The Strain

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Vasiliy Fet’s first stop the next morning was a house in Bushwick, not far from where he had grown up. Inspection calls were coming in from all over, the normal two-to three-week wait time easily doubling. Vasiliy was still working off his backlog from last month, and he had promised this guy he’d come through for him today.

He pulled up behind a silver Sable and got his gear out of the back of his truck, his length of rebar and magician’s cart of traps and poisons. First thing he noticed was a rivulet of water running along the gangway between the two row houses, a clear, slow trickle, as from a broken pipe. Not as appetizing as creamy brown sewage, but more than enough to hydrate an entire rat colony.

One basement window was broken, plugged up with rags and old towels. It could have been simple urban blight, or it could have been the handiwork of “midnight plumbers,” a new breed of copper thieves ripping out pipe to sell at salvage yards.

The bank owned both houses now, neighboring investment properties that, thanks to the subprime mortgage meltdown, flipped back on their owners, who lost them to foreclosure. Vasiliy was meeting a property manager there. The door to the first house was unlocked, and Vasiliy knocked and called out a hello. He poked his head into the first room before the staircase, checking baseboards for runs and droppings. A broken, half-fallen shade hung from one window, casting a slanting shadow onto the gouged wood floor. But no manager in sight.

Vasiliy was in too much of a rush to be kept waiting here. On top of his backlog, he hadn’t been able to sleep right last night, and wanted to get back to the World Trade Center site that morning to talk to somebody in charge. He found a metal clipboard case stuck between balusters on the third step of the stairs. The company name on the business cards in the clip matched the one on Vasiliy’s work order.

“Hello!” he called again, then gave up. He found the door to the basement stairs, deciding to get started anyway. The basement was dark below—the stuffed window frame he had glimpsed from the outside—and the electricity had long ago been turned off. It was doubtful there was even a bulb in the ceiling fixture. Vasiliy left his handcart behind to prop open the door, and walked down carrying his poker.

The staircase hooked left. He saw loafers first, then khaki-clad legs: the property manager sitting against the side stone wall in a crack-house slump, his head to one side, his eyes open but staring, dazed.

Vasiliy had been in enough abandoned houses in enough rough neighborhoods to know better than to rush right over to the guy. He looked around from the bottom step, eyes slow to adjust to the darkness. The basement was unremarkable except for two lengths of cut copper piping lying on the floor.

To the right of the stairs was the base of the chimney, adjacent to the furnace that vented into it. Vasiliy saw, curled low around the far corner of the chimney mortar, four dirty fingers.

Somebody was crouched there, hiding, waiting for him.

He had turned to go back up the stairs to call the police when he saw the light around the bend in the steps disappear. The door had been closed. By someone else at the top of the stairs.

Vasiliy’s first impulse was to run, and run he did, racing off the stairs and right at the chimney where the owner of the dirty hand crouched. With a cry of attack, he swung his length of rebar at the knuckles, crushing bone against mortar.

The attacker came up at him fast, without regard to pain. Crack has a way of doing that, he thought. It was a girl, no older than her teens, and she was filthy all over, with blood down her chest and around her mouth. All of this he saw in a dim flash as she threw herself at him with weird speed, and even weirder strength, propelling him back, hard, against the far wall despite being half his size. She made an airless raging noise, and when she opened her mouth a freakishly long tongue slithered out. Vasiliy’s boot came up instantly, striking her in the chest and putting her down on the floor.

He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and knew he could not win a fight in the dark. He reached up to the blocked window with his rebar and snagged the dirty rags jammed in there, twisting and pulling them down, falling like a plug out of a dyke with light instead of water flooding through.

He turned back just in time to see her eyes go to horror. She lay fully within the frame of sunlight, her body emitting a kind of anguished howl and breaking down all at once, smashed and steaming. It was as he imagined nuclear radiation might work on a person, cooking and dissolving them at the same time.

It happened almost all at once. The girl—or whatever she was—lay desiccated on the filthy floor of the basement.

