The Last Days

There has never been a better time for a pandemic.

Airplanes can carry people across the globe in a single day, and half a billion people fly every year. Cities are far larger and more crowded than at any point in history.

The last great disease was Spanish flu, which appeared at the end of World War I. (Pandemics love wars.) It spread across the planet faster than any previous disease. Within one year, one billion people were infected, a third of the world’s population. Its spread was so frighteningly quick that one U.S. town outlawed shaking hands.

And all this was before airplanes could fly across oceans, before most people owned a car. These days, any pandemic would travel much, much faster. We’ve got it all these days: dense cities, instant transportation, and all the wars you could want. For the worms, that’s motive, means, and opportunity.

When the last days come, they will come quickly.

NIGHT MAYOR TAPES

END HERE.

26. HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS — MINERVA-

The smelly angels took us all away.

I tried to explain to them that I was fine—had been for weeks—and that Zahler, Pearl, and Alana Ray weren’t even infected. But one look at sweaty, frothing, guitar-smashing Mozzy convinced them we were all insane.

That was the angels’ big problem: they thought they knew everything.

I could have run. I was as fast and strong as them now—I could shatter bedroom doors with a single blow, after all. With the angels busy protecting a thousand bystanders and catching Astor Michaels and killing the giant worm that I’d called up (okay… oops), disappearing would have been a cinch.

But that would have meant leaving Moz and the others behind, and we really were a band now; I couldn’t let them be kidnapped without me. So I let the angels stick me with their stupid needles…

And woke up all the way across the river in New Jersey. They’d put me in a locked room, a cross between a cheap hotel and a mental hospital. Nothing to do but watch the world fall apart on TV.

Smelly angels.

“We’re very interested in you, Minerva.”

“Really, Cal?” I batted my eyelashes. He was kind of handsome—in a boring, clean-cut way—and had a cute southern accent. Not as yummy as Mozzy, of course, but I liked how Cal turned pink when you flirted with him. “Then why don’t you let me out of here? It’s not like I’m dangerous, after all.”

His eyes narrowed. Cal never wore sunglasses, like the other angels did. They were all infected, of course, and only sane because they took their meds. The angels had a big pill factory out here. No skulls or crucifixes on the walls, though—they were very scientific.

But Cal was different. He didn’t need pills and smelled a little bit like Astor Michaels. Fellow freaks of nature.

“We can’t let you go because we don’t know what you are,” Cal’s girlfriend said.

I glared at her. Her name was Lace-short-for-Lacey, and she’d stuck Mozzy with her needle.

“But I’m cured. You can see that.” They’d tried to give me their smelly angel medicine, but I was refusing it. Fresh garlic was enough for me now.

Cal scratched his head. “Yeah, you told us about your esoterica already. We’re checking her out.”

“You be nice to Luz,” I warned. “She knows things.”

“We know things too,” he said.

Lace got all bossy then, hands on hips and voice too loud. “We’ve been around for centuries, cured a lot more peeps than Luz ever will. Your friend might know a few folk remedies, but the Watch has this stuff down to a science.”

“Science, huh?” I ran one finger down the side of my neck, making Cal all squirmy. “So what am I, then?”

Lace frowned. “What you are is freaky.”

“We’ve been watching Astor Michaels for a while now,” Cal said. “We knew he was spreading the parasite, but this whole singing thing… It kind of caught us by surprise.”

I didn’t say how the worm had caught me by surprise too. I’d always felt it rumbling when we played, but I’d never thought it would come visit.

Even humming made me nervous now. Smelly underground monsters.

I shrugged. “Why don’t you ask Astor Michaels about it, then?”

“He doesn’t know any more than we do,” Lace said. “He’s just some record producer, trying to find the Next Big Thing. He’s immune to the parasite’s worst effects, but that’s more common than you’d think.”

“I’m a carrier myself.” Cal smiled, all proud of himself. He’d already come by my room to explain how he was naturally immune and how he’d been a badass vampire-hunter even before the crisis. Now he worked for something called the Night Watch, which was run by someone called the Night Mayor. Oooh! Spooky.

I batted my eyes again. “Did you get up to tricks like Astor Michaels did, Cal? Were you bad?”

“No.” He swallowed, then Lace gave him a look. “Well, not on that scale. And never on purpose…”

“Did you infect her?” I asked, pointing at Lace-short-for-Lacey. I’d seen them being all kissy through the bars of my window.

“No,” he said in a tiny voice. “My cat did.”

“Your cat?” I blinked. “Kitties can do that?”

“Felines are the major vector,” Cal said. “The parasite hid in the deep-dwelling rat population for centuries, until the worms drove them up to the surface…”

As Cal went on with his parasite-geek lecture, which he loved to do, I remembered back to before I got sick. As the sanitation crisis had settled over our street, Zombie started spending a lot of time outside. And every night he’d come home and sleep on my chest, breathing his cat-food breath into my face.

That was how I’d gotten sick? From Zombie?

That meant that Mark wasn’t such a dirty dog after all. He hadn’t given the nasty to me; I’d given it to him…

“Oops,” I said softly.

I wondered where Zombie was now. I always left the apartment window open so he could visit his little friends, but Manhattan looked pretty bad on TV. The whole island had been sealed off by Homeland Security, like that was going to keep the parasite from spreading.

Cal had explained to me how clever the parasite was: it turned infected people horny, hungry, bitey—anything to pass on its spores—and made them despise everything they’d loved before. That’s why I’d thrown away Mark and my dolls and my music, why Moz had smashed his Stratocaster to bits. The anathema, as Cal called it, pushed infected people to run away from home and head to the next town over, and the next town after that…

It wouldn’t be long before the whole world had it.

