Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  I saw another shudder pass through the shoulders of her bathrobe. Lace had taken a shower while I’d called Manny and told him to lock up the health club. Her face looked pink from a hard scrubbing, and her wet hair was still giving off curls of steam. I turned my attention back to my boots.

  At the mention of rat bites, she lifted her feet up from the floor and tucked them under her on the chair. “So, sex and rats. Anything else I should worry about?”

  “Well, we think there used to be a strain that infected wolves, based on certain historical … evidence.” I decided not to mention the bigger things that Chip was worried about, or whatever had made the basement tremble, and I cleared my throat. “But as far as we know, wolves are too small a population to support the parasite these days. So, you’re in luck there.”

  “Oh, good. Because I was really worried about wolves.” She turned to me. “So, it’s a parasite? Like a tick or something?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like a flu or the common cold. It’s an animal.”

  “What the hell kind of animal?”

  “Sort of like a tapeworm. It starts off as a tiny spore, but it grows big, taking over your whole body. It changes your muscles, your senses, and most of all, your brain. You become a crazed killer, an animal.”

  “Wow, that is really freaky and disgusting, Cal,” she said, cinching her bathrobe tighter.

  Tell me about it, I thought, but didn’t say anything. I might have promised not to lie to her, but my personal medical history was not her business.

  “So,” Lace said, “does this disease have a name?”

  I swallowed, thinking about the various things it had been called over the centuries—vampirism, lycanthropy, zombification, demonic possession. But none of those old words was going to make this any easier for Lace to deal with.

  “Technically, the parasite is known as Echinococcus cannibillus. But seeing as how that takes too long to say, we usually just call it ‘the parasite.’ People with the disease are ‘parasite-positives,’ but we mostly say ‘peeps,’ for short.”

  “Peeps. Cute.” She looked at me, frowning. “So who’s this we you’re talking about anyway? You’re not really with the city, are you? You’re some sort of Homeland Security guy or something.”

  “No, I do work for the city, like I said. The federal government doesn’t know about this.”

  “What? You mean there’s some insane disease spreading and the government doesn’t even know about it? That’s crazy!”

  I sighed, beginning to wonder if this had been a really bad idea. Lace didn’t even understand the basics yet—all I’d managed to do was freak her out. The Shrink employed a whole department of psych specialists to break the news to new carriers like me; they had a library full of musty but impressive books and a spanking new lab full of blinking lights and creepy specimens. All I was doing was haphazardly answering questions, strictly amateur hour.

  I pulled a chair over and sat down in front of her. “I’m not explaining this right, Lace. This isn’t an acute situation. It’s chronic.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That this disease is ancient. It’s been part of human biology and culture for a long time. It almost destroyed Europe in the fourteenth century.”

  “Hang on. You said this wasn’t the plague.”

  “It isn’t, but bubonic plague was a side effect. In the 1300s, the parasite began to spread from humans to rats, which had just arrived from Asia. But it didn’t reach optimum virulence with rodents for a few decades, so it mostly just killed them. As the rats died, the fleas that carried plague jumped over to human hosts.”

  “Okay. Excuse me, but what?”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, got ahead of myself,” I said, knocking my head with my fists. The last six months had been one big crash course in parasitology for me; I’d almost forgotten that most people didn’t spend days thinking about final hosts, immune responses, or optimum virulence.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, let me start over. The parasite goes way back, to before civilization even. The people I work for, the Night Watch, also go way back. We existed before the United States did. It’s our job to protect the city from the disease.”

  “By doing what? Sticking rats in spaghetti strainers?”

  Release me! squeaked PNS.

  “No. By finding people with the parasite and treating them. And by destroying their broods—um, I mean, killing any rats who carry the disease.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense, Cal. Why keep it a secret? Aren’t you Health Department guys supposed to educate people about diseases? Not lie to them?”

