Peeps

Chapter 11

Chapter 11
MAJOR REVELATION INCIDENT
"What are you doing down here?" I yelled.
"What are you doing down here?" Lace yelled back, grabbing two blind fistfuls of my hazmat suit in the darkness. "Where the hell are we anyway? Were those rats?"
"Yes, those were rats!"
She started hopping. "Crap! I thought so. Why did it go all dark?"
"I kind of dropped my flashlight."
"Dude! Let's get out of here!"
We did. I could see only leftover streaks etched into my retinas by the flashlight, but Lace's eyes weren't as sensitive as mine. She pulled me stumbling back up the stairs, and as we squished through the poisoned-peanut-butter hallway, my vision began to return - light was pouring in from the health club through the open locker door.
Lace squeezed out, and I followed, slamming the locker shut behind me. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, and the basement looked shockingly normal.
"What was that down there?" Lace cried.
"Wait a second." I pulled her away from the security cameras and over to a row of weight benches. Sitting down, I tried to blink away the spots on my vision. Lace stayed standing, eyes wide, nervously shifting from one foot to the other.
"What the hell?" was all she could say.
I stared at her, half blind and still astonished by her sudden appearance. Then I remembered the doorman setting the elevator's controls, leaving them unlocked so that I could return to the ground floor.
I hadn't paid close enough attention. It was all my fault. I'd blown the first rule of every Night Watch investigation: Secure the site. But I was positive I'd closed the locker door behind me...
"How did you get down here?" I sputtered. "I thought the health club was closed at night!"
"Dude, you think I came down here to exercise?" She was still shifting from foot to foot. "I was headed out and Manny said, 'You know that guy you came in with this afternoon? He's here spraying for rats.' And I'm like, 'What?' And he's like, 'Yeah, did you know he was an exterminator? He's down in the health club right now, looking to kill some rats!' " Lace spread her open palms wide. "But you told me you were looking for Morgan. So what the hell?"
I didn't answer, just sighed.
"And when I came down here," she continued in a breathless rush, "the lights weren't even on. I thought Manny had lost his mind or something. But when the elevator closed behind me, it was totally dark." She pointed. "Except suddenly that locker was doing this ... glowing thing."
I groaned. On its killer setting, my Night Watch flashlight had been visible from up here.
Still hyperventilating, Lace continued. "And there was a hidden hallway, and the floor was covered with weird goo, and there were stairs at the end, with this insane squeaky pandemonium coming up from below. I called your name, but all I heard was rats!"
"And that made you want to go down the stairs?" I asked.
"No!" Lace cried. "But by then I figured you were down here, somewhere, maybe in trouble."
My eyes widened. "You came down to help me?"
"Dude, things didn't look so good down there."
I couldn't argue with that. No one else could have messed this up quite as totally as I had. Things were bad enough, with a great big rat reservoir bubbling up from the Underworld, along with a weird peeplike cat and something big enough to make the earth shudder. And right smack in the middle of it all, I'd managed to insert Lace - a Major Revelation Incident.
I was screwed. But I found myself staring at Lace with admiration.
"All those rats..." A note of exhaustion crept into her voice as hysteria subsided. "Do you think they'll follow us?"
"No." I pointed at her shoe. "That stuff will stop them."
"What the ...?" She stood on one foot, staring at the bottom of her other shoe. "What the hell is this crap anyway?"
"Watch out! It's poisonous!"
She sniffed the air. "It smells like peanut butter."
"It's poisonous peanut butter!"
She let out a sigh. "Whatever - I wasn't going to eat it. Note to Cal: I do not eat stuff off my shoe."
"Right. But it's dangerous!"
"Yeah, no kidding. This whole place should be condemned. There were, like, thousands of rats in that pool."
I swallowed, nodding slowly. "Yeah. At least."
"So what's the deal? What are you doing here, Cal? You're not an exterminator. Don't tell me that you investigate STDs and spray for rats."
"Um, not usually."
"So does this building have the plague or something?"
Rats and plague did go together. Would Lace believe that one? My mind began to race.
