The Strain

Canary Headquarters, Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street

On the third morning following the landing of Flight 753, Eph took Setrakian to the office headquarters of the CDC Canary project on the western edge of Chelsea, one block east of the Hudson. Before Eph started Canary, the three-room office had been the local site for the CDC’s World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, investigating links between the 9/11 recovery effort and persistent respiratory ailments.

Eph’s heart lifted as they pulled up at Eleventh Avenue. Two police cars and a pair of unmarked sedans with government license plates were parked outside the entrance. Director Barnes had come through finally. They were going to get the help they needed. There was no way Eph, Nora, and Setrakian could fight this scourge on their own.

The third-floor office door was open when they got there, and Barnes was conferring with a plainclothes man who identified himself as an FBI special agent. “Everett,” said Eph, relieved to find him personally involved. “Your timing is perfect. Just the man I wanted to see.” He moved to a small refrigerator near the door. Test tubes clinked as he reached for a quart of whole milk, uncapping it and drinking it down fast. He needed the calcium the same way he had once needed booze. We trade off our dependencies, he realized. For instance, just last week Eph had been fully dependent upon the laws of science and nature. Now his fix was silver swords and ultraviolet light.

He brought the half-empty bottle away from his lips with the realization that he had just slaked his thirst with the product of another mammal.

“Who is this?” asked Director Barnes.

“This,” said Eph, swiping the milk mustache from his upper lip, “is Professor Abraham Setrakian.” Setrakian was holding his hat, his alabaster hair bright under the low ceiling lights. “So much has happened, Everett,” said Eph, swallowing more milk, putting out the fire in his belly. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

Barnes said, “Why don’t we start with the bodies missing from the city morgues.”

Eph lowered the bottle. One of the cops had edged closer to the door behind him. A second FBI man was sitting at Eph’s laptop, pecking away. “Hey, excuse me,” said Eph.

Barnes said, “Ephraim, what do you know about the missing corpses?”

Eph was a moment trying to read the CDC director’s face. He glanced back at Setrakian, but the old man offered him nothing, standing very still with his hat in his gnarled hands.

Eph turned back to his boss. “They have gone home.”

“Home?” said Barnes, turning his head as though trying to hear him better. “To heaven?”

“To their families, Everett.”

Barnes looked at the FBI agent who kept looking at Eph.

“They are dead,” said Barnes.

“They aren’t dead. At least, not in the way we understand it.”

“There is only one way to be dead, Ephraim.”

Eph shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Ephraim.” Barnes took one sympathetic step forward. “I know you have been under a keen amount of stress recently. I know you have had family troubles…”

Eph said, “Hold on. I don’t think I understand what the hell this is.”

The FBI agent said, “This is about your patient, Doctor. One of the pilots of Regis Air Flight 753, Captain Doyle Redfern. We have a few questions about his care.”

Eph hid a chill. “Get a court order and I’ll answer your questions.”

“Maybe you’d like to explain this.”

He opened a portable video player on the edge of the desk and pressed play. It showed a security-camera view of a hospital room. Redfern was seen from behind, staggering, his johnny open in back. He looked wounded and confused rather than predatory and enraged. The camera angle did not show the stinger swirling out of his mouth.

It did however show Eph facing him with the whirling trephine, jabbing at Redfern’s throat with the circular blade.

There was the flicker of a jump cut, and now Nora was in the background, covering her mouth as Eph stood by the doorway with his chest heaving, Redfern in a heap on the floor.

Then another sequence began. A different camera farther along the same basement hallway, set at a higher angle. It showed two people, a man and a woman, forcing their way into the locked morgue room where Redfern’s body was being held. Then it showed them leaving with a heavy body bag.

The two people looked very much like Eph and Nora.

Playback stopped. Eph looked at Nora—who was shocked—and then at the FBI agent and Barnes. “That was… that attack was edited to look bad. There was a cut there. Redfern had—”

“Where are Captain Redfern’s remains?”

Eph couldn’t think. He couldn’t get past the lie he had just seen. “That wasn’t us. The camera was too high to—”

“So are you saying that was not you and Dr. Martinez?”

Eph looked at Nora, who was shaking her head, both of them too mystified to mount any immediate coherent defense.

Barnes said, “Let me ask you one more time, Ephraim. Where are the missing bodies from the morgues?”

