Peeps (18 page)

“I’ll need the keys to the elevator,” I said. “
All
of them. We don’t want anyone wandering around in the basement. Not even building staff.”

“Really?”

I leaned closer. “These rats . . .
very
dangerous.”

Manny looked doubtful about surrendering his keys. But after calling the fake phone number on the fake Sanitation order, he found himself reassured by a fake city official that everything would be okay as long as he cooperated. Soon I was headed down into the darkness again.

 

First, I dealt with the security cameras, sticking a piece of black tape over each of their lenses. Easy-peasy, and some useful information might turn up for my trouble. If anyone bothered to fix the cameras, at least I’d know someone was paying attention.

Opening the locker, I stepped into the cave darkness, flicked on my new flashlight, and crept down the hidden hallway. Lace’s and my footprints were still there, preserved in peanut butter, but no new ones had appeared.

I cut open the chained-up door again, and this time when I closed it behind me, I jammed wedges into the cracks, restuffing the steel wool underneath.

The site secured, I descended the stairs, flashlight in hand.

 

The swimming pool was almost quiet.

In the soft red glow I saw only a few dozen rats and the picked-clean skeletons of pigeons, sitting undisturbed. Apparently it wasn’t feeding time. The peep cat wasn’t in sight.

I found my abandoned duffel bag and I transferred a few necessary items to my new one, then stepped into the empty pool. My boots trod softly across the pigeon feathers. The few rats perching on the pool’s edge watched me descend toward the deep end, mildly curious. A big fat one leaned his chin over the diving board, looking down at me.

Without a thousand panicking rodents in the way, I could see the drain much better. The concrete around it had collapsed, and through the jagged hole was a deeper darkness that offered up a damp and earthy smell. No scent of death.

The hole was big enough for a slender human body to slip through. Hunkering at the edge, I opened a can of cat food. The smell of Crunchy Tuna infused the air, and I heard little noses sniffing around me. But nothing came to investigate.

Dr. Rat has a word for what rats are:
neophobic
. In other words, they don’t like new things. Related to them or not, I was something new in their environment, and Crunchy Tuna was too.

I pushed a chunk of Crunchy Tuna down into the hole. A liquid
splat
came from below. The space down there was big; I could hear its size in the echoes.

After a few minutes of waiting, I switched off the flashlight completely. Blind in the darkness, I hoped my ears might begin to listen harder. The few rats around me continued going about their business, cleaning themselves and squabbling. A few got up the courage to dart past me and down into the hole. They sniffed the dollop of cat food below, but I heard no little teeth daring to take a bite. They were a cautious bunch.

Rats send chemical signals to one another, emotions carried by smells. One nervous individual can make a whole pack of rats anxious, fear spreading through the population like a dirty rumor. And sometimes, a pack will suddenly abandon a place all at once, collectively deciding that it has bad vibes.

I wondered if the peep cat’s brood was still jittery from my flashlight blast the night before. Maybe they had left this basement forever, fleeing far down into the Underworld.

Then I heard the meow.

It reached me from a long distance, sleepy and annoyed-sounding, through a prism of echoes. The cat was still down here.

But it wasn’t coming to me; I had to go to it.

The concrete was brittle—a few solid kicks opened the hole enough for me to climb through. I lowered my duffel bag as far as possible, then dropped it. The
clunk
of metal told me that the floor was about ten feet below.

Holding onto the flashlight carefully, I slipped through and let myself fall. My boots hit solid ground with a crunch of shattered concrete that echoed like a gunshot.

I switched my flashlight on low again.

A tunnel stretched away into the darkness, extending as far as I could see in both directions. Decades of dust had settled in here, filling the bottom with a loose dirt floor. It was lined with uneven stones, century-old mortar barely holding them together. They were cold and wet to the touch—the tons of dirt over my head squeezing the groundwater through them like a fist around a wet rag.

A slight breeze moved through the passage, carrying the smells of rats, earth, and fungus. Still, nothing as foul and horrible as what I had scented the day before.

