Peeps (27 page)

“What about a movie theater?” Lace asked.

“Not dark enough.” The light from exit signs always drives me crazy during movies. “We need cave darkness, Lace.”

“
Cave
darkness? Not a lot of caves in Manhattan, Cal.”

“You’d be surprised.” My nerves twitched as a trembling came through the soles of my boots. We were standing on the sidewalk grates over Union Square station. I pulled her toward an entrance.

I swiped us through a turnstile and tugged Lace down the stairs and to the very end of the platform, pointing into the darkness ahead. “That way.”

“On the tracks? Are you kidding?”

“There’s an old abandoned station at Eighteenth. I’ve been there before. Plenty dark.”

She leaned over the tracks; a small and scampering thing darted among discarded coffee cups.

“The rats won’t bite you,” I said. “Promise.”

“Forget it.”

“Lace, we subway-hacked all the time in Peep Hunting 101.”

She pulled away, glanced at the couple on the platform watching us, and hissed, “Yeah, well, I didn’t sign up for that class.”

“No, you didn’t. You didn’t sign up for any of this. But we have to know if you’re infected.”

Lace stared at me, her eyes gleaming darkly, like wet ink. “What happens if I am a vampire? Do you, like, vanquish me or something?”

“You’re not a vampire, Lace, just sick, maybe. And this strain is easy to control. Look.” I pulled the pills from my pocket and rattled them. “We’ll get out of the city. Otherwise, they’ll put you into treatment. In Montana.”

“
Montana
?”

I nodded, pointing down the dark tunnel. “The choice is yours.”

The 6 train rattled into view, and we waited as the platform cleared. I tugged Lace into the security camera blind spot, just next to the access ladder down to the tracks.

She looked down the tunnel. “And you can cure me?”

“Not cure. Control the parasite. Make you like me.”

“What, all superstrong and stuff?”

“Yeah. It’ll be great!” After the cannibal stage was over.

“But the disease will kill me eventually, right?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. After a few hundred years.”

Lace blinked. “Dude. Major consolation prize.”

We ran down the middle of the tracks.

“Don’t touch that,” I said, pointing down at the wood-covered rail running between our track and the next one over. “Unless you want to get fried.”

“The famous third rail?” Lace said. “No problem. I’m a lot more worried about trains.”

“The local just passed. We’ve got a few minutes.”

“A
few
!”

“The abandoned station’s only four blocks away, Lace. I’ll know if the rails start rumbling. Supersenses and everything.” I pointed between the columns that held up the streets over our heads, the safe spots. “And if a train does come, just stand there.”

“Oh, yeah, that looks
totally
safe.”

We charged down the tunnel, and I tried not to notice that Lace wasn’t stumbling over the tracks and rubbish, as if the darkness didn’t bother her. But it wasn’t cave dark yet. Work lights dangled around us, casting our manic and fractured shadows against the tracks.

The express train swerved into view ahead, taking the slow curve with one long screaming complaint. The cold white eyes of its headlights flickered through the steel columns like the light of an old movie projector. In the strobing light, I saw that Lace had come to a halt. The train was on the express track; it wouldn’t hit us, but the approaching shriek of metal wheels had paralyzed her.

The wall of metal flew past, whipping Lace’s hair around her face and throwing sparks at our feet. Light from the passing windows flickered madly around us, and a few passengers’ faces shot by, looking down with astonished expressions. I put my arm around Lace, the rhythm of the train’s passage shuddering through our bodies. Its roar battered the air, loud enough to force my eyelids shut.

When the sound had faded into the distance, I asked, “Are you okay?”

She blinked. “Dude, that was loud!”

Lace’s voice sounded thin in my ringing ears. “No kidding. Come on, before another train comes.”

She nodded dumbly, and I pulled her the rest of the way to the abandoned station.

The Eighteenth Street station opened up in 1904, the same time as the rest of the 6; part of that turn-of-the-century dig-fest, I suppose.

Back then, all subway trains were five cars long. In the 1940s, with the city’s population booming, they were doubled up to ten, which left the old subway platforms a couple hundred feet too short. During the station-stretching project, a few in-between stations like Eighteenth were deemed not worth the trouble and shut down.