Eph looked back to Setrakian, standing near the door. Then at Barnes. He couldn’t come up with anything to say.

“Ephraim, I am shutting Canary down. As of this moment.”

“What?” said Eph, coming around. “Wait, Everett—”

Eph moved fast, toward Barnes. The other cops started toward him as though he was dangerous, their reaction stopping Eph, alarming him even more.

“Dr. Goodweather, you have to come with us,” said the FBI agent. “All of you… hey!”

Eph turned. Setrakian was gone.

The agent sent two cops out to get him.

Eph looked back toward Barnes. “Everett. You know me. You know who I am. Listen to what I am about to tell you. There is a plague spreading throughout this city—a scourge unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

The FBI agent said, “Dr. Goodweather, we want to know what you injected into Jim Kent.”

“What I… what?”

Barnes said, “Ephraim, I have made a deal with them. They will spare Nora if you agree to cooperate. Spare her the scandal of arrest and preserve her professional reputation. I know that you two… are close.”

“And how exactly do you know that?” Eph looked around at his persecutors, moving past bewilderment and into anger. “This is bullshit, Everett.”

“You are on video attacking and murdering a patient, Ephraim. You have been reporting fantastic test results, unexplained by any rational measurement, unsubstantiated and most likely doctor-manipulated. Would I be here if I had a choice? If you had a choice?”

Eph turned to Nora. She would be spared. She could perhaps fight on.

Barnes was right. For the moment at least, in a room full of lawmen, he had no choice.

“Don’t let this slow you down,” Eph told Nora. “You may be the only one left who knows what’s really happening.”

Nora shook her head. She turned to Barnes. “Sir, there is a conspiracy here, whether you are willingly a part of it or not—”

“Please, Dr. Martinez,” said Barnes. “Don’t embarrass yourself any further.”

The other agent packed up Eph’s and Nora’s laptops. They started walking Eph down the stairs.

At the second-floor hallway, they met the two cops who had gone after Setrakian. They were standing side by side, almost back to back. Handcuffed together.

Setrakian appeared behind the group with his sword drawn. He held its point at the lead FBI agent’s neck. There was a smaller dagger in his other hand, also fashioned of silver. He held that one near Director Barnes’s throat.

The old professor said, “You gentlemen are pawns in a scheme well beyond your comprehension. Doctor, take this dagger.”

Eph took the weapon’s handle, holding the point at his boss’s throat.

Barnes said, breathlessly, “Good Christ, Ephraim. Have you lost your mind?”

“Everett, this is bigger than you can know. This goes beyond the CDC—beyond regular law enforcement even. There is a catastrophic disease outbreak in this city, the likes of which we have never seen. And that’s just the half of it.”

Nora came up beside him, reclaiming hers and Ephraim’s laptops from the other FBI agent. She said, “I got everything else we need from the office. Looks like we won’t be coming back.”

Barnes said, “For God’s sake, Ephraim, come to your senses.”

“This is the job you hired me to do, Everett. To sound the alarm when a public health crisis warrants. We are on the verge of a worldwide pandemic. An extinction event. And somebody somewhere is pulling out all the stops to make damn sure it succeeds.”

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

ELDRITCH PALMER switched on a bank of monitors, showing six television news channels. The one in the lower-left-hand box interested him most. He angled his chair up a few degrees and isolated the channel, raising its volume.

The reporter was posted outside the 17th Precinct headquarters on East Fifty-first Street, getting a “No comment” from a police official concerning a rash of missing persons reports being filed throughout the New York area in the past few days. They showed the line of people waiting outside the precinct house, too many to be allowed inside, filling out forms on the sidewalk. The reporter noted that other seemingly unexplained incidents, such as house break-ins in which nothing appeared to have been stolen and no one appeared to be home, were being reported also. Strangest of all was the fact of the failure of modern technology to assist in the search for the missing persons: mobile phones, almost all of which contain traceable GPS technology, had apparently gone missing with their owners. This led some to speculate that people were perhaps willfully abandoning families and jobs, and noted that the spike in disappearances seemed to have coincided with the recent lunar occultation, suggesting a link between the two occurrences. A psychologist then commented on the potential for low-grade mass hysteria in the wake of certain startling celestial events. The story ended with the reporter giving airtime to a teary woman holding up a JCPenney portrait of a missing mother of two.

