Peeps (2 page)

I rolled over, gasping, trying to regain my feet. As my eyes cleared, I saw boiling fur in every direction, the rats in a panic at their mistress’s distress.

She had started down the stairs, but now the anathema had taken hold of her mind. The Elvis memorabilia I’d placed on the steps did its job—Sarah twisted in mid-course at the sequined cape, like a horse glimpsing a rattlesnake, and crashed through the rickety banister.

I scrambled to the balcony’s edge and looked down. She crouched on one of the pews, glaring up at me.

“Are you okay, Sarah?”

The sound of her own name got her moving, gliding across the waiting room, bare feet silent on the backs of the benches. But she stumbled to a halt as she came face-to-face with the black velvet King poster, a horrible wail filling the echoing terminal. It was one of those spine-tingling transformations, like when a forlorn cat suddenly makes the sound of a human child, Sarah uttering the cry of some other species.

Rats swept toward me from all sides—attacking, I thought for a moment. But they were simply freaking out, swirling without purpose around my boots, disappearing through holes and into office doorways.

As I ran down the staircase, the metal bolts that held it to the wall yanked at their berths in a screeching chorus. Sarah darted from exit to exit, mewling at the sight of the King’s face. She froze and hissed at me again.

She knew I had her cornered and watched warily as I put the doll back in my pocket.

“Stay there. I won’t hurt you.” I slowly climbed down the rest of the swaying stairs. It was about as steady as standing in a canoe.

The moment one of my feet touched the ground floor, Sarah ran straight toward the far wall. She leaped high, her black claws grasping one of a web of steam pipes that fed a long radiator. Her long black fingernails made pinging sounds on the empty pipes as she climbed up and along the wall toward a high window I hadn’t bothered to cover. She moved like a spider, fast and jerky.

There was no Elvis between her and freedom. I was going to lose her.

Swearing, I turned and dashed back up the swaying stairs. A series of pops came from behind me, bolts failing, and just as I reached the top, the whole staircase pulled away, freeing itself from the wall at last. But it didn’t crash to the ground, just sagged exhaustedly, a few bolts still clinging to the upper floor like rusty fingernails.

Sarah reached the high window and put her fist through it, smeared glass shattering onto a jagged patch of gray sky. But as she pulled herself up into the window frame, a bright shaft of sun struck through the clouds, hitting her square in the face.

The rosy light filled the terminal, and Sarah screamed again, swinging from one hand, the other flailing. She tried to hoist herself through the broken window twice more, but the punishing sunlight forced her back. Finally she scurried away, fleeing along the pipes and leaping to the balcony, darting through the farthest doorway from me.

I was already running.

The last office was the darkest, but I could smell the rats, the main nest of her brood. When I reached the door they turned to face me in awful unison, red eyes illuminated by the dusty shaft of sunlight filtering in behind me. There was a bed in one corner, its rusty springs covered with rotting clothes. Most peeps didn’t bother with beds. Had it been left here by squatters? Or had Sarah salvaged it from some rubbish heap?

She’d always been a fussy sleeper, bringing her own pillow to college from Tennessee. Did she still care what she slept on?

Sarah watched me from the bed, her eyes half closed. It was only because the sunlight had burned them, but it made her look more human.

I approached carefully, one hand on the action figure in my pocket. But I didn’t pull it out. Maybe I could take her without any more struggle. She’d said my name, after all.

The motionless rats made me nervous. I took a plastic bag from my pocket and emptied it onto my boots. The brood parted, scenting Cornelius’s dander. My ancient cat hadn’t hunted in years, but the rats didn’t know that. Suddenly, I smelled like a predator.

Sarah clung to the bed’s spindly frame, which began to shudder. I paused to pull a Kevlar glove onto my left hand and dropped two knockout pills into its palm.

“Let me give you these. They’ll make you better.”

Sarah squinted at me, still wary, but listening. She had always forgotten to take her pills, and it had been my job to remind her. Maybe this ritual would calm her, something remembered, but not fondly enough to be an anathema. I could hear her breathing, her heart still beating as fast as it had during the chase.

She could spring at me at any moment.

