The Strain tst-1

by Guillermo Del Toro

  “A machete and a helicopter.”

  “Machete, huh?” Matt shook his head. “I think I’d rather have a shotgun.”

  “Wrong,” said Zack. “You don’t have to reload a machete.”

  Matt conceded the point, turning to Kelly. “This Fred Falin kid really knows his stuff.”

  “Guys—I’ve HAD it!” Being ganged up on by them wasn’t something she was used to. Any other time, she might have been happy seeing Zack and Matt pulling together. “Zack—you’re talking nonsense. This is a virus, and it’s real. We need to get out of here.”

  Matt stood there while Kelly carried the empty suitcase to the other bags. “Kel, relax. Okay?” He pulled his car keys out of his pocket, twirling them around his finger. “Take a bath, catch your breath. Be rational about this—please. Taking into account the source of your ‘inside’ info.” He went to the front door. “I’ll check in with you later.”

  He went out. Kelly stood staring at the closed door.

  Zack came over to her with his head cocked slightly to one side, the way he used to when he’d ask what death meant or why some men held hands. “What did Dad say to you about this?”

  “He just… he wants the best for us.”

  Kelly rubbed her forehead in a way that hid her eyes. Should she alarm Zack too? Could she pack up Zack and leave here solely on Eph’s word, without Matt? Should she? And—if she believed Eph, didn’t she have a moral obligation to warn others in turn?

  The Heinsons’ dog started barking next door. Not her usual angry yipping, but a high-pitched noise, sounding almost scared. It was enough to bring Kelly into the back sunroom, where she found that the motion light over the backyard deck had come on.

  She stood there with arms crossed, watching the yard for movement. Everything looked still. But the dog kept going, until Mrs. Heinson went out and brought it—still barking—inside.

  “Mom?”

  Kelly jumped, scared by her son’s touch, totally losing her cool.

  “You okay?” Zack said.

  “I hate this,” she said, walking him back into the living room. “Just hate it.”

  She would pack, for her and for Zack and for Matt.

  And she would watch.

  And she would wait.

  Bronxville

  THIRTY MINUTES NORTH of Manhattan, Roger Luss sat poking at his iPhone inside the oak-paneled bar room of the Siwanoy Country Club, awaiting his first martini. He had instructed the Town Car driver to let him off at the club rather than take him straight home. He needed a little reentry time. If Joan was sick, as the nanny’s voice mail message seemed to indicate, then the kids probably had it by now, and he could be walking into a real mess. More than enough reason to extend his business trip by one or two more hours.

  The dining room overlooking the golf course was completely empty at the dinner hour. The server came with his three-olive martini on a tray covered in white linen. Not Roger’s usual waiter. He was Mexican, like the fellows who parked cars out in front. His shirt was shrugged up out of his waistband in the back, and he wore no belt. His nails were dirty. Roger would have a talk with the club manager first thing in the morning. “There she is,” said Roger, the olives sunk at the bottom of the V-shaped cocktail glass, like beady little eyeballs preserved in a pickling vinegar. “Where is everyone tonight?” he asked in his usual booming voice. “What is it, a holiday? The market closed today? President died?”

  Shrug.

  “Where are all the regular staff?”

  He shook his head. Roger realized now that the man looked scared.

  Then Roger recognized him. The barman’s uniform had thrown Roger off. “Groundskeeper, right? Usually out trimming the greens.”

  The groundskeeper in the barman’s uniform nodded nervously and shambled off to the front lobby.

  Damn peculiar. Roger lifted his martini glass and looked around, but there was nobody to toast or nod to, no town politicking to be done. And so, with no eyes on him, Roger Luss slurped the cocktail, downing half of it in two great swallows. It hit his stomach and he let go a low purr in greeting. He speared one of the olives, tapping it dry on the edge of the glass before popping it into his mouth, swishing it around for a thoughtful moment, then squishing it between his back molars.

  On the muted television built into the wood above the bar mirror, he saw clips from a news conference. The mayor flanked by other grim-faced city officials. Then—file footage of the Regis Air Flight 753 plane on the tarmac at JFK.

