The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro; Chuck Hogan

  Eph said, “He’s not crazy.”

  “He show you this?” Fet asked. He crossed to the glass specimen jar, the afflicted heart suspended in fluid. “Guy keeps the heart of a vampire he killed as a pet in his basement armory. He’s plenty crazy. But that’s okay. I’m a little crazy too.” He knelt down, putting his face close to the jar. “Here, kitty, kitty…” The sucker shot out at the glass, trying to get him. Fet straightened and turned to Eph with a look of Can-you-believe-this? “This is all a bit more than I bargained for when I woke up this morning.” He sighted the nail gun on the jar, then pulled off his aim, liking the feel of it. “Mind if I claim this?”

  Eph shook his head. “Be my guest.”

  E ph returned upstairs, slowing in the hallway, seeing Setrakian with Zack in the kitchen. Setrakian lifted a silver chain off his own neck—containing the key to the basement workshop—and with his crooked fingers he placed it over Zack’s head, hanging it around the eleven-year-old’s neck, then patted his shoulders.

  “Why did you do that?” Eph asked Setrakian once they were alone.

  “There are things downstairs—notebooks, writings—that should be preserved. That future generations may find helpful.”

  “You’re not planning on coming back?”

  “I am taking every conceivable precaution.” Setrakian looked around, making certain they were alone. “Please understand. The Master has power and speed well beyond that of these clumsy new vampires we are seeing. He is more than even we know. He has dwelled upon this earth for centuries. And yet…”

  “And yet he is a vampire.”

  “And vampires can indeed be destroyed. Our best hope is to flush him out. To hurt him and drive him into the killing sun. Why we must wait for the dawn.”

  “I want to go now.”

  “I know you do. That is exactly what he wants.”

  “He has my wife. Kelly is where she is for one reason only—because of me.”

  “You have a personal stake here, Doctor, and it is compelling. But you must know that, if he has her, she is already turned.”

  Eph shook his head. “She is not.”

  “I don’t say this to anger you—”

  “She is not!”

  Setrakian nodded after a moment. He waited for Eph to compose himself.

  Eph said, “Alcoholics Anonymous has done a great deal for me. But the one thing I never got out of it was the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

  Setrakian said, “I am the same. Perhaps it is this shared trait that has led us to this point together. Our goals are in perfect alignment.”

  “Almost perfect,” said Eph. “Because only one of us can actually slay the bastard. And it’s going to be me.”

  N ora had been waiting anxiously to speak with Eph, pouncing on him once he stepped away from Setrakian, pulling him into the old man’s tiled bathroom.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Ask me what you’re going to ask me.” She implored him with her fierce brown eyes. “Don’t.”

  Eph said, “But I need you to—”

  “I am scared shitless—but I have earned a place at your side. You need me.”

  “I do. I need you here. To watch Zack. Besides—one of us has to stay behind. To carry on. In case…” He left that unsaid. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “Too much.”

  Eph could not stop looking in her eyes. He said, “I have to go after her.”

  “I know.”

  “I just want you to know…”

  “There’s nothing to explain,” she said. “But—I’m glad you want to.”

  He pulled her close then, into a tight embrace. Nora’s hand went up to the back of his head, caressing his hair. She pulled away to look at him, to say something more—and then kissed him instead. It was a good-bye kiss that insisted on his return.

  They parted and he nodded to let her know he understood.

  He saw Zack watching them from the hallway.

  Eph didn’t try to explain anything to him now. Leaving the beauty and goodness of this boy and departing from the perceived safety of the surface world to go down and face a demon was the most unnatural thing Eph could do. “You’ll stay with Nora, okay? We’ll talk when I come back.”

  Zack’s preteen squint was self-protective, the emotions of the moment too raw and confusing for him. “Come back from where?”

  He pulled his son close, wrapping him up in his arms as though otherwise the boy he loved would fracture into a million pieces. Eph resolved there and then to prevail because he had too much to lose.

  They heard yelling and automobile horns outside, and everyone went to the west-facing window. A mass of brake lights clotted the road some four or more blocks away, people taking to the streets and fighting. A building was in flames and there were no fire trucks anywhere in sight.

