The Complete Strain Trilogy

  “Listen to what I have to say,” the old man continued. “Your friend here. He has been infected. You might say—bitten.”

  Gus looked over at unmoving Felix. “No. No, he’s just … the cops, they knocked him out.”

  “He is changing. He is in the grip of something beyond your comprehension. A disease that changes human people into non-people. This person is no longer your friend. He is turned.”

  Gus remembered seeing the fat man on top of Felix, their maniacal embrace, the man’s mouth going at Felix’s neck. And the look on Felix’s face—a look of terror and awe.

  “You feel how hot he is? His metabolism, racing. It takes great energy to change—painful, catastrophic changes are taking place inside his body now. The development of a parasitic organ system to accommodate his new state of being. He is metamorphosing into a feeding organism. Soon, twelve to thirty-six hours from the time of infection, but most likely tonight, he will arise. He will thirst. He will stop at nothing to satisfy his craving.”

  Gus stared at the old man as though in a state of suspended animation.

  Setrakian said, “Do you love your friend?”

  Gus said, “What?”

  “By ‘love,’ I mean honor, respect. If you love your friend—you will destroy him before he is completely turned.”

  Gus’s eyes darkened. “Destroy him?”

  “Kill him. Or else he will turn you.”

  Gus shook his head in slow motion. “But … if you say he’s already dead … how can I kill him?”

  “There are ways,” said Setrakian. “How did you kill the one who attacked you?”

  “A knife. That thing coming out of his mouth—I cut up that shit.”

  “His throat?”

  Gus nodded. “That too. Then a truck hit him, finished the job.”

  “Separating the head from the body is the surest way. Sunlight also works—direct sunlight. And there are other, more ancient methods.”

  Gus turned to look at Felix. Lying there, not moving. Barely breathing. “Why doesn’t anybody know about this?” he said. He turned back to Setrakian, wondering which one of them was crazy. “Who are you really, old man?”

  “Elizalde! Torrez!”

  Gus was so absorbed in the conversation that he never saw the cops enter the cell. He looked up at hearing his and Felix’s names and saw four policemen wearing latex gloves come forward, geared up for a struggle. Gus was pulled to his feet before he even knew what was happening.

  They tapped Felix’s shoulder, slapped at his knee. When that failed to rouse him, they lifted him up bodily, locking their arms underneath his. His head hung low and his feet dragged as they hauled him away.

  “Listen, please.” Setrakian got to his feet behind them. “This man—he is sick. Dangerously ill. He has a communicable disease.”

  “Why we wear these gloves, Pops,” called back one cop. They wrenched up Felix’s limp arms as they dragged him through the door. “We deal with STDs all the time.”

  Setrakian said, “He must be segregated, do you hear me? Locked up separately.”

  “Don’t worry, Pops. We always offer preferential treatment to killers.”

  Gus’s eyes stayed on the old man as the tank door was closed and the cops pulled him away.

  Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

  HERE WAS the bedroom of the great man.

  Climate controlled and fully automated, the presets adjustable through a small console just an arm’s reach away. The shushing of the corner humidifiers in concert with the drone of the ionizer and the whispering air-filtration system was like a mother’s reassuring hush. Every man, thought Eldritch Palmer, should slumber nightly in a womb. And sleep like a baby.

  Dusk was still many hours away, and he was impatient. Now that everything was in motion—the strain spreading throughout New York City with the sure exponential force of compound interest, doubling and doubling itself again every night—he hummed with the glee of a greedy banker. No financial success, of which there had been plenty, ever enlivened him as much as did this vast endeavor.

  His nightstand telephone toned once, the handset flashing. Any calls to this phone had to be routed through his nurse and assistant, Mr. Fitzwilliam, a man of extraordinary good judgment and discretion. “Good afternoon, sir.”

  “Who is it, Mr. Fitzwilliam?”

  “Mr. Jim Kent, sir. He says it is urgent. I am putting him through.”

  In a moment, Mr. Kent, one of Palmer’s many well-placed Stoneheart Society members, said, “Yes, hello?”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Kent.”