Vasiliy stared. Horrified wasn’t even the word. He completely forgot about the one coming off the stairs until the guy moaned, reacting to the light. The guy backed away, stumbling near the property manager, then regaining his footing and starting for the stairs.

Vasiliy recovered just in time to go underneath the stairs. He jabbed the rod through the step planks, tripping the man, making him fall back down hard to the floor. Vasiliy went around him, his poker raised, as the man got to his feet. His formerly brown skin was a sickly jaundiced yellow. His mouth opened, and Vasiliy saw that it was not a tongue but something much worse.

Vasiliy cracked him across the mouth with the rebar. It sent the man spinning and dropped him to his knees. Vasiliy reached forward and grasped the back of his neck, as he would a hissing snake or a snapping rat, keeping that mouth thing away from him. He looked back to the rectangle of light, swirling with the dust of the annihilated girl. He felt the guy buck and fight to get away. Vasiliy brought the rod down hard against the thing’s knees and forced it toward the light.

Fear-maddened Vasiliy Fet realized he wanted to see it again. This slaying trick of the light. With a boot to the lower back, he sent the guy flailing into the sun—and watched him break and crumble all at once, shredded by the burning rays, sinking into ash and steam.

South Ozone Park, Queens

ELDRITCH PALMER’S limousine eased into a warehouse in a weedy industrial park less than one mile from the old Aqueduct Racetrack. Palmer traveled in a modest motorcade, his own car followed by a second, empty limousine, in the event that his broke down, followed by a third vehicle, a customized black van that was in fact a private ambulance equipped with his dialysis machine.

A door opened on the side of the warehouse to admit the vehicles, then closed behind them. Waiting to greet him were four members of the Stoneheart Society, a subset of his powerful international investment conglomerate, the Stoneheart Group.

Palmer’s door was opened for him by Mr. Fitzwilliam, and he stepped out to their awe. An audience with the chairman was a rare privilege.

Their dark suits emulated his. Palmer was accustomed to awe in his presence. His group investors regarded him as a messianic figure whose foreknowledge of market turns had enriched them. But his society disciples—they would follow him into hell.

Palmer felt invigorated today, and stood with only the aid of his mahogany cane. The former box-company warehouse was mostly empty. The Stoneheart Group used it occasionally for vehicle storage, but its value today lay in its old-fashioned, precode, underground incinerator, accessed by a large oven-size door in the wall.

Next to the Stoneheart Society members was a Kurt isolation pod on top of a wheeled stretcher. Mr. Fitzwilliam stood at his side.

“Any problems?” said Palmer.

“None, Chairman,” they replied. The two who resembled Doctors Goodweather and Martinez handed over their forged Centers for Disease Control and Prevention credentials to Mr. Fitzwilliam.

Palmer looked in through the transparent isolation pod at the decrepit form of Jim Kent. The blood-starved vampire’s body was shriveled, like the form of a demon whittled out of diseased birch. His muscular and circulatory features showed through his disintegrated flesh except at his swollen, blackened throat. His eyes were open and staring out of the hollows of his drawn face.

Palmer felt for this vampire starved into petrifaction. He knew what it was for a body to crave simple maintenance while the soul suffers and the mind waits.

He knew what it was to be betrayed by one’s maker.

Now Eldritch Palmer found himself on the cusp of deliverance. Unlike this poor wretch, Palmer was on the verge of liberation, and immortality.

“Destroy him,” he said, and stood back as the pod was wheeled to the open door of the incinerator, and the body was fed into the flames.

Pennsylvania Station

THEIR TRIP TO Westchester to find Joan Luss, the third Flight 753 survivor, was cut short by the morning news. The village of Bronxville had been closed off by New York State Police and HAZMAT teams due to a “gas leak.” Aerial news helicopter recordings showed the town nearly still at daybreak, the only cars on the road being state police cruisers. The next story showed the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner building at Thirtieth and First being boarded up, with speculation about more people disappearing from the area, and incidents of panic among local residents.

Penn Station was the only place they could think of guaranteed to have old-fashioned pay telephones. Eph stood at a bank of them with Nora and Setrakian off to the side as morning commuters moved through the station.

