Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  “I’ll have one of those,” she said to the bartender, pointing to my Bahamalama-Dingdong, which pointed back. Then she said her name was Morgan.

  Morgan drank hers, I drank mine. We both drank a few more. My recall of subsequent events gets steadily worse. But I do remember that she had a cat, a flat-screen TV, black satin sheets, and a knack for saying what she thought—and that’s pretty much all I remember, except for waking up the next morning, getting kicked out of an unfamiliar apartment because she had to go somewhere and was looking all embarrassed, and heading home with a hangover that made navigation difficult. By the time I got back to my dorm room, I had no idea where I’d started out.

  All I had to show for the event was a newfound confidence with women, slowly manifesting superpowers, and an appetite for rare meat.

  “We’ve been over all that,” I said to Dr. Prolix. “I still can’t help you.”

  “This is not about helping me,” she said firmly. “You won’t come to terms with your disease until you find your progenitor.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve tried. But like you’ve said before, she must have moved away or died or something.” That had always been the big mystery. If Morgan was still around, we’d be seeing her handiwork everywhere—peeps popping up all over the city, a bloodbath every time she picked up some foolish young Texan in a bar. Or at least a few corpses every now and then. “I mean, it’s been over a year, and we don’t have a single clue.”

  “Didn’t have a clue,” she said, and rang a small, high-pitched bell on her desk. Somewhere out of sight but within earshot, a minder tapped away at a computer keyboard. A moment later, the printer on my side of the red line began to hum, its cartridge jerking to life below the plastic cover.

  “This was recently brought to my attention, Cal. Now that you’ve dealt with Sarah, I thought you might want to see it.”

  I stood and went to the printer and lifted with trembling fingers the warm piece of paper that slid into its tray. It was a scanned handbill, like they pass out on the street sometimes:

  Dick’s Bar Is Back in Business!

  — Seven Days a Week—

  The Health Department Couldn’t Keep Us Down!

  *The One and Only Home of the Bahamalama-Dingdong*

  Dr. Prolix watched me read it, steepling her fingers again.

  “Feeling thirsty?” she asked.

  Chapter 4

  TOXOPLASMA

  Flip a coin. Tails? Relax.

  Heads? You’ve got parasites in your brain.

  That’s right. Half of us carry the Toxoplasma gondii parasite. But don’t reach for the power drill just yet.

  Toxoplasma is microscopic. Human immune systems usually kick its ass, so if you’ve got it, you’ll probably never even know. In fact, toxoplasma doesn’t even want to be in your head. Trapped inside your thick skull, under assault by your immune defenses, it can’t lay eggs, which is a big evolutionary Game Over.

  Toxoplasma would much rather live in your cat’s digestive system, eating cat food and laying eggs. Then, when kitty takes a crap, these eggs wind up on the ground, waiting for other scurrying creatures. Like, say, rats.

  A quick word about rats: They’re basically parasite subway trains, carrying them from place to place. In my job, we call this being a vector. Rats go everywhere in the world, and they breed like crazy. Catching a ride on the Rat Express is a major way that diseases have evolved to spread themselves.

  When toxoplasma gets into a rat, the parasite starts to make changes to its host’s brain. If a normal rat bumps into something that smells like a cat, it freaks out and runs away. But toxoplasma-infected rats actually like the smell of cats. Kitty pee makes them curious. They’ll explore for hours trying to find the source.

  Which is a cat. Which eats them.

  And that makes toxoplasma happy, because toxoplasma really, really wants to live in the stomach of a cat.

  Parasite geeks have a phrase for what cats are to toxoplasma: the “final host.”

  A final host is the place where a parasite can live happily ever after, getting free food, having lots of babies. Most parasites live in more than one kind of animal, but they’re all trying to reach their final host, the ultimate vector … parasite heaven.

  Toxoplasma uses mind control to get to its heaven. It makes the rat want to go looking for cats and get eaten. Spooky, huh?

  But nothing like that would work on us humans, right?