There were full-scale riots in most big cities now, blood-thirsty maniacs running around doing vile things—and not all of them were infected, you could totally tell. Schools were shutting down, the roads were choked with refugees, and the president kept making speeches telling everyone to pray.

No shit.

But the news never mentioned cat food supplies, not that I ever saw. So what was Zombie eating now? He didn’t mind birds and mousies, but he always puked them up.

“Anyway,” Lace said, noticing I wasn’t listening. “We don’t really care how you got the disease or how your voodoo friend cured you. This is about your songs.”

I smiled. “They make the ground rumble. Want me to sing one for you?”

“Um, not really,” Cal said, then he frowned. “That worm was probably just a coincidence anyway. But certain people around here are interested. They’ve been listening to recordings from that night, and they want to know where you got those lyrics.”

“You need my help? But I thought you had this stuff down to a science.”

Lace took a slow breath. “Maybe what happened that night wasn’t strictly science.”

Cal turned to her. “What do you mean by that?”

“Dude! You saw what happened! That shit was…” Her voice faded.

“Paranormal?” I looked down at my fingernails, which needed a manicure. They were still growing faster every day, even though I was cured. “Okay. I’ll tell you everything I know… if you let me see Mozzy and the others. I want us to be together. We’re a band, you know.”

“But the other three tested parasite-negative,” Cal said.

“I told you they would.”

He frowned. “Yeah, I guess you did. But if we let you see them, you can’t do anything that would compromise their health.”

“Eww! I wouldn’t kiss any of them.”

“Kissing’s not the only vector.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. Anything to get out of this smelly room. “Okay, I promise not to share my ice cream.”

“Cal,” Lace said. “If she really wanted to infect them, she could have already.” She turned to me. “But Moz is still dangerous.”

“I can handle Mozzy. He just needs his tea.”

“He’s getting better stuff than tea,” she said. “But he’s still in bad shape. It’s not pretty.”

I snorted. “I’ve been tied to a bed in a nuthouse, screaming and trying to bite my doctors’ fingers off. And then locked in my room for three months, hating myself and eating dead chickens raw. Don’t talk to me about pretty, Miss Lace-short-for-Lacey.”

The two of them looked at each other all seriously, then argued for a while longer, but I knew that eventually I’d get my way. They wanted to know about my songs real bad.

And like Astor Michaels always said, you had to keep the talent happy.

27. FAITHLESS — PEARL-

The Night Watch stuck me, Zahler, and Alana Ray in one of their “guest rooms,” a little cluster of cabins at the forested edge of the compound. We were free to go where we wanted in the compound, except the hospital where Moz was, but outside our door a tall fence stretched in both directions. Razor wire coiled down its length, reminding us that we were prisoners; not because they wouldn’t let us out, but because outside was too deadly for us now. Special Guests all over again.

There wasn’t much to do except watch the world end on TV.

Thanks to jet planes, overcrowded schools, and the sheer six billion of us all crammed together, the disease was spinning out of control. It hit critical mass in New York City in that first week we were out in Jersey, spreading faster than anyone could contain, conceal, or comprehend what was happening. The talking heads all went lateral, of course, blaming terrorists or avian flu or the government or God. All nonsense, though at least they’d stopped pretending this was just a sanitation problem. But none of them seemed to get that the world was ending.

Sometimes they’d interview people in small towns, where everything was weirdly normal, the disease invisible so far. They were all smirking at New York, like we’d had it coming. But the boondocks wouldn’t be fun for very long. Credit cards, phones, and the Internet were already starting to fail. Hardly anyone was making contact lenses, movies, medicines, or refined gasoline anymore. Even in the smallest towns, they’d miss all that infrastructure when it was gone.

Ellen Bromowitz had been right: there weren’t going to be any symphony orchestras for a while. No celebrity interviews in magazines, no album cover photo shoots or music videos. And the biggest hit on local radio these days was “Where’s the National Guard Camp Nearest You?”

No way to get famous.

Of course, now that I knew the scale of what was happening, becoming a rock star seemed less important. In fact, it seemed just plain stupid, unbelievably self-centered, and nine kinds of deluded.

I’d seen this coming. Even back when all I’d had to go on was Min’s craziness and Luz’s strange tales, I’d understood somehow that the world was about to break. So what had I done? Tried to escape reality by becoming famous. As if the world couldn’t touch me then, as if bad things didn’t happen to people with record deals. As if I could just leave all the nonfamous people behind.

What a joke. A sad, demented joke.

So that was me now: depressed and deflated in New Jersey, shell-shocked that our first gig had turned into a bloodbath, that the world was crumbling, and that my lifelong dream had turned out to be the Taj Mahal of shallow.

I never wanted to go onstage again, never wanted to play another instrument… and just when I’d finally thought of a really fexcellent band name.

How’s that for annoying?

Every morning the Night Watch brought in truckloads of peeps—parasite positives—they’d captured the night before. They treated as many as would fit in their hospital, an empty elementary school they’d taken over. Hundreds of them, reborn as angels, trained on the assembly field every day. Their swords glittered like a host of flashbulbs popping in unison.

An army was building here.

Cal said that in all of human history, this was the fastest the infection had ever spread—those jet planes again. And what nobody but the Watch realized yet was that the worst part was yet to come. The creature that Min had summoned, the worm, was one of thousands rising up to attack humanity. Just like Luz had said, the sickness was merely a sign that a great struggle was about to begin.

When Cal visited to give us his geeky lectures, he’d offer the scientific version. It was all a chain reaction: the rising worms upset deep-dwelling rats, who carried the parasite to the surface; they infected felines, who gave it to their humans, who turned into peeps and spread it to still more humans. The disease made people stronger and faster, vicious and fearless—the perfect soldiers to fight the worms.

