The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Eph said, “So you’re saying, the airplane… one of them was on it. This rogue.”

  “Exactly.”

  “In the coffin. In the cargo hold.”

  “A coffin full of soil. They are of the earth, and like to return to that from which they arose. Like worms. Vermis. They burrow to nest. We would call it sleep.”

  “Away from daylight,” said Nora.

  “From sunlight, yes. It is in transit that they are most vulnerable.”

  “But you said this is a war of vampires. But isn’t it vampires against people? All those dead passengers.”

  “This too will be difficult for you to accept. But to them we are not enemies. We are not worthy foes. We don’t even rise to that level in their eyes. To them we are prey. We are food and drink. Animals in a pen. Bottles upon a shelf.”

  Eph felt a chill, but then just as quickly rejected his own shivery response. “And to someone who would say this sounds like so much science fiction?”

  Setrakian pointed to him. “That device in your pocket. Your mobile telephone. You punch in a few numbers, and immediately you are in conversation with another person halfway around the world. That is science fiction, Dr. Goodweather. Science fiction come true.” Here Setrakian smiled. “Do you require proof?”

  Setrakian went to a low bench set against the long wall. There was a thing there covered in a drape of black silk and he reached for it in an odd way, his arm outstretched, pinching the nearest edge of fabric while keeping his body as far away from it as possible, and then drawing the cover off.

  A glass container. A specimen jar, available from any medical supply house.

  Inside, suspended in a dusky fluid, was a well-preserved human heart.

  Eph stooped to regard it from a few feet away. “Adult female, judging by the size. Healthy. Fairly young. A fresh specimen.” He looked back at Setrakian. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village outside Shkodër, in northern Albania, in the spring of 1971.”

  Eph smiled at the strangeness of the old man’s tale, leaning in for a closer look at the jar.

  Something like a tentacle shot out of the heart, a sucker at its tip grabbing the glass where Eph’s eye was.

  Eph straightened fast. He froze, staring at the jar.

  Nora, next to him, said, “Um… what the hell was that?”

  The heart began moving in the serum.

  It was throbbing.

  Beating.

  Eph watched the flattened, mouthlike sucker head scour the glass. He looked at Nora, next to him, staring at the heart. Then he looked at Setrakian, who hadn’t moved, hands resting inside his pockets.

  Setrakian said, “It animates whenever human blood is near.”

  Eph stared in pure disbelief. He edged closer again, this time to the right of the sucker’s pale, lipless receptor. The outgrowth detached from the interior surface of the glass—then suddenly thrust itself toward him again.

  “Jesus!” exclaimed Eph. The beating organ floated in there like some meaty, mutant fish. “It lives on without…” There was no blood supply. He looked at the stumps of its severed veins, aorta, and vena cava.

  Setrakian said, “It is neither alive nor dead. It is animate. Possessed, you might say, but in the literal sense. Look closely and you will see.”

  Eph watched the throbbing, which he found to be irregular, not like a true heartbeat at all. He saw something moving around inside it. Wriggling.

  “A… worm?” said Nora.

  Thin and pale, lip-colored, two or three inches in length. They watched it make its rounds inside the heart, like a lone sentry dutifully patrolling a long-abandoned base.

  “A blood worm,” said Setrakian. “A capillary parasite that reproduces in the infected. I suspect, though have no proof, that it is the conduit of the virus. The actual vector.”

  Eph shook his head in disbelief. “What about this… this sucker?”

  “The virus mimics the host’s form, though it reinvents its vital systems in order to best sustain itself. In other words, it colonizes and adapts the host for its survival. The host being, in this case, a severed organ floating in a jar, the virus has found a way to evolve its own mechanism for receiving nourishment.”

  Nora said, “Nourishment?”

  “The worm lives on blood. Human blood.”

  “Blood?” Eph squinted at the possessed heart. “From whom?”

  Setrakian pulled his left hand out of his pocket. The wrinkled tips of his fingers showed at the end of the glove. The pad of his middle finger was scarred and smooth.

  “A few drops every few days is enough. It will be hungry. I’ve been away.”

