Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  What looked like tiny clouds were rolling along the floor, carried by the breeze. They glided toward me, silent and insubstantial, and when I waved a hand close to them, they stirred in its wake.

  Feathers.

  I took a pinch and held it up to my eyes. This was the soft white down from a pigeon’s breast. As the light grew longer, I saw that the whole tunnel was carpeted with downy feathers; they clung to the ceiling stones and to my hazmat suit, rolling across the floor like a slow, ghostly tide.

  Somewhere ahead, there were a lot of dead birds.

  Larger feathers began to appear, the dirty gray and blue of pigeon and seagull wings, trembling in the breeze. I crawled silently across the carpeted dirt floor, feeling the softness under my palms and trying not to think of pigeon mites.

  Ahead I could hear breathing, slow and relaxed for a peep.

  The tunnel ended at a shaft that went straight up—light pouring down from above, a rusted iron ladder driven into the stone wall. A pile of feathers had collected at the bottom. A few whole birds lay on top of it unmoving, their necks twisted.

  I froze, watching the breeze stir the feathers until a shadow moved across them. The peep was at the top of the ladder.

  With the chill autumn air flowing down the shaft, it still couldn’t smell me. I wondered why it was nesting up there, instead of hiding down here in the gloom. Placing my flashlight on the floor to free up my hands, I crawled to the end of the tunnel and peered up, eyes slitted against the sunlight.

  He clung to the ladder twelve feet above me, staring out at the world like a prisoner at a cell window, the reddish light of late afternoon softening his emaciated face.

  I lowered myself into a crouch, gripped the injector, and jumped straight up as high as I could.

  He heard me at the last second, looking down just as I reached up to jam the needle into his leg. He twisted away, the injector missing completely. My hand grasped the ladder but the peep screamed and flailed his foot at me, landing a kick in my teeth. My grip loosened … and I was falling.

  I reached out to grab a passing rung and swung inward, bouncing against the stone wall and holding on for a bare second, the breath knocked from me. Then the peep was dropping toward me, hissing, teeth bared. His body struck me broadside, wrenching my fingers from the ladder rung. We fell together, landing in a crumpled heap on the pile of pigeon feathers, his wiry muscles writhing against me.

  Black fingernails raked across my face, and I scrambled free and jumped away into the tunnel, cracking my head against the low stone ceiling. Dizzy from the impact, I spun to face him, hands raised.

  The peep leaped up in an explosion of feathers, his black claws lashing through the air. I held up the injector to ward him off, and felt his flailing hand connect with it, a brief hiss sounding before the injector flew away into the darkness. The peep’s next blow struck my head, knocking me to the ground.

  He stood over me, silhouetted by the sunlight, swaying a little, like a drunk. I scrambled backward, crab style. He let out another scream…

  Then tumbled heavily to the ground. The injection had knocked him out.

  That good old peep metabolism, fast as lightning.

  I blinked a few times, shaking my head, trying to force the pain away.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” I said. I rubbed at a bump already rising on my scalp. “Stupid tunnel!”

  When the pain had faded a little, I checked his pulse. Slow and thready, but he was alive—for a peep, anyway. The injection would keep him out for hours, but I tagged him to be certain, handcuffing him to the lowest ladder rung and sticking an electronic bracelet around his ankle. The transport squad could follow its signal here.

  Finally, I sat back and grinned happily, letting a rush of pride erase my pain. Even if he was family, this was my first peep capture outside my own ex-girlfriends. I turned him over to look at his face. Thinner than his photograph, his cheekbones high and hair wild, this was a barely recognizable Joseph Moore. He looked way too skinny for a seven-month-old peep, though, considering the pile of feathers he’d accumulated.

  What had he been doing at the top of the ladder, up there in the sun?

  I pulled myself up the ladder, noting how smooth the walls of the shaft were. Too slick for a cat to climb, or even a rat—only a human being could make use of it.

  At the top, the afternoon light slanted through the steel-grated window. The view was the Hudson River, from only a few feet above the water level. From just overhead I heard laughter and the hum of Rollerblades.

