The Complete Strain Trilogy

  Outside the unit, a woman with wiry hair pulled back under a wide headband stood up from the plastic chair she had pulled in from the lobby. Jim shared an apartment in the East Eighties with his girlfriend, Sylvia, a horoscope writer for the New York Post. She brought five cats to the relationship, and he brought one finch, making for a very tense household. “Can I go in?” said Sylvia.

  “Sorry, Sylvia. Rules of the isolation wing—only medical personnel. But Jim said to tell you that he’s feeling fine.”

  Sylvia gripped Eph’s arm. “What do you say?”

  Eph said, tactfully, “He looks very healthy. We want to run some tests, just in case.”

  “They said he passed out, he was a bit woozy. Why the isolation ward?”

  “You know how we work, Sylvia. Rule out all the bad stuff. Go step by step.”

  Sylvia looked to Nora for female reassurance.

  Nora nodded and said, “We’ll get him back to you as soon as we can.”

  Downstairs, in the hospital basement, Eph and Nora found an administrator waiting for them at the door to the morgue. “Dr. Goodweather, this is completely irregular. This door is never to be locked, and the hospital insists on being informed of what is going on—”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Graham,” said Eph, reading her name off her hospital ID, “but this is official CDC business.” He hated pulling rank like a bureaucrat, but occasionally being a government employee had its advantages. He took out the key he had appropriated and unlocked the door, entering with Nora. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, locking it again behind him.

  The lights came on automatically. Redfern’s body lay underneath a sheet on a steel table. Eph selected a pair of gloves from the box near the light switch and opened up a cart of autopsy instruments.

  “Eph,” said Nora, pulling on gloves herself. “We don’t even have a death certificate yet. You can’t just cut him open.”

  “We don’t have time for formalities. Not with Jim up there. And besides—I don’t even know how we’re going to explain his death in the first place. Any way you look at it, I murdered this man. My own patient.”

  “In self-defense.”

  “I know that. You know that. But I certainly don’t have the time to waste explaining that to the police.”

  He took the large scalpel and drew it down Redfern’s chest, making the Y incision from the left and right collarbones down on two diagonals to the top of the sternum, then straight down the center line of the trunk, over the abdomen to the pubis bone. He then peeled back the skin and underlying muscles, exposing the rib cage and the abdominal apron. He didn’t have time to perform a full medical autopsy. But he did need to confirm some things that had shown up on Redfern’s incomplete MRI.

  He used a soft rubber hose to wash away the white, blood-like leakage and viewed the major organs beneath the rib cage. The chest cavity was a mess, cluttered with gross black masses fed by spindly feeders, veinlike offshoots attached to the pilot’s shriveled organs.

  “Good God,” said Nora.

  Eph studied the growths through the ribs. “It’s taken him over. Look at the heart.”

  It was misshapen, shrunken. The arterial structure had been altered also, the circulatory system grown more simplified, the arteries themselves covered over with a dark, cancerous blight.

  Nora said, “Impossible. We’re only thirty-six hours out from the plane landing.”

  Eph flayed Redfern’s neck then, exposing his throat. The new construct was rooted in the midneck, grown out of the vestibular folds. The protuberance that apparently acted as a stinger lay in its retracted state. It connected straight into the trachea, in fact fusing with it, much like a cancerous growth. Eph elected not to anatomize further just yet, hoping instead to remove the muscle or organ or whatever it was in its entirety at a later time, to study it whole and determine its function.

  Eph’s phone rang then. He turned so that Nora could pull it from his pocket with her clean gloves. “It’s the chief medical examiner’s office,” she said, reading the display. She answered it for him, and after listening for a few moments, told the caller, “We’ll be right there.”

  Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan

  DIRECTOR BARNES ARRIVED at the OCME at Thirtieth and First at the same time as Eph and Nora. He stepped from his car, unmistakable in his goatee and navy-style uniform. The intersection was jammed with police cars and TV news crews set up outside the turquoise front of the morgue building.

