The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro; Chuck Hogan

  He waited a few more moments after the fighting stopped, then opened the sack and reached inside, pulling the rat out tail first. It was sedated but not unconscious, its pink-digited front paws still digging their sharp nails into the air, its jaw snapping, its shiny black eyes open. This was a good-size one, maybe eight inches of body, the tail another eight. Its tough fur was dark gray on top, dirty white below. Nobody’s escaped pet, this was a wild city rat.

  Billy had moved many steps back. He had seen plenty of rats in his day, yet he never got used to them. Vasiliy seemed to be okay with it.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said. Rats gestate for just twenty-one days and can birth a litter of up to twenty pups. One healthy female can breed two hundred and fifty pups each year—with half of that litter more females ready to mate. “Want me to bleed her for the lab?”

  Billy shook his head, showing almost as much disgust as though Vasiliy had asked if he wanted to eat it. “The girl had her shots at the hospital. Look at the size, Vaz. In the good name of Christ. I mean, this isn’t”—Billy lowered his voice—“this isn’t some tenement in Bushwick, you catch my drift?”

  Vasiliy did catch his drift. Intimately. Vasiliy’s parents had first settled in Bushwick after they came over. Bushwick had seen waves of émigrés since the mid-1800s: the Germans, the English, the Irish, the Russians, the Polish, the Italians, the African Americans, the Puerto Ricans. Now it was Dominicans, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Ecuadorians, Indians, Koreans, Southeast Asians. Vasiliy spent a lot of time in the poorest neighborhoods of New York. He knew of families who used couch cushions, books, and furniture to wall off parts of their apartments every night, trying to keep out rats.

  But this attack, indeed, was different. Daylight. The boldness. Usually it is only the weakest rats, forced out of the colony, who surface in search of food. This was a strong, healthy female. Highly unusual. Rats coexist in a fragile balance with man, exploiting the vulnerabilities of civilization, living off the larger breed’s waste and refuse, lurking just out of sight, behind the walls or beneath the floorboards. The appearance of a rat symbolizes human anxiety and fear. Any incursion beyond the usual nocturnal scavenging indicates an alteration in the environment. Like man, rats are not accustomed to taking unnecessary risks: they have to be forced from the underground.

  “Want me to comb it for fleas?”

  “Christ, no. Just bag it and get rid of it. Whatever you do, don’t show it to the girl. She’s traumatized enough as it is.”

  Vasiliy pulled a large plastic bag from his kit and sealed the rat inside it with another sponge of halothane, this one a fatal dose. He stuffed the bag inside the sack to hide the evidence, then continued about his business, starting in the kitchen. He pulled out the heavy, eight-burner stove and the dishwasher. He checked the pipe holes under the sink. He saw no droppings, no burrows, but he seeded a little bait behind the cabinets anyway, because he was there. He did so without telling the occupants. People get nervous about poison, especially parents, but the truth is that rat poison is all over every building and street in Manhattan. Anything you see that resembles berry blue Pop Rocks or green kibble, you know rats have been spotted nearby.

  Billy followed him down into the basement. It was neat and orderly, with no evident trash or soft refuse for nesting. Vasiliy scanned the space, sniffing for droppings. He had a good nose for rats, just as rats had a good nose for humans. He switched off the light, much to Bill’s discomfort, and switched on the flashlight he wore clipped to the belt of his light blue overalls, shining purple instead of white. Rodent urine shows up indigo blue under black light, but here he saw none. He baited the crawl spaces with rodenticide and put down corner “motel”-type traps, just in case, then followed Billy back up to the lobby.

  Billy thanked Vasiliy and told him he owed him one, and they went their separate ways at the door. Vasiliy was still puzzled though, and, after returning his kit and the dead rat to the back of his van, lit a Dominican corona and started walking. He went down the street and around to the cobblestone alley he had looked down upon from the girl’s window. Tribeca was the sole remaining neighborhood in Manhattan with any alleys left.

