Peeps (19 page)

My flashlight fell on a sign hanging from chains draped across the stairs:

DANGER

Area Closed

As if answering my hesitation, the cat yowled again, the cry rising up from below like a ghost’s.

I paused, sniffing the air, the hair on my neck rising. Under the dampness and grease and rat droppings, a strange scent lay, massive and unfamiliar, like a heavy hand on my chest, it wasn’t the scent of peeps or of the deep earth. It was the same foul smell I’d scented the day before. Like death. Deep in my genetic memory, alarms and flashing lights were going off.

I swallowed and stepped over the sign. As my duffel bag brushed the chains, they creaked sullenly with rust.

This far down, the earth looked wounded, wet fissures splitting the granite walls. The darkness inside seemed to repulse my flashlight and sent back long echoes from my footsteps. I saw no more empty coffee cups—every piece of garbage looked smoothed down by time, half rotted away. I remembered Chip saying that PATH workers had abandoned this place, and I could see why.

Or at least, I
could feel
it: a cold presence on top of the evil smell.

Finally the stairs ended at a rupture in the rock, a fissure large enough to walk into. I stepped inside, my flashlight glinting off mica-strewn granite. The shadows around me turned jagged.

This was the deepest I had ever been.

The air had fallen still, so I smelled the brood before I heard them. They were huddled together in a ravine of stone, a few thousand rats and their peep cat. Myriad eyes glittered back at me, unafraid of the flashlight.

The cat blinked, yawning, its eyes glittering red.

Red
? I thought. That was odd. Cats’ eyes should be blue or green or yellow.

“What’s
with
you anyway?” I asked the peep cat softly.

It just sat there.

The posse of big fat rats still surrounded it, an entourage of heavy, pale bodies, larger than any rodents I’d ever seen on the surface. All the rats were the color of dried chewing gum, their eyes pink, bred almost to albino from generations in darkness.

I carefully pulled a video camera from my duffel bag and swept it across the brood. Dr. Rat would be thrilled to have footage of these deep-dwellers in their natural habitat.

In the silence, a barely audible sound began to make itself heard.

At first, I thought it was the PATH train rumbling past again. But the noise didn’t build steadily. It came and went, much slower than the sound of the fans. I felt the tiny hairs on my arms moving one way and then the other and realized that the air in the cavern was being pushed in and out, as if a slow and huge bellows was operating.

Something down here was
breathing
. Something huge.

“No,” I whispered.

In answer, a spine-melting sound washed through the cavern on a fetid breeze, like the moan of some titanic beast. It was so low-pitched that I
felt
more than heard it, like the buzz of power lines that my peep senses sometimes detect. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to stand up and run away, the sort of panic I hadn’t felt since I’d become a hunter.

The sound passed away, though the air still shifted back and forth.

The peep cat winked its eyes at me in satisfaction.

Okay. I was leaving now … and taking the cat with me. I put the duffel bag aside. If this worked, I was going to have to run fast, carrying as little as possible.

I pulled out my second can of Crunchy Tuna and slipped my gloves on. There was no point in using my knockout injector, which would overdose the cat.

The brood stirred when they smelled the cat food. I waited, frozen, letting the scent carry to the peep cat.

The almost-human intelligence on its face faded, replaced by the same dull look that Cornelius gets when it’s feeding time: pure animal desire. At least the creature wasn’t some sort of diabolical genius—it was just a cat, really, and a diseased one at that. “Come on, kitty,” I said.

It took a few steps toward me, then sat down again.

“You know you want it,” I murmured, lapsing into my kitty voice and fanning the smell toward the cat. The scent of the huge, hidden thing stirred, and a trickle of sweat coursed down my side.

The cat stood again and moved gingerly across the horde of rats, like someone stepping through a tent crowded with sleeping people. They barely stirred as it passed.

But then it stopped again, a few feet away.

“
Extra
nummies?” I nudged the Crunchy Tuna a little closer.

The peep cat just cocked its head. It wasn’t budging.

Then I remembered Dr. Rat’s perfume of Cal, the family scent distilled into pure essence. Perhaps smelling was believing.