  Their credentials got them inside, all the way to Dr. Julius Mirnstein, the chief medical examiner for New York. Mirnstein was bald but for tufts of brown hair on the sides and back of his head, long faced, dour by nature, wearing the requisite white doctor’s coat over gray slacks.

  “We think we were broken into overnight—we don’t know.” Dr. Mirnstein looked at an overturned computer monitor and pencils spilled from a cup. “We can’t get any of the overnight staff on the phone.” He double-checked that with an assistant who had a telephone to her ear, and who shook her head in confirmation. “Follow me.”

  Down in the basement morgue, everything appeared to be in order, from the clean autopsy tables to the countertops, scales, and measuring devices. No vandalism here. Dr. Mirnstein led the way to the walk-in refrigerator and waited for Eph, Nora, and Director Barnes to join him.

  The body cooler was empty. The stretchers were all still there, and a few discarded sheets, as well as some articles of clothing. A handful of dead bodies remained along the left wall. All the airplane casualties were gone.

  “Where are they?” said Eph.

  “That’s just it,” said Dr. Mirnstein. “We don’t know.”

  Director Barnes stared at him for a moment. “Are you telling me that you believe someone broke in here overnight and stole forty-odd corpses?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Dr. Barnes. I was hoping your people could enlighten me.”

  “Well,” said Barnes, “they didn’t just walk away.”

  Nora said, “What about Brooklyn? Queens?”

  Dr. Mirnstein said, “I have not heard from Queens yet. But Brooklyn is reporting the same thing.”

  “The same thing?” said Nora. “The airline passengers’ corpses are gone?”

  “Precisely,” said Dr. Mirnstein. “I called you here in the hopes that perhaps your agency had claimed these cadavers without our knowledge.”

  Barnes looked at Eph and Nora. They shook their heads.

  Barnes said, “Christ. I have to get on the phone with the FAA.”

  Eph and Nora caught him before he did, away from Dr. Mirnstein. “We need to talk,” said Eph.

  The director looked from face to face. “How is Jim Kent?”

  “He looks fine. He says he feels fine.”

  “Okay,” said Barnes. “What?”

  “He has a perforation wound in his neck, through the throat. The same as we found on the Flight 753 victims.”

  Barnes scowled. “How can that be?”

  Eph briefed him on Redfern’s escape from imaging and the subsequent attack. He pulled an MRI scan from an oversize X-ray envelope and stuck it up on a wall reader, switching on the backlight. “This is the pilot’s ‘before’ picture.”

  The major organs were in view, everything looked sound. “Yes?” said Barnes.

  Eph said, “This is the ‘after’ picture.” He put up a scan showing Redfern’s torso clouded with shadows.

  Barnes put on his half-glasses. “Tumors?”

  Eph said, “It’s—uh—hard to explain, but it is new tissue, feeding off organs that were completely healthy just twenty-four hours ago.”

  Director Barnes pulled down his glasses and scowled again. “New tissue? What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “I mean this.” Eph went to a third scan, showing the interior of Redfern’s neck. The new growth below the tongue was evident.

  “What is it?” asked Barnes.

  “A stinger,” answered Nora. “Of some so
rt. Muscular in construction. Retractable, fleshy.”

  Barnes looked at her as if she was crazy. “A stinger?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Eph, quick to back her up. “We believe it’s responsible for the cut in Jim’s neck.”

  Barnes looked back and forth between them. “You’re telling me that one of the survivors of the airplane catastrophe grew a stinger and attacked Jim Kent with it?”

  Eph nodded and referred to the scans again as proof. “Everett, we need to quarantine the remaining survivors.”

  Barnes checked Nora, who nodded rigorously, with Eph on this all the way.

  Director Barnes said, “The inference is that you believe this … this tumorous growth, this biological transformation … is somehow transmissible?”

  “That is our supposition and our fear,” said Eph. “Jim may well be infected. We need to determine the progression of this syndrome, whatever it is, if we want to have any chance at all of arresting it and curing him.”