"No, dude," Lace said firmly, rising to her feet and putting a finger in my face. "Don't sit there making shit up. Tell me the truth."
"Uh ... I can't."
"You're trying to hide this? That's nuts!"
I stood and put my hands on her shoulders. "Listen, I can't say anything. Except that it's very important that you don't tell anyone about what's down there."
"Why the hell would I keep quiet? There's a swimming pool full of rats in my basement!"
"You just have to trust me."
"Trust you? Screw that!" She set her jaw, and her voice rose. "There's a disease that makes people write on the walls in blood spreading through my building, and I'm supposed to keep it a secret?"
"Um, yes?"
"Well, listen to this, then, Cal. You think this should be a secret? Wait till I tell Manny what I saw down there, and Max and Freddie and everyone else in the building, and the New York Times and the Post and Daily News, for that matter. It won't be very secret then, will it?"
I tried to pull off a shrug. "No. Then it'll just be a building in New York City with rats in the basement."
"Not with that thing on my wall."
I swallowed and had to admit she had something there. With Morgan's gristle graffiti added into the mix, the NYPD would have a reason to reopen apartment 701 's missing persons case, which might lead them in all sorts of uncomfortable directions. The Night Watch was usually pretty good at making investigations go away, but this one would be tricky.
Which meant I was supposed to call the Shrink right now and tell her what had happened. But the problem with that was, I already knew what she'd tell me to do. Lace would have to disappear forever. All because she'd tried to help me.
I stood there in silence, paralyzed.
"I just want the truth," Lace said softly. She sat down heavily on a weight bench, as if her nervous energy had run out.
"It's really complicated, Lace."
"Yeah, well, it's pretty simple for me - I live here, Cal. Something really hideous is going on under our feet, and something insane happened right in my living room. It's starting to freak me out."
On those last words, her voice broke.
She could smell it now. With all she'd seen, Lace could feel the capital-N Nature bubbling up from below - not the fuzzy Nature at the petting zoo, or even the deadly but noble kind on the Nature Channel. This was the appalling, nasty, real-world version, snails' eyes getting eaten by trematodes; hookworms living inside a billion human beings, sucking at their guts; parasites controlling your mind and body and turning you into their personal breeding ground.
I sat down next to her. "Listen, I understand you're scared. But knowing the truth won't make it any better. The truth sucks."
"Maybe. But it's still the truth. All you've done is lie since you met me, Cal."
I blinked. She didn't. "Yeah," I said. "But - "
"But what?"
At that moment, I knew what I really wanted. After six months of the natural world getting steadily more horrible, of my own body turning against me, I was just as scared as Lace. I needed someone to share that fear with, someone to cling to.
And I wanted it to be her.
"Maybe I can explain some of it." I breathed out slowly, a shudder going through me. "But you'd have to promise not to tell anyone else. This isn't some journalism class project, okay? This is deadly serious. It has to stay secret."
Lace thought for a few seconds. "Okay." She raised a finger in warning. "As long as you don't lie to me. Ever."
I swallowed. She'd agreed way too fast. How could I believe her? She was studying to be a reporter, after all. Of course, my only other choice was the phone call that would make her disappear.
I stared into her face, trying to divine the truth of her promise, which probably wasn't the best idea. Her brown eyes were still wide with shock, her breathing still hard. My whole awareness focused itself upon her, a tangle of hyped-up senses drinking her in.
My guess is the parasite inside me made the choice. Partly anyway.
"Okay. Deal." I put out my hand. As Lace shook it, a strange thing happened: Instead of shame, I felt relief. After keeping this secret from the whole world for half a year, I was finally telling someone. It was like kicking my boots off at the end of a really long day.
Lace didn't let go of my hand, her grip strengthening as she said, "But you can't lie to me."
"I won't." My mind was clearing, beginning to work logically for the first time since the earth had started to tremble, and I realized what I had to do next. "But before I tell you, I have to sort out a couple of things."
Lace narrowed her eyes. "Like what?"
