Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Dude. Jasmine has sex? Using butterflies?”

  “Yeah. How about that?”

  “Huh.” She was silent for a moment, still holding me, thinking about all those flowers having butterfly-mediated sex. Finally, she said, “So when butterflies land on my hair, do they think they’re having jasmine-sex with it?”

  “Probably.” I leaned closer, burying my nose in her smell. Maybe the natural world wasn’t so jaw-droppingly horrible—appalling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.

  The subway platform trembled under us again, another train coming. Eventually, we’d have to return to the surface, to face the sunlight and the coming crumbling of civilization, to ride out whatever tumult the old carriers had planned now that the old strain was surging into daylight. But for the moment I was content to stand there, the thought of an apocalyptic future suddenly less panicking. I had something that I’d thought lost forever, another person warm in my arms. Whatever happened next seemed bearable.

  “Will the disease make me hate you, Cal?” she asked again. “Even if I take the pills?”

  I started to say I wasn’t sure, but in that moment the rumbling underfoot shifted, no longer building steadily. Then it shifted again, like something winding toward us, and among the false butterflies of Lace’s hair I caught another scent, ancient and dire.

  “Cal?”

  “Wait a second,” I said, and took a deeper breath.

  The foul smell redoubled, sweeping over us like air pushed up through subway grates by a passing train. And I knew something as thoroughly as my ancestors had known the scents of lions and tigers and bears…

  A bad thing was on its way.

  Chapter 22

  SNAKES ON A STICK

  The next time you go to the doctor, check out the plaques on the wall. One of them, usually the biggest, will be decorated with an intriguing symbol: two snakes climbing up a winged staff.

  Ask your doctor what this symbol means, and you’ll probably get this line: The staff is called the caduceus. It’s the sign of Hermes, god of alchemists, and the symbol of the American Medical Association.

  But that is only half the truth.

  Meet the guinea worm. It hangs around in ponds, too small to see with the naked eye. If you drink guinea-worm-infected water, one of these beasties may find its way into your stomach. From there, it will make its way to one of your legs, working chemical magic to hide from your immune system. It will grow much bigger, as long as two feet.

  And it will have babies.

  Adult guinea worms may be invisible to your immune system, but their kids have a different strategy—they set off every alarm they can.

  Why? Well, overexcited immune defenses are tricky, painful, dangerous things. With all those baby guinea worms raising a ruckus, your infected leg becomes inflamed. Huge blisters appear, which makes you run screaming to the nearest pond to cool them down.

  Very clever. The young guinea worms smell the water and pop out of the blisters. Then they settle down to begin their wait for the next unwary drinker of pond water.

  Ew, yuck, repeat.

  Guinea worms have been pulling this trick for a long time. In fact, it was thousands of years ago that ancient healers found out how to cure them. The procedure is simple, in theory. Just pull the adult worms out of the victim’s leg. But there’s a trick: If you pull too quickly, the worm breaks in half, and the part left inside rots away, causing a terrible infection. The patient usually dies.

  Here’s how the doctors of the ancient world did it:

  Carefully draw one end of the worm out, and wrap it around a stick. Then, over the next seven days or so, wind the guinea worm outward, like reeling in a fish in very slow motion. That’s right: It takes seven days. Don’t rush! It won’t be the most enjoyable week you ever spent, but at the end you’ll have your body back in good working order. And you’ll also have a stick with a wormy thing wrapped around it.

  And this icky leftover will become the symbol of medicine.

  Ew.

  But maybe it’s not such a weird symbol. Historians figure that guinea-worm removal was the first-ever form of surgery. Back then, it was probably a pretty amazing feat, pulling a snake out of a human body. Maybe the doctors hung the snake-wrapped stick on their walls afterward, just to show that they could get the job done.

  So the next time you’re at the doctor’s office, be on the lookout for this heartwarming symbol of the ancient healing arts. (And don’t believe all that crap about the great god Hermes; it’s all about the guinea worms.)