  Setrakian said, “This is the beginning of the breakdown.”

  Morningside Heights

  GUS HAD BEEN on the run since the night before. The handcuffs made it difficult for him to move freely on the streets: the old shirt he had found, and wound around his forearms, as if he was walking with his arms crossed, wouldn’t have fooled many. He ducked into a movie theater through the back exit and slept in the darkness. He thought of a chop shop he knew over on the West Side, and spent a considerable amount of time making his way over there, only to find it empty. Not locked up, just empty. He dug through the tools he could find there, trying to cut the links joining his wrists. He even ran an electric jigsaw, held with a vise, and nearly sliced his wrists open in the process. He couldn’t do anything one-handed, and eventually left in disgust.

  He went by the haunts of a few of his cholos but couldn’t click up with anyone he trusted. The streets were weird—there wasn’t much going on. He knew what was happening. When the sun started going down, he knew that his time and his options would be running out.

  It was risky going home, but he hadn’t seen many cops all day, and anyway he was worried about his madre. He slipped inside the building, trying to keep his shirt-balled hands casual, making for the stairs. Sixteen flights up. Once there, he walked down the hallway and saw no one. He listened at the door. The TV was playing, as usual.

  He knew the bell didn’t work, so he knocked. He waited and knocked again. He kicked at the foot plate, rattling the door and the cheap walls.

  “Crispin,” he hissed at his dirtbag brother. “Crispin, you shit. Open the fucking door.”

  Gus heard the chain lock being undone and the bolt turning inside. He waited, but the door never opened. So Gus unwound the shirt covering his cuffed hands and turned the knob.

  Crispin was standing back in the corner, to the left of the couch, which was his bed, when he came around. The shades were all drawn and the refrigerator door was open in the kitchen.

  “Where’s Mama?” said Gus.

  Crispin said nothing.

  “Fucking pipehead,” said Gus. He closed the fridge. Some stuff had melted and there was water on the floor. “She asleep?”

  Crispin said nothing. He stared at Gus.

  Gus started to get it. He took a better look at Crispin, who barely rated a glance from him anymore, and saw his black eyes and drawn face.

  Gus went to the window and whipped apart the shades. It was night. There was smoke in the air from a fire below.

  Gus turned to face Crispin, across the apartment, and Crispin was already charging him, howling. Gus got his arms up and got the handcuff chain across his brother’s neck, under his jaw. High enough so that he couldn’t get his stinger out.

  Gus grasped the back of his head with his hands and pushed Crispin down to the floor. His vampire brother’s black eyes bugged and his jaw bucked as his mouth tried to open, which Gus’s strangling grip would not allow. Gus was intent on suffocating him, but as time went by and Crispin kept kicking, and there was no blacking out—Gus remembered that vampires didn’t need to breathe and could n
ot be killed that way.

  So he pulled him up by his neck, Crispin’s hands clawing at Gus’s arms and hands. For the past few years, Crispin had been nothing but a drag on their mother and a big pain in the ass for Gus. Now he was a vampire and the brother part of him was gone but the asshole part remained. And so it was retribution that moved Gus to wheel him headfirst into the decorative mirror on the wall, an old oval of heavy glass that didn’t crack until it slid down to the floor. Gus kneed Crispin, throwing him down onto the floor, and then grabbed the largest shard of glass. Crispin wasn’t quite to his knees when Gus rammed the point through the back of his neck. It severed the spine and poked the skin out of the front of his neck without quite ripping it. Gus worked the glass piece sideways, slicing Crispin’s head nearly off—but forgetting its sharpness against his own hands, cutting his palms. The pain stabbed at him, but he did not let go of the broken glass until his brother’s head was removed from its body.

  Gus staggered back, looking at the bloody slash across each of his palms. He wanted to make certain none of those worms wriggling out with Crispin’s white blood got into him. They were on the carpet and hard to see, so Gus stayed away. He looked at his brother, in pieces on the floor, and felt sickened by the vampire part of him, but as to the loss, Gus was numb. Crispin had been dead to him for years.