"I need to secure the basement: Chain up that big door behind the wall and lock that locker." I could leave my duffel bag downstairs, I realized. The rats wouldn't steal it, and I'd need the equipment right where it was the next time I went down. But there was one last thing I had to get before we left. "Um, do you have a flashlight? Or a lighter on you?"
"Yeah, I've got a lighter. But Cal, tell me you're not going down those stairs again."
"Just for a second."
"What the hell for?"
I looked into her brown eyes, wide with rekindled fear, but if Lace wanted to know the truth, it was time she found out how nasty it could be.
"Well, since we're already down here and everything, I really should catch a rat."
"Okay, I'm tracking a disease. That part of my story was true."
"No kidding. I mean, rats? Madness? Bodily fluids? What else could it be?"
"Oh, right. Nothing, I guess."
We were up in Lace's apartment. She was drinking chamomile tea and staring out at the river; I was cleaning poisonous peanut butter out of my boot treads, hoping the task would distract me from the fact that Lace was wearing a bathrobe. A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held down with a pile of journalism textbooks, saying rude things in rat-speak.
I'd caught PNS at the top of the stairs, snatching him up in a rubber-gloved hand as he sniffed one of Lace's peanutty footprints.
Lace cleared her throat. "So, is this a terrorist attack or something? Or a genetic engineering thing that went wrong?"
"No. It's just a disease. The regular kind, but secret."
"Okay." She didn't sound convinced. "So how do I avoid getting it?"
"Well, you can be exposed through unprotected sex, or if someone bites you and draws blood."
"Bites you?"
"Yeah. It's like rabies. It makes its hosts want to bite other animals."
"As in 'So pretty I had to eat him'?"
"Exactly. Cannibalism is also a symptom."
"That's a symptom?" She shuddered and took a sip. "So what's with all the rats?"
"At Health and Mental they call rats 'germ elevators,' because they bring germs that are down in the sewers up to where people live, like this high-rise. A rat bite is probably how Morgan, or someone else up here, got infected in the first place."
I saw another shudder pass through the shoulders of her bathrobe. Lace had taken a shower while I'd called Manny and told him to lock up the health club. Her face looked pink from a hard scrubbing, and her wet hair was still giving off curls of steam. I turned my attention back to my boots.
At the mention of rat bites, she lifted her feet up from the floor and tucked them under her on the chair. "So, sex and rats. Anything else I should worry about?"
"Well, we think there used to be a strain that infected wolves, based on certain historical ... evidence." I decided not to mention the bigger things that Chip was worried about, or whatever had made the basement tremble, and I cleared my throat. "But as far as we know, wolves are too small a population to support the parasite these days. So, you're in luck there."
"Oh, good. Because I was really worried about wolves." She turned to me. "So, it's a parasite? Like a tick or something?"
"Yeah. It's not like a flu or the common cold. It's an animal."
"What the hell kind of animal?"
"Sort of like a tapeworm. It starts off as a tiny spore, but it grows big, taking over your whole body. It changes your muscles, your senses, and most of all, your brain. You become a crazed killer, an animal."
"Wow, that is really freaky and disgusting, Cal," she said, cinching her bathrobe tighter.
Tell me about it, I thought, but didn't say anything. I might have promised not to lie to her, but my personal medical history was not her business.
"So," Lace said, "does this disease have a name?"
I swallowed, thinking about the various things it had been called over the centuries - vampirism, lycanthropy, zombification, demonic possession. But none of those old words was going to make this any easier for Lace to deal with.
"Technically, the parasite is known as Echinococcus cannibillus. But seeing as how that takes too long to say, we usually just call it 'the parasite.' People with the disease are 'parasite-positives,' but we mostly say 'peeps,' for short."
"Peeps. Cute." She looked at me, frowning. "So who's this we you're talking about anyway? You're not really with the city, are you? You're some sort of Homeland Security guy or something."
"No, I do work for the city, like I said. The federal government doesn't know about this."
"What? You mean there's some insane disease spreading and the government doesn't even know about it? That's crazy!"