  He went to the bench and lifted the lid off the jar—Eph stepping back to watch—and, with the point of a little penknife from his keychain, pricked the tip of his finger over the jar. He did not flinch, the act so routine that it no longer hurt him.

  His blood dripped into the serum.

  The sucker fed on the red drops with lips like that of a hungry fish.

  When he was done, the old man dabbed a bit of liquid bandage on his finger from a small bottle on the bench, returning the lid to the jar.

  Eph watched the feeder turn red. The worm inside the organ moved more fluidly and with increased strength. “And you say you’ve kept this thing going in here for…?”

  “Since the spring of 1971. I don’t take many vacations…” He smiled at his little joke, looking at his pricked finger, rubbing the dried tip. “She was a revenant, one who was infected. Who had been turned. The Ancients, who wish to remain hidden, will kill immediately after feeding, in order to prevent any spread of their virus. One got away somehow, returned home to claim its family and friends and neighbors, burrowing into their small village. This widow’s heart had not been turned four hours before I found her.”

  “Four hours? How did you know?”

  “I saw the mark. The mark of the strigoi.”

  Eph said, “Strigoi?”

  “Old World term for vampire.”

  “And the mark?”

  “The point of penetration. A thin breach across the front of the throat, which I am guessing you have seen by now.”

  Eph and Nora were nodding. Thinking about Jim.

  Setrakian added, “I should say, I am not a man who is in the habit of cutting out human hearts. This was a bit of dirty business I happened upon quite by accident. But it was absolutely necessary.”

  Nora said, “And you’ve kept this thing going ever since then, feeding it like a… a pet?”

  “Yes.” He looked down at the jar, almost fondly. “It serves as a daily reminder. Of what I am up against. What we are now up against.”

  Eph was aghast. “In all this time… why haven’t you shown this to anyone? A medical school. The evening news?”

  “Were it that easy, Doctor, the secret would have become known years ago. There are forces aligned against us. This is an ancient secret, and it reaches deep. Touches many. The truth would never be allowed to reach a mass audience, but would be suppressed, and myself with it. Why I’ve been hiding here—hiding in plain sight—all these years. Waiting.”

  This kind of talk raised the hair on the back of Eph’s neck. The truth was right there, right in front of him: the human heart in a jar, housing a worm that thirsted for the old man’s blood.

  “I’m not very good with secrets that imperil the future of the human race. No one else knows about this?”

  “Oh, someone does. Yes. Someone powerful. The Master—he could not have traveled unaided. A human ally must have arranged for his safeguarding and transportation. You see—vampires cannot cross bodies of flowing water unless aided by a human. A human inviting them in. And now the seal—the truce—has been broken. By an alliance between strigoi and human. That is why this incursion is so shocking. And so fantastically threatening.”

  Nora turned to Setrakian. “How much time do we have?”

  The old man ha
d already run the numbers. “It will take this thing less than one week to finish off all of Manhattan, and less than a month to overtake the country. In two months—the world.”

  “No way,” said Eph. “Not going to happen.”

  “I admire your determination,” said Setrakian. “But you still don’t quite know what it is you are up against.”

  “Okay,” Eph said. “Then tell me—where do we start?”

  Park Place, Tribeca

  VASILIY FET pulled up in his city-marked van outside an apartment building down in Lower Manhattan. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but had an awning and a doorman, and this was Tribeca after all. He would have double-checked the address were it not for the health department van parked illegally out in front, yellow dash light twirling. Ironically, in most buildings and homes in most parts of the city, exterminators were welcomed with open arms, like police arriving at the scene of a crime. Vasiliy didn’t think that would be the case here.

  His own van said BPCS-CNY on the back, standing for Bureau of Pest Control Services, City of New York. The health department inspector, Bill Furber, met him on the stairs inside. Billy had a sloping blond mustache that rode out the face waves caused by his constant jawing of nicotine-replacement gum. “Vaz,” he called him, which was short for Vasya, the familiar diminutive form of his given Russian name. Vaz, or, simply, V, as he was often called, second-generation Russian, his gruff voice all Brooklyn. He was a big man, filling most of the stairway.

  Billy clapped him on the arm, thanked him for coming. “My cousin’s niece here, got bit on the mouth. I know—not my kinda building, but what can I do, they married into real estate money. Just so you know—it’s family. I told them I was bringing in the best rat man in the five boroughs.”