  Gus washed his hands at the sink. The cuts were long but not deep. He used a gummy dish towel to stop the bleeding and went to his mother’s bedroom.

  “Mama?”

  His only hope was that she not be there. Her bed was made and empty. He turned to leave, then thought twice and got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed. Just her sweater boxes and the arm weights she’d bought ten years ago. He was on his way back to the kitchen when he heard a rustling in the closet. He stopped, listening again. He went to the door and opened it. All of his mother’s clothes were pulled down off the hanging rack, lumped in a big pile on the floor.

  The pile was moving. Gus tugged back an old yellow dress with shoulder pads and his madre’s face leered out at him, black eyed and sallow skinned.

  Gus closed the door again. Didn’t slam it and run off, he just closed it and stood there. He wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come, only a sigh, a soft, deep whimper, and then he turned and looked around his mother’s bedroom for a weapon to cut her head off with…

  …and then he realized what the world had come to. Instead, he turned back to the closed door, leaning his forehead against it.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered. “Lo siento. I should have been here. I should have been here…”

  He walked, dazed, into his own room. He couldn’t even change his shirt, thanks to the handcuffs. He stuffed some clothes into a paper bag for when he could change, and crumpled it up under his arm.

  Then he remembered the old man. The pawnshop on 118th Street. He would help him. And help him fight this thing.

  He left his apartment, exiting into the hall. People stood down at the elevator end, and Gus lowered his head and started toward them. He didn’t want to be recognized, didn’t want to have to deal with any of his mother’s neighbors.

  He was about halfway to the elevators when he realized they weren’t talking or moving. Gus looked up and saw that the three people there were standing and facing him. He stopped when he realized that their eyes, their dark eyes, were hollow too. Vampires, blocking his exit.

  They started coming down the hall at him, and the next thing he knew, he was hammering away at them with his cuffed hands, throwing them against walls, smashing their faces into the floor. He kicked them when they were down, but they didn’t stay down for long. He gave none of them the chance to get their stingers out, crushing a few skulls with the heel of his heavy boots as he ran to the elevator, the doors closing as they reached it.

  Gus stood alone in the elevator car, catching his breath, counting down the floors. His bag was gone—it had ripped open, leaving his clothes strewn about the hallway.

  The numbers got to L and the doors dinged open on Gus standing in a crouch, ready for a fight.

  The lobby was empty. But outside the door, a faint orange glow flickered, and there were screams and howls. He went out into the street, seeing the blaze on the next block, the flames jumping to neighboring buildings. He saw people in the streets with wooden planks and other makeshift weapons, running toward the blaze.

  From the other direction, he saw another loose gang of six people, no weapons, walking, not running. A lone man came running past Gus the other way, saying, “Fuckers everywhere, man!” and then he was pounced upon by the group of six. To an untrained eye, it would have looked like a good old-fashioned street mugging, but Gus saw a mouth stinger by the orange light of the flames. Vampires turning people in the street.

  While he was watching, an all-black SUV with bright halogen lamps rolled up fast out of the smoke. Cops. Gus turned and chased his headlamp shadow down the street—running right into the gang of six. They came at him, their pale faces and black eyes lit up by the headlights. Gus heard car doors open and boots hit the pavement, and he was caught between these two fates. He raced at the snarling vampires, swinging his bound fists and butting them in the chest with his head. He didn’t want to give them a chance to open their mouths on him. But then one of them hooked its arm inside Gus’s cuffs and twisted him around, dragging him to the ground. In a second, the herd was on top of him, fighting over who would be the one to drink from his neck.

  There was a thwok sound, and a vampire squeal. Then a splat, and one of the vampires’ heads was gone.

  The one on top of him was hit from the side and suddenly knocked away. Gus rolled over and got to his knees in the middle of this street fight.

  These weren’t cops at all. They were men in black hoodies, their faces obscured, black combat pants and black jump boots. They were firing pistol crossbows and larger crossbows with wooden rifle stocks. Gus saw one guy sight a vampire and put a bolt in his neck. Before the vampire even had time to raise his hands to his throat, the bolt exploded with enough force to disintegrate his neck, removing the head.

