The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro

  It was like a whispering gallery inside a cathedral. Original brass chandeliers containing bare, dark bulbs hung from the arched ceilings, the interlocking tile along the arches looking like giant zippers. Two vault skylights allowed light through amethyst glass, the rest having been leaded over due to air raid concerns after World War II. Farther away, light appeared through some surface grates, still very faint, but enough to give depth to their perception along the gracefully curved track. There was not one right angle in the entire place. The tile work was damaged throughout, including the glazed terra-cotta of the nearest wall sign, done in gold with green borders, around white plates containing blue letters spelling CITY HALL.

  A film of steel dust along the curling platform showed the vampires’ footprints, leading into the dark.

  They followed the footprints to the end of the platform, jumping down onto the still-live tracks. Everything operated on a leftward curve along the train loop. They switched off their flashlights, Eph’s Luma showing urine splashes everywhere, iridescent and multicolored, ending farther on. Setrakian was reaching for his thermal scope when they heard noises behind them. Latecomers moving off the mezzanine stairs into the platform. Eph switched off his wand and they crossed the three rails to the far wall, standing flat against the recessed stone.

  The latecomers came off the platform, feet scratching the dusty stones along the rail beds. Setrakian spied them through his heat scope, two bright orange-red forms, nothing unusual about their shape or posture. The first one disappeared, and it took Setrakian a long moment to realize that it had slipped into a seam in the wall, an opening they had somehow missed. The second form stopped at that same spot, but turned there instead of disappearing, looking their way. Setrakian did not move, knowing the creature’s night vision was advanced but not yet matured. His thermal reading registered the vampire’s throat as its warmest region. A spill of orange down its leg cooled immediately to yellow as it pooled on the ground, the creature emptying its bladder. Its head lifted like an animal scenting prey, looking up the tracks away from their hiding space…then ducked its head and disappeared into the crack in the wall.

  Setrakian moved back into the railway, the others following him. The foul smell of fresh, hot vampire piss filled the arched space, the burnt-ammonia scent holding dark associations for Setrakian. The others stepped around the stain on their way to the seam in the wall.

  Eph slid his sword out of the sheath across his back, taking the lead. The passageway widened into a hot, rough-walled catacomb smelling of steam. He switched on his Luma light just in time to see the first vampire rising out of a crouch and driving at him. Eph could not get his silver blade up in time, and the vampire threw him back against the wall. His light lay on its side near the streamlet of sewage lying along the guttered floor, and he saw by its hot indigo light that she was, or had been at one time, a woman. She wore a businesslike blazer over a dirtied white blouse, her black mascara rubbed into menacing raccoon eyes. Her jaw dropped and her tongue curled back—and that was when Fet darted out of the passage.

  He went at her with his dagger, stabbing her once, low in the side. She rolled off Eph and came back up in a crouch. With a yell, Fet jabbed at her again, this time right above where her heart would have been, into her chest, below her shoulder. The vampire staggered backward, only to rush forward again. With a howl he buried his blade in her lower belly, and she buckled and snarled—but again reacted with more confusion than pain. She was going to keep coming at him.

  Eph had recovered enough by this time, and when the vampire went at Fet again, Eph stood and swung his sword at her with two hands, from behind. The impulse to murder was still foreign, and because of this he took a little something off his swing at the end, so that the blade did not find its way through. But it was enough. He had severed the spinal column, the vampire’s head flopping forward. Her arms flailed and her body went into seizure as she pitched forward into the sewage in the center of the floor, like something sizzling in an overheated pan.

  There was little time to be shocked. The splash-splash-splash sounds echoing in the catacomb were the footfalls of the second vampire running ahead—racing to alert the others.

  Eph grabbed his Luma light off the floor and took off after him with his sword at his side. He imagined that he was chasing the one who had lured Kelly here, and that anger carried him along the steamy passageway, his boots splashing hard. The tunnel hooked right, where a wide pipe ran out of the stone and down the length of the narrowing hole. The steam heat fostered algae and fungal growth that glowed in his lamplight. He made out the dim form of the vampire ahead of him, running with its hands open, fingers clawing at the air.