  “Yes—can you hear me? I have to talk quietly …”

  “I can hear you, Mr. Kent. We were cut off last time.”

  “Yes. The pilot had escaped. Walked away from testing.”

  Palmer smiled. “And he is gone now?”

  “No. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I followed him through the hospital until Dr. Goodweather and Dr. Martinez caught up with him. They said Redfern is okay, but I can’t confirm his status. I heard another nurse saying I was alone up here. And that members of the Canary project had taken over a locked room in the basement.”

  Palmer darkened. “You are alone up where?”

  “In this isolation ward. Just a precaution. Redfern must have hit me or something, he knocked me out.”

  Palmer was silent for a moment. “I see.”

  “If you would explain to me exactly what I am supposed to be looking for, I could assist you better—”

  “You said they have commandeered a room in the hospital?”

  “In the basement. It might be the morgue. I will find out more later.”

  Palmer said, “How?”

  “Once I get out of here. They just need to run some tests on me.”

  Palmer reminded himself that Jim Kent was not an epidemiologist himself, but more of a facilitator for the Canary project, with no medical training. “You sound as though you have a sore throat, Mr. Kent.”

  “I do. Just a touch of something.”

  “Mm-hmm. Good day, Mr. Kent.”

  Palmer hung up. Kent’s exposure was merely an aggravation, but the report about the hospital morgue room was troubling. Though in any worthy venture, there are always hurdles to overcome. A lifetime of deal making had taught him that it was the setbacks and pitfalls that make final victory so sweet.

  He picked up the handset again and pressed the star button.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Mr. Fitzwilliam, we have lost our contact within the Canary project. You will ignore any further calls from his mobile phone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And we need to dispatch a team to Queens. It seems there may be something in the basement of the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center that needs retrieving.”

  Flatbush, Brooklyn

  ANN-MARIE BARBOUR checked again to make sure that she had locked all the doors, then went through the house twice—room by room, top to bottom—touching every mirror twice in order to calm herself down. She could not pass any reflective surface without reaching out to it with the first two fingers of her right hand, a nod following each touch, a rhythmic routine resembling genuflection. Then she went through a third time, wiping each surface clean with a fifty-fifty mix of Windex and holy water until she was satisfied.

  When she felt in control of herself again, she phoned her sister-in-law, Jeanie, who lived in central New Jersey.

  “They’re fine,” said Jeanie, referring to the children, whom she had come and picked up the day before. “Very well behaved. How is Ansel?”

  Ann-Marie closed her eyes. Tears leaked out. “I don’t know.”

  “Is he better? You gave him the chicken soup I brought?”

  Ann-Marie was afraid her trembling lower jaw would be detected in her speech. “I will. I … I’ll call you back.”

  She hung up and looked out the back window, at the graves. Two patches of overturned dirt. Thinking of the dogs lying there.

  Ansel. What he had done to
them.

  She scrubbed her hands, then went through the house again, just the downstairs this time. She pulled out the mahogany chest from the buffet in the dining room and opened up the good silver, her wedding silver. Shiny and polished. Her secret stash, hidden there as another woman might hide candy or pills. She touched each utensil, her fingertips going back and forth from the silver to her lips. She felt that she would fall apart if she didn’t touch every single one.

  Then she went to the back door. She paused there, exhausted, her hand on the knob, praying for guidance, for strength. She prayed for knowledge, to understand what was happening, and to be shown the right thing to do.

  She opened the door and walked down the steps to the shed. The shed from which she had dragged the dogs’ corpses to the corner of the yard, not knowing what else to do. Luckily, there had been an old shovel underneath the front porch, so she didn’t have to go back into the shed. She buried them in shallow soil and wept over their graves. Wept for them and for her children and for herself.

  She stepped to the side of the shed, where orange and yellow mums were planted in a box beneath a small, four-pane window. She hesitated before looking inside, shading her eyes from the sunlight. Yard tools hung from pegboard walls inside, other tools stacked on shelves, and a small workbench. The sunlight through the window formed a perfect rectangle on the dirt floor, Ann-Marie’s shadow falling over a metal stake driven into the ground. A chain like the one on the door was attached to the stake, the end of which was obscured by her angle of vision. The floor showed signs of digging.