Through most of history, vampires were rare; but every few centuries, humanity needed tons of them. This epidemic was our species’ immune system gearing up, peeps like killer T-cells multiplying in our blood, getting ready to repel an invader. Of course, as Cal liked to point out, immune systems are dangerous things: lupus, arthritis, and even asthma are all caused by our own defenses. Fevers have to be controlled.

That’s where the Watch came in, to organize the peeps and keep them from doing too much damage. Like your mom bringing you aspirin and cold compresses and chicken soup—but with ninja uniforms.

Early one morning a week after we’d arrived, they finally let us see the others.

Moz was in a hospital bed, looking worse than I’d expected. His arms and legs were restrained, and long IV tubes snaked into both arms, dripping yellowish liquids into his bloodstream. Electronic monitors were taped all over his bare, pale chest. A plastic shunt jutted from his throat, so they could inject things without opening up a vein.

Moz’s eyes looked bruised, his skin stretched taut across his cheekbones. The room was dark and smelled vaguely like garlic and disinfectant.

Minerva sat silent beside him. The sight of her sent a tremor of rage through me: she’d done this to him, infected him with her kiss.

Cal said she’d been partly under the parasite’s control. Always trying to spread itself, it made its hosts horny, greedy, irrational. But I was still pissed off. Parasite-positive or not, you should never, ever hook up with anyone in your band.

Not twice in a row.

“Hey,” I said. They’d warned us not to say his name, because of the anathema. He’d only just recovered enough to look at our faces.

“Hey, man,” Zahler said. “How’s it going, Minerva?”

Minerva pointed to her own mouth, then made a key-turning gesture. My lips are sealed.

Of course… Moz had been in love with Min. Her sultry, beautiful voice would burn his ears. I noticed that he looked at Zahler and Alana Ray and me, but kept his gaze averted from Min.

Not that I could look at her myself.

“Hey,” Moz said hoarsely.

“You look like crap!” Zahler said.

“Feel like crap too.”

“At least you aren’t smashing things,” Alana Ray said. She tried to smile, but her head jerked to one side instead. Since the gig, she was twitchier than I’d ever seen her.

Moz winced, as if remembering the wreckage he’d left of the Strat. He must have loved the guitar more than Minerva, I realized, half smiling. He hadn’t smashed her to pieces, after all.

Small favors.

“Pretty intense gig, though, huh?” Moz said.

I nodded. “Yeah, fawesome. For most of one song anyway.”

“That crowd thought we were totally fool.” Zahler sighed. “Too bad about the, uh… giant worm, though.”

“Yeah. That part sucked,” Moz said.

We were all quiet for a while. The Watch hadn’t told us anything about that night, and the news had much bigger things to talk about, but we all were pretty sure that people had been killed. Of course, so had the beast we’d raised—one less underground monster.

That was why the Night Watch was interested in us.

They knew the secret history of how worms and peeps had always appeared together and had a grip on modern science as well. Cal said they’d known before anyone else that this apocalypse was coming. They had cures and treatments for turning maniacs into soldiers to fight the enemy. They had cool worm-killing swords.

But we could do something they couldn’t.

We could sing the worms up. We could bring them out of hiding and to the surface, which made them a lot easier to destroy…

After we’d been talking for a while, Min handed me a note. Her handwriting was still a mess, but I could understand it. More or less.

“So, Moz, we have to leave for a while,” I said. “Just for a day or so. We’ll be back before you’re out of bed.”

“Where?” he croaked.

My fingers folded the note up small. “Manhattan.”

“Are you kidding?” Zahler said. “It’s dangerous back there! And I promised my mom I’d stay right here!”

I nodded. Local phones were mostly still working, so we knew that my mom was safe in the Hamptons, Elvis at her side, and that Zahler’s parents were at a Guard camp in Connecticut. Minerva’s family had been scooped up by the Night Watch, who’d wanted to check and see if they also carried her weird monster-calling strain of the disease. But Moz’s parents, like most New Yorkers, were holding out in their building. And they’d said things looked ugly down on the street.

“Sorry, Zahler. But there’s someone the Night Watch wants us to meet.”

“Can’t this someone come out to Jersey?” he asked.

I crumpled the note and shrugged. “Apparently not.”

“Well, screw that!” Zahler said. “New York is one big Maniac City! They can’t make us go, can they?”

“Pearl,” Alana Ray said. “Does it say what they want to talk about?”

“Only that maybe we can help. What happened that night—we might be able to use it to save people.” I turned to each of them as I spoke, pushing my glasses up my nose, like this was a rehearsal and I wanted to get them to stop tuning up and playing riffs and listen to me. “These Night Watch guys are the only people in the world who aren’t clueless about what’s going on. When that thing turned up at our gig, they were the ones who stopped it from killing everybody, remember? It won’t hurt us to listen to them.”

“It’s not the listening that I’m—”

“I am sorry to interrupt, Zahler,” Alana Ray said, tapping her forehead twice, a shiver moving across her. “But I agree with Pearl. We called that creature up; we were responsible.”

“We didn’t know it was going to happen!” Zahler cried.

“Whether that is true or not…” Alana Ray’s eyes dropped to the floor, as if she saw something there. “It would be unethical not to help if we can.”

I looked at the others. Minerva nodded silently, trying to catch my eye. Moz crooked one thumb into the air, and Zahler let out a defeated sigh.

28. DOCTOR — ZAHLER-

There was a checkpoint at the Jersey end of the Holland Tunnel, swarming with New York cops and Guardsmen and guys in khaki toting machine guns. It didn’t look to me like they were letting anyone through.

I figured this was the end of the trip—too bad, we’d tried—and that was fine by me. But then Lace zipped down her window, flashed a badge, and said, “Homeland Security.”

The unshaven Guardsman stared at the badge, his eyes red. He looked like he’d been awake for days, like he’d seen some scary shit, and like he thought we were crazy.

