“Tell me about it. But I was an accident?”
She sighed. “We didn’t want the science types at the Night Watch catching on, not until we’d reached critical mass. So we started in a controlled way at first, with our house cats and a few kids from the old families. Except for you, Cal.” Morgan sighed. “I only wanted a drink that night. But your accent is just so cute.”
“So you just infected me?” I closed my eyes, realizing how much this sucked. “God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?”
Morgan sighed again. “The whole thing was really embarrassing; my parents sent me to Brooklyn when they found out.” She shrugged. “I thought I’d be safe in a gay bar, okay? What were you doing in there anyway?”
Lace looked at me sidelong. “You were where?”
I took a sip of beer, swallowed it. “I, uh, hadn’t been in the city … very long. I didn’t know.”
“Hmph. Freshmen. Thank God you turned out to be a natural carrier.” Morgan smiled and patted my knee. “So no harm done.”
“Sure, easy for you to say,” I grumbled. “Couldn’t you have at least told me the truth a little sooner?”
“When those geeks at the Night Watch found you before I did, we couldn’t tell you right away. It just would have confused your pretty head.”
“So when were you going to tell me?” I cried.
“Uh, Cal? Did you miss the last two days? I kept trying. But you kept running away.”
“Oh. Right.”
“A freshman?” Lace said, frowning. “How old are you anyway?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s much more grown up now,” Morgan said, patting my knee again. “Aren’t you, Cal?”
Hoping to move the conversation along, I said, “So what happens now?”
Morgan shrugged. “You two can do whatever you want. Run. Stay. Get laid all over town. But you should probably join up.”
“Join up … with you?”
“Sure. The New Watch could use you.” She waved for the waitress. “And I could use another beer. We’ve been chasing that stupid worm all day.”
I looked at Lace, and she looked back at me. As usual, I didn’t know what to say, but the thought of us fighting together, the exhilaration we’d shared down in the tunnel, sure beat the idea of running off to Montana. This was our city, after all, our species.
“What do you want to do, Cal?” Lace said softly.
I took a deep breath, wondering if I was saying too much, too soon, but saying it anyway. “I want to stay here, with you.”
She nodded slowly, her eyes locked with mine. “Me too.”
“God, you two,” Morgan said. “Just get a room.”
I realized that this was in fact a hotel bar, and that Brooklyn or the West Side seemed much too far away right now. I raised an eyebrow.
Lace smiled. “Dude. Why not?”
EPILOGUE
INFLAMMATION
The orange was fading from the sky, but through my binoculars, the waters of the Hudson sparkled like teeth capped with gold, the river’s choppy surface holding the last dregs of the pollution sunset, which was turning bloodred as it disappeared behind the spiked jaw of New Jersey’s skyline.
A warm, insistent body pushed against my ankles, making noises under its breath. I looked down. “What’s the matter, Corny? I thought you liked it up here.”
He looked up with hungry eyes, assuring me that his annoyance had nothing to do with a fear of heights. Just impatience: It was taking the promised nummies too long to arrive.
At first, bringing Cornelius up to the roof had made me nervous, but Dr. Rat says that peep cats have an improved sense of self-preservation. She also talks a lot about feline high-rise syndrome, the magical ability of cats to survive a fall from any height. In fact, with all the time Dr. Rat spends talking about cats these days, she may need a new nickname.
“Don’t worry, Corny. She’ll be back soon.”
On cue, I heard the scrape of cowboy boots on concrete. A hand reached over the edge of the roof, then another, and Lace pulled herself into view, her face faintly red from the effort.
I frowned. “Don’t you think it’s a little light out to be climbing buildings?”
“You should talk, dude!” Lace said. “At least I wasn’t on the street side.”
“Like there aren’t a million people on the piers?”
She snorted. “They’re all watching the sunset.”
Cornelius yowled, sensing that our argument was delaying nummies.
“Yes, Corny, I love you too,” Lace muttered, slipping off her backpack and unzipping it. She pulled out a paper bag, which gave off the mouthwatering scent of rare hamburgers.
Cornelius began to purr as Lace opened one of the foil-wrapped burgers for him, laying to one side the pointless bun and wilted leaf of lettuce. He liked the mayo, though, and licked it off her fingers as she placed the hamburger on the black-tar roof. Then he dug noisily into the main event.
Lace looked at her cat-spittled fingers. “Great. Now I’m supposed to eat with these?”
I laughed, pulling my burger from the bag. “Relax. Corny doesn’t have any diseases. Nothing you haven’t already got anyway.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, glancing over the roof’s edge. “What’s Dr. Rat always saying? About how cats can fall from any distance?”
“Hey!” I knelt and protectively stroked his flank. He munched away, paying no attention to her threats.
“You’re right anyway,” Lace said. “A fat-ass cat like him would probably leave a crack in the sidewalk, big enough for monsters to get through. Manny wouldn’t like that.”
Manny did like Corny, though. Pets weren’t officially allowed in Lace’s building, but he and the staff had started to make exceptions. With so many people complaining about rat noises in their walls, we’d been lending Cornelius out overnight. A lot of Lace’s fellow tenants took us up on the offer, after we’d explained how once a cat gets its dander inside your apartment, rodents will give you a wide berth. You just had to get used to waking up with him sitting on your chest.
This building was on the front line, after all; Lace and I had made it something of a personal project.
Plus, Lace still had that apartment with the cheap rent and the good views. Once Health and Mental had fired off a few nasty memos to her landlords about the rat issue, they’d extended those seventh-floor leases indefinitely. These particular landlords had plenty of money already, having been New York City landowners for almost four hundred years.
Of course, we know that staying in town won’t be a cakewalk. New York City can be very stressful. There are rough days ahead, right around the corner. It takes some getting used to, going to Bob’s Diner for pepper steak, innocently chatting with Rebecky while fully aware of what’s coming next—the meltdown, the crumbling of civilization, the zombie apocalypse.
Or, as they call it in the New Watch these days, the Inflammation.
When the burgers were eaten, I said, “We should get back to work.”
Lace rolled her eyes, always ready to demonstrate her incredulity that I officially outranked her in the New Watch. But she lifted her binoculars, training them on the red-tinged river. “So what are we looking for again?”
“Worm signs,” I said.
“No duh. But no one ever tells me, what in fact are the signs of a worm?”
I shrugged. “Worminess?”
She turned from her vigil long enough to stick her tongue out at me.
I smiled and raised my own binoculars. “You’ll know them when you see them. We always do.”