The Complete Strain Trilogy

  He awoke hours later in a private room at one of Mexico’s best hospitals, surrounded by flowers, serenaded by well-wishers shouting from the street below.

  But his leg. It was shattered. Irreparably.

  The good doctor explained this to him with genial forthrightness, a man with whom Angel had shared a few afternoons of craps at the country club across from the film studios.

  In the months and years that followed, Angel spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his broken limb—in hopes of mending his fractured career and recovering his technique—but his skin hardened from the multiple scars crisscrossing the knee, and his bones refused to heal properly.

  In a final humiliation, a newspaper revealed his identity to the public, and, without the ambiguity and the mystery of the silver mask, Angel the common man became too pitied to be adored.

  The rest happened quickly. As his investments faltered, he worked as a trainer, then bodyguard, then as a bouncer, but his pride remained, and soon he found himself a burly old guy who scared no one. Fifteen years ago, he followed a woman to New York City and overstayed his visa. Now—like most people who end up in tenements—he had no clear idea how he had gotten here, only that he was indeed here, a resident in a building quite similar to one of six he used to own outright.

  But thinking of the past was dangerous and painful.

  Evenings, he worked as the dishwasher at the Tandoori Palace downstairs, just next door. He was able to stand for hours on busy nights by wrapping lengths of duct tape around two broad splints on either side of his knee, beneath his trousers. And there were many busy nights. Now and then, he cleaned the toilets and swept the sidewalks, giving the Guptas enough reason to keep him around. He had fallen to the bottom of this caste system—so low that now his most valuable possession was anonymity. No one had to know who he once was. In a way, he was wearing a mask again.

  For the past two evenings, the Tandoori Palace had remained closed—as had the grocery store next door, the other half of the neo-Bengali emporium the Guptas owned. No word from them, and no sign of their presence, no answer at their phone. Angel started to worry—no, not about them, truthfully, but about his income. The radio talked of quarantine, which was good for health but very bad for business. Had the Guptas fled the city? Perhaps they had gotten caught in some of the violence that had cropped up? In all this chaos, how would he know if they had been shot?

  Three months before, they had sent him out to make duplicates of the keys to both places. He had made triplicates—he didn’t know what had possessed him, certainly no dark impulse on his part but only a lesson learned in life: to be prepared for anything.

  Tonight, he decided, he would take a look. He needed to know. Just before dusk, Angel hauled himself down to the Guptas’ store. The street was quiet except for a dog, a black husky he had never seen in the neighborhood, barking at him from across the sidewalk—though something stopped the dog from crossing the street.

  The Guptas’ store had once been called The Taj Mahal, but now, after generations of graffiti and pamphlet removal, the painted logo had worn away so that only the rosy illustration of the Indian Wonder of the World remained. Strangely, it exhibited too many minarets.

  Now, someone had defaced the logo even further, spray-painting a cryptic design of lines and dots in fluorescent orange. The design, cryptic though it was, was fresh. The paint still glistened, a few threads of it slowly dripping at the corners.

  Vandals. Here. Yet the locks were in place, the door undamaged.

  Angel turned the key. When both bolts slid free, he limped inside.

  Everything was silent. The power had been cut, and so the refrigerator was off, all the meats and fish inside gone to waste. Light from the last of the sunset filtered in through the steel shutters over the windows, like an orange-gold mist. Deeper inside, the store was dark. Angel had brought two busted cell phones with him. The call functions did not work, but the screens and batteries still did, and he found that—thanks to a picture of his white wall he snapped during daylight—the screens made excellent lights for hanging on his belt or even strapped to his head for close work.

  The store was in absolute disarray. Rice and lentils covered the floor, spilled from several overturned containers. The Guptas would never have allowed this.

  Something, Angel knew, was deeply wrong.

  Above all else was the stench of ammonia. Not the eye-watering odor of the off-the-shelf cleaner kind he used to clean the toilets, but something more foul. Not pure like a chemical, but messy and organic. His phone illuminated several streaking trails of orange-tinged fluid along the floor, sticky and still wet. They led to the cellar door.

