Scott Westerfeld - Peeps

“Couldn’t wait, could you?” I called.

“No,” she yelled up. “It’s a big one, isn’t it?”

“Seems to be.” The brood was still behind me, quietly attending to its sleeping mistress.

She looked at the half-fallen staircase with annoyance. “Did you do that?”

“Um, sort of.”

“So how am I supposed to get up there, Kid?”

I just shrugged. I’m not a big fan of the nickname “Kid.” They all call me that at the Night Watch, just because I’m a peep hunter at nineteen, a job where the average age is about a hundred and seventy-five. All peep hunters are carriers. Only carriers are fast and strong enough to hunt down our crazy, violent cousins.

Dr. Rat’s usually pretty cool, though. She doesn’t mind her own nickname, mostly because she actually likes rats. And even though she’s about sixty and wears enough hair-spray to stick a bear to the ceiling, she plays good alternative metal and lets me rip her CDs—Kill Fee hasn’t made a dime off me since I met Dr. Rat. And mercifully, she falls well off my sexual radar, so I can actually concentrate in the Night Watch classes she teaches (Rats 101, Peep Hunting 101, and Early Plagues and Pestilence).

Like most people who work at the Night Watch, she’s not parasite-positive. She’s just a working stiff who loves her job. You have to, working at the Night Watch. The pay’s not great.

With one last look at the crumpled staircase, Dr. Rat began to set out her traps, then started laying out piles of poison.

“Isn’t there enough of that stuff around already?” I asked.

“Not like this. Something new I’m trying. It’s marked with Essence of Cal Thompson. A few swabs of your sweat on each pile and they’ll eat hearty.”

“My what?” I said. “Where’d you get my sweat?”

“From a pencil I borrowed from you in Rats 101, after that pop quiz last week. Did you know pop quizzes make you sweat, Cal?”

“Not that much!”

“Only takes a little—along with some peanut butter.”

I wiped my palms on my jacket, not sure how annoyed to be.

Rats are great smellers, gourmets of garbage. When they eat, they can detect one part of rat poison in a million. And they can smell their peeps from a mile away. Because I was Sarah’s progenitor, my familiar smell would cover the taint of poison.

I supposed it was worth having my sweat stolen. We had to kill off Sarah’s brood before it fell apart and scattered into the rest of Hoboken. A hungry brood that has lost its peep can be dangerous, and the parasite occasionally spreads from rats back into humans. The last thing New Jersey needed was another peep.

That’s the interesting thing about Dr. Rat: She loves rats but also loves coming up with new and exciting ways to kill them. Like I said, love and hatred aren’t that far apart.

The transport squad arrived ten minutes later. They didn’t wait for sunset, just cut the locks off the biggest set of doors and backed their garbage truck right up to them, its reverse beep echoing through the terminal to wake the dead. Garbage trucks are perfect for the transport squad. They’re like the digestive system of the modern world—no one ever thinks twice about them. They’re built like tanks and yet are completely invisible to regular people going about their regular business. And if the guys who ride on them happen to be wearing thick protective suits and rubber gloves, well, nothing funny about that, is there? Garbage is dangerous stuff, after all.

Rather than chance the ruined staircase, the transport guys reached into their truck for rope ladders with grappling hooks. They climbed up, then lowered Sarah to the ground floor in a litter. They always carry mountain-rescue gear, it turns out.

I watched the whole operation while I did my paperwork, then asked the transport boss if I could come along in the truck with Sarah.

He shook his head and said, “No rides, Kid. Anyway, the Shrink wants to see you.”

“Oh,” I said.

When the Shrink calls, you go.

By the time I got back into Manhattan, darkness had fallen.

In New York City, they grind up old glass, mix it into concrete, and make sidewalks out of it. Glassphalt looks pretty, especially if you’ve got peep eyesight. It sparkled underfoot as I walked, catching the orange glow of streetlights.

Most important, the glassphalt gave me something to look at besides the women passing by—trendy Villagers with chunky shoes and cool accessories, tourists looking around all wide-eyed and wanting to ask directions, NYU dance students in formfitting regalia. The worst thing about New York is that it’s full of beautiful women, enough to make my head start spinning with unthinkable thoughts.

My senses were still at the pitch that hunting brings them to. I could feel the rumble of distant subway trains through my feet and hear the buzz of streetlight timers in their metal boxes. I caught the smells of perfume, body lotion, and scented shampoo.

And stared at the sparkling sidewalk.

I was more depressed than horny, though. I kept seeing Sarah on that bare and rickety bed, asking for one last glimpse of the King, however painful.

I’d always thought that once I found her, things would uncrumble a little. Life would never be completely normal again, but at least certain debts had been settled. With her in recovery, my chain of the infection had been broken.

But I still felt crappy.

The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It’s not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven’t turned into monsters ourselves— survivor’s guilt , that’s called. And we feel a bit stupid that we didn’t notice our own symptoms earlier. I mean, I’d been sort of wondering why the Atkins diet was giving me night vision. But that hadn’t seemed like something to worry about…

And there was the burning question: Why hadn’t I been more concerned when my one real girlfriend, two girls I’d had a few dates with, and another I’d made out with on New Year’s Eve had all gone crazy?

I’d just thought that was a New York thing.

Visiting the Shrink makes my ears pop.

She lives in the bowels of a Colonial-era town house, the original headquarters of the Night Watch, her office at the end of a long, narrow corridor. A soft but steady breeze pushes you toward her, like a phantom hand in the middle of your back. But it isn’t magic; it’s something called a negative-pressure prophylaxis , which is basically a big condom made of air. Throughout the house, a constant wind blows toward the Shrink from all directions. No stray microbes can escape from her out into the rest of the city, because all the air in the house moves toward her. After she’s breathed it, this air gets microfiltered, chlorine-gassed, and roasted at about two hundred degrees Celsius before it pops out of the town house’s always-smoking chimney. It’s the same setup they have at bioweapons factories, and at the lab in Atlanta where scientists keep smallpox virus in a locked freezer.

The Shrink actually has smallpox, she once told me. She’s a carrier, like us hunters, but she’s been alive a lot longer, even longer than the Night Mayor. Old enough to have been around before inoculations were invented, back when measles and smallpox killed more people than war. The parasite makes her immune from all that stuff, of course, but she still wound up catching it, and she carries bits and pieces of various human scourges to this day. So they keep her in a bubble.

And yes, we peeps can live a really long time.

New York’s city government goes back about three hundred and fifty years, a century and a half older than the United States of America. The Night Watch Authority may have split off from official City Hall a while back—like the peeps we hunt, we have to hide ourselves—but the Night Mayor was appointed for a lifelong term in 1687. It just so happens he’s still alive. That makes us the oldest authority in the New World, edging the Freemasons by forty-six years. Not too shabby.