Peeps

You can whack the parasite into submission with drugs, but it’s hard to wipe it out completely. Like a tapeworm, it starts off microscopic but grows much bigger, flooding your body with different parts of itself. It wraps around your spine, creates cysts in your brain, changes your whole being to suit its purposes. Even if you could remove it surgically, the eggs can hide in your bone marrow or your brain. The symptoms can be controlled, but skip one pill, miss one shot, or just have a really upsetting bad-hair day, and you go feral all over again. Sarah could never be let loose in a normal human community.

Worse, the mental changes the parasite makes are permanent. Once those anathema switches get thrown in a peep’s brain, it’s pretty hard to convince a peep that they really, really used to love chocolate. Or, say, this guy from Texas called Cal.

“But don’t some peeps come back more than others?” I asked.

“The sad truth is, for most of those like Sarah, the struggle never ends. She may well stay this way for the rest of her life, on the edge between anathema and obsession. An uncomfortable fate.”

“Is there any way I can help?” My own words surprised me. I’d never been to the recovery hospital. All I knew about it was that it was way out in the Montana wilds, a safe distance from any cities. Recovering peeps usually don’t want their old boyfriends showing up, but maybe Sarah would be different.

“A familiar face may help her treatment, in time. But not until you deal with your own disquiet, Cal.”

I slumped in my chair. “I don’t even know what my disquiet is. Sarah freaked me out is all. I think I’m still…” I waved a hand in the air. “I just don’t feel… done yet.”

The Shrink nodded sagely. “Perhaps that’s because you aren’t done, Cal. There is, after all, one more matter to be settled. Your progenitor.”

I sighed. I’d been over all this before, with Dr. Prolix and the older hunters, and in my own head about a hundred thousand times. It never did any good.

You may have been wondering: If Sarah was my first girlfriend, where did I catch the disease?

I wish I knew.

Okay, I obviously knew how it happened, and the exact date and pretty close to the exact time. You don’t forget losing your virginity, after all.

But I didn’t actually know who it was. I mean, I got her name and everything—Morgan. Well, her first name anyway.

The big problem was, I didn’t remember where. Not a clue.

Well, one clue: “Bahamalama-Dingdong.”

It was only two days after I first got to New York, fresh off the plane from Texas, ready to start my first year at college. I already wanted to study biology, even though I’d heard that was a tough major.

Little did I know.

At that point, I could hardly find my way around the city. I got the general concept of uptown and downtown, although they didn’t really match north and south, I knew from my compass. (Don’t laugh, they’re useful.) I’m pretty sure that this all happened somewhere downtown, because the buildings weren’t quite so tall and the streets were pretty busy that night. I remember lights rippling on water at some point, so I might have been close to the Hudson. Or maybe the East River.

And I remember the Bahamalama-Dingdong. Several, in fact. They’re some kind of drink. My sense of smell wasn’t superhuman back then, but I’m pretty sure they had rum in them. Whatever they had, there was a lot of it. And something sweet too. Maybe pineapple juice, which would make the Bahamalama-Dingdong a close cousin of the Bahama Mama.

Now, the Bahama Mama can be found on Google or in cocktail books. It’s rum, pineapple juice, and a liqueur called Nassau Royale, and it is from the Bahamas. But the Bahamalama-Dingdong has much more shadowy origins. After I found out what I’d been infected with and realized who must have done it, I searched every bar I could find in the Village. But I never met a single bartender who knew how to make one. Or who’d even heard of them.

Like a certain Morgan Whatever, the Bahamalama-Dingdong had come out of the darkness, seduced me, then disappeared.

These searches didn’t evoke a single memory flashback. No hazy images of pinball machines jumped out at me, no sudden glimpses of Morgan’s long dark hair and pale skin. And, no—being a carrier doesn’t make you pale-ski

Unless, of course, she was someone like me: a carrier. But one who got off on changing lovers into Deeps. Either way, I hadn’t seen her since.

So this is all I can remember:

There I was, sitting in a bar in New York City and thinking, Wow, I’m sitting in a bar in New York City. This thought probably runs through the heads of a lot of newly arrived freshmen who manage to get served. I was drinking a Bahamalama-Dingdong because the bar I was sitting in was “The Home of the Bahamalama-Dingdong.” It said so on a sign outside.

A pale-ski

Maybe it was the frozen banana bobbing in my drink that provoked the question. I suddenly felt a bit silly. “Well, it’s this drink that lives here. Says so on the sign out front.”

“Is it good?”

It was good, but I only shrugged. “Yeah. Kind of sweet, though.”

“Kind of girly-looking, don’t you think?”

I did think. The drink had been a vague sort of embarrassment to me since it had arrived, frozen banana bobbing to the music. But the other guys in the bar had seemed not to notice. And they were all pretty tough-looking, what with their leather chaps and all.

I pushed the banana down into the drink, but it popped back up. It wasn’t really trying to be obnoxious, but frozen bananas have a lower specific density than rum and pineapple juice, it turns out.

“I don’t know about girly,” I said. “Looks like a boy to me.”

She smiled at my accent. “Yerr not from around here, are yew?”

“Nope. I’m from Texas.” I took a sip.

“Texas? Well, hell!” She slapped me on the back. I’d already figured out in those two days that Texas is one of the “brand-name” states. Being from Texas is much cooler than being from a merely recognizable state, like Co

“I’ll have one of those,” she said to the bartender, pointing to my Bahamalama-Dingdong, which pointed back. Then she said her name was Morgan.

Morgan drank hers, I drank mine. We both drank a few more. My recall of subsequent events gets steadily worse. But I do remember that she had a cat, a flat-screen TV, black satin sheets, and a knack for saying what she thought—and that’s pretty much all I remember, except for waking up the next morning, getting kicked out of an unfamiliar apartment because she had to go somewhere and was looking all embarrassed, and heading home with a hangover that made navigation difficult. By the time I got back to my dorm room, I had no idea where I’d started out.

All I had to show for the event was a newfound confidence with women, slowly manifesting superpowers, and an appetite for rare meat.

“We’ve been over all that,” I said to Dr. Prolix. “I still can’t help you.”

“This is not about helping me,” she said firmly. “You won’t come to terms with your disease until you find your progenitor.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve tried. But like you’ve said before, she must have moved away or died or something.” That had always been the big mystery. If Morgan was still around, we’d be seeing her handiwork everywhere—peeps popping up all over the city, a bloodbath every time she picked up some foolish young Texan in a bar. Or at least a few corpses every now and then. “I mean, it’s been over a year, and we don’t have a single clue.”