Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  “But our guys at the PATH say that there are a few places under the exhaust towers that their workers have abandoned,” Chip added. “They aren’t officially condemned, but nobody goes down there anymore.”

  “Great. And how close is that to Morgan’s building?”

  “Not far. A couple hundred yards?”

  My nose wrinkled, as if a bad smell had wafted into the cubicle. Why couldn’t I have just lost my virginity the normal way? No vampiric infections, no subterranean menaces. “Okay, so what’s the best way for me to get down there?”

  “Through the front door.” Chip ran a finger across the building plans, pointing out a set of symbols. “They’ve got major security all over the joint; cameras everywhere, especially in the lower levels.”

  “Crap.”

  “I thought you had an inside line. That girl you mentioned in your 1158-S, the one who lives there now? Tell her you want to check out the basement.”

  “She had an attitude problem. I’d rather break in. I’m good with locks.”

  Chip raised an eyebrow.

  “Or a Sanitation badge,” I flailed. “Maybe a Health Inspector of Health Clubs?”

  “What happened between you and her?”

  “Nothing!”

  “You can tell me, Kid.”

  I groaned, but Chip fixed me with his big brown eyes. “Look, it’s just that she… We had this…” My voice fell. “There was a Superhuman Revelation Incident, sort of.”

  “There was?” Chip frowned. “Have you filed an SRI-27/45?”

  “No, I haven’t filed an SRI-27/45. It’s not like she saw me climbing up a wall or anything. All I did was sort of… lift her up, and only for a second.”

  “And?”

  “And swing her from one balcony to another. Otherwise we were going to get caught breaking and entering. Just entering, I mean—nothing was broken.” I decided not to get into the Grand Theft Blender issue. “Look, Chip, all I need are some traps and a Pest Control badge. Catch a few rats, let the Doctor test their blood, see if we’ve got a running reservoir. First things first. No big deal.”

  Chip nodded slowly, then looked down and continued detailing the lower depths of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, letting his expression say it all.

  “Pretty late, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me about it,” I grunted at the doorman, willing him not to look too closely at my face. He was the same guy from that afternoon, but now I was dressed in a standard city-issue hazmat suit, a wool cap pulled down to my eyebrows. My oven-fresh Sanitation badge was flopped open in his face. In more ways than one, I was presenting a different picture than I had nine hours before.

  “Yeah, I’m on till midnight myself,” he said, his eyes dropping from my face as he pulled out a desk drawer. He hadn’t recognized me. The clothes do make the man, as far as most people are concerned.

  He yanked out a clattering ring of keys, and we headed to the elevator.

  “Did you guys get a complaint from one of our tenants? I never heard nothing about rats here.”

  “No, just some problems nearby. Population explosion by the river.”

  “Yeah, the river. Always smells damp down in the basement. Kind of fishy.” The elevator door opened. He leaned one shoulder against it, blocking its attempts to close while he counted through the keys until he found one marked with a green plastic ring. He slipped it into a keyhole marked B2 at the bottom of the controls and gave it a half turn.

  “You ever heard of a tenant getting bitten here?” I asked. “Maybe a year ago or so?”

  He looked up at me. “Didn’t work here then. No one did. They hired all new staff early this year. The old guys were running some kind of payroll scam, I hear.”

  “Ah. I see.” I made a mental note to run all those doormen’s and janitors’ names through Records.

  He pressed the B2 button, keeping one hand on the door’s rubber bumpers. “Not that hardly that many people use it down there. Only a few diehards. Like I said, smells funny. By the way, when you come back up, don’t forget to mention you’re leaving to whoever’s on the door. It’s supposed to be locked up down there this time of night.”

  “No problem.” I lifted my duffel bag in weary half salute.

  He smiled and let the door close. The elevator took me down.

  It did smell funny.

  There were about fifty kinds of mold growing down there, and I could smell the rot of wooden beams behind the walls, dried human sweat on the padded weight benches, assorted shoes decaying behind the slats of locker doors.

  But behind the health club smells, something else was brewing. I couldn’t quite figure out what. Smells are not as easy to place as sights and sounds. They’re like suppressed memories: You sometimes have to let them bubble up on their own.

  I let the elevator close its door and glide away, not switching on any lights. I didn’t want the doorman watching me on the security cameras. I was hoping he would forget I was down here and go off his shift without mentioning me to the next guy.

  Once my eyes adjusted, the red glow of the thermostats and exercise machine controls were enough to see by. For a few minutes, though, I just stood there, listening for the sounds of tiny feet.

  It didn’t seem a likely spot for a rat invasion; there wasn’t any source of food down here, not even a candy machine. In any case, street-level garbage eaters weren’t the only issue here. I was looking for big alpha rats—and, if Chip was right, unnamed other things—bubbling up from below. Things that had never heard of M&M’s.

  All I could hear was the refrigerator in the juice machine, the hiss of steam heat, and a distant steady rumble. I knelt and pressed one palm flat against the floor, feeling the vibration spreading into my flesh along with the chill of the cement. The rumble was cycling slowly—maybe it was those eighty-foot fan blades that gave Chip nightmares.