  Well, maybe. No one’s really sure what toxoplasma does to human beings. But when researchers collected a bunch of people with and without toxoplasma, gave them personality tests, observed their habits, and interviewed their friends, this is what they learned:

  Men infected with toxoplasma don’t shave every day, don’t wear ties too much, and don’t like following social rules. Women infected with toxoplasma like to spend money on clothes, and they tend to have lots of friends. The rest of us think they’re more attractive than non-infected women. In general, the researchers found that infected people are more interesting to be around.

  On the other hand, people without toxoplasma in their brains like following the rules. If you lend them money, they’re more likely to pay you back. They show up for work on time. The men get into fewer fights. The women have fewer boyfriends.

  Could this be toxoplasma mind control?

  But that’s just too weird, isn’t it? There has to be another explanation.

  Maybe some people always hated getting to work on time, and they like having felines around because cats wouldn’t go to work on time either, if they had any work to go to. These people adopted cats and then got toxoplasma.

  Maybe the other half of humanity, the ones who enjoy following the rules, usually get dogs. Fetch. Sit. Stay. So, their brains stay toxoplasma-free.

  Maybe these are two kinds of people who were already different.

  Or maybe not.

  That’s the thing about parasites: It’s hard to tell if they’re the chicken or the egg. Maybe we’re all really robots, walking around doing the bidding of our parasites. Just like those hungry, twitching snails …

  Do you really love your cat? Or is the toxoplasma in your head telling you to take care of kitty, its final host, so that one day it too will reach parasite heaven?

  Chapter 5

  BAHAMALAMA-DINGDONG

  Dick’s Bar hadn’t changed all that much, but I had.

  It wasn’t just my superpowers. I was older, wiser, and had lived in New York for just over a year now. I had grown-up eyes.

  It turned out that Dick’s Bar didn’t get a lot of female patronage. Not much at all. Just a lot of guys playing pool in their leather chaps, drinking beer and swigging the occasional Jell-O shot, listening to a mix of country and classic disco. A typical West Village bar.

  It was a relief, really. I could hang out here without having to stare into my drink, trying to avoid contact with any hot girls. Even better, any woman who was a regular would stick out like a banana in a highball glass. Surely someone would remember a tall, pale-skinned creature wearing a long black dress and picking up wayward Texans.

  “Drink?” the bartender asked.

  I nodded. A little stimulus for my fugitive memories wouldn’t hurt.

  “A Bahamalama-Dingdong, please.”

  The bartender raised an eyebrow, then turned to ring a bell over the bar. A few guys playing pool in the back chuckled, and something dislodged itself from the cloudy sky of memories inside my head.

  Ding! said my brain, as I recalled that whenever anyone ordered a Bahamalama-Dingdong, they rang a special bell. Hence the “dingdong” part of the name.

  Well, partly. I watched the bartender take a banana from the freezer. He put it in a tall highball glass and poured rum over it, then mystery juice from a plastic container marked BID, and finally a careful layer of red liqueur across the top. I detected a scent like cough medicine rising up.

  “Nassau Royale?” I asked.

  The bartender nodded. “Yeah. Do
I remember you?”

  “You mean, from before the Health Department shut you down?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You don’t look so familiar, though.”

  I nodded. “I’ve only been here once, actually. But I had a friend who used to come all the time. Named Morgan?”

  “Morgan?”

  “Yeah. Tall, dark hair, pale skin. Black dresses. Kind of gothy?”

  Pause. “A woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shook his head. “Not ringing a bell. You sure you got the right place?”

  I looked down at the Bahamalama-Dingdong, the Nassau Royale-stained banana looking back at me like a bloodshot eye, and took a sip. Tropical fruit sweetness poured over my tongue, textured by strips of rind shedding from the frozen banana. That night of more than a year before began to flood back into my mind, carried on pineapples and the burnt taste of dark rum.

  “I’m positive,” I said.

  There wasn’t much to do but get drunk.