But he waved us through.

“Homeland Security?” I asked. “Are you guys, like, really Homeland Security? Some sort of paranormal branch?”

“Please.” Lace snorted. “Those guys can’t even handle natural disasters.”

Our convoy slid into the tunnel. We were in two big military-looking vehicles, a bunch of angels riding on the outside. I wondered what the cops thought of them. But I guessed everyone had seen much weirder stuff than black ninja suits and swords lately.

The tunnel was completely dark. Lace flicked on the headlights and drove straight down the middle, ignoring the lane dividers. As I watched the entrance disappear behind us through the back window, blackness swallowed everything except the red tinge of our taillights. It felt like sinking to the core of the earth.

“Aren’t there worms down here?” I asked.

“They’d never attack us here,” Lace said. “The whole Hudson River’s balanced over our heads. They breach this tunnel, and a million tons of water gush down on us and them.”

“Oh. Fawesome,” I said, reminding myself to shut up forever, as of now.

“Are they that smart?” Alana Ray asked.

Lace shrugged. “It’s all instinct. They evolved underground.”

I swallowed, thinking about how much earth there was below us. Room for all kinds of weird stuff to be brewing, and I’d never even thought about it.

“Okay, let’s get a few things straight about Dr. Prolix,” Cal said. “There’s a red line painted on the floor of her office. Whatever you do, don’t step across it.”

“A line on the floor?” Pearl said. “Doesn’t she like musicians?”

“She’s a carrier, like me,” he explained. “A really old one, so she’s got a few diseases that aren’t around much anymore. Typhus and stuff. Bubonic plague. If you get too close to her, we sort of have to… burn your clothes.”

I looked at the others, wondering if I’d really heard him say that. These angels or Night Watch guys or whatever were always saying stuff that was just messed up. Talking to Cal was like watching some psycho version of the History Channel that only showed the nasty parts—epidemics, massacres, and inquisitions, twenty-four/seven.

“Burn our clothes?” Minerva said. “But this is my last nice dress! Shouldn’t you put her in a glass bubble or something?”

Cal shook his head. “The whole house is set up for negative air-pressure prophylaxis, so the germs around Dr. Prolix can’t get to where you’ll be standing. Just don’t cross the line.”

“Bubonic plague?” Alana Ray repeated. A shudder traveled through her body, and she pressed her hands together. “Exactly how old is this woman?”

“Old,” he said.

In Manhattan, the streets were still alive.

Rats moved among leaking piles of garbage, stray cats sliding under smashed and motionless cars. You could see long ripples in the asphalt where the worms had passed, leaving gleaming stains of black water in the high sun. A few gaping holes showed where they’d burst through the surface. I wondered if anyone had been standing right there when they had…

According to Cal, it was all natural: they were hunters and we were their prey.

Nature can blow me.

“There are no bodies,” Alana Ray said.

“The peeps are cannibals,” Lace said. “And the worms are human-eaters.”

“Much neater than your usual epidemic,” Cal said.

A flash of disbelief went through me; this wasn’t really the Manhattan I’d grown up in. For a moment, it was all a big movie set—a giant, evil version of Disney World. There weren’t really any monsters under our feet, or crazy people hiding in the darkened buildings, and all our parents were actually back in the real Manhattan, wondering where we were.

But then we passed an empty school yard, the concrete ripped and torn from one end to the other. An ice-cream truck waited beside it—split almost in half, ripped open from underneath. It was bleeding white goo into the street, and the breeze carried a smell like spoiled milk and burnt sugar through the open windows.

A basketball sat abandoned in the middle of the playground. It stirred in the wind, and the realness of everything settled over me again.

Our convoy weaved slowly downtown, avoiding the worst streets and any people we spotted. Small groups were scurrying from place to place, carrying water and food and other stuff they must have looted from the stores. Smashed and gaping windows were everywhere.

“Are all these people infected?” Pearl asked.

“If they are, they’re not symptomatic yet,” Cal said. “Peeps can’t stand direct sunlight.”

I looked out the back window, twisting my neck to see up. It was almost noon, the sun reaching down into the narrow canyons of downtown. The angels all wore dark glasses, except for Cal.

The problem was, this close to winter the sun went down early in New York. An hour from now the shadows of the empty skyscrapers would begin to lengthen.

I hoped this wasn’t going to be a long conversation.

We made our way down to the Stock Exchange. It was the worst part of the city we’d seen, the streets empty and broken. Papers and trash blew in little cyclones around us, and Lace honked her horn to scatter a big posse of rats. I guessed the stock market wasn’t going to open back up anytime soon.

Lace turned the vehicle’s engine off, rolling the last dozen yards to a silent halt. The angels climbed carefully down, drawing their swords and forming a circle around us. The asphalt was pitted and gouged, as if worms popped through all the time around here.

“Everybody out,” Lace said. “Step lightly, though. The worms can hear our footsteps.” I opened my door and stared down at the street. It was stained with black water, with old gum, and with something viscous and red.

Crap, I thought. All my life I’d been at the top of the food chain and had never really appreciated it. Peeps were bad enough, even worse than junkies, I figured. But the worms—something about the ground opening up and swallowing people was just wrong.

I lowered one foot softly to the street, then the other, a shiver of nerves traveling through my body. The asphalt felt fragile, like the ice on the Central Park Reservoir does when you sneak onto it in early spring. As I took my first step, my foot resisted, and I almost screamed, imagining a hungry mouth bursting through to grab my leg.

But it was just the old wad of gum, softened to stickiness by the sun. It tugged at my sole with every step, making a sucking sound.

