Peeps

On the other hand, if her i

I let the drinks take hold, ringing more bells, bringing back stray fragments of memory from that night. There definitely had been a river involved; I recalled reflected lights rippling in boat wakes. All the Bahamalama-Dingdongs that Morgan and I had drunk had put a little stumble into our step. I’d been worried she’d go over the rail and I’d have to leap into the cold water to save her, even though I wasn’t fit to walk a dog.

We had strolled out to the end of a long pier and stood looking at the river. The Hudson or the East River, though?

Then I remembered: At some point I’d checked my compass and a

What had happened next?

I tried to press the hazy memories forward in time, but my mind was stuck on that image of New Jersey reflected in the river—Hoboken already teasing me from across the water. No matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t recall a single step of the route we’d taken back to Morgan’s apartment.

A guy came up next to me, back here in the present.

It took a few moments to pull myself out of my Bahamalama-Dingdong reverie, but I could tell from his scent that he’d just come back into the bar from catching a smoke outside. His leather vest was cow-smell new, and he wore an intrigued expression. Maybe he’d heard I’d been asking about Morgan.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. What’s your name?”

“Cal.” I reached to shake his hand.

“I’m Dave. So … what are you into, Cal?” he asked.

I paused for a second before answering.

I couldn’t tell him what I was really into: finding the woman who had turned me into a superhuman freak, taking the next step in destroying my bloodline—dealing with my progenitor, then hunting down any more peeps she had created, and then delving further into the endless, knotted tree of the parasite’s spread. So I cast my mind back to the homework I’d been reading in the diner that morning as I’d waited for the clouds to clear.

“Hookworms,” I said.

“Hookworms?” He took the seat next to me. “Never heard of that.”

I sipped from my third Bahamalama-Dingdong.

“Well, they burrow in through your feet, using this enzyme that breaks down skin tissue, then travel along the bloodstream till they get into your lungs. They mess up your breathing, so you cough them up. But you know how you always swallow a little bit of phlegm?”

One of his eyebrows raised, but he admitted he did.

“Well, a few hookworm eggs get swallowed along with the phlegm and travel down into your intestines, where they grow to be about half an inch long.” I held up my fingers a hookworm’s length apart. “And they develop this circle of teeth in their mouths, like a coil of barbed wire. They start chomping into your intestinal wall and sucking your blood.” I realized I was going into drunken detail here and paused to check if he was still interested.

“Really?” His voice sounded a bit dry.

I nodded. “Wouldn’t lie to you, Dave. But here’s the cool thing. They produce this special anticlotting factor, kind of like blood antifreeze, so the wound doesn’t scab over. You become a sort of temporary hemophiliac, just in that one spot. Your intestines won’t stop bleeding until the hookworm gets its fill!”

“Hookworms, huh?” he asked.

“That’s what they’re called.”

Dave nodded gravely, standing back up. He grasped my shoulder firmly, a serious expression on his face. His thoughtful features seemed to reflect for a moment the hard road I had in front of me.

“Good luck with that,” he said.

I figured seven Bahamalama-Dingdongs would do the job.

That was probably more than I’d drunk my first time at Dick’s, but these days I was older and more superhuman. I did a professional job of getting off my stool, and my feet got into a pretty good rhythm after shuffling a bit at first. My metabolism may be peeped up, but there’s only so much rum even my body can process before it starts to sputter. All in all, I’d managed a pretty fair reconstruction of my first really wicked buzz in New York City.

I headed off to retrace my stumbling path from a year before.

The bartender watched me go with an impressed-looking nod, and Dave waved from behind the pool table. As the evening had progressed, he’d sent some of his friends over to ask about hookworms, and they’d all listened attentively. I’d thrown in some stuff about blood flukes, too. So it hadn’t been like drinking alone.

Outside Dick’s Bar, the streetlights wore coronas of orange, and the glassphalt shimmered like sugar crystals on top of lemon meringue pie. My breath curled out steamy, but the warmth from inside Dick’s still saturated my jacket, its fingers nestled around me like a cluster of liver worms.

Okay, bad image. But I was a little drunk.

My feet carried me toward the river automatically, but I wasn’t remembering the route to Morgan’s yet. It was just gravity doing its job.

Skateboarding around the city, I’d noticed the Hump, how the ground rises in the center of Manhattan and falls away toward the rivers, like the slippery back of a giant whale emerging from the harbor. A really giant whale: The slope is barely perceptible—you only feel it on a board or a bike, or if your stride is lubricated by seven or so Bahamalama-Dingdongs.

My feet had wheels, and I rolled toward the water effortlessly.

Soon I glimpsed the river at the end of the street, sparkling as it had that night. A walkway stretched along the water. By instinct, I turned north. It was a little tricky staying between the pedestrian lines, though. A few bikers and skaters whirred around me, leaving a

But my mood lifted when I saw the pier.

It stretched out into the water, as long as a football field. Mismatched beats from various boom boxes echoed across the water from it, and bright lights beamed down from high posts.

Was that the same pier Morgan and I had stood on that night?

There was one way to find out. I shambled to the end of the pier, trying to ignore kissing couples and a group of very cute roller-dancing girls, and pulled my trusty compass out. The needle steadied itself to magnetic north.

I was facing northwest, the exact reading I’d taken a year before.

I breathed in deeply, tasting ocean salt, green algae, and motor oil in the air, all familiar from that night. This had to be the place.

But what now?

I gazed out onto the river. On either side of me, the timbers of abandoned piers rose up from the water like rotting black teeth. More pieces of my memory were falling into place, like a blurry picture downloading in waves, gradually becoming clearer.

Then I saw the dark hulk of a building across the Hudson, its three giant maws open to the river. The Hoboken Ferry Terminal. Without knowing it, I’d had a glimpse of my future that night a year before.

My peep-strength eyes caught a flicker of lights in its second-story windows. Dr. Rat was still up there, probably with a dozen or so of her colleagues from Research and Development, studying the nesting habits of Sarah’s brood. Weighing and measuring poisoned alpha rats and punks. Maybe looking for a rare “rat king”—a bunch of rats with tangled-up tails who travel in a pack all tied together, like dogs being walked by a professional dog walker, ten leashes in hand.

With Sarah gone, her brood would be disintegrating over the next few days, scattering into nearby alleys and sewers like runoff from an autumn storm. I wondered if the rats would miss her. Did they get something more than leftovers from their peeps? A sense of belonging?