Guillermo del Toro - The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

His lower jaw descended and out wriggled something pink and fleshy that was not his tongue. It was longer, more muscular and complex…and squirming. As though he had swallowed a live squid, and one of its tentacles was still thrashing about desperately inside his mouth.

Eph jumped back. He grabbed the IV tree to keep from falling, and then upended it, using it like a prod to keep Redfern and that thing in his mouth at bay. Redfern grabbed the steel stand and then the thing in his mouth lashed out. It extended the six-foot distance of the IV tree, Eph spinning out of the way just in time. He heard the flap of the end of the appendage — narrowed, like a fleshy stinger — strike the wall. Redfern flung the stand to the side, cracking it in half, Eph tumbling with it backward into a room.

Redfern entered after him, still with that hungry look in his black-and-red eyes. Eph searched around wildly for anything that would help him keep this guy away from him, finding only a trephine in a charger on a shelf. A trephine is a surgical instrument with a spinning cylindrical blade generally used for cutting open the human skull during autopsy. The helicopter-type blade whirred to life, and Redfern advanced, his stinger mostly retracted yet still lolling, with flanking sacs of flesh pulsing at its sides. Before Redfern could attack again, Eph tried to cut it.

He missed, slicing a chunk out of the pilot’s neck. White blood kicked out, just as he had seen in the morgue, not spraying out arterially but spilling down his front. Eph dropped the trephine before its whirring blades could spit the substance at him. Redfern grabbed at his neck, and Eph picked up the nearest heavy object he could find, a fire extinguisher. He used the butt end of it to batter Redfern in the face — his hideous stinger Eph’s prime target. Eph smashed him twice more, Redfern’s head snapping back with the last blow, his spine emitting an audible crack.

Redfern collapsed, his body giving out. Eph dropped the tank and stumbled back, looking in horror at what he had done.

Nora came rushing in wielding a broken piece of the IV tree, then saw Redfern lying in a heap. She dropped the shaft and rushed to Eph, who caught her in his arms.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She nodded, her hand over her mouth. She pointed at Redfern and Eph looked down and saw the worms wriggling out of his neck. Reddish worms, as though blood filled, spilling out of Redfern’s neck like cockroaches fleeing a room when a light is turned on. Eph and Nora backed up to the open doorway.

“What the hell just happened?” said Eph.

Nora’s hand came away from her mouth. “Mr. Leech,” she said.

They heard a groan from the hallway — Jim — and rushed out to tend to him.

August was searing through the calendar and Abraham Setrakian, laying out beams for a suspended roof, felt its burden more than most. The sun was baking him, every day it was like this. But even more than that, he had come to loathe the night — his bunk and his dreams of home, which had formerly been his only respite from the horror of the death camp — and was now a hostage to two equally merciless masters.

The Dark Thing, Sardu, now spaced his visits to a regular pattern of twice-a-week feedings in Setrakian’s barracks, and probably the same in the other barracks as well. The deaths went completely unnoticed by guards and prisoners alike. The Ukrainian guards wrote the corpses off as suicides, and to the SS it meant only a change in a ledger entry.

In the months since the Sardu-Thing’s first visit, Setrakian — obsessed with the notion of defeating such evil — learned as much as he could from other local prisoners about an ancient Roman crypt located somewhere in the outlying forest. There, he was now certain, the Thing had made its lair, from whence it emerged each night to slake its ungodly thirst.

If Setrakian ever understood true thirst, it was that day. Water carriers circulated among the prisoners constantly, though many of them themselves fell prey to heat seizures. The burning hole was well fed that day. Setrakian had managed to collect what he needed: a length of raw white oak, and a bit of silver for the tip. That was the old way to dispose of the strigoi, the vampire. He had sharpened the tip for days before treating it with the silver. Smuggling it into his barracks alone took the better part of two weeks of planning. He had lodged it in an empty space directly behind his bed. If the guards ever found it, they would execute him on the spot, for there was no mistaking the shape of the hardwood as a weapon.

The night before, Sardu had entered the camp late, later than usual. Setrakian had lain very still, waiting patiently for it to begin feeding on an infirm Romani. He felt revulsion and remorse, and prayed for forgiveness — but it was a necessary part of his plan, for the half-gorged creature would be less alert.

The blue light of impending dawn filtered through the small grated windows at the east end of the barracks. Just what Setrakian had been waiting for. He pricked his index finger, drawing a perfect crimson pearl out of his dry flesh. Yet he was completely unprepared for what happened next.

He had never heard the Thing utter a sound. It conducted its unholy repast in utter silence. But now, at the smell of young Setrakian’s blood, the Thing groaned . The sound reminded Setrakian of the creaking sound of dry wood when twisted, or the sputter of water down a clogged drain.

In a matter of seconds, the Thing was at Setrakian’s side.

As the young man cautiously slid his hand back, reaching for the stake, the two locked eyes. Setrakian couldn’t help but turn toward it when it moved near his bed.

The Thing smiled at him.

“Ages since we fed looking into living eyes,” the Thing said. “Ages…”

Its breath smelled of earth and of copper, and its tongue clicked in its mouth. Its deep voice sounded like an amalgam of many voices, poured forth as though lubricated by human blood.

“Sardu…,” whispered Setrakian, unable to keep the name to himself.

The beady, burnished eyes of the Thing opened wider, and for a fleeting moment they looked almost human.

“He is not alone in this body,” it hissed. “How dare you call to him?”

Setrakian gripped the stake behind his bed, slowly sliding it out…

“A man has the right to be called by his own name before meeting God,” said Setrakian, with the righteousness of youth.

The Thing gurgled with joy. “Then, young thing, you may tell me yours…”

Setrakian made his move then, but the silver tip of the stake made a tiny scraping noise, revealing its presence a mere instant before it flew toward the Thing’s heart.

But that instant was enough. The Thing uncoiled its claw and stopped the weapon an inch from its own chest.

Setrakian tried to free himself, striking out with his other hand, but the Thing stopped that too. It lacerated the side of Setrakian’s neck with the tip of its stinger — just a gash, coming as fast as the blink of an eye, enough to inject him with the paralyzing agent.

Now it held the young man firmly by both hands. It raised him up from the bed.

“But you will not meet God,” the Thing said. “For I am personally acquainted with him, and I know him to be gone …”

Setrakian was on the verge of fainting from the vicelike pressure the claws exerted upon his hands. The hands that had kept him alive for so long in that camp. His brain was bursting with pain, mouth gaping, lungs gasping for breath, but no scream would surge from within.

The Thing looked deep into Setrakian’s eyes then, and saw his soul.

“Abraham Setrakian,” it purred. “A name so soft, so sweet, for a boy so full of spirit…” It moved close to his face. “But why destroy me, boy? Why am I so deserving of your wrath, when around you you find even more death in my absence. I am not the monster here. It is God. Your God and mine, the absent Father who left us all so long ago…In your eyes I see what you fear most, young Abraham, and it is not me…It is the pit. So now you shall see what happens when I feed you to it and God does nothing to stop it.”