I took another slow step and sat down beside her. The bed’s rusty springs made a questioning sound.

“Take these. They’re good for you.”

Sarah stared at the small white pills cupped in my palm. I felt her relax for a moment, maybe recalling what it was like to be sick—just
normal
sick—and have a boyfriend look after you.

I’m not as fast as a full-blown peep, or as strong, but I am pretty quick. I cupped my hand over her mouth in a flash and heard the pills
snick
into her dehydrated throat. Her hands gripped my shoulders, but I pressed her head back with my whole weight, letting her teeth savage the thick glove. Sarah’s black nails didn’t go for my face, and I saw swallows pulsing along her pale neck.

The pills took her down in seconds. With a metabolism as fast as ours, drugs hit right away—I feel tipsy about a minute after alcohol touches my tongue, and I damn near need an IV to keep a coffee buzz going.

“Well done, Sarah.” I let her go and saw that her eyes were still open. “You’ll be okay now, I promise.”

I pulled the glove off. The outer water-resistant layer was shredded, but her teeth hadn’t broken the Kevlar. (It
has
happened, though.)

My cell phone showed one lonely bar of reception, but the call went straight through. “It was her. Pick us up.”

As the phone went dark, I wondered if I should have mentioned the crumbling stairs. Oh, well. They’d figure out how to get up.

“Cal?”

I started at the sound, but her slitted eyes didn’t seem to pose a threat. “What is it, Sarah?”

“Show me again.”

“Show you what?”

She tried to speak, but a pained look crossed her face.

“You mean…” His name would hurt her if I said it. “The King?”

She nodded.

“You don’t want that. It’ll only burn you. Like the sun did.”

“But I miss him.” Her voice was fading, sleep taking her.

I swallowed, feeling something flat and heavy settle over me. “I know you do.”

Sarah knew a lot about Elvis, but she enjoyed obscure facts the most. She loved it that his mother’s middle name was Love. She searched the Web for MP3s of the B-sides of rare seventies singles. Her favorite movie was one that you’ve probably never heard of:
Stay Away, Joe
.

In it, Elvis is a half-Navajo bronco buster on a reservation. Sarah claimed it was the role he was born to play, because he really was part Native American. Yeah, right. His great-great-great-grandmother was Cherokee. And, like most of us, he had
sixteen
great-great-great-grandmothers. Not much genetic impact there. But Sarah didn’t care. She said obscure influences were the most important.

That’s a philosophy major for you.

In the movie, Elvis sells pieces of his car whenever he needs money. The doors go, then the roof, then the seats, one by one. By the end he’s riding along on an empty frame—Elvis at the steering wheel, four tires and a sputtering engine on an open road.

As the disease had settled across her, Sarah had held onto Elvis the longest. After she’d thrown out all her books and clothes, erased every photograph from her hard drive, and broken all the mirrors in her dorm bathroom, the Elvis posters still clung to her walls, crumpled and scratched from bitter blows, but hanging on. As her mind transformed, Sarah shouted more than once that she couldn’t stand the sight of me, but she never said a word against the King.

Finally, she fled, deciding to disappear into the night rather than tear down those slyly grinning faces she could no longer bear to look at.

As I waited for the transport squad, I watched her shivering on the bed and thought of Elvis clutching the steering wheel of his skeletal car.

Sarah had lost everything, shedding the pieces of her life one by one to placate the anathema, until she was left here in this dark place, clinging to a shuddering, rickety frame.

T
he natural world is jaw-droppingly horrible. Appalling, nasty, vile.

Take trematodes, for example.

Trematodes are tiny fish that live in the stomach of a bird. (How did that happen? Horribly. Just keep reading.) They lay their eggs in the bird’s stomach. One day, the bird takes a crap into a pond, and the eggs are on their way. They hatch and swim around the pond looking for a snail. These trematodes are microscopic, small enough to lay eggs in a snail’s eye, as we used to say in Texas.

Well, okay. We never said that in Texas. But trematodes actually
do
it. For some reason, they always choose the left eye. When the babies hatch, they eat the snail’s left eye and spread throughout its body. (Didn’t I say this would be horrible?) But they don’t kill the snail. Not right away.

