Peeps (13 page)

We did. I could see only leftover streaks etched into my retinas by the flashlight, but Lace’s eyes weren’t as sensitive as mine. She pulled me stumbling back up the stairs, and as we squished through the poisoned-peanut-butter hallway, my vision began to return—light was pouring in from the health club through the open locker door.

Lace squeezed out, and I followed, slamming the locker shut behind me. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, and the basement looked shockingly normal.

“What
was
that down there?” Lace cried.

“Wait a second.” I pulled her away from the security cameras and over to a row of weight benches. Sitting down, I tried to blink away the spots on my vision. Lace stayed standing, eyes wide, nervously shifting from one foot to the other.

“What the hell?” was all she could say.

I stared at her, half blind and still astonished by her sudden appearance. Then I remembered the doorman setting the elevator’s controls, leaving them unlocked so that I could return to the ground floor.

I hadn’t paid close enough attention. It was all my fault. I’d blown the first rule of every Night Watch investigation: Secure the site. But I was
positive
I’d closed the locker door behind me…

“How did you get down here?” I sputtered. “I thought the health club was closed at night!”

“Dude, you think I came down here to
exercise
?” She was still shifting from foot to foot. “I was headed out and Manny said, ‘You know that guy you came in with this afternoon? He’s here spraying for rats.’ And I’m like, ‘
What
?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, did you know he was an exterminator? He’s down in the health club right now, looking to kill some rats!’ ” Lace spread her open palms wide. “But
you
told me you were looking for Morgan. So what the hell?”

I didn’t answer, just sighed.

“And when I came down here,” she continued in a breathless rush, “the lights weren’t even on. I thought Manny had lost his mind or something. But when the elevator closed behind me, it was totally dark.” She pointed. “Except suddenly that locker was doing this …
glowing
thing.”

I groaned. On its killer setting, my Night Watch flashlight had been visible from up here.

Still hyperventilating, Lace continued. “And there was a hidden hallway, and the floor was covered with weird goo, and there were stairs at the end, with this insane squeaky pandemonium coming up from below. I called your name, but all I heard was rats!”

“And that made you
want
to go down the stairs?” I asked.

“No!” Lace cried. “But by then I figured you
were
down here, somewhere, maybe in trouble.”

My eyes widened. “You came down to help me?”

“Dude, things didn’t look so good down there.”

I couldn’t argue with that. No one else could have messed this up quite as totally as I had. Things were bad enough, with a great big rat reservoir bubbling up from the Underworld, along with a weird peeplike cat and something big enough to make the earth shudder. And right smack in the middle of it all, I’d managed to insert Lace—a Major Revelation Incident.

I was screwed. But I found myself staring at Lace with admiration.

“All those rats…” A note of exhaustion crept into her voice as hysteria subsided. “Do you think they’ll follow us?”

“No.” I pointed at her shoe. “That stuff will stop them.”

“What the …?” She stood on one foot, staring at the bottom of her other shoe. “What the hell is this crap anyway?”

“Watch out! It’s poisonous!”

She sniffed the air. “It smells like peanut butter.”

“It’s
poisonous
peanut butter!”

She let out a sigh. “Whatever—I wasn’t going to eat it. Note to Cal: I do not eat stuff off my shoe.”

“Right. But it’s dangerous!”

“Yeah, no kidding. This whole place should be condemned. There were, like,
thousands
of rats in that pool.”

I swallowed, nodding slowly. “Yeah. At least.”

“So what’s the deal? What are you doing here, Cal? You’re not an exterminator. Don’t tell me that you investigate STDs
and
spray for rats.”

“Um, not usually.”

“So does this building have
the plague
or something?”

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.