Peeps (26 page)

I nodded. When Rebecky had gone away, I found my voice. “You’re looking good too, Sarah.”

“Been putting on some weight, actually,” she said, shrugging and taking a huge bite of the hamburger in front of her.

“It suits you,” I said. “Makes you look more…”

“Human?” Sarah grinned.

“Yeah, I guess.” My mind started to struggle for a better word, but an alarm was going off deep in my brain. “Where’s Lace?”

“Lace, huh?” Sarah frowned. “What kind of name is that?”

“Short for Lacey. Where is she? You guys didn’t…” I looked around for the Shrink’s minders, sniffed the air for other predators. All I smelled was Bob’s: potatoes and meat and onions, all turning brown on the grill—and Sarah, who smelled of family.

She shrugged. “Look, Cal, I don’t know who you’re meeting here. Dr. Prolix just called me ten minutes ago and told me to come here and talk to you. She thought you’d listen to someone your own age. She said maybe you needed a jolt.”

“Well, mission accomplished on that.”

“And she figured it wouldn’t hurt if you saw how well I was doing.”

“Yeah. You look … so sane.”

“Am sane. Feels good.”

I shook my head, trying to think straight through the tangle of memories welling up in me. Lace would get here any moment now. Maybe I could run and try to catch her on the way. If Lace said the wrong thing in front of Sarah, the Watch might figure out that she knew too much.

I looked out the window, searching the street for Lace’s face among the lunchtime crowds. But my gaze kept coming back to the girl in front of me—Sarah, alive and well and
human
.

I couldn’t run yet; I had to know… “What
happened
?”

Sarah chewed a bite of burger thoughtfully, then swallowed. “Well, first this total
dickhead
gave me a disease.”

“Oh, yeah.” I drank some coffee, frowned at its bitterness. “I never had a chance to say sorry about that. I didn’t know—”

“Yeah, yeah. I guess we’re both to blame. Safe sex, blah, blah, blah.” Sarah sighed. “Then there was my little … breakdown. But you saw most of that.”

I nodded. “Until you disappeared.”

Sarah took a long breath, staring out the window. “Well, the parts you missed out on are kind of hazy for me, too. Sort of like a long, bad dream. About being hungry.” She shuddered. “And eating. Then there you were again, rescuing me.” She smiled tiredly then took another bite.

“Rescuing you?” I swallowed, never having thought of it that way myself. “It was the least I could do. But, Sarah, how did you get so normal? So
fast
?”

“Good question, which reminds me.” She pulled out a bottle of pills, dumped two into her palm, and swallowed. “Two with every meal.”

I blinked. “There’s a cure?”

“Sure. They had me straightened out about six hours after I got to Montana.”

“When did that happen? The cure, I mean.”

“At least seven hundred years ago.”

There it was again, that seven-hundred-year thing. “The plague? This doesn’t make any sense, Sarah.”

“It will, Cal. Just listen up. I’m here to tell you everything. Doctor’s orders.” She bit deep into her burger, hurrying now that she was only a few swallows from the end.

“Which doctor? Prolix?”

“Yep, the Shrink. She’s been telling me all about what’s coming.” Sarah looked out at the crowds on the sidewalk. “They figured I could take it, because of my personal eating habits lately.” She looked down at her hamburger with momentary suspicion, then took another bite. “And because they don’t have time to mess with me. Or with you, anymore. Time to face facts, Cal.”

Suddenly, the restaurant felt overcrowded, claustrophobic. I could smell the people in the booth behind me, the pressure of the passersby on the street. “The disease is out of control, isn’t it? We’re going to wake up one day in one of those zombie-apocalypse movies, the parasite spreading faster than anyone can stop it.”

“No, Cal. Don’t be silly. The disease is
in control
, the way it should be. The parasite’s calling the shots now.”

“It’s doing
what
?”

“It’s in charge, making things happen. The way it’s supposed to. The Night Watch was always just a holding pattern, keeping down the mutation while waiting for the old strain to come back.”

I shook my head. “Wait. What?”

Sarah held up her fork and knife, looking from one to the other. “Okay. There’s two versions of the parasite. The new kind and the old kind. Right?”

“Two strains, I know.” I nodded. “And we’ve got the new one, you and me.”