The program then went to a commercial for an “age-defying” cream designed to “help you live longer and better.”

The congenitally ill tycoon then switched off the audio, so that the only sound, other than the dialysis machine, was the humming behind his avaricious smile.

On another screen was a graphic showing the financial markets declining while the dollar continued its fall. Palmer himself was moving the markets, steadily divesting himself of equities and buying into metals: gold, silver, palladium, and platinum bullion.

The commentator went on to suggest that the recent recession represented opportunities in futures trading. Palmer strongly disagreed. He was shorting futures. Everybody’s except his own.

A telephone call was forwarded to his chair through Mr. Fitzwilliam. A sympathetic member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, calling to inform him that the epidemiologist with the Canary project, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, had escaped.

“Escaped?” said Palmer. “How is that possible?”

“He had an elderly man with him who apparently was more wily than he’d seemed. He carried a long silver sword.”

Palmer was silent for one full respiration. Then, slowly, he smiled.

Forces were aligning against him. All well and good. Let them come together. It would be easier to clear them all away.

“Sir?” said the caller.

“Oh—nothing,” said Palmer. “I was just thinking of an old friend.”

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

EPH AND NORA stood with Setrakian behind the locked doors of his pawnshop, the two epidemiologists still shaken up.

“I gave them your name,” said Eph, looking outside the window.

“The building is in my late wife’s name. We should be safe here for the moment.”

Setrakian was anxious to get downstairs to his basement armory, but the two doctors were still rattled. “They are coming after us,” said Eph.

“Clearing the way for infection,” said Setrakian. “The strain will move faster through an orderly society than one on high alert.”

“They who?” said Nora.

“Whoever had the influence to get that coffin loaded onto a transatlantic flight in this age of terrorism,” said Setrakian.

Eph said, pacing, “They’re framing us. Sending someone in there to steal Redfern’s remains… who looked like us?”

“As you said, you are the lead authority to sound the general alarm for disease control. Be thankful they only tried to discredit you.”

Nora said, “Without the CDC behind us, we have no authority.”

Setrakian said, “We must continue on our own now. This is disease control at its most elemental.”

Nora looked over at him. “You mean—murder.”

“What would you want? To become like that… or to have someone release you?”

Eph said, “It’s still a polite euphemism for murder. And easier said than done. How many heads do we have to cut off? There are three of us here.”

Setrakian said, “There are ways other than severing the spinal column. Sunlight, for example. Our most powerful ally.”

Eph’s phone trembled inside his pocket. He pulled it out, wary, checking the display.

An Atlanta exchange. CDC headquarters. “Pete O’Connell,” he said to Nora, and took the call.

Nora turned to Setrakian. “So where are they all right now, during the day?”

“Underground. Cellars and sewers. The dark bowels of buildings, such as maintenance rooms, in the heating and cooling systems. In the walls sometimes. But usually in dirt. That is where they prefer to make their nests.”

“So—they sleep during the day, right?”

“That would be most convenient, wouldn’t it? A handful of coffins in a basement, full of dozing vampires. But no, they don’t sleep at all. Not as we understand it. They will shut down for a while if they are sated. Too much blood digestion fatigues them. But never for long. They go underground during daylight hours solely to escape the killing rays of the sun.”

Nora appeared quite pale and overwhelmed, like a little girl who’d been told that dead people do not in fact grow wings and fly straight up to heaven to be angels, but instead stay on earth and grow stingers under their tongues and turn into vampires.

“That thing you said,” she said. “Before you cut them down. Something in another language. Like a pronouncement, or a kind of curse.”

The old man winced. “Something I say only to calm myself. To steady my hand for the final blow.”

Nora waited to hear what it was. Setrakian saw that, for whatever reason, she needed to know.

“I say, ‘Strigoi, my sword sings of silver.’” Setrakian winced again, uncomfortable saying this now. “Sounds better in the old language.”

Nora saw that this old vampire killer was essentially a modest man. “Silver,” she said.

“Only silver,” he said. “Renowned throughout the ages for its antiseptic and germicidal properties. You can cut them with steel or shoot them with lead, but only silver really hurts them.”