  I chewed my lip. “There’s no point in making it public, Lace. The disease is very rare; there’s only a serious outbreak every few decades. Nobody tries to get bitten by a rat, after all.”

  “Hmm. I guess not. But still, this secrecy thing seems like a bad idea.”

  “Well, the Night Watch up in Boston once tried what you’re talking about—a program of education to keep the citizens on the lookout for possible symptoms. They wound up with nonstop accusations of witchcraft, a handful of seventeen-year-olds claiming they’d had sex with the devil, and a lot of innocent bystanders getting barbecued. It took about a hundred years for things to settle down again.”

  Lace raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, we did that play in high school. But wasn’t that a long time ago? Before science and stuff?”

  I looked her in the eye. “Most people don’t know jack about science. They don’t believe in evolution because it makes them uncomfortable. Or they think AIDS is a curse sent down from God. How do you think those people would deal with the parasite?”

  “Yeah, well, people are stupid. But you wouldn’t keep AIDS a secret, would you?”

  “No, but the parasite is different. It’s special.”

  “How?”

  I paused. This was the tricky part. In my own debriefing, the Night Watch psychs had presented all the science stuff for hours before talking about the legends, and it had been a solid week before they’d uttered the V-word.

  “Well, some fears go farther back than science, deeper than rational thought. You can find peep legends in almost every culture on the globe; certain of the parasite’s symptoms lend themselves to scary stories. If we ever get a major outbreak of this, there will be hell to pay.”

  “Certain symptoms? Like what?”

  “Think about it, Lace. Peeps are light-fearing, disease-carrying cannibals who revel in blood.”

  As the words left my mouth, I realized I’d said too much too quickly.

  She snorted. “Cal, are we talking about vampires?”

  As I struggled to find the right words, her amused expression faded.

  “Cal, you are not talking about vampires.” She leaned closer. “Tell me. You’re not supposed to lie to me!”

  I sighed. “Yeah, peeps are vampires. Or zombies in Haiti, or tengu in Japan, or nian in China. But like I said, we prefer the term parasite-positive.”

  “Oh. Vampires,” Lace said softly, looking away. She shook her head, and I thought for a moment that the slender thread of her trust had broken. But then I realized that her gaze was directed at the wall where the words written in blood many months before showed through.

  Lace’s shoulders slumped in defeat, and she drew the robe tightly around her. “I still don’t see why you have to lie about it.”

  I sighed again. “Okay, imagine if people heard that vampires were real. What would they do?”

  “I don’t know. Freak out?”

  “Some would. And some wouldn’t believe it, and some would go see for themselves,” I said. “We figure at least a thousand amateurs would head down into the bowels of New York to look for adventure and mystery, and they would become human germ elevators. Your building is just one acute case. There are dozens of rat reservoirs full of the parasite down there, enough to infect everyone who takes the time to look for them.”

  I stood up and started to move around the room, recall
ing all the motivational classes in Peep Hunting 101.

  “The disease sits under us like a burned-down camp-fire, Lace, and all it needs is for a few idiots to start stirring the embers. Peeps were deadly enough to terrorize people back in tiny, far-flung villages. Imagine massive outbreaks in a modern-day city, with millions of people piled on top of one another, close enough to sink their teeth into any passing stranger!”

  Lace raised her hands in surrender. “Dude, I already promised. I’m not going to tell anyone, unless you lie to me.”

  I took a deep breath, then sat down. Maybe this was going better than I’d thought. “I’ll be handling this personally. All you have to do is sit tight.”

  “Sit tight? Yeah, right! I bet Morgan was sitting tight when she got bitten. There’s probably some little rat tunnel that leads all the way up here from the basement!” Her eyes swept the apartment, searching for tiny cracks in the walls, holes that could let the pestilence inside. Already the old fears were stirring inside her.

  “Well, maybe a year ago there was,” I said soothingly. “But now there’s steel wool stuffed under that chained-up door, and a ton of peanut butter behind the false wall. The disease is probably contained for the moment.”