The Transit Authority may have forgotten these underground vaults, but they are remembered by a host of urban adventurers, graffiti artists, and other assorted spelunkers. For the next sixty years, the abandoned stations were spray-painted, vandalized, and made the subject of drunken dares, urban myths, and fannish Web sites. They are tourist stops for amateur subterraneans, training grounds for the Night Watch—the twilight zone between the human habitat and the Underworld.

I pulled Lace up onto the dark and empty platform. Six decades of graffiti swirled around us, the once-bright spray paint darkened by accumulated grime. Crumbling mosaic signs spelled out the street number and pointed toward exits that had been sealed for decades. As Lace steadied herself at the platform’s edge, she looked around with wide eyes, and my heart sank. It was awfully close to cave darkness here; a normal person should have been waving a hand in front of her face.

“So what now?” she said.

“This way.” Deciding to give her a real test, I led her to the door of the men’s bathroom, a relic of sixty years ago. The broken remains of a sink clung to one wall, and the broken wooden doors of the stalls leaned at haphazard angles. The last smells of disinfectant had faded; all that remained was warmish subway air filled with the scent of rats and mold and decay. Distant work lights reflected dimly from the grimy tiles. Even with my fully formed peep vision, I could hardly see.

I pointed into the last stall. “Can you read that?”

She peered unerringly at the one legible line among the tangled layers of graffiti. For a moment, she was silent, then said softly, “This is how it all started. Reading something written on a wall.”

“Can you see it?”

“It says, Take a shit, Linus.’ ”

I closed my eyes. Lace was infected. The parasite must have been working overtime, gathering reflective cells behind her corneas, readying her for a life of nocturnal hunting, of hiding from the sun.

“Who’s Linus?” Lace asked.

“Who knows? That’s been there for a while.”

“Oh. So what happens now?” she said. “I mean, Cal, did you bring me down here to … get rid of me or something?”

“Get rid—? Of course not!” I pulled the pills from my pocket. “Here, take two of these, right now.”

She shook out two and swallowed them, the pills catching for a moment in her dry throat. She coughed once, then said, “Is it really that dark down here? This isn’t some trick you’re pulling? I can really see in the dark?”

“Yeah, a normal person would be totally blind.”

“And I got this from your cat?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You know, Cal, it’s not like I had sex with your cat either.”

“But he sat on your chest while you slept and … exchanged breath with you, or something. Apparently that’s the way the old strain spreads, but nobody ever told me about it. Things are really screwed up right now at the Watch. In fact, things are about to go nuts in general.” I turned her to face me. “We’ll have to get out of the city. There’s going to be a lot of trouble as the infections set in.”

“Like you said when you first told me about the Watch? Everyone biting one another, a total zombie movie? So why not give everyone the pills?”

I chewed my lip. “Because they want the disease to spread, for some reason. But maybe they’ll eventually use the pills, and things will settle down, but until then…”

She looked at the bottle, squinting at its label. “And these really work?”

“You saw Sarah—she’s normal now. When I captured her, she was eating rats and hiding from the sun and living in Hoboken.”

“Oh, great, dude,” Lace said. “So that’s what I have to look forward to?”

“I hope not,” I said softly, reaching for her hand. She didn’t pull away. “Sarah didn’t have any pills at first. Maybe you’ll just go straight to the superpowers. I mean, you’ll be really strong and have great hearing, and a great sense of smell, too.”

“But Cal, what about the Garth Brooks thing?”

“Garth Brooks? Oh, the anathema.”

“It makes you start hating your old life, right?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “But Sarah’s over that too. She was even wearing an Elvis armband.”

“Elvis? What
is
it with your girlfriends?” Lace sighed. “But the anathema won’t happen to me?”

I paused, realizing I didn’t know anything for sure. None of my classes had covered the cat-borne strain or the ancient garlic-and-mandrake cure—it had all been kept secret from me. I didn’t know what symptoms to look for, or how to adjust the dosage if Lace started to grow long black fingernails or fear her own reflection.

