The Fall. Book II of The Strain Trilogy

He had no idea of where he was, or how he could get out, but the blast must have propelled him quite a way, and now, all around him, he found a little bit of free space.

He turned and located a loose grate near his flank. Rusty steel, rotten screws, rattling to his touch. He pried it loose a bit — and already he could feel a rush of fresh air. He was close to freedom, but his fingers were not enough to pry open the grate.

He felt around for something to use as a lever. He located a twisted length of steel — and then, lying facedown, the charred body of the strigoi.

As he looked at the burned remains, a moment of panic struck Fet. The blood worms. Had they seeped out of their host and blindly sought another body in this dank hole? If so, then… were they already in him? The wound in his leg? Would he feel any different if he was infected?

Then, the body moved.

It twitched.

Ever so slightly.

It was still functioning. Still alive — as alive as a vampire can be.

That was the reason the worms had not seeped out.

It stirred and sat up out of the water. Its back was charred, but not its front. Something was wrong with its eyes, and Fet knew in a moment that it no longer could see. It moved with sloppy determination, many of its bones fully dislocated yet its musculature still intact. Its jaw was no longer in place, ripped away by the blast, such that its stinger waved loosely in the air, like a tentacle.

The being splayed itself aggressively, a blind predator ready to charge. But Fet was transfixed by the sight of the exposed stinger. This was the first time he could see it completely. It was attached at two points, both at the base of the throat and at the back portion of the palate. The root was engorged and had a rippling, muscular structure. At the back of the throat, a sphincter-like hole gaped open in demand for food. Vasiliy thought he had seen a similar structure before — but where?

In the gloomy half-light, Fet felt around, looking for his nail gun. The creature’s head turned to the water sounds, trying to orient itself. Fet was about to give up when he stumbled upon the nail gun — completely submerged in the water. Damn, he thought, trying to control his anger.

But the thing had locked on him, somehow — and charged. Fet moved as fast as he could, but now the creature, blindly adapted to the shape of the duct around it and its damaged limbs, instinctively found its footing, moving with uncanny coordination.

Fet raised the gun and hoped for luck. He pulled back on the trigger — twice — and found he was out of ammo. He had emptied the entire payload before being knocked out, and now was left with an empty industrial tool in his hand.

The thing was on top of him in a matter of seconds, tackling Fet, pushing him down.

Fet had its entire weight on top of him. What was left of its mouth trembled as the stinger recoiled, ready to shoot.

Reflexively, Vasiliy grabbed the stinger as he would a rabid rat. He pulled on it, bending it free of the structure of the thing’s open throat. The thing squirmed and yelped, its dislocated arms unable to fight Fet’s grip. The stinger was like a heavily muscled snake, slimy and squirming, bucking, trying to get loose. But now Vasiliy was angry. The harder the thing pulled back, the stronger Fet pulled forward. He would not give up his tight grip, his good arm pulling with all his might.

And Fet’s might was immense.

In one final yank, Vasiliy overpowered the strigoi and ripped the stinger and part of the glandular structure and trachea from the thing’s neck.

The entity squirmed in his hand, moving like an independent animal, even as the host body twitched spasmodically, falling back.

One thick blood worm emerged from the writhing mess, crawling quickly over Fet’s fist. It slithered past his wrist and, all at once, began boring into his arm. It was drilling straight for the forearm veins, and Fet tossed away the stinger structure, watching this parasite invade his arm. It was halfway in when Vasiliy grabbed it by its visible, wriggling end, and yanked. He tore it back out, howling in pain and disgust. Again, reflex took over and he snapped the revolting parasite in two.

In his hands, before his eyes, the two halves regenerated themselves — as if by magic — into complete parasites again.

Fet tossed them away. He saw, exiting the vampire’s body, dozens of worms oozing out, slithering toward him through the fetid water.

His length of twisted steel gone, Fet said fuck it, ripping at the grate with his bare hands, pumped with adrenaline, tearing it loose and grabbing his empty nail gun as he jumped out of the duct and rushed to freedom.

The Silver Angel

He lived alone in a tenement building in Jersey City, two blocks from Journal Square. One of the few neighborhoods that had not become gentrified. So many yuppies had taken over the rest — and where do they come from? How come they never end?

He climbed the steps to his fourth-floor apartment, his right knee creaking — literally creaking with every step — a squeak of pain jolting his body again and again.

His name was Angel Guzman Hurtado and he used to be big. He still was big, physically, but at age sixty-five his rebuilt knee hurt all the time and his body fat — what his American doctor called his BMI and what any Mexican would call panza — had overtaken his otherwise powerful figure. He sagged where he used to be taut, and he was taut where he had once been flexible — but big? Angel was always big. Both as a man and as a star — or at least what resembled it in his past life.

Angel had been a wrestler—the Wrestler back in Mexico City. El Angel de Plata. The Silver Angel.

He had begun his career in the 1960s as a rudo wrestler (one of the “bad guys”), but soon found himself embraced, with his trademark silver mask, by the adoring public, and so adjusted his style and altered his persona into a tecnico, one of the “good guys.” Through the years he fashioned himself into an industry: comic books, fotonovelas (corny photo-illustrated magazines narrating his strange and often ridiculous exploits), films, and TV spots. He opened two gyms and bought half a dozen tenements throughout Mexico City, becoming, in his own right, a superhero of sorts. His films spanned all genres: western, horror, sci-fi, secret agent — many times within the same feature. He took on amphibian creatures as well as Soviet spies with equal aplomb in badly choreographed scenes full of library sound effects — always ending with his trademark knockout blow known as the “Angel Kiss.”

But it was with vampires that he discovered his true niche. The silver-masked marvel battled every form of vampire: male, female, thin, fat — and, occasionally, even nude, for alternate versions exhibited only overseas.

But the eventual fall equaled the height of his climb. The more he expanded his brand empire, the more infrequently he trained, and wrestling became a nuisance he needed to put up with. When his movies were box- office hits and his popularity still high, he performed wrestling exhibitions only once or twice a year. His movie Angel vs. The Return of the Vampires (a title that made no syntactic sense, and yet encapsulated his film oeuvre perfectly) found new life in repeated TV airings, and Angel felt compelled by fading fame to produce a cinematic rematch with those caped, fanged creatures that had given him so much.

And so it came to pass that one fine morning he found himself face-to-face with a group of young wrestlers made up as vampires in cheap greasepaint and rubber teeth. Angel himself walked them through a change in fight choreography that would have him wrapped three hours early — his focus less on the film at hand than on enjoying an afternoon martini back at the Intercontinental Hotel.

In the scene, one of the vampires would nearly unmask Angel until he miraculously freed himself with an open-palm blow, his trademark “Angel Kiss.”

But as the scene progressed, filmed amid sweaty technicians at a stifling stage in Churubusco Studios, the younger vampire thespian, perhaps enraptured by the glory of his cinematic debut, applied a bit more force than necessary to their skirmish, and threw the middle-aged wrestler down. As they fell, the vampire adversary landed, both awkwardly and tragically, on his venerable master’s leg.