Peeps (12 page)

Switching on the tiny light, I found myself in a narrow hallway, squeezed between the foundation’s cement wall and the back side of the maniacally reinforced wood paneling. The floor was covered with little globs of something gooey. I knelt and sniffed and realized what I’d been smelling all along—peanut butter, mixed with the chalky funk of rat poison. Someone had laid out about a hundred jars of weaponized extra-crunchy back here. The bottom of the false wall was smeared with it to prevent the wood paneling from being gnawed through.

I stepped carefully among the gooey smears, and the hallway led me back to the corner where the missing stairs should have been. An industrial-strength metal door stood there, reinforced with yards of chain and generous wads of steel wool stuffed into the crack beneath it.

Steel wool is one thing rats can’t chew through. Someone was working conscientiously on the rat issue. Hopefully that meant Chip was crazy on the giant monster issue, and all there was down here was some peep’s long-lost brood.

The chains wound back and forth between the door’s push-bar handle and a steel ring cemented into the wall, secured with big, fat padlocks that took keys instead of combinations. To save time, I pulled bolt cutters from my bag and snipped the chains. As taut as rubber bands, they snapped loose and clattered to the floor.

Funny
, I thought,
chains don’t keep out rats
.

Ignoring that uncomfortable fact, I gave the door a good hard push; it scraped inward a few inches. Through the gap, the promised stairs led downward into smellier smells and colder air and darker darkness. Sounds filtered up: little feet scurrying, the snufflings of tiny noses, the nibblings of razor-sharp teeth. An all-night rat fiesta—but what were they
eating
down there?

Not chocolate, was my guess.

I pulled on thick rubber gloves.

The gap was just big enough to squeeze through. As I descended, I kept one thumb on the flashlight’s eyeball-blaster switch, ready to blaze away if there was a peep down here. I couldn’t hear anything bigger than a rat, but, as I’ve said, parasite-positives can hold their breath for a long time.

The rats must have heard me cutting the chains, but they didn’t sound nervous. Did they get a lot of visitors?

At the bottom of the stairs, my night vision began to adjust to the profound darkness, and the basement eased into focus. At first I thought the floor was slanted, then I saw that a long swimming pool dominated the room, sloping away from me. The paired arcs of chrome ladders glowed on either side, and a diving board thrust out from the edge of the deep end.

The pool contained something much worse than water, though.

Along its bottom skittered a mass of rats, a boiling surface of pale fur, slithering tails, and tiny rippling muscles. They scrambled along the pool’s edges, gathered in feeding frenzies around piles of something I couldn’t see. All of them had the wormy look of deep-underground rats, slowly losing their gray camouflage—and ultimately even their eyesight—as they spent generation after generation out of the sun.

A fair number of ratty skeletons were lined up on one side of the basement, bare ribs as thin as toothpicks—as if someone had put out glue traps in a neat row.

There were a lot of smells (as you might imagine) but one stood out among the others, raising my hackles. It was the scent mark of a predator. In Hunting 101, we had been taught to call it by its active molecule: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-1. But most folks just call it “cat pee.”

What the hell was a
cat
doing down here? Sure, there are feral felines in New York. But they live on the surface, in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, within paw’s reach of humanity. They stay out of the Underworld, and rats stay away from them. When it comes to rats, cats are on
our
side.

If one had stumbled down here, it would be lean pickings by now.

I forced that last image from my mind and reached into the duffel bag for an infrared camera. Its little screen winked to life, turning the horde of rats into a blobby green snowstorm. I set the camera on the pool’s edge, pointing down into the maelstrom. Dr. Rat and her Research and Development pals could watch this stuff for hours.

Then I realized something: I didn’t smell chlorine.

With my nose, even a swimming pool that’s been drained for years retains that tangy chemical scent. The pool had never been filled, which meant that the rat invasion had happened
before
they’d finished construction down here. I looked at the pool: The black line at water height had been half started, then abandoned.

I remembered Dr. Rat’s standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface. I began a slow walk around the edge of the basement, flashlight still set low, moving carefully, looking for any holes in the walls.

The rats hardly noticed me. If this was the brood that had infected Morgan, they would find my scent comforting—our parasites were closely related, after all. On the other hand, true Underworld rats might behave this way with anyone. Never having seen a human being before, their little pink eyes wouldn’t know what to make of me.

The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the cement. Of course, this building was just over a year old—the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so.

I peered over the edge. In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling mass of rats. Pale bodies struggled against one another, some disappearing into the mass, others thrashing their way up and out. The brood did have a way out of this basement, I realized, but it didn’t go up to the surface…

It went down.

I swallowed. The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was. Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?

I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared camera. With it in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool.

The sole of my boot didn’t make a sound. A layer of something soft was strewn across against the bottom of the pool, fluttering beneath the claws of darting rats. It was too dark to see what.

Something ran across my boot, and I shuddered.

“Okay, guys, let’s observe some personal space here,” I said, then took another step.

Something answered my words, something that wasn’t a rat. A long, high-pitched moan echoed through the room, like the sound of a mewling infant…

At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl rumbled out.

A
cat
was looking at me, its sleepy eyes floating against invisibly black fur. A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an emperor, when they should have been running for their lives.

The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight’s glow. The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was
not
a normal place for any cat to be.

But cats didn’t carry the parasite. If they did, we’d
all
be peeps by now. They live with us, after all.

My eyes fell from the feline’s unblinking gaze, and I saw what the rats were eating: pigeons. Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool. The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would. And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks—the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down.

