The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal
Her blonde hair lay flat, a smiling sun pendant hanging from a black cord rested against the pit of her throat. Her white dress made her look almost bridelike.
The officers moved on to seal and take the next bag. Nora came up behind Eph, watching him. With his gloved hands, he grasped the girl gently by the sides of her head, rotating it on her neck.
Rigor mortis fully sets in about twelve hours after death, holding for twelve to twenty-four more hours—they were in that middle range now—until the fixed calcium bonds inside the muscles break down again and the body returns to flexibility.
“Still flexible,” said Eph. “No rigor.”
He grasped her shoulder and hip and rolled the girl over onto her front. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, revealing the flesh of her lower back, the small bulbous nodes of her spine. Her skin was pallid and lightly freckled.
After the heart stops, blood pools inside the circulatory system. The capillary walls, being just one cell thick, soon succumb to the pressure, bursting and spilling blood into the surrounding tissues. This blood settles in the lowest, “dependent” side of the body, and coagulates quickly. Lividity is said to become fixed after about sixteen hours.
They were beyond that time limit now.
From expiring in a seated position, and then being laid out flat, the pooled, thickened blood should have rendered the skin along her lower back a deep, dark purple.
Eph looked out over the rows of bags. “Why aren’t these bodies decomposing as they should?”
Eph eased the girl back flat again, then thumbed open her right eye with a practiced hand. Her cornea was clouded, as it should have been, and the sclera, the opaque white protective layer, was suitably dry. He examined the fingertips of her right hand—the one that had been tucked into her mother’s—and found them slightly wrinkled, due to evaporation, as they should have been.
He sat back, annoyed by the mixed signals he was receiving, then inserted his two gloved thumbs between her dry lips. The gasplike noise that escaped from her parted jaw was the simple venting of gas. The immediate interior of the mouth was unremarkable, but he wriggled one gloved finger inside to depress her tongue, checking for more dryness.
The soft palate and tongue were completely white, as though carved in ivory. Like anatomical netsuke. The tongue was rigid and oddly erect. Eph manipulated it to the side and revealed the rest of the mouth, equally drained.
Drained? What’s next? he thought. “The bodies have been drained—there’s not a drop of blood left.” If not that line, then one from a Dan Curtis 1970s TV horror show: “Lieutenant—the corpses—they’re … drained of blood!” Cue organ music.
Fatigue was starting to set in. Eph held the firm tongue between his thumb and index finger, using a small flashlight to peer down her white throat. It looked vaguely gynecological to him. Porn netsuke?
Then the tongue moved. He jerked back, pulling out his finger. “Jesus Christ!” The girl’s face remained a placid mask of death, lips still slightly parted.
Nora, next to him, stared. “What was it?”
Eph was wiping his gloved finger on his trousers. “Simple reflex action,” he said, standing. He looked down at the girl’s face until he couldn’t look anymore, then drew the zipper up along the bag, sealing her inside.
Nora said, “What could it be? Something that slows tissue decay somehow? These people are dead …”
“In every way except decomposition.” Eph shook his head uneasily. “We can’t hold up the transport. Bottom line is, we need these bodies at the morgue. Cut them open. Figure out this thing from the inside.”
Nora, he noticed, was gazing off in the direction of the ornate cabinet, laid out on the hangar floor away from the rest of the unloaded luggage. “Nothing’s right about this,” she said.
Eph was looking the other way, at the great aircraft overhead. He wanted to get back aboard. They must have missed something. The answer had to be in there.
But before he could do this, he saw Jim Kent escorting the director of the CDC inside the hangar. Dr. Everett Barnes was sixty-one years old, and still very much the southern country doctor he had started out as. The Public Health Service that the CDC was a part of had been born of the navy, and though the PHS had long since branched off on its own, many top CDC officials still favored military-style uniforms, including Director Barnes. So you had the contradiction of a folksy, down-home, white-goateed gentleman dressing like a retired admiral in a trim khaki field uniform complete with chest candy. Looking very much like a combat-decorated Colonel Sanders.