  Vasiliy hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he saw his first rat. Skittering along the edge of a building, feeling its way around. He then saw another on the branch of a small, struggling tree grown up alongside a short brick wall. And a third, squatting in the stone gutter, drinking brown effluent flowing from some unseen garbage or sewage source.

  As he stood there watching, rats started appearing out of the cobblestones. Literally, clawing up from between the worn-down stones, surfacing from the underground. Rats’ skeletons are collapsible, allowing them to squeeze through holes no larger than the size of their skulls, about three-quarters of an inch in width. They were coming up through the gaps in twos and threes, and quickly scattering. Using the twelve-by-three stones as a ruler, Vasiliy estimated that these rats ranged from eight to ten inches in body length, doubled by their tail. In other words, fully grown adults.

  Two garbage bags near him were twitching and bulging, rats eating their way through their insides. A small rat tried to dart past him to a trash barrel, and Vasiliy kicked out with his work boot, punting the muncher back fifteen feet. It landed in the middle of the alley, not moving. Within seconds, the other rats were greedily upon it, long, yellow incisors biting through fur. The most effective and efficient way to exterminate rats is to remove the food source from their environment and then let them eat one another.

  These rats were hungry, and they were on the run. Such daytime surface activity was practically unheard of. This kind of mass displacement only happened in the wake of an event such as an earthquake or a building collapse.

  Or, occasionally, a large construction project.

  Vasiliy continued another block south, crossing Barclay Street to where the city opened up to the sky above, a sixteen-acre job site.

  He stepped up to one of the viewing platforms overlooking the location of the former World Trade Center. They were nearing completion of the deep underground basin meant to support the new construction, the cement and steel columns now starting to rise out of the ground. The site existed like a gouge in the city—like the gnaw in the little girl’s face.

  Vasiliy remembered that apocalyptic September of 2001. A few days after the Twin Towers’ collapse, he had gone in with the health department, starting with the shuttered restaurants around the perimeter of the site, clearing away abandoned food. Then down into the basements and underground rooms, never once seeing a live rat, but plenty of evidence of their presence, including miles of rat tracks enshrined in the settled dust. He remembered most vividly a Mrs. Fields cookie shop, almost entirely eaten through. The rat population was exploding at the site, the concern being that the rats would spill out of the ruins in search of new food sources, swarming into the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. So a massive, federally funded containment program was undertaken. Thousands of bait stations and steel-wire traps were set down in and around Ground Zero, and, thanks to Vasiliy’s vigilance and that of others like him, the feared invasion never did materialize.

  Vasiliy remained on a government contract to this day, his department overseeing a rat-control study in and around Battery Park. So he was pretty well caught up on local infestations, and had been throughout the beginnings of the construction project. And until now everything had been business as usual.

  He looked down at the trucks pouring cement and the cranes moving rubble. He waited three minutes for a young boy to finish with one of the mounted viewfinders—the same kind they have on the top of the Empire State Building—then dropped in his two quarters and scanned the work site.

  In a moment, he saw them, their little brown bodies scuttling out from corners, racing around stone piles, a few scampering hell bent for leather up the access road toward Liberty Street. Racing around rebar spikes marking the foundation of the Freedom Tower as though running a goddamned obstacle
course. He looked for the breaks where the new construction would connect underground with the PATH subway. Then he turned the viewfinder higher and followed a line of them scrambling up the underpinnings of a steel platform along the east corner, clambering out onto strung wires. They were racing out of the basin, a mass exodus, following any escape route they could find.

  Isolation Ward, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

  BEHIND THE SECOND DOOR of the isolation ward, Eph pulled on latex gloves. He would have insisted that Setrakian do the same, but another look at his crooked fingers made Eph wonder if it would even be possible.