  The silence of the club made him look around again. Where in the hell was everyone?

  Something was going on here. Something was happening and Roger Luss was missing out.

  He took another quick sip of the martini—and then one more—then set down the glass and stood. He walked to the front, checking the pub room off to the side—also empty. The kitchen door was just to the side of the pub bar, padded and black with a porthole window in the upper center. Roger peeked inside and saw the barman/groundskeeper all alone, smoking a cigarette and grilling himself a steak.

  Roger went out the front doors, where he had left his luggage. No valets were there to call him a taxi, so he reached for his phone, searched online, found the listing that was closest, and called for a car.

  While waiting under the high lights of the pillared carport entrance, the taste of the martini going sour in his mouth, Roger Luss heard a scream. A single, piercing cry into the night, from not so far away. On the Bronxville side of things, as opposed to Mount Vernon. Perhaps coming from somewhere on the golf course itself.

  Roger waited without moving. Without breathing. Listening for more.

  What spooked him more than the scream was the silence that followed.

  The taxi pulled up, the driver a middle-aged Middle Eastern man wearing a pen behind his ear, who smilingly dumped Roger’s luggage into the trunk and drove off.

  On the long private road out from the club, Roger looked out onto the course and thought he saw someone out there, walking across the fairway in the moonlight.

  Home was a three-minute drive away. There were no other cars on the road, the houses mostly dark as they passed. As they turned onto Midland, Roger saw a pedestrian coming up the sidewalk—an odd sight at night, especially without a dog to walk. It was Hal Chatfield, an older neighbor of his, one of the two club members who had sponsored Roger into Siwanoy when Roger and Joan first bought into Bronxville. Hal was walking funny, hands straight down at his sides, dressed in an open, flapping bathrobe and a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

  Hal turned and stared at the taxi as it passed. Roger waved. When he turned back to see if Hal had recognized him, he saw that Hal was running, stiff-legged, after him. A sixty-year-old man with his bathrobe trailing like a cape, chasing a taxi down the middle of the street in Bronxville.

  Roger turned to see if the driver saw this also, but the man was scribbling on a clipboard as he drove.

  “Hey,” said Roger. “Any idea what’s going on around here?”

  “Yes,” said the driver, with a smile and a curt nod. He had no idea what Roger was saying.

  Two more turns brought them to Roger’s house. The driver popped the trunk and jumped out with Roger. The street was quiet, Roger’s house as dark as the rest.

  “You know what? Wait here. Wait?” Roger pointed at the cobblestone curb. “Can you wait?”

  “You pay.”

  Roger nodded. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted him there. It had something to do with feeling very alone. “I have cash in the house. You wait. Okay?”

  Roger left his luggage in the mudroom by the side entrance and moved into the kitchen, calling out, “Hello?” He reached for the light switch but nothing happened when he flipped it. He could see the microwave clock glowing green, so the power was still on. He felt his way forward along the counter, feeling for the third drawer and rooting around inside for the flashlight. He smelled something rotting, more pungent than leftovers moldering in the trash, heightening his anxi
ety and quickening his hand. He gripped the shaft of the flashlight and switched it on.

  He swept the long kitchen with the beam, finding the island counter, the table beyond, the range and double oven. “Hello?” he called again, the fear in his voice shaming him, prompting him to move faster. He saw a dark spatter on the glass-front cabinets and trained his beam on what looked like the aftermath of a ketchup and mayonnaise fight. The mess brought a surge of anger. He saw the overturned chairs then, and dirty footprints (footprints?) on the center island granite.

  Where was the housekeeper, Mrs. Guild? Where was Joan? Roger went closer to the spatter, bringing the light right up to the cabinet glass. The white stuff, he didn’t know—but the red was not ketchup. He couldn’t be certain… but he thought it might be blood.

