Scott Westerfeld - Peeps

Dr. Rat says that the only creatures that ever come out onto the surface are the weak ones, the punks who aren’t competitive enough to feed themselves down where it’s safe. The really big things, the rat kings and the other alpha beasties, live and die without ever troubling the daylight world. Think about that for a second: There are creatures down there who’ve never seen a human being.

The laden sky rumbled overhead, and I smelled rain.

History. Nature. Weather. My head was pounding, full of those big, abstract words that have their own cable channels.

But it was the sound of those tiny scratching feet inside the garbage bag that followed me into the Shrink’s house and down the corridor to her session room, pushed along by an invisible wind.

“Most impressive, Cal.” She leafed through papers on her desk. “All it took was a few drinks to get you back to Morgan’s house.”

“Yeah. But it was an apartment, Dr. Prolix. Not many houses in Manhattan these days, you might have noticed.”

The guy from Records in the other visitor’s chair raised his eyebrows at my tone, but the Shrink only folded her hands and smiled. “Still glum? But you’re making such progress.”

I chewed my lip. The Shrink didn’t need to know what I was bummed about. Not that it mattered anymore, the whole stupid way I’d had Lace help me. Even if she’d gone on believing me, hanging out with her would have just gotten more and more torturous.

Worse than that, it had been dangerous . Lace hadn’t showed a bit of interest—not that kind of interest anyway—and I’d still come close to kissing her.

Never again. Lesson learned. Move on. I was back in lone-hunter mode now.

“Yeah, gallons of progress,” I said. “You saw what I found on the wall?”

“I read your 1158-S from this morning, yes.”

“Well, I went back there today but didn’t find anything more on the creepy graffiti front. Or much else. Morgan moved out at least seven months, ago. Not exactly an oven-fresh trail.”

“Cal, eight months is the blink of an eye for Records. To find out where Morgan has gone, perhaps we should look at where she came from.”

“What do you mean?”

“The history of that property has proven interesting.” She turned to the Records guy and waved her pale hand.

“When the landlords in question filed their initial rent-control forms,” he began, “there were four residents on the seventh floor.” His voice quivered slightly, and once or twice as he read, his eyes darted up to the creepy dolls, confirming that he wasn’t comfortable in the Shrink’s office. Not a hunter, just an average working stiff with a city job. His chair was backed as far away from the red line as it could go. No typhoid germs for him. “We ran the names of these individuals through the city databases and hit a missing persons report from March this year.”

“Only one?” I asked. “I figured they’d all be missing.”

He shook his head. “More than one missing person from the same address, and we would have already filed an MP-2068 with you guys. But there was only one hit. NYPD has no leads, and at this point it’s pretty much a dead investigation.”

Given what I’d seen in Lace’s apartment, that wording was appropriate. “So let me guess: The guy who lived in 701 is gone.” So pretty I just had to eat him .

The man from Records nodded. “That’s right, 701. Jesus Delanzo, age twenty-seven. Photographer.” He looked up at me, and when I didn’t say anything, he continued, “Apartment 702 was occupied by Angela Dreyfus, age thirty-four. Broker.”

“Where does she live now?”

He frowned. “We don’t exactly have an address for her. Just a post office box in Brooklyn, and a cell phone that doesn’t answer.”

“Rather anonymous, don’t you think?” the Shrink said.

“And her friends and family don’t think it’s weird she lives in a post office box?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” the Records guy said. “If they’re worried, they haven’t filed with the NYPD.”

I frowned, but the Records guy kept going. “A couple lived in the other apartment—703. Patricia and Joseph Moore, both age twenty-eight. And guess what: Their mail forwards to the same post office box as Angela Dreyfus’s, and they have the same phone number.” He leaned back, crossed his legs, and smiled, rather pleased to have put such a juicy coincidence on my plate.

But his last words hadn’t even gotten through to me yet. Something else was really wrong.

“That’s only three apartments. What about 704?”

He raised an eyebrow, looked down at his printouts, and shrugged. “Unoccupied.”

“Unoccupied?” I turned to the Shrink. “But that’s where Morgan lived. Her junk mail is still showing up there.”

The Records guy nodded. “The post office doesn’t forward junk mail.”

“But why don’t you have a record of her?”

He leafed through his folder as he shook his head. “Because the landlord never filed an occupancy form for that apartment. Maybe they were letting her live there for free.”

“For free ? Fat chance,” I said. “That’s a three-grand-a-month apartment.”

“Actually, more like thirty-five hundred,” the Records guy corrected.

“Ouch,” I said.

“The rent is not the most unsettling thing about that building, Cal,” the Shrink said. “There was something else Records didn’t notice until you prompted them to look.”

The guy glanced sheepishly down at his papers. “It’s not anything we usually flag for investigation. But it is … odd.” He shuffled papers and unrolled a large set of blueprints across his knees. “The building plans show an oversize foundation, much deeper and more elaborate than one would expect.”

“A foundation?” I said. “You mean, the part that’s underground ?”

He nodded. “They didn’t have the air rights to put up a tall building, because it would block views of the river. So they decided to make some extra space below. There are several subbasements descending into the granite bedrock, spreading out wider than the building overhead. Room for a two-floor health club, supposedly.”

“Health club in the basement.” I shrugged. “Not surprising in a ritzy place like that.”

The Shrink drew herself up. “Unfortunately, this health club is not in a particularly healthy location. They excavated too close to the PATH tunnel, an area where the island is very … porous. That tunnel was only finished in 1908. Not everything stirred up by the intrusion has settled yet.”

“Not settled yet?” I said. “After a hundred years?”

The Shrink steepled her fingers. “The big things down there awaken slowly, Kid. And they settle slowly, too.”

I swallowed. Every old city in the world has a Night Watch of some kind, and they all get nervous when the citizens start digging. The asphalt is there for a very good reason—to put something solid between you and the things that live underneath.

“It’s possible that this excavation has opened the lower environs,” the Shrink said, “allowing something old to bubble up.”

“You think they uncovered a reservoir?”

Neither of them said anything.

Remember what I said about rats carrying the disease? How broods store the parasite in their blood when their peeps die? Those broods can last a long time after the peeps are gone, spreading the disease down generations of rats. Old cities carry the parasite in their bones, the way chicken pox can live in your spinal column for decades, ready to pop out as horrible blisters in old age.

“The health club, huh?” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what people get for working out.”