I sighed, beginning to wonder if this had been a really bad idea. Lace didn't even understand the basics yet - all I'd managed to do was freak her out. The Shrink employed a whole department of psych specialists to break the news to new carriers like me; they had a library full of musty but impressive books and a spanking new lab full of blinking lights and creepy specimens. All I was doing was haphazardly answering questions, strictly amateur hour.
I pulled a chair over and sat down in front of her. "I'm not explaining this right, Lace. This isn't an acute situation. It's chronic."
"Meaning what?"
"That this disease is ancient. It's been part of human biology and culture for a long time. It almost destroyed Europe in the fourteenth century."
"Hang on. You said this wasn't the plague."
"It isn't, but bubonic plague was a side effect. In the 1300s, the parasite began to spread from humans to rats, which had just arrived from Asia. But it didn't reach optimum virulence with rodents for a few decades, so it mostly just killed them. As the rats died, the fleas that carried plague jumped over to human hosts."
"Okay. Excuse me, but what?"
"Oh, right. Sorry, got ahead of myself," I said, knocking my head with my fists. The last six months had been one big crash course in parasitology for me; I'd almost forgotten that most people didn't spend days thinking about final hosts, immune responses, or optimum virulence.
I took a deep breath. "Okay, let me start over. The parasite goes way back, to before civilization even. The people I work for, the Night Watch, also go way back. We existed before the United States did. It's our job to protect the city from the disease."
"By doing what? Sticking rats in spaghetti strainers?"
Release me! squeaked PNS.
"No. By finding people with the parasite and treating them. And by destroying their broods - um, I mean, killing any rats who carry the disease."
She shook her head. "It doesn't make sense, Cal. Why keep it a secret? Aren't you Health Department guys supposed to educate people about diseases? Not lie to them?"
I chewed my lip. "There's no point in making it public, Lace. The disease is very rare; there's only a serious outbreak every few decades. Nobody tries to get bitten by a rat, after all."
"Hmm. I guess not. But still, this secrecy thing seems like a bad idea."
"Well, the Night Watch up in Boston once tried what you're talking about - a program of education to keep the citizens on the lookout for possible symptoms. They wound up with nonstop accusations of witchcraft, a handful of seventeen-year-olds claiming they'd had sex with the devil, and a lot of innocent bystanders getting barbecued. It took about a hundred years for things to settle down again."
Lace raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, we did that play in high school. But wasn't that a long time ago? Before science and stuff?"
I looked her in the eye. "Most people don't know jack about science. They don't believe in evolution because it makes them uncomfortable. Or they think AIDS is a curse sent down from God. How do you think those people would deal with the parasite?"
"Yeah, well, people are stupid. But you wouldn't keep AIDS a secret, would you?"
"No, but the parasite is different. It's special."
"How?"
I paused. This was the tricky part. In my own debriefing, the Night Watch psychs had presented all the science stuff for hours before talking about the legends, and it had been a solid week before they'd uttered the V-word.
"Well, some fears go farther back than science, deeper than rational thought. You can find peep legends in almost every culture on the globe; certain of the parasite's symptoms lend themselves to scary stories. If we ever get a major outbreak of this, there will be hell to pay."
"Certain symptoms? Like what?"
"Think about it, Lace. Peeps are light-fearing, disease-carrying cannibals who revel in blood."
As the words left my mouth, I realized I'd said too much too quickly.
She snorted. "Cal, are we talking about vampires?"
As I struggled to find the right words, her amused expression faded.
"Cal, you are not talking about vampires." She leaned closer. "Tell me. You're not supposed to lie to me!"
I sighed. "Yeah, peeps are vampires. Or zombies in Haiti, or tengu in Japan, or nian in China. But like I said, we prefer the term parasite-positive."
"Oh. Vampires," Lace said softly, looking away. She shook her head, and I thought for a moment that the slender thread of her trust had broken. But then I realized that her gaze was directed at the wall where the words written in blood many months before showed through.
Lace's shoulders slumped in defeat, and she drew the robe tightly around her. "I still don't see why you have to lie about it."
