The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Gus smelled cigarette smoke from the cab of the windowless van, through the closed partition. It had been near dusk when they were loaded in. Gus kept his eye on Felix, sagging forward off the handcuff bar. Thinking about what the old pawnbroker had said. And waiting.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Felix’s head started to buck, then turn to the side. At once he sat erect and surveyed his surroundings. Felix looked at Gus, stared at him, but nothing in Felix’s eyes showed Gus that his lifelong compadre recognized him.

  A darkness in his eyes. A void.

  A blaring car horn woke up the dude next to Gus then, startling him awake. “Shit,” said the guy, rattling his cuffs behind him. “Fuck we headed?” Gus didn’t answer. The dude was looking across at Felix, who was looking at him. He kicked Felix’s foot. “I said where the fuck we headed, junior?”

  Felix looked at him for an instant with a vacant, almost idiotic stare. His mouth opened as though to answer—and the stinger shot out, piercing the helpless guy’s throat. Right across the entire width of the van, and the dude couldn’t do anything about it except stomp and kick. Gus started to do the same, trapped as he was in back there with the former Felix, yelling and rattling and waking up the prisoner across from him. They all yelled and screamed and stomped as the dude next to Gus went limp, Felix’s stinger flushing from translucent to bloodred.

  The partition opened between the prisoner area and the front cab. A head with a cop hat on it twisted around from the passenger’s seat. “Shut the fuck up back there or else I will—”

  He saw Felix drinking the other prisoner. Saw the engorging appendage reaching across the van, the first messy feeding, Felix disengaging and his stinger coming back into his mouth. Blood spilling out of the dude’s neck and dribbling down Felix’s front.

  The passenger cop yelped and turned away.

  “What is it?” yelled the driver, trying to get a look in the back.

  Felix’s stinger shot out through the partition, latching onto the van driver’s throat. Screaming rang from the cab as the van lurched, out of control. Gus grabbed the handcuff rail with his fingers just in time to keep his hands from being broken at the wrists, and the van veered right and then left, hard—before crashing on its side.

  The van scraped along until it hit a guardrail, bouncing off, spinning to a stop. Gus was on his side, the prisoner across from him now dangling from broken arms, yelping in pain and fear. Felix’s bar latch had broken, his stinger hanging down and twitching like a live electrical cable dripping human blood.

  His dead eyes came up and looked at Gus.

  Gus found his pole broken and slid his manacles fast along its length, kicking at the crumpled door until it opened. He tumbled out fast, onto the side of the road, ears roaring as though a bomb had exploded.

  His hands were still cuffed behind him. Headlights went past, cars slowing to inspect the wreckage. Gus rolled away fast, quickly bringing his wrists underneath his feet, getting his hands in front of him. He eyed the busted-open cargo door of the van, waiting for Felix to climb out after him.

  Then Gus heard a scream. He looked around for some kind of weapon, and had to settle for a dented hubcap. He went up with it, edging to the open door of the tipped-over van.

  There was Felix, drinking the wide-eyed prisoner still strung up on the handcuff bar.

  Gus swore, sickened by the sight. Felix disengaged and without any hesitation, shot his stinger at Gus’s neck. Gus just got the hubcap up in time, deflecting the blow before spinning away, out of sight of the rear of the van.

  Again, Felix did not follow him. Gus stood there a moment, regaining his senses—wondering why—and then noticed the sun. It was floating between two buildings across the Hudson, bloodred and almost gone, sinking fast.

  Felix was hiding in the van, waiting for sundown. In three minutes he was going to be free.

  Gus looked around wildly. He saw broken windshield glass on the road, but that wouldn’t do it. He climbed up the chassis of the van, onto the side that was the top now. He scooted over to the driver’s-side door and kicked at the hinge of the side mirror. It cracked off, and he was pulling at the wires to get it free when the cop inside yelled at him.

  “Hold it!”

  Gus looked at him, the driver cop, bleeding from the neck, holding on to the top handle of the roof, his gun out. Then Gus pulled the mirror free with one hard yank and jumped back down onto the road.

