Peeps (31 page)

Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings
by Pamela Nagami (St. Martins Press, 2004)

All you ever wanted to know about diseases that spread through bites and stings, and then some. Did you know that if you punch someone in the mouth, there’s a bacteria that can spread from their teeth to your knuckles and eat your hand away? Hitting people is bad.

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin (going strong since 1859)

The book that started it all. The key to understanding modern biology, from DNA to dinosaurs, and of all the great books of science, the most readable. And those stickers on textbooks, the ones stating that evolution is “only a theory”? Not true. When scientists use the word
theory
, they don’t mean “something that hasn’t been proven to be a fact.” They mean “a framework for understanding the facts.” So guess what, it’s a
fact
that human beings have evolved from other primates over the last five million years. (Like we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimps
by accident
?) But the framework we use to make sense of this fact is called
evolutionary theory
, Darwin’s awesome mash-up of several concepts: inherited traits, mutation, and survival of the fittest. So yes, we’re all distantly related to modern-day apes. Find that hard to believe? Dude, look around you.

ARE THE LAST DAYS HERE?

The summer is stifling, and strange things are happening in New York City. Rats have taken over the borough of Brooklyn. A weird, black, oily substance is oozing from fire hydrants and faucets.

In the midst of all this, five teenagers are trying to ignore the madness and concentrate on something
really
important: their new band.

But will their music stave off the end of the world? Or summon it?

The apocalypse that began in
Peeps
continues in

GARBAGE

—PEARL—

“One of those boys was rather fetching.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, Mom. Thanks for pointing it out, though, in case I missed it.”

“A bit scruffy, though. And that dirge you were playing was making the china rattle all afternoon.”

“It wasn’t
all
afternoon.” I sighed, staring out the window of the limo. “Maybe two hours.”

Getting a ride with Mom was nine kinds of annoying. But deepest Brooklyn was such a pain by subway, and I had to see Minerva right away. Her esoterica kept saying that hearing good news helped the healing process. And my news was better than good.

“Besides, Mom, ‘that dirge’ is totally fexcellent.”

“It’s feculent?” She made a quiet scoffing sound. “Don’t you know that feculent means
foul
?”

I giggled, reminding myself to tell Zahler that one. Maybe we could call ourselves the Feculents. But that sounded sort of British, and we didn’t.

We sounded like the kind of band that rattled the china. The Rattlers? Too country and western. The Good China? Nah. People would think we were from Taiwan.

“Will they be coming over again?” my mother asked in a small voice.

“Yes. They will.” I played with my window buttons, filling the limo’s backseat with little bursts of summer heat.

She sighed. “I’d hoped that we were past all this band practice.”

I let out a groan. “
Band practice
is what marching bands do, Mom. But don’t worry. We’ll be moving our gear to Sixteenth Street in a week or so. Your china will soon be safe.”

“Oh. That place.”

I peered at her, pushing my glasses up my nose. “Yes, full of musicians. How awful.”

“They look more like drug addicts.” She shivered a little, which made her icicles tinkle. Mom was all blinged out for some fund-raiser at the Brooklyn Museum, wearing cocktail black and too much makeup. Her being dressed up like that always creeps me out, like we’re headed to a funeral.

Of course, I was creeped out anyway—we were in Minerva’s neighborhood now. Big brooding brownstones slid past outside, all tricked out like haunted houses, turrets and iron railings and tiny windows way up high. My stomach started to flutter, and I suddenly wished it was both of us going to some dress-up party, everyone drinking champagne and being clueless, and next year’s budget for the Egyptian Wing the big topic of consternation. Or, at worst, talking about the sanitation crisis, instead of staring out the window at it.

Mom detected my flutters—which she’s pretty good at—and took my hand. “How’s Minerva doing, poor thing?”

I shrugged, glad now that I’d scrounged a ride. Mom’s minor annoyances had distracted me almost the whole way. Waiting for the subway, staring down at the rats on the tracks, would’ve totally reminded me of where I was going.

“Better. She says.”

“What do the doctors say?”