I sighed again. "Okay, imagine if people heard that vampires were real. What would they do?"
"I don't know. Freak out?"
"Some would. And some wouldn't believe it, and some would go see for themselves," I said. "We figure at least a thousand amateurs would head down into the bowels of New York to look for adventure and mystery, and they would become human germ elevators. Your building is just one acute case. There are dozens of rat reservoirs full of the parasite down there, enough to infect everyone who takes the time to look for them."
I stood up and started to move around the room, recalling all the motivational classes in Peep Hunting 101.
"The disease sits under us like a burned-down camp-fire, Lace, and all it needs is for a few idiots to start stirring the embers. Peeps were deadly enough to terrorize people back in tiny, far-flung villages. Imagine massive outbreaks in a modern-day city, with millions of people piled on top of one another, close enough to sink their teeth into any passing stranger!"
Lace raised her hands in surrender. "Dude, I already promised. I'm not going to tell anyone, unless you lie to me."
I took a deep breath, then sat down. Maybe this was going better than I'd thought. "I'll be handling this personally. All you have to do is sit tight."
"Sit tight? Yeah, right! I bet Morgan was sitting tight when she got bitten. There's probably some little rat tunnel that leads all the way up here from the basement!" Her eyes swept the apartment, searching for tiny cracks in the walls, holes that could let the pestilence inside. Already the old fears were stirring inside her.
"Well, maybe a year ago there was," I said soothingly. "But now there's steel wool stuffed under that chained-up door, and a ton of peanut butter behind the false wall. The disease is probably contained for the moment."
"Probably? So you're asking me to trust my life to steel wool and peanut butter?"
"Poisoned peanut butter."
"Cal, I don't care if it's nuclear peanut butter." She stood up and stomped into her bedroom. I heard the scrape of vinyl across the floor, the sound of zippers, and the clatter of clothes hangers.
I went to her doorway and saw that she was packing a bag.
"You're splitting?"
"No shit, Sherlock."
"Oh," I said. The sight of her packing had sent a twinge through me. I'd just shared my biggest secret in the world with Lace, and she was leaving. "Well, that's probably a good idea. It won't take long to clear things up downstairs, now that we know what's going on." I cleared my throat. "You should tell me where you're going, though, so I can keep in touch. Tell you when it's safe."
"No problem there. I'm coming to your place."
"Um ... you're doing what?"
She stopped with a half-folded shirt in her hands and stared at me. "Like I told you last night: I'm not going back to my sister's couch. Her boyfriend's there all the time now, and he's a total dick. And my parents moved out to Connecticut last year."
"But you can't stay with me!"
"Why not?"
"Why would you want to? You don't even know me! What if I ... turn out to be a psychopath or something?"
She returned to folding the shirt. "You? Every time I think you're talking crazy, I remember what I saw down in the basement, or what's in there." She nodded toward the living room, where the thing on the wall lurked. "And nuts or not, you've got the inside line on a huge story. Did you really expect me to go off and read textbooks tonight or something? Why do you think I went into journalism anyway?"
My voice went up an octave. "A story? What about keeping this a secret? You promised. Aren't you supposed to have journalistic ethics or something?"
"Sure." She smiled. "But if you break your promise and lie to me, I can break mine. So maybe I'll get lucky."
I opened my mouth and a strangled noise came out. How was I supposed to explain that I was a psycho, that a raging parasite inside me desperately wanted to spread itself by any means possible? That just standing here in the same room with her was already torture?
"Besides," she continued, "you don't want me staying anywhere else if you want to keep this a secret."
"I don't?"
She finished folding the shirt. "No, you don't. I talk in my sleep like crazy."
By the time we left her apartment, it was the dead of night.
I stabbed the button for the health club repeatedly as we rode down. It didn't light up.
"Dude, don't do that."
"Just making sure Manny locked the elevator."
Lace shifted her suitcase from one hand to another. "Yeah, but it'll be open again tomorrow, won't it?"
