Guillermo Del Toro - The Complete Strain Trilogy - The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal

Then a wrenching pain, from deep within her bowels, doubled her over fast. The machete fell to the plywood and a scream that was a shriek of anguish and violation came out of Glory’s mouth. She felt something rippling up her arm—beneath her flesh now, her skin crawling—and while her mouth was open and still screaming, another thin capillary worm slithered from behind her neck and across her jaw to her lip, darting inside the wall of her cheek, wriggling down the back of her throat.

NIGHT WAS FAST approaching as Eph drove east, over the Cross Island Parkway, into Nassau County.

Eph said, “So you’re telling me that the passengers from the city morgues, the ones the entire city is looking for—they all just went home?”

The old professor sat in the backseat with his hat on his lap. “Blood wants blood,” he said. “Once turned, the revenants first seek out family and friends still uninfected. They return, by night, to those with whom they share an emotional attachment. Their ‘Dear Ones.’ Like a homing instinct, I suppose. The same animal impulse that guides lost dogs hundreds of miles back to their owners. As their higher brain function falls away, their animal nature takes over. These are creatures driven by urges. To feed. To hide. To nest.”

“Returning to the people who are mourning them,” said Nora, sitting next to Eph in the front passenger seat. “To attack and infect?”

“To feed. It is the nature of the undead to torment the living.”

Eph exited the highway in silence. This vampire business was the mental equivalent of eating bad food: his mind refused to digest it. He chewed and chewed but could not get it down.

When Setrakian had asked him to pick a passenger from the list of Flight 753 victims, the first one who came to mind was the young girl Emma Gilbarton. The one he had found still holding hands with her mother in the airplane. It seemed a good test for Setrakian’s hypothesis. How could an eleven-year-old dead girl journey at night from a Queens morgue all the way out to her family home in Freeburg?

But now, as he pulled up outside the Gilbartons’ address—a stately looking Georgian on a broad side street of widely spaced properties—Eph realized that, were they wrong, he was about to wake up a man grieving for the end of his family, the loss of his wife and only child.

This was something Eph knew a little bit about.

Setrakian stepped out of the Explorer, fixing his hat on his head, carrying the long walking stick that he did not need for support. The street was quiet at that evening hour, lights glowing inside some of the other houses, but no people out and about, no cars driving past. The windows of the Gilbartons’ house were all dark. Setrakian handed them each a battery-powered light with dark bulbs that looked like their Luma lamps, only heavier.

They went to the door and Setrakian rang the doorbell by using the head of the walking stick. He tried the doorknob when no one answered, using the gloved part of his hand only, keeping his bare fingertips off the knob. Not leaving any fingerprints.

Eph realized that the old man had done this sort of thing before.

The front door was firmly locked. “Come,” said Setrakian.

They went back down the stairs, and started around the house. The backyard was a wide clearing set on the edge of an old wood. The early moon provided decent light, enough to cast faint shadows of their bodies over the grass.

Setrakian stopped and pointed with his walking stick.

A bulkhead rose out at an angle from the cellar, its doors wide open to the night.

The old man continued to the bulkhead, Eph and Nora following. Stone steps led down into a dark cellar. Setrakian scanned the high trees buffering the backyard.

Eph said, “We can’t just go inside.”

“This is exceedingly unwise after sundown,” Setrakian said. “But we do not have the luxury of waiting.”

Eph said, “No, I mean—this is trespassing. We should call the police first.”

Setrakian took Eph’s lamp from him with a scolding look. “What we have to do here … they would not understand.”

He switched on the lamp, two purple bulbs emitting black light. It was similar to the medical-grade wands Eph used, but brighter and hotter, and fitted with bigger batteries.

“Black light?” said Eph.

“Black light is merely long-wave ultraviolet, or UVA. Revealing, but harmless. UVB is medium wave, can cause sunburn or skin cancer. This”—he took care to aim the beam away from them, as well as himself—“is short-wave UVC. Germicidal, used for sterilization. Excites and smashes DNA bonds. Direct exposure is very harmful to human skin. But to a vampire—this is weapons grade.”

The old man started down the steps with the lamp, his walking stick in his other hand. The ultraviolet spectrum provides little real illumination, the UVC light adding to the gloom of the situation rather than alleviating it. Over the stone walls on the sides of the stairs, as they passed from the chill of the night into the cool of a cement-foundation cellar, moss glowed a spectral white.

Inside, Eph made out the dark outline of stairs going up to the first floor. A laundry area and an old-fashioned pinball machine.

And a body lying on the floor.

A man laid out in plaid pajamas. Eph started toward him with the impulse of a trained physician—then stopped himself. Nora groped the wall opposite the inside door, flipping the switch there, but no light came on.

Setrakian moved toward the man, thrusting the lamp close to his neck. The weird indigo glow revealed a small, perfectly straight fissure in glowing blue, just left of the center of his throat.

“He is turned,” said Setrakian.

The old man pushed the Luma lamp back into Eph’s hands. Nora turned on hers and shone it over the man’s face, revealing a mad subcutaneous being, a scowling, deathlike mask shifting and writhing, looking indefinably, yet undoubtedly, evil.

Setrakian went and found, leaning against a corner workbench, a new ax with a glossy wooden handle and a shiny red-and-silver steel blade. He returned with it in his gnarled hands.

“Wait,” said Eph.

Setrakian said, “Please stand back, Doctor.”

“He’s just lying here,” said Eph.

“He will soon arise.” The old man gestured to the stone steps leading up to the open bulkhead doors, his eyes never leaving the man on the floor. “The girl is out there now. Feeding on others.” Setrakian readied the ax. “I don’t ask that you condone this, Doctor. All I ask right now is that you step aside.”

Eph saw the determination in Setrakian’s face and knew the old man would swing whether or not he was in his way. Eph stepped back. The blade was heavy for Setrakian’s size and age, the old man bringing both arms up over his head, the flat of the blade almost at the back of his waist.

Then his arms relaxed. His elbows lowered.

His head turned toward the open bulkhead doors, listening.

Eph heard it then too. The crunching of dry grass being flattened.

He imagined it was an animal, at first. But no. The crunching had the simple cadence of a biped.

Footsteps. Human—or once-human. Approaching.

Setrakian lowered the ax. “Stand by the door. Silently. Close it behind her once she enters.” He took the lamp back from Eph, pressing the ax into his hands in trade. “She must not escape.”

He withdrew to where his walking stick stood against the wall, on the opposite side of the door—then switched off the hot lamp, disappearing into total darkness.

Eph stood beside the open cellar door, his back to the wall, flat up against it. Nora was next to him, both of them shivering in the basement of a stranger’s house. The footsteps were closer, light and soft on the ground.