  I was inside the stone bulwark at the edge of the island, I realized, right below the boardwalk where people jogged and skated every day, only a few feet from the normal daylight world.

  Then I saw the broken black column in front of me, a pylon from an old pier, a rotting piece of wood just big enough for a pigeon or a seagull to perch on. There was bird crap all over it, and it was just within arm’s reach.

  Joseph Moore had been hunting.

  Then a realization swept over me, and I gripped the ladder rungs with white knuckles, remembering the picked-clean pigeon skeletons and feathers back in the swimming pool. Joseph Moore was too skinny to have eaten all those birds at the bottom of the shaft; most had been carried away. He had been hunting for the brood. With his long human arms, he had brought them food that they couldn’t reach.

  But unlike most human peeps, Joseph Moore wasn’t at the center of the brood. He’d been stuck out here on this lonely periphery, the hated sunlight shining in to blind his eyes, forced to give up his kills for the pack to eat.

  He was nothing but a servant to the brood’s real master.

  “The cat has people,” I said aloud.

  Chapter 14

  SLIMEBALLS SAVE THE WORLD

  Okay, remember those slimeballs? The ones with lancet flukes in them? It turns out that they do more than just infect cows, snails, and ants. They help save the world.

  Well, okay, not the whole world. But they do make sure that the corner of the world where ants and cows and snails live doesn’t come crashing down. Here’s how it works:

  When cows are looking for something to eat, they stay away from grass that’s really green. Green grass is good for them, but it’s green because of the cow pies fertilizing it. Now, these cow pies don’t cause problems in themselves—cows are smart enough not to eat them. But cow pies have lancet flukes in them. Thus, there are fluke-infected snails nearby, which means that there must be flukey ants sitting atop stalks of green grass, waiting to be eaten.

  So cows have evolved to avoid bright green grass. They don’t want to get infected with lancet flukes, after all.

  But a problem arises when there are too many cows and not enough grass to go around. The cows wind up eating the green grass, and getting lancet flukes in their stomachs. Less grass to go around, more sick cows. And, it turns out, sick cows have fewer calves. The cow population drops, and there’s more grass for everyone.

  Get the picture? The parasites control the population. They’re part of nature’s balance.

  So what happens if you get rid of the parasites? Bad things.

  Not long ago, some cattle ranchers decided to increase their herds with parasite-killing medicine. They doped every cow until all the parasites were gone. So their cattle had more and more calves, and they ate all the grass, green or not. More hamburgers for everyone!

  For a while.

  It turned out that those little clusters of bright green, parasite-laden grass were important. They were holding down the topsoil. Without parasites to keep the cows in check, every square inch of grass got eaten, and soon the grassland turned into a desert. New plants came in, desert shrubs that made it impossible for grass to return.

  All the cows died. All the snails died. Even the ants got blown away.

  Without our parasites to keep us in check, we’re all in trouble.

  Chapter 15

  THE PATH BELOW

  Joseph Moore was still unconscious, snoring softly on the
feathers. Maybe dreaming of his cat master.

  I wondered if Dr. Rat would try to explain this new development away as just another hopeful monster. Surely a human who served a peep cat would take a few generations to evolve. Of course, people and cats have been getting along for thousands of years, since the Egyptians worshipped them as gods. Maybe this was just a new twist on that, or on the toxoplasma thing.

  Whatever was going on, I had to catch this cat. The yowl I’d heard from the swimming pool must have come from the other end of the ventilation tunnel, downwind. Which meant that it would smell me coming.

  “Fine,” I whispered. I was armed with one more can of Crunchy Tuna, after all.

  Facing the tunnel, I realized that my night vision was gone. Glimpsing the afternoon sun across the Hudson had left me half blind, seeing only spots and traces against the darkness. I closed my eyes to let them readjust to darkness, moving slowly back down the tunnel.

  Then I heard a noise, faint footfalls in the dirt.