  Then another quick turn, and the vampire was gone. Eph slowed and looked all around, shining his lamp, panicking—until he spotted the thing’s legs wriggling through a flat hole dug under the side wall. The being undulated with wormlike efficiency, slithering out of the passage, and Eph slashed at its filthy feet but they whisked through too fast, his sword stabbing dirt.

  Eph got down on his knees, but could not see through to the other side of the shallow hole. He heard footsteps and knew Fet and Setrakian were still well behind him. He decided he could not wait. Eph got down on his back and started through.

  He fed himself into the hole with his arms over his head, lamp and sword first. Don’t get stuck here, he thought. If he did, there would be no way to wriggle back out. He wormed through, his arms and head emerging into the air of an open space, and kicked free of the burrow, getting to his knees.

  Panting now, he waved the lamp around like a torch. He was inside another tunnel, but this one was finished off with track rails and stones, and had an eerie, unused stillness about it. To his left, not one hundred yards away, was light.

  A platform. He hurried along the track and clambered up. This platform offered none of the splendor of the City Hall station; instead it was all bare steel beams and visible ceiling piping. Eph thought he had visited every station in the downtown area, but he had never stopped at this one.

  A length of subway cars rested against the end of the platform, the door sign reading OUT OF SERVICE. The shell of an old control tower stood in the middle, plastered with old-school wild-style graffiti. He tried the door but it was sealed.

  He heard scuffling back inside the tunnel. It was Fet and Setrakian coming through the burrow, catching up with him. Probably not smart, his running ahead alone. Eph resolved to wait for them there, in this oasis of light, until he heard a stone being kicked in the near track bed. He turned just in time to see the vampire breaking from the last subway car, running along the far wall, away from the lights of the abandoned station.

  Eph raced after him, over the elevated platform to the end, then leaped down onto the tracks, following them back into darkness. The track bed veered right, the rails ending. The tunnel walls shuddered in his vision as he ran. He could hear the vampire’s scuttling footsteps echoing, its bare feet upon the cutting rocks. The creature was stumbling, slowing. Eph drew closer, the heat of his lamp panicking the vampire. It turned back once, its indigo-lit face a mask of horror.

  Eph swept his sword arm forward, decapitating the monster in midstep.

  The headless body pitched forward, Eph stopping to shine the Luma light on its oozing neck, killing the escaping blood worms. He straightened again and his harsh breathing subsided…and then he held his breath altogether.

  He heard things. Or, rather, sensed them. Things all around him. No footsteps or movement, just…stirrings.

  He fumbled for his small flashlight and clicked it on. The bodies of New Yorkers were laid out all along the grungy floor of the tunnel. Their clothed bodies lined each side, like victims of a gas attack. Some eyes were still open, gazing with the narcotized stare of the ill.

  These were the turned. The recently bitten, the newly infected. Attacked that very night. The stirring Eph had heard was the metamorphosis inside their bodies: no limbs moving, but rather the tu
mors colonizing their organs, and the mandibles growing into oral stingers.

  The bodies numbered in the dozens, and there were many more ahead, vague forms beyond the reach of his beam. Men, women, children—victims from all walks of life. He rushed around, moving his beam from face to face, searching for Kelly—and praying he would not find her here.

  He was still searching when Fet and Setrakian caught up. With something like relief, and at the same time despair, Eph told them, “She’s not here.”

  Setrakian stood with his hand held against his chest, unable to catch his breath. “How much farther?”

  Fet said, “That was another City Hall station, on the BMT line. A lower level that was never put into service, only used for layup and storage. That means we’re underneath the Broadway line. This turn in the track takes us around the foundation of the Woolworth Building. Cortlandt Street is next. Meaning the World Trade Center is…” He looked up, as though able to see ten, fifteen stories through city rock to the surface. “We’re close.”

  “Let’s finish this,” said Eph. “Now.”

