The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

“How would you each like a pony, and your very own pond?”

She believed it was her generous bribe that had silenced the children, but it was in fact her smile, gargoylelike and glaring, baring an expression of utter hatred, that frightened them into stillness.

For Joan, the momentary silence was bliss.

The 911 call came in for a naked man at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel exits. The dispatch went out as a 10–50, a low-priority disorderly person call. A unit from the 1–7 arrived within eight minutes, and found a bad jam-up, worse than usual for a Sunday night. A few drivers honked and pointed them uptown. The suspect, they yelled, a fat guy wearing nothing but a red tag on his toe, had already moved on.

“I got kids here!” howled one guy in a dinged-up Dodge Caravan.

Officer Karn, the driver, said to his partner, Officer Lupo, “I’m gonna say Park Avenue type. Sex club regular. Took too much X before his weekend kink session.”

Officer Lupo unbuckled and opened his door. “I’m on traffic duty. Loverboy’s all yours.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Officer Karn to the slamming of the door. He lit up his rack and waited patiently — he wasn’t paid extra to rush — for the traffic snarl to part for him.

He cruised up past Thirty-eighth, eyeballing cross streets. A fat naked guy on the loose shouldn’t be too hard to find. People on the sidewalks seemed okay, not freaked. One helpful citizen smoking outside a bar saw the slow- rolling cruiser and stepped forward, pointing him up the street.

A second and third call came in, both for a naked man marauding outside the United Nations headquarters. Officer Karn hit the gas, looking to end this. He cruised past the lit-up flags of all the member nations flying out front, to the visitors’ entrance at the north end. Blue NYPD sawhorses everywhere, as well as car-bomb deterring cement planters.

Karn rolled up on a detail of bored cops near the sawhorses. “I’m looking for a fat naked man.”

One cop shrugged. “I could give you a few phone numbers.”

Gabriel Bolivar returned by limousine to his new home in Manhattan, two town houses undergoing extensive renovations on Vestry Street, in Tribeca. When finished, the home would encompass thirty- one rooms and fourteen thousand total square feet, including a mosaic-lined swimming pool, servants’ quarters for a staff of sixteen, a basement recording studio, and a twenty-six-seat movie theater.

Only the penthouse was finished and furnished, rushed into completion while Bolivar was away on his European tour. The rest of the rooms in the lower floors were roughed out, some of them plastered, others still dressed in plastic wrap and insulation. Sawdust had worked its way onto every surface and into every crevice. Bolivar’s business manager had briefed him on the developments, but Bolivar wasn’t much interested in the journey, only the destination of his soon-to-be lavish and decadent palace.

The “Jesus Wept” tour had ended on a down note. The promoters had had to work hard to fill the arenas so that Bolivar could truthfully claim to have played to sold-out audiences everywhere — but he had. Then the tour charter crapped out in Germany, and rather than wait behind with the others, Bolivar had consented to hop a commercial flight home. He was still feeling the aftereffects of that big mistake. In fact, it was getting worse.

He moved inside the front entrance with his security detail and three young ladies from the club. A few of his larger treasures had been moved in, including twin black marble panthers poised on either side of the twenty-foot- high foyer. Two blue industrial-waste drums said to have belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer and several rows of framed paintings: Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Chet Zar — big, expensive stuff. The loose light switch on the wall activated a string of construction lights winding up the marble staircase, beyond a great, winged, weeping angel of uncertain provenance, having been “rescued” from a Romanian church during the Ceausescu regime.

“He’s beautiful,” said one of the girls, looking up into the angel’s shadowed, time-worn features.

Bolivar stumbled near the great angel, seized by a pain in his gut that was more than a cramp, that was like a punch from an adjoining organ. He gripped the angel’s wing to steady himself, and the girls converged on him.

“Baby,” they cooed, helping him to stand, and he tried to shake off the pain. Had someone slipped him something at the club? It had happened before. Christ, girls had drugged him before, so desperate were they to have their way with Gabriel Bolivar — to get the legend underneath the makeup. He pushed the three of them away, waving off his bodyguards as well, standing erect despite the ache. His detail remained below while he used his silver-encrusted walking stick to shoo the girls up the curling flights of blue-veined white marble to the penthouse.

