The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

Ann-Marie trembled as she watched him run the chain through the shed door handles. The doors started to swing open, Mr. Otish standing near enough to the opening for the pole chain to reach him.

“Now,” he said, “where are these beasts?”

Ann-Marie heard the inhuman growl, and the chain leash moving fast, sounding like spilled coins. Then the doors flew open, Mr. Otish stepped up, and in an instant his stupefied cry was cut short. She ran and threw herself against the shed doors, fighting to close them as the struggling Mr. Otish batted against them. She forced the chain through and around the handles, clasping the lock tight…then fled into her house, away from the shuddering backyard shed and the merciless thing she had just done.

Mark Blessige stood in the foyer of his home with his BlackBerry in hand, not knowing which way to turn. No message from his wife. Her phone was in her Burberry bag, the Volvo station wagon in the driveway, the baby bucket in the mudroom. No note on the kitchen island, only a half-empty glass of wine abandoned on the counter. Patricia, Marcus, and baby Jackie were all gone.

He checked the garage, and the cars and strollers were all there. He checked the calendar in the hallway — nothing was listed. Was she pissed at him for being late again and had decided to do a little passive-aggressive punishment? Mark tried to flip on the television and wait it out, but then realized his anxiety was real. Twice he picked up the telephone to call the police, but didn’t think he could live down the public scandal of a cruiser coming to his house. He went out his front door and stood on the brick step overlooking his lawn and lush flower beds. He looked up and down the street, wondering if they could have slipped over to a neighbor’s — and then noticed that almost every house was dark. No warm yellow glow from heirloom lamps shining on top of polished credenzas. No computer monitor lights or plasma TV screens flashing through hand-sewn lace.

He looked at the Lusses’ house, directly across the street. Its proud patrician face and aged white brick. Nobody home there either, it seemed. Was there some looming natural disaster he didn’t know about? Had an evacuation order been issued?

Then he saw someone emerge from the high bushes forming an ornamental fence between the Lusses’ property and the Perrys’. It was a woman, and in the dappling shadow of the oak leaves overhead she appeared disheveled. She was cradling what looked to be a sleeping child of five or six in her arms. The woman walked straight across the driveway, obscured for a moment by the Lusses’ Lexus SUV, then entered the side door next to the garage. Before entering, her head turned and she saw Mark standing out on his front step. She didn’t wave or otherwise acknowledge him, but her glance — brief though it was — put a block of ice against his chest.

She wasn’t Joan Luss, he realized. But she might have been the Lusses’ housekeeper.

He waited for a light to come on inside. None did. Superstrange, but whatever the case, he hadn’t seen anyone else out and about this fine evening. So he started out across the road — first down his walk to the driveway, avoiding stepping on the lawn grass — and then, hands slipped casually into his suit pants pockets, up the Lusses’ drive to the same side door.

The storm door was shut but the interior door was open. Rather than ring the bell, he gave the glass a jaunty knock and entered, calling, “Hello?” He crossed the tiled mudroom to the kitchen, flipping on the light. “Joan? Roger?”

The floor was streaked all over with dirty footprints, apparently from bare feet. Some of the cabinets and the counter edges were marked with soil-smudged handprints. Pears were rotting in a wire bowl on their kitchen island.

“Anybody home?”

He wagered that Joan and Roger were gone, but he wanted to speak to the housekeeper anyway. She wouldn’t go around blabbing how the Blessiges didn’t know where their children were, or that Mark Blessige couldn’t keep track of his boozy wife. And if he was wrong and Joanie was here, well then he’d ask her about his family as though he had a tennis racket on his shoulder. The kids are sooo busy, how do you keep track? And if he ever heard anything from anyone else about his wayward brood, he’d have to bring up the horde of barefoot peasants the Lusses’ evidently had stampeding through their kitchen.

“It’s Mark Blessige from across the street. Anybody home?”

