As cities grew, with more police and bigger lynch mobs, peeps had to adopt new strategies to stay hidden. They learned to love the night and see in the dark, until the sun itself became anathema to them.
But come on: They don't burst into flame in daylight. They just really, really hate it.
The anathema also created some familiar vampire legends. If you grew up in Europe in the Middle Ages, chances were you were a Christian. You went to church at least twice a week, prayed three times a day, and had a crucifix hanging in every room. You made the sign of the cross every time you ate food or wished for good luck. So it's not surprising that most peeps back then had major cruciphobia - they could actually be repelled by the sight of a cross, just like in the movies.
In the Middle Ages, the crucifix was the big anathema: Elvis and Manhattan and your boyfriend all rolled into one.
Things were so much simpler back then.
These days, we hunters have to do our homework before we go after a peep. What were their favorite foods? What music did they like? What movie stars did they have crushes on? Sure, we still find a few cases of cruciphobia, especially down in the Bible Belt, but you're much more likely to stop peeps with an iPod full of their favorite tunes. (With certain geeky peeps, I've heard, the Apple logo alone does the trick.)
That's why new peep hunters like me start with people they used to know, so we don't have to guess what their anathemas are. Hunting the people who once loved us is as easy as it gets. Our own faces work as a reminder of their former lives. We are the anathema.
So what am I? you may be asking.
I am parasite-positive, technically a peep, but I can still listen to Kill Fee and Deathmatch, watch a sunset, or put Tabasco on scrambled eggs without howling. Through some trick of evolution, I'm partly immune, the lucky winner of the peep genetic lottery. Peeps like me are rarer than hens' teeth: Only one in every hundred victims becomes stronger and faster, with incredible hearing and a great sense of smell, without being driven crazy by the anathema.
We're called carriers, because we have the disease without all the symptoms. Although there is this one extra symptom that we do have: The disease makes us horny. All the time.
The parasite doesn't want us carriers to go to waste, after all. We can still spread the disease to other humans. Like that of the maniacs, our saliva carries the parasite's spores. But we don't bite; we kiss, the longer and harder the better.
The parasite makes sure that I'm like the always-hungry snail, except hungry for sex. I'm constantly aroused, aware of every female in the room, every cell screaming for me to go out and shag someone!
None of which makes me wildly different from most other nineteen-year-old guys, I suppose. Except for one small fact: If I act on my urges, my unlucky lovers become monsters, like Sarah did. And this is not much fun to watch.
Dr. Rat showed up first, like she'd been waiting by the phone.
Her footsteps echoed through the ferry terminal, along with a rattling noise. I left Sarah's side and went out to the balcony. Dr. Rat had a dozen folding cages strapped to her back, like some giant insect with old-lady hair and unsteady metal wings, ready to trap some samples of Sarah's brood.
"Couldn't wait, could you?" I called.
"No," she yelled up. "It's a big one, isn't it?"
"Seems to be." The brood was still behind me, quietly attending to its sleeping mistress.
She looked at the half-fallen staircase with annoyance. "Did you do that?"
"Um, sort of."
"So how am I supposed to get up there, Kid?"
I just shrugged. I'm not a big fan of the nickname "Kid." They all call me that at the Night Watch, just because I'm a peep hunter at nineteen, a job where the average age is about a hundred and seventy-five. All peep hunters are carriers. Only carriers are fast and strong enough to hunt down our crazy, violent cousins.
Dr. Rat's usually pretty cool, though. She doesn't mind her own nickname, mostly because she actually likes rats. And even though she's about sixty and wears enough hair-spray to stick a bear to the ceiling, she plays good alternative metal and lets me rip her CDs - Kill Fee hasn't made a dime off me since I met Dr. Rat. And mercifully, she falls well off my sexual radar, so I can actually concentrate in the Night Watch classes she teaches (Rats 101, Peep Hunting 101, and Early Plagues and Pestilence).
Like most people who work at the Night Watch, she's not parasite-positive. She's just a working stiff who loves her job. You have to, working at the Night Watch. The pay's not great.
With one last look at the crumpled staircase, Dr. Rat began to set out her traps, then started laying out piles of poison.
"Isn't there enough of that stuff around already?" I asked.
"Not like this. Something new I'm trying. It's marked with Essence of Cal Thompson. A few swabs of your sweat on each pile and they'll eat hearty."
"My what?" I said. "Where'd you get my sweat?"
"From a pencil I borrowed from you in Rats 101, after that pop quiz last week. Did you know pop quizzes make you sweat, Cal?"
"Not that much!"
"Only takes a little - along with some peanut butter."
I wiped my palms on my jacket, not sure how annoyed to be.
Rats are great smellers, gourmets of garbage. When they eat, they can detect one part of rat poison in a million. And they can smell their peeps from a mile away. Because I was Sarah's progenitor, my familiar smell would cover the taint of poison.
I supposed it was worth having my sweat stolen. We had to kill off Sarah's brood before it fell apart and scattered into the rest of Hoboken. A hungry brood that has lost its peep can be dangerous, and the parasite occasionally spreads from rats back into humans. The last thing New Jersey needed was another peep.
That's the interesting thing about Dr. Rat: She loves rats but also loves coming up with new and exciting ways to kill them. Like I said, love and hatred aren't that far apart.
The transport squad arrived ten minutes later. They didn't wait for sunset, just cut the locks off the biggest set of doors and backed their garbage truck right up to them, its reverse beep echoing through the terminal to wake the dead. Garbage trucks are perfect for the transport squad. They're like the digestive system of the modern world - no one ever thinks twice about them. They're built like tanks and yet are completely invisible to regular people going about their regular business. And if the guys who ride on them happen to be wearing thick protective suits and rubber gloves, well, nothing funny about that, is there? Garbage is dangerous stuff, after all.