Eph had his free hand over his other ear, trying to hear Pete, who was driving in a car just outside Atlanta. Pete said, “What’s going on up there?”

“Well… what have you heard?”

“That I’m not supposed to be talking to you. That you’re in trouble. That you’ve gone off the reservation or some such.”

“It’s a mess here, Pete. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, I had to call anyway. I’ve been putting in time on the samples you sent me.”

Eph felt another stone fall into his gut. Dr. Peter O’Connell was one of the heads of the Unexplained Deaths Project at the CDC’s National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases. UNEX was an interdisciplinary group made up of virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and clinicians from inside and outside the CDC. A great many naturally occurring deaths go unexplained in the United States each year, and a fraction of these—about seven hundred per annum—are referred to UNEX for further investigation. Of those seven hundred, merely 15 percent are satisfactorily resolved, with samples from the rest being banked for possible future reexamination.

Every UNEX researcher holds another position within the CDC, and Pete was the chief of Infectious Disease Pathology, an expert on how and why a virus affects its host. Eph had forgotten sending him early biopsies and blood samples from Captain Redfern’s preliminary examination.

“It’s a viral strain, Eph. No doubt about that. A remarkable bit of genetic acid.”

“Pete, wait, listen to me—”

“The glycoprotein has amazing binding characteristics. I’m talking skeleton key. Astonishing. This little bugger doesn’t merely hijack the host cell, tricking it into reproducing more copies of itself. No—it fuses to the RNA. Melds with it. Consumes it… yet somehow doesn’t use it up. What it’s doing is, it’s making a copy of itself mated with the host cell. And taking only the parts it needs. I don’t know what you’re seeing with your patient, but theoretically, this thing could replicate and replicate and replicate, and many millions of generations later—and this thing is fast—it could reproduce its own organ structure. Systemically. It could change its host. Into what, I don’t know—but I sure would like to find out.”

“Pete.” Eph’s head was swimming. It made too much sense. The virus overwhelmed and transformed the cell—just as the vampire overwhelmed and transformed the victim.

These vampires were viruses incarnate.

Pete said, “I’d like to do the genetics on this one myself, really see what makes it tick—”

“Pete, listen to me. I want you to destroy it.”

Eph heard Pete’s windshield wipers working in the silence. “What?”

“Save your findings, hang on to those, but destroy that sample right away.”

More windshield wipers, metronomes of Pete’s uncertainty. “Destroy the one I was working on, you mean? Because you know that we always bank some, just in case—”

“Pete, I need you to drive straight to the lab and destroy that sample.”

“Eph.” Eph heard Pete’s blinker, Pete pulling off the road to finish the conversation. “You know how careful we are with any potential pathogens. We’re clean and we’re safe. And we have a very strict laboratory protocol that I can’t just break for your—”

“I made a terrible mistake letting it out of New York City. I didn’t know then what I know now.”

“Exactly what kind of trouble are you in, Eph?”

“Bleach it. If that doesn’t work, use acid. Set it on fire if you have to, I don’t care. I’ll take full responsibility—”

“It’s not about responsibility, Eph. It’s about good science. You need to be straight with me now. Someone said they saw something about you on the news.”

Eph had to end this. “Pete, do as I ask—and I promise I will explain everything to you when I can.”

He hung up. Setrakian and Nora had listened to the end of his conversation.

Setrakian said, “You sent the virus somewhere else?”

“He’s going to destroy it. Pete will err on the side of caution—I know him too well.” Eph looked at the televisions for sale along the wall. Something about you on the news… “Any of these work?”

They found one that did. It wasn’t long before the story rolled around.

They showed Eph’s photograph from his CDC identification card. Then a blurry snippet of his encounter with Redfern, and one of the two look-alikes carrying a body bag from the hospital room. It said that Dr. Ephraim Goodweather was being sought as “a person of interest” in the disappearance of the corpses of the Flight 753 airline passengers.

Eph stood motionless. He thought of Kelly watching this. Of Zack.

“Those bastards,” he hissed.

Setrakian switched off the television. “The only good news about this is that they still consider you a threat. That means there is still time. Still hope. A chance.”

Nora said, “You sound like you have a plan.”

“Not a plan. A strategy.”

Eph said, “Tell us.”

“Vampires have their own laws, both savage and ancient. One such commandment that endures is that a vampire cannot cross moving water. Not without human assistance.”

