The Strain

“Since about twelve, sir.”

“No break?” said Eph. “What about during the eclipse?”

“I stood right out here.” He pointed to a spot a few yards away from the door. “No one went by me.”

Eph looked back at Nora.

Nora said, “What in the hell is going on?” She looked at the duty officer. “Who else might have seen a great big coffin?”

Eph frowned at the word “coffin.” He looked back into the hangar, and then up at the security cameras in the rafters.

He pointed. “They did.”

Eph, Nora, and the Port Authority site log duty officer walked up the long, steel staircase to the control office overlooking the maintenance hangar. Below, mechanics were removing the aircraft’s nose for a look at the internals.

Four drone cameras ran constantly inside the hangar: one at the door leading to the office stairs; one trained on the hangar doors; one up in the rafters—the one Eph had pointed to—and one in the room they were standing in now. All displayed on a four-square screen.

Eph asked the maintenance foreman, “Why the camera in this room?”

The foreman shrugged. “Prolly ’cause this is where the petty cash is.”

He took his seat, a battered office chair whose armrests were striped with duct tape, and worked the keyboard beneath the monitor, expanding the rafter view to full screen. He scanned back through the security recording. The unit was digital, but a few years old, and too distorted to make out anything clearly during the rewind.

He stopped it. On the screen, the cabinet lay exactly where it had, on the edge of the off-loaded cargo.

“There it is,” said Eph.

The duty officer nodded. “Okay. So let’s see where it went.”

The foreman punched it forward. It ran more slowly than the rewind, but was still pretty fast. The light in the hangar darkened with the occultation, and when it brightened again, the cabinet was gone.

“Stop, stop,” said Eph. “Back it up.”

The foreman backed up a little, pressed play again. The time code on the bottom showed the image playing more slowly than before.

The hangar dimmed and at once the cabinet was again gone.

“What the—?” said the foreman, hitting pause.

Eph said, “Go back just a bit.”

The foreman did, then let it play through in real time.

The hangar dimmed, still lit by the interior work lights. The cabinet was there. And then it vanished.

“Wow,” said the duty officer.

The foreman paused the video. He was confounded too.

Eph said, “There is a gap. A cut.”

The foreman said, “No cut. You saw the time code.”

“Go back a bit then. A bit more… right there… now again.”

The foreman played it again.

And again the cabinet disappeared.

“Houdini,” grumbled the foreman.

Eph looked at Nora.

“It didn’t just disappear,” said the duty officer. He pointed out the other luggage nearby. “Everything else stays the same. Not a flicker.”

Eph said, “Back it up again. Please.”

The foreman ran it yet again. The cabinet disappeared yet again.

“Wait,” said Eph. He’d seen something. “Step it back—slowly.”

The foreman did, and ran it again.

“There,” said Eph.

“Christ,” exclaimed the foreman, almost jumping out of his creaky seat. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?” said Nora, together with the duty officer.

The foreman was into it now, rewinding the image just a few steps.

“Coming…,” said Eph, readying him. “Coming…” The foreman held his hand over the keyboard like a game show contestant waiting to press a buzzer. “…there.”

The cabinet was gone again. Nora leaned close. “What?”

Eph pointed to the side of the monitor. “Right there.”

Just evident on the wide right edge of the image was a black blur.

Eph said, “Something bursting past the camera.”

“Up in the rafters?” said Nora. “What, a bird?”

“Too damn big,” Eph said.

The duty officer, leaning close, said, “It’s a glitch. A shadow.”

“Okay,” Eph said, standing back. “A shadow of what?”

The duty officer straightened. “Can you go frame by frame?”

The foreman tried. The cabinet disappeared from the floor… almost simultaneously with the appearance of the blur in the rafters. “Best I can do on this machine.”

The duty officer studied the screen again. “Coincidence,” he declared. “How could anything move at that speed?”

Eph asked, “Can you zoom in?”

The foreman rolled his eyes. “This here ain’t CSI—it’s Radio-fucking-Shack.”

“So, it’s gone,” Nora said, turning to Eph, the other men unable to help. “But why—and how?”

Eph cupped his hand over the back of his neck. “The soil from the cabinet… it must be the same as the soil we just found. Which means…”

Nora said, “Are we formulating a theory that someone got up into the overhead flight crew rest area from the cargo hold?”

Eph recalled the feeling he had gotten, standing in the cockpit with the dead pilots—just before discovering that Redfern was still alive. That of a presence. Something nearby.

He moved Nora away from the other two. “And tracked some of that… whatever swirl of biological matter in the passenger cabin.”

Nora looked back to the image of the black blur in the rafters.

Eph said, “I think someone was hiding up in that compartment when we first entered the plane.”

“Okay…,” she said, grappling with that. “But then—where is it now?”

Eph said, “Wherever that cabinet is.”

Gus

GUS SAUNTERED DOWN the lane of cars in the low-ceilinged, long-term parking garage at JFK. The echoing screech of balding tires turning down the exit ramps made the place sound like a madhouse. He pulled out the folded index card from his shirt pocket and double-checked the section number, written in someone else’s hand. Then he double-checked that there was no one else near.

He found the van, a dinged-up, road-dirtied, white Econoline with no back windows, at the very end of the lane, parked astride a coned-off corner work area of fluttering tarp and crumbled stone where part of the overhead support had cracked.

He pulled out a hand rag and used it to try the driver’s door, which was unlocked, as advertised. He backed off from the van and looked around the isolated corner of the garage, quiet but for those monkey squeals in the