Peeps (25 page)

She answered on the first ring. “Lace here.”

I swallowed. “Hey. It’s me, Cal.”

“Oh. Hi, Cal.” Her tone sounded flat. “That was fast.”

“Um, what was fast?”

“What do you think? You calling me was fast, dumb-ass.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Well, I had to.”

“You did?” Her voice gave a hint of interest.

“Yeah … something’s come up.”

“Like what, dude?”

“Like…”
You have contracted a deadly disease. Soon, you may begin to eat your neighbors—but don’t worry, you will eventually switch to pigeons, or perhaps rats
. “Um, I can’t really talk about it on the phone.”

She groaned. “Still with the top secret, huh? Need-to-know basis?”

“Yeah. But this is something you
really
need to know.”

There was a long pause, then a sigh. “Okay. I was kind of hoping you’d call. I mean, maybe I was a little bit hard on you last night. But I was kind of angry with … the way things are.”

“Oh. Right.” I had the feeling she was about to get angrier.

“Okay. So where and when?”

“Right now. Except I’m out in Brooklyn. Twenty minutes?”

“Okay. I’m hungry anyway. How about that diner where we ate before? Where was that?”

“Bob’s? Broadway and Eleventh. See you there. And thanks.”

“For what?”

“Not hanging up on me.”

A pause. “We’ll see.”

We said good-bye and disconnected. Lace had sounded so normal, I thought, allowing myself to hope. Maybe it took a peep cat more than one night to spread the parasite. Or maybe I was grasping at straws. If she’d been infected the night before last, the only symptom Lace would display so far would be a slight increase in night vision.

I headed for the door.

“
Meow
,” Cornelius cried. He was lying in my way.

“Sorry, Corny. Can’t stay.”

He yowled again, louder.

I slid him away from the door with my foot. “Move. I have to go.”

He scrambled over my boot and back to the door, still yowling.

“You can’t go out, okay?” I yelled and picked him up, planning to step out and then toss him back through from the other side. He started to struggle.

“What’s your
problem
?” I said, pulling open the door.

Morgan and Angela stood there, grinning from ear to ear.

“How did you find me?” I finally managed.

“
I
don’t forget the names of people I sleep with, Cal Thompson,” Morgan said.

“Oh.”

“And I thought that looked like you on the tapes, monkeying around in the basement of my old building, being all brave and daring.” Morgan laughed and turned to Angela. “Cal’s from Texas.”

“Yeah, you told me,” Angela said.

“And look, he has a
kitty
!” Morgan said, reaching out to tickle Cornelius’s chin. “Isn’t it cute?”

“Yes, he is,” I answered, and threw Cornelius in her face.

I followed the yowling ball of cat through the door, whipping the knockout injector from my pocket. Angela’s hands went up to defend herself, the injector hissing as the needle sank into her forearm.

“You Texas butt-head!” she shouted, then crumpled to the floor.

I ignored the squawling mass of cat and Morgan and headed for the stairs.

Halfway down, Morgan’s voice echoed through the stairwell. “Stop, Cal! You’re being a pain!”

I kept running, taking each flight of stairs with a single, bone-jarring leap.

“Your Night Watch isn’t going to help you now, you know!” she called, her sneakers squeaking on the concrete steps behind me.

I’d already figured that much was true; I didn’t trust the Night Watch anymore. But I wasn’t about to trust the person who’d infected me either. From now on, I was on my own.

Reaching the last flights of stairs, I ran through the lobby and burst out the front doors of my building, hoping that by some miracle a cab would be waiting there. The street, of course, was empty of cabs.

But not of cats.

There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred, perched on postboxes and garbage bags, crowding the stoops across the street, all watching me with the same expression of mild amusement.

My knees grew weak, and the world went dizzy; I almost fell to the concrete. But Morgan was right behind me. I pulled my belt from around my waist and cinched it through the curving handles of the front door. Then I took a few deep breaths until the faintness passed.

The cats around me hadn’t moved. Maybe Dr. Rat was right—they were nonviolent.

