Peeps p-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  When the infected cow makes a cow pie, as we say in Texas, a passel of lancet fluke eggs winds up in the pasture. A snail comes along and eats some of the cow pie, because that’s what snails do. Now the snail is infected. The fluke eggs hatch inside the unlucky snail’s belly and then start to drill their way out through its skin.

  Fortunately for the snail, it has a way to protect itself: slime.

  The sliminess of the snail’s skin lubricates the flukes as they drill their way out, and the snail survives their exit. By the time the flukes escape, they’re entirely encased in a slimeball, unable to move. They’ll never mess with any snails again, that’s for sure.

  But the flukes don’t mind this turn of events. It turns out they wanted to be covered in slime. The whole trip through the snail was just evolution’s way of getting the flukes all slimy. Because they’re headed to their next host: an ant.

  Here’s something you didn’t want to know: Ants love slimeballs.

  Slimeballs make a delicious meal, even when they have a few hundred flukes inside. So sooner or later, some unlucky ant comes along, eats the slimeball, and winds up with a bellyful of parasites.

  Inside the ant, the lancet flukes quickly organize themselves. They get ready for some parasite mind control.

  “Do ants even have minds?” you may ask. Hard to say. But they do have tiny clusters of nerves, about midway in complexity between human brains and TV remote controls. A few dozen flukes take up a position at each of these nerve clusters and begin to change the ant’s behavior.

  The flukey ant gets religion. Sort of.

  During the day, it acts normal. It wanders around on the ground, gathering food (possibly more slimeballs) and hanging out with the other ants. It still smells healthy to them, so they don’t try to drive it off as they would a sick ant.

  But when night falls, the ant does something flukey.

  It leaves the other ants behind and climbs up a tall blade of grass, getting as high as it can off the ground. Up there under the stars, it waits all night alone.

  What does it think it’s doing? I always wonder.

  Ants may not think anything ever. But if they do, maybe they have visions of strange creatures coming along to carry them to another world, like X-Files geeks in the Roswell desert waiting for a spaceship to whisk them away. Or perhaps Dicrocoelium dendriticum really is a religion, and the ant thinks some great revelation will strike if it just spends enough nights up at the top of a blade of grass. Like a swami meditating on a mountain, or a monk fasting in a tiny cell.

  I’d like to think that in its final moments the ant is happy, or at least relieved, when a cow’s mouth comes chomping down on its little blade of grass.

  I know the flukes are happy. They’re back in a cow’s stomach, after all.

  Parasite heaven.

  Chapter 7

  OPTIMUM VIRULENCE

  I didn’t really sleep that night. I never do.

  Sure, I take my clothes off, get into bed, and close my eyes. But the whole unconsciousness thing doesn’t quite happen. My mind keeps humming, like in those hours when you’re coming down with something—not quite sick yet, but a bit light-headed, a fever threatening, illness buzzing at the edge of your awareness like a mosquito in the dark.

  The Shrink says it’s the sound of my immune system fighting the parasite. There’s a war in my body every minute, a thousand T-and B-cells battering the horned head of the beast, prying at its hooks along my muscles and spine, finding and destroying its spores hidden inside transmuted red blood cells. On top of which there’s the parasite fighting back, reprogramming my own tissues to feed it, tangling up my immune defenses with false alarms and bogus enemies.

  This guerrilla war is always going on, but only when I’m lying in silence can I actually hear it.

  You’d think this constant battle would tear me apart, or leave me exhausted come daylight, but the parasite is too well made for that. It doesn’t want me dead. I’m a carrier, after all—I have to stay alive to ensure its spread. Like every parasite, the thing inside me has evolved to find a precarious balance called optimum virulence. It takes as much as it can get away with, sucking out the nutrients it needs to create more offspring. But no parasite wants to starve the host too quickly, not while it’s getting a free ride. So, as long as it gets fed, it backs off. I may eat like a four-hundred-pound guy, but I never get fat. The parasite uses the nutrients to churn out its spores in my blood and saliva and semen, with enough left over to give me predatory strength and hyped-up senses.