The angels led us into a long, crooked alley. The old-fashioned cobblestones were broken and bulging, with a few gaping holes that seethed with rats. I shivered at the sight of all those furry bodies. Cal and Lace talked about rats like they were on our side, something about them storing the parasite and bubbling up to spread it when the worms began to rise. But how that was a good thing, I had no idea…

We crept slowly down the alley, keeping clear of the wormholes. At the end was an old town house, its stoop covered with silent, watchful cats.

Their red eyes followed us as we went in.

There really was a red line on the floor.

A breeze pushed me toward it, like a gentle hand pressing against my back. Cal had explained that all the air in the house moved toward Dr. Prolix, sucking her ancient germs away from us and down into a big, germ-killing furnace. She was immune to all her own diseases, being infected like the rest of the angels, but we’d be dead meat if we got too close. Even Cal and Lace kept away from the line. Didn’t want their fexcellent ninja suits burned, I guess.

I stayed against the back wall, as far away as I could get. Not just to stay away from the Plague Lady but to be farther from the weird old dolls that lined the shelves of her office. Real-looking hair sprouted from their crumbling heads, and all their faces were painted with smiles.

Kids in the old days must have loved nightmares or something.

“You’re the one who sings,” Dr. Prolix said, her gaze dismissing the rest of us and locking onto Minerva. Her voice was dry and raspy, like two sheets of paper rubbing together. Her unwrinkled face didn’t look that old, except for the thinness of her skin and the stiffness of her smile. She looked like one of her own dolls, decorated with glowing human eyes.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Minerva said in a small voice.

“And where did you learn these songs, young woman?”

“When I first got sick, I felt something down in my basement calling me, making me sort of…” She let out a giggle.

“Sexually aroused?” Dr. Prolix asked.

“Yeah, I guess. When I went there in my fevers, I could hear whispering from the cracks.” Minerva shrugged. “So I started writing down what they said.”

I swallowed. I’d never really thought about where her lyrics had come from, but then, Minerva had never mentioned that they’d bubbled up from underground. That seemed like the kind of thing you might mention.

“Perhaps I might hear a few words?” Dr. Prolix said.

“Um, is that a good idea?” Pearl asked softly.

“Don’t sing, dear,” the old woman said. “Just speak them.”

Minerva paused a moment, then cleared her throat.

A few syllables came from her mouth, at first halting and tangled, like someone trying to imitate the sound of a sink gurgling. But then she started speaking in rhythm, and the weird sounds smoothed into words.

Then Minerva fell into the verses and choruses Pearl had built around the nonsense syllables, pitching her voice in a singsong way. I recognized a few phrases from Piece Two, and my fingers moved half-consciously, playing the bass line in the air, so I didn’t notice when she started singing.

Maybe the floor trembled a little.

“Stop that!” Dr. Prolix snapped.

Minerva came to a halt, shaking her head as though she were snapping out of a daydream. Then she shrugged. “Sorry.”

“I always wondered how that worked,” Dr. Prolix said softly from behind her desk.

“How what worked?” Cal said. “What is that?”

“The last time the enemy came was seven hundred years ago, before I was born. But the Night Mayor was born toward the end of those times.”

I blinked. Okay, this woman was talking about centuries—about being alive for centuries. I felt my brain trying to switch off, like when a crazy person is ranting on the subway and you totally don’t want to hear it, but you can’t stop listening.

Dr. Prolix spread her hand on her desk. “Have you ever considered, Cal, how the previous invasions were dealt with? Without seismographs? Without walkie-talkies and cell phones?”

“Um… I thought maybe they didn’t deal so well?” he said. “Of course, they didn’t have Homeland Security in the way, making it hard to move medicine into regions suffering outbreaks, and there weren’t any subway tunnels for the enemy to slide around in. But it must have been hard. What did they lose last time? Two hundred million people?”

“And yet humanity survived.” She folded her hands. “Legend has it that they didn’t have to wait for the worms to come up. Certain peeps, called ‘singers,’ were able to bring them forth. So the Watch set traps and ambushes and killed the enemy at will.”

Cal breathed out a little sigh. “And we believe this?”

Dr. Prolix nodded. “The Night Mayor saw it happen when he was a child. He saw a woman call up a worm.” Her glowing eyes swept across the rest of us. “Along with fifteen drummers and bell-ringers and a man with a conch horn, with a great throng watching, waiting for the kill.”

Conch horn? I thought. Oh, great. I was going to have to switch instruments again.

“Dude,” Lace said, punching Cal in the shoulder. “How come you never told me about this?”

“First I’ve heard of it,” he muttered.

“Some of the old ways were lost.” Dr. Prolix looked down at her hands. “Many of us burned in the Inquisition.”

“Those guys again,” Cal said.

“But the knowledge was not completely lost, it seems.” Dr. Prolix looked at Minerva. “Where do you live, child?”

“Um, Boerum Hill.”

The doctor nodded. “Some of the old families are buried there.”

“Buried?” Minerva said. “Eww.”

My jaw dropped. “You mean, like, we were doing songs that dead people wrote?”

“Excellent point, Zahler,” Cal said. “Come on, Dr. Prolix, this is just wishful thinking. Even if the Watch used to know how to call worms back in the old days, the information’s lost, burned at the stake. Why would it be sitting around waiting for some kid in a basement, especially here in the New World?”

“I don’t know, Cal.”

He shook his head. “We only saw it happen once, and that was hardly a controlled experiment. More like a coincidence. The enemy loves to feed in big crowd situations, like that riot the other day in Prague.”

Dr. Prolix was silent for a moment, and I dared to relax a little. Maybe they were going to forget this whole Minerva thing and take us back to New Jersey. We’d only been here half an hour; the sun would still be bright outside…

“No,” Alana Ray spoke up. “It was not a coincidence.”

Everyone looked at her, and she shivered. Then she touched her own chest three times and pointed a quivering finger at Dr. Prolix.

