Peeps (13 page)

I remembered Dr. Rat’s standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface. I began a slow walk around the edge of the basement, flashlight still set low, moving carefully, looking for any holes in the walls.

The rats hardly noticed me. If this was the brood that had infected Morgan, they would find my scent comforting—our parasites were closely related, after all. On the other hand, true Underworld rats might behave this way with anyone. Never having seen a human being before, their little pink eyes wouldn’t know what to make of me.

The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the cement. Of course, this building was just over a year old—the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so.

I peered over the edge. In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling mass of rats. Pale bodies struggled against one another, some disappearing into the mass, others thrashing their way up and out. The brood did have a way out of this basement, I realized, but it didn’t go up to the surface. . . .

It went down.

I swallowed. The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was. Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?

I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared camera. With it in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool.

The sole of my boot didn’t make a sound. A layer of something soft was strewn across against the bottom of the pool, fluttering beneath the claws of darting rats. It was too dark to see what.

Something ran across my boot, and I shuddered.

“Okay, guys, let’s observe some personal space here,” I said, then took another step.

Something answered my words, something that wasn’t a rat. A long, high-pitched moan echoed through the room, like the sound of a mewling infant. . . .

At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl rumbled out.

A
cat
was looking at me, its sleepy eyes floating against invisibly black fur. A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an emperor, when they should have been running for their lives.

The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight’s glow. The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was
not
a normal place for any cat to be.

But cats didn’t carry the parasite. If they did, we’d
all
be peeps by now. They live with us, after all.

My eyes fell from the feline’s unblinking gaze, and I saw what the rats were eating: pigeons. Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool. The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would. And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks—the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down.

It was family to me.

Suddenly, the floor began trembling, a vibration that traveled up through my cowboy boots and into my muscle-clenched stomach. My vision began to shudder, as if an electric toothbrush had been jammed into my brain. A new smell rose up from the swimming pool drain, something I couldn’t recognize—ancient and foul, it made me think of rotten corpses. It made me want to run screaming.

And through it all, the cat’s low purr of satisfaction filled the room.

I squeezed my eyes shut and switched the flashlight to full power.

I could only hear (and feel) what happened next: a thousand rats panicking, pouring out of the pool to race for the dark corners of the room, flowing past my legs in a furry torrent. Hundreds more scrambled to escape down the drain and into the darkness below, their claws scraping the broken concrete as they fought to flee the horrifying light. Bloated rat king bodies flopped from the diving board and landed on the struggling mass, squealing like squeaky toys dropped from a height.

I fumbled a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket, got them on, and opened one eye a slit: The cat was unperturbed, still curled at the end of the diving board, eyes shut against the light, looking like an ordinary cat lying happily in the sun. It yawned.

The trembling of the floor had begun to fade, and the traffic jam of escaping rats was starting to break up. The drain hole looked to be more than
a yard
across; the deep end of the pool had cracked open, crumbling into some larger cavity below. The rats were still roiling, disappearing into it like crap down a flushing toilet.

Squinting up at the cat again, I saw that it had risen to its feet. It was stretching lazily, yawning, its tongue curling pink and obscene.

“You just stay there, kitty,” I called above the din, and took another step toward the drain. How deep
was
the hole? Cat-size? Peep-size?
Monster
-size?

I only needed one glimpse and I was out of there.

Between my blazing flashlight and the squeaks and scrambling feet echoing off the sides of the pool, I was almost blind and practically deafened. But the weird smell of death was fading, and just as the last rats were finally clearing out, I caught the slightest whiff of something new in the air. Something close . . .

A sharp hiss sounded behind me, someone sucking in air. As I spun around, the flashlight slipped from my sweaty fingers. . . .

It cracked on the swimming pool floor, and everything went very dark.

I was completely blind, but before the flashlight had died I’d glimpsed a human form at the edge of the pool. Following the bright image burned into my retinas, I ran the few steps up the slope and leaped from the pool, raising the camera like a club.

As I swung, I caught her smell again, freezing just in time.

Jasmine shampoo, mixed with human fear and peanut butter . . . and I knew who it was.

“Cal?” Lace said.

HOWLER
monkeys live in the jungles of Central America. They have a special resonating bone that amplifies their cries—hence the name “howler monkey.” Even though they’re only two feet tall, you can hear a howler monkey scream from three miles away.

Especially if they’ve got screwworms.

Meet the screwfly, which lives in the same jungles as howler monkeys. Screwflies look pretty much like normal houseflies, except bigger. They aren’t parasites themselves, but their babies are.

When it comes time to have baby flies, screwflies look for a wounded mammal to lay their eggs in. They’re not picky about what kind of mammal, and they don’t need a very large wound. Even a scratch the size of a flea bite is plenty big.

When the eggs hatch, the larvae—also known by such charming names as “maggots” or “screwworms”—are hungry. As they grow, they begin to devour the flesh around them.

Most maggots are very fussy and only eat dead flesh, so they’re not a problem for their host. They can actually help to clean the wounds that they hatch into. In a pinch, doctors still use maggots to sterilize the wounds of soldiers.

But screwworms—screwfly maggots—are another matter. They are born ravenous, and they consume
everything
they can get their teeth into. As they devour the animal’s healthy flesh, the wound gets bigger, luring more screwflies to come and lay their eggs. Those eggs hatch, and the wound gets even bigger. . . .

Eww. Yuck. Repeat.

