The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

too perfect, too observant, too kind — her silent standards, all for his “own good,” were impossible to meet, and he knew, in a strange way, that from the moment he was born, he had disappointed her. By being a boy — by being too much like his dad.

With Eph he felt alive. He would tell his dad the things Mom always wanted to know about: out-of-boundaries things that she was eager to learn. Nothing critical — just private. Important enough not to reveal. Important enough to save for his father, and that was what Zack did.

Now, lying awake on the top of his bedcovers, Zack thought of the future. He was certain now that they would never again be together as a family. No chance. But he wondered how much worse it would get. That was Zack in a nutshell. Always wondering: how much worse can it get?

Much worse was always the answer.

At least, he hoped, now the army of concerned adults would finally screw out of his life. Therapists, judges, social workers, his mother’s boyfriend. All of them keeping him hostage to their own needs and stupid goals. All of them “caring” for him, for his well-being, and none of them really giving a shit.

My Bloody Valentine grew quiet in the iPod and Zack popped the earphones out. The sky was still not yet brightening outside, but he finally felt tired. He loved feeling tired now. He loved not thinking.

So he readied himself for sleep. But as soon as he got settled, he heard the footsteps.

Flap-flap-flap. Like bare feet out on the asphalt. Zack looked out his window and saw a guy. A naked guy.

Walking down the street, skin pale as moonlight, shining stretch marks glowing in the night, crisscrossing the deflated belly. Obvious that the man had been fat once — but had since lost so much weight that now his skin folded in all different ways and different directions, so much so that it was almost impossible to figure out his exact silhouette.

It was old but appeared ageless. The balding head with badly tinted hair and varicose veins on the legs pinned him at around seventy, but there was a vigor to his step and a tone to his walk that made you think of a young man. Zack thought all these things, noticed all these things, because he was so much like Eph. His mother would have told him to move away from the window and called 911, while Eph would have pointed out all the details that formed the picture of that strange man.

The pale creature circled the house across the street. Zack heard a soft moan, and then the rattle of a backyard fence. The man came back and moved toward the neighbor’s front door. Zack thought of calling the police, but that would raise all sorts of questions for him with Mom: he’d had to hide his insomnia from her, or else suffer days and weeks of doctor’s appointments and tests, never mind her worrying.

The man walked out into the middle of the street and then stopped. Flabby arms hanging at his side, his chest deflated — was he even breathing? — hair ruffling in the soft night wind. Exposing the roots to a bad “Just for Men” reddish brown.

It looked up toward Zack’s window, and for one weird moment they locked eyes. Zack’s heart raced. This was the first time he saw the guy frontally. During the whole time, he had been able to see only a flank or the man’s skin-draped back, but now he saw his full thorax — and the pale Y-shaped scar that crossed it whole.

And his eyes — they were dead tissue, glazed over, opaque even in the gentle moonlight. But worst of all, they had a frenzied energy, darting back and forth and then fixing on him — looking up at him with a feeling that was hard to pinpoint.

Zack shrank back, peeling away from the window, scared to death by the scar and those vacant eyes that had looked back at him. What was that expression…?

He knew that scar, knew what it meant. An autopsy scar. But how could that be?

He risked another peek over the window’s edge, so carefully, but the street was empty now. He sat up to see better, and the man was gone.

Had he ever even been there? Maybe the lack of sleep was really getting to him now. Seeing naked male corpses walking in the street: not something a child of divorce wants to share with a therapist.

And then it came to him: hunger. That was it. The dead eyes looked at him with intense hunger…

Zack dove into his sheets and buried his face in his pillow. The man’s absence did not ease his mind, but instead did the contrary. The man was gone, but he was everywhere now. He could be downstairs, breaking in through the kitchen window. Soon it would be on the steps, climbing ever so slowly—could he hear his footsteps already? — and then in the corridor outside his door. Softly rattling his lock — the busted lock that would not catch. And soon it would reach Zack’s bed and then — what? He feared the man’s voice and its dead stare. Because he had the horrible certainty that, even though it moved, the man was no longer alive.

Zombies…

Zack hid under his pillow, mind and heart racing, full of fear and praying for dawn to come and save him. Much as he dreaded school, he begged the morning to come.

Across the street, in the neighboring house, window glass was broken and the TV light snapped off.

Ansel Barbour whispered to himself as he wandered about the second floor of his house. He wore the same T-shirt and boxer shorts he had tried to sleep in, and his hair darted up at odd angles from continuous squeezing and pulling. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Ann-Marie suspected a fever, but when she came to him with the thermometer, he could not bear to think of that steel-tipped probe being stuck in under his inflamed tongue. They had an ear thermometer, for the kids, but he couldn’t even sit still long enough to get an accurate reading. Ann-Marie’s practiced palm against his forehead detected heat — lots of heat — but then, he could have told her that.

She was petrified, he could tell. She made no effort to hide it. To her, any illness whatsoever was an assault on the sanctity of their family unit. The kids’ throw-up bugs were met with the same dark-eyed fear another might reserve for, say, a bad blood test or the appearance of an unexplained lump. This is it. The beginning of the terrible tragedy she was certain would one day befall her.

His tolerance for Ann-Marie’s eccentricities was at low ebb. He was dealing with something serious here, and he needed her help, not her added stress. Now he couldn’t be the strong one. He needed her to take charge.

Even the kids were staying away from him, startled by the not-there look in their father’s eyes, or perhaps — he was vaguely aware of this — the odor of his sickness, which to his nose resembled the smell of congealed cooking grease stored too long in a tin can rusting beneath the sink. He saw them from time to time hiding behind the balusters at the bottom of the staircase, watching him cross the second-floor landing. He wanted to allay their fears, but worried he might lose his temper trying to explain this to them, and in doing so make things worse. The surest way to set their minds at ease was to get better. To outlast this surge of disorientation and pain.

He stopped inside his daughter’s bedroom, found the purple walls too purple, then doubled back into the hallway. He stood very still on the landing — as still as he could — until he could hear it again. That thumping. A beating — quiet and close. Wholly separate from the headache pounding in his skull. Almost…like in small-town movie theaters, where you can hear, during quiet moments in movies, the clicking of the film running through the projector in the back. Which distracts you, and keeps pulling you back to the reality that this is not real, as though you and you alone realize this truth.

He shook his head hard, grimacing from the pain that went with it…trying to use that pain like bleach, to clean his thoughts…but the thumping. The throbbing. It was everywhere, all around him.

The dogs too. Acting strange around him. Pap and Gertie, the big, bumbling Saint Bernards. Growling as they would when some strange animal came into the yard.

Ann-Marie came up later, alone, finding him sitting at the foot of their bed, his head in his hands like a fragile egg. “You should sleep,” she said.

He gripped his hair like the reins of a mad horse and fought down the urge to berate her. Something was wrong in his throat, and whenever he lay down for any length of time, his epiglottis seized up, cutting off his airway, suffocating him until he choked himself back to breathing. He was terrified now of dying in his sleep.

“What do I do?” she asked, remaining in the doorway, her palm and fingers pressing against her own forehead.

“Get me some water,” he said. His voice hissed through his raw throat, burning like steam. “Lukewarm.