“I can see things. I have a neurological condition that may cause compulsive behavior, loss of motor control, or hallucinations. But sometimes they are not hallucinations, I think, but the realness that comes from the patterns of things. I can see how music works, and I often saw something happening as we rehearsed, and when Morgan’s Army played…”

“Morgan’s Army?” Lace said. “Isn’t their guitarist infected?”

“By Morgan herself,” Cal said softly.

“But not their singer,” Alana Ray said, her head jerking toward Minerva. “That’s why we made it real, not them.”

Great, I thought. Ten thousand bands in New York City and I had to be in the monster-calling one.

“Alana Ray’s right.” Pearl stepped right up to the red line. “It’s not just Minerva. Everyone in the New Sound has stumbled on bits and pieces of this.” She turned to Cal. “You’re always saying how nature stores things: in our genes, in the diseases we carry, even in our pets. Everything we need to fight the worms is all around us. So maybe music’s a part of that.”

“Music?” Cal said. “Music isn’t biology.”

I nodded. “Yeah, Pearl. We’re not talking about some force of nature. We’re talking about us.”

She shook her head. “What I’m talking about is whenever a thousand people gather in one spot and move together, all focused on the same beat, mouthing the same words, riding the same twists and turns. I’m talking about the Taj Mahal of human rituals: a huge crowd hanging on the edge together, waiting for a single note to be played. It’s lateral and magic and irresistible, even if you happen to be a giant worm.”

“In other words, music is biology.” Minerva smiled. “Just ask Astor Michaels about that, Cal.”

He rolled his eyes. “And dead people wrote your lyrics?”

“I don’t know where Min’s words came from, okay?” Pearl said. “Maybe they’re passed on through the disease somehow, and Min just imagined them coming out of the walls. Or maybe they’re really nonsense, and it’s the melodies that count. But they work, don’t they?”

Alana Ray nodded. “They make the air shiver.”

“They’re something I thought we’d lost,” Dr. Prolix said softly. “We can’t fight what we can’t find, after all. But if we could call the worms to a place of our choosing, this war might be much shorter.”

“Maybe it’s worth a controlled experiment, Cal,” Lace said. “A little science, a little art.”

Cal looked at them one by one, then sighed. “You’re the boss, Doctor. Once their guitarist gets well, I’ll set it up.”

“Hang on!” I said. “You’re not saying that we’re actually going to play those songs again?”

Minerva let out a giggle. “Let’s put on a show!”

29. THE KILLS — ALANA RAY-

We set up in an old amphitheater in the East River Park.

Surrounded by the crumbling and graffiti-covered concrete, thick grass reaching up through the cracks, it felt as if the world had ended long ago. This place had been abandoned by the city early in the sanitation crisis, but it showed how all of Manhattan would look in a few years: nothing but a ruin in the weeds.

Along one edge of the park the FDR Drive sat empty, the whole city strangely silent behind it. I saw only faint movements in the windows that faced us, the barest pulses of life.

The Night Watch angels set to work, bringing us everything we’d asked for, looting equipment and instruments from the music stores in Midtown. They brought me a brand-new set of Ludwig drums and Zildjian cymbals, but Cal wanted a controlled experiment, as few differences as possible from our first gig. So Lace and three other angels and I made our way to an East Village hardware store, hurrying to make it before the sun started to go down.

The windows were all smashed in, and the angels stepped through without hesitation. My sneakers skidded on shattered glass; I was blind in the darkness inside. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the shelves were almost empty, every tool looted, every can of spray paint gone.

I listened for anyone, or anything, hiding in the wreckage.

As the angels searched, I stood in the broken window, terrified to step in from the sunlight but not wanting to stand out in the street alone. I drummed my fingers against my thighs, watching the way the fragmented glass reflected sunlight on the ceiling.

Finally Lace shouted that she’d found what we needed. Luckily, no one had bothered to steal the paint buckets.

As we emerged, a pair of young boys called to us from a window overhead. They needed food, they said, and more flashlights to drive the peeps away from their doors and windows at night. Their parents had gone out and hadn’t come back.

The angels climbed up and gave them the few remaining batteries they’d found in the store. Then other people started yelling at us from other windows, asking for help. My hands opened, as if they were offering something. But we had nothing else to give.

I felt helpless, the world shimmering with guilt. I’d signed Astor Michaels’s contract, had written my name into that tangle of words and consequences. And the monster I’d seen had really come; people had died that night, scores of them. Maybe hundreds.

And I was accountable.

The moral hazard was still following me, slithering underfoot like Minerva’s beast, half visible in the corner of my eye. It stirred the grass out in New Jersey and rattled in the drain when I took showers. But it was growing bigger here in the city, drinking in the energy of shattered glass and empty streets. It never left my side.

I knew it was just a hallucination, a trick of my mind as I began to ration my last bottle of pills. But standing there, the blank expanse of First Avenue stretching in both directions as far as I could see, my moral hazard felt more real than I did.

Moz wasn’t completely recovered yet, but he could hear his own name without wincing and could look at Minerva, even touch her. The two of them waited in the shadow of the amphitheater’s shell, Moz limbering his fingers up on a new guitar.

“As good as your Strat?” I asked, knowing the answer.

He winced at the memory and shook his head.

We did a short sound check as the shadows lengthened, pulling electricity from one of the Night Watch’s military vehicles. It had a powerful engine, enough to run the instruments, the mixing board, and the thirsty stacks of amplifiers.

The angels had constructed a tower for stage lights on either side of the amphitheater. Once night had fallen in darkened Manhattan, our lights would be visible for miles, a beacon of safety. We were hoping to lure a crowd from among the millions of survivors left in the city.

An audience was necessary, I was certain: it focused Minerva’s music, made it more human, and that was what the enemy hungered for.

Once the angels were ready, we gathered onstage and waited for the sun to go down. The worms would never rise up in broad daylight, not long enough for us to kill them.

