Peeps by Scott Westerfeld Page A

up.”         
    “You think they uncovered a reservoir?”
    Neither of them said anything.
    Remember what I said about rats carrying the disease? How broods store the parasite in their blood when their peeps die? Those broods can last a long time after the peeps are gone, spreading the disease down generations of rats. Old cities carry the parasite in their bones, the way chicken pox can live in your spinal column for decades, ready to pop out as horrible blisters in old age.
    “The health club, huh?” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what people get for working out.”
    “It may be more than a reservoir, Cal. There may be larger things than rats and peeps to worry about.” The Shrink paused. “And then … there are the owners.”
    “The owners?” I asked.
    The man from Records glanced at the Shrink, and the Shrink looked at me.
    “A first family,” she said.
    “Oh, crap,” I answered. One thing about the carriers of the Night Watch: They have a special affection for the families after whom the oldest streets are named. Back in the 1600s, New Amsterdam was a small town, only a few thousand people, and everyone was someone’s cousin or uncle or indentured servant. Certain loyalties go back a long way, and in blood.
    “Who are they? Boerums? Stuys?”
    The Shrink’s eyes slitted as she spoke, one hand gesturing vaguely toward the half-forgotten world outside her town house. “If I remember correctly, Joseph once lived on this very street. And Aaron built his first home on Golden Hill, where Gold Street and Fulton now meet. Mercer Ryder’s farm was up north a ways—he grew wheat in a field off Verdant Lane, although that field is called Times Square these days. And they had more farmland in Brooklyn. They were good boys, the Ryders, and the Night Mayor has kept up with their descendants, I believe.”
    I found my voice. “Ryder, you said?”
    “With a
y
,” the Records guy offered softly.
    I swallowed. “My progenitor’s name is Morgan Ryder.”
    “Then we have a problem,” said the Shrink.
     
    The guy from Records, whose name was Chip, took me down to his cubicle. We were going over the history of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, which was a lot more exciting than you’d think.
    “The first incident was in 1880, killed twenty workers,” Chip said. “Then another in 1882 killed a few more than that. They were supposedly explosions, and the company had the body parts to prove it.”
    “Handy,” I said.
    “And leggy,” he chuckled. Out from under the soulless eyes of the Shrink’s doll collection, Chip was a certified laugh riot. “That brought the project to a halt for a couple of decades. Those incidents were in Jersey, but on this side of the river we never bought the cover story.”
    “Why not?”
    “There are ancient tunnels that travel through the bedrock, all around these parts. And around the PATH train, the tunnels are … newer.” His fingers drifted along the tunnel blueprints on his desk. “Check it out, Cal: If you add up the weight of all the plants and animals that live under the ground, it’s actually
more
than everything that lives above. About a billion organisms in every pinch of soil.”
    “Yeah, none of which is big enough to
eat twenty people
.”
    He lowered his voice. “But that’s what happens after you’re buried, Kid. Things in the ground eat you.”
    Great, now
Records
was calling me Kid. “Okay, Chip,” I said. “But worms don’t eat people who are still alive.”
    “But there’s a food chain down there,” he said. “
Something
has to be at the top.”
    “You guys don’t have a clue, do you?”
    Chip shook his head. “We have clues. Those tunnels? They’re a lot like the trails of an earthworm through the dirt.”
    I frowned and dropped my eyes back to the blueprints for Lace’s building. The fine-lined drawings—precisely scaled and covered in tiny symbols—showed only the shapes that human machines had carved from the soil. No hint at