I cleared my throat. “Well, we’ll have to watch for symptoms. Is there anything in particular you really like? Potato salad?” I wracked my brain, realizing how little I knew about Lace. “Hip-hop? Heavy metal? Oh, yeah, the smell of bacon. Anything else I should worry about if you start despising it?”

She sighed. “I thought we covered this already.”

“What? Potato salad?”

“No, stupid.” And then she kissed me.

Her mouth was warm against mine, her heart still beating hard from our dash through the darkness, from the creepiness of the abandoned station, from the news that she would soon turn into a vampire. Or maybe just from kissing me—I could feel it pounding in her lips, full of blood. My own heartbeat seemed to rush into my head, strong enough to pulse red at the corners of my vision.

A predator’s kiss: endless, insistent, and my first in six long months.

When we finally parted, Lace whispered, “You feel like you’ve got a fever.”

Still dizzy, I smiled. “All the time. Supermetabolism.”

“And you’ve got supersmell too?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Dude.” She sniffed the air and frowned. “So what do I smell like?”

I inhaled softly, letting Lace’s scent claim me, the familiar jasmine of her shampoo somehow settling the chaos of the past twenty-four hours. We could kiss again, I realized, do anything we wanted. It was safe now, even with the parasite’s spores in my blood and saliva, because she was infected, just like me.

“Butterflies,” I said after a moment of thought.

“
Butterflies
?”

“Yeah. You use some kind of jasmine-scented shampoo, right? Smells like butterflies.”

“Wait a second. Butterflies have a smell? And it’s
jasmine
?”

My body was still humming from the kiss, my mind still reeling from all the revelations of the day, and there was something comforting about being asked a question I knew the answer to. I let the wonders of biology flow forth. “It’s the other way around. Flowers imitate insects—patterning their petals after wings, stealing their smells. Jasmine tricks butterflies into landing on it, so they carry pollen from one flower to another. That’s how jasmine flowers have sex with each other.”

“Dude. Jasmine has sex? Using butterflies?”

“Yeah. How about that?”

“Huh.” She was silent for a moment, still holding me, thinking about all those flowers having butterfly-mediated sex. Finally, she said, “So when butterflies land on my hair, do they think they’re having jasmine-sex with it?”

“Probably.” I leaned closer, burying my nose in her smell. Maybe the natural world wasn’t so jaw-droppingly horrible—appalling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.

The subway platform trembled under us again, another train coming. Eventually, we’d have to return to the surface, to face the sunlight and the coming crumbling of civilization, to ride out whatever tumult the old carriers had planned now that the old strain was surging into daylight. But for the moment I was content to stand there, the thought of an apocalyptic future suddenly less panicking. I had something that I’d thought lost forever, another person warm in my arms. Whatever happened next seemed bearable.

“Will the disease make me hate you, Cal?” she asked again. “Even if I take the pills?”

I started to say I wasn’t sure, but in that moment the rumbling underfoot shifted, no longer building steadily. Then it shifted again, like something winding toward us, and among the false butterflies of Lace’s hair I caught another scent, ancient and dire.

“Cal?”

“Wait a second,” I said, and took a deeper breath.

The foul smell redoubled, sweeping over us like air pushed up through subway grates by a passing train. And I knew something as thoroughly as my ancestors had known the scents of lions and tigers and bears…

A bad thing was on its way.

T
he next time you go to the doctor, check out the plaques on the wall. One of them, usually the biggest, will be decorated with an intriguing symbol: two snakes climbing up a winged staff.

Ask your doctor what this symbol means, and you’ll probably get this line: The staff is called the
caduceus
. It’s the sign of Hermes, god of alchemists, and the symbol of the American Medical Association.

But that is only half the truth.

Meet the guinea worm. It hangs around in ponds, too small to see with the naked eye. If you drink guinea-worm-infected water, one of these beasties may find its way into your stomach. From there, it will make its way to one of your legs, working chemical magic to hide from your immune system. It will grow much bigger, as long as two feet.

And it will have babies.