Eph thumbed through Jim’s phone, the RECENT CALLS list, looking for Director Barnes’s direct mobile line. Jim rolled close to one hundred calls each day, and Eph kept scrolling through them while, on the landline, Barnes answered his phone.

Eph said, “Are you really going with the ‘gas leak’ gambit, Everett? How long do you think that’s going to hold in this day and age?”

Barnes recognized Eph’s voice. “Ephraim, where are you?”

“Have you been to Bronxville? Have you seen it now?”

“I have been there… we don’t know what we have quite yet…”

“Don’t know! Give me a break, Everett.”

“They found the police station empty this morning. The entire town appears to have been abandoned.”

“Not abandoned. They’re all still there, just hiding. Come sundown, in Westchester County it’s going to be like Transylvania. What you need are strike teams, Everett. Soldiers. Going house to house through that town, as if it’s Baghdad. It’s the only way.”

“What we don’t want is to create a panic—”

“The panic is already starting. Panic is an appropriate response to this thing, more so than denial.”

“The New York DOH Syndromic Surveillance Systems show no indication of any emerging outbreak.”

“They monitor disease patterns by tracking ER visits, ambulance runs, and pharmacy sales. None of which figures into this scenario. This whole city is going to go the way of Bronxville if you don’t get going on it.”

Director Barnes said, “I want to know what you have done with Jim Kent.”

“I went to go see him and he was already gone.”

“I’m told you had something to do with his disappearance.”

“What am I, Everett—the Shadow? I’m everywhere at once. I’m an evil genius. Yes I am.”

“Ephraim, listen—”

“You listen to me. I am a doctor—a doctor you hired to do a job. To identify and contain emerging diseases in the United States. I am calling to tell you that it’s still not too late. This is the fourth day since the arrival of the plane and the start of the spread—but there is still a chance, Everett. We can hold them here in New York City. Listen—vampires can’t cross bodies of moving water. So we quarantine the island, seal off every bridge—”

“I don’t have that kind of control here—you know that.”

A train announcement broadcast from overhead speakers. “I’m in Penn Station, by the way, Everett. Send the FBI if you like. I’ll be gone well before they arrive.”

“Ephraim… come back in. I promise you a fair shot at convincing me, at convincing everyone. Let’s work on this together.”

“No,” said Eph. “You just said you don’t have that kind of control. These vampires—and that’s what they are, Everett—they are viruses incarnate, and they are going to burn through this city until there are none of us left. Quarantine is the one and only answer. If I see news that you’re moving in that direction, then maybe I’ll consider coming back in to help. Until then, Everett—”

Eph hung the receiver up on its hook. Nora and Setrakian waited for him to say something, but an entry on Jim’s phone log had piqued Eph’s interest. Each one of Jim’s contacts was entered last name first, all except one. A local exchange, to which Jim had made a series of calls within the past few days. Eph picked up the landline and pressed zero and waited through the computer responses until he got a real Verizon operator.

“Yes, I have a number in my phone and I can’t remember who it connects to, and I’d like to save myself some embarrassment before placing a call. It’s a 212 exchange, so I believe it is a landline. Can you do a reverse lookup?”

He read her the number and heard fingers clicking on a keyboard.

“That number is registered to the seventy-seventh floor of the Stoneheart Group. Would you like the building address?”

“I would.”

He covered the mouthpiece and said to Nora, “Why was Jim calling someone at the Stoneheart Group?”

“Stoneheart?” said Nora. “You mean that old man’s investment company?”

“Investment guru,” said Eph. “Second-richest man in the country, I think. Something Palmer.”

Setrakian said, “Eldritch Palmer.”

Eph looked at him. He saw consternation on the professor’s face. “What about him?”

“This man, Jim Kent,” said Setrakian. “He was not your friend.”

Nora said, “What do you mean? Of course he was…”

Eph hung up after getting the address. He then highlighted the number on the screen of Jim’s phone and pressed send.

The number rang. No answer, no voice-mail recording.

Eph hung up, still staring at the phone.

