“What’s that?” he said.
“Vampire.”
A word like that, spoken in earnestness, hangs in the air for a while.
“You are thinking,” said Setrakian, the former professor, “of a moody overactor in a black satin cape. Or else a dashing figure of power, with hidden fangs. Or some existential soul burdened with the curse of eternal life. Or—Bela Lugosi meets Abbott and Costello.”
Nora was looking around the room again. “I don’t see any crucifixes or holy water. No strings of garlic.”
“Garlic has certain interesting immunological properties, and can be useful in its own right. So its presence in the mythology is biologically understandable, at any rate. But crucifixes and holy water?” He shrugged. “Products of their time. Products of one Victorian author’s fevered Irish imagination, and the religious climate of the day.”
Setrakian had expected their expressions of doubt.
“They have always been here,” he continued. “Nesting, feeding. In secret and in darkness, because that is their nature. There are seven originals, known as the Ancients. The Masters. Not one per continent. They are not solitary beings as a rule, but clannish. Until very recently—‘recently’ considering their open-ended life span—they were all spread throughout the greatest landmass, what we know today as Europe and Asia, the Russian federation, the Arabian peninsula, and the African continent. Which is to say, the Old World. There was a schism, a clash among their kind. The nature of this disagreement, I do not know. Suffice it to say, this rift preceded the discovery of the New World by centuries. Then the founding of the American colonies opened the door to a new and fertile land. Three remained behind in the Old World, and three went ahead to the New. Both sides respected the other’s domain, and a truce was agreed upon and upheld.
“The problem was that seventh Ancient. He is a rogue who turned his back on both factions. While I cannot prove it at this time, the abrupt nature of this act leads me to believe that he is behind this.”
“This,” said Nora.
“This incursion into the New World. Breaking the solemn truce. This upsetting of the balance of their breed’s existence. An act, essentially, of war.”
Eph said, “A war of vampires.”
Setrakian’s smile was for himself. “You simplify because you cannot believe. You reduce; you diminish. Because you were raised to doubt and debunk. To reduce to a small set of knowns for easy digestion. Because you are a doctor, a man of science, and because this is America—where everything is known and understood, and God is a benevolent dictator, and the future must always be bright.” He clasped his gnarled hands, as best as he could, touching his bare fingertips to his lips in a pensive moment. “This is the spirit here, and it is beautiful. Truly—I don’t mock. Wonderful to believe only in what you wish to believe in, and to discount all else. I do respect your skepticism, Dr. Goodweather. And I say this to you in the hope that you will in turn respect my experience in this matter, and allow my observations into your highly civilized and scientific mind.”
Eph said, “So you’re saying, the airplane…one of them was on it. This rogue.”
“Exactly.”
“In the coffin. In the cargo hold.”
“A coffin full of soil. They are of the earth, and like to return to that from which they arose. Like worms. Vermis. They burrow to nest. We would call it sleep.”
“Away from daylight,” said Nora.
“From sunlight, yes. It is in transit that they are most vulnerable.”
“But you said this is a war of vampires. But isn’t it vampires against people? All those dead passengers.”
“This too will be difficult for you to accept. But to them we are not enemies. We are not worthy foes. We don’t even rise to that level in their eyes. To them we are prey. We are food and drink. Animals in a pen. Bottles upon a shelf.”
Eph felt a chill, but then just as quickly rejected his own shivery response. “And to someone who would say this sounds like so much science fiction?”
Setrakian pointed to him. “That device in your pocket. Your mobile telephone. You punch in a few numbers, and immediately you are in conversation with another person halfway around the world. That is science fiction, Dr. Goodweather. Science fiction come true.” Here Setrakian smiled. “Do you require proof?”
Setrakian went to a low bench set against the long wall. There was a thing there covered in a drape of black silk and he reached for it in an odd way, his arm outstretched, pinching the nearest edge of fabric while keeping his body as far away from it as possible, and then drawing the cover off.
A glass container. A specimen jar, available from any medical supply house.
Inside, suspended in a dusky fluid, was a well-preserved human heart.