  “Wait,” said Setrakian, still trying to steady his heart rate. His flashlight beam played over the faces of the turned. He got down on one knee to check some of them with a silver-backed mirror from his coat pocket. “We have a responsibility here first.”

  Fet and Eph exterminated the nascent vampires by the light of Setrakian’s flashlight. Each beheading was like a hack at Eph’s sanity.

  Eph too had been turned. Not from human to vampire, but from healer to slayer.

  The groundwater deepened farther into the catacombs, with strange, sun-starved roots and vines and albino growths crawling down from the unfinished ceiling to feed off the water. The occasional yellow tunnel light showed a total lack of graffiti. White dust lay across the untouched sides of the floor, some of it very fine, coating the surface of pockets of stagnant water. It was residue from the World Trade Center. The three of them avoided stepping in it where they could, with the respect afforded a graveyard.

  The ceiling got lower, gradually dipping below head level, approaching a dead end. Setrakian’s search beam found an opening in the upper part of the shrinking wall, wide enough to admit them. A rumbling that had been vague and distant began to gather in force. Their flashlight beams showed the water at their boots beginning to tremble. It was the unmistakable roar of a subway train, and each of them actually turned around to look, though the tunnel they were standing in contained no rail beds.

  It was in front of them, coming right at them—but on live tracks lifting over their heads, entering the active City Hall BMT platform above. The squealing, roaring, and shuddering became unbearable—reaching earthquakelike force and decibels—and at once they realized that this powerful disruption was their best opportunity.

  They pressed through the crack, hurrying into another man-made, trackless passage, this one strung with unlit bulbs, construction lights dancing under the force of the passing subway train. Piles of dirt and debris had long ago been pushed back beyond steel beams rising some thirty feet to the ceiling. Around a long corner up ahead, jaundiced light shone faintly. They switched off their Luma lights and rushed along the dark tunnel, feeling it widen as they rounded the corner into a long, open chamber.

  As the floor stopped trembling and the train noise faded like a passing storm, they slowed to keep their boot steps quiet. Eph sensed the others before he saw them, their outlines, sitting on or lying about the floor. The creatures were roused by their presence, sitting up, but not attacking. So he and Setrakian and Fet kept moving, wading forward into the Master’s lair.

  The demons had fed that night, and were bloated with blood, like ticks, lying about and digesting. Their languor was deathlike, they were creatures resigned to waiting for sundown and the opportunity to feed again.

  They started to rise. They wore construction clothes and business suits and workout clothes and pajamas and evening wear and dirty aprons and nothing at all.

  Eph gripped his sword, searching faces as he passed them. Dead faces with bloodred eyes.

  “Stay together,” whispered Setrakian, lifting the UVC mine thing carefully out of the mesh bag on Fet’s back as they walked. With crooked fingers, he peeled back a strip of safety tape, then rotated the top of the globe to ready the battery. “I do hope this works.”

  “Hope?” said Fet.

  One came at him then—an old man, maybe not as sated as the others—and Fet showed him his silver dagger and the vampire hissed. Fet put a boot on the man’s thigh and kicked him back, showing the others his silver.

  “We’re digging ourselves into a deep hole here.”

  Faces came out of the walls, flushed and leering. Older vampires, first or second generation, marked by their whitening hair. There were animal-like groans and glottal clicks from some, like attempts at speech blocked by the vile appendages grown beneath their tongues. Their swollen throats twitched perversely.

  Setrakian said, walking between Fet and Eph, “When this spike makes contact with the ground, the battery should connect.”

  “Should!” said Fet.

  “You must take cover before it ignites. Behind these supports.” Rusted, rivet-studded beams stood at regular intervals. “You won’t have more than a few seconds. When you do, shut your eyes. Do not look. The burst will blind you.”

  “Just do it!” said Fet, crowded by the vampires.

  “Not yet…” The old man opened his walking stick just enough to bare the silver blade, and with the quick motion of flint striking stone he ran the tips of two crooked fingers against the sharp edge. Blood dripped to the stone floor. The scent went through the vampires with a visible ripple. They were coming from all over, crowding in from unseen corners, ever curious and ever hungry.