I pulled out the tiny vial and opened it, waiting only a few seconds before screwing the bottle top closed again, not wanting to rile up the horde of rats.

As the smell spread throughout the room, the brood stirred like a single entity restless in its sleep. Snufflings echoed like a horde of tiny whispers around me. The rats would wake up fast once I made my move.

The cat stood up again, stretching, then took a few steps closer to the can of Crunchy Tuna. It remained only inches out of arm’s reach, now staring at the can instead of me, nose quivering, suspicion and curiosity at war inside its little brain.

Of course, it was a cat, so curiosity won…

I snatched the creature up from the floor and squashed it to my chest. Leaping up and spinning around, I dashed back through the rough stone fissure, my flashlight bouncing maniacally off the walls.

The cat let out a disgruntled meow, and squeaks sounded from behind, a sudden panic spreading as the brood realized its master was gone. I reached the stairs and bounded upward, the metal banging like a gong under my boots. The cat fought, yowling and raking my chest, its claws catching the fabric of Garth Brooks’s face in a death grip. But it couldn’t escape my gloved hand.

Still struggling, it let out another scream, this one purposeful and harsh. The hum of turbines and giant fans above grew louder, but before they overwhelmed my ears I heard the rustling of a brood on the move below, like a lawn full of leaves stirred by an impatient wind.

At the last flight of stairs, I paused to peer back down. Rats streamed upward, shimmying along the handrails like tightrope walkers, bounding up the stairs, stumbling over one another in a boiling mass of fur and claws.

I dashed across the exhaust building, the image of stampeding rats spinning in my head, my senses swamped by the pulsing sunlight and mechanical sounds. We’d learned about massed rat attacks in Hunting 101, how a pack’s chemical messages of panic could urge them into a state of mob hysteria. Once a horde of rats was committed to taking down prey, even a superbright burst from a Night Watch flashlight wouldn’t change their minds.

And that went even for
normal
rats, without the brood bonds and hyperactive aggression of the parasite. The army pursuing me had a master to protect; this was evolutionary perfection trailing me, hungering to tear me to pieces.

The tunnel leading back to the swimming pool opened up two feet above floor level—an easy jump for me, but a climb that might take the rats a few extra moments. I would need every second of lead time to get to safety through the jammed-shut metal door.

The cat screamed again and struggled harder, and I fell something wet and warm against my chest. It was
pissing
on me as I ran! Leaving spatters of its scent on the floor, an unmistakable trail for the horde to follow.

“You little shit!” I yelled, leaping up into the exhaust tunnel.

The cat got one leg free and lashed out at my face, getting a single curved claw into my cheek, rapier-sharp and fiercely painful. I dropped the flashlight and grabbed hold of the cat with both gloved hands, pulling it away from me with a rip of skin that felt like yanking out a fishhook.

“Ow!” I screamed at it.

It hissed back at me.

The flashlight lay at my feet, but the rumble of turbines behind me was now joined by the rush of tiny claws—they’d almost reached the tunnel entrance. I dashed forward blindly both hands clutching the squirming cat.

Then I saw something horrible ahead … light. Sunlight.

I stumbled to a halt.

It didn’t make sense. The only light down here was at the
far
end of the tunnel, where my captured human peeps lay handcuffed, well past the swimming pool.

I swallowed. Had I gone too far already? Maybe the tunnel was shorter than it had seemed while I’d been crawling and skulking, listening between every step.

I ran a few more steps forward; then I saw them handcuffed on the sunlit ground: Patricia and Joseph Moore. This was the other end of the tunnel, a dead end.

I felt a low rumbling overhead—the transport squad in its garbage truck, getting ready to collect the peeps—and my heart leaped for a moment. Allies were only a few yards away.

But a steel grate still stood between me and them. By the time they cut through it, the horde would have torn me to pieces.

I had to get back to the swimming pool.

I turned from the light and ran, the murmur of the rats building in front of me, thousands of little claws on stone, like the sound of distant surf. The peep cat growled happily in my arms; it could smell its brood approaching.

The blackness before me began to glitter—the glow of sunlight at my back catching a swarm of reflective, night-seeing eyes. The brood filled the tunnel floor, spreading halfway up the walls like a shimmering pink smile.