  The sun was melting away like a punctured egg yolk. Gus went to figure out the angle, holding the mirror over his head to catch its last rays. He saw the reflection shimmer on the ground. It looked vague, too dim to do anything. So he cracked the planar glass with his knuckles, breaking it up but keeping the pieces adhered to the mirror backing. He tried it again and the reflected rays now had some distinction.

  “I said hold it!”

  The cop came down from the van with his gun still out. His free hand was holding his neck where Felix had gotten him, his ears bleeding from the impact. He came around and looked in the van.

  Felix was crouched inside, handcuffs dangling from one hand. The other hand was gone, severed at the wrist by the cuffs at the force of impact. Its absence didn’t seem to bother him. Nor did the white blood spilling from the open stump.

  Felix smiled and the cop opened up on him. Rounds pierced Felix’s chest and legs, ripping away flesh and chips of bone. Seven, eight shots, and Felix fell backward. Two more shots into his body. The cop lowered the gun and then Felix sat upright, still smiling.

  Still thirsty. Forever thirsty.

  Gus shoved the cop aside then, and held up his mirror. The last vestiges of the dying orange sun were just poking over the building across the river. Gus called Felix’s name one last time, as though saying his name would snap him out of it, would miraculously bring Felix back…

  But Felix was no longer Felix. He was a vampire motherfucker. Gus reminded himself of this as he angled the mirror so that the blazing orange shafts of reflected sunlight shot into the overturned van.

  Felix’s dead eyes went to horror as the beams of sun shot through him. They impaled him with the force of lasers, burning holes and igniting his flesh. An animal howl arose from deep inside him, like the cry of a man shattered at the atomic level, as the rays ravaged his body.

  The sound etched itself into Gus’s mind, but he kept working the reflection around until all that was left of Felix was a charred mass of smoking ash.

  The light rays faded and Gus lowered his arm.

  He looked across the river.

  Night.

  Gus felt like crying—all kinds of anguish and pain mixed together in his heart—and his pain was turning into rage. Fuel was pooled beneath the van, almost at his feet. Gus went to the cop who was still staring from the roadside at what had happened. He riffled through his pockets, finding a Zippo lighter. Gus popped the top and scratched the wheel and the flame jumped up dutifully.

  “Lo siento, ’mano.”

  He touched off the fuel spill and the van went up with a boom, knocking back both Gus and the cop.

  “Chingado—he stung you,” Gus said to the cop who still held his neck. “You’ll become one of them now.”

  He took the cop’s gun and pointed it at him. Now the sirens were coming.

  The cop looked up at Gus, and then a second later his head was gone. Gus kept the smoking gun aimed at the body until he was off the side of the highway. Then he tossed away the gun and thought about the handcuff keys, but too late. Flashing lights were approaching. He turned and ran off the side of the highway, into the new night.

  Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens

  KELLY WAS STILL in her teaching clothes, a dark tank shirt beneath a soft wraparound top and a long, straight skirt. Zack was up in his room, supposedly doing his homework, and Matt was home, having only worked a half day because he had a store inventory that night.

  This news about Eph on the television had Kelly horrified. And now she couldn’t get him on his c
ell phone.

  “He finally did it,” said Matt, the tails of his denim Sears shirt pulled out for the time being. “He finally cracked.”

  “Matt,” said Kelly, only half scolding. But—had Eph cracked? And what did this mean for her?

  “Delusions of grandeur, the big virus hunter,” said Matt. “He’s like those firefighters who set blazes in order to be the hero.” Matt sank deeply into his easy chair. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he was doing all this for you.”

  “Me?”

  “The attention, or whatnot. ‘Look at me, I’m important.’”

  She shook her head fast, as if he was wasting her time. Sometimes it confounded her that Matt could be so wrong about people.

  The doorbell rang, and Kelly stopped her pacing. Matt sprang up from his chair, but Kelly was at the door first.