  “Probably? So you’re asking me to trust my life to steel wool and peanut butter?”

  “Poisoned peanut butter.”

  “Cal, I don’t care if it’s nuclear peanut butter.” She stood up and stomped into her bedroom. I heard the scrape of vinyl across the floor, the sound of zippers, and the clatter of clothes hangers.

  I went to her doorway and saw that she was packing a bag.

  “You’re splitting?”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Oh,” I said. The sight of her packing had sent a twinge through me. I’d just shared my biggest secret in the world with Lace, and she was leaving. “Well, that’s probably a good idea. It won’t take long to clear things up downstairs, now that we know what’s going on.” I cleared my throat. “You should tell me where you’re going, though, so I can keep in touch. Tell you when it’s safe.”

  “No problem there. I’m coming to your place.”

  “Um … you’re doing what?”

  She stopped with a half-folded shirt in her hands and stared at me. “Like I told you last night: I’m not going back to my sister’s couch. Her boyfriend’s there all the time now, and he’s a total dick. And my parents moved out to Connecticut last year.”

  “But you can’t stay with me!”

  “Why not?”

  “Why would you want to? You don’t even know me! What if I … turn out to be a psychopath or something?”

  She returned to folding the shirt. “You? Every time I think you’re talking crazy, I remember what I saw down in the basement, or what’s in there.” She nodded toward the living room, where the thing on the wall lurked. “And nuts or not, you’ve got the inside line on a huge story. Did you really expect me to go off and read textbooks tonight or something? Why do you think I went into journalism anyway?”

  My voice went up an octave. “A story? What about keeping this a secret? You promised. Aren’t you supposed to have journalistic ethics or something?”

  “Sure.” She smiled. “But if you break your promise and lie to me, I can break mine. So maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  I opened my mouth and a strangled noise came out. How was I supposed to explain that I was a psycho, that a raging parasite inside me desperately wanted to spread itself by any means possible? That just standing here in the same room with her was already torture?

  “Besides,” she continued, “you don’t want me staying anywhere else if you want to keep this a secret.”

  “I don’t?”

  She finished folding the shirt. “No, you don’t. I talk in my sleep like crazy.”

  By the time we left her apartment, it was the dead of night.

  I stabbed the button for the health club repeatedly as we rode down. It didn’t light up.

  “Dude, don’t do that.”

  “Just making sure Manny locked the elevator.”

  Lace shifted her suitcase from one hand to another. “Yeah, but it’ll be open again tomorrow, won’t it?”

  “Not for long.” I could requisition a fake court order in the morning, enough to shut down the lower levels for a week or so. And as soon as possible, I was going down there with Dr. Rat and a full extermination team, carrying enough poison to exterminate this particular slice of the Underworld halfway to the earth’s core.

  The doormen had changed shifts, and the new guy looked up at us through thick glasses as we crossed the lobby, reflections of the little TVs on his console flickering in them. It gave me an idea.

  “Talk to him for a second,” I whispered.

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Like what’s in your bag?”

  I will be avenged! came PNS’s muffled squeak. He was trapped between the spaghetti strainer and a dinner plate, duct-taped together and wrapped in a towel for silence, the whole thing shoved inside the Barneys shopping bag in my hand. I figured his little rat lungs had another minute of oxygen left before I’d have to take the towel off.

  “No. Just distract the guy. Quick.”

  I steered Lace over to the doorman’s desk, elbowing her until she launched into a rant about her water taking too long to heat up. As the doorman tried to placate her, I eased around to where I could see his security monitors.

  The little screens showed the insides of elevators, hallways, the sidewalk outside the building’s entrance, but nothing from the floor below. That was why no one had noticed our comings and goings—the cameras downstairs didn’t work anymore.

