The infected plant asks for help.
That’s right: When a cassava plant is attacked by mealworms, it begins to send out signals to any wasps in the area. Some unknown chemical rises up and draws the wasps toward it, like a big red highway flare saying, Help me! Help me!
Of course, another way to translate the message is: Mealworms! Get your hot delicious mealworms!
You could say that the cassava and the parasitic wasp have an evolutionary deaclass="underline" “I’ll tell you when I’m infected with mealworms, and you come and deposit your deadly eggs in them.”
It’s a great relationship, because the parasite of your parasite is your friend.
Chapter 21
EX
“Hiya, darling,” Sarah said. “You’re looking good.”
I didn’t say anything, paralyzed by the sight of her. Sarah was utterly transformed from my last glimpse before the transport squad had taken her away. Her hair was clean, her fingernails pink and neatly trimmed; there was no demented gleam in her eye. As her familiar scent reached me through the smell of grease and frying eggs, Bob’s Diner seemed to shudder, as if time were snapping backward.
She was even wearing a thick black leather wristband, a definite reference to Elvis’s 1968 Comeback Special. Very appropriate.
Rebecky slapped down a cup of coffee in front of me, breaking the spell. “Thought I recognized you,” she said to Sarah. “It’s been a while since you’ve been in here, right?”
“Been out of town. Hoboken mostly, then a few days in Montana, of all places,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “But I’m back to stay.”
“Well, good. Looks like Cal here sure missed you.” She patted me on the shoulder, chuckling at my blank expression. “The usual, Cal?”
I nodded. When Rebecky had gone away, I found my voice. “You’re looking good too, Sarah.”
“Been putting on some weight, actually,” she said, shrugging and taking a huge bite of the hamburger in front of her.
“It suits you,” I said. “Makes you look more…”
“Human?” Sarah grinned.
“Yeah, I guess.” My mind started to struggle for a better word, but an alarm was going off deep in my brain. “Where’s Lace?”
“Lace, huh?” Sarah frowned. “What kind of name is that?”
“Short for Lacey. Where is she? You guys didn’t…” I looked around for the Shrink’s minders, sniffed the air for other predators. All I smelled was Bob’s: potatoes and meat and onions, all turning brown on the grill—and Sarah, who smelled of family.
She shrugged. “Look, Cal, I don’t know who you’re meeting here. Dr. Prolix just called me ten minutes ago and told me to come here and talk to you. She thought you’d listen to someone your own age. She said maybe you needed a jolt.”
“Well, mission accomplished on that.”
“And she figured it wouldn’t hurt if you saw how well I was doing.”
“Yeah. You look … so sane.”
“Am sane. Feels good.”
I shook my head, trying to think straight through the tangle of memories welling up in me. Lace would get here any moment now. Maybe I could run and try to catch her on the way. If Lace said the wrong thing in front of Sarah, the Watch might figure out that she knew too much.
I looked out the window, searching the street for Lace’s face among the lunchtime crowds. But my gaze kept coming back to the girl in front of me—Sarah, alive and well and human.
I couldn’t run yet; I had to know… “What happened?”
Sarah chewed a bite of burger thoughtfully, then swallowed. “Well, first this total dickhead gave me a disease.”
“Oh, yeah.” I drank some coffee, frowned at its bitterness. “I never had a chance to say sorry about that. I didn’t know—”
“Yeah, yeah. I guess we’re both to blame. Safe sex, blah, blah, blah.” Sarah sighed. “Then there was my little … breakdown. But you saw most of that.”
I nodded. “Until you disappeared.”
Sarah took a long breath, staring out the window. “Well, the parts you missed out on are kind of hazy for me, too. Sort of like a long, bad dream. About being hungry.” She shuddered. “And eating. Then there you were again, rescuing me.” She smiled tiredly then took another bite.
“Rescuing you?” I swallowed, never having thought of it that way myself. “It was the least I could do. But, Sarah, how did you get so normal? So fast?”
“Good question, which reminds me.” She pulled out a bottle of pills, dumped two into her palm, and swallowed. “Two with every meal.”
I blinked. “There’s a cure?”
“Sure. They had me straightened out about six hours after I got to Montana.”
“When did that happen? The cure, I mean.”
“At least seven hundred years ago.”
There it was again, that seven-hundred-year thing. “The plague? This doesn’t make any sense, Sarah.”
“It will, Cal. Just listen up. I’m here to tell you everything. Doctor’s orders.” She bit deep into her burger, hurrying now that she was only a few swallows from the end.
“Which doctor? Prolix?”
“Yep, the Shrink. She’s been telling me all about what’s coming.” Sarah looked out at the crowds on the sidewalk. “They figured I could take it, because of my personal eating habits lately.” She looked down at her hamburger with momentary suspicion, then took another bite. “And because they don’t have time to mess with me. Or with you, anymore. Time to face facts, Cal.”
Suddenly, the restaurant felt overcrowded, claustrophobic. I could smell the people in the booth behind me, the pressure of the passersby on the street. “The disease is out of control, isn’t it? We’re going to wake up one day in one of those zombie-apocalypse movies, the parasite spreading faster than anyone can stop it.”
“No, Cal. Don’t be silly. The disease is in control, the way it should be. The parasite’s calling the shots now.”
“It’s doing what?”
“It’s in charge, making things happen. The way it’s supposed to. The Night Watch was always just a holding pattern, keeping down the mutation while waiting for the old strain to come back.”
I shook my head. “Wait. What?”
Sarah held up her fork and knife, looking from one to the other. “Okay. There’s two versions of the parasite. The new kind and the old kind. Right?”
“Two strains, I know.” I nodded. “And we’ve got the new one, you and me.”
Sarah sighed. “No, dickhead, we have the old kind. The original.” She rattled her pill bottle. “This is mandrake and garlic, mostly. Totally old-school. Until seven hundred years ago, people used to totally control this disease.”
“Until the plague?”
“Bingo. That’s when the new strain showed up.” Sarah shook her head. “You’ve got to blame the Inquisition for that. You know, when Christians got it into their heads that cats were evil and started killing loads of them? That was bad for the old version of the parasite, seeing as how it jumps back and forth between felines and humans.”
“Right… I know about that. But that’s the old version?”
“Yes. Pay attention, Cal. As I was saying, it’s 1300 a.d. and everyone’s killing cats. So with hardly any cats around, the rat population grows like crazy. More human-to-rat contact, evolution of various diseases, fleas and ticks, blah, blah, blah.” She waved her hand. “Plague.”