He hadn’t been in their house since the boy’s birthday party in May. The parents had bought him one of those electric kiddie race cars, but because it didn’t come with a pretend trailer hitch — the kid was obsessed with trailer hitches, apparently — he drove the car straight into the cake table just after the hired help in the SpongeBob SquarePants costume had filled all the cups with juice. “Well,” Roger had said, “at least he knows what he likes.” Cue forced laughter and a fresh round of juice.

Mark ducked through a swinging door into a sitting room where, through the front windows, he got a good look at his own house. He savored the view for a moment, as he didn’t often get a neighbor’s perspective. Damn fine house. Although that stupid Mexican had clipped the west hedges unevenly again.

Footsteps came up the basement stairs. More than one set — more even than a few sets. “Hello?” he said, wondering about those barefoot hordes, and supposing he had gotten too comfortable in the neighbors’ house. “Hi, there. Mark Blessige, from across the way.” No voices answered. “Sorry to barge in like this, but I was wondering —”

He pushed back the swinging door and stopped. Some ten people stood facing him. Two of them were children who stepped out from behind the kitchen island — neither of them were his. Mark recognized a few of the people by face, fellow Bronxville residents, people he saw at Starbucks or the train station or the club. One of them, Carole, was the mother of a friend of Marcus’s. Another was just a UPS delivery man, wearing the trademark brown shirt and shorts. Quite a random assortment for a get-together. Among them was nary a Luss nor a Blessige.

“I’m sorry. Am I interrupting…?”

Now he really started to see them, their complexions and their eyes as they stared at him without speaking. He had never been stared at like that by people before. He felt a heat from them that was separate from their gaze.

Behind them stood the housekeeper. She looked flushed, her complexion red and her staring eyes scarlet, and there was a red stain on the front of her blouse. Her hair was stringy and unwashed and her clothes and skin couldn’t have been dirtier if she had been sleeping in real dirt.

Mark flipped a forelock of hair out of his eyes. He felt his shoulders come up against the swinging door and realized he was backing up. The rest of them moved toward him, with the exception of the housekeeper, who merely stood and watched. One of the children, a twitchy boy with jagged black eyebrows, stepped up on an open drawer to climb onto the kitchen island, so that he stood a head taller than anyone else. He took a running start off the granite countertop and launched himself into the air toward Mark Blessige, who had no choice but to put out his arms and catch him. The boy’s mouth opened as he leaped, and by the time he grabbed Mark’s shoulders his little stinger was out. Like a scorpion’s tail, it flexed up before shooting straight out, piercing Mark’s throat. It split skin and muscle to anchor in his carotid artery, and the pain was like that of a hot skewer rammed halfway into his neck.

He fell backward through the door, crashing to the floor with the boy holding fast, tethered to his throat, sitting astride his chest. Then the pulling began. The drawing out. The sucking. The draining.

Mark tried to speak, tried to scream, but the words clotted in his throat and he choked on them. He was paralyzed. Something in his pulse changed — was interrupted — and he couldn’t utter a sound.

The boy’s chest pressed against his, and he could feel the faint thumping of its heart — or something — against his own. As the blood rushed out of Mark’s body, he felt the boy’s rhythm accelerate and become stronger —thump-thump-thump—reaching a frenzied, intimate gallop that was close to pleasure.

The boy’s stinger engorged as he fed, and the whites of his eyes, as he stared at Mark, flushed crimson. Methodically, the boy kept twining his crooked, bony fingers through Mark’s hair. Tightening his grip on his prey…

The others burst through the door, setting upon the victim, tearing at his clothes. As their stingers pierced his flesh, Mark felt a renewed pressure change inside his body, not decompression but compression. Vacuum collapse, like a juice pack being consumed.

And at the same time, a scent overpowered him, rising into his nose and eyes like a cloud of ammonia. He felt an eruption of wetness over his chest, warm, like freshly made soup, and his hands gripping the little fiend’s