  Chapter 23

  WORM

  “Stay here,” I said.

  “What’s up?”

  “I smell something.”

  Lace frowned. “Dude. It’s not me, is it?”

  “No! Hush.” I squatted, pressing my palms flat against the trembling platform. The shudder in the graffitied concrete built, then gradually faded again, tacking toward us, back and forth through the warrens of the Underworld. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, sensing a low and shuddering note hanging in the air, the same vast moan I’d heard below the exhaust towers.

  “Cal? What the hell?”

  “I think something’s coming.”

  “Something? Not a train?”

  “I don’t know what it is, except that it’s part of all this craziness. And it’s old and big, and … getting closer.”

  A crumbling exit sign pointed up a set of stairs, but I knew from Hunting 101 that it had been long since paved over. We would have to run back to Union Square along the tracks.

  But first I needed a weapon.

  I brushed past Lace and through the bathroom stall, kicking away the last pieces of wood clinging to one corner of its metal frame. I wrenched the seven feet of rust-caked iron from the crumbling cement and weighed it in my hands. Brutal and straightforward.

  “What about me?” Lace said from the doorway.

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t I get a club-thingy?”

  “Lace, you couldn’t even pick this up. You don’t have superpowers yet.”

  She scowled at me and lifted a fragment of rusty iron from the floor. “Well, whatever’s coming, it’s not catching me empty-handed. It smells like death.”

  “You can smell it? Already?”

  “Duh.” She sniffed and made a face. “Dead rat on steroids.”

  I blinked. Lace was changing faster than any peep I’d ever seen, as if the new strain was mutating at some hyped-up pace, changing as it moved from host to host. Or maybe the beastie simply smelled bad. The stench was overpowering now, sending signals of alarm and fury coursing through my body. Though my mind screamed run, my muscles were itching for a fight.

  And somehow, I was certain they were going to get one. My instincts sang to me that the creature knew we were here; it was hunting us.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We jumped from the platform, landing with a crunch on the gravel bed. As we dashed headlong up the tracks, the lights of the next station glimmered along the curved rails, seeming to pull away from us as we ran. It was only four blocks; and I told myself we were going to make it.

  Then I saw—through one of the bolt holes that workers jump into if they get caught by an approaching train—a blackness deeper than the subway tunnel’s gloom. A hole in the earth. A few yards closer, a cold draft hit us, goose-pimpling my flesh and carrying another wave of the beast’s smell.

  “It’s coming,” Lace said, nose in the air. She had come to a halt, holding her foot-long piece of iron high, as if she were going to stake a vampire. But this was bigger than any peep, and I was fairly sure that it didn’t have a heart.

  “Stay behind me,” I said. I pointed toward the opening. “It’ll come out of there.”

  Her eyes peered into the blacker-than-black space for a moment. “So what is this thing again?”

  “Like I said, I don’t…” My voice trailed o
ff, an answer dawning on me. Not so much words or images, but a feeling—a generations-forgotten dread, an enemy long buried, a warning never to lose the old knowledge, because the sun can’t always protect us from what lives in the lower depths. I felt again the shuddering revelation from my first biology courses, that the natural world is less concerned with our survival than we ever admit. As individuals, even as a species—we are here on borrowed time, and death is as cold and dark and permanent as the deepest fissures in the stones we walk on.

  “What is it, Cal?” Lace asked again.

  “It’s the reason we’re here.” I swallowed. The words came from my mouth unbidden. “Why peeps are here.”

  She nodded gravely. “Is that why I want to kill it so much?”

  I might have answered her, but I didn’t get a chance, because the thing finally showed its face—if you could call it that. The white-pale, squirming shape emerged into the tunnel without eyes or nose, or discernable top or bottom, just a mouth—a ring of spikes set in a glistening hole, like the maw of some mutant and predatory earthworm, adapted to chew through rock as easily as flesh.

