The Strain

groin.

It was hairless and doll-smooth, lacking any genitalia.

Gabe’s hand covered Rudy’s mouth, hard. Rudy started to struggle, but much too late. Rudy saw Gabe grinning—and then that grin fell away, something like a whip writhing inside his mouth. By the trembling blue light of his phone—as he frantically and blindly felt for the numerals 9, 1, and 1—he saw the stinger emerge. Vaguely defined appendages inflated and deflated along its sides, like twin spongy sacs of flesh, flanked by gill-like vents that flared open and closed.

Rudy saw all of this in the instant before it shot into his neck. His phone fell to the bathroom floor beneath his kicking feet, the SEND button never pressed.

Nine-year-old Jeanie Millsome wasn’t tired at all on her way home with her mother. Seeing The Little Mermaid on Broadway was so awesome, she believed she was the most awake she had ever been in her life. Now she truly knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. No more ballet school instructor (after Cindy Veeley broke two toes on a leap). No more Olympic gymnast (pommel horse too scary). She was going to be (drumroll, please…) a Broadway Actress! And she was going to dye her hair coral red and star in The Little Mermaid in the lead role of Ariel, and at the end take the biggest and most graceful curtain curtsy of all time, and after the thunderous applause she was going to greet her young theatergoing fans after the show and sign all their programs and smile for camera-phone pictures with them—and then, one very special night, she was going to select the most polite and sincere nine- year-old girl in the audience and invite her to be her understudy and Best Friend Forever. Her mother was going to be her hairstylist, and her dad, who stayed home with Justin, would be her manager, just like Hannah Montana’s dad. And Justin… well, Justin could just stay home and be himself.

And so she sat, chin in hand, turned around in the seat on the subway running south underneath the city. She saw herself reflected in the window, saw the brightness of the car behind her, but the lights flickered sometimes, and in one of those dark blinks she found herself looking out into an open space where one tunnel fed into another. Then she saw something. No more than a subliminal flash of an image, like a single disturbing frame spliced into an otherwise monotonous strip of film. So fast that her nine-year-old conscious mind didn’t have time to process it, this image she did not understand. She couldn’t even say why she burst into tears, which woke up her nodding mother, so pretty in her theater coat and dress next to her, who comforted her and tried to draw out what had prompted the sobbing. Jeanie could only point to the window. She rode the rest of the way home cuddled beneath her mother’s arm.

But the Master had seen her. The Master saw everything. Even—especially—while feeding. His night vision was extraordinary and nearly telescopic, in varying shades of gray, and registered heat sources in a glowing spectral white.

Finished, though not satiated—never satiated—he let his prey slide limply down his body, his great hands releasing the turned human to the gravel floor. The tunnels around him whispered with winds that fluttered his dark cloak, trains screaming in the distance, iron clashing against steel, like the scream of a world suddenly aware of his coming.

EXPOSURE

Canary Headquarters, Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street

On the third morning following the landing of Flight 753, Eph took Setrakian to the office headquarters of the CDC Canary project on the western edge of Chelsea, one block east of the Hudson. Before Eph started Canary, the three-room office had been the local site for the CDC’s World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, investigating links between the 9/11 recovery effort and persistent respiratory ailments.

Eph’s heart lifted as they pulled up at Eleventh Avenue. Two police cars and a pair of unmarked sedans with government license plates were parked outside the entrance. Director Barnes had come through finally. They were going to get the help they needed. There was no way Eph, Nora, and Setrakian could fight this scourge on their own.

The third-floor office door was open when they got there, and Barnes was conferring with a plainclothes man who identified himself as an FBI special agent. “Everett,” said Eph, relieved to find him personally involved. “Your timing is perfect. Just the man I wanted to see.” He moved to a small refrigerator near the door. Test tubes clinked as he reached for a quart of whole milk, uncapping it and drinking it down fast. He needed the calcium the same way he had once needed booze. We trade off our dependencies, he realized. For instance, just last week Eph had been fully dependent upon the laws of science and nature. Now his fix was silver swords and ultraviolet light.

He brought the half-empty bottle away from his lips with the realization that he had just slaked his thirst with the product of another mammal.

“Who is this?” asked Director Barnes.

“This,” said Eph, swiping the milk mustache from his upper lip, “is Professor Abraham Setrakian.” Setrakian was holding his hat, his alabaster hair bright under the low ceiling lights. “So much has happened, Everett,” said Eph, swallowing more milk, putting out the fire in his belly. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

Barnes said, “Why don’t we start with the bodies missing from the city morgues.”

Eph lowered the bottle. One of the cops had edged closer to the door behind him. A second FBI man was sitting at Eph’s laptop, pecking away. “Hey, excuse me,” said Eph.

Barnes said, “Ephraim, what do you know about the missing corpses?”

Eph was a moment trying to read the CDC director’s face. He glanced back at Setrakian, but the old man offered him nothing, standing very still with his hat in his gnarled hands.

Eph turned back to his boss. “They have gone home.”

“Home?” said Barnes, turning his head as though trying to hear him better. “To heaven?”

“To their families, Everett.”

Barnes looked at the FBI agent who kept looking at Eph.

“They are dead,” said Barnes.

“They aren’t dead. At least, not in the way we understand it.”

“There is only one way to be dead, Ephraim.”

Eph shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Ephraim.” Barnes took one sympathetic step forward. “I know you have been under a keen amount of stress recently. I know you have had family troubles…”

Eph said, “Hold on. I don’t think I understand what the hell this is.”

The FBI agent said, “This is about your patient, Doctor. One of the pilots of Regis Air Flight 753, Captain Doyle Redfern. We have a few questions about his care.”

Eph hid a chill. “Get a court order and I’ll answer your questions.”

“Maybe you’d like to explain this.”

He opened a portable video player on the edge of the desk and pressed play. It showed a security-camera view of a hospital room. Redfern was seen from behind, staggering, his johnny open in back. He looked wounded and confused rather than predatory and enraged. The camera angle did not show the stinger swirling out of his mouth.

It did however show Eph facing him with the whirling trephine, jabbing at Redfern’s throat with the circular blade.

There was the flicker of a jump cut, and now Nora was in the background, covering her mouth as Eph stood by the doorway with his chest heaving, Redfern in a heap on the floor.

Then another sequence began. A different camera farther along the same basement hallway, set at a higher angle. It showed two people, a man and a woman, forcing their way into the locked morgue room where Redfern’s