Peeps (14 page)

Rats and plague did go together. Would Lace believe that one? My mind began to race.

“No, dude,” Lace said firmly, rising to her feet and putting a finger in my face. “Don’t sit there making shit up. Tell me the truth.”

“Uh . . . I can’t.”

“You’re trying to
hide
this? That’s nuts!”

I stood and put my hands on her shoulders. “Listen, I can’t say anything. Except that it’s very important that you don’t tell anyone about what’s down there.”

“Why the hell would I keep quiet? There’s a swimming pool full of rats in my basement!”

“You just have to trust me.”

“Trust you? Screw that!” She set her jaw, and her voice rose. “There’s a disease that makes people write on the walls in blood spreading through my building, and I’m supposed to keep it a secret?”

“Um, yes?”

“Well, listen to this, then, Cal. You think this should be a secret? Wait till I tell Manny what I saw down there, and Max and Freddie and everyone else in the building, and the
New York Times
and the
Post
and
Daily News
, for that matter. It won’t be very secret then, will it?”

I tried to pull off a shrug. “No. Then it’ll just be a building in New York City with rats in the basement.”

“Not with that thing on my wall.”

I swallowed and had to admit she had something there. With Morgan’s gristle graffiti added into the mix, the NYPD would have a reason to reopen apartment 701’s missing persons case, which might lead them in all sorts of uncomfortable directions. The Night Watch was usually pretty good at making investigations go away, but this one would be tricky.

Which meant I was supposed to call the Shrink right now and tell her what had happened. But the problem with that was, I already knew what she’d tell me to do. Lace would have to disappear forever. All because she’d tried to help me.

I stood there in silence, paralyzed.

“I just want the truth,” Lace said softly. She sat down heavily on a weight bench, as if her nervous energy had run out.

“It’s really complicated, Lace.”

“Yeah, well, it’s pretty simple for me—I
live
here, Cal. Something really hideous is going on under our feet, and something insane happened right in my living room. It’s starting to
freak me out
.”

On those last words, her voice broke.

She could smell it now. With all she’d seen, Lace could
feel
the capital-
N
Nature bubbling up from below—not the fuzzy Nature at the petting zoo, or even the deadly but noble kind on the Nature Channel. This was the appalling, nasty, real-world version, snails’ eyes getting eaten by trematodes; hookworms living inside a billion human beings, sucking at their guts; parasites controlling your mind and body and turning you into their personal breeding ground.

I sat down next to her. “Listen, I understand you’re scared. But knowing the truth won’t make it any better. The truth sucks.”

“Maybe. But it’s still the truth. All you’ve done is lie since you met me, Cal.”

I blinked. She didn’t. “Yeah,” I said. “But—”

“But what?”

At that moment, I knew what I really wanted. After six months of the natural world getting steadily more horrible, of my own body turning against me, I was just as scared as Lace. I needed someone to share that fear with, someone to cling to.

And I wanted it to be her.

“Maybe I can explain some of it.” I breathed out slowly, a shudder going through me. “But you’d have to promise not to tell anyone else. This isn’t some journalism class project, okay? This is deadly serious. It has to stay secret.”

Lace thought for a few seconds. “Okay.” She raised a finger in warning. “As long as you don’t lie to me. Ever.”

I swallowed. She’d agreed way too fast. How could I believe her? She was studying to be a
reporter
, after all. Of course, my only other choice was the phone call that would make her disappear.

I stared into her face, trying to divine the truth of her promise, which probably wasn’t the best idea. Her brown eyes were still wide with shock, her breathing still hard. My whole awareness focused itself upon her, a tangle of hyped-up senses drinking her in.

My guess is the parasite inside me made the choice. Partly anyway.

“Okay. Deal.” I put out my hand. As Lace shook it, a strange thing happened: Instead of shame, I felt relief. After keeping this secret from the whole world for half a year, I was finally telling someone. It was like kicking my boots off at the end of a really long day.

Lace didn’t let go of my hand, her grip strengthening as she said, “But you can’t lie to me.”

“I won’t.” My mind was clearing, beginning to work logically for the first time since the earth had started to tremble, and I realized what I had to do next. “But before I tell you, I have to sort out a couple of things.”

Lace narrowed her eyes. “Like what?”

“I need to secure the basement: Chain up that big door behind the wall and lock that locker.” I could leave my duffel bag downstairs, I realized. The rats wouldn’t steal it, and I’d need the equipment right where it was the next time I went down. But there was one last thing I had to get before we left. “Um, do you have a flashlight? Or a lighter on you?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a lighter. But Cal, tell me you’re not going down those stairs again.”

“Just for a second.”

“What the hell
for
?”

I looked into her brown eyes, wide with rekindled fear, but if Lace wanted to know the truth, it was time she found out how nasty it could be.

“Well, since we’re already down here and everything, I really should catch a rat.”

 

“Okay, I’m tracking a disease. That part of my story was true.”

“No kidding
.
I mean, rats? Madness? Bodily fluids? What else could it be?”

“Oh, right. Nothing, I guess.”

We were up in Lace’s apartment. She was drinking chamomile tea and staring out at the river; I was cleaning poisonous peanut butter out of my boot treads, hoping the task would distract me from the fact that Lace was wearing a bathrobe. A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held down with a pile of journalism textbooks, saying rude things in rat-speak.

I’d caught PNS at the top of the stairs, snatching him up in a rubber-gloved hand as he sniffed one of Lace’s peanutty footprints.

Lace cleared her throat. “So, is this a terrorist attack or something? Or a genetic engineering thing that went wrong?”

“No. It’s just a disease. The regular kind, but secret.”

“Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced. “So how do I avoid getting it?”

“Well, you can be exposed through unprotected sex, or if someone bites you and draws blood.”

“
Bites
you?”

“Yeah. It’s like rabies. It makes its hosts want to bite other animals.”

“As in ‘So pretty I had to eat him’?”

“Exactly. Cannibalism is also a symptom.”

“That’s a
symptom
?” She shuddered and took a sip. “So what’s with all the rats?”

“At Health and Mental they call rats ‘germ elevators,’ because they bring germs that are down in the sewers up to where people live, like this high-rise. A rat bite is probably how Morgan, or someone else up here, got infected in the first place.”

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.”