The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal. Guillermo Toro del
could not process this shock. She could not deal with it. The husband she had thought she was rid of. The tyrant. The batterer. The rapist.
She stood over his sleeping body, the machete a sword of Damocles, ready to fall if he offered the slightest move.
Then, by degrees, she lowered her arm, the machete blade coming to rest at her side. He was a ghost now, she realized. A man returned from the dead, a presence, meaning to haunt her forever. She would never be free of him.
As she was thinking this, Hermann opened his eyes.
The lids rose on his eyeballs, staring straight up.
Glory froze. She wanted to run and she wanted to scream and she could do neither.
Hermann’s head rotated until his staring eyes fixed on her. That same taunting look, as always. That sneer. The look that always preceded the bad things.
And then something clicked inside her head.
At that same moment, four houses down the street, three-year-old Lucy Needham stood in her driveway feeding a doll named Baby Dear from a snack-size bag of Cheez-Its. Lucy stopped munching the loud crackers, and instead listened to the muffled screams and hard, chopping thwacks coming from … somewhere nearby. She looked up at her own house, then north, her nose scrunched up toward her eyes in innocent confusion. She stood very still, an orange tongue of half-chewed, cheese-baked crackers sticking out of her open mouth, listening to some of the strangest noises she had ever heard. She was going to tell Daddy when he came back outside with the telephone, but by then her bag of Cheez-Its had spilled and she was squatting and eating them off the driveway, and after getting yelled at she forgot the whole thing.
Glory stood there gasping in her attic, retching, the machete gripped in both hands. Hermann lay in pieces among the sticky pink insulation, the attic wall splattered in dripping white.
White?
Glory trembled, soul sick. She surveyed the damage she had done. Twice, the blade had become lodged in the wood joist, and in her mind it was Hermann trying to wrench the machete away from her, and she’d had to rock it back and forth violently to get it free again and keep swinging at his flesh.
She backed away one step. She was experiencing an out-of-body sensation. It was shocking what she had done.
Hermann’s sneering head had rolled off between two joists, facedown now, a fluffy pinch of pink fiberglass stuck to his cheek like cotton candy. His torso was gouged and gored, his thighs sliced to the femur, his groin bubbling up white.
White?
She felt something poking her slipper, tap-tap-tap. She saw blood there—red blood—and realized she had nicked herself somehow, her left arm, though she felt no pain. She raised it for inspection, dripping fat, red plops onto the plywood.
White?
She saw something dark and small, slithering. She was bleary-eyed and blinking, still in the grip of a homicidal rage. She couldn’t trust her sight.
She felt an itch on her ankle, underneath her bloody slipper. The itch crawled up her leg and she swatted at her thigh with the flat side of the sticky white blade.
Then—another tickle on the front of her other leg. And—separately—her waist. She realized she was having some sort of hysterical reaction, as if bugs were attacking her. She stumbled back another step, and almost tumbled off the plywood walkway.
There was then a most unnerving wriggling sensation around her crotch—and then a sudden, twisting discomfort in her rectum. An intrusive slithering that made her jump and clench her buttocks, as though she were about to soil herself. Her sphincter dilated and she stood that way for a long moment, paralyzed, until the feeling started to fade. She allowed herself to unclench, to relax. She needed to get to a bathroom. Another wriggle distracted her, inside her blouse sleeve now. And she felt a burning itch over the cut in her arm.
Then a wrenching pain, from deep within her bowels, doubled her over fast. The machete fell to the plywood and a scream that was a shriek of anguish and violation came out of Glory’s mouth. She felt something rippling up her arm—beneath her flesh now, her skin crawling—and while her mouth was open and still screaming, another thin capillary worm slithered from behind her neck and across her jaw to her lip, darting inside the wall of her cheek, wriggling down the back of her throat.
Freeburg, New York
NIGHT WAS FAST approaching as Eph drove east, over the Cross Island Parkway, into Nassau County.
Eph said, “So you’re telling me that the passengers from the city morgues, the ones the entire city is looking for—they all just went home?”
The old professor sat in the backseat with his hat on his lap. “Blood wants blood,” he said. “Once turned, the revenants first seek out family and friends still uninfected. They return, by night, to those with whom they share an emotional attachment. Their ‘Dear Ones.’ Like a homing instinct, I suppose. The same animal impulse that guides lost dogs hundreds of miles back to their owners. As their higher brain function falls away, their animal nature takes over. These are creatures driven by urges. To feed. To hide. To nest.”
“Returning to the people who are mourning them,” said Nora, sitting next to Eph in the front passenger seat. “To attack and infect?”
“To feed. It is the nature of the undead to torment the living.”
Eph exited the highway in silence. This vampire business was the mental equivalent of eating bad food: his mind refused to digest it. He chewed and chewed but could not get it down.
When Setrakian had asked him to pick a passenger from the list of Flight 753 victims, the first one who came to mind was the young girl Emma Gilbarton. The one he had found still holding hands with her mother in the airplane. It seemed a good test for Setrakian’s hypothesis. How could an eleven-year-old dead girl journey at night from a Queens morgue all the way out to her family home in Freeburg?
But now, as he pulled up outside the Gilbartons’ address—a stately looking Georgian on a broad side street of widely spaced properties—Eph realized that, were they wrong, he was about to wake up a man grieving for the end of his family, the loss of his wife and only child.
This was something Eph knew a little bit about.
Setrakian stepped out of the Explorer, fixing his hat on his head, carrying the long walking stick that he did not need for support. The street was quiet at that evening hour, lights glowing inside some of the other houses, but no people out and about, no cars driving past. The windows of the Gilbartons’ house were all dark. Setrakian handed them each a battery-powered light with dark bulbs that looked like their Luma lamps, only heavier.
They went to the door and Setrakian rang the doorbell by using the head of the walking stick. He tried the doorknob when no one answered, using the gloved part of his hand only, keeping his bare fingertips off the knob. Not leaving any fingerprints.
Eph realized that the old man had done this sort of thing before.
The front door was firmly locked. “Come,” said Setrakian.
They went back down the stairs, and started around the house. The backyard was a wide clearing set on the edge of an old wood. The early moon provided decent light, enough to cast faint shadows of their bodies over the grass.
Setrakian stopped and pointed with his walking stick.
A bulkhead rose out at an angle from the cellar, its doors wide open to the night.
The old man continued to the bulkhead, Eph and Nora following. Stone steps led down into a dark cellar. Setrakian scanned the high trees buffering the backyard.
Eph said, “We can’t just go inside.”
“This is exceedingly unwise after sundown,” Setrakian said. “But we do not have the luxury of waiting.”
Eph