"Not for long." I could requisition a fake court order in the morning, enough to shut down the lower levels for a week or so. And as soon as possible, I was going down there with Dr. Rat and a full extermination team, carrying enough poison to exterminate this particular slice of the Underworld halfway to the earth's core.
The doormen had changed shifts, and the new guy looked up at us through thick glasses as we crossed the lobby, reflections of the little TVs on his console flickering in them. It gave me an idea.
"Talk to him for a second," I whispered.
"About what?"
"Anything."
"Like what's in your bag?"
I will be avenged! came PNS's muffled squeak. He was trapped between the spaghetti strainer and a dinner plate, duct-taped together and wrapped in a towel for silence, the whole thing shoved inside the Barneys shopping bag in my hand. I figured his little rat lungs had another minute of oxygen left before I'd have to take the towel off.
"No. Just distract the guy. Quick."
I steered Lace over to the doorman's desk, elbowing her until she launched into a rant about her water taking too long to heat up. As the doorman tried to placate her, I eased around to where I could see his security monitors.
The little screens showed the insides of elevators, hallways, the sidewalk outside the building's entrance, but nothing from the floor below. That was why no one had noticed our comings and goings - the cameras downstairs didn't work anymore.
Or did they? I remembered their red lights glowing in the dark. This building was owned by an old family, after all. They hadn't simply walled up the rat invasion; they'd left a secret passage through the locker and turned the cameras to face it. Someone was interested in what was going on downstairs. There could be videotape of us somewhere, waiting to be watched...
"Come on," I said, pulling Lace away in mid-sentence.
The air outside was cold and damp. I paused to unwrap a corner of PNS's cage to let him breathe. He squeaked vengeance and rebellion, and Lace glanced at the bag and took a step back.
"You owe me a plate and a strainer, dude," she said.
"You owe me an earth-shattering secret history."
"I'd rather have a spaghetti strainer."
"Fine, take mine when you leave." I pointed east, up Leroy Street. "We can catch the B on Fourth."
"What? Take the subway? Go underground all the way to Brooklyn?" Lace shuddered. "No way. We're cabbing it."
"But that's like twenty bucks!"
"Split two ways, it's only ten. Duh. Come on, we can grab one on Christopher."
She started off, and I walked a little behind her, realizing that my lifestyle was already changing, and my guest hadn't even set foot in my apartment yet. I'd considered giving Lace my keys and taking PNS downtown for immediate testing, but the thought of her tromping through my personal space alone had killed that idea - there were books lying around that detailed the few Night Watch secrets I hadn't already spilled. I'd promised to tell her the truth about the disease, not teach a college course on it.
As we walked up Leroy, I glanced at the loading docks of the big industrial buildings, wondering if any of the brood had found a way up to street level. A couple of rats sat atop a glistening pile of plastic garbage bags, but they had the furry look of surface-dwellers, not the pale greasiness of the brood in the basement.
Then I saw another shape, something lean and sleek moving in the shadows. It had the stride of a predator - a cat.
I couldn't spot any markings, only a dark silhouette and the shine of fur. The cat in the basement had also been solid black, but so were about a million other cats in the world.
Suddenly the animal froze, looking straight at me. Its eyes caught a streetlight, the reflective cells behind them igniting with a flash. My stride slowed to a halt.
"What is it?" Lace asked from a few yards ahead. At the sound of her voice, the cat blinked once, then disappeared into the darkness.
"Cal? What's wrong?"
"Um, I just remembered something I didn't tell you, another vector for the disease."
"Just what I was hoping for. Another thing to worry about."
"Well, it's not very likely, but you should be careful of any cats you see in this neighborhood."
"Cats?" Her gaze followed mine into the shadows. "They can get it too?!'
"Maybe. Not sure yet."
"All right." She pulled her coat tighter again. "You know, Cal ... the guys upstairs from Morgan said that she had a cat. A loud one."
A shudder traveled through me, another memory from that fateful night. There had been a cat in Morgan's apartment, greeting us as we came in the door, watching as I dressed to leave the next morning. But had it been the one down in the basement?
Or the one watching us right now?
