Page 11 (1/2)

Chapter 11

MAJOR REVELATION INCIDENT

"What are you doing down here?" I yelled

"What are you doing down here?" Lace yelled back, grabbing two blind fistfuls of my hazmat suit in the darkness "Where the hell are we anyway? Were those rats?"

"Yes, those were rats!"

She started hopping "Crap! I thought so Why did it go all dark?"

"I kind of dropped et out of here!"

We did I could see only leftover streaks etched into ht, but Lace&039;s eyes weren&039;t as sensitive asback up the stairs, and as we squished through the poisoned-peanut-butter hallway,in froh the open locker door

Lace squeezed out, and I followed, sla the locker shut behind me Fluorescents buzzed overhead, and the basely normal

"What was that down there?" Lace cried

"Wait a second" I pulled her away froht benches Sitting down, I tried to blink away the spots onfrom one foot to the other

"What the hell?" was all she could say

I stared at her, half blind and still astonished by her sudden appearance Then I re the elevator&039;s controls, leaving theround floor

I hadn&039;t paid close enough attention It was all ht Watch investigation: Secure the site But I was positive I&039;d closed the locker door behind et down here?" I sputtered "I thought the health club was closed at night!"

"Dude, you think I ca from foot to foot "I was headed out and Manny said, &039;You know that guy you ca for rats&039; And I&039;m like, &039;What?&039; And he&039;s like, &039;Yeah, did you knoas an exter to kill some rats!&039; " Lace spread her open palan So what the hell?"

I didn&039;t answer, just sighed

"And when I cahts weren&039;t even on I thought Manny had lost hisBut when the elevator closed behind me, it was totally dark" She pointed "Except suddenly that locker was doing thisglowing thing"

I groaned On its killer setting, ht had been visible fro, Lace continued "And there was a hidden hallway, and the floor was covered eird goo, and there were stairs at the end, with this insane squeaky pande up from below I called your name, but all I heard was rats!"

"And that o down the stairs?" I asked

"No!" Lace cried "But by then I figured you were down here, somewhere, maybe in trouble"

My eyes widened "You cas didn&039;t look so good down there"

I couldn&039;t argue with that No one else could have s were bad enough, with a great big rat reservoir bubbling up fro with a weird peeplike cat and soht sed to insert Lace - a Major Revelation Incident

I was screwed But I foundat Lace with admiration

"All those rats" A note of exhaustion crept into her voice as hysteria subsided "Do you think they&039;ll follow us?"

"No" I pointed at her shoe "That stuff will stop the at the bottom of her other shoe "What the hell is this crap anyway?"

"Watch out! It&039;s poisonous!"

She sniffed the air "It smells like peanut butter"

"It&039;s poisonous peanut butter!"

She let out a sigh "Whatever - I wasn&039;t going to eat it Note to Cal: I do not eat stuff off erous!"

"Yeah, no kidding This whole place should be condemned There were, like, thousands of rats in that pool"

I sed, nodding slowly "Yeah At least"

"So what&039;s the deal? What are you doing here, Cal? You&039;re not an exterate STDs and spray for rats"

"U have the plague or soether Would Lace believe that one? My an to race

"No, dude," Lace said firer inshit up Tell me the truth"

"UhI can&039;t"

"You&039;re trying to hide this? That&039;s nuts!"

I stood and putExcept that it&039;s very important that you don&039;t tell anyone about what&039;s down there"

"Why the hell would I keep quiet? There&039;s a swi pool full of rats in my basement!"

"You just have to trust me"

"Trust you? Screw that!" She set her jaw, and her voice rose "There&039;s a disease that h , and I&039;m supposed to keep it a secret?"

"Um, yes?"

"Well, listen to this, then, Cal You think this should be a secret? Wait till I tell Manny what I san there, and Max and Freddie and everyone else in the building, and the New York Times and the Post and Daily News, for that matter It won&039;t be very secret then, will it?"

