Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  Did they know what they were doing?

  The cat licked my nose. I suppressed a curse and tried to give the creature a shove down the stairs. It just rubbed its head against my fingers, demanding to be scratched.

  Giving up, I began to stroke its scalp, sniffing its dander. Just like the cat beneath Lace’s building, it had no particular smell. But I watched its eyes, until they glimmered in the light from below. Bloodred.

  I lay there, unable to move, still nervously petting the peep cat as Angela and Morgan flirted and joked and drank, readying the unknowing men to be infected. Or eaten? Were they pretty enough? The cat purred beneath my fingers, unconcerned.

  How many more peep cats were out there? And how had this all happened here in Brooklyn, right under the nose of the Night Watch?

  After an interminable time, the peep cat stretched and padded the rest of the way downstairs. I started to think about slinking back up to the servants’ kitchen and escaping. But as the cat crossed the floor toward Morgan, my heart rose into my throat.

  It jumped into her lap, and she began to stroke its head.

  No, I mouthed silently.

  A troubled look crossed Morgan’s face. She fell silent, bringing her hand up and sniffing it. A look of recognition crossed her face.

  She peered at the stairs, and I saw her eyes find me through the banister.

  “Cal?” she called. “Is that you?”

  We carriers never forget a scent.

  I scrambled to get upright, dizzy from the blood gathered in my head.

  “Cal from Texas?” Morgan had crossed to the bottom of the stairs, her drink still in her hand.

  “There’s someone up there?” one of the men asked, rising to his feet.

  As I stumbled backward up the stairs, Angela Dreyfus joined Morgan at the bottom. My knockout injector only carried one load, and these women weren’t wild-eyed peeps; they were not only as strong and fast as me, they were as smart.

  “Wait a second, Cal,” Morgan said. She put one foot on the bottom step.

  I turned and bolted up the stairs, racing through the kitchen and the bedroom. Footsteps followed, floorboards creaking indignantly, the old house exploding with the sounds of a chase.

  Bursting out onto the balcony I leaped up and grabbed the edge of the next roof, pulling myself over and snatching up my boots. Still in my socks, I took the one-story drop that followed, sending a stunning jolt up my spine. I stumbled and fell, rolling onto my back as I yanked my boots back on.

  Springing to my feet, I jumped across the eight-foot alleyway and scrambled up onto the roof of the brownstone. I paused for a moment, looking back at Ryder House.

  Morgan stood on the balcony, shaking her head in disappointment.

  “Cal,” she called, her voice not too loud—perfectly pitched for my peep hearing. “You don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Damn right I don’t!” I said.

  “Wait there.” She slipped off her high-heeled shoes.

  A door slammed somewhere below me, and I took a step back toward the front edge of the brownstone, glancing over my shoulder. A flicker of movement on the street caught my eye. Angela Dreyfus was moving through the shadows, a squad of small, black forms slinking along beside her.

  They had me surrounded.

  “Crap,” I said, and ran. I leaped to the next building and raced across it, meeting a dead end: an alley fifteen feet across. If I didn’t make the jump, I’d be sliding down a windowless brick wall to the asphalt, four stories below.

  A fire escape snaked down the back of the building, where a high fence surrounded a small yard. I pounded down the metal stairs, taking each flight with two quick jumps, my thudding footsteps making the whole fire escape ring. Once on the ground I scrambled across the grass and over the fence into another yard.

  I kept moving, jumping fences, stumbling over stored bicycles and tarp-covered barbecue sets. At the opposite corner from Ryder House, a narrow alley full of garbage bags led out to the street—only a ten-foot-high iron fence and a spiral of razor wire between me and freedom.

  I tossed my jacket over the wire, then climbed the wet plastic bags, sending rats scurrying in all directions. The mountain of garbage swaying beneath me, I jumped, rolling over the fence, feeling the razor wire compress like giant springs through the jacket.

  Then the street rushed up to meet me like an asphalt fist.