He left the girls to mix themselves more drinks and fix themselves up in the other bathroom. Bolivar locked himself inside the master bath and dug out his Vicodin stash and self-medicated with two pretty white pills chased with a gulp of scotch. He rubbed his neck, massaging the rawness of his throat, worried about his voice. He wanted to run water through the raven’s-head faucet and splash some on his face to cool down, but he still had his makeup on. Nobody would know him in the clubs without it. He stared at the sickly pallor it gave him, the gaunt shadowing of his cheeks, the dead black pupils of his contact lenses. He was in fact a beautiful man, and no amount of makeup could hide it, and this, he knew, was part of the secret of his success. His entire career consisted of taking beauty and corrupting it. Seducing the ear with moments of transcendent music only to subvert it with gothic screams and industrial distortion. That was what the young responded to. Defacing beauty. Subverting good.

Beautiful Corruption. Possible title for his next CD.

The Lurid Urge had moved 600,000 copies in the first week of its U.S. release. Huge for the post-mp3 era, but still down almost a full half million units from Lavish Atrocities. People were becoming inured to his antics, both onstage and off. He was no longer the anti-everything Wal-Mart had loved to ban and religious America — including his own father — had sworn to oppose. Funny how his father was in agreement with Wal-Mart, proving his thesis about how dull everything was. Nonetheless, with the exception of the religious right, it was getting difficult to shock people anymore. His career was hitting a wall and he knew it. Bolivar was not exactly considering a switch to coffeehouse folk — though that would indeed shock the world — but the theatrical autopsies and onstage biting and cutting were no longer fresh. They were anticipated, like encores. He was playing to his audience instead of playing against them. He had to run ahead of them, because if they ever caught up, he’d be trampled.

But hadn’t he taken his act as far as he could? Where could it possibly go from here?

He heard the voices again. Like an unrehearsed chorus, voices in pain, pain that echoed his own. He spun around in the bathroom to make certain he was alone. He shook his head hard. The sound was like that when you put seashells to your ears, only, instead of hearing an echo of the ocean, he heard the moaning of souls in limbo.

When he came out of the bathroom, Mindy and Sherry were kissing, and Cleo lay on the big bed with a drink in hand, smiling at the ceiling. All of them started when he appeared, and turned in anticipation of his advance. He crawled up onto the bed, his gut doing kayak rolls, thinking that this was just what he needed. A vigorous pipe cleaning to clear the system. Blond Mindy came at him first, running her fingers through his silky black hair, but Bolivar chose Cleo, something about her, running his pale hand over the brown flesh of her neck. She removed her top for easier access and slipped her own hands down over the fine leather sheathing his hips.

She said, “I’ve been a fan of yours ever since—”

“Shhhh,” he told her, hoping to cut through the usual acolyte’s back-and-forth. The Vikes must have acted on the voices in his head, because they had dulled to a thrumming noise, almost like an electrical current, but with some throbbing mixed in.

The other two crawled up around him now, their hands like crabs, touching him, exploring him. Starting to peel off his clothes to reveal the man beneath. Mindy again ran her fingers through his hair, and he pulled away, as if there was something clumsy in her touch. Sherry squealed playfully, undoing the buttons of his fly. He knew the whispers that went around about him, from conquest to conquest, about his prodigious size and skill. She slid her hand across his leather pants and over his crotch, and while there was no groan of disappointment, there was no gasp of astonishment either. Nothing doing down there yet. Which was baffling, even given his illness. He had proven himself in much more adverse conditions, over and over and over again.

He returned his focus to the girl Cleo’s shoulders, her neck, her throat. Lovely — but it was more than that. He felt a bucking sensation in his mouth. Not a sensation of nausea, but perhaps its opposite: a need somewhere on the continuum between the longing for sex and the necessity of nourishment. But — bigger. A compulsion. A