The breeze felt fresh; it had to be coming from some sort of opening at the surface. I decided to move upwind. With the air blowing into my face, I could smell whatever was in front of me without it smelling me.

I’ve been in a lot of underground spaces in New York—subway tracks, sewers, steam pipe tunnels—but this one was different. There were no stray bits of paper, no garbage, no smells of piss. Maybe it had lain undisturbed by human beings for the century since it had been built, carrying only air, rats, and the occasional peep cat beneath the city streets. The tunnel inclined slightly as I walked, a winding stain in the center of the floor showing where rain had trickled down the slope for the last hundred years.

Then I smelled something human on the breeze. Well . . . half human.

Peeps have a subtle scent. Their feverish bodies consume almost everything they eat, leaving few smells of waste. Their dry skin exudes none of the salty sweat of a regular person. But no metabolism is perfect—my predator’s nose detected a hint of rotten meat and the whiff of dead skin cells, like fresh leather hanging on a boot factory wall.

The breeze died and I froze, waiting for it to come again. I didn’t want my scent to drift ahead of me. A moment later, the air moved again, and the intimate smell of family washed over me.

This peep was a relative.

As softly as I could, I laid the duffel bag on the ground and pulled a knockout injector from the zippered pocket of my hazmat suit.

I switched off the flashlight and began to crawl, a wave of nerves rushing through me. This was the first peep I’d ever hunted who was an absolute unknown. The only anathema I had was the Garth Brooks T-shirt, which somehow didn’t seem equal to the task. The darkness seemed to stretch forever before me, until a hint of light played across the blackness. Gradually I was able to make out the stones in the passage walls again, and my hands in front of my face . . . and then something else.

What looked like tiny clouds were rolling along the floor, carried by the breeze. They glided toward me, silent and insubstantial, and when I waved a hand close to them, they stirred in its wake.

Feathers.

I took a pinch and held it up to my eyes. This was the soft white down from a pigeon’s breast. As the light grew stronger, I saw that the whole tunnel was carpeted with downy feathers; they clung to the ceiling stones and to my hazmat suit, rolling across the floor like a slow, ghostly tide.

Somewhere ahead, there were a lot of dead birds.

Larger feathers began to appear, the dirty gray and blue of pigeon and seagull wings, trembling in the breeze. I crawled silently across the carpeted dirt floor, feeling the softness under my palms and trying not to think of pigeon mites.

Ahead I could hear breathing, slow and relaxed for a peep.

The tunnel ended at a shaft that went straight up—light pouring down from above, a rusted iron ladder driven into the stone wall. A pile of feathers had collected at the bottom. A few whole birds lay on top of it unmoving, their necks twisted.

I froze, watching the breeze stir the feathers until a shadow moved across them. The peep was at the top of the ladder.

With the chill autumn air flowing down the shaft, it still couldn’t smell me. I wondered why it was nesting up there, instead of hiding down here in the gloom. Placing my flashlight on the floor to free up my hands, I crawled to the end of the tunnel and peered up, eyes slitted against the sunlight.

He clung to the ladder twelve feet above me, staring out at the world like a prisoner at a cell window, the reddish light of late afternoon softening his emaciated face.

I lowered myself into a crouch, gripped the injector, and jumped straight up as high as I could.

He heard me at the last second, looking down just as I reached up to jam the needle into his leg. He twisted away, the injector missing completely. My hand grasped the ladder but the peep screamed and flailed his foot at me, landing a kick in my teeth. My grip loosened . . . and I was falling.

I reached out to grab a passing rung and swung inward, bouncing against the stone wall and holding on for a bare second, the breath knocked from me. Then the peep was dropping toward me, hissing, teeth bared. His body struck me broadside, wrenching my fingers from the ladder rung. We fell together, landing in a crumpled heap on the pile of pigeon feathers, his wiry muscles writhing against me.