I tore the remaining shreds of hazmat suit off and wrapped the cat in them to silence it, then pulled out Dr. Rat’s Essence of Cal.
You don’t want to cause a rat riot
, she had said.

Maybe I did.

I knelt on the ground, facing away from the horde, my body wrapped tightly around the cat. Its muffled growls rumbled like a hungry stomach.

Twisting the cap from the bottle, I hurled it spinning down the tunnel as far as I could and ducked my head to the floor.

Seconds later, they flowed over me, rat claws nicking through the Garth Brooks T-shirt like an Astroturf massage, their thin cries building as they scented what was ahead.

Rats are smart. They learn, they adapt, they know to be suspicious of free peanut butter. But these weren’t rats anymore—they were a mob, whipped into a frenzy, running on instinct and chemical signals. And right in front of them was a trail of cat piss leading to a great big bottle of distilled Cal, the creature they knew had stolen their master.

When the last few had passed, I leaped to my feet, keeping the cat clutched tightly to my chest. It growled uselessly. The brood had found the bottle and fallen upon it in a churning mass.

I dashed back toward the swimming pool, half suffocating the peep cat to keep it silent, knowing they would be following me again in a few moments.

This time, I didn’t miss the echoing presence of the pool overhead. I climbed up into the deep end, then headed for the stairs, grabbing the duffel bag I’d left the night before. A few rats scented their master, but they had hardly begun to stir by the time I got the heavy metal door open. From the other side, I shoved it closed again hard, stuffing steel wool back into the cracks, securing the snipped chains with a Night Watch deadbolt and squishing through the poisonous peanut butter to safety.

When the locker door slammed shut behind me, I collapsed on the floor, shaking in the darkened health club. The peep cat heaved as I loosened my grip to let it breathe again. It growled once, low and long.

You’re dead meat
, its eyes said.

“Oh, yeah?” I answered. “You and what army?”

Possibly the army I’d just run from like a headless chicken.

When I’d stopped shaking, I stood up and emptied the duffel bag onto the floor. Stuffing my struggling captive into it wasn’t easy, but I finally zipped the bag closed, muffling its yowls.

I was still panting, still half in shock, but as I pulled off my gloves I realized that I’d escaped. My clawed cheek felt like a pencil had been shoved through it, but the mission into the Underworld had been a success.

And the peep cat wasn’t so tough after all. Maybe Dr. Rat was right, and this new mutation was no big deal, just another evolutionary experiment gone awry.

It was still pissed off, though. The bag danced, needle-sharp claw tips poking through the vinyl. Not the best confinement system, but it would do for the moment. I only had to make it to the transport squad, a few blocks away. They would have a proper cage, and in any case, I had to drop by and warn them about the loose brood rampaging in the tunnel below.

And that other thing, the big breathing thing, whatever the hell
that
was …

Manny’s eyes widened when he saw me.

“Are you okay, man?” he said.

I shrugged. “Yeah. But I wouldn’t go down there if I were you.”

His gaze went from my shredded hazmat coveralls to my bloodied face, then fell on the struggling bulge in the duffel bag. “What the hell is that?”

“Just one less thing for you to worry about, Manny. But be careful; there’s more down there.”

“Jesus, it looks as big as a cat!” He sniffed the air, smelling the tunnel muck and pigeon feathers and feline piss all over me. “What happened down there?”

“Just got a little ugly is all. But it’s under control.”

One hand went to his face. “Maybe you should go to a doctor, man.”

I nodded, realizing that Dr. Rat would be with the transport squad. “Yep. That’s right where I’m headed.”

I left Manny there at his desk, still wide-eyed and bemused, and headed down the river toward the entrance of the tunnel.

On the way, I spotted a stray cat lurking in the lengthening shadows. A block farther, another peered out from beneath a Dumpster full of garbage. I began to walk faster.

It’s not unusual to see groups of rodents in the city, of course, but wild felines tend to stay alone. That’s just predator-prey mathematics: It takes hundreds of the hunted to keep one hunter in business—there are always lots of sheep for every wolf.