The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  The wood held. The old door she hated for swelling and sticking to the frame in the summer heat was solid enough to withstand the blows, as was the dead bolt and even the smooth iron doorknob. The presence behind the door eventually went silent. Maybe even went away altogether.

  Neeva looked at the puddle of Christ’s tears on the floor. When the power of Jesus fails you, then you know you truly are shit out of luck.

  Wait for daylight. That was all she could do.

  “Neeva?”

  Keene, the Luss boy, stood behind her in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Neeva moved faster than she imagined she ever could, clamping a hand over the young boy’s mouth and sweeping him away around the corner. Neeva stood there with her back against the wall, the boy wrapped in her arms.

  Had the thing at the door heard its son’s voice?

  Neeva tried to listen. The boy squirmed against her, trying to speak.

  “Hush, child.”

  Then she heard it. The squeak again. She grasped the boy even more tightly as she leaned to her left, risking a look around the corner.

  The mail slot was propped open by a dirty finger. Neeva whipped back around the corner again, but not before she glimpsed a pair of glowing red eyes looking inside.

  Gabriel Bolivar’s manager, Rudy Wain, cabbed over to his town house from Hudson Street after a late dinner meeting at Mr. Chow’s with the BMG people. He hadn’t been able to get Gabe on the phone, but there were whispers about his health now, following the Flight 753 thing and a paparazzi picture of him in a wheelchair and Rudy had to see for himself. When he showed up at the door on Vestry Street, there were no paparazzi in sight, only a few dopey-looking Goth fans sitting around on the sidewalk smoking.

  They stood up rather expectantly when Rudy walked up the front-stoop stairs. “What’s up?” asked Rudy.

  “We heard he’s been letting people in.”

  Rudy looked straight up, but there were no lights on anywhere in the twin town houses, not even in the penthouse. “Looks like the party’s over.”

  “It’s no party,” said one chubby kid with colored elastic bands hanging from a pin through his cheek. “He let the paparazzi in too.”

  Rudy shrugged and punched in his key code, entered, and closed the door behind him. At least Gabe was feeling better. Rudy entered, past the black marble panthers and into the dark foyer. The construction lights were all dark, and the light switches still weren’t connected to anything. Rudy thought for a moment, then brought out his BlackBerry, changing the display to ALWAYS ON. He shone the blue light around, noticing, at the foot of the winged angel by the stairs, a heap of high-end digital SLRs and video cameras, weapons of the paparazzi. All piled there like shoes outside a swimming pool.

  “Hello?”

  His voice echoed dully through the unfinished first few floors. Rudy started up the curling marble stairs, following his BlackBerry’s pool of electronic blue light. He needed to motivate Gabe for his Roseland show next week, and there were scattered U.S. dates around Halloween to prepare for.

  He reached the top floor, Bolivar’s bedroom suite, and all the lights were off.

  “Hey, Gabe? It’s me, man. Don’t let me walk in on anything.”

  Too quiet. He pushed into the master bedroom, scanning it with his phone light, finding the bedsheets tossed but no hungover Gabe. Probably out night crawling as usual. He wasn’t here.

  Rudy popped into the master bathroom to take a leak. He saw an open prescription bottle of Vicodin on the counter, and a crystal cocktail glass that smelled of booze. Rudy deliberated a moment, then dealt himself two Vikes, rinsing out the glass in the sink and washing the pills down with tap water.

  As he was replacing the glass on the counter, he caught sight of movement somewhere behind him. He turned fast, and there was Gabe, coming out of the darkness and into the bathroom. The mirrored walls on both sides made it seem as though there were hundreds of him.

  “Gabe, Jesus, you scared me,” said Rudy. His genial smile faded as Gabe stood there staring at him. The blue phone light was indirect and faint, but Gabe’s skin looked dark, his eyes tinged red. He wore a thin black robe, to his knees, with no shirt underneath. His arms hung straight, and he offered his manager no indication of greeting. “What’s wrong, man?” His hands and chest were dirty. “You spend the night in a coal bin?”

  Gabe just stood there, multiplied in the mirrors out to infinity.

