The Strain

are a doctor, a man of science, and because this is America—where everything is known and understood, and God is a benevolent dictator, and the future must always be bright.” He clasped his gnarled hands, as best as he could, touching his bare fingertips to his lips in a pensive moment. “This is the spirit here, and it is beautiful. Truly—I don’t mock. Wonderful to believe only in what you wish to believe in, and to discount all else. I do respect your skepticism, Dr. Goodweather. And I say this to you in the hope that you will in turn respect my experience in this matter, and allow my observations into your highly civilized and scientific mind.”

Eph said, “So you’re saying, the airplane… one of them was on it. This rogue.”

“Exactly.”

“In the coffin. In the cargo hold.”

“A coffin full of soil. They are of the earth, and like to return to that from which they arose. Like worms. Vermis. They burrow to nest. We would call it sleep.”

“Away from daylight,” said Nora.

“From sunlight, yes. It is in transit that they are most vulnerable.”

“But you said this is a war of vampires. But isn’t it vampires against people? All those dead passengers.”

“This too will be difficult for you to accept. But to them we are not enemies. We are not worthy foes. We don’t even rise to that level in their eyes. To them we are prey. We are food and drink. Animals in a pen. Bottles upon a shelf.”

Eph felt a chill, but then just as quickly rejected his own shivery response. “And to someone who would say this sounds like so much science fiction?”

Setrakian pointed to him. “That device in your pocket. Your mobile telephone. You punch in a few numbers, and immediately you are in conversation with another person halfway around the world. That is science fiction, Dr. Goodweather. Science fiction come true.” Here Setrakian smiled. “Do you require proof?”

Setrakian went to a low bench set against the long wall. There was a thing there covered in a drape of black silk and he reached for it in an odd way, his arm outstretched, pinching the nearest edge of fabric while keeping his body as far away from it as possible, and then drawing the cover off.

A glass container. A specimen jar, available from any medical supply house.

Inside, suspended in a dusky fluid, was a well-preserved human heart.

Eph stooped to regard it from a few feet away. “Adult female, judging by the size. Healthy. Fairly young. A fresh specimen.” He looked back at Setrakian. “Where’d you get it?”

“I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village outside Shkoder, in northern Albania, in the spring of 1971.”

Eph smiled at the strangeness of the old man’s tale, leaning in for a closer look at the jar.

Something like a tentacle shot out of the heart, a sucker at its tip grabbing the glass where Eph’s eye was.

Eph straightened fast. He froze, staring at the jar.

Nora, next to him, said, “Um… what the hell was that?”

The heart began moving in the serum.

It was throbbing.

Beating.

Eph watched the flattened, mouthlike sucker head scour the glass. He looked at Nora, next to him, staring at the heart. Then he looked at Setrakian, who hadn’t moved, hands resting inside his pockets.

Setrakian said, “It animates whenever human blood is near.”

Eph stared in pure disbelief. He edged closer again, this time to the right of the sucker’s pale, lipless receptor. The outgrowth detached from the interior surface of the glass—then suddenly thrust itself toward him again.

“Jesus!” exclaimed Eph. The beating organ floated in there like some meaty, mutant fish. “It lives on without…” There was no blood supply. He looked at the stumps of its severed veins, aorta, and vena cava.

Setrakian said, “It is neither alive nor dead. It is animate. Possessed, you might say, but in the literal sense. Look closely and you will see.”

Eph watched the throbbing, which he found to be irregular, not like a true heartbeat at all. He saw something moving around inside it. Wriggling.

“A… worm?” said Nora.

Thin and pale, lip-colored, two or three inches in length. They watched it make its rounds inside the heart, like a lone sentry dutifully patrolling a long-abandoned base.

“A blood worm,” said Setrakian. “A capillary parasite that reproduces in the infected. I suspect, though have no proof, that it is the conduit of the virus. The actual vector.”

Eph shook his head in disbelief. “What about this… this sucker?”

“The virus mimics the host’s form, though it reinvents its vital systems in order to best sustain itself. In other words, it colonizes and adapts the host for its survival. The host being, in this case, a severed organ floating in a jar, the virus has found a way to evolve its own mechanism for receiving nourishment.”

Nora said, “Nourishment?”

“The worm lives on blood. Human blood.”

“Blood?” Eph squinted at the possessed heart. “From whom?”

Setrakian pulled his left hand out of his pocket. The wrinkled tips of his fingers showed at the end of the glove. The pad of his middle finger was scarred and smooth.

“A few drops every few days is enough. It will be hungry. I’ve been away.”

He went to the bench and lifted the lid off the jar—Eph stepping back to watch—and, with the point of a little penknife from his keychain, pricked the tip of his finger over the jar. He did not flinch, the act so routine that it no longer hurt him.

His blood dripped into the serum.

The sucker fed on the red drops with lips like that of a hungry fish.

When he was done, the old man dabbed a bit of liquid bandage on his finger from a small bottle on the bench, returning the lid to the jar.

Eph watched the feeder turn red. The worm inside the organ moved more fluidly and with increased strength. “And you say you’ve kept this thing going in here for…?”

“Since the spring of 1971. I don’t take many vacations…” He smiled at his little joke, looking at his pricked finger, rubbing the dried tip. “She was a revenant, one who was infected. Who had been turned. The Ancients, who wish to remain hidden, will kill immediately after feeding, in order to prevent any spread of their virus. One got away somehow, returned home to claim its family and friends and neighbors, burrowing into their small village. This widow’s heart had not been turned four hours before I found her.”

“Four hours? How did you know?”

“I saw the mark. The mark of the strigoi.”

Eph said, “Strigoi?”

“Old World term for vampire.”

“And the mark?”

“The point of penetration. A thin breach across the front of the throat, which I am guessing you have seen by now.”

Eph and Nora were nodding. Thinking about Jim.

Setrakian added, “I should say, I am not a man who is in the habit of cutting out human hearts. This was a bit of dirty business I happened upon quite by accident. But it was absolutely necessary.”

Nora said, “And you’ve kept this thing going ever since then, feeding it like a… a pet?”

“Yes.” He looked down at the jar, almost fondly. “It serves as a daily reminder. Of what I am up against. What we are now up against.”

Eph was aghast. “In all this time… why haven’t you shown this to anyone? A medical school. The evening news?”