Nora shook her head. “Why not?”

“The reason perhaps lies in their very creation, so long ago. The lore has existed in every known culture on the planet, for all time. Mesopotamians, Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, Hebrews, the Romans. Old as I am, I am not old enough to know. But the prohibition holds even today. Giving us something of an advantage here. Do you know, what is New York City?”

Nora got it right away. “An island.”

“An archipelago. We are surrounded on all sides by water right now. The airline passengers, they went to morgues in all five boroughs?”

“No,” said Nora. “Only four. Not Staten Island.”

“Four, then. Queens and Brooklyn are both separated from the mainland, by the East River and the Long Island Sound respectively. The Bronx is the only borough connected to the United States.”

Eph said, “If only we could seal off the bridges. Set up fire lines north of the Bronx, east of Queens at Nassau…”

“Wishful thinking at this point,” said Setrakian. “But, can you see, we do not have to destroy every one of them individually. They are all of one mind, operating in a hive mentality. Controlled by a single intelligence. Who is very likely landlocked somewhere here in Manhattan.”

“The Master,” said Eph.

“The one who came over in the belly of the airplane. The owner of the missing coffin.”

Nora said, “How do you know he’s not back near the airport? If he can’t cross the East River on his own.”

Setrakian smiled flatly. “I feel very confident that he did not journey all the way to America to hide out in Queens.” He opened the rear door, the steps leading to his basement armory. “What we have to do now is hunt him down.”

Liberty Street, the World Trade Center Site

VASILIY FET, the exterminator with the New York City Bureau of Pest Control, stood at the construction fence above the great “bathtub” foundation at the site of the former World Trade Center complex. He had left his handcart in his van, parked over on West Street, in a Port Authority lot with the other construction vehicles. In one hand he carried rodenticide and light tunnel gear in a red-and-black Puma sport bag. In his other he held his trusty length of rebar, found at a job site once, a one-meter-long steel rod perfect for probing rat burrows and pushing bait inside—and occasionally beating back aggressive or panicked vermin.

He stood between the Jersey barriers and the construction fence at the corner of Church and Liberty, among the orange-and-white caution barrels along the wide pedestrian walkway. People walked past, striding toward the temporary subway entrance at the other end of the block. There was a sense of new hope in the air here, warm, like the abundant sunshine that blessed this destroyed part of the city. The new buildings were starting to go up now, after years of planning and excavation, and it was as though this terrible black bruise was finally starting to heal.

Only Fet noticed the oily smears discoloring the vertical edges of the curb. The droppings around the parking barriers. The gnaw marks scoring the lid of the corner garbage can. Telltale signs of surface rat presence.

One of the sandhogs took him down the haul road and into the basin. He pulled up at the foot of the structure that would become the new underground WTC PATH station, with five tracks and three underground platforms. For now, the silver trains entered through daylight and open air as they made their way along the bottom of the bathtub toward the temporary platforms.

Vasiliy stepped out of the pickup, down among the concrete footings, looking up seven stories to the street above him. He was in the pit where the towers had fallen. It was enough to take his breath away.

Vasiliy said, “This is a holy place.”

The sandhog had a bushy, gray-flecked mustache, and wore a loose flannel shirt over a tucked-in flannel shirt—both heavy with soil and sweat—and blue jeans with muddy gloves tucked into the belt. His hard hat was covered with stickers. “I always thought so,” he said. “Recently I’m not so sure.”

Fet looked at him. “Because of the rats?”

“There’s that, sure. Gushing out of the tunnels the past few days, like we’ve struck rat oil. But that’s fallen off now.” He shook his head, looking up at the slurry wall erected beneath Vesey Street, seventy sheer feet of concrete studded with tiebacks.

Fet said, “Then what?”

The guy shrugged. Sandhogs are a proud lot. They built New York City, its subways and sewers, every tunnel, pier, skyscraper, and bridge foundation. Every glass of clean water comes out of the tap thanks to a sandhog. A family job, different generations working together on the same sites. Dirty work done right. So the guy was reluctant to sound reluctant. “Everyone’s in kind of a funk. We had two guys walk off, disappear. Clocked in for a shift, went down into the tunnels, but never clocked out. We’re twenty-four/seven here, but nobody wants night shifts anymore. Nobody wants to be underground. And these are young guys, my daredevils.”