  “You really stink, man,” said Rudy, holding his hand to his nose. “What the hell you been into?” Rudy felt a strange heat coming off Gabe. He held his phone closer to Gabe’s face. His eyes didn’t do anything in the light. “Dude, you left your makeup on way too long.”

  The Vikes were starting to kick in. The room, with its facing mirrors, expanded like an unpacked accordion. Rudy moved the phone light, and the entire bathroom flickered.

  “Look, man,” said Rudy, unnerved by Gabe’s lack of reaction, “if you’re tripping, I can come back.”

  He tried to glide out on Gabe’s left, but Gabe didn’t stand aside. He tried again, but Gabe would not give way. Rudy stood back, holding his phone light out on his longtime client. “Gabe, man, what the—?”

  Bolivar opened his robe then, spreading his arms wide, like wings, before allowing the garment to fall to the floor.

  Rudy gasped. Gabe’s body was gray and gaunt throughout, but the sight that made him dizzy was Gabe’s groin.

  It was hairless and doll-smooth, lacking any genitalia.

  Gabe’s hand covered Rudy’s mouth, hard. Rudy started to struggle, but much too late. Rudy saw Gabe grinning—and then that grin fell away, something like a whip writhing inside his mouth. By the trembling blue light of his phone—as he frantically and blindly felt for the numerals 9, 1, and 1—he saw the stinger emerge. Vaguely defined appendages inflated and deflated along its sides, like twin spongy sacs of flesh, flanked by gill-like vents that flared open and closed.

  Rudy saw all of this in the instant before it shot into his neck. His phone fell to the bathroom floor beneath his kicking feet, the SEND button never pressed.

  Nine-year-old Jeanie Millsome wasn’t tired at all on her way home with her mother. Seeing The Little Mermaid on Broadway was so awesome, she believed she was the most awake she had ever been in her life. Now she truly knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. No more ballet school instructor (after Cindy Veeley broke two toes on a leap). No more Olympic gymnast (pommel horse too scary). She was going to be (drumroll, please…) a Broadway Actress! And she was going to dye her hair coral red and star in The Little Mermaid in the lead role of Ariel, and at the end take the biggest and most graceful curtain curtsy of all time, and after the thunderous applause she was going to greet her young theatergoing fans after the show and sign all their programs and smile for camera-phone pictures with them—and then, one very special night, she was going to select the most polite and sincere nine-year-old girl in the audience and invite her to be her understudy and Best Friend Forever. Her mother was going to be her hairstylist, and her dad, who stayed home with Justin, would be her manager, just like Hannah Montana’s dad. And Justin… well, Justin could just stay home and be himself.

  And so she sat, chin in hand, turned around in the seat on the subway running south underneath the city. She saw herself reflected in the window, saw the brightness of the car behind her, but the lights flickered sometimes, and in one of those dark blinks she found herself looking out into an open space where one tunnel fed into another. Then she saw something. No more than a subliminal flash of an image, like a single disturbing frame spliced into an otherwise monotonous strip of film. So fast that her nine-year-old conscious mind didn’t have time to process it, this image she did not understand. She couldn’t even say why she burst into tears, which woke up her nodding mother, so pretty in her theater coat and dress next to her, who comforted her and tried to draw out what had prompted the sobbing. Jeanie could only point to the window. She rode the rest of the way home cuddled beneath he
r mother’s arm.

  But the Master had seen her. The Master saw everything. Even—especially—while feeding. His night vision was extraordinary and nearly telescopic, in varying shades of gray, and registered heat sources in a glowing spectral white.

  Finished, though not satiated—never satiated—he let his prey slide limply down his body, his great hands releasing the turned human to the gravel floor. The tunnels around him whispered with winds that fluttered his dark cloak, trains screaming in the distance, iron clashing against steel, like the scream of a world suddenly aware of his coming.

  EXPOSURE

  Canary Headquarters, Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street

  On the third morning following the landing of Flight 753, Eph took Setrakian to the office headquarters of the CDC Canary project on the western edge of Chelsea, one block east of the Hudson. Before Eph started Canary, the three-room office had been the local site for the CDC’s World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, investigating links between the 9/11 recovery effort and persistent respiratory ailments.