I didn’t even shrug. I wasn’t allowed to tell Mom that there were no doctors anymore, just an esoterica. We stayed silent until the limo pulled up outside Minerva’s house. Night was falling by then, lights going on. The brownstone’s darkened windows made the block look like it was missing a tooth.

The street looked different, as if the last two months had sapped something from it. Garbage was piled high on the streets, the sanitation crisis much more obvious out here in Brooklyn, but I didn’t see any rats scuttling around. There seemed to be a lot of stray cats, though.

“This used to be such a nice neighborhood,” Mom said. “Do you need Elvis to collect you?”

“No. That’s okay.”

“Well, call him if you change your mind,” Mom said as the door opened. “And don’t take the train too late.”

I slipped out past Elvis, annoyance rising in me again. Mom knew I hated the subway late at night, and that Minerva’s company didn’t exactly make me want to dally.

Elvis and I traded our funny little salute. But then he glanced up at the house, lines creasing his forehead. Something skittered in the garbage bags by our feet—stray cats or not, rats were in residence.

“Are you sure you won’t be wanting a ride home, Pearl?” he rumbled softly.

“Positive. Thanks, though.”

Mom likes all conversations to include her, so she scooted closer across the limo’s backseat. “What time did you get in last night anyway?”

“Right after eleven.”

She pursed her lips the slightest discernible amount, showing she knew I was lying, and I gave her the tiniest possible eye-roll to show I didn’t care.

“Well, see you
at
eleven tonight, then.”

I snorted a little for Elvis. The only way Mom was coming home before midnight was if they ran out of champagne at the museum, or if the mummies all got loose.

I imagined old-movie mummies in tattered bandages. Nice and nonscary.

Then her voice softened. “Give my love to Minerva.”

“Okay,” I said, waving and turning away, flinching as the door boomed shut behind me. “I’ll try.”

Luz de la Sueno opened the door and waved me in quick, like she was worried about flies zipping in behind. Or maybe she didn’t want the neighbors to see her new decorations, seeing as how Halloween was more than two months away.

My nostrils wrinkled at the smell of garlic tea brewing, not to mention the other scents coming from the kitchen, overpowering and unidentifiable. These days, New York seemed to disappear behind me when I came through Minerva’s door, as if the brownstone had one foot in some other city, somewhere ancient and crumbling, overgrown.

“She is much better,” Luz said, ushering me toward the stairs. “And excited you are visiting.”

“That’s great,” I said, but I hesitated for a moment in the foyer. Luz’s take on Minerva’s illness had always been a bit too mystical for me, but after what I’d witnessed the night before, I figured the esoterica was at least a little noncrazy.

“Luz, can I ask you a question? About something I saw?”

“You saw something? Outside?” Her eyes widened, drifting to the shaded windows.

“No, back in Manhattan.”

“
Si
?” Luz said. The intensity of her gaze was freaking me out as usual.

“There was this woman,” I said. “Around the corner from us. She went crazy, throwing all this stuff out the window.”

“
Si
.” Luz nodded. “That is the sickness. It is spreading now. You are still careful, yes?”

“Yep. No boys for me.” I put my hands up. Luz believed everything was because of too much sex—part of her religious thing. “But it looked like her own stuff. Not like when Minerva broke up with Mark, hating everything he’d given her.”

“Yes, but it is the same. The sickness, it makes the infected not want to be what they were before. They must throw away everything to make the change.” She crossed herself—
the change
was what she was trying to prevent in Minerva.

“But Min didn’t trash all her stuff did she?”

“Not so much.” Luz fingered the cross around her neck. “She is very spiritual, not joined to things. But to people, and to
la musica
.”

“Oh.” That made a kind of sense. When Minerva had cracked up, she’d thrown away Mark and the rest of Nervous System first. And then her classes and all our friends, one by one. I’d stuck with her the longest, until everyone hated me for staying friends with her, and then she’d finally tossed me too.

That meant Moz had been right: the crazy woman had been getting rid of her own stuff, throwing her whole life out the window. I wondered how he’d known.

I thought about the mirrors upstairs, all covered with velvet. Min didn’t want to see her own face, to hear her own name—suddenly it all made sense.