  He saw something moving in the reflection of the glass and whipped around with the flashlight. The back stairs behind him were empty. He realized he had just moved the cabinet door himself. He didn’t like his imagination taking over, and so ran upstairs, checking each room with the flashlight. “Keene? Audrey?” Inside Joan’s office, he found handwritten notes pertaining to the Regis Air flight. A timeline of sorts, though her penmanship failed over the last couple of incomprehensible sentences. The last word, scrawled in the bottom-right corner of the legal pad, read, “hummmmmm.”

  In the master bedroom, the bedsheets were all kicked down, and inside the master bath, floating unflushed in the toilet, was what looked to him like curdled, days-old vomit. He picked a towel up off the floor and, letting it fall open, discovered dark clots of staining blood, as though the plush cotton had been used as a coughing rag.

  He ran back down the front stairs. He picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed 911. It rang once before a recording played, asking him to hold. He hung up and dialed again. One ring and the same recording.

  He dropped the phone from his ear when he heard a thump in the basement beneath him. He threw open the door, about to call down into the darkness—but something made him stop. He listened, and heard… something.

  Shuffling footsteps. More than one set, coming up the stairs, approaching the halfway point where the steps hooked ninety degrees and turned toward him.

  “Joan?” he said. “Keene? Audrey?”

  But he was already backpedaling. Falling backward, striking the door frame, then scrambling back through the kitchen, past the gunk on the walls and into the mudroom. His only thought was to get out of there.

  He slammed through the storm door and out into the driveway, running to the street, yelling at the driver sitting behind the wheel, who didn’t understand English. Roger opened the back door and jumped inside.

  “Lock the doors! Lock the doors!”

  The driver turned his head. “Yes. Eight dollar and thirty.”

  “Lock the goddamn doors!”

  Roger looked back at the driveway. Three strangers, two women and one man, exited his mudroom and started across his lawn.

  “Go! Go! Drive!”

  The driver tapped the pay slot in the partition between the front and back seats. “You pay, I go.”

  Four of them now. Roger stared, stupefied, as a familiar-looking man wearing a ripped shirt knocked the others aside to get to the taxi first. It was Franco, their gardener. He looked through the passenger-door window at Roger, his staring eyes pale in the center but red around the rims, like a corona of bloodred crazy. He opened his mouth as though to roar at Roger—and then this thing came out, punched the window with a solid whack, right at Roger’s face, then retracted.

  Roger stared. What the hell did I just see?

  It happened again. Roger understood—on a pebble level, deep beneath many mattresses of fear, panic, mania—that Franco, or this thing that was Franco, didn’t know or had forgotten or misjudged the properties of glass. He appeared confused by the transparency of this solid.

  “Drive!” screamed Roger. “ Drive!”

  Two of them stood close, in front of the taxi now. A man and a woman, headlights brightening their waists. There were seven or eight in total, all around them, others coming out of the neighbors’ houses.

  The driver yelled something in his own language, leaning on the horn.

  “Drive!” screamed Roger.

  The driver reached for something on the floor instead. He pulled up a small bag the size of a toiletry case and ran back the zipper, spilling out a few Zagnut bars before getting his hand on a tiny silver revolver. He waved the weapon at the windshield and hollered in fear.

  Franco’s tongue was exploring the window glass. Except that the tongue wasn’t a tongue at all.

  The driver kicked open his door. Roger yelled, “No!” through the partition glass, but the driver was already outside. He fired the handgun from behind the door, shooting it with a flick of his wrist, as though throwing bullets from it. He fired again and again, the pair in front of the car doubling up, struck by small-caliber rounds, but not dropping.

  The driver kicked off two more wild shots and one of them struck the man in the head. His scalp flew backward and he stumbled to the ground.

  Then another grabbed the driver from behind. It was Hal Chatfield, Roger’s neighbor, his blue bathrobe hanging off his shoulders.

  “No!” Roger shouted, but too late.

  Hal spun the driver to the road. The thing came out of his mouth and pierced the driver’s neck. Roger watched the howling driver through his window.