Nora said, “Remember the administrator for the isolation ward, after the survivors left isolation? She said she had called, Jim said she hadn’t—then he said he just missed some calls?”

Eph nodded. It didn’t make any sense. He looked at Setrakian. “What do you know about this guy Palmer?”

“Many years ago he came to me for help in finding someone. Someone I was also keenly interested in finding.”

“Sardu,” guessed Nora.

“He had the funding, I had the knowledge. But the arrangement ended after only a few months. I came to understand that we were searching for Sardu for two very different reasons.”

Nora said, “Was he the one who ruined you at the university?”

Setrakian said, “I always suspected.”

Jim’s phone buzzed in Eph’s hand. The phone did not recognize the number, but it was a local New York exchange. A callback from someone at Stoneheart, maybe. Eph answered it.

“Yeah,” said the voice, “is this the CDC?”

“Who is calling?”

The voice was gruff and deep. “I’m looking for the disease guy from the Canary project who’s in all that trouble. Any way you can put me through to him?”

Eph suspected a trap. “What do you want him for?”

“I’m calling from outside a house in Bushwick, here in Brooklyn. I’ve got two dead eclipse hysterics in the basement. Who didn’t like the sun. This mean anything to you?”

Eph felt a tingle of excitement. “Who is this?”

“My name is Fet. Vasiliy Fet. I’m with the city’s pest control, an exterminator who’s also working a pilot program for integrated pest management in lower Manhattan. It’s funded by a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar grant from the CDC. How I have this phone number. Am I right in guessing that this is Goodweather?”

Eph hesitated a moment. “It is.”

“I guess you could say that I work for you. Nobody else I could think to bring this to. But I’m seeing signs all over the city.”

Eph said, “It’s not the eclipse.”

“I think I know that. I think you need to get over here. Because I’ve got something you need to see.”

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

EPH HAD TWO STOPS to make on the way. One alone, and one with Nora and Setrakian.

Eph’s CDC credentials got him through a security checkpoint in the main lobby of the Stoneheart Building, but not past a second checkpoint on the seventy-seventh floor, where an elevator change was necessary to gain access to the top ten floors of the Midtown building.

Two immense bodyguards stood upon the massive brass Stoneheart Group logo, inlaid in the onyx floor. Behind them, movers in overalls crossed the lobby, rolling large pieces of medical equipment on dollies.

Eph asked to see Eldritch Palmer.

The larger of the two bodyguards almost smiled. A shoulder holster bulged conspicuously beneath his suit jacket. “Mr. Palmer does not accept visitors without an appointment.”

Eph recognized one of the machines being dismantled and crated. It was a Fresenius dialysis machine. An expensive piece of hospital-grade equipment.

“You’re packing up,” said Eph. “Moving house. Getting out of New York while the getting’s good. But won’t Mr. Palmer need his kidney machine?”

The bodyguards didn’t answer, didn’t even turn to look.

Eph understood it then. Or thought he did.

They met up again outside Jim and Sylvia’s place, a high-rise on the Upper East Side.

Setrakian said, “It was Palmer who brought the Master into America. Why he is willing to risk everything—even the future of the human race—in order to further his own ends.”

“Which are?” said Nora.

Setrakian said, “I believe Eldritch Palmer intends to live forever.”

Eph said, “Not if we can do anything about it.”

“I applaud your determination,” said Setrakian. “But with his wealth and influence, my old acquaintance has every advantage. This is his endgame, you realize. There is no going back for him. He will do whatever it takes to achieve his goal.”

Eph couldn’t afford to think in big-picture terms or else he might discover that he was fighting a losing battle. He focused on the task at hand. “What did you find out?”

Setrakian said, “My brief visit to the New York Historical Society bore fruit. The property in question was completely rebuilt by a bootlegger and smuggler who made his fortune during Prohibition. His home was raided numerous times but never more than a pint of illicit brew was seized, due, it was said, to a web of tunnels and underground breweries—some of those tunnels were expanded later to accommodate underground subway lines.”

Eph looked at Nora. “What about you?”