Luz touched my shoulder. “That is why it is good you are here. I think maybe now, Pearl, you can do more than I.”

I felt the music player in my pocket, loaded up with Big Riff. I couldn’t do anything myself—I wasn’t some kind of skull-wielding esoterica—but maybe this fexcellent music …

Luz started up the stairs, waving for me to follow.

“One more thing: I think I saw angels.”

She stopped and turned, crossing herself again. “
Angeles de la lucha
? They were fast? On the rooftops?”

I nodded. “Like you told me to watch for around here.”

“And they took this woman?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I got the hell out of there.”

“Good.” She reached out and stroked my face, her fingers rough and smelling of herbs. “It is not for you, the struggle that is coming.”

“So where do the angels take you?” I whispered.

Luz closed her eyes. “To somewhere far away.”

“What, like heaven?”

She shook her head. “No. On an airplane. To a place where they make the change firm in you. So you can fight for them in the struggle.” She took my hand. “But that is not for you—not for Minerva. Come.”

The rest of the way up, there were lots of new decorations to check out. The stairway walls were covered with wooden crosses, a thousand little stamped-metal figures nailed into each one. The figures were nonweird shapes—shoes, dresses, trees, dogs, musical instruments—but the wild jumble of them made me wonder if someone had put normality into a blender, then set it on disintegrate.

And of course there were the skulls. Their painted black eyes stared down at us from the shadows, every floor a little darker as we climbed. The windows up here were blacked out, the mirrors draped with red velvet. Street noises faded as we climbed, the air growing as still as a sunken ship.

Outside Minerva’s room, Luz bent to pick up a towel from the floor, sighing apologetically. “It is only me tonight. The family are more tired every day.”

“Anything I can do to help?” I whispered.

Luz smiled. “You are here. That is help.”

She pulled a few leaves from her pocket, crushing them together in her hands. They smelled like fresh-cut grass, or mint. She knelt and rubbed her palms on my sneakers and the legs of my jeans.

I’d always kind of rolled my eyes at her spells before, but tonight I felt in need of protection.

“Maybe you will sing to her.”

I swallowed, wondering if Luz had somehow divined what I’d been planning. “Sing? But you always said—”

“
Si
.” Her eyes sparked in the darkness. “But she is better now. However, to keep you safe…”

She pressed a familiar little doll into my hands, stroking its tattered red yarn hair into place. It stared up at me, smiling maniacally, one button eye dangling from two black threads, setting my stomach fluttering again.

The doll was the creepiest of Luz’s rituals of protection. But suddenly it made sense. It had always been Min’s favorite back when we were little, the only object she’d ever really been attached to, besides the ring she’d thrown at Mark in front of the whole System. I was glad to have the doll tonight, even if Minerva hadn’t been violent since her family had given up on drugs and doctors and had switched to Luz.

I wondered how they’d found her. Were esotericas listed in the phone book? Was Esoterica a cool band name, or too lateral? Was the Big Riff in my pocket really a kind of magic—

“Don’t be afraid,” Luz whispered. Then she opened the door with one strong hand, the other pushing me into the darkness. “Go and sing.”

—MINERVA—

Pearl was glowing. Her face shimmered as the door swung closed, setting the candle flickering jaggedly.

“You’re shiny,” I murmured, squinting.

She swallowed, licking her upper lip. I could smell her nervous saltiness.

“It’s hot out.”

“It’s summer, right?”

“Yeah, middle of August.” Pearl frowned, even though I’d been right.

I closed my eyes, remembering April, May … all the way up to graduation. Pearl was jealous because she had to go back to Juilliard next year, though everyone else in the Nerv—

The thing inside me flinched.

Zombie made a grumpy noise and rolled over on my belly. His big green eyes opened slowly, surveying Pearl.

“I have good news,” she said softly. When I first got sick, I hated the sound of her voice, but not anymore. I was getting better—I didn’t hate Pearl, or anyone human. All I hated now was the Vile Thing she brought every time she visited. It hung from her hands, one eyeball dangling, leering at me.