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

A panel television hung on the wall like a wide, glass-framed painting. On it, the mayor was speaking into a bouquet of microphones. He was trying to answer questions about the missing dead from the airplane, the bodies that had disappeared from the city’s morgues. The NYPD was on high alert, and actively stopping all refrigerated trucks at bridges and tunnels. A TIPS line had been set up. The victims’ families were outraged, and funerals had been put on hold.

Bill led Vasiliy to the girl’s bedroom. A canopy bed, a gem—encrusted Bratz television and matching laptop, and an animatronic butterscotch pony in the corner. Vasiliy’s eyes went immediately to a food wrapper near the bed. Toasted crackers with peanut butter inside. He liked those himself.

“She was in here taking a nap,” said Billy. “Woke up feeling something gnawing on her lip. The thing was up on her pillow, Vaz. A rat in her bed. Kid won’t sleep for a month. You ever heard of this?”

Vasiliy shook his head. There were rats in and around every building in Manhattan—no matter what landlords say or tenants think—but they didn’t like to make their presence known, especially in the middle of the day. Rat attacks generally involve children, most often around the mouth, because that’s where the food smell is. Norway rats—Rattus norvegicus, city rats—have a highly defined sense of smell and taste. Their front incisors are long and sharp, stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron. Gnawing rats are responsible for one-quarter of all electric-cable breaks in the city, and the likely culprit behind the same percentage of fires of unknown origin. Their teeth are comparable in pure hardness to steel, and the alligator-like structure of their jaw allows for thousands of pounds of biting pressure. They can chew through cement and even stone.

Vasiliy said, “Did she see the rat?”

“She didn’t know what it was. She screamed and flailed and it ran off. The emergency room told them it was a rat.”

Vasiliy went to the window that was open a few inches to let in a breeze. He pushed it open farther and looked down three stories to a narrow cobblestone alley. The fire escape was ten or twelve feet from the window, but the centuries-old brick facing was uneven and craggy. People think of rats as squat and waddling, when in fact they move with squirrel-like agility. Especially when motivated by food or by fear.

Vasiliy pulled the girl’s bed away from the wall and shed its bedding. He moved a dollhouse, a bureau, and a bookcase in order to look behind them, but he did not expect to find the rat still in the bedroom. He was merely eliminating the obvious.

He stepped out into the hallway, pulling his wheeled cart along the smooth, varnished wood. Rats have poor eyesight and move largely by feel. They get about quickly by repetition, wearing paths along low walls, rarely traveling more than sixty feet from their nest. They don’t trust unfamiliar settings. This rat would have found the door and turned the corner, hugging the right-hand wall, his coarse fur gliding against the floorboard. The next open door led into a bathroom, the young daughter’s own, decorated with a strawberry-shaped bath mat, a pale pink shower curtain, and a basket of bath bubbles and toys. Vasiliy scanned the room for hiding places, then sniffed the air. He nodded to Billy, who then closed the door on him.

Billy lingered a minute, listening, then decided to head back out to reassure the mother. He was almost there when he heard, from the hallway bathroom, a terrific BANG!—the sound of bottles falling into the bathtub—and a loud grunt and Vasiliy’s voice, grown fierce, spurting Russian invective.

The mother and daughter looked stricken. Billy held out a hand to them in a gesture of patience—having accidentally swallowed his gum—then rushed back down the hall.

Vasiliy opened the bathroom door. He was wearing Kevlar-sleeved trapping gloves and holding a large sack. Something in the sack was writhing and pawing. And that something was big.

Vasiliy nodded once and handed the sack to Billy.

Billy couldn’t do anything other than take it, otherwise the sack would fall and the rat would escape. He hoped the fabric was as sturdy as it seemed, the big rat twisting and fighting inside. Billy held the sack out as far from his body as his arm would reach while still allowing him to hold the flailing rat aloft. Vasiliy was, meanwhile, calmly—but too slowly—opening his cart. He removed a sealed package, a sponge prepared with halothane. Vasiliy took back the sack, and Billy was only too happy to relinquish it. He opened the top just long enough to drop the anesthetic inside, then closed it again. The rat struggled just as violently at first. Then it began to slow down. Vasiliy shook the sack to speed up the process.

