That's a philosophy major for you.
In the movie, Elvis sells pieces of his car whenever he needs money. The doors go, then the roof, then the seats, one by one. By the end he's riding along on an empty frame - Elvis at the steering wheel, four tires and a sputtering engine on an open road.
As the disease had settled across her, Sarah had held onto Elvis the longest. After she'd thrown out all her books and clothes, erased every photograph from her hard drive, and broken all the mirrors in her dorm bathroom, the Elvis posters still clung to her walls, crumpled and scratched from bitter blows, but hanging on. As her mind transformed, Sarah shouted more than once that she couldn't stand the sight of me, but she never said a word against the King.
Finally, she fled, deciding to disappear into the night rather than tear down those slyly grinning faces she could no longer bear to look at.
As I waited for the transport squad, I watched her shivering on the bed and thought of Elvis clutching the steering wheel of his skeletal car.
Sarah had lost everything, shedding the pieces of her life one by one to placate the anathema, until she was left here in this dark place, clinging to a shuddering, rickety frame.
Chapter 2
TREMATODES
The natural world is jaw-droppingly horrible. Appalling, nasty, vile.
Take trematodes, for example.
Trematodes are tiny fish that live in the stomach of a bird. (How did that happen? Horribly. Just keep reading.) They lay their eggs in the bird's stomach. One day, the bird takes a crap into a pond, and the eggs are on their way. They hatch and swim around the pond looking for a snail. These trematodes are microscopic, small enough to lay eggs in a snail's eye, as we used to say in Texas.
Well, okay. We never said that in Texas. But trematodes actually do it. For some reason, they always choose the left eye. When the babies hatch, they eat the snail's left eye and spread throughout its body. (Didn't I say this would be horrible?) But they don't kill the snail. Not right away.
First, the half-blind snail gets a gnawing feeling in the pit of its stomach and thinks it's hungry. It starts to eat but for some reason can never get enough food. You see, when the food gets to where the snail's stomach used to be, all that's left down there is trematodes, getting their meals delivered. The snail can't mate, or sleep, or enjoy life in any other snaily way. It has become a hungry robot dedicated to gathering food for its horrible little passengers.
After a while, the trematodes get bored with this and pull the plug on their poor host. They invade the snail's antennae, making them twitch. They turn the snail's left eye bright colors. A bird passing overhead sees this brightly colored, twitching snail and says, "Yum..."
The snail gets eaten, and the trematodes are back up in a bird's stomach, ready to parachute into the next pond over.
Welcome to the wonderful world of parasites.
This is where I live.
One more thing, and then I promise no more horrific biology (for a few pages).
When I first read about trematodes, I always wondered why the bird would eat this twitching, oddly colored snail. Eventually, wouldn't the birds evolve to avoid any snail with a glowing left eye? This is a nasty, trematode-infected snail, after all. Why would you eat it?
Turns out the trematodes don't do anything unpleasant to their flying host. They're polite guests, living quietly in the bird's gut, not messing with its food or its left eye or anything. The bird hardly knows they're there, just craps them out into the next pond over, like a little parasite bomb.
It's almost like the bird and the trematodes have a deal between them. You give us a ride in your stomach, and we'll arrange some half-blind snails for you to eat.
Isn't cooperation a beautiful thing?
Unless, of course, you happen to be the snail...
Chapter 3
ANATHEMA
Okay, let's clear up some myths about vampires.
First of all, you won't see me using the V-word much. In the Night Watch, we prefer the term parasite-positives, or peeps, for short.
The main thing to remember is that there's no magic involved. No flying. Humans don't have hollow bones or wings - the disease doesn't change that. No transforming into bats or rats either. It's impossible to turn into something much smaller than yourself - where would the extra mass go?
On the other hand, I can see how people in centuries past got confused. Hordes of rats, and sometimes bats, accompany peeps. They get infected from feasting on peep leftovers. Rodents make good "reservoirs," which means they're like storage containers for the disease. Rats give the parasite a place to hide in case the peep gets hunted down.
Infected rats are devoted to their peeps, tracking them by smell. The rat brood also serves as a handy food source for the peep when there aren't humans around to hunt. (Icky, I know. But that's nature for you.)
Back to the myths:
Parasite-positives do appear in mirrors. I mean, get real: How would the mirror know what was behind the peep?
But this legend also has a basis in fact. As the parasite takes control, peeps begin to despise the sight of their own reflections. They smash all their mirrors. But if they're so beautiful, why do they hate their own faces?
Well, it's all about the anathema.
The most famous example of disease mind control is rabies. When a dog becomes rabid, it has an uncontrollable urge to bite anything that moves: squirrels, other dogs, you. This is how rabies reproduces; biting spreads the virus from host to host.
A long time ago, the parasite was probably like rabies. When people got infected, they had an overpowering urge to bite other humans. So they bit them. Success!
But eventually human beings got organized in ways that dogs and squirrels can't. We invented posses and lynch mobs, made up laws, and appointed law enforcers. As a result, the biting maniacs among us tend to have fairly short careers. The only peeps who survived were the ones who ran away and hid, sneaking back at night to feed their mania.
The parasite followed this survival strategy to the extreme. It evolved over the generations to transform the minds of its victims, finding a chemical switch among the pathways of the human brain. When that switch is thrown, we despise everything we once loved. Peeps cower when confronted with their old obsessions, despise their loved ones, and flee from any signifier of home.
Love is easy to switch to hatred, it turns out. The term for this is the anathema effect.
The anathema effect forced peeps from their medieval villages and out into the wild, where they were safe from lynch mobs. And it spread the disease geographically. Peeps moved to the next valley over, then the next country, pushed farther and farther by their hatred of everything familiar.