After the preliminaries, and a cursory examination of one of the airplane dead, Director Barnes asked about the survivors.
Eph told him, “None of them has any memory of what happened. They are no help at all.”
“Symptoms?”
“Headaches, some severe. Muscle pain, ringing in the ears. Disorientation. Dry mouth. Problems with balance.”
Director Barnes said, “Generally, not much worse than anyone else getting off a transatlantic flight.”
“It’s uncanny, Everett,” said Eph. “Nora and I were the first ones on the plane. These passengers—all of them—were flat-lined. Not breathing. Four minutes without oxygen is the threshold for permanent brain damage. These people, they might have been out for more than an hour.”
“Evidently not,” said the director. “And they couldn’t tell you anything?”
“They had more questions for me than I had for them.”
“Any commonality among the four?”
“I’m pursuing that now. I was going to ask for your help in confining them until our work is done.”
“Help?”
“We need these four patients to cooperate.”
“We have their cooperation.”
“For now. I just … we can’t take any chances.”
The director smoothed down his trim white beard as he spoke. “I’m sure that, with a little tactical use of bedside manner, we can leverage their appreciation for having been spared this tragic fate, and keep them compliant.” His smile revealed an upper row of heavily enameled dentures.
“What about enforcing the Health Powers Act—”
“Ephraim, you know there is a world of difference between isolating a few passengers for voluntary preventive treatment, and confining them in quarantine. There are larger issues—media issues, to be frank—to consider.”
“Everett, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree—”
The director’s small hand came down gently on Eph’s shoulder. He exaggerated his drawl a bit, maybe in order to soften the blow. “Let me save us both some time here, Ephraim. Looking at this objectively now, this tragic incident is, thankfully—one might say, blessedly—contained. We’ve had no other deaths or illnesses on any other airplanes or in any other airports around the globe, in what is approaching eighteen hours since that plane landed. These are positives, and we must stress them. Send a message to the public at large, reinforcing their confidence in our system of air travel. I am certain, Ephraim, that engaging these fortunate survivors, appealing to their sense of honor and duty, will be enough to compel them to cooperate.” The director removed his hand, smiling at Eph like a military man humoring his pacifist son. “Besides,” continued Barnes, “this has all the hallmarks of a goddamn gas leak, doesn’t it? So many victims so suddenly incapacitated? The closed environment? And the survivors rallying after being removed from the plane?”
Nora said, “Except that the air circulation quit when the electrical did, right after landing.”
Director Barnes nodded, folding his hands in consideration of this. “Well, it’s a lot to process, no question. But, look here—this was a very good drill for your team. You’ve handled it well. And now that things appear to be settling down, let’s see you get right to the bottom of it. Just as soon as this damn press briefing is done with.”
Eph said, “Hang on. What?”
“The mayor and the governor are holding a press conference, along with airline representatives, Port Authority officials, and so on. You and I will represent the federal health response.”
“Oh—no. Sir, I don’t have the time. Jim can do that—”
“Jim can do it, but today it will be you, Ephraim. As I said, it is time for you to be the point man on this. You are the head of the Canary project, and I want someone up there who has been dealing with victims firsthand. We need to put a face on our efforts.”
That was why all this bluster about no detention or quarantine. Barnes was laying down the party line. “But I really don’t know anything yet,” said Eph. “Why so soon?”
Director Barnes smiled, showing his enamel again. “The doctor’s code is, ‘First—do no harm.’ The politician’s code is, ‘First—go on television.’ Plus, I understand that there is a time element involved. Something about wanting to get the broadcast out before this damn solar event. Sunspots affecting radio waves, or something.”
“Solar …” Eph had forgotten all about it. The rare total solar eclipse that was to occur around three thirty that very afternoon. The first such solar event in the New York City region in more than four hundred years, since the advent of America. “Christ, I forgot.”
“Our message to the people of this country will be simple. A profound loss of life has occurred here, and is being investigated fully by the CDC. It is a human catastrophe, but the incident has been contained, and is apparently unique, and there is absolutely no further cause for alarm.”