Sarah sighed. “No, dickhead, we have the
old
kind. The original.” She rattled her pill bottle. “This is mandrake and garlic, mostly. Totally old-school. Until seven hundred years ago, people used to totally control this disease.”

“Until the plague?”

“Bingo. That’s when the new strain showed up.” Sarah shook her head. “You’ve got to blame the Inquisition for that. You know, when Christians got it into their heads that cats were evil and started killing loads of them? That was bad for the old version of the parasite, seeing as how it jumps back and forth between felines and humans.”

“Right… I know about that. But that’s the
old
version?”

“Yes. Pay attention, Cal. As I was saying, it’s 1300
a.d.
and everyone’s killing cats. So with hardly any cats around, the rat population grows like crazy. More human-to-rat contact, evolution of various diseases, fleas and ticks, blah, blah, blah.” She waved her hand. “Plague.”

“Um, I think you’re skipping over something there.”

She snorted. “
I’m
not the one going for a biology degree. I’m just a philosophy major who eats people. But here’s the bio-for-philosophers version: A new strain of the parasite appeared, one that moved back and forth between rats and humans,
without
cats. Of course, as with any new strain, the optimum virulence was a mess; the peeps were much more violent and difficult to control. A total zombie movie, like you said.”

“And the old strain went underground.”

“Very good.” Sarah smiled. “They told me you’d understand.”

“But that was Europe. This is New York.”

“Rats go everywhere, Cal. They love ships, so of course the new parasites made it to the New World. Even here, the old strain was pushed down into the deep.”

“But now it’s coming back up,” I said. “Why aren’t we doing something about it? Why are the old carriers hiding it from the rest of the Watch?”

“Excellent questions.” She nodded slowly, chewing the last bite of her hamburger. “That’s what you scientists never seem to understand: The
whys
are always more important than
the hows
.”

“Sarah, just tell me!”

“Okay.” She placed her palms on the table. “Feel that?”

I looked at the surface of my coffee; its black mirror reflected the lights overhead with a pulsing shimmer. “You mean the subway going by?”

She shook her head, her eyes closed. “Feel deeper.”

I placed my hands on the table, and as the train faded, I felt another, more subtle shudder in its wake. Like something disturbed in its sleep, turning over. Like the trembling I’d felt through my cowboy boots, the first time I’d seen the peep cat.

Sarah opened her eyes. “Our strain is coming up because it’s being
pushed
up.”

I remembered the unseen thing I’d smelled in the Underworld, and the shudder in my hands took over my whole body for a moment. “By what?”

Sarah lifted her palms from the table, sighed, then shrugged. “There are a lot of things down there, Cal, things human beings haven’t seen in a long time. We lost a lot of knowledge during the plague. But the old guys do know one thing: When the ground starts to tremble, the old strain will rise up. They need us.”

“Wait a second. Who needs
who
?”

“They”—she looked out the window at the passing crowds—“need
us
. We’re the immune system for our species, Cal. Like those kick-ass T-cells and B-cells you always told me about, we get activated by an invasion. New-strainers are just zombies, vampires. But those of us with the old disease, the carrier strain, we’re
soldiers
.”

My mind spun, trying to reconcile what Sarah was saying with what I’d seen Morgan doing, spreading the disease haphazardly, enlisting hordes of cats. “But why is this a secret? I mean, why didn’t this come up in my Night Watch courses? Does Dr. Rat know about it? Or Records?”

“It’s older than Records. Older than science. Even older than New York. So the carriers kept it a secret from the Night Watch humans, Cal. It’s not going to be pleasant for them, the next few months. But we need all the soldiers we can get. Fast.”

“So you’re spreading the disease on
purpose
?” I asked, but Sarah’s eyes had left mine, looking over my right shoulder, a pleasant smile filling her face.

A hand fell on me. “Uh, hey, Cal. Sorry I’m late.”

I looked up. Lace was staring down at Sarah, a little unsure.

“Oh, hi.” I cleared my throat, realizing I’d waited too long; the inevitable collision had happened. “This is Sarah. My ex.”

“And you must be Lacey.” Sarah extended her hand.

“Uh, yeah. Lace, actually.” They shook.

“Hot stuff, coming through!” said Rebecky, sliding a plate of pepper steak in front of me. Lace sat down next to me, wary of the woman across from her. Rebecky’s gaze moved among us, intrigued by the obvious discomfort of it all.

