Scott Westerfeld - Peeps

The express train swerved into view ahead, taking the slow curve with one long screaming complaint. The cold white eyes of its headlights flickered through the steel columns like the light of an old movie projector. In the strobing light, I saw that Lace had come to a halt. The train was on the express track; it wouldn’t hit us, but the approaching shriek of metal wheels had paralyzed her.

The wall of metal flew past, whipping Lace’s hair around her face and throwing sparks at our feet. Light from the passing windows flickered madly around us, and a few passengers’ faces shot by, looking down with astonished expressions. I put my arm around Lace, the rhythm of the train’s passage shuddering through our bodies. Its roar battered the air, loud enough to force my eyelids shut.

When the sound had faded into the distance, I asked, “Are you okay?”

She blinked. “Dude, that was loud!”

Lace’s voice sounded thin in my ringing ears. “No kidding. Come on, before another train comes.”

She nodded dumbly, and I pulled her the rest of the way to the abandoned station.

The Eighteenth Street station opened up in 1904, the same time as the rest of the 6; part of that turn-of-the-century dig-fest, I suppose.

Back then, all subway trains were five cars long. In the 1940s, with the city’s population booming, they were doubled up to ten, which left the old subway platforms a couple hundred feet too short. During the station-stretching project, a few in-between stations like Eighteenth were deemed not worth the trouble and shut down.

The Transit Authority may have forgotten these underground vaults, but they are remembered by a host of urban adventurers, graffiti artists, and other assorted spelunkers. For the next sixty years, the abandoned stations were spray-painted, vandalized, and made the subject of drunken dares, urban myths, and fannish Web sites. They are tourist stops for amateur subterraneans, training grounds for the Night Watch—the twilight zone between the human habitat and the Underworld.

I pulled Lace up onto the dark and empty platform. Six decades of graffiti swirled around us, the once-bright spray paint darkened by accumulated grime. Crumbling mosaic signs spelled out the street number and pointed toward exits that had been sealed for decades. As Lace steadied herself at the platform’s edge, she looked around with wide eyes, and my heart sank. It was awfully close to cave darkness here; a normal person should have been waving a hand in front of her face.

“So what now?” she said.

“This way.” Deciding to give her a real test, I led her to the door of the men’s bathroom, a relic of sixty years ago. The broken remains of a sink clung to one wall, and the broken wooden doors of the stalls leaned at haphazard angles. The last smells of disinfectant had faded; all that remained was warmish subway air filled with the scent of rats and mold and decay. Distant work lights reflected dimly from the grimy tiles. Even with my fully formed peep vision, I could hardly see.

I pointed into the last stall. “Can you read that?”

She peered unerringly at the one legible line among the tangled layers of graffiti. For a moment, she was silent, then said softly, “This is how it all started. Reading something written on a wall.”

“Can you see it?”

“It says, Take a shit, Linus.’ ”

I closed my eyes. Lace was infected. The parasite must have been working overtime, gathering reflective cells behind her corneas, readying her for a life of nocturnal hunting, of hiding from the sun.

“Who’s Linus?” Lace asked.

“Who knows? That’s been there for a while.”

“Oh. So what happens now?” she said. “I mean, Cal, did you bring me down here to … get rid of me or something?”

“Get rid—? Of course not!” I pulled the pills from my pocket. “Here, take two of these, right now.”

She shook out two and swallowed them, the pills catching for a moment in her dry throat. She coughed once, then said, “Is it really that dark down here? This isn’t some trick you’re pulling? I can really see in the dark?”

“Yeah, a normal person would be totally blind.”

“And I got this from your cat?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You know, Cal, it’s not like I had sex with your cat either.”

“But he sat on your chest while you slept and … exchanged breath with you, or something. Apparently that’s the way the old strain spreads, but nobody ever told me about it. Things are really screwed up right now at the Watch. In fact, things are about to go nuts in general.” I turned her to face me. “We’ll have to get out of the city. There’s going to be a lot of trouble as the infections set in.”

“Like you said when you first told me about the Watch? Everyone biting one another, a total zombie movie? So why not give everyone the pills?”

I chewed my lip. “Because they want the disease to spread, for some reason. But maybe they’ll eventually use the pills, and things will settle down, but until then…”

She looked at the bottle, squinting at its label. “And these really work?”

“You saw Sarah—she’s normal now. When I captured her, she was eating rats and hiding from the sun and living in Hoboken.”

“Oh, great, dude,” Lace said. “So that’s what I have to look forward to?”

“I hope not,” I said softly, reaching for her hand. She didn’t pull away. “Sarah didn’t have any pills at first. Maybe you’ll just go straight to the superpowers. I mean, you’ll be really strong and have great hearing, and a great sense of smell, too.”

“But Cal, what about the Garth Brooks thing?”

“Garth Brooks? Oh, the anathema.”

“It makes you start hating your old life, right?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “But Sarah’s over that too. She was even wearing an Elvis armband.”

“Elvis? What is it with your girlfriends?” Lace sighed. “But the anathema won’t happen to me?”

I paused, realizing I didn’t know anything for sure. None of my classes had covered the cat-borne strain or the ancient garlic-and-mandrake cure—it had all been kept secret from me. I didn’t know what symptoms to look for, or how to adjust the dosage if Lace started to grow long black fingernails or fear her own reflection.

I cleared my throat. “Well, we’ll have to watch for symptoms. Is there anything in particular you really like? Potato salad?” I wracked my brain, realizing how little I knew about Lace. “Hip-hop? Heavy metal? Oh, yeah, the smell of bacon. Anything else I should worry about if you start despising it?”

She sighed. “I thought we covered this already.”

“What? Potato salad?”

“No, stupid.” And then she kissed me.

Her mouth was warm against mine, her heart still beating hard from our dash through the darkness, from the creepiness of the abandoned station, from the news that she would soon turn into a vampire. Or maybe just from kissing me—I could feel it pounding in her lips, full of blood. My own heartbeat seemed to rush into my head, strong enough to pulse red at the corners of my vision.

A predator’s kiss: endless, insistent, and my first in six long months.

When we finally parted, Lace whispered, “You feel like you’ve got a fever.”

Still dizzy, I smiled. “All the time. Supermetabolism.”

“And you’ve got supersmell too?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Dude.” She sniffed the air and frowned. “So what do I smell like?”

I inhaled softly, letting Lace’s scent claim me, the familiar jasmine of her shampoo somehow settling the chaos of the past twenty-four hours. We could kiss again, I realized, do anything we wanted. It was safe now, even with the parasite’s spores in my blood and saliva, because she was infected, just like me.