  They walked inside Jim Kent’s bay, the only occupied station in the otherwise empty ward. Jim lay sleeping now, still in his street clothes, wires from his chest and hand leading to machines whose readings were quiet. The attending nurse had said his levels were dipping so low that all the automatic alarms—low heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, oxygen levels—had to be muted, because they kept going off.

  Eph pushed past the hanging curtains of clear plastic, feeling Setrakian grow tense beside him. As they got close, Kent’s vitals rose on all the readout screens—which was highly irregular.

  “Like the worm in the jar,” said Setrakian. “He senses us. He senses that blood is near.”

  “Can’t be,” said Eph.

  He advanced farther. Jim’s vitals and brainwave activity increased.

  “Jim,” said Eph.

  His face was slack in sleep, his dark skin turning a putty gray color. Eph could see his pupils moving fast beneath his eyelids in a kind of manic REM sleep.

  Setrakian drew back the last intervening layer of clear curtain with the silver wolf’s head of his tall walking staff. “Not too close,” he warned. “He is turning.” Setrakian reached into his coat pocket. “Your mirror. Take it out.”

  The inside-front pocket of Eph’s jacket was weighed down by a four-inch-by-three-inch silver-framed mirror, one of the many items the old man had collected from his basement vampire armory.

  “You see yourself in there?”

  Eph saw his reflection in the old glass. “Sure.”

  “Please use it to look at me.”

  Eph turned it at an angle, so as to view the old man’s face. “Okay.”

  Nora said, “Vampires have no reflection.”

  Setrakian said, “Not quite. Please now—with caution—use it to look at his face.”

  Because the mirror was so small, Eph needed to step closer to the bed, his arm outstretched, holding the glass at an angle over Jim’s head.

  He couldn’t pick up Jim’s reflection at first. The image looked as though Eph’s hand were violently shaking. But the background, the pillow and bed frame, were still.

  Jim’s face was a blur. It looked as though his head was shaking with tremendous speed, or vibrating with such force that his features were imperceptible.

  He pulled his arm back fast.

  “Silver backing,” said Setrakian, tapping his own mirror. “That is the key. Today’s mass-produced mirrors, with their chrome-sprayed backing, they won’t reveal anything. But silver-backed glass always tells the truth.”

  Eph looked at himself in the mirror again. Normal. Except for the slight trembling of his own hand.

  He angled the glass over Jim Kent’s face again, trying to hold it still—and saw the tremulous blur that was Jim’s reflection. As though his body were in the throes of something furious, his being vibrating too hard and too fast to be visibly rendered.

  Yet to the naked eye he lay still and serene.

  Eph handed it to Nora, who shared his astonishment, and his fear. “So this means…he’s turning into a thing…a thing like Captain Redfern.”

  Setrakian said, “Following normal infection, they can complete their transformation and activate to feeding after just one day and night. It takes seven nights for one to fully turn, for the disease to consume the body and reshape it to its own end—its new parasitic state. Then about thirty nights to total maturity.”

  Nora said, “Total maturity?”

  The old man said, “Pray we don’t see that phase.” He gestured toward Jim. “The arteries of the human neck offer the quickest access point, though the femoral artery is another direct route into our blood supply.”

  The neck breach was so neat it was not visible at the moment. Eph said, “Why blood?”

  “Oxygen, iron, and many other nutrients.”

  “Oxygen?” asked Nora.

  Setrakian nodded. “Their host bodies change. Part of the turning is that the circulatory and digestive systems merge, becoming one. Similar to insects. Their own blood substance lacks the iron-and-oxygen combination that accounts for the red color of human blood. Their product turns white.”

  “And the organs,” Eph said. “Redfern’s looked almost like cancers.”

  “The body system is being consumed and transformed. The virus takes over. They no longer breathe. They respire, merely as a vestigial reflex, but they don’t oxygenate anymore. The unneeded lungs eventually shrivel and are readapted.”

  Eph said, “Redfern, when he attacked, exhibited a highly developed growth in his mouth. Like a well-developed muscular stinger underneath the tongue.”