  Optimum virulence is why most deaths from parasites are long and lingering—in the case of a carrier like me, the time it takes to die happens to be longer than a normal human life span. That’s the way the older peep hunters talk about it: not so much immortality as a centuries-long downward spiral. Maybe that’s why they use the word undead.

  So I lie awake every night, listening to the gnawing, calorie-burning struggle inside me, and getting up for the occasional midnight snack.

  That particular long night, I found myself thinking about Lace, remembering her smell, along with another flood of details I hadn’t even known I’d spotted. Her right hand sometimes made a fist when she talked, her eyebrows moved a lot beneath their concealing fringe, and—unlike girls back in Texas—her voice didn’t rise in pitch at the end of a sentence, unless it really was a question, and sometimes not even then.

  We’d agreed to meet in my favorite diner at noon the next day, after her morning class. Neither of us wanted to discuss things in front of her friends, and something about the aftertaste of pepperoni doesn’t go with talk of gristle on the wall.

  Normally, I don’t like to torture myself, hanging around with cute girls my age, but this was job-related, after all. Besides, maybe a little bit of torture is okay. I didn’t want to wind up like the Shrink, after all, collecting old dolls or something even weirder.

  And I figured it would be nice to hang out with someone from outside the Night Watch once in a while, someone who thought I was a normal guy.

  So I stayed awake all night, thinking of lies to tell her.

  I got up early and reported to the Night Watch first.

  The Watch’s offices are pretty much like any other city government building, except older, danker, and even deeper underground. There are the usual metal detectors, petty bureaucrats behind glass, and ancient wooden file drawers stuffed with four centuries’ worth of paperwork. Except for the odd fanatic like Dr. Rat, no one looks remotely happy to be at work there, or even slightly motivated.

  It’s a wonder the whole city isn’t infected.

  I went to Records first. In terms of square footage, Records is the biggest department of the Watch. They’ve got back doors into regular city data, and also their own paper trails going back to the days when Manhattan was called New Amsterdam. Records can find out who owns what anywhere in the city, who owned it before that, and before that … back to the Dutch farmers who stole it from the Manhattan Indians.

  And they’re not just into real estate—Records has a database of every suspicious death or disappearance since 1648 and can produce a clipping of pretty much every newspaper story involving infectious diseases, lunatic attackers, or rat population explosions published since the printing press reached the New World.

  Records has two mottos. One is:

  The Secrets of the City Are Ours

  The other:

  NO, WE DO NOT HAVE PENS!

  Bring your own. You’ll need them. You see, like every other department in the city, Records runs on Almighty Forms. There are forms that tell the Night Mayor’s office what we hunters are doing—starting an investigation, ending one, or reaching various points along the way. There are forms that make things happen, from installing rat traps to getting lab work done. There are forms with which to requisition peep-hunting equipment, from tiger cages to Tasers. (The form for commandeering a genuine NYC garbage truck may be thirty-four pages long, but one day I will think of some reason
to fill it out, I swear to you.) There are even forms that activate other forms or switch them off, that cause other forms to mutate, thus bringing newly formed forms into the world. Put together, all these forms are the vast spiral of information that defines us, guides our growth, and makes sure our future looks like our past—they are the DNA of the Night Watch.

  Fortunately, what I wanted that morning wasn’t quite DNA-complicated. First, I requisitioned some standard equipment, the sort of peep-hunting toys that you can pull off the rack. Then I asked for some information about Lace’s building: who owned it, who had originally rented all the seventh-floor apartments, and if anything noticeably weird had ever happened there. Getting answers to these simple questions wasn’t easy, of course. Nothing ever is, down in the bowels of a bureaucracy. But after only three hours, my paperwork passed muster with the ancient form-dragon behind the bulletproof glass, was rolled into a pneumatic-tube missile, and was launched on its journey into the Underworld with a swish.

