See? Parasites aren’t all bad. They take primates who otherwise might be killing one another and leave them merely yelling.
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 Caclass="underline" 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.