commercial flight home. He was still feeling the aftereffects of that big mistake. In fact, it was getting worse.

  He moved inside the front entrance with his security detail and three young ladies from the club. A few of his larger treasures had been moved in, including twin black marble panthers poised on either side of the twenty-foot-high foyer. Two blue industrial-waste drums said to have belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer and several rows of framed paintings: Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Chet Zar—big, expensive stuff. The loose light switch on the wall activated a string of construction lights winding up the marble staircase, beyond a great, winged, weeping angel of uncertain provenance, having been “rescued” from a Romanian church during the Ceausescu regime.

  “He’s beautiful,” said one of the girls, looking up into the angel’s shadowed, time-worn features.

  Bolivar stumbled near the great angel, seized by a pain in his gut that was more than a cramp, that was like a punch from an adjoining organ. He gripped the angel’s wing to steady himself, and the girls converged on him.

  “Baby,” they cooed, helping him to stand, and he tried to shake off the pain. Had someone slipped him something at the club? It had happened before. Christ, girls had drugged him before, so desperate were they to have their way with Gabriel Bolivar—to get the legend underneath the makeup. He pushed the three of them away, waving off his bodyguards as well, standing erect despite the ache. His detail remained below while he used his silver-encrusted walking stick to shoo the girls up the curling flights of blue-veined white marble to the penthouse.

  He left the girls to mix themselves more drinks and fix themselves up in the other bathroom. Bolivar locked himself inside the master bath and dug out his Vicodin stash and self-medicated with two pretty white pills chased with a gulp of scotch. He rubbed his neck, massaging the rawness of his throat, worried about his voice. He wanted to run water through the raven’s-head faucet and splash some on his face to cool down, but he still had his makeup on. Nobody would know him in the clubs without it. He stared at the sickly pallor it gave him, the gaunt shadowing of his cheeks, the dead black pupils of his contact lenses. He was in fact a beautiful man, and no amount of makeup could hide it, and this, he knew, was part of the secret of his success. His entire career consisted of taking beauty and corrupting it. Seducing the ear with moments of transcendent music only to subvert it with gothic screams and industrial distortion. That was what the young responded to. Defacing beauty. Subverting good.

  Beautiful Corruption. Possible title for his next CD.

  The Lurid Urge had moved 600,000 copies in the first week of its U.S. release. Huge for the post-mp3 era, but still down almost a full half million units from Lavish Atrocities. People were becoming inured to his antics, both onstage and off. He was no longer the anti-everything Wal-Mart had loved to ban and religious America—including his own father—had sworn to oppose. Funny how his father was in agreement with Wal-Mart, proving
his thesis about how dull everything was. Nonetheless, with the exception of the religious right, it was getting difficult to shock people anymore. His career was hitting a wall and he knew it. Bolivar was not exactly considering a switch to coffeehouse folk—though that would indeed shock the world—but the theatrical autopsies and onstage biting and cutting were no longer fresh. They were anticipated, like encores. He was playing to his audience instead of playing against them. He had to run ahead of them, because if they ever caught up, he’d be trampled.

  But hadn’t he taken his act as far as he could? Where could it possibly go from here?

  He heard the voices again. Like an unrehearsed chorus, voices in pain, pain that echoed his own. He spun around in the bathroom to make certain he was alone. He shook his head hard. The sound was like that when you put seashells to your ears, only, instead of hearing an echo of the ocean, he heard the moaning of souls in limbo.

  When he came out of the bathroom, Mindy and Sherry were kissing, and Cleo lay on the big bed with a drink in hand, smiling at the ceiling. All of them started when he appeared, and turned in anticipation of his advance. He crawled up onto the bed, his gut doing kayak rolls, thinking that this was just what he needed. A vigorous pipe cleaning to clear the system. Blond Mindy came at him first, running her fingers through his silky black hair, but Bolivar chose Cleo, something about her, running his pale hand over the brown flesh of her neck. She removed her top for easier access and slipped her own hands down over the fine leather sheathing his hips.

  She said, “I’ve been a fan of yours ever since—”

  “Shhhh,” he told her, hoping to cut through the usual acolyte’s back-and-forth. The Vikes must have acted on the voices in his head, because they had dulled to a thrumming noise, almost like an electrical current, but with some throbbing mixed in.