  They’d call me when it came back, so I headed off to meet Lace at my favorite diner. On the way, I realized that this was my first date in six months—even if it was only a “date” in the lame sense of being an arrangement to meet someone. Still, the concept made me nervous, all my underused muscles of dating anxiety springing into action. I started checking out my reflection in shop windows and wondering if Lace would like the Kill Fee T-shirt I was wearing. Why hadn’t I put on something less threadbare? And what was with my hair these days? Apparently, Dr. Rat, the Shrink, and my other Night Watch pals didn’t feel compelled to tell me it was sticking out at the sides.

  After two minutes in front of a bank window, trying to stick it behind my ears, I despaired of fixing it. Then I despaired of my life in general.

  What was the point of a good haircut when nothing could come of it anyway?

  Lace sat down across from me, wearing the same leather jacket as the night before, this time over a wool dress. Under a beret that was the same dark brown as her eyes, her hair still smelled like jasmine-scented shampoo. She looked like she’d had about as much sleep as I had.

  Seeing Lace in the daylight, both of us sober, I realized for the first time that she might be a few years older than me. Her leather jacket was brown—with buttons, not black and zippered like mine—and the rest of her outfit looked like something you would wear to an office job. My Kill Fee T-shirt felt suddenly dorky, and I hunched my shoulders together so my jacket would fall across the screaming demon on my chest.

  “What up?” she said, feeling my scrutiny, and I dropped my eyes back to the table.

  “Uh, nothing. How was your class?” I asked, spattering some more Tabasco over my scrambled eggs and bacon. Before she’d arrived, I’d already consumed a pepper steak to calm my nerves.

  “All right, I guess. Some guest lecturer yakking about ethics.”

  “Ethics?”

  “Journalistic ethics.”

  “Oh.” I stirred my black coffee for no particular reason. “Journalists have ethics?”

  Lace cast her eyes around for a waiter or waitress, one finger pointing at my coffee. She nodded as the connection was made, then turned back to me. “They’re supposed to. You know, don’t reveal your sources. Don’t destroy people’s lives just to get a story. Don’t pay people for interviews.”

  “You’re studying journalism?”

  “Journalism and the law, actually.”

  I nodded, wondering if that was an undergraduate major. Somehow, it didn’t sound like one. I revised Lace’s age up to the lower to mid-twenties and felt myself relax a little. Suddenly, this was even less a date than it had been a moment before.

  “Cool,” I said.

  She looked at me like I might be retarded.

  I tried to smile back at her, realizing that my small-talk muscles were incredibly rusty, the result of socializing only with people in a secret organization who pretty much only socialized with one another. Of course, if I could just steer the conversation to rinderpest infection rates in Africa, I knew I’d blow her away.

  Rebecky—at sixty-seven and three hundred pounds, my favorite waitress in the world to flirt with—appeared and handed Lace a cup of coffee and a menu.

  “How’re you doing there, Cal?” she asked.

  “Just fine, thanks.”

  “You sure? You haven’t been eating much lately.” She gave me a sly wink.

  “On a diet,” I said, patting my stomach.

  Her standard response: “Wish that diet worked on me.”

  Rebecky chuckled as she walked away. She’s amazed by my appetite, but her repertoire of where-does-Cal-put-it-all jokes had shrunk to the bare minimum over the last months. As a guy with something to hide, there’s one thing I’ve learned: People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that’s the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.

  Lace looked up from her menu. “Speaking of funny diets, Cal, what the hell happened in my building last winter?”

  I leaned back and sipped coffee. Evidently, Lace wasn’t up for small talk either. “You in a hurry or something?”

  “My lease is up in two months, dude. And last night you promised you wouldn’t jerk me around.”

  “I’m not jerking you around. You should try the pepper steak.”

  “Vegetarian.”

  “Oh,” I said, my parasite rumbling at the concept.

  Lace flagged down Rebecky and ordered potato salad, while I crammed some bacon into my mouth. Potato salad is an Atkins nightmare, and more important, the parasite hates it. Peeps prefer protein, red in tooth and claw.

  “So tell me what you know,” she said.

  “Okay.” I cleared my throat. “First of all, I’m not really Morgan’s cousin.”