  Vasiliy nodded with the quiet pride characteristic of exterminators. An exterminator succeeds in silence. Success means leaving behind no indication of his success, no trace that a problem ever existed, that a pest had ever been present or a single trap laid. It means that order has been preserved.

  He pulled his wheeled case behind him like a computer repairman’s tool kit. The interior of the loft opened to high ceilings and wide rooms, an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo that cost three million easily in New York real estate dollars. Seated on a short, firm, basketball-orange sofa inside a high-tech room done in glass, teak, and chrome, a young girl clutched a doll and her mother. A large bandage covered the girl’s upper lip and cheek. The mother wore her hair buzzed short; eyeglasses with narrow, rectangular frames; and a nubby, green knee-length wool skirt. She looked to Vasiliy like a visitor from a very hip, androgynous future. The girl was young, maybe five or six, and still frightened. Vasiliy would have attempted a smile, but his was the sort of face that rarely put children at ease. He had a jaw like the flat back of an ax blade and widely spaced eyes.

  A panel television hung on the wall like a wide, glass-framed painting. On it, the mayor was speaking into a bouquet of microphones. He was trying to answer questions about the missing dead from the airplane, the bodies that had disappeared from the city’s morgues. The NYPD was on high alert, and actively stopping all refrigerated trucks at bridges and tunnels. A TIPS line had been set up. The victims’ families were outraged, and funerals had been put on hold.

  Bill led Vasiliy to the girl’s bedroom. A canopy bed, a gem-encrusted Bratz television and matching laptop, and an animatronic butterscotch pony in the corner. Vasiliy’s eyes went immediately to a food wrapper near the bed. Toasted crackers with peanut butter inside. He liked those himself.

  “She was in here taking a nap,” said Billy. “Woke up feeling something gnawing on her lip. The thing was up on her pillow, Vaz. A rat in her bed. Kid won’t sleep for a month. You ever heard of this?”

  Vasiliy shook his head. There were rats in and around every building in Manhattan—no matter what landlords say or tenants think—but they didn’t like to make their presence known, especially in the middle of the day. Rat attacks generally involve children, most often around the mouth, because that’s where the food smell is. Norway rats—Rattus norvegicus, city rats—have a highly defined sense of smell and taste. Their front incisors are long and sharp, stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron. Gnawing rats are responsible for one-quarter of all electric-cable breaks in the city, and the likely culprit behind the same percentage of fires of unknown origin. Their teeth are comparable in pure hardness to steel, and the alligator-like structure of their jaw allows for thousands of pounds of biting pressure. They can chew through cement and even stone.

  Vasiliy said, “Did she see the rat?”

  “She didn’t know what it was. She screamed and flailed and it ran off. The emergency room told them it was a rat.”

  Vasiliy went to the window that was open a few inches to let in a breeze. He pushed it open farther and looked down three stories to a narrow cobblestone alley. The fire escape was ten or twelve feet from the window, but the centuries-old brick facing was uneven and craggy. People think of rats as squat and waddling, when in fact they move with squirrel-like agility. Especially when motivated by food or by fear.

  Vasiliy pulled the girl’s bed away from the wall and shed its bedding. He moved a dollhouse, a bureau, and a bookcase in order to look behind them, but he did not expect to find the rat still in the bedroom. He was merely eliminating the obvious.

  He stepped out into the hallway, pulling his wheeled cart along the smooth, varnished wood. Rats have poor eyesight and move largely by feel. They get about quickly by repetition, wearing paths along low walls, rarely traveling more than sixty feet from their nest. They don’t trust unfamiliar settings. This rat would have found the door and turned the corner, hugging the right-hand wall, his coarse fur gliding against the floorboard. The next open door led into a bathroom, the young daughter’s own, decorated with a strawberry-shaped bath mat, a pale pink shower curtain, and a basket of bath bubbles and toys. Vasiliy scanned the room for hiding places, then sniffed the air. He nodded to Billy, who then closed the door on him.