  It was Eph, with Nora Martinez behind him, and an old man in a long tweed coat behind her.

  “What are you doing here?” said Kelly, looking up and down the street.

  Eph pushed inside. “I’m here to see Zack. To explain.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  Eph looked around, completely ignoring Matt, who was standing right there. “Is he upstairs doing homework on his laptop?”

  “Yes,” said Kelly.

  “If he has Internet access, then he knows.”

  Eph went to the stairs, taking the steps two at a time.

  Leaving Nora there at the door with Kelly. Nora exhaled, soaking in awkwardness. “Sorry,” she said. “Barging in on you like this.”

  Kelly shook her head gently, looking her over with just a hint of appraisal. She knew that there was something going on between Nora and Eph. For Nora, Kelly Goodweather’s house was the last place she wanted to be.

  Kelly then turned her attention to the old man with the wolf-head walking stick. “What is going on?”

  “The ex—Mrs. Goodweather, I presume?” Setrakian offered his hand with the courtly manners of a lost generation. “Abraham Setrakian. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “The same,” said Kelly, taken aback, casting an uncertain glance at Matt.

  Nora said, “He needed to see you guys. To explain.”

  Matt said, “Doesn’t this little visit make us criminal accomplices to something?”

  Kelly had to counter Matt’s rudeness. “Would you like a drink?” she asked Setrakian. “Some water?”

  Matt said, “Jesus—we could both get twenty years for that glass of water…”

  Eph sat on the edge of Zack’s bed, Zack at his desk with his laptop open.

  Eph said, “I’m caught up in something I don’t really understand. But I wanted you to hear it from me. None of it is true. Except for the fact that there are people after me.”

  Zack said, “Won’t they come here looking for you?”

  “Maybe.”

  Zack looked down, troubled, working through it. “You gotta get rid of your phone.”

  Eph smiled. “Already did.” He clasped his conspiratorial son on the shoulder. He saw, next to the boy’s laptop, the video recorder Eph had bought him for Christmas.

  “You still working on that movie with your friends?”

  “We’re kind of in the editing stage.”

  Eph picked it up, the camera small and light enough to fit into his pocket. “Think I could borrow this for a little while?”

  Zack nodded slowly. “Is it the eclipse, Dad? Turning people into zombies?”

  Eph reacted with surprise—realizing the truth was not much more plausible than that. He tried to see this thing from the point of view of a very perceptive and occasionally sensitive eleven-year-old. And it drew something up in him, from a deep reservoir of feeling. He stood and hugged his boy. An odd moment, fragile and beautiful, between a father and son. Eph felt it with absolute clarity. He ruffled the boy’s hair, and there was nothing more to be said.

  Kelly and Matt were having a whispered conversation in the kitchen, leaving Nora and Setrakian alone in the glassed-in sunroom off the back of the house. Setrakian stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the glowing sky of early night, the third since the landing of the accursed airplane, his back to her.

  A clock on the shelf went tick-tick-tick.

  Setrakian heard pick-pick-pick.

  Nora sensed his impatience. She said, “He, uh, he’s got a lot of issues with his family. Since the divorce.”

  Setrakian moved his fingers into the small pocket on his vest, checking on his pillbox. The pocket was near his heart, as there were circulatory benefits to be gleaned just from placing nitroglycerin close to his aged pump. It beat steadily if not robustly. How many more beats did he have in him? Enough, he hoped, to get the job done.

  “I have no children,” he said. “My wife, Anna, gone seventeen years now, and I were not so blessed. You would assume that the ache for children fades over time, but in fact it deepens with age. I had much to teach, yet no student.”

  Nora looked at his walking stick, stood up against the wall near her chair. “How did you… how did you first come to this?”

  “When did I discover their existence, you mean?”

  “And devote yourself to this, over all these years.”

  He was silent for a moment, summoning the memory. “I was a young man then. During World War Two, I found myself interred in occupied Poland, very much against my own wishes. A small camp northeast of Warsaw, named Treblinka.”

  Nora shared the old man’s stillness. “A concentration camp.”