  Eph’s heart lifted as they pulled up at Eleventh Avenue. Two police cars and a pair of unmarked sedans with government license plates were parked outside the entrance. Director Barnes had come through finally. They were going to get the help they needed. There was no way Eph, Nora, and Setrakian could fight this scourge on their own.

  The third-floor office door was open when they got there, and Barnes was conferring with a plainclothes man who identified himself as an FBI special agent. “Everett,” said Eph, relieved to find him personally involved. “Your timing is perfect. Just the man I wanted to see.” He moved to a small refrigerator near the door. Test tubes clinked as he reached for a quart of whole milk, uncapping it and drinking it down fast. He needed the calcium the same way he had once needed booze. We trade off our dependencies, he realized. For instance, just last week Eph had been fully dependent upon the laws of science and nature. Now his fix was silver swords and ultraviolet light.

  He brought the half-empty bottle away from his lips with the realization that he had just slaked his thirst with the product of another mammal.

  “Who is this?” asked Director Barnes.

  “This,” said Eph, swiping the milk mustache from his upper lip, “is Professor Abraham Setrakian.” Setrakian was holding his hat, his alabaster hair bright under the low ceiling lights. “So much has happened, Everett,” said Eph, swallowing more milk, putting out the fire in his belly. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Barnes said, “Why don’t we start with the bodies missing from the city morgues.”

  Eph lowered the bottle. One of the cops had edged closer to the door behind him. A second FBI man was sitting at Eph’s laptop, pecking away. “Hey, excuse me,” said Eph.

  Barnes said, “Ephraim, what do you know about the missing corpses?”

  Eph was a moment trying to read the CDC director’s face. He glanced back at Setrakian, but the old man offered him nothing, standing very still with his hat in his gnarled hands.

  Eph turned back to his boss. “They have gone home.”

  “Home?” said Barnes, turning his head as though trying to hear him better. “To heaven?”

  “To their families, Everett.”

  Barnes looked at the FBI agent who kept looking at Eph.

  “They are dead,” said Barnes.

  “They aren’t dead. At least, not in the way we understand it.”

  “There is only one way to be dead, Ephraim.”

  Eph shook his head. “Not anymore.”

  “Ephraim.” Barnes took one sympathetic step forward. “I know you have been under a keen amount of stress recently. I know you have had family troubles…”

  Eph said, “Hold on. I don’t think I understand what the hell this is.”

  The FBI agent said, “This is about your patient, Doctor. One of the pilots of Regis Air Flight 753, Captain Doyle Redfern. We have a few questions about his care.”

  Eph hid a chill. “Get a court order and I’ll answer your questions.”

  “Maybe you’d like to explain this.”

  He opened a portable video player on the edge of the desk and pressed play. It showed a security-camera view of a hospital room. Redfern was seen from behind, staggering, his johnny open in back. He looked wounded and confused rather than predatory and enraged. The camera angle did not show the stinger swirling out of his mouth.

  It did however show Eph facing him with the whirling trephine, jabbing at Redfern’s throat with the circular blade.

  There was the flicker of a jump cut, and now Nora was in the background, covering her mouth as Eph stood by the doorway with his chest heaving, Redfern in a heap on the floor.

  Then another sequence began. A different camera farther along the same basement hallway, set at a higher angle. It showed two people, a man and a woman, forcing their way into the locked morgue room where Redfern’s body was being held. Then it showed them leaving with a heavy body bag.

  The two people looked very much like Eph and Nora.

  Playback stopped. Eph looked at Nora—who was shocked—and then at the FBI agent and Barnes. “That was… that attack was edited to look bad. There was a cut there. Redfern had—”

  “Where are Captain Redfern’s remains?”

  Eph couldn’t think. He couldn’t get past the lie he had just seen. “That wasn’t us. The camera was too high to—”

  “So are you saying that was not you and Dr. Martinez?”

  Eph looked at Nora, who was shaking her head, both of them too mystified to mount any immediate coherent defense.

  Barnes said, “Let me ask you one more time, Ephraim. Where are the missing bodies from the morgues?”

  Eph looked back to Setrakian, standing near the door. Then at Barnes. He couldn’t come up with anything to say.

  “Ephraim, I am shutting Canary down. As of this moment.”