“The same. And that Bolivar bought the property expressly because it was an old bootlegger’s pad, and because it was said that the owner before that was a Satanist who held black masses on the rooftop altar around the turn of the twentieth century. Bolivar’s been renovating that building and combining it with the one next to it on and off for the past year, constructing one of the largest private residences in New York.”

“Good,” said Eph. “Where did you go, the library?”

“No,” she said, handing over a printout featuring photos of the original town house interior and current photos of Bolivar in stage makeup. “People magazine online.”

They were buzzed in and rode up to Jim and Sylvia’s small ninth-floor unit. Sylvia answered the door in a flowing linen dress befitting a horoscope columnist, her hair pulled back with a wide headband. She was surprised to see Nora, and doubly shocked to see Eph.

“What are you doing—?”

Eph moved inside. “Sylvia, we have some very important questions, and we only have a little time. What do you know about Jim and the Stoneheart Group?”

Sylvia held her hand to her chest as if she didn’t understand. “The who?”

Eph saw a desk in the corner, a tabby cat snoozing on top of a closed laptop. He crossed to it and started opening drawers. “Do you mind if we take a quick look through his things?”

“No,” she said, “if you think it will help. Go ahead.”

Setrakian remained near the door while Eph and Nora searched the contents of the desk. Sylvia apparently received a strong vibration from the old man’s presence. “Would anyone like anything, a drink?”

“No,” said Nora, smiling briefly, then getting back to the search.

“I’ll be right back.” Sylvia went to the kitchen.

Eph stood back from the cluttered desk, mystified. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. Jim working for Palmer? How far back in time did this reach? And what was Jim’s motive anyway? Money? Would he have turned on them like that?

He went to ask Sylvia a delicate question about their finances, leaving the room to find her in the kitchen. As Eph turned the corner, Sylvia was replacing her wall phone. She stepped backward with a strange look on her face.

Eph was confused at first. “Who were you calling, Sylvia?”

The others came in behind him. Sylvia felt for the wall behind her, then sat down in a chair.

Eph said, “Sylvia—what’s going on?”

She said, without moving, and with an eerie sense of calm behind her wide, damning eyes, “You’re going to lose.”

PS 69, Jackson Heights

KELLY USUALLY never turned her mobile phone on in the classroom, but now it sat to the left of her calendar blotter, set to silent. Matt had stayed out all night, not unusual for overnight inventories; he often took the crew out to breakfast afterward. But he always called to check in as well. The school was a no-cell-phone zone, but she had sneaked a few calls to him, getting his voice mail each time. Maybe he was out of range. She was trying not to worry, and losing the battle. Attendance was low at the school.

She regretted listening to Matt and giving in to his arrogance about not leaving the city. If he had somehow put Zack at risk…

Then her phone lit up and she saw the envelope icon. A text message from his mobile.

It read: come home.

That was it. Two words, lower case, no punctuation. She tried to call him right back. The phone rang and then stopped ringing as though he had answered. But he didn’t say anything.

“Matt? Matt?”

Her fourth-graders looked at her strangely. They had never seen Ms. Goodweather talking on a phone in class.

Kelly tried their home phone, and got a busy signal. Was the voice mail broken? When was the last time she’d heard a busy signal?

She decided to leave. She’d have Charlotte open the door to her classroom next door, keep an eye on her students. Kelly thought about packing it in for the day and even picking up Zack at the middle school, but no. She’d shoot home, find out what was wrong, then evaluate her options and go from there.

Bushwick, Brooklyn

THE MAN WHO MET THEM at the empty house filled most of the door frame. The shadow of a skipped shave blackened his jutting jaw like a dusting of soot. He carried a large white sack at his hip, one hand choking its neck, an oversize pillowcase with something heavy inside.

After the introductions, the big man went into his shirt pocket and unfolded a worn copy of a cover letter bearing the CDC seal. He showed the letter to Eph.

“You said you had something to show us?” said Eph.

“Two things. First, this.”

Fet loosened the drawstring on his sack and overturned the contents onto the floor. Four furry rodents landed in a heap, all dead.

Eph jumped back and Nora gasped.