  Bruised and gasping for breath, I rolled over, listening for the sounds of Morgan following me. There was nothing except the footsteps of the still-scattering rats. I scanned the streets, but Angela was nowhere to be seen.

  A single cat was watching me, however, peering out from underneath a parked car. Its eyes flashed red.

  Scrambling to my feet, I tried to pull my jacket off the razor wire, but it stayed caught. Abandoning it, I started limping hurriedly in the opposite direction from Ryder House, the wind cutting through my T-shirt, my right elbow bleeding from the fall.

  One block later, a cab stopped for my raised hand and I jumped in, shivering like a wet dog.

  An epidemic was loose in Brooklyn.

  My apartment was dark. I flipped the light switch but nothing happened.

  I stood there shivering for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the gloom.

  “Hello?” I called.

  In the glow of the DVD-player clock, I saw a human form sitting at the kitchen table. The smell of jasmine was in the air.

  “Lace? Why are the lights—?”

  Something zoomed through the air at me.

  My hands shot up and caught the missile, plastic and soft. I looked at it, dumbfounded—my spatula, generally used for flipping pancakes.

  “Um, Lace? What are you doing?”

  “You can see in the dark,” she said.

  “I… oh.”

  She hissed out a breath. “You dumb-ass. Did you think I’d forgotten about when you swung me across to Freddie’s balcony?”

  “Well—”

  “Or that I didn’t notice when you sniffed that thing on my wall? Or that you eat nothing but meat?” “I had some bread tonight.”

  “Or that I wouldn’t bother to follow you for half a block, and watch you climb up a fucking building?”

  Her voice cracked at the last word, and I smelled her anger in the room. Even Cornelius had been quieted by its force.

  “We had a deal, Cal. You weren’t supposed to lie to me.”

  “I didn’t lie,” I said firmly.

  “That is such crap!” she shouted. “You’re a carrier, and you didn’t even tell me there was such a thing until tonight!”

  “But—”

  “And what did you say to me? ‘A friend of mine slept with Morgan.’ I can’t believe I didn’t see through that. A friend, my ass. You got it from her, didn’t you?”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I did. But I never lied to you. I just didn’t bring it up.”

  “Listen, Cal, there are certain things you’re supposed to mention without being asked. Being infected with vampirism is one.”

  “No, Lace,” I said. “It’s one of those things I have to hide every day of my life. From everyone.”

  She was silent for a moment, and we sat in the darkness, glaring at each other.

  “When were you going to tell me?” she finally asked.

  “Never,” I said. “Don’t you get it? Having this disease means never telling anyone.”

  “But what if…” she started, then shook her head slowly, her voice dropping to a whisper. “What if you want to sleep with someone, Cal? You’d have to tell them.”

  “I can’t sleep with anyone,” I said.

  “Jesus, Cal, even people with HIV have sex. They just wear a condom.”

  My heart was pounding as I repeated the bleak dogma of Peeps 101. “The parasite’s spores are viable even in saliva, and they’re small enough to penetrate latex. Any kind of sex is dangerous, Lace.”

  “But you…” She trailed off.

  “In other words, Lace, it
just can’t happen. I can’t even kiss anyone!” I spat these last words at her, furious that I was having to say this all out loud, making it real and inescapable again. I remembered my pathetic little fantasy at the restaurant, hoping someone might mistake us for a couple, confusing me for a normal human being.

  She shook her head again. “And you didn’t think this would be important to me?”

  My pounding head reverberated with this question for a while, remembering the sound of her breath filling the room the night before. “Important to you?”

  “Yeah.” She stood and dragged her chair under the overhead light, climbed up onto it, and screwed the bulb back in. It flickered once in her hand, then stayed on.

  I squinted against the glare. “I guess everything’s important to you. Do you want to read my diary now? Go through my closet? I told you practically everything!”

  Lace stepped down from the chair and crossed to the door. Her backpack lay there, already full. She was leaving.