  “Duh.”

  I frowned. This revelation hadn’t provided the same oomph that it had on my mental flowchart of the conversation. “But I am looking for her.”

  “Again: duh, dude. So you’re like a private detective or something? Or stalker ex-boyfriend?”

  “No. I work for the city.”

  “Cal, you are so not a cop.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how she’d come to this assessment, but I couldn’t argue. “No, I’m not. I work for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Sexually Transmitted Disease Control.”

  “Sexually transmitted?” She raised an eyebrow. “Wait. Are you sure you’re not a stalker?”

  I reached for my wallet and flopped it open, revealing one of the items I’d picked up from the Night Watch that morning. We’ve got a big machine that spits out laminated ID cards and badges, credentials for dozens of city agencies, both real and imaginary. This silver-plated badge was very impressive, with the words Health Field Officer curving along the bottom. In the ID case next to it, my photo stared grimly out at her.

  She stared at it for a moment, then said, “You know you’re wearing the same shirt today as in that picture?”

  I froze for a second, realizing that, yep, I hadn’t changed since that morning. In a brilliant save, I glanced down at my Kill Fee T-shirt and said, “What? You don’t like it?”

  “Not particularly. So what’s that job all about? Do you, like, hunt people down and arrest them for spreading the clap?”

  I cleared my throat, pushing my empty plate away. “Okay, here’s how it works. About a year ago, I was given a disease. Um, let me put that another way—I was assigned a specific carrier of a certain disease. I tracked down all his sexual partners and encouraged them to get tested, then I tracked down their sexual partners, and so on.” I shrugged. “I just keep going where the chain of infection leads me, informing people along the way. Sometimes I don’t get enough specific information about someone, so I have to poke around a little, like I was last night. For one thing, I don’t even know Morgan’s last name.” I raised my eyebrows hopefully.

  Lace shrugged. “Me neither. So let me get this straight: You tell people they’ve got STDs? That’s your job, dude?”<
br />
  “No, their doctors do that. All I’m allowed to do is tell them they’re at risk. Then I try to get them to cooperate and give me a list of people they’ve slept with. Someone’s got to do it.”

  “I guess. Wow, though.”

  “So far I’ve spent a whole year tracking down the offspring—or rather, the infections from that one carrier.” I smiled at my cover story’s cleverness. Nifty how I worked the truth in there, huh?

  “Wow,” Lace repeated softly, her eyes still wide.

  Now that I thought about it, the job I’d chosen for myself did sound pretty cool. A little bit of undercover work, some social consciousness, an air of illicit mystery and human tragedy. One of those careers where you’d have to face life’s harsh realities and be a good listener. By now, she had to figure I was older than nineteen—more like her age, and probably wise beyond my years.

  Her potato salad arrived, and after a fortifying bite of carbs, she said, “So what’s your disease?”

  “My disease? I didn’t say I had a disease.”

  “The one you’re tracking, dude.”

  “Oh. Right. I’m not at liberty to say. Confidentiality. We have ethics too.”

  “Sure you do.” Her eyes narrowed. “And that’s why you didn’t want to talk in front of my friends last night?”

  I nodded. My cover story was sliding into place perfectly.

  She put down her fork. “But it’s one of those sexually transmitted diseases that makes people paint stuff on the walls in blood?”

  I swallowed, wondering if perhaps my cover story might have a few loose ends.

  “Well, some STDs can cause dementia,” I said. “Late-stage syphilis, for example, makes you go crazy. It eats your brain. Not that syphilis is what we’re talking about here, necessarily.”

  “Wait a second, Cal. You think all the people on the seventh floor of my building were shagging one another? And going all demented from it?” She made a face at her potato salad. “Do you guys get a lot of that kind of thing?”

  “Um, it happens. Some STDs can cause … promiscuity. Sort of.” I felt my cover story entering the late stages of its life span and suppressed an urge to mention rabies (which was a little too close to the truth, what with the frothing and the biting). “Right now, I can’t be sure what happened up there. But my job is to find out where all those people went, especially if they’re infected.”