“This is weird,” she said.
“Yeah. But good.”
“Mmm. Let’s go somewhere a little more private.”
I nodded. “Where?”
“Anywhere.”
We ran up the stairs and into Union Square, crossing the park, walking without a plan. The city seemed weirdly blurry around us. My connection with Lace was so intense, everyone else seemed faded and remote. The parasite’s imperative mixed with six months of celibacy screaming inside me, heady and insistent.
I thought about risking her apartment—after all, she’d have to pick up some clothes some time—and started to draw Lace toward the Hudson. But then my eyes began to catch glimpses of them. Their smells grew under the current of humanity in the streets.
Predators.
They were spread out across the crowd, walking not much faster than normal humans, but somehow completely different. They moved like leopards through high grass, leaving only the faintest stir behind them. Maybe a dozen, all more or less my age.
No one else seemed to notice them, but their uncanny movements made my head pound. I’d never seen so many carriers in one place before. Night Watch hunters always work alone, but this was a pack.
And the funny thing was, they were really sexy.
“Cal…?” Lace said softly.
“Yeah. I see them.”
“What are they?”
“They’re like us. Infected.”
“The Night Watch?”
“No. Something else.”
By the time I spotted Morgan Ryder, she was already standing in front of us, blocking our path, wearing all black and an amused expression.
“What do we do?” Lace asked, squeezing my hand hard.
I sighed, bringing her to a halt.
“I guess we talk to them.”
“How did you find us?”
Morgan smiled, taking a drink of water before she answered. She’d taken us to a hotel bar on Union Square. The others had kept moving, except for one waiting at the door of the place and cradling a cell phone. Occasionally, he glanced back at her and signaled.
Even with Lace beside me, I was having trouble not staring at Morgan. Memories of the night I’d been infected were rushing back into me. Her eyes were green, I finally recalled. And her black hair set such a contrast, gathered in locks as thick as shoelaces against her pale skin.
“We didn’t find you,” she said. “That is, we weren’t looking for you. We were after something else. Something underneath.”
“The worm,” Lace said.
Morgan nodded. “You smelled it?”
“We saw it,” Lace said. “Took a big chunk out of it too.”
“It was in the old Eighteenth Street station,” I said.
Morgan nodded and made a hand gesture to the carrier in front, and he spoke into his cell phone.
Our beers arrived, and Morgan raised hers into the air. “Well done, then.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“What? Are you finally going to listen to me, Cal? Not going to run away?”
“I’m listening. And we already know about the old strain and the new, and that we’re meant to fight the worms. But what you’re doing is crazy—infecting people at random is no way to go about this.”
“It’s not as random as you think, Cal.” She leaned back into the plush couch. “Immune systems are tricky things. They can do a lot of damage.”
I nodded, thinking about wolbachia driving T- and B-cells crazy, your immune defenses eating your own eyeballs.
But Lace hadn’t benefited from six months of parasitology. “How do you mean?”
Morgan held the cold beer against her cheek. “Let’s say you’ve got a deadly fever—your body temperature is climbing past the limit, high enough to damage your brain. That’s your immune system hoping that your illness will fry before you do. Killing the invader is worth losing a few brain cells.”
Lace blinked. “Dude. What does that have to do with monsters?”
“We’re our species’ immune system, Lace. Humanity needs a lot of us, and soon. The worms are a lot worse than a few more peeps, and chaos is a fair trade for our protection. It’s like losing those brain cells when you get a fever.” Morgan turned to me. “And it’s hardly random, Cal. It’s quite elegant, really. As the worms push closer to the surface, they create panic in the Underworld broods; a nervous reaction spreads through the rat reservoirs that carry the old strain. The rats come up through the sewers and PATH tunnels and swimming pool drains. Then a few lucky people, like me, get bitten and we begin to spread the strain. It’s happening all over the world, right now.”
“So where’s the Night Watch in all this? I mean, who elected you the carrier queen? Or whatever?”
“I’m in charge because my family knew what to do, once they saw what I had become. Once I felt the basement calling me, drawing me down.” Her eyelids half closed, fluttering, and she took a slow, deep breath. “I knew the whole planet was in trouble… I was so horny.”
Lace and I exchanged a glance.
“As for the Night Watch”—Morgan rolled her eyes—“they were never more than a temporary measure. I mean, come on, Cal. If you were really fighting to save the world from vampires, you wouldn’t keep it a secret, would you?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” Lace spread her hands. “You don’t hide diseases, you publicize them. And eventually someone comes up with a cure.”
Morgan nodded. “Which is exactly what the old carriers were afraid of—science. A cure for the parasite would erase both peeps and carriers. Meaning that the next time the worms rose up from the Underworld, humanity wouldn’t have anyone to protect it—like switching off your own immune system.” She laughed and took a long drink of beer. “There’s only one logical reason you’d have a secret government organization hunt vampires—if you wanted the vampires to survive.”
“Oh.” I gripped my beer glass, certainties falling away all around me. I saw the rows of dusty file cabinets, the ancient pneumatic tubes, the stacks of endless forms. Inefficiency perfected. “So I’ve been working for a big joke?”
