The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  The raccoons. They were back. Hermann, he’d first trapped one in the attic. He’d taken the fear-crazed intruder out into the backyard and made an example of it in front of her boys…

  No more. She had nothing to be afraid of now. The boys wouldn’t be home for at least another hour, and she decided to go up there now. She had planned to start going through Hermann’s things anyway. Trash day was Tuesday, and she wanted to have it all gone by then.

  She needed a weapon, and the first one that came to mind was Hermann’s own machete. He had brought it home some years ago, and kept it wrapped in oilcloth in the locked plastic toolshed against the side of the house. When she asked him why he would ever want such a thing—a jungle tool here in Sheepshead Bay, of all places—he’d just sneered at her, “You never know.”

  These constant little insinuated threats were part of his daily menacing. She pulled the key from the hook behind the pantry door, and went outside and sprang the lock. She found the oilcloth buried under yard tools and an old, splintered croquet set they had received as a wedding gift (which she would use for kindling now). She took the package into the kitchen and set it on the table, pausing before she unwrapped it.

  She had always ascribed evil to this object. Had always imagined it would be somehow significant in the fate of this household, possibly as an instrument of Glory’s own demise at Hermann’s hands. Accordingly, she unwrapped it with great care, as though unswaddling a sleeping baby demon. Hermann had never liked her touching his special things.

  The blade was long, wide, and flat. The grip was formed of wrapped leather straps worn to a soft brown by the hand of the former owner. She lifted it, turning it over, feeling the weight of this strange object in her hand. She caught sight of her reflection in the microwave door, and it scared her. A woman standing with a machete in her kitchen.

  He had made her crazy.

  She walked upstairs with it in her hand. She stopped beneath the ceiling door and reached for the bottom knot of the dangling white rope handle. It opened down to a forty-five-degree angle on groaning springs. That noise should have scared any lurking critters. She listened for scattering sounds, but there were none.

  She reached for the high wall switch, but no light came on above. She flicked it a couple of times, but still nothing. She hadn’t been up here since after Christmas, and the bulb could have burned out at any time between now and then. There was a small skylight cut into the rafters. That would provide enough light.

  She unfolded the hinged stairs and started up. Three steps brought her eye line above the attic floor. It was unfinished, with foil-backed pink fiberglass insulating blankets unrolled between the exposed joists. Plywood was laid out north—south and east—west, in a cross pattern, creating a walking path to each of the four quadrants of storage space.

  The space was darker than she had expected, and then she saw that two of her old clothes racks had been moved, effectively blocking the low skylight. Clothes from her life before Hermann, zipped up in plastic and left in storage for thirteen years. She followed the plywood and moved the racks to allow more light in, with the idea of maybe sorting through the clothes and revisiting her old self. But then she saw, beyond the plywood walkway, a bare lane of floor between two long joists where the insulation had, for some reason, been pulled up.

  Then she noticed another bare lane.

  And another.

  She froze there. She sensed something at her back suddenly. She was afraid to turn—but then she remembered the machete in her hand.

  Behind her, against the vertical edge of the attic, farthest from the skylight, the missing strips of insulation had been piled up into a lumpy mound. Some of the fiberglass had been shredded, as though by an animal feathering an enormous nest.

  Not a raccoon. Something bigger. Much bigger.

  The mound was completely still, arranged as though to hide something. Had Hermann been tending to some strange project without her knowing? What dark secret had he stored under here?

  With the machete raised in her right hand, she pulled on the end of a strip, drawing it away from the mound in a long trail that revealed…

  …nothing.

  She dragged away a second strip then—stopping when it revealed a man’s hairy arm.

  Glory knew that arm. She also knew the hand it was connected to. Knew them both intimately.

  She could not believe what she was seeing.

  With the machete raised in front of her, she pulled away another length of insulation.

  His shirt. One of the short-sleeved button-ups he favored, even in winter. Hermann was a vain man, proud of his hairy arms. His wristwatch and wedding ring were gone.

