Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

“Did you infect her ?” I asked, pointing at Lace-short-for-Lacey. I’d seen them being all kissy through the bars of my window.

“No,” he said in a tiny voice. “My cat did.”

“Your cat?” I blinked. “Kitties can do that?”

“Felines are the major vector,” Cal said. “The parasite hid in the deep-dwelling rat population for centuries, until the worms drove them up to the surface…”

As Cal went on with his parasite-geek lecture, which he loved to do, I remembered back to before I got sick. As the sanitation crisis had settled over our street, Zombie started spending a lot of time outside. And every night he’d come home and sleep on my chest, breathing his cat-food breath into my face.

That was how I’d gotten sick? From Zombie ?

That meant that Mark wasn’t such a dirty dog after all. He hadn’t given the nasty to me; I’d given it to him…

“Oops,” I said softly.

I wondered where Zombie was now. I always left the apartment window open so he could visit his little friends, but Manhattan looked pretty bad on TV. The whole island had been sealed off by Homeland Security, like that was going to keep the parasite from spreading.

Cal had explained to me how clever the parasite was: it turned infected people horny, hungry, bitey—anything to pass on its spores—and made them despise everything they’d loved before. That’s why I’d thrown away Mark and my dolls and my music, why Moz had smashed his Stratocaster to bits. The anathema, as Cal called it, pushed infected people to run away from home and head to the next town over, and the next town after that…

It wouldn’t be long before the whole world had it.

There were full-scale riots in most big cities now, blood-thirsty maniacs running around doing vile things—and not all of them were infected, you could totally tell. Schools were shutting down, the roads were choked with refugees, and the president kept making speeches telling everyone to pray.

No shit.

But the news never mentioned cat food supplies, not that I ever saw. So what was Zombie eating now? He didn’t mind birds and mousies, but he always puked them up.

“Anyway,” Lace said, noticing I wasn’t listening. “We don’t really care how you got the disease or how your voodoo friend cured you. This is about your songs.”

I smiled. “They make the ground rumble. Want me to sing one for you?”

“Um, not really,” Cal said, then he frowned. “That worm was probably just a coincidence anyway. But certain people around here are interested. They’ve been listening to recordings from that night, and they want to know where you got those lyrics.”

“You need my help? But I thought you had this stuff down to a science.”

Lace took a slow breath. “Maybe what happened that night wasn’t strictly science.”

Cal turned to her. “What do you mean by that?”

“Dude! You saw what happened! That shit was…” Her voice faded.

“Paranormal?” I looked down at my fingernails, which needed a manicure. They were still growing faster every day, even though I was cured. “Okay. I’ll tell you everything I know… if you let me see Mozzy and the others. I want us to be together. We’re a band, you know.”

“But the other three tested parasite-negative,” Cal said.

“I told you they would.”

He frowned. “Yeah, I guess you did. But if we let you see them, you can’t do anything that would compromise their health.”

“Eww! I wouldn’t kiss any of them .”

“Kissing’s not the only vector.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. Anything to get out of this smelly room. “Okay, I promise not to share my ice cream.”

“Cal,” Lace said. “If she really wanted to infect them, she could have already.” She turned to me. “But Moz is still dangerous.”

“I can handle Mozzy. He just needs his tea.”

“He’s getting better stuff than tea,” she said. “But he’s still in bad shape. It’s not pretty.”

I snorted. “I’ve been tied to a bed in a nuthouse, screaming and trying to bite my doctors’ fingers off. And then locked in my room for three months, hating myself and eating dead chickens raw. Don’t talk to me about pretty, Miss Lace-short-for-Lacey.”

The two of them looked at each other all seriously, then argued for a while longer, but I knew that eventually I’d get my way. They wanted to know about my songs real bad.

And like Astor Michaels always said, you had to keep the talent happy.

The Night Watch stuck me, Zahler, and Alana Ray in one of their “guest rooms,” a little cluster of cabins at the forested edge of the compound. We were free to go where we wanted in the compound, except the hospital where Moz was, but outside our door a tall fence stretched in both directions. Razor wire coiled down its length, reminding us that we were prisoners; not because they wouldn’t let us out, but because outside was too deadly for us now. Special Guests all over again.

There wasn’t much to do except watch the world end on TV.

Thanks to jet planes, overcrowded schools, and the sheer six billion of us all crammed together, the disease was spinning out of control. It hit critical mass in New York City in that first week we were out in Jersey, spreading faster than anyone could contain, conceal, or comprehend what was happening. The talking heads all went lateral, of course, blaming terrorists or avian flu or the government or God. All nonsense, though at least they’d stopped pretending this was just a sanitation problem. But none of them seemed to get that the world was ending.

Sometimes they’d interview people in small towns, where everything was weirdly normal, the disease invisible so far. They were all smirking at New York, like we’d had it coming. But the boondocks wouldn’t be fun for very long. Credit cards, phones, and the Internet were already starting to fail. Hardly anyone was making contact lenses, movies, medicines, or refined gasoline anymore. Even in the smallest towns, they’d miss all that infrastructure when it was gone.

Ellen Bromowitz had been right: there weren’t going to be any symphony orchestras for a while. No celebrity interviews in magazines, no album cover photo shoots or music videos. And the biggest hit on local radio these days was “Where’s the National Guard Camp Nearest You?”

No way to get famous.

Of course, now that I knew the scale of what was happening, becoming a rock star seemed less important. In fact, it seemed just plain stupid, unbelievably self-centered, and nine kinds of deluded.

I’d seen this coming. Even back when all I’d had to go on was Min’s craziness and Luz’s strange tales, I’d understood somehow that the world was about to break. So what had I done? Tried to escape reality by becoming famous . As if the world couldn’t touch me then, as if bad things didn’t happen to people with record deals. As if I could just leave all the nonfamous people behind.

What a joke. A sad, demented joke.

So that was me now: depressed and deflated in New Jersey, shell-shocked that our first gig had turned into a bloodbath, that the world was crumbling, and that my lifelong dream had turned out to be the Taj Mahal of shallow.

I never wanted to go onstage again, never wanted to play another instrument… and just when I’d finally thought of a really fexcellent band name.

How’s that for annoying?

Every morning the Night Watch brought in truckloads of peeps—parasite positives—they’d captured the night before. They treated as many as would fit in their hospital, an empty elementary school they’d taken over. Hundreds of them, reborn as angels, trained on the assembly field every day. Their swords glittered like a host of flashbulbs popping in unison.