Black fingernails raked across my face, and I scrambled free and jumped away into the tunnel, cracking my head against the low stone ceiling. Dizzy from the impact, I spun to face him, hands raised.

The peep leaped up in an explosion of feathers, his black claws lashing through the air. I held up the injector to ward him off, and felt his flailing hand connect with it, a brief hiss sounding before the injector flew away into the darkness. The peep’s next blow struck my head, knocking me to the ground.

He stood over me, silhouetted by the sunlight, swaying a little, like a drunk. I scrambled backward, crab style. He let out another scream. . . .

Then tumbled heavily to the ground. The injection had knocked him out.

That good old peep metabolism, fast as lightning.

I blinked a few times, shaking my head, trying to force the pain away.

“Ow, ow,
ow
!” I said. I rubbed at a bump already rising on my scalp. “Stupid tunnel!”

When the pain had faded a little, I checked his pulse. Slow and thready, but he was alive—for a peep, anyway. The injection would keep him out for hours, but I tagged him to be certain, handcuffing him to the lowest ladder rung and sticking an electronic bracelet around his ankle. The transport squad could follow its signal here.

Finally, I sat back and grinned happily, letting a rush of pride erase my pain. Even if he was family, this was my first peep capture outside my own ex-girlfriends. I turned him over to look at his face. Thinner than his photograph, his cheekbones high and hair wild, this was a barely recognizable Joseph Moore. He looked way too skinny for a seven-month-old peep, though, considering the pile of feathers he’d accumulated.

What had he been doing at the top of the ladder, up there in the sun?

I pulled myself up the ladder, noting how smooth the walls of the shaft were. Too slick for a cat to climb, or even a rat—only a human being could make use of it.

At the top, the afternoon light slanted through the steel-grated window. The view was the Hudson River, from only a few feet above the water level. From just overhead I heard laughter and the hum of Rollerblades.

I was
inside
the stone bulwark at the edge of the island, I realized, right below the boardwalk where people jogged and skated every day, only a few feet from the normal daylight world.

Then I saw the broken black column in front of me, a pylon from an old pier, a rotting piece of wood just big enough for a pigeon or a seagull to perch on. There was bird crap all over it, and it was just within arm’s reach.

Joseph Moore had been hunting.

Then a realization swept over me, and I gripped the ladder rungs with white knuckles, remembering the picked-clean pigeon skeletons and feathers back in the swimming pool. Joseph Moore was too skinny to have eaten all those birds at the bottom of the shaft; most had been carried away. He had been hunting for the brood. With his long human arms, he had brought them food that they couldn’t reach.

But unlike most human peeps, Joseph Moore wasn’t at the center of the brood. He’d been stuck out here on this lonely periphery, the hated sunlight shining in to blind his eyes, forced to give up his kills for the pack to eat.

He was nothing but a servant to the brood’s real master.

“The cat has people,” I said aloud.

O
kay, remember those slimeballs? The ones with lancet flukes in them? It turns out that they do more than just infect cows, snails, and ants. They help save the world.

Well, okay, not the
whole
world. But they do make sure that the corner of the world where ants and cows and snails live doesn’t come crashing down. Here’s how it works:

When cows are looking for something to eat, they stay away from grass that’s really green. Green grass is good for them, but it’s green because of the cow pies fertilizing it. Now, these cow pies don’t cause problems in themselves—cows are smart enough not to eat them. But cow pies have lancet flukes in them. Thus, there are fluke-infected snails nearby, which means that there must be flukey ants sitting atop stalks of green grass, waiting to be eaten.

So cows have evolved to avoid bright green grass. They don’t want to get infected with lancet flukes, after all.

But a problem arises when there are too many cows and not enough grass to go around. The cows wind up eating the green grass, and getting lancet flukes in their stomachs. Less grass to go around, more sick cows. And, it turns out, sick cows have fewer calves. The cow population drops, and there’s more grass for everyone.

Get the picture? The parasites control the population. They’re part of nature’s balance.