Fet looked ahead to the tunnel openings where the subterranean structures would be joined beneath Church Street. “So no new construction these past few days? Breaking new ground?”

“Not since we got the basin hollowed out.”

“And all this started with the rats?”

“Around then. Something’s come over this place, just in the past few days.” The sandhog shrugged, shaking it off. He had a plain white hard hat for Vasiliy. “And I thought I had a dirty job. What makes someone want to become a rat catcher anyway?”

Vasiliy put on the hat, feeling the wind change near the mouth of the underground passage. “I guess I’m addicted to the glamour.”

The sandhog looked at Vasiliy’s boots, his Puma bag, the steel rod. “Done this before?”

“Gotta go where the vermin are. There’s a lot of city under this city.”

“Tell me about it. You got a flashlight, I hope? Some bread crumbs?”

“Think I’m good.”

Vasiliy shook the sandhog’s hand, then started inside.

The tunnel was clean at first, where it had been shored up. He followed it out of the sunlight, yellow lights strung every ten or so yards, marking his way. He was under where the original concourse had been located. This big burrow would, when all was said and done, connect the new PATH station to the WTC transportation hub located between towers two and three, a half block away. Other feed tunnels connected to city water, power, and sewer.

Deeper in, he couldn’t help but notice fine, powdery dust still coating the walls of the original tunnel. This was a hallowed place, still very much a graveyard. Where bodies and buildings were pulverized, reduced to atoms.

He saw burrows, he saw tracks and scat, but no rats. He picked away at the burrows with his rod, and listened. He heard nothing.

The strung-up work lights ended at a turn, a deep, velvety blackness lying ahead. Vasiliy carried a million-candlepower spot lamp in his bag—a big yellow Garrity with a bullhorn grip—as well as two backup mini Maglites. But artificial light in a dark enclosure wiped out one’s night vision altogether, and for rat hunting he liked to stay dark and quiet. He pulled out a night-vision monocular instead, a handheld unit with a strap that attached nicely to his hard hat, coming down over his left eye. Closing his right eye turned the tunnel green. Rat vision, he called it, their beady eyes glowing in the scope.

Nothing. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the rats were gone. Driven off.

That stumped him. It took a lot to displace rats. Even once you removed their food source, it could be weeks before seeing a change. Not days.

The tunnel was joined by older passages, Vasiliy coming across filth-covered rail tracks unused for many years. The quality of the ground soil had changed, and he could tell by its very texture that he had crossed over from “new” Manhattan—the landfill that had been brought in to build up Battery Park out of sludge—into “old” Manhattan, the original dry island bedrock.

He stopped at a junction to make certain he had his bearings. As he looked down the length of the crossing tunnel, he saw, in his rat vision, a pair of eyes. They glowed back at him like rat eyes, but bigger, and high off the ground.

The eyes were gone in a flash, turning out of sight.

“Hey?” yelled Vasiliy, his call echoing. “Hey up there!”

After a moment, a voice answered him, echoing back off the walls. “Who goes there?”

Vasiliy detected a note of fear in the voice. A flashlight appeared, its source down at the end of the tunnel, well beyond where Vasiliy had seen the eyes. He flipped up the monocular just in time, saving his retina. He identified himself, pulling out a little Maglite to shine back as a signal, then moved forward. At the point where he estimated seeing the eyes, the old access tunnel ran up alongside another tunnel track that appeared to be in use. The monocular showed him nothing, no glowing eyes, so he continued around the bend to the next junction.

He found three sandhogs there, in goggles and sticker-covered hard hats, wearing flannels, jeans, and boots. A sump pump was running, channeling out a leak. The halogen bulbs of their high-powered work-light tripods lit up the new tunnel like a space-creature movie. They stood close together, tense until they could fully see Vasiliy.

“Did I just see one of you back there?” he asked.

The three guys looked at one another. “What’d you see?”

“Thought I saw someone.” He pointed. “Cutting across the track.”

The three sandhogs looked at one another again, then two of them started packing up. The third one said, “You the guy looking for rats?”

“Yeah.”

The groundhog shook his head. “No more rats here.”

“I don’t mean to contradict you, but that’s almost impossible. How come?”

“Could be they’ve got more sense than us.”