Eph stooped to regard it from a few feet away. “Adult female, judging by the size. Healthy. Fairly young. A fresh specimen.” He looked back at Setrakian. “Where’d you get it?”
“I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village outside Shkodër, in northern Albania, in the spring of 1971.”
Eph smiled at the strangeness of the old man’s tale, leaning in for a closer look at the jar.
Something like a tentacle shot out of the heart, a sucker at its tip grabbing the glass where Eph’s eye was.
Eph straightened fast. He froze, staring at the jar.
Nora, next to him, said, “Um…what the hell was that?”
The heart began moving in the serum.
It was throbbing.
Beating.
Eph watched the flattened, mouthlike sucker head scour the glass. He looked at Nora, next to him, staring at the heart. Then he looked at Setrakian, who hadn’t moved, hands resting inside his pockets.
Setrakian said, “It animates whenever human blood is near.”
Eph stared in pure disbelief. He edged closer again, this time to the right of the sucker’s pale, lipless receptor. The outgrowth detached from the interior surface of the glass—then suddenly thrust itself toward him again.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Eph. The beating organ floated in there like some meaty, mutant fish. “It lives on without…” There was no blood supply. He looked at the stumps of its severed veins, aorta, and vena cava.
Setrakian said, “It is neither alive nor dead. It is animate. Possessed, you might say, but in the literal sense. Look closely and you will see.”
Eph watched the throbbing, which he found to be irregular, not like a true heartbeat at all. He saw something moving around inside it. Wriggling.
“A…worm?” said Nora.
Thin and pale, lip-colored, two or three inches in length. They watched it make its rounds inside the heart, like a lone sentry dutifully patrolling a long-abandoned base.
“A blood worm,” said Setrakian. “A capillary parasite that reproduces in the infected. I suspect, though have no proof, that it is the conduit of the virus. The actual vector.”
Eph shook his head in disbelief. “What about this…this sucker?”
“The virus mimics the host’s form, though it reinvents its vital systems in order to best sustain itself. In other words, it colonizes and adapts the host for its survival. The host being, in this case, a severed organ floating in a jar, the virus has found a way to evolve its own mechanism for receiving nourishment.”
Nora said, “Nourishment?”
“The worm lives on blood. Human blood.”
“Blood?” Eph squinted at the possessed heart. “From whom?”
Setrakian pulled his left hand out of his pocket. The wrinkled tips of his fingers showed at the end of the glove. The pad of his middle finger was scarred and smooth.
“A few drops every few days is enough. It will be hungry. I’ve been away.”
He went to the bench and lifted the lid off the jar—Eph stepping back to watch—and, with the point of a little penknife from his keychain, pricked the tip of his finger over the jar. He did not flinch, the act so routine that it no longer hurt him.
; His blood dripped into the serum.
The sucker fed on the red drops with lips like that of a hungry fish.
When he was done, the old man dabbed a bit of liquid bandage on his finger from a small bottle on the bench, returning the lid to the jar.
Eph watched the feeder turn red. The worm inside the organ moved more fluidly and with increased strength. “And you say you’ve kept this thing going in here for…?”
“Since the spring of 1971. I don’t take many vacations…” He smiled at his little joke, looking at his pricked finger, rubbing the dried tip. “She was a revenant, one who was infected. Who had been turned. The Ancients, who wish to remain hidden, will kill immediately after feeding, in order to prevent any spread of their virus. One got away somehow, returned home to claim its family and friends and neighbors, burrowing into their small village. This widow’s heart had not been turned four hours before I found her.”
“Four hours? How did you know?”
“I saw the mark. The mark of the strigoi.”
Eph said, “Strigoi?”
“Old World term for vampire.”
“And the mark?”
“The point of penetration. A thin breach across the front of the throat, which I am guessing you have seen by now.”
Eph and Nora were nodding. Thinking about Jim.
Setrakian added, “I should say, I am not a man who is in the habit of cutting out human hearts. This was a bit of dirty business I happened upon quite by accident. But it was absolutely necessary.”