  The bartender asked around, but no one remembered Morgan or even vaguely recalled a gothlike woman who had hung out here in the old days. Maybe, like me, she’d randomly wandered in off the street that night.

  On the other hand, if her inner parasite had been pulling her strings, making her desperately horny, then why had she chosen a gay bar, the place she was least likely to get lucky? (Had she been as clueless as my younger self? Hmm.)

  I let the drinks take hold, ringing more bells, bringing back stray fragments of memory from that night. There definitely had been a river involved; I recalled reflected lights rippling in boat wakes. All the Bahamalama-Dingdongs that Morgan and I had drunk had put a little stumble into our step. I’d been worried she’d go over the rail and I’d have to leap into the cold water to save her, even though I wasn’t fit to walk a dog.

  We had strolled out to the end of a long pier and stood looking at the river. The Hudson or the East River, though?

  Then I remembered: At some point I’d checked my compass and announced that we were facing northwest, which made her laugh. Definitely the Hudson, then. We’d been looking at New Jersey.

  What had happened next?

  I tried to press the hazy memories forward in time, but my mind was stuck on that image of New Jersey reflected in the river—Hoboken already teasing me from across the water. No matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t recall a single step of the route we’d taken back to Morgan’s apartment.

  A guy came up next to me, back here in the present.

  It took a few moments to pull myself out of my Bahamalama-Dingdong reverie, but I could tell from his scent that he’d just come back into the bar from catching a smoke outside. His leather vest was cow-smell new, and he wore an intrigued expression. Maybe he’d heard I’d been asking about Morgan.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey. What’s your name?”

  “Cal.” I reached to shake his hand.

  “I’m Dave. So … what are you into, Cal?” he asked.

  I paused for a second before answering.

  I couldn’t tell him what I was really into: finding the woman who had turned me into a superhuman freak, taking the next step in destroying my bloodline—dealing with my progenitor, then hunting down any more peeps she had created, and then delving further into the endless, knotted tree of the parasite’s spread. So I cast my mind back to the homework I’d been reading in the diner that morning as I’d waited for the clouds to clear.

  “Hookworms,” I said.

  “Hookworms?” He took the seat next to me. “Never heard of that.”

  I sipped from my third Bahamalama-Dingdong.

  “Well, they burrow in through your feet, using this enzyme that breaks down skin tissue, then travel along the bloodstream till they get into your lungs. They mess up your breathing, so you cough them up. But you know how you always swallow a little bit of phlegm?”

  One of his eyebrows raised, but he admitted he did.

  “Well, a few hookworm eggs get swallowed along with the phlegm and travel down into your intestines, where they grow to be about half an inch long.” I held up my fingers a hookworm’s length apart. “And they develop this circle of teeth in their mouths, like a coil of barbed wire. They start chomping into your intestinal wall and sucking your blood.” I realized I was going into drunken detail here and paused to check if he was still interested.

  “Really?” His voice sounded a bit dry.

  I nodded. “Wouldn’t lie to you, Dave. But here’s the cool thing. They produce this special anticlotting factor, kind of like blood antifreeze, so the wound doesn’t scab over. You become a sort of temporary hemophiliac, just in that one spot. Your intestines won’t stop bleeding until the hookworm gets its fill!”

  “Hookworms, huh?” he asked.

  “That’s what they’re called.”

  Dave nodded gravely, standing back up. He grasped my shoulder firmly, a serious expression on his face. His thoughtful features seemed to reflect for a moment the hard road I had in front of me.

  “Good luck with that,” he said.

  I figured seven Bahamalama-Dingdongs would do the job.

  That was probably more than I’d drunk my first time at Dick’s, but these days I was older and more superhuman. I did a professional job of getting off my stool, and my feet got into a pretty good rhythm after shuffling a bit at first. My metabolism may be peeped up, but there’s only so much rum even my body can process before it starts to sputter. All in all, I’d managed a pretty fair reconstruction of my first really wicked buzz in New York City.