Vasiliy looked down the lit tunnel, in the direction of the sump hose. “The subway exit down there?”

“That’s the way out.”

Vasiliy pointed in the opposite direction. “What’s this way?”

The sandhog said, “You don’t want to go that way.”

“Why not?”

“Look. Forget about rats. Follow us out. We’re done here.”

Water was still trickling into the troughlike puddle. Vasiliy said, “I’ll be right along.”

The guy dead-eyed him. “Suit yourself,” he said, switching off a tripod lamp and then hoisting a pack onto his back, starting after the others.

Vasiliy watched them go, lights playing far down the tunnel, darkening along a gradual turn. He heard the screeching of subway car wheels, near enough to concern him. He went on, crossing to the newer track, waiting for his eyes to acclimate themselves to the darkness again.

He switched on his monocular, everything going subterranean green. The echoing of his footfalls changed as the tunnel broadened to a trash-strewn exchange near a convergence of tracks. Rivet-studded steel beams stood at regular intervals, like pillars in an industrial ballroom. An abandoned maintenance shack stood to Vasiliy’s right, defaced by vandalism. The shack’s crumbling brick walls featuring some artless graffiti tags around a depiction of the twin towers in flames. One was labeled “Saddam,” the other “Gamera.”

On an old support, an ancient track sign had once warned workers:

It had since been defaced, the T and the N in TRAINS blotted out, and electric tape stuck atop the I to turn it into a T, so that it now read:

Indeed, this godforsaken place should have been rat central. He decided to go to black light. He pulled the small wand from his Puma bag and switched it on, the bulb burning cool blue in the dark. Rodent urine fluoresces under black light, due to its bacterial content. He ran it over the ground near the supports, a moonlike landscape of dry trash and filth. He noticed some duller, older, piddling stains but nothing fresh. Not until he waved it near a rusted oil barrel lying on its side. The barrel and the floor beneath it lit up bigger and brighter than any rat piss he had ever seen. A huge splash. Factored out from what he normally found, this trace would indicate a six-foot rat.

It was the recent bodily waste of some larger animal, possibly a man.

The drip-dripping of the water over the old track echoed down the breezy tunnels. He sensed rustling, some distant movement, or else maybe this place was getting to him. He put away the black light and scanned the area with his monocular. Behind one of the steel supports, he again saw a pair of shining eyes reflecting back at him—then turning away and vanishing.

He couldn’t tell how near. Given his one-eyed view scope and the geometrical pattern of the identical beams, his depth perception was shot.

He did not call out a hello this time. He did not say anything but gripped his rebar a bit more tightly. The homeless, when you encountered them, were rarely combative—but this felt like something different. Put it down to an exterminator’s sixth sense. The way he could sniff out rat infestations. Vasiliy suddenly felt outnumbered.

He pulled out his bright bullhorn spot lamp and scanned the chamber. Before retreating, he reached back into his bag, broke open the cardboard spout on a box of tracking powder, and shook out a fair amount of rodenticide over the area. Tracking powder worked more slowly than pure edible bait, but also more surely. It had the added advantage of showing the intruders’ tracks, making follow-up nest baiting easier.

Vasiliy hastily emptied three cartons, then turned with his lamp and made his way back through the tunnels. He came across active tracks with the boxed-over third rail, and then the sump pump, and followed the long hose. At one point he felt the tunnel wind change, and turned to see the curve brightening behind him. He quickly stepped back into a wall recess, bracing himself, the roar deafening. The train squealed past and Vasiliy glimpsed commuters in the windows before shielding his eyes from the smoky swirl of grit and dust.

It passed, and he followed the tracks until he reached a lighted platform. He surfaced with bag and rod, pulling himself up off the track onto the mostly empty platform, next to a sign that read, IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Nobody did. He walked up the mezzanine stairs and moved through the turnstiles, resurfacing on the street into the warming sun. He moved to a nearby fence and found himself back above the World Trade Center construction site. He lit a cheroot with his blue flame butane Zippo and sucked in the poison, chasing the fear he’d felt under the streets. He walked back across the street to the World Trade Center site, coming upon two handmade fliers stapled to the fence. They were scanned color photographs of two sandhogs, one with his helmet still on and dirt on his face. The blue heading over both photographs read: missing.