  Segments ran down its length, like a rat’s tail, and I wondered for a moment if this was just a part of a much greater monster. This white, gelatinous mass emerging from the tunnel might have been its head, or a clawed tentacle, or a bulbous and spiny tongue; I couldn’t tell. All I knew was what the parasite inside me wanted: My constant hunger had turned suddenly to boundless energy—attack, the parasite demanded.

  In a blind fury, I ran toward the beast, the rusty iron in my hands hissing through the air like ancient hatred.

  The eyeless beast sensed me coming, its body flinching away, and the tip of my swinging iron barely scraped its flesh, tearing a stringy tendril from its side, which unraveled like a thread pulled from a garment. The tendril flailed angrily, but no blood gushed—all that flowed from the wound was another wave of the beast’s smell.

  While I teetered off balance, it struck back, the mouth shooting toward me on a column of pale flesh. I stumbled backward, and the teeth reached their limit a few short inches from my leg, gnashing wetly at the air before snapping back into the beast.

  I swung again, striking home in the monster’s flank and squishing to a halt as if I’d hit a wall of jelly, the impact ringing dully in my hands. The huge pale body wrapped itself around the staff, like a human doubling over from a blow to the stomach.

  I tried to pull away, but the iron was firmly stuck, and the toothed maw shot out toward me again. The extended mouth slashed past my legs, one stray tooth catching and ripping my jeans. I jumped straight into the air, stomping down on the appendage with one cowboy boot. My weight forced it to the ground, but its slick hide slipped out from under my foot, toppling me backward onto the tracks. The whole beast uncurled over me, rolling more of itself out from the tunnel to crush me.

  Then Lace flashed into view, her iron stake slashing through the air and straight into the ring of teeth. At this contact the creature let out an earsplitting screech. The noise was metallic and grinding, like a sack of nails dumped into a wood-chipper. The beast twisted back, crashing against the subway wall, its bulk dislodging a shower of grit.

  Lace pulled me to my feet as I yanked the iron staff free, both of us stumbling backward, certain we’d hurt the thing. But the grinding turned to a violent hissing, and a spray of metal shards shot out from its maw, battering us. The creature’s ring of teeth had rendered the iron into shrapnel, which it spat out like a rain of rusty coins. We fell to our knees, and I saw it rearing up again, a new set of teeth jumping out from its hide.

  I raised up the iron staff and felt Lace’s hands join mine on the weapon.

  “The rail!” she shouted in my ear, tugging at the iron. I didn’t have breath to answer, but I understood, and let her slide the butt of the weapon toward the edge of the track as the monstrous mass descended, impaling itself. Lace jumped away from the pole; I knew I should let go, but the murderous imperative that had filled me from the moment I’d smelled the creature kept my hands on the weapon, guiding it backward until it lodged firmly against the third rail.

  A shower of sparks cascaded from the point of contact, the mad buzz of electrocution sweeping across my body, every muscle locked fast by the wild energies moving through me—enough juice to power a subway train. And yet, despite the pain, all I felt was the satisfaction that the worm, my age-old enemy, was feeling it too, glowing from inside, spiderwebs of red veins pulsing inside its glistening skin.

  That pleasure lasted half a second; then Lace was pulling me away by my jacket, breaking my mortal grip on the iron staff. More sparks flew, but the beast didn’t make a sound; it just flailed randomly, like some giant, exposed muscle struck with a doctor’s hammer again and again. Finally, it pulled itself free, retreating back into its tunnel, leaving behind a burned scent of injury and defeat.

  But it wasn’t fatally wounded, I somehow knew; it was tougher than that. I swore and fell back on the tracks, shivering.

  Lace wrapped her arms around me. “Are you okay? You smell … totally toasted.” She opened my palms, which were black with charred flesh. “Jesus, Cal. You were supposed to let go.”

  “Had to kill it!” I managed through electrocution-lockjaw.

  “Chill, dude. It’s gone.” She peered up the tunnel. “And there’s a local coming.”