“Coffee, honey?” she asked Lace.

“Yeah, please.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Me three,” Sarah added. “And another hamburger.”

“And one of those.” Lace pointed at my pepper steak. “I’m starving.”

“Pepper steak?” I said. “Oh, crap.”

“Hey, it’s not against the law, dude,” Lace muttered as Rebecky walked away.

“What isn’t against the law?” Sarah asked, licking her fingers.

“Eating meat,” Lace said. “Sometimes people change, you know?”

Sarah smiled. “Oh. Used to be a vegetarian, did you?”

I started in ravenously on my own pepper steak. Otherwise, I was going to faint. “She was. Until recently.”

Sarah looked from Lace to me, then giggled. “You’ve been very naughty, haven’t you, Cal?”

“It was Cornelius.”

“Could someone please tell me what’s going on?” Lace asked.

Sarah sighed. “Well, Lacey, things are about to get complicated.”

Lace raised her hands. “Don’t look at me, girl. I never even kissed this guy. In fact, I’m really pissed at him right now.”

“Oh, poor Cal!” Sarah said. Then she added in a cruel baby voice, “Did kitty beat you to it?”

“What the
hell
are you guys talking about?” Lace said.

I dropped my fork to the table. Things were spinning out of control, and I had to do something to unspin them. Most important, I had to get Lace out of here, or she would wind up in Montana.

Sweeping Sarah’s bottle of pills into my pocket, I pushed Lace out of the booth and dragged her toward the door.

“What the hell!” she shouted.

“Cal,” Sarah called. “Wait a second!”

“We have to leave,” I hissed to Lace. “She’s one of
them
.”

“What, an old girlfriend? I could tell that.” Lace paused, looking back at Sarah. “Oh, you mean …?”

“Yes!”

“Whoa, dude.”

As we reached the door, I glanced back. Sarah wasn’t following us, just watching our retreat with an amused expression. She pulled out a cell phone but paused to wave it at me:
shoo
. For some reason—old loyalty? lingering insanity?—she was giving us time to get away.

The street in front of us was thronged with pedestrians, but I didn’t smell any predators among the crowd—just lots of humans crammed together, ready for infection and slaughter. I kept us moving, tugging Lace along in one random direction after another.

“Where are we going, Cal?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we have to get out of here. They know about you.”

“Know
what
about me? That you told me all your Night Watch stuff?”

I didn’t answer for a moment, trying to think, but Lace pulled me to a stop. “Cal? Tell me the truth, or I’ll have to kill you.”

I glanced behind her—still no signs of pursuit. “They sent Sarah to find me.”

“And you told her about me?”

“No!
You
did. When you ordered that pepper steak!” I tried to get Lace moving again, but she pulled me to a stop.

“What the hell? What’s pepper steak got to do with this?”

“You’re starving, right? Feeling faint? And you’ve been craving meat all day…”

She didn’t answer, just stood there with eyes narrowed, my words finally sinking in. “Um, earth to Cal: You and I
didn’t sleep together
.”

“Believe me, I know. But you see, there’s this new strain… I mean, turns out it’s an old strain, and it has to do with cats. They’re the vectors we have to worry about now.”

Unsurprisingly, this explanation didn’t alter Lace’s perplexed expression. She just stood there staring back at me. A few passersby bumped into her, but the contact didn’t register. Finally, after ten long seconds, she spoke slowly and clearly. “Are you saying that your fat-ass cat has turned me into a vampire?”

“Um, maybe?” I coughed. “But I can test you, and we’ll know for sure.”

“Dude, you are so dead.”

“Fine, but wait until we find someplace to test you.”

“Someplace like where?”

“Someplace dark.”

Finding pitch blackness in Manhattan isn’t easy at noon. In fact, finding pitch blackness in Manhattan isn’t easy anytime.

I considered going to Lace’s apartment, but if the Watch was looking for us, they were as likely to start there as anywhere. I also thought about renting a hotel room and yanking the curtains closed, but if Lace was infected, there was no point throwing away money. We might be on the run for a while.

The pills were still clutched in my hand; even if Lace was infected, we could control the parasite. I could analyze the garlic-and-mandrake compound and keep her human. We could escape whatever the old carriers had planned for the end of civilization.