  The basement beneath the store communicated with the restaurant and, ultimately, with the belowground floors of his tenement building.

  Angel put a shoulder to the Guptas’ office door. He knew they kept an old handgun inside the desk. He found it, the weapon feeling heavy and oily, not at all like the shiny prop guns he used to wave around. He tucked one of the phones into his tight belt and returned to the cellar door.

  With his leg hurting more than ever, the old wrestler started down the slick steps. At the bottom, a door. This one had been broken, Angel saw—but from the inside. Someone had broken in from the cellar up to the store.

  Beyond the storeroom, Angel heard a hissing sound, evenly measured and prolonged. He went in with both the gun and his phone out.

  Another design defaced the wall. It resembled a bloom of six petals, or perhaps an inkblot: the center done in gold, the petals painted black. The paint still glistened, and he ran his light over all of it—maybe a bug, not a flower—before squeezing through the doorway into the next room.

  The ceiling was low, spaced with wooden beams for support. Angel knew the layout well. One passage led to a narrow stairway to the sidewalk, where they received food shipments three times a week. The other burrowed through to his tenement building. He started ahead toward his building when the toe of his shoe hit something.

  He aimed his phone light down onto the floor. At first he did not understand it. A person, sleeping. Then another. And two more near the stack of chairs.

  They weren’t sleeping, because he didn’t hear any snoring or deep breathing, and yet they weren’t dead, because he didn’t smell death.

  At that very moment, outside, the last of the sun’s direct rays disappeared from the East Coast sky. Night was upon the city, and newly turned vampires, those in their first days, responded very literally to the cosmic edict of sundown and sunup.

  The slumbering vampires began to stir. Angel had stumbled unwittingly into a vast nest of undead. He did not need to wait to see their faces to know that this—people rising en masse from the floor of a darkened cellar—was not anything he wanted to be part of, nor indeed present for.

  He moved to the narrow space in the wall toward the burrow to his building—one he had seen both ends of but never had the occasion to cross—only to see more figures beginning to rise, blocking his way.

  He did not yell or give any warning. He fired the weapon, but was not prepared for the intensity of light and sound inside that constricted space.

  Nor were his targets, who appeared more affected by the reports and the bright flash of flame than they were by the lead rounds that pierced their bodies. He fired three more times, achieving the same effect, and then twice behind him, sensing the others’ approach.

  The gun clicked empty.

  He threw it down. Only one option remained. An old door he had never opened—because he had never been able to, a door with no knob or handle, stuck within a compressed wooden frame surrounded by rock wall.

  Angel pretended it was a prop door. Told himself it was a breakaway piece of balsa wood. He had to. He gripped the phone in his fist and lowered his shoulder and ran at it full-force.

  The old wood scraped away from its frame, dislodging dust and dirt as the lock cracked and it burst open. Angel and his balky leg stumbled thr
ough—nearly falling into a gang of punks on the other side.

  The bangers raised guns and silver swords at him, staggered by his bulk, about to slay him.

  “Madre Santisima!” exclaimed Angel. Holy Mother of God!

  Gus, at the head of the pack, was about to run this vampire motherfucker through when he heard him speak—and speak Spanish. The words stopped Gus—and the vampire-hunting Sapphires behind him—just in time.

  “Me lleva la chingada—que haces tu aca, muchachon?” said Gus. What the fuck are you doing here, big boy?

  Angel said nothing, letting his facial expression do all the talking as he turned and pointed behind him.

  “More bloodsuckers,” said Gus, understanding. “That’s what we’re here for.” He stared at the big man. There was something noble and familiar about him.

  “Te conozco?” said Gus. Do I know you? To which the wrestler answered with a quick shrug, but no more words.

  Alfonso Creem charged through the doorway, armed with a thick silver rapier with a bell-cup hilt to protect his hand from the blood worms. That protection was negated by the use of his other hand, bare except for a silver-knuckled multi-finger ring inscribed with fake diamonds spelling C-R-E-E-M.