  That focused my mind, and we scrambled into the mouth of the thing’s tunnel, pulling out of sight just as the headlights flared around the corner. The train roared past as we cowered together.

  “So this is what you feel?” she yelled over the noise. “When you fight those things?”

  “Never saw one before,” I said.

  “Really? But it felt…” She was breathing deep, her brown eyes wide and gleaming. “It felt like something we were supposed to do. Like that strength you were talking about, when mothers save their kids.”

  I nodded. It seemed too soon for Lace, but I couldn’t deny how well she’d fought. The worm and the parasite were connected; maybe seeing the beast had accelerated her change.

  Since my first sight of the creature, the puzzles of the last few days had begun to solve themselves in the back of my brain. This invasion, these ancient creatures rising up through the century-old cracks in the city’s sinews—halting it was what the old, cat-vector strain was for. This was why peeps had been created.

  There were more of those things down here, I could tell—a plague of worms that humanity had faced before. Lace and Sarah and Morgan and I were only the vanguard; we needed lots of help.

  Now I understood what Morgan was doing, spreading the old strain of the parasite, massing a new army to face the coming days. And suddenly I could feel a similar imperative surging through my own body—every bit as strong as the six hundred and twenty-five volts from the third rail—something I had suppressed for six long months.

  I took Lace’s hand. “Are you feeling what I’m feeling? A sort of post-battle…”

  “Horniness?” she finished. “Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe not.” Our lips met again, a kiss as intense as the passing train’s thunder in our ears.

  Chapter 24

  PARASITES R US

  Let us recap:

  Parasites are bad.

  They suck your blood out of the lining of your stomach. They grow into two-foot-long snakes and roost in the skin of your leg. They infect your cat and then jump up your nose to live in cysts inside your brain, turning you feline-centric and irresponsible. They take over your blood cells in hopes of infecting passing mosquitoes, leaving your liver and brain crumbling from lack of oxygen. They incense your immune system, causing it to destroy your eyeballs. They take terrible advantage of snails and birds and ants and monkeys and cows, stealing their bodies and their food and their evolutionary futures. They almost starved twenty million people in Africa to death.

  Basically, they want to rule the world and will crumple whole species like balls of p
aper and then reshape them in order to carry out their plans. They turn us into walking undead, ravaged hosts that serve only their reproduction.

  That’s bad. But…

  Parasites are also good.

  They have bred howler monkeys to live in peace with one another. Their lousy genes help track the history of the human species. They prevent cows from overgrazing grasslands into windblown deserts. They tame your immune system so it doesn’t destroy your own stomach lining. Then they go and save those twenty million people in Africa, by laying their eggs in those other parasites, the ones trying to starve them.

  Which is all quite good, really.

  So parasites are bad and good. We depend on them, like all the other checks and balances of the natural world; predators and prey, vegetarians and carnivores, parasites and hosts all need one another to survive.

  Here’s the thing: They’re part of the system. Like government bureaucracies with all those forms that have to be filled out in triplicate, they may be a pain, but we’re stuck with them. If every parasite suddenly disappeared from the earth one day, it would be a much bigger disaster than you’d think. The natural order would crumble.

  In short, parasites are here to stay, which is a good thing, really. We are what we eat, and we consume them every day, the worms lodged in slices of rare beef or the toxoplasma spores floating up our noses from boxes of cat litter. And they eat us every day too, from ticks sucking our blood to microscopic invaders reshaping our cells. The exchange goes on unendingly, as certain as the earth traveling around the sun.

  In a manner of speaking, parasites are us.

  Deal with it.

  Chapter 25

  MORGAN’S ARMY

  When we pulled ourselves back up onto the subway platform, everyone gave us a wide berth.

  You could hardly blame them. We were covered in dust and sweat, our palms reddened with rust, our expressions crazed. And the funny thing was, we were all over each other. Fighting the worm had redoubled my usual implacable desires, and somehow Lace was affected too. We kept stopping just to smell each other, to hold hands tightly, to taste each other’s lips.