The Last Days (26 page)

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Authors: Scott Westerfeld

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Performing Arts, #Music

BOOK: The Last Days
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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.

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