  “Extermination camp. These are brutal creatures, my dear. More brutal than any predator one could ever have the misfortune of encountering in this world. Rank opportunists who prey on the young and the infirm. In the camp, myself and my fellow prisoners were a meager feast set unknowingly before him.”

  “Him?”

  “The Master.”

  The way he said the word chilled Nora. “He was German? A Nazi?”

  “No, no. He has no affiliation. He is loyal to no one and nothing, belonging not to one country or another. He roams where he likes. He feeds where there is food. The camp to him was like a fire sale. Easy prey.”

  “But you… you survived. Couldn’t you have told someone…?”

  “Who would have believed an emaciated man’s ravings? It took me weeks to accept what you are processing now, and I was a witness to this atrocity. It is more than the mind will accept. I chose not to be judged insane. His food source interrupted, the Master simply moved on. But I made a pledge to myself in that camp, one I have never forgotten. I tracked the Master for many years. Across central Europe and the Balkans, through Russia, central Asia. For three decades. Close on his heels at times, but never close enough. I became a professor at the University of Vienna, I studied the lore. I began to amass books and weapons and tools. All the while preparing myself to meet him again. An opportunity I have waited more than six decades for.”

  “But… then who is he?”

  “He has had many forms. Currently, he has taken the body of a Polish nobleman named Jusef Sardu, who went missing during a hunting expedition in the north country of Romania, in the spring of 1873.”

  “1873?”

  “Sardu was a giant. At the time of the expedition, he already stood nearly seven feet tall. So tall that his muscles could not support his long, heavy bones. It was said that his pants pockets were the size of turnip sacks. For support, he had to lean heavily on a walking stick whose handle bore the family heraldic symbol.”

  Nora looked over again at Setrakian’s oversize walking stick, its silver handle. Her eyes widened. “A wolf’s head.”

  “The remains of the other Sardu men were found many years later, along with young Jusef’s journal. His account detailed their stalking of their hunting party by some unknown predator, who abducted and killed them, one by one. The final entry indicated that Jusef had discovered the dead bodies inside the opening to an underground cave. He buried them before returning to the cave to face the beas
t, to avenge his family.”

  She could not take her eyes off the wolf’s-head grip. “How ever did you get it?”

  “I tracked this walking stick to a private dealer in Antwerp in the summer of 1967. Sardu eventually returned to his family’s estate in Poland, many weeks later, though alone and much changed. He carried his cane, but no longer leaned on it, and in time ceased carrying it altogether. Not only had he apparently been cured of the pain of his gigantism, he was now rumored to possess great strength. Villagers soon began to go missing, the town was said to be cursed, and eventually it died away. The house of Sardu fell into ruin and the young master was never seen again.”

  Nora sized up the walking stick. “At fifteen he was that tall?”

  “And still growing.”

  “The coffin… it was at least eight by four.”

  Setrakian nodded solemnly. “I know.”

  She nodded. Then she said, “Wait—how do you know?”

  “I saw, once—at least, the marks it left in the dirt. A long time ago.”

  Kelly and Eph stood across from each other in the modest kitchen. Her hair was lighter and shorter, more businesslike now. Maybe more Mom-like. She gripped the edge of the countertop, and he noticed little paper cuts on her knuckles, a hazard of the classroom.

  She had gotten him an unopened pint of milk from the fridge. “You still keep whole milk?” he said.

  “Z likes it. Wants to be like his father.”

  Eph drank some, and the milk cooled him but didn’t give him that usual calming sensation. He saw Matt lurking on the other side of the pass-through, sitting in a chair, pretending not to look their way.

  “He is so much like you,” she said. She was referring to Zack.

  “I know,” said Eph.

  “The older he gets. Obsessive. Stubborn. Demanding. Brilliant.”

  “Tough to take in an eleven-year-old.”

  Her face broke into a broad smile. “I’m cursed for life, I guess.”

  Eph smiled also. It felt strange, exercise his face hadn’t gotten in days.