I tried to pull off a shrug "No Then it&039;ll just be a building in New York City with rats in the base on my wall"

I sed and had to adraffiti added into the mix, the NYPD would have a reason to reopen apartht lead theht Watch was usually pretty good at o away, but this one would be tricky

Which ht now and tell her what had happened But the problem with that was, I already knehat she&039;d tell me to do Lace would have to disappear forever All because she&039;d tried to help me

I stood there in silence, paralyzed

"I just want the truth," Lace said softly She sat down heavily on a weight bench, as if her nervous energy had run out

"It&039;s really complicated, Lace"

"Yeah, well, it&039;s pretty sioing on under our feet, and so roo to freak me out"

On those last words, her voice broke

She could smell it now With all she&039;d seen, Lace could feel the capital-N Nature bubbling up fro zoo, or even the deadly but noble kind on the Nature Channel This was the appalling, nasty, real-world version, snails&039; eyes getting eaten by tres, sucking at their guts; parasites controlling your round

I sat down next to her "Listen, I understand you&039;re scared But knowing the truth won&039;t make it any better The truth sucks"

"Maybe But it&039;s still the truth All you&039;ve done is lie since you met me, Cal"

I blinked She didn&039;t "Yeah," I said "But - "

"But what?"

At that moment, I knehat I really wanted After sixsteadily ainst me, I was just as scared as Lace I needed so to

And I wanted it to be her

"Maybe I can explain soh me "But you&039;d have to promise not to tell anyone else This isn&039;t some journalism class project, okay? This is deadly serious It has to stay secret"

Lace thought for a few seconds "Okay" She raised a finger in warning "As long as you don&039;t lie to reed way too fast How could I believe her? She was studying to be a reporter, after all Of course, my only other choice was the phone call that wouldto divine the truth of her promise, which probably wasn&039;t the best idea Her brown eyes were still ith shock, her breathing still hard My whole awareness focused itself upon her, a tangle of hyped-up senses drinking her in

My guess is the parasite inside me made the choice Partly anyway

"Okay Deal" I put outhappened: Instead of sha this secret fro soday

Lace didn&039;t let go ofas she said, "But you can&039;t lie to inning to work logically for the first time since the earth had started to tremble, and I realized what I had to do next "But before I tell you, I have to sort out a couple of things"

Lace narrowed her eyes "Like what?"

"I need to secure the base door behind the wall and lock that locker" I could leavedownstairs, I realized The rats wouldn&039;t steal it, and I&039;d need the equipht where it was the next tiet before we left "Uhter on you?"

"Yeah, I&039;ve got a lighter But Cal, tell ain"

"Just for a second"

"What the hell for?"

I looked into her brown eyes, ith rekindled fear, but if Lace wanted to know the truth, it was time she found out how nasty it could be

"Well, since we&039;re already down here and everything, I really should catch a rat"

"Okay, I&039; a disease That part ofI mean, rats? Madness? Bodily fluids? What else could it be?"

"Oh, right Nothing, I guess"

We were up in Lace&039;s apart out at the river; I was cleaning poisonous peanut butter out ofthe task would distracta bathrobe A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held doith a pile of journaliss in rat-speak

I&039;d caught PNS at the top of the stairs, snatching hiloved hand as he sniffed one of Lace&039;s peanutty footprints

Lace cleared her throat "So, is this a terrorist attack or so?"

"No It&039;s just a disease The regular kind, but secret"

"Okay" She didn&039;t sound convinced "So how do I avoid getting it?"

"Well, you can be exposed through unprotected sex, or if someone bites you and draws blood"

"Bites you?"

"Yeah It&039;s like rabies It makes its hosts want to bite other animals"

"As in &039;So pretty I had to eat him&039;?"

"Exactly Cannibalism is also a symptom"

"That&039;s a symptom?" She shuddered and took a sip "So what&039;s with all the rats?"

"At Health and Mental they call rats &039;gererms that are down in the sewers up to where people live, like this high-rise A rat bite is probably how Morgan, or soot infected in the first place"

I saw another shudder pass through the shoulders of her bathrobe Lace had taken a shohile I&039;d called Manny and told him to lock up the health club Her face looked pink fro off curls of steam I turned my attention back to my boots

At the mention of rat bites, she lifted her feet up from the floor and tucked the else I should worry about?"

"Well, we think there used to be a strain that infected wolves, based on certain historicalevidence" I decided not to s that Chip orried about, or whatever had made the basement tremble, and I cleared my throat "But as far as we knoolves are too small a population to support the parasite these days So, you&039;re in luck there"

"Oh, good Because I was really worried about wolves" She turned to ?"

"Yeah It&039;s not like a flu or the common cold It&039;s an animal"

"What the hell kind of animal?"

