Peeps (6 page)

On the other hand, if her inner parasite had been pulling her strings, making her desperately horny, then why had she chosen a gay bar, the place she was least likely to get lucky? (Had she been as clueless as my younger self? Hmm.)

I let the drinks take hold, ringing more bells, bringing back stray fragments of memory from that night. There definitely had been a river involved; I recalled reflected lights rippling in boat wakes. All the Bahamalama-Dingdongs that Morgan and I had drunk had put a little stumble into our step. I’d been worried she’d go over the rail and I’d have to leap into the cold water to save her, even though I wasn’t fit to walk a dog.

We had strolled out to the end of a long pier and stood looking at the river. The Hudson or the East River, though?

Then I remembered: At some point I’d checked my compass and announced that we were facing northwest, which made her laugh. Definitely the Hudson, then. We’d been looking at New Jersey.

What had happened next?

I tried to press the hazy memories forward in time, but my mind was stuck on that image of New Jersey reflected in the river—Hoboken already teasing me from across the water. No matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t recall a single step of the route we’d taken back to Morgan’s apartment.

A guy came up next to me, back here in the present.

It took a few moments to pull myself out of my Bahamalama-Dingdong reverie, but I could tell from his scent that he’d just come back into the bar from catching a smoke outside. His leather vest was cow-smell new, and he wore an intrigued expression. Maybe he’d heard I’d been asking about Morgan.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. What’s your name?”

“Cal.” I reached to shake his hand.

“I’m Dave. So . . . what are you into, Cal?” he asked.

I paused for a second before answering.

I couldn’t tell him what I was
really
into: finding the woman who had turned me into a superhuman freak, taking the next step in destroying my bloodline—dealing with my progenitor, then hunting down any more peeps she had created, and then delving further into the endless, knotted tree of the parasite’s spread. So I cast my mind back to the homework I’d been reading in the diner that morning as I’d waited for the clouds to clear.

“Hookworms,” I said.

“Hookworms?” He took the seat next to me. “Never heard of that. ”

I sipped from my third Bahamalama-Dingdong.

“Well, they burrow in through your feet, using this enzyme that breaks down skin tissue, then travel along the bloodstream till they get into your lungs. They mess up your breathing, so you cough them up. But you know how you always swallow a little bit of phlegm?”

One of his eyebrows raised, but he admitted he did.

“Well, a few hookworm eggs get swallowed along with the phlegm and travel down into your intestines, where they grow to be about half an inch long.” I held up my fingers a hookworm’s length apart. “And they develop this circle of teeth in their mouths, like a coil of barbed wire. They start chomping into your intestinal wall and sucking your blood.” I realized I was going into drunken detail here and paused to check if he was still interested.

“Really?” His voice sounded a bit dry.

I nodded. “Wouldn’t lie to you, Dave. But here’s the cool thing. They produce this special anticlotting factor, kind of like blood antifreeze, so the wound doesn’t scab over. You become a sort of temporary hemophiliac, just in that one spot. Your intestines won’t stop bleeding until the hookworm gets its fill!”

“Hookworms, huh?” he asked.

“That’s what they’re called.”

Dave nodded gravely, standing back up. He grasped my shoulder firmly, a serious expression on his face. His thoughtful features seemed to reflect for a moment the hard road I had in front of me.

“Good luck with that,” he said.

 

I figured seven Bahamalama-Dingdongs would do the job.

That was probably more than I’d drunk my first time at Dick’s, but these days I was older and more superhuman. I did a professional job of getting off my stool, and my feet got into a pretty good rhythm after shuffling a bit at first. My metabolism may be peeped up, but there’s only so much rum even my body can process before it starts to sputter. All in all, I’d managed a pretty fair reconstruction of my first really wicked buzz in New York City.

I headed off to retrace my stumbling path from a year before.

The bartender watched me go with an impressed-looking nod, and Dave waved from behind the pool table. As the evening had progressed, he’d sent some of his friends over to ask about hookworms, and they’d all listened attentively. I’d thrown in some stuff about blood flukes, too. So it hadn’t been like drinking alone.