Nora said, “And you’ve kept this thing going ever since then, feeding it like a…a pet?”
“Yes.” He looked down at the jar, almost fondly. “It serves as a daily reminder. Of what I am up against. What we are now up against.”
Eph was aghast. “In all this time…why haven’t you shown this to anyone? A medical school. The evening news?”
“Were it that easy, Doctor, the secret would have become known years ago. There are forces aligned against us. This is an ancient secret, and it reaches deep. Touches many. The truth would never be allowed to reach a mass audience, but would be suppressed, and myself with it. Why I’ve been hiding here—hiding in plain sight—all these years. Waiting.”
This kind of talk raised the hair on the back of Eph’s neck. The truth was right there, right in front of him: the human heart in a jar, housing a worm that thirsted for the old man’s blood.
“I’m not very good with secrets that imperil the future of the human race. No one else knows about this?”
“Oh, someone does. Yes. Someone powerful. The Master—he could not have traveled unaided. A human ally must have arranged for his safeguarding and transportation. You see—vampires cannot cross bodies of flowing water unless aided by a human. A human inviting them in. And now the seal—the truce—has been broken. By an alliance between strigoi and human. That is why this incursion is so shocking. And so fantastically threatening.”
Nora turned to Setrakian. “How much time do we have?”
The old man had already run the numbers. “It will take this thing less than one week to finish off all of Manhattan, and less than a month to overtake the country. In two months—the world.”
“No way,” said Eph. “Not going to happen.”
“I admire your determination,” said Setrakian. “But you still don’t quite know what it is you are up against.”
“Okay,” Eph said. “Then tell me—where do we start?”
Park Place, Tribeca
VASILIY FET pulled up in his city-marked van outside an apartment building down in Lower Manhattan. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but had an awning and a doorman, and this was Tribeca after all. He would have double-checked the address were it not for the health department van parked illegally out in front, yellow dash light twirling. Ironically, in most buildings and homes in most parts of the city, exterminators were welcomed with open arms, like police arriving at the scene of a crime. Vasiliy didn’t think that would be the case here.
His own van said BPCS-CNY on the back, standing for Bureau of Pest Control Services, City of New York. The health department inspector, Bill Furber, met him on the stairs inside. Billy had a sloping blond mustache that rode out the face waves caused by his constant jawing of nicotine-replacement gum. “Vaz,” he called him, which was short for Vasya, the familiar diminutive form of his given Russian name. Vaz, or, simply, V, as he was often called, second-generation Russian, his gruff voice all Brooklyn. He was a big man, filling most of the stairway.
Billy clapped him on the arm, thanked him for coming. “My cousin’s niece here, got bit on the mouth. I know—not my kinda building, but what can I do, they married into real estate money. Just so you know—it’s family. I told them I was bringing in the best rat man in the five boroughs.”
Vasiliy nodded with the quiet pride characteristic of exterminators. An exterminator succeeds in silence. Success means leaving behind no indication of his success, no trace that a problem ever existed, that a pest had ever been present or a single trap laid. It means that order has been preserved.
He pulled his wheeled case behind him like a computer repairman’s tool kit. The interior of the loft opened to high ceilings and wide rooms, an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo that cost three million easily in New York real estate dollars. Seated on a short, firm, basketball-orange sofa inside a high-tech room done in glass, teak, and chrome, a young girl clutched a doll and her mother. A large bandage covered the girl’s upper lip and cheek. The mother wore her hair buzzed short; eyeglasses with narrow, rectangular frames; and a nubby, green knee-length wool skirt. She looked to Vasiliy like a visitor from a very hip, androgynous future. The girl was young, maybe five or six, and still frightened. Vasiliy would have attempted a smile, but his was the sort of face that rarely put children at ease. He had a jaw like the flat back of an ax blade and widely spaced eyes.
A panel television hung on the wall like a wide, glass-framed painting. On it, the mayor was speaking into a bouquet of microphones. He was trying to answer questions about the missing dead from the airplane, the bodies that had disappeared from the city’s morgues. The NYPD was on high alert, and actively stopping all refrigerated trucks at bridges and tunnels. A TIPS line had been set up. The victims’ families were outraged, and funerals had been put on hold.