  Billy lingered a minute, listening, then decided to head back out to reassure the mother. He was almost there when he heard, from the hallway bathroom, a terrific BANG!—the sound of bottles falling into the bathtub—and a loud grunt and Vasiliy’s voice, grown fierce, spurting Russian invective.

  The mother and daughter looked stricken. Billy held out a hand to them in a gesture of patience—having accidentally swallowed his gum—then rushed back down the hall.

  Vasiliy opened the bathroom door. He was wearing Kevlar-sleeved trapping gloves and holding a large sack. Something in the sack was writhing and pawing. And that something was big.

  Vasiliy nodded once and handed the sack to Billy.

  Billy couldn’t do anything other than take it, otherwise the sack would fall and the rat would escape. He hoped the fabric was as sturdy as it seemed, the big rat twisting and fighting inside. Billy held the sack out as far from his body as his arm would reach while still allowing him to hold the flailing rat aloft. Vasiliy was, meanwhile, calmly—but too slowly—opening his cart. He removed a sealed package, a sponge prepared with halothane. Vasiliy took back the sack, and Billy was only too happy to relinquish it. He opened the top just long enough to drop the anesthetic inside, then closed it again. The rat struggled just as violently at first. Then it began to slow down. Vasiliy shook the sack to speed up the process.

  He waited a few more moments after the fighting stopped, then opened the sack and reached inside, pulling the rat out tail first. It was sedated but not unconscious, its pink-digited front paws still digging their sharp nails into the air, its jaw snapping, its shiny black eyes open. This was a good-size one, maybe eight inches of body, the tail another eight. Its tough fur was dark gray on top, dirty white below. Nobody’s escaped pet, this was a wild city rat.

  Billy had moved many steps back. He had seen plenty of rats in his day, yet he never got used to them. Vasiliy seemed to be okay with it.

  “
She’s pregnant,” he said. Rats gestate for just twenty-one days and can birth a litter of up to twenty pups. One healthy female can breed two hundred and fifty pups each year—with half of that litter more females ready to mate. “Want me to bleed her for the lab?”

  Billy shook his head, showing almost as much disgust as though Vasiliy had asked if he wanted to eat it. “The girl had her shots at the hospital. Look at the size, Vaz. In the good name of Christ. I mean, this isn’t”—Billy lowered his voice—“this isn’t some tenement in Bushwick, you catch my drift?”

  Vasiliy did catch his drift. Intimately. Vasiliy’s parents had first settled in Bushwick after they came over. Bushwick had seen waves of émigrés since the mid-1800s: the Germans, the English, the Irish, the Russians, the Polish, the Italians, the African Americans, the Puerto Ricans. Now it was Dominicans, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Ecuadorians, Indians, Koreans, Southeast Asians. Vasiliy spent a lot of time in the poorest neighborhoods of New York. He knew of families who used couch cushions, books, and furniture to wall off parts of their apartments every night, trying to keep out rats.

  But this attack, indeed, was different. Daylight. The boldness. Usually it is only the weakest rats, forced out of the colony, who surface in search of food. This was a strong, healthy female. Highly unusual. Rats coexist in a fragile balance with man, exploiting the vulnerabilities of civilization, living off the larger breed’s waste and refuse, lurking just out of sight, behind the walls or beneath the floorboards. The appearance of a rat symbolizes human anxiety and fear. Any incursion beyond the usual nocturnal scavenging indicates an alteration in the environment. Like man, rats are not accustomed to taking unnecessary risks: they have to be forced from the underground.

  “Want me to comb it for fleas?”

  “Christ, no. Just bag it and get rid of it. Whatever you do, don’t show it to the girl. She’s traumatized enough as it is.”

  Vasiliy pulled a large plastic bag from his kit and sealed the rat inside it with another sponge of halothane, this one a fatal dose. He stuffed the bag inside the sack to hide the evidence, then continued about his business, starting in the kitchen. He pulled out the heavy, eight-burner stove and the dishwasher. He checked the pipe holes under the sink. He saw no droppings, no burrows, but he seeded a little bait behind the cabinets anyway, because he was there. He did so without telling the occupants. People get nervous about poison, especially parents, but the truth is that rat poison is all over every building and street in Manhattan. Anything you see that resembles berry blue Pop Rocks or green kibble, you know rats have been spotted nearby.