He waited a few more moments after the fighting stopped, then opened the sack and reached inside, pulling the rat out tail first. It was sedated but not unconscious, its pink-digited front paws still digging their sharp nails into the air, its jaw snapping, its shiny black eyes open. This was a good-size one, maybe eight inches of body, the tail another eight. Its tough fur was dark gray on top, dirty white below. Nobody’s escaped pet, this was a wild city rat.

Billy had moved many steps back. He had seen plenty of rats in his day, yet he never got used to them. Vasiliy seemed to be okay with it.

“She’s pregnant,” he said. Rats gestate for just twenty-one days and can birth a litter of up to twenty pups. One healthy female can breed two hundred and fifty pups each year—with half of that litter more females ready to mate. “Want me to bleed her for the lab?”

Billy shook his head, showing almost as much disgust as though Vasiliy had asked if he wanted to eat it. “The girl had her shots at the hospital. Look at the size, Vaz. In the good name of Christ. I mean, this isn’t”—Billy lowered his voice—“this isn’t some tenement in Bushwick, you catch my drift?”

Vasiliy did catch his drift. Intimately. Vasiliy’s parents had first settled in Bushwick after they came over. Bushwick had seen waves of émigrés since the mid-1800s: the Germans, the English, the Irish, the Russians, the Polish, the Italians, the African Americans, the Puerto Ricans. Now it was Dominicans, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Ecuadorians, Indians, Koreans, Southeast Asians. Vasiliy spent a lot of time in the poorest neighborhoods of New York. He knew of families who used couch cushions, books, and furniture to wall off parts of their apartments every night, trying to keep out rats.

But this attack, indeed, was different. Daylight. The boldness. Usually it is only the weakest rats, forced out of the colony, who surface in search of food. This was a strong, healthy female. Highly unusual. Rats coexist in a fragile balance with man, exploiting the vulnerabilities of civilization, living off the larger breed’s waste and refuse, lurking just out of sight, behind the walls or beneath the floorboards. The appearance of a rat symbolizes human anxiety and fear. Any incursion beyond the usual nocturnal scavenging indicates an alteration in the environment. Like man, rats are not accustomed to taking unnecessary risks: they have to be forced from the underground.

“Want me to comb it for fleas?”

“Christ, no. Just bag it and get rid of it. Whatever you do, don’t show it to the girl. She’s traumatized enough as it is.”

Vasiliy pulled a large plastic bag from his kit and sealed the rat inside it with another sponge of halothane, this one a fatal dose. He stuffed the bag inside the sack to hide the evidence, then continued about his business, starting in the kitchen. He pulled out the heavy, eight-burner stove and the dishwasher. He checked the pipe holes under the sink. He saw no droppings, no burrows, but he seeded a little bait behind the cabinets anyway, because he was there. He did so without telling the occupants. People get nervous about poison, especially parents, but the truth is that rat poison is all over every building and street in Manhattan. Anything you see that resembles berry blue Pop Rocks or green kibble, you know rats have been spotted nearby.

Billy followed him down into the basement. It was neat and orderly, with no evident trash or soft refuse for nesting. Vasiliy scanned the space, sniffing for droppings. He had a good nose for rats, just as rats had a good nose for humans. He switched off the light, much to Bill’s discomfort, and switched on the flashlight he wore clipped to the belt of his light blue overalls, shining purple instead of white. Rodent urine shows up indigo blue under black light, but here he saw none. He baited the crawl spaces with rodenticide and put down corner “motel”-type traps, just in case, then followed Billy back up to the lobby.

Billy thanked Vasiliy and told him he owed him one, and they went their separate ways at the door. Vasiliy was still puzzled though, and, after returning his kit and the dead rat to the back of his van, lit a Dominican corona and started walking. He went down the street and around to the cobblestone alley he had looked down upon from the girl’s window. Tribeca was the sole remaining neighborhood in Manhattan with any alleys left.

Vasiliy hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he saw his first rat. Skittering along the edge of a building, feeling its way around. He then saw another on the branch of a small, struggling tree grown up alongside a short brick wall. And a third, squatting in the stone gutter, drinking brown effluent flowing from some unseen garbage or sewage source.

As he stood there watching, rats started appearing out of the cobblestones. Literally, clawing up from between the worn-down stones, surfacing from the underground. Rats’ skeletons are collapsible, allowing them to squeeze through holes no larger than the size of their skulls, about three-quarters of an inch in width. They were coming up through the gaps in twos and threes, and quickly scattering. Using the twelve-by-three stones as a ruler, Vasiliy estimated that these rats ranged from eight to ten inches in body length, doubled by their tail. In other words, fully grown adults.