Eph hid his scowl from the director. He was being made to stand up in front of cameras and say that everything was just dandy. He walked out of the containment area and through the narrow space between the great doors of the hangar, into the doomed light of the day. He was still trying to figure a way out of this when the mobile inside his pants pocket buzzed against the top of his thigh. He pulled it out, an envelope icon slowly revolving on the LCD screen. A text message from Matt’s mobile. Eph opened it:
Yanks 4 Sux 2. gr8t seats, wish u wre here, Z.
Eph stood staring at this electronic dispatch from his son until his eyes lost focus. He was left staring at his own shadow on the airport tarmac, which, unless he was imagining things, had already begun to vanish.
Approaching Totality
Anticipation grew on the ground as the slender nick in the western side of the sun—the lunar “first contact”—became a creeping blackness, a rounded bite gradually consuming the afternoon sun. At first there was no obvious difference in the quality or quantity of light on the ground. Only the black gouge high in the sky, making a crescent of the normally reliable sun, marked this day as being different from any other.
The term “solar eclipse” is in fact a misnomer. An eclipse occurs when one object passes into a shadow cast by another. In a solar eclipse, the moon does not pass into the sun’s shadow, but instead passes between the sun and the earth, obscuring the sun—causing the shadow. The proper term is “occultation.” The moon occults the sun, casting a small shadow onto the surface of the earth. It is not a solar eclipse, but in fact an eclipse of the earth.
The earth’s distance from the sun is approximately four hundred times the moon’s distance from the earth. In a remarkable coincidence, the diameter of the sun happens to be approximately four hundred times the diameter of the moon. This is why the area of the moon and the sun’s photosphere—its bright disk—appear roughly the same size from the perspective of earth.
A total occultation is possible only when the moon is in its new phase, and near its perigee, its closest distance to the earth. The duration of totality depends upon the orbit of the moon, never to exceed seven minutes and forty seconds. This occultation was due to last exactly four minutes and fifty-seven seconds: just under five minutes of uncanny nighttime in the middle of a beautiful early fall afternoon.
Half-covered now by the new (and otherwise invisible) moon, the still bright sky began to take on a dusky cast: like a sunset, only without any warming of the light. At ground level, the sunlight appeared pale, as though filtered or diffused. Shadows lost their certainty. The world, it seemed, had been put on a dimmer.
As the crescent continued to thin, being consumed by the lunar disk, its smothering brightness blazed as though in a panic. The occultation appeared to gain momentum and a kind of desperate speed as the ground landscape went gray, colors bleeding off the normal spectrum. The western sky darkened faster than the east as the shadow of the moon approached.
The eclipse was to be partial in much of the United States and Canada, achieving totality along only a lengthy, narrow trail measuring ten thousand miles long by one hundred miles wide, describing the moon’s dark umbral shadow upon the earth. The west-to-east course, known as the “path of totality,” began at the horn of Africa and curved up the Atlantic Ocean, ending just west of Lake Michigan, moving at more than one thousand miles per hour.
As the crescent sun continued to narrow, the complexion of the sky became a strangled violet. The darkness in the west gathered strength like a silent, windless storm system, spreading throughout the sky and closing in around the weakened sun, like a great organism succumbing to a corrupting force spreading from within.
The sun grew perilously thin, the view—through safety glasses—like that of a manhole lid being slid shut high above, squeezing out the daylight. The crescent blazed white, then turned to silver in its agonal last moments.
Strange, roving bands of shadow began moving over the ground. Oscillations formed by the refraction of light in the earth’s atmosphere—similar to the effect of light moving on the floor of a swimming pool—writhed like shadowy snakes at the corner of one’s vision. These ghostly tricks of light made the hair stand on the back of every viewer’s neck.
The end came quickly. The last throes were chilling, intense, the crescent shrinking to a curved line, a slicing scar in the sky, then fragmenting into individual pearls of fiery white, representing the last of the sun’s rays seeping through the deepest valleys along the lunar surface. These beads winked and vanished in rapid succession, snuffed out like a dying candle flame drowned in its own black wax. The crimson-colored band that was the chromosphere, the thin upper atmosphere of the sun, flared for a precious, final few seconds—and then the sun was gone.
