Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

An army was building here.

Cal said that in all of human history, this was the fastest the infection had ever spread—those jet planes again. And what nobody but the Watch realized yet was that the worst part was yet to come. The creature that Min had summoned, the worm, was one of thousands rising up to attack humanity. Just like Luz had said, the sickness was merely a sign that a great struggle was about to begin.

When Cal visited to give us his geeky lectures, he’d offer the scientific version. It was all a chain reaction: the rising worms upset deep-dwelling rats, who carried the parasite to the surface; they infected felines, who gave it to their humans, who turned into peeps and spread it to still more humans. The disease made people stronger and faster, vicious and fearless—the perfect soldiers to fight the worms.

Through most of history, vampires were rare; but every few centuries, humanity needed tons of them. This epidemic was our species’ immune system gearing up, peeps like killer T-cells multiplying in our blood, getting ready to repel an invader. Of course, as Cal liked to point out, immune systems are dangerous things: lupus, arthritis, and even asthma are all caused by our own defenses. Fevers have to be controlled.

That’s where the Watch came in, to organize the peeps and keep them from doing too much damage. Like your mom bringing you aspirin and cold compresses and chicken soup—but with ninja uniforms.

Early one morning a week after we’d arrived, they finally let us see the others.

Moz was in a hospital bed, looking worse than I’d expected. His arms and legs were restrained, and long IV tubes snaked into both arms, dripping yellowish liquids into his bloodstream. Electronic monitors were taped all over his bare, pale chest. A plastic shunt jutted from his throat, so they could inject things without opening up a vein.

Moz’s eyes looked bruised, his skin stretched taut across his cheekbones. The room was dark and smelled vaguely like garlic and disinfectant.

Minerva sat silent beside him. The sight of her sent a tremor of rage through me: she’d done this to him, infected him with her kiss.

Cal said she’d been partly under the parasite’s control. Always trying to spread itself, it made its hosts horny, greedy, irrational. But I was still pissed off. Parasite-positive or not, you should never, ever hook up with anyone in your band.

Not twice in a row.

“Hey,” I said. They’d warned us not to say his name, because of the anathema. He’d only just recovered enough to look at our faces.

“Hey, man,” Zahler said. “How’s it going, Minerva?”

Minerva pointed to her own mouth, then made a key-turning gesture. My lips are sealed.

Of course… Moz had been in love with Min. Her sultry, beautiful voice would burn his ears. I noticed that he looked at Zahler and Alana Ray and me, but kept his gaze averted from Min.

Not that I could look at her myself.

“Hey,” Moz said hoarsely.

“You look like crap!” Zahler said.

“Feel like crap too.”

“At least you aren’t smashing things,” Alana Ray said. She tried to smile, but her head jerked to one side instead. Since the gig, she was twitchier than I’d ever seen her.

Moz winced, as if remembering the wreckage he’d left of the Strat. He must have loved the guitar more than Minerva, I realized, half smiling. He hadn’t smashed her to pieces, after all.

Small favors.

“Pretty intense gig, though, huh?” Moz said.

I nodded. “Yeah, fawesome. For most of one song anyway.”

“That crowd thought we were totally fool.” Zahler sighed. “Too bad about the, uh… giant worm, though.”

“Yeah. That part sucked,” Moz said.

We were all quiet for a while. The Watch hadn’t told us anything about that night, and the news had much bigger things to talk about, but we all were pretty sure that people had been killed. Of course, so had the beast we’d raised—one less underground monster.

That was why the Night Watch was interested in us.

They knew the secret history of how worms and peeps had always appeared together and had a grip on modern science as well. Cal said they’d known before anyone else that this apocalypse was coming. They had cures and treatments for turning maniacs into soldiers to fight the enemy. They had cool worm-killing swords.

But we could do something they couldn’t.

We could sing the worms up. We could bring them out of hiding and to the surface, which made them a lot easier to destroy…

After we’d been talking for a while, Min handed me a note. Her handwriting was still a mess, but I could understand it. More or less.

“So, Moz, we have to leave for a while,” I said. “Just for a day or so. We’ll be back before you’re out of bed.”

“Where?” he croaked.

My fingers folded the note up small. “Manhattan.”

“Are you kidding?” Zahler said. “It’s dangerous back there! And I promised my mom I’d stay right here!”

I nodded. Local phones were mostly still working, so we knew that my mom was safe in the Hamptons, Elvis at her side, and that Zahler’s parents were at a Guard camp in Connecticut. Minerva’s family had been scooped up by the Night Watch, who’d wanted to check and see if they also carried her weird monster-calling strain of the disease. But Moz’s parents, like most New Yorkers, were holding out in their building. And they’d said things looked ugly down on the street.

“Sorry, Zahler. But there’s someone the Night Watch wants us to meet.”

“Can’t this someone come out to Jersey?” he asked.

I crumpled the note and shrugged. “Apparently not.”

“Well, screw that!” Zahler said. “New York is one big Maniac City! They can’t make us go, can they?”

“Pearl,” Alana Ray said. “Does it say what they want to talk about?”

“Only that maybe we can help. What happened that night—we might be able to use it to save people.” I turned to each of them as I spoke, pushing my glasses up my nose, like this was a rehearsal and I wanted to get them to stop tuning up and playing riffs and listen to me. “These Night Watch guys are the only people in the world who aren’t clueless about what’s going on. When that thing turned up at our gig, they were the ones who stopped it from killing everybody, remember? It won’t hurt us to listen to them.”

“It’s not the listening that I’m—”

“I am sorry to interrupt, Zahler,” Alana Ray said, tapping her forehead twice, a shiver moving across her. “But I agree with Pearl. We called that creature up; we were responsible.”

“We didn’t know it was going to happen!” Zahler cried.

“Whether that is true or not…” Alana Ray’s eyes dropped to the floor, as if she saw something there. “It would be unethical not to help if we can.”

I looked at the others. Minerva nodded silently, trying to catch my eye. Moz crooked one thumb into the air, and Zahler let out a defeated sigh.

There was a checkpoint at the Jersey end of the Holland Tunnel, swarming with New York cops and Guardsmen and guys in khaki toting machine guns. It didn’t look to me like they were letting anyone through.

I figured this was the end of the trip—too bad, we’d tried—and that was fine by me. But then Lace zipped down her window, flashed a badge, and said, “Homeland Security.”

The unshaven Guardsman stared at the badge, his eyes red. He looked like he’d been awake for days, like he’d seen some scary shit, and like he thought we were crazy.

But he waved us through.

“Homeland Security?” I asked. “Are you guys, like, really Homeland Security? Some sort of paranormal branch?”