  Fet swiped the dusty air with his dagger in order to maintain the few meters of open space around them as they moved. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

  Eph searched faces, scanning the dead-eyed women for Kelly. One made a move toward him and he laid the tip of his sword against her breastbone and she shrank back as though burned.

  More noise now, the front crowd being pressed closer from behind, hunger overriding hesitance, want trumping wait. Setrakian’s blood dribbled to the floor, its scent—and the casual waste—driving them into a frenzy.

  “Do it!” said Fet.

  Setrakian said, “A few more seconds…”

  The vampires pushed in, Eph prodding them back with the tip of his sword. He only then thought to turn his Luma light back on, but they leaned into its repulsing rays like zombies staring at the sun. The ones in front were at the mercy of those in the rear. The bubble was collapsing…Eph felt one hand grab at his sleeve…

  “Now!” said Setrakian.

  He tossed the spiked globe into the air, like a referee serving up a jump ball. The heavy thing righted itself at its apex, weighted spikes pointing straight down as it drove toward the floor.

  The four-edged steel spike sank into the stone, and a whir started, like that of an old flashbulb rack recharging.

  “Go, go!” said Setrakian.

  Eph waved his light and swung his sword like a machete, making for one of the stanchions. He felt them grabbing at him, pulling, and felt the squishy thump of his sword cutting, and heard their groans and garbled howls. And still—he checked faces, looking for Kelly, and striking down all those who were not her.

  The mine’s whir became a growing whine, and Eph stabbed and kicked and swiped his way to the steel support beam, stepping into its shadow just as the underground chamber began to fill with a blazing blue light. He clamped his eyes shut and buried them in the crook of his elbow.

  He heard the bestial agony of the shattered vampires. The melting, blistering, peeling sound of their bodies being desiccated at the chemical level, the collapsing of their innards like the charcoaling of their very souls. Their dumb cries strangled in scalded throats.

  Mass immolation.

  The hig
h-pitched whine lasted no longer than ten seconds, the brilliant plane of cleansing blue light riding from floor to ceiling before the battery burned out. The chamber went mostly dark again—and when the only sound left was a residual sizzling, Eph lowered his arm, opening his eyes.

  The nauseating stench of roasted disease rose in smoky steam from the charred creatures laid out over the floor. It was impossible to move without disturbing these rotted demons, their bodies crumbling like artificial logs hollowed out by fire. Only those vampires lucky enough to have been partially behind a beam remained animate, Eph and Fet moving quickly to release these crippled, half-destroyed creatures.

  Fet then walked over to the mine, which had caught fire. He surveyed the damage.

  “Well,” he said, “that fucking worked.”

  “Look,” said Setrakian.

  At the far end of the steaming chamber, set on top of a yard-high mound of dirt and refuse, was a long, black box.

  As Eph and the others approached it—with the dread of bomb-squad agents approaching a suspicious device without wearing blast suits—the situation felt terribly familiar, and it was only a moment before he placed it: he had felt exactly the same walking toward the darkened airplane on the taxiway, at the start of this whole thing.

  This sense of approaching something dead and not dead. Some delivery from another world.

  He got close enough to confirm that it was indeed the long, black cabinet from the cargo hold of Flight 753. Its top doors exquisitely carved with human figures swirling as though burning in flames, and elongated faces screaming in agony.

  The Master’s oversize coffin, set here on an altar of rubble and rubbish beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center.

  “This is it,” Eph said.

  Setrakian reached out to the side of the box, almost touching the carvings, then pulling back his twisted fingers. “A long time I have searched for this,” he said.

  Eph shuddered, not wanting to meet this thing again, with its devouring size and ruthless strength. He remained on the near side, expecting the top doors to burst open at any moment. Fet went around to the facing side. There were no handles on the top doors. One had to slip one’s fingers in beneath the lip of the middle seam and pull up. It would be awkward, and difficult to do quickly.