  My eyes sprang open, but the tunnel ahead remained absolutely black. The only scents came from behind me—the pile of feathers and the sleeping peep. I swore softly no longer so proud of my hunting instincts. Just like Joseph Moore, I had been cornered, blind and upwind. And my spare knockout injector was in my duffel bag.

  I crouched in a defensive stance, listening hard.

  No sound at all came from the darkness. Had I imagined the footsteps?

  My stuff had to be up there somewhere, probably only a few steps away. I gritted my teeth and scuttled forward, sweeping my hands back and forth across the dirt, hunting for the cold metal of the flashlight.

  I barely glimpsed her before she struck, barreling out of the darkness and crashing into me, as hard and solid as a suitcase full of books. The impact knocked my breath away and threw me to the ground. Long fingernails raked my chest, shredding my hazmat suit. I blindly swung a fist and connected with hard muscle, driving a grunt from the peep.

  “Patricia!” I shouted, half guessing, and she hissed at the sound, scrambling away from the anathema of her own name. I was right—it was Joseph’s wife. The light came from behind her now, igniting a shimmering halo of feathers wound into her hair and sticking to her skin. With her long fingernails and half-starved face, she looked like a human partly transformed into an awful bird of prey.

  She readied herself to spring at me.

  “ ‘I’ve got friends in low places,’ ” I sang—the only Garth Brooks song that came to mind. The refrain halted her long enough for me to tear the shredded hazmat suit the rest of the way open.

  Patricia Moore stared at my chest in horror; the jolly country singer stared back.

  “Oh, yeah!” I said. “She’s my cowboy Cadillac!”

  Her eyes widened and she screamed, spinning away to scuttle up the tunnel toward the light.

  Another anathema awaited her there: her husband, faceup on the floor. I turned and scrambled deeper into the darkness, sweeping the dirt floor wildly with my palms. Where was my damn flashlight?

  My racing brain wondered how long she’d been tracking me. Had she followed me from downwind since I’d dropped into the tunnel? Or maybe she always lurked near her husband, just as Sarah had stayed close to Manhattan.

  Suddenly my knuckles grazed hard metal, sending the flashlight’s cylinder rolling farther into the darkness. I reached out, grasping blindly, and at that moment my ears split with Patricia Moore’s scream—fear for her husband and horror at the sight of his beloved face, mixed up in one terrible cry that echoed through the tunnel.

  My hand closed on the flashlight.

  She was already headed back, loping toward me on hands and knees, growling like a wolf.

  I covered my eyes with one hand, turned the flashlight on her, and switched it to full power. Her feral grunts choked off, and the tunnel flooded with light so strong that the blood-pink veins in my eyelids were burned into my vision.

  A moment later, I flicked it off and opened my eyes. Against the sunlight streaming down the shaft, I could see Patricia Moore crouching in the center of the tunnel, head pressed against the feather-strewn dirt, motionless, as if paralyzed by one too many insults to her optic nerve.

  I set the flashlight on low and found my duffel bag, only a few yards down the tunnel. Pulling out the spare injector and loading it, finally thankful for all those tedious drills in Hunting 101, I whirled to face her. She still hadn’t moved.

  Perhaps Patricia had despaired, thinking that her husband was dead, or maybe it was too much to keep fighting in a world that included my rendition of “Cowboy Cadillac.” But for whatever reason, she didn’t move a muscle as I approached across the feathered floor.

  I reached out and jabbed her in the shoulder. She winced as the needle hissed, lifted her head, and sniffed the air.

  “You’re one of Morgan’s?” she asked.

  I blinked. My vision was still spotted with tracers, but her expression seemed thoughtful, almost curious. Her voice, like Sarah’s, was dry and harsh, but the way she said the words sounded so reasonable, so human.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “You’re sane?”

  “Um … I guess.”

  She nodded slowly. “Oh. I thought you’d gone bad, like Joseph.” Her eyes closed as the drug took effect. “She says it’s coming soon…”

  “What is?” I asked.

  She opened her mouth again but fell into a heap without making another sound.

