Peeps (4 page)

After a few moments, she took her hands from the papers, steepled her fingers, and peered at me. “So, let me guess…”

This was how Dr. Prolix started every session, telling me what was in my own head. She wasn’t much for the so-how-does-that-make-you-feel school of head-shrinking. I noticed that her voice had the same dry timbre as Sarah’s, with a hint of dead, rustling leaves among her words.

“You have finally reached your goal,” she said. “And yet your long-sought redemption isn’t what you thought it would be.”

I had to sigh. The worst part of visiting the Shrink was being read like a book. But I decided not to make things
too
easy for her and just shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a long day drinking coffee and waiting for the clouds to clear. And then Sarah put up a wicked fight.”

“But the difficulty of a challenge usually makes its accomplishment more satisfying, not less.”

“Easy for you to say.” The bruises on my chest were still throbbing, and my ribs were knitting back together in an itchy way. “But it wasn’t really the fight. The messed-up thing was that Sarah recognized me. She said my name.”

Dr. Prolix’s Botoxed eyes widened even farther. “When you captured your other girlfriends, they didn’t speak to you, did they?”

“No. Just screamed when they saw my face.”

She smiled gently. “That means they loved you.”

“I doubt it. None of them knew me that well.” Other than Sarah, who I’d met before I turned contagious, every woman I’d ever started a relationship with had begun to change in a matter of weeks.

“But they must have felt something for you, or the anathema wouldn’t have taken hold.” She smiled. “You’re a very attractive boy, Cal.”

I cleared my throat. A compliment from a five-hundred-year-old is like when your aunt says you’re cute. Not helpful in any way.

“How’s that going anyway?” she added.

“What? The enforced celibacy? Just great. Loving it.”

“Did you try the rubber band trick?”

I held up my wrist. The Shrink had suggested I wear a rubber band there and
ping
myself with it every time I had a sexual thought. Negative reinforcement, like swatting your dog with a rolled-up newspaper.

“Mmm. A bit raw, isn’t it?” she said.

I glanced down at my wrist, which looked like I’d been wearing a razor-wire bracelet. “Evolution versus a rubber band. Which would you bet on?”

She nodded sympathetically. “Shall we turn back to Sarah?”

“Please. At least I know she really loved me; she almost killed me.” I stretched in the chair, my still-tender ribs creaking. “Here’s the funny thing, though. She was nested upstairs, with these big-ass windows looking out over the river. You could see Manhattan perfectly.”

“What’s so strange about that, Cal?”

I glanced away from her gaze, but the blank eyes of the dolls weren’t much better. Finally, I stared at the floor, where a tiny tumbleweed of dust was being sucked toward Dr. Prolix. Inescapably.

“Sarah was
in love
with Manhattan. The streets, the parks, everything about it. She owned all these New York photo books, knew the histories of buildings. How could she stand to look at the skyline?” I glanced up at Dr. Prolix. “Could her anathema be, like,
broken
somehow?”

The Shrink’s fingers steepled again as she shook her head. “Not broken, exactly. The anathema can work in mysterious ways. My patients and the legends both report similar obsessions. I believe your generation calls it
stalking
.”

“Um, maybe. How do you mean?”

“The anathema creates a great hatred for beloved things. But that doesn’t mean that the love itself is entirely extinguished.”

I frowned. “But I thought that was the point. Getting you to reject your old life.”

“Yes, but the human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.” Dr. Prolix leaned back in her chair. “You’re nineteen, Cal. Haven’t you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love.”

“Uh, yeah. That would pretty much be stalking.” I nodded. “Kind of a fatal attraction thing?”

“Yes,
fatal
is an apt word. It happens among the undead as well.”

A little shiver went through me. Only the really old hunters use the word
undead
, but you have to admit it has a certain ring to it.

“There are legends,” she said, “and modern case studies in my files. Some of the undead find a balancing point between the attraction of their old obsessions and the revulsion of the anathema. They live on this knife’s edge, always pushed and pulled.”

“Hoboken,” I said softly.
Or my sex life, for that matter
.