  Another one rose up into the headlights. No, not another one—the same man who had been shot in the head. His wound was leaking white, running down the side of his face. He used the car to hold himself up, but he was still coming.

  Roger wanted to run, but he was trapped. To the right, past Franco the gardener, Roger saw a man in UPS brown shirt and shorts come out of the garage next door with the head of a shovel on his shoulder, like the baseball bat of an on-deck hitter.

  The head-wound man pulled himself around the driver’s open door and climbed into the front seat. He looked through the plastic partition at Roger, the front-right lobe of his head raised like a forelock of flesh. White ooze glazed his cheek and jaw.

  Roger turned just in time to see the UPS guy swing the shovel. It clanged off the rear window, leaving a long scrape in the reinforced glass, light from the streetlamps glinting in the spiderweb cracks.

  Roger heard the scrape on the partition. The head-wound man’s tongue came out, and he was trying to slip it through the ashtray-style pay slot. The fleshy tip poked through, straining, almost sniffing at the air as it tried to get at Roger.

  With a scream, Roger kicked at the slot in a frenzy, slamming it shut. The man in front let out an ungodly squeal, and the severed tip of his… whatever it was, fell directly into Roger’s lap. Roger swatted it away as, on the other side of the partition, the man spurted white all over, gone wild either in pain or in pure castration hysteria.

  Whamm! Another swing of the shovel crashed against the back window behind Roger’s head, the antishatter glass cracking and bending but still refusing to break.

  Pown-pown-pown. Footsteps leaving craters on the roof now.

  Four of them on the curb, three on the street side, and more coming from the front. Roger looked back, saw the deranged UPS man rear back to swing the shovel at the broken window again. Now or never.

  Roger reached for the handle and kicked the street-side door open with all his might. The shovel came down and the back window was smashed away, raining chips of glass. The blade just missed Roger’s head as he slid out into the street. Someone—it was Hal Chatfield, his eyes glowing red—grabbed his arm, spinning him around, but Roger shed his suit jacket like a snake wriggling out of its skin and kept on going, racing up the street, not looking back until he reached the corner.

  Some came in a hobbling jog, others moved faster and with more coordination. Some were old, and three of them were grinning children. His neighbors and friends. Faces he recognized from the train station, from birthday parties, from church.
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  All coming after him.

  Flatbush, Brooklyn

  EPH PRESSED THE DOORBELL at the Barbour residence. The street was quiet, though there was life in the other homes, television lights, bags of trash at the curb. He stood there with a Luma lamp in his hand and a Setrakian-converted nail gun hanging on a strap from his shoulder.

  Nora stood behind him, at the foot of the brick steps, holding her own Luma. Setrakian brought up the rear, his staff in hand, its silver head glowing in the moonlight.

  Two rings, no answer. Not unexpected. Eph tried the doorknob before looking for another entrance, and it turned.

  The door opened.

  Eph went in first, flicking on a light. The living room looked normal, slipcovered furniture and throw pillows set just so.

  He called out, “Hello,” as the two others filed in behind him. Strange, letting himself into the house. Eph trod softly on the rug, like a burglar or an assassin. He wanted to believe he was still a healer, but that was becoming more difficult to believe by the hour.

  Nora started up the stairs. Setrakian followed Eph into the kitchen. Eph said, “What do you think we will learn here? You said the survivors were distractions—”

  “I said that was the purpose they served. As to the Master’s intent—I don’t know. Perhaps there is some special attachment to the Master. In any event, we must start somewhere. These survivors are our only leads.”

  A bowl and spoon sat in the sink. A family Bible lay open on the table, stuffed with mass cards and photographs, turned to the final chapter. A passage was underlined in red ink with a shaky hand, Revelations 11:7–8:

  …the beast that ascends from the bottomless pit will make war upon them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which is allegorically called Sodom…

  Next to the open Bible, like instruments set out upon an altar, were a crucifix and a small glass bottle Eph presumed to be holy water.

  Setrakian nodded at the religious articles. “No more reasonable than duct tape and Cipro,” he said. “And no more effective.”