Outside Dick’s Bar, the streetlights wore coronas of orange, and the glassphalt shimmered like sugar crystals on top of lemon meringue pie. My breath curled out steamy, but the warmth from inside Dick’s still saturated my jacket, its fingers nestled around me like a cluster of liver worms.

Okay, bad image. But I
was
a little drunk.

My feet carried me toward the river automatically, but I wasn’t remembering the route to Morgan’s yet. It was just gravity doing its job.

Skateboarding around the city, I’d noticed the Hump, how the ground rises in the center of Manhattan and falls away toward the rivers, like the slippery back of a giant whale emerging from the harbor. A
really
giant whale: The slope is barely perceptible—you only feel it on a board or a bike, or if your stride is lubricated by seven or so Bahamalama-Dingdongs.

My feet had wheels, and I rolled toward the water effortlessly.

Soon I glimpsed the river at the end of the street, sparkling as it had that night. A walkway stretched along the water. By instinct, I turned north. It was a little tricky staying between the pedestrian lines, though. A few bikers and skaters whirred around me, leaving annoyed comments in their wake. I commented right back at them, my words a little slurred. Outside the warm company of Dick’s Bar, my Bahamalama-Dingdongs had made me antisocial.

But my mood lifted when I saw the pier.

It stretched out into the water, as long as a football field. Mismatched beats from various boom boxes echoed across the water from it, and bright lights beamed down from high posts.

Was that the same pier Morgan and I had stood on that night?

There was one way to find out. I shambled to the end of the pier, trying to ignore kissing couples and a group of very cute roller-dancing girls, and pulled my trusty compass out. The needle steadied itself to magnetic north.

I was facing northwest, the exact reading I’d taken a year before.

I breathed in deeply, tasting ocean salt, green algae, and motor oil in the air, all familiar from that night. This had to be the place.

But what now?

I gazed out onto the river. On either side of me, the timbers of abandoned piers rose up from the water like rotting black teeth. More pieces of my memory were falling into place, like a blurry picture downloading in waves, gradually becoming clearer.

Then I saw the dark hulk of a building across the Hudson, its three giant maws open to the river. The Hoboken Ferry Terminal. Without knowing it, I’d had a glimpse of my future that night a year before.

My peep-strength eyes caught a flicker of lights in its second-story windows. Dr. Rat was still up there, probably with a dozen or so of her colleagues from Research and Development, studying the nesting habits of Sarah’s brood. Weighing and measuring poisoned alpha rats and punks. Maybe looking for a rare “rat king”—a bunch of rats with tangled-up tails who travel in a pack all tied together, like dogs being walked by a professional dog walker, ten leashes in hand.

With Sarah gone, her brood would be disintegrating over the next few days, scattering into nearby alleys and sewers like runoff from an autumn storm. I wondered if the rats would miss her. Did they get something more than leftovers from their peeps? A sense of belonging?

The thought of all those orphaned creatures depressed me, and I turned back toward Manhattan.

My heart drunkenly skipped a beat.

Before me, just across the highway, a razor-thin high-rise stood.

Buildings get their personality from their windows, just like people express themselves with their eyes. This building had a schizophrenic look. Its lower floors were cluttered with tiny balconies, but along the top floor stretched floor-to-ceiling windows, wide open with surprise. I remembered Morgan pointing the building out to me, giggling and squeezing my hand. . . .

“That’s where I live!” she’d said, thus marking the exact moment when I had been absolutely
positive
I was going to get laid.

How the hell does anyone forget a moment like that?
I wondered.

Shaking my head in amazement, I stumbled back up the pier.

 

The first trick was getting in.

Funny. I hadn’t remotely remembered that Morgan lived in a luxury building: river views and duplex penthouses, a lobby encased in marble and brass, the uniformed doorman watching six TV monitors.

Give a boy the loss of his virginity and much else is forgotten.