“Don’t be whiny, Cal. The Watch had its uses. By keeping a lid on the new strain, it allowed that to happen.” Morgan pointed out the window at the crowded streets. “Big old cities are like houses of cards, giant cauldrons of infection waiting to happen. This was always the plan, huge reservoirs of humans, a potential army of carriers to take on the ancient enemy.” Morgan’s eyes were bright as she downed the rest of her beer, her throat working to empty it. “We’re just the beginning.”
She thumped her glass on the table, laughing, proud that she was one chosen to be the harbinger of doom. And I could smell the parasite humming in her, making every man and woman in the room glance in our direction, making their palms sweat. Without knowing it, everyone wanted to join Morgan’s army.
The whole thing was madness, but amid all the insanity, one thing kept bugging me. “Why was I kept in the dark? I’m an old-strain carrier, after all.”
For a moment, Morgan looked sheepish. “You were … um, an accident.”
“A what?”
“A little indiscretion of mine. It’s not easy, you know, being a sexual vector.”
“Tell me about it. But I was an accident?”
She sighed. “We didn’t want the science types at the Night Watch catching on, not until we’d reached critical mass. So we started in a controlled way at first, with our house cats and a few kids from the old families. Except for you, Cal.” Morgan sighed. “I only wanted a drink that night. But your accent is just so cute.”
“So you just infected me?” I closed my eyes, realizing how much this sucked. “God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?”
Morgan sighed again. “The whole thing was really embarrassing; my parents sent me to Brooklyn when they found out.” She shrugged. “I thought I’d be safe in a gay bar, okay? What were you doing in there anyway?”
Lace looked
at me sidelong. “You were where?”
I took a sip of beer, swallowed it. “I, uh, hadn’t been in the city … very long. I didn’t know.”
“Hmph. Freshmen. Thank God you turned out to be a natural carrier.” Morgan smiled and patted my knee. “So no harm done.”
“Sure, easy for you to say,” I grumbled. “Couldn’t you have at least told me the truth a little sooner?”
“When those geeks at the Night Watch found you before I did, we couldn’t tell you right away. It just would have confused your pretty head.”
“So when were you going to tell me?” I cried.
“Uh, Cal? Did you miss the last two days? I kept trying. But you kept running away.”
“Oh. Right.”
“A freshman?” Lace said, frowning. “How old are you anyway?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s much more grown up now,” Morgan said, patting my knee again. “Aren’t you, Cal?”
Hoping to move the conversation along, I said, “So what happens now?”
Morgan shrugged. “You two can do whatever you want. Run. Stay. Get laid all over town. But you should probably join up.”
“Join up … with you?”
“Sure. The New Watch could use you.” She waved for the waitress. “And I could use another beer. We’ve been chasing that stupid worm all day.”
I looked at Lace, and she looked back at me. As usual, I didn’t know what to say, but the thought of us fighting together, the exhilaration we’d shared down in the tunnel, sure beat the idea of running off to Montana. This was our city, after all, our species.
“What do you want to do, Cal?” Lace said softly.
I took a deep breath, wondering if I was saying too much, too soon, but saying it anyway. “I want to stay here, with you.”
She nodded slowly, her eyes locked with mine. “Me too.”
“God, you two,” Morgan said. “Just get a room.”
I realized that this was in fact a hotel bar, and that Brooklyn or the West Side seemed much too far away right now. I raised an eyebrow.
Lace smiled. “Dude. Why not?”
EPILOGUE
INFLAMMATION
The orange was fading from the sky, but through my binoculars, the waters of the Hudson sparkled like teeth capped with gold, the river’s choppy surface holding the last dregs of the pollution sunset, which was turning bloodred as it disappeared behind the spiked jaw of New Jersey’s skyline.
A warm, insistent body pushed against my ankles, making noises under its breath. I looked down. “What’s the matter, Corny? I thought you liked it up here.”
He looked up with hungry eyes, assuring me that his annoyance had nothing to do with a fear of heights. Just impatience: It was taking the promised nummies too long to arrive.
At first, bringing Cornelius up to the roof had made me nervous, but Dr. Rat says that peep cats have an improved sense of self-preservation. She also talks a lot about feline high-rise syndrome, the magical ability of cats to survive a fall from any height. In fact, with all the time Dr. Rat spends talking about cats these days, she may need a new nickname.
“Don’t worry, Corny. She’ll be back soon.”
On cue, I heard the scrape of cowboy boots on concrete. A hand reached over the edge of the roof, then another, and Lace pulled herself into view, her face faintly red from the effort.
I frowned. “Don’t you think it’s a little light out to be climbing buildings?”
“You should talk, dude!” Lace said. “At least I wasn’t on the street side.”
“Like there aren’t a million people on the piers?”
She snorted. “They’re all watching the sunset.”
Cornelius yowled, sensing that our argument was delaying nummies.
“Yes, Corny, I love you too,” Lace muttered, slipping off her backpack and unzipping it. She pulled out a paper bag, which gave off the mouthwatering scent of rare hamburgers.
