Peeps

“Dude. Jasmine has sex? Using butterflies?”

“Yeah. How about that?”

“Huh.” She was silent for a moment, still holding me, thinking about all those flowers having butterfly-mediated sex. Finally, she said, “So when butterflies land on my hair, do they think they’re having jasmine-sex with it?”

“Probably.” I leaned closer, burying my nose in her smell. Maybe the natural world wasn’t so jaw-droppingly horrible—appalling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.

The subway platform trembled under us again, another train coming. Eventually, we’d have to return to the surface, to face the sunlight and the coming crumbling of civilization, to ride out whatever tumult the old carriers had pla

“Will the disease make me hate you, Cal?” she asked again. “Even if I take the pills?”

I started to say I wasn’t sure, but in that moment the rumbling underfoot shifted, no longer building steadily. Then it shifted again, like something winding toward us, and among the false butterflies of Lace’s hair I caught another scent, ancient and dire.

“Cal?”

“Wait a second,” I said, and took a deeper breath.

The foul smell redoubled, sweeping over us like air pushed up through subway grates by a passing train. And I knew something as thoroughly as my ancestors had known the scents of lions and tigers and bears…

A bad thing was on its way.

Chapter 22

SNAKES ON A STICK

The next time you go to the doctor, check out the plaques on the wall. One of them, usually the biggest, will be decorated with an intriguing symbol: two snakes climbing up a winged staff.

Ask your doctor what this symbol means, and you’ll probably get this line: The staff is called the caduceus. It’s the sign of Hermes, god of alchemists, and the symbol of the American Medical Association.

But that is only half the truth.

Meet the guinea worm. It hangs around in ponds, too small to see with the naked eye. If you drink guinea-worm-infected water, one of these beasties may find its way into your stomach. From there, it will make its way to one of your legs, working chemical magic to hide from your immune system. It will grow much bigger, as long as two feet.

And it will have babies.

Adult guinea worms may be invisible to your immune system, but their kids have a different strategy—they set off every alarm they can.

Why? Well, overexcited immune defenses are tricky, painful, dangerous things. With all those baby guinea worms raising a ruckus, your infected leg becomes inflamed. Huge blisters appear, which makes you run screaming to the nearest pond to cool them down.

Very clever. The young guinea worms smell the water and pop out of the blisters. Then they settle down to begin their wait for the next unwary drinker of pond water.

Ew, yuck, repeat.

Guinea worms have been pulling this trick for a long time. In fact, it was thousands of years ago that ancient healers found out how to cure them. The procedure is simple, in theory. Just pull the adult worms out of the victim’s leg. But there’s a trick: If you pull too quickly, the worm breaks in half, and the part left inside rots away, causing a terrible infection. The patient usually dies.

Here’s how the doctors of the ancient world did it:

Carefully draw one end of the worm out, and wrap it around a stick. Then, over the next seven days or so, wind the guinea worm outward, like reeling in a fish in very slow motion. That’s right: It takes seven days. Don’t rush! It won’t be the most enjoyable week you ever spent, but at the end you’ll have your body back in good working order. And you’ll also have a stick with a wormy thing wrapped around it.

And this icky leftover will become the symbol of medicine.

Ew.

But maybe it’s not such a weird symbol. Historians figure that guinea-worm removal was the first-ever form of surgery. Back then, it was probably a pretty amazing feat, pulling a snake out of a human body. Maybe the doctors hung the snake-wrapped stick on their walls afterward, just to show that they could get the job done.

So the next time you’re at the doctor’s office, be on the lookout for this heartwarming symbol of the ancient healing arts. (And don’t believe all that crap about the great god Hermes; it’s all about the guinea worms.)

Chapter 23

WORM

“Stay here,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“I smell something.”

Lace frowned. “Dude. It’s not me, is it?”

“No! Hush.” I squatted, pressing my palms flat against the trembling platform. The shudder in the graffitied concrete built, then gradually faded again, tacking toward us, back and forth through the warrens of the Underworld. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, sensing a low and shuddering note hanging in the air, the same vast moan I’d heard below the exhaust towers.

“Cal? What the hell?”

“I think something’s coming.”

“Something? Not a train?”

“I don’t know what it is, except that it’s part of all this craziness. And it’s old and big, and … getting closer.”

A crumbling exit sign pointed up a set of stairs, but I knew from Hunting 101 that it had been long since paved over. We would have to run back to Union Square along the tracks.

But first I needed a weapon.

I brushed past Lace and through the bathroom stall, kicking away the last pieces of wood clinging to one corner of its metal frame. I wrenched the seven feet of rust-caked iron from the crumbling cement and weighed it in my hands. Brutal and straightforward.

“What about me?” Lace said from the doorway.

“What about you?”

“Don’t I get a club-thingy?”

“Lace, you couldn’t even pick this up. You don’t have superpowers yet.”

She scowled at me and lifted a fragment of rusty iron from the floor. “Well, whatever’s coming, it’s not catching me empty-handed. It smells like death.”

“You can smell it? Already?”

“Duh.” She sniffed and made a face. “Dead rat on steroids.”

I blinked. Lace was changing faster than any peep I’d ever seen, as if the new strain was mutating at some hyped-up pace, changing as it moved from host to host. Or maybe the beastie simply smelled bad. The stench was overpowering now, sending signals of alarm and fury coursing through my body. Though my mind screamed run, my muscles were itching for a fight.

And somehow, I was certain they were going to get one. My instincts sang to me that the creature knew we were here; it was hunting us.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We jumped from the platform, landing with a crunch on the gravel bed. As we dashed headlong up the tracks, the lights of the next station glimmered along the curved rails, seeming to pull away from us as we ran. It was only four blocks; and I told myself we were going to make it.

Then I saw—through one of the bolt holes that workers jump into if they get caught by an approaching train—a blackness deeper than the subway tu

“It’s coming,” Lace said, nose in the air. She had come to a halt, holding her foot-long piece of iron high, as if she were going to stake a vampire. But this was bigger than any peep, and I was fairly sure that it didn’t have a heart.

“Stay behind me,” I said. I pointed toward the opening. “It’ll come out of there.”