  She went back to the front, stopping before the chained doors. Listening.

  “Ansel?”

  No more than a whisper on her part. She listened again, and, hearing nothing, put her mouth right up to the half inch of space between the rain-warped doors.

  “Ansel?”

  A rustling. The vaguely animalistic sound terrified her … and yet reassured her at the same time.

  He was still inside. Still with her.

  “Ansel … I don’t know what to do … please … tell me what to do … I can’t do this without you. I need you, dearest. Please answer me. What will I do?”

  More rustling, like dirt being shaken off. A guttural noise, as from a clogged pipe.

  If she could just see him. His reassuring face.

  Ann-Marie reached inside the front of her blouse, drawing out the stubby key that hung on a shoelace there. She reached for the lock that secured the chain through the door handles and inserted the key, turning it until it clicked, the curved top disengaging from the thick steel base. She unwound the chain and pulled it through the metal handles, letting it fall to the grass.

  The doors parted, swinging out a few inches on their own. The sun was straight overhead now, the shed dark inside but for residual light from the small window. She stood before the opening, trying to see inside.

  “Ansel?”

  She saw a shadow stirring.

  “Ansel … you have to keep quieter, at night … Mr. Otish from across the street called the police, thinking it was the dogs … the dogs …”

  She grew teary, everything threatening to spill out of her.

  “I … I almost told him about you. I don’t know what to do, Ansel. What is the right thing? I am so lost here. Please … I need you …”

  She was reaching for the doors when a moanlike cry shocked her. He drove at the shed doors—at her—attacking from within. Only the staked chain jerked him back, strangling an animal roar in his throat. But as the doors burst open, she saw—before her own scream, before she slammed the doors on him like shutters on a ferocious hurricane—her husband crouched in the dirt, naked but for the dog collar tight around his straining neck, his mouth black and open. He had torn away most of his hair just as he had torn off his clothes, his pale, blue-veined body filthy from sleeping—hiding—beneath the dirt like a dead thing that had burrowed into its own grave. He bared his bloodstained teeth, eyes rolling back inside his head, recoiling from the sun. A demon. She wound the chain back through the handles with wildly fluttering hands and fastened the lock, then turned and fled back into her house.

  Vestry Street, Tribeca

  THE LIMOUSINE took Gabriel Bolivar straight to his personal physician’s office in a building with an underground garage. Dr. Ronald Box was the primary physician for many New York-based celebrities of film, television, and music. He was not a Rock Doc, or a Dr. Feelgood, a pure prescription-writing machine—although he was liberal with his electronic pen. He was a trained internist, and well versed in drug-rehabilitation centers, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis C, and other fame-related maladies.

  Bolivar went up the elevator in a wheelchair, clad only in a black robe, sunk into himself like an old man. His long, silken black hair had gone dry and was falling out in patches. He covered his face with thin, arthritic-like hands so that none would recognize him. His throat was so swollen and raw that he could barely speak.

  Dr. Box saw him right away. He was looking through images transferred electronically from the clinic. The images came with a note of apology from the head clinician, who saw only the results and not the patient, promising to repair their machines and suggesting another round of tests in a day or two. But, looking at Bolivar, Dr. Box didn’t think it was their equipment that was corrupt. He went over Bolivar with his stethoscope, listening to his heart, asking him to breathe. He tried to look into Bolivar’s throat, but the patient declined, wordlessly, his black-red eyes glaring in pain.

  “How long have you had those contact lenses in?” asked Dr. Box.

  Bolivar’s mouth curled into a jagged snarl and he shook his head.

  Dr. Box looked at the linebacker standing by the door, wearing a driver’s uniform. Bolivar’s bodyguard, Elijah—six foot six, two hundred and sixty pounds—looked very nervous, and Dr. Box was becoming frightened. He examined the rock star’s hands, which appeared aged and sore yet not at all fragile. He tried to check the lymph nodes under his jaw, but the pain was too great. The temperature reading from the clinic had read 123° F, a human impossibility, and yet, standing near enough to feel the heat coming off Bolivar, Dr. Box believed it.