Cornelius began to purr as Lace opened one of the foil-wrapped burgers for him, laying to one side the pointless bun and wilted leaf of lettuce. He liked the mayo, though, and licked it off her fingers as she placed the hamburger on the black-tar roof. Then he dug noisily into the main event.
Lace looked at her cat-spittled fingers. “Great. Now I’m supposed to eat with these?”
I laughed, pulling my burger from the bag. “Relax. Corny doesn’t have any diseases. Nothing you haven’t already got anyway.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, glancing over the roof’s edge. “What’s Dr. Rat always saying? About how cats can fall from any distance?”
“Hey!” I knelt and protectively stroked his flank. He munched away, paying no attention to her threats.
“You’re right anyway,” Lace said. “A fat-ass cat like him would probably leave a crack in the sidewalk, big enough for monsters to get through. Manny wouldn’t like that.”
Manny did like Corny, though. Pets weren’t officially allowed in Lace’s building, but he and the staff had started to make exceptions. With so many people complaining about rat noises in their walls, we’d been lending Cornelius out overnight. A lot of Lace’s fellow tenants took us up on the offer, after we’d explained how once a cat gets its dander inside your apartment, rodents will give you a wide berth. You just had to get used to waking up with him sitting on your chest.
This building was on the front line, after all; Lace and I had made it something of a personal project.
Plus, Lace still had that apartment with the cheap rent and the good views. Once Health and Mental had fired off a few nasty memos to her landlords about the rat issue, they’d extended those seventh-floor leases indefinitely. These particular landlords had plenty of money already, having been New York City landowners for almost four hundred years.
Of course, we know that staying in town won’t be a cakewalk. New York City can be very stressful. There are rough days ahead, right around the corner. It takes some getting used to, going to Bob’s Diner for pepper steak, innocently chatting with Rebecky while fully aware of what’s coming next—the meltdown, the crumbling of civilization, the zombie apocalypse.
Or, as they call it in the New Watch these days, the Inflammation.
When the burgers were eaten, I said, “We should get back to work.”
Lace rolled her eyes, always ready to demonstrate her incredulity that I officially outranked her in the New Watch. But she lifted her binoculars, training them on the red-tinged river. “So what are we looking for again?”
“Worm signs,” I said.
“No duh. But no one ever tells me, what in fact are the signs of a worm?”
I shrugged. “Worminess?”
She turned from her vigil long enough to stick her tongue out at me.
I smiled and raised my own binoculars. “You’ll know them when you see them. We always do.”
“Sure. But do they even like water?”
“Another good question. After all, the PATH tunnel doesn’t actually go through the water, just under it.” I swept my amplified gaze across to the exhaust towers, the dynamos of subterranean fresh air that had caused this whole turn of the worm. Above the windowless column of bricks, shapes circled in the fading light, their white feathers toasted a dull orange by the sunset. This was a new thing, the wheeling cloud of seagulls that perpetually hovered over the towers. No one knew what it meant.
Some new airborne vector? Mere coincidence? Scavengers sensing a coming kill?
I sighed. “Sometimes I don’t think we actually know anything.”
“Don’t worry, Cal,” she said. “It’s still early days.”
The whoop of a siren filtered up from the street, and we ran to the other side of the building, peering down into the darkness. The flash of police-car lights filled the cavern between our building and the one across the street, the pop of radios echoing up. Definitely an arrest.
“Got your badge?” I asked.
“Always. Best part of the job.”
We sometimes have to int
ervene, when the police are about to take a confused and violent newbie off to jail. We flash our Homeland Security badges and talk some bio-warfare crap, and everyone backs off real quick. Ten hours later, the peep is in Montana, hooked up to an intravenous garlic drip and getting the lowdown way too fast.
Of course, newbies take a lot less convincing, these days. The signs are everywhere.
I focused my binoculars, training them on the crowd gathered around the police car. The cops were putting handcuffs on some guy, and a woman was yelling at him, shaking her purse by its broken strap. A wallet and some other stuff lay scattered across the sidewalk. A backup police car rolled down the block at a leisurely speed.
I sighed, lowering the binoculars. “Looks like a purse-snatching, just a perp, not a peep.”
One thing you can say for them, peeps don’t steal, except for maybe the occasional chunk of meat. They can’t think far enough ahead to go for the cash. And it’s interesting how, even with the Inflammation going on, regular crime still happens. Maybe more so. End of the world or not, people aren’t going to change that much.
“Yeah,” Lace sighed, lowering her binoculars. “This sucks.” Her teeth chewed at her lower lip.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “We’ll get some action tonight. We always do.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She shook her head. “I’m just bummed.”
“Why?”
She let out a long breath. “Side effects.”
My eyebrows raised. “From the pills?”
“No, the disease.” Lace turned to me and made a face. “I don’t like potato salad anymore.”
I had to laugh. “Don’t worry. Carbs just don’t do it for the parasite.”
“Sure, but what if it’s … you know, the anathema. What if I’m starting to hate stuff?”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” I nodded sagely. “Well, maybe we should do a little testing, just to make sure.”
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