Scott Westerfeld - Peeps

She snorted. “They’re all watching the sunset.”

Cornelius yowled, sensing that our argument was delaying nummies.

“Yes, Corny, I love you too,” Lace muttered, slipping off her backpack and unzipping it. She pulled out a paper bag, which gave off the mouthwatering scent of rare hamburgers.

Cornelius began to purr as Lace opened one of the foil-wrapped burgers for him, laying to one side the pointless bun and wilted leaf of lettuce. He liked the mayo, though, and licked it off her fingers as she placed the hamburger on the black-tar roof. Then he dug noisily into the main event.

Lace looked at her cat-spittled fingers. “Great. Now I’m supposed to eat with these?”

I laughed, pulling my burger from the bag. “Relax. Corny doesn’t have any diseases. Nothing you haven’t already got anyway.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, glancing over the roof’s edge. “What’s Dr. Rat always saying? About how cats can fall from any distance?”

“Hey!” I knelt and protectively stroked his flank. He munched away, paying no attention to her threats.

“You’re right anyway,” Lace said. “A fat-ass cat like him would probably leave a crack in the sidewalk, big enough for monsters to get through. Manny wouldn’t like that.”

Manny did like Corny, though. Pets weren’t officially allowed in Lace’s building, but he and the staff had started to make exceptions. With so many people complaining about rat noises in their walls, we’d been lending Cornelius out overnight. A lot of Lace’s fellow tenants took us up on the offer, after we’d explained how once a cat gets its dander inside your apartment, rodents will give you a wide berth. You just had to get used to waking up with him sitting on your chest.

This building was on the front line, after all; Lace and I had made it something of a personal project.

Plus, Lace still had that apartment with the cheap rent and the good views. Once Health and Mental had fired off a few nasty memos to her landlords about the rat issue, they’d extended those seventh-floor leases indefinitely. These particular landlords had plenty of money already, having been New York City landowners for almost four hundred years.

Of course, we know that staying in town won’t be a cakewalk. New York City can be very stressful. There are rough days ahead, right around the corner. It takes some getting used to, going to Bob’s Diner for pepper steak, innocently chatting with Rebecky while fully aware of what’s coming next—the meltdown, the crumbling of civilization, the zombie apocalypse.

Or, as they call it in the New Watch these days, the Inflammation.

When the burgers were eaten, I said, “We should get back to work.”

Lace rolled her eyes, always ready to demonstrate her incredulity that I officially outranked her in the New Watch. But she lifted her binoculars, training them on the red-tinged river. “So what are we looking for again?”

“Worm signs,” I said.

“No duh. But no one ever tells me, what in fact are the signs of a worm?”

I shrugged. “Worminess?”

She turned from her vigil long enough to stick her tongue out at me.

I smiled and raised my own binoculars. “You’ll know them when you see them. We always do.”

“Sure. But do they even like water?”

“Another good question. After all, the PATH tunnel doesn’t actually go through the water, just under it.” I swept my amplified gaze across to the exhaust towers, the dynamos of subterranean fresh air that had caused this whole turn of the worm. Above the windowless column of bricks, shapes circled in the fading light, their white feathers toasted a dull orange by the sunset. This was a new thing, the wheeling cloud of seagulls that perpetually hovered over the towers. No one knew what it meant.

Some new airborne vector? Mere coincidence? Scavengers sensing a coming kill?

I sighed. “Sometimes I don’t think we actually know anything.”

“Don’t worry, Cal,” she said. “It’s still early days.”

The whoop of a siren filtered up from the street, and we ran to the other side of the building, peering down into the darkness. The flash of police-car lights filled the cavern between our building and the one across the street, the pop of radios echoing up. Definitely an arrest.

“Got your badge?” I asked.

“Always. Best part of the job.”

We sometimes have to intervene, when the police are about to take a confused and violent newbie off to jail. We flash our Homeland Security badges and talk some bio-warfare crap, and everyone backs off real quick. Ten hours later, the peep is in Montana, hooked up to an intravenous garlic drip and getting the lowdown way too fast.

Of course, newbies take a lot less convincing, these days. The signs are everywhere.

I focused my binoculars, training them on the crowd gathered around the police car. The cops were putting handcuffs on some guy, and a woman was yelling at him, shaking her purse by its broken strap. A wallet and some other stuff lay scattered across the sidewalk. A backup police car rolled down the block at a leisurely speed.

I sighed, lowering the binoculars. “Looks like a purse-snatching, just a perp, not a peep.”

One thing you can say for them, peeps don’t steal, except for maybe the occasional chunk of meat. They can’t think far enough ahead to go for the cash. And it’s interesting how, even with the Inflammation going on, regular crime still happens. Maybe more so. End of the world or not, people aren’t going to change that much.

“Yeah,” Lace sighed, lowering her binoculars. “This sucks.” Her teeth chewed at her lower lip.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “We’ll get some action tonight. We always do.”

“Yeah, whatever.” She shook her head. “I’m just bummed.”

“Why?”

She let out a long breath. “Side effects.”

My eyebrows raised. “From the pills?”

“No, the disease.” Lace turned to me and made a face. “I don’t like potato salad anymore.”

I had to laugh. “Don’t worry. Carbs just don’t do it for the parasite.”

“Sure, but what if it’s … you know, the anathema. What if I’m starting to hate stuff?”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” I nodded sagely. “Well, maybe we should do a little testing, just to make sure.”

I drew her closer, and we kissed. The chill wind kicked up, and Corny padded over to slide figure eights between our ankles, but our mouths stayed locked, warm and unbreakable. So much was changing around us, it was good how this feeling stayed the same.

She still smelled wonderful.

“Hating me yet?” I asked after a while.

“No. In fact…” She stopped. “Whoa. Did you feel that?”

I knelt and placed a palm on the black tar. The slightest rumble filtered up through the fourteen stories of the building. “Two big ones, fading now.”

“I’ll call them in,” Lace said, pulling out her phone, her thumbs darting out a text message to the tracking office.

I sniffed the air, smelling traces of the beasts. Impressive how the scent reached all the way up here, as if the earth were growing more porous every day.

But all I wanted to do was hold Lace again.

“Funny how that happens,” I said. “How we’re always kissing, or about to, when they come around?”

She pressed send, looked up from the tiny screen, and smiled. “You’ve noticed that too?”

I nodded slowly. “Remember, Morgan said she could feel something here, after she’d been infected. She’d sneak down into the basement and the darkness would turn her on. Drive her crazy.”

“That’s parasite mind control, right? Making carriers horny so the disease spreads fastest where it’s needed most?” Lace smiled, pleased at her own analysis; she was starting to get the biology down.