  Or did they? I remembered their red lights glowing in the dark. This building was owned by an old family, after all. They hadn’t simply walled up the rat invasion; they’d left a secret passage through the locker and turned the cameras to face it. Someone was interested in what was going on downstairs. There could be videotape of us somewhere, waiting to be watched…

  “Come on,” I said, pulling Lace away in mid-sentence.

  The air outside was cold and damp. I paused to unwrap a corner of PNS’s cage to let him breathe. He squeaked vengeance and rebellion, and Lace glanced at the bag and took a step back.

  “You owe me a plate and a strainer, dude,” she said.

  “You owe me an earth-shattering secret history.”

  “I’d rather have a spaghetti strainer.”

  “Fine, take mine when you leave.” I pointed east, up Leroy Street. “We can catch the B on Fourth.”

  “What? Take the subway? Go underground all the way to Brooklyn?” Lace shuddered. “No way. We’re cabbing it.”

  “But that’s like twenty bucks!”

  “Split two ways, it’s only ten. Duh. Come on, we can grab one on Christopher.”

  She started off, and I walked a little behind her, realizing that my lifestyle was already changing, and my guest hadn’t even set foot in my apartment yet. I’d considered giving Lace my keys and taking PNS downtown for immediate testing, but the thought of her tromping through my personal space alone had killed that idea—there were books lying around that detailed the few Night Watch secrets I hadn’t already spilled. I’d promised to tell her the truth about the disease, not teach a college course on it.

  As we walked up Leroy, I glanced at the loading docks of the big industrial buildings, wondering if any of the brood had found a way up to street level. A couple of rats sat atop a glistening pile of plastic garbage bags, but they had the furry look of surface-dwellers, not the pale greasiness of the brood in the basement.

  Then I saw another shape, something lean and sleek moving in the shadows. It had the stride of a predator—a cat.

  I couldn’t spot any markings, only a dark silhouette and the shine of fur. The cat in the basement had also been solid black, but so were about a million other cats in the world.

  Suddenly the animal froze, looking straigh
t at me. Its eyes caught a streetlight, the reflective cells behind them igniting with a flash. My stride slowed to a halt.

  “What is it?” Lace asked from a few yards ahead. At the sound of her voice, the cat blinked once, then disappeared into the darkness.

  “Cal? What’s wrong?”

  “Um, I just remembered something I didn’t tell you, another vector for the disease.”

  “Just what I was hoping for. Another thing to worry about.”

  “Well, it’s not very likely, but you should be careful of any cats you see in this neighborhood.”

  “Cats?” Her gaze followed mine into the shadows. “They can get it too?!’

  “Maybe. Not sure yet.”

  “All right.” She pulled her coat tighter again. “You know, Cal … the guys upstairs from Morgan said that she had a cat. A loud one.”

  A shudder traveled through me, another memory from that fateful night. There had been a cat in Morgan’s apartment, greeting us as we came in the door, watching as I dressed to leave the next morning. But had it been the one down in the basement?

  Or the one watching us right now?

  “That reminds me, Lace,” I said. “Are you allergic to cats?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You’ll like Cornelius.”

  “You have a cat? Even though they spread the disease?”

  “Not this one. Rats are afraid of him. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Cornelius was waiting for us, yowling from the moment my keys jingled in the lock, demanding food and attention. Once the door was open, he slipped out into the hall and did a quick figure eight through my legs, then darted back inside. We followed.

  “Hey, baby,” I said, picking Cornelius up and cradling him.

  Save me from the beast! squeaked PNS from his Barneys bag.

  Cornelius’s claws unsheathed as he climbed painfully up my coat and down my back, leaping to the floor to paw the bag and yowl.

  “Um, Cal?” Lace said. “I’m seeing a possible vector-thingy here.”

  “Huh? Oh.” I whisked the bag away from Cornelius and across the room to the closet. Kicking aside a pile of dirty laundry, I deposited PNS’s entire containment system on the floor inside and shut the closet door tight.