  Glory stood riveted by the sight, melting with dread. Still, she had to see. She reached for another strip which, when drawn away, made most of the rest of the insulation slide off to the floor.

  Her dead husband, Hermann, lay asleep in her attic. On a bed of shredded pink fiberglass, fully dressed except for his feet, which were filthy, as though from walking.

  She could not process this shock. She could not deal with it. The husband she had thought she was rid of. The tyrant. The batterer. The rapist.

  She stood over his sleeping body, the machete a sword of Damocles, ready to fall if he offered the slightest move.

  Then, by degrees, she lowered her arm, the machete blade coming to rest at her side. He was a ghost now, she realized. A man returned from the dead, a presence, meaning to haunt her forever. She would never be free of him.

  As she was thinking this, Hermann opened his eyes.

  The lids rose on his eyeballs, staring straight up.

  Glory froze. She wanted to run and she wanted to scream and she could do neither.

  Hermann’s head rotated until his staring eyes fixed on her. That same taunting look, as always. That sneer. The look that always preceded the bad things.

  And then something clicked inside her head.

  At that same moment, four houses down the street, three-year-old Lucy Needham stood in her driveway feeding a doll named Baby Dear from a snack-size bag of Cheez-Its. Lucy stopped munching the loud crackers, and instead listened to the muffled screams and hard, chopping thwacks coming from… somewhere nearby. She looked up at her own house, then north, her nose scrunched up toward her eyes in innocent confusion. She stood very still, an orange tongue of half-chewed, cheese-baked crackers sticking out of her open mouth, listening to some of the strangest noises she had ever heard. She was going to tell Daddy when he came back outside with the telephone, but by then her bag of Cheez-Its had spilled and she was squatting and eating them off the driveway, and after getting yelled at she forgot the whole thing.

  Glory stood there gasping in her attic, retching, the machete gripped in both hands. Hermann lay in pieces among the sticky pink insulation, the attic wall splattered in dripping white.

  White?

  Glory trembled, soul sick. She surveyed the damage she had done. Twice, the blade had become lodged in the wood joist, and in her mind it was Hermann trying to wrench the machete away from her, and she’d had to rock it back and forth violently to get it free again and keep swinging at his flesh.

  She backed away one step. She was experiencing an out-of-body sensation. It was shocking what she had done.

  Hermann’s sneering head had rolled off between two joists, facedown now, a fluffy pinch of pink fiberglass stuck to his cheek like cotton candy. His torso was gouged and gored, his thighs sliced to the femur, his groin bubbling up white.

  White?

  She felt something poking her slipper, tap-tap-tap. She saw blood there—red blood—and realized she had nicked herself somehow, her left arm, though she felt no pain. She raised it for inspection, dripping fat, red plops onto the plywood.

  White?

  She saw something dark and small, slithering. She was bleary-eyed and blinking, still in the grip of a homicidal rage. She couldn’t trust her sight.

  She felt an itch on her ankle, underneat
h her bloody slipper. The itch crawled up her leg and she swatted at her thigh with the flat side of the sticky white blade.

  Then—another tickle on the front of her other leg. And—separately—her waist. She realized she was having some sort of hysterical reaction, as if bugs were attacking her. She stumbled back another step, and almost tumbled off the plywood walkway.

  There was then a most unnerving wriggling sensation around her crotch—and then a sudden, twisting discomfort in her rectum. An intrusive slithering that made her jump and clench her buttocks, as though she were about to soil herself. Her sphincter dilated and she stood that way for a long moment, paralyzed, until the feeling started to fade. She allowed herself to unclench, to relax. She needed to get to a bathroom. Another wriggle distracted her, inside her blouse sleeve now. And she felt a burning itch over the cut in her arm.

  Then a wrenching pain, from deep within her bowels, doubled her over fast. The machete fell to the plywood and a scream that was a shriek of anguish and violation came out of Glory’s mouth. She felt something rippling up her arm—beneath her flesh now, her skin crawling—and while her mouth was open and still screaming, another thin capillary worm slithered from behind her neck and across her jaw to her lip, darting inside the wall of her cheek, wriggling down the back of her throat.