Bill led Vasiliy to the girl’s bedroom. A canopy bed, a gem-encrusted Bratz television and matching laptop, and an animatronic butterscotch pony in the corner. Vasiliy’s eyes went immediately to a food wrapper near the bed. Toasted crackers with peanut butter inside. He liked those himself.
“She was in here taking a nap,” said Billy. “Woke up feeling something gnawing on her lip. The thing was up on her pillow, Vaz. A rat in her bed. Kid won’t sleep for a month. You ever heard of this?”
Vasiliy shook his head. There were rats in and around every building in Manhattan—no matter what landlords say or tenants think—but they didn’t like to make their presence known, especially in the middle of the day. Rat attacks generally involve children, most often around the mouth, because that’s where the food smell is. Norway rats—Rattus norvegicus, city rats—have a highly defined sense of smell and taste. Their front incisors are long and sharp, stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron. Gnawing rats are responsible for one-quarter of all electric-cable breaks in the city, and the likely culprit behind the same percentage of fires of unknown origin. Their teeth are comparable in pure hardness to steel, and the alligator-like structure of their jaw allows for thousands of pounds of biting pressure. They can chew through cement and even stone.
Vasiliy said, “Did she see the rat?”
“She didn’t know what it was. She screamed and flailed and it ran off. The emergency room told them it was a rat.”
Vasiliy went to the window that was open a few inches to let in a breeze. He pushed it open farther and looked down three stories to a narrow cobblestone alley. The fire escape was ten or twelve feet from the window, but
the centuries-old brick facing was uneven and craggy. People think of rats as squat and waddling, when in fact they move with squirrel-like agility. Especially when motivated by food or by fear.
Vasiliy pulled the girl’s bed away from the wall and shed its bedding. He moved a dollhouse, a bureau, and a bookcase in order to look behind them, but he did not expect to find the rat still in the bedroom. He was merely eliminating the obvious.
He stepped out into the hallway, pulling his wheeled cart along the smooth, varnished wood. Rats have poor eyesight and move largely by feel. They get about quickly by repetition, wearing paths along low walls, rarely traveling more than sixty feet from their nest. They don’t trust unfamiliar settings. This rat would have found the door and turned the corner, hugging the right-hand wall, his coarse fur gliding against the floorboard. The next open door led into a bathroom, the young daughter’s own, decorated with a strawberry-shaped bath mat, a pale pink shower curtain, and a basket of bath bubbles and toys. Vasiliy scanned the room for hiding places, then sniffed the air. He nodded to Billy, who then closed the door on him.
Billy lingered a minute, listening, then decided to head back out to reassure the mother. He was almost there when he heard, from the hallway bathroom, a terrific BANG!—the sound of bottles falling into the bathtub—and a loud grunt and Vasiliy’s voice, grown fierce, spurting Russian invective.
The mother and daughter looked stricken. Billy held out a hand to them in a gesture of patience—having accidentally swallowed his gum—then rushed back down the hall.
Vasiliy opened the bathroom door. He was wearing Kevlar-sleeved trapping gloves and holding a large sack. Something in the sack was writhing and pawing. And that something was big.
Vasiliy nodded once and handed the sack to Billy.
Billy couldn’t do anything other than take it, otherwise the sack would fall and the rat would escape. He hoped the fabric was as sturdy as it seemed, the big rat twisting and fighting inside. Billy held the sack out as far from his body as his arm would reach while still allowing him to hold the flailing rat aloft. Vasiliy was, meanwhile, calmly—but too slowly—opening his cart. He removed a sealed package, a sponge prepared with halothane. Vasiliy took back the sack, and Billy was only too happy to relinquish it. He opened the top just long enough to drop the anesthetic inside, then closed it again. The rat struggled just as violently at first. Then it began to slow down. Vasiliy shook the sack to speed up the process.
The Strain Page 22
