The Strain

The girl saw the old man’s blade, glowing nearly white, and something like fear came into her face. Then the fear went fierce.

“Hurry!” said Eph, wanting it to be over. The girl hissed and he saw the dark shade inside her, beneath her skin, a demon snarling to be let out.

Nora was watching the father, lying on the floor. His body began to stir, his eyes opening. “Professor?” said Nora.

But the old man was locked in on the girl.

Nora watched Gary Gilbarton sit up, then rise to his bare feet, a dead man standing in his pajamas, eyes open.

“Professor?” said Nora again, switching on her lamp.

The lamp crackled. She shook it, smacking the bottom, where the battery went. The purple light fizzled on, then off—then on again.

“Professor!” she yelled.

The fluttering lamplight had gotten Setrakian’s attention. He turned on the revenant man, who looked confused and unsteady on his feet. With skill rather than agility, Setrakian doubled Gilbarton up with jabbing thrusts to the gut and chest, opening white-bleeding wounds in his pajama top.

Eph, alone with the girl now, watching this demon assert itself inside her, and not knowing what was happening behind him, said, “Professor Setrakian!”

Setrakian directed thrusts at the father’s armpits in order to bring his hands down by his sides, then slashed at the tendons behind his knees, collapsing the revenant onto all fours. With Gilbarton’s head up and his neck extended, Setrakian raised his sword and uttered some words in a foreign language—like a solemn pronouncement—and then his blade sang through the man’s neck, separating his head from his trunk, the revenant’s lower quarters collapsing to the floor.

“Professor!” said Eph, pressing the lamplight on the girl, torturing her—a girl about Zack’s age, her wild eyes filling with indigo coloring—bloody tears—while the being inside her raged.

Her mouth opened as though to speak. Almost as though to sing. Her mouth kept opening and the thing emerged, the stinger from the soft palate beneath her tongue. The appendage swelled as the girl’s eyes changed from sad to hungry, almost glowing in anticipation.

The old man returned to her, sword first. “Back, strigoi!” he said.

The girl turned to the old man, her eyes still flaring. Setrakian’s silver blade was now slick with white blood. He intoned the same words as before, his sword poised two-handedly over one shoulder. Eph backed out of the way just as the blade swept through.

She had raised her hand in protest at the last moment, and the blade lifted it from her wrist before separating her head from her neck. The cut was clean and perfectly flat. White blood splattered against the wall— not in an arterial spray, but with more of a sickening splatch—and her body collapsed to the floor, head and hand dropping against it, the head tumbling away.

Setrakian lowered his sword and pulled the lamp from Eph’s hands, holding the fading beam close to the girl’s open neck wound, almost in a gesture of triumph. But triumph it was not: Eph saw things wriggling in the seeping pool of thick white blood.

The parasitic worms. They curled tight and went still when the light hit them. The old man was irradiating the scene.

Eph heard footfalls on the stone steps. Nora, racing out through the bulkhead. He ran after her, nearly tripping over the decapitated body of the girl’s father, surfacing onto the grass and the night air.

Nora was running to the swaying, dark trees. He caught up to her before she reached them, pulling her close, wrapping her up tight. She screamed into his chest, as though afraid to allow her cry to escape into the night, and he held her until Setrakian surfaced onto the yard.

The old man’s breath steamed into the cool night, chest pumping from exertion. He pressed his fingers to his heart. His white hair was mussed and shiny in the moonlight, making him appear—as did everything to Eph, at that moment—quite mad.

He cleaned his blade on the grass before returning it to the sheath end of the walking stick. He fixed the two pieces together with a firm twist, and the overlong walking stick was as it had been before.

“She is released now,” he said. “The girl and her father are at peace.”

He was checking his shoes and pants cuffs for vampire blood in the moonlight. Nora viewed him through wild eyes. “Who are you?” she said.

“Just a pilgrim,” he answered. “Same as you.”

They walked back to Eph’s Explorer. Eph felt all jittery and exposed out in the front yard. Setrakian opened the passenger door and pulled out a spare battery pack. He swapped batteries with the one in Eph’s lamp, then checked the purple light briefly against the side of the truck.

Setrakian said, “You wait here please.”

“For what?” said Eph.

“You saw the blood on her lips, her chin. She was flushed. She had fed. This is not done yet.”

The old man set off toward the next house. Eph watched him, Nora leaving Eph’s side in order to lean against the truck. She swallowed hard, as though about to be sick. “We just killed two people in the cellar of their own home.”

“This thing is spread by people. By un people.”

“Vampires, my God…”

Eph said, “Rule number one is always—fight the disease, not its victims.”

“Don’t demonize the sick,” said Nora.

“But now… now the sick are demons. Now the infected are active vectors of the disease, and have to be stopped. Killed. Destroyed.”

“What will Director Barnes say about that?”

Eph said, “We can’t wait for him. We’ve already waited too long.”

They fell silent. Soon Setrakian returned carrying his walking stick/vampire sword and the still warm lamp.

“It is done,” he said.

“Done?” Nora said, still appalled by what she had seen. “Now what? You do realize there were some two hundred other passengers aboard that plane.”

“It is much worse than that. The second night is upon us. The second wave of infection is happening now.”

THE SECOND NIGHT

Patricia ran a hand vigorously back through her hair, as though shaking out the lost hours of another day gone by. She found herself actually looking forward to Mark coming home, and not just for the satisfaction of throwing the kids at him and saying, “Here.” She wanted to fill him in on the only real news of the day, the Lusses’ nanny—who Patricia spied through the sheers of the front-facing dining room windows—racing out of the Lusses’ house not five minutes after arriving, children nowhere in sight, the old black woman running as if she was being chased.

Oooh, the Lusses. How neighbors can get under your skin. Whenever she thought of skin-and-bones Joanie tossing off a description of her “European-style pure-soil wine cellar,” Patricia shot an automatic middle finger in the general direction of the Luss house. She was dying to find out what Mark knew about Roger Luss, if he was still overseas. She wanted to compare notes. The only time she and her husband seemed to get on the same page was when they were tearing down friends, family, and neighbors. Maybe because savoring others’ marital problems and family misfortunes somehow made hers and Mark’s seem less troublesome.

Scandal always went better with a glass of pinot, and she finished off her second with a flourish. She checked