I remembered Dr. Rat's standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface. I began a slow walk around the edge of the basement, flashlight still set low, moving carefully, looking for any holes in the walls.
The rats hardly noticed me. If this was the brood that had infected Morgan, they would find my scent comforting - our parasites were closely related, after all. On the other hand, true Underworld rats might behave this way with anyone. Never having seen a human being before, their little pink eyes wouldn't know what to make of me.
The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the cement. Of course, this building was just over a year old - the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so.
I peered over the edge. In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling mass of rats. Pale bodies struggled against one another, some disappearing into the mass, others thrashing their way up and out. The brood did have a way out of this basement, I realized, but it didn't go up to the surface...
It went down.
I swallowed. The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was. Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?
I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared camera. With it in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool.
The sole of my boot didn't make a sound. A layer of something soft was strewn across against the bottom of the pool, fluttering beneath the claws of darting rats. It was too dark to see what.
Something ran across my boot, and I shuddered.
"Okay, guys, let's observe some personal space here," I said, then took another step.
Something answered my words, something that wasn't a rat. A long, high-pitched moan echoed through the room, like the sound of a mewling infant...
At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl rumbled out.
A cat was looking at me, its sleepy eyes floating against invisibly black fur. A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an emperor, when they should have been running for their lives.
The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight's glow. The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was not a normal place for any cat to be.
But cats didn't carry the parasite. If they did, we'd all be peeps by now. They live with us, after all.
My eyes fell from the feline's unblinking gaze, and I saw what the rats were eating: pigeons. Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool. The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would. And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks - the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down.
It was family to me.
Suddenly, the floor began trembling, a vibration that traveled up through my cowboy boots and into my muscle-clenched stomach. My vision began to shudder, as if an electric toothbrush had been jammed into my brain. A new smell rose up from the swimming pool drain, something I couldn't recognize - ancient and foul, it made me think of rotten corpses. It made me want to run screaming.
And through it all, the cat's low purr of satisfaction filled the room.
I squeezed my eyes shut and switched the flashlight to full power.
I could only hear (and feel) what happened next: a thousand rats panicking, pouring out of the pool to race for the dark corners of the room, flowing past my legs in a furry torrent. Hundreds more scrambled to escape down the drain and into the darkness below, their claws scraping the broken concrete as they fought to flee the horrifying light. Bloated rat king bodies flopped from the diving board and landed on the struggling mass, squealing like squeaky toys dropped from a height.
I fumbled a pair of sunglasses out of a pocket, got them on, and opened one eye a slit: The cat was unperturbed, still curled at the end of the diving board, eyes shut against the light, looking like an ordinary cat lying happily in the sun. It yawned.
The trembling of the floor had begun to fade, and the traffic jam of escaping rats was starting to break up. The drain hole looked to be more than a yard across; the deep end of the pool had cracked open, crumbling into some larger cavity below. The rats were still roiling, disappearing into it like crap down a flushing toilet.
Squinting up at the cat again, I saw that it had risen to its feet. It was stretching lazily, yawning, its tongue curling pink and obscene.
"You just stay there, kitty," I called above the din, and took another step toward the drain. How deep was the hole? Cat-size? Peep-size? Monster-size?
I only needed one glimpse and I was out of there.
Between my blazing flashlight and the squeaks and scrambling feet echoing off the sides of the pool, I was almost blind and practically deafened. But the weird smell of death was fading, and just as the last rats were finally clearing out, I caught the slightest whiff of something new in the air. Something close ...
A sharp hiss sounded behind me, someone sucking in air. As I spun around, the flashlight slipped from my sweaty fingers...
It cracked on the swimming pool floor, and everything went very dark.
I was completely blind, but before the flashlight had died I'd glimpsed a human form at the edge of the pool. Following the bright image burned into my retinas, I ran the few steps up the slope and leaped from the pool, raising the camera like a club.
As I swung, I caught her smell again, freezing just in time.
Jasmine shampoo, mixed with human fear and peanut butter... and I knew who it was.
"Cal?" Lace said.
Chapter 10
MONKEYS AND MAGGOTS...OR PARASITES FOR PEACE
Howler monkeys live in the jungles of Central America. They have a special resonating bone that amplifies their cries - hence the name "howler monkey." Even though they're only two feet tall, you can hear a howler monkey scream from three miles away.
Especially if they've got screwworms.
Meet the screwfly, which lives in the same jungles as howler monkeys. Screwflies look pretty much like normal houseflies, except bigger. They aren't parasites themselves, but their babies are.
When it comes time to have baby flies, screwflies look for a wounded mammal to lay their eggs in. They're not picky about what kind of mammal, and they don't need a very large wound. Even a scratch the size of a flea bite is plenty big.
When the eggs hatch, the larvae - also known by such charming names as "maggots" or "screwworms" - are hungry. As they grow, they begin to devour the flesh around them.