Peeps (7 page)

“Hey, thanks a lot,” Roger said.

Lace ignored him. “But then my sister’s super says he’s got a line on this building they’re trying to fill up fast. A whole floor of people totally skipped out on their rent, and they want new tenants right away. So it’s cheap. Way cheap.” Her voice trailed off.

“You sound unhappy,” I said. “Why’s that?”

“We only signed up to finish the previous tenants’ leases,” she said. “There’s only a couple of months left. Everyone on seven’s talking about how they’re going to raise the rent, push us out one by one.”

I shrugged. “So how can I help you?”

“You know more than you’re saying, dude,” she said flatly.

The certainty in her eyes silenced me—I didn’t deny it, and Lace nodded slowly, positive now I wasn’t some long-lost cousin.

“Something happened here,” Lace said. “Something the landlords wanted to cover up. I
need
to know what it was.”

“Why?”

“Because I need leverage.” She leaned forward on the couch, fingers gripping the cushions with white-knuckled strength. “I’m
not
going back to my sister’s couch!”

Like I said: hell hath no fury.

I held up my hands in surrender. To get anything more out of her, I was going to have to give her some of the truth, but I needed time to get my story straight.

“Okay. I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But first … show me the thing.”

She smiled. “I was going to anyway.”

“The thing is
so
cool,” Roger said.

They’d done this before.

Without being told, the other two women turned off the lamps at either end of the couch. Roger flicked off the kitchen light and came through, sitting cross-legged in front of the white expanse of wall, almost like it was a TV screen.

It was dark now, the room glowing with dim orange from distant Jersey streetlights, accented by a bluish strip of night-light from under the bathroom door.

The other guy got out of his chair, scraping it out of our way, turning around to get his own view of the blank white wall.

“Is this a slide show?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Roger said, giggling and hugging his knees. “Fire up the projector, Lace.”

She grunted, rooting around under the coffee table and pulling out a fat candle and a pack of matches. She crossed the room carefully in the darkness and knelt beside the blank wall, setting the candle against the baseboard.

“Farther away,” Roger said.

“Shut
up
,” Lace countered. “I’ve done this more than you have.”

The match flared in her hand, and she put it to the candle’s wick. Just before the scent of sandalwood overpowered my nostrils, I detected the human smell of nervous anticipation.

The wall flickered like an empty movie screen, little peaks of stucco casting elongated shadows, like miniature mountains at sunset. The mottled texture of the wall became exaggerated, and my peep vision sharpened in the gloom, recording every imperfection. I could see the hurried, uneven paths that the rollers had followed up and down when the wall had been painted.

“What am I looking at?” I asked. “A bad paint job?”

“I told you,” Roger said. “Move it
out
a little.”

Lace growled but slid the candle farther from the wall.

The words appeared…

They glowed faintly through the shadows, their edges indistinct. A slightly darker layer of paint showed through the top coat, as often happens when landlords don’t bother with primer.

Like when they’re in a big rush.

The wall said:

so pRetty i hAd to Eat hiM

I crossed to the wall. The darker layer was less noticeable up close. I ran my fingertips across the letters. The cheap water-based paint felt as dry as a piece of chalk.

With one fingernail, I incised a curved mark in the paint, about the size of a fully grown hookworm. The dark color showed through a little more clearly there.

I brought my fingertip to my nose and sniffed.

“Dude, that’s weird,” Roger said.

“Smell is the most sensitive of our senses, Roger,” I said. But I didn’t mention the substance humans are most sensitive to: ethyl mercaptan, the odorant that gives rotten meat its particular tang. Your nose can detect one four-billionth of a gram of it in a single breath of air.

My nose is about ten times better.

I also didn’t mention to Roger that my one little sniff had made me certain of something—the words had been painted in blood.

It turned out to be more than blood, though. As I incised the wall again with my steel-hard fingernails, breathing in the substances preserved under the hasty coat of paint, I caught a whole range of tissues from the human body. The iron tang of blood was joined by the mealy smell of ground bone, the saltiness of muscle, the flat scent of liver, and the ethyl mercaptan effluence of skin tissues.

I believe the layman’s term is
gristle
.

There were other, sharper smells mixed in—chemical agents used to clean away the message. By the time they’d found it, though, the blood must have already soaked deep into the plaster, where it still clung tenaciously. They had painted it over, but the letters remained.

I mean, really:
water-based
paint? What
is
it with New York landlords?

“What the hell are you doing?” Lace said softly.

I turned and saw that they were all sitting there wide-eyed. I tend to forget how normal humans are made uncomfortable by the sniffing thing.

“Well…” I started, searching for a good excuse among the dregs of rum in my system. What was I going to say?

The buzzer sounded.

“Pizza’s here!” Roger cried, jumping up and running to the door.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

For some reason, I was starving.

A
nts have this religion, and it’s caused by slimeballs.

It all starts with a tiny creature called
Dicrocoelium dendriticum
—though even parasite geeks don’t bother saying that out loud. We just call them “lancet flukes.”

Like a lot of parasites, these flukes start out in a stomach. Stomachs are the most popular organs of final hosts, you may have noticed. Well, duh—there’s
food
in them. In this case, we’re talking about the stomach of a cow.

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.

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.