First, the half-blind snail gets a gnawing feeling in the pit of its stomach and thinks it’s hungry. It starts to eat but for some reason can never get enough food. You see, when the food gets to where the snail’s stomach used to be, all that’s left down there is trematodes, getting their meals delivered. The snail can’t mate, or sleep, or enjoy life in any other snaily way. It has become a hungry robot dedicated to gathering food for its horrible little passengers.

After a while, the trematodes get bored with this and pull the plug on their poor host. They invade the snail’s antennae, making them twitch. They turn the snail’s left eye bright colors. A bird passing overhead sees this brightly colored, twitching snail and says, “Yum…”

The snail gets eaten, and the trematodes are back up in a bird’s stomach, ready to parachute into the next pond over.

Welcome to the wonderful world of parasites.

This is where I live.

One more thing, and then I promise no more horrific biology (for a few pages).

When I first read about trematodes, I always wondered why the bird would eat this twitching, oddly colored snail. Eventually, wouldn’t the birds evolve to avoid any snail with a glowing left eye? This is a nasty, trematode-infected snail, after all. Why would you
eat
it?

Turns out the trematodes don’t do anything unpleasant to their flying host. They’re polite guests, living quietly in the bird’s gut, not messing with its food or its left eye or anything. The bird hardly knows they’re there, just craps them out into the next pond over, like a little parasite bomb.

It’s almost like the bird and the trematodes have a deal between them. You give us a ride in your stomach, and we’ll arrange some half-blind snails for you to eat.

Isn’t cooperation a beautiful thing?

Unless, of course, you happen to be the snail…

O
kay, let’s clear up some myths about vampires.

First of all, you won’t see me using the V-word much. In the Night Watch, we prefer the term
parasite-positives
, or
peeps
, for short.

The main thing to remember is that there’s no magic involved. No flying. Humans don’t have hollow bones or wings—the disease doesn’t change that. No transforming into bats or rats either. It’s impossible to turn into something much smaller than yourself—where would the extra mass go?

On the other hand, I can see how people in centuries past got confused. Hordes of rats, and sometimes bats, accompany peeps. They get infected from feasting on peep leftovers. Rodents make good “reservoirs,” which means they’re like storage containers for the disease. Rats give the parasite a place to hide in case the peep gets hunted down.

Infected rats are devoted to their peeps, tracking them by smell. The rat brood also serves as a handy food source for the peep when there aren’t humans around to hunt. (Icky, I know. But that’s nature for you.)

Back to the myths:

Parasite-positives
do
appear in mirrors. I mean, get real: How would the mirror know what was
behind
the peep?

But this legend also has a basis in fact. As the parasite takes control, peeps begin to despise the sight of their own reflections. They smash all their mirrors. But if they’re so beautiful, why do they hate their own faces?

Well, it’s all about the anathema.

The most famous example of disease mind control is rabies. When a dog becomes rabid, it has an uncontrollable urge to bite anything that moves: squirrels, other dogs, you. This is how rabies reproduces; biting spreads the virus from host to host.

A long time ago, the parasite was probably like rabies. When people got infected, they had an overpowering urge to bite other humans. So they bit them. Success!

But eventually human beings got organized in ways that dogs and squirrels can’t. We invented posses and lynch mobs, made up laws, and appointed law enforcers. As a result, the biting maniacs among us tend to have fairly short careers. The only peeps who survived were the ones who ran away and hid, sneaking back at night to feed their mania.

The parasite followed this survival strategy to the extreme. It evolved over the generations to transform the minds of its victims, finding a chemical switch among the pathways of the human brain. When that switch is thrown, we despise everything we once loved. Peeps cower when confronted with their old obsessions, despise their loved ones, and flee from any signifier of home.

Love is easy to switch to hatred, it turns out. The term for this is the
anathema effect
.

The anathema effect forced peeps from their medieval villages and out into the wild, where they were safe from lynch mobs. And it spread the disease geographically. Peeps moved to the next valley over, then the next country, pushed farther and farther by their hatred of everything familiar.