I watched from across the street, hiding behind a cluster of newspaper boxes, waiting for just the right bunch of residents to follow through the door—my age or so, a little bit drunk, and enough of them for me to follow along unnoticed.

Of course, if I was really lucky I’d see Morgan herself. But what was I going to say to her?
Hey, do you know you’re carrying vampirism? What’s up with that?

The minutes passed slowly, the night growing steadily colder. The wind roaring off the river stopped being invigorating and veered over into cruel. My Bahamalama-Dingdong buzz began to wear off, and soon my system started demanding more blood sugar. It occurred to me that the only solid food I’d had for dinner was seven frozen bananas, not enough for my voracious parasites.

Bad
host. Hungry parasites can provoke crazy behavior.

Worst of all, I felt like
I
was being the stalker now, stuck between anathema and obsession.

Just after midnight, I spotted my ticket inside.

They were three girls and two guys, college-aged, dressed for a night out. They shouted jokes at one another, their voices still pitched for whatever loud bar they had spent the evening in.

I left my cover and started across the street, timing my move to reach the outer door just as they did.

They hardly noticed me, still arguing about what kind of pizza to order. “Lots of cheese. Hangover helper,” one guy was saying. The others laughed and voted their way to a split ticket of two large—one mushroom and one pepperoni, both with extra cheese. Sounded pretty good to me, after all those drinks. As we approached the door, I tried to look interested in the conversation while hanging at the back of the pack.

Through the glass, the doorman looked up with a smile of weary and indulgent recognition, and the inner door buzzed as one of the women reached for its handle. Warm air rushed over us, and I was inside.

As we crossed the lobby toward the elevators together, the woman who’d opened the door glanced back at me. A questioning look troubled her expression. I returned her gaze blankly. With four friends around her, she shouldn’t be so nervous about a stranger, but sometimes normal humans get a weird feeling from us predator types.

Of course, I was getting a weird feeling about her too.

She wore a leather jacket over a short plaid dress that left her knees bare to the cold. Her hair lay across her forehead in a jet-black fringe that had grown out too long, ending just above her dark brown eyes. It took me a moment to realize that in the days before I lusted after
all
women
all
the time, this girl would have been my type.

She kept watching me as her friends prattled on, her expression more thoughtful than suspicious. When she ran her tongue between her lips in a distracted way, a little shudder went through me, and I tore my eyes away.

Bad carrier
, I scolded myself, snapping a mental rubber band against my wrist.

The elevator dinged and opened, and the six of us crowded inside. I tucked myself into the corner. The pizza consensus had become unglued, and everyone besides the girl in the leather jacket was arguing again, the reflected sound from the shiny steel walls sharpening their voices.

Then a smell reached me—jasmine shampoo. I glanced up and saw the girl pushing her fingers through her hair. Somehow, the fragrance cut through the cigarette smoke clinging to their clothes, the alcohol on their breath; it carried her human scent to my nose—the smell of her skin, the natural oils on her fingers.

I shuddered again.

She pressed seven, glanced at me. “What floor?”

I stared at the controls. The array of buttons covered one through fifteen (without the thirteen), in three columns. I tried to imagine Morgan’s hand reaching out and pressing one of them, but my mind was in turmoil over the smell of jasmine.

The Bahamalama-Dingdong memory injection had finally let me down.

“Any particular floor?” she said slowly.

“Um, I uh . . . ” I managed, my voice dry. “Do you know Morgan?”

She froze, one finger still hovering near the buttons, and the rest of them fell into a sudden silence. They all stared at me.

The elevator
meeped
away a couple of floors.

“Morgan on the seventh floor?” she said.

“Yeah . . . I think so,” I answered. How many Morgans could there be in one building?

“Hey, isn’t that the—?” one of the boys asked, but the other three shushed him.

“She moved out last winter,” leather-jacket girl said, her voice controlled and flat.

“Oh, wow. It’s been a while, I guess.” I lit up a big fake smile. “You don’t know where she lives now, do you?”