Two garbage bags near him were twitching and bulging, rats eating their way through their insides. A small rat tried to dart past him to a trash barrel, and Vasiliy kicked out with his work boot, punting the muncher back fifteen feet. It landed in the middle of the alley, not moving. Within seconds, the other rats were greedily upon it, long, yellow incisors biting through fur. The most effective and efficient way to exterminate rats is to remove the food source from their environment and then let them eat one another.

These rats were hungry, and they were on the run. Such daytime surface activity was practically unheard of. This kind of mass displacement only happened in the wake of an event such as an earthquake or a building collapse.

Or, occasionally, a large construction project.

Vasiliy continued another block south, crossing Barclay Street to where the city opened up to the sky above, a sixteen-acre job site.

He stepped up to one of the viewing platforms overlooking the location of the former World Trade Center. They were nearing completion of the deep underground basin meant to support the new construction, the cement and steel columns now starting to rise out of the ground. The site existed like a gouge in the city—like the gnaw in the little girl’s face.

Vasiliy remembered that apocalyptic September of 2001. A few days after the Twin Towers’ collapse, he had gone in with the health department, starting with the shuttered restaurants around the perimeter of the site, clearing away abandoned food. Then down into the basements and underground rooms, never once seeing a live rat, but plenty of evidence of their presence, including miles of rat tracks enshrined in the settled dust. He remembered most vividly a Mrs. Fields cookie shop, almost entirely eaten through. The rat population was exploding at the site, the concern being that the rats would spill out of the ruins in search of new food sources, swarming into the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. So a massive, federally funded containment program was undertaken. Thousands of bait stations and steel-wire traps were set down in and around Ground Zero, and, thanks to Vasiliy’s vigilance and that of others like him, the feared invasion never did materialize.

Vasiliy remained on a government contract to this day, his department overseeing a rat-control study in and around Battery Park. So he was pretty well caught up on local infestations, and had been throughout the beginnings of the construction project. And until now everything had been business as usual.

He looked down at the trucks pouring cement and the cranes moving rubble. He waited three minutes for a young boy to finish with one of the mounted viewfinders—the same kind they have on the top of the Empire State Building—then dropped in his two quarters and scanned the work site.

In a moment, he saw them, their little brown bodies scuttling out from corners, racing around stone piles, a few scampering hell bent for leather up the access road toward Liberty Street. Racing around rebar spikes marking the foundation of the Freedom Tower as though running a goddamned obstacle course. He looked for the breaks where the new construction would connect underground with the PATH subway. Then he turned the viewfinder higher and followed a line of them scrambling up the underpinnings of a steel platform along the east corner, clambering out onto strung wires. They were racing out of the basin, a mass exodus, following any escape route they could find.

Isolation Ward, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

BEHIND THE SECOND DOOR of the isolation ward, Eph pulled on latex gloves. He would have insisted that Setrakian do the same, but another look at his crooked fingers made Eph wonder if it would even be possible.

They walked inside Jim Kent’s bay, the only occupied station in the otherwise empty ward. Jim lay sleeping now, still in his street clothes, wires from his chest and hand leading to machines whose readings were quiet. The attending nurse had said his levels were dipping so low that all the automatic alarms—low heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, oxygen levels—had to be muted, because they kept going off.

Eph pushed past the hanging curtains of clear plastic, feeling Setrakian grow tense beside him. As they got close, Kent’s vitals rose on all the readout screens—which was highly irregular.

“Like the worm in the jar,” said Setrakian. “He senses us. He senses that blood is near.”

“Can’t be,” said Eph.

He advanced farther. Jim’s vitals and brainwave activity increased.

“Jim,” said Eph.

His face was slack in sleep, his dark skin turning a putty gray color. Eph could see his pupils moving fast beneath his eyelids in a kind of manic REM sleep.

Setrakian drew back the last intervening layer of clear curtain with the silver wolf’s head of his tall walking staff. “Not too close,” he warned. “He is turning.” Setrakian reached into his coat pocket. “Your mirror. Take it out.”

The inside-front pocket of Eph’s jacket was weighed down by a four-inch-by-three-inch silver-framed mirror, one of the many items the old man had collected from his basement vampire armory.

“You see yourself in there?”

Eph saw his reflection in the old glass. “Sure.”

“Please use it to look at me.”