"Sort of like a tapewor over your whole body It changes your muscles, your senses, and most of all, your brain You become a crazed killer, an ani, Cal," she said, cinching her bathrobe tighter

Tell ht have promised not to lie to her, but my personal medical history was not her business

"So," Lace said, "does this disease have a nas it had been called over the centuries - vampirism, lycanthropy, zombification, de to make this any easier for Lace to deal with

"Technically, the parasite is known as Echinococcus cannibillus But seeing as how that takes too long to say, we usually just call it &039;the parasite&039; People with the disease are &039;parasite-positives,&039; but we mostly say &039;peeps,&039; for short"

"Peeps Cute" She looked atabout anyway? You&039;re not really with the city, are you? You&039;re so"

"No, I do work for the city, like I said The federal government doesn&039;t know about this"

"What? You overnment doesn&039;t even know about it? That&039;s crazy!"

I sighed, beginning to wonder if this had been a really bad idea Lace didn&039;t even understand the basics yet - all I&039;d ed to do was freak her out The Shrink employed a whole department of psych specialists to break the news to new carriers like me; they had a library full ofnew lab full of blinking lights and creepy speci questions, strictly amateur hour

I pulled a chair over and sat down in front of her "I&039;ht, Lace This isn&039;t an acute situation It&039;s chronic"

"Meaning what?"

"That this disease is ancient It&039;s been part of hu time It almost destroyed Europe in the fourteenth century"

"Hang on You said this wasn&039;t the plague"

"It isn&039;t, but bubonic plague was a side effect In the 1300s, the parasite began to spread from humans to rats, which had just arrived from Asia But it didn&039;t reach optimum virulence with rodents for a few decades, so it mostly just killed theue jumped over to human hosts"

"Okay Excuse ot ahead ofcrash course in parasitology for otten thatabout final hosts, immune responses, or optimum virulence

I took a deep breath "Okay, let oes way back, to before civilization even The people I work for, the Night Watch, also go way back We existed before the United States did It&039;s our job to protect the city fro rats in spaghetti strainers?"

Releasepeople with the parasite and treating the any rats who carry the disease"

She shook her head "It doesn&039;t make sense, Cal Why keep it a secret? Aren&039;t you Health Departuys supposed to educate people about diseases? Not lie to them?"

I chewedit public, Lace The disease is very rare; there&039;s only a serious outbreak every few decades Nobody tries to get bitten by a rat, after all"

"H seeht Watch up in Boston once tried what you&039;re talking about - a program of education to keep the citizens on the lookout for possible symptoms They wound up with nonstop accusations of witchcraft, a handful of seventeen-year-olds clai they&039;d had sex with the devil, and a lot of innocent bystanders getting barbecued It took about a hundred years for things to settle down again"

Lace raised an eyebrow "Yeah, we did that play in high school But wasn&039;t that a long tio? Before science and stuff?"

I looked her in the eye "Most people don&039;t know jack about science They don&039;t believe in evolution because it makes them uncomfortable Or they think AIDS is a curse sent down from God How do you think those people would deal with the parasite?"

"Yeah, well, people are stupid But you wouldn&039;t keep AIDS a secret, would you?"

"No, but the parasite is different It&039;s special"

"How?"

I paused This was the tricky part In ht Watch psychs had presented all the science stuff for hours before talking about the legends, and it had been a solid week before they&039;d uttered the V-word

"Well, soo farther back than science, deeper than rational thought You can find peep legends in allobe; certain of the parasite&039;s syet a major outbreak of this, there will be hell to pay"

"Certain symptoms? Like what?"

"Think about it, Lace Peeps are light-fearing, disease-carrying cannibals who revel in blood"

As the words left my mouth, I realized I&039;d said tooabout vaht words, her a about vampires" She leaned closer "Tell hed "Yeah, peeps are vau in Japan, or nian in China But like I said, we prefer the term parasite-positive"

"Oh Va away She shook her head, and I thought for a moment that the slender thread of her trust had broken But then I realized that her gaze was directed at the here the words written in blood h

Lace&039;s shoulders sluhtly around her "I still don&039;t see why you have to lie about it"

I sighed again "Okay, iine if people heard that vampires were real What would they do?"

"I don&039;t know Freak out?"

"Soo see for theure at least a thousand amateurs would head down into the bowels of New York to look for adventure and er is just one acute case There are dozens of rat reservoirs full of the parasite down there, enough to infect everyone who takes the time to look for them"