  “Practically everything wasn’t enough, Cal,” she said. “You should have told me. You should have known I’d want to know.” She took a step closer, placed a folded piece of paper on the table, and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m really sorry you’re sick, Cal. I’ll be at my sister’s.”

  My mind was racing, trapped in one of those nightmarish hamster wheels when you know it really matters what you say next, but you can’t even get your mouth open.

  Finally, a flicker of will broke through the chaos. “Why? Why do you care if I’m sick?”

  “Christ, Cal! Because I thought we had something.” She shrugged. “The way you keep looking at me. From the first time we saw each other in that elevator.”

  “That’s because … I do like you.” I felt my throat swelling, my eyes stinging, but I was not going to cry. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You could have told me. It’s like you were playing a game with me.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but realized that she was right. Except I’d been mostly playing the game with myself, not admitting how much I liked her, trying to forget the fact that it was bound to come to this—her feeling disappointed and betrayed, me caught in my deception, sputtering hopelessly.

  But I didn’t know how to say all that, so I didn’t say anything at all.

  Lace opened the door and left.

  I sat there for a while, trying not to cry, clinging to that minuscule place inside me that somehow managed to be quietly pleased: Lace had liked me too. Yay.

  Some time later I fed Cornelius and got ready for a long night awake in the throes of optimum virulence. I unhid my spore-ridden toothbrush and got out all the Night Watch books I’d secreted away, returning the apartment to how it had been before Lace had arrived. I even sprayed the couch with window cleaner, trying to erase her scent.

  But before I went to sleep I looked at the folded piece of paper she’d left behind. It was a cell-phone number.

  So I could call and tell her when her building was safe? Or when I was ready to send a replacement spaghetti strainer? Or was it an invitation to a really frustrating friendship?

  I lay down on the futon and let Cornelius sit on my chest, comforting me with all his fourteen pounds, and getting ready to relish these questions and others as they danced behind my eyelids for the next eight hours.

  Wait, did I say eight hours?

  I meant four hundred years.

  Chapter 18

  PLASMODIUM

  Imagine dying from a mosquito bite.

  About two million people every year do just that, thanks to a parasite called Plasmodium. Here’s how it works:

  When an infected mosquito bites you, Plasmodium is injected into your bloodstream. It moves through your body until it reaches your liver, where it stays for about a week. During that time it changes into a new form—sort of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

  Did I say butterfly? Actually, it’s more like a microscopic tank. Plasmodium grows treads that allow it to crawl along your blood vessel walls, and it develops a sort of missile launcher on its head. This launcher helps the parasite blast its way into one of your red blood cells.

  Inside the blood cell, Plasmodium is safe, hidden from your immune system. But it stays busy. It consumes the insides of the cell and uses them to build sixteen copies of itself. Those burst forth and go on to invade more of your blood cells, where they each make sixteen more copies of themselves…

  You can see where this might become a problem. This problem is called malaria.

  Getting malaria sucks. As your blood cells are consumed by Plasmodium, you get chills, then a high fever that comes back every few days. Your liver and spleen expand, and your urine turns black with dead blood cells.

  It gets worse. All those blood cells are supposed to be carrying oxygen through your body. As they get turned into plasmodium-breeding factories, the oxygen stops flowing. Your skin turns yellow, and you become delirious. If your malaria remains untreated, you’ll eventually go into a coma and die.

  But why is Plasmodium so nasty? Why would a parasite want to kill you, when that means that it too will die? This seems to go against the law of optimum virulence.

  Here’s the thing: Humans can’t give one another malaria, because most people don’t bite each other. So to infect other humans, Plasmodium needs to get back into a mosquito.

  This is trickier than it sounds, because when a mosquito bites you, it only sucks a tiny, mosquito-size drop of blood. But plasmodium doesn’t know which drop of blood will get sucked, so it has to be everywhere in your bloodstream, even if that winds up killing you.

  In this case, optimum virulence means total domination.