Totality.
Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens
KELLY GOODWEATHER could not believe how quickly the day went dark. She stood out on the sidewalk, as did the rest of her Kelton Street neighbors—on what was normally, at that time of day, the sunny side of the street—staring up at the darkened sky through the cardboard-framed glasses that had come free with two two-liter bottles of Diet Eclipse soda. Kelly was an educated woman. She understood on an intellectual level what was occurring. And still she felt an almost giddy surge of panic. An impulse to run, to hide. This lining up of celestial bodies, the passing into the shadow of the moon: it reached something deep inside her. Touched the night-frightened animal within.
Others surely felt it. The street had grown quiet at the moment of total eclipse. This weird light they were all standing in. And those wormy shadows that had wriggled on the lawn, just out of their vision, against the sides of the house, like swirling spirits. It was as though a cold wind had blown down the street and not ruffled any hair but had only chilled their insides.
That thing people say to you, after you shiver: Someone just walked over your grave. That was what this whole “occultation” seemed like. Someone or something walking over everyone’s grave at once. The dead moon crossing over the living earth.
And then, looking up: the solar corona. An anti-sun, black and faceless, shining madly around the nothingness of the moon, staring down at the earth with glowing, gossamer white hair. A death’s head.
Her neighbors, Bonnie and Donna, the couple renting next door, stood together with their arms around each other, Bonnie with her hand in the back pocket of Donna’s saggy jeans. “Isn’t it amazing?” Bonnie called, smilingly, over her shoulder.
Kelly could not respond. Didn’t they get it? To her, this was no mere curiosity, no afternoon entertainment. How could anyone not see this as some kind of omen? Astronomical explanations and intellectual reasoning be damned: how could this not mean something? So maybe it had no inherent meaning, per se. It was a simple convergence of orbits. But how could any sentient being not imbue it with some significance, positive or negative, religious or psychic or otherwise? Just because we understand how something works doesn’t necessarily mean we understand it …
They called back to Kelly, alone in front of her house, telling her it was safe now to remove her glasses. “You don’t want to miss this!”
Kelly was not going to remove her glasses. No matter what the television said about it being safe to do during the “totality.” The television also told her she wouldn’t age if she bought expensive creams and pills.
Oohhs and aahhs all up and down the street, a real communal event as people got comfortable with the singularity, embracing the moment. Except for Kelly. What is wrong with me? she wondered.
Part of it was just having seen Eph on TV. He didn’t say much at the press conference, but Kelly could tell by his eyes and the way that he spoke that something was wrong. Really wrong. Something beyond the governor’s and the mayor’s rote assurances. Something beyond the sudden and unexplained deaths of 206 transatlantic passengers.
A virus? A terror attack? A mass suicide?
And now this.
She wanted Zack and Matt home. She wanted them here with her right now. She wanted this solar occultation thing to be over with, and to know that she would never have to experience this feeling again. She looked up through the filtered lenses at the murdering moon in all its dark triumph, worried that she might never see the sun again.
Yankee Stadium, the Bronx
ZACK STOOD ON HIS SEAT next to Matt, who stared at the eclipse with his nose scrunched up and his mouth hanging open like a driver squinting into oncoming traffic. Fifty-thousand-plus Yankees fans wearing special collector’s pin-striped eclipse glasses, on their feet now, faces upturned, looking at the moon that darkened the sky on a perfect afternoon for baseball. All except Zack Goodweather. The eclipse was cool and all, but now he had seen it, and so Zack turned his attention to the dugout. He was trying to see Yankees players. There was Jeter, wearing the same exact specs as Zack, perched on the top step on one knee as though waiting to be announced to hit. Pitchers and catchers were all outside the bullpen, gathered on the right-field grass like anyone else, taking it all in.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Bob Sheppard, the public address announcer, “boys and girls, you may now remove your safety glasses.”