"That reminds me, Lace," I said. "Are you allergic to cats?"
"No."
"Good. You'll like Cornelius."
"You have a cat? Even though they spread the disease?"
"Not this one. Rats are afraid of him. Now let's get out of here."
Cornelius was waiting for us, yowling from the moment my keys jingled in the lock, demanding food and attention. Once the door was open, he slipped out into the hall and did a quick figure eight through my legs, then darted back inside. We followed.
"Hey, baby," I said, picking Cornelius up and cradling him.
Save me from the beast! squeaked PNS from his Barneys bag.
Cornelius's claws unsheathed as he climbed painfully up my coat and down my back, leaping to the floor to paw the bag and yowl.
"Um, Cal?" Lace said. "I'm seeing a possible vector-thingy here."
"Huh? Oh." I whisked the bag away from Cornelius and across the room to the closet. Kicking aside a pile of dirty laundry, I deposited PNS's entire containment system on the floor inside and shut the closet door tight.
"So that's enough?" Lace asked. "A closet?"
"Like I said, the parasite has to be spread by biting," I explained. "It's not like the flu; it doesn't travel through the air."
"Ynneeeeow!" complained Cornelius, and sounds of ratty panic answered from inside the closet.
"But we're going to be listening to that all night?"
"No. Watch this." I picked up a can of cat food and ransacked the silverware drawer for a can opener. "Nummy-time!"
As the opener's teeth incised the can, a million years of predatory evolution was sandblasted from Cornelius's brain by the smell of Crunchy Tuna. He padded back over to the kitchen and sat on his haunches, staring raptly up at me.
"See? Cornelius has priorities," I said, spooning the tuna into a bowl.
" 'Nummy-time'?" Lace asked.
I swallowed, realizing that I wasn't used to filtering my cat-to-owner gibberish. Lace was the first guest ever to set foot in this apartment. Between peep hunting and parasitology textbooks, I hadn't had much time for socializing. Especially not with women.
The whole thing made me nervous, like I was being invaded. But I kept reminding myself that I wouldn't lose control like I almost had on the balcony. That had been a moment of fear and excitement in a very small space.
I was considering, however, putting another rubber band around my wrist.
"It's just a thing Cornelius and I do," I said, placing his bowl on the floor.
Lace didn't respond. She was touring the apartment, all one room of it, stretching from the kitchen to the futon squished into one corner. It was the same size as most, but I was suddenly self-conscious. Scoring an apartment in a fancy building had probably dampened Lace's enthusiasm for slumming.
She was inspecting my CD tower.
"Ashlee Simpson?"
"Oh, wait, no. That was an old girlfriend's obsession." Actually, more of an anathema, lately. When I'd tracked Maria - the unfortunate girl I'd made out with at a New Year's Eve party - to an abandoned 6-train station below Eighteenth Street, I'd brought a boom box full of Ashlee for self-defense. "I'm more into Kill Fee."
"Kill Fee? Aren't they, like, heavy metal?"
"Excuse me, alternative metal."
She rolled her eyes. "Whatever. But you realize that having a girlfriend who's into Ashlee Simpson isn't much better than liking it yourself."
"Ex-girlfriend," I said, moving around the room and putting away my books from the Night Watch library. "And she wasn't really... It was a short-term thing."
"But you stocked up on tunes she liked? Very smooth."
I groaned. "Listen, you can stay here, but you don't have to snoop."
Lace glanced at a T-shirt on the floor. "Yeah, well, at least I didn't bring my ultraviolet wand."
"Hey that was for work. I don't usually seek out bodily fluids." I crossed to the futon and pulled it out straight. "Speaking of which, I'll put clean sheets on this. You can have it."
"Listen, I don't want to kick you out of your bed." She looked at my run-down couch. "I'll be okay there. It's not like I'm sleeping that close to the floor again ever, especially not with an infected rat about ten feet away."
I glanced at the closet, but apparently PNS had no comment.
"No, I can take the couch."
She shook her head. "You're too tall. You'll wake up crumpled."