  Dr. Box stood back.

  “I don’t really know how to tell you this, Gabriel. Your body, it seems, is riddled with malignant neoplasms. That’s cancer. I’m seeing carcinoma, sarcoma, and lymphoma, and all of it is wildly metastasized. There is no medical precedent for this that I am aware of, although I will insist on involving some experts in the field.”

  Bolivar just sat there, listening, a baleful look in his discolored eyes.

  “I don’t know what it is, but something has you in its grip. I do mean that literally. As far as I can tell, your heart has ceased beating on its own. It appears that the cancer is … manipulating the organ now. Beating it for you. Your lungs, the same. They are being invaded and … almost absorbed, transformed. As though …” Dr. Box was just realizing this now. “As though you are in the midst of a metamorphosis. Clinically, you could be considered deceased. It appears that the cancer is keeping you alive. I don’t know what else to say to you. Your organs are all failing, but your cancer … well, your cancer is doing great.”

  Bolivar sat staring into the middle distance with those frightful eyes. His neck bucked slightly, as though he were trying to formulate speech but could not get his voice past an obstruction.

  Dr. Box said, “I want to check you in to Sloan-Kettering right away. We can do so under an assumed name with a dummy social security number. It’s the top cancer hospital in the country. I want Mr. Elijah to drive you there now—”

  Bolivar emitted a rumbling chest groan that was an unmistakable no. He placed his hands on the armrests of the wheelchair and Elijah came forward to brace the rear handles as Bolivar rose to his feet. He took a moment regaining his balance, then picked at the belt of his robe with his sore hands, the knot falling open.

  Revealed beneath his robe was his lim
p penis, blackened and shriveled, ready to drop from his groin like a diseased fig from a dying tree.

  Bronxville

  NEEVA, THE LUSSES’ NANNY, still very much rattled by the events of the past twenty-four hours, left the children in the care of her nephew, Emile, while her daughter, Sebastiane, drove her back to Bronxville. She had kept the Luss children, Keene and his eight-year-old sister, Audrey, eating Frosted Flakes for lunch, and cubed fruit, things Neeva had taken with her from the Luss house when she’d fled.

  Now she was returning for more. The Luss children wouldn’t eat her Haitian cooking, and—more pressingly—Neeva had forgotten Keene’s Pulmicort, his asthma medication. The boy was wheezing and looking pasty.

  They pulled in to find Mrs. Guild’s green car in the Lusses’ driveway, the sight of which gave Neeva pause. She told Sebastiane to wait for her there, then got out and straightened her slip beneath her dress, going with her key to the side entrance. The door opened without any tone, the house alarm not set. Neeva walked through the perfectly appointed mudroom with built-in cubbies and coat hooks and heated tile floor—a mudroom that had never seen any mud—and pushed through the French doors into the kitchen.

  It did not appear that anyone had been in the room since she had left with the children. She stood still inside the doorway and listened with extraordinary attention, holding her breath for as long as she could before exhaling. She heard nothing.

  “Hallo?” she called a few times, wondering if Mrs. Guild, with whom she had a largely silent relationship—the housekeeper, Neeva suspected, was a silent racist—would answer. Wondering if Joan—a mother so devoid of natural maternal instinct as to be, for all her lawyerly success, like a child herself—would answer. And knowing, in both cases, that they would not.

  Hearing nothing, she crossed to the central island and laid her bag gently down on it, between the sink and the countertop range. She opened the snack cabinet, and quickly, a bit more like a thief than she had imagined, filled a Food Emporium bag with crackers and juice pouches and Smartfood popcorn—stopping once in a while to listen.

  After raiding the paneled refrigerator of string cheese and yogurt drinks, she noticed Mr. Luss’s number on the contact sheet taped to the wall near the kitchen phone. A bolt of uncertainty shot through her. What could she say to him? Your wife is ill. She is not right. So I take the children. No. As it was, she barely exchanged words with the man. There was something evil in this magnificent house, and her first and only duty—both as an employee and as a mother herself—was the safety of the children.