  Maybe I should have headed back to the surface to rest up, reload, and share my revelations about the parasite’s new tricks. Maybe I should have waited right there for the transport squad, brought them in by GPS and cell phone.

  Both of my captives had been so unpeeplike—Joseph facing the orange late-afternoon sun as if the light didn’t faze him, Patricia speaking so clearly once she’d identified my scent.

  Are you sane? she’d asked. Yeah, right. I wasn’t the one living in a tunnel.

  But it reminded me of the way Sarah had changed after I’d cornered her, asking about Elvis, peering into my eyes without terror. Maybe I should have mentioned this to someone right away.

  Maybe I should have wondered more about what was coming soon.

  But I didn’t wait around. I still had a peep cat to catch.

  After handcuffing Patricia Moore, I called the transport squad, giving them precise GPS coordinates for the captives. They wouldn’t even have to disturb Manny and his tenants to collect the peeps. They could simply put on Con Edison uniforms, set up a fake construction site on the Hudson River walk, and cut their way in through the metal 22 grate at the end of the ventilation tunnel.

  They didn’t need me, and with a high-priority work order from the Mayor himself in hand, it made perfect sense to follow the tunnel in the other direction: down the slope, the steady breeze at my back, toward the rumble of the huge exhaust fans.

  Under the swimming pool again, I listened to the echoes bouncing down the shattered drain. The basement overhead sounded the same—still just a few dozen rats squabbling and skittering among the feathers. The brood hadn’t returned, and nothing had touched the cat food I’d left behind.

  I wondered how far down the tunnel the scent would travel, if floating molecules of Crunchy Tuna would tempt the peep cat out into the open. With the wind at my back, I was hardly going to catch it by surprise. I kept my flashlight on medium, not wanting to get jumped in the darkness again.

  The slope grew steeper, descending as the tunnel continued. The air became chill around me, and drops of water began to plink from the ceiling. The low rumble of exhaust fans grew in the distance, throbbing like a massive heartbeat at the core of the city.

  Then another sound floated up the tunnel, an impatient yowl that cut through the low-pitched thrumming. The cat could smell me now and knew that I was coming. I wondered if it also knew two of its pet peeps had been dispatched.

  Just how smart was this thing?

  The echoes of the cat’s cry suggested
a large open space in front of me. The push of the breeze at my back had strengthened, and the pulsing beat of the exhaust fans grew more distinct.

  Then I felt something, a trembling in the earth. Unlike the rumbling of the fan, it was building steadily under my feet, until it made the stones in the tunnel walls vibrate visibly. I knelt on the quivering dirt, suddenly feeling trapped in the narrow tunnel. I peered deep into the darkness, one way and then the other, searching for whatever was coming as I tried to fight off panic.

  Then the rumble peaked and began to fall away, fading into the distance, just like … the sound of a passing train.

  Chip had been right. The PATH tunnel was nearby, and the rush-hour commute was just beginning. The disturbance hadn’t been some rampaging creature from the depths, just a trainload of New Jerseyites headed home. I stood, feeling like an idiot.

  But the earth-shaking passage had left something visible up ahead—strands of stirred-up dust hung illuminated in the air. Flicking the flashlight off, I saw shafts of light filtering into the tunnel. They pulsed brighter and then darker in time with the constant throbbing—I had to be close to the exhaust fans now.

  The tunnel ended a little farther on, and I stepped down from its open maw into a vast cathedral of machines. Whirring turbines filled the air with the smell of grease and an electric hum. Above me I could see a huge pair of fans turning at a stately pace, the blades eighty feet across; this was Chip’s ventilation system.

  Between the spinning blades the sky showed through, the dark blue of early evening.

  In my days searching for Morgan’s apartment, I’d often seen this building from the outside, a magnificent column of brick, windowless and ten stories high, like a prison balanced on the river’s edge. The inside was just as cheerless, the greasy machines layered with a slapdash coat of gray paint and bird droppings. The scant sunlight pulsed in time with the fans’ rotation. The air was drawn steadily toward the fans, carrying dust and the occasional stray feather upward.