  Freeburg, New York

  NIGHT WAS FAST approaching as Eph drove east, over the Cross Island Parkway, into Nassau County.

  Eph said, “So you’re telling me that the passengers from the city morgues, the ones the entire city is looking for—they all just went home?”

  The old professor sat in the backseat with his hat on his lap. “Blood wants blood,” he said. “Once turned, the revenants first seek out family and friends still uninfected. They return, by night, to those with whom they share an emotional attachment. Their ‘Dear Ones.’ Like a homing instinct, I suppose. The same animal impulse that guides lost dogs hundreds of miles back to their owners. As their higher brain function falls away, their animal nature takes over. These are creatures driven by urges. To feed. To hide. To nest.”

  “Returning to the people who are mourning them,” said Nora, sitting next to Eph in the front passenger seat. “To attack and infect?”

  “To feed. It is the nature of the undead to torment the living.”

  Eph exited the highway in silence. This vampire business was the mental equivalent of eating bad food: his mind refused to digest it. He chewed and chewed but could not get it down.

  When Setrakian had asked him to pick a passenger from the list of Flight 753 victims, the first one who came to mind was the young girl Emma Gilbarton. The one he had found still holding hands with her mother in the airplane. It seemed a good test for Setrakian’s hypothesis. How could an eleven-year-old dead girl journey at night from a Queens morgue all the way out to her family home in Freeburg?

  But now, as he pulled up outside the Gilbartons’ address—a stately looking Georgian on a broad side street of widely spaced properties—Eph realized that, were they wrong, he was about to wake up a man grieving for the end of his family, the loss of his wife and only child.

  This was something Eph knew a little bit about.

  Setrakian stepped out of the Explorer, fixing his hat on his head, carrying the long walking stick that he did not need for support. The street was quiet at that evening hour, lights glowing inside some of the other houses, but no people out and about, no cars driving past. The windows of the Gilbartons’ house were all dark. Setrakian handed them each a battery-powered light with dark bulbs that looked like their Luma lamps, only heavier.

  They went to the door and Setrakian rang the doorbell by using the head of the walking stick. He tried the doorknob when no one answered, using the gloved part of his hand only, keeping his bare fingertips off the knob. Not leaving any fingerprints.

  Eph realized that the old man had done this sort of thing before.

  The front door was firmly locked. “Come,” said Setrakian.

  They went back down the stairs, and started around the house. The backyard was a wide clearing set on the edge of an old wood. The early moon provided decent light, enough to cast faint shadows of their bodies over the grass.

  Setrakian stopped and pointed with his walking stick.

  A bulkhead rose out at an angle from the cellar, its doors wide open to the night.

  The old man continued to the bulkhead, Eph and Nora following. Stone steps led down into a dark cellar. Setrakian scanned the high trees buffering the backyard.

  Eph said, “We can’t just go inside.”

  “This is exceedingly unwise after sundown,” Setrakian said. “But we do not have the luxury of waiting.”

  Eph said, “No, I mean—this is trespassing. We should call the police first.”

  Setrakian took Eph’s lamp from him with a scolding look. “What we have to do here… they would not understand.”

  He switched on the lamp, two purple bulbs emitting black light. It was similar to the medical-grade wands Eph used, but brighter and hotter, and fitted with bigger batteries.

  “Black light?” said Eph.

  “Black light is merely long-wave ultraviolet, or UVA. Revealing, but harmless. UVB is medium wave, can cause sunburn or skin cancer. This”—he took care to aim the beam away from them, as well as himself—“is short-wave UVC. Germicidal, used for sterilization. Excites and smashes DNA bonds. Direct exposure is very harmful to human skin. But to a vampire—this is weapons grade.”