At the end of this cycle is a painful death for many a howler monkey.

But screwflies also bring a message of peace.

 

Like all primates, howler monkeys want mates, food, and territory—all the stuff that makes being a howler monkey fun. So they compete with one another for these resources—in other words, they get into fights.

But no matter how angry they get, howler monkeys
never
use their teeth or claws. Even if one of the monkeys is much bigger, all it ever does is slap the other one around and (of course) howl a lot.

You see, it’s just not worth it to get into a real fight. Because even if the smaller monkey gets its monkey ass totally kicked, all it has to do is get in
one tiny scratch
, and the fight becomes a lose-lose proposition. One little scratch, after all, is all a screwfly needs to lay its eggs inside you.

Many scientists believe that the howler monkeys developed their awesome howling ability
because
of screwworms. Any monkeys who resolved their conflicts by scratching and biting (and getting bitten and scratched in return) were eaten from within by screwworms. Game over for all the scratchy and bitey howler monkey genes.

Eventually, all that was left in the jungle were non-scratchy monkeys. Survival of the fittest, which in this case were the nonscratchiest.

But there were still mates and bananas to be fought over, so the non-scratchy monkeys evolved a non-scratchy way to compete: howling. Survival of the loudest. And that’s how we got howler monkeys.

See? Parasites aren’t all bad. They take primates who otherwise might be killing one another and leave them merely yelling.

“
WHAT
are you
doing
down here?” I yelled.

“What are
you
doing down here?” Lace yelled back, grabbing two blind fistfuls of my hazmat suit in the darkness. “Where the hell are we anyway? Were those
rats
?”

“Yes, those were rats!”

She started hopping. “Crap! I thought so. Why did it go all dark?”

“I kind of dropped my flashlight.”

“Dude! Let’s get
out
of here!”

We did. I could see only leftover streaks etched into my retinas by the flashlight, but Lace’s eyes weren’t as sensitive as mine. She pulled me stumbling back up the stairs, and as we squished through the poisoned-peanut-butter hallway, my vision began to return—light was pouring in from the health club through the open locker door.

Lace squeezed out, and I followed, slamming the locker shut behind me. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, and the basement looked shockingly normal.

“What
was
that down there?” Lace cried.

“Wait a second.” I pulled her away from the security cameras and over to a row of weight benches. Sitting down, I tried to blink away the spots on my vision. Lace stayed standing, eyes wide, nervously shifting from one foot to the other.

“What the hell?” was all she could say.

I stared at her, half blind and still astonished by her sudden appearance. Then I remembered the doorman setting the elevator’s controls, leaving them unlocked so that I could return to the ground floor.

I hadn’t paid close enough attention. It was all my fault. I’d blown the first rule of every Night Watch investigation: Secure the site. But I was
positive
I’d closed the locker door behind me. . . .

“How did you get down here?” I sputtered. “I thought the health club was closed at night!”

“Dude, you think I came down here to
exercise
?” She was still shifting from foot to foot. “I was headed out and Manny said, ‘You know that guy you came in with this afternoon? He’s here spraying for rats.’ And I’m like, ‘
What?
’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, did you know he was an exterminator? He’s down in the health club right now, looking to kill some rats!’” Lace spread her open palms wide. “But
you
told me you were looking for Morgan. So what the hell?”

I didn’t answer, just sighed.

“And when I came down here,” she continued in a breathless rush, “the lights weren’t even on. I thought Manny had lost his mind or something. But when the elevator closed behind me, it was totally dark.” She pointed. “Except suddenly that locker was doing this . .
. glowing
thing.”

I groaned. On its killer setting, my Night Watch flashlight had been visible from up here.

Still hyperventilating, Lace continued. “And there was a hidden hallway, and the floor was covered with weird goo, and there were stairs at the end, with this insane squeaky pandemonium coming up from below. I called your name, but all I heard was rats!”

“And that made you
want
to go down the stairs?” I asked.

“No!” Lace cried. “But by then I figured you
were
down here, somewhere, maybe in trouble.”

My eyes widened. “You came down to help me?”

“Dude, things didn’t look so good down there.”

I couldn’t argue with that. No one else could have messed this up quite as totally as I had. Things were bad enough, with a great big rat reservoir bubbling up from the Underworld, along with a weird peeplike cat and something big enough to make the earth shudder. And right smack in the middle of it all, I’d managed to insert Lace—a Major Revelation Incident.

I was screwed. But I found myself staring at Lace with admiration.

“All those rats . . . ” A note of exhaustion crept into her voice as hysteria subsided. “Do you think they’ll follow us?”

“No.” I pointed at her shoe. “That stuff will stop them.”

“What the . . . ?” She stood on one foot, staring at the bottom of her other shoe. “What the hell is this crap anyway?”

“Watch out! It’s poisonous!”

She sniffed the air. “It smells like peanut butter.”

“It’s
poisonous
peanut butter!”

She let out a sigh. “Whatever—I wasn’t going to eat it. Note to Cal: I do not eat stuff off my shoe.”

“Right. But it’s dangerous!”

“Yeah, no kidding. This whole place should be condemned. There were, like,
thousands
of rats in that pool.”

I swallowed, nodding slowly. “Yeah. At least.”

“So what’s the deal? What are you doing here, Cal? You’re not an exterminator. Don’t tell me that you investigate STDs
and
spray for rats.”

“Um, not usually.”

“So does this building have
the plague
or something?”