  But I didn’t hear any rats, or any of Chip’s monsters, for that matter. I moved among the dark shapes of machines, the red eyes of their controls winking at me. The smell of chlorine rose from a covered Jacuzzi. That other scent, the one I couldn’t identify, seemed to grow stronger as I moved toward the back wall.

  Then I felt a draft, the slightest hint of cold. I swept my eyes across the baseboard behind the radiator, searching for a rat-hole letting in the autumn chill of the earth. Rats don’t need much space to crawl through; they can break down their own skeletons and squeeze through holes the size of quarters. (We peeps can supposedly do that too, but it hurts like hell, I’ve heard.)

  There weren’t any openings along the floor. The fittings around the steam pipes were tight. I didn’t spot any doors to slip under, no loose tiles in the ceiling. No way for anything to bubble up from the depths.

  But in the farthest corner of the gym, the paneled walls themselves radiated cold.

  I gave the wall a thump.

  It was hollow.

  Hearing the empty sound, I realized something about the darkened health club—it didn’t have any stairs down. The second level promised in the blueprints didn’t exist. Or it was hidden.

  My duffel bag clanked against the concrete floor. From a pocket, I pulled the plans that Chip had printed for me, checking my compass. According to the blueprints, the sub-basement stairs were only a few yards away, on the other side of the wall.

  The wood paneling didn’t give at all when I pushed; there was something solid behind it. Of course, my duffel bag was full of drills, hacksaws, bolt cutters, and a crowbar, or I could have just put my fist through the wall. But I still had to come back in my Sanitation costume to reclaim any rats my traps caught, and the staff doesn’t like it when you break their building.

  I moved along the wall, pressing and thumping. The echoes were muffled, which meant that lots of crisscrossed S beams supported the paneling. The stairs were solidly sealed off as well, with no easy way in. Had they just abandoned a whole subbasement down there?

  The wood paneling ended at a row of lockers—too heavy to move, even w
ith my peep muscles. I tapped the floor with my feet, wondering what was hidden beneath. From the ceiling, the red eyes of security cameras glowed mockingly in the darkness.

  Then I realized something: All of the cameras were pointed more or less at me. Were they tracking me?

  I moved a few yards, back into the cold corner, but the cameras didn’t follow. They all stayed pointed at the same target—the row of lockers. Whoever had set the security system up didn’t care what happened in the rest of the health club, as long as they could watch that one spot.

  I walked along the lockers, running my fingers against them, smelling the dirty socks and chlorinated swimsuits inside. The metal grew colder as I went.

  In the center, one locker was icy to my touch, and through its ventilation slats that half-familiar scent—the one I couldn’t quite identify—floated on a draft of chilled air. I looked up at the cameras; they were all pointed directly at me now.

  The padlock was an off-the-shelf Master Lock, though with four tumblers instead of the usual three, more expensive than the others. I knelt, cradling it like a cell phone to my head. As the numbers spun left, then right, I heard the tiny steel teeth connecting, the tumblers aligning … until it sprang open, as loud as a gunshot in my ear.

  Sliding the lock off the hasp, I opened the door.

  There was nothing inside—nothingness, in fact. No hanging clothes, no hooks or shelves, just a black void that consumed the dim light of the gym. A chill wind came from the darkness, bearing that same half-familiar smell, sharpened now.

  I reached into the locker. My hand went back into the darkness and cold, disappearing into nothingness.

  Let me get this straight about my night vision: When I’m at home, the only light I keep on is the red LED of my cell-phone charger; I can read fine print by starlight; I have to tape over the glowing clock face of my DVD player, because otherwise it’s too bright to sleep in my bedroom.

  But I couldn’t see jack inside this locker.

  There is something called cave darkness, which is ten times darker than sitting in a closet with towels stuffed under the door, covering your eyes with your hands—basically darker than anything you’ve ever experienced except down in a cave. Your hands disappear in front of your face, you can’t tell whether your eyes are open or not, random red lights seem to flicker in your peripheral vision as your brain freaks out from the total absence of light.

  “Great,” I said.

  Hoisting my duffel bag, I slipped through into the void.

  The standard Night Watch flashlight has three settings. One is a low-light mode designed not to burn out peep night vision. The second setting is a normal flashlight, useful for normal people. The third is a ten-thousand-lumen eyeball-blaster intended to blow away peeps, scare away rat hordes, and generally indicate panic. Held a few inches from your skin, it will actually give you a suntan.

  Switching on the tiny light, I found myself in a narrow hallway, squeezed between the foundation’s cement wall and the back side of the maniacally reinforced wood paneling. The floor was covered with little globs of something gooey. I knelt and sniffed and realized what I’d been smelling all along—peanut butter, mixed with the chalky funk of rat poison. Someone had laid out about a hundred jars of weaponized extra-crunchy back here. The bottom of the false wall was smeared with it to prevent the wood paneling from being gnawed through.