We were silent for a while, and I remembered Sarah’s face after the pills had taken effect. She’d gazed at me without terror. I wondered if Sarah had ever stalked me, watching from the darkness after disappearing from my life, wanting a last glimpse before her Manhattan anathema had driven her across the river.

I cleared my throat. “Couldn’t that mean that Sarah might be more human than most peeps? After I gave her the pills, she wanted to see her Elvis doll … that is, the anathema I’d brought. She
asked
to see it.”

Dr. Prolix raised an eyebrow. “Cal, you aren’t fantasizing that Sarah might recover completely, are you?”

“Um … no?”

“That you might one day get back together? That you could have a lover again? One your own age, whom you couldn’t infect, because she already carries the disease?”

I swallowed and shook my head no, not wanting the lecture in Peeps 101 repeated to me: Full-blown peeps never come back.

You can whack the parasite into submission with drugs, but it’s hard to wipe it out completely. Like a tapeworm, it starts off microscopic but grows much bigger, flooding your body with different parts of itself. It wraps around your spine, creates cysts in your brain, changes your whole being to suit its purposes. Even if you could remove it surgically, the eggs can hide in your bone marrow or your brain. The symptoms can be controlled, but skip one pill, miss one shot, or just have a really upsetting bad-hair day, and you go feral all over again. Sarah could never be let loose in a normal human community.

Worse, the mental changes the parasite makes are permanent. Once those anathema switches get thrown in a peep’s brain, it’s pretty hard to convince a peep that they really, really used to
love
chocolate. Or, say, this guy from Texas called Cal.

“But don’t some peeps come back more than others?” I asked.

“The sad truth is, for most of those like Sarah, the struggle never ends. She may well stay this way for the rest of her life, on the edge between anathema and obsession. An uncomfortable fate.”

“Is there any way I can help?” My own words surprised me. I’d never been to the recovery hospital. All I knew about it was that it was way out in the Montana wilds, a safe distance from any cities. Recovering peeps usually don’t want their old boyfriends showing up, but maybe Sarah would be different.

“A familiar face may help her treatment, in time. But not until you deal with your own disquiet, Cal.”

I slumped in my chair. “I don’t even know what my disquiet is. Sarah freaked me out is all. I think I’m still…” I waved a hand in the air. “I just don’t feel…
done
yet.”

The Shrink nodded sagely. “Perhaps that’s because you aren’t done, Cal. There is, after all, one more matter to be settled. Your progenitor.”

I sighed. I’d been over all this before, with Dr. Prolix and the older hunters, and in my own head about a hundred thousand times. It never did any good.

You may have been wondering: If Sarah was my first girlfriend, where did
I
catch the disease?

I wish I knew.

Okay, I obviously knew
how
it happened, and the exact date and pretty close to the exact time. You don’t forget losing your virginity, after all.

But I didn’t actually know
who
it was. I mean, I got her name and everything—Morgan. Well, her first name anyway.

The big problem was, I didn’t remember
where
. Not a clue.

Well, one clue: “Bahamalama-Dingdong.”

It was only two days after I first got to New York, fresh off the plane from Texas, ready to start my first year at college. I already wanted to study biology, even though I’d heard that was a tough major.

Little did I know.

At that point, I could hardly find my way around the city. I got the general concept of uptown and downtown, although they didn’t really match north and south, I knew from my compass. (Don’t laugh, they’re useful.) I’m pretty sure that this all happened somewhere downtown, because the buildings weren’t quite so tall and the streets were pretty busy that night. I remember lights rippling on water at some point, so I might have been close to the Hudson. Or maybe the East River.

And I remember the Bahamalama-Dingdong. Several, in fact. They’re some kind of drink. My sense of smell wasn’t superhuman back then, but I’m pretty sure they had rum in them. Whatever they had, there was
a lot
of it. And something sweet too. Maybe pineapple juice, which would make the Bahamalama-Dingdong a close cousin of the Bahama Mama.