  He went after the vampires with furious chops and brutal blows. Gus was right behind him, a UV lamp in one hand, a silver sword in the other. More Sapphires followed close behind.

  Never fight in a basement was a tenet of both street fighting and warfare, but it couldn’t be avoided in a vamp hunt. Gus would have preferred to firebomb the place, if he could be guaranteed full mortality. But these vamps always seemed to have another way out.

  There were more nesting vamps than they had bargained for, and the white blood spilled like sludgy, sour milk. Still, they cut and chopped their way through, and, when they were done, they returned to Angel, who remained standing on the other side of the broken door.

  Angel was in a state of shock. He had recognized the Guptas among Creem’s victims, and he couldn’t get over their undead faces, and the creature howls they emitted when the Colombian hacked at their white-blooded throats.

  These were the types of punks he used to slap around in his movies. “Que chingados pasa?” What is all this?

  “The end of the world,” said Gus. “Who are you?”

  “I’m … I am nobody,” Angel said, recovering. “I worked here.” He pointed up at an angle. “Live there.”

  “Your entire building is infested, man.”

  “Infested? Are they really …?”

  “Vampires? You bet your ass.”

  Angel felt dizzy—disoriented—this couldn’t be happening. Not to him. A whirl of emotions overtook him and amid them he was able to recognize one that had long ago deserted him.

  It was excitement.

  Creem was flexing his silver fist. “Leave him. These freaks are waking up all over the place, and I still got some more killing in me.”

  “What do you say?” asked Gus, turning back to his fellow countryman. “Nothing for you here.”

  “Look at that knee,” said Creem. “No one’s going to slow me up, get me turned into one of them stingers.”

  Gus pulled a small sword from the Sapphires’ equipment bag and handed it to Angel. “This is his building. Let’s see if he can earn his keep.”

  As though some sort of psychic alarm had been sounded, the vampire residents of Angel’s building were ready for battle. The undead emerged from every doorway, climbing effortlessly through obstacles and staircases.

  During a stairway battle, Angel saw a neighbor of his, a seventy-three-year-old woman with a walker, use the banister as a jumping point to traverse the stairwell between floors. She and others moved with the stupefying grace of primates.

  In his movies, the enemy announced itself with a glower, and accommodated the hero by moving slowly for the kill. Angel didn’t exactly “earn his keep,” though his brute strength did give him certain advantages. His wrestling knowledge came back to him in close combat situations, despite his limited mobility. And he felt like an action hero once again.

  Like evil spirits, the undead kept coming. As though summoned from the surrounding buildings, wave after wave of pale, slithery-tongued creatures swarmed up from the lower floors, and the tenement walls ran white. They fought them the way firemen fight fires, pushing back, tamping out flare-ups, and attacking hot spots. They functioned as a stone-cold execution squad, and Angel would later be amazed to learn that this was their inaugural nighttime assault. Two of the Colombians were stung, lost to the scourge—and yet when they were done, the punks only seemed to want more.

  Compared to this, they said, daylight hunting was a breeze.

  Once they had stemmed the tide, one of the Colombians found a carton of smokes and they all lit up. Angel hadn’t smoked in years, but the taste and the smell blocked out the stench of the dead things. Gus watched the smoke dissipate and offered up a silent prayer for the departed.

  “There is a man,” said Gus. “An old pawnbroker over in Manhattan. He was the first to clue me to these vamps. Saved my soul.”

  “No chance,” said Creem. “Why go all the way across the river when there is killing galore here?”

  “You meet this guy, you’ll understand why.”

  “How do you know he’s still kickin’ it?”

  “I sure hope he is. We’re going over the bridge at first light.”

  Angel took a minute then to return to his apartment for the last time. His knee ached as he looked around: unwashed clothes heaped in the corner, dirty dishes in his sink, the general squalor of the place. He had never taken any pride in his living condition—and it shamed him now. Perhaps, he sensed, he knew all the time that he was destined for something better—something he could never have foreseen—and he was just waiting for the call.