  “What?” said Eph, coming around. “Wait, Everett—”

  Eph moved fast, toward Barnes. The other cops started toward him as though he was dangerous, their reaction stopping Eph, alarming him even more.

  “Dr. Goodweather, you have to come with us,” said the FBI agent. “All of you… hey!”

  Eph turned. Setrakian was gone.

  The agent sent two cops out to get him.

  Eph looked back toward Barnes. “Everett. You know me. You know who I am. Listen to what I am about to tell you. There is a plague spreading throughout this city—a scourge unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

  The FBI agent said, “Dr. Goodweather, we want to know what you injected into Jim Kent.”

  “What I… what?”

  Barnes said, “Ephraim, I have made a deal with them. They will spare Nora if you agree to cooperate. Spare her the scandal of arrest and preserve her professional reputation. I know that you two… are close.”

  “And how exactly do you know that?” Eph looked around at his persecutors, moving past bewilderment and into anger. “This is bullshit, Everett.”

  “You are on video attacking and murdering a patient, Ephraim. You have been reporting fantastic test results, unexplained by any rational measurement, unsubstantiated and most likely doctor-manipulated. Would I be here if I had a choice? If you had a choice?”

  Eph turned to Nora. She would be spared. She could perhaps fight on.

  Barnes was right. For the moment at least, in a room full of lawmen, he had no choice.

  “Don’t let this slow you down,” Eph told Nora. “You may be the only one left who knows what’s really happening.”

  Nora shook her head. She turned to Barnes. “Sir, there is a conspiracy here, whether you are willingly a part of it or not—”

  “Please, Dr. Martinez,” said Barnes. “Don’t embarrass yourself any further.”

  The other agent packed up Eph’s and Nora’s laptops. They started walking Eph down the stairs.

  At the second-floor hallway, they met the two cops who had gone
after Setrakian. They were standing side by side, almost back to back. Handcuffed together.

  Setrakian appeared behind the group with his sword drawn. He held its point at the lead FBI agent’s neck. There was a smaller dagger in his other hand, also fashioned of silver. He held that one near Director Barnes’s throat.

  The old professor said, “You gentlemen are pawns in a scheme well beyond your comprehension. Doctor, take this dagger.”

  Eph took the weapon’s handle, holding the point at his boss’s throat.

  Barnes said, breathlessly, “Good Christ, Ephraim. Have you lost your mind?”

  “Everett, this is bigger than you can know. This goes beyond the CDC—beyond regular law enforcement even. There is a catastrophic disease outbreak in this city, the likes of which we have never seen. And that’s just the half of it.”

  Nora came up beside him, reclaiming hers and Ephraim’s laptops from the other FBI agent. She said, “I got everything else we need from the office. Looks like we won’t be coming back.”

  Barnes said, “For God’s sake, Ephraim, come to your senses.”

  “This is the job you hired me to do, Everett. To sound the alarm when a public health crisis warrants. We are on the verge of a worldwide pandemic. An extinction event. And somebody somewhere is pulling out all the stops to make damn sure it succeeds.”

  Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

  ELDRITCH PALMER switched on a bank of monitors, showing six television news channels. The one in the lower-left-hand box interested him most. He angled his chair up a few degrees and isolated the channel, raising its volume.

  The reporter was posted outside the 17th Precinct headquarters on East Fifty-first Street, getting a “No comment” from a police official concerning a rash of missing persons reports being filed throughout the New York area in the past few days. They showed the line of people waiting outside the precinct house, too many to be allowed inside, filling out forms on the sidewalk. The reporter noted that other seemingly unexplained incidents, such as house break-ins in which nothing appeared to have been stolen and no one appeared to be home, were being reported also. Strangest of all was the fact of the failure of modern technology to assist in the search for the missing persons: mobile phones, almost all of which contain traceable GPS technology, had apparently gone missing with their owners. This led some to speculate that people were perhaps willfully abandoning families and jobs, and noted that the spike in disappearances seemed to have coincided with the recent lunar occultation, suggesting a link between the two occurrences. A psychologist then commented on the potential for low-grade mass hysteria in the wake of certain startling celestial events. The story ended with the reporter giving airtime to a teary woman holding up a JCPenney portrait of a missing mother of two.