  Setrakian nodded as though agreeing with Eph about the weather. “It engorges as they feed. Their flesh flushes almost crimson, their eyeballs, their cuticles. This stinger, as you call it, is in fact a reconversion, a repurposing of the old pharynx, trachea, and lung sacs with the newly developed flesh. Something like the sleeve of a jacket being reversed. The vampire can expel this organ from its own chest cavity, shooting out well over four and up to even six feet. If you anatomize a mature victim, you would find a muscular tissue, a sack that propels this for feeding. All they require is the regular ingestion of pure human blood. They are maybe like diabetics in that way. I don’t know. You are the doctor.”

  “I thought I was,” mumbled Eph. “Until now.”

  Nora said, “I thought vampires drank virgin blood. They hypnotize…they turn into bats…”

  Setrakian said, “They are much romanticized. But the truth is more…how should I say?”

  “Perverse,” said Eph.

  “Disgusting,” said Nora.

  “No,” said Setrakian. “Banal. Did you find the ammonia?”

  Eph nodded.

  “They have a very compact digestive system,” Setrakian continued. “No room for storing the food. Any undigested plasma and any other residues have to be expelled to make room for incoming nourishment. Much like a tick—excreting as it feeds.”

  Suddenly the temperature inside the bay changed. Setrakian’s voice dropped to an icy whisper.

  “Strigoi,” he hissed. “Here.”

  Eph looked at Jim. Jim’s eyes were open, his pupils dark, the sclera around them turning grayish orange, almost like an uncertain sky at dusk. He was staring at the ceiling.

  Eph felt a spike of fear. Setrakian stiffened, his gnarled hand poised near the wolf’s-head handle of his walking stick—ready to strike. Eph felt the electricity of his intent, and was shocked by the deep, ancient hatred he saw in the old man’s eyes.

  “Professor…” said Jim, on a slight groan escaping from his lips.

  Then his eyelids fell closed again, Jim lapsing back into a REM-like trance.

  Eph turned to the old man. “How did he…know you?”

  “He doesn’t,” said Setrakian, still on alert, poised to strike. “He is like a drone now, becoming part of a hive. A body of many parts but one single will.” He looked at Eph. “This thing must be destroyed.”

  “What?” said Eph. “No.”

  “He is no longer your friend,” said Setrakian. “He is your enemy.”

  “Even if that is true—he is still my patient.”

  “This man is not ill. He has moved into a realm beyond illness. In a matter of hours, no part of him will remain. Apart from all that—it is supremely dangerous, keeping him here. As with the pilot, you will be placing the peop
le in this building at great risk.”

  “What if…what if he doesn’t get blood?”

  “Without nourishment, he will begin caving. After forty-eight hours without feeding, his body will begin to fail, his system cannibalizing his body’s human muscle and fat cells, slowly and painfully consuming itself. Until only the vampiric systems prevail.”

  Eph was shaking his head, hard. “What I need to do is formulate some protocol for treatment. If this disease is caused by a virus, I need to work toward finding a cure.”

  Setrakian said, “There is only one cure. Death. Destruction of the body. A merciful death.”

  Eph said, “We’re not veterinarians here. We can’t just put down people who are too ill to survive.”

  “You did so with the pilot.”

  Eph stuttered, “That was different. He attacked Nora and Jim—he attacked me.”

  “Your philosophy of self-defense, if truly applied, absolutely holds in this situation.”

  “So would a philosophy of genocide.”

  “And if that is their goal—total subjugation of the human race—what is your answer?”

  Eph didn’t want to get tangled up in abstractions here. He was looking at a colleague. A friend.

  Setrakian saw that he was not going to change their minds here, not just yet. “Take me to the pilot’s remains, then. Perhaps I can convince you.”

  No one spoke on the elevator ride down to the basement. There, instead of finding the locked morgue room, they found the door open and the police and the hospital administrator huddling around it.