And so they did. Fifty thousand people, nearly in unison. An appreciative gasp went up, then some ballpark applause, then full-out cheering, as though the crowd were trying to lure the unfailingly modest Matsui out of the dugout for a cap tip after slugging one into Monument Park.
In school, Zack had learned that the sun was a 6,000-degree Kelvin thermonuclear furnace, but that its corona, the outer edge, consisting of superheated hydrogen gas—visible from earth only during totality—was unexplainably hotter, its temperature reaching as high as 2,000,000 degrees Kelvin.
What he saw when he removed his glasses was a perfect black disk edged by a thin blaze of crimson, surrounded by an aura of wispy white light. Like an eye: the moon a wide, black pupil; the corona the white of the eye; and the vivid reds bursting from the rim of the pupil—loops of superheated gas erupting from the edge of the sun—the bloodshot veins. Kind of like the eye of a zombie.
Cool.
Zombie Sky. No: Zombies of the Eclipse. Zombies of the Occultation. Occult Zombies from the Planet Moon! Wait—the moon isn’t a planet. Zombie Moon. This could be the concept for the movie he and his friends were going to make this winter. Moon rays during a total earth eclipse transform members of the New York Yankees into brain-slurping zombies—yes! And his buddy Ron looked almost just like a young Jorge Posada. “Hey, Jorge Posada, can I have your autograph … wait, what are you … hey, that’s my … what’s wrong with … your eyes … gah … no … NOOO!!!”
The organ was playing now, and a few of the drunks turned into conductors, waving their arms and exhorting their section to sing along with some corny “I’m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow” song. Baseball crowds rarely need an excuse to make noise. These people would have cheered even if this occultation were an asteroid hurtling toward them.
Wow. Zack realized, with a start, that this was exactly the sort of thing his dad would have said if he were here.
Matt, now admiring his free specs next to him, nudged Zack. “Pretty sweet keepsake, huh? I bet eBay’ll be flooded with these suckers by this time tomorrow.”
Then a drunk guy jostled Matt’s shoulder, sloshing beer onto his shoes. Matt froze a moment, then rolled his eyes at Zack, kind of a What-are-you-going-to-do? face. But he didn’t say or do anything. He didn’t even turn around to look. It occurred to Zack now that he’d never seen Matt drink a beer before, only white or red wine on nights at home with Mom. Zack got the sense then that Matt, for all his enthusiasm about the game, was essentially afraid of the fans sitting around them.
Now Zack really wished his dad were there. He dug Matt’s phone out of his jeans pocket and checked again for a text reply.
Searching for signal, it read. Still no service. Solar flares and radiation distortion messing with radio waves and orbiting satellites; they said that would happen. Zack put the phone away and craned his head toward the field, looking for Jeter again.
International Space Station
TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES above earth, astronaut Thalia Charles—the American flight engineer on Expedition 18, along with a Russian commander and a French engineer—floated in zero gravity through the vestibule joining the Unity module to the aft hatch of lab mod Destiny. The ISS research facility orbited earth sixteen times each day, or about once every hour and a half, at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Occultations were no great feat in low earth orbit: blocking the sun with any round object in a window revealed the spectacular corona. Thalia’s interest therefore was not in the alignment of the moon and the sun—from her fast-moving perspective, there was indeed no occultation—but rather the result of this phenomenon upon the slow-rotating earth.
Destiny, the primary research lab on the ISS, measures twenty-eight by fourteen feet—although the interior working space of this cylindrical module, due to the amount of equipment tied down to the squared-off sides, is tighter than that, measuring roughly five humans long by one human across. Every duct, pipe, and wire connection was directly accessible and therefore visible, such that each of Destiny’s four walls looked like the back of a panel-size motherboard. At times Thalia felt like little more than a tiny microprocessor dutifully carrying out computations inside a great space computer.
Thalia walked her hands along the nadir, the “floor” of Destiny—in space there is no up or down—to a broad, lenslike ring studded with bolts. The portal shutter was designed to protect the integrity of the module from micrometeoroids or collisions with orbital debris. She maneuvered her sock-covered feet against a wall grip and manually opened it, revealing the two-foot-diameter optical-quality window.