Seconds later, Morgan approached the other side of the glass door, grabbed the inside handles, and pulled. The belt held tight. It would take her a while to wear down the leather, or for some random passerby to let her out.

I stumbled back from the door.

“Cal!” she called, her voice muffled through the glass. “Stop!”

I shook my head and turned to walk down the street, ignoring her cries.

“Cal!” The sound faded behind me.

The cats watched placidly, no concern in their expressions. But somehow their collective gaze kept me from running—some threat implicit in their eyes suggested that if I disturbed the quiet street, they would turn into an angry horde and devour me.

So I walked slowly, feeling their red-flickering eyes with every step.

Another two blocks up was Flatbush Avenue, busy and normal and not overrun with cats. I stuck out my shaking arm and hailed a taxi to Manhattan.

Halfway across the bridge, my phone rang. It was the Shrink.

“Kid, we need to talk.”

“
Don’t
call me Kid!”

There was a long silence on the other end. Evidently, the words had surprised the Shrink just as much as they had me.

“Um, if you don’t mind?” I added lamely.

“Certainly … Cal.”

I frowned. “Hey, wait a second. I thought you didn’t like talking on phones.”

“I don’t, but the world is changing, Cal. And one must adapt.”

I wanted to point out that telephones were
so
1881—not exactly cutting edge—but the Shrink’s choice of words froze the remark in my mouth.

“The world is changing?” I said hoarsely.

“You hadn’t noticed?”

“Um, I’d say there’s been some weird stuff going on.” I cleared my throat. “And I’m starting to feel like nobody’s keeping me in the loop.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we haven’t been fair to you.”

The cab slowed as the bridge descended into Chinatown, and a few moments of reception crackle interrupted the conversation. Ahead of me were crowds of workday pedestrians—all within arm’s length of one another—a perfect breeding ground for infection and for sudden violence spinning out of control.

When the rattle in my ear subsided, I said, “And you’re going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Of course. I, for one, have always wanted you to know what’s going on. I’ve always trusted you, Cal. But you see, you’re so very young compared to the rest of us.”

“The rest of the Night Watch?”

“Not the Watch. We carriers, Cal, with all those centuries behind us. And those of us in the old families. Some thought you wouldn’t understand the way things were changing.” She sighed. “I’m afraid we’ve been treating you as a bit of a human.”

“Um, last time I checked, I was one.”

The Shrink laughed. “No, Cal, you’re one of us.”

I groaned, not wanting to get into some weird semantic argument. “Could you just tell me what’s going on!”

“I’ll let her tell you.”

“Her who?”

“Just get where you’re going. Don’t worry. She’ll be there.”
Click
. She’d hung up.

How did the Shrink know where I was going? I couldn’t imagine the Mayor’s office having tapped my phone. That was
way
too high-tech for them. Then I remembered Cornelius sitting by the door, yowling. He’d smelled Morgan out there, which meant that Morgan could have heard my conversation with Lace. I replayed it in my mind… Bob’s on Broadway and Eleventh, I had helpfully said aloud.

She
would be waiting? But who was
she
?

I dialed Lace’s number on my cell, but there was no answer.
Out of service
, the recorded voice said. We were approaching Houston, the cars around us slowing to a walking pace. I paid, jumped out, and ran toward Broadway and Eleventh, trying to untangle the meaning of the Shrink’s call.

The Shrink knew that I knew. My first thought was that Chip had broken his promise and talked to the Mayor’s office, but then Morgan’s words at my door came back to me: “
I
don’t forget the names of people I sleep with, Cal Thompson.”

Morgan knew that I had forgotten her last name, something the Shrink had always chided me about. But how would Morgan have known that, unless someone had told her?

They were all in it together—Morgan Ryder, the Shrink, and the Night Mayor, along with the other carriers and the old families of New York—all of them knew something about my strain of the parasite and what it meant. They had kept me in the dark from the beginning.

And if it hadn’t been for Lace’s detective work, I would
still
be in the dark.

Lace
… I thought, speeding up.

Rebecky greeted me at the door. “Hey, Cal! Hungry again already?”

I tried not to pant. “Yeah. Meeting someone.”