The park began to come alive. Cats moved among the broken concrete, and the scurrying of smaller creatures stirred the weeds. Lace told Pearl, Zahler, and me to sit on top of one of the Night Watch vehicles, so that we wouldn’t be bitten by an infected rat. That seemed wise. Bands with too many insects, like Toxoplasma, could only play fast and twitchy music.

And I didn’t want to become a peep. I didn’t want to hate my drums and my friends, my own reflection. Lace said that peeps who’d been devout Christians even feared the sight of the cross. Would I be terrified of my own pills? Of paint buckets? Of the sight of music?

The sky changed from pale pink to black, and I saw human forms moving in the near distance, parasite-positives out hunting, looking for the uninfected. They shied away from the bright band shell for now, but I wondered if a few spotlights and a dozen angels could really protect us from an entire city full of cannibals.

I drummed on my thighs and tried to remember that the worms were the real enemy: incomprehensible, inhuman. They came from some unlit place we’d never even imagined existed.

But peeps were still people.

Moz and Minerva were my friends and were human enough to be in love. The infection had made Moz sweaty and sick and violent at first, but I’d seen normal love do that. He was already playing his guitar again; maybe soon he would become like the angels, powerful and sure.

I remembered Astor Michaels talking happily about all the bands he’d signed. He thought of the peeps as more than human, as gods, as rock stars. He’d even tried to give them a new kind of music.

Of course, if Pearl was right, the New Sound wasn’t new at all. Despite our keyboards and amps and echo boxes, the songs shimmering nervously through my head might be like the struggle itself: very, very old.

I’d never seen Manhattan pitch-black before. Normally the pink glow of mercury-vapor streetlights filled the sky, the rivers sparkled with lights from the other side, the windows of buildings shone all night. But the grid was failing now, and outside the band shell’s radiance, the only light trickled down from the strange profusion of stars.

Lace joined us up on the truck. “I can think of one problem with this whole idea.”

“Only one?” Zahler asked.

“Well, one big one.” Lace pointed across the highway toward the darkened city. “These people have seen their whole world fall apart, and they’ve only survived this long by being very careful. So why would they leave their barricaded apartments for something as random as a free concert?”

I looked up at the lightless rows of windows. “Before we had a name, Astor Michaels said that our real audience would find us by smell.”

“Smell?” She sniffed the air. “The parasite improves your senses, you know. But aren’t we talking about people who aren’t infected?”

I frowned. Astor Michaels had been ethically broken, a tangled maze of moral hazards, but he knew brilliantly how crowds worked. Even if the people hiding in the city were terrified, they still needed some kind of hope to cling to.

“Don’t worry,” I said, tapping my forehead. “They’ll come.”

By ten P.M. the wind had grown stronger, cutting slices of cold salt air from the East River.

The angels had disappeared, hidden among the trees and up in the light towers, perched across the arched top of the amphitheater—watching over us, just like at the nightclub. Ready to descend.

And hopefully to protect us, if this all went horribly wrong.

Pearl switched on her mixing board, and the columns of speakers began to buzz. She gave Zahler a low E and he tuned his bass, the stage rumbling beneath me. Moz and Minerva came out of the shadows to take their places, trembling in the cold.

We waited for a moment, looking at one another. Pearl had finally come up with the perfect name for us, but there was no one to announce it.

So we just started playing.

This time Zahler didn’t freeze. He began the Big Riff, the bass notes thundering out across the park, bouncing lazily back from the wall of housing projects along Manhattan’s edge. The rest of the lights came up, bright white instead of the colored gels we were used to, as harsh as a movie set. We were blinded now to anything out there in the darkness, terrifyingly exposed. We had only our angels to trust in.

It was Moz who froze this time, his body shuddering for a long moment as he fought the anathema of his own music. But finally his fingers danced into motion on the strings, years of practice beating aside the parasite inside him.

I started drumming, muscles falling into familiar patterns, but the motion of my hands didn’t calm me. It wasn’t the blank and empty darkness before me, or the thousands of deadly, infected maniacs all around us. It wasn’t even the thought of those huge, human-eating creatures we were trying to summon.

What scared me was being drawn again into the engine of our music. I remembered playing, unable to stop, while the worm had rampaged through the crowd, cutting them down while they watched us, mesmerized. My moral hazard still lurked in the corners of my vision, watching me and waiting.

If the world wasn’t cured soon, that vision would become too real. I was running out of pills, the last bottle shaking half empty in my pocket, more depleted every day. I wasn’t being heroic, risking my life here on the cold edge of Manhattan. I was being logical.

I was one of those people who needed civilization simply to survive.

Minerva began to sing, her voice searching the darkness, keening through the empty and weed-choked park around us. Calling.

The air began to glisten, and soon I could see the music: Moz’s notes hovering in the air, Pearl’s piercing melody like a thin spotlight moving among them, making them sparkle. Minerva’s song wound through it all, stretching out into the darkness, and Zahler and I played with a fierce determination, as tight as fingers locked together, like sentries afraid to turn their heads.

We played the whole piece through, hoping someone would hear.

When we reached the end, no cheers or applause answered us, not even a lonely shout of encouragement. No one had come.

Then the lights faded around us, and I looked out at where the audience should have been.

A galaxy of eyes reflected back at me. Night-seeing eyes.

Peeps.

They stared at us, transfixed, undead. Not like the angels or Minerva or even trembling Moz, not sane or reasonable or human. These had been fully taken by the disease. They wore filthy and tattered clothes, logos ripped from them as the anathema had taken hold. Many were barely covered, shivering in ragged pajamas and sweat-pants—the sort of clothes you’d wear to bed when you felt feverish and half-crazy, coming down hard with the flu. Their fingernails were long and shone black, as if they’d glued the husks of dead beetles to their fingers. A hundred of them stood there. Motionless.