It was family to me.

Suddenly, the floor began trembling, a vibration that traveled up through my cowboy boots and into my muscle-clenched stomach. My vision began to shudder, as if an electric toothbrush had been jammed into my brain. A new smell rose up from the swimming pool drain, something I couldn’t recognize—ancient and foul, it made me think of rotten corpses. It made me want to run screaming.

And through it all, the cat’s low purr of satisfaction filled the room.

I squeezed my eyes shut and switched the flashlight to full power.

I could only hear (and feel) what happened next: a thousand rats panicking, pouring out of the pool to race for the dark corners of the room, flowing past my legs in a furry torrent. Hundreds more scrambled to escape down the drain and into the darkness below, their claws scraping the broken concrete as they fought to flee the horrifying light. Bloated rat king bodies flopped from the diving board and landed on the struggling mass, squealing like squeaky toys dropped from a height.

I fumbled a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket, got them on, and opened one eye a slit: The cat was unperturbed, still curled at the end of the diving board, eyes shut against the light, looking like an ordinary cat lying happily in the sun. It yawned.

The trembling of the floor had begun to fade, and the traffic jam of escaping rats was starting to break up. The drain hole looked to be more than
a yard
across; the deep end of the pool had cracked open, crumbling into some larger cavity below. The rats were still roiling, disappearing into it like crap down a flushing toilet.

Squinting up at the cat again, I saw that it had risen to its feet. It was stretching lazily, yawning, its tongue curling pink and obscene.

“You just stay there, kitty,” I called above the din, and took another step toward the drain. How deep
was
the hole? Cat-size? Peep-size? Monster-size?

I only needed one glimpse and I was out of there.

Between my blazing flashlight and the squeaks and scrambling feet echoing off the sides of the pool, I was almost blind and practically deafened. But the weird smell of death was fading, and just as the last rats were finally clearing out, I caught the slightest whiff of something new in the air. Something close …

A sharp hiss sounded behind me, someone sucking in air. As I spun around, the flashlight slipped from my sweaty fingers…

It cracked on the swimming pool floor, and everything went very dark.

I was completely blind, but before the flashlight had died I’d glimpsed a human form at the edge of the pool. Following the bright image burned into my retinas, I ran the few steps up the slope and leaped from the pool, raising the camera like a club.

As I swung, I caught her smell again, freezing just in time.

Jasmine shampoo, mixed with human fear and peanut butter… and I knew who it was.

“Cal?” Lace said.

H
owler monkeys live in the jungles of Central America. They have a special resonating bone that amplifies their cries—hence the name “howler monkey.” Even though they’re only two feet tall, you can hear a howler monkey scream from three miles away.

Especially if they’ve got screwworms.

Meet the screwfly, which lives in the same jungles as howler monkeys. Screwflies look pretty much like normal houseflies, except bigger. They aren’t parasites themselves, but their babies are.

When it comes time to have baby flies, screwflies look for a wounded mammal to lay their eggs in. They’re not picky about what kind of mammal, and they don’t need a very large wound. Even a scratch the size of a flea bite is plenty big.

When the eggs hatch, the larvae—also known by such charming names as “maggots” or “screwworms”—are hungry. As they grow, they begin to devour the flesh around them.

Most maggots are very fussy and only eat dead flesh, so they’re not a problem for their host. They can actually help to clean the wounds that they hatch into. In a pinch, doctors still use maggots to sterilize the wounds of soldiers.

But screwworms—screwfly maggots—are another matter. They are born ravenous, and they consume
everything
they can get their teeth into. As they devour the animal’s healthy flesh, the wound gets bigger, luring more screwflies to come and lay their eggs. Those eggs hatch, and the wound gets even bigger…

Eww. Yuck. Repeat.

At the end of this cycle is a painful death for many a howler monkey.

But screwflies also bring a message of peace.

Like all primates, howler monkeys want mates, food, and territory—all the stuff that makes being a howler monkey fun. So they compete with one another for these resources—in other words, they get into fights.

But no matter how angry they get, howler monkeys
never
use their teeth or claws. Even if one of the monkeys is much bigger, all it ever does is slap the other one around and (of course) howl a lot.

You see, it’s just not worth it to get into a real fight. Because even if the smaller monkey gets its monkey ass totally kicked, all it has to do is get in
one tiny scratch
, and the fight becomes a lose-lose proposition. One little scratch, after all, is all a screwfly needs to lay its eggs inside you.

Many scientists believe that the howler monkeys developed their awesome howling ability
because
of screwworms. Any monkeys who resolved their conflicts by scratching and biting (and getting bitten and scratched in return) were eaten from within by screwworms. Game over for all the scratchy and bitey howler monkey genes.

Eventually, all that was left in the jungle were non-scratchy monkeys. Survival of the fittest, which in this case were the non-scratchiest.

But there were still mates and bananas to be fought over, so the non-scratchy monkeys evolved a non-scratchy way to compete: howling. Survival of the loudest. And that’s how we got howler monkeys.

See? Parasites aren’t all bad. They take primates who otherwise might be killing one another and leave them merely yelling.

“What are you
doing
down here?” I yelled.

“What are
you
doing down here?” Lace yelled back, grabbing two blind fistfuls of my hazmat suit in the darkness. “Where the hell are we anyway? Were those
rats
?”

“Yes, those were rats!”

She started hopping. “Crap! I thought so. Why did it go all dark?”

“I kind of dropped my flashlight.”

“Dude! Let’s get
out
of here!”