I switched on the flashlight, shining it straight into his eyes…
They flashed bloodred. He blinked at me and cocked his head.
I crumpled to the floor, dropping the flashlight. In addition to all my girlfriends, I’d infected my own cat. How much did that suck? “Oh, Corny.”
He meowed.
After a whole year, how had I not noticed his eyes? Of course, with my night vision, I almost never kept the lights on. Cornelius came to rest his head on my knee and let out a soft meow. I rubbed him, stoking up a good purr.
“How long?” I wondered aloud.
Probably for most of the last year. Cornelius always slept with me on the futon, and I couldn’t count the number of times I’d woken up with him perched on my chest, bathing me in Crunchy Tuna breath. He could have contracted the parasite even before I’d noticed the changes in myself.
Maybe it had been through him that Sarah had been infected. She’d always complained of his bladder-crushing weight in the morning.
Maybe the sex had been irrelevant. Maybe she’d been his peep, not mine. Maybe Lace was already …
I stood up and fed Cornelius, going through the motions on autopilot, fighting off panic. She’d only spent one night here, after all. And even if she’d been infected, it wouldn’t be as bad as Sarah. This was an early diagnosis. I just had to get her into treatment as soon as possible.
Of course, getting her into treatment meant going to the Night Watch and admitting that I’d committed a Major Revelation Incident. And telling them everything I’d seen out in Brooklyn, and that the Mayor’s office was covering something up. And trusting them with Lace’s life, when I didn’t even trust them to use the phone book anymore.
I began to realize just how badly everything was about to crumble. The Night Watch had been corrupted and the parasite had gone airborne, helped along by Morgan Ryder—a new Typhoid Mary, with the added bonus of feline familiars.
Even if Lace wasn’t already infected, I had to warn her. No matter how nonviolent Patricia and Joseph Moore might seem at the moment, someone had eaten the guy in 701 and turned his guts into graffiti.
I remembered the motivational computer simulations Dr. Rat had shown in Peep Hunting 101—showing how we were helping to save the world. On their way to being epidemics, diseases reach something called critical mass, the point at which chaos begins to feed upon itself—roving peeps in the streets, garbagemen afraid to go to work, garbage piling up, rats breeding and biting—more peeps. Except that this strain would include nervous people getting cats to save them from the rats, and the cats making more peeps…
You get the picture. In the days and weeks ahead, the time bombs set by Morgan and Angela would begin to explode into temporary cannibals. New York City was going to get nasty.
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t think about all that yet. The first thing I had to do was find Lace and test her for early signs of infection. I took her cell-phone number from where it lay on the table and dialed.
She answered on the first ring. “Lace here.”
I swallowed. “Hey. It’s me, Cal.”
“Oh. Hi, Cal.” Her tone sounded flat. “That was fast.”
“Um, what was fast?”
“What do you think? You calling me was fast, dumb-ass.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Well, I had to.”
“You did?” Her voice gave a hint of interest.
“Yeah … something’s come up.”
“Like what, dude?”
“Like…” You have contracted a deadly disease. Soon, you may begin to eat your neighbors—but don’t worry, you will eventually switch to pigeons, or perhaps rats. “Um, I can’t really talk about it on the phone.”
She groaned. “Still with the top secret, huh? Need-to-know basis?”
“Yeah. But this is something you really need to know.”
There was a long pause, then a sigh. “Okay. I was kind of hoping you’d call. I mean, maybe I was a little bit hard on you last night. But I was kind of angry with … the way things are.”
“Oh. Right.” I had the feeling she was about to get angrier.
“Okay. So where and when?”
“Right now. Except I’m out in Brooklyn. Twenty minutes?”
“Okay. I’m hungry anyway. How about that diner where we ate before? Where was that?”
“Bob’s? Broadway and Eleventh. See you there. And thanks.”
“For what?”
“Not hanging up on me.”
A pause. “We’ll see.”
We said good-bye and disconnected. Lace had sounded so normal, I thought, allowing myself to hope. Maybe it took a peep cat more than one night to spread the parasite. Or maybe I was grasping at straws. If she’d been infected the night before last, the only symptom Lace would display so far would be a slight increase in night vision.
I headed for the door.
“Meow,” Cornelius cried. He was lying in my way.
“Sorry, Corny. Can’t stay.”
He yowled again, louder.
I slid him away from the door with my foot. “Move. I have to go.”
He scrambled over my boot and back to the door, still yowling.
“You can’t go out, okay?” I yelled and picked him up, planning to step out and then toss him back through from the other side. He started to struggle.
“What’s your problem?” I said, pulling open the door.
Morgan and Angela stood there, grinning from ear to ear.
“How did you find me?” I finally managed.
“I don’t forget the names of people I sleep with, Cal Thompson,” Morgan said.
“Oh.”
“And I thought that looked like you on the tapes, monkeying around in the basement of my old building, being all brave and daring.” Morgan laughed and turned to Angela. “Cal’s from Texas.”
“Yeah, you told me,” Angela said.
“And look, he has a kitty!” Morgan said, reaching out to tickle Cornelius’s chin. “Isn’t it cute?”
“Yes, he is,” I answered, and threw Cornelius in her face.
I followed the yowling ball of cat through the door, whipping the knockout injector from my pocket. Angela’s hands went up to defend herself, the injector hissing as the needle sank into her forearm.
“You Texas butt-head!” she shouted, then crumpled to the floor.
I ignored the squawling mass of cat and Morgan and headed for the stairs.
Halfway down, Morgan’s voice echoed through the stairwell. “Stop, Cal! You’re being a pain!”
I kept running, taking each flight of stairs with a single, bone-jarring leap.
“Your Night Watch isn’t going to help you now, you know!” she called, her sneakers squeaking on the concrete steps behind me.
I’d already figured that much was true; I didn’t trust the Night Watch anymore. But I wasn’t about to trust the person who’d infected me either. From now on, I was on my own.
Reaching the last flights of stairs, I ran through the lobby and burst out the front doors of my building, hoping that by some miracle a cab would be waiting there. The street, of course, was empty of cabs.
But not of cats.
There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred, perched on postboxes and garbage bags, crowding the stoops across the street, all watching me with the same expression of mild amusement.
My knees grew weak, and the world went dizzy; I almost fell to the concrete. But Morgan was right behind me. I pulled my belt from around my waist and cinched it through the curving handles of the front door. Then I took a few deep breaths until the faintness passed.
The cats around me hadn’t moved. Maybe Dr. Rat was right—they were nonviolent.