The survivors hadn’t gathered to hear us. The vampires had.

Astor Michaels had been all too right. Our real audience had found us by smell.

“Oh, crap,” Zahler said next to me.

A stir moved through them, forms shifting in the silence, the spell of the song fading. Glimmers of hunger flashed in their eyes.

“We have to keep playing,” I said.

“We have to run,” Zahler hissed. He started to back away.

The crowd stirred again. One of them was shambling toward the stage, squinting his eyes against the light.

“Zahler, stop,” Moz said. “It’s like your dogs. Don’t show them you’re afraid.”

“My dogs don’t eat people!”

I heard more sounds in the darkness behind us. Of course, the peeps weren’t just in the audience in front of us. They were all around us…

“Alana Ray’s right. We need to keep playing,” Minerva said. “We don’t want to disappoint the fans.” She pulled the microphone to her lips and began to hum.

The eerie melody crept from the amps, a nameless, shapeless tune that we’d made into our slowest song: “A Million Stimuli to Go.”

The peeps began to settle down.

Pearl joined Minerva, her fingers spreading across her keyboards to hold down long, lush chords. Then Moz came in on top, quick notes flirting with Minerva’s hummed melody, pushing her toward words.

I began to play, rolling the sticks softly across my paint buckets, breaking into a slow beat. Finally Zahler reluctantly joined us, his bass rumbling through the darkness.

The peeps remained motionless, staring at us, unblinking.

We played the whole song, trying to forget our ghastly audience, but we wound up going faster toward the finish, our fear finally showing in the music. We ended with a brutal thrashing of the same chord again and again, finally rattling into silence.

I looked out into the dark.

There were five times as many of them now.

“Spot the problem,” Zahler said.

A ripple went through the ragged army before us. One of them let out a low, hungry moan. A drop of sweat crawled down my back, as cold as the night air.

“We can’t stop playing!” I said.

“What?” Zahler hissed. “You want more of them to come?”

Moz took a step back, his hands quivering. “Yeah, and what if no worm ever shows up?”

“Boys,” Minerva said straight into the microphone, her words echoing through the park, “I don’t think we have a choice.”

A few of the peeps had begun to advance, teeth glittering in the moonlight, hands flexing into claws.

“Min’s right,” Pearl murmured.

“’Piece Two’?” Zahler said, and started before anyone could answer.

We all jumped in, playing hard.

Even terrified, I wondered how we sounded to the peeps, whether they really liked the music or whether certain kinds of sound waves calmed them down, like plants and Mozart. They weren’t exactly dancing or moshing or singing along. Why were they listening instead of eating us?

I started pushing the tempo, coaxing the others along, almost as fast as a Toxoplasma song—music for insects.

Then Minerva came in, howling her nonsense syllables, setting my vision shimmering, like the glitter of weeping-willow fireworks fading in the air.

Something rippled through the crowd, a sudden wave of motion, and for a terrible moment I wondered if our spell was breaking. But the ragged army didn’t rush to attack us; instead the whole mass of them turned together, like a vast flock of birds wheeling as one.

For a second, I thought the peeps were dancing… but it was something much better. Or worse, depending on what happened next. The ground had finally begun to shudder.

They were getting ready. They smelled something: the hated worm rising up toward the surface. Sane or not, the parasite inside them knew the scent of its natural enemy.

The rumbling grew, and I pushed the tempo still faster.

The worm broke through just as we hit the first chorus, scattering dirt and black water, tossing a handful of bodies into the air. But these were peeps, not clueless kids in some nightclub, and the crowd didn’t panic or run. They came at the beast from every angle, setting upon it with flashing claws, tearing into its pulsing sides with their razor teeth.

The angels didn’t stand back and watch. They shot out of the trees, dropping from the amphitheater roof, swords drawn. Jumping into the throng, they fought side by side with the peeps, the great worm screaming and twisting in its trench.

We played and kept playing. When we ran out of verses, we started over without pausing a single beat, the air warping around me. Minerva’s voice had a new shape now, shimmering lines of strength that bound peeps and angels into a single force. Zahler’s low thumping notes were tendrils reaching down, squeezing the earth shut below the enemy, trapping it here on the surface. I could feel the battle in my muscles, my sticks flashing like the swords below.

Some endless time later the song finally stumbled to a halt, all five of us exhausted, the engine of our music out of steam at last.

I looked down into the park.

The peeps had torn the worm to pieces. Fragments of its huge carcass were spread out across the broken concrete, still twitching as if trying to burrow back into the earth.

A few of the peeps were scrabbling over the remains, eating them…

“What now?” Zahler said as the last echoes faded. The army of peeps had grown bigger than the crowd at our first gig—more than a thousand of them summoned by our music and the death cries of the worm.

Most of them still looked hungry.

The handful of angels stood out in the audience, covered with blood and black water. They glanced nervously at the peeps around them, their bloodlust fading.

“Dudes!” Lace yelled up at us. “Keep going!”

So we did.

Altogether we killed five worms that night, playing until dawn began to break at last.

Light filtered across the sky, pink clouds brightening to orange, and finally our grisly audience began to disperse. They faded into the trees, driven back into the dark alleys of the city, sated by the fight.

Up onstage, we collapsed one by one. Zahler’s fingers were bleeding, and Minerva had practically croaked her way through our last song. Even the angels looked unsteady on their feet. Covered with black water, blood, and chunks of gelatinous flesh, they cleaned their swords with shaking hands.

I curled up on the concrete stage, shivering in the predawn chill. My hands ached, my body thrummed with echoes, and shimmering hallucinations colored everything I saw.

But I was smiling. About halfway through the concert, my moral hazard had slunk into the darkness.

And this felt very real.