Now, the Bahama Mama can be found on Google or in cocktail books. It’s rum, pineapple juice, and a liqueur called Nassau Royale, and it is from the Bahamas. But the Bahamalama-Dingdong has much more shadowy origins. After I found out what I’d been infected with and realized who must have done it, I searched every bar I could find in the Village. But I never met a single bartender who knew how to make one. Or who’d even
heard
of them.

Like a certain Morgan Whatever, the Bahamalama-Dingdong had come out of the darkness, seduced me, then disappeared.

These searches didn’t evoke a single memory flashback. No hazy images of pinball machines jumped out at me, no sudden glimpses of Morgan’s long dark hair and pale skin. And, no—being a carrier doesn’t make you pale-skinned or gothy-looking. Get real. Morgan was probably just some goth type who didn’t know she was about to turn into a bloodthirsty maniac.

Unless, of course, she was someone like me: a carrier. But one who got off on changing lovers into Deeps. Either way, I hadn’t seen her since.

So this is all I can remember:

There I was, sitting in a bar in New York City and thinking,
Wow, I’m sitting in a bar in New York City
. This thought probably runs through the heads of a lot of newly arrived freshmen who manage to get served. I was drinking a Bahamalama-Dingdong because the bar I was sitting in was “The Home of the Bahamalama-Dingdong.” It said so on a sign outside.

A pale-skinned woman with long dark hair sat beside me and said, “What the hell is that thing?”

Maybe it was the frozen banana bobbing in my drink that provoked the question. I suddenly felt a bit silly. “Well, it’s this drink that lives here. Says so on the sign out front.”

“Is it good?”

It was good, but I only shrugged. “Yeah. Kind of sweet, though.”

“Kind of girly-looking, don’t you think?”

I did think. The drink had been a vague sort of embarrassment to me since it had arrived, frozen banana bobbing to the music. But the other guys in the bar had seemed not to notice. And they were all pretty tough-looking, what with their leather chaps and all.

I pushed the banana down into the drink, but it popped back up. It wasn’t really trying to be obnoxious, but frozen bananas have a lower specific density than rum and pineapple juice, it turns out.

“I don’t know about girly,” I said. “Looks like a boy to me.”

She smiled at my accent. “
Yerr
not from around here, are
yew
?”

“Nope. I’m from Texas.” I took a sip.

“Texas? Well, hell!” She slapped me on the back. I’d already figured out in those two days that Texas is one of the “brand-name” states. Being from Texas is much cooler than being from a merely recognizable state, like Connecticut or Florida, or a
huh
? state, like South Dakota. Texas gets you noticed.

“I’ll have one of those,” she said to the bartender, pointing to my Bahamalama-Dingdong, which pointed back. Then she said her name was Morgan.

Morgan drank hers, I drank mine. We both drank a few more. My recall of subsequent events gets steadily worse. But I do remember that she had a cat, a flat-screen TV, black satin sheets, and a knack for saying what she thought—and that’s pretty much all I remember, except for waking up the next morning, getting kicked out of an unfamiliar apartment because she had to go somewhere and was looking all embarrassed, and heading home with a hangover that made navigation difficult. By the time I got back to my dorm room, I had no idea where I’d started out.

All I had to show for the event was a newfound confidence with women, slowly manifesting superpowers, and an appetite for rare meat.

“We’ve been over all that,” I said to Dr. Prolix. “I still can’t help you.”

“This is not about helping me,” she said firmly. “You won’t come to terms with your disease until you find your progenitor.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve tried. But like you’ve said before, she must have moved away or died or something.” That had always been the big mystery. If Morgan was still around, we’d be seeing her handiwork everywhere—peeps popping up all over the city, a bloodbath every time she picked up some foolish young Texan in a bar. Or at least a few corpses every now and then. “I mean, it’s been over a year, and we don’t have a single clue.”

“
Didn’t
have a clue,” she said, and rang a small, high-pitched bell on her desk. Somewhere out of sight but within earshot, a minder tapped away at a computer keyboard. A moment later, the printer on my side of the red line began to hum, its cartridge jerking to life below the plastic cover.

“This was recently brought to my attention, Cal. Now that you’ve dealt with Sarah, I thought you might want to see it.”