  But plasmodium isn’t completely lacking in subtlety. Sometimes it takes a break from killing you.

  Why? Because if too many humans in one place get malaria at the same time, it might wind up killing them all. This would be very bad for Plasmodium; it needs a human population to keep breeding. So every once in a while, Plasmodium plays it cool. In fact, one strain can hang around inside you for as long as thirty years before it makes its move.

  It lets you think that you’re okay, but it’s still there, hiding in your liver, waiting for the right moment to unleash its engines of destruction.

  Clever, huh?

  Chapter 19

  VECTOR

  I woke up in a foul mood, ready to kick some ass. I started with Chip in Records.

  “Hey, Kid.”

  “Okay, first thing: Don’t call me Kid!”

  “Jeez, Cal.” Chip’s big brown eyes looked hurt. “What’s with you? Didn’t get enough sleep last night?”

  “No, I didn’t. Something about Morgan Ryder living half a mile away kept me awake.”

  He blinked. “You did what now?”

  I sighed as I sat down in his visitor’s chair. I’d been practicing that dramatic line all the way here, and Chip was looking at me like I was speaking Middle Dutch. “Okay, Chip. Listen carefully. I found Morgan Ryder, my progenitor, the high-priority peep that you guys have been looking for since the day before yesterday. In the phone book!”

  “Huh. Well, don’t look at me.”

  “Um, Chip, I am looking at you.” It was true. I was looking at him. “This is Records, is it not? You guys do have phone books down here, don’t you?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “But you’ve been messing with me, haven’t you?”

  He raised his hands. “No one’s messing with you, Cal.” Then he leaned forward, lowering his voice a bit. “At least, no one in Records is. I can tell you that.”

  I stopped, mouth already loaded with my next sarcastic remark. It took me a moment to switch gears. “What do you mean, no one in Records?”

  He looked over his shoulder. “No one in Records is messing with you.”

  The ceiling fan squeaked overhead.

  “Who?” I whispered.

  Chip took a breath and gestured me closer. “All I can say is, that
case got lifted from us.”

  “Define lifted.”

  “Transferred to a higher level. High priority, like you said. After you found out her last name, certain individuals told us to track down the other three missing persons but to leave Morgan Ryder alone. They wanted to handle her special.”

  A little shudder went through me. “The Mayor’s office?”

  Chip said nothing, which said everything.

  “Um, does that happen a lot?”

  Chip shrugged unconvincingly. “Well…” He chewed his lower lip. “Actually, it doesn’t happen that much. Especially not this way.”

  “Which way?”

  He leaned even closer, his whisper barely audible above the squeaking of the ceiling fan. “With no one telling you about it, Cal. You see, we were supposed to be copied on any info that the Mayor’s office found and then pass it along to you. But you weren’t supposed to know that we’d been pulled off the case. And I’m not supposed to be telling you this now, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “Oh.” I leaned back heavily in Chip’s spare chair, my righteous anger turning to mush. Yelling at Chip was one thing, but busting in to raise hell with the Night Mayor was something I couldn’t visualize. Four-hundred-year-old vampires have that effect on me.

  So this was a conspiracy. But the Night Mayor? He was the head guy, the big cheese. Who would he even be conspiring against?

  All of us? The whole Night Watch?

  Humanity?

  I leaned over the desk again. “Um, Chip? Seeing as how you weren’t supposed to tell me this, maybe we should pretend that you didn’t?”

  Chip didn’t say a word, just pointed to the biggest of the many signs on his bulletin board—even bigger than the We Do Not Have Pens sign—and I knew absolutely that our secret was safe.

  In large block letters were the words When in Doubt, Cover Your Ass.

  Next, I went to see Dr. Rat.

  If I could trust anyone at the Watch, it would be her. Unlike the Shrink and the Mayor, she wasn’t a carrier. She hadn’t been alive for centuries and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the old families. She was a scientist—her only loyalty was to the truth.