“So I noticed.” Rebecky winked. “I never forget a face. She’s right back there.”

I nodded and headed toward the rear corner table, still breathing heavily, still dizzy, still trying to put together everything I had to explain to Lace, so harried and distracted that it wasn’t until I’d
thunked
myself down into the booth that I realized the girl sitting across from me wasn’t Lace.

It was Sarah.

H
ere is the story of how parasitic wasps saved twenty million lives.

But to tell the tale, first you get to hear about mealworms, a kind of insect that’s just as unpleasant as its name. Mealworms aren’t very big—a cluster of thousands looks like a tiny white speck. But this single speck can devastate whole continents. Here’s how:

The average mealworm has eight hundred kids, almost all of which are female. Each of these offspring can have eight hundred
more
kids. Do the math: One mealworm can produce five hundred million great-grandchildren. And they aren’t really worms at all; the young ones can fly, carried from plant to plant on the wind, spreading infection as they go.

Thirty years ago, a species of mealworm rampaged through Africa, attacking a staple crop called cassava and almost starving twenty million people. That’s a pretty big death toll for a microscopic parasite. Fortunately, however, cassava mealworms have their own parasite, a species of wasp from South America.

A word about parasitic wasps:
nasty
. Instead of a stinger, they kill with something called an
ovipositor
, which injects eggs instead of venom. And, believe me, these eggs are much worse than poison. At least with poison, you die fast.

Here’s what wasp eggs do to their unlucky hosts: Some hatch into “soldiers,” which have big teeth and hooked tails. They roam around in the victim’s bloodstream, sucking out the guts of any children left by other wasps. (Parasitic wasps are very territorial.) Other eggs hatch into wasp larvae, which are basically big bloated stomachs with mouths. Protected by their soldier siblings, they ravenously consume the host from within, sucking away its juices as they grow into wasps themselves. Once they’re big enough to grow wings, the larvae eat their way out into the world and fly off to lay more eggs. The soldiers don’t leave, they just stay behind with the dried-up, dying host, having done their duty for their waspy brothers and sisters. (Isn’t that sweet?)

So what happened in Africa? Long story short: The crops were saved.

Once the right species of wasp was let loose, the mealworms were dead meat. Mealworms may spread as fast as the wind, but wherever they go, the wasps can follow. Wasps can fly too, after all, and they’re pretty much psychic when it comes to finding mealworms. If a single plant in a huge field is infected, the wasps will find the mealworms and inject them with their eggs. No one really knows how wasps track down microscopic mealworms, but some scientists have an intriguing theory:

The infected plant asks for help.

That’s right: When a cassava plant is attacked by mealworms, it begins to send out signals to any wasps in the area. Some unknown chemical rises up and draws the wasps toward it, like a big red highway flare saying,
Help me! Help me
!

Of course, another way to translate the message is:
Mealworms! Get your hot delicious mealworms
!

You could say that the cassava and the parasitic wasp have an evolutionary deal: “I’ll tell you when I’m infected with mealworms, and you come and deposit your deadly eggs in them.”

It’s a great relationship, because the parasite of your parasite is your friend.

“Hiya, darling,” Sarah said. “You’re looking good.”

I didn’t say anything, paralyzed by the sight of her. Sarah was utterly transformed from my last glimpse before the transport squad had taken her away. Her hair was clean, her fingernails pink and neatly trimmed; there was no demented gleam in her eye. As her familiar scent reached me through the smell of grease and frying eggs, Bob’s Diner seemed to shudder, as if time were snapping backward.

She was even wearing a thick black leather wristband, a definite reference to Elvis’s 1968 Comeback Special. Very appropriate.

Rebecky slapped down a cup of coffee in front of me, breaking the spell. “Thought I recognized you,” she said to Sarah. “It’s been a while since you’ve been in here, right?”

“Been out of town. Hoboken mostly, then a few days in Montana, of all places,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “But I’m back to stay.”

“Well, good. Looks like Cal here sure missed you.” She patted me on the shoulder, chuckling at my blank expression. “The usual, Cal?”