  Dead vampire.

  The bolts were silver tipped and top loaded with an impact charge.

  Vampire hunters. Gus stared in amazement at these guys. Other vampires were coming out of the doorways, and these shooters were throat accurate at twenty-five, even thirty yards.

  One of them came up fast on Gus, as though mistaking him for a vamp, and before Gus could even speak, the hunter put a boot on his arms, pinning them against the road. He reloaded his crossbow and aimed it at the links joining Gus’s cuffs. A silver bolt split the steel, embedding itself in the asphalt. Gus winced, but there was no explosive charge. His hands were apart, though still in cop bracelets, and the hunter hauled him up onto his feet with startling strength.

  “Shit yeah!” said Gus, overjoyed by the sight of these guys. “Where do I sign up!”

  But his savior had slowed, something catching his eye. Gus looked more closely into the shadowy recesses of his sweatshirt hood, and the face there was eggshell white. Its eyes were black and red, and its mouth was dry and nearly lipless.

  The hunter was staring at the bloody lines across Gus’s palms.

  Gus knew that look. He had just seen it in his brother’s and his mother’s eyes.

  He tried to pull back, but the grip on his arm was lock solid. The thing opened its mouth and the tip of its stinger appeared.

  Then another hunter came up, holding its crossbow to this hunter’s neck. The new hunter pulled back Gus’s hunter’s hood, and Gus saw the bald, earless head, the aged eyes of a mature vampire. The vampire snarled at his brethren’s weapon, then surrendered Gus to the new hunter, whose pale vampire face Gus glimpsed as he was lifted aloft, carried to the black SUV, and thrown into the third-row seat.

  The rest of the hooded vampires climbed back inside the vehicle and it took off, wheeling a hard U-turn in the middle of the avenue. Gus was the only human inside the SUV
.

  A smack to the temple knocked him out cold. The SUV raced back toward the burning building, bursting through the street smoke like an airplane punching through a cloud, then screaming past the rioting, rounding the next corner and heading farther uptown.

  The Bathtub

  THE SO-CALLED BATHTUB of the fallen World Trade Center, the seven-stories-deep foundation, was lit up as bright as day for overnight work even in the minutes before dawn. Yet the construction site was still, the great machines quiet. The work that had continued around the clock almost since the towers’ collapse had, for the time being, all but ceased.

  “Why this?” asked Eph. “Why here?”

  “It drew him,” said Setrakian. “A mole hollows out a home in the dead trunk of a felled tree. Gangrene forms in a wound. He is rooted in tragedy and pain.”

  Eph, Setrakian, and Fet sat in the back of Fet’s van, parked at Church and Cortlandt. Setrakian sat by the rear-door windows with a nightscope. Very little traffic rolled past, only the occasional predawn taxi or delivery truck. No pedestrians or any other signs of life. They were looking for vampires and not finding any.

  Setrakian, his eye still to the scope, said, “It’s too bright here. They don’t want to be seen.”

  Eph said, “We can’t keep looping around the site again and again.”

  “If there are as many as we suspect,” said Setrakian, “then they must be nearby. To return to the lair before sunrise.” He looked at Fet. “Think like vermin.”

  Fet said, “I will tell you this. I’ve never seen a rat go in anywhere through the front door.” He thought about it some more, then pushed past Eph toward the front seats. “I have an idea.”

  He rolled north on Church to City Hall, one block northeast of the WTC site. A large park surrounded it, and Fet pulled into a bus space on Park Row, killing the engine.

  “This park is one of the biggest rat nests in the city. We tried pulling out the ivy, ’cause it was such good ground cover. Changed the garbage containers, but it was no use. They play here like squirrels, especially at noon when the lunch crowd comes. Food makes them happy, but they can get food just about anywhere. It’s infrastructure that rats really crave.” He pointed to the ground. “Underneath, in there, is an abandoned subway station. The old City Hall stop.”