  He threw some extra clothes into a grocery bag, including his knee brace, and then lastly—almost ashamedly, because taking it was like admitting it was his most cherished possession, all he had left of who he once was—he grabbed the silver mask.

  He folded the mask into his jacket pocket and, with it next to his heart, he realized that, for the first time in decades, he felt good about himself.

  The Flatlands

  EPH FINISHED TENDING to Vasiliy’s injuries, giving particular attention to cleaning out the worm hole in his forearm. The rat-catcher had sustained a great deal of damage, but none of it permanent, except maybe the hearing loss and ringing in his right ear. The metal shard came out of his leg and he hobbled on it but did not complain. He was still standing. Eph admired that, and felt a bit like an Ivy League momma’s boy by his side. For all his education and scholarly achievements, Eph felt infinitely less useful to the cause than Fet.

  But that would soon change.

  The exterminator opened his poison closet, showing Setrakian his bait packs and traps, his halothane bottles and toxic blue kibble. Rats, he explained, lacked the biological mechanism for vomiting. The main function of emesis is to purge a body of toxic substances, which was why rats were particularly susceptible to poisoning. Why they had evolved and developed other traits to compensate for this. One was that they could ingest just about anything, including nonfood materials such as clay or concrete, which helped to dilute a toxin’s effect on the rat’s body until they could get rid of the poison as waste. The other was the rats’ intelligence, their complex food-avoidance strategies that aided in their survival.

  “Funny thing,” said Fet, “is that when I ripped out that thing’s throat, and got a good look in there?”

  “Yes?” said Setrakian.

  “The way it looked to me, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they can’t puke either.”

  Setrakian nodded, thinking on that. “I believe you are correct,” he said. “May I ask, what is the chemical makeup of these rodenticides?”

  “Depends,” said Fet. “These use thallium sulfate, a heavy metal salt that attacks the liver, brain, and muscle. Odorless, colorless, and hig
hly toxic. These over here use a common mammalian blood-thinner.”

  “Mammalian? What, something like Coumadin?”

  “No, not something like. Exactly like.”

  Setrakian looked at the bottle. “So I myself have been taking rat poison for some years now.”

  “Yep. You and millions of other people.”

  “And this does what?”

  “Same thing it would do to you if you took too much of it. The anticoagulant leads to internal hemorrhaging. Rats bleed out. It’s not pretty.”

  In picking up the bottle to examine its label, Setrakian noticed something on the shelf behind it. “I do not wish to alarm you, Vasiliy. But aren’t these mouse droppings?”

  Fet pushed his way in for a closer look. “Motherfucker!” he said. “How can this be?”

  “A minor infestation, I’m sure,” said Setrakian.

  “Minor, major, what does it matter? This is supposed to be Fort Knox!” Fet knocked over a few bottles, trying to see better. “This is like vampires breaking into a silver mine.”

  While Fet was obsessively searching the back of the closet for more evidence, Eph watched Setrakian slip one of the bottles inside his coat pocket.

  Eph followed Setrakian away from the closet, catching him alone. “What are you going to do with that?” he said.

  Setrakian showed no guilt at having been discovered. The old man’s cheeks were sunken, his flesh a pale shade of gray. “He said it is essentially blood thinner. With all the pharmacies being raided, I would not like to run out.”

  Eph studied the old man, trying to see the truth behind his lie.

  Setrakian said, “Nora and Zack are ready for their journey to Vermont?”

  “Just about. But not Vermont. Nora had a good point—it’s Kelly’s parents’ place, she might be drawn to it. There’s a girls’ camp Nora knows, from growing up in Philadelphia. It’s off-season now. Three cabins on a small island in the middle of a lake.”

  “Good,” said Setrakian. “The water will keep them safe. How soon do you leave for the train station?”

  “Soon,” said Eph, checking his wristwatch. “We still have a little time.”