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.”