She sat down, her houndstooth-check coat still wrapped around her. "And I'm too tired to care; I'm even too tired to worry about your pigeon mites. So keep your bed, okay?"
"Um, sure." At least the couch and the futon were a decent distance apart. Lace's jasmine smell was already filling the apartment, making my palms sweat.
She lay down, coat and all. "Just wake me up before ten."
"Aren't you going to brush your teeth?"
"I forgot to pack a toothbrush. Got an extra one?"
"No. Sorry."
"Man, I forgot pretty much everything. That happens when things scare me."
"Sorry."
"Not your fault, dude."
She closed her eyes, and I went into the bathroom, trying to be silent, every sound I made rattling my super-hearing. I hid my toothbrush, just in case Lace got desperate in the morning. It's not a good idea to share a toothbrush with a positive, seeing as your gums bleed a tiny amount every time the brush scrapes across them. Not a very likely vector, but it could happen.
When I emerged, Cornelius had finished eating and was eyeing the closet. I knelt to stroke him for a while, building up a good purr. He wasn't strong enough to open the closet door - but I didn't want him and PNS yelling at each other all night. As always, I saved the fur that shed from his coat in a plastic Ziploc bag.
I went to bed in my clothes. Lace hadn't stirred since closing her eyes. She looked pretty crumpled herself, huddled there, and I felt guilty for having the almost-real bed, and for having blown up her world.
It took a long time for silence to come. At first, I was too aware of Cornelius purring at my feet and the panicky short breaths of PNS as he shivered in his metal prison. I could smell cat food and Cornelius dander and even the scent of infected rat with its weird hint of family. I could also smell Lace's jasmine shampoo and the oils in her hair. From her breathing, I knew she wasn't asleep yet.
Finally she stirred and pulled her coat off.
"Cal?" she said softly. "Thanks for letting me stay here."
"That's okay. Sorry for messing up your life."
She made the slightest movement - something like a shrug.
"Maybe you saved it. I knew that damn apartment was too good to be true. But I didn't think it would try to kill me."
"It won't."
"No, thanks to you." She sighed. "I mean, I always figured one day I'd be a fearless reporter and everything, but your job? Going down into that basement knowing what might be down there? Looking for those peep thingies instead of running away? You must be really brave, dude. Or really stupid."
I felt a flush of pride, even though she didn't know the pathetic truth. I hadn't really chosen my job; I'd been infected by it.
"Hey, you followed me down there," I said. "That was pretty brave."
"Yeah, but that was before I knew about the cannibals, you know?"
"Mmm," was all I said.
"Anyway, I don't think I would've slept at all tonight, if I'd been alone. Thanks."
We fell silent, and the glow inside me from Lace's words stayed for a long time. Her smell was intense, all around me, and I seemed to be expanding as I breathed it in. I really did want to get up and kiss her good night, but I don't think it was the parasite that wanted her. Not entirely.
And somehow, that made it easier to lie there, unmoving.
After a while, Lace's breathing slowed. My ears grew accustomed to the stirrings of cat and mouse. The rattle of steam heating and the rush of passing traffic gradually faded away. Finally, all that was left was the unfamiliar sound of someone breathing close to me. It was something I hadn't heard since the Night Watch had informed me that any lovers in my future were guaranteed to go crazy.
It kept spinning around in my head that Lace trusted me, a guy she'd only met the day before. Maybe it was something more than trust. Before the parasite, I'd wondered every few minutes if one girl or another liked me, but it had been a long six months since I'd entertained the question seriously. The fact that the answer was worthless didn't stop my brain from turning it over and over again. It was pure torture, but in a funny way it was better than nothing. Better than being alone.
I listened for hours as Lace drifted deeper into sleep, rose up slowly, almost breaching the surface of consciousness to utter a few words of some imagined conversation, then descended again into dreamlessness.
Even those sounds faded as I reached my own half-waking slumber, trapped alone inside my head with the rumble of the beast, the hum of the never-ending war raging inside me, the keen of optimum virulence ... until something strange and wonderful happened.
I fell asleep.