  “Are you telling me you saw this … this retractable stinger, as you call it?”

  “We both did.”

  “And where is Captain Redfern now?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “His prognosis?”

  Eph answered before Nora could. “Uncertain.”

  Barnes looked at Eph, now starting to sense that something wasn’t kosher.

  Eph said, “All we are requesting is an order to compel the others to receive medical treatment—”

  “Quarantining three people means potentially panicking three hundred million others.” Barnes checked their faces again, as though for final confirmation. “Do you think this relates in any way to the disappearance of these bodies?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eph. What he almost said was, I don’t want to know.

  “Fine,” said Barnes. “I will start the process.”

  “Start the process?”

  “This will take some doing.”

  Eph said, “We need this now. Right now.”

  “Ephraim, what you have presented me with here is bizarre and unsettling, but it is apparently isolated. I know you are concerned for the health of a colleague, but securing a federal order of quarantine means that I have to request and receive an executive order from the president, and I don’t carry those around in my wallet. I don’t see any indication of a potential pandemic just yet, and so I must go through normal channels. Until that time, I do not want you harassing these other survivors.”

  “Harassing?” said Eph.

  “There will be enough panic without our overstepping our obligations. I might point out to you, if the other survivors have indeed become ill, why haven’t we heard from them by now?”

  Eph had no answer.

  “I will be in touch.”

  Barnes went off to make his calls.

  Nora looked at Eph. She said, “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” She could see right through him.

  “Don’t go looking up the other survivors. Don’t screw up our chance of saving Jim by pissing off this lawyer woman or scaring off the others.”

  Eph was stewing when the outside doors opened. Two EMTs wheeled in an ambulance gurney with a body bag set on top, met by two morgue attendants. The dead wouldn’t wait for this mystery to play itself out. They would just keep coming. Eph foresaw what would happen to New York City in the grip of a true plague. Once the municipal resources were overwhelmed—police, fire, sanitation, morticians—the entire island, within weeks, would degenerate into a stinking pile of compost.

  A morgue attendant unzipped the bag halfway—and then emitted an uncharacteristic gasp. He backed away from the table with his gloved hands dripping white, the opalescent fluid oozing from the black rubber bag, down the side of the stretcher, onto the floor.

  “What the hell is this?” the attendant asked the EMTs, who stood by the doorway looking particularly disgusted.

  “Traffic fatality,” said one, “following a fight. I don’t know … must have been a milk truck or something.”

  Eph pulled gloves from the box on the counter and approached the bag, peering inside. “Where’s the head?”

  “In there,” said the other EMT. “Somewhere.”

  Eph saw that the corpse had been decapitated at the shoulders, the remaining mass of its neck splattered with gobs of white.

  “And the guy was naked,” added the EMT. “Quite a night.”

  Eph drew the zipper all the way down to the bottom seam. The headless corpse was overweight, male, roughly fifty. Then Eph noticed its feet.

  He saw a wire wound around the bare big toe. As though there had been a casualty tag attached.

  Nora saw the toe wire also, and blanched.

  “A fight, you say?” said Eph.

  “That’s what they told us,” said the EMT, opening the door to the outside. “Good day to you, and good luck.”

  Eph zipped up the bag. He didn’t want anyone else seeing the tag wire. He didn’t want anyone asking him questions he couldn’t answer.

  He turned to Nora. “The old man.”

  Nora nodded. “He wanted us to destroy the corpses,” she remembered.

  “He knew about the UV light.” Eph stripped off his latex gloves, thinking again of Jim, lying alone in isolation—with who could say what growing inside him. “We have to find out what else he knows.”

  17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan

  SETRAKIAN COUNTED thirteen other men inside the room-size cage with him, including one troubled soul with fresh scratches on his neck, squatting in the corner and rubbing spit vigorously into his hands.