  The old man started down the steps with the lamp, his walking stick in his other hand. The ultraviolet spectrum provides little real illumination, the UVC light adding to the gloom of the situation rather than alleviating it. Over the stone walls on the sides of the stairs, as they passed from the chill of the night into the cool of a cement-foundation cellar, moss glowed a spectral white.

  Inside, Eph made out the dark outline of stairs going up to the first floor. A laundry area and an old-fashioned pinball machine.

  And a body lying on the floor.

  A man laid out in plaid pajamas. Eph started toward him with the impulse of a trained physician—then stopped himself. Nora groped the wall opposite the inside door, flipping the switch there, but no light came on.

  Setrakian moved toward the man, thrusting the lamp close to his neck. The weird indigo glow revealed a small, perfectly straight fissure in glowing blue, just left of the center of his throat.

  “He is turned,” said Setrakian.

  The old man pushed the Luma lamp back into Eph’s hands. Nora turned on hers and shone it over the man’s face, revealing a mad subcutaneous being, a scowling, deathlike mask shifting and writhing, looking indefinably, yet undoubtedly, evil.

  Setrakian went and found, leaning against a corner workbench, a new ax with a glossy wooden handle and a shiny red-and-silver steel blade. He returned with it in his gnarled hands.

  “Wait,” said Eph.

  Setrakian said, “Please stand back, Doctor.”

  “He’s just lying here,” said Eph.

  “He will soon arise.” The old man gestured to the stone steps leading up to the open bulkhead doors, his eyes never leaving the man on the floor. “The girl is out there now. Feeding on others.” Setrakian readied the ax. “I don’t ask that you condone this, Doctor. All I ask right now is that you step aside.”

  Eph saw the determination in Setrakian’s face and knew the old man would swing whether or not he was in his way. Eph stepped back. The blade was heavy for Setrakian’s size and age, the old man bringing both arms up over his head, the flat of the blade almost at the back of his waist.

  Then his arms relaxed. His elbows lowered.

  His head turned toward the open bulkhead doors, listening.

  Eph heard it then too. The crunching of dry grass being flattened.

  He imagined it was an animal, at first. But no. The crunching had the simple cadence of a biped.

  Footsteps. Human—or once-human. Approaching.

  Setrakian
lowered the ax. “Stand by the door. Silently. Close it behind her once she enters.” He took the lamp back from Eph, pressing the ax into his hands in trade. “She must not escape.”

  He withdrew to where his walking stick stood against the wall, on the opposite side of the door—then switched off the hot lamp, disappearing into total darkness.

  Eph stood beside the open cellar door, his back to the wall, flat up against it. Nora was next to him, both of them shivering in the basement of a stranger’s house. The footsteps were closer, light and soft on the ground.

  They stopped at the top of the steps. A faint shadow fell over the moonlight on the cellar floor: a head and shoulders.

  The footsteps started coming down.

  At the bottom, just before the door, they stopped. Eph—not three yards away, the ax hugged to his chest—was transfixed by the girl’s profile. Small and short, blond hair falling over the shoulders of a modest, shin-length nightgown. Barefoot, arms hanging straight and loose, standing with a peculiar stillness. Her chest rose and fell, but no steam came out of her mouth into the moonlight.

  Later, he would learn much more. That her senses of hearing and smell had become greatly enhanced. That she could hear blood pulsing through his and Nora’s and the professor’s bodies, and could smell the carbon dioxide emitted by their breath. He would learn that sight was the least acute of her senses. She was now at the stage where she was losing her color vision, and yet her thermal imaging—the ability to “read” heat signatures as monochromatic halos—had not yet fully matured.

  She took a few steps forward, moving out of the rectangle of faint moonlight and into the full darkness of the cellar. A ghost had entered the room. Eph should have shut the door, but the girl’s very presence here froze him.

  She turned toward where Setrakian stood, fixing on his position. The old man switched on his lamp. The girl looked at it with no expression. Then he started toward her with it. She felt its heat, and turned toward the cellar door to escape.