  I headed off to retrace my stumbling path from a year before.

  The bartender watched me go with an impressed-looking nod, and Dave waved from behind the pool table. As the evening had progressed, he’d sent some of his friends over to ask about hookworms, and they’d all listened attentively. I’d thrown in some stuff about blood flukes, too. So it hadn’t been like drinking alone.

  Outside Dick’s Bar, the streetlights wore coronas of orange, and the glassphalt shimmered like sugar crystals on top of lemon meringue pie. My breath curled out steamy, but the warmth from inside Dick’s still saturated my jacket, its fingers nestled around me like a cluster of liver worms.

  Okay, bad image. But I was a little drunk.

  My feet carried me toward the river automatically, but I wasn’t remembering the route to Morgan’s yet. It was just gravity doing its job.

  Skateboarding around the city, I’d noticed the Hump, how the ground rises in the center of Manhattan and falls away toward the rivers, like the slippery back of a giant whale emerging from the harbor. A really giant whale: The slope is barely perceptible—you only feel it on a board or a bike, or if your stride is lubricated by seven or so Bahamalama-Dingdongs.

  My feet had wheels, and I rolled toward the water effortlessly.

  Soon I glimpsed the river at the end of the street, sparkling as it had that night. A walkway stretched along the water. By instinct, I turned north. It was a little tricky staying between the pedestrian lines, though. A few bikers and skaters whirred around me, leaving annoyed comments in their wake. I commented right back at them, my words a little slurred. Outside the warm company of Dick’s Bar, my Bahamalama-Dingdongs had made me antisocial.

  But my mood lifted when I saw the pier.

  It stretched out into the water, as long as a football field. Mismatched beats from various boom boxes echoed across the water from it, and bright lights beamed down from high posts.

  Was that the same pier Morgan and I had stood on that night?

  There was one way to find out. I shambled to the end of the pier, trying to ignore kissing couples and a group of very cute roller-dancing girls, and pulled my trusty compass out. The needle steadied itself to magnetic north.

  I was facing northwest, the exact reading I’d taken a year before.

  I breathed in deeply, tasting ocean salt, green algae, and motor oil in the air, all familiar from that night. This had to be
the place.

  But what now?

  I gazed out onto the river. On either side of me, the timbers of abandoned piers rose up from the water like rotting black teeth. More pieces of my memory were falling into place, like a blurry picture downloading in waves, gradually becoming clearer.

  Then I saw the dark hulk of a building across the Hudson, its three giant maws open to the river. The Hoboken Ferry Terminal. Without knowing it, I’d had a glimpse of my future that night a year before.

  My peep-strength eyes caught a flicker of lights in its second-story windows. Dr. Rat was still up there, probably with a dozen or so of her colleagues from Research and Development, studying the nesting habits of Sarah’s brood. Weighing and measuring poisoned alpha rats and punks. Maybe looking for a rare “rat king”—a bunch of rats with tangled-up tails who travel in a pack all tied together, like dogs being walked by a professional dog walker, ten leashes in hand.

  With Sarah gone, her brood would be disintegrating over the next few days, scattering into nearby alleys and sewers like runoff from an autumn storm. I wondered if the rats would miss her. Did they get something more than leftovers from their peeps? A sense of belonging?

  The thought of all those orphaned creatures depressed me, and I turned back toward Manhattan.

  My heart drunkenly skipped a beat.

  Before me, just across the highway, a razor-thin high-rise stood.

  Buildings get their personality from their windows, just like people express themselves with their eyes. This building had a schizophrenic look. Its lower floors were cluttered with tiny balconies, but along the top floor stretched floor-to-ceiling windows, wide open with surprise. I remembered Morgan pointing the building out to me, giggling and squeezing my hand…

  “That’s where I live!” she’d said, thus marking the exact moment when I had been absolutely positive I was going to get laid.

  How the hell does anyone forget a moment like that? I wondered.

  Shaking my head in amazement, I stumbled back up the pier.