  Setrakian had seen worse than this, of course—much worse. On another continent, in another century, he had been imprisoned as a Romanian Jew in World War II, in the extermination camp known as Treblinka. He was nineteen when the camp was brought down in 1943, still a boy. Had he entered the camp at the age he was now, he would not have lasted a few days—perhaps not even the train ride there.

  Setrakian looked at the Mexican youth on the bench next to him, the one he had first seen in booking, who was now roughly the same age Setrakian had been when the war ended. His cheek was an angry blue and dried black blood clogged the slice beneath his eye. But he appeared to be uninfected.

  Setrakian was more concerned about the youth’s friend, lying on the bench next to him, curled up on his side, not moving.

  For his part, Gus, feeling angry and sore, and jittery now that his adrenaline was gone, grew wary of the old man looking over at him. “Got a problem?”

  Others in the tank perked up, drawn by the prospect of a fight between a Mexican gangbanger and an aged Jew.

  Setrakian said to him, “I have a very great problem indeed.”

  Gus looked at him darkly. “Don’t we all, then.”

  Setrakian felt the others turning away, now that there would be no sport to interrupt their tedium. Setrakian took a closer look at the Mexican’s curled-up friend. His arm lay over his face and neck, his knees were pulled up tight, almost into a fetal position.

  Gus was looking over at Setrakian, recognizing him now. “I know you.”

  Setrakian nodded, used to this, saying, “118th Street.”

  “Knickerbocker Loan. Yeah—shit. You beat my brother’s ass one time.”

  “He stole?”

  “Tried to. A gold chain. He’s a druggie shitbag now, nothing but a ghost. But back then, he was tough. Few years older than me.”

  “He should have known better.”

  “He did know better. Why he tried it. That gold chain was just a trophy, really. He wanted to defy the street. Everybody warned him, ‘You don’t fuck with the pawnbroker.’”

  Setrakian said, “The first week I took over the shop, someone broke my front window. I replaced it—and then I watch, and I wait. Caught the next bunch who came to break it. I gave them something to think about, and something to tell their friends. That was more than thirty years ago. I haven’t had a problem with
my glass since.”

  Gus looked at the old man’s crumpled fingers, outlined by wool gloves. “Your hands,” he said. “What happened, you get caught stealing once?”

  “Not stealing, no,” said the old man, rubbing his hands through the wool. “An old injury. One I did not receive medical attention for until much too late.”

  Gus showed him the tattoo on his hand, making a fist so that the webbing between his thumb and forefinger swelled up. It showed three black circles. “Like the design on your shop sign.”

  “Three balls is an ancient symbol for a pawnbroker. But yours has a different meaning.”

  “Gang sign,” said Gus, sitting back. “Means thief.”

  “But you never stole from me.”

  “Not that you knew, anyway,” said Gus, smiling.

  Setrakian looked at Gus’s pants, the holes burned into the black fabric. “I hear you killed a man.”

  Gus’s smile went away.

  “You were not wounded? The cut on your face, you received from the police?”

  Gus stared at him now, like the old man might be some kind of jailhouse informer. “What’s it to you?”

  Setrakian said, “Did you get a look inside his mouth?”

  Gus turned to him. The old man was leaning forward, almost in prayer. Gus said, “What do you know about that?”

  “I know,” said the old man, without looking up, “that a plague has been loosed upon this city. And soon the world beyond.”

  “This wasn’t no plague. This was some crazy psycho with kind of a … a crazy-ass tongue coming up out of his …” Gus felt ridiculous saying this aloud. “So what the fuck was that?”

  Setrakian said, “What you fought was a dead man, possessed by a disease.”

  Gus remembered the look on the fat man’s face, blank and hungry. His white blood. “What—like a pinche zombie?”

  Setrakian said, “Think more along the lines of a man with a black cape. Fangs. Funny accent.” He turned his head so that Gus could hear him better. “Now take away the cape and fangs. The funny accent. Take away anything funny about it.”

  Gus hung on the old man’s words. He had to know. His somber voice, his melancholy dread, it was contagious.