“I always say, you want to get people’s attention, bring ’em a bag of rats.” Fet picked one up by its long tail, its body twirling slowly back and forth under his hand. “They’re coming up out of their burrows all across the city. Even in daytime. Something’s driving them out. Meaning, something’s not right. I know that during the black death, rats came out and dropped dead in the streets. These rats here aren’t coming up to die. They’re coming up plenty alive and plenty desperate and hungry. Take my word for it, when you see a big change in rat ecology, it means bad news is on the way. When the rats start to panic, it’s time to sell GE. Time to get out. Know what I mean?”

Setrakian said, “I do indeed.”

Eph said, “I’m missing something here. What do rats have to do with…?”

“They are a sign,” said Setrakian, “as Mr. Fet rightly states. An ecological symptom. Stoker popularized the myth that a vampire can change its form, transforming into a nocturnal creature such as a bat or a wolf. This false notion arises out of a truth. Before dwellings had basements or cellars, vampires nested in caves and dens on the edges of villages. Their corruptive presence displaced the other creatures, bats and wolves, driving them out so that they overran the villages—their appearance always coinciding with the spreading sickness and the corruption of souls.”

Fet was paying close attention to the old man. “You know what?” he said. “Twice when you were just talking, I heard you say the word ‘vampire.’”

Setrakian looked at him evenly. “That you did.”

After a contemplative pause, and a long look at the others, Fet said, “Okay.” As though he was starting to get it. “Now let me show you the other thing.”

He led them down into the basement. The smell was one of foul incense, of something diseased that had been burned. He showed them the atomized flesh and bone, now cold cinder lying on the floor of the basement. The rectangle of window sunlight had elongated and moved, shining against the wall now. “But it was beaming down here, and they went into it, and it cooked them in an instant. But, before that, they came at me with this… thing shooting out from underneath their tongues.”

Setrakian told him the short version. The rogue Master stowing away on Flight 753. The disappearing coffin. The morgue dead rising and returning to their Dear Ones. The household nests. The Stoneheart Group. Silver and sunlight. The stinger.

Fet said, “Their heads tipped back and their mouths opened up… and it was like that candy, that kids’ candy—the one that used to come with Star Wars character heads.”

Nora said, after a moment, “A Pez dispenser.”

“That’s it. You tip up the chin, candy pops out of the neck.”

Eph nodded. “Except for the candy part, an apt description.”

Fet looked at Eph. “So why are you public enemy number one?”

“Because silence is their weapon.”

“Hell, then. Somebody has to make some noise.”

“Exactly,” said Eph.

Setrakian eyed the light clipped on the side of Fet’s belt. “Let me ask you this. Your profession uses black light, if I am not mistaken.”

“Sure. To pick up rodent urine traces.”

Setrakian glanced over at Eph and Nora.

Fet took another look at the old man in the vest and suit. “You know about exterminating?”

Setrakian said, “I have had some experience.” He stepped over to the turned property manager, who had crawled or dragged himself away from the sunlight, and was now curled up in the far corner. Setrakian examined him with a silver-backed mirror, and showed Fet the result. The exterminator looked back and forth between the property manager as he appeared to his eyes and the vibrating blur reflected in the glass. “But you strike me as an expert on things that burrow and hide. Creatures who nest. Who feed off the human population. Your job is to drive out these vermin?”

Fet looked at Setrakian and the others like a man standing on an express train, gathering speed out of the station, suddenly realizing he had boarded on the wrong track. “What are you getting me into here?”

“Tell us, then, please. If vampires are vermin—an infestation spreading quickly throughout the city—how would you stop them?”

“I can tell you that, from a pest control point of view, poisoning and trapping are short-term solutions that won’t work in the long run. Picking these babies off one by one gets you nowhere. The only rats you ever see are the weakest ones. The hungry ones. Smart ones know how to survive. Control is what works. Managing their habitat, disrupting their ecosystem. Removing the food supply and starving them out. Then you get to the root of the infestation, and wipe it clean.”

