The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal

Faint. Very faint. A squirming sound, almost like that of something wriggling in mud. A slow sound, so maddeningly slight he couldn’t be altogether certain he wasn’t imagining it.

He gave the scope to Nora to have a listen.

“Maggots?” she said, straightening.

Bennett shook his head. “In fact there is no infestation at all, accounting in part for the lack of decay. But there are some other intriguing abnormalities …”

Bennett waved everyone else to return to their work, selecting, from a side tray, a big number 6 blade scalpel. But instead of starting in on the chest with the usual Y-shaped incision, he took a large-mouthed stock jar from the enameled counter and placed it beneath the corpse’s left hand. He drew the scalpel blade abruptly across the underside of the wrist, slicing it open like the rind of an orange.

A pale, opalescent liquid sprayed at first, some of it spurting out onto his gloves and his hip on the initial cut, then sluicing steadily out of the arm, singing into the bottom of the jar. Flowing fast, but then, lacking any circulatory pressure from its stilled heart, losing force after about three ounces or so. Bennett lowered the arm to draw out more.

Eph’s shock at the callousness of the cut was quickly overcome by his amazement at the sight of the flow. This couldn’t be blood. Blood settles and congeals after death. It doesn’t drain out like engine oil.

Nor does it turn white. Bennett returned the arm to the corpse’s side and held up the jar for Eph to see.

Lieutenant—the corpses—they’re …

“At first I thought maybe the proteins were separating, the way oil sits on top of water,” Bennett said. “But it’s not quite that either.”

The issue was pasty white, almost as though sour milk had been introduced into the bloodstream.

Lieutenant … oh, Jesus—

Eph could not believe what he was seeing.

Nora said, “They’re all like this?”

Bennett nodded. “Exsanguinated. They have no blood.”

Eph eyed the white matter in the jar, and his taste for whole milk turned his stomach.

Bennett said, “I’ve got some other things. Core temperature is elevated. Somehow these bodies are still generating heat. Additionally, we’ve found dark spots on some organs. Not necrosis, but almost more like … like bruising.”

Bennett set the jar of opalescent fluid back down on the counter and called over a pathology assistant. She brought with her an opaque plastic tub of the same sort that take-out soup comes in. She peeled off the top and Bennett reached inside, removing an organ, setting it on a cutting board like a small, fresh-from-the-butcher roast. It was an undissected human heart. He pointed a gloved finger at where it would have joined the arteries. “See the valves? Almost as if they have grown open. Now, they couldn’t have operated like this in life. Not closing and opening and pumping blood. So this can’t have been congenital.”

Eph was aghast. This abnormality was a fatal defect. As every anatomist knows, people look just as different on the inside as they do on the outside. But no human being could conceivably have survived to adulthood with this heart.

Nora asked, “Do you have medical records for the patient? Anything we can check this against?”

“Nothing yet. Probably not until morning. But it’s made me slow this process down. Way down. I’m stopping in a little while, shutting down for the night so I can get some more support in here tomorrow. I want to check every little thing. Such as—this.”

Bennett walked them down to a fully anatomized body, that of a midweight adult male. His neck had been dissected back to the throat, exposing the larynx and trachea, so that the vocal folds, or vocal cords, were visible just above the larynx.

Bennett said, “See the vestibular folds?”

They were also known as “false vocal cords”: thick mucous membranes whose only function is to sit above and protect the true vocal folds. They are a true anatomical oddity in that they can regenerate themselves completely, even after surgical removal.

Eph and Nora leaned in closer. Both saw the outgrowth from the vestibular folds, a pinkish, fleshy protuberance—not disruptive or malformed like a tumorous mass, but branching from and within the inner throat, below the tongue. A novel, seemingly spontaneous augmentation of the soft lower mandible.

They scrubbed up outside, more diligently than usual. Both were deeply shaken by what they had seen inside the morgue.

Eph spoke first. “I’m wondering when things are going to start making sense again.” He dried his hands completely, feeling the open air against his gloveless hands. Then he felt his own neck, over the throat, approximately where the incisions were all located. “A straight, deep puncture wound in the neck. And a virus that slows antemortem decomposition on the one hand, yet apparently causes spontaneous antemortem tissue growth on the other?”

Nora said, “This is something new.”

“Or—something very, very old.”

They started out the delivery door, to Eph’s illegally parked Explorer, his EMERGENCY BLOOD DELIVERY pass on the dash. The last streaks of daytime warmth were leaving the sky. Nora said, “We need to check out the other morgues, see if they are finding the same deviations.”

The alarm went off on Eph’s cell phone. A text message from Zack:

whre R U ???? Z

“Shit,” said Eph. “I forgot … the custody hearing …”

“Now?” Nora said, before catching herself. “Okay. You go. I’ll meet you after—”

“No, I’ll call them—it will be fine.” He looked around, feeling himself splitting in two. “We need to take another look at the pilot. Why did his puncture close up, but not the others’? We need to get on top of the physiopathology of this thing.”

“And the other survivors.”

Eph frowned, reminded that they were gone. “It’s not like Jim to screw up like that.”

Nora wanted to defend Jim. “If they’re getting sick, they’ll come back.”

“Only—it might be too late. For them, and for us.”

“What do you mean, for us?”

“To get to the bottom of this thing. There’s got to be an answer somewhere, an explanation. A rationale. Something impossible is happening, and we need to find out why and stop it.”

Up on the sidewalk at the main entrance on First Street, news crews were set up for live remotes from the medical examiner’s office. That attracted a sizable crowd of onlookers, whose nervousness was palpable from around the corner. Lots of uncertainty in the air.

But one man broke from the crowd, a man Eph had noticed on the way in. An old man with birch white hair, holding a walking stick that was too tall for him, gripping it, like a staff, below its high silver handle. Like a dinner-theater Moses, except that he was impeccably dressed, formal and old-fashioned, in a light black overcoat over a gabardine suit, with a gold watch chain looped on his vest. And—oddly for the otherwise distinguished wardrobe—gray wool gloves with the fingertips cut off.

“Dr. Goodweather?”

The old man knew his name. Eph gave him another look, and said, “Do I know you?”

The man spoke with an accent, maybe Slavic. “I saw you on the box. The TV. I knew you would have to come here.”

“You’ve been waiting here for me?”

“What I have to say, Doctor, it is very important. Critical.”

Eph was distracted by the handle on top of the old man’s tall walking stick: a silver wolf’s head. “Well, not now … call my office, make an appointment …” He moved away, dialing rapidly on his cell phone.

The old man appeared anxious, an agitated man striving to speak calmly. He put on his best gentlemanly smile, including Nora in his introduction. “Abraham Setrakian is my name. Which should mean nothing to you.” He gestured, with his walking stick, at the morgue. “You saw them in there. The passengers from the airplane.”