Scott Westerfeld - Peeps

There were more of those things down here, I could tell—a plague of worms that humanity had faced before. Lace and Sarah and Morgan and I were only the vanguard; we needed lots of help.

Now I understood what Morgan was doing, spreading the old strain of the parasite, massing a new army to face the coming days. And suddenly I could feel a similar imperative surging through my own body—every bit as strong as the six hundred and twenty-five volts from the third rail—something I had suppressed for six long months.

I took Lace’s hand. “Are you feeling what I’m feeling? A sort of post-battle…”

“Horniness?” she finished. “Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not.” Our lips met again, a kiss as intense as the passing train’s thunder in our ears.

Let us recap:

Parasites are bad.

They suck your blood out of the lining of your stomach. They grow into two-foot-long snakes and roost in the skin of your leg. They infect your cat and then jump up your nose to live in cysts inside your brain, turning you feline-centric and irresponsible. They take over your blood cells in hopes of infecting passing mosquitoes, leaving your liver and brain crumbling from lack of oxygen. They incense your immune system, causing it to destroy your eyeballs. They take terrible advantage of snails and birds and ants and monkeys and cows, stealing their bodies and their food and their evolutionary futures. They almost starved twenty million people in Africa to death.

Basically, they want to rule the world and will crumple whole species like balls of paper and then reshape them in order to carry out their plans. They turn us into walking undead, ravaged hosts that serve only their reproduction.

That’s bad. But…

Parasites are also good.

They have bred howler monkeys to live in peace with one another. Their lousy genes help track the history of the human species. They prevent cows from overgrazing grasslands into windblown deserts. They tame your immune system so it doesn’t destroy your own stomach lining. Then they go and save those twenty million people in Africa, by laying their eggs in those other parasites, the ones trying to starve them.

Which is all quite good, really.

So parasites are bad and good. We depend on them, like all the other checks and balances of the natural world; predators and prey, vegetarians and carnivores, parasites and hosts all need one another to survive.

Here’s the thing: They’re part of the system . Like government bureaucracies with all those forms that have to be filled out in triplicate, they may be a pain, but we’re stuck with them. If every parasite suddenly disappeared from the earth one day, it would be a much bigger disaster than you’d think. The natural order would crumble.

In short, parasites are here to stay, which is a good thing, really. We are what we eat, and we consume them every day, the worms lodged in slices of rare beef or the toxoplasma spores floating up our noses from boxes of cat litter. And they eat us every day too, from ticks sucking our blood to microscopic invaders reshaping our cells. The exchange goes on unendingly, as certain as the earth traveling around the sun.

In a manner of speaking, parasites are us.

Deal with it.

When we pulled ourselves back up onto the subway platform, everyone gave us a wide berth.

You could hardly blame them. We were covered in dust and sweat, our palms reddened with rust, our expressions crazed. And the funny thing was, we were all over each other. Fighting the worm had redoubled my usual implacable desires, and somehow Lace was affected too. We kept stopping just to smell each other, to hold hands tightly, to taste each other’s lips.

“This is weird,” she said.

“Yeah. But good.”

“Mmm. Let’s go somewhere a little more private.”

I nodded. “Where?”

“ Anywhere .”

We ran up the stairs and into Union Square, crossing the park, walking without a plan. The city seemed weirdly blurry around us. My connection with Lace was so intense, everyone else seemed faded and remote. The parasite’s imperative mixed with six months of celibacy screaming inside me, heady and insistent.

I thought about risking her apartment—after all, she’d have to pick up some clothes some time—and started to draw Lace toward the Hudson. But then my eyes began to catch glimpses of them. Their smells grew under the current of humanity in the streets.

Predators.

They were spread out across the crowd, walking not much faster than normal humans, but somehow completely different. They moved like leopards through high grass, leaving only the faintest stir behind them. Maybe a dozen, all more or less my age.

No one else seemed to notice them, but their uncanny movements made my head pound. I’d never seen so many carriers in one place before. Night Watch hunters always work alone, but this was a pack.

And the funny thing was, they were really sexy .

“Cal…?” Lace said softly.

“Yeah. I see them.”

“What are they?”

“They’re like us. Infected.”

“The Night Watch?”

“No. Something else.”

By the time I spotted Morgan Ryder, she was already standing in front of us, blocking our path, wearing all black and an amused expression.

“What do we do?” Lace asked, squeezing my hand hard.

I sighed, bringing her to a halt.

“I guess we talk to them.”

“How did you find us?”

Morgan smiled, taking a drink of water before she answered. She’d taken us to a hotel bar on Union Square. The others had kept moving, except for one waiting at the door of the place and cradling a cell phone. Occasionally, he glanced back at her and signaled.

Even with Lace beside me, I was having trouble not staring at Morgan. Memories of the night I’d been infected were rushing back into me. Her eyes were green, I finally recalled. And her black hair set such a contrast, gathered in locks as thick as shoelaces against her pale skin.

“We didn’t find you,” she said. “That is, we weren’t looking for you. We were after something else. Something underneath.”

“The worm,” Lace said.

Morgan nodded. “You smelled it?”

“We saw it,” Lace said. “Took a big chunk out of it too.”

“It was in the old Eighteenth Street station,” I said.

Morgan nodded and made a hand gesture to the carrier in front, and he spoke into his cell phone.

Our beers arrived, and Morgan raised hers into the air. “Well done, then.”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“What? Are you finally going to listen to me, Cal? Not going to run away?”

“I’m listening. And we already know about the old strain and the new, and that we’re meant to fight the worms. But what you’re doing is crazy—infecting people at random is no way to go about this.”

“It’s not as random as you think, Cal.” She leaned back into the plush couch. “Immune systems are tricky things. They can do a lot of damage.”

I nodded, thinking about wolbachia driving T- and B-cells crazy, your immune defenses eating your own eyeballs.

But Lace hadn’t benefited from six months of parasitology. “How do you mean?”

Morgan held the cold beer against her cheek. “Let’s say you’ve got a deadly fever—your body temperature is climbing past the limit, high enough to damage your brain. That’s your immune system hoping that your illness will fry before you do. Killing the invader is worth losing a few brain cells.”

Lace blinked. “Dude. What does that have to do with monsters?”