Setrakian nodded slowly, then looked back at Eph. “The Master. The root of this evil. Somewhere in Manhattan right now.” The old man looked again at the unfortunate curled up on the floor, who would animate after nightfall, became a vampire, vermin. “You will step back please,” he said, unsheathing his sword. With his pronouncement and a two-handed stroke, he decapitated the man where he lay. As pale pink blood eked out—the host was not yet fully turned—Setrakian wiped his blade on the man’s shirt and returned it to the walking stick. “If only we had some indication of where the Master might be nesting. The site would have been preapproved and perhaps even selected by him. A lair worthy of his stature. A place of darkness, offering shelter from, yet access to, the human world on the surface.” He turned back to Fet. “Do you have any notion where these rats might be rising from? The epicenter of their displacement?”

Fet nodded immediately, his eyes staring into the distance. “I think I know.”

Church Street and Fulton

IN THE DECLINING light of day, the two epidemiologists, the pawnbroker, and the exterminator all stood on the viewing platform on the upper edge of the World Trade Center construction site, the excavation dug one block wide and seventy feet deep.

Fet’s city credentials and one small lie—Setrakian was not a world-famous rodentologist in from Omaha—got them into the subway tunnel without an escort. Fet led them down to the same out-of-service track he had followed before, playing his flashlight upon the ratless tracks. The old man stepped carefully over the ties, picking his way along the bed stones with his oversize walking stick. Eph and Nora carried Luma lights.

“You are not from Russia,” Setrakian said to Fet.

“Just my parents and my name.”

“In Russia, they are called vourdalak. The prevailing myth is that one gains immunity from them by mixing the blood of a vourdalak with flour and making bread from the paste, which must then be eaten.”

“Does that work?”

“As well as any folk remedy. Which is to say, not very well at all.” Setrakian remained far to the right of the electrified third rail. “That steel rod looks handy.”

Fet looked at his length of rebar. “It’s crude. Like me, I suppose. But it gets the job done. Also like me.”

Setrakian lowered his voice to cut down on the tunnel echo. “I have some other instruments you might find at least as effective.”

Fet saw the sump hose the sandhogs had been working on. Farther ahead, the tunnel turned and widened, and Fet recognized the dingy junction at once. “In here,” he said, shining a flashlight beam around, keeping it low.

They stopped and listened to the dripping of water. Fet scoured the ground with his light. “I put down tracking powder last time. See?”

There were human footprints in the powder. Shoes, sneakers, and bare feet.

Fet said, “Who goes barefoot in a subway tunnel?”

Setrakian held up a wool-gloved hand. The tubelike tunnel acoustics brought them distant groans.

Nora said, “Jesus Christ…”

Setrakian whispered, “Your lamps, please. Turn them on.”

Eph and Nora did, their powerful UVC rays illuminating the dark underground, exposing a mad swirl of colors. Innumerable stains splashed wildly against the floor, the walls, the iron stanchions… everywhere.

Fet recoiled in disgust. “This is all…?”

“It is excrement,” said Setrakian. “The creatures will shit while they eat.”

Fet looked around in amazement. “I guess a vampire doesn’t have much need for good hygiene.”

Setrakian was backing away. He had a different grip on his walking stick now, the top half pulled several inches out of the bottom half, baring the bright, sharp blade. “We must leave here. Right now.”

Fet was listening to the noises in the tunnels. “No argument from me.”

Eph’s foot kicked something, and he jumped back, expecting rats. He shone his UVC lamp down and discovered a low mound of objects in the corner.

They were mobile phones. One hundred or more, piled up as though they had been thrown into the corner.

“Huh,” said Fet. “Somebody dumped a load of mobile phones down here.”

Eph reached for some on the top of the pile. The first two he tried were dead. The third had just one blinking bar of battery life. An X icon along the top of the screen indicated that there was no reception.

“That’s why the police can’t find all the missing people by their cell phones,” said Nora. “They’re all underground.”

“Judging by the looks of this,” said Eph, tossing the phones back onto the pile, “most of them are here.”

Eph and Nora stared at the phones, quickening their steps.

“Quickly,” said Setrakian, “before we are detected.” He led the retreat out of the tunnel. “We must prepare.”