  I stepped carefully among the gooey smears, and the hallway led me back to the corner where the missing stairs should have been. An industrial-strength metal door stood there, reinforced with yards of chain and generous wads of steel wool stuffed into the crack beneath it.

  Steel wool is one thing rats can’t chew through. Someone was working conscientiously on the rat issue. Hopefully that meant Chip was crazy on the giant monster issue, and all there was down here was some peep’s long-lost brood.

  The chains wound back and forth between the door’s push-bar handle and a steel ring cemented into the wall, secured with big, fat padlocks that took keys instead of combinations. To save time, I pulled bolt cutters from my bag and snipped the chains. As taut as rubber bands, they snapped loose and clattered to the floor.

  Funny, I thought, chains don’t keep out rats.

  Ignoring that uncomfortable fact, I gave the door a good hard push; it scraped inward a few inches. Through the gap, the promised stairs led downward into smellier smells and colder air and darker darkness. Sounds filtered up: little feet scurrying, the snufflings of tiny noses, the nibblings of razor-sharp teeth. An all-night rat fiesta—but what were they eating down there?

  Not chocolate, was my guess.

  I pulled on thick rubber gloves.

  The gap was just big enough to squeeze through. As I descended, I kept one thumb on the flashlight’s eyeball-blaster switch, ready to blaze away if there was a peep down here. I couldn’t hear anything bigger than a rat, but, as I’ve said, parasite-positives can hold their breath for a long time.

  The rats must have heard me cutting the chains, but they didn’t sound nervous. Did they get a lot of visitors?

  At the bottom of the stairs, my night vision began to adjust to the profound darkness, and the basement eased into focus. At first I thought the floor was slanted, then I saw that a long swimming pool dominated the room, sloping away from me. The paired arcs of chrome ladders glowed on either side, and a diving board thrust out from the edge of the deep end.

  The pool contained something much worse than water, though.

  Along its bottom skittered a mass of rats, a boiling surface of pale fur, slithering tails, and tiny rippling muscles. They scrambled along the pool’s edges, gathered in feeding frenzies around piles of something I couldn’t see. All of them had the wormy look of deep-underground rats, slowly losing their gray camouflage—and ultimately even their eyesight—as they spent generation after generation out of the sun.

  A fair number of ratty skeletons were lined up on one side of the basement, bare ribs as thin as toothpicks—as if someone had put out glue traps in a neat row.

  There were a lot of smells (as you might imagine) but one stood out among the others, raising my hackles. It was the scent mark of a predator. In Hunting 101, we had been taught to call it by its active molecule: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-1. But most folks just call it “cat pee.”

  What the hell was a cat doing down here? Sure, there are feral felines in New York. But they live on the surface, in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, within paw’s reach of humanity. They stay out of the Underworld, and rats stay away from them. When it comes to rats, cats are on our side.

  If one had stumbled down here, it would be lean pickings by now.

  I forced that last image from my mind and reached into the duffel bag for an infrared camera. Its little screen winked to life, turning the horde of rats into a blobby green snowstorm. I set the camera on the pool’s edge, pointing down into the maelstrom. Dr. Rat and her Research and Development pals could watch this stuff for hours.

  Then I realized something: I didn’t smell chlorine.

  With my nose, even a swimming pool that’s been drained for years retains that tangy chemical scent. The pool had never been filled, which meant that the rat invasion had happened before they’d finished construction down here. I looked at the pool: The black line at water height had been half started, then abandoned.

  I remembered Dr. Rat’s standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface. I began a slow walk around the edge of the basement, flashlight still set low, moving carefully, looking for any holes in the walls.

  The rats hardly noticed me. If this was the brood that had infected Morgan, they would find my scent comforting—our parasites were closely related, after all. On the other hand, true Underworld rats might behave this way with anyone. Never having seen a human being before, their little pink eyes wouldn’t know what to make of me.

  The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the cement. Of course, this buildin
g was just over a year old—the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so.

  I peered over the edge. In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling mass of rats. Pale bodies struggled against one another, some disappearing into the mass, others thrashing their way up and out. The brood did have a way out of this basement, I realized, but it didn’t go up to the surface…

  It went down.

  I swallowed. The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was. Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?

  I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared camera. With it in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool.

  The sole of my boot didn’t make a sound. A layer of something soft was strewn across against the bottom of the pool, fluttering beneath the claws of darting rats. It was too dark to see what.

  Something ran across my boot, and I shuddered.

  “Okay, guys, let’s observe some personal space here,” I said, then took another step.

  Something answered my words, something that wasn’t a rat. A long, high-pitched moan echoed through the room, like the sound of a mewling infant…

  At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl rumbled out.

  A cat was looking at me, its sleepy eyes floating against invisibly black fur. A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an emperor, when they should have been running for their lives.

  The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight’s glow. The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was not a normal place for any cat to be.

  But cats didn’t carry the parasite. If they did, we’d all be peeps by now. They live with us, after all.

  My eyes fell from the feline’s unblinking gaze, and I saw what the rats were eating: pigeons. Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool. The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would. And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks—the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down.